The settlement still needs federal court approval, but Flint residents were being cautiously optimistic after the drawn-out crisis: “I just want it to be over.”
…although their mileage clearly varies considerably
The Republican Embrace of QAnon Goes Far Beyond Trump
…but sometimes we need to accept that in a world where nobody thus far has pulled off perfection it’s basically a given that somewhere in the context there are flaws to be found
Mark Zuckerberg Questioned Under Oath in F.T.C. Antitrust Inquiry
…so
Silicon Valley has enthusiastically backed Ms. Harris since she first ran for state attorney general in California a decade ago.
…how come the guys get to travel light & the ladies have baggage?
…I mean…I’m all for trying to dwell a little on how good it was to hear from a man who can actually be spoken of in the same sentence as words like oratory
[…it’ll get bounced back to the Supreme Court so they still haven’t got those suckers yet…but they’ve had the Deutsche Bank stuff for what…a year or so now…so I wonder if there’s really anything in the returns they think they’ll learn or if they mostly want them for corroborative purposes?]
While the Postmaster General’s announcement gave no indication whether previously disconnected machines were to be reinstated, emails obtained by The Washington Post show that Kevin Couch, a director of maintenance operations at the USPS, sent word to the agency’s maintenance managers on Tuesday afternoon that “they are not to reconnect/reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager.”
Former Postal Governor Tells Congress Mnuchin Politicized Postal Service – David C. Williams also said he raised concerns about Louis DeJoy, the embattled postmaster general, before he was hired.
…some people…I’m not saying they’re completely irredeemable…but they sure as shit come off that way…who the hell does this?
The criminal charges were the latest twist for We Build the Wall, which had drawn praise from top Homeland Security officials while causing controversy over its construction methods.
…& if anyone was wondering who would give Steve Bannon a berth on a boat that probably costs more to maintain than most of us make in a year…the answer is…this guy
over here the law of unintended consequences is now in effect courtesy of the gubments you deal with it aproach to rona measures and letting towns and counties make up rules as they please
now we have streets where masks are mandated sometimes crossed by streets where they arent… hell some shops have entrances on different streets with different rules…its causing all kinds of confusion
also shops on streets with mask mandates are losing a lot of business as people will apparently walk a street or two further just to not wear a mask
but what mostly annoys me is that every county has people on the payroll planning this shit out and its becoming increasingly obvious that planning a trip to the coffeemachine is about the upper limit of their planning abilities
ooo…well..today it kinda sucks i dont have a car
free pear trees are being given away all over the country…150.000 of them
they were meant to be exported but rona fucked up the shipping and the pear grower doesnt want to incinerate them all so nationwide pear tree giveaway woooo!
nearest pick up point 20 miles away….fuck…thats a long way to carry a tree on a bicycle
Did anyone watch the speech given by Mike Bloomberg (and his familiar, the fly) last night? That was a bracing dose of “Donald Trump is an utter failure and has been all his life.”
In 2020, in these divisive, pandemic-ridden times, there are few things that unite all New Yorkers. One is our revulsion at the ineptness and clownishness of Mayor de Blasio. This crosses all party lines, income levels, gender, age, you name it.
The other is the great shame we all feel in having produced a creature like Donald Trump and his Children of the Corn offspring. Well, maybe not on Staten Island. Manhattan Republicans like Bloomberg (he was one until very recently) probably feel this most acutely. What the rest of the Republican country sees is a rich, self-made, smart and successful business guy. Bloomberg, who actually is one, is probably in a perpetual state of rage that any sentient being on the planet believe that he and Trump have anything at all in common.
A supreme irony is that Bloomberg himself is a little bit of a real estate developer. He presided over the construction of the Bloomberg HQ on the site of the old Alexander’s. It is an easy walk from Trump Tower and probably probably visible from corner units with a northeast view. The Bloomberg Tower is not eye-rollingly 80s gauche though, and has a very handy and much-in-demand Home Depot within. This is line with Bloomberg’s “give the people what they want and need,” like the Bloomberg terminals, and Bloomberg news, and not this desperate pursuit of status and luxury, embodied by the Tiffany’s flagship at Trump Tower.
Well, I think that’s enough ranting for this early hour.
I really don’t think enough people know how much of a failure Donald Trump is. I think I bought it up before, but my wife didn’t even know about stuff like Trump Steaks or Tour De Trump or destroying the USFL or somehow not making money on casinos until I told her.
I think it was sort of a side talking point in 2016 but wasn’t really pushed hard by the candidates themselves, and even in 2020, Joe Biden is kinda leaving the work of pointing out the immense, next level failure Donald is to everyone else. Donald Trump has failed at literally everything he’s tried, and he only won the Presidency on a technicality. Even he didn’t expect to succeed in that.
My overwhelming impression watching Biden last night was OhMyGod this is what it is like watching a real person with real emotions and a normal, functioning brain talk about things that matter in an understandable, normal way.
I didn’t forget that he is a politician, or that there are soft spots in his ideas where I want a bigger commitment. But I always feel like I can relate to him, like there is a person there you can have a real agreement or argument with.
I’m too cynical to think any politician will always be on my side or always take the tough stands. But he did a great job of showing last night that he’ll put in a good faith try after a brutal four years.
I mean…the one thing about Joe is that his is pretty likable. It’s hard to imagine that he’s a bad dude, or a bad person, and just having a decent human with a soul who’s experienced loss and can relate to people would be such a massive step up.
Like…my biggest thing is that I feel like Joe will listen. I know people are down on him for not being progressive enough, but I feel like his position can be moved. I know he’s going to surround himself with people who know what the fuck they’re talking about and will actually listen to them, and if we keep the pressure on to get the progressive ideas we want, his ideals are somewhat changable, or at least as you can change the mind of any old white guy.
Joe’s job was to give people a reason to vote for him other than “I am not Trump”. I think he did a good job at giving people a good reason to vote for him; he’s a fundamentally good human being, who, like, gives a shit about what we’re going through. I think that’ll go a long way towards getting some enthusiasm towards him.
As someone who both doesn’t drink coffee and whose anxiety is heightened when I do so much as drink a little too much Coca-Cola, I can not relate to this and think my therapist would advice against such an action.
…well…hard as I find it to relate to managing to get through the day without the stuff…I salute your ability to achieve a coffee-free existence…let alone these days
I didn’t know until recently that we had a law to prevent voter intimidation at the polls that expired in 2018. This is another reason that they don’t want vote by mail, they can’t intimidate and pick who gets to vote and who doesn’t! This is going to be a shitshow of an election!
I spared a thought today for the real people out there who donated to We Build The Wall who had faith that it was going to be built and be glorious. Further still, those same people, when they heard about the arrests thought, “Oh, so the wall is being delayed a little :)! No biggie, the Deep State won’t win!”
Trump and his associates are demonstrable criminals and at least 40% of the population buys into Obama and his cabal wielding the the apparatus of government, even now, to avoid their “crimes.”
The media is still treating everything as a “both sides” narrative. Where I’m at, they don’t broadcast Trump’s ramblings anymore unless it’s explicitly about the coronavirus, because he kept interrupting local news for it. I know his every moment on TV is free advertising, I know that letting his words reach more people converts more people, but I wish a little bit that they would keep broadcasting his ramblings. When he was doing that every day in March and April, they sunk his poll numbers.
The news is also not covering coronavirus with the amount of gravity it should and keeps taking cues from businesses and our governor who keep happy talking their way through this.
I think people just got tired of watching a liar and a failure continue to lie and fail. While there is something to be said about letting Trump stand in front of a microphone and blither on and on about whatever passes through his addled mind, the man’s rantings keep leading to people either directly or indirectly dying.
Yeah, making Trump look like an incompetent schmuck isn’t a bad thing, but…I don’t know man, I’m kinda of tired of waking up to whatever new horrible thing Trump has said. I imagine lots of other people are too. Which isn’t to say I don’t seek it out on my own, but if I watched it every day on the news it’d be fuckin’ exhausting, in a situation where just going outside is already fucking exhausting. I think everyone has Trump fatigue.
Besides, the RNC is next week, and the Republicans will be tripping all over each other to say the dumbest fucking thing that comes to their minds. Trust me, we’re gonna get plenty of lunatic shit to sink Trump’s poll numbers next week.
…you’re not wrong about any of that…but one of the things that’s been hard to comprehend all the way through this is how anyone can listen to the man splutter & flail his way through any piece of dialogue & not conclude that what little mind he may possess is not only misfiring but rotten to the core…so I can at least understand that letting him talk seems like rationally it ought to be giving him rope & letting him hang himself
…but that isn’t how it went last time & at this point there’s a whole industry devoted to repackaging things for people who didn’t want to notice that shit last time round
…clearly I’d like to think that if it were framed differently by various elements of “the media” we might have wound up with an Overton window in which snake oil salesmen didn’t thrive but I honestly dread to think what the pro-trump convention is going to look like
The RNC will be a joyus celebration of washed up actors putting the “who?” in who’s who! Who doesn’t want to hear from Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, Scott Baio, Diamond & Silk, and that smarmy fucking kid that got in the Native American elder’s face? I think we could all use a few more conspiracy theories to keep us wondering if Kamala Harris is going to break into our house & eat our babies. They even have a great new catch phrase, “putting the con in convention since the Nixon era”
I think Trump does more harm than good, no matter what he does. I agree that letting him speak at length is not productive.
But unlike you and me, most people aren’t babysitting everything he does. They might here a 30 second sound bite and go about their day and think these are normal times. More people need to be tired of his nonsense, even if they need to be forcibly exposed.
I look forward to the day I can wake up and not think, “What did that fuck do while I was sleeping?”
In other news, Texas, the Gulf Coast, Florida, the Caribbean, and the Carolinas may get to experience the weather version of ‘the shocker’, with two named storms running nearly parallel paths.
I’m gonna send some money to Jose Andres now.
I’m only posting this to point out how utterly boring, flat and joyless Trump sounds when he has to read a speech full of shit that he honestly doesn’t believe and doesn’t want to say. Trump only comes to life when he gets to say his brief ad-libs; the rest of the the time he’s speaking in a flat, droning, boring monotone.
When forced for a moment to at least seems quasi-presidential, Trump can only barely constrain his contempt for the office and his deep, buring desire to just say whatever horse shit pops into his mind.
I don’t ask for much; only that my politicians seem peripherally interested in doing the job.
Okay, this is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Compare that first video with THIS one from the same speech, where Trump completely veers off the script and just rambles and says whatever the fuck he wants, when he has a captive (and stupid) audience to listen to him brag about shit and applaud him. All the sudden he doesn’t sound like a bored student forced to recite a book report in front of class.
THAT is what motivates him. Not the job. Having people like the horseshit he’s saying. It’s why the RNC is scrambling to make sure there is some kind of live audience for Trump. He can’t go out there and recite a speech the same way that Joe did. He’s gotta be able to do his stupid little riffs, otherwise he sounds like the stupid asshole he is.
I firmly believe that Trump didn’t want to be president, but wanted the praise and power. His exit strategy was creating Trump TV where he could yell from the sidelines and be praised and admired. You don’t live life as a rich person, accountable to no one but your own impulses, then settle into a life where 300 million people are counting on you.
It will be “interesting” to see how the RNC shakes out. Each one of the guest speakers is going to one-up one another in craziness, making it difficult for Trump to stand out. I anticipate Trump’s speech some kind of AMERICAN CARNAGE and FORGOTTEN PEOPLE repeat written by Miller with plenty of Trump’s usual lies about his accomplishments and the state of Dem cities being not his fault. I feel like he’s going to do some victory lap on coronavirus because cases in Florida are down.
I really don’t know how much worse it can get between now and the election by Trump, uh, finds a way.
i was out walkabout…so im about 50 minutes late..no idea how much longer itll go
but a song for joe is now live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522hHPWLoxA
normally i’d link it as a video but as its a charity thinger im thinking they need you to be on the toob of yoos
over here the law of unintended consequences is now in effect courtesy of the gubments you deal with it aproach to rona measures and letting towns and counties make up rules as they please
now we have streets where masks are mandated sometimes crossed by streets where they arent… hell some shops have entrances on different streets with different rules…its causing all kinds of confusion
also shops on streets with mask mandates are losing a lot of business as people will apparently walk a street or two further just to not wear a mask
but what mostly annoys me is that every county has people on the payroll planning this shit out and its becoming increasingly obvious that planning a trip to the coffeemachine is about the upper limit of their planning abilities
ooo…well..today it kinda sucks i dont have a car
free pear trees are being given away all over the country…150.000 of them
they were meant to be exported but rona fucked up the shipping and the pear grower doesnt want to incinerate them all so nationwide pear tree giveaway woooo!
nearest pick up point 20 miles away….fuck…thats a long way to carry a tree on a bicycle
Amateur. Start pedaling….
Did anyone watch the speech given by Mike Bloomberg (and his familiar, the fly) last night? That was a bracing dose of “Donald Trump is an utter failure and has been all his life.”
In 2020, in these divisive, pandemic-ridden times, there are few things that unite all New Yorkers. One is our revulsion at the ineptness and clownishness of Mayor de Blasio. This crosses all party lines, income levels, gender, age, you name it.
The other is the great shame we all feel in having produced a creature like Donald Trump and his Children of the Corn offspring. Well, maybe not on Staten Island. Manhattan Republicans like Bloomberg (he was one until very recently) probably feel this most acutely. What the rest of the Republican country sees is a rich, self-made, smart and successful business guy. Bloomberg, who actually is one, is probably in a perpetual state of rage that any sentient being on the planet believe that he and Trump have anything at all in common.
A supreme irony is that Bloomberg himself is a little bit of a real estate developer. He presided over the construction of the Bloomberg HQ on the site of the old Alexander’s. It is an easy walk from Trump Tower and probably probably visible from corner units with a northeast view. The Bloomberg Tower is not eye-rollingly 80s gauche though, and has a very handy and much-in-demand Home Depot within. This is line with Bloomberg’s “give the people what they want and need,” like the Bloomberg terminals, and Bloomberg news, and not this desperate pursuit of status and luxury, embodied by the Tiffany’s flagship at Trump Tower.
Well, I think that’s enough ranting for this early hour.
I really don’t think enough people know how much of a failure Donald Trump is. I think I bought it up before, but my wife didn’t even know about stuff like Trump Steaks or Tour De Trump or destroying the USFL or somehow not making money on casinos until I told her.
I think it was sort of a side talking point in 2016 but wasn’t really pushed hard by the candidates themselves, and even in 2020, Joe Biden is kinda leaving the work of pointing out the immense, next level failure Donald is to everyone else. Donald Trump has failed at literally everything he’s tried, and he only won the Presidency on a technicality. Even he didn’t expect to succeed in that.
My overwhelming impression watching Biden last night was OhMyGod this is what it is like watching a real person with real emotions and a normal, functioning brain talk about things that matter in an understandable, normal way.
I didn’t forget that he is a politician, or that there are soft spots in his ideas where I want a bigger commitment. But I always feel like I can relate to him, like there is a person there you can have a real agreement or argument with.
I’m too cynical to think any politician will always be on my side or always take the tough stands. But he did a great job of showing last night that he’ll put in a good faith try after a brutal four years.
I mean…the one thing about Joe is that his is pretty likable. It’s hard to imagine that he’s a bad dude, or a bad person, and just having a decent human with a soul who’s experienced loss and can relate to people would be such a massive step up.
Like…my biggest thing is that I feel like Joe will listen. I know people are down on him for not being progressive enough, but I feel like his position can be moved. I know he’s going to surround himself with people who know what the fuck they’re talking about and will actually listen to them, and if we keep the pressure on to get the progressive ideas we want, his ideals are somewhat changable, or at least as you can change the mind of any old white guy.
Joe’s job was to give people a reason to vote for him other than “I am not Trump”. I think he did a good job at giving people a good reason to vote for him; he’s a fundamentally good human being, who, like, gives a shit about what we’re going through. I think that’ll go a long way towards getting some enthusiasm towards him.
Coffee AND therapy can work well…
Por que no los dos dot gif
My therapist and I both drink a lot of coffee, often during our sessions together.
As someone who both doesn’t drink coffee and whose anxiety is heightened when I do so much as drink a little too much Coca-Cola, I can not relate to this and think my therapist would advice against such an action.
…well…hard as I find it to relate to managing to get through the day without the stuff…I salute your ability to achieve a coffee-free existence…let alone these days
…that really is above & beyond
I’ve been drinking coffee for so long it has little to no effect on me. I’d be anxious without it!
I didn’t know until recently that we had a law to prevent voter intimidation at the polls that expired in 2018. This is another reason that they don’t want vote by mail, they can’t intimidate and pick who gets to vote and who doesn’t! This is going to be a shitshow of an election!
https://theintercept.com/2020/04/11/republican-poll-watchers-vote-by-mail-voter-fraud/
I spared a thought today for the real people out there who donated to We Build The Wall who had faith that it was going to be built and be glorious. Further still, those same people, when they heard about the arrests thought, “Oh, so the wall is being delayed a little :)! No biggie, the Deep State won’t win!”
Trump and his associates are demonstrable criminals and at least 40% of the population buys into Obama and his cabal wielding the the apparatus of government, even now, to avoid their “crimes.”
The media is still treating everything as a “both sides” narrative. Where I’m at, they don’t broadcast Trump’s ramblings anymore unless it’s explicitly about the coronavirus, because he kept interrupting local news for it. I know his every moment on TV is free advertising, I know that letting his words reach more people converts more people, but I wish a little bit that they would keep broadcasting his ramblings. When he was doing that every day in March and April, they sunk his poll numbers.
The news is also not covering coronavirus with the amount of gravity it should and keeps taking cues from businesses and our governor who keep happy talking their way through this.
I think people just got tired of watching a liar and a failure continue to lie and fail. While there is something to be said about letting Trump stand in front of a microphone and blither on and on about whatever passes through his addled mind, the man’s rantings keep leading to people either directly or indirectly dying.
Yeah, making Trump look like an incompetent schmuck isn’t a bad thing, but…I don’t know man, I’m kinda of tired of waking up to whatever new horrible thing Trump has said. I imagine lots of other people are too. Which isn’t to say I don’t seek it out on my own, but if I watched it every day on the news it’d be fuckin’ exhausting, in a situation where just going outside is already fucking exhausting. I think everyone has Trump fatigue.
Besides, the RNC is next week, and the Republicans will be tripping all over each other to say the dumbest fucking thing that comes to their minds. Trust me, we’re gonna get plenty of lunatic shit to sink Trump’s poll numbers next week.
…you’re not wrong about any of that…but one of the things that’s been hard to comprehend all the way through this is how anyone can listen to the man splutter & flail his way through any piece of dialogue & not conclude that what little mind he may possess is not only misfiring but rotten to the core…so I can at least understand that letting him talk seems like rationally it ought to be giving him rope & letting him hang himself
…but that isn’t how it went last time & at this point there’s a whole industry devoted to repackaging things for people who didn’t want to notice that shit last time round
…clearly I’d like to think that if it were framed differently by various elements of “the media” we might have wound up with an Overton window in which snake oil salesmen didn’t thrive but I honestly dread to think what the pro-trump convention is going to look like
The RNC will be a joyus celebration of washed up actors putting the “who?” in who’s who! Who doesn’t want to hear from Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, Scott Baio, Diamond & Silk, and that smarmy fucking kid that got in the Native American elder’s face? I think we could all use a few more conspiracy theories to keep us wondering if Kamala Harris is going to break into our house & eat our babies. They even have a great new catch phrase, “putting the con in convention since the Nixon era”
I think Trump does more harm than good, no matter what he does. I agree that letting him speak at length is not productive.
But unlike you and me, most people aren’t babysitting everything he does. They might here a 30 second sound bite and go about their day and think these are normal times. More people need to be tired of his nonsense, even if they need to be forcibly exposed.
I look forward to the day I can wake up and not think, “What did that fuck do while I was sleeping?”
I’ll hook you up – it’s Fur Face Friday!
https://groupthink.kinja.com/fur-face-friday-1844797502
…so tomorrow really is the weekend…hurrah
…I was starting to doubt myself
In other news, Texas, the Gulf Coast, Florida, the Caribbean, and the Carolinas may get to experience the weather version of ‘the shocker’, with two named storms running nearly parallel paths.
I’m gonna send some money to Jose Andres now.
Interesting hurricane story.
I’m only posting this to point out how utterly boring, flat and joyless Trump sounds when he has to read a speech full of shit that he honestly doesn’t believe and doesn’t want to say. Trump only comes to life when he gets to say his brief ad-libs; the rest of the the time he’s speaking in a flat, droning, boring monotone.
When forced for a moment to at least seems quasi-presidential, Trump can only barely constrain his contempt for the office and his deep, buring desire to just say whatever horse shit pops into his mind.
I don’t ask for much; only that my politicians seem peripherally interested in doing the job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-TOBK8ox1g
Okay, this is EXACTLY what I’m talking about. Compare that first video with THIS one from the same speech, where Trump completely veers off the script and just rambles and says whatever the fuck he wants, when he has a captive (and stupid) audience to listen to him brag about shit and applaud him. All the sudden he doesn’t sound like a bored student forced to recite a book report in front of class.
THAT is what motivates him. Not the job. Having people like the horseshit he’s saying. It’s why the RNC is scrambling to make sure there is some kind of live audience for Trump. He can’t go out there and recite a speech the same way that Joe did. He’s gotta be able to do his stupid little riffs, otherwise he sounds like the stupid asshole he is.
It drives me up the wall.
I firmly believe that Trump didn’t want to be president, but wanted the praise and power. His exit strategy was creating Trump TV where he could yell from the sidelines and be praised and admired. You don’t live life as a rich person, accountable to no one but your own impulses, then settle into a life where 300 million people are counting on you.
It will be “interesting” to see how the RNC shakes out. Each one of the guest speakers is going to one-up one another in craziness, making it difficult for Trump to stand out. I anticipate Trump’s speech some kind of AMERICAN CARNAGE and FORGOTTEN PEOPLE repeat written by Miller with plenty of Trump’s usual lies about his accomplishments and the state of Dem cities being not his fault. I feel like he’s going to do some victory lap on coronavirus because cases in Florida are down.
I really don’t know how much worse it can get between now and the election by Trump, uh, finds a way.
I doubt he can think so far ahead!
Sorry if you’re being facetious and I’m not recognizing it.
I’ll concede that maybe someone came to him with the idea and he was all “Yeah, sure, get me some money from it” and he didn’t care about the details but it’s an actual thing he was set up to do in the event he lost.
https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/351101/4-years-later-does-trump-want-to-own-a-tv-network.html
i was out walkabout…so im about 50 minutes late..no idea how much longer itll go
but a song for joe is now live
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=522hHPWLoxA
normally i’d link it as a video but as its a charity thinger im thinking they need you to be on the toob of yoos