Welcome to your nation, US Deadsplinters!
Dems in Disarray As Pushed By The Media
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/03/biden-democrats-governors-support
But unlike the other guy, he’s not a criminal or traitor, but he’ll raise rich people’s taxes.
UK Tories In Tatters
Gee, I wonder why.
Beryl Barrelling Over Caribbean Causing Havoc
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/03/jamaica-braces-for-arrival-of-hurricane-beryl
Category 4 storm rocks Jamaica meanwhile oil and gas producers say it’s not their fault.
Bidnez
A Summer of Concern
Brit Cyclist Continues Tour De France
Meanwhile cycling world sez: Lance Who?
Euro 24: Meanwhile Nation Struggling in Game They Invented
At least England can laugh at Italy. Seriously? The Swiss beat them?
I Better Win The Silver Sow Award for This
https://www.usfoods.com/our-services/business-trends/farmers-report/pork.html
Pork Belly market not as crisp as expected.
Finally…
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/colorado-reports-human-case-bird-flu-2024-07-03
No reason to be concerned. I hope.
Distractions
Enjoy your BBQ fireworks and explosions. Stay safe.
Here is a movie I am so used to seeing that it is inevitable…
Nederland gets screwed by refs so either France or Spain can win.
At least I won’t have to watch the refs cheer on Messi.
eh…gotta make it past turkey first
i mean we should…but its wait and see anyways…whatever happens its gonna be a pretty unpleasant night out in the big cities
large turkish population here….and their troublemakers are every bit as happy to kick off as ours…sooo…win or lose theres probably gonna be riots here and there
Love the animal content.
How did President Biden’s meeting with the Dem governors go? Maga Haberman reports:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/biden-governors-presidential-election-debate.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4k0.WUPk.36SkWFBUzP1T&smid=url-share
(This is unlocked so no paywall or anything, read at will.)
From the Greatest City in the World™ (this is from the NY Times if anyone’s interested in sourcing):
The story is about Times Square’s descent into chaos. Mostly it’s about how it’s driving tourists away, but people do live in the neighborhood. It used to be a low-cost haven for brave Broadway hopefuls. When I first got here in 1932 I met people who lived in Times Square, or on the fringe, just barely in Hell’s Kitchen. I once went to a party in a rent-controlled walkup that apparently was once the home of Bruce Willis, when he was just starting out, and the current inhabitant/my host was a younger relative.
Anyway, back to our junkie hornballs. I don’t know what my reaction to that would be. I suppose if they were hot enough, why not, go at it, but people who stick needles into their arms recreationally tend not to be the most desirable physical specimens. And then the porter has to clean up after them, but I bet that building doesn’t have one and it’s every tenant for themselves.
Happy 4th. Let freedom ring. Let the eagle soar!
You arrived in 1932? You’re 92 years old?
I know better. It just startled me. Wait, you rolled into town after World War I?
This is what Better Half tells me. My loathing of smartphones is well-known, as is my horror of all things tech after about 1995, but I have unwillingly learned the tricks of the trade, out of self-preservation. I haven’t driven in over 20 years, it’s probably more like 25. Since I am so much more elderly than he is (15 months) the charges of cradle-robbing fly fast and furious and when a C-list celebrity dies at 95 or whatever he will ask me, “Didn’t you go to high school with him/her?”
I might as well have! We have a very fun relationship, full of teasing and eye-rolling and sarcasm and, yes, whataboutism. This is probably a very embarrassing thing to admit but we were watching a murder mystery set in the 1920s and the subject of Zionism came up.
Completely apolitical BH asked me, “What is a Zionist?”
“I’ll tell you when the show’s over.”
So blissfully unaware, chatting on the phone all day, making deals, making money for us and for his company. I envy him some days. I’m not sure he realizes Joe Biden is our President. It’s not severe cognitive decline, like our President and my Faithful Hound suffer from, it’s because it doesn’t matter. It’s like he’s orbiting the earth, free from the shackles of electoral democracy. You really can’t believe the hold that “the monied interests” have on this country.
Question Chuck Schumer about what he’s doing to rein in the banks and Wall Street. Try to get Liz Warren to clamp down on the Big Pharma firms in her home town of Cambridge and Massachusetts in general. Ask The Big Guy or Delaware’s two Senators to look into shady corporate operations being run out of shadow boiler rooms in Wilmington. I wonder if Gov. Newsom and CA’s two Senators are working to clamp down on the social media abuses and pushed ad horrors and relentless data-scraping we’re all subjected to from Silicon Valley (full disclosure: that’s where Better Half’s company is HQ’d and it’s why we got shifted to Blue Cross of Cali-FOUR-nya?)
A note about Blue Cross of Cali-FOUR-nya? So, everyone, everything I deal with is here in New York. Because of our system, one finds oneself repeating one’s private health insurance over and over again, because no one takes notes and no one shares files. Because we don’t have national health (thanks, Joe Lieberman) I like to amuse myself by interacting with these very echt New Yorkers about my insurance in my best Cali-FOUR-nya? vocal fry. If I can keep them on the phone long enough or talk to the them long enough in person I can get them to adopt it.
“Yes, Mr. Crawley, I do see that you have Blue Cross of Cali-FOUR-nya? but I need…”
“You can call a rep at Blue Cross of Cali-FOUR-nya? Maybe you don’t have the right contact number.” [I give them a couple of numbers, because BC is such a sprawling bureaucracy.]
“I will call Blue Cross of Cali-FOUR-nya? and see if I can resolve this.”
You take your fun where you can find it.
As far as Delaware’s corporate opacity, you’ll be glad to know that Democrats including Biden backed the 2020 Corporate Transparency Act which wiped out a lot of the old Delaware provisions against strong GOP opposition.
https://www.ochhoalaw.com/resources/blog/the-corporate-transparency-act-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter/
It has started to go into effect this year, but of course for all of the lies the GOP tells about being in the side of everyday Americans against corporations, they’re trying to gut the law and return to the old days of Wilmington lockboxes.
https://tax.thomsonreuters.com/news/battle-against-the-corporate-transparency-act-continues/
The Times keeps running puff pieces about JD Vance types (and the right wing rags like National Review are even worse) trying to claim they’re the anti-corporate heroes. They do it because they know the suckers in their readership eat that stuff up.
I love how the NY Times pingpongs between thumbsucking bits on the one hand about Times Square like “Lose the Traffic. Keep That Times Square Grit” and “the Disney world [ sic ] that is Times Square” and on the other hand pearl clutching that there was a violent crime in a five block zone that averages 130 million visits a year.
I’m curious what would happen if you drew a Venn diagram for the people there with the thumbsucking viewpoint and the pearl clutchers. Would you even need two circles to show the overlap, or are they all in one and the same circle?
“Fun” fact: John Ashcroft’s son went to my high school and was actually in a couple of my Spanish classes. One of the teachers was Cuban and would often admonish him for his behavior in class (in spite of his pedigree and her own political affinity), to which he would respond, in this gratingly nasal voice of his: “Lo si-EN-to, señoruuuuhhh.” (The other thing I remember about him is overhearing him in group activities exclaiming “Bolshevik!” as an euphemism for bullshit. Yeah, he was a dork.)
And now his brother(?), who’s currently our Secretary of State, is on the Missouri GOP promotion track of running for governor (just like their dad), fresh from the illustrious achievements of mandating statewide voter ID, slow-walking the procedure for allowing a petition to put abortion rights on the ballot this fall and giving an angry but not very telegenic interview to CNN earlier this year when Maine decided to remove Trump from the presidential ballot. And, even besides the fact that I only found out that there was a Democratic candidate within the last couple of weeks when his ad popped up before a couple of YouTube videos I watched (never mind remembering the guy’s name), he’ll more than likely get it, too – because this state is horrible.
Do you think John Ashcroft’s son had a good singing voice, like his Dad? I only ask because my university had a very strong theater department. I, naturally, was in amateur musicals in junior high and high school but my university’s theater dept. was a few notches above that so I contented myself with volunteering behind the scenes (the “wardrobe mistress” and I used to drink and smoke [tobacco] quite a lot.)
One season we did “Pippin.” I’m sure you’ve seen it. Our Pippin was very weak but he was
fucin a relationship with the director*. A tale as old as time. Had we had John Ashcroft’s son lo those many years ago on campus maybe our production would have been much more successful.*This is another of my tragic closeted gay men in the 1980s stories. The director, who was a flaming homosexual, was a senior and upon graduation entered a seminary and became a Catholic priest. He drank himself to death when he was in his late 40s. Our Pippin received an AIDS diagnosis in 1989 or 1990 and promptly committed suicide. He would have been in his late 20s. It’s a wonder that any of us made it out alive.
If he has any sort of singing voice, he probably limits himself to bad country songs.
I imagine he sounds like a slightly higher-pitched version of Brother John Occhipinti, who has a YouTube channel full of paeans not only to King Donald, Steve Bannon, MTG, Ashli Babbitt and the like, but also to MyPillow, OAN, Goya, Hobby Lobby and Waffle House – all sung in a horribly braying, elderly voice with a nightmarishly distorted “three-part harmony” effect and illustrated by a slideshow of whatever seems to come up on Google Image Search for the lyrics in question. (I’ve checked out the channel a few times and don’t think I’ve ever been able to get through a single song, subject matter notwithstanding, so I’m not claiming responsibility for your own curiosity.)
Having sex and using syringes at the same time? Unlikely.
That’s a good DOT. Farm report, animal videos, weather, the whole package.
If @ManchuCandidate could come out and do a cooking segment that would make it even better.
Ha. I’m not that good of a cook. However, we shall see tomorrow.
You must be miles (kilometers?) better than failson Brooklyn Beckham.
I got yelled at by a hummingbird this morning, they’re such feisty lil birbs.
I was refilling the feeder and it buzzed in, saw me there holding its feeder, and made it clear to me that ugh I was the literal worst and needed to hurry the fuck up!
Hummingbirds are mean AF. Do not screw with them. It matters not that you are several hundred times their size. They will throw down with you.
Truly the chihuahuas of the avian world.