Asshole MAGAts

They can't stop telling us they're assholes.

So let's put aside for the moment that Gus Walz has some neurodivergence issues - including ADHD and some kind of anxiety - that can make it hard for him to regulate his emotions, especially in public.

And all of that is beside the fucking point.

Here's the fucking point:

When did it become a bad thing for a kid to react in a big way when his dad stands up in front of god and everybody - on national TV - to tell the world that he loves his family?

How the fuck is that something to be mocked? Whether they know about Gus's challenges or not, how the fuck is that something to be mocked?

These ass-dwellers will jump on anything they see as an opportunity to get shitty with somebody.

And getting shitty with Gus Walz is further proof of who they are. Gus is "other". Mocking him - trying to humiliate him - tearing him down in order to drive him from the public square - and to "rid the body politic of contamination" - it's all consistent with the worst of fascist (ie: Nazi) doctrine.

It's disgusting and unpardonable.

We have to stomp on MAGA

until there's nothing left

but a greasy spot on the rug.

On Political Honesty

One of the all time universal oxymorons is "honest politician".

Finding one of those now is less likely than finding a verifiable video of bigfoot disembarking an alien spaceship riding a unicorn.

But once upon a time, we could count on politicians having enough honor to feel at least a might bit sheepish when caught in an outright lie.

Doesn't matter anymore. Not when 50 million of us are actually proud of just how far out of our way we're willing to go to stay ignorant.

So we get guys like Vivek Ramaswami.

The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy

As our nation continues its march to 2024, a year that will feature not only a presidential election but also potentially four criminal trials of the Republican front-runner, I’ve been thinking about the political and cultural power of leadership. How much do leaders matter, really? What role does corrupt political leadership play in degrading not just a government but the culture itself?

Let’s talk today about the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.

Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in 1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.

That number rose to a still dispiriting 38 percent in 2011, a year in which almost twice as many Americans knew that Randy Jackson was a judge on “American Idol” as knew that John Roberts was the chief justice of the United States. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn’t pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn’t identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn’t know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.

Civic ignorance isn’t confined to U.S. history or the Constitution. Voters are also wildly ignorant about one another. A 2015 survey found that Democrats believe Republicans are far older, far wealthier and more Southern than they truly are. Republicans believe Democrats are far more atheist, Black and gay than the numbers indicate.

But I don’t share these statistics to write yet another story bemoaning public ignorance. Instead, I’m sharing these statistics to make a different argument: that the combination of civic ignorance, corrupt leadership and partisan animosity means that the chickens are finally coming home to roost. We’re finally truly feeling the consequences of having a public disconnected from political reality.

Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.

Consider, for example, one of the most consequential gaffes in presidential debate history. In October 1976, the Republican Gerald Ford, who was then the president, told a debate audience, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

The statement wasn’t just wrong, it was wildly wrong. Of course there was Soviet domination of Eastern Europe — a domination that was violently reaffirmed in the 1956 crackdown in Hungary and the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. The best defense that Ford’s team could muster was the national security adviser Brent Scowcroft’s argument that “I think what the president was trying to say is that we do not recognize Soviet domination of Europe.”

In a close election with Jimmy Carter, the gaffe was a big deal. As the political scientist Larry Sabato later wrote, the press “pounced” and “wrote of little else for days afterward.” As a result, “a public initially convinced that Ford had won the debate soon turned overwhelmingly against him.” Note the process: Ford made a mistake, even his own team recognized the mistake and tried to offer a plausible alternative meaning, and then press coverage of the mistake made an impression on the public.

Now let’s fast-forward to the present moment. Instead of offering a plausible explanation for their mistakes — much less apologizing — all too many politicians deny that they’ve made any mistakes at all. They double down. They triple down. They claim that the fact-checking process itself is biased, the press is against them and they are the real truth tellers.

I bring this up not just because of the obvious example of Donald Trump and many of his most devoted followers in Congress but also because of the surprising success of his cunning imitator Vivek Ramaswamy. If you watched the first Republican debate last week or if you’ve listened to more than five minutes of Ramaswamy’s commentary, you’ll immediately note that he is exceptionally articulate but also woefully ignorant, or feigning ignorance, about public affairs. Despite his confident delivery, a great deal of what he says makes no sense whatsoever.

As The Times has documented in detail, Ramaswamy is prone to denying his own words. But his problem is greater than simple dishonesty. Take his response to the question of whether Mike Pence did the right thing when he certified the presidential election on Jan. 6, 2021. Ramaswamy claims that in exchange for certification, he would have pushed for a new federal law to mandate single-day voting, paper ballots and voter identification. Hang on. Who would write the bill? How would it pass a Democratic House and a practically tied Senate? Who would be president during the intervening weeks or months?

It’s a crazy, illegal, unworkable idea on every level. But that kind of fantastical thinking is par for the course for Ramaswamy. This year, for instance, he told Don Lemon on CNN, “Black people secured their freedoms after the Civil War — it is a historical fact, Don, just study it — only after their Second Amendment rights were secured.”

Wait. What?

While there are certainly Black Americans who used weapons to defend themselves in isolated instances, the movement that finally ended Jim Crow rested on a philosophy of nonviolence, not the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The notion is utterly absurd. If anything, armed Black protesters such as the Black Panthers triggered cries for stronger gun control laws, not looser ones. Indeed, there is such a long record of racist gun laws that it’s far more accurate to say that Black Americans secured greater freedom in spite of a racist Second Amendment consensus, not because of gun rights.

Ramaswamy’s rhetoric is littered with these moments. He’s a very smart man, blessed with superior communication skills, yet he constantly exposes his ignorance, his cynicism or both. He says he’ll “freeze” the lines of control in the Ukraine war (permitting Russia to keep the ground it’s captured), refuse to admit Ukraine to NATO and persuade Russia to end its alliance with China. He says he’ll agree to defend Taiwan only until 2028, when there is more domestic chip manufacturing capacity here in the States. He says he’ll likely fire at least half the federal work force and will get away with it because he believes civil service protections are unconstitutional.

The questions almost ask themselves. How will he ensure that Russia severs its relationship with China? How will he maintain stability with a weakened Ukraine and a NATO alliance that just watched its most powerful partner capitulate to Russia? How will Taiwan respond during its countdown to inevitable invasion? And putting aside for a moment the constitutional questions, his pledge to terminate half the federal work force carries massive, obvious perils, beginning with the question of what to do with more than a million largely middle- and high-income workers who are now suddenly unemployed. How will they be taken care of? What will this gargantuan job dislocation do to the economy?

Ramaswamy’s bizarre solutions angered his debate opponents in Milwaukee, leading Nikki Haley to dismantle him on live television in an exchange that would have ended previous presidential campaigns. But the modern G.O.P. deemed him one of the night’s winners. A Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll found that 26 percent of respondents believed Ramaswamy won, compared with just 15 percent who believed Haley won.

The bottom line is this: When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account.

And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.

In hindsight, I should have seen all this coming. I can remember feeling a sense of disquiet during the Tea Party revolution. Republican candidates were pledging to do things they simply could not do, such as repealing Obamacare without holding the presidency and Congress or, alternatively, veto-proof congressional majorities. Then, when they failed to do the thing they could never do in the first place, their voters felt betrayed.

There is always a problem of politicians overpromising. Matthew Yglesias recently reminded me of the frustrating way in which the 2020 Democratic primary contest was sidetracked by a series of arguments over phenomenally ambitious and frankly unrealistic policy proposals on taxes and health care. But there is a difference between this kind of routine political overpromising and the systematic mendacity of the Trump years.

A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?

Today's Brian

Just when we thought Jim Jordan couldn't get any more corrupt - morally, politically or intellectually - there he goes again.

Here's Brian Tyler Cohen, pointing out how amazing it is to watch Jim Jordan rise to the challenge. Mr Jordan continues to demonstrate that his capacity for fuckery is without limit.

A Faint Glimmer

Joe Manchin has been under a lot of pressure to stop acting like he's the only guy with ideas - the only one who knows what we should do - the one guy who's ass everybody has to kiss if the Dems want to get anything done.

He dresses it up in pretty camouflage, saying he's all about tradition and noble ideas, but that starts to sound too much like some hick from the hollers flappin' his jaw about the confederate flag.

So anyway, it seems there may be some movement.

In a "democracy", how is it that one guy gets to make the decisions on whether or not we should do the stuff that a majority of us (60% to 80+%) voted to get done? 

The GQP

NYT is in classic Press Poodle form with this one.

‘It’s Embarrassing’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Tests the Limits of Some Voters

In her Georgia district, voters saw Ms. Greene as a conservative voice that would be impossible to ignore. Now the revelation of past social media posts has unsettled some who backed her.

"Some"

Billy Martin does not care much for politicians. But the retired teacher and coach liked what he heard from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who promised to arrive in Washington as a defiant force, intent on rattling the establishment.

For his community in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, which he believed had long been overlooked, Ms. Greene had a voice that was impossible to ignore.

But in recent weeks, it has also been impossible to ignore the torrent of troubling social media posts and videos in which Ms. Greene had endorsed violent behavior, including executing Democratic leaders, and spread an array of conspiracy theories, including that the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon and the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., were hoaxes.

“Sometimes people say things they regret, speak before they think,” Mr. Martin said as he got in his pickup in downtown Summerville, a town of 4,300 people represented by Ms. Greene, a Republican who was elected to Congress in November in an unopposed race that drew national attention because of her promotion of the pro-Trump movement QAnon.

He found her posts and statements puzzling. Still, he added, he was not sure what to believe. “I don’t think they treat you fairly anymore,” Mr. Martin said, referring to the news media and Democratic politicians.

As Democrats push to strip Ms. Greene of committee assignments and as some Republicans condemn her statements, she has argued that the resistance confronting her only “strengthens my base of support at home and across the country.”

To some degree, that was true, as her most fervent supporters saw in the treatment of Ms. Greene a reminder of all that they loathed about Washington. But in a congressional district proud of its ranking as one of the most conservative in the country, voters drawn to her unapologetic intensity were now also brushing the limits of their support.

“It’s embarrassing,” Ashley Shelton, a stay-at-home mother who voted for Ms. Greene, said of the controversy. She thought former President Donald J. Trump would serve another term and saw Ms. Greene as “a backup, a comfort.”

“I think she’s kind of a loose cannon,” Ms. Shelton said before paraphrasing a line from the Old Testament: “The wise are the quiet ones,” she said. “The more she opens her mouth, the less evidence of her wisdom.”

Georgia has been gripped by a political tug of war, as the once reliably Republican state was won by President Biden in November, the first Democrat to do so in nearly three decades. And last month, the state’s two Republican senators were replaced by Democrats, tilting control of the Senate to that party.

Ms. Greene’s district represents the other end of the rope — a largely white and rural corner of the state dominated by Republicans. Sprawled across a dozen counties, the 14th Congressional District reaches from the outer suburbs of Atlanta to the outskirts of Chattanooga.

Despite her promotion of conspiracy theories during the tightly contested primary and runoff, Republicans said Ms. Greene gained traction by hewing to core conservative themes — defending gun rights, opposing immigration and supporting Mr. Trump. She covered a lot of ground, too, sometimes attending as many as five campaign events in a day.

“A lot of people here feel like they really know her,” said Luke Martin, a local prosecutor and chairman of the Republican Party in Floyd County, which is in her district. “They’ve met her. They’ve spoken with her. She never talked about that stuff. It’s kind of confusing to a lot of people. The person they think they know is not this person.”

The recent cascade of past social media posts, which also included a conspiracy theory that a space laser controlled by Jewish financiers started a California wildfire, Luke Martin said, has weakened her support. “You can’t justify it,” he said of her statements and social media activity. “It’s indefensible.”

But local Democrats contend that Republicans should not have been surprised. Some have written letters to the editor of newspapers in the district calling for her to step down.

“I didn’t think she was fit for office back then,” John Lugthart, who wrote one of the letters published in The Daily Citizen-News in Dalton, said of his opinions of Ms. Greene during the election. “More and more has come out, and my hope is that many others in our district now realize she’s not the one to represent us.”

Others, having long been resigned to the minority position held by Democrats in the region, said they hoped an infusion of energy in the party could bolster its chances in the next election.

But emotion filled Teresa Rich’s voice as she stood outside the radiator shop she owns with her husband, bemoaning the way Ms. Greene has been treated and the failure of other Republicans to adequately defend her.

“I love her,” she said of Ms. Greene, describing her as a fighter taking on the political establishment. “She fought them. If the party was like it was supposed to be, she wouldn’t be in a corner by herself.”

"Leadership" in the GQP is practically nonexistent. And when you've cultivated a base of voters with lies about women and minorities and "real America" and all the other shit they've been peddling for 50 years, you can't feign surprise to find out the people who're determined to step into leadership roles are as crazed as a buncha scorpions with heat stroke.

Like Driftglass says:

"I'm shocked - shocked - to find the Republican Party is filled with Republicans".

Crafty manipulators like MTGreene get elected by idiot voters who can't figure out what a lie sounds like because that's what the Party and Dumfux News have been drumming into everybody's heads for decades.

Unfortunately, we can't really tell anymore if MTGreene is the crafty cynical manipulator I think she is, or if she's dumb-as-a-fuckin'-stump like her idiot supporters.

And after NYT spills their ink all over this thing, their style book comes shining through - they still try to shoehorn some kind of middle ground into it - a safe place for them to land. They managed to put 4 whole sentences in the piece that sound critical to the rubes, but the rest of it pulls up way short of telling those rubes that we really really really need them to get their heads outa their asses "Cuz you're not fucking it all up just for yourselves, morons. The rest of us have to live with your stoopid fuckin' decisions too".

But hey - at least some of them are starting to get a little uncomfortable with some of the Qrazy shit.

Hoping For The Best

Believe Me News - I Will Go Down With This Ship

Acronym Alert

word: FOCUS.

usage: When arguing with a MAGAt.

"Fuck Off Cuz U're Stoopid."

Both Sides Don't

One of the worst aspects of Both Sides-ism is the current notion of "polarization" and "tribalism" - that the two major parties have both moved to the "their respective political extremes".

They haven't.

They. Have. Fucking. NOT.

Asymmetrical polarization has shifted the window so far to the right that when we try to steer back toward the middle, it gets characterized as an extreme effort by the lefty extremists to move us way too far to the extreme left and turn us into an extremely leftist version of communistically horrible horribleness.

People who lean to the Dem side are not "tribalized" in the same way as those who can't see that the Repubs are possibly the real threat to the very freedoms they squawk so loudly about all the fuckin' time.

This is definitely a problem of deliberate dysfunction created and maintained by disinformation on the part of the practitioners in the dark arts of propaganda, but it's also a very disturbing indication that those practices are succeeding in making way too many Americans complacent, &/or unable to discern between fact and fiction.

Come At Me, Bro

If you're still on board with Cult45, you have no way to troll me effectively, because it's all but certain there's nothing in your opinion that can be identified as factual, or logic-based - which makes it impossible to respect the intellect behind that opinion.

Your MAGA hat, and your big red Xs, and your 4Chan QAnon baloney, and your DumFux News bullet points all demonstrate that you and I are simply not morally compatible.

Say your worst - it's meaningless - it's nothing - it's balloon juice and sail boat fuel.

hat tip = @JohnPavlovitz

Stoopid Repub Tricks

Just need to get this off my chest:

I'm sick-n-goddamned-tired of these entitlement-laden fat-cat legacy pukes. They need to be thrown out with the rest of the hog slop - they're stinkin' up the whole fuckin' joint.

Marc Fisher and Perry Stein, WaPo:

As Christine Blasey Ford tells it, only one person can offer eyewitness confirmation of her account of a sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh: Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Prep.

Ford says Judge watched Kavanaugh attack her at a high school party in the early 1980s and then literally piled on, leaping on top of her and Kavanaugh. Judge says he does not remember the party and never saw his buddy behave like that. Ford’s legal team has asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to compel Judge to testify.

A review of books, articles and blog posts by Judge — a freelance writer who has shifted among jobs at a record store, substitute teaching, housesitting and most recently at a liquor store — describes an ’80s private-school party scene in which heavy drinking and sexual encounters were standard fare.

Judge wrote about the pledge he and his friends at the all-male school on Rockville Pike in North Bethesda, Md., made to drink 100 kegs of beer before graduation. On their way to that goal, there was a “disastrous” party “at my house where the place was trashed,” Judge wrote in his book “God and Man at Georgetown Prep.” Kavanaugh listed himself in the class yearbook as treasurer of the “100 Kegs or Bust” club.

“I’ll be the first one to defend guys being guys,” Judge wrote in a 2015 article on the website Acculturated. He described a party culture of “drinking and smoking and hooking up.” During senior year, Judge said he and his pals hired a stripper and bought a keg for a bachelor party they threw to honor their school’s music teacher.
"...guys being guys"...because they'd drink too much and do stoopid things. Oh well, whutcha gonna do? Hey, how 'bout them Red Sox, huh?

Try to think about the effect that has on young girls growing up, and what effect it might have on young boys.

And that's just the obvious basic stuff that you have to assume even a complete bonehead would start to understand eventually. But here we are - not again, but still.

Feel free to go out and find a Leftie Equivalent - 10 stoopid quotes from Dems about rape.  Because, of course - the Dems are just as bad - it's the Evil Duopoly!!! 

I'll wait here.

Brain Science

Raw Story - Bobby Azarian:

As a journalist and a cognitive scientist, I often write about the psychology underlying the seemingly-nonsensical and unwavering support for President Donald Trump, and a very common response in the comments section goes something like, “It’s not that complicated. They are racists, plain and simple.”

While that may be true for a portion of Trump supporters (and perhaps Trump himself), is it really simple? What do we mean exactly when we say someone is racist? An even better question—what are the neural and psychological characteristics of a racist mind? By analyzing the pathways in the brain that underlie racist thought and behavior, we can better understand how this nasty bias is created, and potentially, how to mitigate it.

First of all, how do we know that racial biases actually exist? While some may claim that they have no biases, a clever psychological experiment provides objective evidence supporting the notion that the vast majority of us do. In the implicit bias task, participants are shown words on a computer screen like “happy” and “fear,” which they must categorize as positive or negative. What results have consistently shown is that if a black face is quickly flashed before the words, individuals will be faster to correctly categorize negative words, while the same people will be quicker to correctly categorize positive words when they follow white faces. These troubling findings suggest that over 75 percent of Whites and Asians have an implicit racial bias, which affects how they process information and perceive the social world around them.

However, this bias is subconscious and implicit. Whether or not it leads to overtly racist attitudes and behavior depends on an interplay between different brain areas—specifically those that create feelings of fear and promote tribalism, and those that help us regulate and suppress those bad instincts.
- and -

The problem is, not everyone has a healthy functioning prefrontal cortex, and these people are the ones whose biases control them. They cannot reason those fearful surges away because they lack the cognitive mechanisms that normally allow people to do so.

So yeah - they are the whiny-butt pussies I've been trying to ya they are. And it seems part of the cause for it is that they're a might brain-damaged as well.

I think one conclusion that isn't changed by this newer information is that while most rubes may have an organic predisposition for bias - and an inadequately developed mechanism for coping with it - a lot of them are racist assholes because they choose to be racist assholes.

A Reminder

(versions of this have been floating around for quite a while)

I'm not mad that Hillary lost.
I'm really not concerned that we have differing political preferences.

I don't think less of you because you vote a certain way.

-- I think less of you because you watched an adult mock a disabled person in front of a crowd and you still supported him.
-- I think less of you because you heard him spouting clearly racist language, and you stood with him.
-- I think less of you because you listened to him speak in favor of committing war crimes, and you still wanted him to lead our government.
-- I think less of you because you watched as he reduced a woman's worth to nothing but her appearance, and you got on board with him.
-- I think less of you because your loyalties lie with your political tribe instead of our national family.

It isn't your politics that I find repulsive. It's your willingness to side with a traitorous Daddy State bully - to indulge his bigotry, his misogyny, his cruelty, and his treachery; which leaves me only to surmise that you embrace those characteristics as your own.

So no - we will not be coming together to move forward, or whatever.

Trump disgusts me, but the simple fact that he doesn't disgust you is why these particular bygones will never be bygones. ever.

In The Marketplace Of Ideas

Media Matters For America:

We now have further confirmation that Fox News’ role as a mouthpiece for Donald Trump is affecting the network’s bottom line.

According to a report by Gabriel Sherman in Vanity Fair, the network is struggling to sell ad space on their 9 and 10 PM respective programs.

While Fox News dominated the ratings in May—a fact Trump bragged about on Saturday—the network is having new difficulties monetizing its most pro-Trump programming. According to three sources briefed on the numbers, advertising revenues for Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham are down in recent months. “The pro-Trump thing isn’t working. We can’t monetize DACA and the wall and that right-wing shit,” one staffer said. “Despite all the hype on Hannity, they can’t sell it,” another insider told me. (Tucker Carlson’s show is faring better, sources said).

But until some management imposes real standards and consequences at Fox News, it’s up to activists and advertisers to shoulder the burden. As Media Matters president Angelo Carusone wrote in October:

Mostly driven by concerns around digital advertising, companies are becoming increasingly mindful about brand safety and intentionality in that advertising. And that mindfulness is starting to influence other advertising decisions as well, like television sponsorships.

Companies do not want their advertising to be associated with rank partisanship, bigotry, or deceit. They recognize that it’s bad for business. But Fox News continues to offer all three in spades, and as a result, I suspect it is beginning to have a downward effect on the network’s commercial viability as a whole.

Bottom line is this: Fox News’ ad revenue plummeted. It’s likely largely attributable to Hannity’s growing advertiser losses. And it also appears to reflect a deeper vulnerability in Fox News’ business model of bigotry, deceit, and partisanship.

Today's Bit O' Satire

The fucked-up-edness really kicked into high gear when we (ie: conservatives) became convinced that the whole thing should be demystified because all you really needed was some common sense and a regular guy's outlook.

Jonathan Pie

"I went to the best doctor's on the planet, and the cancer came back - twice.  And now it's back again. This time I think I'll hire a plumber instead."

Sir John of Oliver

I think I understand the impulse to "keep a civil tongue in your head".  Taking steps to prevent rhetorical violence turning into physical violence is an important part of the foundation of American Democracy.

But when a legitimate news item has that violent rhetoric at its core, I think I'd prefer to hear it straight out.

That's why we're better served when the "news" is presented to us by John Oliver and Samantha Bee and Bill Maher, et al.

And that's why I bitch about having to rely on half-hour comedy shows to get something approaching the real story.

C'mon, Press Poodles - dial it up a little.

Some Of What We Lose

Claire Kelly at Melville House

The Mark Twain branch of the Detroit Public Library opened to the public on February 22, 1940 with over 20,000 books. The building’s architect was the prolific and celebrated Wirt C. Rowland, who was known as an “avid modernist and supporter of the Arts and Crafts movement…best known for contributing Art Deco-style skyscrapers to Detroit’s skyline.”

The library was referred to as a “regional library” and was designed to be larger than other neighborhood libraries. It included space for members of the community to not only sit and read books and periodicals, but also hold events and social gatherings...

We bitch about the loss of "community", and ignore the fact we've pissed it away because we don't have one fuckin' clue what the word actually means to us.

From urbanex.com:

 

Get It Straight

Climate Change is not a hoax perpetrated against us by the Chinese.

Donald Trump is a hoax perpetrated against us by the Russians.

hat tip = Occupy Democrats

It's A Wonderment

It seems like the GOP has grown more and more sour on the CIA ever since they helped the black guy kill Osama bin Laden.

hat tip = @TeaPainUSA

What We're Up Against

Spotted in a NC parking lot (via Reddit)

(click to embiggen)

Hire Better

I think I understand. You don't like politicians because politicians have fucked it all up and so it's time to try somebody else. 

OK, but here's my hangup - it sounds like you're saying that you got kinda sick, and your regular doctor prescribed the wrong treatment, and it made things worse.

But instead of finding a better doctor, you've decided what you really need is a plumber?