G7 Open Thread: Good News (If We Can Keep Him to It)

by 11:17 pm. It has 155 Comments.

More immediately:

If you’re in a paranoid mood (remember, even paranoids have real enemies!): It has been widely assumed that Trump’s ‘special guest nation’ at this G7 would be… Russia. What price a scenario where Putin rejects his puppet’s down-at-heels hotel, and tells him he’d prefer to introduce his own ‘security arrangements’ at Camp David?





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PSA Open Thread: Must-*Not*-Watch Video

by 9:16 am. It has 81 Comments.

Over the weekend, those second-tier benchwarmers not required to fluff His Lardship during his hatefest trifecta got together (at a Trump property, of course!) to throw themselves a fan-fest. Complete with ‘volunteer’ videos, including a (possibly deliberately) amateurish parody of the Kingsman movie, showing Trump as a fit’n’focused James Bond character shooting up a church full of ‘media figures’. This — I know, you’re shocked — didn’t go over well with the media in question. (AMPFest has since disavowed the video, FWIW.)

You’d think the Trumpsters would be a little more cautious, given present circumstances, about pissing off the already-getting-bored media figures required to facilitate their attempts to steal another election, but then: High-quality hires are not a Trump trademark.

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Much further down the political food chain, the Sanders campaign announced they’d be hiring independent video producer Matt Orfalea because his extremely enthusiastic pro-Bernie YouTube commercials were so viral. Unfortunately, outside researchers soon discovered ‘#Orf’ had also produced a wealth of deeply cringeworthy material, including a 2-minute ‘parody’ clip-cut entitled ‘MLK: I Have A Wet Dream’. Which I am not linking, not even to one of the many tweets decrying it, because it is every bit as disgusting as you’d imagine, or worse. (Public obscenity standards have relaxed a lot since the days when Sanders was writing rape-fantasy ‘think pieces’ for his local newspaper.) When neither the ‘can’t you people take a joke’ or the ‘when I was young and irresponsible… ‘ defenses defused the critics, the campaign hastily un-hired Orfalea. So, if the Sandernistas are lucky (and can keep from relitigating it all over social media), this glitch in the primary matrix will go unnoticed beyond the obscure realms of the Politically Engaged Online.





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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Don’t Just Protest, Do It Fabulously!

by 5:30 am. It has 120 Comments.

From the Washington Post, “A spice company spent more money on impeachment ads on Facebook than anyone not named Trump”:

… On Wednesday, Axios published a list of the entities spending the most money on Facebook ads on both sides of the impeachment debate. They included the usual suspects of the political war roll call, including Trump himself (he was top of the list, of course, at $718,000), Democratic presidential candidates Tom Steyer and Elizabeth Warren, and both the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

But one name jumped off the screen for its sheer one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other factor: Penzeys Spices, the nation’s largest spice retailer, had dropped $92,000 from Sept. 29 to Oct. 5 on ads championing impeachment. That was more than self-funding millionaire Steyer, more than hard-charging Warren — more than anyone else other than Trump…

For many Penzeys fans, it comes as no surprise. The company has a history of unabashed liberal activism. Its founder, Bill Penzey, greeted Trump’s election with an email calling the president an “openly racist candidate.” As Helen Rosner noted in a New Yorker story last year, that set him far apart from the rest of the business-leader pack. He was “quite possibly the first to publicly call Trump’s election an ‘embrace of racism,’” she wrote. “And he was definitely the first to do so while hawking a free bottle of Quebec Seasonings with any five-dollar purchase.”…
Read more





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Accidental Open Thread (Texas)

by 12:34 pm. It has 38 Comments.

This outdated partial draft got front-paged while I wasn’t around. I’d take it down now, if not for the conversations in the comments. Won’t happen again, I *hope*!

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/take-texas-seriously-gop-anxiety-spikes-after-retirements-democratic-gains/2019/08/02/d9e9942c-b4b8-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html





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Gun Safety PSA: Back to School Essentials

by 10:52 am. It has 105 Comments.

Trigger warning — this spot is almost too effective…

Seriously good work by the Sandy Hook Promise people — I learned about it from a spot on the local news, and I suspect it’s going viral on the airwaves as well as in social media.





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