Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

No one could have predicted…

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

It’s been a really long fucking year.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Everybody saw this coming.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Reality always wins in the end.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

This blog will pay for itself.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

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

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Late Night Open Thread: All We Have Learned…

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… is that Conservatives have a proud tradition of never learning anything new.

… Some of the candidates who received votes were joke candidates, and I think that speaks volumes. Have we considered whether or not more of our candidates in America ought to be jokes? It is clear that the people are hungry for bad ideas that will solve nothing; I think we ought to consider whether worse ideas, more clearly labeled, might not be better…

Think we got that last part covered, for sure. They call themselves ‘dirtbag leftists‘ and they are at best a wen on the Democratic party they seek to parasitize.


“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes” is a strong contender for motto of the year. Hopefully *this* year, and not 2020!

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Repubs in Disarray Open Thread: Crowdstruck

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It could be worse, you could be a Republican (assuming you could drop 40 IQ points and every moral qualm)…

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Whole Lotta “Nothing” Goin’ On

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Late Night Open Thread: Rich ‘Sparklepants’ Lowry Throws A Public Snit

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Not that I normally read anything by, or if I can help it about, the National Review editor who wrote the first public paean to Sarah Palin’s charms. But Mr. Boie’s tweet sent me in search of explication…

“You know what I am?” U.S. President Donald J. Trump said at a rally in October 2018. “I’m a nationalist.” Rich Lowry’s The Case for Nationalism can be seen as a way of working through, and defending, what the president meant. As the editor of National Review, the prominent conservative magazine, Lowry is an intellectual gatekeeper on the American right. He was one of the speakers at the National Conservatism conference in July 2019, an event that brought together such thinkers as J. D. Vance and Patrick Deneen, with keynotes by the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, along with a notorious intervention on the perils of immigration by University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

Lowry’s central claim is that Americans are, and have been from their country’s founding, a nation and not a community of universal ideas. Although intellectuals and left-wing pundits are openly hostile to expressions of national sentiment, the United States has a unique national tradition that is today obscured by fissiparous identity politics. If Americans reacquaint themselves with their true national heritage, they will be better equipped to overcome dangerous tribalism, protect their borders, and make their country great again. To the degree that the United States has a global role, it should be as “vindicator of the prerogatives of other democratic nation-states”—in other words, a defender of the idea that a world of culturally defined nations is humanity’s state of nature…

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Repubs in Disarray!… Open Thread: Nikki Haley’s Delicate Balancing Act

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Conventional wisdom, any time over the last forty years, has been that the first female president would be a Republican. (Or, we should amend, the first female winner of the popular vote allowed to take her earned seat in the Oval Office.) Nikki Haley has been working to be that woman for most of her adult life, but her best shot — and her new memoir — arrive at a tricksy point in the current electoral cycle: She can’t afford to denounce the sitting Republican president, for fear of angering his (Deplorable) base. But she can’t risk applauding too publicly someone who might be impeached, or worse, before her book tour is well under way.

Solution: Embrace the Oval Office Occupant; blame any ‘mistakes’ on the people around him. Even better, on the people who were around him, but have since been dismissed!

… In the book, which was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release Tuesday, Haley offers only glancing critiques of her former boss, saying she and others who worked for Trump had an obligation to carry out his wishes since he was the one elected by voters.

The former South Carolina governor, widely viewed by Republicans as a top potential presidential candidate in 2024, has repeatedly sought to minimize differences with Trump while distancing herself from his excesses. Haley, 47, writes that she backed most of the foreign policy decisions by Trump that others tried to block or slow down, including withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord and the relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

In a New York City interview with The Post coinciding with the book release, Haley also dismissed efforts by House Democrats to impeach Trump. She said she opposes Trump’s efforts to seek foreign help for political investigations in a call with Ukraine’s president, but that the actions are not impeachable.

“There was no heavy demand insisting that something had to happen. So it’s hard for me to understand where the whole impeachment situation is coming from, because what everybody’s up in arms about didn’t happen,” Haley said…

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So make sure when you say you’re in it but not of it

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Don’t forget to vote in your local elections today if you have them. Where I live, in Monroe County, the Republicans have dominated county politics for years, but there’s been a big shift in registration in the past three years, amounting to a 3-4% net gain for Democrats. I asked a friend if Dems have a chance this year and he said no because they don’t turn out for county elections.

Commenter MikeJ once said that too many liberals were

too cool to actually approve of anything. The whole thing smacks of effort, man. Democrats are also famous for only liking the first album (or better yet, the unreleased demos.)

Don’t be that guy. Go out and vote Democrat today no matter how uninspiring your candidates are.

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“Bring Me the Head of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi”: Early Reviews, Not Promising

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Publicity-grab sequels seldom match the success of the originals. Title of this post from a Christopher Dickey article in the Daily Beast, “Trump Turns Baghdadi’s Killing Into a Reality Show”:

PARIS—President Donald J. Trump wants you to see his new movie: “Bring Me the Head of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

At a special Sunday morning press conference in Washington D.C., Trump described the way U.S. Special Operations Forces attacked Baghdadi’s compound and killed him in such graphic and explicit detail that some intelligence professionals worried he may have revealed, again, too much about sources and methods.

But Trump knows great television when he sees it, and he was enthusiastic about the images he was watching from the White House situation room Saturday night. “It was absolutely perfect, as though you were watching a movie,” he said…

The reasons such a video of the 2011 Osama operation was not released are the same ones that the intelligence community will use to argue against dissemination of the Baghdadi death: because such images could compromise so much about the operation.

But quite apart from Trump’s worthy desire to undermine the messaging of the still virulent ISIS organization, there is also his unworthy inclination to gloat. Remember when Trump tweeted a highly classified high-resolution image of a failed Iranian missile launch earlier this year for little more reason, it would seem, that smug self-satisfaction?

Trump hates it when the fast-turning news cycle that he uses effectively to obscure his failings also works to push his accomplishments into oblivion…

He’ll be tweeting obscenities — not dirty words, but actual graphic images & descriptions — no later than tomorrow morning. And that’s only if the Fox News prime-time lineup lathers sufficient Kim-Jong-un – style propaganda all this evening.

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