Monday Mood [DOT 7/10/24]

7/10/24 MegMegMcGee 41

Hope everyone had a good weekend! Friday night the 80s band canceled so there we were in our 80s garb just having dinner. The Meshell Ndegeocello show on Saturday night was fabulous though.

OMG these people are dumb as rocks.

Johnson won’t say Biden won in 2020, raising worries on 2024’s process
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/06/mike-johnson-donald-trump-election

Nothing, the answer is nothing. (Unless it does, then call me lol)

Here’s what Harris’ unrealized capital gains tax proposal means for you
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/06/politics/capital-gains-tax-harris-tiktok/index.html

Be safe out there

Confusing headline as to who was in the wrong here

Black bear with three cubs attacks man after breaking into Colorado home
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/06/black-bear-attacks-man-colorado-home

Have a great day!

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41 Comments

  1. Presented as a public service: an “unlocked” (so you should be able to access it) vegetarian dining guide to NYC from our beloved New York Times. I like how the writer goes to Le Bernadin for their vegetarian tasting menu and finds it not as satisfying as the seafood tasting menu she has had many times before. So relatable. Also, the retired banker, no doubt a friend of her parents or the father of a college roommate. The tetchy Baruch College professor. Also this:

    “I only need one entree,” said Samuel Shapiro, a graduate student who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. “But that one has to be treated with the same care and thought and attention as the other entrees, and if it is, I will be perfectly satisfied.”

    Sam, hon, I don’t suppose you’re a graduate student at the Columbia School of Journalism, are you? Because it sure sounds like it. You give good quote.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/dining/vegetarian-restaurants-nyc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.QU4.QcRq.5lseLx4gIMhX&smid=url-share

      • Oh yes, it’s very “Daily Worker.” To be honest, I was kind of surprised that they even ran this piece. I guess with the entire Adams criminal enterprise making news they have to report on that, sort of, and while they’re in the neighborhood they might as well talk about very expensive, hard-to-get-reservations vegetarian restaurants, no matter how well-trod the subject matter.

      • It’s always worth remembering what AG Sulzberger wrote when he was bureau chief in Kansas City just a few years before his dad named him as his replacement as publisher.

        AG wrote a long screed moaning that as a vegetarian he was “starving” for three days after he arrived until he finally found a Chinese restaurant that served tofu, complained how it was nothing like life in Manhattan, and unironically claimed the main vegetable in the Midwest was iceberg lettuce. I’m sure he thought he was being self-deprecating but the whole thing stinks of snobbery.

        Of course there are plenty of vegetables served all over the midwest and tons of vegetarian options, and there’s the whole mystery of how AG Sulzberger couldn’t Google “pizza” or “Chinese restaurant” but he’s never seemed to be one to care for facts. What was clear though is the guy is a self involved, unqualified weirdo, and still is.

        • I wonder how many servants the Sulzbergers have and how self-sufficient the family members are. A. G. does not do the Google nor does he Yahoo things. Does A. G. tie his own shoes or brush his own teeth? He’s giving off a very King Charles III vibe. I look forward to the story of his calfskin toilet seat cover.

          • He actually described mostly living off his own cooking, which sounded like it was 1980s era Moosewood Cookbook garbage – lumps of beans and brown rice. The picture comes across of a petulant guy who would rather stew in his unhappiness than show any curiousity or creativity, or reach out for help.

            He also made it clear he wasn’t a vegetarian for any religious or ethical reason, or anything he thought about – he just thought meat was yucky. Which quite frankly may explain a lot of the editorial choices under his leadership. Trans people, college kids, old people, anything outside of a narrow strip of Manhattan is just yucky.

            • The Moosewood Cookbook! I have a couple of friends who cook from it (not exclusively; they’re not that crazy) and the stuff is actually pretty tasty. The secret is in all the garlic they use, and saucing and spicing. You could dig a carrot out of your backyard and just eat that but we’re not Bugs Bunny, thankfully. You need to add and transform.

        • *THAT* was Sulzberger?!?

          Iceberg lettuce kid is *Bedbugs Brett’s* boss?!???

          Noooooow i fiiiiinally get why the Grey Lady has fallen *so* far, so quickly!🙃🫠

    • Including his wife and children, according to awkward videos and memes and other assorted evidence.

      It’s a great tragedy, really, because if I were a Cuban/Canadian/American I bet I’d be pretty good looking, and I wouldn’t be as nutty as Rafael. I’d probably be more conservative, I guess, but my Margaret Mead-ish deep study of Miami Cubans (second, third generation) leads me to believe that their conservatism is constricted to very restricted channels. They can rail all they want about Castro* but I never found them to be particularly homophobic. And I’m very light-skinned so I’m at the top of the heap but Better Half is very dark-skinned and they took that in stride.

      * There is a joke among the non-Cuban Spanish. Whenever you meet a Cuban, they will tell you how much extensive lands their family lost in the Revolution. A friend of mine, a Dominican, said, “If all their claims were true Cuba would need to be the size of Canada. And habitable.”

      • It’s true. I can’t tell you how many Cuban-Americans told me about their lost estates when I lived in South Florida. Even back then, though, none of them actually lived there. They were repeating stuff their grandparents told them.

    • The fact he is resorting to being a big dumb whiny crybaby might mean things are even worse than the polling suggests.

      And acting that way is the best way to win the haters over… LOL

  5. It won’t happen — and, of course, shouldn’t happen — but it would be the funniest thing ever if when Congress convened to count the electoral college votes, Kamala just jumped in two seconds after the first gavel and was like “I already signed the paper saying I won, don’t worry about counting.” Because that IS what they wanted from Pence, so clearly they believe the VP has the power to do that.

    • I genuinely worry about the scenario where the GOP tries to jam through a Trump victory despite a Harris win.

      The thing is that Biden doesn’t have to hand over the keys to Trump instead of Harris, even if the Supreme Court says he does. Mike Johnson and the Supreme Court don’t have anyone who can actually enforce anything, they just have their words, and it’s an open question what the 101st Airborne does if Samuel Alito tries to tell them to back a judicial coup when Biden and Harris point to the actual vote.

      Does Biden end up declaring some kind of state of emergency and start arresting top Republicans? I don’t think the public would necessarily rally to the GOP when some hardcore judge tries to screw them over, and what do GOP leaders do if they are stuck in a facility with no communications to the outside world?

      I am sure there are people on Trump’s team who would egg him on to go through with this. I’m not sure he’d say no.

      • I think the bigger question is how much the party would actually want to go to the mat for a two-time loser in Trump who has reached the end of his electoral viability (and may or may not even be alive for 2028). If it is clear he’s lost the vote, I’m not sure they want to go guns a’blazing (literally) and I don’t say that out of some belief that these people have souls or standards or whatever — they did NOT like Jan. 6 the first time and the sequel would be a lot bigger and bloodier. We know what his fans want and they talk a good game, but I’m not even a little convinced the normies or party leadership are prepared to take up arms and start murdering their neighbors.

        • OK, but how much damage could Johnson do? I don’t mean “realistically” because we all know that our vaunted standards and protections only matter if people choose to abide by them I mean, how much damage could Johnson do if he chooses to go full tilt and refuse to allow a vote on the certification?

          • The biggest problem for him and them is that Biden is president and would remain so. This time out, they’re not trying to hold onto an imagined lead and bleed the clock … not voting on it wouldn’t be enough, basically. They would have to go full force and while again I don’t think these are good, smart or ethical human beings, Johnson can’t even keep his people in line to vote down budget bills. Does he actually have the cobbles to live with real fear? (Because he’d be getting it from EVERY angle, everyone reasonable in the world would be screaming for him AND the Trumpers would be death threating him and his family for not doing it faster.)

            • I think a piece of the problem is there are a bunch of apocalyptic thinkers on the right like Bannon and Musk (and for that matter, Putin) who think any chaos is good for them, and if that means trashing the legitimacy of the GOP in Congress and courts, that ends up helping them in the long run.

              They’re ultimately authoritarians rather than partisans, and they wouldn’t necessarily mind seeing a smaller but more cohesive and extreme right wing. They’ll count on a core of billionaires to keep pumping money into crackpots and disinformation, and hope mainstream institutions go back into complacency.

              I get a little glimmer of hope from people like Melinda French (Gates) who is saying screw her ex husband’s technocratic fake neutrality and pumping a fortune into women’s rights. I think there’s a bit more understanding that tech and finance bros are poison, and it’s actively stupid to try to be disengaged.

            • Yup. Biden is in charge and going to stay that way. MAGA doesn’t have the resources to mount an actual coup against real military. The 1500 or so that have been sentenced aren’t going to show up, and you can bet the rest paid attention to those arrests.

              My understanding is that there are already plans in place to secure the Capitol this time. MAGAs won’t be overwhelming a handful of DC police, IF enough of them show up to make a difference.

              Trump’s traitorous cabal is going to try, but I don’t see the support out there for Trump at all. He can beg people to show up again, but I doubt it’s going to work.

              • What they can do is convince some lunatic Federalist Society judges to issue idiotic injunctions essentially ordering the election handed over to Trump, and get the Supreme Court to either agree, ridiculously slow walk a decision, or refuse to intervene at all.

                The goal wouldn’t be winning, but it would be setting up a confrontation between Biden and Harris and the courts. It wouldn’t be crazy to imagine a situation where Inauguration Day was a couple of days away and the courts were still screwing around, and Biden is forced to just declare the courts null and void.

                I don’t think the GOP comes out well in this scenario. But I also think there are a lot of apocalyptic types there who aren’t thinking straight. A more strategic bunch wouldn’t have wiped out Roe v. Wade, but they decided to just do it anyway.

                • I do not think the party establishment wants that one bit, though. They’ve spent 40 years packing the courts specifically to side-step legislative or executive scrutiny and this opens the door to all of that work being undone in a heartbeat — and not to score some huge priority they want done but to give a dying oaf they do not give the slightest shit about a free pass from jail. That sounds like their nightmare scenario.

                  • I agree that’s not what they want. I’m just not sure they have the brains or courage to avoid getting maneuvered into some kind of Kool Aid pact.

                    One of the things coming out of the recent report on John Roberts and the Trump immunity ruling is a picture of Roberts as wildly delusional before the opinion came out that everyone would be wildly impressed by his reasoning.  And this was after he blew up Roe v. Wade. He’s in denial of just how much legitimacy he’s blown off, and I think he’s symptomatic of how bad the party elders are at getting a real reading on the country has gotten. Their information networks are fractured.

                    Which isn’t to say they wouldn’t bow to reality, if good fortune gives us a Harris victory. But I don’t know how clean the process would be.

                    • We already know it won’t be clean. Trump will claim victory even if he gets trounced and plenty of people will either believe it or repeat it to the masses. There is no scenario where he’s a candidate and the election is anything approaching normal. That’s out the window.

                      The Supreme Court can’t also unilaterally declare someone the president, that’s not how it works. It would take a very close result in a red state as the tipping point just to generate the type of case they could rule on (by sending it back to that state’s judiciary.) If they were getting something they desperately wanted out of the deal — end to personal lawsuits, a bigger Chevron, outlawing of unions, private Social Security — maybe they’d be willing to risk the biscuit but, again, they spent 40 years building their judicial fiefdom and I think Trump’s the delusional one if he thinks they’re just gonna let him put that work in jeopardy (and not the other way around).

                • I think the ones actually in office are too attached to the status quo. Yeah, you’ll have bomb throwers like Miller and Bannon, and some batshits like MTG, but at a certain point you’re going to see the Republicans that aren’t completely delusional back off because blowing everything up doesn’t help them at all.

                  The Supreme Court does concern me, and that’s why I’m interested to see if they calm down or if they double-down on fascism this session.

                  But at the end of the day they gave Biden unlimited power. So we’ve got that going for us, if he decides to use it.

                  • I’m sure they’ll double down, but the whole point of having the Supreme Court in their pocket is to do unpopular stuff without getting the voters involved. Trying to openly overturn an election is EXTREMELY having the voters involved, it’s a totally different thing and they know that. The fact that “judicial reform” is a thing that’s been said more than a few times this year on the campaign trail is a giant problem for them and this would provide huge and pressing ammunition for it to become a much hotter issue.

        • I don’t think leadership would want a full out confrontation in the event of a clear loss, but I can see an argument being made by the extremists to staus quo types to go to the edge before giving up under protest. They’ll basically promise they’ll give up in the end if the status quo stays unified until then.

          And the danger of brinksmanship is that it can be wildly destabilizing, which I think extremists recognize better than the status quo types. If the status quo stays quiet during early days of vote challenges and court filings, they may it gets harder to say no rather than easier.

          One of the best things to happen just prior to January 6 was the joint statement on 1/3 by every former Defense secretary, Republicans and Democrats – including Trump’s former secretaries – calling on the military to stay out away from a coup. I think it would be critical to get that type of open defiance by even more of the GOP. It would be smart to issue a “move on” statement right away, but I don’t know how much intelligence controls their actions.

      • Honestly?

        I thiiiink if that happens, Biden will just resign *early* and have Harris sworn in in December, so that *SHE* would be the one riding out all the kerfuffle as *already* POTUS.

        An Inauguration Day/January Coup becomes *much* smaller a deal, when the Woman President has already quietly been sworn in, at the White House, and is just continuing her first term.

        Biden is sn actual Patriot and believer in the Rule of Law. He knows The Order of Succession, and I don’t believe he’d struggle with stepping down *again*, for the good of the country.

        He was in the Senate when Nixon resigned.

        He *knows* how it works, and I honestly don’t think he’d hesitate to use that particular tool if necessary.

  6. It’s sad that all the bears had to die after trying to have their own picnic.

    As I wrote before, where I live, there are idiots who feed coyotes and the local authorities have been asking people not to do so.

  7. Freedom of speech!  Unless I don’t agree with it…

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/desantis-threatens-tv-station-abortion-advert-b2624767.html

    This is a felony!  Lock him up!!!!

    Elon Musk's pinned comment on X is an offer to pay people to sign a petition, which requires the signer to register to vote. This is a FELONY. Federal law prohibits paying people to vote, or register to vote.
    byu/GonzoVeritas inWhitePeopleTwitter

     

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