Ughhhhh [DOT 25/1/23]

25/1/23 MegMegMcGee 32
sarcastic mom from That Seventies Show pouring alcohol into a blender with text "it's only Wednesday"

Happy Wednesday gang! Hope all is well with you guys.

Thanks I hate it.
There have been nearly 40 mass shootings so far this year
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01/24/mass-shootings-us/

Six women, we call that a Tuesday here in ‘Merica, sadly.

Spain calls second emergency meeting over murders of six more women
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/24/spain-second-emergency-meeting-murders-women

Yeah, sure, he didn’t know.
Trump’s golf course photo with Philadelphia mob boss raises questions
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/23/trump-philadelphia-mobster-photo

Florida Man Strikes Again

Florida teachers forced to remove or cover up books to avoid felony charges
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/florida-manatee-county-books-certified-media-specialist

Sprots

Everton put up for sale by Farhad Moshiri with asking price of over £500m
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/jan/24/everton-for-sale-farhad-moshiri-asking-price-more-than-500m

I’m sorry but this woman is an idiot.

My bad trip – I wanted a romantic jaunt. I got a kidnapping and a breakup
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/jan/25/my-bad-trip-i-wanted-a-romantic-jaunt-i-got-a-kidnapping-and-a-breakup

Have a great day!

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32 Comments

  1. I’m at the emergency vet with Noodle. They think he has congestive heart failure. My sweet kitty is only 3… please, please tell me the universe isn’t this cruel?

  4. DeSantis has completely embraced a “defund the schools” plan following his most recent election. Literally every single aspect of public school is under attack.

    1. He’s going to adopt a “voucher” plan where any parent can get public money to send any student to any school they want. This is the same plan that’s been riddled with scandal and corruption for years now. It’s going to cut billions from public schools.

    2. He’s establishing term limits for school board members and eliminating non-partisan races. School board elections here are completely non-partisan — you actually have to research the candidates to see where they stand, which is why the schools haven’t been completely junked before now. He wants to put Republicans in charge. And he’ll use any crisis to immediately do so — he replaced the entire school board of Broward County after the Douglas High School shooting with Republicans, claiming the elected officials were incompetent.

    3. His “anti-woke” and “anti-CRT” horseshit is designed to terrorize and demoralize teachers at every level. None of them can afford to defend themselves against fake criminal charges. They barely make a living wage. So yeah, they’re pulling books off shelves and dropping courses that could get them arrested.

    One of my teacher friends retired last year and another just said he was retiring too. We’ve got over 5,000 teacher vacancies in Florida already. The system is heading for collapse.

    More and more, I keep thinking about moving. But my wife’s library job is here and the kid’s still getting 100% free college. I wanted to try to wait a few years, but unless something seismic happens on the political landscape, Florida will be unlivable by then.

    • What a fucking shithole state.  Once the school board thing is finalized, there’s no going back.

      Do you have to live in FL for the kid to have free college?  If not, get the hell out while you can.  If so, then brace yourself and make your plans.

      • Partially, yes. But the bigger issue is that we just got our economic footing back with my wife moving to full-time employment. I’m loath to jeopardize that right now. We still have backed-up bills from our unfortunate period of un- and under-employment that I want to get cleared ASAP. I’m not willing to rock the boat at the moment.

        I can work anywhere, but if we do anything prior to retirement, my wife needs a library job. And those ain’t exactly increasing these days.

        Worst case scenario, 5-7 years. Not sure that Florida won’t become a white supremacist hellhole long before then.

    • …it’s maybe a stupid question…but even if the “long game” for desantis is to go gunning for the white house & leave the state to be some other sucker’s problem…where’s the percentage in leaving this sort of wreckage in his wake?

      …I dunno…I was going to try to fashion some sort of hypothetical in which actively championing of a policy of denying education was in some sort of interest however perversely incentivized

      …but then I remembered that apparently books are somehow a thing kids supposedly need better protection from than guns & I figured it might be the proverbial hiding to nothing?

      • He, and Republicans in general, do. not. care. It’s simple math and they won’t be here for the fallout. And their voters are too stupid to understand cause and effect, so they’ll never face blame. It’s a simple plan:

        1. People who vote Republican are stupid. I’ve document that a thousand times so not gonna link today.

        2. To keep and increase Republican ranks, you need stupid people. Attacking schools provides that resource. Last year, Republican registrations finally outnumber Democratic ones for the first time in decades. Not coincidentally, we need uneducated workers to fuel our main industries, tourism and agriculture. PhDs don’t change the sheets at Disney hotels or pick tomatoes.

        3. Florida has a huge number of electoral votes and is the linchpin of presidential elections. Texas too, to some extent, but it’s locked down as Republican. That’s why the Bushes took over both places to get W installed in the White House.  Don’t think for a second they don’t war-game this out, because they absolutely did then and still do. The Bushes aren’t out front any more, but don’t pretend that the DeSantises, McConnells, and Scotts of the GQP aren’t working in concert. They hate each other but like any organized crime cartel they’ll work together.

        4. DeSantis’ blowout victory was due to two reasons: an increasing number of stupid Republicans and the fact that Democrats didn’t. show. up. Both they and “legitimate” independents (the ones who aren’t actually Republicans) stayed home on election day. Why? Reasons abound but a big part of it was the massive Republican disinformation campaign that “proved” a red wave was coming and that the election was already lost. It didn’t help that Democrats adopted pro-abortion rhetoric way too late in the game.

        Our home insurance market is collapsing and voters still picked the guy who rants about “woke” nonsense and mask mandates. If you’re going to sit there while your house is destroyed by a hurricane and your insurance company denies you coverage, and still vote for the assholes responsible, I don’t know what other motivation is going to spur you to actually think.

        • The thing that people outside the GOP rarely understand is how much they believe this stuff is true, or else believe they can make it true.

          Nonradicals constantly believe there must be some logical motivating factor behind irrational behvior — they’re being bribed, or it’s Kompromat, or it’s all about money.

          RDS is doing this because he hates educating people and thinks he can create a functional new world with a tiny elite and a huge blob of dumb suckers. He’s a creep who thinks he can make it happen.

          • Well, objective evidence shows that it’s working so far, so Ronnie is justified in his confidence.

            The other issue that I didn’t cover was Democrat indifference. We’ve got a lazy and indolent Democratic Party in this state. They do nothing and get paid, because they can just throw up their hands and surrender. “Nothing we can do here, might as well take a vacation.” They don’t even have to try. The party finally forced the useless sack chairman Manny Diaz to resign, but that’s not going to move the needle.

            Unless the Florida Democratic Party pulls its collective head out of its ass and locates a Stacey Abrams-style leader from somewhere, we’re fucked. Even then, it will be a long uphill climb, and the rest of you need to get used to Florida deciding who’s gonna be President. Because it will keep happening.

            And Ronnie is counting on it.

  8. Pence had some classified documents too, in the same small numbers as Biden, and like Biden he cooperated with efforts to find and retrieve them.

    So of course Peter Baker, chief White House reporter of the NY Times, wrote a long piece throwing up his hands in helplessness over how hard his job is trying to explain the simplest things about how any of this compares to Trump, who had boxes and fought cooperation and refused to follow the law.

    He isn’t talking about the reporting, of course. It’s not hard. He’s really talking about he (and his bosses) just want to lie down for potential GOP critics.  They are the ones who will complain he got the story wrong — because they always complain — not his imaginary readers.

    To paraphrase Lincoln on McClellan, if he’s not to going to use his position, maybe he could lend it to someone who will?

    • Top marks for the Lincoln reference. Last month I read Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light, yet another Lincoln biography. It’s a real door stopper, over 700 pages, but a lot of that is taken up by the index, notes, and references. Any account of Lincoln’s final hours never fails to move me, and the contemporary writings about the paroxysms of grief that fell over the North. Of course Lincoln is why the South was solidly Democratic for the next century, but we must remember, according to Lost Cause Southerners, that the Civil War Between the States was not about slavery, it was about states’ rights.

      • I went down a bit of rabbit hole verifying that Lincoln actually said this.

        Lincoln is like Churchill and Einstein in that he supposedly said everything. But in this case, the quotes are basically right. A contemporary memo about a meeting with Lincoln said:

        “To use his own expression, if something was not soon done, the bottom would be out of the whole affair; and, if General McClellan did not want to use the army, he would like to “borrow it,” provided he could see how it could be made to do something.”

        https://www.swartzentrover.com/cotor/E-Books/misc/Lincoln/AL_App06.htm

    • That was bold of the government-chartered BBC to do a broadcast critical of Modi, given that there are so many Indian citizens resident in the UK, including the Prime Minister’s wife, and since she is from one of India’s richest families (Dad founded InfoSys) I bet she’s met Modi more than once.

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