Rubio’s gonna get fired anyway. He made a speech that that didn’t terrify people in Munich as badly as MAGA speeches usually do, so he got a standing ovation, and Trump HAAAAATES that.

The actual ad, if one is feeling like a fuddy duddy.

I think they’ve both had their issues with where their money comes from, her corporate PACs, him with the Adelson family that’s trying to somehow get gambling legalized in Texas without any Native American reservations and with a Christofascist state government. That said, neither one is a Schumer-style appeaser. He wears a brand of class-conscious social justice theology on his sleeve, throwing the Christian Nationalists’ so-called faith into clear focus, but because of that he’s also very much pitching “electability,” which in Texas right now means “I’m a cishet white guy so maybe some of the racists will stay home on election day.”

She is a firebrand who has made calling out Trump and the gang her full-time job, but her campaign seems to revel more in the idea of pissing off Donald Trump than in letting us know what she’ll do. There is a zeitgeisty element to that, and I think she’d be a more prominent and powerful advocate in Congress, but I think either would slot more into the Progressive wing. Ultimately, either would also be an insane improvement over Cornyn or (gag) Paxton.

Would be remiss of course without mentioning the dustup where a Tiktoker left the Talarico camp for the Crockett camp, saying that Talarico told her he was expecting to run against a mediocre black guy, not a talented black woman. He’s admitted to using the word mediocre about Colin Allred’s prior campaign, and TBF it was extremely mediocre (like Allred knew from day one he had no chance, so why knock yourself out?), but if Talarico did try to add in Allred’s race as (one would hope) a rhetorical flourish, then it was a tone-deaf moment that harmed his credibility in promising to advocate for the black community. “Electability” with white people doesn’t help if you simultaneously depress the vote of the usual 4/9 of Texans who vote blue. I’m as white as Talarico is, but it really gave me pause.

Like a candle in the wind…

The first Fantastic Beasts movie is set in New York, and it makes several appearances in the supporting lore books. Apparently, Americans don’t really like Quidditch, preferring some sort of magical-explosions basketball-ish game. Jeez I wish Joanne weren’t such an awful piece of shit human.

Okay, so I’ll point out that Murray Rothbard and David Gordon are prominent in the “Everything should be completely equal and fair as long as we first enshrine my generations of privilege” Austrian-school economists, beloved of white guys everywhere who never got over their Ayn Rand phase.

Makes it much funnier, actually.

With apologies to the baseball fans in the room…

The definition of woke:

You can’t just be up there and just doin’ a woke like that.

1a. Woke is when you

1b. Okay well listen. Woke is when the woke mob

1c. Let me start over

1c-a. The blue haired liberal is not allowed to say to the, uh, patriot, that prohibits the patriot from doing, you know, just trying to oppress the fringe groups. You can’t do that.

1c-b. Once the blue haired liberal is in the kindergarten classroom, she can’t be over here and say to the patriot, like, “I’m gonna get ya! I’m gonna teach your kids about pronouns! You better watch your butt!” and then just be like he didn’t even do that.

1c-b(1). Like, if you’re about to teach about racist history and then don’t teach it, you have to still teach. You cannot not teach. Does that make any sense?

1c-b(2). You gotta be, pooping in the right bathroom, and then, until you just wash your hands.

1c-b(2)-a. Okay, well, you can have the drag queen, like this, but then there’s the children you gotta think about.

1c-b(3). Okay seriously though. Woke is when the teacher, err drag queen, says or does a thing that, as determined by, when you do a move involving the history and CRT

Do not do a woke please

My buddy’s older brother did the thing where you remove the little filter cylinders from the coax in, I think(?), the curbside junction box. I saw the cylinders and the result, but not the deed.

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-effects-workers-psychological

The article is… fine… I guess.

They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.

I think what they’re saying is that the dissent says out loud the part that the majority would prefer to keep quiet. It’s a clear consequence of the “clever jackass 7th-grader” mindset that comes from the Originalist school of jurisprudence.

You can’t run a modern nation-state or withstand a bad actor in power if you insist that it must all be done exactly as set out in 4,500 words by a bunch of 18th-century provincial lawyers writing by committee, and that anything not expressly forbidden is allowed because… “oh well.” SCOTUS abdicating its role as a backstop of liberty and good sense to instead be a bunch of pedants is a piss-poor reason to send your country to hell, yet here we are.

They’re about to find out what we actually were getting in return.

This is one of the huge under-analyzed aspects of all this. The US “over” invested in defense and foreign aid, and got virtually all the soft power benefits of a hegemonic power, and by simply setting an upper limit on the worst abuses of imperial overlords, it generally had its allies saying “Thank You” for the privilege, with no particular signs that the bloc was weakening.

If the US is not an accessible market or a reliable guarantor of security, or if (for fuck’s sake) it’s threatening the territorial integrity of its own allies and trading partners, then it’s just China with less cheap shit to sell. Hell, even China doesn’t do the last one (offer not valid in Taiwan).

Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!

And both are fucking delicious (and honestly pretty similar, mostly with the tomato being less “in your face” with the murgh makhani).

I had to sit on the floor to invite cuddles, but he finally came in and is now resting on his stinky blanket. To be completely honest, he was only out like that for a few minutes, but bless his heart he was trying so hard. The fosters called him “Sergeant” because he was bossy and protective of his siblings.

At this point dealing with the predictable and polite asshole is easier than the unpredictable and rude one. Trump is making a diplomacy mess that will take decades to clean up, if ever.

Well, I did say possibility.

If nothing else, and back in the Bush days it’s pretty much all we had, they accept the possibility that they can lose elections. The bar is literally laying on the ground, yet MAGA still can’t clear it.

drive through Lubbock

Well, yes. Lubbock is as Lubbock was. It is known.

Texas is a mess.

This is also true.

This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!