Midweek Meh-Ness [DOT 20/3/24]

20/3/24 MegMegMcGee 54

Thanks to whomever put an image on Monday’s DOT, as I’m pretty sure I totally forgot.
Hope everyone is having a good week!

All he ever had to do was invest Daddy’s money in an index fund, but nooooo
Here’s what happens if Trump can’t pay his $454 million bond
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1239524037/heres-what-happens-if-trump-cant-pay-his-454-million-bond

Ken Paxton is scum of the earth

Supreme Court clears way for Texas to enforce immigration law, for now
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/19/supreme-court-texas-immigration-law/

JFC!

Second of 6 former Mississippi officers sentenced to more than 17 years in the torture of 2 Black men
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/19/us/mississippi-black-men-police-torture-sentencing-tuesday/index.html

Stonks!

Here’s everything to expect from the Federal Reserve’s policy meeting Wednesday
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/19/heres-everything-to-expect-from-the-federal-reserves-policy-meeting-wednesday.html

Sprots!

March Madness 2024 bracket guide: Joe Lunardi’s predictions
https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/insider/story/_/id/39762112/march-madness-2024-bracket-guide-joe-lunardi-ncaa-tournament-predictions

She’s stellar!
MacKenzie Scott donates $640 million, more than doubling her planned gifts to nonprofit applicants
https://apnews.com/article/mackenzie-scott-open-call-yield-giving-bezos-ae809a469080e9e61a945a14a230629e

Stumpy we hardly knew ya!

So long, Stumpy. More than 150 of D.C.’s cherry trees have to go as water rises
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1238896379/cherry-blossom-trees-remove-stumpy-climate-change-washington-dc

Are we ready for this?

Have a great day!

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54 Comments

    • And I write this song tonight
      And I write it more than ever
      And if it could just block the light
      We’ll have memories forever
      And we’ll only be making it right
      ‘Cause we’ll never be wrong

      Together we could take it to the end of the line (Maine?)
      Instead will be a shadow on me during that time (during that time)

      I don’t know what to do
      I’m partially in the dark
      Living near Buffalo and typing internet snark

      I really need this tonight
      April’s gonna start tonight
      (April’s gonna start tonight)

      Once upon a time I thought I was in line
      But now I’m only kms apart
      Nothing I can do
      A partial eclipse of the heart

  3. So, Kate Middleton has passed away? Right? I mean, I didn’t have an opinion or care before, but now that they have put out to doctored photos, well, seems like a cover up. Just so weird…..

    • …there are so many out-there theories doing the rounds it’s beginning to look like a cross between a hobby & a sport…but there’s one I quite like…or, I guess, appeals to me on the grounds that it’s like the conspiracy vs. cluster-fuck version of ockham’s razor

      …in that way the way it goes is that she had some sort of elective surgery of the cosmetic variety…& the intention was to have it all be vague enough that she’d get a pass because the people who feel strongly about the royals would sympathize with a woman who required “abdominal surgery” after having children…& since I’ve tried quite hard not to know…for all I know that is exactly the kind of sympathy the lady deserves…but…if that was what she’d been getting & it turned out she’d decided going under the knife was the most painless route to fitting back into her wardrobe…the weirdly parasocial sense of entitlement that co-exists with that well of sympathy might develop something like whiplash

      …whatever the answer is…the shift in how the royals fare is morbidly fascinating…I can remember a time when they pretty much had curatorial control of their press coverage…but it slipped when diana divorced chuck…& never really recovered…by the time she died the framing where the firm were the bad guys had gathered steam it’s never really lost…so the version of it that sounds like the plot of an episode of curb your enthusiasm is, if nothing else, an excellent fit for the “fact pattern” of the way it’s gone?

      • That scenario and this whole bizarre thing with Kate Middleton feels like an episode of Veep where Selena Meyer went in for a quickie facelift but it turned into an international incident.

      • She doesn’t need 3 months for cosmetic surgery unless it’s something really major that required multiple surgeries.

        I think there was something more significant happening like actual abdominal surgery like a hysterectomy.

        Or rehab. Rehab is honestly more likely.

        • …I should maybe add for the sake of clarity that I don’t particularly think it’s any more plausible that she went in for “a tummy tuck” or whatever…& then something went awry & she needed to be in for longer than anticipated or the surgical side was more dramatic or extensive…or she had a nervous breakdown about the potential for things devolving into precisely the circus they have…than the rehab thing would be

          …there’s plenty of possibilities that most people would instinctively sympathize with…& even understand trying to not let the press get its teeth into like a dog with a bone…miscarriage for one…but I think what’s kept it on the simmer is that most of the ones most people can think of…even when they’d be something you’d understand at least initially trying to keep under wraps…are things that they can’t see a reason not to be transparent about at this point since they’d close the thing down if they “came clean” & made people feel bad for hounding them under the circumstances

          …but they haven’t

          …& that might just be “never complain, never explain” misfiring increasingly badly as the years roll by…but…it plays right into the flame-fanning?

    • I’m pretty sure the answer is “no” but it’s pretty wild how horrendously the Royal PR trust has botched the whole thing. I don’t care about the royals at all but it’s gotten so out of hand that even I’m like “Wow, this is nuts.”

      • When you tire of Windsorania, as even I do sometimes, you can turn to the House of Grimaldi, which has ruled the tiny principality of Monaco for a millennium. News from them is a little difficult to get, but if you can read French you can turn to “Le Parisien,” among other tabloids. “Bild,” a German tabloid, loves the Grimaldis, or at least the scandals and news stories they generate. I think both must have English-language websites but I go straight to the source for all their lurid headlines and direct quotes from “those in the know,” without the smoothing effect so frequently encountered in translated texts.

  5. A Deadsplinter bracket????

    “The winner be showered with praise; the lower will be taunted and booed till my throat is sore!”*

    *yes, it is a Homer Simpson quote from one of the greatest sports episodes ‘Lisa On Ice’ and I predict the winner will be someone who cares not for college b-ball.

  10. That NPR piece is a great example of how easily the press will turn off its critical functions when it comes to Trump.

    This judgment isn’t a bolt out of the blue. Trump had years to be ready for it. Why wasn’t he ready? And what does this say about his capacity to be president?

    The political press is quick to jump to judgments about the implications of Biden’s shoes. But the fraud ruling is being framed as an internal financial matter, and his lack of cash couldn’t possibly be connected to his bizarre confusion on the campaign trail, his overtures to Manafort, Kushner’s apparent dealings in the Balkans and Israel, or anything else.

    It’s not being viewed as a distraction that will limit his time on the campaign trail, it’s not seen as anything other than another day at the office.

    My point isn’t that Trump should be treated with exactly the same level of stupid analysis as Biden, but that there’s a reasonable standard in the middle which should apply to both candidates. But the problem for the press is that any real fairness would mean a huge shift toward negative coverage of Trump, and that’s too much to ask.

    • …I mostly get your beef with this stuff but this is about where you lose me…that npr thing doesn’t purport to be anything more than some hints about the ways these things usually work with an overlay of a few specifics about this instance…& there’s no apparent shortage of the sort of thing you seem to be saying it should have been instead…so I try but I just can’t see who it is you’re really claiming dropped what ball…all of that stuff can coexist & it’s simply not remotely plausible for every piece on every topic to be an exhaustive examination of a cumulative process that always covers all the ground all the way from the beginning…people don’t read most shit all the way through to begin with so if it were then the net effect would be even more people who knew even less about what’s going on & that’s surely the opposite of how you think it should be?

      …but…just off the top of my head there was the cnbc thing @loveshaq posted a link to a couple of days back…the daily kos effort @bryanlsplinter posted a link to yesterday…one each from WaPo & the guardian in a reply I eventually had a moment for yesterday…& none of the them may break it down to the point of speculating as to whether he thought he had it in hand because the case would break his way…or because the judgement would come with a smaller bill…or because he’d been promised that SPAC money from the truth social deal would be in his pocket by the time it fell due

      …all of which would be interesting to read a take or two about…but would be firmly in the weeds compared to the sort of bordering-the-fairway speculation that’s doing the rounds

      …but as far as the distraction part goes…that cuts more than one way…& I’ve read a number of things here & there that got into it about that…some of them from a fair while back…a few so far back they were openly speculating about a host of assumptions like how long a window there generally is between indictments being handed down & the case having its day in court…but more recently they’ve had to shift the way they describe it because *to the only audience he gives a shit about* it works for rather than against him…like this one from just the other day

      Delays and counterattacks: How the Trump campaign plans to use his court dates for political gain

      …that one happens to be an NBC effort because I’m lazy & it was easy to pull up again…but there hasn’t been a noticeable shortage of the sort of thing you seem to be saying there’s a dearth of…at least in my reading…& the thing you cite to kick off your complaint seems like a poor candidate for being guilty of what you say because it’s simply doing something else that is not unreasonable or invalid by its own lights

      …so I get the distinct feeling that what you’re trying to say is at least partially lost on me…& since it’s probably interesting…that’s frustrating…but I never seem to have any joy trying to get you to refine it to a point where I feel like I’m getting what you’re really getting at?

      • LIke I said, I don’t expect Trump to be run through the same level of bad scrutuny as Biden. But there is simply no way to see this as anywhere close to the framing it deserves.

        It’s as damning a statement on his mental acuity and leadership as you can get. And where is that connection made? This is an existential crisis for him and he has done no contingency planning.

        This is not a complaint about whether there is coverage of the financial issues. It is about what is wrong with Trump’s mind.

        When that kind of analysis falls to Daily Kos, that’s a problem.

        The forms of journalism matter. What are the headlines? How often is a story repeated? What’s in the ledes? How much content of stories is devoted to certain issues?

        For a good example of how this works here’s another example:

        https://www.npr.org/2024/02/20/1232688266/trump-afford-legal-penalties-civil-cases

        No mention of Trump’s planning capacity or executive function, and only a mention of a political impact in the 24th graf.

        Washington Post – Procedure story, no comment on qualifications or politics

        https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/18/trump-civil-fraud-judgment-bond-450-million/

        NY Times – Procedure stories, nothing about qualifications.

        https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/nyregion/trump-bond-civil-fraud-case.html

        https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/nyregion/trump-bond-ny-fraud-case.html

        That CNBC story – procedures, not executive function.

        Again, this is not a surprise for Trump. He’s known for a long time he needed to plan for this problem. That he’s failed is proof – not speculation – that he struggles to grasp his basic job. But this doesn’t come up because editors have decided to treat this overwhelmingly as a procedural story and ignore the meaning of how he got here. Because treating Trump’s mental state as an issue is distasteful and inconvenient.

        This is as bad a sign of his dysfunctional mind as where he was four years ago. But of course the press has decided there are no lessons to be drawn from the fourth anniversary of his Covid disaster either.

        • …forgive me…but this is what I meant about the lack of success with the refining part in my experience…& just when I think I maybe have a better handle on it I find I might be less certain than ever

          …like this part

          LIke I said, I don’t expect Trump to be run through the same level of bad scrutuny as Biden. But there is simply no way to see this as anywhere close to the framing it deserves.

          …the “this” that fails to be “the framing it deserves” would, in terms of a reply to my question about why pick on the NPR thing for not being something else that can be found somewhere else…indeed in a bunch of other places a good deal more well-established than the daily kos site…& including at least some of what people like to lump together as “mainstream media”…would seem to be referring to the NPR piece…but…for the reasons I suggested in the reply you’re responding to…that would just be repeating a point that didn’t seem to quite land the first time…which I have to assume isn’t what you’d bother taking the time to type up…& that punts it over to being a sweeping generalization sort of a “this”…& I don’t see what you’ve cited as really succeeding in a clear definition of terms that would allow for making a claim for some coverage not being the sort of coverage you think is merited…being a charge worth levying in the manner you seem to intend…or at least imply…as though it’s a deliberate & conscious thing done with…perhaps not malice…but something untoward aforethought…in a way sufficiently distinct that the existence of coverage that does address the aspects of the thing you think deserve better attention elsewhere is an insufficient remedy to be considered adequate redress…& not just your common-or-garden emergent properties giving an unduly complex appearance to the fruit of deceptively simple rubrics by which the whole mess ratchets its way to press day after day…& now I’m more confused than ever & I haven’t made it past the first line

          …I get that I might very well be describing what it feels like to read one of the DOTs I string together out of frequently tenuous-to-the-point-of-invisible through-lines…but what I’m trying to get at is that it isn’t that I’m not trying to see your point that’s the part that’s hanging me up

          …then we get to this stuff

          The forms of journalism matter. What are the headlines? How often is a story repeated? What’s in the ledes? How much content of stories is devoted to certain issues?

          …&…that’s a broad brush you’ve broken out somewhere along the way…but I can’t tell how broad you mean for it to be…or how consistent the edges of the swath it paints are meant to be…because if it’s broad enough it ceases to be exclusively a spectrum where you can’t say everything gets covered somewhere by someone…if it’s narrow enough to make the charge unassailable it requires overlooking content from sources that would be included for the stuff they produce that it’d be true of…how many headlines count…in print…on a page on a screen…in a tweet or a facebook post…a phone notification…on a radio show…on tv…cable…network…public access…foreign or domestic?

          …& those answers matter in the context because if cherry-picking is allowed you can build an airtight case for both sides of the thing & the only way to pick between them is subjective to the point of arguably being arbitrary

          …even if I just stuck to the archive for either the post or the times I could find stuff that addresses the stuff you’re talking about…that the bulk of the shallower offerings is presented as a fresh slice of a thing that assumes you came via a route that included previous coverage which, combined with the spectrum of other stuff out there related to one strand or another of it, is an assumption of aggregate knowledge on the readers’ part…isn’t surprising or necessarily nefarious…the bulk of coverage of anything & everything by “the media” is seldom deeper than a veneer…& that’s what most people want…they have no interest in taking the time or making the effort to look deeper

          …& there are undoubtedly rafts of people out there under NDAs who could spill all kinds of beans about the actual finances & financing of the man’s holdings…or have the kind of access that would allow for more than rank speculation of the sort even I can provide when it comes to what the reality is of things like his capacity for executive function…but that boils down to an unqualified version of the thing psych doctors have that rule about not doing so it wouldn’t exactly be a responsible exercise for a journalist who didn’t want their DMs full of MAGA-fueled threats & their voicemail clogged up with irate lawyers blaming them for the demise of their parent publication…at least if it were on the money enough to land where he’d feel it

          …so it’s not as simple as “they give him a pass but he’s clearly gooped his brain” on the one hand…not that there isn’t a good amount of coverage in a variety of places that does the compare/contrast between ’16 & ’24 in terms of how he presents & how it plays & who with

          …but I still don’t really understand who or what you think is at fault for the way things look in a picture I can’t get to come into focus well enough to follow where it draws its lines…& it’s not because I don’t think you have that picture in front of you in high definition…I just can’t get the view from here to match the view from there & I can’t figure out what the adjustment is that I’m missing

          …it’s why a while back I went on about an academic thing about the framing of the press itself…because that at least gave me a structure that let me do that & it gave me an extra problem with the exercise I’m attempting again today…because a lot of what it had to say about the pitfalls & downsides of framing the press itself as, effectively, an enemy…often in ways a lot easier to not notice than decrying “MSM lies” or whatever…but as an amorphous antagonist composed of more heads than a hydra but somehow a gestalt adversary…fits your comments about this stuff like a glove…& my take is that you don’t mean to be engaged in the thing that would paint you as doing…but you don’t choose to talk about it in ways where it wouldn’t fit that model even when it seems like it might undo the tangle I get in trying to understand why you picked the examples you did to illustrate something they don’t quite seem to from my perspective…& that just continues to be a thing I struggle to understand, I’m afraid

          …appreciate you trying, though…sincerely…so thanks for that

          • There is simply no way to argue that coverage of Trump’s mental competency is remotely in sync with the coverage of Biden. None.

            And his failure to prepare for an existential crisis for his business is unquestionably as big a piece of evidence of incompetence as you can get so far, except for how badly he handled Covid.

            If you have any evidence beyond a drip here and a drop there that the implications of Trump’s competence related to the handling of his fraud trial has gotten anywhere close to the attention it deserves, I’d love to see it.

            This is an even bigger deal than Trump’s gaffes in speeches. It’s even bigger than his second defamation of E. Jean Carroll, although maybe by trial four he’ll get to the level of this case.

            Biden is put under the spotlight for his choice of shoes. Trump’s serious executive function instability in a half billion dollar case that could collapse his finances gets, what exactly? Where are the headlines challenging his fitness on this issue?

            It’s a serious question, and headlines aren’t even the top level marker of press attention, but they’re an easy way to check where priorities are. Where are the headlines?

            • …ok…I’ll try but I probably ought to note for the sake of clarity that I’d have to shift track to be looking at what seem to be a different set of goalposts…still…from where I’m sitting it’s hard to find an example anywhere in the press about any two people who represent the heads of two opposing political entities that suggests an expectation of parity in that sense is a reasonable one to have about how coverage of those folks operates…so I don’t think I can honestly claim to know what I think “sync” would mean in practice

              …for example…if he’s as old now as joe was then…does that mean that comparing apples with apples requires trawling through ’20 coverage about joe…or that the age difference doesn’t impact the parity stakes & every piece written about either man for any audience ought properly to come with a companion piece that re-writes the “same” story about the other guy…& what does a practically feasible version of that approach look like once you put it through the wringer of a capitalistic media industry in an internet age?

              …I don’t know…I know what we’ve got is necessarily imperfect the same way the world is…but since I don’t believe it boils down to anything as simple as “if we could just murder all the murdochs & dacres everything would be perfect” the way the old joke about “first, kill all the lawyers” goes…I don’t think the kind of thing someone like bret stephens is guilty of…which until tucker carson existed I might have been tempted to think of as a gussied up version of alex jones for the crowd that likes to break out the bowties in the sense of spending a bunch of time in tuxedos at expensive venues…makes sense as a “writ large” thing without taking into account all the things that make the columns he & his ilk produce just some stagnant backwaters that aren’t representative of an industry that scales up to oceanic waters

              …& in terms of this sort of complaint

              If you have any evidence beyond a drip here and a drop there that the implications of Trump’s competence related to the handling of his fraud trial has gotten anywhere close to the attention it deserves, I’d love to see it.

              …I don’t have the time…but I do have the inclination…& over a timeline I’d guess would be longer than you had in mind I actually think I could produce more of that sort of thing than I’d consider fair to dismiss as “a drip here and a drop there”…& in that even dumb as he is & as bad as they are…he has lawyers whose competence is arguably more germane to the immediate context of the trials just because that’s how those work & consequently get covered…I don’t think that’s really accurate…I’ve nigh drowned in coverage & speculative discussion about whether what the record reflects in terms of legal moves on the part of his lawyers seems to be the product of the lawyers themselves being in some cases criminally bad…or if it makes more sense that they only did things fellow lawyers blanch at even reading about someone else doing because it’s so clearly fucking bullshit in ways that can endanger a bar license…because their client insisted…but short of watergate level malfeasance…the press doesn’t have access…by design…to the real picture…they’re in the peanut gallery with the rest of us on the bulk of that kind of thing

              This is an even bigger deal than Trump’s gaffes in speeches. It’s even bigger than his second defamation of E. Jean Carroll, although maybe by trial four he’ll get to the level of this case.

              …see, now this part I pretty much am in wholehearted agreement with…I think…although I wouldn’t phrase it quite that way…because how big of a deal a thing is would be rather in the line of things that differ a lot depending on the eye of the beholder…& are hard to get a clear read on until substantially after the fact more often than not…so I’d probably say something like “In terms of blood in the water this might indicate a much deeper wound than the scratches he got from serially defaming a woman he’s been judged to have sexually assaulted for having the temerity to call out his criminally misogynist proclivities” or something…& in that sense I do think that the shallowness of the coverage has a significant flaw in that they’ll happily compare the length of the cuts & say this one is five times longer than the other & probably going to leave a mark when it is likely to prove much more important how deep the thrust went & what kind of unseen internal bleeding it set off in the guts of the beast

              …that wouldn’t get me any closer to understanding what got the NPR thing singled out at the top of this thread…but would be a perfect example of what I meant in my previous comment about there being ways to talk about legitimate criticisms that wouldn’t borrow from that enemy creation playbook I alluded to not meaning to crib from the way it comes across like

              …so…as far as this part goes

              Biden is put under the spotlight for his choice of shoes. Trump’s serious executive function instability in a half billion dollar case that could collapse his finances gets, what exactly? Where are the headlines challenging his fitness on this issue?

              …I don’t aim to turn over the rest of my day to making a project of it so I can produce links I’d need to actively seek rather than happen to have to hand…but I’m going to be all kinds of surprised if some of the links I’ve included in a DOT here or there didn’t get into it in a historic sense…& even where stuff related to this case is concerned from back in the pre-verdict times…& even post judgement I’ve seen a few…so I guess the honest answer is “in places I see them”…which more or less by definition means the catchment area you have the question framed as considering to “count” necessarily has to be a different one…but I don’t have the criteria to build out the venn diagram so I’m still on a hiding to nothing in that sense

              …& all the way along I realize I’ve been laboring under the assumption that when you kicked this thread off with “That NPR piece is a great example of how easily the press will turn off its critical functions…” rather than…say…an example of the way that the press operates like a faceted lens…more or less literally…most of the time…the thing we’re trying to see is inside the gem…but the view we get looking at an individual piece from an individual outlet is looking square on at a single facet…where that one pretty much did what it said on the tin…there was something about it that made it more than an arbitrary example…because that really would be the sort of thing that essay was talking about & that way madness lies…or lurks…with all kinds of malice aforethought & any kind of clarity or integrity…be it on the part of the press or in an individual intellectual sense is so far in the rear it’s out of sight

              …if…as it now sounds…it was more by way of a stand-in for something akin to a genre…which I wouldn’t altogether dispute so much as consider to be less obvious a candidate for the role than a lot of easily found examples…then I’m back to not really understanding who or what it is you seem to want to pin it on in causative terms…because by that emergent properties interpretation I mentioned earlier if you trace it all the way back it goes beyond your murdochs or musks & becomes a flaw in the capitalism paradigm more than any individual actor(s)…& in that sense…parity-wise…it’s not a press-specific problem…whereas your comment very much augurs in the direction of a complaint leveled at some combination of individual journalists, editors, publications & news orgs…while also appearing to be a demand for something that is at least a couple of removes from…say…the raw output of reuters global feed…which is about as big a firehose of raw material as I can think of in a news-gathering sense…so to get what you seem to outline as being what you think we should…you need a spread of very much those usual suspects

              …don’t get me wrong…I’m a fan of a headscratcher…so even if I don’t have the time to take a run at it as though it were an actual thesis I needed to buttress with a full spread of citations I could happily keep fiddling with my viewfinder until I dialed in the magic formula…but I should probably quit for today…I have it on good authority that it bores the crap out of several people when I do this & I don’t want to add further to the stuff they scroll past without bothering to read because they’re pretty sure they’ve been there & done that more times than they had the appetite for

              …feel like I got closer this time, though…so I expect I’ll have another go at some point?

  12. and if you think the Hitler quotes were just a funny coincidence…

    Is the Putin caucus getting smaller or are these 9 just too stupid to see a trap?

    https://www.rawstory.com/meet-the-republicans-who-voted-against-condemning-putins-illegal-abduction-of-children/

    • For a moment I was wondering if the twitter writer’s wife was HAL9000 or SAL9000.

      And then it turned from a puzzle looked to a WTF look.

      Sad to say Trump’s political mentor must have been Marge Schott.

    • It’s both hard to argue with her methods … but also she could actually be the (((George Soros)))-level boogeyman imagined by the right! (Assuming, of course, she feels that way politically, which I’m not sure about.)

      It would hilarious and amazing if she plowed a few hundred mill into unionizing efforts as a giant F-U to Bezos. Given Biden’s shockingly excellent record on labor so far, this would be the time to do it, too!

  14. Seen this morning: Biden’s campaign has $155M on hand.

    I’m not saying he should buy Trump Tower in NYC and Mar-A-Lago but I’m not NOT saying that it would be the funniest and best campaign spend ever to have Mango Unchained suddenly living in Biden Tower or Hunter-A-Lago.

    • …I think the optics on the money for the bond coming out of the public purse would be a tough row to hoe…but…if the SDNY AG appointed someone who flogged his OG trump tower…they could maybe make it a condition of the sale that they mount a billboard directly under his name…with the proceeds going to a fund for enabling state prosecutions of financial crime, say

      …& if biden’s campaign or an enterprising PAC chose to take a long-term lease on the billboard & produce posters that played on the gaudy name overhead

      …well…that’d be something else altogether

      …hell…cover the whole frontage in billboards & have the top half be a litany of god-awful attributes or failed business that match the name & then underneath run a few that say BIDEN & then a list of accomplishments

      …but now I’m getting carried away

      …& maybe if the penalty winds up in at least state coffers the optics aren’t bad to begin with if the feds snap it up…but…jeff’s ex might be worth a call?

      • 100% a super PAC could scrape together enough to put in a reasonable bid in and rename all his shit just to drive him nuts. We’ve already covered Biden Tower and Hunter-A-Lago but I realize now that “Obama Tower” in Chicago would absolutely make his brain explode.

  15. Impeachment hearings going well…

    How has the DOJ not arrested these fucking traitors?

  16. Well I am not driving to Carbondale as that is like 8 hrs away. It is supposed to be close to 90% here. I did buy some eclipse glasses but almost every* astronomical event in my 41 yrs has been obscured by clouds so I am not holding my breath. Something about Chicago weather, man.

    *I can’t speak for meteor showers as I can’t be arsed to get up at 2am to look.

    I feel like other kids got to make those viewing boxes in school when there were eclipses growing up. I always saw them do it on tv, but we never did that. Just sat inside doing whatever we were supposed to be doing.

    • …I went to a wedding once a long time ago where everyone found somewhere to stay & came back the next day for a reception that coincided with a solar eclipse…as luck would have it the weather stayed more-or-less fair & the clouds were mostly in other bits of the sky

      …mostly what I remember is that (aside from a guest or two who might have had more than a couple already) everything gets eerily quiet as the wildlife is all “WTF? are you kidding me with night-time in the day-time bullshit? is this the end? or if I pretend it isn’t happening maybe it’ll just go back to normal…assuming I’m not dead already?” & by that point things are noticeably getting brighter again & the noise comes back?

      • I wandered outside during the last one (2017?). I was at work so I just stood in the parking lot and took in the ambiance as I didn’t have a safe way to look. But it was partly cloudy that day. Eclipse just made it grayer. I was like “ok then!” and went back to work lol.

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