So, anything going on these days?

22/8/24 bryanlsplinter 40

Ha! I kid. We all know what’s going on. The Democratic National Convention! And honestly, I kinda wish I was there.

This is like an hour and a half, but it’s the delegate roll call set to music. It’s incredible how much fun everybody has with this.

This guy. At least he’s giving up. What a putz.

RFK Jr. seems to be looking for the exit—and potential Trump gig

Pursuant to our discussion of “fact checking” yesterday:

TRUMP: Kamala is a MarxistWASHINGTON POST:TRUMP: She's a CommunistWASHINGTON POST:TRUMP: They did a coupWASHINGTON POST:TRUMP: You can't go outside without getting rapedWASHINGTON POST:DNC SPEAKER MICHELLE GRISHAM: Trump wants to repeal the ACAWASHINGTON POST: THERE IS NO EVIDENCE OF TH

— Matt Negrin still host of Hardball on MSNBC (@mattnegrin.bsky.social) 2024-08-21T15:10:52.294Z

Speaking of putzes … what does this idiot hope to accomplish?

‘Were you aborted?’ Mike Lindell films bizarre clash after sneaking into DNC

I’m telling you, Taylor Swift is going to introduce Kamala Friday night. In the meantime …

Exclusive: Oprah Winfrey will be part of DNC program Wednesday night

How’s this going over with the viewing public?

DNC Crushes RNC’s Ratings Again on Night No. 2

It’s okay, though. Republicans have deployed their secret weapon.

Vance speaks to crowd of tens as Trump campaign deflates

And in closing, turtle content. Wash your hands after handling turtles, people. I mean, wash your hands in general, but especially after handling turtles.

Pet Turtles Are Making Americans Everywhere Sick with Salmonella

Stay out of trouble, y’all.

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40 Comments

  1. I heard that RFK called the Harris Campaign first to ask for a job in exchange for his endorsement before he went to Trump. I would pay real money to know exactly how that phone call went with Harris’ people.

    • “Hi! I’m calling from the office of Bobby Kennedy, Jr. He was wondering if—”

      Click

      • My understanding is that’s almost exactly how it went. They refused to talk to him. He apparently wants a Cabinet post in exchange for his endorsement. Sure, Brain Worm, we’ll give you a top-level position. What a moron.

        • They should have offered to make him Secretary of an ultra super-secret Department.  So secret, it doesn’t even have a name, for deniability reasons.  So secret, it doesn’t even have a brick-and-mortar location.  So secret, in fact, that each employee can only communicate with one other employee, you know, to keep things secret.

          That could net Harris what, 2500 votes with his endorsement?

  2. Ha! Hakeem Jeffries knows the score.

    “Donald Trump is like an old boyfriend who you broke up with, but he just won’t go away,” Jeffries said. “He has spent the last four years spinning the block, trying to get back into a relationship with the American people. Bro, we broke up with you for a reason.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/21/tim-walz-nancy-pelosi-bill-clinton-speeches-dnc/

  3. Let’s play a guessing game. Every speaker at the DNC lavished multiple insults on Donald Trump. Which speaker supposedly personally hurt him the most? The answer will surprise you.

     

    • Uh, yeah, that does surprise me, though I won’t spoil it for others. My first thought was Michelle Obama, but since she’s Black, Trump would just shrug that off.

      Two takeaways from that: One, Trump didn’t write those comments. He doesn’t know what “adversarial” means and he can’t compose sentences of that length. Two, either he or his staff or both are glued to the TV watching the DNC. There wasn’t a ton of coverage of that speech.

      • Apparently most people, including VP candidate Walz, stood around, or sat around, and chatted right through it, and it was hard to hear over the clamor.

      • Right, and “vitriol” is a giveaway too.

        That’s like an offensive coordinator trying during pregame comments to deflect what the coach is really worried about by talking up some scrub on the other team.

        The Daily Beast doesn’t care, though. They’ll print whatever they’re pitched.

        • I thought it was a good story because it basically strings together some Truth Social posts from Trump or people taking dictation from him, so primary source (although sometimes more than usually unhinged) and, not that I’m particularly interested in this topic, they reached into the Truth Social cesspool for me. Does the California dairy farmer still run that operation?

          • NOT THAT THERE IS ANYTHING WRONG WITH BEING A CALIFORNIA DAIRY FARMER. Must be a helluva lot of work, and when those wildfires come in and you lose the herd…the poor cows.

    • The Daily Beast really picked the most Oompah Loopah like photo of the Donald.

      He looks like the village elder or idiot who got captured along with the rest of them by Willie Wonka.

  4. Clinton’s speech was meh. Except for this zinger:

    “Let’s cut to the chase. I am too old to gild the lily,” Clinton said, in a thin and raspy voice. “Two days ago I turned 78. … And the only personal vanity I want to assert is I’m still younger than Donald Trump.”

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/21/tim-walz-nancy-pelosi-bill-clinton-speeches-dnc/

    Not gonna lie, that startled me. And he’s been out of office for a couple of decades now.

    • Fact I heard recently that officially scrambled my brain: The last Democratic president to pass away was LBJ in 1973 (!!!!!)

      Jimmy Carter, amazingly, is still going, but also Clinton and Obama were relatively young guys so of course they’re still around too.

      • Well, Republicans still have W so maybe he’ll step up for Trump … oh, wait, he hates Trump? Well, that’s unfortunate.

        Carter has stated he’s going to stick around just so he can vote for Harris. Betcha he’ll do it too. My grandfather was a peanut farmer and he was the stubbornest sonofabitch I ever met. His mule knew better than to argue with him.

  5. As Vance and Trump are struggling to find all of those supposedly diehard supporters we’ve been told about for the past eight years, Harris went on a sidetrip to the site of the Republican convention in Milwaukee and filled the joint.

    Trump’s team is laboring to make symbolic appearances like going to little places like Howell Michigan to make a point about how much he loves people who love Nazis, and they’re hoping the gesture somehow generates a groundswell of support.

    The Harris campaign is just bringing out the hammer.

  6. CLEVER NAME HERE FACT CHECK

    Let’s take a look at the accuracy of this morning’s DOT.

    Claim: I kid. We all know what’s going on.

    Not unless you have a subscription to the Washington Post, you don’t! Two Pinocchios

    Claim: This is like an hour and a half, but it’s the delegate roll call set to music. It’s incredible how much fun everybody has with this.

    Fact check: We have no way of knowing that “everybody” was having fun. Given that we know several conservative operatives snuck in, one must assume they were not enjoying this that much. Three Pinocchios

    Claim: Speaking of putzes … what does this idiot hope to accomplish?

    Fact check: Is Mike Lindell a putz or an idiot? This claim doesn’t know what it’s trying to accomplish, plus Mr. Lindell is a successful businessman which means he can’t possibly be stupid. 12 Pinocchios

    Claim: I’m telling you, Taylor Swift is going to introduce Kamala Friday night

    Fact check: This is blatant speculation, just like we have no idea who Taylor Swift might endorse if she chooses to endorse anyone. 414 Pinocchios

    Claim: Republicans have deployed their secret weapon.

    Fact check: J.D. Vance is the nominated vice president on the GOP ticket this year, to call him a “secret” is reductive. The man is a best-selling author, soldier, father, Senator, furniture connoisseur and Ivy League graduate. It’s demeaning to say he’s a secret anything. 17,812 Pinocchios

    • I stand corrected. You must have been reading WaPo’s fact check this morning. They are desperate to establish some sort of lying equivalency between Democrats and Republicans.

      Claim: Page 451 of Project 2025 says the only legitimate families are married mothers and fathers where only the father works.

      WaPo: It doesn’t say that, it just implies it.

      Claim: GOP tax scam gives 83% of benefits to wealthiest 1%.

      WaPo: That’s actually not going to happen until 2027.

      Claim: Since 1989, Democrats created 50 million jobs and Republicans only one million.

      WaPo: YOU DIDNT COUNT RONALD REAGAN YOU JUST COMPARED THREE DEMOCRATS TO THREE REPUBLICANS YOU HAVE TO COUNT RONALD REAGAN

      Claim: Trump will repeal the ACA.

      WaPo: He hasn’t mentioned that in a LONG TIME

      Claim: Trump will ban abortion.

      WaPo: HE DIDNT DO IT THE SUPREME COURT HE CREATED DID IT ITS NOT HIS FAULT AND YOU DONT KNOW IF HE EVEN UNDERSTANDS THE COMSTOCK ACT

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/22/dnc-fact-check-democratic-national-convention-day-3/

      • Kessler has been pretty clearly been taking pitches and prepackaged facts from rightwingers for years.

        When Obama truthfully said that Paul Ryan’s plan to dismantle Medicare was going to dismantle Medicare, Kessler called it the lie of the year, and his backup was clearly straight from Ryan.

        He basically hung the whole thing on Ryan keeping the name Medicare. The rest of it was gutting the funding and taking away all of the coverage and putting it on an ice floe, but as far as Kessler was concerned the burden of proof was entirely on Obama to show that being on an ice floe in the Arctic winter was definitely going to kill it.

        • Bluesky is ratioing the hell out of Kessler. So the good news is we aren’t the only ones who notice his bullshit.

      • Yeah, I don’t even think Kessler is specifically a hardcore righty or whatever but he (and the Post and all major papers) are so fucking Pavlovian about right-wing criticism that they just cannot admit to the things the right openly wants to do or has even done because that would simply be unfair somehow and beneath a check of pure fact that simply must remove “context” from everything.

        His check on Clinton’s numbers today is downright hilarious, he so desperately wants to say Clinton is lying so he just keeps throwing cope at it — uhhh that’s an arbitrary date and umm it’s somewhat better if you count Reagan and errrrr actually presidents don’t have a ton of control over the job market (which is true but that’s context he’s absolutely terrified to get near and he discards it out of hand) — to the point where he finally has to admit that if you are just counting from the Cold War line as Clinton said last night, it’s actually worse for Republicans so Clinton was wrong because it’s not 50 million to 1 million, it’s actually more like 50.3 million to nothing. 50.3 million Pinocchios

         

        • Honestly, my absolute favorite is his defense of Trump and repealing ACA. Despite the fact that Trump tried to do it numerous times, Kessler literally says “well, he hasn’t mentioned that in a year” so apparently it’s now false simply because Trump isn’t mentioning it.

          Let’s put it in Hannibal Lecter terms. So a serial killer that’s killed multiple times isn’t going to ever kill again, because he isn’t discussing his plans to do so.

  7. This thread on the replacement of engineer CEOs with MBA CEOs and the destructive effect it’s had is worth reading.

    https://nitter.privacydev.net/mmjukic/status/1825919774586552736

    I think it’s overly reductive – plenty of engineer type CEOs have ended up screwing up the companies they built, with Henry Ford as the prime example.

    But it’s definitely true that the MBA dominance has caused a ton of problems, in particular the finance types, He slides between the terms MBA and MBA/finance, and I think it’s the second that’s particularly bad. A lot of MBAs are focused on the consumer side of things, and that can be a big positive.

    You want people focused on finding out what customers want, and that’s what a lot of MBAs do. Engineers often think in terms of what they think customers need, and they often need help understanding the public. Often MBAs do junky salesmanship, but not always.

    But the finance-dominated MBAs are definitely a problem with none of the redeeming factors of the product and customer types.

    • That dude isn’t wrong. I’ve been saying much of the same about MBAs for a long fucking time. Most MBAs aren’t ops or R&D folks.

      Also the education hasn’t changed much since I jokingly/pathetically looked at the curriculum in the mid 90s. To be ‘fair’, my grades were too terrible for even the worst MBA program so I was saved from going (also, more importantly I didn’t want to.)

      At least with my PEng, I have to consider the public safety and interest over my own personal interests. MBAs have no professional inclination, limitation or obstacle.

      From my own view MBA/Engineers tend to be the worst. Take the reductive reasoning of an engineer and merge it with the short term bullshit from MBA skule and you get a halfwit who thinks they’re an expert in both when in actuality neither. The reason in part is because MBA skules want people with 2-4 (mostly 2) years of experience. 2-4 years of experience don’t mean shit. I worked as an engineer for 17 years and still learning. Then they get brain washed into the skule mentality and it ruins them.

      My social group fascist outcast Mr C is a pure financial MBA (and a real shitty one at best.) Loved to brag that management should ONLY be for MBAs and he could work in ANY industry, but considering the number of times he got fired… he couldn’t hack it in any industry except his small company because he can’t fire himself. One time he bragged that an MBA equals leadership and I fell off my barstool laughing at him for about 5 minutes. He was not amused.

      Nortel’s end was started by a MBA/Engineer and its ugly demise was authored by the idiot MBA (who helped destroy the Jack Welch cult (which I was once a member of to my shame) because he was so fucking inept.)

      • The bottom line is running a big business is hard, really, really hard.  You need people who can balance engineering, finance and above all else customer issues, but a lot of dummies only think about cost cutting and goosing short term stock value.

        • Exactly. Engineers (like all specialist professionals) should stay in their damn lane. At current work, I get pissed when I see non-engineers (QA for example) sticking their fucking noses in manufacturing engineering work. I made waves when I dumped on them for fucking up our SOPs. The QA rep gave me side eye.

        • McD brought in the short term thinking that produced the DC-10…

    • That was an incredibly perceptive insight. And I think we need more billionaires who look like 19th-century robber barons. He just needs a beard the size of a small topiary.

    • Because they figure Trump is a lost cause and are going to do their best to turn Canada into America’s MAGAt hat.

    • In Christopher Rufo I think we have another JD Vance:

      Spouse

      Suphatra Paravichai
      ​
      (m. 2016)​

      Children
      3

  10. Here’s a little squib from Politico:

    [Hochul’s] speech was not terribly memorable, but having Trump — who polls have shown is even less popular than she is in New York — can only shore up her support among fellow Democrats.

    Can you imagine—“well, I’m not very popular, but at least New Yorkers don’t hate me as much as Donald Trump. And I got rid of congestion pricing until after the election and did I get any thanks from Democrats up for reelection and the car-driving outer boroughs and suburbs? No. I did not. I give and give and give (for a price, of course) and where is the respect?”

    • That’s some really weird calculus there, and sounds like the writer is just channelling what a Hochul person says.

      You can bet a lot of progressives are looking at all of the better speakers – including AOC – and thinking even more that they can do better than Hochul. Progressives are probably looking across the Hudson at Andy Kim who launched a surprise move in the Senate race and outmaneuvered the old guard in NJ. They’ve got to be thinking this week makes Hochul look easier to primary, not harder.

  11. It is nepobaby Luke Russert’s birthday! He turns 39. From wiki:

    Russert is the son of newsman Tim Russert and Maureen Orth, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

    In May 2023, after seven years away from media, Russert’s travel memoir Look for Me There, about his three-and-a-half-year journey through six continents and more than 60 countries, was published by HarperHorizon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers. The book became a New York Times best-seller.[2]

    Did we all get that? “his three-and-a-half-year journey through six continents…” Well, I hope his three-and-a-half-year journey through six continents went better than mine. You would think being kidnapped and being forced to join a pirate crew would be kind of fun, but it gets tedious after a while. Do you know how big the oceans are? And eating the raw fish when the rations run low and you have to catch them yorself? We’re not talking Nobu here. 

    • That’s insane. Who does that? And they get upset by being called weird?

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