Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This blog will pay for itself.

How has Obama failed you today?

Naturally gregarious and alpha

Not all heroes wear capes.

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

Forty-two’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Mission Accomplished!

Also, too.

We Survived Breitbartpocalypse!

Women: They Get Shit Done

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Word salad with all caps

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

I personally stopped the public option…

Gastritis Broke My Calculator

Hot Air and Ill Informed Banter

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

The Math Demands It!

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Yes we did.

Shock troops for the Unitarian Jihad.

Wetsuit optional.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

You are here: Home / Archives for Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Nope, Joe Biden Is (Still) Not A White Supremacist

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I’d like to believe this particular calumny will be obsolete by morning, but I suspect it’s actually a warning that 2020 is gonna be even dumber than 2019…

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Repubs in Disturbingly Close Array! Open Thread

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… Over the past three years, Trump has spent his days at Mar-a-Lago — which he calls “The Southern White House” — surrounded by an unpredictable cast of Palm Beach residents, wedding guests and the characters Trump invites down for a meeting or a round of golf. It’s often led to a more freewheeling atmosphere, in which the president feels more comfortable to freely meet with people, knowing he’s outside the strictures of official Washington…

Multiple former White House officials said that Trump is much more comfortable when he is relaxing down at Mar-a-Lago and is surrounded by many fewer staffers who try to keep out shady individuals when he’s in the White House. One of those former White House officials described Trump as feeling “liberated” and at home when he’s at Mar-a-Lago…

In the early days, there was some consternation among White House officials about the lax situation. The Secret Service was “never happy,” according to the first former White House official.

“It was a bunch of hangers-on,” that official said. “You just don’t want to put the president in the same room with some folks … who were maybe closer to him when he was a developer or living in New York than you’d want, who were controversial in their own right, whether they were involved in lawsuits or other things.”

Back then, “every guy would bring a friend and the friend was some guy from some country or [a] lobbyist,” said a person close to the White House. “I think they put the kibosh on that and became a lot tougher on screening and who members were bringing as guests.”

The person remembered one time when a member showed up with people from a sub-Saharan African country who wanted to talk to Trump. In a sign that staff were trying to put some limits on things, the individuals were turned away…

War criminals, serial rapists, global gangsters — no problem! But anyone whose skin is darker than Tiger Woods’…

Laurence Leamer, the author of “Mar-a-Lago: Inside the Gates of Power at Donald Trump’s Presidential Palace,” said one reason that Trump is in a better mood at the Palm Beach resort is because no members or visitors to Mar-a-Lago challenge Trump directly when they’re at his resort. Leamer noted that numerous one-time members who object to Trump’s policies resigned over their political differences.

“He can’t stand to be criticized or challenged. And when he asks you, ‘How am I doing?’ you just say ‘You’re doing great,’ that’s it, that’s what he wants to hear,” said Leamer, who has talked with Trump many times at Mar-a-Lago over the years…

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Election 2020 Open Thread: Joe Biden Is Fortunate in His Enemies

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In New Hampshire? I’d give 50/50 odds it was a capital-L Libertarian, willing to ratfvck the primary in favor of whichever candidate offered them personally the most entertainment.

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Repub Stupidity Open Thread: Daft Days

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My teenage brothers and their friends used to challenge each other to stunts like mooning drivers on the Major Deegan Expressway from an extremely rickety overpass. But they were teenagers, and mostly working on imagined future careers as alcoholics. They expected to be ‘rewarded’, if caught, with a smack upside the head — the stupid stunting was bonding over their self-professed goals of being public losers. They weren’t highly-educated professional political operatives.

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Here’s A Piece About Rich Asshole Misanthropes (Or Miscoenothropes) That Doesn’t Mention Howard Hughes

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There’s a metric fuck tonne of crap news — daily revelations of the evil (and I use that word in its full sense) lodged at the center of American power that continues to add to the tally of human misery.  But here I want to talk about assholes of a different stripe.  Or species:

Hermit crabs face a uniquely competitive real estate market. They need bigger and bigger shells throughout their lives, but can’t grow these homes themselves. So they rely on castoff snail shells, and are constantly on the lookout for better properties entering the market.

A study that will be published next month in the journal Physica A found that the distribution of these shells in one hermit crab population was surprisingly similar to the distribution of wealth in human societies.

Here's A Piece About Rich Asshole Hermits That Doesn't Mention Howard Hughes

That may make hermit crabs one of the first animals known to experience wealth inequality.

Hermit crabs, perhaps because of their socialist disdain for the possibility of inheriting wealth, do not display quite the extremes of wealth inequality that human societies now display:

The team used a number called the Gini coefficient to measure overall inequality among the crabs. It found a value similar to that in small human populations, though not as great as in today’s large countries. The top 1 percent of hermit crabs owned only about 3 percent of the total shell weight, Dr. Chase and his co-authors noted: “There are no Warren Buffetts or Jeff Bezoses.”

Still, there are similarities:

While smaller crabs don’t exactly inherit their wealth from bigger crabs, the largest shells are a scarce resource that only a few crabs are privileged enough to get their claws on.

Nice to know that we aren’t the only ones wrestling with privilege.

And with that detour into “Ain’t nature grand?” territory, lets have our way with the comments, shall we?

Consider this the Escargot Open Thread.

Image: Follower of Rembrandt, A Hermit Reading, c. 1630

 

 

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: What Comes Next

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Trump toddler wails at Impeachment Santa - Luckovich

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

Per a very thorough explainer in the Washington Post, paper of record in the town whose monopoly industry is politics:

… The Constitution only says that the Senate has to hold a trial, with the senators sitting as jurors, House lawmakers serving as prosecutors known as managers, and the chief justice of the United States presiding over it. Senators must take a public vote, and two-thirds of those present must agree on whether to convict the president and thus remove him from office. But the Constitution doesn’t lay out exactly how to hold a trial.

Rules the Senate approved in the 1980s give some guidelines, but the really important stuff — such as whether to call witnesses and what kind of evidence to admit and how long to make it — is up to the senators themselves to decide. The only modern guide we have is the Clinton impeachment trial, which allowed no new evidence and only taped witness testimony of key witnesses. It was largely considered a successful example of bipartisan cooperation, as Republicans worked with Democrats to put together as fair a trial as possible.

A majority of senators need to agree on the rules for Trump’s impeachment trial. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) will probably try to come to a compromise beforehand on what witnesses to call to avoid a big, dramatic battle during the trial. But they have vastly different views on how to do this. Schumer has said he wants people close to the president during the period scrutinized in the impeachment inquiry, such as Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, or former national security adviser John Bolton, to testify. The Washington Post has reported McConnell wants no witnesses at all. Republicans are also feeling pressured by Trump, who appears ready to use the Senate trial to attack his political opponents and try to undermine his impeachment…

Minutes after the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told reporters she wouldn’t be naming House managers until she saw the parameters of the Senate trial and was assured it was fair, strongly suggesting that she believes a fair trial includes witnesses.

Assuming they get the articles without delay, senators will come to an agreement on a start date for a trial. We expect that will be in January. Senators will start by taking an oath of impartiality and will work six days a week until they’ve voted on both articles of impeachment. If there are witnesses, senators can ask them questions in writing, which the presiding official, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., will read out loud. The president can choose his own lawyers, and they can cross-examine witnesses. The chief justice can overrule something that happens in the trial that he feels is out of line with the rules, but senators can overrule him with a vote.

If Trump is convicted on even one count, the Constitution says he has to be removed from office. Senators could take yet another vote to prevent him from running for office ever again…

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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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Extremely Stupid Watergate Open Thread: It’d Be Funnier If He Didn’t Have the Nuclear Codes

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IMO, there is a non-zero chance that Trump will avoid incarceration because of a major medical event — either a fatal myocardial infarction or an ischemic incident. Remember back in the day, we all made jokes about Nixon’s phlebitis?

At least the CREEPsters, however unfortunate their acronyms, didn’t publicly target teenage girls. Which may only have been because Twitter hadn’t been invented yet…

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‘Season of Giving’ Open Thread: Spare A Thought for the Locally-Grown, Artisanal Bigots & Hypocrites

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The multinational big-box kleptocrats, with the Oval Office Occupant as their spokesthing, are making it impossible for the traditional regional hatemongers to get the earned media (free publicity) they rely upon to survive!

Take, for instance, newly-minted reparative-justice advocate and unindicted insurance-fraud Republican Darrel Issa:


“If the soulless legislative middle managers are gonna keep a stand-up guy like Duncan Hunter from voting with us, just because he’s pled guilty to robbing wounded veterans to pay for his golf fees, cigar bars, and at least five extramarital liaisons with lobbyists and staffers… who’s gonna be left to accuse the Democrats of immorality and lawlessness? (ME!, that’s who)”

… In August, Issa announced that he had launched an exploratory committee to consider a potential bid for Hunter’s seat, which prompted him to withdraw his nomination by Trump for a trade post.

The Union-Tribune noted that unlike other challengers running for Hunter’s seat, Issa has not criticized the embattled Republican congressman.

On Thursday, the House Ethics Committee urged Hunter to “refrain from voting on any question at a meeting of the House or of the Committee of the Whole House,” citing a House rule regarding convicted lawmakers…

Not to mention the sad status of favorite blog chewtoy Little Prince Rand, who can’t get any front-page MSM attention for the kind of puke-funnel performance that used to be worth thousands from his donors / voters…

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Late Night Open Thread: When Narwhal Tusks Are Outlawed…

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… Actually, as far as I can tell from a cursory google search, because the narwhal is a protected species, only pre-1972 narwhal tusks are legal in the U.S. (The one spontaneously repurposed in London was a pub ornament, date of its collection unspecified.) And given the legal ones are hella pricey, there’d probably be fewer stories like this…


I’m not fond of unannounced drop-ins either, but jeez.

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Open Thread: Revenge of the “Rockies”

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Since Trump theoretically didn’t have access to his own twitter account when it first  appeared, it’s possible he didn’t personally retweet that ridiculous Rocky Balboa photoshop. (His diligent minions should’ve known better than to retweet it, but ‘should’ve known better’ is not a skill for which Trump minions are selected.)

Interesting riff from Jamelle Bouie on the trope:

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Sunday Afternoon Open Thread: The Way ‘Trump Nation’ Lives Now

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It would be funnier, if they weren’t so damned sad…

The SPLC’s take on organizer Harim Uzziel, “Hardcore American Patriot”.

Errol Webber, U.S. House candidate caught between the warring armies.

Award-winning closer on the full video!

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Saturday Night PopCult Nostalgia Open Thread: CYBERTRUCK!

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Soundtrack for this post:

RIP my menchies, as the kids say, but this was too good *not* to share. Bryan Feldman, at NYMag, “We May Not Want the Cybertruck, But We Deserve It”:

… The Cybertruck is a truck that Elon Musk unveiled last night. It is a Humvee-ish vehicle that looks like it was made for a direct-to-video Starship Troopers ripoff called Spaceship Soldiers. It looks like a secret car you unlock if you get a high score on every Cruisin’ USA track. It looks like one of those first-pass shots on a visual-effects highlights reel from 1992. It looks like it has a physics system completely separate from every other object on this earth and if you hit a curb at the wrong angle, the truck will glitch out and clip through an entire city block, causing untold devastation. It is the Cybertruck.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Ah, a Cybertruck. A truck that is computer-y.” Wrong! Cybertruck should be said in the exact same way that one might pronounce the word “cyberpunk,” a sci-fi genre all about how technology will completely ruin us once we start jamming chips into our brains. Just look at the Cybertruck logo. It’s not some coder font — it’s graffiti. It’s the Official Truck of App-Catalyzed Urban Decay. This a Blade Runner-ass truck for the end times. It is not a utopian, idealistic creation — and in that sense, it is refreshing. Elon Musk is not selling us the world we want; he is selling the world we have (starting at MSRP $39,900). The Cybertruck is, in a sense, practical. Everything about this truck screams, “This is the car you will drive through overgrown suburbs full of decaying houses, searching for potable water. This is the car the next three generations of your family will be born in the trunk of. When the feral wolves attack, this truck will protect you.”

But the truck will not protect you. In its unveiling last night, Musk tried to show off the vehicle’s “bulletproof” windows. He asked an employee to throw a rock at the window. The window fractured. They tried it again on a second window. That window also fractured. It was a pure, perfect distillation of what Elon Musk’s whole, like, deal is. He has spent years pouring his billions into projects that make science fiction into science fact, in order to sell people and governments expensive stuff that maybe half-functions. A demonstration of the dent-proof doors went off more successfully.

Many of Musk’s products are self-indulgent, but this might be the most self-indulgent. Like, you know how there are people who design their living rooms to look like the bridge of the Enterprise, or have rooms dedicated to baseball paraphernalia? The Cybertruck can then be read as Musk’s attempt to shape not just his own life, but the lives of others, to mimic the media of his youth. The whole thing resembles a low-poly model — a 3-D asset made of a limited number of polygons based on the limited computing power of older devices. Musk doesn’t just want a Cybertruck for himself, he wants to see thousands of Cybertrucks roaming the streets, sticking out like sore thumbs, parts of the world that quite literally haven’t fully rendered to the level of everything else around them. The notion might not be as far-fetched as it seems. Silicon Valley is full of newly minted millionaires with more money than they know what to do with. The Cybertruck looks very stupid, but so do AirPods…

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Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: I Learn Something New Every Day

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Never even heard of the Teremok chain, and now I wanna visit one…

Elsewhere, per the Hill:

President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani remarked Saturday that he has “insurance” if the president tries to turn on him while defending their relationship amid the ongoing House impeachment inquiry.

Giuliani in a wide-ranging interview on Fox News declined to say if he has spoken with Trump in recent days, saying, “You can assume that I talk to him early and often.”

He then touted what he called a “very, very good relationship” with Trump before knocking unspecified comments about him in the press, calling them “totally insulting.”

“I’ve seen things written like he’s going to throw me under the bus. When they say that, I say he isn’t, but I have insurance,” Giuliani told Fox News’s Ed Henry…

Trump on Friday defended his use of Giuliani despite scrutiny over his actions in Ukraine, calling the former New York City mayor “an iconic figure in this country” and “the greatest crime fighter probably in the last 50 years” based on his time as a federal prosecutor.

“He’s also a friend of mine. He’s a great person,” Trump added during an interview Friday on “Fox & Friends,” portraying the lawyer as focused on tackling corruption.

Pitch for the kind of “reality tv show” Trump so loves: Two former goodfellas share a cell! Wacky antics and non-stop backbiting! Which one will snap first?

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Late Night Open Thread: The Berlin Wall – Both Sides!

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(Crowley’s tweet, it seems, is actually four years old… part of her campaign seeking ‘promotion’ from Fox News host to Trump official.)

On the ‘opposite’ pole:

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