Protests

by 11:11 am. It has 42 Comments.

I though the protests last January around time of inauguration were great. Let’s make this an open thread about protests of the tax scam bill. In particular, let’s hear about any protests going on in your area and let me know if you hear of any centralized place where people can about protests they can go to.


Johnny goes Buh Bye

by 10:39 am. It has 117 Comments.

Compare:

and Contrast:


Spinning Circle Open Thread

by 10:04 am. It has 62 Comments.

Microsoft seized control of my laptop when I cranked it up this morning to start work. It said, “Working on updates. Don’t turn off your PC. This will take a while.”

It wasn’t kidding. I’ve been watching the spinning circle for an hour and a half, and it’s 75% complete. It would have been nice to have some advance warning that this goddamned update would consume hours of my workday. I have deadlines to meet, but Microsoft don’t give a fuck!

Anyhoo, while I wait with growing impatience, a story: I was in town last night on an errand, and I stopped by the world famous Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City to pick up some take-out. Aside from their food, mosaics and early 20th century architecture, the Columbia is famous for their flamenco dancer shows, which look like this:

As I was awaiting my food at the Maître D’ stand in the crowded foyer, a tourist approached the hostess and inquired about tickets to the “flamingo dance.” In the ensuing conversation, it soon became clear that he thought there were actual dancing birds at the Columbia.

Everyone laughed at the poor bastard. The end.

Open thread!





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CHIP and my daughter

by 6:27 am. It has 43 Comments.

2010 was a rough year financially for my family. I had been laid off the previous September. My wife was working part time in a position that did not utilize her skills to the fullest of her ability. We were both looking for full time work in our respective fields and finding nothing.

We also have an amazing (and increasingly not a ) little girl. I was lucky, I was able to spend fifteen months of the most critical developmental time with Elise.

We had a routine and we had fun. Long walk to the library on Monday and Wednesday for story times, bus rides for lap sits and finger plays on Tuesday and Thursdays. Playground time with her little buddies almost every day so that they could toddle and I could talk with other adults. Fridays usually meant we had lunch dates with the moms in the group that we had assembled. I don’t know how much of this routine was for her and how much of it was for me as it was my social life as a stay at home parent.

When I had been laid off, I tried to COBRA my family’s coverage. We had the stimulus subsidy of 65% of the COBRA premium helping, but health insurance was still one of my four unemployment checks for a policy with a $2,500 individual deductible. My wife and I quickly realized that this would blow through our savings and run up credit card debt too quickly. We decided to see what we could find for Elise while we applied for an underwritten plan with a $12,500 deductible, no maternity and a 6 month non-emergency surgery exclusion waiver for under $100. We could not afford a $12,500 deductible but we could probably pay that off over several years if we got a cancer diagnosis.

We applied for CHIP, and after the application ping-ponged back and forth between the Medicaid qualification team and the CHIP team, we put Elise on heavily subsidized CHIP. $25 a month for UPMC for Kids. It had a big network, low co-pays and good customer service. And we barely used it for her. She had her one year old visit covered by CHIP. I betrayed her as I held her down as the nurse gave her the vaccines. Daddy was supposed to protect her. I was not supposed to aid and abet people stabbing her. Ice cream fixed that betrayal.

And then mid-summer came. She suddenly transitioned from being a happy go lucky kid to being a complete cranky pants. In the last week of June she would just sit down in the middle of a walk and cry. She would reach for Mom or Dad to carry her instead of running with the other kids. She was not herself.

We took her to the pediatrician, he saw nothing, but said to trust our instincts. A few days later on the 4th of July, we knew something was not right so we took her to the ER. They X-rayed her and thought nothing too strange was happening and sent us back to our PCP. He saw her again and set up an appointment with an orthopedist as he saw that Elise was not walking right.

Three days later, I took her to the orthopedist. He made funny faces at her and offered her a lollipop as the grown-ups talked. He poked and prodded. He thought he saw something on the original X-ray, and ordered another that focused more on her shin than her ankles. Four minutes later, we had a diagnosis, a green stick fracture. Once he had a clear indicator, he showed me how the ER team missed it as the break had not been obvious.

She got a walking boot. Three odd steps and a high five to the orthopedists, and we were on our way. And then she was back to being a happy kid as we stopped at the mall to let her play in some air conditioned space:

CHIP made sure my little girl was safe, CHIP made sure my little girl got the care that she needed. CHIP made sure my little girl was not walking around in pain for the summer. CHIP made my little girl’s life a whole lot better.





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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Same, Cat…

by 6:23 am. It has 85 Comments.

This is the Internet, so of course Max has an Instagram account, and also got a story in the Washington Post:

… Max spent time on the streets as a young cat, so he learned to roam early on. About a year ago, he was adopted at a shelter by Connie Lipton, who lives across a small street from Macalester, where Lipton’s husband teaches religious studies. Max made very clear that he wanted to continue roaming, Lipton said in an interview Wednesday, so they let him.

And roam he did, making friends across campus. Last summer, Max hung out at a reunion event that featured live music and a large tent. He enjoyed spending time on a vast green where students play Frisbee. He frequented student housing down the street, entered the science building more than once, and stopped by the Spanish and Portuguese department…

“We’ve had multiple calls because his phone number is on his tag,” Lipton said. “He’s a funny guy. He loves people. He loves to socialize — with groups.”…

But when Max began entering the library, zipping by students whose arms were loaded with books, “he started getting in trouble,” Lipton said… An employee is very allergic to cats, and some people worried Max would get locked inside, Lipton said, so a handwritten sign announcing his banishment was posted about a month ago. It was replaced more recently with the version that went viral this week, which was made by an artist and library employee named Christopher Schommer…

The sign recently came down, Lipton said, because Max’s roaming privileges have been revoked. A major construction project is happening on campus, and she didn’t want the cat to somehow get stuck in its mess. He now has a red harness and a leash, not that he’s happy about it.

“He’s going crazy. He cries and howls and paces around, looking out the windows,” Lipton said. “I’m really hoping he takes to walking on the leash. Then I can just walk him over there and he can still see his peeps and have his social life.”…

Such sociability is a condition for which red tabby boys are known — by cat standards, they’re party animals. Our current redhead, Rocket the Viking, is a rescue we’re pretty certain escaped from his original home in search of a good time, and then couldn’t find his way back. He’s also inherited the Siamese genes that lead to a depraved appetite (term of veterinary art) for various inedible fibers. In the three years he’s lived here, his unnatural desires and burglary skills have cost us some hundreds of dollars in sweaters, t-shirts, socks, towels, jeans, dish scrubbies, etc. (We installed child-proof latches — which don’t always thwart him — on the cupboards, and keep the toilet brush container rubber-banded shut.) There is one room to which *none* of the pets are allowed access, because that’s where my clothes/hobbies/sewing supplies are stored; needless to say, Rocky thinks of this as The Big Sock Candy Mountain, and spends hours trying to work the doorknob & complaining in his meezer yowl when he’s once again rebuffed…
***********

Apart from sympathizing with a guy so cruelly deprived of his Feline Rights, what’s on the agenda for the day?


RIP, John Anderson

by 1:15 am. It has 88 Comments.

Anderson got my first presidential vote (because you had to be 21 to vote in 1976, and my 21st birthday fell a week too late). In my defense, those were more innocent days; I was outraged at Jimmy Carter’s cynically abandoning women to court “heartland” anti-choice voters, and besides, my individual vote didn’t mean much in then-dependably-Democratic Michigan.

What happened next convinced me (and should have convinced younger voters, IMO) that there are only two possible choices in American presidential elections, and the Democratic one is always preferable. The ensuing, increasingly suicidal, embrace of Ralph Nader by “progressives” only reinforced my conviction that too many leftists are less interested in actual political progress than in performative virtue-signalling.

We may not have fully appreciated it in 1980, but John Anderson marked the last bastion of Liberal Republicanism. Per Ed Kilgore, at NYMag

John B. Anderson of Illinois, who died today at the age of 95, served in Congress for 20 years. But what gave him national fame was a briefly sensational independent candidacy for president in 1980, running against President Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be-president Ronald Reagan. By doing so, Anderson represented two milestones in modern political history: He was the most conspicuous of early conscientious objectors to the conservative movement’s takeover of the Republican Party, and he was the prototype for the kind of centrist third-party presidential candidate that so many pundits and billionaires long for in today’s era of partisan polarization.

Anderson was not, of course, the first moderate-to-liberal Republican to oppose the rightward drift of his party. But he was the first to take an unsuccessful presidential primary candidacy right out of the GOP and into an independent ballot line. He took that fateful step in part because of the low regard he had for Ronald Reagan, his vanquisher in the primaries. But he also realized his brand of socially liberal, fiscally conservative politics had a stronger constituency outside his own party…

For a while, Anderson’s campaign was quite the phenomenon. In June his National Unity Party ticket (with running mate Pat Lucey, a Democratic former governor of Wisconsin) was polling at 24 percent according to Gallup. But as is typically the case, voters returned to the two major parties as the election approached. And in fact, Anderson largely abandoned his centrist positioning in order to poach liberals from Jimmy Carter, whose Evangelical background, fiscal conservatism, and cool relationship with Israel alienated a lot of usually Democratic voters. I recall seeing Anderson speak in San Francisco in the fall of 1980, by which time he was emphasizing his progressive social views, including what was then an unusual attitude of support for gay rights.

In the end, Anderson won only 7 percent of the vote, and his National Unity Party vanished without a trace. By 1984, Anderson was endorsing Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale. And so he was the prototype for millions of other relatively liberal Republicans who trended Democratic as even larger numbers of conservative Democrats joined the GOP. He had a distinguished later career as chairman of the electoral-reform group FairVote, which promotes a national popular vote and ranked-choice voting…





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Yet Another Russiagate Open Thread: These Crappy New Reboots Are Too Rushed

by 10:55 pm. It has 139 Comments.

Love the graphic, tho…

Sure, we all remember the basic outlines, but it just makes the whole process feel sketchy!
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Meanwhile, in Would this face lie to you? developments…

… K. T. McFarland served on the presidential transition team before becoming the White House deputy national security adviser. In July, she was questioned in writing by Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, on whether she had ever spoken to Mr. Flynn about his contacts with Sergey I. Kislyak, who was then the Russian ambassador to Washington, before Mr. Trump took office.

“I am not aware of any of the issues or events described above,” Ms. McFarland wrote in response, sidestepping a direct answer to the question.

An email exchange obtained by The New York Times indicates that Ms. McFarland was aware at the time of a crucial Dec. 29 phone call between Mr. Flynn and Mr. Kislyak that was intercepted by American intelligence. During that call, Mr. Flynn urged Moscow to respond cautiously to sanctions just imposed by the Obama administration for Russia’s interference in the presidential election.

If senators on the Foreign Relations Committee find that Ms. McFarland was evasive in her testimony, it could complicate her nomination to become ambassador to Singapore. Repeated attempts to reach Ms. McFarland, who left her post as deputy national security adviser in May, were unsuccessful…

(Readership capture):


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Late night fundraising

by 10:55 pm. It has 10 Comments.

Let’s try to hit 20K for Doug Jones. If he wins on December 12, we have a decent chance to kill the big tax scam bill.

Goal Thermometer





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Quid Pro Quo

by 10:04 pm. It has 49 Comments.

This seems significant (via NPR):

2016 RNC Delegate: Trump Directed Change To Party Platform On Ukraine Support

President Trump may have been involved with a change to the Republican Party campaign platform last year that watered down support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine, according to new information from someone who was involved.

Diana Denman, a Republican delegate who supported arming U.S. allies in Ukraine, has told people that Trump aide J.D. Gordon said at the Republican Convention in 2016 that Trump directed him to support weakening that position in the official platform.

Recall that this was the only proposed platform policy the Trump people saw fit to adjust. After running a “populist” campaign that was credited by the more gullible members of the Beltway media herd for rejecting GOP orthodoxy and goring Republican sacred cows left and right, when the so-called insurgents seized control, the sole alteration they requested just coincidentally was designed to make Putin’s life easier.

Trump’s flunky Gordon now denies he told Denman that the platform change request came from Trump. Uh huh.

I’ve always thought this platform change smelled fishier than a scratch-and-dent Chicken of the Sea warehouse.


Good breaking news

by 7:27 pm. It has 227 Comments.

That is all.

Open thread.





This post is in , and has 227 Comments.

Begging For It

by 6:27 pm. It has 99 Comments.

I just can’t tell if these guys are this fucking stupid or this arrogant because they have never had to deal with the consequences of their actions:

The special counsel investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Monday accused President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, of working with a Russian colleague to draft an opinion piece about his political work for Ukraine.

In court filings, a prosecutor working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team said Manafort was working on the article as recently as Nov. 30.

Had it been published, prosecutors say it would have violated a Nov. 8 court order not to discuss the case publicly.

The Russian colleague who was working with Manafort allegedly to shape public opinion about his work for a Ukrainian political party has ties to Russian intelligence agencies, according to the filing.

Manafort ultimately never published the opinion piece, after prosecutors reached out to his attorneys to alert them, they said in the filing.

Due to Manafort’s actions, prosecutors said the judge should reject his request to modify his bail conditions.

Just put the motherfucker in jail already.





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Just seventeen if you know what I mean

by 5:29 pm. It has 148 Comments.

The George Soros forgeries are getting better and better:

Debbie Wesson Gibson was in her attic hauling out boxes of Christmas decorations last week when she noticed a storage bin she said she had forgotten about. Inside was a scrapbook from her senior year of high school, and taped to a page titled “Those Who Inspire” was a graduation card.

“Happy graduation Debbie,” it read in slanted cursive handwriting. “I wanted to give you this card myself. I know that you’ll be a success in anything you do. Roy.”

[….]

At a Nov. 27 campaign event in the north Alabama town of Henagar, Moore said, “The allegations are completely false. They are malicious. Specifically, I do not know any of these women.”

At a Nov. 29 rally at a church in the south Alabama town of Theodore, Moore said, “Let me state once again: I do not know any of these women…

I hope Alabama is ready for lots of boycotts if they elect this pedophile.





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Monday Afternoon Open Thread

by 2:39 pm. It has 178 Comments.

For the past few days, I’ve been slacking on the blog and social media (not to mention work) because of the arrival of this early Christmas present to myself:

My husband got a motorcycle a couple of months ago, and I can’t bear to let him go through a mid-life crisis alone, so I got one too. When I first met my husband, he drove a motorcycle, which was the sole misgiving my mom had about him. But then we took a 20-year break from motorcycling to nurture the next generation of Crackers.

Since I hadn’t ridden a proper motorcycle in years, I took a class a few weeks ago, then found a deal on this Suzuki Boulevard S40, an entry-level cruiser with a single cylinder 650cc engine. I like it a lot so far. It’s got a low center of gravity and is quick and nimble.

I’m still learning its quirks and regaining my motorcycling chops, which were never all that great to begin with, to be honest. So I’ve just been riding around our little town and out in the country among the strawberry fields, avoiding the highways because 1) I’m a chickenshit (according to my husband), or 2) I have a well-developed sense of self-preservation (according to me).

So far, I’ve had the opportunity to test my reflexes when two people backed cars out of their driveways right in front of me. Yesterday, a Jack Russell Terrier who bore a striking resemblance to Cole’s Miss Rosie (only not quite as spherical as she) chased me for a while. I let her almost catch me and then gunned it. Haha, dog! She retreated to her yard.

Anyhoo, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. I know it’s dangerous, I’m stupid to ride a donorcycle, etc. Whatever, man.

Open thread!


Pure excitement, misled

by 1:10 pm. It has 154 Comments.

It’s beginning to look a like obstruction:

The White House’s chief lawyer told President Donald Trump in January he believed then-national security adviser Michael Flynn had misled the FBI and lied to Vice President Mike Pence and should be fired, a source familiar with the matter said Monday.

Most you know this but the upshot is that Trump asking Comey to go easy on Flynn is obstruction of justice if Trump knew Flynn committed a crime.


Excellent Read: “Inside the secretive nerve center of the Mueller investigation”

by 11:04 am. It has 183 Comments.


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No matter how many tantrums Lord Smallgloves throws, or how anxious the rest of us, it doesn’t seem like Mr. Mueller is gonna be finished by the end of 2017:

… With his stealth morning arrival Thursday, White House Counsel Donald F. McGahn II became the latest in a string of high-level witnesses to enter the secretive nerve center of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Twenty hours later, Mueller and his team emerged into public view to rattle Washington with the dramatic announcement that former national security adviser Michael Flynn would plead guilty to lying to the FBI.

The ensnaring of Flynn, the second former aide to President Trump to cooperate with the inquiry, serves as the latest indication that Mueller’s operation is rapidly pursuing an expansive mission, drilling deeper into Trump’s inner circle.

In the past two months, Mueller and his deputies have received private debriefs from two dozen current and former Trump advisers, each of whom has made the trek to the special counsel’s secure office suite…

The special counsel has continued to make ongoing requests for records from associates of the Trump campaign, according to two people familiar with the requests. The campaign associates aren’t expected to finish producing these documents by the end of the year. Mueller’s team is also newly scrutinizing an Alexandria-based office and advisers who worked there on foreign policy for the campaign.

In the past several weeks, Mueller’s operation has reached out to new witnesses in Trump’s circle, telling them they may be asked to come in for an interview. One person who was recently contacted said it is hard to find a lawyer available for advice on how to interact with the special counsel because so many Trump aides have already hired attorneys…

People familiar with the Mueller team said they convey a sense of calm that is unsettling.

“These guys are confident, impressive, pretty friendly — joking a little, even,” one lawyer said. When prosecutors strike that kind of tone, he said, defense lawyers tend to think: “Uh oh, my guy is in a heap of trouble.”