Inherent Contempt

by

by wj

No, this is not about the contempt for others, or contempt for the law, that seem inherent in the personality of certain public figures. At least not directly. Rather, it is about Contempt of Congress and how it plays out.

As you may be aware, the House Judiciary Committee is in the process of finding Attorney General Barr in contempt. The cogent question is: What happens next?

Normally, when someone is found in contempt of Congress, the United States Attorney takes them before a grand jury. But there is some reason to doubt that this will happen in this case. Which is unusual, but not unheard of the past few years. In which case, Congress usually moves to Plan B:

Alternatively, the Congress can launch a civil suit to compel compliance. This can result in a court order – something even the more recalcitrant individuals are generally unwilling to blow off. The down side is, if the defendant stalls and launches appeals, it can take months before the matter is resolved. And if the delay extends past the next election, the case gets dropped.

But, it develops, there is a third alternative. It hasn’t been used in decades, but there is solid case law, including Supreme Court decisions, upholding it. It’s called “inherent contempt”. In this, the House (or Senate) Sergeant-At-Arms (or his deputy) acts as a police officer to arrest and detain the individual in contempt. I’m not sure exactly where the Congress would detain him, but presumably they can find some place suitable.

But the question that leaps to my mind is this. Suppose the issue is the refusal of an individual to produce records in response to a subpoena. Does inherent contempt extend to having the Sergeant-At-Arms physically seize the subpoenaed records?

I can see where this would be straightforward, at least in principle, in the case of Congress wanting an unredacted copy of the Mueller Report. Finding a copy at the Justice Department shouldn’t be that difficult, and even at a few hundred pages it should be easy enough for one person to pick up and carry out. Getting Mr. Trump’s tax returns could be more of a challenge. But it should still be possible to find out where the IRS has them, rent a truck, and send a couple of guys to load them up. Wouldn’t that be fun?

Open Thread (because we’re overdue for one)

478 thoughts on “Inherent Contempt”

  1. I’ve read the IRS keep the tax returns in lockers.
    In p’s case, meat lockers.

  2. I’ve read the IRS keep the tax returns in lockers.
    In p’s case, meat lockers.

  7. seems strange that nobody has leaked a copy of the full report to Congress. surely there’s a PDF of it floating around the White House that someone could thumb drive out of there.

  8. seems strange that nobody has leaked a copy of the full report to Congress. surely there’s a PDF of it floating around the White House that someone could thumb drive out of there.

  9. On the other hand…
    “Yet China’s overseas ventures include hundreds of electric power plants that burn coal, which is a significant emitter of the carbon scientifically linked to climate change. Edward Cunningham, a specialist on China and its energy markets at Harvard University, tells NPR that China is building or planning more than 300 coal plants in places as widely spread as Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines.”
    Why Is China Placing A Global Bet On Coal?

  10. On the other hand…
    “Yet China’s overseas ventures include hundreds of electric power plants that burn coal, which is a significant emitter of the carbon scientifically linked to climate change. Edward Cunningham, a specialist on China and its energy markets at Harvard University, tells NPR that China is building or planning more than 300 coal plants in places as widely spread as Turkey, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philippines.”
    Why Is China Placing A Global Bet On Coal?

  11. seems strange that nobody has leaked a copy of the full report to Congress
    I’m not sure we’d necessarily know if they had. Maybe whoever sent/received it wanted to capitalize on a certain timing for the reveal.
    Wishful thinking, I suppose.

  12. seems strange that nobody has leaked a copy of the full report to Congress
    I’m not sure we’d necessarily know if they had. Maybe whoever sent/received it wanted to capitalize on a certain timing for the reveal.
    Wishful thinking, I suppose.

  13. The two stories are hardly incompatible, Charles.
    Hence my “not enough, by some distance” qualifier.
    What remains true is that there is a very strong economic case for making the transition (which does not rely on adopting anything which might be labelled as ‘socialism’) – which might help persuade those in denial about the serious danger we are in.
    Investing in (as your story describes it) a “50 year asset” is far from smart if it is going to be utterly obsolete in ten.

  14. The two stories are hardly incompatible, Charles.
    Hence my “not enough, by some distance” qualifier.
    What remains true is that there is a very strong economic case for making the transition (which does not rely on adopting anything which might be labelled as ‘socialism’) – which might help persuade those in denial about the serious danger we are in.
    Investing in (as your story describes it) a “50 year asset” is far from smart if it is going to be utterly obsolete in ten.

  17. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.

  18. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.

  19. True if were are talking about immediately, but on a three decade view it would be possible to do without fossil fuels entirely, without any heroic technical developments:
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320934766_Global_Energy_System_based_on_100_Renewable_Energy_-_Power_Sector
    To illustrate the possibilities (though this is for now slightly fanciful), a new coal fired station costs around $3000 per kW of output capacity.
    A Tesla has a battery capacity of around 60-75 kW for a cost of perhaps $35k – so you could get 10 hours of continuous 6 -7.5 kW output: ie $5000 per kW of output capacity.
    With sufficient free marginal cost solar or wind, it would be nearly as cheap to buy half a million Teslas as a new coal fired power station, for pretty well the same output.
    Obviously that would depend on a huge amount of new build wind and solar – but that is exactly what we are starting to do now.

  20. True if were are talking about immediately, but on a three decade view it would be possible to do without fossil fuels entirely, without any heroic technical developments:
    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320934766_Global_Energy_System_based_on_100_Renewable_Energy_-_Power_Sector
    To illustrate the possibilities (though this is for now slightly fanciful), a new coal fired station costs around $3000 per kW of output capacity.
    A Tesla has a battery capacity of around 60-75 kW for a cost of perhaps $35k – so you could get 10 hours of continuous 6 -7.5 kW output: ie $5000 per kW of output capacity.
    With sufficient free marginal cost solar or wind, it would be nearly as cheap to buy half a million Teslas as a new coal fired power station, for pretty well the same output.
    Obviously that would depend on a huge amount of new build wind and solar – but that is exactly what we are starting to do now.

  21. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.
    This assertion cannot be taken at face value absent some clarifications of the assumptions that underlay it.

  22. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.
    This assertion cannot be taken at face value absent some clarifications of the assumptions that underlay it.

  23. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.
    Is it so much a “technological fix” as capacity for large-scale manufacturing of say, solar panels?
    Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “backed up.” Are you talking about occasional outages, managing peak loads, or just ongoing, gradually decreasing, output?

  24. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.
    Is it so much a “technological fix” as capacity for large-scale manufacturing of say, solar panels?
    Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “backed up.” Are you talking about occasional outages, managing peak loads, or just ongoing, gradually decreasing, output?

  25. Batteries are necessary to deal with the fact that solar doesn’t generate at night. And we are certainly heading in the direction of having that. Even if the details (the particular technological improvements) are still being worked.
    What is a lot further away is dealing with winter. Especially in the parts of the world closer to the poles, which have both longer nights and lots of days without much sunshine to generate power from. How we deal with that remains unclear — batteries that can hold massive amounts of power for 6-9 months are a whole different level from those which deal with 10-14 hours. Without that, some nuclear or fossil looks unavoidable.

  26. Batteries are necessary to deal with the fact that solar doesn’t generate at night. And we are certainly heading in the direction of having that. Even if the details (the particular technological improvements) are still being worked.
    What is a lot further away is dealing with winter. Especially in the parts of the world closer to the poles, which have both longer nights and lots of days without much sunshine to generate power from. How we deal with that remains unclear — batteries that can hold massive amounts of power for 6-9 months are a whole different level from those which deal with 10-14 hours. Without that, some nuclear or fossil looks unavoidable.

  27. True if were are talking about immediately, but on a three decade view it would be possible to do without fossil fuels entirely, without any heroic technical developments
    I have very strong doubts that this can be accomplished in three decades even if the whole world took China’s approach to governance. Putting aside physical and technical challenges, in western countries there would be endless environmental impact, eminent domain, NIMBY, etc. lawsuits.

  28. True if were are talking about immediately, but on a three decade view it would be possible to do without fossil fuels entirely, without any heroic technical developments
    I have very strong doubts that this can be accomplished in three decades even if the whole world took China’s approach to governance. Putting aside physical and technical challenges, in western countries there would be endless environmental impact, eminent domain, NIMBY, etc. lawsuits.

  29. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “backed up.”
    The problem with electricity is that supply has to exactly match demand. Oversupply has to be ran into the ground increasing the cost per unit used. Undersupply creates problems for users. Some method is needed to keep supply/demand balanced. Batteries are one approach. But is everyone prepared to rip the planet apart to get all the elements necessary to create the mountains of batteries needed to do so?

  30. Also, I’m not sure what you mean by “backed up.”
    The problem with electricity is that supply has to exactly match demand. Oversupply has to be ran into the ground increasing the cost per unit used. Undersupply creates problems for users. Some method is needed to keep supply/demand balanced. Batteries are one approach. But is everyone prepared to rip the planet apart to get all the elements necessary to create the mountains of batteries needed to do so?

  31. Rather, it is about Contempt of Congress and how it plays out.
    I’m not sure they need to send the Sergeant of Arms to go fetch him, and I’m not sure where they’d keep him if they decided to arrest him.
    Handcuff him to the radiator in the coat closet? Not that I would object, but I don’t think they have an actual Congressional jail anymore.
    All of that said, it makes sense to me for Congress to keep this in-house – inherent contempt, rather than garden-variety. Because the guy they are holding in contempt runs the organization that would need to pursue the garden-variety kind.
    As far as the power thing goes, I don’t see a way to address any of that without some kind of concerted public effort. The upside is too long-range, and the downside too immediate, to rely on invisible hands to make it happen.
    In the case of the US, we’ve lost our understanding of how to do stuff like that. We used to know how, more or less, now we don’t.
    In the case of China, it seems like they see the present moment as their time to step forward and assume what appears to them to be their rightful place as a leader among nations. And they are going for it. If that requires burning coal to make power for another 50 years, then that’s what they’re going to do.
    I imagine they’d prefer to not wear the “world’s biggest polluter” hat, but I also imagine they are willing to do so, for some period of time, if that will gain them regional or even global pre-eminence.
    There are no technological fixes for stuff like that. You have to persuade people that using the technological fix, whatever it is, is actually in their best interest. The problem is, it might not be, and then you have to persuade people to do it anyway.
    There aren’t any trivially easy solutions to any of this stuff. Any technology capable of replacing our use of fossil fuels is going to have issues of its own, simply due to scale if nothing else.
    We have to decide that not fncking up the world is a goal that deserves some amount of sacrifice. ‘We’ here meaning everybody, and ‘sacrifice’ here possibly meaning nothing more than inconvenience. Maybe not even that, maybe just change.
    And a lot of folks are already barely bumping along, so to the degree that actual sacrifice may be required, all of us at the top of the food chain are probably going to be required to give up, or at least forgo, more than some others will.
    Bon chance. I honestly have no idea how this is going to turn out. Humans don’t have a good track record in this area.

  32. Rather, it is about Contempt of Congress and how it plays out.
    I’m not sure they need to send the Sergeant of Arms to go fetch him, and I’m not sure where they’d keep him if they decided to arrest him.
    Handcuff him to the radiator in the coat closet? Not that I would object, but I don’t think they have an actual Congressional jail anymore.
    All of that said, it makes sense to me for Congress to keep this in-house – inherent contempt, rather than garden-variety. Because the guy they are holding in contempt runs the organization that would need to pursue the garden-variety kind.
    As far as the power thing goes, I don’t see a way to address any of that without some kind of concerted public effort. The upside is too long-range, and the downside too immediate, to rely on invisible hands to make it happen.
    In the case of the US, we’ve lost our understanding of how to do stuff like that. We used to know how, more or less, now we don’t.
    In the case of China, it seems like they see the present moment as their time to step forward and assume what appears to them to be their rightful place as a leader among nations. And they are going for it. If that requires burning coal to make power for another 50 years, then that’s what they’re going to do.
    I imagine they’d prefer to not wear the “world’s biggest polluter” hat, but I also imagine they are willing to do so, for some period of time, if that will gain them regional or even global pre-eminence.
    There are no technological fixes for stuff like that. You have to persuade people that using the technological fix, whatever it is, is actually in their best interest. The problem is, it might not be, and then you have to persuade people to do it anyway.
    There aren’t any trivially easy solutions to any of this stuff. Any technology capable of replacing our use of fossil fuels is going to have issues of its own, simply due to scale if nothing else.
    We have to decide that not fncking up the world is a goal that deserves some amount of sacrifice. ‘We’ here meaning everybody, and ‘sacrifice’ here possibly meaning nothing more than inconvenience. Maybe not even that, maybe just change.
    And a lot of folks are already barely bumping along, so to the degree that actual sacrifice may be required, all of us at the top of the food chain are probably going to be required to give up, or at least forgo, more than some others will.
    Bon chance. I honestly have no idea how this is going to turn out. Humans don’t have a good track record in this area.

  33. bobbyp and other golfers here might find this “fascinating”.
    http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?p=29049
    How is it that a hockey game has never broken out on the course when p is cheating his way thru the front nine?
    And American conservatives whine that “manhood” is under assault in this country.
    Teach your children to lie, cheat, and steal.
    It’s how we get ahead in pigfucker America, losers.
    Would a Big Bertha driver catching him right in the larynx violate the gentlemanly spirit of the game?

  34. bobbyp and other golfers here might find this “fascinating”.
    http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?p=29049
    How is it that a hockey game has never broken out on the course when p is cheating his way thru the front nine?
    And American conservatives whine that “manhood” is under assault in this country.
    Teach your children to lie, cheat, and steal.
    It’s how we get ahead in pigfucker America, losers.
    Would a Big Bertha driver catching him right in the larynx violate the gentlemanly spirit of the game?

  35. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.
    Nuclear’s biggest problem right now is cost: the only new plants that are being built today are the two units at Vogtle in Georgia, which are coming in at just about $12.5B per GW of capacity. At least in the US Western Interconnect, overbuilt wind/solar plus pumped-hydro storage plus transmission to tie the whole thing together can be built for a fraction of that. I admit that my interests are parochial: how the eastern US solves its (much harder) problem is their concern.

  36. Until if and when a technological fix is found, solar and wind will have to be backed up by fossil and/or nuclear.
    Nuclear’s biggest problem right now is cost: the only new plants that are being built today are the two units at Vogtle in Georgia, which are coming in at just about $12.5B per GW of capacity. At least in the US Western Interconnect, overbuilt wind/solar plus pumped-hydro storage plus transmission to tie the whole thing together can be built for a fraction of that. I admit that my interests are parochial: how the eastern US solves its (much harder) problem is their concern.

  37. Some method is needed to keep supply/demand balanced.
    It strikes me that most discussions on this matter implicitly assume some kind of demand growth going out to the infinite horizon.
    That is like constructing a grand plan for putting out a fire and not ever considering the use of water.

  38. Some method is needed to keep supply/demand balanced.
    It strikes me that most discussions on this matter implicitly assume some kind of demand growth going out to the infinite horizon.
    That is like constructing a grand plan for putting out a fire and not ever considering the use of water.

  41. bobbyp and other golfers here might find this “fascinating”.
    I do, but I don’t know how Reilly made a whole whole book about it. That’s some cheating.

  42. bobbyp and other golfers here might find this “fascinating”.
    I do, but I don’t know how Reilly made a whole whole book about it. That’s some cheating.

  43. There are no technological fixes for stuff like that. You have to persuade people that using the technological fix, whatever it is, is actually in their best interest. The problem is, it might not be, and then you have to persuade people to do it anyway.
    Read the report at the link I posted above.
    It’s around 150 pages, but it is interesting.

  44. There are no technological fixes for stuff like that. You have to persuade people that using the technological fix, whatever it is, is actually in their best interest. The problem is, it might not be, and then you have to persuade people to do it anyway.
    Read the report at the link I posted above.
    It’s around 150 pages, but it is interesting.

  45. The problem with electricity is that supply has to exactly match demand. Oversupply has to be ran into the ground increasing the cost per unit used.
    Not true.
    With renewables, the marginal cost once the plant is in place is effectively zero, which opens up a lot of possibilities. Oversupply can be used for useful stuff.

  46. The problem with electricity is that supply has to exactly match demand. Oversupply has to be ran into the ground increasing the cost per unit used.
    Not true.
    With renewables, the marginal cost once the plant is in place is effectively zero, which opens up a lot of possibilities. Oversupply can be used for useful stuff.

  47. Oversupply can be used for useful stuff.
    Key word here is “used”. The amount of electrical power delivered to the grid in the next few seconds has to match very closely the amount removed from the grid, or Bad Things happen.
    Charging batteries or pumping water uphill are both fast-responding useful things that let us time-shift consumption. Trying to run an aluminum smelter on momentary oversupply isn’t.

  48. Oversupply can be used for useful stuff.
    Key word here is “used”. The amount of electrical power delivered to the grid in the next few seconds has to match very closely the amount removed from the grid, or Bad Things happen.
    Charging batteries or pumping water uphill are both fast-responding useful things that let us time-shift consumption. Trying to run an aluminum smelter on momentary oversupply isn’t.

  49. One of the few bright spots during the Trump administration is the FERC ruled utilities can bid “negawatts” in the power supply markets. Chances are good that once they have plans in place and arrangements made with their customers, utilities will be able to reduce peak demand spikes for less than generators can produce power.

  50. One of the few bright spots during the Trump administration is the FERC ruled utilities can bid “negawatts” in the power supply markets. Chances are good that once they have plans in place and arrangements made with their customers, utilities will be able to reduce peak demand spikes for less than generators can produce power.

  51. Read the report at the link I posted above.
    I don’t know when I’ll have time to get through 150 pages, but I will surely take a look at it. And, thanks for sharing it.
    I don’t doubt that technological fixes are available for stuff like electrical power generation and distribution. Which is, actually, a huge win.
    The stuff I’m talking about is more along the lines of what we eat, how we grow the food we eat, how we move ourselves from one place to another. How much stuff we use just to wrap up the stuff we buy.
    The three top selling vehicles in the US now, and for years, have been the Ford F series pickup, Chevy Silverado pickup, and Dodge RAM pickup. 11 of the remaining 17 top 20 are either pickups or SUVs.
    Because Americans like to drive big-ass trucks and SUVs. Not need to, like to. And if you tell them they need to change that, they’ll tell you to bugger off and quit interfering with their freedoms.
    Americans like to eat beef. They like to live in unattached homes surrounded by yards. They like to drive everywhere, including to the gym where they will walk on a treadmill.
    Things like that, at least some of them, also need to change. That’s a harder lift than the technology.

  52. Read the report at the link I posted above.
    I don’t know when I’ll have time to get through 150 pages, but I will surely take a look at it. And, thanks for sharing it.
    I don’t doubt that technological fixes are available for stuff like electrical power generation and distribution. Which is, actually, a huge win.
    The stuff I’m talking about is more along the lines of what we eat, how we grow the food we eat, how we move ourselves from one place to another. How much stuff we use just to wrap up the stuff we buy.
    The three top selling vehicles in the US now, and for years, have been the Ford F series pickup, Chevy Silverado pickup, and Dodge RAM pickup. 11 of the remaining 17 top 20 are either pickups or SUVs.
    Because Americans like to drive big-ass trucks and SUVs. Not need to, like to. And if you tell them they need to change that, they’ll tell you to bugger off and quit interfering with their freedoms.
    Americans like to eat beef. They like to live in unattached homes surrounded by yards. They like to drive everywhere, including to the gym where they will walk on a treadmill.
    Things like that, at least some of them, also need to change. That’s a harder lift than the technology.

  53. Handcuff him to the radiator in the coat closet? Not that I would object, but I don’t think they have an actual Congressional jail anymore.
    They may not have a jail. But they do have a lot of conference rooms where he could be confined, with a guard on the door. (It’s not, after all, likely that he’s the type to assault a guard.) Not as nasty at the typical jail cell, but then just being confined is likely to be a shock to his system.
    Which is why I suspect that it will only take one or two such arrests for Barr, Mnuchin, etc. to fold up. They have, so far, had actions without personal consequences — some reputational degradation, but perhaps not with the people whose opinions they really care about. But walked out in handcuffs? Suddenly, consequences get really real.

  54. Handcuff him to the radiator in the coat closet? Not that I would object, but I don’t think they have an actual Congressional jail anymore.
    They may not have a jail. But they do have a lot of conference rooms where he could be confined, with a guard on the door. (It’s not, after all, likely that he’s the type to assault a guard.) Not as nasty at the typical jail cell, but then just being confined is likely to be a shock to his system.
    Which is why I suspect that it will only take one or two such arrests for Barr, Mnuchin, etc. to fold up. They have, so far, had actions without personal consequences — some reputational degradation, but perhaps not with the people whose opinions they really care about. But walked out in handcuffs? Suddenly, consequences get really real.

  55. Declare the NRA a domestic terrorist organization and cuff them to the same radiators the p republicans are shackled to.
    Remove their pants and turn up the thermostat:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/10/instagram-letting-nra-encourage-harassment-and-threats-against-one-gun-group-s-biggest-critics/223681
    All of the Democratic Presidential candidates, all 20-something of them, need to start traveling abroad and huddling with foreign governments who would like to see all American conservatives defeated and destroyed.
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/marc-lotter-giuliani-ukraine
    Guiliani’s plane should be shot down by our patriotic military when it re-enters American airspace.
    How does this crap get stopped without savage violence against the perpetrators.
    Elections?
    Patooey!

  56. Declare the NRA a domestic terrorist organization and cuff them to the same radiators the p republicans are shackled to.
    Remove their pants and turn up the thermostat:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/10/instagram-letting-nra-encourage-harassment-and-threats-against-one-gun-group-s-biggest-critics/223681
    All of the Democratic Presidential candidates, all 20-something of them, need to start traveling abroad and huddling with foreign governments who would like to see all American conservatives defeated and destroyed.
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/marc-lotter-giuliani-ukraine
    Guiliani’s plane should be shot down by our patriotic military when it re-enters American airspace.
    How does this crap get stopped without savage violence against the perpetrators.
    Elections?
    Patooey!

  57. “Declare the NRA a domestic terrorist organization and order drone strikes on gun shows terrorist arms depots”
    Coulda, shoulda, but Obama didn’t. even. try.
    SAD.

  58. “Declare the NRA a domestic terrorist organization and order drone strikes on gun shows terrorist arms depots”
    Coulda, shoulda, but Obama didn’t. even. try.
    SAD.

  59. Only proof of concept so far, but this is the kind of thing I (and the study I linked) had in mind:
    Continuous Production of Ethylene from Carbon Dioxide and Water Using Intermittent Sunlight
    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02110
    The reason it might take three decades to get to 100% renewables is that it will take a good couple of decades to develop and deploy such technologies on a commercial scale.
    It is entirely doable.

  60. Only proof of concept so far, but this is the kind of thing I (and the study I linked) had in mind:
    Continuous Production of Ethylene from Carbon Dioxide and Water Using Intermittent Sunlight
    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acssuschemeng.7b02110
    The reason it might take three decades to get to 100% renewables is that it will take a good couple of decades to develop and deploy such technologies on a commercial scale.
    It is entirely doable.

  67. The unfortunate case for very very very very very late term abortion and a deadly measles epidemic in red states:
    https://juanitajean.com/the-louie-gohmert-honorary-goofy-award/
    This 245 pound (not including the weight of the popgun strapped around his ample Texas-sized fat ass) bolus of corrupted fetal tissue (Rosemary’s Scabies*) is 35 years old. That’s roughly 420 months and well past the term when a fetus can be diagnosed as brain-dead.
    And it’s not even a human fetus. His own mother begs for the relief. He’s an itch she can’t scratch*.
    *https://www.google.com/search?q=scabie&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS774US774&oq=scabie&aqs=chrome..0j69i57j0l4.5585j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
    I’m awful, but as long as this guy is accepted as sentient among decent people of voting age, I’m looking not half bad.

  68. The unfortunate case for very very very very very late term abortion and a deadly measles epidemic in red states:
    https://juanitajean.com/the-louie-gohmert-honorary-goofy-award/
    This 245 pound (not including the weight of the popgun strapped around his ample Texas-sized fat ass) bolus of corrupted fetal tissue (Rosemary’s Scabies*) is 35 years old. That’s roughly 420 months and well past the term when a fetus can be diagnosed as brain-dead.
    And it’s not even a human fetus. His own mother begs for the relief. He’s an itch she can’t scratch*.
    *https://www.google.com/search?q=scabie&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS774US774&oq=scabie&aqs=chrome..0j69i57j0l4.5585j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
    I’m awful, but as long as this guy is accepted as sentient among decent people of voting age, I’m looking not half bad.

  69. It’s gotta be stopped.
    These people are the progeny, spiritual if not literal, of the folks who gathered together with their picnic lunches to watch public lynchings as a kind of civic holiday.
    Blacks, Jews, Catholics. Hang them, mutilate them, set fire to their corpses, pass body parts around as souveniers. And invite the whole family to watch.
    The last lynching of a black man by white supremacists in this country was 1981. Not 100 years, not even 40 years ago. James Byrd, not lynched, merely chained to a truck and dragged to death, was 1998.
    There is nothing whatsoever new about the toxic, malevolent, murderous bullshit these kids are into. Nothing. It is as much a part of what America is as the words of Jefferson in the Declaration, or the words of Madison, Adams, and others in the Constitution.
    What is different now is that we thought we were beyond it. We aren’t. And what is different now is that we have a POTUS, and a significant political party, that embraces and panders to it, whether at arms length or not, and relies on it for its power and influence.
    Conservatives, clean your damned house. The people in this video are not, remotely, an anomaly. They are becoming an acceptable norm.
    It is on responsible conservatives in this country to make it unacceptable. That means Trump has to go, along with his cabinet and his entourage including creeps like Miller and Gorka. That means the Steven Kings and the Louis Gohmerts and the whole long list of bigots and boneheads have to go.
    They have to go. They are unacceptable. They have no place in positions of public responsibility. Get them the hell out.
    And all of the people who vote for them need to be made to understand that bigotry and malice are not acceptable, and have no place in public life. That requires constructive leadership. Which does not appear to be on offer. Stop filling your people’s heads with lies and hate, even if that means you lose some elections. Just fucking stop it.
    There will always be rats, human vermin like the punks in the video. What we don’t want are rats and human vermin to be seen as acceptable or even normal or laudable.
    There is damned little I can do about. Conservatives are the ones who put these people in positions of power. Conservatives are the ones who accept Nazis – literally Nazis – racists and bigots into their fold. Conservatives are the ones who benefit from the evil bile spewed out every damned day by the likes of Fox News, and Rush, and Alex Jones, and the rest.
    Clean your damned house. It’s doing profound damage to the nation. Make it stop. It is on you to change it.
    Just fncking get it done.

  70. It’s gotta be stopped.
    These people are the progeny, spiritual if not literal, of the folks who gathered together with their picnic lunches to watch public lynchings as a kind of civic holiday.
    Blacks, Jews, Catholics. Hang them, mutilate them, set fire to their corpses, pass body parts around as souveniers. And invite the whole family to watch.
    The last lynching of a black man by white supremacists in this country was 1981. Not 100 years, not even 40 years ago. James Byrd, not lynched, merely chained to a truck and dragged to death, was 1998.
    There is nothing whatsoever new about the toxic, malevolent, murderous bullshit these kids are into. Nothing. It is as much a part of what America is as the words of Jefferson in the Declaration, or the words of Madison, Adams, and others in the Constitution.
    What is different now is that we thought we were beyond it. We aren’t. And what is different now is that we have a POTUS, and a significant political party, that embraces and panders to it, whether at arms length or not, and relies on it for its power and influence.
    Conservatives, clean your damned house. The people in this video are not, remotely, an anomaly. They are becoming an acceptable norm.
    It is on responsible conservatives in this country to make it unacceptable. That means Trump has to go, along with his cabinet and his entourage including creeps like Miller and Gorka. That means the Steven Kings and the Louis Gohmerts and the whole long list of bigots and boneheads have to go.
    They have to go. They are unacceptable. They have no place in positions of public responsibility. Get them the hell out.
    And all of the people who vote for them need to be made to understand that bigotry and malice are not acceptable, and have no place in public life. That requires constructive leadership. Which does not appear to be on offer. Stop filling your people’s heads with lies and hate, even if that means you lose some elections. Just fucking stop it.
    There will always be rats, human vermin like the punks in the video. What we don’t want are rats and human vermin to be seen as acceptable or even normal or laudable.
    There is damned little I can do about. Conservatives are the ones who put these people in positions of power. Conservatives are the ones who accept Nazis – literally Nazis – racists and bigots into their fold. Conservatives are the ones who benefit from the evil bile spewed out every damned day by the likes of Fox News, and Rush, and Alex Jones, and the rest.
    Clean your damned house. It’s doing profound damage to the nation. Make it stop. It is on you to change it.
    Just fncking get it done.

  71. A Tesla has a battery capacity of around 60-75 kWh [my edit] for a cost of perhaps $35k – so you could get 10 hours of continuous 6 -7.5 kW output: ie $5000 per kW of output capacity.
    With sufficient free marginal cost solar or wind, it would be nearly as cheap to buy half a million Teslas as a new coal fired power station, for pretty well the same output.
    Curiously, the cost per kWh of a Tesla Model 3 car is similar to the cost per kWh of a Tesla Powerwall, designed for storage and nothing else. Which suggests that the Powerwall, or its competitors, will get cheaper.
    However, Nigel’s calculation based on ten hours of storage seems not to the point. If you want 100% renewal energy in, say, California, you need months of storage.

  72. A Tesla has a battery capacity of around 60-75 kWh [my edit] for a cost of perhaps $35k – so you could get 10 hours of continuous 6 -7.5 kW output: ie $5000 per kW of output capacity.
    With sufficient free marginal cost solar or wind, it would be nearly as cheap to buy half a million Teslas as a new coal fired power station, for pretty well the same output.
    Curiously, the cost per kWh of a Tesla Model 3 car is similar to the cost per kWh of a Tesla Powerwall, designed for storage and nothing else. Which suggests that the Powerwall, or its competitors, will get cheaper.
    However, Nigel’s calculation based on ten hours of storage seems not to the point. If you want 100% renewal energy in, say, California, you need months of storage.

  77. The lengthy study I cited addresses precisely those issues, Pro Bono.
    My Tesla example was merely an illustration of what’s possible with current commercial technology.
    Clearly for some locations, insulation of pretty good for the entire year, and in others, wind energy is considerably more plentiful in the winter.
    The study I linked is quite explicit that without electrical conversion of CO2, water etc into fuels and chemical feedstocks, 100% renewable energy is simply not possible – and enveloping economic production will take decades. It runs through scenarios of how fast we might be able to reduce CO2 emissions during that period of development, and what it is likely to cost.
    Even today, it is surprising what is possible:
    https://phys.org/news/2019-04-energy-required-co2-valuable-resources.html
    Ironically, the gulf oil states are likely to be the big future solar energy states.
    And Patagonia could be a wind energy giant.

  78. The lengthy study I cited addresses precisely those issues, Pro Bono.
    My Tesla example was merely an illustration of what’s possible with current commercial technology.
    Clearly for some locations, insulation of pretty good for the entire year, and in others, wind energy is considerably more plentiful in the winter.
    The study I linked is quite explicit that without electrical conversion of CO2, water etc into fuels and chemical feedstocks, 100% renewable energy is simply not possible – and enveloping economic production will take decades. It runs through scenarios of how fast we might be able to reduce CO2 emissions during that period of development, and what it is likely to cost.
    Even today, it is surprising what is possible:
    https://phys.org/news/2019-04-energy-required-co2-valuable-resources.html
    Ironically, the gulf oil states are likely to be the big future solar energy states.
    And Patagonia could be a wind energy giant.

  79. However, Nigel’s calculation based on ten hours of storage seems not to the point. If you want 100% renewal energy in, say, California, you need months of storage.
    A lot less, though, if you do things on a regional (Western Interconnect) basis. Southern California already gets, via HVDC, large amounts of hydro power from the Columbia dams and large amounts of coal-fired power from Utah. The Utah plant is converting to NG, and a new solar farm is going in next door. Within a few years there will be an additional HVDC line that will be able to deliver up to 3GW from the east downslope of the Rockies in Wyoming, one of the most reliable onshore wind resources in the country. The California legislature and CAISO are already looking at how to set up excess power exchanges across the region that are in everyone’s interests (the biggest hurdle will be getting the feds to play nice).

  80. However, Nigel’s calculation based on ten hours of storage seems not to the point. If you want 100% renewal energy in, say, California, you need months of storage.
    A lot less, though, if you do things on a regional (Western Interconnect) basis. Southern California already gets, via HVDC, large amounts of hydro power from the Columbia dams and large amounts of coal-fired power from Utah. The Utah plant is converting to NG, and a new solar farm is going in next door. Within a few years there will be an additional HVDC line that will be able to deliver up to 3GW from the east downslope of the Rockies in Wyoming, one of the most reliable onshore wind resources in the country. The California legislature and CAISO are already looking at how to set up excess power exchanges across the region that are in everyone’s interests (the biggest hurdle will be getting the feds to play nice).

  81. However, Nigel’s calculation based on ten hours of storage seems not to the point. If you want 100% renewal energy in, say, California, you need months of storage.
    California is actually in relatively good shape for longer-term storage. That’s because we build so much of our generation infrastructure as hydro. As a result, we can use peak power to pump up existing reservoirs — reservoirs being a major capital expense (not to mention slow to build). All we need is to install the pumps.
    Other places, especially further north and/or flatter, have more serious issues. Can’t really do hydro in Minnesota.

  82. However, Nigel’s calculation based on ten hours of storage seems not to the point. If you want 100% renewal energy in, say, California, you need months of storage.
    California is actually in relatively good shape for longer-term storage. That’s because we build so much of our generation infrastructure as hydro. As a result, we can use peak power to pump up existing reservoirs — reservoirs being a major capital expense (not to mention slow to build). All we need is to install the pumps.
    Other places, especially further north and/or flatter, have more serious issues. Can’t really do hydro in Minnesota.

  83. I thought Janie would enjoy Susan Collins here.
    It’s so accurate that the word “satire” is pointless.
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/snl-savages-gops-unconditional-love-for-trump-ride-or-die-bitches?via=newsletter&source=Weekend
    Kate McKinnon’s Lindsay Graham is so strangely, weirdly on point that I want to marry her and have her baby, if she’d have me, though I get why she wouldn’t, plus Rod Dreher would quote his entire “The Benedict Option” (“as I wrote in my book” is the phrase that leads off at least two paragraphs in every one of his posts, which are basically just book signings) non-optional should Ms. McKinnon and I make a life together.
    The only thing I would add to this SNL bit is a sound track of automatic gunfire bursts after each character speaks, comedy being what it is in whatever misbegotten country we are living in.

  84. I thought Janie would enjoy Susan Collins here.
    It’s so accurate that the word “satire” is pointless.
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/snl-savages-gops-unconditional-love-for-trump-ride-or-die-bitches?via=newsletter&source=Weekend
    Kate McKinnon’s Lindsay Graham is so strangely, weirdly on point that I want to marry her and have her baby, if she’d have me, though I get why she wouldn’t, plus Rod Dreher would quote his entire “The Benedict Option” (“as I wrote in my book” is the phrase that leads off at least two paragraphs in every one of his posts, which are basically just book signings) non-optional should Ms. McKinnon and I make a life together.
    The only thing I would add to this SNL bit is a sound track of automatic gunfire bursts after each character speaks, comedy being what it is in whatever misbegotten country we are living in.

  87. I thought Janie would enjoy Susan Collins here.
    Yes indeed, in a depressing sort of way. She did a great job imitating Collilns! The best bit was Lindsay Graham late in the clip. But — no spoilers.
    Thanks, JDT.

  88. I thought Janie would enjoy Susan Collins here.
    Yes indeed, in a depressing sort of way. She did a great job imitating Collilns! The best bit was Lindsay Graham late in the clip. But — no spoilers.
    Thanks, JDT.

  99. More trumparency … I would use the term that includes “trans” and “parent” but that word has been banned by the American Taliban:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/trump-to-government-dont-publish-truth.html
    Who was it here who claimed lo those many months ago that this Maladministration was transparent?
    Whomever it was, your adoption privileges have been revoked.
    p is considering establishing several new Cabinet level agencies, whose Secretaries (actual secretaries, maybe grocery clerks, not leaders) will report directly to where the sun don’t shine: The Department of Hunh, Shinola, and WTF?, The National Bureau of STFU, and the Department of Alternative Facts and Parallel Realities.
    A Liaison Interpretative Equivocator (LIE), Dr. Mendacity Jazzhands, and been appointed to perp walk the public thru the agencies’ maze of new missions and her assistant, Taradiddle Eyewash, formerly the fifth runner-up beauty queen in a heterosexual free range barnyard animal contest, handed out dic pics to illustrate that in the new America of the Gospel of the Predator Pig Fuckers, size is all that matters, ah, but it’s a game of centimeters on a non-metric conversion … conservatives have all converted from metric to the Christian Prosperity Gospel, also known as the game of CRAPs …. device (Chapter Seven of Milton Friedman’s dog-eared copy of Ayn Rand’s memoir, “Dagny Taggart, The Early Years, Before She Learned To Reverse Cowboy The Shrugging Atlas”, later folded into the well-known KGB instructional manual for the hometown secret agent: “Atlas Shagged”).
    White House Spokessubhuman, Hasnot A. Clue, who recently underwent radical dental surgery at taxpayer expense to expand the gaps in his teeth, the better to lie through, referred a reporter, the last and only FOX fellatrix with current press credentials, to a dumpster full of fresh dog shit, labeled “The Files” in the White House parking lot for deep background and in pidgin French mumbled, “Bon Appetite”.

  100. More trumparency … I would use the term that includes “trans” and “parent” but that word has been banned by the American Taliban:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/trump-to-government-dont-publish-truth.html
    Who was it here who claimed lo those many months ago that this Maladministration was transparent?
    Whomever it was, your adoption privileges have been revoked.
    p is considering establishing several new Cabinet level agencies, whose Secretaries (actual secretaries, maybe grocery clerks, not leaders) will report directly to where the sun don’t shine: The Department of Hunh, Shinola, and WTF?, The National Bureau of STFU, and the Department of Alternative Facts and Parallel Realities.
    A Liaison Interpretative Equivocator (LIE), Dr. Mendacity Jazzhands, and been appointed to perp walk the public thru the agencies’ maze of new missions and her assistant, Taradiddle Eyewash, formerly the fifth runner-up beauty queen in a heterosexual free range barnyard animal contest, handed out dic pics to illustrate that in the new America of the Gospel of the Predator Pig Fuckers, size is all that matters, ah, but it’s a game of centimeters on a non-metric conversion … conservatives have all converted from metric to the Christian Prosperity Gospel, also known as the game of CRAPs …. device (Chapter Seven of Milton Friedman’s dog-eared copy of Ayn Rand’s memoir, “Dagny Taggart, The Early Years, Before She Learned To Reverse Cowboy The Shrugging Atlas”, later folded into the well-known KGB instructional manual for the hometown secret agent: “Atlas Shagged”).
    White House Spokessubhuman, Hasnot A. Clue, who recently underwent radical dental surgery at taxpayer expense to expand the gaps in his teeth, the better to lie through, referred a reporter, the last and only FOX fellatrix with current press credentials, to a dumpster full of fresh dog shit, labeled “The Files” in the White House parking lot for deep background and in pidgin French mumbled, “Bon Appetite”.

  103. Open thread, so… I fear the Game of Thrones writers have put themselves in a corner with no way out that will satisfy anyone in the audience. Well, maybe the nihilists who think everybody is bad and it’s just as well they all died.

  104. Open thread, so… I fear the Game of Thrones writers have put themselves in a corner with no way out that will satisfy anyone in the audience. Well, maybe the nihilists who think everybody is bad and it’s just as well they all died.

  107. “I fear the Game of Thrones writers have put themselves in a corner with no way out that will satisfy anyone in the audience. Well, maybe the nihilists who think everybody is bad and it’s just as well they all died.”
    Turn the channel instead to this reality show:
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sabotage-attacks-on-saudi-oil-tankers-puts-strait-of-hormuz-back-in-spotlight-2019-05-13?mod=mw_quote_news
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/is-trump-yet-another-us-president-provoking-a-war
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/john-bolton-on-the-warpath
    Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Tonkin, wag the dog:
    I hope this escalates quickly to a worldwide nuclear confrontation because I want to test what the murderous oaf who stole the White House learned in that hour and a half he spent studying all there is to know about nuclear weaponry and warfare years ago.
    Especially the incinerating, vaporizing, mutual annihilation parts of the study and I want it up close and personal for the conservative, war-loving thug vermin infesting this globe in every country, particularly America, but killing conservatives and their governments in very country, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and Europe must be carried out so what’s left of the human race can spend the next million years of their radioactive half lives in relative miserable peace without conservative vermin to tell us they know better.
    They ARE all bad.

  108. “I fear the Game of Thrones writers have put themselves in a corner with no way out that will satisfy anyone in the audience. Well, maybe the nihilists who think everybody is bad and it’s just as well they all died.”
    Turn the channel instead to this reality show:
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/sabotage-attacks-on-saudi-oil-tankers-puts-strait-of-hormuz-back-in-spotlight-2019-05-13?mod=mw_quote_news
    https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/is-trump-yet-another-us-president-provoking-a-war
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/john-bolton-on-the-warpath
    Strait of Hormuz, Gulf of Tonkin, wag the dog:
    I hope this escalates quickly to a worldwide nuclear confrontation because I want to test what the murderous oaf who stole the White House learned in that hour and a half he spent studying all there is to know about nuclear weaponry and warfare years ago.
    Especially the incinerating, vaporizing, mutual annihilation parts of the study and I want it up close and personal for the conservative, war-loving thug vermin infesting this globe in every country, particularly America, but killing conservatives and their governments in very country, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Iran, and Europe must be carried out so what’s left of the human race can spend the next million years of their radioactive half lives in relative miserable peace without conservative vermin to tell us they know better.
    They ARE all bad.

  109. There is no precedent is world history for the savage violence that is coming to the anti-American conservative movement.
    All precedent for living among conservatives is hereby revoked.

  110. There is no precedent is world history for the savage violence that is coming to the anti-American conservative movement.
    All precedent for living among conservatives is hereby revoked.

  113. Michael Cain—
    There are plenty of morally good characters in GOT. But what they have done to Dany’s character arc is a crime against humanity. She was always ruthless and self righteous, but her actions in the last episode were nonsensical. They have been building up to this, but by making her petty and paranoid and last night’s episode still made no sense. I haven’t agreed with some of the feminist critiques of the show before, but in her case only a pair of male idiots like Benioff and Weiss could butcher a female character so badly.

  114. Michael Cain—
    There are plenty of morally good characters in GOT. But what they have done to Dany’s character arc is a crime against humanity. She was always ruthless and self righteous, but her actions in the last episode were nonsensical. They have been building up to this, but by making her petty and paranoid and last night’s episode still made no sense. I haven’t agreed with some of the feminist critiques of the show before, but in her case only a pair of male idiots like Benioff and Weiss could butcher a female character so badly.

  115. Mattis is no longer there to slow-walk p’s ravings or knee Bolton in the testicles as the latter is about to declare nuclear war.
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/05/13/this-business-will-get-out-of-control-it-will-get-out-of-control-and-well-be-lucky-to-live-through-it-tanker-attack-rashomon-edition/
    Not that I have any respect for asshole Mattis either after his agreeing to serve under p and his role in promoting another psychopath, Elizabeth Holmes and her utterly fraudulent blood-testing corporation, Theranos.
    This is a parable of the rank bullshit that is now coursing thru the veins of bullshit America, and championed by a bipartisan selection of our nearest and dearest:
    https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X
    We are the marks of predators and we like it.

  116. Mattis is no longer there to slow-walk p’s ravings or knee Bolton in the testicles as the latter is about to declare nuclear war.
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/05/13/this-business-will-get-out-of-control-it-will-get-out-of-control-and-well-be-lucky-to-live-through-it-tanker-attack-rashomon-edition/
    Not that I have any respect for asshole Mattis either after his agreeing to serve under p and his role in promoting another psychopath, Elizabeth Holmes and her utterly fraudulent blood-testing corporation, Theranos.
    This is a parable of the rank bullshit that is now coursing thru the veins of bullshit America, and championed by a bipartisan selection of our nearest and dearest:
    https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/152473165X
    We are the marks of predators and we like it.

  117. Bolton and the Saudis may have their Reichstag Fire. But, as one would expect from this administration, it appears to have been exceptionally ineptly executed. Who sets off mines on empty tankers??? (Only the best people, of course.)

  118. Bolton and the Saudis may have their Reichstag Fire. But, as one would expect from this administration, it appears to have been exceptionally ineptly executed. Who sets off mines on empty tankers??? (Only the best people, of course.)

  125. Naturally, the shits over at TAC are full all up in there with Orban.
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/viktor-orban-renewal-washington/
    Dreher the Innocent runs with vermin white nationalists and anti-Semites. He thinks he can pick and choose among their “policies”, as long as they let him discriminate against the fags.
    They’ll kill HIM once he turns his permanently revved up victimization hysteria machine on them, though the way he goes on about the Weimar Republic I get the feeling he would have liked the cut of Hitler’s jib until deep into the 1930s.

  126. Naturally, the shits over at TAC are full all up in there with Orban.
    https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/viktor-orban-renewal-washington/
    Dreher the Innocent runs with vermin white nationalists and anti-Semites. He thinks he can pick and choose among their “policies”, as long as they let him discriminate against the fags.
    They’ll kill HIM once he turns his permanently revved up victimization hysteria machine on them, though the way he goes on about the Weimar Republic I get the feeling he would have liked the cut of Hitler’s jib until deep into the 1930s.

  127. Another way to think about climate change is that someone is going to make an awful lot of money helping solve it.
    And all those long term investments in oil exploration and coal fired power stations, which can take decades to pay off, will become purchases of stranded assets.
    Even if we don’t transition to renewables fast enough to prevent climate disaster, we will do so quick enough to ruin the economics of fossil fuels (with the possible exception, for a couple of decades, of natural gas).
    If you’re above all else a capitalist, do you want China to be reaping all of the profit ?

  128. Another way to think about climate change is that someone is going to make an awful lot of money helping solve it.
    And all those long term investments in oil exploration and coal fired power stations, which can take decades to pay off, will become purchases of stranded assets.
    Even if we don’t transition to renewables fast enough to prevent climate disaster, we will do so quick enough to ruin the economics of fossil fuels (with the possible exception, for a couple of decades, of natural gas).
    If you’re above all else a capitalist, do you want China to be reaping all of the profit ?

  129. “Another way to think about climate change is that someone is going to make an awful lot of money helping solve it.”
    There’ll be a real opportunity for those who get in early on “buggy whip” makers.
    Carbon-neutral transport, and they can be used on Trumpkins also, too.

  130. “Another way to think about climate change is that someone is going to make an awful lot of money helping solve it.”
    There’ll be a real opportunity for those who get in early on “buggy whip” makers.
    Carbon-neutral transport, and they can be used on Trumpkins also, too.

  133. It’s a bright spot for more than JDT, wj. What excellent news that is. And since I’m now on, I may as well inform ObWi that I had a hip replacement last Tuesday, have been home since Sunday, and am a) doing extremely well and b) extremely pissed off with life, the universe and everything (TM Douglas Adams). It’s heck feeling semi-helpless, and having to plan your every move in advance to avoid wasted journeys, and carrying everything you might need with you in a bag on your crutches including a grabber claw. Which is just to say that as a boomer who has tended to enjoy pretty good health, and always had access to good medical care when I needed it, my entitled ass is once again getting a mild reality check on the basic human condition. Bah!

  134. It’s a bright spot for more than JDT, wj. What excellent news that is. And since I’m now on, I may as well inform ObWi that I had a hip replacement last Tuesday, have been home since Sunday, and am a) doing extremely well and b) extremely pissed off with life, the universe and everything (TM Douglas Adams). It’s heck feeling semi-helpless, and having to plan your every move in advance to avoid wasted journeys, and carrying everything you might need with you in a bag on your crutches including a grabber claw. Which is just to say that as a boomer who has tended to enjoy pretty good health, and always had access to good medical care when I needed it, my entitled ass is once again getting a mild reality check on the basic human condition. Bah!

  135. GFTNC, get well soon!
    From seeing my Mom thru that some years back, I know it’s way short of instantaneous. But it’s do-able. And we can try to keep you distracted.

  136. GFTNC, get well soon!
    From seeing my Mom thru that some years back, I know it’s way short of instantaneous. But it’s do-able. And we can try to keep you distracted.

  137. GFTNC: You’ll be fine, I’m certain. Rehab with all your might.
    wj: Good on the Red Hen. Still, voracious p-ridden conservatives don’t need lunch at the Red Hen, as they are eating the world’s lunch. If I were the owner of the Red Hen, I would send coupons for Free Lunches to each of the haters, presuming they provided a return address (their parents’ basement or maybe a mobile phone in Macedonia), which they don’t, being cowards, but in exchange I would request they turn in their firearms for the amuse bouche, and IF they did I would point the same firearm at the their faces and tell them to get off the property.
    But, nevertheless, your sunniness in the face of these dreary days is appreciated. You wouldn’t believe how even-tempered I am in person. Except for that pulsating vein in my forehead.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bphHHR2aVM0
    As Anne Frank didn’t say to her father: “PIM, look on the bright side. One day they will sell tickets to get into our humble hiding place here. We could franchise this thing.

  138. GFTNC: You’ll be fine, I’m certain. Rehab with all your might.
    wj: Good on the Red Hen. Still, voracious p-ridden conservatives don’t need lunch at the Red Hen, as they are eating the world’s lunch. If I were the owner of the Red Hen, I would send coupons for Free Lunches to each of the haters, presuming they provided a return address (their parents’ basement or maybe a mobile phone in Macedonia), which they don’t, being cowards, but in exchange I would request they turn in their firearms for the amuse bouche, and IF they did I would point the same firearm at the their faces and tell them to get off the property.
    But, nevertheless, your sunniness in the face of these dreary days is appreciated. You wouldn’t believe how even-tempered I am in person. Except for that pulsating vein in my forehead.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bphHHR2aVM0
    As Anne Frank didn’t say to her father: “PIM, look on the bright side. One day they will sell tickets to get into our humble hiding place here. We could franchise this thing.

  139. GftNC, get well soon.
    I’ve heard that hip replacement is easier to rehab from than knee replacement, but either way, I hope you’re back on nothing more than your own two feet without delay.

  140. GftNC, get well soon.
    I’ve heard that hip replacement is easier to rehab from than knee replacement, but either way, I hope you’re back on nothing more than your own two feet without delay.

  149. It will be sadly ironic if bad behavior (and it was bad behavior!) by the California Franchise Tax Board is the path that results in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. Because even a Court willing to ignore stare decisis is going to want a relatively uncontroversial precident for overturning precedents. And this well may be it.

  150. It will be sadly ironic if bad behavior (and it was bad behavior!) by the California Franchise Tax Board is the path that results in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v Wade. Because even a Court willing to ignore stare decisis is going to want a relatively uncontroversial precident for overturning precedents. And this well may be it.

  153. Many thanks, all. Am indeed doing all the exercising, rehabbing etc mandated. It’s a considerable drag, but as I said, there are certainly far worse things in life/the world.

  154. Many thanks, all. Am indeed doing all the exercising, rehabbing etc mandated. It’s a considerable drag, but as I said, there are certainly far worse things in life/the world.

  155. At least you’re ahead of my Mom’s experience in one regard. She was stuck in a rehab facility with NO Internet access — and furious about it. (Hey, it was the late ’90s. Most 80+ year old women had never even tried the Internet.)

  156. At least you’re ahead of my Mom’s experience in one regard. She was stuck in a rehab facility with NO Internet access — and furious about it. (Hey, it was the late ’90s. Most 80+ year old women had never even tried the Internet.)

  157. GftNC, a good friend of mine just came through it and is looking fabulous, and spry. Get better soon, and may you see similar results!

  158. GftNC, a good friend of mine just came through it and is looking fabulous, and spry. Get better soon, and may you see similar results!

  159. my wife did it about 3 years ago – she had had a bad hip from birth. and it was pretty tough going, because they … lengthened her leg, intentionally. which stretched all the muscles and connecty bits.
    she’s better now.

  160. my wife did it about 3 years ago – she had had a bad hip from birth. and it was pretty tough going, because they … lengthened her leg, intentionally. which stretched all the muscles and connecty bits.
    she’s better now.

  161. I don’t own a TV, so I miss a few things.
    Perhaps you’ve seen it, but this is lay science the way I like it:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/bill-nye-gets-very-salty.html
    They even present a fat methane-belching cow, Laura Ingraham, to illustrate which end of the cow is the methane business end.
    And Bill Nye, the Science Guy, resorts to very technical language to communicate the fact that he has had it up to his plastic pocket pen holder with dimwits.
    Give yourself 20 minutes and have a larf.

  162. I don’t own a TV, so I miss a few things.
    Perhaps you’ve seen it, but this is lay science the way I like it:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/bill-nye-gets-very-salty.html
    They even present a fat methane-belching cow, Laura Ingraham, to illustrate which end of the cow is the methane business end.
    And Bill Nye, the Science Guy, resorts to very technical language to communicate the fact that he has had it up to his plastic pocket pen holder with dimwits.
    Give yourself 20 minutes and have a larf.

  169. On energy storage…
    A manganese hydride molecular sieve for practical hydrogen storage under ambient conditions
    https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/EE/C8EE02499E#!divAbstract
    >>A viable hydrogen economy has thus far been hampered by the lack of an inexpensive and convenient hydrogen storage solution meeting all requirements, especially in the areas of long hauls and delivery infrastructure. Current approaches require high pressure and/or complex heat management systems to achieve acceptable storage densities. Herein we present a manganese hydride molecular sieve that can be readily synthesized from inexpensive precursors and demonstrates a reversible excess adsorption performance of 10.5 wt% and 197 kgH2 m-3 at 120 bar at ambient temperature with no loss of activity after 54 cycles. Inelastic neutron scattering and computational studies confirm Kubas binding as the principal mechanism. The thermodynamically neutral adsorption process allows for a simple system without the need for heat management using moderate pressure as a toggle. A storage material with these properties will allow the DOE system targets for storage and delivery to be achieved, providing a practical alternative to incumbents such as 700 bar systems, which generally provide volumetric storage values of 40 kgH2 m-3 or less, while retaining advantages over batteries such as fill time and energy density. Reasonable estimates for production costs and loss of performance due to system implementation project total energy storage costs roughly 5 times cheaper than those for 700 bar tanks, potentially opening doors for increased adoption of hydrogen as an energy vector…<<

  170. On energy storage…
    A manganese hydride molecular sieve for practical hydrogen storage under ambient conditions
    https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/EE/C8EE02499E#!divAbstract
    >>A viable hydrogen economy has thus far been hampered by the lack of an inexpensive and convenient hydrogen storage solution meeting all requirements, especially in the areas of long hauls and delivery infrastructure. Current approaches require high pressure and/or complex heat management systems to achieve acceptable storage densities. Herein we present a manganese hydride molecular sieve that can be readily synthesized from inexpensive precursors and demonstrates a reversible excess adsorption performance of 10.5 wt% and 197 kgH2 m-3 at 120 bar at ambient temperature with no loss of activity after 54 cycles. Inelastic neutron scattering and computational studies confirm Kubas binding as the principal mechanism. The thermodynamically neutral adsorption process allows for a simple system without the need for heat management using moderate pressure as a toggle. A storage material with these properties will allow the DOE system targets for storage and delivery to be achieved, providing a practical alternative to incumbents such as 700 bar systems, which generally provide volumetric storage values of 40 kgH2 m-3 or less, while retaining advantages over batteries such as fill time and energy density. Reasonable estimates for production costs and loss of performance due to system implementation project total energy storage costs roughly 5 times cheaper than those for 700 bar tanks, potentially opening doors for increased adoption of hydrogen as an energy vector…<<

  181. he dumbshit marketing genius lab rats in the private sector need to have the incentives and disincentives in their mazes reordered…
    Of course.
    The economy woull transition to renewables anyway if we left it to the market….. but around two or three decades too late.
    Putting a large thumb on the scales now is simply common sense – and were we to do so, the business lobbies which benefit from the change would pretty soon ensure it didn’t get undone.

  182. he dumbshit marketing genius lab rats in the private sector need to have the incentives and disincentives in their mazes reordered…
    Of course.
    The economy woull transition to renewables anyway if we left it to the market….. but around two or three decades too late.
    Putting a large thumb on the scales now is simply common sense – and were we to do so, the business lobbies which benefit from the change would pretty soon ensure it didn’t get undone.

  183. Yet another nonsensical, goofball, hilarious, giggle-enabling, pants-wetting inducing, malarkey-piercing, stultiloquent, tom-foolering, jiggery-poking, hokum-jokum, a Conway before the Kellyannes and Georges fucked us, silly, kind light in the world is snuffed as serious, malign subhumans swarm to try to kill all of us.
    https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/tim-conway-dies-carol-burnett-show-best-clips
    Only two things might have saved us … staying in bed like John and Yoko or Tim Conway running out the clock on Harvey Korman’s ability to remain continent and in character simultaneously.

  184. Yet another nonsensical, goofball, hilarious, giggle-enabling, pants-wetting inducing, malarkey-piercing, stultiloquent, tom-foolering, jiggery-poking, hokum-jokum, a Conway before the Kellyannes and Georges fucked us, silly, kind light in the world is snuffed as serious, malign subhumans swarm to try to kill all of us.
    https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/05/tim-conway-dies-carol-burnett-show-best-clips
    Only two things might have saved us … staying in bed like John and Yoko or Tim Conway running out the clock on Harvey Korman’s ability to remain continent and in character simultaneously.

  187. Being fired from the DOL, no less, for being, simultaneously, too much of an a**hole in person and not enough of an a**hole on policy.

  188. Being fired from the DOL, no less, for being, simultaneously, too much of an a**hole in person and not enough of an a**hole on policy.

  193. You gotta understand. Obergefell notwithstanding, the State Department has simply decided to not recognize gay marriage.
    And why should they? If the executive branch can ignore the legislative branch (e.g. on subpoenas), why shouldn’t they be able to ignore the judicial branch as well? Seems perfectly consistent.
    And suggests that even winning their cases in court may not get compliance with the various subpoenas from House committees. Bringing us around to the original post….

  194. You gotta understand. Obergefell notwithstanding, the State Department has simply decided to not recognize gay marriage.
    And why should they? If the executive branch can ignore the legislative branch (e.g. on subpoenas), why shouldn’t they be able to ignore the judicial branch as well? Seems perfectly consistent.
    And suggests that even winning their cases in court may not get compliance with the various subpoenas from House committees. Bringing us around to the original post….

  197. See this conservative ratfucker right here:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
    She will be executed, with all of the relevant judicial t’s dotted and her eyes crossed, and her corpse repatriated to Russia.
    The Rosenberg’s want their lives back.
    bobbyp is supposed to be the fucking commie around here.

  198. See this conservative ratfucker right here:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/
    She will be executed, with all of the relevant judicial t’s dotted and her eyes crossed, and her corpse repatriated to Russia.
    The Rosenberg’s want their lives back.
    bobbyp is supposed to be the fucking commie around here.

  201. Remember that scene in “Red Dawn, so beloved by pigfucking subhuman conservatives, in which Soviet paratroopers land on the grounds of the Colorado public high school and force it to go private charter at Kalashnikov-point and brainwash the students into arming themselves, hitting the hills as a field trip, and letting their parents go without health insurance and vaccinations:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/15/laura-ingraham-s-astoundingly-ghoulish-attack-seth-rich-s-family/223707

  202. Remember that scene in “Red Dawn, so beloved by pigfucking subhuman conservatives, in which Soviet paratroopers land on the grounds of the Colorado public high school and force it to go private charter at Kalashnikov-point and brainwash the students into arming themselves, hitting the hills as a field trip, and letting their parents go without health insurance and vaccinations:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/05/15/laura-ingraham-s-astoundingly-ghoulish-attack-seth-rich-s-family/223707

  203. Hey, the financial markets are rebounding, so no sweat, most of my holdings were up today despite my socialist veneer.
    Do I seem like I’m sweating it?
    I know Mnuchin (that can’t be his name) and Kudlow are placing massive buy orders in offshore futures markets with taxpayer monies to celebrate the use of taxpayer monies in the freely manipulated markets, ya know, like the law stipulates.
    I’m long radiation futures, mushroom cloud startups and shorting the Red Cross’s blood banking capabilities because I don’t think they are quite up to what is coming.
    Remember when you were a toddler and you still believed that if you made a movement with one apparently causative hand that there would be a corresponding movement in the reality around you ….. a leak would fall from a tree, a cloud would cover the sun, or your Mom would appear in front of you, and you thought it was YOU, the magic you running the show.
    This is how p works. He tweets. The financial markets, like a yoyo attached to the poisonous root of his tongue soar and collapse, seemingly at his will. His Beck. His Call.
    He gives his family a little taste, maybe a close criminal thug associate as well, Kudlow of course, and they dial in futures contracts with each move of the Wizard’s tweeting tongue.
    Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
    Toto just sniffs out the dog shit stuck to his shoe.
    There are priceless doodads on display at the White House.
    We’ll never find them again.

  204. Hey, the financial markets are rebounding, so no sweat, most of my holdings were up today despite my socialist veneer.
    Do I seem like I’m sweating it?
    I know Mnuchin (that can’t be his name) and Kudlow are placing massive buy orders in offshore futures markets with taxpayer monies to celebrate the use of taxpayer monies in the freely manipulated markets, ya know, like the law stipulates.
    I’m long radiation futures, mushroom cloud startups and shorting the Red Cross’s blood banking capabilities because I don’t think they are quite up to what is coming.
    Remember when you were a toddler and you still believed that if you made a movement with one apparently causative hand that there would be a corresponding movement in the reality around you ….. a leak would fall from a tree, a cloud would cover the sun, or your Mom would appear in front of you, and you thought it was YOU, the magic you running the show.
    This is how p works. He tweets. The financial markets, like a yoyo attached to the poisonous root of his tongue soar and collapse, seemingly at his will. His Beck. His Call.
    He gives his family a little taste, maybe a close criminal thug associate as well, Kudlow of course, and they dial in futures contracts with each move of the Wizard’s tweeting tongue.
    Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
    Toto just sniffs out the dog shit stuck to his shoe.
    There are priceless doodads on display at the White House.
    We’ll never find them again.

  213. That Alabama anti-abortion bill is not that bad since it allows a woman to abort up to the moment that she knows that she is pregnant (according to one of the main sponsors of the bill). So, just put that abortion procedure into your daily routine. The only damper is that a woman can’t know anymore that she committed a murder of an innocent* which is the whole point of the excercise (we know that the fun of that is the main driving force for women).
    *caveat: fetuses go straight to hell since they are unbaptized, so they are innocent only as far as secular law goes. Whether a fetus murdering his mother could be prosecuted by secular law** is open to debate though (apart from the question whether it is to be treated as a minor or an adult or whether it is to be considered a citizen since that is a birthright).
    **According to rabbinic interpretation a fetus with murderous intent (rodef) can be killed in self-defense.

  214. That Alabama anti-abortion bill is not that bad since it allows a woman to abort up to the moment that she knows that she is pregnant (according to one of the main sponsors of the bill). So, just put that abortion procedure into your daily routine. The only damper is that a woman can’t know anymore that she committed a murder of an innocent* which is the whole point of the excercise (we know that the fun of that is the main driving force for women).
    *caveat: fetuses go straight to hell since they are unbaptized, so they are innocent only as far as secular law goes. Whether a fetus murdering his mother could be prosecuted by secular law** is open to debate though (apart from the question whether it is to be treated as a minor or an adult or whether it is to be considered a citizen since that is a birthright).
    **According to rabbinic interpretation a fetus with murderous intent (rodef) can be killed in self-defense.

  215. sure, the Alabama forced-delivery bill is a disgrace, but we have to admit: HRC wasn’t perfect.

  216. sure, the Alabama forced-delivery bill is a disgrace, but we have to admit: HRC wasn’t perfect.

  219. Pregnant women without health insurance, both those whose choice it is to bring their pregnancies to term and those who do not, will search in vain for life-saving medical care for themselves and their fetuses, as a result of this outrage perpetrated by a rapist lout, whose unpaid for aborted fetuses during his squalid lifetime, if placed end to end, could serve as a cordon to keep the Other off his fully mortgaged, bankrupt properties:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sunlight-foundation-report-obamacare-trump-deleting-websites
    Pregnancy, under murderous, subhuman vermin republican governance, is a pre-existing condition which may be used to deny coverage …. a pre-existing condition the mother does not know about until it has pre-existed long enough to enable republicans to not only deny insurance coverage but to punish 13-year old rape victims if they seek abortions or attempt to abort the fetus themselves by desperately sticking a republican-supplied gun … which conservative filth use to kill darker, more mature fetuses with if those fetuses break into their homes or drive while black … up their vaginas and pulling the trigger, and to jail doctors and other medical personnel who attempt to help the young raped woman in her predicament before she is forced by republican neo-Christian bedbugs to marry her rapist and then submit to the re-consummation of his rape fetish on her during their blessed conservative-supervised honeymoon at Niagara Falls, after enjoying a ride over the Falls, fetus-intact, in a barrel since laws prohibiting such pregnancy-interruptus behavior were struck from the books by pox-spreading libertarian/republican c&cks&ckers to reduce the regulatory state.
    My suggestion for monitoring the thinning of the antarctic ice sheets is to strap the pregnant daughters and girlfriends of Alabama, Missouri, and Ohio state legislators (we’ll not tell their wives about the girlfriends the former of whom are probably being anally violated by their Christian divorce counselors in motels on the outskirts of town) to the ice flows and we can observe whether these fine, upstanding republicans believe global climate change is a HOAX or an abortifacient.
    Marilyn Monroe was forcibly brutally anally raped by a Hollywood producer as part of his “auditioning” procedures for her role in the movie “Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay!”, and now male republican trash are poohing-poohing the notion by female actresses that the movie industry might boycott Alabama as a prime backdrop for their productions, wondering how it is that America can employ the same barbaric cracker birth control methods across state lines and yet use commerce as a weapon like ‘at.
    Roll into this comment that I personally would prefer to see abortion as a rare event, but legal nevertheless, with certain restrictions and medical safeguards, which we now have to varying degrees, but not for long, and financial support, state supplied, for surviving fetuses well into their majority age, should they not be shot by conservatives well before that for exhibiting socialist tendencies.
    Put that in your pipe, conservatives, and light the thing.
    Then shove it up your virgin as&holes, and we’ll call it love.
    Marry me.
    Next to go down the legal drain, all birth control methods outside of Elmer Gantry rogering a billy goat to maintain the proprieties.

  220. Pregnant women without health insurance, both those whose choice it is to bring their pregnancies to term and those who do not, will search in vain for life-saving medical care for themselves and their fetuses, as a result of this outrage perpetrated by a rapist lout, whose unpaid for aborted fetuses during his squalid lifetime, if placed end to end, could serve as a cordon to keep the Other off his fully mortgaged, bankrupt properties:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sunlight-foundation-report-obamacare-trump-deleting-websites
    Pregnancy, under murderous, subhuman vermin republican governance, is a pre-existing condition which may be used to deny coverage …. a pre-existing condition the mother does not know about until it has pre-existed long enough to enable republicans to not only deny insurance coverage but to punish 13-year old rape victims if they seek abortions or attempt to abort the fetus themselves by desperately sticking a republican-supplied gun … which conservative filth use to kill darker, more mature fetuses with if those fetuses break into their homes or drive while black … up their vaginas and pulling the trigger, and to jail doctors and other medical personnel who attempt to help the young raped woman in her predicament before she is forced by republican neo-Christian bedbugs to marry her rapist and then submit to the re-consummation of his rape fetish on her during their blessed conservative-supervised honeymoon at Niagara Falls, after enjoying a ride over the Falls, fetus-intact, in a barrel since laws prohibiting such pregnancy-interruptus behavior were struck from the books by pox-spreading libertarian/republican c&cks&ckers to reduce the regulatory state.
    My suggestion for monitoring the thinning of the antarctic ice sheets is to strap the pregnant daughters and girlfriends of Alabama, Missouri, and Ohio state legislators (we’ll not tell their wives about the girlfriends the former of whom are probably being anally violated by their Christian divorce counselors in motels on the outskirts of town) to the ice flows and we can observe whether these fine, upstanding republicans believe global climate change is a HOAX or an abortifacient.
    Marilyn Monroe was forcibly brutally anally raped by a Hollywood producer as part of his “auditioning” procedures for her role in the movie “Scudda Hoo, Scudda Hay!”, and now male republican trash are poohing-poohing the notion by female actresses that the movie industry might boycott Alabama as a prime backdrop for their productions, wondering how it is that America can employ the same barbaric cracker birth control methods across state lines and yet use commerce as a weapon like ‘at.
    Roll into this comment that I personally would prefer to see abortion as a rare event, but legal nevertheless, with certain restrictions and medical safeguards, which we now have to varying degrees, but not for long, and financial support, state supplied, for surviving fetuses well into their majority age, should they not be shot by conservatives well before that for exhibiting socialist tendencies.
    Put that in your pipe, conservatives, and light the thing.
    Then shove it up your virgin as&holes, and we’ll call it love.
    Marry me.
    Next to go down the legal drain, all birth control methods outside of Elmer Gantry rogering a billy goat to maintain the proprieties.

  221. Brett Kavanaugh is preparing a Valentine for Christine Blasey Ford proposing another gang roll in the hay, once the legal specifics are worked out.

  222. Brett Kavanaugh is preparing a Valentine for Christine Blasey Ford proposing another gang roll in the hay, once the legal specifics are worked out.

  223. murderous, subhuman vermin republican governance
    John, indulge my curiosity. Think back to the middle of the last century, when Democrats’ control of Congress was predicated on the racist Democrats from the Deep South. Did you think that all Democrats deserved to be denounced as racists, simply because they were tolerating the racists who kept them in power?
    And how about during the New Deal, when the same dynamic played out?
    Seems like consistency would require that. Certainly there were some seriously subhuman individuals in play. But I have a hunch that you wouldn’t have. Am I worng?

  224. murderous, subhuman vermin republican governance
    John, indulge my curiosity. Think back to the middle of the last century, when Democrats’ control of Congress was predicated on the racist Democrats from the Deep South. Did you think that all Democrats deserved to be denounced as racists, simply because they were tolerating the racists who kept them in power?
    And how about during the New Deal, when the same dynamic played out?
    Seems like consistency would require that. Certainly there were some seriously subhuman individuals in play. But I have a hunch that you wouldn’t have. Am I worng?

  225. We were talking about changing minds recently, and wj cited the change in public attitudes and legal status for LGBTQ people that has happened at what I admit is an astonishingly fast pace in this country, and worldwide, over the past few decades.
    This is my brief summary, echoing another BJ commenter, of that optimistic observation. In short: “Things can change back.”
    See, for example, Waterville, Maine, where the mayor is in the news again, rabble-rousing as usual. And I do mean rabble.
    Seriously, you don’t want your kids to be read to by a drag queen? Don’t fucking take your kids to the fucking event. But the rabble’s anthem is “freedom [sic] for me and not for thee,” so no one else is free to go to that event without being harassed.
    Once a long time ago, during one of the many statewide referenda we had in Maine on gay rights, I had a dream. I mean, a dream while I was sleeping, not in the MLK sense. I was in a
    long line of people, waiting to be loaded onto the trains that were going to take us … away.
    Backwards into darkness: that’s where they want to take us. They won’t stop with abortion, or children in cages, or ignoring marriages rights in the State Department.

  226. We were talking about changing minds recently, and wj cited the change in public attitudes and legal status for LGBTQ people that has happened at what I admit is an astonishingly fast pace in this country, and worldwide, over the past few decades.
    This is my brief summary, echoing another BJ commenter, of that optimistic observation. In short: “Things can change back.”
    See, for example, Waterville, Maine, where the mayor is in the news again, rabble-rousing as usual. And I do mean rabble.
    Seriously, you don’t want your kids to be read to by a drag queen? Don’t fucking take your kids to the fucking event. But the rabble’s anthem is “freedom [sic] for me and not for thee,” so no one else is free to go to that event without being harassed.
    Once a long time ago, during one of the many statewide referenda we had in Maine on gay rights, I had a dream. I mean, a dream while I was sleeping, not in the MLK sense. I was in a
    long line of people, waiting to be loaded onto the trains that were going to take us … away.
    Backwards into darkness: that’s where they want to take us. They won’t stop with abortion, or children in cages, or ignoring marriages rights in the State Department.

  227. Backwards into darkness: that’s where they want to take us. They won’t stop with abortion, or children in cages, or ignoring marriages rights in the State Department.
    I have to say, dramatic as this sounds, I completely agree. It’s why I told my late husband (to his surprise) that I could barely watch the first series of the Handmaid’s Tale, which he was happy to watch almost as dystopian sci-fi, whereas to me it seemed a perfectly possible future (and indeed present, in some of the world).

  228. Backwards into darkness: that’s where they want to take us. They won’t stop with abortion, or children in cages, or ignoring marriages rights in the State Department.
    I have to say, dramatic as this sounds, I completely agree. It’s why I told my late husband (to his surprise) that I could barely watch the first series of the Handmaid’s Tale, which he was happy to watch almost as dystopian sci-fi, whereas to me it seemed a perfectly possible future (and indeed present, in some of the world).

  229. You mean, when I was an 8-year old RINO, in the middle of the last century?
    I would hope so. Same, same for the racist southern Democrats, as opposed to the racist northern republicans, during the New Deal.
    And yes, yes, judging folks of earlier generations by today’s moral sensibilities is a sticky wicket.
    This we are lectured by conservatives who claim THEIR values are universal, eternal, etched in tablets, unassailably inspired by unquestionable divinity.
    All men are created equal. Since when? The beginning? Or when some politically incorrect Texan republican state rep finally decides by noon this Friday that this should be the case because not only does consistency demand it, but if he doesn’t mend his racist ways, and all of the other ways, someone is going to stick a gun in his mouth and force him too.
    Time’s up. We aren’t going to backslide yet again, James W. Crow.
    But, were I a sentient adult in 1935, as opposed to a pre-fetal fetus in the imagination of my seven-year old mother, I would probably have shared many of the racist insensibilities of the era.
    I may well be racist in some ways right this minute. I’ll bet any black person could point those ways out to me.
    Seems to me black folks should have burned me out of house of home then for the privations my racist dumbshitedness forced upon them, given universal, eternal values always held forth by “conservatives”, and if I haven’t figured it out after 240 years of foot-dragging bullshit, I should be burned out now, finally.
    I don’t expect consistency from human beings, least of all myself.
    But I just want movement conservatives, who issue blanket accusations regarding everyone, all, who doesn’t/don’t abide by their program to shut the fuck up about their fake news bullshit consistency.
    In the meantime, until they do, I’ll speak fully enunciated English to them.
    Not you, wj.
    You are maddeningly consistent in all of the right ways.

  230. You mean, when I was an 8-year old RINO, in the middle of the last century?
    I would hope so. Same, same for the racist southern Democrats, as opposed to the racist northern republicans, during the New Deal.
    And yes, yes, judging folks of earlier generations by today’s moral sensibilities is a sticky wicket.
    This we are lectured by conservatives who claim THEIR values are universal, eternal, etched in tablets, unassailably inspired by unquestionable divinity.
    All men are created equal. Since when? The beginning? Or when some politically incorrect Texan republican state rep finally decides by noon this Friday that this should be the case because not only does consistency demand it, but if he doesn’t mend his racist ways, and all of the other ways, someone is going to stick a gun in his mouth and force him too.
    Time’s up. We aren’t going to backslide yet again, James W. Crow.
    But, were I a sentient adult in 1935, as opposed to a pre-fetal fetus in the imagination of my seven-year old mother, I would probably have shared many of the racist insensibilities of the era.
    I may well be racist in some ways right this minute. I’ll bet any black person could point those ways out to me.
    Seems to me black folks should have burned me out of house of home then for the privations my racist dumbshitedness forced upon them, given universal, eternal values always held forth by “conservatives”, and if I haven’t figured it out after 240 years of foot-dragging bullshit, I should be burned out now, finally.
    I don’t expect consistency from human beings, least of all myself.
    But I just want movement conservatives, who issue blanket accusations regarding everyone, all, who doesn’t/don’t abide by their program to shut the fuck up about their fake news bullshit consistency.
    In the meantime, until they do, I’ll speak fully enunciated English to them.
    Not you, wj.
    You are maddeningly consistent in all of the right ways.

  231. wj asks John Thullen: Did you think that all Democrats deserved to be denounced as racists, simply because they were tolerating the racists who kept them in power?
    I’m not John, but I’m borderline irritated by wj’s question on several levels.
    First and least: “murderous, subhuman vermin republican governance” is not the same as “all Republicans are racists”.
    Second: there’s at least some difference between “tolerating” racists and encouraging them, let alone surrendering to them. FDR needed racist Southern Democrats to enact Social Security (against Republican opposition, mind you) so he tolerated them to the extent of leaving farm laborers and domestic workers out of the initial deal because those racist Southern Democrats wouldn’t vote for anything that might benefit black people. But FDR did NOT drop the idea of Social Security altogether in order to please those racist Southern Democrats.
    Third: those racist Southern Democrats are all Republicans now.
    Fourth: neither John, nor you, wj, nor I were politically conscious at the time you speak of. So your question is at least ungrammatical.
    Other than that, I think you’re a fine Republican. Whether the racist Southern former-Democrats would agree, I beg leave to doubt.
    –TP

  232. wj asks John Thullen: Did you think that all Democrats deserved to be denounced as racists, simply because they were tolerating the racists who kept them in power?
    I’m not John, but I’m borderline irritated by wj’s question on several levels.
    First and least: “murderous, subhuman vermin republican governance” is not the same as “all Republicans are racists”.
    Second: there’s at least some difference between “tolerating” racists and encouraging them, let alone surrendering to them. FDR needed racist Southern Democrats to enact Social Security (against Republican opposition, mind you) so he tolerated them to the extent of leaving farm laborers and domestic workers out of the initial deal because those racist Southern Democrats wouldn’t vote for anything that might benefit black people. But FDR did NOT drop the idea of Social Security altogether in order to please those racist Southern Democrats.
    Third: those racist Southern Democrats are all Republicans now.
    Fourth: neither John, nor you, wj, nor I were politically conscious at the time you speak of. So your question is at least ungrammatical.
    Other than that, I think you’re a fine Republican. Whether the racist Southern former-Democrats would agree, I beg leave to doubt.
    –TP

  233. Tony,
    “First”: it is, however, routinely being used that way (OK, not always racist, but varying kinds of objectionable) by John. Which is what set me off.
    “Third”: sad but true.
    “Fourth”: Actually, I do have a few political memories of the 50s. Not to mention that Thurmond, et al were still around and toxic (as Democrats) during the 60s. But I’m open to suggestions for a more grammatical way to phrase my point.
    As to your final point, the feeling is mutual. Although I am aware that, on raw numbers, they are winning at the moment. Sigh.

  234. Tony,
    “First”: it is, however, routinely being used that way (OK, not always racist, but varying kinds of objectionable) by John. Which is what set me off.
    “Third”: sad but true.
    “Fourth”: Actually, I do have a few political memories of the 50s. Not to mention that Thurmond, et al were still around and toxic (as Democrats) during the 60s. But I’m open to suggestions for a more grammatical way to phrase my point.
    As to your final point, the feeling is mutual. Although I am aware that, on raw numbers, they are winning at the moment. Sigh.

  235. I confess I still find the level of, for lack of a better term, “self-parody” in this administration remarkable.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-pardons-billionaire-friend-conrad-black-who-wrote-book-about-him/2019/05/15/b494b208-7771-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html
    I was particularly taken by this:

    Trump … fully pardoned Patrick Nolan, a former Republican state legislative leader who pleaded guilty to public corruption charges in 1994 and served nearly three years in prison.

    But hey, who cares about public corruption?

  236. I confess I still find the level of, for lack of a better term, “self-parody” in this administration remarkable.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-pardons-billionaire-friend-conrad-black-who-wrote-book-about-him/2019/05/15/b494b208-7771-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html
    I was particularly taken by this:

    Trump … fully pardoned Patrick Nolan, a former Republican state legislative leader who pleaded guilty to public corruption charges in 1994 and served nearly three years in prison.

    But hey, who cares about public corruption?

  239. FDR needed racist Southern Democrats to enact Social Security
    And current-day (R)’s need the current-day equivalents of mid-20th C racist southern Democrats to flush SS down the drain.
    Backwards into darkness: that’s where they want to take us.
    On the evening of my personal great unhinging, which I spent communicating with all of my friends who suck and who I was trying to talk down off the ledge, a significant number of them were gay folks who were wondering what was in store for them.
    Jobs, marriages, kids. Not in that order. Would they lose them, how hard would it be to hold on to them, what would it cost them.
    What were they in for.
    I don’t know why it is so freaking hard for anyone to understand why Trump specifically, and (R) governance in general, is disturbing to a lot of people. It’s simple.
    Conservatives are afraid their country is changing. They might have to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Somebody might wish them Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. They have to press 1 for English.
    Or, you know, they might be required to get health insurance. Their car might have to get more than 20 miles per gallon. The estate tax exemption might drop back below 10 million bucks.
    Other folks are afraid of things like losing their kids, losing their marriages, losing their jobs and careers. Things like not being able to walk down the street without being harassed or assaulted by bigots.
    Or maybe being grabbed from their home, or place of business, and being thrown in prison with no particular due process, to wait while they see if they will be thrown out of the country. They tell their kids who to reach out to if mom or dad doesn’t come home from work.
    They’re afraid of those things because, for a lot of their lives or the lives of people they know, those things have been a tangible threat. A reality. Those thing actually happened to people.
    It’s not a given that they won’t happen again. Lots of folks would be perfectly happy for them to happen again. Some of them happen now, today.
    This is not hypothetical stuff.

  240. FDR needed racist Southern Democrats to enact Social Security
    And current-day (R)’s need the current-day equivalents of mid-20th C racist southern Democrats to flush SS down the drain.
    Backwards into darkness: that’s where they want to take us.
    On the evening of my personal great unhinging, which I spent communicating with all of my friends who suck and who I was trying to talk down off the ledge, a significant number of them were gay folks who were wondering what was in store for them.
    Jobs, marriages, kids. Not in that order. Would they lose them, how hard would it be to hold on to them, what would it cost them.
    What were they in for.
    I don’t know why it is so freaking hard for anyone to understand why Trump specifically, and (R) governance in general, is disturbing to a lot of people. It’s simple.
    Conservatives are afraid their country is changing. They might have to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Somebody might wish them Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. They have to press 1 for English.
    Or, you know, they might be required to get health insurance. Their car might have to get more than 20 miles per gallon. The estate tax exemption might drop back below 10 million bucks.
    Other folks are afraid of things like losing their kids, losing their marriages, losing their jobs and careers. Things like not being able to walk down the street without being harassed or assaulted by bigots.
    Or maybe being grabbed from their home, or place of business, and being thrown in prison with no particular due process, to wait while they see if they will be thrown out of the country. They tell their kids who to reach out to if mom or dad doesn’t come home from work.
    They’re afraid of those things because, for a lot of their lives or the lives of people they know, those things have been a tangible threat. A reality. Those thing actually happened to people.
    It’s not a given that they won’t happen again. Lots of folks would be perfectly happy for them to happen again. Some of them happen now, today.
    This is not hypothetical stuff.

  241. I’m not John, but I’m borderline irritated by wj’s question on several levels.
    Me, too. The question has a certain “when did you stop beating your wife” quality to it.
    But in essence, insofar as nearly all white folk were objectively racists at the time, the answer is, “Yes.”
    So, what’s the point?
    Also, too: The New Deal coalition was a pretty rickety ad hoc affair arising out of the historical backwash of the Civil War and the emergency of the Great Depression. By the second half of the 30’s the southern Dems, in cooperation with the GOP, were pretty much effectively blunting the more liberal aspects of the New Deal (cf John Nance Garner).
    As has been brought to your attention more than once, the current GOP is taking on an ideological rigidity that is simply frightening. Good old fashioned “moderate republicans” such as yourself are going to get run over or run out of the party.

  242. I’m not John, but I’m borderline irritated by wj’s question on several levels.
    Me, too. The question has a certain “when did you stop beating your wife” quality to it.
    But in essence, insofar as nearly all white folk were objectively racists at the time, the answer is, “Yes.”
    So, what’s the point?
    Also, too: The New Deal coalition was a pretty rickety ad hoc affair arising out of the historical backwash of the Civil War and the emergency of the Great Depression. By the second half of the 30’s the southern Dems, in cooperation with the GOP, were pretty much effectively blunting the more liberal aspects of the New Deal (cf John Nance Garner).
    As has been brought to your attention more than once, the current GOP is taking on an ideological rigidity that is simply frightening. Good old fashioned “moderate republicans” such as yourself are going to get run over or run out of the party.

  243. They have to press 1 for English.
    Even here is lefty California, I have never encountered this. I get offered the option of pressing 2 for Spanish. But English is the default, requiring no action on my part.
    Are there really places where that isn’t true? One has to wonder why anyone would have a different default.

  244. They have to press 1 for English.
    Even here is lefty California, I have never encountered this. I get offered the option of pressing 2 for Spanish. But English is the default, requiring no action on my part.
    Are there really places where that isn’t true? One has to wonder why anyone would have a different default.

  245. As has been brought to your attention more than once, the current GOP is taking on an ideological rigidity that is simply frightening. Good old fashioned “moderate republicans” such as yourself are going to get run over or run out of the party.
    Yeah, I know. Frightening, not to mention insanely self-defeating in even the medium term. (Just to be clear, the fact that it will, I am sure, eventually be self defeating does not by any means reconcile me to the damage they are trying to do in the short term.)
    I suppose it makes me a real conservative that I am standing athwart the changing GOP yelling “Stop!” 😉

  246. As has been brought to your attention more than once, the current GOP is taking on an ideological rigidity that is simply frightening. Good old fashioned “moderate republicans” such as yourself are going to get run over or run out of the party.
    Yeah, I know. Frightening, not to mention insanely self-defeating in even the medium term. (Just to be clear, the fact that it will, I am sure, eventually be self defeating does not by any means reconcile me to the damage they are trying to do in the short term.)
    I suppose it makes me a real conservative that I am standing athwart the changing GOP yelling “Stop!” 😉

  249. Just to follow on Russell’s WRS-worthy comment, it very much reminds me of a conservative friend’s declaration that Obama was ruining the country. This was near the end of Obama’s second term in office before the 2016 election. Mind you, we were on our way to a beer festival on a retired battleship that hosts regular tours and special events – special events like beer festivals.
    Do they do stuff like that in ruined countries? Things were looking pretty good for us that day!
    At any rate, when pressed for specifics on how mean-old and/or super-incompetent President Obama was ruining the country, there was something like, “Well, he’s just ruining it!” Realizing that wasn’t a good answer, there were some follow-ups on points of disagreement or things that didn’t go perfectly, all of which fell well short of anything like ruination. Stuff along the lines of Black Lives Matter leaders getting to go to the White House or the AG not prosecuting so-and-so whom no one who didn’t watch Fox News everyday could even name.
    There’s no there there. It’s gay, Muslim, baby-killing turtles all the way down.

  250. Just to follow on Russell’s WRS-worthy comment, it very much reminds me of a conservative friend’s declaration that Obama was ruining the country. This was near the end of Obama’s second term in office before the 2016 election. Mind you, we were on our way to a beer festival on a retired battleship that hosts regular tours and special events – special events like beer festivals.
    Do they do stuff like that in ruined countries? Things were looking pretty good for us that day!
    At any rate, when pressed for specifics on how mean-old and/or super-incompetent President Obama was ruining the country, there was something like, “Well, he’s just ruining it!” Realizing that wasn’t a good answer, there were some follow-ups on points of disagreement or things that didn’t go perfectly, all of which fell well short of anything like ruination. Stuff along the lines of Black Lives Matter leaders getting to go to the White House or the AG not prosecuting so-and-so whom no one who didn’t watch Fox News everyday could even name.
    There’s no there there. It’s gay, Muslim, baby-killing turtles all the way down.

  251. HSH,
    Well put. An earlier classic that I remember was casual reference to “Obama phones”.
    The 2016 version of this was throwing about the term, “crooked Hillary”, with the clear intonation that nothing else need be said.

  252. HSH,
    Well put. An earlier classic that I remember was casual reference to “Obama phones”.
    The 2016 version of this was throwing about the term, “crooked Hillary”, with the clear intonation that nothing else need be said.

  253. It’s gay, Muslim, baby-killing turtles all the way down.
    Close. It’s gay, Muslim, baby-killing, black turtles all the way down.
    Which is to say, that while there are some (a depressingly large number, actually) people who have sincere objections to one or another specific policy or action by the government — especially under Democrats. But there are also a lot who think the country is going to hell in a handbasket, but cannot actually come up with a specific policy or significant action that’s bad. Beyond not liking who they see as in charge — i.e. not them or people like them.

  254. It’s gay, Muslim, baby-killing turtles all the way down.
    Close. It’s gay, Muslim, baby-killing, black turtles all the way down.
    Which is to say, that while there are some (a depressingly large number, actually) people who have sincere objections to one or another specific policy or action by the government — especially under Democrats. But there are also a lot who think the country is going to hell in a handbasket, but cannot actually come up with a specific policy or significant action that’s bad. Beyond not liking who they see as in charge — i.e. not them or people like them.

  255. Are there really places where that isn’t true?
    when phone trees first started offering Spanish, you did have to ‘press 1 for English’. but that was in the 80s.
    and you still have to choose your language on many ATMs.
    it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. because i’m not afraid of other languages

  256. Are there really places where that isn’t true?
    when phone trees first started offering Spanish, you did have to ‘press 1 for English’. but that was in the 80s.
    and you still have to choose your language on many ATMs.
    it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. because i’m not afraid of other languages

  259. having a
    “Press 1 for a sexy French female voice”
    would go a long way to solving these problems.
    Might create others, though.
    Press 2 if you want this option to be available.

  260. having a
    “Press 1 for a sexy French female voice”
    would go a long way to solving these problems.
    Might create others, though.
    Press 2 if you want this option to be available.

  263. I appreciate the emptywheel link, and I very much appreciate all the work that Marcy Wheeler et al do in decoding the endless stream of toxic BS that we are flooded with every day.
    All of that said, here is the situation as it presents itself to us:
    The POTUS and principals in his campaign solicited materials that had been obtained illegally in an effort to damage Clinton. The materials had been obtained by, or were held by, Russian nationals connected to the Russian government. The POTUS’ campaign reached out to many of those folks directly, and also to Wikileaks as an intermediary source, to obtain those materials and/or align their campaign efforts with the deliberate release of those materials by others.
    Having done all of that, the POTUS then repeatedly attempted to obstruct investigations into all of that mess. He was prevented from doing so only by the reluctance of the people who reported to him to expose themselves or the POTUS to criminal liability.
    Much of this is in the public record.
    Current DOJ policy prevents folks in the DOJ from indicting a sitting POTUS. So Mueller declined to do so.
    The Constitutional remedy for dealing with malfeasance by the POTUS is impeachment. That requires the House to initiate the process, and then the Senate to adjudicate. The political calculation, no doubt 100% correct, is that the Senate will never, ever, ever find this POTUS guilty of any impeachable offense. So the House appears disinclined to begin the process, at least not without conducting further investigation.
    Further investigation is currently being stonewalled by the executive. Not just stonewalled, but the authority of Congress to even conduct investigation has been called into question.
    Resolving all of this will require months if not years of legal wrangling, because our form of government prefers that process to guillotines. Which is, all things considered, a net positive.
    It’s highly likely that nothing further will come of the Mueller findings. It’s highly likely that the people currently in jail for the various and numerous crimes committed by the Trump campaign will be pardoned.
    It’s more than reasonably likely that Trump will be POTUS until January 2025. Because a lot of people think he’s great, and if there is one thing the man knows how to do, it’s sell a turd. That, and cheat.
    My assumption is that we’re on our way to being, at best, a second rate country. Rich and with lots of guns, but the rest of the world is going to find a way to work around the likes of us. Because we consent to be governed by a belligerent criminal fraud, and because people basically just don’t like dealing with assholes if they don’t have to.
    We’re obliged to put up with him, because we elected him, and we don’t have the fucking simple political will to throw him the hell out.
    The rest of the world is under no such obligation.
    Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is what the US looks like now. To the rest of the world, and also here at home. He’s the POTUS because he won the freaking election. He remains POTUS because the political will to remove him does not exist.
    I put the odds of him winning in 2020 at better than even. He is as popular as he was the day he was elected, he has apparently unshakeable support within the (R) party, the economy is basically holding up, and he now has all of the advantages of incumbency. Short of a disastrous war or the economy imploding, he has every ingredient needed to do well.
    Win or lose, 40% or more of the country thinks he is the cat’s meow.
    And that is where we are.

  264. I appreciate the emptywheel link, and I very much appreciate all the work that Marcy Wheeler et al do in decoding the endless stream of toxic BS that we are flooded with every day.
    All of that said, here is the situation as it presents itself to us:
    The POTUS and principals in his campaign solicited materials that had been obtained illegally in an effort to damage Clinton. The materials had been obtained by, or were held by, Russian nationals connected to the Russian government. The POTUS’ campaign reached out to many of those folks directly, and also to Wikileaks as an intermediary source, to obtain those materials and/or align their campaign efforts with the deliberate release of those materials by others.
    Having done all of that, the POTUS then repeatedly attempted to obstruct investigations into all of that mess. He was prevented from doing so only by the reluctance of the people who reported to him to expose themselves or the POTUS to criminal liability.
    Much of this is in the public record.
    Current DOJ policy prevents folks in the DOJ from indicting a sitting POTUS. So Mueller declined to do so.
    The Constitutional remedy for dealing with malfeasance by the POTUS is impeachment. That requires the House to initiate the process, and then the Senate to adjudicate. The political calculation, no doubt 100% correct, is that the Senate will never, ever, ever find this POTUS guilty of any impeachable offense. So the House appears disinclined to begin the process, at least not without conducting further investigation.
    Further investigation is currently being stonewalled by the executive. Not just stonewalled, but the authority of Congress to even conduct investigation has been called into question.
    Resolving all of this will require months if not years of legal wrangling, because our form of government prefers that process to guillotines. Which is, all things considered, a net positive.
    It’s highly likely that nothing further will come of the Mueller findings. It’s highly likely that the people currently in jail for the various and numerous crimes committed by the Trump campaign will be pardoned.
    It’s more than reasonably likely that Trump will be POTUS until January 2025. Because a lot of people think he’s great, and if there is one thing the man knows how to do, it’s sell a turd. That, and cheat.
    My assumption is that we’re on our way to being, at best, a second rate country. Rich and with lots of guns, but the rest of the world is going to find a way to work around the likes of us. Because we consent to be governed by a belligerent criminal fraud, and because people basically just don’t like dealing with assholes if they don’t have to.
    We’re obliged to put up with him, because we elected him, and we don’t have the fucking simple political will to throw him the hell out.
    The rest of the world is under no such obligation.
    Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is what the US looks like now. To the rest of the world, and also here at home. He’s the POTUS because he won the freaking election. He remains POTUS because the political will to remove him does not exist.
    I put the odds of him winning in 2020 at better than even. He is as popular as he was the day he was elected, he has apparently unshakeable support within the (R) party, the economy is basically holding up, and he now has all of the advantages of incumbency. Short of a disastrous war or the economy imploding, he has every ingredient needed to do well.
    Win or lose, 40% or more of the country thinks he is the cat’s meow.
    And that is where we are.

  265. Much much shorter me:
    Trump is a crook. A criminal. Mueller delivered the evidence of that to the DOJ and Congress, signed and sealed, with a cherry on top.
    The DOJ will do nothing with it. The Senate will do nothing with it. The House will dither around at trying to do something with it, but they can’t seem to summon the muscle to make it stick.
    The institutions that exist to prevent people like Donald J Trump from retaining the office of POTUS are so far proving to be insufficient to the task.
    Maybe we can vote him out, but that assumes that a sufficient number of people want him out. Given the advantages he brings to the contest, it might need to be a pretty strong majority. And that may not be on offer.
    And there it is.

  266. Much much shorter me:
    Trump is a crook. A criminal. Mueller delivered the evidence of that to the DOJ and Congress, signed and sealed, with a cherry on top.
    The DOJ will do nothing with it. The Senate will do nothing with it. The House will dither around at trying to do something with it, but they can’t seem to summon the muscle to make it stick.
    The institutions that exist to prevent people like Donald J Trump from retaining the office of POTUS are so far proving to be insufficient to the task.
    Maybe we can vote him out, but that assumes that a sufficient number of people want him out. Given the advantages he brings to the contest, it might need to be a pretty strong majority. And that may not be on offer.
    And there it is.

  271. Today in Arlington MA. Second time in a week.
    Because Jews will not replace us. Ask any very fine person you might happen to meet.
    None of this, of course, has anything to do with the POTUS’ language or behavior.

  272. Today in Arlington MA. Second time in a week.
    Because Jews will not replace us. Ask any very fine person you might happen to meet.
    None of this, of course, has anything to do with the POTUS’ language or behavior.

  273. This week in New Haven.
    Because scary towel-head camel-jockey terrorists in our midst.
    None of this, of course, has anything to do with the POTUS’ language or behavior.
    I’m not going looking for this stuff, I’m just reading my news feed, hoping to find some funny cat videos.

  274. This week in New Haven.
    Because scary towel-head camel-jockey terrorists in our midst.
    None of this, of course, has anything to do with the POTUS’ language or behavior.
    I’m not going looking for this stuff, I’m just reading my news feed, hoping to find some funny cat videos.

  275. I disagree on one point with russell. I consider it unlikely that there will be many pardons for those already behind bars because most refused to fall on their swords for their boss and thus are considered traitors to Him.
    Apart from that, iirc a pardon would mean that they could not refuse anymore to testify against Him. Btw, could a POTUS pardon someone again for violating the obligations incurred by a first pardon?

  276. I disagree on one point with russell. I consider it unlikely that there will be many pardons for those already behind bars because most refused to fall on their swords for their boss and thus are considered traitors to Him.
    Apart from that, iirc a pardon would mean that they could not refuse anymore to testify against Him. Btw, could a POTUS pardon someone again for violating the obligations incurred by a first pardon?

  277. I consider it unlikely that there will be many pardons for those already behind bars
    Then they’re fncked. Too bad for them, they knew he was a scorpion, they shouldn’t have played the frog.
    Doesn’t do anything to change the rest of the situation.

  278. I consider it unlikely that there will be many pardons for those already behind bars
    Then they’re fncked. Too bad for them, they knew he was a scorpion, they shouldn’t have played the frog.
    Doesn’t do anything to change the rest of the situation.

  279. The horse of a different color’s patootie wants the openings in the wall to be smaller, but presumably still large enough to to pass tacos INTO pigfuck America and permit automatic gunfire to leave this, our benighted land of assholes, in the other direction:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC871hNBig4
    A recently coined word: “Progressive”
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/trumps-new-plan-requires-immigrants-to.html
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE8kOv26BuQ
    What he is trying to tell us is that the bodies are buried in Teddy’s Panama Canal dig … in the basement. You first, Mr President:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCWBDwkhGN0

  280. The horse of a different color’s patootie wants the openings in the wall to be smaller, but presumably still large enough to to pass tacos INTO pigfuck America and permit automatic gunfire to leave this, our benighted land of assholes, in the other direction:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC871hNBig4
    A recently coined word: “Progressive”
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/trumps-new-plan-requires-immigrants-to.html
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE8kOv26BuQ
    What he is trying to tell us is that the bodies are buried in Teddy’s Panama Canal dig … in the basement. You first, Mr President:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCWBDwkhGN0

  281. “hoping to find some funny cat videos.”
    Grumpy cat wasn’t displaying the requisite amount of prosperity gospel happy talk, so always-wrong f*cker Larry Kudlow gave the order to off him:
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/grumpy-cat-internet-sensation-is-dead-at-age-7
    That order went out from the White House at the same time as the orders to the republican base for the Mosque arson and the rabbi’s keep-the-home-fires-burning celebration.
    So, conservatives, republicans, libertarians whatever you are calling yourselves today, you’ve been stockpiling military grade weaponry for decades to combat tyranny in blessed America.
    Well, now’s your chance.
    You have opposable thumbs, am I right, or is that too sciency?
    First thing you do, is take those thumbs out of your asses.
    But wait, that’s not the target the guns are for, are they?
    I didn’t think so.

  282. “hoping to find some funny cat videos.”
    Grumpy cat wasn’t displaying the requisite amount of prosperity gospel happy talk, so always-wrong f*cker Larry Kudlow gave the order to off him:
    https://www.thedailybeast.com/grumpy-cat-internet-sensation-is-dead-at-age-7
    That order went out from the White House at the same time as the orders to the republican base for the Mosque arson and the rabbi’s keep-the-home-fires-burning celebration.
    So, conservatives, republicans, libertarians whatever you are calling yourselves today, you’ve been stockpiling military grade weaponry for decades to combat tyranny in blessed America.
    Well, now’s your chance.
    You have opposable thumbs, am I right, or is that too sciency?
    First thing you do, is take those thumbs out of your asses.
    But wait, that’s not the target the guns are for, are they?
    I didn’t think so.

  283. I put the odds of him winning in 2020 at better than even. He is as popular as he was the day he was elected, he has apparently unshakeable support within the (R) party, the economy is basically holding up, and he now has all of the advantages of incumbency. Short of a disastrous war or the economy imploding, he has every ingredient needed to do well.
    All that’s true. However low an opinion of him we here have, there’s a (depressingly) large portion of the population that either likes what he does (or, more often, says), or just likes the reality TV show he is providing.
    HOWEVER, it should be noted that, unlike every other President in my lifetime, his popularity has never cleared 50%. And, since his first week in office, not even 45%. This with, as you say, an economy which is doing quite well — despite his best efforts. Considering how narrow his margin of victory was, even a tiny shift in a couple of places could see him gone.
    It should also be noted that incumbency is mainly an advantage when people at the margins can see that you are accomplishing something for them. There may not be as many swing voters like that as there once were, but there are still enough. And from the polls, not to mention 2018 election results, a lot of them (including a lot who said “Why not give him a try?”) are seriously underwhelmed.**
    Certainly the Democrats need to avoid anything like overconfidence. A lesson I hope they have taken from last time. But provided they do, I’d say that Trump’s reelection odds are more like 1 in 3, possibly lower.
    ** That’s now. If the trogdolites succeed in their effort to get abortion laws like Alabama’s sustained, even some Trump fans will, I suspect, decide they aren’t as enthused about winning the culture wars as they were about fighting them.

  284. I put the odds of him winning in 2020 at better than even. He is as popular as he was the day he was elected, he has apparently unshakeable support within the (R) party, the economy is basically holding up, and he now has all of the advantages of incumbency. Short of a disastrous war or the economy imploding, he has every ingredient needed to do well.
    All that’s true. However low an opinion of him we here have, there’s a (depressingly) large portion of the population that either likes what he does (or, more often, says), or just likes the reality TV show he is providing.
    HOWEVER, it should be noted that, unlike every other President in my lifetime, his popularity has never cleared 50%. And, since his first week in office, not even 45%. This with, as you say, an economy which is doing quite well — despite his best efforts. Considering how narrow his margin of victory was, even a tiny shift in a couple of places could see him gone.
    It should also be noted that incumbency is mainly an advantage when people at the margins can see that you are accomplishing something for them. There may not be as many swing voters like that as there once were, but there are still enough. And from the polls, not to mention 2018 election results, a lot of them (including a lot who said “Why not give him a try?”) are seriously underwhelmed.**
    Certainly the Democrats need to avoid anything like overconfidence. A lesson I hope they have taken from last time. But provided they do, I’d say that Trump’s reelection odds are more like 1 in 3, possibly lower.
    ** That’s now. If the trogdolites succeed in their effort to get abortion laws like Alabama’s sustained, even some Trump fans will, I suspect, decide they aren’t as enthused about winning the culture wars as they were about fighting them.

  285. as always: national polls are of extremely limited use when talking about the Presidency. the President is not elected by a national poll, or a national vote.

  286. as always: national polls are of extremely limited use when talking about the Presidency. the President is not elected by a national poll, or a national vote.

  287. russell and wj, you’re talking as if the election will be held without shenanigans. Gerrymandering, hackable, generally unreliable machines, voter suppression (closing of polling places, impossible hours, etc.), foreign interference — and if all of that doesn’t quite work, we’ll get the mere accusation of cheating as an excuse to disqualify the results. Not a single bit of it will surprise me from this crew.
    And, wrs at 10:49, although I’m trying to keep a bit of a hold on the fact that the rest of us are not going to go back into the darkness quietly. Closets are dark, back alleys are dark, a lot of us still remember those days, and I hope a lot of younger people, who might in other circumstances be oblivious to the gains because they take them for granted, are seeing firsthand that they can be taken away in a blink.

  288. russell and wj, you’re talking as if the election will be held without shenanigans. Gerrymandering, hackable, generally unreliable machines, voter suppression (closing of polling places, impossible hours, etc.), foreign interference — and if all of that doesn’t quite work, we’ll get the mere accusation of cheating as an excuse to disqualify the results. Not a single bit of it will surprise me from this crew.
    And, wrs at 10:49, although I’m trying to keep a bit of a hold on the fact that the rest of us are not going to go back into the darkness quietly. Closets are dark, back alleys are dark, a lot of us still remember those days, and I hope a lot of younger people, who might in other circumstances be oblivious to the gains because they take them for granted, are seeing firsthand that they can be taken away in a blink.

  289. …and if all of that doesn’t quite work, we’ll get the mere accusation of cheating as an excuse to disqualify the results.
    It definitely won’t surprise me if Trump says exactly that. But I’m reasonably confident that power will get transferred regardless.
    Now if you want to worry that some of his fans will take action in support of those accusations, I’d give that a higher probability. Although, again, I doubt it will be anywhere close to enough to keep/restore him to office. A hassle to smack down, perhaps, but a serious threat only in their own minds. Give themselves a new Lost Cause to be nostalgic over.

  290. …and if all of that doesn’t quite work, we’ll get the mere accusation of cheating as an excuse to disqualify the results.
    It definitely won’t surprise me if Trump says exactly that. But I’m reasonably confident that power will get transferred regardless.
    Now if you want to worry that some of his fans will take action in support of those accusations, I’d give that a higher probability. Although, again, I doubt it will be anywhere close to enough to keep/restore him to office. A hassle to smack down, perhaps, but a serious threat only in their own minds. Give themselves a new Lost Cause to be nostalgic over.

  295. as always: national polls are of extremely limited use when talking about the Presidency. the President is not elected by a national poll, or a national vote.
    Very true. But why assume anyone is relying on national polls when stuff like this is available?
    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-states-where-trump-is-more-and-less-popular-than-he-should-be/
    I picked 3 states at random (NOT!!!) to look at Rump’s net approval:
    Pennsylvania: -7%
    Michigan: -10%
    Wisconsin: -13%
    I know it’s early, but that’s reason for hope.

  296. as always: national polls are of extremely limited use when talking about the Presidency. the President is not elected by a national poll, or a national vote.
    Very true. But why assume anyone is relying on national polls when stuff like this is available?
    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-states-where-trump-is-more-and-less-popular-than-he-should-be/
    I picked 3 states at random (NOT!!!) to look at Rump’s net approval:
    Pennsylvania: -7%
    Michigan: -10%
    Wisconsin: -13%
    I know it’s early, but that’s reason for hope.

  297. russell and wj, you’re talking as if the election will be held without shenanigans.
    Not me.
    Among the advantages of incumbency are an AG who is fond of the phrase “nothing to see here”. Just for starters.
    the rest of us are not going to go back into the darkness quietly.
    Nope.

  298. russell and wj, you’re talking as if the election will be held without shenanigans.
    Not me.
    Among the advantages of incumbency are an AG who is fond of the phrase “nothing to see here”. Just for starters.
    the rest of us are not going to go back into the darkness quietly.
    Nope.

  299. Think back to the middle of the last century, when Democrats’ control of Congress was predicated on the racist Democrats from the Deep South. Did you think that all Democrats deserved to be denounced as racists, simply because they were tolerating the racists who kept them in power?
    And how about during the New Deal, when the same dynamic played out?
    Seems like consistency would require that. Certainly there were some seriously subhuman individuals in play.
    This is false equivalence, wj. Yes, the Democrats did rely on the racists to stay in power, but they were were by no means universally, or even mostly, supporters of racist agendas. I can go into detail, but all you really need to remember is that there was a Dixiecrat revolt, which sort of suggests that maybe the Southerners weren’t in full control of the party.
    Unfortunately, today’s Republicans, certainly 95+% of its politicians are firmly behind Trump’s corrupt, racist, ignorant policies. I don’t think the situations are comparable.

  300. Think back to the middle of the last century, when Democrats’ control of Congress was predicated on the racist Democrats from the Deep South. Did you think that all Democrats deserved to be denounced as racists, simply because they were tolerating the racists who kept them in power?
    And how about during the New Deal, when the same dynamic played out?
    Seems like consistency would require that. Certainly there were some seriously subhuman individuals in play.
    This is false equivalence, wj. Yes, the Democrats did rely on the racists to stay in power, but they were were by no means universally, or even mostly, supporters of racist agendas. I can go into detail, but all you really need to remember is that there was a Dixiecrat revolt, which sort of suggests that maybe the Southerners weren’t in full control of the party.
    Unfortunately, today’s Republicans, certainly 95+% of its politicians are firmly behind Trump’s corrupt, racist, ignorant policies. I don’t think the situations are comparable.

  303. Clearly, as the time rapidly approaches, the most effective way to get close enough to the conservative movement in order to gain its trust and poison, stab, machete, and shoot it, is to appear ignorant, stupid, not too up on current events, perhaps altogether bereft of sentience:
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/05/ignorance-is-strength
    Say “duh” and “search me!” a lot and listlessly shrug your shoulders when non-thinking with them in their group-think cult tanks. Maybe scratch your private parts absentmindedly with one of them cogitating expressions on your face like maybe all of the facts have escaped you. Whatever you do, don’t utter the words “jejune” or “disintermediate”, or “ironic”, or “second opinion” in their presence or they turn on you ferociously like a body snatcher sniffing out a single glandular squirt of empathy.
    “Whatchamacallit” should be the only noun you will require to communicative with them, but make sure to pull on your forelock and mutter “Yes, my Lord” when they order you to lick their faces and other hard to reach areas of their biology.
    This will spark their great admiration of your non-existent knowledge in all areas of expertise, which will gain you the confidence of their higher ups and allow you to advance to hobnob where their knowledge and smarts deficit is most egregious.
    When they mention the “Democrat Party”, socialists, man-on-dog liberals, just say “Fuck, em!” and at that moment conservative filth will let down their guard completely at your display of psychopathic dimwittedeness and you can lunge in for the sure kill.
    Now, personally, this would not be MY method of liquidating the American conservative movement, considering how time consuming it would be, and frankly, it’s a little late in the day for such piecemeal measures, so don’t you worry.
    Nuking them from space is a superior idea. Maybe we can invite the top million of the filth to Burning Man in the high desert and when they torch the sculpture a nuclear device of some awful mega-tonnage will go ka-blam and fry them right down to the cellular level.
    We’ll tow a statue of a pantsless Robert E. Lee out to the site, while wearing hazmat suits, to serve as a marker of what needs to be done from time to time in American history.
    We’ll preserve their fetuses, however, and attempt to raise them to be normal human beings, unless of course this entire conservative nutcase phenomenon turns out to be nature, not nurture, a matter of all them indelible, inexorably hate-seeking chromosomes doing their worst with any intervention short of absolute ruthlessness being all there is for it.

  304. Clearly, as the time rapidly approaches, the most effective way to get close enough to the conservative movement in order to gain its trust and poison, stab, machete, and shoot it, is to appear ignorant, stupid, not too up on current events, perhaps altogether bereft of sentience:
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/05/ignorance-is-strength
    Say “duh” and “search me!” a lot and listlessly shrug your shoulders when non-thinking with them in their group-think cult tanks. Maybe scratch your private parts absentmindedly with one of them cogitating expressions on your face like maybe all of the facts have escaped you. Whatever you do, don’t utter the words “jejune” or “disintermediate”, or “ironic”, or “second opinion” in their presence or they turn on you ferociously like a body snatcher sniffing out a single glandular squirt of empathy.
    “Whatchamacallit” should be the only noun you will require to communicative with them, but make sure to pull on your forelock and mutter “Yes, my Lord” when they order you to lick their faces and other hard to reach areas of their biology.
    This will spark their great admiration of your non-existent knowledge in all areas of expertise, which will gain you the confidence of their higher ups and allow you to advance to hobnob where their knowledge and smarts deficit is most egregious.
    When they mention the “Democrat Party”, socialists, man-on-dog liberals, just say “Fuck, em!” and at that moment conservative filth will let down their guard completely at your display of psychopathic dimwittedeness and you can lunge in for the sure kill.
    Now, personally, this would not be MY method of liquidating the American conservative movement, considering how time consuming it would be, and frankly, it’s a little late in the day for such piecemeal measures, so don’t you worry.
    Nuking them from space is a superior idea. Maybe we can invite the top million of the filth to Burning Man in the high desert and when they torch the sculpture a nuclear device of some awful mega-tonnage will go ka-blam and fry them right down to the cellular level.
    We’ll tow a statue of a pantsless Robert E. Lee out to the site, while wearing hazmat suits, to serve as a marker of what needs to be done from time to time in American history.
    We’ll preserve their fetuses, however, and attempt to raise them to be normal human beings, unless of course this entire conservative nutcase phenomenon turns out to be nature, not nurture, a matter of all them indelible, inexorably hate-seeking chromosomes doing their worst with any intervention short of absolute ruthlessness being all there is for it.

  305. Word to the wise to women contemplating undergoing an abortion after being raped by a republican stranger of perhaps a republican relative closer to home.
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/when-abortion-was-banned-in-romania.html
    Don’t let on to your rapist or his buddies at church about your intentions in that direction because conservative law enforcement and jurists will entertain leniency, and perhaps even high fives from Brett Kavanaugh, for your rapist if the latter divulge the who, what, when, and why of your intentions so they may punish you and, well, murder your doctor.
    Furthermore, conservative religious wedding cake bakers will offer discounts to conservative rapists who wish to marry their victims and make honest, but compliant and submissive women of them.
    Conservative wedding planners are all over this trend as they are now offering honeymoon discounts to selected resorts for conservative rapists and their blushing, hemorrhaging, and handcuffed brides.
    At Mar-a-Lago, for example, well, p will let his fingers do the walking, especially at the orphanage-cum-pizza basement joint off the lobby housing kidnapped Central American children AND now, the new market, dusky kids unwanted by conservative palefaces.

  306. Word to the wise to women contemplating undergoing an abortion after being raped by a republican stranger of perhaps a republican relative closer to home.
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/05/when-abortion-was-banned-in-romania.html
    Don’t let on to your rapist or his buddies at church about your intentions in that direction because conservative law enforcement and jurists will entertain leniency, and perhaps even high fives from Brett Kavanaugh, for your rapist if the latter divulge the who, what, when, and why of your intentions so they may punish you and, well, murder your doctor.
    Furthermore, conservative religious wedding cake bakers will offer discounts to conservative rapists who wish to marry their victims and make honest, but compliant and submissive women of them.
    Conservative wedding planners are all over this trend as they are now offering honeymoon discounts to selected resorts for conservative rapists and their blushing, hemorrhaging, and handcuffed brides.
    At Mar-a-Lago, for example, well, p will let his fingers do the walking, especially at the orphanage-cum-pizza basement joint off the lobby housing kidnapped Central American children AND now, the new market, dusky kids unwanted by conservative palefaces.

  311. Is He, Trump worth impeaching?
    Lindsey Graham, that weasel among lemmings or vice versa, proudly thinks not. He, Trump may be a crook, with traitors for servants and racists for supporters, but Little Lindsey will loudly claim that’s not worth impeaching Him over.
    Nancy Pelosi, who may not think it’s possible to win over any of the MAGA maggots but fears that “swing voters” will be put off by the sight of a grandmother spanking He, Trump’s fat ass with a rolled-up copy of the Constitution, has said in so many words that Dear Leader isn’t worth impeaching. A charlatan, however crooked, is only worth impeaching when even His most gullible dupes finally agree, you see, and never mind whether any sentient cactus that understands simple Anglo-Saxon words like “would” or “be” or “king” thinks it’s long past time for impeachment.
    Nothing will change Little Lindsey’s mind, because he lost it somewhere around the 4th tee. Nancy might change her mind, but not before Moderate Marty does.
    The punditocracy keeps talking as if “ordinary Americans” view “politics” the same way they view chess: a boring game among pointy-headed nerds that has nothing to do with “real life”. To the pundits, impeachment is just a political gambit — to be judged solely on whether it leads to mate in 7 against the best defense, or not. Sweeping away the pieces and breaking the board over your opponent’s head — the He, Trump Defense — is something the pundits imagine “ordinary Americans” will find entertaining at best, understandable at worst.
    As a cynic, I say: if the pundits are right, “ordinary Americans” will deserve everything that’s coming to them in the next 2, or 6, or 60 years. But: as a bleeding-heart liberal, positively seething with good will toward those “ordinary Americans”, I would gladly spare them the comeuppance, even at the cost of pundits’ furrowed brows.
    Nancy: stop waiting for the Revelation that will finally liberate “moderates” from their slavish devotion to “bipartisanship”, let alone for the 2×4 upside the head it will take to deprogram the MAGA cultists from their worship of Individual_1, the 5th Avenue shootist who can do no wrong in their eyes.
    ITMFA. The Republic you save may be your own.
    –TP

  312. Is He, Trump worth impeaching?
    Lindsey Graham, that weasel among lemmings or vice versa, proudly thinks not. He, Trump may be a crook, with traitors for servants and racists for supporters, but Little Lindsey will loudly claim that’s not worth impeaching Him over.
    Nancy Pelosi, who may not think it’s possible to win over any of the MAGA maggots but fears that “swing voters” will be put off by the sight of a grandmother spanking He, Trump’s fat ass with a rolled-up copy of the Constitution, has said in so many words that Dear Leader isn’t worth impeaching. A charlatan, however crooked, is only worth impeaching when even His most gullible dupes finally agree, you see, and never mind whether any sentient cactus that understands simple Anglo-Saxon words like “would” or “be” or “king” thinks it’s long past time for impeachment.
    Nothing will change Little Lindsey’s mind, because he lost it somewhere around the 4th tee. Nancy might change her mind, but not before Moderate Marty does.
    The punditocracy keeps talking as if “ordinary Americans” view “politics” the same way they view chess: a boring game among pointy-headed nerds that has nothing to do with “real life”. To the pundits, impeachment is just a political gambit — to be judged solely on whether it leads to mate in 7 against the best defense, or not. Sweeping away the pieces and breaking the board over your opponent’s head — the He, Trump Defense — is something the pundits imagine “ordinary Americans” will find entertaining at best, understandable at worst.
    As a cynic, I say: if the pundits are right, “ordinary Americans” will deserve everything that’s coming to them in the next 2, or 6, or 60 years. But: as a bleeding-heart liberal, positively seething with good will toward those “ordinary Americans”, I would gladly spare them the comeuppance, even at the cost of pundits’ furrowed brows.
    Nancy: stop waiting for the Revelation that will finally liberate “moderates” from their slavish devotion to “bipartisanship”, let alone for the 2×4 upside the head it will take to deprogram the MAGA cultists from their worship of Individual_1, the 5th Avenue shootist who can do no wrong in their eyes.
    ITMFA. The Republic you save may be your own.
    –TP

  313. I think any discussion about whether impeachment is worthwhile requires asking: Given that actual removal is not in the cards, what is gained by impeachment? (Now if something surfaces that looks like it might actually convince some Republican Senators, that’s a different discussion.)
    On one hand, it makes the point that at least part of Congress takes its responsibilities seriously. On the other hand, having the Senate fail to convict will get hyped as validation that there was never anything there. And that includes scenarios where a majority of the Senate votes to remove, just not 2/3. After all, if it was a huge win to lose the popular vote by 3 million, surely it would be a huge win to only have 65 Senators vote to remove him….

  314. I think any discussion about whether impeachment is worthwhile requires asking: Given that actual removal is not in the cards, what is gained by impeachment? (Now if something surfaces that looks like it might actually convince some Republican Senators, that’s a different discussion.)
    On one hand, it makes the point that at least part of Congress takes its responsibilities seriously. On the other hand, having the Senate fail to convict will get hyped as validation that there was never anything there. And that includes scenarios where a majority of the Senate votes to remove, just not 2/3. After all, if it was a huge win to lose the popular vote by 3 million, surely it would be a huge win to only have 65 Senators vote to remove him….

  315. Given that actual removal is not in the cards, what is gained by impeachment?
    Impeachment is the remedy that is available, and failing to make use of it is a concession of your own powerlessness.
    Plus, it brings demands for evidence and testimony within the bounds of powers explicitly and unambiguously granted to Congress, in black letters, by the Constitution. Which cuts the whole “we will only comply with what is necessary for legislative purposes” hogwash off at the pass.
    If the Senate fails to convict, then they can own that. At least the House will have done what is in their power to do.
    ITMFA

  316. Given that actual removal is not in the cards, what is gained by impeachment?
    Impeachment is the remedy that is available, and failing to make use of it is a concession of your own powerlessness.
    Plus, it brings demands for evidence and testimony within the bounds of powers explicitly and unambiguously granted to Congress, in black letters, by the Constitution. Which cuts the whole “we will only comply with what is necessary for legislative purposes” hogwash off at the pass.
    If the Senate fails to convict, then they can own that. At least the House will have done what is in their power to do.
    ITMFA

  319. Not only WRS, but consider this: conventional wisdom has it that impeachment is pointless because it will die in the McConnell Senate, but goo-goo legislation which McConnell’s Senate will never even take up will somehow score points for the Dems.
    Conventional wisdom is nuts.
    –TP

  320. Not only WRS, but consider this: conventional wisdom has it that impeachment is pointless because it will die in the McConnell Senate, but goo-goo legislation which McConnell’s Senate will never even take up will somehow score points for the Dems.
    Conventional wisdom is nuts.
    –TP

  321. I want a serious smoking gun before the House impeaches. Recordings of Trump; clear-cut tax fraud; something on that order. Enough that the Senate Republicans will pay a heavy electoral price if they acquit.

  322. I want a serious smoking gun before the House impeaches. Recordings of Trump; clear-cut tax fraud; something on that order. Enough that the Senate Republicans will pay a heavy electoral price if they acquit.

  323. Meanwhile, Calhoun lives!
    Dear Texas: go ahead and try it on. It didn’t work out so well last time, but maybe this time you’ll have better luck.
    You surrendered your sovereignty in 1845, dudes.

  324. Meanwhile, Calhoun lives!
    Dear Texas: go ahead and try it on. It didn’t work out so well last time, but maybe this time you’ll have better luck.
    You surrendered your sovereignty in 1845, dudes.

  325. I want a serious smoking gun before the House impeaches
    Trump told McGahn to fire Mueller. So says McGahn. Under oath.
    You need tax evasion?

  326. I want a serious smoking gun before the House impeaches
    Trump told McGahn to fire Mueller. So says McGahn. Under oath.
    You need tax evasion?

  327. Enough that the Senate Republicans will pay a heavy electoral price if they acquit.
    “A heavy electoral price”? OK: what’s a heavy electoral price when it’s at home?
    Best I can figure, it amounts to this: even semi-sentient friends and neighbors of the MAGA maggots decide to vote for the Democratic opponents of those Senate Republicans. He, Trump shooting somebody on 5th Avenue might accomplish that. Maybe. If those semi-sentient friends and neighbors of the MAGA maggots actually hear about it.
    But I come back to my own point: House Dems think they can get somewhere with “swing voters” by passing popular bills that embody a “positive vision”, even though McConnell and his fellow GOPers in the Senate won’t even take them up. And yet they think an impeachment will turn off “swing voters”, because the Senate will never convict.
    Democrats have always been clever enough to outwit themselves.
    –TP

  328. Enough that the Senate Republicans will pay a heavy electoral price if they acquit.
    “A heavy electoral price”? OK: what’s a heavy electoral price when it’s at home?
    Best I can figure, it amounts to this: even semi-sentient friends and neighbors of the MAGA maggots decide to vote for the Democratic opponents of those Senate Republicans. He, Trump shooting somebody on 5th Avenue might accomplish that. Maybe. If those semi-sentient friends and neighbors of the MAGA maggots actually hear about it.
    But I come back to my own point: House Dems think they can get somewhere with “swing voters” by passing popular bills that embody a “positive vision”, even though McConnell and his fellow GOPers in the Senate won’t even take them up. And yet they think an impeachment will turn off “swing voters”, because the Senate will never convict.
    Democrats have always been clever enough to outwit themselves.
    –TP

  329. Impeachment is the remedy that is available, and failing to make use of it is a concession of your own powerlessness.
    Alternatively, impeachment when you know it won’t go anywhere is a concession that you are powerless to do anything which would accomplish something. I don’t personally have any objection to impeachment proceedings. I just think there are other, more productive, ways to extract damning information about Trump, his cabinet, and all his works.

  330. Impeachment is the remedy that is available, and failing to make use of it is a concession of your own powerlessness.
    Alternatively, impeachment when you know it won’t go anywhere is a concession that you are powerless to do anything which would accomplish something. I don’t personally have any objection to impeachment proceedings. I just think there are other, more productive, ways to extract damning information about Trump, his cabinet, and all his works.

  331. Trump told McGahn to fire Mueller. So says McGahn. Under oath.
    But Mueller didn’t get fired. He finished the investigation. I want something stronger than attempted obstruction, especially when it’s one witness. Sans recordings or something in writing, the vast largely-uninterested public will accept Trump saying, “McGahn misunderstood.”
    If a failed impeachment proceeding is the best that we’ve got against the Trump administration and its policies, we’re doomed.

  332. Trump told McGahn to fire Mueller. So says McGahn. Under oath.
    But Mueller didn’t get fired. He finished the investigation. I want something stronger than attempted obstruction, especially when it’s one witness. Sans recordings or something in writing, the vast largely-uninterested public will accept Trump saying, “McGahn misunderstood.”
    If a failed impeachment proceeding is the best that we’ve got against the Trump administration and its policies, we’re doomed.

  333. “Extracting information” reminds me of my annoyance any time Bob Woodward talks about “ruhporting”. For decades now, I’ve heard him use “ruhporting” as a name for the process of gathering information. English being my second language and all, I always thought of “reporting” as the process of disseminating information.
    It also reminds me of an old joke about the wacky professor who excitedly announces to his colleagues that he has invented a reading machine. “How does it work?”, they ask. “It uses a suction cup to turn the pages”, he answers. “Does it convert the printed text to some digital format?” “No. It just reads.” “Oh, you mean it speaks the text aloud!” “No, it just reads.” And so on.
    The point of impeachment hearings is not to “extract” information and shove it straight into the Congressional record. The point is to lay out the “information” that even people who can read nothing longer than a tweet already know, and make such a dog-and-pony show of it that C-Span outdraws Fox News in every “demo”. The point is to make He, Trump’s lickspittles in the Congress froth at the mouth and say increasingly stupid things. The point is to lead public opinion, not cower to some pundit’s notion of it.
    Despicable as Dick and Dubya were, they were “leaders” in the operative sense that they led a public which couldn’t spell Iraq, much less find it on a map, one year, to back their splendid little war on Iraq the next.
    Democrats need to lead.
    –TP

  334. “Extracting information” reminds me of my annoyance any time Bob Woodward talks about “ruhporting”. For decades now, I’ve heard him use “ruhporting” as a name for the process of gathering information. English being my second language and all, I always thought of “reporting” as the process of disseminating information.
    It also reminds me of an old joke about the wacky professor who excitedly announces to his colleagues that he has invented a reading machine. “How does it work?”, they ask. “It uses a suction cup to turn the pages”, he answers. “Does it convert the printed text to some digital format?” “No. It just reads.” “Oh, you mean it speaks the text aloud!” “No, it just reads.” And so on.
    The point of impeachment hearings is not to “extract” information and shove it straight into the Congressional record. The point is to lay out the “information” that even people who can read nothing longer than a tweet already know, and make such a dog-and-pony show of it that C-Span outdraws Fox News in every “demo”. The point is to make He, Trump’s lickspittles in the Congress froth at the mouth and say increasingly stupid things. The point is to lead public opinion, not cower to some pundit’s notion of it.
    Despicable as Dick and Dubya were, they were “leaders” in the operative sense that they led a public which couldn’t spell Iraq, much less find it on a map, one year, to back their splendid little war on Iraq the next.
    Democrats need to lead.
    –TP

  335. It is too early to impeach. They might finish it this year, almost certainly before the election. I would think just after Christmas to start, maybe even March 1. Then the hearings would have “new” revelations in the headlines every day until the election.
    As a political tool it’s enough to talk about it every day between now and then.

  336. It is too early to impeach. They might finish it this year, almost certainly before the election. I would think just after Christmas to start, maybe even March 1. Then the hearings would have “new” revelations in the headlines every day until the election.
    As a political tool it’s enough to talk about it every day between now and then.

  337. The point is to lead public opinion, not cower to some pundit’s notion of it.
    QFT.
    And so very depressing.

  338. The point is to lead public opinion, not cower to some pundit’s notion of it.
    QFT.
    And so very depressing.

  339. “As a political tool” is chess analysis.
    But if Nancy Pelosi wants to keep playing chess instead of trying to save the Republic, we should pass Marty’s advice on to her.
    It’s not like He, Trump’s flying monkeys can do much damage to “ordinary Americans”, the Constitution, or the planet between now and Christmas, is it?
    BTW, I wish Pelosi would stop telling The American People that “only Congress can declare war” and say it explicitly and publicly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
    –TP

  340. “As a political tool” is chess analysis.
    But if Nancy Pelosi wants to keep playing chess instead of trying to save the Republic, we should pass Marty’s advice on to her.
    It’s not like He, Trump’s flying monkeys can do much damage to “ordinary Americans”, the Constitution, or the planet between now and Christmas, is it?
    BTW, I wish Pelosi would stop telling The American People that “only Congress can declare war” and say it explicitly and publicly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
    –TP

  341. Then the hearings would have “new” revelations in the headlines every day until the election.
    If that’s the way Pelosi is playing it, I tip my hat to her.

  342. Then the hearings would have “new” revelations in the headlines every day until the election.
    If that’s the way Pelosi is playing it, I tip my hat to her.

  347. 27 of Trump’s nominees to the federal bench have declined to affirm Brown vs Board of Education. Jeffrey Rosen, his nominee for deputy AG, likewise declines to affirm Brown.
    Brown vs Board of Ed is one of the cornerstones of modern civil rights legislation.
    Is there a positive, or even neutral, way to interpret this refusal?

  348. 27 of Trump’s nominees to the federal bench have declined to affirm Brown vs Board of Education. Jeffrey Rosen, his nominee for deputy AG, likewise declines to affirm Brown.
    Brown vs Board of Ed is one of the cornerstones of modern civil rights legislation.
    Is there a positive, or even neutral, way to interpret this refusal?

  349. I cannot imagine that there is. But IANAL, so I hope to God I am wrong. This is the first time I have heard of this shocking fact: has it received much coverage in the US?

  350. I cannot imagine that there is. But IANAL, so I hope to God I am wrong. This is the first time I have heard of this shocking fact: has it received much coverage in the US?

  353. Wow. Trump is appointing judges who want public schools to be racially segregated?
    I thought that sort of overt racism was over.

  354. Wow. Trump is appointing judges who want public schools to be racially segregated?
    I thought that sort of overt racism was over.

  355. Is there a positive, or even neutral, way to interpret this refusal?
    Two possible neutral interpretations:
    1) they think separate can be equal — and if it isn’t, it’s the fault of those on the short end.
    2) they don’t think equal justice for all is required by the constitution.
    A positive interpretation is more challenging. But I suppose:
    – We’re positive that we shouldn’t have to worry about what happens to “those people”
    What there isn’t is a Christian interpretation….

  356. Is there a positive, or even neutral, way to interpret this refusal?
    Two possible neutral interpretations:
    1) they think separate can be equal — and if it isn’t, it’s the fault of those on the short end.
    2) they don’t think equal justice for all is required by the constitution.
    A positive interpretation is more challenging. But I suppose:
    – We’re positive that we shouldn’t have to worry about what happens to “those people”
    What there isn’t is a Christian interpretation….

  359. Ya remember when lying, thieving, vermin conservatives, we know who the filth are, told us that republicans have no intention of banning birth control as well as abortion:
    https://www.truthorfiction.com/does-a-proposed-ohio-bill-make-the-pill-and-iuds-illegal/
    Oh, the language is muddy, is it? Subhuman conservatives always, coyly, keep the language muddy until they do precisely what they say they are going to in Federalist Society meetings closed to the press for the past 70 years, since the Federalist Society changed its name from the John Birch Society.
    Republicans plan to increase the birthrate in America by raping their wives, their mistresses, and under-aged girls and keeping them in legal prison until the sacred fetus, at the very least their sperm half of it, are delivered.
    All females in Ohio must begin carrying loaded semi-automatic pistols and shoot any vermin republican who wants sovereignty over their bodies in the faces bodies.
    I’m going to be in Ohio in a few weeks.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKLmw1AN4JA

  360. Ya remember when lying, thieving, vermin conservatives, we know who the filth are, told us that republicans have no intention of banning birth control as well as abortion:
    https://www.truthorfiction.com/does-a-proposed-ohio-bill-make-the-pill-and-iuds-illegal/
    Oh, the language is muddy, is it? Subhuman conservatives always, coyly, keep the language muddy until they do precisely what they say they are going to in Federalist Society meetings closed to the press for the past 70 years, since the Federalist Society changed its name from the John Birch Society.
    Republicans plan to increase the birthrate in America by raping their wives, their mistresses, and under-aged girls and keeping them in legal prison until the sacred fetus, at the very least their sperm half of it, are delivered.
    All females in Ohio must begin carrying loaded semi-automatic pistols and shoot any vermin republican who wants sovereignty over their bodies in the faces bodies.
    I’m going to be in Ohio in a few weeks.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKLmw1AN4JA

  361. wj, couldn’t you just lose it over republican conservatives threatening BvB?
    Would it hurt you to just throw up your hands and say screw the sunshine both sides part of the argument, which doesn’t exist?
    If you are planning on turning into John Brown at the last minute over this stuff, time is running out.
    I write this in full confidence of your basic, essential humanity.
    Think of yourself as the pilot of the Enola Gay.
    Some things just need to be done.

  362. wj, couldn’t you just lose it over republican conservatives threatening BvB?
    Would it hurt you to just throw up your hands and say screw the sunshine both sides part of the argument, which doesn’t exist?
    If you are planning on turning into John Brown at the last minute over this stuff, time is running out.
    I write this in full confidence of your basic, essential humanity.
    Think of yourself as the pilot of the Enola Gay.
    Some things just need to be done.

  363. Ya remember when . . . [they] . . . told us that republicans have no intention of banning birth control as well as abortion.
    Well, you always knew opposition to abortion had nothing to do with avoiding killing a “human being”. Because if that was the goal, they would have been fighting hard for universally available, free, contraception. Or even mandatory contraceptive implants for every girl from puberty. But somehow, that never seemed to be a priority.

  364. Ya remember when . . . [they] . . . told us that republicans have no intention of banning birth control as well as abortion.
    Well, you always knew opposition to abortion had nothing to do with avoiding killing a “human being”. Because if that was the goal, they would have been fighting hard for universally available, free, contraception. Or even mandatory contraceptive implants for every girl from puberty. But somehow, that never seemed to be a priority.

  365. So I’m still thinking about this. Is this in confirmation hearings? What normally happens in judges’ confirmation hearings? Are they usually asked to affirm the precedent of famous foundational cases? I think I’ve heard of some in the past questioning whether, for example, Roe v Wade is “settled law”, was that in the same kind of situation? Although like everyone else I am all too familiar with the swell of overt conservative opinion on the abortion question, like Pro Bono I find it incredible that these people are prepared to say out loud, or imply, that they are against the desegregation of schools. But if there is no reasonable explanation, I am afraid this may be an astonishingly graphic illustration of Janie’s prophecy upthread about America being taken back into darkness.
    The only hope, I guess, is that in the 2020 campaign, the Dems manage to really put the message across powerfully: the Republicans are hoping to segregate schools and outlaw abortion. If they do put it across successfully, that should be enough to get them over the line.

  366. So I’m still thinking about this. Is this in confirmation hearings? What normally happens in judges’ confirmation hearings? Are they usually asked to affirm the precedent of famous foundational cases? I think I’ve heard of some in the past questioning whether, for example, Roe v Wade is “settled law”, was that in the same kind of situation? Although like everyone else I am all too familiar with the swell of overt conservative opinion on the abortion question, like Pro Bono I find it incredible that these people are prepared to say out loud, or imply, that they are against the desegregation of schools. But if there is no reasonable explanation, I am afraid this may be an astonishingly graphic illustration of Janie’s prophecy upthread about America being taken back into darkness.
    The only hope, I guess, is that in the 2020 campaign, the Dems manage to really put the message across powerfully: the Republicans are hoping to segregate schools and outlaw abortion. If they do put it across successfully, that should be enough to get them over the line.

  367. What I’m about to say feels like a series of truisms, but if it were that simple we wouldn’t be where we are.
    I thought that sort of overt racism was over.
    It is never over.
    “We” (the human race) will never see the last of the kind of overt racism that Clickbait’s election both relied on and freed from the closet. It never goes away, it just goes underground when the pendulum swings, and maybe the rest of us get complacent, or maybe (thinking of Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, on which I did my PhD thesis) we just don’t live long enough to learn these lessons effectively.
    It’s a weird, schizy time we’re living in, where on the one hand we’ve come so far that gay people can get married, and on the other we’re seeing a revival of the worst kind of viciousness toward every kind of group that isn’t straight, white, male, and well off, and one by one, the dismantling of the steps along the way to our present, relatively less dark social customs (in some places). It brings to mind the notion of outrunning your headlights, which we hear about a lot here in snowmobile country.
    Not to say we shouldn’t have been pushing forward on all these fronts, but we didn’t bring everyone with us, and I’m pretty sure that’s impossible anyhow. To me the most depressing thing (well, other than everything else) is related to what TP wrote last night about shaping public opinion instead of cowering before it. The power- and money-brokers on the right have spent decades to get us to the point we’re at right now. Kavanaugh and all those judges who won’t affirm Brown didn’t just pop out of Athena’s brow the other day. Those anti-abortion bills didn’t just get churned out at some right-wing legal chop shop last week. This stuff has been in preparation for a very long time.
    Why doesn’t our side know how to do that?
    (Rhetorical question.)
    *****
    I’m reminded of a quote from Solzhenitsyn: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
    I’ll leave the connection as an exercise for the reader.

  368. What I’m about to say feels like a series of truisms, but if it were that simple we wouldn’t be where we are.
    I thought that sort of overt racism was over.
    It is never over.
    “We” (the human race) will never see the last of the kind of overt racism that Clickbait’s election both relied on and freed from the closet. It never goes away, it just goes underground when the pendulum swings, and maybe the rest of us get complacent, or maybe (thinking of Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, on which I did my PhD thesis) we just don’t live long enough to learn these lessons effectively.
    It’s a weird, schizy time we’re living in, where on the one hand we’ve come so far that gay people can get married, and on the other we’re seeing a revival of the worst kind of viciousness toward every kind of group that isn’t straight, white, male, and well off, and one by one, the dismantling of the steps along the way to our present, relatively less dark social customs (in some places). It brings to mind the notion of outrunning your headlights, which we hear about a lot here in snowmobile country.
    Not to say we shouldn’t have been pushing forward on all these fronts, but we didn’t bring everyone with us, and I’m pretty sure that’s impossible anyhow. To me the most depressing thing (well, other than everything else) is related to what TP wrote last night about shaping public opinion instead of cowering before it. The power- and money-brokers on the right have spent decades to get us to the point we’re at right now. Kavanaugh and all those judges who won’t affirm Brown didn’t just pop out of Athena’s brow the other day. Those anti-abortion bills didn’t just get churned out at some right-wing legal chop shop last week. This stuff has been in preparation for a very long time.
    Why doesn’t our side know how to do that?
    (Rhetorical question.)
    *****
    I’m reminded of a quote from Solzhenitsyn: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
    I’ll leave the connection as an exercise for the reader.

  369. Okay, Zeus’s brow, Athena was the one who popped out. Bad metaphor in any case. What the heck, it’s a blog comment.

  370. Okay, Zeus’s brow, Athena was the one who popped out. Bad metaphor in any case. What the heck, it’s a blog comment.

  375. There has been for some time a trend for judicial nominees to refuse on ‘principle’ to comment on particular SC decisions during nomination hearings (which has become part, I think, of Federal Society training/doctrine for lawyers) in order to avoid providing ammunition against their confirmation.
    This is coupled with a firm declaration that as a judge they will, of course, respect precedent. We have seen in recent years that such declarations are effectively meaningless when it comes to SC justices being bound by the principle of stare decisis.
    It is only very recently that such a refusal now includes BvB.
    The pretext is, of course, ‘if I answer that you’ll then ask me about Roe v Wade’. But it is also clear that BvB is no longer secure in a future Republican dominated Court.

  376. There has been for some time a trend for judicial nominees to refuse on ‘principle’ to comment on particular SC decisions during nomination hearings (which has become part, I think, of Federal Society training/doctrine for lawyers) in order to avoid providing ammunition against their confirmation.
    This is coupled with a firm declaration that as a judge they will, of course, respect precedent. We have seen in recent years that such declarations are effectively meaningless when it comes to SC justices being bound by the principle of stare decisis.
    It is only very recently that such a refusal now includes BvB.
    The pretext is, of course, ‘if I answer that you’ll then ask me about Roe v Wade’. But it is also clear that BvB is no longer secure in a future Republican dominated Court.

  379. Slate has had a series of good articles on the dangers of court packing. This is the latest:
    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/senate-trump-judges-kenneth-lee-mitch-mcconnell.html
    The abandonment on the Blue Slip process (the respecting of which is why Obama left some many Federal court vacancies infilled – which Trump is now filling at a record rate) is every bit as troubling as any given Supreme Court appointment, but garners a minute fraction of the public attention.

  380. Slate has had a series of good articles on the dangers of court packing. This is the latest:
    https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/senate-trump-judges-kenneth-lee-mitch-mcconnell.html
    The abandonment on the Blue Slip process (the respecting of which is why Obama left some many Federal court vacancies infilled – which Trump is now filling at a record rate) is every bit as troubling as any given Supreme Court appointment, but garners a minute fraction of the public attention.

  381. What Nadler said.
    “They are now taking the position that the Justice Department can’t hold the President accountable, since they say no President can be indicted, no matter what the evidence, as a matter of law. And now they are saying that Congress can’t hold the President accountable. That means the President is above the law, and that’s intolerable in a democratic society. We cannot permit that kind of arrogation of power.”

  382. What Nadler said.
    “They are now taking the position that the Justice Department can’t hold the President accountable, since they say no President can be indicted, no matter what the evidence, as a matter of law. And now they are saying that Congress can’t hold the President accountable. That means the President is above the law, and that’s intolerable in a democratic society. We cannot permit that kind of arrogation of power.”

  383. Thank you, Nigel, for the explanation @12.19. Once I read it, I realised I knew it, but clearly there is currently a limit to the amount of backstory I can keep in my head at any one time. So, leaving aside the LGBT changes (just for the moment, for the sake of this argument as being more recent, less-embedded public attitudes): manoeuvring toward no Roe v Wade and no B v BofE, and a president above the law – a pretty good definition of a not-so-slow-moving coup.

  384. Thank you, Nigel, for the explanation @12.19. Once I read it, I realised I knew it, but clearly there is currently a limit to the amount of backstory I can keep in my head at any one time. So, leaving aside the LGBT changes (just for the moment, for the sake of this argument as being more recent, less-embedded public attitudes): manoeuvring toward no Roe v Wade and no B v BofE, and a president above the law – a pretty good definition of a not-so-slow-moving coup.

  387. All of us can play this stupid fucking game:
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/05/18/censorship-open-thread-feel-free-to-just-stfu-now/
    Warning: I’ve had any number of comments censored by “moderators (Stasi fascist conservatives)” at “The American Conservative” and in the past at “Red State”.
    Several of my letters to the editor at the conservative Rocky Mountain News (now a dead item) in past decades disappeared into the censor’s circular file, though a few were published, after which I received death threats from Christian conservative vermin, one instance of which was investigated by the FBI.
    My high school newspaper columns were censored by school authorities. When I worked in public information and journalism, editors and copy readers dared to censor my grammatical peculiarities, with RED pencils, no less, and which are protected by the literal, God-given, blood-soaked words of the Bill of Rights, ain’t they?
    I’m a victim. Me own sainted mother shushed me once with the threat that if I couldn’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.
    Who did she think SHE was … Joe Stalin?
    It now occurs to me, thanks to the filthy whining victims in the conservative bowel movement that I want justice, I want my First Amendment rights restored, recognized, and licked clean by conservatives in every instance.
    How brutal of a violent, savage revolution in this country do I have to answer with against conservative vermin suggesting the same to satisfy their martydom, in order to satisfy MY need to have every word of MINE heard and quite frankly appreciated, if not memorized and taught as gospel in religious schools to the awe-struck open minded offspring of cannibal conservatives?
    Hanh?
    I’m going to complain to the White House, that’s what!
    I’m going to request that they give a proper burial to Mr Khashosggi’s body parts they have been feeding, without identifying such on the menu, to smirking amateur sports champions and calling it a Happy Meal.
    Or at least serve body parts during meals without a hint of political bias. Those athletes can choke down some Milo with fries too, can’t they?
    As a show of good faith that censorship shall never be practiced again in this, our Bellmorian free society.

  388. All of us can play this stupid fucking game:
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/05/18/censorship-open-thread-feel-free-to-just-stfu-now/
    Warning: I’ve had any number of comments censored by “moderators (Stasi fascist conservatives)” at “The American Conservative” and in the past at “Red State”.
    Several of my letters to the editor at the conservative Rocky Mountain News (now a dead item) in past decades disappeared into the censor’s circular file, though a few were published, after which I received death threats from Christian conservative vermin, one instance of which was investigated by the FBI.
    My high school newspaper columns were censored by school authorities. When I worked in public information and journalism, editors and copy readers dared to censor my grammatical peculiarities, with RED pencils, no less, and which are protected by the literal, God-given, blood-soaked words of the Bill of Rights, ain’t they?
    I’m a victim. Me own sainted mother shushed me once with the threat that if I couldn’t say something nice, then don’t say anything at all.
    Who did she think SHE was … Joe Stalin?
    It now occurs to me, thanks to the filthy whining victims in the conservative bowel movement that I want justice, I want my First Amendment rights restored, recognized, and licked clean by conservatives in every instance.
    How brutal of a violent, savage revolution in this country do I have to answer with against conservative vermin suggesting the same to satisfy their martydom, in order to satisfy MY need to have every word of MINE heard and quite frankly appreciated, if not memorized and taught as gospel in religious schools to the awe-struck open minded offspring of cannibal conservatives?
    Hanh?
    I’m going to complain to the White House, that’s what!
    I’m going to request that they give a proper burial to Mr Khashosggi’s body parts they have been feeding, without identifying such on the menu, to smirking amateur sports champions and calling it a Happy Meal.
    Or at least serve body parts during meals without a hint of political bias. Those athletes can choke down some Milo with fries too, can’t they?
    As a show of good faith that censorship shall never be practiced again in this, our Bellmorian free society.

  389. I find this fascinating:
    https://twitter.com/ibdeditorials?lang=en
    Investor’s Business Daily discontinued one of the most right wing in the dumper for p editorial pages in the country.
    As we approach the most decisive election in the same all-of-U.S.-history during which p claims he has been the greatest President.
    Maybe the denizens of that sribbling nest of vipers decided they’d better hide so we can’t find them to mete out punishment.
    This was par for the course:
    https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/kerry-obsessed-with-nonexistent-global-warming/
    Meanwhile, this brief note in the “news” section, (all the news that’s fit to print and then lie about on the opinion page) page A-2 in today’s weekly copy of the paper:
    “Arctic Circle temp hits high
    Ardhangelsk, Russia, recently hit 84 degrees vs the average of 54 degrees. The record-breaking temperatures around the Arctic Circle comes as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory saw carbon dioxide measurements of 415 parts per million in the atmosphere, the highest in at least 800,000 years. The data points to increased carbon dioxide emissions heating up the Earth as 18 out of the 19 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.”
    I suspect they are heading for higher ground.
    We’ll find them.

  390. I find this fascinating:
    https://twitter.com/ibdeditorials?lang=en
    Investor’s Business Daily discontinued one of the most right wing in the dumper for p editorial pages in the country.
    As we approach the most decisive election in the same all-of-U.S.-history during which p claims he has been the greatest President.
    Maybe the denizens of that sribbling nest of vipers decided they’d better hide so we can’t find them to mete out punishment.
    This was par for the course:
    https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/kerry-obsessed-with-nonexistent-global-warming/
    Meanwhile, this brief note in the “news” section, (all the news that’s fit to print and then lie about on the opinion page) page A-2 in today’s weekly copy of the paper:
    “Arctic Circle temp hits high
    Ardhangelsk, Russia, recently hit 84 degrees vs the average of 54 degrees. The record-breaking temperatures around the Arctic Circle comes as Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory saw carbon dioxide measurements of 415 parts per million in the atmosphere, the highest in at least 800,000 years. The data points to increased carbon dioxide emissions heating up the Earth as 18 out of the 19 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000.”
    I suspect they are heading for higher ground.
    We’ll find them.

  391. Maybe the denizens of that sribbling nest of vipers decided they’d better hide so we can’t find them to mete out punishment.
    Probably a lot simpler than that. The market has hit the skids, thanks in no small part to Trump’s trade wars, and their readers know it. So continuing to praise Trump would not go down well. Pissing off their subscribers is just bad business.
    Or perhaps they incline, at least in Trump’s case, to “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.:

  392. Maybe the denizens of that sribbling nest of vipers decided they’d better hide so we can’t find them to mete out punishment.
    Probably a lot simpler than that. The market has hit the skids, thanks in no small part to Trump’s trade wars, and their readers know it. So continuing to praise Trump would not go down well. Pissing off their subscribers is just bad business.
    Or perhaps they incline, at least in Trump’s case, to “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.:

  393. NPR OR assures me that all the rubes in flyover country are perfectly fine with Trump’s trade war, because they’re all very concerned about forced intellectual property transfers.
    the tech industry thanks them for their sacrifice.

  394. NPR OR assures me that all the rubes in flyover country are perfectly fine with Trump’s trade war, because they’re all very concerned about forced intellectual property transfers.
    the tech industry thanks them for their sacrifice.

  397. Sticky fingers:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/deutsche-bank-illicit-transactions-kushner-trump-russian-laundering
    Same here:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-disagree-alabama-abortion-ban-rape-incest-exceptions
    p tweeted that he used his fingers as birth control until the day after he announced his candidacy for President, and when that method failed, he OFFERED to pay to abort the fetuses of his dozens of illicit sexual assault victims during his lifetime, out of the kindness of the cold-blooded hearts of whomever he was married to at the time, but he never, NEVER followed thru on those payments, well …. maybe a few times, via Deutsche Bank …as any good, fake, right-wing Falwell Christian piece of shit would not, being a pro-self deal maker.

  398. Sticky fingers:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/deutsche-bank-illicit-transactions-kushner-trump-russian-laundering
    Same here:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-disagree-alabama-abortion-ban-rape-incest-exceptions
    p tweeted that he used his fingers as birth control until the day after he announced his candidacy for President, and when that method failed, he OFFERED to pay to abort the fetuses of his dozens of illicit sexual assault victims during his lifetime, out of the kindness of the cold-blooded hearts of whomever he was married to at the time, but he never, NEVER followed thru on those payments, well …. maybe a few times, via Deutsche Bank …as any good, fake, right-wing Falwell Christian piece of shit would not, being a pro-self deal maker.

  401. The logic of tariffs often boils down to: “If you don’t stop mistreating your citizens by selling their products below cost, we’re going to mistreat our citizens by adding a tax to your price.

  402. The logic of tariffs often boils down to: “If you don’t stop mistreating your citizens by selling their products below cost, we’re going to mistreat our citizens by adding a tax to your price.

  403. “The market has hit the skids”
    Not yet. It’s oversold technically at the moment.
    This Fall should be exciting, however.
    All of this is within the context that if p shot platoons of the OTHER dead every week day lunch hour on Fifth Avenue, this market would step around the rivers of blood coursing down the storm drains and declare the news irrelevant to the Market Gods, who shall be worshiped and sacrificed to as the ultimate super gods of brutal transcendent shareholder subhuman values.
    If it enhanced shareholder to shoot Milton Friedman on Fifth Avenue, Friedman himself would shrug with excruciating rationality and whimper: “The market has spoken!”
    In other words, I’m still making money in the market, so it can’t be on the skids.
    Nimble is the word.

  404. “The market has hit the skids”
    Not yet. It’s oversold technically at the moment.
    This Fall should be exciting, however.
    All of this is within the context that if p shot platoons of the OTHER dead every week day lunch hour on Fifth Avenue, this market would step around the rivers of blood coursing down the storm drains and declare the news irrelevant to the Market Gods, who shall be worshiped and sacrificed to as the ultimate super gods of brutal transcendent shareholder subhuman values.
    If it enhanced shareholder to shoot Milton Friedman on Fifth Avenue, Friedman himself would shrug with excruciating rationality and whimper: “The market has spoken!”
    In other words, I’m still making money in the market, so it can’t be on the skids.
    Nimble is the word.

  405. In other words, I’m still making money in the market, so it can’t be on the skids.
    In addition to public schools teaching every student how to write a business plan, I’d also like them to teach every student the rudiments of reading corporate financial statements. It’s a life skill I know I wish I had, and IMO it would be beneficial to a lot of people. Most people, probably.
    Not a political point, just an observation.

  406. In other words, I’m still making money in the market, so it can’t be on the skids.
    In addition to public schools teaching every student how to write a business plan, I’d also like them to teach every student the rudiments of reading corporate financial statements. It’s a life skill I know I wish I had, and IMO it would be beneficial to a lot of people. Most people, probably.
    Not a political point, just an observation.

  407. p also said the pro-lifers should wait to get rid of exceptions for abortions undertaken in the case of rape and incest, until he wins re-election and conservatives take back the House, and then he will sign an Executive Order legalizing rape and incest, regardless of the age of Falwell’s daughters, obviating the need for the exception.
    Right-wing Catholics cheered the tweet and said “Finally, we will be able to forgo shagging the choirboys as a form of birth control and instead return to preying on the female parishioners, as the Bible stipulated, thus going back to the time when priests never, never … well maybe Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town and a couple of times, accidentally, in the Middle Ages… violated the choirboys.”

  408. p also said the pro-lifers should wait to get rid of exceptions for abortions undertaken in the case of rape and incest, until he wins re-election and conservatives take back the House, and then he will sign an Executive Order legalizing rape and incest, regardless of the age of Falwell’s daughters, obviating the need for the exception.
    Right-wing Catholics cheered the tweet and said “Finally, we will be able to forgo shagging the choirboys as a form of birth control and instead return to preying on the female parishioners, as the Bible stipulated, thus going back to the time when priests never, never … well maybe Spencer Tracy in Boy’s Town and a couple of times, accidentally, in the Middle Ages… violated the choirboys.”

  411. The p Adminstration is now referring to women’s uteruses as Tehran and threats to national security.

  412. The p Adminstration is now referring to women’s uteruses as Tehran and threats to national security.

  413. It may be that, as Trump has said, he could gun down someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing his core supporters. But this?
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-republicans-distance-themselves-from-alabama-abortion-law/2019/05/19/d44036d8-7a3f-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html
    Failing to embrace their fanaticism over abortion might be a way to turn them off. They obviously have no hesitation embracing someone who spits on the rest of their morality. But there are limits!

  414. It may be that, as Trump has said, he could gun down someone in the middle of 5th Avenue without losing his core supporters. But this?
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-republicans-distance-themselves-from-alabama-abortion-law/2019/05/19/d44036d8-7a3f-11e9-8bb7-0fc796cf2ec0_story.html
    Failing to embrace their fanaticism over abortion might be a way to turn them off. They obviously have no hesitation embracing someone who spits on the rest of their morality. But there are limits!

  415. No, that is not what is going on.
    p and otherwise radical republicans, fully on board with lacing the entire Fed court system with fanatical pro-life fake jurists are doing some kabuki here so that when their chosen hanging judges rule that is constitutional to hang women and their physicians for the crime of abortion, even in the event of rape or incest, they can present themselves as “moderates” on the issue despite it being the law of the land to force the bringing to term of a fetus conceived with the sacred sperm of a rapist, related to the victim or not.
    And then we will be enjoined to worship their feigned moderation and send them money.
    Just as p does everything: destroys markets for our farmers’ crops and then ups their crop support payments … see what I do for you, my subjects. Threatens to nuke his foreign enemy and then does not and expects them to tongue wash his perineum in rabid appreciation for sparing them. Threatens liberals and the press with violence at the hands of his thugs at his campaign appearances and then calls them off and lets them depart by force but not beaten up.
    He seems all hat and no cattle but he owns all the hats and all of the cows.
    In two to three years, as the vermin republican party and p dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and declare the debt ceiling violated and the Nation bankrupt except for the funding of its fascist military arsenal, there will emerge some republicans, hired actors all, who have all these decades signed on to pledges to do just that and attended all of the meetings at the fucking conservative think tanks as the radical conservative intelligentsia …. pool boys, grocery clerks, small town seance swamis, card sharks ….. have detailed the plans to accomplish all of these things over the past 40 years.
    Janie knows the score.
    It’s all in the hopper.
    Time to blow up and kill the hopper.

  416. No, that is not what is going on.
    p and otherwise radical republicans, fully on board with lacing the entire Fed court system with fanatical pro-life fake jurists are doing some kabuki here so that when their chosen hanging judges rule that is constitutional to hang women and their physicians for the crime of abortion, even in the event of rape or incest, they can present themselves as “moderates” on the issue despite it being the law of the land to force the bringing to term of a fetus conceived with the sacred sperm of a rapist, related to the victim or not.
    And then we will be enjoined to worship their feigned moderation and send them money.
    Just as p does everything: destroys markets for our farmers’ crops and then ups their crop support payments … see what I do for you, my subjects. Threatens to nuke his foreign enemy and then does not and expects them to tongue wash his perineum in rabid appreciation for sparing them. Threatens liberals and the press with violence at the hands of his thugs at his campaign appearances and then calls them off and lets them depart by force but not beaten up.
    He seems all hat and no cattle but he owns all the hats and all of the cows.
    In two to three years, as the vermin republican party and p dismantle Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and declare the debt ceiling violated and the Nation bankrupt except for the funding of its fascist military arsenal, there will emerge some republicans, hired actors all, who have all these decades signed on to pledges to do just that and attended all of the meetings at the fucking conservative think tanks as the radical conservative intelligentsia …. pool boys, grocery clerks, small town seance swamis, card sharks ….. have detailed the plans to accomplish all of these things over the past 40 years.
    Janie knows the score.
    It’s all in the hopper.
    Time to blow up and kill the hopper.

  419. Because, wj, it is most likely pantomime to demonstrate his ‘moderation’.
    The true believers understand the ongoing transaction – their votes for him ensure the appointment of judges who believe any restrictions on abortion constitutional.

  420. Because, wj, it is most likely pantomime to demonstrate his ‘moderation’.
    The true believers understand the ongoing transaction – their votes for him ensure the appointment of judges who believe any restrictions on abortion constitutional.

  421. IOW what Trump actually believes, if anything other than his right to unrestricted ego gratification, is an irrelevance.

  422. IOW what Trump actually believes, if anything other than his right to unrestricted ego gratification, is an irrelevance.

  423. NYC should fine Steve Doozy $2000 for speaking trash into a FOX microphone while walking in their streets:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/steve-doocey-texting-walking-new-york
    It’s NYC. Why didn’t someone cold cock him for harassing them on their way to real jobs.
    It would have been funny if a self-driving Uber had flatcatted him as he walked across the street while flatulating into his microphone.
    I might then declare self-driving technology suitable for widespread adoption.

  424. NYC should fine Steve Doozy $2000 for speaking trash into a FOX microphone while walking in their streets:
    https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/steve-doocey-texting-walking-new-york
    It’s NYC. Why didn’t someone cold cock him for harassing them on their way to real jobs.
    It would have been funny if a self-driving Uber had flatcatted him as he walked across the street while flatulating into his microphone.
    I might then declare self-driving technology suitable for widespread adoption.

  427. Just as p doesn’t really give a crap about fetuses (especially once they grow up to vote socialist), nor do many pro-lifers, he doesn’t really give a crap about immigration either:
    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/
    E-Verify has been rejected by conservatives thru 20 years of bullshit immigration legislation rejection because what they really want is the perpetual imposition of cleek’s Law.
    How long can America go on being fucked without finally killing the fuckers?

  428. Just as p doesn’t really give a crap about fetuses (especially once they grow up to vote socialist), nor do many pro-lifers, he doesn’t really give a crap about immigration either:
    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/
    E-Verify has been rejected by conservatives thru 20 years of bullshit immigration legislation rejection because what they really want is the perpetual imposition of cleek’s Law.
    How long can America go on being fucked without finally killing the fuckers?

  429. A longish read, but if you like Marilynn Robinson’s great novels and her musings on Calvinism in her essays, you’ll like this:
    https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/is-poverty-necessary-marilynne-robinson/
    Among historical, religious, and economic points dear to me to that she hits on is this observation, recently driven home to me during my reading of Chekhov’s letters:
    “We’re afraid of the word “collective” because of the history of the Soviet Union, though in fact postrevolutionary Russia resembles nothing so closely as prerevolutionary Russia, but with high-rises.”
    The Czar’s and the Bolsheviks shared a rancid and brutal conservatism.

  430. A longish read, but if you like Marilynn Robinson’s great novels and her musings on Calvinism in her essays, you’ll like this:
    https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/is-poverty-necessary-marilynne-robinson/
    Among historical, religious, and economic points dear to me to that she hits on is this observation, recently driven home to me during my reading of Chekhov’s letters:
    “We’re afraid of the word “collective” because of the history of the Soviet Union, though in fact postrevolutionary Russia resembles nothing so closely as prerevolutionary Russia, but with high-rises.”
    The Czar’s and the Bolsheviks shared a rancid and brutal conservatism.

  439. E-Verify has been rejected by conservatives thru 20 years of bullshit immigration legislation rejection because what they really want is…..
    drum roll, please…cheap labor.

  440. E-Verify has been rejected by conservatives thru 20 years of bullshit immigration legislation rejection because what they really want is…..
    drum roll, please…cheap labor.

  441. Game of Thrones spoiler:
    For the finale, I’ll give the win to Tyrion on points. He went to what was supposed to be his trial for treason, and left Hand of a king that he chose and as I understand succession in Westeros the Lannister heir and ruler of the Westerlands. Sansa second, and a number of people with a claim to third.

  442. Game of Thrones spoiler:
    For the finale, I’ll give the win to Tyrion on points. He went to what was supposed to be his trial for treason, and left Hand of a king that he chose and as I understand succession in Westeros the Lannister heir and ruler of the Westerlands. Sansa second, and a number of people with a claim to third.

  443. meanwhile…. looks like a change of careers for our pal Roger Stone.
    Every day I wake up and wonder if it can possibly get weirder than it was the day before.
    The answer is always “yes”.

  444. meanwhile…. looks like a change of careers for our pal Roger Stone.
    Every day I wake up and wonder if it can possibly get weirder than it was the day before.
    The answer is always “yes”.

  445. Every day I wake up and wonder if it can possibly get weirder than it was the day before.
    Easy explanation. We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.

  446. Every day I wake up and wonder if it can possibly get weirder than it was the day before.
    Easy explanation. We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.

  449. Or maybe The Eye of Argon.
    I find that believable when I look at some of the grammar even on respectable news sites. 🙂

  450. Or maybe The Eye of Argon.
    I find that believable when I look at some of the grammar even on respectable news sites. 🙂

  451. Not just the grammar, but the word choice of Trump’s tweets and the plot line of the administration — to the extent there is one.

  452. Not just the grammar, but the word choice of Trump’s tweets and the plot line of the administration — to the extent there is one.

  453. So,let’s strive to reach at least Atlanta Nights levels of quality and consistency again.
    (I have to admit that I love that book)

  454. So,let’s strive to reach at least Atlanta Nights levels of quality and consistency again.
    (I have to admit that I love that book)

  455. My one beef with the adaptation of Game of Thrones is that grammar nazi Stannis Baratheon never ascended the Iron Throne…

  456. My one beef with the adaptation of Game of Thrones is that grammar nazi Stannis Baratheon never ascended the Iron Throne…

  457. We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.
    Mahayana Buddhism has elaborated a system of states or modes of consciousness called bardos. Your ‘self’ or ‘mindstream’ experiences the cycle of life and rebirth as a progression through these states.
    When you die, they have it, you enter a brief-ish state where ultimate reality is present to you. You will be able to receive, and respond to, this to whatever degree your life has prepared you. If you have been mindful and compassionate, you may be able to receive and surrender to this luminous reality in its entirely. If not, not.
    And if not, your consciousness moves on to the sidpa bardo. Untethered from your physical body, your consciousness now manifests its inner impulses as vivid hallucinations. Basically you are immersed in a reality constructed from your own inner life, good bad or indifferent. It may not be pretty.
    There are many days when I could easily be convinced that we are all in the sidpa bardo. Especially in western first-world societies, where technology has freed us, and to a great degree isolated us, from the demands and intrusions of physical life. We don’t even have to interact with other people, let alone non-human beings, as flesh and blood creatures all that much, if we don’t want to. We’re free to elaborate our fantasies and surround ourselves with manifestations and expressions of reality that align with and reinforce our own inner obsessions and urges.
    I drive to work every day in a long stream of other beings, encased in two tons of metal and glass, each of us isolated in our own cocoon. Not just a metal and glass cocoon, but a cocoon constructed of what we choose to read, listen to, and watch, who we know and don’t know, who we don’t want to know or not know.
    Never mind Philip K Dick. Maybe this is the sidpa bardo.
    Hopefully we will all grab that brass ring of luminous reality next time around.

  458. We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.
    Mahayana Buddhism has elaborated a system of states or modes of consciousness called bardos. Your ‘self’ or ‘mindstream’ experiences the cycle of life and rebirth as a progression through these states.
    When you die, they have it, you enter a brief-ish state where ultimate reality is present to you. You will be able to receive, and respond to, this to whatever degree your life has prepared you. If you have been mindful and compassionate, you may be able to receive and surrender to this luminous reality in its entirely. If not, not.
    And if not, your consciousness moves on to the sidpa bardo. Untethered from your physical body, your consciousness now manifests its inner impulses as vivid hallucinations. Basically you are immersed in a reality constructed from your own inner life, good bad or indifferent. It may not be pretty.
    There are many days when I could easily be convinced that we are all in the sidpa bardo. Especially in western first-world societies, where technology has freed us, and to a great degree isolated us, from the demands and intrusions of physical life. We don’t even have to interact with other people, let alone non-human beings, as flesh and blood creatures all that much, if we don’t want to. We’re free to elaborate our fantasies and surround ourselves with manifestations and expressions of reality that align with and reinforce our own inner obsessions and urges.
    I drive to work every day in a long stream of other beings, encased in two tons of metal and glass, each of us isolated in our own cocoon. Not just a metal and glass cocoon, but a cocoon constructed of what we choose to read, listen to, and watch, who we know and don’t know, who we don’t want to know or not know.
    Never mind Philip K Dick. Maybe this is the sidpa bardo.
    Hopefully we will all grab that brass ring of luminous reality next time around.

  459. I’ll put my money on the sidpa bardo.
    As we know, investing in the stock market is one of my passions. Russell’s sentence “your consciousness now manifests its inner impulses as vivid hallucinations” comes close to describing what is going on right now in the financial markets, which has happened before, of course, at previous levels of “euphoria” as market mavens life to call it, but this time around is something else, which I can’t quite describe at the moment.
    It’s nuts, like one of of p’s or Elon Musk’s tweets.
    I’m seeing stock “analysts”, those well paid lying evangelists for the prosperity of their gospel, recommend a stock as a “BUY” with say a price target of $75, and the stock at that moment is trading at $82.
    It’s like Abbott counting out change to Costello, except the Costellos of our time dig the non-math.
    You think: Whut?
    The vividness of their hallucinations has me on edge and questioning my own sanity, but then my sanity is questionable at best.
    charlesWT writes: “We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.”
    And we’re told libertarians never collectively do anything, let alone saunter.
    Don’t saunter then. Walk this way:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK8iNBiO05M

  460. I’ll put my money on the sidpa bardo.
    As we know, investing in the stock market is one of my passions. Russell’s sentence “your consciousness now manifests its inner impulses as vivid hallucinations” comes close to describing what is going on right now in the financial markets, which has happened before, of course, at previous levels of “euphoria” as market mavens life to call it, but this time around is something else, which I can’t quite describe at the moment.
    It’s nuts, like one of of p’s or Elon Musk’s tweets.
    I’m seeing stock “analysts”, those well paid lying evangelists for the prosperity of their gospel, recommend a stock as a “BUY” with say a price target of $75, and the stock at that moment is trading at $82.
    It’s like Abbott counting out change to Costello, except the Costellos of our time dig the non-math.
    You think: Whut?
    The vividness of their hallucinations has me on edge and questioning my own sanity, but then my sanity is questionable at best.
    charlesWT writes: “We have collectively sauntered into a Philip K Dick novel.”
    And we’re told libertarians never collectively do anything, let alone saunter.
    Don’t saunter then. Walk this way:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK8iNBiO05M

  461. I don’t know if this is the sidpa bardo or not, but russell’s description @07.42 nonetheless reads pretty luminously and beautifully to me, despite the momentary worry that his supposition might be a sinister explanation for this strange hallucinogenic “reality” in which we find ourselves. However, as always, while having these kinds of images in mind, we still have to (as I know russell knows, and sapient will remind us) act as though we can change things, and muster our forces against the encroaching agents of chaos, oppression and destruction.

  462. I don’t know if this is the sidpa bardo or not, but russell’s description @07.42 nonetheless reads pretty luminously and beautifully to me, despite the momentary worry that his supposition might be a sinister explanation for this strange hallucinogenic “reality” in which we find ourselves. However, as always, while having these kinds of images in mind, we still have to (as I know russell knows, and sapient will remind us) act as though we can change things, and muster our forces against the encroaching agents of chaos, oppression and destruction.

  463. we still have to (as I know russell knows, and sapient will remind us) act as though we can change things
    lovingkindness and compassion free us from slavery to the cycle. us, and others.
    so, things can be changed. and, will be. it’s just up to each of us if we want to join in the fun.
    and no, I’m not a buddhist, of any stripe. just be freaking kind. it does make a difference.

  464. we still have to (as I know russell knows, and sapient will remind us) act as though we can change things
    lovingkindness and compassion free us from slavery to the cycle. us, and others.
    so, things can be changed. and, will be. it’s just up to each of us if we want to join in the fun.
    and no, I’m not a buddhist, of any stripe. just be freaking kind. it does make a difference.

  465. “vivid hallucinations” comes close to describing what is going on right now in the financial markets
    Think of it as a learning opportunity. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn’t the “one true path” to a florishing economy.
    Of course, a lot of devote libertarians will manage to rise above reality and not learn. But some may respond to the coming 2×4 up side the head.

  466. “vivid hallucinations” comes close to describing what is going on right now in the financial markets
    Think of it as a learning opportunity. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn’t the “one true path” to a florishing economy.
    Of course, a lot of devote libertarians will manage to rise above reality and not learn. But some may respond to the coming 2×4 up side the head.

  467. My man Charlie Pierce agrees with me:

    But the simple fact is that no bill produced by a Democratic House has a chance in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. In this, impeachment is no different from Medicare For All or a Green New Deal or a big infrastructure package or humane immigration reform. If passage in the Senate is the sine qua non for doing something in the House, then Pelosi, Jeffries and the rest of their caucus simply should give up and go home for the summer. In addition, an impeachment inquiry, which is all Raskin and the others were asking for, can serve as a powerful educational tool for the general public. The cause of removing a reality-show president needs a reality show of its own—a real one, with witnesses and testimony.

    A Republic if you can keep it, Ben Franklin said. Little did Ben know that Americans would someday decide it’s not worth the fuss and bother.
    –TP

  468. My man Charlie Pierce agrees with me:

    But the simple fact is that no bill produced by a Democratic House has a chance in Mitch McConnell’s Senate. In this, impeachment is no different from Medicare For All or a Green New Deal or a big infrastructure package or humane immigration reform. If passage in the Senate is the sine qua non for doing something in the House, then Pelosi, Jeffries and the rest of their caucus simply should give up and go home for the summer. In addition, an impeachment inquiry, which is all Raskin and the others were asking for, can serve as a powerful educational tool for the general public. The cause of removing a reality-show president needs a reality show of its own—a real one, with witnesses and testimony.

    A Republic if you can keep it, Ben Franklin said. Little did Ben know that Americans would someday decide it’s not worth the fuss and bother.
    –TP

  469. TP,
    It’s not that the House leadership knows the chances of Trump’s removal from office by the Senate is below zero, it’s that they fear such an effort will make them “look bad”.
    Well, suck it up, Nancy. Be bad, go bad, do bad, get bad. The times of badness are upon us.

  470. TP,
    It’s not that the House leadership knows the chances of Trump’s removal from office by the Senate is below zero, it’s that they fear such an effort will make them “look bad”.
    Well, suck it up, Nancy. Be bad, go bad, do bad, get bad. The times of badness are upon us.

  471. I don’t really think they are worried about “looking bad” per se. But I think they are concerned (rightly or not; I suspect not) that an impeachment which doesn’t result in removal will somehow increase Trump’s chances of winning reelection.

  472. I don’t really think they are worried about “looking bad” per se. But I think they are concerned (rightly or not; I suspect not) that an impeachment which doesn’t result in removal will somehow increase Trump’s chances of winning reelection.

  473. wj,
    That’s what I meant by “looking bad”. If the Trump presidency is an existential danger to the body politic, then “looking bad” should be way low on the worry list, and constitutes political malpractice.

  474. wj,
    That’s what I meant by “looking bad”. If the Trump presidency is an existential danger to the body politic, then “looking bad” should be way low on the worry list, and constitutes political malpractice.

  475. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn’t the “one true path” to a florishing economy.
    For the folks in question, the learning opportunity will be fine-tuning their intuition for when it’s time to go short.
    Some folks don’t really care if they burn it all down as long as they get their piece. That’s the lesson the rest of us need to learn.
    Over and over and over again, apparently.

  476. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn’t the “one true path” to a florishing economy.
    For the folks in question, the learning opportunity will be fine-tuning their intuition for when it’s time to go short.
    Some folks don’t really care if they burn it all down as long as they get their piece. That’s the lesson the rest of us need to learn.
    Over and over and over again, apparently.

  477. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn’t the “one true path” to a florishing economy.
    For the folks in question, the learning opportunity will be fine-tuning their intuition for when it’s time to go short.
    Some folks don’t really care if they burn it all down as long as they get their piece. That’s the lesson the rest of us need to learn.
    Over and over and over again, apparently.

  478. A chance, when the crash comes, to learn that deregulation isn’t the “one true path” to a florishing economy.
    For the folks in question, the learning opportunity will be fine-tuning their intuition for when it’s time to go short.
    Some folks don’t really care if they burn it all down as long as they get their piece. That’s the lesson the rest of us need to learn.
    Over and over and over again, apparently.

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