Jan 24, 2019
We Live For Recognition
The reason we're addicted to social media is that we're addicted to every little squirt of dopamine our brains give us when we get even the tiniest bit of approval - every Like or Retweet or Share or whatever.
Even when it's a negative reaction - we gotta have that daily fix.
What makes it one of the greatest ironies ever is that the web has given us a feeling of power because of its promise of anonymity, but that same anonymity - the fear of being ignored and forgotten and discarded - that's what drives us to call attention to ourselves.
"...where your glory and your doom are bound up together..."
Plus - if you think nobody knows who you are, or where you are, or what you're doing, then you're completely daft, and you're the perfect pigeon when the cynical manipulators need to move political opinion in one direction or another.
For a good look at a fairly representative part of the problem, and how the rat-fuckers exploit these vulnerabilities, find "Brexit: The Uncivil War" (BBC and HBO).
And oh yeah - our "president" is "president" because in a bizarre and perverse way, he is, in fact "one of us".
Taking Solace Where I Find It
George Will has no room to criticize anyone for hypocrisy, or for the voluntary blindness that's become the hallmark of the GOP Establishment. ie: "Holy fuck - the Republican Party seems to be filled with Republicans".
He's been a de facto cheerleader for the GOP's fuckery for 35 years - always looking the other way as they pulled the most heinous shit on people, telling us the results of the election proved the party was representing the will of the people and blah blah blah.
But anyway - now he's considered an Elder of the Beltway Tribe, and so of course, we have to listen when he croaks out something that sounds vaguely cogent.
File this under - "When You've Lost George Will..." which has grown into a gargantuan folder, and still somehow, George's "conservatives" continue their dickishness apace.
(ed note: try to ignore the very old and very stale "windsock" analogy - George himself is old and stale, so - yeah)
From WaPo:
Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today.
When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.
In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.
On a recent day, in 90 minutes he went from “I don’t know” whether the president has the power to declare an emergency and divert into wall-building funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, to “Time for President . . . to use emergency powers to build Wall.” The next day, he scrambled up the escalation ladder by using capitalization: “Declare a national emergency NOW. Build a wall NOW.” Two days later, he scampered down a few rungs, calling for his hero to accept a short-term funding measure to open the government while wall negotiations continue. Stay tuned for more acrobatics.
He's been a de facto cheerleader for the GOP's fuckery for 35 years - always looking the other way as they pulled the most heinous shit on people, telling us the results of the election proved the party was representing the will of the people and blah blah blah.
But anyway - now he's considered an Elder of the Beltway Tribe, and so of course, we have to listen when he croaks out something that sounds vaguely cogent.
File this under - "When You've Lost George Will..." which has grown into a gargantuan folder, and still somehow, George's "conservatives" continue their dickishness apace.
(ed note: try to ignore the very old and very stale "windsock" analogy - George himself is old and stale, so - yeah)
From WaPo:
Back in the day, small rural airports had textile windsocks, simple and empty things that indicated which way the wind was blowing. The ubiquitous Sen. Lindsey O. Graham has become a political windsock, and as such, he — more than the sturdy, substantial elephant — is emblematic of his party today.
When in 1994, Graham, a South Carolina Republican, first ran for Congress, he promised to be “one less vote for an agenda that makes you want to throw up.” A quarter-century later, Graham himself is a gastrointestinal challenge. In the past three years, he had a road-to-Damascus conversion.
In 2015, he said Donald Trump was a “jackass.” In February 2016, he said: “I’m not going to try to get into the mind of Donald Trump, because I don’t think there’s a whole lot of space there. I think he’s a kook, I think he’s crazy, I think he’s unfit for office.” And: “I’m a Republican and he’s not. He’s not a conservative Republican. He’s an opportunist.” Today, Graham, paladin of conservatism and scourge of opportunism, says building the border wall is an existential matter for the GOP: “If we undercut the president, that’s the end of his presidency and the end of our party.” Well.
- and -
But stay focused on this: Anyone — in Graham-speak, ANYONE — who at any time favors declaring an emergency, or who does not denounce the mere suggestion thereof, thereby abandons constitutional government. Yes, such a declaration would be technically legal. Congress has put on every president’s desk this (to adopt Justice Robert Jackson’s language in his dissent from the Supreme Court’s 1944 Korematsu decision affirming the constitutionality of interning of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent) “loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Or an implausible one. However, an anti-constitutional principle would be affirmed. The principle: Any president can declare an emergency and “repurpose” funds whenever any of his policy preferences that he deems unusually important are actively denied or just ignored by the legislative branch.
Why do they come to Congress, these people such as Graham? These people who, affirmatively or by their complicity of silence, trifle with our constitutional architecture, and exhort the president to eclipse the legislative branch, to which they have no loyalty comparable to their party allegiance?
Seven times, Graham has taken the oath of congressional office, “solemnly” swearing to “support and defend the Constitution” and to “bear true faith and allegiance” to it, “without any mental reservation.” Graham, who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.
One important point that Mr Will doesn't include in this little sermon is that once Cult45 is out of office, guys just like George Will are going to assure us that either it never even happened, or it was some really strange anomaly.
Yeah, you bet - an anomaly that keeps happening in much the same way over and over again.
Mr Will wrote this same column about Bush43, and then carried a lot of water for the people who needed us to forget about that particular chapter of GOP fuckery, having done almost exactly the same after Reagan's fuckery.
At least this time, he touches on the problem - that Lindsey Graham is a symptom of the disease - but he fails to point it up properly.
The failure is all about refusing to deal honestly with that problem. And even more to the point - the failure lies in promoting the kind of memory loss that pimps Deliberate Ignorance on the part of Team Rube so they'll keep voting against their own best interests.
45* and Lindsey Graham and Steve King and Devin Nunes and and and - those guys have not remade the party in some weirdly warped image of themselves. They are the near-perfect reflection of what the GOP has been evolving into for the last 40 years, at the behest of the guys with all the money, and the power to buy these Coin-Operated Politicians.
Jan 23, 2019
Happy Birthday
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| Django Reinhardt |
Just Missed
A sinkhole opened up on Tuesday afternoon in the road a block away from White House grounds in Washington.
DC police said in a tweet that 17th Street NW between C and E streets NW was closed in both directions because of the sinkhole.
A sinkhole formed last summer on the north White House lawn near the entrance to the James Brady Press Briefing Room. The hole was cordoned off, excavated and repaired over the course of roughly a week last May.
DC police said in a tweet that 17th Street NW between C and E streets NW was closed in both directions because of the sinkhole.
God was unavailable for comment, but through a spokes-angel, heaven released this brief message, quoting the deity: "Shit - I guess my targeting system's all fucked up again".
Today's Tweet
Startin' to get it now?
There's no apparent connection between the Cov Cath presence on the mall last Saturday, and there's probably not much we can hook into NBC's decision to interview the privileged little prick who's the face of the problem, but when that little prick and his gang are invited to a White House where the General Counsel just happens to be a Cov Cath graduate, there's a little too much coincidence on that one.
Oh, hey, look! WH counsel is a CovCath grad. NO WONDER media was so anxious to whitewash the little shits’ behavior. https://t.co/SxYLGW7sli— Karoli (@Karoli) January 23, 2019
Today's GIF
Cult45 needs desperately to convince us that their "president" is powerful and potent and manly.
There's no way to get this clown on horseback with his shirt off. And he's way too much of a pussy to go anywhere near a tiger.
So when they create memes for posting on social media, they just PhotoShop the image to make him appear thinner, and to make his fingers look longer.
And ain't that pretty much the whole story on this dickhead?
Your tax dollars hard at work - gaslighting the fuck outa ya.
hat tip = Gizmodo
There's no way to get this clown on horseback with his shirt off. And he's way too much of a pussy to go anywhere near a tiger.
So when they create memes for posting on social media, they just PhotoShop the image to make him appear thinner, and to make his fingers look longer.
And ain't that pretty much the whole story on this dickhead?
Your tax dollars hard at work - gaslighting the fuck outa ya.
hat tip = Gizmodo
Jan 22, 2019
Today's Tweet
I get a little queasy a lot lately.
Pay attention to the long-term, cumulative damage of the shutdown, including the effect on the census.— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 11, 2019
The Trump admin has long sought to manipulate the census in an effort to reallocate resources and annihilate rights. This isn't just a shutdown -- it's a hostile restructuring. https://t.co/1CHsbx1BUk
On MLK Yesterday
Tim Wise, at Univ of Michigan:
If we want the world to be a better place, the first thing we have to do is to stop insisting that it can't be.
The Baldwin quote (Jet Magazine, 1965):
People who imagine that history flatters them - as it does indeed, since they wrote it - are impaled on their history like a butterfly on a pin, and they become incapable of seeing or changing themselves or the world. This is where it appears to me most white Americans find themselves - impaled. They are dimly, or perhaps vividly, aware that the history they have fed themselves is mainly a lie. But they do not know how to be released from it, and they suffer enormously from the resulting personal incoherence.
If we want the world to be a better place, the first thing we have to do is to stop insisting that it can't be.
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