Today's GIF

Today's Tweet

Conway claimed microwave ovens have eyes now inspector Gaget Kellyanne: "I'm not in the job of having evidence.👀" pic.twitter.com/9KQnxBwB2K

— RiotWomenn (@riotwomennn) March 13, 2017

We have to consider what I think is a pretty strong probability that she's not offering a defense or an explanation or simply trying to spin out of the shit.

She's making a statement of intent.

So the translation is: "We won't allow ourselves to be encumbered by a need for evidence. When we decide it's time to fuck you up, we'll just fuck you up."

Spying Appliances

#KellyanneConway

I thought the whole microwaves spying on us was bunk till I caught my stove & microwave battling it out this morning... pic.twitter.com/NzzdsVBW3X

— The Anti-Trump (@IMPL0RABLE) March 13, 2017

Today's Today

Nerd porn alert - it's Pi Day (𝛑 🌞) so here's one you've prob'ly seen already but I don't care because I never get tired of hearing something about stuff.

And yes, I know it's not really about Pi - shut up. My porn, my rules.

Pimping The Obvious

WaPo:

The nation’s opioid epidemic is changing the way law enforcement does its job, with police officers acting as drug counselors and medical workers and shifting from law-and-order tactics to approaches more akin to social work.

Departments accustomed to arresting drug abusers are spearheading programs to get them into treatment, convinced that their old strategies weren’t working. They’re administering medication that reverses overdoses, allowing users to turn in drugs in exchange for treatment, and partnering with hospitals to intervene before abuse turns fatal.

“A lot of the officers are resistant to what we call social work. They want to go out and fight crime, put people in jail,” said Capt. Ron Meyers of the police department in Chillicothe, Ohio, a 21-year veteran who is convinced that punitive tactics no longer work against drugs. “We need to make sure the officers understand this is what is going to stop the epidemic.”

Officers are finding children who were barricaded in rooms while their parents got high, and they are responding to the same homes for the same problems. Feelings of exasperation course through some departments in which officers are interacting with the same drug users over and over again, sometimes saving their lives repeatedly with naloxone, a drug that reverses an opiate overdose.

How much more are we going to expect the cops to do? I like it better that they're helping people instead of shooting them, but we can't just keep piling more tasks on them because we're not willing to be inconvenienced by it all.

Anyway, isn't it amazing how "the drug problem" can move so suddenly from, "government handouts and mollycoddling won't make up for the moral deficiency of those people", to something more like, "maybe we should start looking at this as a public health issue".

And gee - it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the enormously powerful circle jerk of Coin-Operated Politicians, and their buddies in the Rent-a-Prison bidness, and the DEA as an organization of Confiscation For Fun and Profit with guns and permission to fuck you out of everything you own.

The truly obvious though, is simply that the drug thing really hasn't mattered as long as it was "an urban problem", and we were just fucking over the brown people. Now that it's come to the great American Cracker Barrel, we should try something that might be a better approach? Something we could've been doing this whole time? Because it works better? And we've always known that?

Two things:

1. I wonder how many well-connected leeches will suddenly discover their life-long passion for providing Re-Hab services - as a proper Market-Based solution, you understand -  and of course financed by taxpayers.
2. This is another one of those things the hippies have been trying to get the cement heads to understand for a very long time.

And you can color me un-fucking-surprised.

Wow - Look Who Just Caught Up

Raw Story:

Professional presidential campaign staff for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) confirmed to the Huffington Post that Russian trolls were responsible for pushing out anti-Hillary Clinton memes and social media content.

The shocking series of interviews revealed large Facebook groups supporting Sanders were inundated with content from people with no ties to the regions in which the pages were located. Former reporter John Mattes explained that his San Diego page became overwhelmed with anti-Clinton memes with messages he’d never heard coming out of the Sanders campaign. Instead, they were memes alleging Clinton used body doubles and murdered political opponents.

He initially suspected the posts were coming from anti-Clinton sites run by 1990s Clinton opponents, but he quickly found out that domain names were registered in Macedonia and Albania. Websites like WorldPoliticus.com, TrumpVision365.com, USConservativeToday.com, DonaldTrumpNews.co and USADailyPolitics.com are just a few of the sites that trafficked in fake news against Clinton. By the end of October he traced at least 40 percent of the domain registrations of the fake news sites on pro-Sanders pages back to Eastern Europe. Some others were based in Panama and the U.S. or untraceable.

In the context of Divide-n-Conquer tactics, this happens a lot under normal circumstances. But these are not normal circumstances. This shit at this level is killing this republic.

Trae Crowder

Today's Tweet

As addiction ravages the (white) heartland, sympathy tends toward treatment - and away from moral condemnation. https://t.co/X3xbkZhHRj

— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) March 12, 2017

And in case you're at all confused by that - 

@BrentNYT @nytimes Crack did the same thing to Black communities 30 yrs ago. We got SWAT teams and mandatory minimums. Funny how that works.

— BPearson (@BCP72) March 13, 2017

It'd be nice if I could be more comfortable thinking this is a signal that we're starting to understand there are way more facets to the "drug problem" than we've been conditioned to believe.

On Tyranny

Resist

If NPR is catching up with it, you know there's an increasing probability that it's true.

Retribution

POTUS is not supposed to be calling U.S. Attorneys.

Trump broke protocol—and Bharara responded accordingly: https://t.co/PWJUB6t5Fo pic.twitter.com/VebnNLHGLt

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 12, 2017