My local Starbucks was once again packed with women wearing cute pink hats this morning. The sense of sisterhood was palpable.
On my flight this morning there were two women who had set out for the D.C. march but failed to get there because of a broken bus. They marched in Pittsburgh and, despairing of the bus repair schedule, abandoned sisterhood for a flight home.
The moral of the story is again don't bring a gun to a protest. Even if you don't shoot anybody, if your bus breaks, you can't fly with a gun unless you check a bag.
Speaking of checked baggage, a woman was riding the bus to the airport this morning. She had three very large rolling bags (not just too big for a carry-on, but bigger than standard full-sized suit cases) and two smaller bags. As she was obviously foreign, alone, and unable to move that much shit, I offered to help her to the ticket counter. I wondered in an idle sort of way if she had any idea what the fees would be for that much luggage. I didn't raise the point with her because I figured I didn't want to get too involved.
It's because of half-assed empathy like that that America can't have nice things.
Anyone know if you can bring in a jar of olives from abroad? I've found info about the rest of what I have (candies, various canned seafoods are all fine) but can't find anything about olives or other jarred/pickled vegetables.
My first thought was that she was transporting three corpses. The bags were big enough and heavy enough to have contained the corpses of small adults or exsanguated corpses of all but the largest adults. But she said she was flying to New Jersey and I ruled out my initial hypothesis on coals-to-Newcastle grounds.
Half-assed empathy and fat-assed libertarianism.
In the aggregate, I have one average-size ass.
6
I don't see why not. Olives as long as they're in a sealed container should be totally fine.
But also, I've been studiously avoiding American news. What are these cake and tantrums you speak of?
Cake would be the copying of the Obama inauguration cake, which, ffs, I need to find a new way to roll my eyes.
Tantrums, who knows, there always seems to be a couple going on. Spicer? Trump on Spicer? Conway?
As determined as I felt going into the new year, I find I can't practically avoid all news from both my country of origin and country of residence. I can't decide which makes me more toxically* angry, so I can't even focus on ignoring one.
*'Toxically' doesn't really look like a word to me when I see it typed, but I feel like I'm going to need it a lot going forward.
Trumps cake was plagiarized, and he is also having tantrums over the press showing pictures of his tiny inaugural crowd. He had the Press Secretary go full Bagdad Bob.
Of all the things I can't get worked up about a plagiarized cake is right there in the middle. The Bagdad Bob thing is just funny, and I look forward to many more such occasions. The real horrorshow starts tomorrow, when Cheeto Benito starts firing off executive orders. I realize he's already done a couple of idiotic things, but the show is just getting started.
the margin by which Clinton won the popular vote
I was interested to hear Michael Moore say recently that Trump actually lost the popular vote by 10 million if you count votes cast for Green party and Libertarian party and any other candidates.
Clinton: 65.8 million
Others: 7.8 million
(total: 73.6 million)
Trump: 63 million
Huh. If a person really wanted to reflect things accurately, a person would be shouting "10 million!" rather than "3 million."
There was a story that Trump was going to announce the move of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Hello Intifada III.
The Spicer thing is both ridiculous and a pretty big deal. I'd like to see the press boycott the press conferences but I don't think that will happen.
H.R. 193 repeal of UN participation act seems to be next on the dock. Looks like Bannon may have the controlling hand. Quick, someone get to Jared and tell him to whisper in the Donald's ear.
Looks like Bannon may have the controlling hand.
God, I'm so torn about this.
Robert Reich says he has it on some authority that establishment Republicans figure they'll throw Trump under the bus after a while:
"They'll play along for a while," the unidentified [Republican] friend said. "They'll get as much as they want - tax cuts galore, deregulation, military buildup, slash all those poverty programs, and then get to work on Social Security and Medicare - and blame him. And he's such a fool he'll want to take credit for everything."
Asked what happens then, the Reich's friend laughed and said, 'They like [Vice President] Pence."
"Pence is their guy. They all think Trump is out of his mind," he explained. "So the moment Trump does something really dumb - steps over the line - violates the law in a big stupid clumsy way ... and you know he will ..."
They'll impeach him. Eh, maybe so. But you know by now that I consider Pence and Congressional Republicans to be the real threat. Bannon is actually a counter to them on some fronts.
Not that ditching the UN is awesome, obviously.
Pence terrifies me. Trump might actually do some halfway decent things if he keeps his promise to work on infrastructure for example. Pence is relentlessly evil. Pence plus a Republican majority in Congress is terrifying. If it comes to that i will ask my senator to vote against impeachment. I prefer crazy and stupid over smart and evil.
Parsi, are you recycling quotes or am I imagining things?
Not that I can think of: I only read that Reich piece yesterday. Um, did I link to it yesterday? I don't think so. I recall wondering if I should point to it here, and thought at the time that I was becoming a broken record regarding the perils of Pence, so I should forebear.
If it comes to that i will ask my senator to vote against impeachment.
Yeah, I was musing about that. Depends on what Trump does that seems impeachable, I guess. A move like that wouldn't happen, if it does happen, for probably 2 years, I figure. After the next mid-term elections, maybe. A lot will change by then.
I swear I read that pullquote recently, but it could have been FB.
Reich's FB posts seem to show up in my feed a lot. I think they're pretty widely shared.
H.R. 193 repeal of UN participation act seems to be next on the dock.
I have a fair amount of confidence there aren't 60 votes in the Senate for this one. Its probably a good thing for them to waste their time on. The UN has an awesome new Secretary General who can stand in dramatic contrast to Trump.
Under those criteria, Bill Clinton lost the popular vote by 14 million votes.
I ain't doing no predictin' in chaos conditions, and Trump could be gone in thirty days or around for thirty years in an animtronic form with Ivanka and Kushner controlling the dials behind the curtain. I'm serious about the early possibility, cause although if I listen to the bitter loser crowd Trump will be rapin and nukin so quick the Deep State will off him, or more reasonably, stroke or infarction.
And don't much matter, cause I am not hypnotized by the spectacle and shiny objects and can take my eyes of Trump tweets and kitty helmets and watch the Pence-Ryan-McConnell-(Bannon) administration fuck this country beyond recognition.
The authoritarian tendencies of the identity left are showing themselves in the obsession with Littlefingers, but after eight years of Obamism, preceded by eight years of Bush derangement, we already knew that.
Luckily, we have people like Sanders and Warren paying attention to policy rather than Rupert Pumpkin, and letting the ladies have their ladies day, like totally redeeming themselves for handing the country to fascism with a like Awesome Party.
Barney Frank: "Republicans vote when they are mad. Democrats march."
Republicans did plenty of marching, a lot of dress up too, when they got shut out of government. Worked pretty well.
I can find no evidence of Barney Frank ever saying something like that.
Who needs evidence when you could have bob?
To be frank (ha!) it sounds more like a Republican talking point, as does so much of what Bob says these days.
Washington Monthly 1/21/17
Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) nailed it going [link] away a few years ago:[Frank] said liberals sometimes draw the wrong lesson from the success of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Frank said Gandhi and King were forced to resort to marches and demonstrations because they were representing groups that lacked the right to vote.
He said perhaps for that reason the conservative Tea Party has been more successful than the liberal Occupy Movement.
Frank said, "When the Right gets mad it votes, when the Left gets mad it marches."
So basically you got the quote right, which is a start - well done! - but you just completely misunderstood what he was saying, to the point where you massively mistook his argument.
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Can anyone recommend a good place to buy stockings? For years I bought them at Ann Taylor but they dropped most of their colors.
I've been buying the Nordstrom brand for quite a while, but there is a boycott of companies that sell Trump-branded merchandise, and Nordstrom is on that list. (As are Bloomingdale's, TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Macy's, Lord and Taylor, and Neiman Marcus.
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Jesus Christ, I am not sure I can take more than 48 hours of a Trump presidency with daily commentary by mcmanus. I'm sorry. I need that bandwidth for other things.
OK 37 made me LOL. Sorry, LK, I totally sympathize but right now I'm clinging to anything even remotely funny. I'll take a break and watch the video of the nazi Spencer getting tolchocked. Not that I'm in favor of violence, but nazis, yanno?
I didn't think 37 was that funny.
I looked up "Rupert Pumpkin" (containing a Scorcese allusion) but apparently there is a cartoon character. Wonder if DeNiro is voicing. I thought it was pretty decent as a quick witticism, and first use as far as I can tell. But permissions granted, cause commonism.
We obviously can't rely on ajay's google-fu.
I am just like Gandhi in that I have walked places to get salt.
If it comes to that i will ask my senator to vote against impeachment. I prefer crazy and stupid over smart and evil.
This is crazy to me.
Pence would be evil but also standard Republican.
With Trump we have a white supremacist in the WH (who wrote his Inauguration speech- "America First" anyone?Bannon knows exactly what that means). Erosion of a host of democratic norms, every day seems to bring another one from Spicer to the massive corruption we know is already being planned and taking place. Plausible expectations of a shooting war with China over either Taiwan or the South China Sea (both are policy positions already articulated by Trump which will involve conflict with China if put into place).
And that's putting aside the entire Russian mishegas.
Plus passing up a chance to seriously weaken the GOP. Does anyone think that Pence as president would stand a better chance in 2020 than Trump (if he makes it that far)? Honestly this is just...take a step back. If we can get rid Trump we'd be crazy not to.
Trump is also standard Republican, just more so. We got here because Republicans have spent 40 years eroding those norms. Your point on 2020 is right, but otherwise I think others are right, sheer incompetence is the only real check right now.
While I remember, I heard a thing recently, where Reagan's 1980 election was quite a shock at the time, comparable to, if smaller than, the shock felt now. Anyone remember?
42 Agree on the 40 years eroding norms but in no way is Trump a bog-standard Republican. He introduces an element of chaos, immaturity, cult of authoritarian personality that the likes of Pence, Cruz, etc., just does not elicit. But he also introduces a vulnerabilities that they do not (like the corruption, etc) so if we can get rid of him and weaken the GOP it would be madness not to.
43 I do.
A couple of items with regard to the march. In the other thread someone was asking if the organizers had made a new estimate of attendance in DC. Don't think they did, and don't think they would have had a clue given the extent of overflow outside of the original planned gathering areas --Independence Ave and a small section of the Mall (in fact many of the overview pictures I have seen in newspapers did not show the main portion of the march at all since harder to get aerial shots down Independence). This short panoramic video shot from atop a building along Independence probably gives the best overall perspective of that part of the march. Stage was a fair distance to the east down Independence from that shot, with a number of big jumbotrons set up down Independence and a few set up perpendicularly to be visible from parts of the mall.
The dueling crowd sizes are completely polarized but the data I saw in the WaPo had Saturday at just over 1M rides, 2nd to 1st Obama at 1.1M. Obama 2 was 780K and Trump on Friday was 570K (which I think I saw somewhere was smaller than a typical weekday).
So probably somewhere between 500K and 1M at the "march". In the end we did finally follow the original planned route to the Ellipse, but BIL and family were on the mall and basically ended up going along there and Constitution, while my son who arrived late (got to train station in Baltimore at 7 and got on a train at 11) was behind the stage and ended up with a going around the Capitol and up Pennsylvania.
And the Reagan administration really was disastrous in many ways, albeit not the end of world. As was the Bush II administration. It was said a lot during the campaign, and needs to keep being said, Trump is not an aberration.
43: My recall is that him winning was a much, much smaller shock*. However, the *margin* of victory was a huge shock.
*I was living in Houston at the time so tha tmay have colored my perception.
And here is an observation on maleness I will make after having spent a good part of the day today pink-behatted out and around the various memorials and whatnot at the west end of the Mall. I received a greatly disproportionate number of comments and gestures of approval etc. compared to my similarly-behatted wife and daughter (who had actually made theirs,* as well as mine and a few others...). Such a low bar for a man in America as the two of them reminded me at many junctures throughout the day.
*My son did make his own, so we were not completely gender-stereotyped (well I am).
40/42/44/etc is the circles we're all going in, right? When it comes to nuclear codes, we all trust Pence more than Trump. When it comes to passing horrendous legislation and repealing good laws, Pence is probably more efficient than Trump. There's a non-negligible chance that Trump starts World War III, but if he doesn't, he probably wastes more time bumbling around than Pence would. It's just impossible to know if our priority should be preventing a hundred thousand tiny cuts or one giant major nuclear cut.
I think the CIA speech was truly something special. The part I like the best is that it has now come out that the main cheering and clapping came from Trump staffers he had brought along (like at the press conference). I expect this to be SOP in all appearances for him.
Today's Trump/Comey interaction does make me want to puke, but is certainly inconsequential in the grander scheme of things.
49: Yeah with DT for me in addition to the big scary foreign policy stuff it's the Bannon/worldwide supremacist stuff that freaks me out a bit. Pence is a total freaking bigot but along more standard Reaganesque lines.
Gah, what a fucking mess.
And I'm actually in about the best mood I've been in since the election, and I still hate pretty much everything. In fact we made the unanimous decision to not go to the Holocaust Museum today in an attempt to try to stretch out our illusions about humanity just a little bit longer.
53.last: I had been wondering why you had chosen that particular museum to visit this time.
My wife has wanted to go for a long time. But even she realized it was a bit much. (Talking about someone who over the past year has read The Plot Against America and It Can't Happen Here, and is in the middle of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; so she's quite willing to explore the darker possibilities of the dark side.)
But we were Shiny, Happy People today!
43: Oh fuck yes I remember 1980
Reagan not that bad a shock, but the coattails were screaming bad. Lost my fucking wonderful congressman of like twenty years to a complete asshole. McGovern, the better Bayh, Frank Church, Magnuson, Gaylord Nelson (founder of Earth Day)
Course, the partisan differences were different then, and the new Repub Senators would align with Dixiecrats. 1st Repub Senate control since 1954
The math on Pence versus Trump is complicated. Surely Trump has a caucus of GOP senators who hate his guts and will carry grudges to their graves. Pence really is a very dim bulb who was pretty unpopular even in Indiana and a bought-and-sold subsidiary of JesusCorp.
(Though this feels like debating the merits of being burned to death or impaled.)
43 I'm still in shock over 1980. It was really bad.
I've explained why I think Pence is better for our side, and won't repeat it. Let me just say that voting against impeachment would be a different level of madness. Whatever it is that has gotten DT into the dock -- open bribery, most likely, although abuse of domestic opponents' NSA files could be egregious enough -- voting no is saying that it was ok. Then it's not just 40 years of eroding norms, but we've ratified it.
It looks like our special election may end up the first test of post-Trump mobilization. Both our Dem contenders were big public supporters of Sanders, and whichever one wins the nomination, you'll all be getting funding appeals. Election late April early May, looks like.
It's actually a petty interesting choice we have to make. I've probably already blathered on about this here, so instead I'll just link a song from one of the contenders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdOHoHfuE5E
The other main contender is also in a band, but I can't find any of their work online.
It looks like our special election may end up the first test of post-Trump mobilization. Both our Dem contenders were big public supporters of Sanders, and whichever one wins the nomination, you'll all be getting funding appeals. Election late April early May, looks like.
There's also going to be one for Price's seat in Georgia. Not sure of the timing, though.
43. I remember the reaction to Reagan as being less shock than horror. Because he obviously didn't have what it takes, all previous Presidents in living memory, good and bad, having been obviously intelligent, aware people. It was the first time a blithering idiot had been elected as front man. Plus what people have said about the coat tails.
But you need to remember how unpopular Carter was at the time. We've become so used to Carter as the genial elder statesman, that we easily forget that instinctive liberals would have voted for the Easter bunny to get him out in 1980.
I hope these emolumennts lawsuits being filed have been well thought out and carefully prepared.
I see Zephyr Teachout is involved.
I'm supposed to be mad at Zephyr Teachout over something, but I can't remember what. I guess I have to wish her luck with this in any case.
She's cool. I think I've told the story about how I knew her when I lived in Morocco.
Was Zephyr Teachout on the outs with the Obama administration? It seems like she's the kind of young liberal idealist with political aspirations that Obama should have been cultivating to build the party, but instead it seems like she was kept at arms length. Maybe because of her association with Howard Dean?
Because of her association with Barry, obvs.
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Rather anachronistic anxiety dream this morning about a contract negotiation pay cut due to be arranged today — anachronistic, at least for a Stuart monarch: I was living in a large, dilapidated mansion, with mahogany paneled walls, faded tapestries and wide stone staircases; tucked in under the staircase, amid the paneling, was a bijou cast iron gas chamber, roughly cubical in shape. It was explained to me that I'd have to step in because they needed to test that the gas actually worked. I argued about this, but the woman attending me, who looked a little like Sarah Palin, was politely unmoved. I didn't know how to fill the time until my appointment.
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If you're sitting on a plane and the person next to you is doing their work in a totally incompetent manner* such that you could do in 30 seconds what's taking them 30 minutes, is it considered rude to rip the computer from their hands and just do the damn work the right way?
*Preparing tables of data in Keynote by retyping data by hand cell by cell from an Excel sheet instead of just copying and pasting- literally moving the keynote window down to see Excel behind it and using the top of the window as a straightedge to look across a row and copy info from various columns.
voting no is saying that it was ok. Then it's not just 40 years of eroding norms, but we've ratified it
Good point. I think the chances of a Republican Congress actually impeaching are virtually nil, so the discussion is kind of hypothetical. But if it happened then yes, you're quite right.
73: Definitely rude, definitely humane, and definitely the wrong thing to do because my only advantage in life is being smarter than people like that.
Don't worry Charlie, you're fine until they start building a scaffold.
Its true, Republican Congressmen aren't going to impeach Trump. I'm sure that they've all entertained the thought, and some may even truly wish to do it. But, at heart, they are a bunch of unprincipled cowards who are likely to become increasingly complicit with his crimes. Don't look there for rescue.
73. Senior executive? Sounds like boardroom approach to technology.
73: Try to enjoy it. Over the holidays I noticed a guy two rows up from me - middle aged man with wife and two kids - playing tic tac toe against the computer on the in-flight entertainment system and losing roughly half the games over the course of about 30 minutes.
Probably one of those tic-tac-toe hustlers. Don't bet against him.
If the plane goes down, at least you can die knowing that the species will emerge the stronger.
78- No, I think just a team member of a business consulting firm.
Yeah 74 is exactly how I feel about it which is why I found myself getting a bit miffed at the very idea.
How old was when I "solved" tic-tac-toe? Less than 10 I think, but certainly older than the chicken tic-tac-toe champion. But, I think there are a fair number of adults who never figure it out. I suppose that includes a lot of adults that never gave it a moment of concentrated attention.
68: Zephyr Teachout was a boogeyman and a running joke in the early political blogosphere for writing about and then running a conference on ethical standards for bloggers. She criticized Atrios and DailyKos for raising tens of thousands of dollars for Democrats when they were anonymous (there was less of that on the otehr side back then). Atrios still uses the line "time for a blogging ethics conference" occasionally.
Both of those guys unanonomyzed before long, and regarding secret fundraisers she was basically right. I met here last year when she was unsuccessfully running for Congress, and she's good.
85 Oh god I remember that. I was commenting at Eschaton back when Atrios was still teaching gym.
Eschaton. Everything old is new again.
Eschaton: Everything future is immanentized again.
I'm in the talking out loud stages of drunk, and don't have any chocolate to eat.
But can still make low-level jokes about Christian theological concepts. My priorities in life have possibly been misplaced.
Oh mother, tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in Kaoliang spirit haze
In the land of the Plum Blossom
34 oh let's talk about stockings! Wolford has an outlet site and you can get things relatively cheap there. I mean, they're still not drugstore tights cheap, but hey.
I dunno. I have a lot of energy for doing the work and almost no energy for talking about it, which is in some ways good but in other ways, well, I might have better ideas about what work to do if I could bear to hash it out with people. But nope, head down, stay kind, push for rule of law that transcends and binds government in any venue in which I practice, live the rest of my life like nothing's different aside from occasionally googling churches. It's helpful that my dad, who would normally be a font of exhausting outrage, is doing wonderfully and is happy enough to be alive and returned that he doesn't get too worked up about the state of the world he returned to. Maybe we can all just get hit on the head and be in a coma for a bit, seems to solve some problems.
Oh man, baiju. I don't envy you your hangover.
Seriously that shit is awful. But it's ubiquitous and cheap as dirt.
Jesus Christ, baijiu? Get yourself together, man.
They have these hilarious ads where models knock back shots of the stuff, writhe in agony, and then contort their faces into into broad smiles as if, no, actually that was really enjoyable.
It's a perverse state of affairs, given the lack of hydrogenase factors or whatever.
Mossy, move to KY. It's time for an intervention.
Like, for better cheap booze, not to stop drinking. You could try urpleville!
What do they do for beer in roc Island?
93 continued I wish I had found these before unwavering commitment to MODT aesthetic rendered them objectionably loud.
yes the stocking window is full size on my entirely visible work screen.
Zephyr Teachout is on Brian Lehrer on WNYC right now.
100: Here, here.
103: Badly. I'm not much of a beer drinker, but Jesus Christ, terrible. In my defence, I can actually tell the difference between good and bad liquor, and there are good whiskys on sale (though not much of anything else). But cheap Trumpian drunkenness, kaoliang's like air.
108.1 Those are hilarious. Thanks.
My wife and I attended our local march this weekend. On the way, we were just hoping that the crowd wouldn't be embarrassingly small. I think the organizers had the same thought--they agreed to cut the marching route in half to avoid construction. (I can see that falling in a hole would be bad for a march.)
Instead, turnout was surprisingly large. We choked the sidewalks at all 4 corners of the northern street crossing, and had a solid mass waiting for each light at the southern crossing. Instead of the maybe 50-100 people that we saw at prop 8 protests, it was a solid, happy mass of humanity that seemed to exceed everyone's expectations.
Going with friends made it much better.
Stopping drinking before you get dementia is maybe a good idea. The combination of not being able to have a drink and not being able to remember why you can't have a drink is horrible to watch.
That sounds awful. Is it maybe a situation where a couple of sixpacks of non-alcoholic beer would be ameliorative?
I'd rather shoot a bear with a .22.
My wife and I met up with some high school friends at one of their apartments close to the start point. We bailed on the march itself just after the Washington Monument due to the lack of throughput, then headed west to see the MLK Memorial. An unimaginable number of people, the vast majority of which were women; I often wouldn't realize how many people were around me until we'd go up stairs or hit a small rise and I'd realize that my immediate crowd extended, at the same packed density in all directions and around buildings. (This lead to some issues when a crowd hundreds of yards long suddenly realized it didn't have any room to advance and had to reverse, but people were surprisingly patient.) I didn't wear one of the undeniably cute pussy hats as to me it straddles the line of being supportive and appropriative (and some people saw them as transphobic). But yeah, much energy, great experience, so wow.
84: You don't have to use quotes around "solved"; I think the sense you're using it in is exactly the sense that a computer scientist would when describing a solved game, i.e. that either the first player can force a win, either player can force a draw, or no such solution exists.
cosign 112. my grandmother died like that; it was awful. she hated beer and seeing her totter around with a half-can of spit-warm beer...gives me the cold robbies thinking about it: I got a coupon for a free drink for the flight today and thought about taking it along to give to someone but we departed st 8:30 a.m.
If it's United, I'll need it Sunday.
Anyway, as long as the social worker keeps looking at my like that, I'll never calm down without a drink.
I am annoyed with things like this from my FB feed:
Far greater than the threat of evil is the silence of good people.Obviously I get what they're going for. But you know what? The evil is worse. If the evil weren't evil, no one would give a shit if I were silent.
Yep. At the women's march I saw a t-shirt with some boilerplate about how being neutral made you complicit with the oppressor. I thought: "But you know, it's definitely a good idea to go after the oppressors first... and then decide what to do with the neutral people. Let's stay focused. I know it's a hell of a lot easier to yell at nearby stupid cowards than to take any meaningful action against scary things, but that doesn't actually make you any braver."
120: Similarly, even if you don't think much of Hillary, it seems like a mistake to not include her among the honorees for the march.
I mean, it's obvious and unavoidable that march organizers have some ideas that I won't agree with. That didn't and wouldn't stop me from attending. But that sure does seem like a bad choice.
121: "Do it perfectly, or don't try at all." Words I live by.
I agree that it looks weird not having her on that list of honorees, but a lot of things look weird about it. A mix of living and dead women, for one thing. For another, I don't recognize all the names, but are there any living politicians on it? If they had a general policy against that for whatever reason, fine, but I have to think some of them must merit inclusion, whether Clinton or others. For a third, I see two articles about Clinton's omission and non-attendance, but neither says why. Has she said why she didn't join? Did the organizers say? If so, what is the reason? Maybe she asked not to be mentioned. For all we can tell this is a non-story.
I think it's most likely that they chose to exclude Clinton (if that's actually what happened) because of the risk of it becoming all about her. I don't mean any offense or aspersions to her, it's just that she's in a unique position. Anything she said or did there would have got more attention than everything everyone else did, and it would have been seen as re-fighting the general election. I'm surprised by how well the march and coverage of it went, and I doubt it would have been even better by making her an honoree.
Also, People's comments section seems even worse than most.
Her presence would have given a lot of media the wrong tent pole.
I don't recognize all the names, but are there any living politicians on it?
When I saw "Winona LaDuke" go by, I stopped giving a shit pretty fucking fast.
Charley, you and your GTMO work have been on my mind all weekend and into the week. Is there anything for me, a random bystander, to do to make a difference, ranging from looking for more Arabic-language books to enrolling in law school?
123: Yeah, I think she was wise not to attend.
There's not all that much.
Actually, I need a mp3 player that has no other functionality. Like FM, for example -- the last one I took down just got rejected. If anyone has one lying around unused and unloved, I know a good home for it.
I need to go buy him some shoes this week.
Can someone please explain the second commercial in 108?
What's to explain? Colonel Sanders looking dude says drink this liquor and somebody does and he passes out. Sanders says he has drunk himself drunk, now you must do so alongside him,so the next guy does. The colonel says to the remaining guy, everybody has drunk themselves drunk, so you must pay the check. And then he says drinking responsibly is the tastiest drinking.I have trouble understanding what glasses dude says, so maybe I'm missing nuance, but I doubt it.
If you drink responsibly, you have to pay for the drinks of the irresponsible?
I think it has to do with their reverence for Colonel Sanderses.
112: My grandmother was getting drunk and maudlin every night by having her "before dinner sherry" over and over and over. She was never a big drinker, maybe a small glass of sherry before dinner and wine with dinner. It took my aunt weeks to figure out (aides were helping with grocery shopping). Sparkling cider was the answer for her, but she was incredibly agreeable about the whole thing. They switched her to decaf for similar reasons - she basically stopped sleeping.
My mother just qualified for hospice. She gets a massage therapist, a music therapist and a chaplain (!), plus a reclining wheelchair with high back, AND side supports. Happy day, I guess.
I hope that works. Who knows what will happen here.
Not even the first full week and the entire senior management team of State has just resigned. Career FSOs all.
Speechless.
Blimey.
Here's the link BTW https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/01/26/the-state-departments-entire-senior-management-team-just-resigned/?postshare=7891485447148486&tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.744a462961f6
Is there a link to anything that's not paywalled?
It's not paywalled for me. Try googling the headline: "The State Department's entire senior management team just resigned" that sometimes works.
talkingpointsmemo.com has a good summary.
Chief of the Border Patrol has just resigned.
I suspect some of these resignations are because the people involved know they'll be fired once Trump's cronies are running the show. Still, kudos to them for taking a stand.
CNN reporting that they were fired. I guess these are the alternative facts I keep hearing so much about.
I'd be a little disappointed in them if they did resign so quickly. The deep state has to resist.
We could probably use a 2nd weekend post things have moved so very fast.
Thought this would get some bitter laughs in these parts:
https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/825337947968983041
I'm regularly traveling overseas and this bullshit is making me more nervous than any threat of terrorism ever did.
Same here. I've lived in the MENA region off and on for a number of years in the 90s and now. And I've been adjacent to some very nasty and scary shit. With this and the taking the oil line it's the first time I can remember I've been seriously concerned with my own personal safety.
146: That is great, in the way of gallows humor.
149 I thought of you specifically when I came here to post it.
Thinking generally, we're all doomed but I'm encased in a protective cocoon of white people so I don't need to worry about Trump as directly as you.