The Trump shutdown goes on and on and on. As does the president* himself: he tweeted 40 times yesterday according to Politico.
The Insult Comedian’s attempt to impose a “compromise” flopped. Bigly. It’s what happens when the “negotiations” involve only Republicans. It pissed off anti-immigration hardliners and was rejected out of hand by Nancy Smash *before* Trump spoke. She continues to play contract bridge while the president* plays go-fish.
The Turtle finally poked his head out of his shell but the proposal went nowhere Saturday and will not get 60 votes in the Senate. Democrats remain united even though reports of suffering federal employees are painful. We can’t negotiate with a gun pointed at our heads. If we give in, Trump will pull this stunt over and over again.
It’s Martin Luther King Day everywhere in the country except in Mississippi and Alabama where it’s MLK/Robert E. Lee Day. The Lost Cause dream dies hard in the cradle of the confederacy. I wonder if Jeff Beau Sessions is wearing gray today?
It’s “we wuz robbed” day in New Orleans after that egregious blown call in the NFC Championship game. There are even calls for a Saints parade on Super Bowl Sunday. I’m not crazy about the idea. I’d prefer placing the refs in the stocks and pelting them with stale King Cake, but that’s just me. Vengeance is sticky…
That concludes this edition of America Held Hostage. The last word goes to U2:
WASHINGTON — The White House is describing comments by Republican Rep. Steve King about white supremacy as “abhorrent.”
Presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders is praising the move by House Republicans to strip the nine-term Iowa lawmaker of his committee assignments.
So – not only did The Darnold call King’s blather “abhorrent”, he sent Baghdad Boob out to the assembled press corps to say so.
.
I’m sure this dolchstosslegende is going to bring down the wrath of Freeperville on ole Tweety Amin.
.
No?
.
To: Blue House Sue
Horse crap.
That’s no way to talk about your Fuhrer.
His comments were no such thing. Vilification of someone asking a question regarding today’s political discourse, or the lack thereof, is eroding our representative foundation.
2 posted on 1/16/2019, 11:01:18 AM by rjsimmon (The Tree of Liberty Thirsts)
To: Blue House Sue
Jeez…yet another successful political assassination by the New York Times Trump.
4 posted on 1/16/2019, 11:02:21 AM by House Atreides (Boycott the NFL 100% — PERMANENT)
FIFY.
To: House Atreides
Jeez…yet another successful political assassination by the New York Times.
The New York Times didn’t spy on the guy and illegally record his conversations.
He sat down and gave them an ‘effing interview.
I have no sympathy — and no patience — for a moron like this. I hope he resigns soon, so he can be replaced by someone who has an IQ above 80.
6 posted on 1/16/2019, 11:05:29 AM by Alberta’s Child (“In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey.”)
.
Well, that rules out The Darnold. I hear that Randy Quaid is available…
.
So – there’s two schools of so-called thought here – King was an idiot for saying this shit on the record, and King is an upstanding true American for saying this shit on the record.
.
And not one person from either of these two special needs schools is blaming The Darnold for his stabbity-stab in the back of the once and future King.
.
Not one.
.
To: Blue House Sue
Just what in the hell did Steve King say that was so abhorrent?That he was a white nationalist.
Well so am I. I’m a white male
What a shocker!
and I love my country and I hate seeing where the commiecrats are taking us.
10 posted on 1/16/2019, 11:13:17 AM by puppypusher ( The world is going to the dogs.)
One Freeper ALMOST goes there :
To: Blue House Sue
Why is the White House falling for this NYT smear?
White House can not afford to throw conservative leaning legislators under the bus every time someone on the left attacks them.
Foolish.
11 posted on 1/16/2019, 11:16:39 AM by unlearner (War is coming.)
.
.
Fortunately for “unlearner”, nobody responds to his little tiptoe through the minefield.
.
Join me below the fold for Ann Coulter’s wall squall.
At the shopping mall, because it was the 1980s. With my aunt.
We were sitting by some kind of fountain or courtyard. There were lots of little kids jumping and playing, chasing each other, their voices echoing off the tile floors and metal furniture. I don’t remember why some of them bothered me, whether they bumped into me or I just saw them and didn’t like them, but they bothered me somehow.
And I turned to my aunt — both of us so white as to be transparent, in case you’re new here — and I said, “Look at those little colored boys running around.”
I’d heard older relatives use that word. I’d heard the tone of contempt in their voices when they did it. I mimicked both, no, I said it. I was old enough to know better and I said it meanly.
“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?”
My aunt grabbed me by the shoulder. I’ll never forget the look on her face. She dragged me to a chair and got down to my level and she asked me a question I couldn’t answer then and certainly can’t now.
“Who do you think you are? You think you’re better than them? Why, because they’re black and you’re not?”
She was fuming. Exasperated. But somehow sad, too.
“You don’t call people ‘colored.’ That’s a terrible thing old people said a long time ago. They prefer African-American. And you don’t talk about people that way, ever, no matter what they look like or what they’re doing.”
She adored me. I was her tiny little princess who she spoiled and indulged. I’d never seen her angry at me before but she was angry then.
It’s been more than 30 years and I think about that moment all the time.
In video footage that was shared widely on social media, one boy, wearing the red hat that has become a signature of President Trump, stood directly in front of the elder, who stared impassively ahead while playing a ceremonial drum.
Some boys in the group wore clothing associated with Covington Catholic High School, an all-male college preparatory school in Park Hills, Ky., near Cincinnati.
High school kids surrounded and intimidated an elderly Native American man and laughed while they did it.
Public shaming is getting out of hand in this country and more often than not, we aren’t getting the full story. Anyways, it’s time we as a nation learn not to judge others when you and I are nowhere near perfect. We need to forgive because we’ve all said and done dumb things in our lives, especially when we were their age.
Probably lots of kids are stupid. Lots of kids are shitheads.
But that’s the point.
When they do shit like this, you correct them and you educate them and you for the love of God don’t make excuses for them and then turn around and scream about how the elderly Native American man they were taunting “started it” because then they learn nothing.
Yelling at adult MAGA chuckleheads is beyond pointless. They’re out there cheering for this, they’re past changing. But some of the kids might not be.
Unless the only response by the adults in their lives is to pretend their kids did nothing wrong.
This is bad reporting. Those that were there said the man approached the kids beating his drum and even joined into the kids as well as they did to his beat. Disgusting what the AP did with this. If you notice the man is smiling as the Indian does the “stare down” done during the ritual. Jeez.
I think about my aunt and the mall when kids do stupid, racist things. I think about the time I came home from school laughing because somebody called somebody else a faggot and I thought that word sounded funny and my mom explained why it wasn’t. I think about the people who took the time to knock my ass down when I spoke out of turn or presumed or overstepped.
I think about how long it took me to be grateful for those times.
Would she have done me any favors, my aunt, had she simply shushed me? Had she made sure nobody heard, and then muttered darkly about the “PC police” and “the media” setting up “good kids” to look bad? Would that have, in any way, prepared me for the world we live in now?
If they’re “just kids” that means there’s a chance they could turn back from this.
The adults in their lives egging them on and defending them are the ones who are irredeemable.
The weather roller coaster continues in New Orleans but nobody cares because the Saints are playing the Rams in the NFC championship game tomorrow. Our loud fans are bound to blow the roof off the Superdome and it’s going to be raucous everywhere in town. There’s some overconfidence among the fans but very little on the team itself. I still refuse to say Who Dat but I will say Geaux Saints.
In other local news, the Rolling Stones are playing Jazz Fest. I’ve seen the Stones 6 times, but I’m not shelling out $185 for their special day, which is especially expensive. I may just have to listen for free from my top-secret location nearby. Here’s my only comment on the continuing gentrification of Jazz Fest:
This week’s theme song, Drinking Again, was written in 1962 by Johnny Mercer and Doris Tauber. We have versions by two of the greatest singers ever: Aretha Franklin and Francis Albert Sinatra. Bottoms up.
The song was reworked in 1968 by the Jeff Beck Group:
I’ve been following British politics my entire adult life. In the pre-Brexit era, there were occasional outbreaks of lunacy on the extremes of both major parties. But since the country narrowly voted to leave the European Union, there’s been an unprecedented outbreak of the crazy. It’s as if the Raging Monster Loony Party has seized control of both Labour and the Tories. Yes, there really is such a thing. It’s the real life counterpart of Monty Python’s Silly Party.
That brings me to this week’s events in the House of Commons. First, hapless Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit “compromise” bill was overwhelmingly defeated. Then, the equally hapless Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, tabled a vote of no-confidence in the government. The Prime Minister won that vote since the last thing her party wants to do is face the electorate.
May is a stoical and unemotional leader. That’s why the Guardian’s John Crace dubbed her the Maybot. Remind you of anyone? May, however, makes Willard Mittbot Romney look like a ball of fire.
“She is indestructible,” wrote Tom Peck, a sketch writer for the Independent, reflecting on the events of the day. “She is the cockroach in nuclear winter. She is the algae that survives on sulphuric gas from subaquatic volcanoes, seven miles beneath the daylight. She is the Nokia 5210.”
That’s quite a list. The only comparison Peck missed is this one: She is the Keith Richards of Prime Ministers. I’ve long referred to Keef as a human cockroach. Indestructibility is the only thing the two have in common.
The last word goes to (who else?) Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones:
I keep dating myself (I kiss and tell too) on this blog but I do it for a good cause. I remember when ABC News launched a late night newscast after bored students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took a bunch of hostages to avoid studying for finals. The show was originally called America Held Hostage before morphing into Nightline, which is apparently still airing but I haven’t seen it in eons. A late night network news show is now kinda quaint but it was cutting edge in 1979.
The Trump shutdown is in its 26th day, which is the longest in American history. That makes it the latest in a series of dubious firsts for the Trump regime.
The modern era of extortion by government shutdown started in 1995 when Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House and Bill Clinton president. The Gingrich shutdown was the previous record holder at 21 days. Clinton stood frim and the GOP took the blame for that shutdown.
I feel the pain of federal workers who have missed a paycheck but it’s important for Democrats to hold firm on the Trump shutdown. If they cave, he will keep doing this every time his will is thwarted. It’s extortion pure and simple.
Speaker Pelosi’s SOTU gambit was smashing. She *is* the host of the event and is hoping that Trump will be unable to resist the clarion call of a speech in the most dramatic setting imaginable. The Insult Comedian loves the sound of sycophantic GOPers cheering his every lie, after all. He’s unlikely to revert to the pre-1913 custom of a written SOTU. Woodrow Wilson initiated the modern in-person SOTU but he was a noted orator, not a ranter like Trump.
It’s time to thank the president* for taking responsibility for the shutdown. I’ll never forget the smirk on Chuck Schumer’s face when Trump fell into that trap. It’s what happens when you have no impulse control and cannot STFU. That’s why Rex Tillerson called him a fucking moron. Thanks, Trumpy.
At day 26, it’s no longer just the Trump shutdown, it’s the Trump-McConnell shutdown. There are the votes in the Senate to override a presidential veto but Chinless Mitch won’t schedule a vote despite how badly Republicans are tanking in the polls. The Turtle has crawled back into his shell. I didn’t know they hibernated.
Republicans are desperate – and not even doing much or well to hide it – to have Democrats start negotiating with them about a wall. We’ve moved on from demanding the chunk of money. Now it’s wanting to negotiate, begging frankly. For all the atmospherics and strategies, the only important point to make is that the President is holding the government hostage to force his way. That has to stop. The shutdown bacillus that Newt Gingrich injected into our political system in 1995 must be eradicated. It was dormant for almost two decades until Republicans (neo-Gingrichites) returned to power in the House in 2011. It’s wrong. It’s destructive. And it’s the same principle we apply to all terrorists. You can’t negotiate with terrorists or hostage takers, because it encourages the behavior.
My own effort isn’t nearly as impressive, but I cranked it out pretty quickly; The Yes Men’s latest was carefully crafted and well worth a look
Early this morning, thousands of commuters in Washington, D.C. were handed a spitting image of the Washington Post. But this one was dated May 1, 2019 — and in lieu of the Post’s usual tagline, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the phrase “Democracy Awakens in Action” appeared at the top. The paper’s lead headline: “Unpresidented: Trump Hastily Departs White House, Ending Crisis.” (An online version of the paper has also been making the rounds, at democracyawakensinaction.org, complete with PDF of the print version.)
A scan of the paper’s front page offers up a compelling backstory for Trump’s flight: a women-led, multi-racial grassroots resistance. Their winning strategy is borrowed from other movements against authoritarian rulers: target those who support the tyrant, rather than the tyrant himself.
That strategy has also led to growing support for a package of groundbreaking progressive legislation known as the “Bundle”: 64 bills sure to be popular across the political spectrum, including some — the Green New Deal bills, Medicare for All, the H.R. 1 election reform bill — that already are.
“The story this paper tells is more reasonable than our current reality,” says author Onnesha Roychoudhuri, who created the paper together with author L.A. Kauffman and trickster activist collective the Yes Men. “And it’s anything but far-fetched. We’re already seeing unprecedented levels of protest and resistance. Now we just need to ask ourselves: What’s next? This paper offers a blueprint to help us reclaim our democracy.”
It’s been a bad week for the president* thus far. His wildly unpopular shutdown enters its 27th day, he’s been mocked for serving cold hamberders to jocks from Clemson, and his administration* has been leaking like a sieve. The stories about his NATO-phobia and Interpretergate have been particularly damaging as well as damning. It’s been an excellent week, however, for Putin’s plan to foment chaos in what used to be called the free world. We’ll just have to keep on rockin’…
Enough of the Insult Comedian, let’s talk about *other* Republicans in disarray. Two past malakas of the week have been in the news: Steve King and Chris Christie.
The Same Old Racist Iowa Cornholer: Emulating Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy is shocked, shocked to learn that Steve King is a bigot. Based on his legendary “untrustable in hungria” comment, McCarthy is not the brightest bulb in the lamp. He’s also not very observant: Steve King was a racist long before he was stripped of his committee assignments. I wrote about it in a 2017 post called King Of The Bigots and Trip Gabriel of the Failing New York Times has compiled Steve King’s Greatest Hits. What a long, strange Trip it’s been.
Perhaps Kevin hadn’t noticed before because his head is so far up Trump’s ample rump that he’s been blind to King’s racism. It’s a lame excuse: King has been saying this shit since he was a member of the Iowa lege. This quote comes from 2002, when the Trump presidency* was just a bad dream:
Mr. King, in the Iowa State Senate, files a bill requiring schools teach that the United States “is the unchallenged greatest nation in the world and that it has derived its strength from … Christianity, free enterprise capitalism and Western civilization.”
The Congressman from next door Metry and past malaka of the week, Steve Scalise, has been too busy selling books and pretending NOT to be a more politically viable David Duke to notice King’s bigotry either. Scalise prefers code words to raw naked hatred but he’s guilty of Renault-ism as well:
The King of Bigots took to the House floor yesterday to defend himself:
.@SteveKingIA: "It's 13 words, ironically, that's caused this firestorm."
King on the Civil War: "I come from a family of abolitionists. Maybe I would have some artifacts from…my five-time great-grandfather if he hadn’t been killed in that conflict. This means something to me." pic.twitter.com/VSvT9Szymp
Dolts like King always twist history to justify their words and actions. Many abolitionists were racists and preferred emigration and separation to integration and equality. I wonder if King has ever heard of Liberia.
The only reason Republicans stripped the bark off King’s committee assignments is that House Democrats voted to rebuke the Iowa Cornholer’s latest statements. The vote was 424-1. And the no vote came from Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush who thought the House should censure the King of Bigots.
Let’s move on to our next example of Republicans in disarray. The post title feels slightly illicit since it mocks a million such stories about Democrats in Tiger Beat on the Potomac aka Politico. Perhaps I’ll win the morning.
Governor Asshole’s Revenge: There’s a consensus out there that the Trump regime operates like a mob family. I’ve even given him a wise guy name: Don Donaldo Il Comico Insulto.
The man who wanted to be Clemenza to Trump’s Godfather has written a book that verifies the old Sicilian adage “revenge is a dish best served cold.” I wonder if the dish is pizza? I happen to like cold, leftover pizza for breakfast. I’ve also been known to hold a grudge.
Back to Christie’s upcoming tome, Let Me Finish. Yesterday, the Guardian published an exclusive article about the most explosive parts of the book, which involve the Governor Asshole/Slumlord Jared blood feud:
Christie blames this key player[Kushner] in the president’s inner circle for his ignominious dismissal shortly after Trump’s election victory in November 2016. Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, writes that Kushner’s role in his sacking was confirmed to him by Steve Bannon, Trump’s campaign chief, in real time.
As Bannon was carrying out the firing, at Trump Tower in New York, Christie forced him to tell him who was really behind the dismissal by threatening to go to the media and point the finger at Bannon instead.
“Steve Bannon … made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago.”
The political assassination was carried out by Kushner as a personal vendetta, Christie writes, that had its roots in his prosecution, as a then federal attorney, of Charles Kushner in 2005. The real estate tycoon was charged with witness tampering and tax evasion and served more than a year in federal prison.
Apologies for the long quote but I couldn’t quite channel my inner Mario Puzo or David Chase this morning, so I let the Guardian guys do it for me.
I’ve missed having Governor Asshole to kick around. I’m glad he’s publishing an *almost* tell-all book about the Trump regime. I say almost because he’s softer on Trumpberius than on anyone else:
At his first meeting with Trump in 2002, at a dinner in the Trump International Hotel and Tower, in New York, Trump ordered his food for him. He chose scallops, to which Christie is allergic, and lamb which he has always detested. Christie recalls wondering whether Trump took him to be “one of his chicks”.
At another dinner three years later Trump told the obese Christie he had to lose weight. Addressing him like one of the contestants in Miss Universe, the beauty contest organisation that he owned, Trump said “you gotta look better to be able to win” in politics.
Trump returned to the theme of girth during the 2016 presidential campaign, exhorting Christie to wear a longer tie as it would make him look thinner.
Christie hates lamb? Fuck him and the long red tie he rode in on. Was that a bridge too far? Nah, in the immortal words of Bobby Bacala:
No, Bobby, I don’t. It’s what I do.
There’s one more example of Republicans in disarray. Chinless Mitch may be preventing a vote on re-opening the government but he lost a vote yesterday, which had to be one of the most newsworthy Tuesdays in history. One could even call it Christie Gras.
The Oleg Deripaska Sanctions Blues: Team Trump wants to lift sanctions on the Russian oligarch to whom Paul Manafort owes millions of dollars, Oleg Deripaska. 11 Republican Senators joined Democrats to stop this move in its tracks; one of whom, to my great surprise, was Gret Stet Senator John Neely Kennedy of Neelyisms fame. As Neely himself might put it, even a blind pig finds an acorn sometime. Boy howdy.
This was a preliminary vote: they need 2 more GOP votes to stop Mnuchin’s folly but any sign of Republican disarray is inordinately pleasing. Props to Chuck Schumer for organizing this mini uprising. He’s showing more backbone since Nancy Smash became Speaker. Keep it up, Chuck.
That concludes this episode of Republicans In Disarray Theatre. The last word goes to the Gin Blossoms who have anthropomorphized disarray.
It’s been cold so I ran a search for winter album covers and came up with Winter In America. This 1974 album is a collaborator between the late, great Gil Scott-Heron and his old friend jazz pianist Brian Jackson. The cover art is by another friend of the duo’s Eugene Coles.
Here’s a nifty inner sleeve collage designed by Peggy Harris:
I’d never heard this album until this week. It’s pretty darn good.
Now on top of those errors, the graf above says VICE wanted ppl with “the look.” “But” it hired “very young” reporters w/ “scant experience.” I’m the 1st example of this. Elements of the graf paint me as an “edgy” but inept diversity hire, rather than a competent journalist.
Jill Abramson follows four companies: The New York Times, The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, and VICE Media over a decade of disruption and radical adjustment. The new digital reality nearly kills two venerable newspapers with an aging readership while creating two media behemoths with a ballooning and fickle audience of millennials. We get to know the defenders of the legacy presses as well as the outsized characters who are creating the new speed-driven media competitors. The players include Jeff Bezos and Marty Baron (TheWashington Post), Arthur Sulzberger and Dean Baquet (TheNew York Times), Jonah Peretti (BuzzFeed), and Shane Smith (VICE) as well as their reporters and anxious readers.
Merchants of Truth raises crucial questions that concern the well-being of our society. We are facing a crisis in trust that threatens the free press. Abramson’s book points us to the future.
I’ll keep saying it until I’m dead but you are not talking about what’s happened to journalism unless you’re talking about money.
Hedge fund money. Billionaire money. Corporate money and the slavering greed that called 17 percent profit margins “struggling” and pissed away every ounce of customer loyalty that media brands spent centuries building.
Media company bosses fired experienced reporters and hired younger ones, counting on the old hands to yell at their replacements and not their bosses and for 20 years that’s been the response, along with screaming at “millennials” to stop being so hip and edgy and getting their news “for free.” You are not talking about what happened to journalism unless you’re talking about that.
For that matter, you are not talking about what’s happened to journalism unless you’re talking about the consolidation of production and delivery that doomed people who wanted information to getting it irregularly, incorrectly or not at all.
You are not talking about what happened to journalism unless you’re talking about systematically attacking customers by redirecting them to bloated, heaving websites that drop 35 ad trackers on you while screaming at you to subscribe even after you log in three times.
You are not talking about what happened to journalism unless you’re talking about running a sports team and a TV station and an events production company and a luxury high-rise with the money you’re supposed to be spending on DOING THE FUCKING NEWS.
If you’re talking about the content, and taking potshots at the hip hairstyles of people who ACTUALLY WANT TO BE REPORTERS IN THIS GODFORSAKEN MEDIA HELLSCAPE (people you should be mentoring and nurturing and encouraging, not smacking around for violating your antique gender norms), you are already so far behind the 8-ball that locating Charlottesville in North Carolina is the least of your problems.
And let’s not even get started on supposedly surveying everything the light touches in American journalism without centering Fox and its media and cultural imitators, who are responsible for the parts of the slaughter hedgies haven’t gotten to yet.
In the year of our Lord and Savior Nellie Bly 2018, we cannot possibly still be saying the problem is young people with partially shaved heads. In the year of endless hearings into misinformation on Facebook shared over and over by elderly MAGAtroids, our pundit class cannot still be obsessed with the blogger ethics panic that seized the entirety of the early oughts, right?
Got into a discussion the other day about the infuriating cost of dental work and the near-total uselessness of dental insurance and a friend pointed my way to this story, which explains in some ways why my dentist acts like money doesn’t exist:
On a recent Friday, Michael Hanson, 54, a lobsterman who went 15 years without seeing a dentist, was sitting in the community health clinic near Maine’s Acadia National Park. Over time, lack of care and poor health ruined Hanson’s teeth. In February, they were all pulled. He sat toothless, talking about eating soft food for months while he awaits his dentures.
Hanson said his daughter, too, skips annual exams because it is hard to come up with the money.
The dental system is broken, he said. “You go to the hospital and they give you time to pay your bill. But you go to the dentist and they want you to pay right there, and people just don’t have the money.”
The sickest I’ve ever been was from a botched root canal that abscessed. No pain was like that in my life, not the C-section, not the burst ovarian cyst, not the herniated back disc. At 3 a.m. I was begging Mr. A to either pull the tooth out with pliers or put me immediately to death. But in calling around to emergency rooms to try to find someone to shoot me like a horse we realized almost none of them consider dental care health care at all.
I have a decent dentist now, but my teeth are genetically horrible and if I tilt my head just right I can get radio signals, I have so much metal in my head. Every time I go in it’s $200 with head-shaking advice to spend approximately 10 grand (I’m exaggerating but only a little) on veneers, replacing all my old fillings, getting implants and/or bridges, and they get downright SHIRTY when I say flat-out that I can’t afford what they want to do.
“When are you going to get these implants?” the dentist asked, noting the four holes in my mouth where adult teeth never came in.
“When they’re free.” She stared at me like I’d suggested paying her with my body. At $3,500 times four, it would be the only way to get it done.
If we had a decent government and not a dumpster fire overseen by a fascist lunatic, we’d be adding to Obamacare a few levels that let us get our teeth fixed before we all died of blood poisoning or had to get dentures in our 30s.
I’ve saved the best for last: a Krewe du Vieux worthy mini-float that the unknown (to me) artist calls Fat Man and Little Boy after the first two nukes, They’re definitely da bomb.
Statue of Trump dressed as Napoleon riding a nuclear bomb at the New Orleans protest ahead of his speech to the Farm Bureau pic.twitter.com/AMLNtMEESc
Finally, after a shaky start the Saints beat the Eagles 20-14. Next up are the Rams in the NFC Championship Game. We’ll see if Jared Goff handles the crowd noise better than Nick Foles. We witnessed a Foles fail yesterday and it wasn’t even the fall.
I still refuse to say Who Dat but I will say GEAUX SAINTS.
I wasn’t surprised by Friday’s NYT blockbuster but I was still shocked. We need to retain the capacity to be shocked, if we lose it, they win. There are more stories of White House horrors in the pipeline, if we’re numb to the outrages, they win. This is not normal.
I’ve resisted the temptation to label Kremlingate the worst scandal in American political history, but that ended Friday with the confirmation that the FBI has investigated Trump’s sinister pro-Russian conduct as president*. Imagine if Woodrow Wilson had connived with the Kaiser in 1916 or if FDR was in league with Tojo and Hirohito in 1940. That’s where we find ourselves in 2019.
I deliberately picked the years before war was declared (a quaint thing we used to do in the pre-Korea/Vietnam/Gulf Wars era) to remind everyone that Trump’s peacetime affiliation with Putin’s Russia is subversion and sedition, not treason, which, as I pointed out early last year, is the only crime defined in the constitution:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
treason n the offense of attempting to overthrow the government of one’s country or of assisting its enemies in war.
We’re not at war with Russia and when it comes to the law words matter. I understand why the T word and its variations roll off the tongue and one’s twitter timeline but repeat after me: Kremlingate is sedition, not treason.
I’m *almost* a Russia hawk but I don’t want war. Bullies like Putin should be resisted. But we should use the tried and tested methods of containment. It worked with the infinitely more powerful Soviet Union. Putin’s efforts to subvert small-L, small-D liberal democracy by stealth are an admission of weakness, not strength. Unfortunately, we have a fake tough guy as president* who is compromised by Russian intelligence.
Until last Friday, I was in favor of slow walking impeachment. I’m well aware that it’s a politically explosive topic. The last thing I want is for Trump’s eroding base to rally around him BUT with the latest confirmation of his seditious activities there’s no choice but to impeach. Timing remains important: the House should wait for Muller to issue his final report on the Kremlingate aspects of this sprawling scandal. BUT they will have to confront this issue directly this year even if the votes to convict in the Senate aren’t there. At the very least, impeachment will turn this president* into a political eunuch.
As I’ve said many times before, Watergate was my formative political issue. In fact, I’m currently re-reading Woodstein’s The Final Days. So, I’m loathe to admit that any scandal is worse than Watergate or that any president is more corrupt than Richard Nixon but the time has come to put aside my “childish ways” and agree with Congressperson Rashida Tlaib that it’s time to “impeach the motherfucker.”
It seems like Kanye’s deranged behavior is here to stay in 2019.
Through 2018, Kanye had a lot of ups and downs in his personal life. The rapper has seemed to have fallen from stardom due to his outspoken personality and random outburst. Because of his actions he has lost the respect of the peers in the world of music. It seems as though his arrogance continues to grow and rubbed people throughout the year. It even went as for to typical Kanye finding ways to piss people off at Cher opening. Most of the animosity has come by way of him being an advocate for Donald Trump within the urban community.
Many people were appalled when news broke that Kanye West arrives at Whitehouse for lunch with Trump. Fellow artist that have accepted Kanye West stunts in the past would not be silent on this particular shenanigan. Artist such as Snoop Dogg, T.I., and former label mate Camron took to social media to air out the Chicago native. Everyone is highly offended by Mr. West rocking the highly controversial “Make America Great Again” hat. Shortly after his wife Kim Kardashian says she educated Kanye after the Trump visit.
Longtime colleague Charlemagne Da God canceled his interview his discussion with Kanye West because of his public outcry for attention. After all of the drama, Yeezy eventually apologized publicly on Twitter for making the wrong stance regarding the world of politics. Even his label Pusha T claimed that Kanye doesn’t wear the MAGNA hat anymore. At the moment it seems as though Kanye is back to supporting Trump again. During his cabinet meeting to kick off the year, the President shouted out Mr. West.
It’s obvious that Ye loves to be the center of attention, as he even called out larger than life rapper Drake on Twitter. He claims that Drizzy took shots at him several times, and he was steamin after Drake followed his wife on Instagram.
Is Kanye really deranged? Or is he trying to stay relevant?
I never pay any attention to the worthless, lowlife filth. Anyone who did an idiot. He’s a con-artist, subhuman garbage and a racist POS. He richly deserves the “Tupac Treatment”, bigtime, for his trash rags and noise.
10 posted on 1/2/2019, 11:30:21 PM by carriage_hill (A society grows great when old men plant trees, in whose shade they know they will never sit.)
I’ve been following this conversation with interest because the way I respond to burnout is really specific and goes against the standard advice — just take a break! learn to breathe again! — and plays into the specificity of millennial burnout, as opposed to my late-GenX crabbiness:
My own behavior didn’t make sense to me because I didn’t recognize it as burnout. But everyone’s burnout works differently — which is why my immediate follow-up to the piece was to collect 16 different accounts of how burnout accumulates differently for people from different backgrounds, with different life conditions, with different contexts. As I said last week, no one’s “bottom half of their to-do list” — the things they avoid and find themselves incapable of completing — are exactly the same, and the consequences of the inability to complete them are different. If I don’t get my knives sharpened (still haven’t! the sharpener guy wasn’t at the store!) I might accidentally cut myself while cutting onions, but no huge deal. But if one of the things on my list was my inability to go renew my driver’s license, or make a doctor’s appointment, or find shoes that are comfortable for walking, or have a conversation with my kid’s teacher, or tell my boss about a coworker who makes my life hell — the consequences are different.
In the mid-oughts I had the work I always wanted to have, and it was making me fucking miserable. I’m not talking about a bad job, or a bad boss, or even a few rough days at the office. I’m talking the thing I wanted to do since I was six years old literally wasn’t working for me on any level at all. I would have incredible successes and go home feeling like I’d been hit by a truck. It was all I ever wanted to do and I hated doing it so much I started smoking.
Take a vacation! You need a break! That was everybody’s advice. Take a day off! Okay, but when I get back and I don’t feel refreshed, then what? Because I took days off, days and days off. And I spent them curled up on the bed hyperventilating.
I don’t need a break, I would say. I need this not to suck. Breaks just delayed the suck, and then anticipating it was another level of suck entirely.
I read Anne’s first piece thinking “all these people need a combination of psychiatric medication, lots of it, and to read Unfuck Your Habitat with their therapists” because “errand paralysis” is one of MY danger signs of depression. I stop making haircut appointments and mailing shit and then I stop sleeping, eating and taking my meds. It’s a slippery slope from not emptying the dishwasher to talking to myself on the train is what I’m saying, but when I got done wishing everyone could afford to see a decent doctor I started wishing everybody could have work they felt good about.
Burnout to me isn’t about being tired. I worked something like 60 hours a week this past fall and I didn’t even FEEL any of them. Sure I was exhausted, caffeine toxicity is a real thing and I’ve had it twice in my life, once when Kick was a newborn and once in October, but I wasn’t burned out. I was just tired. Tired is easy. Tired, you take a nap.
Feeling like nothing matters and you can’t bring yourself to participate in the world, that’s burned out.
So many people not only can’t take a break, can’t catch their breath, but also so many people’s work fucking sucks. We devalue work a lot in this country even as we chain ourselves to it, with our catchy little “nobody ever died wishing they spent more time at work” plaques and aggressive marketing of “work-life” balance, implying as that does that work isn’t part of your life. So many people’s work doesn’t make them feel like they’re part of anything, or pay them enough to be able to invest significant parts of themselves, or make them feel like it’s worth it, all the ass-busting they have to do.
And we can’t fix that with a “break” from something that’s just gonna suck as hard when we return to it.
BRIDGEPORT — For nearly 75 years, La Guadalupana’s tamales have been a fixture at South Side grocers and corner stores.
Now — thanks to a new contract with Walmart — the rest of the Chicago area is getting the chance to try out the Bridgeport-based company’s products.
La Guadalupana inked a deal in the summer to sell its products at 38 Walmart stores throughout Chicago and southern Wisconsin. It marks a major expansion for a company that has humble roots as a local, immigrant-owned bakery. The products arrived on Walmart shelves in time for the holidays.
“There’s a lot of pride,” said Alejandro Castro, third generation manager of La Guadalupana. “We’ve been able to stick to our roots, using the same recipes my grandparents started with.”
Twelfth Night Revelers Pageant Design by Charles Briton, 1871
Carnival is in its early stages but it’s beginning to eat my life. That may sound cannibalistic but I’ve always been fascinated by the Donner Party, so I’m down with cannibals. But I was never big on the band Fine Young Cannibals. I like music with more bite. All FYC ever did was was drive me crazy. Hmm, FYC sounds like KFC and you know what they say about chicken…
Last Sunday was Twelfth Night proper so Dr. A and I attended the launch party of a new business owned by our friends Will and Jennifer Samuels. It’s called the King Cake Hub and they sell a wide variety of King Cake from numerous local bakeries. And New Orleanians are obsessed with King Cake.
The King Cake Hub’s location has added to the local interest: the Mortuary at 4800 Canal Street. It used to be a genuine mortuary and is currently home to an elaborate haunted house every fall. If you don’t believe me, it’s picture time:
I knew Will before he became a King Cake impresario and was a pizza man; not to be confused with Frank Furillo of Hill Street Blues. I wish him well in his new venture. End of semi-shameless unpaid commercial plug.
The song was originally recorded by Bruce Springsteen during sessions for his Darkness on the Edge of Town album. He was not satisfied with the song and later declared he already knew he wasn’t going to finish it since it was “a[nother] love song”; the Patti Smith Group was working on Easter in the studio next door, with engineer/producer Jimmy Iovine working on both albums. Iovine gave Smith a tape of the song, she recast it, and it was included on Easter, becoming the first single released from that album.
We have three versions for your listening pleasure: Patti’s version, Bruce and the E Street live in 2012, and Bruce and Patti teaming up with U2.
WARNING: BONO ALERT.
If that Bono sighting doesn’t make you want to jump to the break, I don’t know what will. So, follow me, trail along.
The Insult Comedian is coming to the Gret Stet of Louisiana next week. He’ll be speaking at the Farm Bureau convention at the Morial Convention Center. Since New Orleans is one of the bluest cities in the country, there will be protesters. I may be among them.
That brings me to the tweet of the day. Thanks to my blogger buddy and Spank krewe mate, Noladishu, for sending this my way:
Since President Trump will be in Louisiana Monday, we dug into the archive and found this picture of a 1993 press conference he had with then-Gov. Edwin Edwards. The two had just concluded a meeting about Trump’s attempt to build a casino in the Bayou State. #LaLege#LaGovpic.twitter.com/JpFSoP6DBc
