Fresh Onion

Don't panic - it's The Onion:

Khashoggi Assassin Hopes Bonus Check From Saudi Crown Prince Clears Before Execution

RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—Expressing concerns about losing out on hard-earned blood money, a member of the Khashoggi assassination squad admitted Friday that he hoped his bonus check from the Saudi Crown Prince cleared before his execution. “They said they would do direct deposit, so everything should be good by Monday,” said Maher Mutreb, adding that the Saudi Crown Prince had always made timely payments on past invoices for silencing dissidents. “Plus, I’m pretty sure there aren’t any national holidays coming up that would affect bank hours. I get that I’ll never get the chance to spend it, but that murder and the subsequent cover-up were a lot of work. I already asked that they make it out to my wife, who they’ll probably kill as well, but if they don’t it would be pretty nice if she got what I promised her.” At press time, one of Mutreb’s work friends cashed the check after murdering his entire family.

Welcome Back

...to the once and future reality of Unfettered Free Market Capitalism.

Raw Story:

Thirty-nine members of the United Aryan Brotherhood and Unforgiven neo-Nazi groups were arrested in a Florida drug trafficking sting — and one had functional pipe bombs in his home.

Tampa’s WFTS-TV reported that the multi-agency sting codenamed “Operation Blackjack,” a three-year-long investigation, led to the seizure of more than 110 illegal firearms, a rocket launcher and two pipe bombs from the individuals mostly based in Pasco County, Florida.

Authorities also seized “several pounds” of meth and fentanyl.

These outfits are prison-based gangs. 

There's nothing ideological about them. 

They're commercial enterprises that happen to be criminal.
Much like Cult45.

Today's Tweet

Well - prob'ly not weird at all.

Weird how more than a week after a Democratic wave electing tons of women and further diversifying our government, the mainstream media isn't giving us lavish profiles of Democratic voters who rejected the GOP and Trump.

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) November 17, 2018

Cable news needs the catfight. They don't get any nice spikes in the ad revenue chart by running segments on how the majority of voters are actually just normal folk who think normal thoughts.

A Little Spoof

I get a bit suspicious sometimes. Like when certain movies end up looking like commercials that just happen to be 2 hours long.

Today's Quote

Trump allows people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven't been able to in quite a while, and they really love him for that.

It's a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.

--Fran Lebowitz

Whoa Momma

I don't know what to say.

The art of Michael Rubino

Still Waiting

Wondering when we're going to get some followup analysis on this one, now that the numbers are in.

NBC News - Guns In America (11-1-18):

NRA slashes campaign spending, lowers profile in midterms. Why?
The gun group has put $11 million into midterm races this year — less than half what it spent four years ago.

The National Rifle Association — long seen as a kingmaker in Republican politics — is taking a lower profile in this year's high-stakes midterm campaign, a sign of the shifting dynamics of the gun debate as the GOP fights to maintain its grip on Congress.

The NRA has put $11 million into midterm races this year — less than half what it spent four years ago in an election that gave Republicans full control of Congress. This year's totals are also far below the $54 million the group spent in 2016 on both the presidential and congressional races.

 - and - 

It's the first time under current campaign finance laws that the NRA might be outspent by gun control groups, though the organization often ramps up spending late in the campaign. That money won't show up in federal financial reports until after Election Day.
BTW - here's a picture from the time Repubs in the House voted to fuck over 20,000,000 Americans by passing ACA Repeal:

A) Guess what the ❌ means

B) Guess which Gun Makers' Trade Group didn't donate as much as usual to most of those people in the picture

Getting the excessive amounts of dark money out of politics will do wonders for the process.

Today's Tweet

There must be consequences. We make noise about law and order, and how no one's above the law, but then what do we do when it comes time to follow our own credo?

This is a remarkable work of art. This picture is made from the faces of 670 soldiers who died in the Iraq War. pic.twitter.com/6ENRbJ0ECJ

— Stone Cold (@stonecold2050) November 17, 2018

We didn't hold Nixon fully accountable for Watergate - and a host of other shit - and we got Reagan.

We didn't hold Reagan fully accountable for Iran-Contra - and a host of other shit - and we got W43.

We didn't hold W43 fully accountable for Iraq - and a host of other shit - and we got Cult45.

What is it we're thinking about doing this time?

Podcast

On why we can't let 'em off the fucking hook this time.

- how clean water and succession planning fit together.

- why the Press Poodles are salivating over a return to Speaker Pelosi, and the fight inside the Dem Party.

Plus a quote from the darkest days of the Watergate era:

"Knit on with confidence and hope through every crisis" 

--Elizabeth Zimmerman

ProLeftPod.com

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A Lesson In Perception

An awful lot of what we see and hear, is what we're taught to see and hear.

We usually don't even know it's happening - we don't know we're being programmed to think a certain way.

This is not representative of the way we vote:

This is what is actually looks like:

Because it says "We the people", not "we the acreage".

The Dems' wins in the 2018 midterms should go a long way in fixing the gerrymandering problem on the House side. But we still have a very long haul to figure out what to do about the ratfuckery that can (and does) happen because of the way we do the Senate and the Electoral College.