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All your base are belong to Tunch.

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

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Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

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The house always wins.

This is how realignments happen…

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Your Place Is In The Resistance

Cheap Snark Open Thread: Being Mean to MAGAt Morons

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I try not to encourage being mean to people (yeah, you should read me when the filters are *off*), but when people waltz into someone else’s online conversation attempting to ‘slay’ them, well — don’t start none, won’t *be* none, fellas. Since Ben Shapiro is well-compensated for being a professional Guy Who Never Learns, only fitting he lead this clown parade…

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Open Thread: Due Respect for Senator Romney

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This, right here. It hasn’t changed how I feel about Mitt Romney, and if he still lived in Massachusetts I might not be able to bring myself to say this, but he did the right thing by voting to impeach Trump.

And if that’s because he finally got to behave in a way that would make his old man proud… well, I’ve never heard a harsh word about George Romney from the Michiganders who lived through his governorship there. Which among others would include my Spousal Unit, along with political professional Dana Houle.

And he’s just made himself all the right enemies…

And he’s changed the top line in his obituary from that dinner with Trump:

Take your victories where you find them!

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Amateurs Take Down Disinformation Network

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On Twitter, one of the people I follow and interact with is Steffan Watkins, who follows ships and airplanes. Many sites follow ships and airplanes, and Steffan follows those sites to make sense out of who and what are going where. For example, Steffan knew a government plane was on its way long before we were told that President Trump was in Afghanistan.

He has recently been debunking stories about Russian ships and submarines off the east coast of the United States. This is a perennial story and is sometimes even true! Just as American ships and submarines do, Russian ships travel in many places in international waters. What they don’t do is dock at Mar-a-Lago.

Some of those stories come from real reporters who don’t understand what’s going on and repeat a version of something that is true but trivial. Sometimes their stories are based on dodgy websites that deliver deliberate disinformation, laundered through repetition and rumor.

Steffan doggedly checks out those news stories and sets them straight. That usually means that he debunks them, but occasionally he says yes, that Russian ship is off the coast in international waters on a normal patrol. Not once has he found the more sensational stories to be supported.

That’s what he was doing a couple of weeks ago and found a website that consistently was producing junk news stories and stealing stuff from other sites. They also advertised Trump merchandise.

That intrigued a couple of Israeli hackers, Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, who decided to check the website out. That link has all the detail for the more computer-savvy among us. Here’s their bottom line:

We found a network of dozens of websites operated by an affiliate marketer. Some of the websites pushed pro-Trump/anti-Clinton fake-news meant to use patriotism in order to sell unofficial Trump merch to Trump supporters. The technical aspects of the operation allowed us full visibility into not only the operators, but also the unwitting customers.

Many of the web addresses were registered by the same person, identified as Jackson Lin, through a company called Extreme Wisdom. Another company linked to some of the sites is Alabama company Click Wu LLC. They have been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for advertising on Facebook. The pages have been taken down from Facebook.

Although Rotem and Locar say the motivation is money, it could be that or disinformation or both. It’s part of the stream of junk that flows through social media. It’s particularly  encouraging that a bunch of amateurs exposed it. Now I’d like to see a bigger news operation take it up.

For the rest of us? Be careful what you share or retweet. Know your sources.

Watergirl is doing some diagnostics. Between them and the problems currently infecting the site, I may not be able to comment. I’ll stick around for a bit.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Think Diagonally

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(That’s Dan Scavino, Trump’s former golf caddy and reputed twitter-ghostwriter.)

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

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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.”…

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Friday Morning Open Thread: There’s Still Time!…

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Nobody tell Cole about this, he’s got enough on his plate ottoman already. But if you’re curious, ActionNews suggests checking the shelter’s Facebook page.

Elsewhere… The Repubs have already decided that Trump is gonna lose in 2020, because we all know deficits only matter when there’s a Democrat in the Oval Office:

Further proof:

So — while we must still do our best to Dump Trump — here’s to the success of Amy McGrath!

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Monday Morning Open Thread: “If You Witness… “

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Open Thread: Netroots Nation #14 Is Now Taking Place in Philadelphia

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Any Jackals in attendance? Or planning to attend over the weekend? Honest curiosity — I’d like to get your impressions!

I can remember when ‘we’ all hoped NN would be the progressive answer to CPAC… but, as people warned at the time, even if we had the same deep-pocketed ‘donors’ as the Repubs, getting Democrats to work together is like herding cats. I’m holding on to the Good Thought that the many, many breakout panels are supporting and training local activists working on local issues, which Murphy knows is every bit and more as important as taking back the White House.

Dave Weigel, for the Washington Post:

… Four thousand or so liberal activists will spend the next three days here, gathering for the 14th annual Netroots Nation conference — the third with a presidential forum. In 2007, nearly every Democratic presidential candidate attended the conference in Chicago, staying for a debate and holding special sessions for attendees. In 2015, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley (but not Hillary Clinton) sat for Netroots interviews in Phoenix, only to be interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists who protested the lack of a focus on racial justice in the questions.

This year, just a handful of the 25 Democratic presidential candidates will make the trek to Philadelphia. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a frequent speaker at the conference, will join former HUD secretary Julián Castro, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) at the Saturday presidential forum — and that may be it. With Warren’s exception, the highest-polling Democratic candidates will not be in Philadelphia. Joe Biden, whose campaign is headquartered in that city, will be in New Hampshire; so will South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Neither Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif) nor Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will be attending, and the Sanders campaign says the candidate is off the trail completely this weekend, for unspecified reasons.

Sanders will have a surrogate, of sorts, at Netroots; former Ohio state senator Nina Turner, a co-chair of his campaign, will appear on a panel and join a solidarity protest with hospital workers. But the smaller footprint for presidential candidates is notable, and organizers say that Biden et. al. are making a mistake by skipping.

“Netroots attendees are the core activists of the party and will play a key role in determining who Democrats’ 2020 nominee will be,” said Carolyn Fiddler, the spokeswoman for Daily Kos, the group blog that founded the conference. “Candidates not in attendance are missing the opportunity to speak directly to this ultra-engaged group of voters and engage core progressives the issues they care about most.”

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: RESIST

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GOP Venality Open Thread: Kiddie Concentration Camps, Not Polling Well

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WE NEED TO KEEP FIGHTING BACK – LOUDLY.

Small comfort for the children now suffering — or dead — but if Senate Majority House Minority Leader ‘There’s two people Putin is paying’ McCarthy and Erik ‘Voice of the Gated GOP Community’ Erikson are alternately blustering and pantomiming Christianist concern about Trump’s concentration camps… it’s not good news for conservatives.

Clearly the GOP had assumed that enough voters were indifferent to human suffering that they could afford to tickle ‘the Base’ by kicking the untermenschen. Fortunately for the survival of our GOP-battered commonwealth, they seem to have miscalculated. Trump folds when he’s put under pressure, especially the pressure of being publicly shamed… and Trump’s enablers know that the I-was-only-following-orders defense doesn’t work in courts of law.

EvenTheVerySeriouslyBipartisan NYTimes has jumped ship on this…

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Dark Night of the National Soul Open Thread: Trump’s Concentration Camps

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Thing is, I don’t think this is a power move — it’s the GOP’s frantic effort to appeal to worst elements of its Base by upping the public cruelty, because Trump’s lost his novelty and the economic impact of the GOP’s smash-and-grab is affecting too many ‘dependable’ GOP voters. It’s like offering fentanyl to a heroin addict in withdrawal… assuming the GOP oligarchs are fentanyl addicts already, and the junkie has the key to the drug safe.

I remember reading that, by the final months of World War II, Hitler’s staff was pulling desperately needed resources away from the production of weapons to keep the trains running to the death camps. We need to fight back, hard, but we shouldn’t let an unwarranted despair over Republican power deter our efforts.

The current “debate” started, AFAICT, because Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez “decried the conditions of migrant detention facilities the administration is using to cope with a surge of border crossings and highlighted a decision to hold some children at an Oklahoma Army base that was used as an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.” So Dick Cheney’s favorite daughter Liz — already “the No. 3 Republican in the House” — upheld her family’s proud tradition of inhumanity by pretending the Holocaust meant something more to her and her GOP associates than a rhetorical tool. Every Media Village Idiot (plus some quasi-liberal people who should’ve known better, like Chris Hayes) rushed to wallow in the quicksand…

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Tornillo, TX March: Report from the Field

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I am privileged to front page O. Felix Culpa’s trip to the Tornillo march this weekend. I’ll let her take it from here:

From O. Felix Culpa:

Trawling the internet over Saturday morning coffee, I chanced upon an announcement for a march on the new tent city in Tornillo, Texas, scheduled for the next day. I read the info to my wife and we said simultaneously, “Let’s go.” We abandoned our weekend gardening plans, packed a few things, dropped the dog off with a friend, and drove 300-plus miles southwest to El Paso, where we spent the night. The drive was pretty and uneventful, except for the plague of insects committing suicide on our windshield near Fort Bliss.

Early next morning we headed to the march’s starting point at the Tornillo-Guadalupe Toll Plaza on the US-Mexico border. It’s in a rural area, marked by orderly pecan groves interspersed with verdant alfalfa. But the land is brown and desolate where the fields end and the internment camp begins. Although set up for 400 children, capacity might be expanded to 4,000 according to the government.

Many other cars were turning off the highway ahead of us as we approached. Good! we thought. These people must be going to the march too and we can follow them. It seemed unlikely that so many people would be heading to this remote place on a Sunday morning for any other reason, and we were right.

There were already hundreds of cars parked along the roads when we arrived and more kept streaming in. All told, about 2,000 people came – more protestors than residents in Tornillo – extraordinary numbers for a Father’s Day event in an out-of-the-way location announced late Friday. Most were from El Paso, but folks hailed from all over Texas and as far away as Salt Lake City, Denver, and Santa Fe (us).

The crowd of families with young children, youth, and seniors – brown, black, and white – huddled for shade under the toll plaza cover, waiting for the march to start. The sun was already fierce at 9:30 a.m. – on the coolest day forecast for the week. Three guards stood at the entrance to the camp, watching. We couldn’t see the tents, which were somewhere behind the barbed wire, walls, and outbuildings. The organizers informed us they had not been able to secure permission to enter, so we marched out a short way, then back through the toll plaza to a gathering place as close to the camp as possible for the rally.

Beto O’Rourke was highly visible throughout, surrounded by supporters, cameras, and broadcast microphones. He’s tall, handsome, and an effective speaker. He notably avoided directly attacking Trump and the GOP (this is Texas, after all, and he’s running for Senator), but was clear about the immorality of the family separation policy: “This is inhumane. This is cruel. This is torture to take a child from that mother, from that father, who literally risked all, including their lives, to bring them to safety, fleeing horrific violence.” All true. Beto added, “People say this is not who we are. But it is who we are. We are doing this and we must stop it.” Also true.

A small commotion arose just behind me and I turned to see Joseph Kennedy III, carrot-haired with that pink-and-white Irish complexion and distinctive Kennedy good looks, working his way through the crowd to the speaker’s box. He too denounced the anti-immigrant policies: “We recognize that universal truth that humanity does not come with citizenship or with a green card,” and concluded by noting our American immigrant family names are “Jimenez…Martinez…O’Rourke [applause]…and Kennedy,. My family is Kennedy” [more applause].

Kennedy sped away in the requisite black SUV to seek entry into the camp. I don’t know if he got in. The crowd dispersed shortly afterward, some heading to Father’s Day brunches, while others, like us, drove home. I’m glad we went and we have more work to do to rescue these children and restore them to their families.

Me again. There are more photos below the fold.

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Just Say No

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This story got buried under the news of Andrew McCabe’s firing on Friday, but it’s important if we want to elect people who can bring about responsible government. That starts now, as we move toward November’s elections.

You know those cute little quizzes that are supposed to tell you something about who you are? Which movie star are you? Are you a cat or a dog person? What is your color? So much fun to compare with what you think of yourself and with your friends’ results. In fact, you could share on Facebook and urge your friends to see what their favorite color was. Those quizzes asked you to share most of your Facebook data before you could play.

You may have been contributing data to Cambridge Analytica’s work to help elect Donald Trump.

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Yes: You’re Crazy. What? You Want A Second Opinion? OK. You’re Ugly Too*

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*Old shrink joke that applies with a depressingly tight fit to Trump’s Republican Party.

Update: I just noticed I bigfooted Anne Laurie below. Ordinarily, I’d delete this and reschedule it. But my reschedule function has been verklempt lately so I don’t trust that, and I’m about to pass out, so I’ll leave this here on the assumption that the jackals can multitask.

———————

So here’s the thing.  I heard that the Trump-Pence folks were fundraising w. a push poll on immigration.

I decided to respond, as below:

    • is an astonishingly stupid idea that both won’t work and apes the worst of our adversaries in the Cold War. It’s unAmerican, and idiocy to boot.

  11. A truly responsible immigration bill is one that does not begin from a premise of ethnic cleansing. Hatred of folks who talk funny and don’t look like you is no way to go through life.

I’m not going to suggest that any jackals should swamp such a poll — and in fact, it’s pointless to do for this one, as it’s just another iteration of crappy digital age fundraising.  But if you want to tell some of the worst people on earthy how shitty they are, here’s the link.

File this one under completely futile gestures that are still, somehow satisfying.

And, more seriously, if anyone doubted that the Republicans are going all in as the party of ethnic cleansing, doubt no more.

This thread? It is open.

Image:  Pigsty and Latrines, earthenware, probably Henan Province, Han Dynasty, between 1st c. BCE. and 1st c. CE.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Speaking Up

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via commentor Rikyrah

The Media Village Idiot ‘let’s you and her fight’ spin is stupid, but Michelle Obama is a very smart lady. I’m really looking forward to seeing what she does next. Per the Boston Globe:

Former First Lady Michelle Obama criticized women who voted for President Donald Trump during a wide-ranging conversation in Boston Wednesday that addressed life in the White House, her forthcoming book, and the challenges of discrimination that women face together.

“Any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice,” Obama told the audience during a question-and-answer session with author Roxane Gay at Inbound, a marketing conference that has attracted an assortment of famous speakers this week.

Obama maintained that she and her husband, former President Barack Obama, still support Trump and want him to be successful…

Obama said she doesn’t miss being in the White House, though she does miss the “people and the work.” The process taught her that she can do anything, she told the audience.

“It was like being shot out of a cannon…with a blindfold and the spotlight on you,” she said when asked what it was like as First Lady…

(Tim Eagan via GoComics.com)
.

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