Women’s World Cup Final! U! S! A! (open thread too!)

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by Ugh

Let's do this.  For some reason the game is at 11am Eastern instead of 3pm like the semifinals, but whatever.  Need to by me a Rapinoe jersey and walk around by the White House with it on if they win.

Separately – go Coco!  And really, All England Club, this "no middle Sunday play" nonsense has got to stop.  Srsly.  Also, love that the French starts on Sunday, the other tourneys should do that too (though I guess the Australian technically starts on Sunday in the US).

What other less than horrible sh1t is going on out there?

Open thread 

385 thoughts on “Women’s World Cup Final! U! S! A! (open thread too!)”

  1. And yeah the “no middle Sunday” thing dates back to some agreement with the neighborhood, but come on, it’s almost 2020!

  2. First thing to ask: does the neighborhood still care? If not, no reason not to change it.
    But if the neighborhood still does care, I really don’t see abrogating the agreement for the convenience of others. I’ve seen too many cases of “well enough time has passed that now it’s OK to screw you, just ’cause we’re powerful enough to do so.”

  3. Sometimes it’s tough:

    Shasta County, about 250 miles north of San Francisco, is where California takes a hard right, where people wave the flag and hold their conservative ideology tight. Now they have a homegrown, world-famous sports star with lavender-streaked hair who is both “out,” and outspoken.
    “It is interesting to watch people pretzel themselves to say, ‘We love her and we want to claim her but we also don’t support her as a person,’ ” Shasta College sociology professor Heather Wylie said.

  6. “Boris Johnson described as “moronic and clueless”.
    That’s just the typical English gift for understatement, innit?

  7. Sometimes it’s tough
    They grow a lot of weed up there in Shasta. At least, that’s what I hear.
    Ideology is as ideology does.
    Hopefully, they’ll find a way to hold Rapinoe and MAGA in their heads at the same time. Maybe it will even give the “G” in MAGA new meaning.
    In other news, the great turkey invasion of recent years has turned into an influx of bunnies. Cute as a button, but they eat everything they can reach.

  8. “Reason by degrees submits to absurdity,” Samuel Johnson once wrote,“as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness.”
    Yeah, we’re there. That’s not a statement about some nascent future.
    We are there today.
    Absurdity and darkness. And the savage violence that follows.
    From Nigel’s link:
    “If, in fact, the Fourteenth Amendment requires that the president impose a citizenship question on the census form, how come nobody ever noticed that until the precise moment, 150 years after its passage, that Donald Trump needed a new argument?”
    Indeed. As sold to us by those who believe in a literal, static “interpretation” of words as written in 1787. Except when THEY want to make up a bunch of shit yesterday afternoon to further their interests.
    As with Citizen’s United, as with Columbia versus Heller, and with so much conservative horseshit foisted upon and ruining my country, year after year, made up of whole cloth, freshly and stupidly “re-interpreting” settled law, supposedly “literal” constitutional language, claimed by asshole conservatives to be settled and literal from the get go in 1787, just as they claimed the fucking Articles of Confederation were settled and literal, ordained-by-God words, all to further the malignant aims of the modern conservative movement, not the country, not the people as a whole, not society. THEM.
    THEM. Not me. Not you. THEM.
    What took so long, indeed?
    Along these lines, another must read: “Tailspin” by Steven Brill, which chronicles the unified theory of the willful, corrupt, dissolute perversion of everything having to do with the conduct of government by vermin conservative subhumans, not all it partisan, by the way, Democrats and liberals ….. look up the liberal name Martin Redish for a pig-headed, no exceptions, one-dimensional, Johnny-come-lately, literal, and utterly destructive “interpretation” of the First Amendment …. have been bought off, bribed, and compromised by the exclusively self-interested vermin in the fucking business “community” (there is no such thing as a business “community”; there are packs of wolves and colonies of termites, and lounges of lizards, but business is not a fucking “community”; in its place business is fine, but it will be put back in its place or it will be butchered and slaughtered, on as-need basis).
    They want ALL of it, as Russell would say, and want government, if it must exist at all, to seize up and stop working altogether for the common good.
    Again, the book is not positing a future. It’s already fucking happened.
    It’s a fucking done deal.
    This book, the sheer depressing, enraging factuality of it, should come with one year subscriptions to the in-house magazines of radical gun fetishist organizations, a five-year supply of ammo, and unlimited free access to gun ranges to practice one’s aim when the killing of motherfuckers is finally interpreted by some asshole, surely enough conservative, as permitted by the Constitution.
    For when the Roberts Court rules that bullets in transit from the barrels’ of guns are protected free speech.
    I trust this rant has not sent various OBWIer’s off on a snipe hunt for cooler climes.
    Thank you.
    Here’s my handkerchief to wipe the spittle from your lapels.
    Keep it, for the next time.
    All of the good faith in America had been dissipated over the past 40 years.
    It can’t, nor should it, be reclaimed.
    We’re done with these cocksuckers.

  10. another must read: “Tailspin” by Steven Brill,
    saw this at B&N yesterday and thought about picking it up but then decided I had too many other unread books (but can there ever be enough?).
    Thanks for the rec John.

  11. If, in fact, the Fourteenth Amendment requires that the president impose a citizenship question on the census form
    It doesn’t. The whole thing is transparent bullshit. The intent is to tilt congressional districts away from people who might vote for (D)’s.
    Full stop.
    Trump et al will beat this dead horse until the courts tell him to piss off. Or, until they defer to him and let him do what he wants.
    (R)’s have been playing a long game for a generation, and now it’s paying off. Time for the (D)’s, or whoever, to wise up and do likewise.
    It is a long game, so it will take another generation to undo it all.
    Savage violence is not going to happen unless the economy utterly craters. And if that happens and savage violence ensues, the outcome could go in any of ten ways. So, not something to really look forward to.
    We need a generation of steady, patient, hands-on grunt work to rebuild representative governance, starting locally and building up.
    If the (D)’s want to really make a dent, somebody will take all of the POTUS wanna-be’s aside and suggest they run for some other office. Senator, House Rep, governor, state Senator or House rep, mayor.
    There really isn’t another option that doesn’t break more things than it fixes.
    Those are my thoughts.

  14. You are low-minded, and it’s about time. 😉
    “So, not something to really look forward to.”
    Of course not.
    Lincoln did not relish going to war.
    But even after that terrible interlude of the Civil War, “steady, patient, hands-on grunt work to rebuild representative governance, starting locally and building up” was attempted and sabotaged, rolled back, and destroyed in the years following by conservative, fundamentalist, racist, confederate nationalists, who called themselves Democrats, and when THAT 100 years of traitorous backsliding was temporarily thwarted in the second half of the 20th Century, the same ilk were welcomed into the conservative, fundamentalist, racist, confederate republican party, made themselves at home, and began yet another era of reclaiming their hooded, malignant bullshit for the country.
    It never fucking stops.
    No more.
    “If the (D)’s want to really make a dent, somebody will take all of the POTUS wanna-be’s aside and suggest they run for some other office. Senator, House Rep, governor, state Senator or House rep, mayor.”
    Yup.
    There’s a horse loose in the hospital, and these idiots skate in like Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr Howard commandeering a gurney with no apparent horse sense and not a bridle or bit in evidence, generally speaking.
    “There really isn’t another option that doesn’t break more things than it fixes.”
    Everything has already been broken with malice aforethought by the conservative movement and now its apotheosis, p., irrevocably.
    Clean-up crews in HazMat suits with ruthless triage powers are the only option, IMHO.
    But I’m just a voice in this little corner of the world, growing hoarse.

  16. So, alongside Brill’s “Tailspin”, I’m finishing up, among other books as well, “The Outlaw Bible of American Literature”, which is a survey of excerpts from the usual suspects on the periphery of the literary canon, Kerouac, Miller, Dick, Kesey, Algren, Burroughs, Thompson (the ones Truman Capote maligned as mere typists, not writers) but lots of other not-so well known names to the literary-inclined, we’re not talking Jane Austen, we’re talking the low but entirely satisfying pleasures of James Leo Herlihy, Patti Smith, John Waters, Andrea Dworkin, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Harry Crews and on and on, including Annie Sprinkle, prostitute, stripper, porn actress, advocate for legalized and regulated prostitution who provides in her cheerful, glib, forthright way an unwitting synopsis and analogue of Brill’s overarching point in his book that legalistic assholes have overtaken the government and America by pointing out that in her numerous pursuits in the prostitution business, attorneys, cops and Judges make up a sizable percentage of her clientele.
    You know, the ones who prosecute her from time to time for crimes such as “conspiracy to commit sodomy” a charge over which she has a good cackle.
    But Sodomy of a closely-related political variety could be the subtitle of Brill’s book.

  17. Want to see a little more sanity in our foreign/military policy? Rather than the rise of the chickenhawks? Here’s an idea that I think has a lot going for it.
    https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/political-confessional-the-guy-who-wants-to-bring-back-the-draft/
    Will it be popular? Perhaps not — especially with those who remember how the draft during Vietnam disrupted our lives. But has Afghanistan (not to mention Iraq) been any better? I’d argue that they have been worse, not least because so few in Congress (and the various administrations), not to member voters, have experience in the military. Or children in the military.
    Wars will happen regardless. But dumb wars are easier to slide into when it’s mercenaries, or just a small cadre out of the total population, who are the only ones bearing the cost.
    And that’s before we get to the author’s argument, which I think has a lot going for it: national service, whether in the military or otherwise, does a lot to build national cohesion. Something that is in pretty short supply these days.

  18. But I’m just a voice in this little corner of the world, growing hoarse.
    I find no fault with your analysis. Just hoping for solutions by peaceful means.
    Rave on.
    Re: New York and socialists:

    The decline of the GOP in dense urban areas can be seen throughout the country

    Here are the most densely populated areas of the United States. 133 incorporated areas with population densities greater than 10,000 per square mile are shown.
    Those in the NYC metro area include:
    9 of the top 10
    12 of the top 20
    24 of the top 50
    42 of the top 100
    56 of the 133
    2/3 of the population of NY state live in the NYC metropolitan area.
    The degree to which socialism, or at least “socialism”, is a more functional approach than not is directly related to population density. There are a lot of “socialists” in NY because the overwhelming majority of people in NY live in densely settled areas, and in densely settled areas, providing basic services and public goods through public means makes more sense than not.
    It’s not an ideological thing, it’s a pragmatic one. People aren’t stupid, and absent other incentives or impediments they will evolve institutions that address their needs.

  19. Horses loose in a hospital?
    How bout unlicensed black bears driving cars as an analogue to p and vermin company shoving the country into reverse and then tearing off the doors when they don’t get their way.
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/07/08/monday-morning-open-thread-hey-boo-boo-lets-go-for-a-joyride/
    And fleeing the scene afterwards, natch.
    This is what happens when you leave food out for conservatives.
    They wreck everything and then have to be hunted down so they don’t ever come close to civilization again, one way or another.

  20. Look, the demographic profile of the country is changing. It’s becoming more urban. Ethnically, it’s becoming less northern European. It’s becoming less religious overall, at least nominally, and specifically less Christian.
    The dynamics between nations, and parts of the world, are changing. Europe no longer dominates the rest of the world through colonization and empire. The whole communist vs free world thing is no longer the thesis and antithesis that drives the dialectical wheel. The West no longer has exclusive claim to technological or economic pre-eminence.
    I understand why people might find that unsettling. Their image of what it means to be “American” may increasingly look less and less like the ground truth. Either within or without our national boundaries.
    Nothing stands still.
    There are various ways to respond to this. You can hide your head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. You can dig in your heels and try to prevent it from happening. You can adapt to reality and find a way to express yourself and your culture, traditions, and values, in a new context.
    One of these ways affords the possibility of success. Only one.

  21. One of these ways affords the possibility of success. Only one.
    WTF? No door number two? That is simply un-American!
    Well said. Couldn’t agree more.

  22. And that’s before we get to the author’s argument, which I think has a lot going for it: national service, whether in the military or otherwise, does a lot to build national cohesion.
    So, involuntary servitude is OK if done by the state instead of individuals?

  23. (R)’s have been playing a long game for a generation
    There have been variations on the theme, but the GOP has essentially been playing this same game since right after the Civil War – So yes, a very long game. It was a lot more ruthless when the initial heat of their love for Social Darwinism first bloomed in the Gilded Age, and calling out the national guard to gun down labor strikers by the hundreds was just another cost of doing business.
    If they don’t cement their victory this time, I expect their response will fall along similar lines.
    They have no qualms about resorting to naked force.

  24. So, involuntary servitude is OK if done by the state instead of individuals?
    yes.
    also, taxation is violence and mandatory vaccinations are rape.

  26. Wars will happen regardless. But dumb wars are easier to slide into when it’s mercenaries, or just a small cadre out of the total population, who are the only ones bearing the cost.
    The opposite seems to be the case with Vietnam. And you must remember how freely the military wasted lives in that war when they could easily shanghai fresh cannon fodder as needed.

  27. from the wikki:
    If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man’s mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?
    — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?[I]

  28. The national service issue is not one of involuntary servitude versus freedom (as Milton Friedman argued for the AVF). What it does is subsidize military service in the market in order to persuade as many at-risk individuals as necessary to indenture themselves in order to supplement the number of people who have chosen a military job because they find the violence/myth/experience attractive. That subsidy is itself a form of coercion.
    The other effect of the AVF is that it externalizes the moral hazard of engaging in military action. If they didn’t want to be pawns, then they shouldn’t have joined up in the first place. Screw ’em (and thankyouforyourservice, sucka)!
    Of the two ills, I find the moral hazard to be the more dangerous.

  29. Of the two ills, I find the moral hazard to be the more dangerous.
    And, of the two, I find the other to be more immoral.

  30. p, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Mitch McConnell and an assortment of bloviating male and female conservative cowards fake newsing their anal cysts will serve on the draft boards and decide who goes and who doesn’t.
    No thanks.
    https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/5c1211e5-1916-4721-9742-b40f2c19c4f1
    I’ll agree to a draft when they agree to draft me as a replacement instead of drafting and placing my son in harm’s way.
    If they start a draft again, thank god, perversely speaking, that the conservative vermin have decided to prohibit entry by LGBT, which includes cross-dressers, I presume, so that I can at least show up in a sundress and heels powdering my nose demurely at the examining physician while inquiring about the availability of sex-change surgery at taxpayer expense and at least have a shot at being dismissed from certain slaughter under false pretenses and living to see the rest of my days as a straight, heterosexual man without having my testicles blown off by friendly fire.
    I don’t believe for a second that wars will not be engaged in by the powers that be for fear of a backlash by the citizenry.
    Citizenries in World War I pf all stripes felll all over themselves to tne forst to be gasses, maimed, and butchered.
    I WILL accede to a draft if true believers of one of Milton Friedman’s other dumb notions .. that corporations should ignore all externalities and work only to increase shareholder value .. are drafted first and sent directly to the front lines without camouflage for quick, efficient scragging by enemy troops who also have only one fucking ideological reason for living.

  32. “Citizenries in World War I pf all stripes felll all over themselves to tne forst to be gasses, maimed, and butchered.”
    Obviously, I am suffering from PTSD just thinking about it.

  33. The opposite seems to be the case with Vietnam. And you must remember how freely the military wasted lives in that war when they could easily shanghai fresh cannon fodder as needed.
    If we had had an all-volunteer force, there never would have been a mass movement to stop our involvement in Vietnam. (See Afghanistan for an example).
    We should also talk about the moral hazard of drone strikes. Vietnam with an AVF and with drones would have been an unending bloodbath for Southeast Asians.

  34. I’ll agree to a draft when they agree to draft me as a replacement instead of drafting and placing my son in harm’s way.
    The premise of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War SF series.

  36. Vietnam with an AVF and with drones would have been an unending bloodbath for Southeast Asians.
    Though not unending, it certainly was a bloodbath.

  38. As I recall, the French AVF didn’t do so well in Viet Nam.
    Much as I opine that CharlesWT is lost in the intellectual wilderness, I would aver that in order to “win” in Viet Nam an AVF would have simply priced itself out of the market.

  39. The French still had conscription during the Indo-China war, they just did not send any of the conscripted troops to fight in SE Asia because it wasn’t considered an intrinsic part of the Metropole.

  40. of the two, I find the other to be more immoral.
    So what you are saying is that you believe it is a virtue to be a free-rider. That is, to get the benefits of having a military (and nobody with an ounce of realism thinks we are going to be able to do without one any time soon), without the inconvenience of having to actually serve yourself.
    You do realize that is what your position amounts to, right Charles?

  41. wj,
    Charles would counter that he pays taxes, so he is not actually a free rider.
    Of course taxes are coercion, so they, too, are immoral.
    So two wrongs do make a right. Now you know the rest of the story.
    The peace of mind that comes from knowing that if an externality is not captured by the price mechanism, it does not exist is simply extraordinary.
    It’s a drug more powerful than oxycontin.

  42. A few years ago, when I supposed people should know what I thought, I wrote this about compulsory military service. Add President Bonespur to my list.

  44. You do realize that is what your position amounts to, right Charles?
    So, is someone a free-rider for using public roads if they’ve never worked road construction? As for me, I had the inconvenience of four years of involuntary servitude and worked one summer on a bridge construction crew.
    Since WWII, old politicians have been using the blood of young people as Viagra for what they perceive as the state’s erectile dysfunction.
    The peace of mind that comes from knowing that if an externality is not captured by the price mechanism, it does not exist is simply extraordinary.
    I certainly have greater peace of mind when politicians aren’t defining and fixing what they perceive to be externalities.

  45. Things that could count as mandatory service:
    Military Service
    Teaching
    Health Care
    Elder Care
    Child Care
    Conservation Work
    Infrastructure Work
    In return – free access to educational classes during (related to service) and after (elective) or apprenticeships or internships where those are more applicable.
    If I got one wish for a constraint to place on service, it would be that the service would require travel and cross-cultural exchange (including urban/rural).

  47. CharlesWT: So, is someone a free-rider for using public roads if they’ve never worked road construction?
    As rhetorical questions go, that’s a very good one. But this …
    I certainly have greater peace of mind when politicians aren’t defining and fixing what they perceive to be externalities
    … is problematic. Who exactly is CharlesWT willing to countenance as arbiters of what “externalities” are?
    –TP

  48. So, is someone a free-rider for using public roads if they’ve never worked road construction?
    Road construction does not, in the usual course of events, subject you to getting shot at. At least around here — your experience may differ.

  49. Who exactly is CharlesWT willing to countenance as arbiters of what “externalities” are?
    Government regulations are no guarantee since regulations are sometimes as much about protecting the creator of the externality as they are in mitigating the externality. A polluter can argue that he cannot be sued for polluting because his pollution levels are within the limits set by regulation.
    Some externalities can be handled with contracts between property owners and in the civil courts. Air pollution is probably one the externalities least amendable to the property rights approach.
    Negative Externalities and the Coase Theorem

  50. Road construction does not, in the usual course of events, subject you to getting shot at. At least around here — your experience may differ.
    So, if someone doesn’t want to get shot at, the state would be justified in making them take the risk?
    I suppose road construction could lead to being shot at if you’re on a chain gang.

  51. When I was growing up, we had chores. (It was a farm, so there was lots to do.) Not particularly burdensome, but it taught us about responsibility — if you fail to feed the chickens, they die.
    But around the house there were other tasks that we were expected to do “because you live here.” Sweeping, washing dishes, laundry, misc other stuff that had to get done routinely. I can’t really see that expectation as involuntary servitude or violating the child labor laws.
    National service is much the same. If you aren’t willing to contribute to the efforts required to function as a nation, go live somewhere else. And no, you don’t get to buy your way out, even if you can afford to.

  52. National service is much the same.
    A nation is not a family writ large. To make it come close to acting like one requires coercion and violence.

  53. A nation is not a family writ large. To make it come close to acting like one requires coercion and violence.
    Depends on the family. And the nation. Sometimes people can agree to share responsibilities in a reasonable way. Not everyone is capable of it. Not in families, not in nations.

  54. Evolutionary psychologist John Tooby’s take on the subject.
    “The chief problem, he suggested, is that many people are beguiled by ‘romantic socialism’—that is, they imagine what their personal lives would be like if everyone shared and treated one another like family. We evolved in small bands that were an individual’s only protection from starvation, victimization, and inter-group aggression. People feel vulnerable if their band does not exist. Such sentiments are more or less appropriate when people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers composed mostly of kin, but they fail spectacularly when navigating a world of strangers cooperating in global markets.”
    Why Is Socialism So Damned Attractive?: Because evolution wired our brains for it.

  55. To follow on that, sometimes coercion and violence is necessary to enforce reasonable rules. The issue is what rules, who makes the rules, and how. We all want rules. Nobody wants the gangsters evicting us from our homes.
    Sadly, we have the gangsters now. Reason? Violence? Coercion? I have a feeling we at ObWi won’t be the deciders.

  56. “A nation is not a family writ large.”
    Finally, does this mean I don’t have to attend those family budget meetings around the kitchen table conservatives are always prattling on about when it comes down to deciding the nation’s finances?
    My family was not the Nation writ large either, except that time we sent the drones over the neighbors’ house to get them back for TP’ing the willow tree by the driveway.
    If I recall, someone or other is supposed to be representing me in these affairs.
    “romantic socialism”
    I hang out at the local Medicare office looking for love.
    I carry a lute with me, hoping for at least a kiss, but what I really end up with is some practical cooperation from a large pool of participants in paying my medical bills.
    It works pretty well, but I notice wolves and gangsters sniffing around the parking lot in recent decades.
    It’s starting to take the romance out of the whole thing.

  57. Things that could count as mandatory service:
    Military Service
    Teaching
    Health Care
    Elder Care
    Child Care
    Conservation Work
    Infrastructure Work
    Yes, but who do you think will be assigned to teach, or baby-sit, and who to fight in the war?
    Even in wartime we no longer need millions in the armed forces, so there will inevitably be, as there were during the Vietnam War, gross inequities in who gets shot at and who doesn’t.

  58. “Government regulations are no guarantee since regulations are sometimes as much about protecting the creator of the externality as they are in mitigating the externality. A polluter can argue that he cannot be sued for polluting because his pollution levels are within the limits set by regulation.”
    Gosh, that just kinda happened by accident, didn’t it?
    Read “Tailspin”
    Read “The Wrecking Crew”
    Read “The Fifth Risk”
    Read “Dark Money”

  59. If we paid everyone not to work, no one would be coerced to work, as they are now.
    Every job I ever had entailed coercing someone at some point to do something.

  60. A nation is not a family writ large.
    And mandatory national service is not slavery.
    That’s the thing about analogies: if you don’t like the implication, you can always claim a different one. The challenge, if you get dueling analogies, is to contrive to have the more plausible one.

  62. And mandatory national service is not slavery.
    So, if someone refuses, people with guns won’t show to take them to jail or turn them over to someone else who will force them to perform services for others against their will?

  63. And if you break any of numerous laws, the same scenario (complete with guns) plays out. Does that mean that any and every sort of government, short of absolute anarchy, is involuntary servitude?
    Granted extreme libertarians tend to act like that’s exactly true. But I thought you had a better grip on reality.

  64. I’m with nous on this.
    Yes, but who do you think will be assigned to teach, or baby-sit, and who to fight in the war?
    What we hope is that people would select a path. As was mentioned above, we need fewer people in the military (because of robots – I know, dronz! They’re evil! We want people to be shot at!). But there would be people who would be interested in choosing a military life. People wouldn’t be “assigned” to hazardous service, but there might be incentives for that if we needed people to do that. (Like more money – this service wouldn’t be unpaid.)
    Kind of unrealistic to expect people to give a bit of their lives though, when so many Americans resist so hard giving a pittance of their income.

  65. Yes, but who do you think will be assigned to teach, or baby-sit, and who to fight in the war?
    Even in wartime we no longer need millions in the armed forces, so there will inevitably be, as there were during the Vietnam War, gross inequities in who gets shot at and who doesn’t.
    Well, since we are brainstorming, the military already does a decent job of determining aptitudes and matching those to structural needs. Universities do the same with their admissions criteria.
    As far as combat MOS goes, there are always people willing to volunteer for that in general and more who are willing if needed if the cause seems just and necessary.
    And if we have enough people with experience in the support skills, then they can practice those skills in non-military national service during peacetime and we could scale down our active military budget without affecting readiness as much.
    Since we’re SF worldbuilding here.

  66. Kind of unrealistic to expect people to give a bit of their lives though, when so many Americans resist so hard giving a pittance of their income.
    Well, young people tend to be a bit more idealistic. And a bit less fanatical in their resistance to taxes. So maybe not that unrealistic. After all, we do currently manage to staff both the military and the Peace Corps, etc.

  67. Granted extreme libertarians tend to act like that’s exactly true.
    From a not so extreme libertarian.
    “I. Why Mandatory National Service Is Unjust.
    Mandatory national service is not just another policy proposal. It is an idea that undermines one of the fundamental principles of a free society: that people own themselves and their labor. We are not the property of the government, of a majority of the population, or of some employer. Mandatory national service is a frontal attack on that principle, because it is a form of forced labor—literally so. Millions of people would be forced to do jobs required by the government on pain of criminal punishment if they disobey. Under most proposals, they would have to perform this forced labor for months or even years on end.
    …
    II. Why Mandatory National Service is Unconstitutional.
    The constitutional issues raised by mandatory national service are not as important as the moral ones. Nonetheless, any such proposal is likely to be unconstitutional, as well: if it includes civilian service, it would be beyond the scope of federal power, and it also violates the Thirteenth Amendment.”
    Why Mandatory National Service is Both Unjust and Unconstitutional: A post based on my presentation at a panel on mandatory national service organized by the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service.

  69. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
    The Epstein case is going to have massive repercussions, as he assiduously courted powerful friends. How many were complicit in his crimes is for now a matter of conjecture, but it is almost impossible to think that none were.
    Trump’s Labour Secretary, Alan Dershowitz, and Kenn Starr were involved in the dodgy plea deal, recently found unconstitutional.

  72. Epstein needs to be given a simple choice:
    Either rat out all the ‘clients’ of his pedo service, provide copious testimony and evidence, and serve a substantial sentence at Club Fed,
    OR, 2 hours in a locked room with the victims of his pedo ring, who are armed with nail clippers.

  74. It’s likely to have repercussions for Bill Clinton and other Democrats who circled Epstein’s toilet bowl.
    p and republicans will not be touched, (il)legally vaselined up as they are and protected by the stinking, fucking right wing government coup underway for the past three years and counting.
    Only wiping the conservative movement off the face of the Earth will accomplish America’s renewal.
    Nothing will be nice, nothing will change until that day.

  75. J Rubin:

    I’m tempted to say that the Republican Party should join Pelosi because it wouldn’t want to be associated with an alleged child molester, but Trump already has (Alabama’s Moore). I’m tempted to say that the GOP should care about victimized minors; but its indifference to the plight of mistreated children detained at the border should disabuse you of that notion. I’m tempted to say that the GOP doesn’t want to be on the side of men who abuse women, but … well, you get the point. If Acosta doesn’t quit as Pelosi suggests, Democrats should pass a resolution in the House demanding Acosta’s resignation. If that doesn’t do it, commence impeachment hearings. It’ll be good practice. And let the Republicans defend the guy who cut a deal with a “monster.”

    come at me with the ‘morality’ and the ‘family values’ now, muthafuggin GOP.

  78. I agree that anyone associated with Epstein’s deal should be disqualified from public service. Trump will take on water and he should. So will Bill Clinton (IIRC, Bill had 30 plus flights on the Lolita Express) and by extension Hillary and by extension, their past apologists. Trump is truly disgusting and his disconnection with reality is patent. That said, the stone-throwing from the left may hit some unintended targets.

  79. That said, the stone-throwing from the left may hit some unintended targets.
    LOL. That’s funny. You really do not know much about “The Left”, do you?
    Take care, Tex.

  80. What has Hillary to do with Bill’s flights on the “Lolita Express”?
    By the way, two of my comments are in the Spam trap, one with a link (as an experiment) and one without.
    Fixed — wj

  81. What has Hillary to do with Bill’s flights on the “Lolita Express”?
    you’ve clearly forgotten that Hillary is the root, stem and branch of all evil in the world.

  83. What has Hillary to do with Bill’s flights on the “Lolita Express”?
    Epstein is a classic sexual predator. He grooms not only his victims but he grooms his environment, seeking and obtaining the goodwill of those around him (it’s almost always a man). Clinton is a predator too. And he groomed much more effectively than Epstein. The purpose of the grooming is to cause the accusers to be disbelieved.
    A lot of men are rightly being called to account for their behavior. The women who give those men shelter and cover should be held to account as well. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy and opportunism.
    To be clear, the Republican Party has sold its soul to accommodate Trump. However, the outrage from the left–which I know nothing about–rings hollow with the Clinton baggage in plain view.

  84. The women who give those men shelter and cover should be held to account as well.
    please present evidence of Mr Clinton’s crime, and of Mrs Clinton’s knowledge of it, counselor.

  85. you’ve clearly forgotten that Hillary is the root, stem and branch of all evil in the world.
    This is actually not a substantive response. HRC rode her husband’s coattails to national prominence. Her husband was a sexual predator. She enabled that. It’s a matter of record he hung fairly often with Epstein. If Trump takes a hit because of his relationship with Epstein, fine by me. However, Bill, and by extension, Hillary should take hits as well.

  86. please present evidence of Mr Clinton’s crime, and of Mrs Clinton’s knowledge of it, counselor.
    If a “crime” is the bar, then Janita Brodderick. Her story was as least as compelling as Christine Ford’s, so there is that. If it’s just plain, predation, then you tell me why Bill spent so much time with Epstein. Or why “Bimbo Eruptions” were a thing well before he got the nomination?
    Treating women like objects is wrong. Enabling/benefiting/applying a double standard, all wrong.
    I hope Esptein brings a lot of people down. If lefties get a break, well, that tells it’s own story.

  87. A lot of men He, Trump’s minions are rightly being called to account for their behavior. The women conservatives who give those men lickspittles shelter and cover should be held to account as well. Otherwise, it’s hypocrisy and opportunism.
    But also tax cuts.
    –TP

  89. Her husband was a sexual predator. She enabled that.
    I’m quite prepared to believe the first of these two sentences, finding Juanita Broadrick for one credible, but see absolutely no evidence for the second as it relates to paedophilia, or, FWIW, anything other than adultery and habitual womanising.
    Treating women like objects is wrong.
    How true. And treating them like adjuncts to their husbands, as well as responsible for their husband’s possible criminal behaviour, just as wrong.

  90. Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, who was at the White House weeks ago huddling with p, perhaps to strategize where next nookie shall be available with Epstein on the rocks, blames Hillary Clinton for not reigning in Bill’s carnal excesses and by extension, allowing Hunter’s wife to look the other way as he serially unzipped and cheated on her at taxpayer expense, that latter feature being the only part of it she commended so as not to dip into their savings so more $$$ would be available to her in the divorce settlement after both of them one day, not soon, emerge from jail, even though in Hunter’s case the death penalty should be applied.
    See, from the point of view of the fundamentalist family values republican conservative Falwell/p axis of snivel, the problem with wives and girlfriends, especially when they are juggling both simultaneously, is that like Hillary, their wives and girlfriends are so wrapped up in developing policy positions to serve the poor and other rightful functions of government, that they just don’t have the time to put out for the man of the house and fetch them a beer while they are up.
    You see a conservative* walking around pantsless waving his manhood in the breeze and invariably he places the blame on Hillary Clinton for attempted emasculation.
    Hillary Clinton*, to Humbert Humbert republicans, is like Charlotte Haze, Lolita’s mother …. a woman to be dispatched by every means available to make gangway to the main chance, which is screwing children outta their food stamps.
    *something you won’t see at OBWI
    *Lousy candidate, corrupt in an amateur way, despite her good traits, unlike the professional gangsters running/duining the show now. I’d vote for her again if she was the only candidate available.

  91. come at me with the ‘morality’ and the ‘family values’ now, muthafuggin GOP
    please present evidence of Mr Clinton’s crime, and of Mrs Clinton’s knowledge of it, counselor.
    decline.
    i’m not interested in whattabouting.
    I sense a pattern here.

  92. Prince Andrew is also in trouble re Epstein. If it was just(!) with a 17 year old girl, as previously alleged, that is problematical for UK public opinion, since 16 is the age of consent here, but it still looks pretty sleazy.

  93. but see absolutely no evidence for the second as it relates to paedophilia
    I agree, and I said predator, not pedophile. Monica was 21. That said, anyone who was a regular passenger on Epstein’s jet will come under the microscope. It could get ugly for a number of people.
    I absolutely hold spouses responsible who look the other way and continue to benefit from associating with predators. Male or female.

  94. What evidence is there that Hillary knew about Bill’s “predation”, as opposed to adultery and serial womanising?

  95. yeah, the pattern is: the GOP spent my whole life presuming to lecture the country (and the world) on only morality. but now it’s hooked up with a serial-divoring, casually-bankrupting, con man who can’t speak two sentences without at least one of them being a self-aggrandizing lie.
    so, no, i don’t give a single fuck about your fantasy Hillary Clinton. feel free to derive as much pleasure from that phantom as you can. but i’m not going to hand you the lotion.

  96. To round out my thoughts, the Republican embrace of Trump completely de-legitimizes any and everything they said about Bill Clinton. I just find it interesting that Democrats and the left revel so freely in Trump’s awfulness with respect to women and are so blind in their own selectivity. Was/is Trump more of a monster than Clinton? Maybe. Clinton lies better and has a much more compliant media.

  98. Yeah, it’s just terrible how prominent Dems like Edwards, Weiner, Franken, and Spitzer have been able to glide through HUGE sex scandals unharmed, all while climbing to ever higher office.
    Meanwhile Moore, Vitter and Trump have had to slink away from public view in shame after their teensy pecadillos came to light.
    So unfair.

  99. What evidence is there that Hillary knew about Bill’s “predation”, as opposed to adultery and serial womanising?
    This kind of illustrates my point. If you google “clinton’s accusers”, you’ll see that there were at least three public complaints of sexually assaultive behavior by Clinton. Public, meaning HRC had to have known. Impossible not to have known. As we know, many women fear coming forward. Much truer then than today and still not easy today.
    Demanding proof that HRC “knew” about her husband is the kind of passive denial that makes the complaints about Trump ring hollow.

  100. I absolutely hold spouses Republicans responsible who look the other way and continue to benefit from associating with predators traitors. Male MAGA or female “reasonable conservative”.
    –TP

  101. Yeah, it’s just terrible how prominent Dems like Edwards, Weiner, Franken, and Spitzer have been able to glide through HUGE sex scandals unharmed, all while climbing to ever higher office.
    Meanwhile Moore, Vitter and Trump have had to slink away from public view in shame after their teensy pecadillos came to light.
    So unfair.
    I agree. All three are disqualified from public service and Moore probably belongs in prison. That isn’t exactly the point. And Republicans are huge hypocrites. And so are Democrats. Which is why your complaining about Trump/Epstein rings hollow. Very hollow.

  103. Don’t be absurd, McKinney, you have to know about something to be credibly accused of enabling it. I have done as you suggest, and googled Bill’s accusers, and although I believe their stories it’s perfectly possible Hillary didn’t, since Bill is (by common consent, including among people I know who have met him) magnetically attractive, and might be supposed by his wife not to “need” to assault women to get them into bed with him. After all, rape and sexual violence does not seem to be his normal MO, as Hillary would presumably know.
    I just find it interesting that Democrats and the left revel so freely in Trump’s awfulness with respect to women and are so blind in their own selectivity.
    We revel (if you want to call it that) in all his awfulness, but your point is not made: nobody is arguing that Bill’s awfulness should be excused, we are arguing about whether his wife should be held accountable. And your contention that she should be is extraordinary, to say the least.

  104. Iirc in the past Hillary got blamed in certain quarters for Bill’s womanising and adultery. If she had been a proper wife, Bill would not have gone astray seeking elsewhere what his wife was unwilling to give him (thus breaking her marriage vows even before him). Not to forget the ‘questions’ about Chelsea’s paternity and/or maternity since the fanatical lesbian Hillary obviously never had a carnal relationship with Bill (a dissenting minority opinion deduced rape there but since that would exonerate Hillary it tends to get dismissed).
    Also both were the Antichrist (Is two incarnations of the same person having sex technically incest?).

  105. Iirc in the past Hillary got blamed in certain quarters for Bill’s womanising and adultery.
    Yes, a life-long Republican of my acquaintance made this very argument to me. But since she also tried to tell me that McCain’s nomination of Palin was clever because it would attract women who would otherwise have been Hillary supporters (!), I gave her argument exactly as much respect as it deserved. These people who purport to respect women certainly have some pretty odd attitudes towards them…

  106. almost everyone here will be shocked to learn that of the five mentions of Epstein on FoxNews’ front page right now, three are in relation to Bill Clinton.
    because Bill Clinton is the center of their universe.

  108. people own themselves and their labor.
    And, as a logical extension, the income from their labor. Which would make any and all taxes unjust. Just for consistency.
    Which pretty much makes government impossible. At most you can get the occasional voluntary cooperative for a specific purpose, with all non-members excluded — at gun point if necessary. Doesn’t sound like a particularly pleasant place to live.
    Especially since you’ve got no way to keep the guys from down the road, who are OK with a government, from annexing you. Putting you right back under the thumb of a government. Just one where you have no say. And which could care less about your views on fairness.

  110. 2 hours in a locked room with the victims of his pedo ring, who are armed with nail clippers.
    An amusing image from the outside. But for the victims sake, I’d vote for the Dismemberment of Mad Emperor Yuri. Also makes the final outcome more certain.

  111. I tend to consider Bill Clinton an appalling excuse for a human being. (Albeit a reasonably competent President overall.) But I’ve seen enough examples of similar marriages to give Hilary the benefit of the doubt, pending proof that she was aware of anything more than serial adultery.**
    Why she chose to tolerate that is a different question. But lots of people make choices I find inexplicable. Sometimes for reasons that, while I don’t subscribe, aren’t immoral either.
    ** Always True to You, Darling, in My Fashion” as Cole Porter put it.

  112. people own themselves and their labor.
    Yes, this is the Lockean basis for private property and natural individual human rights.
    And when people move from being unallied bands of hunter-gatherers, to living in organized societies, they surrender some claim to those rights as part of belonging to a polity.
    Man in nature, vs man in society.
    You have to read the whole book, not just the parts you like.
    Epstein:
    Expose the facts of his behavior to the light of day, and give the man whatever justice is due him. Which will probably not look like much of an upside, to him.
    Anyone who gets tarred as a result through their participation in or association with trafficking minors – or anyone – for sex, for rape or other sexual assault, for procuring sex partners for friends and associates, or whatever the hell else Epstein was up to, will deserve it.
    Clinton, Trump, whoever.
    My understanding of the Broderick case, specifically, is that she was not a particularly consistent witness. That doesn’t mean it did or did not happen, it just means the case against Clinton is therefore legally weak.
    Some of the other cases against Clinton involve consensual relationships, or situations that were described at various times by the claimant as either consensual or not.
    Some appear to be straight up cases of assault.
    A case can be made fairly easily that Clinton had a life-long habit of abusing his office to get laid. The case for unwelcome sexual advances is not , by any means, a stretch. Rape is less clear.
    In any case, his behavior over decades can certainly be described as predatory.
    I have nothing to say about Hillary’s culpability in any of this. The distance from “she looked the other way so she could ride on his coattails” to blaming the victim is, IMO, vanishingly small. Just my opinion.
    I don’t care one way or the other if Trump is implicated by the investigation into Epstein. What would we discover, that he’s a creep and a lecher and a narcissistic sex tourist? How would that be a surprise? What would that add, in any significant way, to what is already known about that man?
    So, whatever.
    Squeeze Epstein like a grape and let the chips fall where they may.

  114. Thirded. All of Epstein’s compadres need a dose of sunlight, along with any who knew and allowed it to go on.

  115. If Hillary Rodham had never married Bill Clinton, it’s possible that he would never have become president, and that she would have.
    Hillary did not get into public service through marriage to Bill. However, she was always more policy wonk than back-slapper. Bill was no slouch at policy himself, but he could play the good-ole-boy and appeal to the Bubbas pretty well.
    I suppose it’s not too surprising that press-the-flesh politicians are often lechers too. Of course, rumor has it that even germophobe politicians are sometimes lechers and worse — even after they marry two or three statuesque gold-diggers.
    –TP

  117. N-ed, obvs.
    i somewhat expect to learn that Bill C stepped a bit too far into Epstein’s world. i won’t be a bit surprised if we learn the same about Trump, too.
    i mean, it takes no imagination at all to envision the playmate-shush-money-paying, daughter-creeping, teenage dressing-room-entering, boastful pussy-grabber up to no good in a room full of paid-for Eastern European wink-wink-women.
    he’s a scumbag, after all.
    but, at least he’s not a Democrat, amirite!

  118. By the way, for our Americans here, I don’t think Boris Johnson’s cowardice on the issue of the Trump spat with our ambassador and Theresa May is doing him much good in his leadership race. Of course some of his base love Trump, but I doubt most are so stupid. Many will have already voted, but for those who haven’t, he’s really looking like a lickspittle. And regarding any future relationship, the C4 newscaster has just asked Corey Lewandowski if Trump knows that Boris, who he (Corey) was just praising and longing for, once called Trump “abysmally ignorant”. If he didn’t before, he does now.

  119. i mean, it takes no imagination at all to envision the playmate-shush-money-paying, daughter-creeping, teenage dressing-room-entering, boastful pussy-grabber up to no good in a room full of paid-for Eastern European wink-wink-women.
    The timing, regardless of who is involved, will be interesting because of the statute of limitations. However, unless there is a specific under aged victim identifying a specific pervert, Esptein’s associates will be under a cloud, but that will be the extent of it.
    My research indicates Epstein mostly preyed on young American women, although there appear to be some victims who were trafficked internationally.

  122. Yeah. Am I supposed to give a sh1t what happens to Bill Clinton if he’s implicated in this Epstein case? Of course, he was a 1000-times-better president than Rump, but that’s not the point. Is there hypocrisy in this?
    Did Clinton get away with stuff that he wouldn’t have gotten away with today? Yeah, probably. Was that because views at large regarding such things were different then? Yeah, probably. Does that include my views on such things? Yeah, probably.
    So what?

  123. On the flip side, no one a couple decades ago would have gotten away with the stuff Rump did and does as a candidate or president, but he has a special brand of supporters these days.

  124. Of course some of his base love Trump, but I doubt most are so stupid.
    Depends what you mean by base. As far as Tory party membership is concerned, a recent poll showed over kale of them think Trump would make a good Prime Minister.
    The UK Conservative party is possibly beyond redemption.

  126. The UK Conservative party is possibly beyond redemption.
    At least you folks have a history of third parties springing up and lasting for decades as viable entities. Even becoming part of the government on occasion. Whereas our last success in replacing one of our (never more than two) potential governing parties was over a century and a half ago.
    In short, you at least have experience on how to go about it. We don’t.

  127. Hmm, Nigel, for what value of kale?
    p.s. Not that I disagree with your view of the Tories.

  128. If you’re trying to cheer me up, can I just point out that the newly formed Brexit Party is ahead of the Conservatives in recent polls…

  129. No chance of cheering you up on this matter, I shouldn’t think: unbelievable situation where the Tories are in this state, yet personally I can’t currently contemplate voting Labour.

  133. Welp, maybe right wing radical conservatism in this country, which will be violently slaughtered in what is goddamned to come, will bypass their usual Clinton gotchas, and lay the Epstein fuckup on a more current topical target of their never-ending anti-American vermin hate, Republican law enforcer, Robert Mueller:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2019/07/09/far-right-conspiracy-theory-robert-mueller-blame-jeffrey-epstein-s-prior-sweetheart-deal-makes-jump/224156
    It won’t stop until it is stopped.
    Elections stop nothing.

  134. Well, I’m not expecting Prime Minister Jo Swinson… but stranger things have happened.
    With increasing frequency.

  136. I remember back when old Horace Rumpole said of his Head of Chambers, Guthrie Featherstone QC MP, that he had given up politics and joined the LibDems:)
    –TP

  138. You may recall that the Justice Dept. was going to replace its lawyers in the census citizenship case. (Or maybe the original ones declined to support a baseless appeal.)
    Well, turns out that, to change lawyers in mid stream, you have to give a reason and get the judge’s approval. And the judge has refused, saying:
    “Defendants provide no reasons, let alone ‘satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel,”
    He also pointed out that they are on a tight timetable. And that the proposed substitutes are from other divisions of the Justice Dept., with no familiarity with the relevant laws and regulations. Let alone the specifics of the case.
    How awkward. Especially considering what this may reveal about exactly why this step was taken.
    http://washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-judge-rejects-trump-administrations-bid-to-swap-out-lawyers-for-census-case-on-citizenship-question/2019/07/09/d12f811e-a24f-11e9-b7b4-95e30869bd15_story.html

  141. We are a nation that spans a continent, with a big ocean on the east and west. To our north and south, friendly non-belligerent neighbors with neither the resources nor the interest to do us serious harm. To top it off, we’re rich as midas and we spend extravagantly – more than the next seven nations combined – on our military.
    Formidable.
    Anyone who wishes to defeat us, or at least neutralize us or minimize our role and presence in the world, will have to find a way to induce us to defeat ourselves.

  142. As a martial art, judo allows weaker players to defeat stronger ones by getting them off balance and then using the larger size and strength of the opponent against them to throw and control them. Feints to provoke the larger opponent into a reaction may be used to draw the opponent into an unbalanced and therefore vulnerable position.
    Who plays judo?

  144. the Republican embrace of Trump completely de-legitimizes any and everything they said about Bill Clinton.
    It delegitimizes 40+ years of lectures about morality, “family values,” etc., so on and so forth.
    And even if there were never a hint of sexual misconduct by Trump, that would still be true.
    As for Bill Clinton, yeah, he’s a bad actor with respect to sex also. He’s not the all-purpose monster Trump is.
    And what Hillary knew or didn’t know, what she said or didn’t say, we don’t know.
    Moore, Vitter and Trump have had to slink away from public view in shame after their teensy pecadillos came to light.
    And Jim Jordan is still running around in Congress too.

  146. Epstein:
    The sad truth of the matter is that there are some industries and/or professions where the mix of money and power and celebrity make it possible for people to avoid accountability for their actions.
    Government, finance, pop music, film, as examples. Hookers and blow, y’all.
    In the case of government, specifically, the offense is more egregious, IMVHO, because as a field of endeavor it involves public responsibility.
    You’re not supposed to leverage the power with which you have been entrusted to get laid.
    Epstein has apparently worked his connections among the wealthy, powerful, and famous to avoid responsibility for his actions up to now. “Up to now” may be coming to an end. If that takes down other folks who have abused their positions or neglected their responsibilities, so be it.
    What I would really, really, really like to see is some kind of code of ethics in public service that would make participation in sex tourism and/or prostitution and sexual relationships with subordinates grounds for ejection from office.
    I’m not particularly judgemental or prudish about people’s sex lives, and all of the above is not about people having sex. It’s about holding people who hold public office to a standard high enough that we can have some confidence in their conduct, judgement, and motivations.
    Same for financial entanglements while holding office, same for leaving office and immediately taking lucrative positions in the private sector that leverage your prior public experience.
    If any of that is inconvenient, don’t seek or hold positions of public responsibility.
    It really does not seem like a lot to ask.
    I have a friend who is a research librarian at a university in Boston. She hired someone who she subsequently fell in love with. It was mutual. They held off on entering into a relationship until her soon-to-be-partner found a different job.
    Because it is inherently problematic for people to be in relationship with people they are in authority over.
    If a freaking research librarian can understand that and comply with it, at some personal sacrifice, then a mayor, governor, rep, senator, judge, or president can do so.
    Squeeze Epstein like a grape, and let the chips fall where they may. It’s government, not junior high school.
    My two cents.

  147. “Who plays judo?”
    As a metaphor, it is a pretty good analysis:
    But:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghBY8dakqJ4
    It takes too long to learn:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzh9koy7b1E
    There is this “close-in fighting dirty” school of thought, which is kind of an alternative. Like poet laureate Mike Tyson opined, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face”, to which he later added “Ear-biting will get you nowhere.”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNKxAg8U578
    But the American conservative movement, as now unconstitutionally constituted in 2019, this crippled, gnarled, ingrown, ridiculous, one-testicled, self-smitten, racist, fascist, tassle-loafered, deadly, ideological cartoon, which must be wiped off the face of the Earth along with its analogues in every other country on the planet (yes, p and the ayatollahs and Netanyahu, to name a mere three, deserve identical fates), has armed itself with military-grade weaponry to the teeth, so they brag. P points his snub-nosed finger and makes shooting noises like a little twat in his campaign, but on the other hand he has a $750 billion dollar cache of mass death weaponry at his fingertips. And despite infinite numbers of YouTube videos illustrating how to disarm a gunman with martial arts training, conservatives think like Indiana Jones, they’ll just fucking shoot you as long as the guy threatening fancy footwork and twenty years of martial arts experience isn’t within close combat distance.
    Hell, they fucking shoot innocents in the back.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnA-ESWcPs
    No, we need to use their weapons on them.
    Stealthily, from a distance. Advanced gun scope technology on the rifles of a metaphorical nationwide loose affiliation of, say, 5000 highly trained but ideology-free (with the exception of liquidating gangster motherfuckers) assassins is the sort of war that would please the conservative bowel movement when used against them, by which I mean they would find it pleasurable for about four seconds until they got over the fact that giving a piece a chance isn’t just some histrionic hippie-dippie liberal hypocrisy.
    Showboat Chuck Norris can’t touch assassins from 1000 feet away.
    Of course, we are still speaking metaphorically, are we not?
    Put all of my comments here under one cover and you might have a Tom Clancy novel. Fiction, right?
    But conservatives have never been under the illusion that Tom Clancy was just fucking around.
    They believe their own shit.
    They want the worst that is coming to them.
    They spend countless days contorting themselves into white, for the most part male, Pat Buchanan/p, crypto-Christian victim status, thinking one day there might be affirmative action for them too, this after two and half centuries of their total domination of the OTHER in this country.
    Fuck them.

  148. “I have a friend who is a research librarian at a university in Boston. She hired someone who she subsequently fell in love with. It was mutual. They held off on entering into a relationship until her soon-to-be-partner found a different job.”
    IMHO, libraries are the most romantic, erotic settings going.
    If Walker Percy had lived to write another sequel to “Love In The Ruins” (“The Thanatos Syndrome” was the first, well worth several readings), he could name it “Love In The Stacks”.

  151. It takes too long to learn
    Putin started when he was 12. He began in the KGB in ’75.
    Putin’s the guy who came out on top in the post-Soviet-collapse free for all. He’s overseen the transition of Russia from a kleptocratic Communist totalitarian state, to a kleptocratic non-Communist semi-totalitarian criminal enterprise masquerading as a state, with himself as capo di tutti capi.
    Trump is a loud bully with a lot of money and a following among people who think that’s a resume.
    Advantage Putin.

  156. classic.
    so, after Trump’s Grab em By The Pussy tape first came out (to rave reviews! straight #1 on the charts!), the GOP tried to ditch him. Pence fretted that he couldn’t appear with him in public. Priebus was under pressure to get him off the ticket.
    within 48 hours, they’d all changed their tune.
    why?
    because Trump’s response to the tape included a threat to go after the GOP’s real enemy: Hillary Clinton. (ominous music plays)
    the GOP is a cult.

  157. Turning Virginia blue:
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/gun-debate-hits-full-throttle-in-richmond-as-legislature-convenes/2019/07/09/caf20590-a1d4-11e9-bd56-eac6bb02d01d_story.html
    Combine this with the draconian law on abortion that Alabama’s legislature passed recently. You get the impression that state legislators have lost track of the fact that, while the most extreme views make the most noise, the actual views of even Republican voters are nowhere near what they keep voting for.
    Democrats may not be able to win over Republican voters. But those voters may get shoved into their arms anyway. (And if the case to void the ACA keeps going, the GOP may well find itself inthe situation of the dog who actually caught the truck.)
    You can argue that I’m being unduly optimistic. But it’s no longer obvious that I’m being totally unrealistic.

  158. The GOP murder syndicate:
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/a-court-without-law
    No, martial arts and the above suggested self-inflicted bullet wounds are not enough, are too late, by about however many years it’s been since Lincoln’s assassination, and wholly inadequate to accomplish goddamned fucking vengeance.
    To Erick Erickson:
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2019/07/projecting-much
    Yes, Erick, mon ami, and if door-to-door Census takers each were armed with your slut wife’s shotgun for this upcoming 2020 Census the conservative movement could be wiped off the face of the Earth in a few months.
    We of course can discuss later whether or not Erickson’s slut wife knew ahead of time about his threats to murder Census employees in 2009 with her shotgun, and judge and punish her complicity at that time.

  160. No criticism intended, by the way, JDT, I know you are an equal opportunities insulter!

  161. https://thinkprogress.org/erickson-ill-pull-out-my-wife-s-shotgun-if-someone-comes-to-my-door-for-the-american-community-e3ecef3a0eb/
    One presumes, as we are expected to do in every instance of Bill Clinton’s bullshit, that the wife is always in on the bullshit, and in fact, may be dispatching his dog self out there to commit his peccadilloes, which if they include forced bullshit with under-aged women are no longer peccadilloes, of course.
    https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2010/03/18/erick-ericksons-insult-problem
    Therefore, I suspect, when Erickson asked his wife what kind of animal Republican Judge Souter might be fucking so that he could tweet the unfounded accusation, that his wife immediately and cheerfully chimed in “Well, he fucked a goat, of course, knumbknuts!” and Erickson ran with it while making a mental note that if the wife in a confederate Christian family is supposed to serve and submit, how come SHE owns the shotgun and he doesn’t, and furthermore where and when did she come by her intimate knowledge of goats and carnality, hanh?
    Well, I think we know.
    The two of them dropped the kids off at fundamentalist Falwell finishing Sunday school and headed back to the house to oil up the firearms and much else.
    Thank you for the opportunity to expand on my ravings.
    Mr Epstein introduced p to Melania.
    Russell’s couple in the library were not in evidence in the gang hot tub in the grotto where the introduction took place, not that there is anything wrong with that, unless liberals and RINOs do it.
    So, let’s get this out of the way:
    The attempt to impeach Bill Clinton noth for his acts with Monica Lewinsky and the lying about it, along with whatever else could be dredged up, true, false, who the fuck cared?, was not because the filth in the conservative movement* were in any way outraged, scandalized, constitutionally betrayed or whatever, it was a naked attempt to overthrow a democratically and Democratically elected government by other means, not to halt the practice of fellatio, by God, as we know, that is the republican party’s favorite activity just behind putting kids in cages, encouraging pollution and government corruption, and eliminating their taxes and the buggery of everyone not them including our institutions, and not necessarily in that order, it’s kind of a tie between the taxes and buggery.
    *OK, McKT and maybe three other perfectly non-filthy conservatives whom I know of were sincerely outraged by Bill Clinton’s behavior.
    The rest of the conservatives saw the main chance and the liberals who like me, who choked down criticism of his behavior did so because we saw Gingrich and company holding up their trousers with one hand while overthrowing government with the other, because they were being paid to do it right wing and corporate dark money.
    So, here we are, with 25 years of additional malignity from the conservative movement, including several instances of stealing elections.
    And now this travesty of the past three years.
    It’s past time to end them.

  163. By the way too, once Mrs. Erickson reaches widowhood, may she live out her life in peace.

  164. By the way too, once Mrs. Erickson reaches widowhood, may she live out her life in peace.
    Perhaps she will have her goats to console her…?

  167. I think we can now assert that all of the females and males still working at FOX did more than twirl for fat bastard bisexual republican rapist Roger Ailes.

  168. everybody ready to live the pre-ACA dream of not being able to get individual insurance if you have a pre-existing condition?
    all set to thank the GOP for caring so much about the public health?
    i am!

  172. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28351613/british-ambassador-kim-darroch-resign-donald-trump/
    He should have refused to resign, the pussy.
    England should kick out the fucking American Ambassador to their country and then shutter the American Embassy and all consulates.
    England should order the shooting in the heads of all conservative republicans as they disembark from airplanes at British airports.
    I’m thinking of visiting that great country next year, and if they shoot me down by mistake because I might look like a fucking subhuman conservative republican piece of American filth, then it’s a justice I’ll accept, because I let this travesty happen to my country.

  174. With the exception of Larison, all of the subhuman conservative names and much of the commentariat at TAC are fully behind Russia’s traitorous efforts to destroy European governments and replace them with the right wing conservative gangster Putin policies Russell describes upthread.
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-great-alliance-between-russia-and.html
    Because they want to kill the browns, the fags, the feminists, the liberals, the non-orthodox Christians, all of the Other, just as they will in America.

  178. He’s only half of the three-fifths of the man he used to be:
    https://www.mediamatters.org/video/2019/07/10/mark-levin-absurdly-claims-three-fifths-compromise-constitution-had-nothing-do-slavery-or-white/224170
    I agree though that next time we have a chance to limit or prohibit representation in our national government by confederate conservatives from every state, we should count each resident who is not a conservative as twice the men and women they once were and designate each of the confederate conservative filth like Levin as a fatal pre-existing condition thrice times zero and don’t carry the two.
    Yesterday will come suddenly to the dead conservative movement.

  179. He should have refused to resign, the pussy.
    He has to do what’s best for his country. What would be good for the US is, at best, a secondary consideration.

  180. What’s best for the UK is for Brits to decide, BUT:
    Are the Brits any more sane than Americans are? Can they agree on what’s “best for the UK” any more than Americans can agree on what “makes America great”?
    So what’s a conscientious civil servant, British or American, to do?
    –TP

  183. I nominate ugh’s 3:55pm comment way up there as the winner of the thread:
    “I will never vote for Bill or Hillary Clinton for President again.”
    That’s got everything dry and deadpan going for it.

  184. Are the Brits any more sane than Americans are? Can they agree on what’s “best for the UK” any more than Americans can agree on what “makes America great”?
    So what’s a conscientious civil servant, British or American, to do?
    In this case precisely what Sir Kim did. His immediate resignation was made inevitable by Boris Johnson’s public refusal of support.
    Johnson has behaved, and will continue to behave in a craven and disreputable manner, but a civil servant can only operate at the behest of their political masters.

  185. Boris Johnson’s contemptible behaviour over Kim Darroch makes it clearer than ever that if the UK is unfortunate enough to be led by him when a trade agreement is being hammered out between the US and the UK after Brexit, the UK will cave and give the US whatever it demands. This has always been one of the dangers with Brexit, particularly with Tories in power, but with Boris it looks like a certainty. I only hope (without any conviction) that this somehow strengthens the possibility of another referendum and a reversal…

  186. Kim Darroch was quite right to resign – he couldn’t do his job any more once Trump turned on him. I can’t see that BoJo’s attitude had much to do with it.
    And I can’t see any ambassador anywhere keeping his job for long once his highly critical comments on the country’s government have been leaked.
    Of course KD was right about Trump, and Trump’s reaction was the sort of contemptible bullying one has come to expect from him, but so what.

  187. but so what.
    And there is the damage done, in a nutshell.
    Not disagreeing with you, pro bono, on any point. On the contrary.
    Just SMH at what we have come to find normal.

  188. I can’t see that BoJo’s attitude had much to do with it.
    It determined the timing of the resignation.
    Rather more importantly, it represented a public abandonment of a senior diplomat. You back your subordinates in public, and sort things out quietly in private.
    Signalling a craven attitude towards someone you will soon be dealing with is simply bad politics.

  189. It really is awful how a Mr. Pladimir Vutin leaked that diplomatic cable from the UK ambassador to the US.
    MI6 should ask 007 to make use of his special “license” on that one.

  190. >Rather more importantly, it represented a public abandonment of a senior diplomat. You back your subordinates in public, and sort things out quietly in private.
    Signalling a craven attitude towards someone you will soon be dealing with is simply bad politics.
    Exactly this. KD probably had to go, but BJ’s behaving like a craven poltroon (and lickspittle: something about him inspires these somewhat archaic insults) was an illustration of just what we (and by extension, his civil servants etc) can expect from him.
    It really is awful how a Mr. Pladimir Vutin leaked that diplomatic cable from the UK ambassador to the US.
    As to this, Snarki is almost certainly right, at least in essence. Isabel Oakeshott, the “journalist” to whom this was leaked, was apparently the ghostwriter for Arron Banks’s (funder of Brexit, subject of multiple investigations into his dealings with Russia, and where the money came from, friend and patron of Farage, friend of Trump etc) The Bad Boys of Brexit.
    Putin’s ongoing project to weaken and destabilise the democratic West continues apace.

  191. Putin’s ongoing project to weaken and destabilise the democratic West continues apace.
    oddly, this was also OBL’s raison d’terror, but the world’s right still haven’t stopped wetting themselves in fear over the threat. but the world’s right lurves Putin.
    but yes, Bill Clinton exists, so it’s all a wash.

  193. Rather more importantly, it represented a public abandonment of a senior diplomat. You back your subordinates in public, and sort things out quietly in private
    In brief, Johnson keeps looking ever more like Trump. Wonder what his take on Putin will turn out to be….

  197. It’s like this:
    Shit is gonna be fncked up and bullshit until we wise up.
    It’ll probably get worse before it gets better.
    Show me where I’m wrong about this. I’d welcome it.

  198. “OBL: osama bin Ladin”
    Somehow, I think bin Laden would be quite aggrieved that his initials now elicit a mere quizzical “Who dat?”.
    The disappointment is second only to that he experienced when OBL looked around upon his express arrival in heaven and asked “So ….. 72 virgins? I don’t see a one. What gives? I was told 72 virgins. I promised my warriors 72 virgins. Bring me the virgins!”
    Well, he probably accidentally went to Christian heaven, where there are no virgins, but only demure fibbers.
    Or maybe he misheard. Might “surgeons” or “sturgeon”, or some sort of far flung Richard Branson operation have been the more accurate hearings.
    We can thank the other Osama (in vermin, racist anti-American conservative movement eyes), Barack Hussein Obama for having the chops to terminate OBL, going where conservative movement government was too incompetent, mealy-mouthed, inattentive, cowardly, and quite frankly Saudi Arabian-aligned to do what needed to be done, except cough into their fake Viagra prescriptions.

  199. “Show me where I’m wrong about this. I’d welcome it.”
    It’s going to get much worse and getting better will occur only after a horrible national ordeal.
    I never ask for change for my 2 cents.

  200. https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-social-media-summit-mortifies-white-house-enrages-far-right-allies?via=newsletter&source=DDMorning
    To Whom It May Concern:
    I am outraged and disappointed that I was snubbed from attending this important confab of my fellow victims of liberal media exclusion at the White House.
    Why, over the years, I, but apparently not the attendees, have been de-platformed, banned, and moderated by Letters to the Editor sections of major metropolitan newspapers, the comment sections of Red State and The American Conservative and, I daresay, from the pages of the esteemed blog Obsidian Wings at least twice, including once at the hands of Hilzoy, an accomplishment I am most proud of.
    Back in the day, I was ostracized from the Silent Majority because I wasn’t enough of a loudmouth, if you can believe it, from the Proud Boys, for sticking my chest out TOO far, and from the blog Tacitus, for not displaying the requisite amount of bored insouciance at the tiresome prattling of the resident proprietor of that now unmourned, defunct blog.
    My credentials for inclusion among the mountebanks and rank assholes at your conference are unsurpassed and I take the rejection of my victimhood as a personal affront.
    I’m also missing the luncheon of day-old Whoppers and the experience of opening those little plastic packages of ketchup with my teeth among the company of giants therein assembled in the vicinity of where the heads carved into Mount Rushmore once rested their brows upon the fine taxpayer-owned linens.
    As you know, this means Civil War, but hold the civility.

  201. Pro Bono: Kim Darroch was quite right to resign
    All I know about the British civil service comes from watching old “Yes, Minister” episodes, so would somebody please tell me what Darroch resigned FROM?
    The post of ambassador? The civil service entirely? I have not seen a clear answer in news reports I’ve read.
    Presumably, Kim Darroch is not in the same position personally as He, Trump. Losing his job does not put him in danger of going to prison, right? So I don’t worry about the man’s future.
    I worry about the future of a society — on either side of the pond — that tries to govern itself on the “True, but so what?” principle.
    –TP

  202. He’s resigned as ambassador, and will retire from the Civil Service – he’s 65. He will enjoy a very comfortable pension.
    Trump has emphasised that the USA will act without any consideration for its allies. Johnson has made clear that his idea of Brexit is a servile relationship with the USA. This is damaging to both countries.
    I hope Johnson’s behaviour will stiffen the resolve of most MPs not to allow him to have his way over a no-deal Brexit.

  204. Nigel: hard agree, as the kids say. That’s a good piece. What a fucking shower.

  205. Just as a bitterly amusing side note, when I watched Corey Lewandowski being interviewed on C4 news the other night, it gave me a sick laugh to hear him describe Sir KD as being “unprofessional” in what he said about the Trump administration: leaving aside the completely correct point Pro Bono (I think it was) made about everybody in the world essentially agreeing with Sir KD, it just went to show how absolutely clueless everybody associated with Trump is about absolutely everything. Anybody who has ever worked in an Embassy (among whom I am numbered) knows that it is exactly an Ambassador’s professional responsibility to give an accurate assessment of everything relevant about the host country; there is no suggestion that they should mince their words or use euphemisms, on the contrary since confidentiality is assumed to be guaranteed (no longer) they are supposed to be as honest and accurate as possible. From now on, one can only assume, they will need the equivalent of an Enigma machine.

  206. From now on, one can only assume, they will need the equivalent of an Enigma machine.
    Or at least have computer systems that the Russians can’t hack into.

  207. I was told 72 virgins.
    not that it matters one way or the other, but where did they come up with the number 72?
    the prevalence of very specific, yet inexplicable, detail in religious beliefs fascinates and puzzles me.
    among whom I am numbered
    aha! there is a story in there, I am sure.
    obwi contains multitudes.

  209. I will merely say that this is how, when I told you Reagan had Alzheimer’s when he was President, I was able to speak from direct personal observation.

  211. For the last couple of days, refreshing this page returned the same result every time with (IIRC) 143 comments. Same this AM. Then I go to the front page and it reports 200+ comments, many of them from the last two days. Has anyone else seen anything like that? (Or should I just blame my browser?)

  213. Has anyone else seen anything like that?
    I have. I can’t even see your comment, Michael Cain.

  217. “Meaningless” in the sense that even manifest incompetents are mostly going to get confirmed. (Although even there, a few have gotten nixed.)
    But even so, they do provide an opportunity to haul some stuff into the open. So not totally useless.

  219. Corrupt Jesus Freak vermin heads for a border whitewashing:
    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/12/1871159/-Trump-sends-Pence-to-the-border-to-defend-concentration-camps
    Insane ratfucker Cruz emerges from concentration camps slightly recovered to from insanity tp merely “disturbed”, as he toes the line between his execution by automatic weapons or whirling machetes when D-Day comes to be.
    Meanwhile lickspittle virgin Jesus freak Pence convinced trump, with the former’s tongue bathing the latter’s perineum, to drop a conservative judicial nomination because the corrupt walking dead man nominated might have exposed Pence’s biblically-inspired corruption, it being the text that inspires now three generations of subhuman conservative fascists in this geographically-concentrated population of fucking assholes.

  220. This is why, since conservatives and dumbass libertarians have created such a polite society for the rest of us with their Second Amendment abominations, all should carry a fully loaded semi-automatic weapon to all and every encounter with republican conservatives.
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/president-trumps-former-adviser-clashes-with-playboy-writer-at-social-media-summit-youre-not-a-journalist-youre-a-punk-2019-07-12?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    And considering the fascists’ phalanxed solidarity, attach a very large ammo clip to the weapon and disable the safety.
    React with maximum force to the slightest provocation like an inner city white cop would.

  221. P is going to eliminate the Director of Intelligence position.
    In former days, when wry humor seemed a comfort, there was the obvious joke to be made there.
    But with massive savage violence approaching from coast to coast, the government will need some smarts to prevent itself from being toppled and incinerated.

  222. I am skeptical of all efforts toward health care reform, and this can be extended to reform in all areas involving the raw material: Americans, of which I am one .. so far.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/american-health-care-spending/590623/
    Americans are not only miserably incompetent at governing themselves, but as a class of fully dispensable assholes, we fuck up every other role we assume in society as well, including patienthood.
    We’re raised as a bunch of insufferable, pigfucking, never-satisfied dyspeptic me’s, enslaved to autonomy.
    There is me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me and me … well no matter how many me’s you place end to end, a viable polity cannot be produced, if the me’s, that is, are Americans.
    My favorite passage in the link:
    “We ought to consider the possibility that if we exported Americans to those other countries, their systems might end up with our costs and outcomes. That although Americans (rightly, in my opinion) love the idea of Medicare for All, they would rebel at its reality.”
    The enemy is US and our worst export is US and when WE attempt to import ourselves to other countries, those countries should slap 500% tariffs on each of us and when we attempt our fatuously vainglorious transfer of the American “way of death” to other societies, they should embargo our asses and blockade our shores.
    The experiment is kaputnik, which is the word Ben Franklin uttered under his breath to the question “What have you wrought?”
    Like any sell side liar, he was humoring us for the commission with his published answer.
    We are the U and the S in U.S.A and its spelled US Assholes and it rhymes with p, and that spells trouble.
    Defund the entire laboratory and euthanize the rats and their fuckers.
    Friend, either you’re closing your eyes
    to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge
    or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of conservative republicans in your community.

  223. P is going to eliminate the Director of Intelligence position.
    And here, I thought you were making a joke.
    Joke’s on me.

  224. “Jokes on me.”
    Understandable.
    If only it was ONLY you.
    This sentence from a piece about The Three Stooges:
    “While Moe would then usually fake the (Moe)slap, he would sometimes do it for real to keep the others on their toes.”
    😉
    Once Moe or Curly threw a fountain pen across the stage as a gag and it stabbed Larry Fine in the back of his head and stuck there.
    Everyone laughed anyway.
    As republican businessmen tell OSHA inspectors who show up to investigate one of their workers having their arm torn from the shoulder socket by a safety-free piece of equipment:
    “Anything for a laugh. The show must go on, hunh, fellas! But seriously, I’ve paid over your Congresspeople and Senators, so go easy.”
    Decent Americans at this moment are like moviegoers emerging from the movie theater into the light of day chuckling to themselves over the rueful message about their fate depicted in the movie “Dr. Strangelove”, only to have Slim Pickens fall from the sky and flatten them on the sidewalk, followed by immediate thermonuclear annihilation.
    We* continue to and shrug and put our faith in life’s little ironies, just as all killing goddamned hell breaks loose.
    *For all variables of “We”, subtract those in the know, which means most here.

  225. P is going to eliminate the Director of Intelligence position.
    I didn’t realize that Trump got to fire the directors of Hannity’s and Carlson’s shows. Those being, after all, the directors of the only places he goes for information about what’s happening in the world.

  228. From “Stoney The Road”, Henry Louis Gates most recent book on Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the many Rises of Jim Crow, a quote from President Andrew Johnson, the vermin traitor to the Constitution and all things American, except alcoholism.
    I’ve changed the nouns, the objects of Johnson’s racist contempt in the paragraph, to reflect how this country and our government shall move forward once the conservative movement is liquidated and Jim Crowed out of existence, refused the ballot, and relegated to a remnant, ignored, beaten to death if appearing in public and driving while Republican.
    “But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations conservatives/republicans have shown less capacity government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. In the Southern States, though certainly not exclusive to those locations, however, conservatives/republicans have undertaken to confer upon themselves privileged access to the ballot. Just now in the majority electorally by employing filthy cheating and corruption, it may be doubted whether as a class they know more than their ancestors, recently descended from the trees, how to organize and regulate civil society. Indeed, it is admitted that the conservatives/republicans of the Nation are not only regardless of the rights of property, but so utterly ignorant of public affairs that their voting can consist of nothing more than carrying to the place where they have been directed and paid to deposit it.”
    To put a finer point on the subhumanity of conservatives/republicans, Colonel Pat Donan, (Gates quoting, me making the quote accurate) the editor of a Lexington, Kentucky newspaper, declared of himself and his fellow conservative movement trash of that time and now. “No simian-souled, pale-skinned, straight-follicled, pencil-necked, thin-lipped, prehensile-heeled European Scots-Irish gorilla shall pollute the ballot box with his leprous vote.”
    Why, it’s as if Donan was an eye-witness, his bowdlerized statement being so prophetic, to the 4th of July travesty at the Andrew Johnson/John Wilkes Booth Memorial and the recent right-wing Hitler Youth victimization conference at the White House the other day.

  229. I’ve raised my price target on Facebook to $2000 per share, but only if they are fined an amount equal to their total market worth, their entire management team goes down in a fiery plane crash, and an asteroid is due to hit their corporate headquarters tomorrow at noon, if those events do not occur, then I would sell the stock because it’ll just be dead money:
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/facebook-stock-hits-highest-price-in-nearly-a-year-after-reports-of-5-billion-ftc-fine-2019-07-12?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts

  230. Just wondering:
    The concentration camps were happening in Germany, and the people did nothing about it. We assumed that they didn’t want to, and there was some evidence for that.
    The concentration camps are going on in America, and the people are doing nothing about it. Many of us want to (according to people posting on Twitter) but nothing is being done. What if we stormed one of them? If as many people who showed up for the Women’s March showed up at one facility (we would have to choose one, and focus) and plan to break in, and escort people out, how about that?
    I don’t know how to organize that. But what if we could do that? Would we do that? If people had a couple of weeks to prepare?

  231. So, just to follow up on my previous comment:
    There’s been a lot of consternation about “The Squad” versus “Pelosi”.
    What if adherents of “The Squad” and/or “Pelosi” go storm the concentration camps? Or compete finding the soldiers to do that. Seems like a win/win.

  232. My dad flew a plane on D-Day, and survived the invasion of Europe. About half of his friends didn’t.
    We are cowards. We claim to oppose Nazis, but we really don’t want to go there, do we?
    When my dad was alive, I had a conversation with him. I asked him whether he was afraid. He laughed, and said Yes, I was afraid!

  233. And yet, he flew mission, after mission, after mission, as his friends went down.
    Bravery, for sure. Also, discipline.
    We don’t know what that is. (Including me. But I am gritting my teeth to learn so that I can get out of this life with some dignity.)

  234. according to people posting on Twitter
    Twitter is most definitely not real life.
    it takes almost no energy to be a committed Twitter activist.

  235. What if we stormed one of them? If as many people who showed up for the Women’s March showed up at one facility (we would have to choose one, and focus) and plan to break in, and escort people out, how about that?
    Civil disobedience has a long history in this country. This sounds like a proposal for another iteration. (Although my knowledge of history isn’t strong enough to reveal whether “break out”, as opposed to something more passive, has precedent. As civil disobedience; I’m thinking we don’t want to recreate John Brown’s Raid. Not right off the bat.)
    It would probably be worthwhile to do some training ahead of time. I don’t know whether we’d see a reprise of Bull Connor’s fire hoses. But stun guns and batons see a certainty. And firearms not unlikely, especially if the demonstrators have “weapons” — i.e. equipment to actually break in. Want to have people prepped on how to respond. And, more important, how not to respond in order to get maximally effective news footage.
    Also want to have some recon in place. First, want to make sure to hit one on the facilities still stuffed, not one which has been mostly cleared out. Also want an idea of the physical layout, so as to move towards the right part of the building.
    Finally, want some lawyers standing by, with motions, etc. drafted and ready to go. Ditto bail arrangements set up.
    And, of course, cameras. Perhaps best to be selective on alerting the media; wouldn’t want to give Homeland Security a head start. But lots of cameras, preferably continuously uploading to the cloud, so the pictures can’t get suppressed.
    In short, actually implementing this, successfully, is going to take more than just telling the Park Service you want to schedule a Women’s March.

  236. Adding to wj’s list…some kind of plan for the aftermath would be a good idea too. As in, legal and other kinds of aid for the people freed from the facility. Portland, Maine, might be able to provide some tips, although I don’t suppose you can teach bigheartedness and a welcoming attitude.
    This strand of conversation makes me realize all the more clearly that the camps are in part deliberately designed to provoke outrage, and to further tweak some of us with the difficulty of figuring out how to do anything constructive about them while the outrages pile higher and deeper in the meantime.
    Our (the US’s) incarceration rate is the highest in the world, more than double Russia’s and more than five times that of China. (Not that I’m not skeptical about what they’re counting…e.g. Uyghurs in camps?) Never mind the racial disparity in the prison population. Where has the outrage about that been hiding for lo these past many decades…?
    From a few days ago:

    Addressing an overflowing town hall of 650+ in Peterborough, NH @ewarren said “It’s not enough to knock the current occupant out of the White House. Things were broken before he ever got there…a country that is healed & in good shape does not elect a man like that to president”

  237. You know, I have to half take back what I said about deliberately provoking outrage. Above all, the camps are there for the sake of the cruelty, the hatred, and the fear. Provoking helpless outrage (while drawing attention from other outrages) is just gravy.
    And as russell wrote recently, we all do what we can.

  238. I should have stayed away from this conversation; if nothing else, I don’t like my own contribution, and if it weren’t against custom, I would take the two previous comments down.
    The Warren comment stands, though. And as usual, the “wrs.”

  239. Speaking personally, I’ve valued your contributions – apart from anything else, I hadn’t seen that Warren comment, she couldn’t be more correct.

  240. You know, I have to half take back what I said about deliberately provoking outrage. Above all, the camps are there for the sake of the cruelty, the hatred, and the fear. Provoking helpless outrage (while drawing attention from other outrages) is just gravy.
    I’d phrase it that it was about deliberately provoking glee in Trump’s supporters. The outrage is, as you say, strictly a side benefit. Except in so far as it creates further glee. But the focus in developing the policies was entirely on the bigots.

  241. I have no direct experience with civil disobedience, but I have some exposure to it. Very good friends of mine were very active in the Catholic Worker community in the 80’s, and I know their stories and had the opportunity to basically “ride along” on a couple of events.
    Their focus at that time was mostly nuclear disarmament and our anti-Communist policies in South and Central America. Actions that they, or people in their community, took included trespassing on White House grounds (to pray) to provoke arrest, chaining themselves to and throwing blood on a public entrance to the Pentagon on the Feast of the Innocents to protest our South and Central American policies, and trespassing on and doing minor vandalism in nuclear sites.
    That last earned some folks some years in jail, and plans had to be made for, basically, fostering some folks’ kids. I rode along on the Feast of the Innocents event, and it was preceded by very careful and thorough training of the participants. Some folks who were visibly angry were asked to not participate, to limit the possibility of escalation to violence.
    In most cases, the consequences for the folks involved in this were more or less trivial arrest – overnight in jail, you get to give your speech at arraignment, and they generally send you home with a fine. I know quite clearly that many of the folks involved earned careful monitoring by various federal agencies. Most of the Catholic Worker folks were white middle class people, plus some religious who were also mostly white. It can be a different picture if you’re not in that demographic.
    In any case, there is ample precedent for the kind of thing sapient is calling for. Not only precedent, but actions targeting ICE facilities are going on now – the ICE detention center in South Boston was the site of a protest about two weeks ago, that resulted in downtown traffic coming to a stop and 18 arrests.
    As an aside, I’m tempted to ask, “They stopped downtown Boston traffic? How did anyone notice?”.
    A while ago I suggested that turning around the crap that Trump and the (R)’s have injected into public life was going to require more than talk, probably more than votes. It was probably going to require getting in the way of it, perhaps absolutely literally. Marty found this somewhat risible, but my basic observation is that sometimes changing public policy requires changing people’s hearts and minds – getting people to recognize that something they thought was right or at least OK, was actually wrong – and that most times when that has happened in our history, no small part of that change has come from people just getting in the damned way.
    Often at a cost of jail, or social rejection, or a beating, or death.
    Sometimes we have to be shamed into changing, and sometimes that requires somebody bearing the brunt of our collective stupidity on their own lives or even their own bodies.
    It’s not a joke. It can be a very difficult path to take, and may not turn out the way you thought it would. And there’s no guarantee of success. There is, on the contrary, an almost certain guarantee of no immediate success.
    So, we may be at one of those points. It’s up to every individual to decide what they are willing to take on. I encourage everyone to take on whatever they can.
    And best of luck to us.

  242. To add a more personal note, my wife and I have discussed this, and our deal is we have to pay off the mortgage before I can go get arrested.
    Welcome to modern dinner conversation.
    If there was ever a privileged suburban white guy compromise, that is surely it. But it’s also a pragmatic calculus of what I, and we, can afford, here and now. In the meantime, I send money, and write get out the vote postcards, and show up at legal protests, and vote. I will probably donate some hours to common cause and/or league of women voters later in the year.
    And, when I retire, maybe I’ll go to jail.
    Everyone can do something. Do what you can.

  243. I have to half take back what I said about deliberately provoking outrage.
    I’ll offer my opinion, FWIW.
    Things are rarely about just one thing. But Trump is a textbook bully, and he appears to richly enjoy pushing people’s buttons.
    So yes, I’m sure that trolling the libs is one of the goals.
    He’s a nasty SOB, and stuff like this is milk and honey to him. In my opinion.

  244. sometimes changing public policy requires changing people’s hearts and minds – getting people to recognize that something they thought was right or at least OK, was actually wrong – and that most times when that has happened in our history, no small part of that change has come from people just getting in the damned way.
    I think that often, rather than changing people’s hearts and minds, it’s a matter of making it impossible to continue to ignore something that they already know is unacceptable. By putting in front of them pictures of people like them getting arrested while protesting it.
    That’s what made the Freedom Riders critical to the Civil Rights movement. Suddenly white people in the North were seeing on their evening news other white people getting mugged by the police in the South. Black people getting mugged was, after all, “old news” and didn’t make the network shows. And wouldn’t have had the same impact if it did.
    So yeah, gotta have people getting in the way. But also gotta have some of them being folks the people you want to influence will relate to. Get a couple of white evangelical preachers being arrested on camera and it will, like it or not, be more effective than a hundred Latinos getting arrested. Having the numbers is important. But who you have is more important. Unfortunate, but true.

  245. Not even in my protest days did I ever find so many people protesting for something they then turn around and deny they believe in.
    ICE is arresting and detaining and deporting people who are illegally in the country. Without them our borders are certainly open. Anyone who lives in South Texas can take you to 20 places people just walk across the border every day.
    The people being arrested have come with a visa and stayed or just walked across. They mostly meet none of our immigration criteria.
    Supporting those people not being deported is supporting open borders. You cant have it both ways.

  246. I’m going to extend the benefit of the doubt and introduce the idea that what people object to is not that anyone who crosses the border is not allowed to just stay here with no questions asked, but rather the way people are treated once they are in the immigration system.
    If you want to argue with people who want “open borders” you will have to go elsewhere, because none of those people appear to be here.
    This point has been made a number of times, so if it fails to register at this point, I will no longer be able to extend the benefit of the doubt.
    You don’t get to tell other people what they “really think”.

  247. It keeps being made, but that isnt what is being protested this weekend. Protesting ICE is not protesting conditions in the border facilities.
    So, I’m just listening to what people “really say”.

  248. FWIW, I can walk, in less than an hour, to a number of majority-immigrant neighborhoods. People whose first language is not English, but Spanish, or Haitian Creole, or Hmong, or Vietnamese, or God knows what. Maybe Gaelic.
    There is nothing specifically South Texan about immigration issues.
    Everyone understands that the number of people coming over the southern border from Central America is a huge strain on the resources of immigration agencies in that area. There are ways to address that in a humane and respectful way. None of those ways are being employed.
    If you want to defend the actual policies and actions being implemented on the southern border – and elsewhere – go for it, and good luck to you.
    But don’t freaking chime in to tell us all what we do or don’t believe in, or what “ways” we can or cannot have.

  249. that isnt what is being protested this weekend.
    WTF do you know about “what was being protested”? What the goals or purposes of the protests were?
    Did you attend any? Talk to anyone involved?
    Watch the news reports on TV? Read about it in FB?
    Our treatment of immigrants is shameful. It’s freaking barbaric. If we continue down this oath well turn ourselves into monsters.
    Defend how we treat the people who come here, I freaking dare you. If you don’t want to do that, then you have no argument with the people who object to it.

  250. I m not telling you what to do, I am nothing what you’re doing.
    “There is nothing specifically South Texan about immigration issues”
    The neighborhoods you can walk to do not resemble any part of Texas. The grade school I went to in Dallas is now 98% Hispanic, that’s in a neighborhood in a pretty big city that is 48% Hispanic, 300 miles from the Rio Grande. My Mom lives there, my brothers and sisters. We are regularly part of a community that is predominantly Hispanic.
    I live in a fairly mixed race area on the Mass RI border, mostly Portuguese and Puerto Rican. These are my neighbors. It ain’t Texas. FWIW

  251. Dude, whatever. Good for you.
    We are treating people who want to come here like beasts. I don’t give a shit if they’ve entered the country illegally, they are in our custody and should be treated with the respect and consideration due to human beings.
    Go ahead and explain why that is not so if you like.

  252. I think we shlould treat them fairly. Every surge creates overcrowding, every 4.6b helps, I dont see anyone mistreating people by chouce, these are the same border patrol folks that have been dealing with this as best they can with mixed results since long before Trump was President, or Obama, we were having these discussions since at least 1980.
    Root out bad seeds,open more facilities, close the border, fix the laws so there is rational policy, quit demonizing people trying their best.
    Tell me what’s wrong with that?

  254. Let me change that statement a little. In general, I dont believe people are mistreating migrants by choice. There are exceptions at all levels, thus root out the bad seeds.

  257. The government went to court to argue that children don’t need soap, toothpaste, or blankets.
    Yes, and when people tried to donate supplies to the detainees, the donations were rejected, with DHS falsely claiming that they were not allowed to accept them.
    Basically, people are suffering from purposeful cruelty, and we are asked to “vote them out” as our only solution? We can’t wait that long, betting on the possibility that Putin isn’t going to succeed in managing the election again.
    In short, actually implementing this, successfully, is going to take more than just telling the Park Service you want to schedule a Women’s March.
    This is definitely true. And one-off misguided attempts are not likely to help.
    As russell said, not everyone can do everything, but we all need to do what we can. And I do wish we had a specific effort to mobilize people to actually try to use nonlethal force, the power of many people, to get them out.

  258. Of all the government employees conservatives have respect for and don’t mind overpaying and not kvetching about, it’s the ones wielding the spear of authoritarian rule.
    If government scientists and IRS auditors carried semi-automatic weapons and came knocking on our doors at odd hours, think of the love.
    What rot.

  259. Marty may or may not feel entitled to be treated like a human being. So I don’t know whether he’d squeal like a stuck pig if he were ever treated the way “people trying to do their best” are treating brown-skinned Spanish-speaking migrants.
    I admit it’s possible that Marty would, if so treated, stand on his pro-authoritarian principles (like he did when rent-a-cops beat up that airline passenger or that thug Republicon candidate decked a reporter) and suffer in silence whatever indignities The Authorities chose to heap upon him.
    But I tend to think that Marty would instead feel put-upon — given that, being a maternity-ward immigrant, he has been endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights.
    As for the one policy that would guarantee no unauthorized across-the-border immigrants could live long in the US, namely a mandatory national ID card, Marty says “Meh”. Open borders for fair-skinned Norther European visa overstayers is what that amounts to.
    But don’t tell Marty. As a human being he deserves to pursue happiness by fooling himself.
    –TP

  260. root out the bad seeds.
    This group has 9500 members. That’s about half the border patrol.
    Immigration enforcement has become a dysfunctional and toxic organization. I’m sure there are people there who are trying to do their best, but they are apparently obliged to separate kids from their parents, make people – including kids – sleep on concrete floors, allow infants to sit in shitty diapers for hours, tell people to drink from toilets, not provide them with toothpaste toothbrushes and soap, not provide them with a place to bathe.
    And on and on and on and on.
    So people’s good intentions don’t really amount to a bucket of warm piss.
    It’s fucking broken. And it is fucking broken in a way that obliges us, as a nation, to treat human beings like shit. Systematically and as a matter of policy.
    That is what people object to.
    “You all want open borders” is bullshit. Show me one person on this board calling for open borders. You’ll find a stray comment from CharlesWT, which he has subsequently explained is not actually his position anyway.
    All of this crap comes from Trump and the likes of Stephen Miller and Sebastian Gorka and the rest of the fucking fascist clowns in the executive who think they have special magical genes that brown people don’t have.
    This is poison, and it’s damaging the nation. Time to quit meeping about people who want “open borders” and start getting pissed off at the assholes who are requiring all of the good civil servants with “good intentions” to treat human beings like animals.
    And FWIW, it’s great that you live in a diverse neighborhood, but Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, they are American citizens. And Portuguese people have been living in the area you live in since, not just before there was a United States, but before there was a permanent English-speaking community in North America.
    It was nice of them to let us in.

  262. I do wish we had a specific effort to mobilize people to actually try to use nonlethal force, the power of many people, to get them out.
    FWIW, the protest in Boston, and a similar one in NJ, was led by IfNotNow, a Jewish social action group. They usually focus on Israeli policy toward Gaza and the West Bank, apparently they are expanding their scope.
    A place to start, perhaps, if you are looking for people engaged in non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.

  263. The grade school I went to in Dallas is now 98% Hispanic..
    Look, the neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn where my mother and uncles grew up is not just now majority minority, but overwhelmingly majority foreign born. Something like 20% of the population in Richmond Hill, which is where my grandparents lived when I first knew them, are not citizens.
    The neighborhood in Queens where I worked after high school and during college is now 70% Asian.
    The neighborhood in Salem where I lived when I first moved up to New England was than, and is now, largely Hispanic. Mostly Dominican Republic. Before it was Dominican, it was French Canadian, and at the time it was French Canadian, they were an immigrant population.
    In my immediate vicinity, Lynn MA is 40% Hispanic and 8% Asian. Revere is mostly “white”, which includes a lot of Hispanics and Russian immigrants.
    When I first started working in software, it was basically middle class English-speaking white people. Now it’s becoming mostly south Asians and Russians.
    Shit happens. Places change. Some people think that’s a good thing, some think it’s a bad thing, some don’t think it’s one or the other, it just is what it is.
    None of that has to do with how we treat people who come into our custody, especially when they intend no harm.
    How we are treating those people is what people are objecting to.

  264. My current gripe is with Asians. Or some small number of them.
    Over two months ago, my favorite Asian supermarket changed hands, closed for renovations and hasn’t reopened yet. Some of the stuff I got there is hard to find elsewhere. And what can be found doesn’t compare in price and quality. 🙁

  269. Hey Tony, if you think s national id solves that problem without creating bigger ones I’m all for it.
    I think everyone should have the option of a free id from someplace anyway. But then, I’m just your run of the mill authoritarian because I believe people who act like assholes shouldnt complain about consequences. i.e. Every example you list.
    That includes Trump, based on his current tweet storm on the squad I think he should be impeached. It is the step too far. They are home, trying to fix a government they perceive as broken. Whole Pelosi has the right to point out they have more twitter followers than votes in the House, Trump has no right, actually he has an obligation not to, tweet blatant racist tropes at them. Censure should be immediate. Impeachment would be appropriate.

  270. Good to be able to agree with you, Marty.
    For a moment, I read one of the tweets and thought it was aimed at the UK….
    …Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all)…

  271. what we should do is try to improve the situations in the places these people are fleeing.
    can you imagine how bad things must be there to make you want to put on your shoes and walk across all of Mexico, in the summer?
    but no, Trump cut aid to those places.
    that is the course one would take if one wanted to increase the flow of refugees, not decrease it. but why Trump want that? it’s not like immigration is the key to his electoral success.

  272. FWIW, the protest in Boston, and a similar one in NJ, was led by IfNotNow, a Jewish social action group.
    I was very moved when I read the unexpurgated version in a tweet by Alyssa Rubin:

    200 jews are shutting down the ICE immigration center because when we say never again we fucking mean it.

  274. And he appears not to be the only one.
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/an-epidemic-of-disbelief/592807/
    Eric Eugene Wilkes was known to Detroit police for robbery and carjacking. Not for rape. Yet Wilkes’s DNA was in boxes scattered throughout the warehouse, even as he walked free. His DNA first arrived there more than 18 years ago, after he raped a woman waiting for a bus on December 26, 2000. It next appeared after another rape four months later. Three days after that, police shelved the untested kit from his third victim…

  275. but why Trump want that? it’s not like immigration is the key to his electoral success.
    But refugees ARE the key to his electoral success! If they actually stopped coming, how would he get his fans worked up?

  276. “Impeachment would be appropriate.”
    Too late, Marty. you can’t back out on the bargain now. Impeachment won’t be near enough appropriate for the vermin who bought you by slashing your taxes, especially when you didn’t even have the good grace to vote for p, your benefactor.
    Besides, p and his vermin will not leave office anyway because of some flimsy bullshit constitutional adherence to non-existent rule of law, at least not bi-pedally under their own forward motion.
    Even when p is dead, the next you know he’ll be off the slab and asking us “Why so serious?”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Clt-FZIjJ4
    Think of the border security that could have been purchased, that is, if conservative motherfuckers hadn’t walked out of and sabotaged every negotiated legislative immigration reform effort over the past 25 years in order to goose and oil up the subhuman, hateful republican base and ready it for p’s racist, cocksucking demagoguery.
    Who would it be among the filth you elected to legislative offices who are going to dare impeach the leader of the Republican Party, the greatest gift to those psychopathic ilk since the John Birch society went legit and signed up for all of those unmarked, anonymous postal boxes for their corporate and foreign campaign contributions?
    They are doing their worst, and the bloody, catastrophic, brutal worst needs to happen to them.
    Storming Lindsay Graham (that’s it? just storming? what are we going to do to him once we’ve stormed and are in his vermin face? Mug for the camera?) and the entire malign, murderous conservative movement across the globe simply will not be adequate justice.
    Body odor squinching up the nostrils of fake Christian fascists will be the least of their problems.
    That bad smell in the room is the corpse of the conservative movement rotting on its cloven hooves.
    This:
    https://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2019/07/republican-officials-are-beside.html
    They are beside themselves, so now there are twice as many of them to aim at in the conservative mirrored fascist funhouse.
    Some men? We won’t discriminate against the subhuman conservative/republican women in the meting out of savage justice either, because we liberals are politically correct and egalitarian that way.
    https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=some+men+just+want+to+see+ther+world+burn

  278. By the way, Gingrich is on the money when he says p’s racist mouthshitting is a good political move.
    47% of the so-called conservative electorate, approximately, eat that shit for breakfast.
    And the conservative movement knows there are 4% more who are developing a taste for it.
    It’s what for dinner as Civil War II engulfs them.

  279. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jeffrey-epstein-had-cash-diamonds-foreign-passport-stashed-safe-prosecutors-n1029851
    Most of the republican/conservative hydra-headed traitorous movement have their fake foreign papers, foreign ban accounts, and foreign residences ready to go at the drop of a hat when the gunfire gets too hot for them.
    I suspect we’ll find the frozen sawed-up hunks of Khashoggi in the restaurant larder freezers at Mar-a-Lago after Navy Seal SWAT teams (and this after the many vermin p-supporters in those units have been separated out and liquidated) shoot their way into and secure the Florida Kremlin.

  280. nothing about Trump’s latest outburst is new. this is exactly who he has always been.
    but the GOP loves it.
    HRC was just 40% too low in her estimate when she said half of them are deplorable.

  285. Under the category of “The Joke Is On Us”, unveiled by Russell the other day, after the gathering of the subhuman tribes at the House of White Right Wing Pudenda, p once again mentioned his intention to revive the Fairness Doctrine.
    The world is always unfair to conservatives. They are the victims of the Other, who they have dominated as victims in turn for thousands of years.
    We must get rid of the Fairness Doctrine in order to be fair to conservatives; no, wait, now we must revive the Fairness Doctrine in order to be fair to conservatives.
    No matter the facts of their small dicks, not that there is anything wrong with that, we must constantly come up with new units of measurement and measuring devices to put them over the edge in the game of centimeters vermin conservatives like to play in public restrooms, as they take dispiriting peeks right and left at the urinals.
    It never stops. You gotta be the victimized underdog to keep the demagogic violent conservative grift in the majority.
    This isn’t the first time he has seized on the idea.
    https://www.newsmax.com/john-gizzi/trump-fairness-doctrine-pelosi/2017/11/01/id/823340/
    The author of the article, yet another dumbhatted NEWSMAX conservative, fears that Rush Limbaugh might be forced to invite liberals on to his Hitler Hour Show, and we can’t have that.
    I volunteer to appear on Limbaugh’s show and deliver the other side of whatever fake issue he’s bloviating about .. with my fists.

  286. Disney heiress storms Disneyland:
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/disney-heiress-livid-after-going-to-one-of-her-familys-theme-parks-undercover-2019-07-15?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    Meanwhile, Area 51 undergoes a storming as well.
    https://www.marketwatch.com/story/area-51-assault-not-a-real-threat-explains-organizer-who-says-the-goal-of-the-event-plan-was-thumbsy-uppies-2019-07-15?siteid=bigcharts&dist=bigcharts
    I’d find it funny if the Kardashian girls were eaten by aliens.
    As pure research, natch.

  287. there are perfectly good legal reasons why Trump should be impeached.
    here’s one.

    White House counselor Kellyanne Conway will ignore a congressional subpoena at the request of President Trump, refusing to testify about a government watchdog’s findings that she broke the law dozens of times, the White House said Monday.

    of course the Rule of Law Party is too busy defending the racist rapist from accusations that he’s a scumbag to give a shit about the law.
    the GOP is a cult.

  288. So it looks like Trump has taken down the specific tweets telling the congresswomen to go back where they came from, but they were up long enough (I saw them on his twitter feed) for people to screenshot them. However, stand by for conservatives denying he said what he said. Even the craven poltroon BoJo was apparently induced, at a hustings earlier this evening, to call the comments “unacceptable”, although he is currently denying that he didn’t support Kim Darroch over the leaked emails/letters.

  289. the GOP is a cult.
    The question is….what should the House, like right ‘effing now, do about this? (PS: Sniping at some freshman members who happen to be women of color, is, you know, not going to do much).
    I’m open to suggestions….
    Here’s a few hairbrained ideas:
    1.) The House should defund the position of any federal officeholder who ignores a subpoena.
    2.) They should adopt a very extreme interpretation of their authority under Article 1, Section V.
    3.) When the Senate fills up a District Court with lunatics, that district court should be abolished.
    Just freebasing here…but the fact is this: The House needs to go to war.
    Impeachment is the least they can do.

  290. It’s what for dinner as Civil War II engulfs them.
    I might take Civil War II more seriously if you could get enough people to do Reconstruction III first.

  292. The question is….what should the House, like right ‘effing now, do about this?
    draw up the papers, start the process. impeach the scumbag. let’s get it all out there – Russia, subpoena defying, emoluments, racism, porn stars, threatening journalists, on and on and on. and if the Senate GOP wants to defend him, let them defend him on record. let it be known all around the world what exactly they support.
    and if, at the end of it all, people still want to stick with him, we and everyone else in the world will know exactly what kind of country we are. and that’ll be the end of the “shining city on the hill”.
    or, maybe we’ll get rid of him.
    let’s find out.
    [took me a bit to get here. but here i am.]

  293. what should the House, like right ‘effing now, do about this?
    Impeach him. For all the reasons cleek cites, plus for contempt of Congress and generally impeding every attempt at oversight, plus obstruction of justice.
    Kick him out then send him to jail. Along with the rest of his crew, and his kids.
    If the Senate doesn’t deliver, so be it. Enough of this crap.
    What I fear is that Pelosi has let the moment elude her. So maybe call your own House reps and make it impossible for her to ignore.

  294. what should the House, like right ‘effing now, do about this?
    Impeach him.
    I’d be fine with starting formal i impeachment proceedings IF the other investigations go forward in parallel. In particular, I think the battles over Congressional subpoenas need to be settled. Against the next time we get a President inclined to stonewall like this.
    And, of course, there are plenty of low-life scum in high places, other than Trump, who should get their misdeeds dragged into the open. So go for impeachment, sure. But don’t let that shut down all the other work going on.

  295. First, take a page from Frank Luntz: stop, immediately and forever, referring to He, Trump as “the President”. Stop addressing Him as “Mr. President”. Definitely never use the phrase “our President”, in the House, on TV, or on the stump. Call him “Donald”, or “Trump”, or “the Birther in Chief”.
    Second, announce both publicly and officially that the House will no longer appropriate money for any agency that rejects a subpoena or withholds information from Congress. McConnell’s tame judges can side with He, Trump all they want, but they cannot force Pelosi to give Him money.
    (If the Republicons want to argue that it’s unacceptable to defund the IRS, well … let them make that case to their small-government-loving, tax-cut-worshiping “base”.)
    Third, get some practice impeaching. Start with Wilbur Ross, if He doesn’t can him first. Proceed to Brett Kavanaugh; if perjury is not a “high crime and misdemeanor” nothing is.
    Fourth, stop — just stop — indulging the fantasy that “getting things done for the American People” is something you can accomplish until both He, Trump and Mitch McConnell are gone. You’re setting yourself up for shameless attacks by the Republicons: “Haw, haw! The Dems promised the moon and delivered bupkis!”
    Finally, buy all the air time you can in South Carolina and play before-and-after clips of little Lindsey Graham on the subject of He, Trump. You can’t embarrass the little twerp enough.
    –TP

  296. Just for JDT:
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/07/15/i-may-not-agree-with-aocs-squad-they-are-better-americans-than-trump/

    I have significant differences with Pressley, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez and Omar — perhaps even greater differences on the issues than I have with the president — but they are better Americans than Trump.

    Personally I’d say that, massive as my ideological differences with AOC et al. are, they are still less than my disagreements with Trump. In spite of the fact that, on most issues, Trump has no position beyond the transactional — what is, in this moment (because longer term than that doesn’t appear to exist for him), better for Trump. Specifically, for Trump’s fragile ego.

  297. I have long been for impeachment. In fact, I think I may have stated even here that Obama should not made the peaceful transition of power to Trump until the Russian interference was investigated.
    That said, impeachment will be a dog and pony show since Trump won’t be removed. I still want it to happen, but I want to win whatever propaganda war will result. So the timing and the theatrics are extremely important. It needs to be dragged out, and loudly covered by the press. I’m concerned that it won’t play out the way we want it to.
    I think there is a duty to impeach him. But while we’re at it (and I sure hope we do it, because if we don’t, I’ll be just as angry at Pelosi as are her current detractors) we should try to make it be an effective tool for 2020. I’m afraid that people will get bored by it if we start now. I was riveted by the Senate hearings on Kavanaugh, and thought the Dem Senators did a good job. The House seems to be a lot Gym Jordan screaming, and Democrats saying things that we all agree with, but sounding like saccharine cliches. Unfortunately, saying what we all believe gets boring. The American people will be bored by February.
    Trump’s behavior reads like an absurd work of fiction, but unless people are already moved by it, I’m not sure how they’ll be more outraged by an impeachment hearing.
    Again, I think it’s absolutely necessary. But I’m worried that either it will go to shit or it won’t happen at all, and that Trump will be reelected, and more atrocities will ensue. So, we have to impeach before we go the way of John D. Thullen’s methods just to say we tried. We’ll probably never get to the violence he suggests, because we’ll just sit back and quietly be sick. As I sit back and wring my hands and bite my nails, I deeply hope that we rise to this occasion and stop this horrifying nightmare one way or another.

  298. Proceed to Brett Kavanaugh; if perjury is not a “high crime and misdemeanor” nothing is.
    However it does seem a pity to miss the irony that the only Supreme Court justice ever impeached (Samuel Chase) was charged with letting his partisan leanings influence his judicial rulings. It may be too soon to charge Kavanaugh (though not some of his colleagues) with that. But only a fool or an astonishing optimist doubts that he will do so.

  299. Tony,
    Yup…they don’t have to limit impeachment to just the MF’er in chief. Wilbur Ross should be impeached. Lying to Congress is a crime. Two days of hearings then off to the Senate for trial, just to see how Mittens would vote is good enough for me.
    This easy vote would also help the blue dogs grow a spine if she forces them to commit on such matters, for once committed, they may grow to like the exercise of their constitutional duty.
    Thanks.

  302. we should try to make it be an effective tool for 2020.
    Well, duh. The whole point is what should our Dem leadership do right now? Right now their political judgement is under extreme criticism as it appears to be utterly failing. Their inability to move the political needle is hanging over them. The perception that they lack the willpower to take the MF’er in chief on is killing us.
    Sh*t or get off the pot. Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Tippecanoe and Tyler too. The time is now.
    Get the picture?
    One of these days the Dem leadership’s bullying hippy punching will come home to roost and the hippies will really stay home, just like the AFL-CIO did in ’72. Ya’ know, they really could find someplace else to go. Yes…it’s possible.
    Thanks. Hang in there.

  303. Each country gets a maximum of two Reconstructions.
    Then we deconstruct.
    Ya remember when irony, sarcasm, humor, and satire were enough to get us thru the day regarding those funny old dyspeptic conservatives.
    It was like when John Calhoun could be dismissed with a bit of funny-talking, homespun cracker surliness in 1854 or when Hitler’s funny walk was goofy to point at in 1928, and say, lookit ‘at guy, imagine if everyone walked like ‘at.
    Naah!
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCDj5Jbmcv8
    Ya know, before it dawned on folks a little late in the day that, golly, we might just have to fucking kill those clowns if this keeps up.
    Ya ‘member when we had to just tell ourselves gentle stories about conservatives, so as to be nice to them and not hurt their feelings and sully their image of the wide, wide wonderful conservative world:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iweXpwP9QUc
    This just in: We’re done.

  304. Right now their political judgement is under extreme criticism as it appears to be utterly failing.
    It would appear to be failing no matter what they did. They subpoena people, and the subpoenas are ignored. What will happen when the impeachment hearings start? Same. The problem is that Congressional deliberation is boring. Politics is boring. Atrocities are interesting. Democrats are boring. Republicans are interesting.
    That’s why things “appear” as they do. It’s a statement about us, not Democratic leadership. But, sure, I agree. It’s time for them to do whatever they can do. It will land like a thud, because it will appear to be meaningless, just like the subpoenas, just like the emoluments litigation, just like the investigations. Thud.

  305. If anything the Dems try will “land like a thud”” then (a.) They have not tried/considered everything; or (b.) They have nothing to lose by going to the mattresses.

  308. Prudence is great, but at some point, you have to quit worrying about the “what if’s” and just do stuff.
    That time has arrived.
    Trump is going to keep flipping the world the bird until somebody yanks his leash. And he does have one, and the House holds the other end of it.
    Impeach the SOB.

  311. Turtle would never let it get to a vote.
    Could be.
    Still not a sufficient reason to oppose initiating impeachment. Do we rally the troops or just sit back and pray for a miracle?

  312. Kevin Drum counsels Democrats to be “Lincolnesque” in the conservative republican race war.
    https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/07/liberals-need-to-be-lincolnesque-in-our-latest-race-war/
    How’d that work out the last time?
    Does he mean we should end up being shot in the head from behind for our troubles?
    Does he mean we should put up with General McClellan’s dilatory caution in taking the killing directly to the confederate republican enemy as long as Lincoln did, or should we “borrow the Army” sooner and get to it?
    I mean, the Confederate Republican subhuman vermin aren’t just encamped on the outskirts of Washington D.C. this time around. They hold the city and are raping and pillaging it.
    At any rate, can we dispense with the theater-going until all of the traitors, the tens of millions of them among us, are executed, imprisoned, or exiled by brutal force to the countries of their foreign paymasters.

  313. Still not a sufficient reason to oppose initiating impeachment. Do we rally the troops or just sit back and pray for a miracle?
    I agree with you, as I said. But what I expect will happen is that the usual suspects will accuse Democrats of failing. Yes, they should proceed even with the consequences being what they will certainly be. I hope they begin impeachment hearings as soon as they return from summer break. That would be a good time.

  314. precedence:

    That said Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, unmindful of the high duties of his office and the dignity and proprieties thereof, and of the harmony and courtesies which ought to exist and be maintained between the executive and legislative branches of the government of the United States, designing and intending to set aside the rightful authority and powers of Congress, did attempt to bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach the Congress of the United States, and the several branches thereof, to impair and destroy the regard and respect of all the good people of the United States for the Congress and legislative power thereof, (which all officers of the government ought inviolably to preserve and maintain,) and to excite the odium and resentment of all the good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted; and in pursuance of his said design and intent, openly and publicly, and before divers assemblages of the citizens of the United States convened in divers parts thereof to meet and receive said Andrew Johnson as the Chief Magistrate of the United States, did, on the eighteenth day of August, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and on divers other days and times, as well before as afterward, make and deliver with a loud voice certain intemperate, inflammatory and scandalous harangues, and did therein utter loud threats and bitter menaces as well against Congress as the laws of the United States duly enacted thereby, amid the cries jeers and laughter of the multitudes then assembled and in hearing, which are set forth in the several specifications hereinafter written, in substance and effect, that is to say:…

  316. In general, it seems unreasonable to hold a wife responsible for her husband’s sexual misconduct. I suppose Hillary was against it.
    Also in general, I’m opposed to dynastic politics. Having a politically influential husband or father is not a good criterion for elected office.

  317. “Precedence”
    Whazzat?
    Love,
    Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh
    John Roberts has furrowed his brow and you can read portents either way in the furrows, but it’s merely to build suspense for inevitability.
    More likely than the impeachment of p, the case of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson will be reopened by the Federalist Society via a Federal Appeals Court in a state formerly belonging to the Confederate States of America and brought to today’s Supreme Court for re-adjudication and Johnson will be cleared on all counts.
    The racist conservative majority will cite Johnson’s rescission of the “40 Acres and a Mule” program designed as reparations to freed slaves by Abolitionists as evidence that Johnson was on the side of God, Country, and the Constitution of pre-Mandela South Africa.
    He will run posthumously as p’s Vice Presidential running mate in 2020, Mike Pence having been outed as a cross-dressing karaoke DJ by his wife, merely so that she doesn’t have to witness p eating with that mouth of his at state dinners for a second term.
    Next up, Brown versus Board of Education will reach the docket once again with Alito and Gorsuch clerks leaking rumors that the two Justices don’t consider brown an acceptable color except as a sure ticket to prison, preceded by a whoopin.
    After the Andrew Johnson decision, Clarence Thomas’ toes will be feted at on the P White House lawn in a game of Catch a Nigger By The Toe And Never Let Him Go with introductory remarks by Leonard Leo, Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society to a guest list consisting of the Proud Boys, Storm Front members, the KKK Grand Dragon, and the Russian Ambassador to the NRA.
    p will announce a Presidential Pardon of Bill Cosby at the ceremony for his contributions to roofie science and applications in the field of unconscious nut not mutual affection, and p will name him Superintendent of the newly formed all-black Thurgood Marshall National School District, into which all black students in America will be folded into one single campus out of reach of all public and private bus routes in perpetuity, just to make sure.
    Cosby will be asked to use the drinking fountain near the men’s washroom off the main Hall.
    p, with his usual flair for compassion and least-racist-man in-America chops, will disgrace the memory of Sammy Davis Jr by slaughtering and quartering a mule and mailing one quarter to each of the four dusky representatives who comprise the Squad.
    “Don’t say I never did anything for you,” the attached note on White House stationary will say, “but you are out of luck on the acreage, because all of it is designated for the construction of Trump resorts and golf courses. Any of you girls caddy?”

  319. Gerson says what i’ve been thinking.

    The problem, however, is not merely a matter of management. The deeper scandal is this: Trump is trying to make desperate, suffering people the villains of our national story. He compares refugees fleeing repression and violence to snakes. He smears them as rapists and invaders . In his warped moral vision, mercy is a form of national weakness. Kindness and respect are crimes against the state. His approach to nationalism involves slander against the voiceless. It demands further oppression of the oppressed. Trump wants to change not just the policy of our government, but also the character of our country, into something hard, and dark, and dishonorable, and pitiless.

    and the GOP is a cult that’s more interested in cheering for themselves than facing reality.

  320. W.E.B. Dubois:
    “One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginning with the slave trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word ‘Negro’, leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributing every bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modern profit which lies in degrading blacks — all this has unconsciously trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk are subhuman … a mass of despicable men; inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the meat of mobs and fury.”
    It is fully conscious now, the training.

  322. take me to the river!

    Rep. Al Green says he will file articles of impeachment against Trump tonight, despite pushback from Democratic leaders
    The Texas Democrat told The Washington Post that he has notified Democratic leaders of his move to file the articles Tuesday night. Under House rules, Democratic leaders can decide to try to table the impeachment articles, effectively killing them for now; refer them to the House Judiciary Committee for consideration; or allow the vote to proceed as is.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2019/07/16/rep-al-green-says-he-will-file-articles-of-impeachment-against-trump-tonight-despite-pushback-from-democratic-leaders/?utm_term=.fc6d825f9800

  323. If this morbid feedback loop could be rigged to effect the mass extinction of only all conservatives and republicans among the human race worldwide, I would join those right wing vermin who prevent us from doing a fucking thing to ameliorate or reverse the process of mass Death:
    https://www.balloon-juice.com/2019/07/16/acid-tripwire/
    As carbon dioxide will not discriminate, however, I’m making a list of who I need to kill to preserve my son’s future.
    There is much overlap with conservative nationalist racist murderers on my hit list.
    Two birds with one stone times about 50 million filth in this country alone adds up to 25 million stones as weapons, though following the NRA’s theory of 100-bullet gun clips, I’m gathering 2.5 billion stones to be on the safe side.
    Let’s check the math from time to time while there is time.

  324. Bobby, I’d say that, contra your LGM link, economic anxiety was responsible for Trump’s victory. Not that the vast majority of his supporters weren’t responding to his racism and white nationalism (followed by some straight-party-ticket tribalism). But those economic anxiety voters were, I believe, the margin of victory.
    Certainly they were conned. Trump isn’t concerned about the economic situation of anybody but Trump — although the benefits do lap over on the very rich. The question going forward is a combination of how many of those economic anxiety voters can bring themselves to admit they were conned. Or how well can the Democratic candidate convince them that she has a better plan for them.

  325. any chance that anxiety is driven by the GOP screeching, 24/7, “THE IMMIGRANTS ARE GONNA TAKE YR JERBS!” ?

  326. Some of it doubtless is. But I was including those folks in the white nationalist/racist category. By economic anxiety voters I meant those have increasing difficulty making ends meet, and who see the rich getting richer while they cannot see how their children and grandchildren will do better than they did, the way their parents and grandparents did. For all that it was an obvious (at least to us) con job, Trump did at least purport to be speaking to their concerns. While the Democrats failed to articulate their (superior) vision for the problem.

  327. He, Trump is a pussy grabber.
    Yertl McConnell, Little Lindsey Graham, and Father Pence are just a few of the pussies He has grabbed and caused to melt into his arms — unlike many of his women victims.
    The “economic anxiety” voters who fell for He, Trump are more like Melania Knaus: not bright, but willing to get fucked by a transparent charlatan offering baubles and beads. They won’t abandon He, Trump any more than Melania will divorce Him.
    Stop — just stop — talking as if the “white working class” voted for He, Trump on any other basis than his Archie-Bunker-without-the-decency schtick.
    –TP

  328. Yeah, but Meliana at least got paid for prostituting herself. Trump’s voters have not only not gotten paid, in many cases he’s made their economic situation worse.

  330. he’s telling them that they’re winning. and they believe him.
    But if you’re a Midwestern soy bean farmer, and you’ve got crops rotting in the fields because the Chinese market you spent years building have been closed thanks to Trump’s trade wars? Believing you’re winning get really difficult.

  331. Talked to any Midwestern soybean farmers recently, wj? I admit I haven’t, myself.
    I freely acknowledge that Midwestern soybean farmers may be smarter and more competent in many ways than I am, so it’s easy to assume that if I can see that He, Trump has screwed them then so can they. But then again, I know Massachusetts high-tech engineers who I know are smarter and more capable than me, and they still make excuses for Dear Leader. They’ll vote for Him in 2020 because nativist yahooism, if not outright racism, is the foundational creed of their cult.
    –TP

  332. Believing you’re winning get really difficult.
    I would hazard a guess that ‘owning the libs’ is way more important to them.
    At the margin, there were a whole host of things that cost Clinton the election (cf Comey, James). The matter of “loss of (white) manufacturing jobs” and the associated economic anxiety has been a trend since the 1980’s in the upper midwest. When China was admitted to the WTO, this trend accelerated under GWB. Absent you providing any evidence to the contrary, I’ll go with Lemieux as they have discussed this issue at great length on their blog since November, 2016.

  333. Believing you’re winning get really difficult.
    NPR has done approx 834,321,239 stories about these people. they all love Trump, despite the tariffs. they just love the guy and are willing to eat shit for years if he tells them it’s what winners do.

  334. It’s nice that the House condemned Trump’s racist tweets. I’m really glad they did.
    Let’s move quickly on though, because everyone knew he was a racist (and his supporters want that), and the past two days have taken national attention away from the camps. It’s probably good to have it on record in the House that Trump is a racist, so that whenever anything is brought before a judge [appointed by a Democrat, because R’s don’t give a flying f***] that thing is on the record.
    Jesus, help me. (And really, Jesus, if you’re listening, I don’t care whether you’re God or not.) I am so pissed off.

  335. I would hazard a guess that ‘owning the libs’ is way more important to them.
    Important? Certainly. But more important than facing bankruptcy and losing the family farm? No. (Let alone “way more important”.)
    Tony and cleek may be right that the Cult of Trump will carry all before it. For some. But

  339. “as always, the GOP lied about what would happen.”
    Worse, they believe their own lying eyes.
    Moore, Kudlow, Laffer can’t fucking die soon enough.
    Too bad our non-existent rule of law sez it has to be of natural causes.

  340. Women in business and government, let alone housewives, aren’t going to be invited anywhere individually, unless of course they agree to jump out of a cake, by these crypto-Christian conservative republican cocksuckers.
    The vile horndogs find themselves so attractive to the opposite, contradictory gender that they are afraid the ladies won’t be able to help themselves and will beg the filth to grab their lady bits.
    I guess the women will have to meet together among themselves in they want to conduct any business in pigfuck America, at which point vermin subhuman male Christian conservatives will accuse them of lesbian tendencies.
    Unless his wife is on hand, or has him in hand, Pence can’t help “accidentally” dropping his silverware and then diving under the table to fetch it when dining with KellyAnne Conway.
    Excuse me, but the FOXNews pussycats are on the tube at the moment and the cameras are pointing right up their skirts.
    Gotta run.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r8Ze6eXMVU
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwfVaehcdfE
    Roger Ailes is in his over-sized fatboy coffin without pants.

  346. Women in business and government, let alone housewives, aren’t going to be invited anywhere individually, unless of course they agree to jump out of a cake, by these crypto-Christian conservative republican cocksuckers.
    It is odd that their paranoia about possible false accusations has survived the obvious evidence during the past two years that even TRUE accusations don’t significantly damage the perp. See Trump, D., Kavanagh, B., et al.

  350. Per wj @ 10:41: maybe your snarky edge is meant to imply this, but let’s make it explicit: this is just another line of attack in the war to send women back to their place, which is at home cooking meals, providing sex for the lord and master, and having babies.
    Great punch line to a letter to the editor in the nearest thing I have to a home-town paper: I get a hoot out of right-wingers who defend individual freedoms unless they involve a bedroom or reproductive choice. (Or think life begins at conception but ends at birth, after which you are on your own.)

  351. it’s just rather unwise for a presidential candidate to do so.
    i’m not sure that’s true any more.
    the US is no longer a polite and statesmanly state (if it ever was). “fuck the other guy” is where it’s at.
    for example: Trump’s popularity has gone… up, since his latest outburst.

  352. What cleek said.
    And about He, Trump’s rise in “popularity”: if we live among people so deplorable that some of them who disapproved of Him before the racist tweets switched to approving of Him afterward, then I suggest the Dem candidates should start calling them “despicable”. Namby-pamby, touchy-feely words like “deplorable” are too kind.
    –TP

  353. i’m not sure that’s true any more.
    It wasn’t true at the time. The faux hurt feelings were just another way to stick it to Hillary Clinton.
    We need to think and repeat to ourselves this: There is an international conspiracy of oligarchical nationalists who, headed by Russians, have used illegal mob tactics to interfere with elections to bring down liberal democracies throughout the world. Although it’s true that the conspirators have exploited existing cultural resentments and divisions, as well as systemic weaknesses, those factors have always been there. The dictatorships that have resulted are going to be increasingly effective at accumulating and holding power. We really need to know what it is we’re fighting against.
    Continuing the mythology that Hillary didn’t use the right words, or didn’t campaign enough in the right states, is doing a disservice to the truth.

  354. Per wj @ 10:41: maybe your snarky edge is meant to imply this, but let’s make it explicit: this is just another line of attack in the war to send women back to their place, which is at home cooking meals, providing sex for the lord and master, and having babies
    I would say (overlapping, but not quite identical) that it’s another manifestation of living in the idealized mid-20th century. I recollect my high school’s Dean of Boys saying that he always left the door wide open when meeting with a female student. Because “if she gets upset, all she has to do is rip her [own] dress and scream. And you have no defense.”
    These fossils are living in the past. And apparently assume that everybody else is, too.

  355. Life in fantasy land:
    Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said “The President’s record of accomplishments strongly appeals to all voters, including women, blacks, Latinos, and everyone else.” “record of accomplishments”????? What accomplishments?
    (Empty) gestures (accomplishing nothing)? Sure. But actual accomplishments? Well, cutting taxes on the rich — but how that appeals to non-millionaires is less than obvious. The appeal of appointing a flood of incompetents (regardless of their judicial philosophy) as Federal judges is also not exactly obvious.

  356. wj. We fire people where there are true accusations, otherwise we just let them go.i dont know what century you’re in, but your examples arent from walking into hr with a complaint.

  357. according to one subject on today’s NPR Cletus Safari, Trump has done great things in foreign policy by meeting with leaders that no other President was able to.

  358. your examples arent from walking into hr with a complaint.
    Well duh! What HR department do you imagine has jurisdiction here?

  360. I was actually not put off by the judge’s choice to not meet with female colleagues alone and/or someplace where they could not be observed. The bit about wanting to be “respectful to his wife” seemed… odd, but the part about transparency and not providing any opportunity for misunderstanding is, I think, common best practice nowadays.
    Not to say that there isn’t significant weirdness in (R) messaging about women.
    A lovely map of the pain pill epidemic.
    76 billion-with-a-b pills.
    230 oxy hits for every man, woman, and child in the United States.
    That’s a lot of sciatica.

  361. I was actually not put off by the judge’s choice to not meet with female colleagues alone and/or someplace where they could not be observed.
    Whatever policy is adopted should be gender neutral. Two colleagues shouldn’t meet in private ever? Seems unworkable to me.
    If the #metoo movement has created gender apartheid in the workplace, it has failed women.

  363. What accomplishments?
    Court makeup. DOJ reversing the government’s position on a number of issues. Combined, leading a significant push to put control in a range of areas back in the hands of the states, eg, gerrymandering and voter id.
    Roll back most of the progress the Obama administration made in the direction of climate change. Open up more federal land to oil and gas drilling. They haven’t found a way to force increased use of coal, but they’re still looking.
    The national Republicans aren’t trying to turn California into Alabama, they’re just trying to keep enough Alabamas around to control the Senate, the EC, and occasionally the House.

  365. Must be a different Rand Paul from the one who voted for a massive increase in the deficit to fund tax cuts for the rich.

  366. Thanks GftNC. My worry now is that we know, but we’re ignoring it. This is a podcast that I started listening to today: https://theassetpodcast.org/
    I accidentally started with Episode 4, and it was really good. Catching up with the rest now. (It narrates things that we have all read, but in a way that’s easy to digest. I have the Mueller Report in my living room, but have been to busy to read it yet.)

  367. Michael Cain lists what the MAGA maggots would surely agree are examples of He, Trump “getting things done”. This should reinforce my oft-repeated point that “getting things done” is NOT what The American People want, no matter what the pundits claim to know. Some Americans want certain things done; other Americans not only want different things done, but want to prevent the “certain things”.
    I keep waiting for some Democrat to say it plainly: “The Republicons are out to screw you and we’re going to stop them”. The MAGA maggots will respond that they just love getting screwed by Dear Leader for the benefit of their betters, but so what? We’re trying to beat them, not convince them.
    –TP

  368. GftNC, I just realized that you were referring to a different comment of mine than I thought you were. My bad for posting more than I can keep track of.
    But thanks for acknowledging.

  370. One more thing though: the Russia related comments are more important. We are f’d because we ignored it, and we’re still ignoring it.
    Trump’s racism has been obvious for a very long time. I’m glad we’re finally acknowledging it. The cruelty of the Republican party has been a given for a long time (“drill, baby, drill”). What’s new? Feminists arguing vulnerability versus strength and equality is a complicated and difficult story, generations old.
    The fact that we have a foreign agent in the White House is a really weird and new thing to deal with. Nobody knows what to do. Is it too late? Maybe somebody will think of something. Putin did.

  371. Apologies if some of this shows up in a somewhat different form, I can never tell if a comment went to the spam trap, or if I just forgot to post after editing.
    To Michael Cain’s list, I will add, “and the markets are roaring!”.
    There are a lot of people who are more than pleased with the substantive accomplishments of the Trump administration. Not just the cartoon people peddled by the NYT – “economically insecure” former factory workers in flannel shirts in a diner in Indiana – but all kinds of people. People in my neighborhood and yours.
    That disturbs me, because it tells me exactly how freaking broken we are as a people.
    We aren’t going to make progress until we are talking about stuff other than Donald J Trump and whatever freaking horrendous thing he did today. And I don’t think we’ll be able to do that until he is the hell out of the Oval Office. If then. Because he won’t allow it. It’s not how he wants it, and now he has the biggest freaking bullhorn on the planet.
    He is the turd in the punchbowl, and he likes it that way. It is, literally, the source of his power.
    The Russian thing is enormously consequential, because Vladimir Putin, having extorted murdered and otherwise criminally advanced himself to the head of a nation somewhat reduced in international clout, has discovered that money is as good as guns when it comes to exerting influence. Better, maybe, because with money you can corrupt your adversaries and rot them from the inside out.
    Putin wants to undermine NATO specifically, and undermine the rule and influence of tolerant non-authoritarian self-governing open societies in general. Trump is his fncking dream come true.
    As a sort-of aside – if we don’t navigate the current issue with Turkey skillfully, they may end up out of NATO, and from there either be unallied or else unambiguously within the scope of Russian influence. Turkey is, to an unparalleled degree, a strategic piece in the geopolitical puzzle. All that has to happen to totally bollocks that situation is for Trump to be a dick. Place your bets.
    Lather rinse and repeat for Iran, Israel and the Palestinians, China as a hegemon in the Pacific Rim. And on and on. Trump’s approach to everything is to yell at people until they do what he wants. He is no longer playing in the NYC real estate market, and he’s no longer playing with other people’s money. He is dealing with actors who represent old, in some case ancient, societies, who have been around the block more times than Trump has crapped in his golden toilet, and who have the subtlety to play him like a violin. And he’s playing with the fucking planet.
    I don’t think he has the chops for this game. He is not an unintelligent man, but he is bone ignorant, and profoundly, narcissistically vain, and vulnerable to flattery and cupidity. He is a walking, talking mark. It’s disturbing.
    His approach to solidifying political power within the US is to press every divisive button he can find. Repeatedly. That doesn’t bode well for us.
    And what worries the hell out of me is not Trump, but all of the people who think he is the best thing since sliced bread.
    He tells it like it is! No, he says what you wish you could say, but are too embarrassed to say out loud in public.
    Those are two different things, and you are fucking right to be embarrassed. Consider your embarrassment a mirror, a gift from whatever benevolent powers may exist in the universe, sent to help you save your damned soul.
    And listen to what it tells you.
    Rhetorical you, natch.

  373. Without his base, Trump would be another rich asshole on the TV. He’d be a Kardashian, with a smaller butt. Or maybe not a smaller butt.
    I don’t give a crap about Donald J Trump one way or the other. It’s the people who think “he speaks for them” that make me wonder where this is all going to end up.

  374. Trump is of course nothing without his crowd, but it is his crowd chanting “send her back”. It is a dangerous symbiosis.

  375. Without his base, Trump would be another rich asshole on the TV. He’d be a Kardashian, with a smaller butt. Or maybe not a smaller butt.
    But definitely a smaller brain. (I disagree, obviously, with your thesis that “He is not an unintelligent man.” He is exactly an unintelligent man. I’d buy dead average, but nothing beyond maybe 55th percentile. He’s not interested in learning anything, but even if he decided he was, he’s just not capable.

  380. beautiful:

    “We’re not going to let Donald Trump dismantle the Bill of Rights. For five and half years, every time we got to the floor and try to push back against an overreaching president, we get accused of being partisan at best and racist at worst. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see it was a principled objection in the first place.”

    — current WH CoS Mick Mulvaney, chest thumping in 2016 about how he and the Congressional GOP were going to stand up to Trump.

  381. When we do it against a Republican president, maybe people will see it was a principled objection in the first place.
    And he was totally correct. IF he and his buddies had done so, that would certainly have been evidence (not proof, but evidence) that they had been acting, at least in part, on principle rather than racism. But it must be said that their total failure to do so constitutes evidence that their objections to Obama being racist and partisan rather than principled.
    Of course, anyone with a working brain cell knew that the vigor of their objections to Obama and all his works was solidly grounded in racism. It’s not like most of them made a serious effort to conceal the fact.

  382. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-immigration-policies-speak-louder-than-his-racist-xenophobic-words/2019/07/18/e8309a76-a996-11e9-86dd-d7f0e60391e9_story.html

    Last week, the Department of Homeland Security sent its draft final regulation of the “public charge” rule to the White House for final review. This rule would make it more difficult for immigrants who’ve used noncash safety-net services to which they are legally entitled — or who are deemed at risk of ever using such services — to receive green cards or temporary visas.

    Why am I guessing that, for this administration, “at risk” will translate seamlessly to “non-white”?

  384. If the “xenophobic jingoists” ever get shamed into acting like decent human beings, it will be because people like Marty, McKinney, Slarti et al stand up to them. Criticisms from DFHs like us only gives MAGA maggots a woodie.
    –TP

  385. UK politics are nothing to boast about, but no mainstream politician would go near Trump’s racism.

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