What a huge fucking relief. Thank you, black voters of Alabama, for sending Roy Moore packing.
Screw you, Roy Moore, but not that poor horse you rode in on.
Roy Moore rides away on his horse after voting in the Alabama Senate election.
Here's what to watch in today's hotly contested race: https://t.co/iONlmtfGJd #alsen pic.twitter.com/WI2xoJbi6s
— POLITICO (@politico) December 12, 2017
Why would you ride to the polls on a horse if you CAN’T FUCKING RIDE A HORSE PROPERLY TO SAVE YOUR LIFE YOU FAKE COWBOY ASSHOLE PREDATOR?
Here are some more Tweets and an open thread. CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES COME ON.
Woke up from a nap. Turned on MSNBC, expecting the worst, then … pic.twitter.com/EIvDkseYMH
— David Futrelle (@DavidFutrelle) December 13, 2017
Shouts to Steve Bannon, MASTER STRATEGIST, who managed to lose a Republican election in fucking Alabama. pic.twitter.com/fWT4AhFzGW
— shauna (@goldengateblond) December 13, 2017
Black folks elected Doug Jones. FYI. #AlabamaSenateElection pic.twitter.com/CErgK6eOeI
— deray (@deray) December 13, 2017
https://twitter.com/owillis/status/940798680214458370
https://twitter.com/pattymo/status/940787884285718528
Roy Moore not conceding is very very on-brand for a son of the confederacy.
— AT (@primediscussion) December 13, 2017
donald trump is hog tied in a bathroom somewhere desperately chewing trying to chew through the door https://t.co/Y70TmLXOdN
— Ashley Feinberg (ashleyfeinberg.bsky.social) (@ashleyfeinberg) December 13, 2017
hell yeah dude, it would be my PLEASURE pic.twitter.com/ugWregfJ3X
— Rafi Schwartz (@TheJewishDream) December 13, 2017
https://twitter.com/DIorioNathaniel/status/940797919833329666
https://twitter.com/notwokieleaks/status/940797646846988295
Big night for the Republican party https://t.co/NxhbbVF9g4
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) December 13, 2017
One more dancing dog because why not?
@ Shadowplay;
I believe he’s constantly looking for that next thing, the thing that’s going to make him feel good about himself. Unfortunately, his obsession with the NEXT “next thing” immediately derails any satisfaction he could enjoy from having “got” the LAST “next thing”.
@Weird Eddie
Agree.
Seem to recall a profile or an interview where someone said the only time Trump is vaguely happy is when he’s after something. It’s the chase, not the result, that turns his crank.
To use one of his bigly words – Sad.
I feel sorry for Trump only until I remember how many people he’s hurt. I think that’s a time measured in picoseconds.
@VP
Gah! Never even occurred to me that saying “Sad” could be taken as feeling sorry for him!
I meant sad as in he’s a pathetic little man. And little there is in the moral sense – the size of his attributes are of no interest to me. 😛
Sorry!
@ Shadowplay
Oh, no worries. I knew what you meant, so no apology needed. If anything, I was thinking about the people who now say that POTUS needs support always (now that President Obama has left the Oval Office).
abars01
Yes, me too, but I do like the explanation I head on (I think) Rachael Maddow. Their traditional base has shrunk to white evangelicals of the sort that give wait staff a tract instead of a tip. OK, I’m paraphrasing that bit, but their small dollar campaign donations are negligible. All the useful money comes from about 20 families of billionaires. They have to choose between alienating the public, and having no money for reelection. Presumably they think the public are stupid, have short memories, and are more swayed by campaigns than facts.
They’re probably right about a lot of people (partly because stress tends to do that to you) but I think they’re overestimating what they can get away with, in spite of vote suppression and gerrymandering.
A part of me is worried that Trump is going to try to cancel the elections somehow. Half the gop would support him if he did.
I know it seems irrational, but I can’t rule anything out where Trump is involved.
for the bigot base, that’s simply NOT POSSIBLE. The trumpanzees are saying OUT LOUD that they don’t care how little the Repugnican’t agenda does for them, indeed they’re saying they don’t even care if it actively HURTS THEM, as long as the Repugnican’t agenda is hurting the people the bigots hate.
The dumpster fire bunch will get the 33-million open-faced bigots’ vote every time. They likely can’t win the white house (formerly known as the “White House”) without the 30-million other trump voters who formed the Synchronized Denial Demonstration Team, but the ‘pugs would rather have the money from the mega-wealthy and just buy the election.
My concern is the congressional races in the red states. If they can gerrymander those races, they can always have a situation where they only need flip a few congresscritters’ votes. And, as we are well aware, there is NEVER a shortage of politicians willing to sell out those whom they were hired to serve, in order to keep their seat.
yeah, call me paranoid, but I consider that to be a foregone conclusion. The dumpster is NOT going to leave office voluntarily, PARTICULARLY if he feels he’s going to be defeated in an election.
His delusions go beyond the norm. When he told people he had “a million, maybe a million and a half” people at his inauguration, I think he actually believes he saw them. His reality is completely spur-of-the-moment, and completely malleable.
I think David should create a thread about/for discussing The Last Jedi sometime close to New Years Day, if he wants to. By then enough Mammothers should have seen the film to get a good discussion going about it, while letting those who haven’t seen it by then avoid spoilers.
Also, there should be a virtual cornucopia of outraged Alt Right reactions by then to the assorted SJW themes in TLJ to make a good blogpost over. At least in my opinion; your mileage may vary on that point.
Though am I the only one here that kinda hopes that Disney eventually does to the Expanded Universe what Marvel Studios did to its own characters to create the Marvel Cinematic Universe? That is, take the essence of characters like (for example) Mara Jade and rework them to fit in with the Disney version of the Star Wars Universe?
While admittedly the writing wasn’t the best in much of the EU, there were still a bunch of cool concepts and characters in there that should be given new life again. Including stuff from the old Marvel and Dark Horse SW series. Some of that was seriously cool, in my opinion.
I remember in 2008 a lot of progressives were afraid that GWB would find a way to declare martial law and cancel the elections but I dismissed that as paranoid rubbish.
This time, I think it’s a valid fear.
I also think it’s equally possible that if polling indicates he’ll lose his reelection campaign badly, he’ll decide not to run again in order to save face. I don’t think he likes being president all that much. Too much scrutiny and too many expectations.
Katamount – Dreamcatcher was my least favorite King book so I had zero interest in seeing the movie.
Great scares; awful “atheists and skeptics are just Christians who disagree with God” storyline.
@Fishy Goat, try changing it from minor to major key too – it sounds ridiculous as a non-evil/pre-evil Vader march (very skipping-through-the-bluebells-with-cartoon-bluebirds-and-fluffy-bunnies theme tune).
(sorry for continuing to meander along the derail/sideline, everybody. I’m kind of hiding (aka cowering) behind the sofa re yer actual (e.g. Trump and/or brexit-related) news just at the moment :-/ Things here tend to be a bit of a minefield at this time of year… )
Nequam— Yep, I’ve def heard a version of blood libel was originally used against Christians by the pre-christian Roman empire. How I learned it back in uni* was thusly: early Christians found that an easy way to increase their numbers was to rescue Roman infants who had been left outside the city walls to die of exposure. (per the Roman tradition of abandoning newborns which seemed weak/sickly; potentially illegitimate; a financial burden; suspected of disability, etc.)
The Roman political & religious TPTB simply couldn’t imagine what these odd, new, troublesome not-Jews could possibly be doing with these (in the minds of TPTB) “worthless” infants they were scooping up. Clearly they couldn’t be intending to *gasp* raise them as their own; they’d already been judged worthless, inferior, a drain on resources!
Faced with questions, Roman TPTB acted in character with their historical peers. (Projection powerz: ON!)
After all, what other conclusion could they have come to, really? (/s) When dealing with a mysterious new cult, whose rituals seem incomprehensible, but maybe have to do with “blood,” “virgins,” “ultimate sacrifice,” and…collecting abandoned babies?
OMFG…THEY MUST BE SACRIFICING & EATING THE BABIES!!! WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE?!!? NO MYSTERY CULT CAN EVER HAZ SYMBOLISM BEFORE!!
The dehumanizing trope of “baby-eating savage!!11” has long been a tactic used by “civilized” societies as a means of rendering The Other into “barbarians.” Such imagery reliably evokes horror & disgust in the “civilized”, “Western” mind…even, it seems, in the leaders of Rome, despite their perception of infanticide as socially moral & healthy.
(I think the most recent spate of attacks on PP are going for exactly this angle; they weren’t gaining traction from either violent terror directed at women & providers, nor from trying to convince WoC that there was a “genocidal” campaign against them. So they went right for “OMG PP IS *LITERALLY* CANNIBALIZING BABBYS U MIGHT DRINK FETUS PEPSI!!!”)
Alan— Huh! I’d always heard that it came from people seeing Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses at San Pietro in Vincoli, and confusing what were supposed to be “rays of light” with “horns.” But now that I’m looking it up, it appears that a translation error from Hebrew confused “radiant” with “horns,” and that maybe Michelangelo just ran with that? Layers and layers…of horny Mosii. Who knew?
@Diptych
I really hate when movies do that, it turns me right off of the film.
@ WWTH
I’ll admit, I was one of those progressives who were worried. (At least I have the excuse of still being a stupid teenage at the time)
I really hope Trump takes the resignation option instead. I’d be willing to let him take a golden parachute if it meant he was no longer in a position to screw over America. (I’d prefer jettisoning him into the sun, but you have to take what you can get)
I can live with Trump declaring that he’s finished everything that a president should do, and now he’s going to step down and enjoy his post-presidential period in a country with no extradition treaty. It’s not all that different from how he handled the Obama birth certificate “investigation.”
Gotta admit, this was how I was half-expecting his recent word tour to end. Turns out he had at least a few more weeks of evil in him.
WWTH & Weird Eddie—
Yep, count me in as someone who had that fear in 2008. And who feels it once again, except now it’s more like a near-overwhelming terror at times, because (IMHO at least) the supporters of W were nuthin’ like what I’m seeing with the waves upon waves of devout, die-hard, bloodthirsty (literally!) minions of Big Orange T.
These folks don’t just want a sanitized war against brown people in some far-off, unpronounceable-to-them land, for vague reasons associated with “Patriotism MURICUUUH!”
They want a real, up-close, bloody, violent war, fought on American soil, waged against OTHER AMERICANS WHO MAKE THEM ANGRY OR UNCOMFORTABLE!
They aren’t even bothering to cloak it in the language of “values” and “morals” at this point. Gone are all the Gothardite and Dobsonian references to “character” and “family.”
Naked, shameless, vicious, violent rage, hatred, greed, xenophobia, intimidation & bigotry of all stripes. And they’re PROUD to show it off; they’re proud to show how this Randian misanthropy makes them “winners!”
It’s scary. And it needs to end.
I also hate how in the movies, characters are usually only atheists if they’re troubled and grieving and something bad happened to make them lose their faith. Prime examples of this would be Signs and The Knowing.
I’m an atheist because none of the religions out there ring true to me and I see no particular reason to believe in any deities without some pretty compelling evidence. I think that’s probably true of most non-theists. It’s irritating and offensive that popular culture gives the impression that one is only atheist if they’re defective in some way.
I actually had to stop near the beginning of Dean Koontz’s retelling of Frankenstein because there was a serial killer who killed people because not believing in God was so traumatizing for him that he snapped. What the fucking fuck?
Indeed. There’s a more general discernible trend with Koontz from being more sci-fi-ish early on, to some sort of almost-fundie-level Xtian pulpit-pounding in the past ten years or so. Makes me wonder if someone slipped him some sort of Kool-Ade sometime around the mid-2000s.
Koontz is also a gun lovin’ libertarian. Maybe he always was, but it didn’t used to show up in his books quite as much.
He also does that thing where he’s always talking about how the world these days is so violent and cruel and shallow. Not like the perfect, perfect olden days.
Typical privileged straight white dude crap where he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that the 1950s weren’t so wonderful for a lot of people.
Even when his plots were better, there was a lot of issues in his books. I was already rolling my eyes at his poorly written female characters when I was a 13 year old who had no clue what good writing was. The female love interest/protagonist was always, always a naturally super slim woman with a sad past who is naturally beautiful and has no idea. Can’t have women be all uppity and confident now can we?
Yet I keep reading his books because my parents tend to obtain them and pass them down to me. I’ll read just about any thriller if I can get it for free.
@Tovius
Which has been said about every president since Carter (and a couple before hand) to my certain knowledge. Hell, the exact same thing was being said about Obama not 15 months ago.
It’s not going to happen.
Manecki Neckbeard,
They’re the same people. They’ve been carefully groomed.
This plan has been in place since Carter was in office. They’re tools and the evangelical right has been sharpening them for a while.
We’re in for a wild ride.
You know that thing where people go “but due process!” when sexual harassers and abusers are getting the scrutiny for a change? Fuck that thing.
Politeness feels like an irritating courtesy used on enablers when it comes to being political. They’re shoving a broken social structure at people who’ve been denied the same damn structure, and doing it in public, the wrong context. Reciprocity says the social contract is null and void. The burden of proof on them.
Anyone who enjoys an argument has lots of targets. This is so vulnerable to criticism and mockery. Historical contingency is the only thing holding it together.