Did you see Jim Dave on Laura Ingraham, saying normal women don't care about abortion?
This man can’t stop, won’t stop. It’s actually pretty remarkable. You know they’ve coached him “Just be pleasant. Conciliatory, even. Just have a friendly smile and mention one or two women whose achievements you respect.” But Jim Dave simply cannot do it. He is ride or die weird. He is the Patron Saint of Weird. He should get a cape and wear a leotard with a big “W” on his chest. His superpower is being unable to make a single public appearance without stepping on his own dick.
Yup, JV is the apotheosis of the modern toxic male movement. From the PUAs and MGTOWs to the incels and MAGats, they have worked to combine “masculine” and “asshole” into a single pure package, and with Vance they have done it. Which is why him barely consciously spitting out “You better quit your job and let your husband put a baby in you, whore” is so pitch-perfect. Bravo, Roy!
Trump is (or was) the swaggering, womanizing braggart, Jim Dave is the stern pastor wagging his finger. Together they combine into a huge, seamless ball of toxic masculinity. Combined, they are every weak man's idea of what a strong man should be.
A weak man's idea of what a strong man should be pretty much sums up all of conservatism's views of manhood and masculinity. Which is, I guess, consistent with how conservatism manages to invert everything. Newt Gingrich and Jonah Goldberg are considered intellectuals but are both abject morons--stupid people's ideas of what smart people are like. Ivermectin cures everything even though it's only known action is against a small family of parasitic intestinal worms in livestock--a stupid person's idea of how medicine works.
Hearted for "passel." And just wait til the passel finds out there ain't no inheritance to inherit. He's a supersized version of MAGA Grandpa who spent his kids inheritance on red hats and guns. "Well, honey, your daddy bought this thing called Twitter, and that's why you're going to a State University."
Sign on to be faculty advisor to your school's Gay-Straight Alliance in Mankato, Minnesota in the late 90's. There, that's my idea of what a strong man should be.
Sometime when you've got a spare hour and 15 minutes, have a look at Some More News hilarious review of the Ben Shapiro Production: Lady Ballers. Cringe along with the rest of us at Shapiro & Co. attempting to be funny! But, most of all, what you'll learn from this experience is that these guys really, really do hate women. Sure, it's supposed to be about The Trans, and they hate them too, but they really, really, REALLY hate women.
They hate women therefore a guy betraying masculinity by becoming a lady deserves hatred as well. (Notice as well these creeps like to ask "what is a woman?" but they never, NEVER ask "what is a man?" because you never question masculinity in this crowd.)
There's one line that stuck with me, the guy who's really getting into identifying as a woman and he says something like, "It's easy being a woman, just cry when things get tough and everybody helps you." And that's what they really believe, I think.
For decades now, right-wingers have had the same formula: Demonstrate your "honesty" and "toughness" with "pick up some small, crappy demographic and throw it against the wall." And it worked OK for them when the demographic they were picking on was an actual minority. Only problem is someone forgot to tell them that women comprise more than half of the voting population.
I of course love the slapstick (!) image of stepping on one's own dick, but it does give him credit for possessing an organ of unusual length. If I had a dick I could step on...oh, never mind. He's an asshole, yes.
"Besides that. I mean, what can we say that will get them to vote for us?"
Maybe not be condescending assholes?
"Nah, that ain't it. Maybe if we tell 'em they're too flighty to make decisions about their own bodies and we'll take care of that for them? Don't they all want to be taken care of like that?"
"I guess they were lonely and drunk." Is a wonderful line. Woods and JD seem quite human. Repellent, yes, but in a most humane way.
The Arthur Murray studio in town was on the west edge of a five or six block area of old commercial buildings. Warehouses, factories, a lot of them empty. The Studio was on the second floor of the building made of highly glazed, light brown oversized brick. The sign was a neon outline of a couple dancing beneath a "Arthur Murray" signature, also in neon. The walls to the studio were mostly windows. The view of the sunsets were spectacular I imagine.. it would be easy to tell a ballroom dancing school story that was sad and lonely - did Marty ever take dancing lessons? You know, I bet for every sad loser, desperate to connect that never learned to not step on their own feet and always went home alone, there were plenty of couples that met and danced and then maybe had a drink after class and went someplace and dance some more, not quite so vertical though.
The place was open the first dozen years I lived in town and then they closed. The sign hung in front of an empty building for years. Sometimes I thought about finding someone to maybe sell it to me. I had nowhere to put it. It made me sad to think of it ending up in the trash somewhere though.
The building went up for rent a dozen years ago and I arranged to take a look at it. I knew right away it wouldn't work for my purposes. The only way up was a narrow stairway. The studio looked like I imagined it would. The worn floor like the basketball court in an old high school gymnasium . I was there in the morning. With all the windows the place was bright. I wish I'd come later in the day so maybe I could enjoy a bit of sunset there.
I have a near famous friend. She's one of the leading dialect coaches in the film industry. She knows everyone who's anyone. (I Am Three degrees of separation away from everyone who's anyone. ) She's retired to a small college town in Ohio . Last time I talked to her, she told me about her plans to open an actor's studio, working with the theater program at the college and also doing outreach to disadvantage kids in the dying Rust Belt City just up the road. I told her she needed to find the old Arthur Murray dance studio in town. It would be perfect. She went out and found it. It's currently home to a baton twirling School with a national reputation. She says she's jealous of them.
There are a surprising number of decrepit storefronts around Camden County with signs identifying themselves as "ballrooms" for dance lessons. No sir, you are a ex-Jack-in-the-Box.
Yeah, I don't get the James Woods stuff either. Mostly I know that he has a sense of self-deprecating humor (see his role as Hades in Disney's Hercules, a role he loved playing) and that he identified a couple of the 9-11 hijackers as being on his flights for the FBI. I mean, you can way up the Hollywood jerk ladder from his rung.
It amuses me that Vancey Pants is needing coaching to be able to come across as a regular guy, and that the people doing the coaching know it's a losing enterprise. As far as I'm concerned, he will always have a theme song, and it's a paraphrase of the great Bob Marley: Ottoman Vibrations.
Oh my fucking god, I laughed so hard when I came to the part about putting a baby in her that I scared all three of my cats. 🤣 Thank goodness I'm working from home today, if I'd been in the office .....
I went to a Halloween party once, hosted by a friend, Jeff, a man who made mixtapes with the kind of attention and care you'd put into making a bomb. He worked on the party project for days; he had a five-90-minute-Maxell-tape strategy to carefully build and sustain the energy throughout the evening. So party night arrives, and it's all coming together. Everyone is dancing and drinking and having a blast. I'm sure there were party drugs, because that was the time and it was, after all, a party. But there was this one guy, who came as someone's plus-one, who kept following him around with a tape he wanted to play. "Thanks, but I've got a groove here," Jeff said. "We need to keep it going." The guy kept saying, "This is Earl Klugh! It's great! Everyone will love it!" Jeff kept putting him off until he looked at the clock and realized it was 3:30 a.m. and the gathering showed no sign of running out of steam. Jeff was at that age where staying up all night penalizes you for a couple days afterward, and he wanted to start guiding people toward the door. The Earl Klugh fan was still there, so he said, "Hey, let's put your tape on. I think it's time." So he slapped Earl into the tape deck, and the place cleared out in 20 minutes. Thanks for the memory prod, Roy!
We played the Partridge Family when it was time to close the record store. One guy actually liked it, but the rest of us knew the place would be empty in two minutes, tops.
Ha! Great story, Nance. Reminds me of a party some friends had, with the same mixtape (though these were CDRs) situation. Their obnoxious Brit roomate's equally obnoxious Brit friend sauntered up to the stereo and pulled out the disc and popped in his own. When he was challenged by the stereo owner on this transgression, his response was "What, vintage Duran isn't good enough for you?"
The obnoxious Brit roomate once told us that Indian food tastes like it does because "While WE were running the show over there, we told them "Look here, you've got all these spices lying about, why don't you dolly this food up a bit?""
"if you want to score at Roseland Ballroom" - deep cut for sure. I worked on a few gigs there and even went dancing there once, and if there was ever a place that needed to be a setting for a Stephen King novel that was it. There were lots of unused spaces and balconies that made you feel like you had travel back in time. When I went dancing a large percentage of the patrons were gentleman who could have fought in WW2 (this was the early 90s) with young Asian escorts. Very creepy.
You've captured the singular essence of old buildings – the odd, unexpected, slightly (or mostly) extraneous spaces, angled, dark, enticing in a modestly spooky way, that make me feel a little transgressive (but also deliciously sneaky) just being there...
When anyone invites me to visit an old building, and adds "Bring a flashlight" I'm THERE!
Just look at his lame attack on Tim Walz, these guys don't even know how to do a proper smear campaign. The smear needs to be done by OTHER people, the candidate never says it himself, when asked about it he says, "Well, all I know about it is what I see in the papers, just like you." You let it build over time, let the Prestige Press help you out, "Questions remain..."
Plus, is your smear for a niche audience or for general consumption? This Tim Walz thing and the difference between retiring as a Command Master Sergeant vs. Sergeant Major might play well with the VFW crowd, let 'em feel they're in on the straight dope that the regular folks ain't gettin', might be good for a few votes, don't expect too much out of it. But you launch it with the candidate himself, straight out most people say they don't give a fuck and the whole thing flops.
Jeez, I can't keep givin' advice like this away for free, you know...
Gee, what did you do in Iraq, Daddy J.D.? I faced the deadly Iraqis face-to-face! Funny, Daddy, it says here you were a rear-echelon blogger for the Marines PR department miles and miles from combat....
So yeah. An REMF. Them as has ears, let them hear.
On the Democratic (i.e. competent) side there is a HARD line between what the candidates say and what everyone else says. Online liberals can mock JD Vance's service all they want (like I just did!) but Harris/Walz won't go there, EVER.
On the Republican (i.e. incompetent) side, watch as some random mouth-fart by an incel YouTube influencer comes out of the party's Presidential candidate the very next day.
I saw an interview with the guy who won the Republican primary for the open Congressional seat in Green Bay, he said something like "We gotta get the cost of living under control, people are really struggling with these high prices, and also that border crisis." And then he shut up. That guy could be elected President. Stand him up, he says his one line, say "Good night everybody!" and wheel him off the stage.
But Ed Zitron (I think) brought up a good point t' other day which I hadn't thought about - more and more industries in America are monopolies, and monopolies ALWAYS jack up prices because they fucking can. Add that in to wanting to recover their "lost profits" from COVID plus LINE GO UP and you've got an explanation for price increases totally disconnected from politics.
The smart thing is you say "People are really struggling with these high prices", you don't mention inflation at all, don't say it's up, or even use the word "inflation", just "people are struggling", which is undeniably true (this is America, after all). Get people to connect their discontents to the Biden administration but leave it vague, people don't have to know WHAT or HOW, just that life is tough and "It's time for a change." Ought to be good for some votes from the disengaged low-info voters.
They showed a clip from one of Andy Jack's commercials, he was dressed up like a boxer, with a hooded robe, throwing punches at "The Woke Mob." For me, one Republican's about as bad as any other, but I am glad Andy didn't win because that means we might avoid a flood of copycat ads with Republicans dressed up as boxers.
Teddy Roosevelt, and to a lesser extent William Howard Taft, were known for their "trust-busting". Republicans won't claim that anymore because their "malefactors of great wealth" are people like Der Blutgraf who own a Vice-Presidential candidate and Harlan Crow who owns the Supreme Court.
Also, absolutely right about monopolies and price-fixing - just look at consolidation among grocery stores, a few chains own the whole damn country. Elizabeth Warren was onto this right at the start, it's incredibly frustrating that more Democrats didn't join her. The Democrats have gotten better in recent memory, but they've got a long way to go.
Prime example: the Obama era merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Obama's DOJ simply said "What could go wrong with THAT?", and let it fly. It'd be great if we could do a take-back on that one, for starters.
Thanks for this, I sometimes forget how incredibly disappointing the Democrats were under Obama, especially after Biden far exceeded my expectations, it's good to keep this in mind and to be on the lookout for the early warning signs like "Picks Wall Street lawyer as AG."
Plus - one wonders how much "border crisis" there ACTUALLY is, versus how much folks PERCEIVE. When you look at those statistics, it doesn't look particularly crisis-y. Most of the migrants are coming from countries with civil unrest or straight up civil war.
Right, so you just keep repeating "border crisis" like it's a thing that's self-evidently true, a thing that everybody knows, then people are too embarrassed to ask for details.
Cant remember who, but some right-winger years ago tried to draw a contrast between "an invasion of Englishmen" and "an invasion of Africans", arguing the first would be obviously much better, so much easier for them to assimilate into American culture!
Looking at what's been happening in Merrie Olde England this past week and I say keep your damn Englishmen.
Here's how to strike a blow today against these creeps:
Kim Daniels, a certifiable pro-Trump very weird woman serves as a "Democrat" in the FL House. Her racist and anti-Semitic remarks include: "You can talk about the Holocaust, but Jews own everything!” and “I thank God for slavery. . . if it wasn’t for slavery, I might be somewhere in Africa worshipping a tree.”)
The deadline for contributing to her excellent primary opponent, Therese Wakefield Gamble is MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. The primary is 8/20
Just think of the poor, innocent condo developments, their lives snuffed out before they could be born because of opposition from some Goddamn tree-worshipers!
Totally random: Wait, that was a Moog the whole time? The 50,000 times I listened to "Here Comes The Sun" and I didn't catch it was a damn Moog?! I built a fucking synthesizer (which my high school still has) and *I* didn't catch that, ever? Me, I am profoundly dissapoint. OK, I want to see all plugs and patch cables, now dammit. How they'd get that damn vibrato? No board for that....wait. Oh John, you sly bastard. That device came next..... ahhhhhh
Try a Little Tenderness, that's all I know.
Send In The Clowns?
102 damnations
All you got to do is know how to love her!
There's also Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.
Did you see Jim Dave on Laura Ingraham, saying normal women don't care about abortion?
This man can’t stop, won’t stop. It’s actually pretty remarkable. You know they’ve coached him “Just be pleasant. Conciliatory, even. Just have a friendly smile and mention one or two women whose achievements you respect.” But Jim Dave simply cannot do it. He is ride or die weird. He is the Patron Saint of Weird. He should get a cape and wear a leotard with a big “W” on his chest. His superpower is being unable to make a single public appearance without stepping on his own dick.
Yup, JV is the apotheosis of the modern toxic male movement. From the PUAs and MGTOWs to the incels and MAGats, they have worked to combine “masculine” and “asshole” into a single pure package, and with Vance they have done it. Which is why him barely consciously spitting out “You better quit your job and let your husband put a baby in you, whore” is so pitch-perfect. Bravo, Roy!
Trump is (or was) the swaggering, womanizing braggart, Jim Dave is the stern pastor wagging his finger. Together they combine into a huge, seamless ball of toxic masculinity. Combined, they are every weak man's idea of what a strong man should be.
A weak man's idea of what a strong man should be pretty much sums up all of conservatism's views of manhood and masculinity. Which is, I guess, consistent with how conservatism manages to invert everything. Newt Gingrich and Jonah Goldberg are considered intellectuals but are both abject morons--stupid people's ideas of what smart people are like. Ivermectin cures everything even though it's only known action is against a small family of parasitic intestinal worms in livestock--a stupid person's idea of how medicine works.
I'd toss Ben Shapiro in there with Gingrich and Goldberg. [1]
"He's the cool kids philosopher". Oh rilly?
[1] Hmm, there's your "small family of parasitic worms."
Elon Fucking Musk. Fathered a passel of children he doesn’t care about to up his manhood cred.
No sympathy for the womanhoods?
Hearted for "passel." And just wait til the passel finds out there ain't no inheritance to inherit. He's a supersized version of MAGA Grandpa who spent his kids inheritance on red hats and guns. "Well, honey, your daddy bought this thing called Twitter, and that's why you're going to a State University."
Speaking of "cool kids philosophers" this Guardian piece about "The Heterodoxy" is pretty eye-opening.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/14/young-men-election-joe-rogan-donald-trump
A) guy named "Sneako"
B) accent on "hetero"
C) these are the assholes who are always talking about how they're such independent thinkers and yet all have essentially the same views
Trump is a poor MAGA’s idea of a rich man. Bankrupt and corrupt but with gold toilets.
Sign on to be faculty advisor to your school's Gay-Straight Alliance in Mankato, Minnesota in the late 90's. There, that's my idea of what a strong man should be.
The He-Man Woman Haters Club's ideal Presidential ticket.
Makes me think of my favorite stupid joke:
BOYS TREE HOUSE. NO GRILS ALLOWED.
-- That's GIRLS, you dummy.
---- What about us GRILS?
Get Rid of Slimy grilS
I may quote that, especially the first two sentences.
I did have to look up PUA and it's Pick Up Artist, not Pandemic Unemployment Insurance.
MGTOWs hate women in a way that even the most misogynistic gay guys I might know: but those men were seriously abused ny their moms...
Sometime when you've got a spare hour and 15 minutes, have a look at Some More News hilarious review of the Ben Shapiro Production: Lady Ballers. Cringe along with the rest of us at Shapiro & Co. attempting to be funny! But, most of all, what you'll learn from this experience is that these guys really, really do hate women. Sure, it's supposed to be about The Trans, and they hate them too, but they really, really, REALLY hate women.
https://youtu.be/nrsysN_LBoo
They hate women therefore a guy betraying masculinity by becoming a lady deserves hatred as well. (Notice as well these creeps like to ask "what is a woman?" but they never, NEVER ask "what is a man?" because you never question masculinity in this crowd.)
There's one line that stuck with me, the guy who's really getting into identifying as a woman and he says something like, "It's easy being a woman, just cry when things get tough and everybody helps you." And that's what they really believe, I think.
"Porter? Oh porter?"
Oh, and yet another data point in the "conservatives can't be funny if their lives depended on it" graph.
Dog bites man
Would these "normal women" he's talking about happen to be named Abbey something, by any chance?
QUICK, GIVE HIM THE -
Abbey Something was a band in Rapid City one of my students played guitar in
Nice!
Not this big "W":
https://tenor.com/view/mad-world-jingalls-big-w-mad-mad-mad-mad-world-gif-23369421
For decades now, right-wingers have had the same formula: Demonstrate your "honesty" and "toughness" with "pick up some small, crappy demographic and throw it against the wall." And it worked OK for them when the demographic they were picking on was an actual minority. Only problem is someone forgot to tell them that women comprise more than half of the voting population.
I of course love the slapstick (!) image of stepping on one's own dick, but it does give him credit for possessing an organ of unusual length. If I had a dick I could step on...oh, never mind. He's an asshole, yes.
"French Pole Vaulter" is now the accepted euphemism.
“VANCE: I don’t know, I guess they were lonely and drunk.”
Ehh… is this a joke or, like, the truth?
Woulda been my "2-marker" reply up front (if I'd been awake 3 hours ago).
Late night?
Time zones – it's a different world here in the cool grey city of love...
yes
"What do women want?"
Respect?
"Besides that. I mean, what can we say that will get them to vote for us?"
Maybe not be condescending assholes?
"Nah, that ain't it. Maybe if we tell 'em they're too flighty to make decisions about their own bodies and we'll take care of that for them? Don't they all want to be taken care of like that?"
It's a lonely life for you, isn't it?
This was really good!
"I guess they were lonely and drunk." Is a wonderful line. Woods and JD seem quite human. Repellent, yes, but in a most humane way.
The Arthur Murray studio in town was on the west edge of a five or six block area of old commercial buildings. Warehouses, factories, a lot of them empty. The Studio was on the second floor of the building made of highly glazed, light brown oversized brick. The sign was a neon outline of a couple dancing beneath a "Arthur Murray" signature, also in neon. The walls to the studio were mostly windows. The view of the sunsets were spectacular I imagine.. it would be easy to tell a ballroom dancing school story that was sad and lonely - did Marty ever take dancing lessons? You know, I bet for every sad loser, desperate to connect that never learned to not step on their own feet and always went home alone, there were plenty of couples that met and danced and then maybe had a drink after class and went someplace and dance some more, not quite so vertical though.
The place was open the first dozen years I lived in town and then they closed. The sign hung in front of an empty building for years. Sometimes I thought about finding someone to maybe sell it to me. I had nowhere to put it. It made me sad to think of it ending up in the trash somewhere though.
The building went up for rent a dozen years ago and I arranged to take a look at it. I knew right away it wouldn't work for my purposes. The only way up was a narrow stairway. The studio looked like I imagined it would. The worn floor like the basketball court in an old high school gymnasium . I was there in the morning. With all the windows the place was bright. I wish I'd come later in the day so maybe I could enjoy a bit of sunset there.
I have a near famous friend. She's one of the leading dialect coaches in the film industry. She knows everyone who's anyone. (I Am Three degrees of separation away from everyone who's anyone. ) She's retired to a small college town in Ohio . Last time I talked to her, she told me about her plans to open an actor's studio, working with the theater program at the college and also doing outreach to disadvantage kids in the dying Rust Belt City just up the road. I told her she needed to find the old Arthur Murray dance studio in town. It would be perfect. She went out and found it. It's currently home to a baton twirling School with a national reputation. She says she's jealous of them.
That's all I know about Arthur Murray.
Well, that's a lot.
Yeah, I’m really impressed.
Worried’s story made me think of this song by the Magnetic Fields:
https://youtu.be/ePGRIJ_Zsz8?si=VMwlmrxYMy_OFF4c
2 marks. This is delightful.
I just wanna know where they sourced the oversize bricks...
(feels nervous for being unable to remember when I didn't know who Arthur Murray was....)
Dancing around the point, you might say...
*rimshot*
There are a surprising number of decrepit storefronts around Camden County with signs identifying themselves as "ballrooms" for dance lessons. No sir, you are a ex-Jack-in-the-Box.
James Woods is the perfect guy to teach JD how to be an even bigger asshole. Just ask Sean Young.
Pass.
Yeah, I don't get the James Woods stuff either. Mostly I know that he has a sense of self-deprecating humor (see his role as Hades in Disney's Hercules, a role he loved playing) and that he identified a couple of the 9-11 hijackers as being on his flights for the FBI. I mean, you can way up the Hollywood jerk ladder from his rung.
Still and all, good to know he has a rung of his own.
He's a very good actor.
I believe the Texans have a phrase for it: all hat, no cattle.
It amuses me that Vancey Pants is needing coaching to be able to come across as a regular guy, and that the people doing the coaching know it's a losing enterprise. As far as I'm concerned, he will always have a theme song, and it's a paraphrase of the great Bob Marley: Ottoman Vibrations.
May he never live that down.
"Don't sit there! Don't sit there!"
Oh my fucking god, I laughed so hard when I came to the part about putting a baby in her that I scared all three of my cats. 🤣 Thank goodness I'm working from home today, if I'd been in the office .....
That one was for you, if the lede is any clue...
I went to a Halloween party once, hosted by a friend, Jeff, a man who made mixtapes with the kind of attention and care you'd put into making a bomb. He worked on the party project for days; he had a five-90-minute-Maxell-tape strategy to carefully build and sustain the energy throughout the evening. So party night arrives, and it's all coming together. Everyone is dancing and drinking and having a blast. I'm sure there were party drugs, because that was the time and it was, after all, a party. But there was this one guy, who came as someone's plus-one, who kept following him around with a tape he wanted to play. "Thanks, but I've got a groove here," Jeff said. "We need to keep it going." The guy kept saying, "This is Earl Klugh! It's great! Everyone will love it!" Jeff kept putting him off until he looked at the clock and realized it was 3:30 a.m. and the gathering showed no sign of running out of steam. Jeff was at that age where staying up all night penalizes you for a couple days afterward, and he wanted to start guiding people toward the door. The Earl Klugh fan was still there, so he said, "Hey, let's put your tape on. I think it's time." So he slapped Earl into the tape deck, and the place cleared out in 20 minutes. Thanks for the memory prod, Roy!
We played the Partridge Family when it was time to close the record store. One guy actually liked it, but the rest of us knew the place would be empty in two minutes, tops.
Ha! Great story, Nance. Reminds me of a party some friends had, with the same mixtape (though these were CDRs) situation. Their obnoxious Brit roomate's equally obnoxious Brit friend sauntered up to the stereo and pulled out the disc and popped in his own. When he was challenged by the stereo owner on this transgression, his response was "What, vintage Duran isn't good enough for you?"
The obnoxious Brit roomate once told us that Indian food tastes like it does because "While WE were running the show over there, we told them "Look here, you've got all these spices lying about, why don't you dolly this food up a bit?""
HEY MAN EARL KLUGH ALRIGHT
Well, if you want baby-making jazz you need Grover Washington Jr.
"if you want to score at Roseland Ballroom" - deep cut for sure. I worked on a few gigs there and even went dancing there once, and if there was ever a place that needed to be a setting for a Stephen King novel that was it. There were lots of unused spaces and balconies that made you feel like you had travel back in time. When I went dancing a large percentage of the patrons were gentleman who could have fought in WW2 (this was the early 90s) with young Asian escorts. Very creepy.
You've captured the singular essence of old buildings – the odd, unexpected, slightly (or mostly) extraneous spaces, angled, dark, enticing in a modestly spooky way, that make me feel a little transgressive (but also deliciously sneaky) just being there...
When anyone invites me to visit an old building, and adds "Bring a flashlight" I'm THERE!
Can't parse this too finely – 2 marks for the whole damn thing.
If Queensman is Good Time Charlie*, then Jimmy Dimmy is Bad Time Snarlie.
Just look at his lame attack on Tim Walz, these guys don't even know how to do a proper smear campaign. The smear needs to be done by OTHER people, the candidate never says it himself, when asked about it he says, "Well, all I know about it is what I see in the papers, just like you." You let it build over time, let the Prestige Press help you out, "Questions remain..."
Plus, is your smear for a niche audience or for general consumption? This Tim Walz thing and the difference between retiring as a Command Master Sergeant vs. Sergeant Major might play well with the VFW crowd, let 'em feel they're in on the straight dope that the regular folks ain't gettin', might be good for a few votes, don't expect too much out of it. But you launch it with the candidate himself, straight out most people say they don't give a fuck and the whole thing flops.
Jeez, I can't keep givin' advice like this away for free, you know...
Gee, what did you do in Iraq, Daddy J.D.? I faced the deadly Iraqis face-to-face! Funny, Daddy, it says here you were a rear-echelon blogger for the Marines PR department miles and miles from combat....
So yeah. An REMF. Them as has ears, let them hear.
LP is right - just call him a REMF and move on.
On the Democratic (i.e. competent) side there is a HARD line between what the candidates say and what everyone else says. Online liberals can mock JD Vance's service all they want (like I just did!) but Harris/Walz won't go there, EVER.
On the Republican (i.e. incompetent) side, watch as some random mouth-fart by an incel YouTube influencer comes out of the party's Presidential candidate the very next day.
rare earth mother fucker?
Daddy was a Fobbit.
Except the VFW dudes all probably did the same thing as Walz
I saw an interview with the guy who won the Republican primary for the open Congressional seat in Green Bay, he said something like "We gotta get the cost of living under control, people are really struggling with these high prices, and also that border crisis." And then he shut up. That guy could be elected President. Stand him up, he says his one line, say "Good night everybody!" and wheel him off the stage.
But these two guys, I dunno.
Boom Done!
Inflation is down to 2.9%, so there's that.
But Ed Zitron (I think) brought up a good point t' other day which I hadn't thought about - more and more industries in America are monopolies, and monopolies ALWAYS jack up prices because they fucking can. Add that in to wanting to recover their "lost profits" from COVID plus LINE GO UP and you've got an explanation for price increases totally disconnected from politics.
The smart thing is you say "People are really struggling with these high prices", you don't mention inflation at all, don't say it's up, or even use the word "inflation", just "people are struggling", which is undeniably true (this is America, after all). Get people to connect their discontents to the Biden administration but leave it vague, people don't have to know WHAT or HOW, just that life is tough and "It's time for a change." Ought to be good for some votes from the disengaged low-info voters.
Sure he doesn't have any solutions for the people struggling except to give more to rich folks but he did beat Andy Jack
They showed a clip from one of Andy Jack's commercials, he was dressed up like a boxer, with a hooded robe, throwing punches at "The Woke Mob." For me, one Republican's about as bad as any other, but I am glad Andy didn't win because that means we might avoid a flood of copycat ads with Republicans dressed up as boxers.
Teddy Roosevelt, and to a lesser extent William Howard Taft, were known for their "trust-busting". Republicans won't claim that anymore because their "malefactors of great wealth" are people like Der Blutgraf who own a Vice-Presidential candidate and Harlan Crow who owns the Supreme Court.
"...the Haves, and the Have Mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."
Also, absolutely right about monopolies and price-fixing - just look at consolidation among grocery stores, a few chains own the whole damn country. Elizabeth Warren was onto this right at the start, it's incredibly frustrating that more Democrats didn't join her. The Democrats have gotten better in recent memory, but they've got a long way to go.
Prime example: the Obama era merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation. Obama's DOJ simply said "What could go wrong with THAT?", and let it fly. It'd be great if we could do a take-back on that one, for starters.
Ah, Eric Holder. Whatta guy.
The lack of foresight just blew my mind.
Thanks for this, I sometimes forget how incredibly disappointing the Democrats were under Obama, especially after Biden far exceeded my expectations, it's good to keep this in mind and to be on the lookout for the early warning signs like "Picks Wall Street lawyer as AG."
Hey he liked to fine companies rather than anything stronger
Plus - one wonders how much "border crisis" there ACTUALLY is, versus how much folks PERCEIVE. When you look at those statistics, it doesn't look particularly crisis-y. Most of the migrants are coming from countries with civil unrest or straight up civil war.
Right, so you just keep repeating "border crisis" like it's a thing that's self-evidently true, a thing that everybody knows, then people are too embarrassed to ask for details.
but they aren't white so Rs don't want them here
Cant remember who, but some right-winger years ago tried to draw a contrast between "an invasion of Englishmen" and "an invasion of Africans", arguing the first would be obviously much better, so much easier for them to assimilate into American culture!
Looking at what's been happening in Merrie Olde England this past week and I say keep your damn Englishmen.
See, that's the trick, set the expectations low.
And I've heard Boston is full of illegal Irishmen, which Republicans never seem to find the time to look into.
Not even the ladies?
yeah, there should be no profit in a perfectly competitive market, so businesses don't want to get anywhere close to those
Here's how to strike a blow today against these creeps:
Kim Daniels, a certifiable pro-Trump very weird woman serves as a "Democrat" in the FL House. Her racist and anti-Semitic remarks include: "You can talk about the Holocaust, but Jews own everything!” and “I thank God for slavery. . . if it wasn’t for slavery, I might be somewhere in Africa worshipping a tree.”)
The deadline for contributing to her excellent primary opponent, Therese Wakefield Gamble is MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. The primary is 8/20
Here is Therese's ActBlue Page: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/therese-w-gamble-for-hd14-1?refcode=directory
More on the race: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/12/2262511/-There-s-Weird-and-there-s-Kim-Daniels-Weird-three-days-to-help-oust-her
"worshipping a tree"
Like that's a bad thing.
In Kim Daniels world, tree worships YOU!
Just think of the poor, innocent condo developments, their lives snuffed out before they could be born because of opposition from some Goddamn tree-worshipers!
"VANCE follows WOODS around, though he more strongly resembles Elmer Fudd sneaking up on Bugs Bunny."
OK, first enjoying that, and then at the end ... chef's kiss!
Totally random: Wait, that was a Moog the whole time? The 50,000 times I listened to "Here Comes The Sun" and I didn't catch it was a damn Moog?! I built a fucking synthesizer (which my high school still has) and *I* didn't catch that, ever? Me, I am profoundly dissapoint. OK, I want to see all plugs and patch cables, now dammit. How they'd get that damn vibrato? No board for that....wait. Oh John, you sly bastard. That device came next..... ahhhhhh
Can't wait till "jesus fucking christ"!