Hi all. I hope you had a great weekend. Mine was super productive. I got the new washer and dryer installed (they arrived at 9:36 on Saturday, for those keeping track). I went to Costco and the grocery store, made brownies, did yard work. I also went to two birthday parties and made a very fussy vegetarian dish for one of the parties.
Gosh, I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Let’s see what else was going on this weekend…
Ukraine Updates:
Ceramic cockerels surprise Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Kyiv walk
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/10/ceramic-cockerels-surprise-boris-johnson-and-volodymyr-zelenskiy-on-kyiv-walk
French Elections:
Macron projected to finish ahead of far-right leader Le Pen in first round of French presidential election
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/10/french-election-results-2022/
Sprots!
Scottie Scheffler caps remarkable rise with a dominant Masters victory
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/04/10/scottie-scheffler-wins-masters/
This is sad…
Stonks!
Stock futures are little changed as Wall Street looks to rebound from a losing week
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/10/stock-futures-inch-higher-as-wall-street-looks-to-rebound-from-losing-week.html
Tell me you know nothing about Dee Snider without saying you know nothing about Dee Snider.
I wonder if I could teach Fritz to do this?
Have a great day!
Even without the obvious giveaways of the tweet submitter’s name and its title you just knew that the designer of the cat agility test/obstacle course was German: the perfectly aligned cups and cardboard demonstrates Teutonic precision engineering at its finest.
Meanwhile, who among us hasn’t dreamed of running a gift shop on a small island just off the coast of Antartica? That’s just one of three jobs currently available through this organization:
https://www.ukaht.org/latest-news/2022/we-re-recruiting-port-lockroy/
Might be a solid investment opportunity. It won’t be much longer before we are installing cabanas and lounge chairs on Antarctic beaches. Get in on the ground floor! Who’s with me?
Did you happen to watch the latest season of The Great British Baking Show? They made a big deal of a contrast between the German baker and an Italian, although you could tell they were exaggerating a bit.
Parts of it. Since I can’t really bake I might as well be watching people achieve nuclear fission. Ironically Giuseppe was an engineer, and Jürgen was a software engineer, which is engineering but not useful for when you’re trying to construct something that has to keep another something 10X its weight from collapsing.
The levels of self delusion these right wing twits exhibit still has the capacity to surprise even me. Clearly these assholes never saw the Twisted Sister video
They heard “You’re all worthless and weak” and thought “Yeah, suck it, Libs.”
Wait till they finally read the lyrics to Born In the USA.
Apparently Rage Against The Machine is allegedly popular among GOPers while not realizing they are the Machine.
I’m convinced they heard the lyrics and thought those were all good things.
Favorite Dee Snider tweet to right-wing shithead:
Elon Musk: I’m joining Twitter’s board!
Twitter: Great! We’ll just do a quick background check and–
Elon Musk: … Oh?
Twitter: Elon Musk will not be joining the board.
“We were excited……this is for the best.”
What in the corporate doublespeak….?
My hot take:
Twitter allowed Trump to shit on everything for four years because they were afraid of him. Once they banned him, lo and behold, nothing happened. There was no mass exodus and Trump keeps begging to be allowed back in.
Musk was mumbling crazy shit about free speech and Twitter’s management said, fuck, no, we don’t need more of this bullshit. We are doing fine.
Basically, Musk shot his mouth off too much once again and talked himself out of the job.
Board members have a “fiduciary responsibility” which means he wouldn’t be able to tweet shit like the following;
I’m embarrassed. I’ve written extensively about fiduciary responsibility and I didn’t catch that angle at all.
It didn’t occur to me either til I saw the tweet thread and then it made perfect sense.
For Cousin Matthew:
Morning Digest: Barring an X-Files-level conspiracy, Andrew Cuomo won’t be on the ballot
I’d love to see every reporter who treated this as a serious possibility asked whether they looked if he was even bothering to get on the ballot.
Articles like this that treated it as possibly more than a stunt are one of the reasons political coverage stinks — it’s reporters giving in to PR without naming the PR reps.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/06/nyregion/cuomo-cancel-culture-speech.html
But
TrumpCuomo himself teased it, saying that among his options he could still run as an independent. “I’ve done it before.”Sigh. What he meant was he and the rest of the center-right Democratic machinery can’t stand parties other than their own and the Republicans, who have their own minor rightist parties. We have fusion voting in New York, which means, to take my case for example, if you like to vote but you can’t stand the thought of seeming to support the State Democratic Party, you can still vote for the Democrat but (again, my example) on the Working Families Party line. The WFP rarely runs its own candidates in the general but in the primaries they often run alternates to the machine hacks, who are to the right of George H. W. Bush. Voting in the general for the machine Democrat but on the WFP line indicates to the supremely inept Jay Jacobs, the state Democratic Party chair, that perhaps the party could run someone who might, deep down, display liberal tendencies.
Cuomo has special loathing for the WFP. In the last two gubernatorial elections the WFP didn’t run him in the primaries, they went with his challenger. In this way I once got the chance to vote for Miranda from “SATC”. Cuomo decided to fight fire with fire and created something out of whole cloth called the WEP, which, because Cuomo can’t stoop too low, stood for the Women’s Equality Party. Andrew Cuomo. Women’s Equality Party. The whole purpose was to confuse the electorate. Almost no one fell for.
Tl; dr but Cuomo could make up his own party and would probably get enough signatures to appear on the general ballot. He could call it the “I’m Italian: That’s Just How We Greet Women” party.
I agree that Cuomo teased it, but it’s undoubtably true that he had people behind the scenes yelling it. The press should have smelled the blood in the water and named the yellers.
The juicy part of the Cuomo and Zucker/Cuomo investigations wasn’t the high level passive voice “pressure was exerted” reporting. It was the revelations about who was doing it and low they sunk in specific hit jobs. The interesting part of a sad Cuomo appearance isn’t vague speculation about him campaigning, it’s finding out who is still debasing themselves with him and watching them squirm to explain it on the record.
It does make a good story. It’s certainly keeping this New Yorker on edge. I think the solution is simple: all the reporters have his spokesperson Rich Cocopazzo or whatever his name is on speed dial and they like talking to him because he talks shit about everyone and gives good quote. Also, Cuomo technically can’t dip into his slush fund if he’s not campaigning for something, as if there’s any regulatory body in this entire, corrupted state that would lift a finger to stop him.
The Trump Organization used to borrow from major banks. Now look who’s lending it money.
TL;DR: Trump is now borrowing from a massive loan shark (loan megalodon?). Nobody else will touch him. Trump gonna find out how payday lenders play this game.
I was wondering who did the refi since even Deutsche Bank, his lender of last resort, won’t touch Trump now.
If you read all the way down this “lender” is funded by a couple of Russian companies, which is wholly unsurprising. Axos looks to me like a giant money-laundering operation, which is totally on-brand for Trump.
Interesting analysis of Rush Limbaugh’s “life”:
Sad, forgotten legacy of Limbaugh shows the future to current peddlers of hate
Full disclosure: I am not SemDem, even though I am a Democrat in Seminole County.
You can come visit him in Bellefontaine Cemetery and piss on his grave, if you want. Phyllis Schlafly might be in the same cemetary? Leave some used condoms on her tombstone though.
What? A sane person in Texas?
and on the other side of the spectrum…
https://accountability.gop/ukraine-quotes/
Wait, they are blackmailing a mouse?
https://popular.info/p/political-blackmail?s=r
Thing is, the DA should have fucking known better because it’s his job. My guess is that he was somehow hoping this wouldn’t turn into a national story that thoroughly embarrassed these fucking barbarians.
They can try to blackmail The Mouse but they will lose. Disney is a major economic engine in Florida as its biggest employer, and they have billions of dollars and millions of fans. “Tilting at windmills” doesn’t even begin to describe the depths of DeSantis’ stupidity.
It’s performative nonsense AGAIN. Problem is, the right-wingers will hear about DeSantis’ “principled stand” but when he cowers back into his corner that won’t get reported. Even in defeat the right-wingers will claim victory and their adherents will believe they won even though they lost.
New York State just threw over $1 billion at Buffalo to build a stadium for the Bills (whose owners, the Pekulas, are Florida residents, as opponents to this outrageous misuse of taxpayer money never cease to point out.)
What if Disney responds to DeSantis by saying, “You know, we don’t have to be in Florida. Texas is a huge sunbelt state with a lot of open land, tons of people, multiple huge airports doing a land office business in domestic and foreign travelers [etc. The list goes on.]” If DeSantis followed Hochul’s lead his reply would probably be, “We will give you 50% of all state revenues in perpetuity if you just agree to stay. Plus we’ll throw in the Everglades for potential development opportunities.”
That absolutely would happen but Disney doesn’t have to do that. What they could do is say, “Hey, we’re going to build this new studio/hotel/development/office (pick one or more) in Texas instead of Florida because you’re an asshole.”
DeSantis would crawl from Tallahassee to Orlando on his knees to beg forgiveness.
That cat solved more problems in that video than most Republicans officials will solve in their entire careers….
ETA: Jesus Christ, that Haskins story. Dude is trying to cross an interstate and … gets hit by a dump truck? Holy hell. A small part of me is making a “hit by a bus” joke, but that’s just bizarre and sad as hell.
The GOP answer is bark at every obstacle in the hopes a weak willed owner will jump in and make things better, and then the owner wonders why their dog acts like they’re in charge.
This is probably the most stupifying thing I’ve read in ages:
Republicans trust almost nothing.
Barely half of them (53%) trust Fox News, and shit goes straight downhill from there.
Only 20% trust The Weather Channel, for fuck’s sake. I guess weather is a liberal conspiracy too?
They hate the Wall Street Journal too, even though the WSJ caters to them almost exclusively now.
Seriously, take a look. It’s incredibly illustrative of the right-wing insanity. They simply don’t believe reality.
The Weather Channel doesn’t deny that climate change is real. Ergo, it’s not trustworthy.
Yeah, but does it work the other way?
https://www.salon.com/2022/04/04/can-fox-news-viewers-be-deprogrammed-paying-them-to-watch-cnn-makes-them-less-gullible_partner/