TGIF! [DOT 23/8/24]

23/8/24 MegMegMcGee 26

Hope everyone had a great week! Anything going on?

Last night in Chicago!

DNC live updates: Kamala Harris to call Trump an ‘unserious man’ in biggest speech of her career; Beyoncé rumored to appear

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2024/aug/22/kamala-harris-dnc-night-4

That’s pretty funny

Y’all know there’s two guys stuck in space?

NASA says data will guide return of stuck astronauts, but past tragedies loom large
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/08/22/boeing-starliner-nasa-astronauts-dragon-spacex

FYI

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/08/22/new-coronavirus-vaccine-covid/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/08/22/new-coronavirus-vaccine-covid

A fun thing I learned yesterday that this guy is like an actual GOLDWYN, as in MGM.

Kerry Washington reunites with ‘Scandal’ co-star Tony Goldwyn at DNC
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/4843230-kerry-washington-dnc-speech-kamala-harris

This is my Chicks National Anthem:

Have a great day!

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26 Comments

  1. NASA says data will guide return of stuck astronauts

    I know he wasn’t human, but shouldn’t his name still be capitalized?

      • Here he is reading the riot act to Lt. Commander Worf:

        Kinda hot if you’re just aimlessly wandering around Deep Space Nine with little to divert you. The holodeck can only take you so far.

        • It’s also canon that Klingons have backups to their major organs so … y’know … Worf might be a lot of fun on a boring evening.

          • Backups…to major organs…oh dear. So suppose you and the male Klingon hit it off and you invite him back to your quarters. When would you be finished up? And how is time measured in space? Would you be in there for two earth days? Four? Two weeks? There must be fan fic that addresses this but I’m not a Trekkie.

            • Hey, wanna see something that’ll blow your . . . uh, mind? The same actor who played Data also played . . . Bob Wheeler on Night Court. Check it out. . . .

              • That was the best show. It didn’t set out to be a magnet for young people to move into New York, neither did Taxi or Barney Miller, but all of that captivated the young Mattie Crawley. Then, years later, we got Seinfeld and Friends and Sex and the City and suddenly NYU, which used to be a third-rate commuter school, became one of the hottest tickets in town.

    • Something something adjusting the tachyons something something reverse the polarity of the flogiston matrix something something.

  2. CLEVER NAME HERE FACT CHECK

    Claim: Hope everyone had a great week! 

    Fact check: Meg does not wish every single person in the world had a great week. Two Pinocchios

    Claim: That’s pretty funny

    Fact check: Once again, JD Vance is a Senator, soldier, best-selling author, father, husband, Chesterfield admirer and vice presidential nominee, that is not, in fact, funny. Six Pinocchios

    Claim: Y’all know there’s two guys stuck in space?

    Fact check: NASA has said on several occasions that the astronauts are not stuck in space. Stuck implies unable to move; video evidence shows that the astronauts are free to move about the cabin of the space station. 250 Pinocchios

    Claim: This is my Chicks National Anthem

    Fact check: The Chicks, formerly the Dixie Chicks, do not have a national anthem nor any claim to writing the American national anthem. 1,776 Pinocchios

    Claim: Last night in Chicago!

    Fact check: The convention ran until after 11 p.m. Eastern, which would be 4 a.m. in Greenwich Mean Time, a time zone at least one DeadSplinterite lives in, which means the convention was not, in fact, last night for everyone, and saying as such is exclusionary and America-centric in the worst way. 3,949 Pinocchios

    Claim: Beyoncé rumored to appear

    Fact check: There was no Bey, no Hive, no Once, so this should receive the second most Pinocchios ever (17.3 million Pinocchios). However, on Truth Social, the Trump campaign was passing around Bey vetting, which means they thought she was going to show up. Thus, it is completely true that she was rumored to appear, and full credit to Meg for doing her research. Zero Pinocchios.

    • You’re right, I hope everyone has the day they DESERVE.

      • I hope everyone has the day they DESERVE.

        Well that’s just mean.

      • Thank you for setting the record straight. I am willing to reduce my fact-check down to one (1) Pinocchio for the original claim.

    • So let’s take a look at Kessler’s fact-check from last night:

      Harris: Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.

      WaPo: Not so fast. Trump only wanted to cut Social Security Disability Insurance as well as Supplemental Security Income, which has NOTHING TO DO WITH SOCIAL SECURITY

      Harris: Trump will add $5 trillion to the national debt giving money to billionaires.

      WaPo: THAT HASN’T HAPPENED YET YOU CAN’T SAY IT WILL HAPPEN

      Harris: Trump wants to create what is, in effect, a national sales tax.

      WaPo: NO HE DOESNT HE WANTS TO CREATE TARIFFS AND BY THE WAY HE’S RATCHETING UP THE PERCENTAGE AND … oh, wait.

      Harris: America will have the strongest fighting force in the world.

      WaPo: JOE BIDEN has proposed military budgets that don’t keep up with inflation. What JOE BIDEN did is exactly what Harris will do if elected. Because … fuck, I don’t know.

      Harris: Trump encouraged Putin’s invasion.

      WaPo: No he didn’t. He said he would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. There’s no way “invasion” falls under “whatever the hell they want.”

      But hey, don’t take my word for it.

      https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/23/fact-check-dnc-kamala-harris-day-4/

      • The idea that something like national defense can be “factchecked” is nuts. It’s a subject for national security reporters, and the fact that editors have handed over this function to Kessler is a sign of how far off the rails they’ve gone.

        I went to the PBS website last night to catch the stream of Harris and they had a prominent link to factchecking alongside it, which represents a major editorial decision on their part. And it’s weird. Serious critics have been pointing out problems with the concept for years, and the interest of audiences is tiny. It’s another one of those things execs want because they don’t actually understand the functions of journalism and the best ways to perform them.

      • Claim: If Popeye can eat that can of spinach, he will develop super-strength and wallop all comers.

        Fact check: While that has happened in the past, there is no guarantee that this particular can of spinach will give Popeye anything more than a small boost in calories.

  3. Who are you going to believe, Fox News or your lying eyes?

    Your audience is filled with Republicans. The Democratic convention is underway. How to cover it?

    I read this and thought it was funny. Then I saw this.

    Fox News hosts struggle to get rattled Trump off the line as he goes on media blitz after Harris’s DNC speech

    What is a poor Fox host to do? I mean, they can’t admit that the DNC was a monumental success. And they can’t let the orange candidate talk because he’s up past his bedtime and apparently punching buttons randomly on his phone.

    ‘Beep! Boop!’ Trump’s Fox News call-in fumble spurs social media uproar

    So it’s been a really unpleasant week for MAGA world. 

    • Mom would do that when she called me a few months before she totally lost her marbles.

      • My mother-in-law does it to. And denies it, because she can’t hear the beeping. Just like she rides around without a seat belt because she can’t hear the ear-splitting shriek her car emits when she does it.

  4. This is a good backgrounder on “he said/she said” reporting from journalism professor Jay Rosen.

    https://pressthink.org/2009/04/he-said-she-said-journalism-lame-formula-in-the-land-of-the-active-user/

    It’s only 15 years old, so obviously it’s too soon for outlets to understand it yet.

    Rosen quotes one journalist explaining how it can happen:

    Writing the news so that it lands somewhere near the “halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone” is not a truthtelling impulse at all, but a refuge-seeking one, and it’s possible that this ritual will distort a given story.

    Rosen said back in 2010 how it had been less accepted, which I think was a result of some introspection due to the Iraq War. What’s interesting to me is that by 2016 Trump had blown up so much of that perspective and editors were back to insisting that both Trump and Clinton’s viewpoints needed to be given equal weight.

    Rosen also notes an example of a government study of ethanol, and how a reporter on a deadline might resort to the format due to deadline pressure. Which is understandable.

    Reflecting to a point Black Rod makes repeatedly about Jan. 6, though, Rosen noted there’s simply no excuse for citing deadline pressure for whitewashing the role of an architect of the 2008 financial crash, and today there is no grounds to accept Trump’s word about abortion or attacking this year’s election. There is too much evidence to give him any benefit of the doubt.

    That’s what this week’s factcheckers keep doing, though. The whole framework of “Dems claim this, here’s the GOP rebuttal, and here’s the narrowest possible reading of the most recent evidence…” is broken. The press is doubling down on it all the same.

    • Funny that Hank Greenberg (arrogant asshole former CEO of AIG who allowed the CDS that would nearly sink AIG) would later sue the Feds for bailing him out claiming economic damages.

      He (like Trump when he sued the NFL) would “win” but got jack shit.

  5. No shit?

     

    https://edition.cnn.com/2024/08/22/media/newsmax-smartmatic-chris-ruddy-no-evidence-2020-election-rigged/index.html

    Only the best and brightest…

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/nathan-thornsberry-january-6-arrest-b2600595.html

    Not all heroes wear capes…

    https://crooksandliars.com/2024/08/merry-prankster-photobombs-msnbc-jd-vance

     

  6. More hot goss about beef between Speaker Emerita Nancy Soprano Pelosi and Kickback Kathy. Carmela Nan totally blames the Mildred Pierce cosplayer for loss of the House in 2022 because most Democrats nationwide held their seats, but not in New York with her at the top of the ticket.

    When asked on Thursday, Pelosi said she hadn’t spoken to Hochul about congressional races in New York this cycle, saying she’s only spoken to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, her successor. She said they spoke “as recently as this morning” about the New York House races.

    “No, I’ve spoken to the future speaker Hakeem Jeffries about it,” Pelosi said. “We’re optimistic about our races. We will mobilize to win on the ground. We’ll message progressive, bold, but non-menacing, unifying to the country. And we will have the money — the three M’s: mobilization, message, money.”

    Non-menacing. One wonders what that means. I hope it means the abandonment of the daft tax on unrealized capital gains, which—how many Americans are in mutual funds? Also price controls on groceries. Imagine an army of federal hacks dictating what a box of cereal should cost in a highly competitive, low-margin industry like consumer foods. Firebrand Socialist AOC was a Econ major at BU. Maybe she can share some wisdom about how price controls have worked out over time (spoiler: they haven’t.)

  7. The Donald occupies way too much real estate in my mind:

    Trump also said he would bring major investments into the Army and launch the largest peace-time recruitment drive in the United States’s history.

    Peace-time recruitment  but larger than the mass mobilization during WWII? And to what end? I am ready to convert our rooftop planters into a victory garden. I like Benny Goodman and the Andrews Sisters. I am prepared to mend and make do. I used to know how to knit (thanks, Mom; it was to keep me quiet for A FEW BLESSED MOMENTS) so I suppose I could relearn that. I am prepared.

  8. Sunita Williams is not a guy. There are not 2 guys stuck in space.

    She’s been assigned to the ISS several times prior to being stuck on this shithole Boeing mission. She’s fucking cool.

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