Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shelter in place is one thing. Shelter in pants is quite another.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

We need fewer warriors in public service and more gardeners.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

This fight is for everything.

We have all the best words.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

We can agree to disagree, but i’m right.

This blog goes to 11…

How does anyone do Gilligan’s Island as trump world and not cast Jared as Gilligan?

I’m going back to the respite thread.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Verified, but limited!

Too inconsequential to be sued

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Fuck if i know. i just get yelled at when i try it.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

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Trump Crime Cartel

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Much As Expected

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A classic Gambino style roll-up

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I am not a lawyer.

However, that sure as fuck sounds like an overt act of a conspiracy.

And given an overt act of conspiracy, there are going to be a shit ton of small fry who will soon be enjoying the full and unparrelled attention of the US government.  They will be getting lawyers who will be telling them that silence gets them 10 to 20 while talking gets them a much shorter and easier sentence.

A lot of people are extremely unlikely to be pardoned in the next week.  The incentive to squeal will be extraordinarily high.

But again, I am not a lawyer.

 

 

 

A classic Gambino style roll-upPost + Comments (174)

Who Are They?

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Who are the guys you saw foaming at the mouth, screaming about stolen elections and loving the constitution and calling capitol police traitors as they broke into the Capitol and defiled the place? You know them, folks. You went to school with them. While the ages range,, they mostly 30-60 years old. They’re bored. They’re unhappy with where they are in life. They were never much into book learning, but not stupid. But they feel like time has passed them by and their glory days are over. No one cares about the HS football or basketball championship, their league softball exploits bring them no glory.

They may have been in the military for a while and that gave them a sense of purpose, or maybe they were LEO’s, or firemen. Mill workers and miners. Contractors and laborers. Add in some nutjoob losers, some lawyers and brokers, etc.

And they’re angry. Life hasn’t gone the way they thought it would. Maybe they expected more out of it. Maybe they got screwed. But they are aging and feeling irrelevant, and insecure in their masculinity. It’s why they flock to shiny 80k pick-em-trucks they will never haul anything in and worship guns- it makes them feel important and in charge. They haven’t really read the constitution any more than they have read the bible, and what they have read they don’t understand or they ignore the parts they don’t like. They like the cosplay of it all, too- the tactical gear they barely fit into and in many cases don’t know how to use. It makes them look tough. It’s why the most important part of their kit is the Punisher logos and the badges letting people know what group they’re in. They think it gives them respect, and a camaraderie they are missing.

And they’re angry. For the last 40 years they’ve been lied to and they’ve been screwed in the wallet by policies of both parties. And they have also self-radicalized. They go to these online rooms, facebook groups, share bullshit memes, and refuse to actually investigate if they are true. It’s easier to just yell fake news or blame the media or people who actually know what they are talking about. And they work themselves into a froth, creating a feedback loop, where each time one of them says how they been wrong someone comes up with something worse and then all of a sudden they hate Adam Schiff or Steny Hoyer more than anything else in the world even though they couldn’t pick them out of a lineup. I mean, try to debate them. Everything they say is a soundbite and superficial, and when you definitively prove them wrong they just keep on believing what they want to believe, or engage in false equivalencies and whataboutism. “OK FINE MAYBE THAT WAS OUT OF LINE AT THE CAPITOL BUT WHATABOUT BLM PROTESTS.” Literally the ONLY information they are interested in is that which reinforces what they already believe and tells them they are right.

So you take all that, feed them toxic shit for years in the media, and then have the President urge them all on with lies, and that’s how you get the Beergut Putsch that happened the other day. And I don’t know how it stops, because for a lot of these guys it’s a game, and for the people feeding them this bullshit, it’s very profitable.

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: What, You Mean Actions Have Consequences?!?…

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I’d joke Jared Kushner spent the evening calling all his foreign ‘business allies’ in countries with no extradition treaties… but I seriously doubt Jared/Jarvanka have the collective IQ to understand how much trouble they’re in.

Seriously, though, this video clip is a schadenfreudelicious treat:

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: What, You Mean Actions Have <em>Consequences?!?…</em>Post + Comments (88)

And Another Thing About These Fuckers

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One of the enduring lies of the last four years is that Trump speaks for the downtrodden and disfranchised. This has never been true. Sure, there are a lot of racist poor people who vote for him, but as the arrests are pouring in from the McRib Rebellion, you are seeing Trump’s true base. Middle and Upper middle class white people with means. Like this shitstain:

As insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol this week, a few figures stood out. One man, clad in a combat helmet, body armor, and other tactical gear, was among the group that made it to the inner reaches of the building. Carrying zip-tie handcuffs, he was captured in photographs and videos on the Senate floor and with a group that descended on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office suite. In a video shot by ITV News, he is seen standing against a wall adjacent to Pelosi’s office, his face covered by a bandana. At another point, he appears to exit the suite, face exposed, pushing his way through the crowds of demonstrators.

A day after the riots, John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School, notified the F.B.I. that he suspected the man was retired Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., a Texas-based Air Force Academy graduate and combat veteran. Scott-Railton had been trying to identify various people involved in the attack. “I used a number of techniques to hone in on his identity, including facial recognition and image enhancement, as well as seeking contextual clues from his military paraphernalia,” Scott-Railton told me. Brock was wearing several patches on his combat helmet and body armor, including one bearing a yellow fleur de lis, the insignia of the 706th Fighter Squadron. He also wore several symbols suggesting that he lived in Texas, including a vinyl tag of the Texas flag overlaid on the skull logo of the Punisher, the Marvel comic-book character. The Punisher has been adopted by police and Army groups and, more recently, by white supremacists and followers of QAnon. Scott-Railton also found a recently deleted Twitter account associated with Brock, with a Crusader as its avatar. “All those things together, it’s like looking at a person’s C.V.,” Scott-Railton said.

Or this fuckknob:

A Texas-based lawyer is among those who have been terminated from their job after being identified as a participant in Wednesday’s riot on Capitol Hill.

“Paul Davis, Associate General Counsel, is no longer employed by Goosehead,” Goosehead Insurance, located in Westlake, Texas, tweeted Thursday.

That’s why the Trump boat flotillas were popular- his base is predominantly crazy white people of means. The poors don’t have 200k boats. Boats are fucking expensive to own and maintain. You weren’t seeing blue collar boys in their weekend bass boats at those things. These were expensive toys.

On top of that, truly poor people can not afford to fly or drive across country, dress up in expensive tactical gear, and riot. They don’t have the means or the money to fly across country on a private jet like this dumpsterfire of a person:

One Dallas-area woman flew by private jet to participate in the initial protest at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday that turned violent as the mob breached the building.

Realtor and radio host Jenna Ryan took a private jet with three others to Washington D.C. to protest the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump.

These people have never been disfranchised, they just don’t accept it when their candidate loses and they don’t accept minority voters as their equals. What has happened is the mainstreaming of the Birchers. Add in all the unstable nutjobs who follow conspiracy theories, opportunists and grifters, fascist groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters and militias, the Jesus freaks, and your friends on facebook who want their tax cuts and don’t give a fuck about anything else, and there you have the Trump base.

But it isn’t the poor and downtrodden who just want their voices heard.

And Another Thing About These FuckersPost + Comments (409)

Schadenfreudelicious Link: “”The Stink of His Family Is Nearly Impossible to Get Off”: Jared and Ivanka’s Final Chapter in Washington Demolished Their Future”

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Of course, chances are that the younger Trump/Kushners will be miraculously rehabilitated no later than the 2020 midterms, but it’s nice to know they’re currently suffering the worst such can suffer…

… Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, have spent the past five years performing a mincing dance around reality, spinning their own parallel universe instead. When it suited them, they were the loudest, most trusted voices in President Trump’s ear, with outsize presences and responsibilities. When it was less advantageous, they shrunk out of sight. As for their influence, well, there was only so much they could do, they’d say. Dad would ultimately be dad…

There aren’t many friends left, but as of this week, there were plenty of people who would either tolerate Javanka or at least bite their tongues: people who had known them for years, people who’d hold their noses to do business with them, people who didn’t much care for their administration but certainly didn’t mind the lower tax rates, the deregulation, the proximity to power. As such, they kept their disdain quiet, at least beyond their immediate social circles.

That changed on Wednesday…

Other longtime friends told me on Thursday that many people who hadn’t wanted to get political were looking to get their feet wet. “It feels like everyone on the Upper East Side is texting me today. Suddenly they all want to join the Resistance,” the former friend said.

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Adios, You Edgelord Fuck

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Trump banned from twitter:

After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.

In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action. Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.

However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.

Did he really cross their line or did they realize that Democrats are now chairing all the science and tech committees?

Adios, You Edgelord FuckPost + Comments (357)