About The Author

Banjos

Banjos

Wife of sloopy, mother to three bright, curious, and highly active young girls. Perpetually exhausted.

371 Comments

  1. Scruffy Nerfherder

    To the teachers, go back to work or quit. I’d happily fire you if I had the power for refusing to do your job.

    • Tonio

      ^This. And the closure of government schools is driving a lot of the other pandemic hysteria. Open the schools and the rest of society will follow.

    • AlexinCT

      My hope is that parents realize the current schools system serves nobody but the teachers unions, and work dillengetly to wreck that model and replace it.

      • Tonio

        The problem is that it’s going to take a long, nasty political struggle to do that. Very few parents have the means, or are willing to downscale their lifestyles to afford, private school tuition. And then there are the charter schools, beckoning us lewdly.

      • Chipwooder

        Yep. Tuition for the better private schools around here is in the the $20K and up range. We have two children. No way in hell can I afford that.

      • AlexinCT

        Would it be easier if the tax dollars that get sent to failing public schools were given back to you? It might not pay the entire bill, but it certainly should help…

      • Viking1865

        Chipwooder’s county schools have a budget of 31,000 per student if you divide the budget by the enrollment.

        Now, obviously a lot of that money is tied up in federal programs, special ed, etc. But that’s the cost per student from the 40,000 foot view.

      • Chipwooder

        Yup. Henrico spends obscene amounts of money on the schools. It’s a big reason why people, including us, pay a premium to live in western Henrico. Otherwise I could have spent the same money to live in a bigger brand new house in New Kent instead of this shoebox.

      • Rat on a train

        It is ~$11,000 per student here. That would still cover tuition at a local private school.

      • Rat on a train

        Chipwooder: according to HCPS, they spend ~$11K.

      • Viking1865

        Yeah I mistakenly took the 1.4 billion county budget as the school budget, which is 500 million.

        500 million/ 45,,000 students =11,000

      • Idle Hands

        One of my friend’s wives is a teacher down there and is currently bitching about the prospect of going back without a vaccine. I don’t have too much sympathy for that position given I had to work in person everyday.

      • The Other Kevin

        There are at least 3 (?) states that have just passed a law that makes the money follow the student instead of the school.

      • Mad Scientist

        How about if the tax dollars are given back to the people who paid them, instead of to a bunch of mooching parents.

      • Muzzled Woodchipper

        Most private schools have a pretty robust financial aid system. If you’d like to get out, you owe it to yourself and your children to at least take a gander and see what’s out there.

        It’s expensive for us, even with financial aid, but it’s worth every penny to be rid of gov intervention.

        Our school has been open since August in an area where there are still no plans to open government schools.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        There are also non-traditional schools out there that cost less. Some require more hands-on from the parents or more self-discipline from the kids, but they can be well under $10k/year/kid

      • JG43

        The schools wouldn’t close. You’d end up with something like Yes Minister with fully staffed schools and no students

      • DEG

        #metoo

  2. Scruffy Nerfherder

    South Dakota unemployment now at pre-pandemic level.

    Give the Biden administration a chance. It’s only been a week.

    • Pope Jimbo

      If Noem had any sense of humor, she should use her emergency dictator covid powers to decree that the SDak gov will eminent domain the Crazy Horse monument and redo it as Trump. (I would say to seize Mt. Rushmore, but that would get sedition charges)

      The only problem is that Crazy Horse was an actual cool bad ass and shouldn’t be drug into this mess.

      • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

        I’m cracking up at the image of Trump’s head on the Crazy Horse statue.

    • Agent Cooper

      A sports blog I visit still had people ranting about Sturgis as a white-supremacist super-spreader event.

  3. mrfamous

    “In September, LIUNA “proudly” endorsed Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, claiming the Democrats “stand out as the blue-collar candidates.””

    I’m certain that LIUNA knew full well Biden would do this. Their current complaining is simply to try and mollify their rank and file whom they intentionally betrayed for political gain.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      ?

    • Nephilium

      Like those blue collar schmucks really know who they should be voting for. Without the unions, they may have full employment, and be able to switch between jobs without an issue!

    • Certified Public Asshat

      Nothing says blue-collar like a law degree.

      • Swiss Servator

        …and life long politician.

    • rhywun

      Yeah, I think the parties switched again or something.

    • Chipwooder

      They have two options to explain why they backed a candidate who ran on throwing their members out of work: brazen betrayal or complete incompetence. Neither is a good look.

    • Viking1865

      Giving even union schemers the benefit of the doubt, I’m sure the smoke filled room was that Biden would fuck over the greenies, not the union guys. I’m sure the convo went something like

      “Look Bill, George, come on you know we have to play up the environment in an election year, get the youth turned out, draw in the Cali money. But when we’re in power, it’s time to govern sensibly. We all know this is a good project with good jobs, after the election we can put the loonies back in the bin.

      • Chipwooder

        So, incompetence then.

        Doesn’t take a genius to see who holds sway in the Dem party today, and it’s not the hard hats.

      • Viking1865

        Eh, its a smart political calculation.

        If you endorse Trump and Trump wins, you get what you already have: a pro domestic energy agenda. Endorsing Biden wouldn’t suddenly make Donald Trump anti-domestic energy. You just get the same policy as 2016-2020. He’s not gonna fuck you over out of spite.

        If you endorse Biden and Biden wins, he might protect you from the Greens. Turns out he didn’t, but if you had endorsed Trump and Biden wins he definitely would have hammered you into the dirt as punishment for the betrayal.

        The smart move was to endorse Biden and hope that he would get you off the hook, for old time’s sake.

      • Chipwooder

        “Can’t do it, Sal”

        *nods at Willie Cici*

  4. robodruid

    Good Morning Banjos et al.
    Anybody raise sheep? (not the voters)
    I think thats my spring project.

    • AlexinCT

      You live near a cliff? Plan to walk the sheep up to it, put the hind legs in your boots, then force the sheep closer to the edge so it backs up on you?

      • AlexinCT
      • robodruid

        WTH?

      • AlexinCT

        If you were a sheep would you fuck a sheep???

      • Pope Jimbo

        Alex what do you have against Montana Blondes?

      • AlexinCT

        Nothing at all… Just not my personal preference…

      • robodruid

        I have listened to this. Thinking of a sheep pen next to the chicken run.

      • Tundra

        How much land do you have to graze them? Does it make sense to move them around?

      • robodruid

        I have a shade under 10 acres. No fencing though.
        Still a work in progress.

    • pistoffnick

      When I was a young boy we raised a flock of 30-40 sheep.
      They require a fair amount of grazing land, and oats (which are not cheap).
      The bucks are ornery sum bitches
      We raised them for wool (not a strong market right now), never ate them.
      I raised a pet lamb (Bambi) in the house. Bottle fed her. She and the dog had side-by-side beds.

      Pigs will convert stuff to protein more efficiently. And they taste better.

      • pistoffnick

        Also, there should only be one buck in the herd. That means the little boys get sold or get a rubber band put around their nut sacks until the nutsacks fall off.

      • Homple

        Don’t forget docking the lambs.

      • AlexinCT

        You must not have had some grilled lamb chops with mint jelly ever….

      • pistoffnick

        Nope, never have.

        If’n yer cookin’ it, I’d eat it.

  5. mrfamous

    “The owner of the Washington Post is against mail-in voting.”

    We need drop boxes everywhere for this union vote. Also there should be no requirement to show ID and any attempt to contest the results should be met with heavy punitive sanctions against that party.

    • Swiss Servator

      Have a “pipe break” in the building when they are counting the ballots…

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Anything else would be voter suppression

    • Certified Public Asshat

      Alternate headline: USPS’ biggest customer is against mail-in voting.

    • Pope Jimbo

      And no need to match any signatures on the mail in ballots. Or require a witness.

  6. KromulentKristen

    Good morning!!

    The Biden people saw fit to call a town hall meeting today – Monday – at 9am.

    So not only are we going to hear about how our long nightmare is over (despite Trump’s people being excellent managers overall), and how they’re here to save us, but we get to do it first thing on a Monday!

    Hooray.

    • rhywun

      Well, Biden’s day does end at 9:30.

      • Swiss Servator

        “We’re calling a lid.”

      • bacon-magic

        No way that is a lid man. *shakes bag

      • Festus

        They’ll call a lid on on it when the black eyes turn umber.

    • Rebel Scum

      He has to fit it in between his reservation at the Country Kitchen and his nap.

    • AlexinCT

      Things will go back to business as usual KK. These fucks will do no work, but promise the moon to the idiots that will vote for the crime syndicate that lets them get away with this anyway.

  7. Rebel Scum

    Biden reinstates Covid travel ban.

    That’s racist.

    • Necron 99

      Pfft, stunning and brave.

  8. Rebel Scum

    Unions that endorsed Biden are now criticizing him for canceling Keystone pipeline that will ‘kill thousands of good-paying union jobs!’

    Did they forget that the Obama admin was against this project? Idk how anyone who pays attention could be surprised.

    • AlexinCT

      No, they actually knew it would be cancelled but pretended that was not going to happen so they could fool their members. Now that the truth comes out it is just more Kabuki theatre for the membership. The fuckers running these unions, just like the political and bureaucratic class, don’t care about the serfs: it is all about THEIR lucre options..

      • juris imprudent

        And people wonder why unions are irrelevant.

  9. The Late P Brooks

    Unions that endorsed Joe Biden for president are experiencing some buyer’s remorse only days after his inauguration. In one of his first actions in the White House, President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, the unions that supported Biden are criticizing the newly-elected president for the political move that they say will “kill thousands of good-paying union jobs!”

    Haha, suckers. He said he was going to.

    • Chipwooder

      He said he was, but the WaPo fact checker said he didn’t, so what was a person to do?

    • Cowboy

      Man…those replies don’t give me a lot of confidence ifor the future. The internet was a mistake.

      • Rat on a train

        The internet is an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters flinging shit.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Greenwald has a legion of asshole followers that seem to exist only to hate on him. They consider him a traitor to the leftist cause and will shit all over each and every tweet he puts out.

      • juris imprudent

        He blasphemes against the Holy cause!

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Pretty much

        I personally know one and was surprised to find out that he is an Ivy League educated malevolent moron. TEAM UBER ALLES.

      • Rat on a train

        A credentialed moron is still …

      • Nephilium

        Credentialed… therefore is better then someone without the credential. That’s what the credentials MEAN!

      • Mojeaux

        You know what the guy who graduated at the bottom of his med school class is called?

        “Doctor.”

      • Rat on a train

        Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will.

  10. Rebel Scum

    1 in 5 Americans have confidence Biden can unite the country

    It would help if he refrained from calling a third of the country terrorists and white-supremacists.

    • Nephilium

      Those people aren’t really part of the country. They’re just kulaks and wreckers!

    • Rat on a train

      conformity and heeling

    • Tonio

      They’re going to need a lot of camps…

    • juris imprudent

      STOP RESISTING!

  11. The Late P Brooks

    Andy Black, president and CEO of the Association of Oil Pipe Lines, said, “Killing 10,000 jobs and taking $2.2 billion in payroll out of workers’ pockets is not what Americans need or want right now.”

    “Shush, now. Here’s a quarter for your little tin cup. Say thankyewsir.”

  12. Rufus the Monocled

    Pfizer makes it clear do not give the vaccine to kids under 16. Competent paediatricians won’t give it. The teachers unions are pure evil for sure and must be destroyed.

    • Swiss Servator

      Is that why my Pfizer stock has dropped a bit?

      • AlexinCT

        No, that was because people were worried Biden might not fuck the sheeple over in favor of the pharma companies. That is one of the promises he did keep. The guy is a globalist corporatist. As I told all the energy people, he will kill fracking & the pipeline (this benefits the OPEC nations and especially Venezuela, Iran, and Russia, whom all have economies that depend on high oil prices and forces the Canadians to create a new pipeline to the west coast to send the oil to China) because the globalists want it. All his decisions will be to strengthen the globalist control and movement at the expense of the sheeple.

        Their priority is to restore enough of the old order Trump undermined so the can go back to the heady days of the Obama administration where they all made insane money doing real questionable and downright criminal work for/with recipients of US tax payer largesse (see Ukraine, China, and anything related to globalist organizations).

      • Rufus the Monocled

        I’m not sure but there’s gotta be some racism in this comment.. Flagged!

  13. Rufus the Monocled

    Biden already screwed everyone just five days in. Impressive.

    People who are acting shocked really really are stupid. No seriously. Have they not observed how the Dems roll the last few years?

    Wtf is wrong with people?

    • AlexinCT

      People that acted as if these fuckers were not talking out of both sides of their mouths are now woefully quiet, huh?

      • hayeksplosives

        There is no opposition media to tell them there is more than one opinion to have, so they’re quiet while waiting for the MSM to tell them how they should feel.

    • tripacer

      Maybe he’s just getting it all out of the way now, that way it will all be forgotten in 4 years.

  14. robc

    I have been criticizing January baseball birthdays, but today is the worst I have seen.

    Danny Richardson retired in 1894 with 16.4 WAR and no one has come close since.

    Top 1000 all time is at 26.8 WAR or above. So, yeah, ummm, today is bad.

  15. Festus

    On the way home from work tonight had a cop follow me for 5 miles right up my bumper just because xe could. FOOKING CUNTE! I was going 10 klicks over the speed limit the entire way in a snow squall so I could make it up the hill out of town. Why? Why would you do that to a citizen? FYTW! I was almost hoping that xit would pull me over. Sunday deep-clean day is not a fun time to be messin’ with Festus. I suppose they might have ticketed me for the marginal crack in the windshield.

    • AlexinCT

      You must not have been wearing your chin diaper….

      • Festus

        I wish it were that. The posted speed is 60 but everyone runs 80. Right on my bum up the hill. Hoping I’d fuck up, I’d imagine. I’ve been dealing with those assholes for nearly 50 years.

  16. The Late P Brooks

    Amazon further argues that mail-in voting decreases voter turnout, and said in a prepared statement, “If a manual election is improper here, it is hard to imagine any circumstances in which a Regional Director would allow manual elections until COVID-19 is eradicated,”

    \Wait, what?

    • AlexinCT

      We joke, but these assholes are downright evil and know exactly what they are doing. Our election system is by design created to allow and hide fraud, but they pretend otherwise because it benefits them. You see they are fucking us over when scenarios like this come along. They just don’t care that you know they are fucking evil as long as they have power. After all, what are you gonna do, huh?

  17. Jerms

    Amazon owns the Washington Post i think. Same paper pushing for mail in voting when it came to the election. Will anyone in the media ask these questions and make a big deal of it? Of course not. So sad.

  18. Rufus the Monocled

    Sooooo. On the travel ban. Is Biden racist?

    Funny how the media shut their fucken stupid faces up with their guy eh?

    I watched that fake pretend journalist George Steph. pull one of the all-time great lies as he mauled and attacked Rand Paul like the little cowardly bully hack that he is.

    The idea people think this guy is an ‘objective’ journalists is palpably ghoulish and retarded.

    He’s a political hack jerk off.

  19. Tonio

    Virginia Glibs – keep an eye on attorney Tim Anderson (up and coming liberty champion) and his attempt to get a permit for a First Amendment rally at the Virginia Capitol. The permit has been denied on the first request, and I suspect Tim’s goal is to exhaust all administrative avenues so he can sue in federal court since EDVA (one judge, at least) seems sympathetic to the notion that the mutterings of the physicians does not override the constitution. Unfortunately he mostly posts on the FB.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Thanks, will do

    • KromulentKristen

      I’ll keep an eye out!

  20. Rufus the Monocled

    Boy did Biden fuck Canada over with the pipeline. Purely for ideological reasons. It passed I believe five environmental tests and billions of dollars. Now the Canadian government is suing the U.S.. Please send your money to me.

  21. The Late P Brooks

    Wtf is wrong with people?

    TDS.

    They were willing to amputate both legs to get rid of annoying, itchy athlete’s foot.

  22. Certified Public Asshat

    How Miley Cyrus’ ‘Preference’ Remarks Show Underlying Transphobia

    She dug in even deeper, adding, “everyone knows that tits are prettier than balls… That’s what ended up making female relationships make more sense to me.”

    I wish I could say this news makes me excited and proud to be a woman and a lesbian, but Cyrus’ quote is littered with transphobia. This kind of gender essentialism was left behind by most of the queer community years ago. Genitals do not equal gender, and Miley should know this.

    In an age where TERFS are more vocal than they’ve ever been, comments like these reinforce some very dangerous ideas about bodies and gender. Having a gender preference, or even genitalia preference, in who you sleep with is obviously not a problem, but to reduce dicks and balls to “men’s bodies” contributes to dangerous beliefs about trans women.

    • limey

      “Everyone knows that tits are prettier than balls.”

      – M. Cyrus

      • Certified Public Asshat

        Even Q couldn’t have said it any better.

      • Rat on a train

        I like titties.

        – Stephen Fry

        I know. A different context.

      • bacon-magic

        She has neither. Nor an ass.

      • limey

        Chick-a-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee!

    • KromulentKristen

      Articles like this just come off as “Please sleep with me! Even though I have nothing to offer you sexually or emotionally, you should just totally sleep with me anyway! Because transphobia. Or something.”

      • Tres Cool

        Despite being way below my weight-class in terms of ideal, I prolly would. I’d intentionally play “Achy Breaky Heart” during the act, too.

      • KromulentKristen

        The question is, would she?

        ?

      • Tres Cool

        She seems damaged enough, with latent daddy-issues. I aint Brad, but I aint bad. Couple drinks and some starting fluid (aka ‘consent in a can’) and I bet I could pull it off.

        Now, would my aged wang be willing to stab into that petri dish of chlamydia and trichomoniasis ? Different story.

    • Chipwooder

      Having a gender preference, or even genitalia preference, in who you sleep with is obviously not a problem

      Uh oh, looks like someone is in need of a struggle session!

      • Rat on a train

        You aren’t allowed to turn down advances from someone with a better intersectionality score.

      • Festus

        Umm. No! My name ain’t “Peggy”!

  23. Festus

    Just found a dried out fish on the floor in front of the tank. Sticky to the touch. Plopped it back in and it started respirating. Goldfish be strong, Yo!

  24. robc

    Continuing from overnight thread, Gamestop now over $100 in pre-market. As far as I can tell, r/wallstreetbets is the 4chan of investing. And usually involves people getting absolutely killed on stupid investments. But not this time. I find it amusing for some reason I apparently cannot explain.

    • UnCivilServant

      I wouldn’t invest in a company whose business model is dying and has been shut down by government action anyway.

      • Certified Public Asshat

        Right…but that’s not what is happening here.

      • robc

        IIRC, and am not confusing you with someone else, you are in the biz…have you ever heard of 100% of calls being In the money at expiration? I guess this isn’t the first time, but that seems basically impossible.

      • Certified Public Asshat

        Not me, I am in corporate tax, but I’ll answer anyway…no, I have never seen anything this crazy.

      • robc

        This isn’t investing…the reddit is called WallStreetBets for a reason. But GME has made at least 1 multimillionaire in the last week, and probably a handful more millionaires. The one guy made at least 5 million in options on Friday alone. And that was “verified” from his small purchases of options that he posted well in advance.

        If he isn’t absolutely nuts, he will get out before the inevitable crash. But the options expired on Friday, so he has that money at least.

      • UnCivilServant

        If you’re betting, you should be shot.

      • robc

        Bettors get what they have coming, its a suckers play long term. But if one manages to break the house on the way to going broke, I find it a cool story.

      • Nephilium

        /invests in bullet proof vest for next trip to Vegas.

      • robc

        [insert Mandalay Bay joke here]

      • Nephilium

        UCS, from what little I’ve read on the Gamestop stock thing it’s a short squeeze. Right now, Gamestop has more shares of stock sold short then existed. So, people driving the price up causes the people who still need to cover their short sells to start going into negative returns. IF the price gets high enough, some of the short sellers will cut their losses, and buy the shares to cover their short sale at a loss, which then further drives up the prices. It’s a bubble and it will eventually pop.

      • robc

        It was an options squeeze, now it is a short squeeze.

        People wrote naked calls, so had to buy shares last week to cover. As they bought it pushed price up making higher calls in the money, requiring more purchases to cover. Etc/etc, until all calls were ITM on Friday. GME has a huge short ratio right now too, and now they are getting hammered in the short squeeze for the same reason. Pushing the price up even more.

        the r/wsb meme is they are holding until $420.69 is reached.

        Like I said, the 4chan of investing.

      • Nephilium

        Appreciate the added details, I just skimmed an article on it, and chuckled at the random bubble. Here’s hoping some of those who made cash don’t ride it until the pop.

      • robc

        Not just some choosing to buy to cut losses, due to margin rules, some will be forced to buy in order to have their positions closed out.

    • robc

      One more fun GME factoid:

      Average trading volume is 18MM shares. Friday was 197MM.

      There are only 69MM shares outstanding.

      • robc

        Here is daily info for this year. You can see what “normal” GME trading looked like up thru Jan 12. The 13th is when it started going crazy. That is when the volume changed and the price went through the roof.

        GME

  25. Atanarjuat

    It’s not really that crazy for Democrats to pursue various charges against Trump on flimsy grounds. Any Romneyesque Republicans who vote for impeachment or the 14th amendment thing will receive a serious primary challenge and the rift could prove disastrous to The Democrats’opposition.

  26. limey

    Looks like AAF Nation purged all the Trump-related merch. Memory holed.

    • limey

      Also memory holed here? The Trump Tank artwork was magnificent.

      • limey

        If anyone cares, which they don’t, I have messaged them to find out what the flowerbed is going on, and the response to that message will likely determine whether or not I make any further purchases with them.

  27. The Late P Brooks

    I wonder what the vote breakdown was for those so-called pipeline workers.

    “people who actually build and maintain pipelines” vs “corporate officers of” and “lobbyist for” the union

  28. Festus

    Mornin’ Banjos! That music link reminds me that I haven’t re-watched any Dr. Phibes movies since I was a boy.

  29. The Late P Brooks

    South Dakota unemployment rate is down because of the thousands and thousands of people who died. Like half the population was murdered by that sassy bitch governor who doesn’t love SCIENCE.

    • Festus

      It was all those fat accountant bikers sweeping the state clean and infecting the rest of the nation.

  30. The Late P Brooks

    Yesterday, during one or both football games, they were braying about how the kind and noble and generous NFL was giving Super Bowl tickets to VACCINATED health care HEEEROES.

    Does that mean a maskless SB?

    Har dee fucking har.

    • KromulentKristen

      I posted last night about how the first-ever “home team” Super Bowl is meaningless because the crowd will be hand-picked assholes who probably DGAF about football.

    • Muzzled Woodchipper

      Yes.

      We’re now moving from the land of the stupid in to the land of the truly absurd.

      I had to wear a mask at my guitar lesson the other day. Just my teacher and me. He had Covid around New Years.

      We had to wear masks. Despite the fact that exactly one of the 2 of us cannot catch it or pass the virus.

  31. KromulentKristen

    Meeting has started. Is it too early to start drinking alcohol?

    • robc

      If you don’t start early, you cant drink all day.

    • Brochettaward

      Why would you even ask that question?

    • KromulentKristen

      Already heard “diversity, equity & inclusion”

      Kill me now.

      • juris imprudent

        So, govt is a suicide pact after all?

    • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

      It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.

    • Muzzled Woodchipper

      Try some Sativa-based Delta8.

      Perfectly legal, and it fucking works.

  32. Rebel Scum

    Biden had a record-breaking $145 million in “dark money” donations.

    Something something money in politics.

    • Akira

      Yea, I noticed that the pearl-clutching about Citizens United promptly ceased when Trump defeated JEB!’s cash juggernaught and then did the same with Herself.

  33. Brochettaward

    You know, the Democrats sure seem scared of a guy who they just supposedly beat in a presidential election. I mean, their guy got more votes than anyone in American history! 80 mil people supposedly rejected the Trumpster, but they are deathly concerned about what he might do in 2024.

    • creech

      I think they see the impeachment trial as a win-win opportunity to cause chaos in the GOP ranks. Convict Trump and those GOP folks who voted to convict will get their asses primaried and, even if they win primary, will lose hard core Trump support and make them vulnerable in the 2022 general. Don’t convict Trump, and those who vote not to convict will get hammered by Never Trumpers and by the media calling them supporters of insurrectionism.

  34. Rebel Scum

    Section 3 of the 14th Amendment allows Congress to limit an elected official from being considered for office if they have taken part in insurrection or rebellion. Democrats have continually said President Trump encouraged his supporters to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, something they consider an act of insurrection. At least that’s what they claim in their article of impeachment.

    That is crazier than impeachment because insurrection/rebellion literally did not happen.

  35. Tundra

    Ah, Bach!

    Good morning, Banjos!

    And good morning to the rest of you fantastic people.

    I hope everyone had a good weekend. I actually got the skates out and played some outdoor hockey. It was fucking great!

    The news is laughably bad, but I think just the simple pleasures of watching my proggies slowly realize what happened will sustain me through the dark times.

    Make it a great day, y’all!

    • KromulentKristen

      It’s too complicated you wouldn’t understand shut up

    • juris imprudent

      The last few necessary signatures to put his recall on the ballot?

  36. Rebel Scum

    Some long-awaited good news for the residents of Virginia came out this week. Governor Ralph “blackface klansman” Northam announced that schools could be safely reopened in the next few weeks. With online “distance learning” turning out to be largely a miserable failure and parents scrambling to find new daycare options, many were breathing a sigh of relief, thinking there was finally a light at the end of the tunnel that wouldn’t turn out to be an oncoming train. Unfortunately, the celebrations didn’t last very long. Not long after the Governor’s announcement, a Virginia teachers union came out and told everyone to stuff it. They’re not going back to work unless their demands are met. This is looking increasingly like a hostage negotiation where the children are the hostages.

    Fire. Them. All.

    • Viking1865

      One of the little things the Dems slipped through their first year seizing control was a law to allow the teachers unions to collectively bargain. VA public schools have consistently been in the top 10. Say goodbye to that.

    • Chipwooder

      Henrico keeps kicking the can down the road. I am certain that they will not return to the schools this school year.

      My son saw two of his friends this weekend, and my wife and I chatted with both of their mothers. All three boys have been good to excellent students in the past, and all three of them are failing multiple classes this year because it’s insanity to make online classes the entirety of their schooling and not expecting them to play games, watch YouTube, etc instead of doing their work. 12 year olds simply do not generally possess that kind of self-discipline.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        . 12 year olds simply do not generally possess that kind of self-discipline.

        The heart wrenching part is that they can possess such self-discipline at that age, but the public schools have completely atrophied the skills that lead to that level of discipline.

        It’s a prototypical example of breaking their subjects’ legs and handing them a crutch.

        I keep coming back to my experience in undergrad. I was smart enough to keep up with the top tier students, but I was consistently getting outworked by the homeschooled kids. They knew how to self-motivate. They had developed the skills required to sit down and teach themselves a concept, no matter how difficult. I struggled with that for the first couple years.

        Your average public school 12 year old is used to being hand-held, if not dragged, across the finish line. Hell, participation is a large percentage of their grades at that age. There is no accountability for them to actually put in effort beyond studying for an exam here or there. Zone out in class. Perfunctory participation when required. Participate in teacher led cram sessions for a couple days before each exam. Regurgitate the most basic learnings. Rinse. Repeat.

      • Ownbestenemy

        ^^^^^ And it is damn hard to counter that at home. Clark County has the option for 16 year olds to test out of high school. We have always made that an option for our kids but because it requires them to put in the work and not screw off in class and still pass, they act like water and take the path of least resistance.

        Our weekly conversations about this at home is:
        “I hate online school, the teachers don’t really teach anything, they just review, no one knows what the homework is”

        “Put your nose to the books and study to test out of school then”

        “Nah that might be hard”

        “Life is hard kids”

        “Not in online school”

        *Goes and gets another glass of whiskey*

      • juris imprudent

        I think the only logical follow on in that conversation is “how long do you think you can live in online school”?

      • kinnath

        I have no skin in this game. My kids are in their 40s, and two of my grandkids have already graduated from high-school.

        This is what I would recommend to a frustrated parent with a 12yo that is failing zoom school: fuck school — teach them ANYTHING that is useful to know that has a reasonable chance of the kid succeeding. Build something. Cook something. Plant something.

        The first small success is critical to long term success in life.

      • Ownbestenemy

        ^^ One teen works part time for family business. They have all access to Udemy courses when they drop sales (which is all the time) so I encourage them to learn that way.

      • kinnath

        The single biggest failure in public schooling right now is the utter failure to kids that “you learn stuff to be able to do stuff”.

        Schools teach stuff to test stuff.

        Thank you W and No Child Left Behind.

      • Ownbestenemy

        My youngest wrote and essay to apply for dual-credits and one of his points was just that. The basic gist was “I don’t mind history, civics, etc, but there is no connection between what I am learning and application in life other than to test on it”

      • kinnath

        You should tell him, sometime we learn stuff to make sure we don’t do things.

        something, something, . . . condemned to repeat it.

      • Pine_Tree

        My 11-year-old when I got home last Thursday: “I got the carburetor off. You said not to clean it without you…”

      • Chipwooder

        I actually expect my son to eventually end up in a trade anyway. It’s what he’s interested in. He likes to build things and try to repair things. He’s said he wants to be a mechanic when he grows up. He’s plenty smart but, outside of his science class, he just isn’t terribly interested in academics in general.

    • Ownbestenemy

      What amazes me is that you can go to each state that is in this stance of online only and see the same exact affects. Good students with poor results, a suspected uptick in student suicides, total disengagement from the learning process, and on and on.

      • Jerms

        My brother teaches in Brooklyn where a lot of the kids were having problems with school as it was. Now they dont even bother to log on to the lessons. My middle class white kids are in school 5 days a week like nothing happened.

  37. KromulentKristen

    Puddin Cup is “talking” to us, reading a pre-recorded message. The teleprompter needs to be closer, or the font needs to be bigger, because he’s squinting like he’s Trump viewing an eclipse.

    • KromulentKristen

      And even though this is an “event”, not a “meeting”, in video conference parlance, which means everyone but the speaker is muted automatically, I’m still terrified to watch Youtube videos. Someone will hear I am listening to Bridget Phetasy and I’ll be purged for independent thought.

    • rhywun

      Puddin Cup is “talking” to us, reading a pre-recorded message

      Thoughts and prayers.

    • Festus

      Old “Black-eyed-peas” is running on autopilot. He’s evil. He wants revenge.

    • KromulentKristen

      I’m 100% going to take advantage of this squishy SJW shit and say my mental health is dependent on my not living in DC anymore.

    • KromulentKristen

      Sweet merciful jeebus, it’s over

      • AlexinCT

        How many IQ points did it cost you?

  38. The Late P Brooks

    Our justice must be swift, terrible, and merciless!

    This fussy handwringing about future presidents possibly abusing their power is peanuts compared to what Trump has already done. The fact is the United States is a corrupt, rickety, unstable semi-democracy, where one party out of two does not recognize the legitimacy of its political opponents. Contrary to Rauch’s description of President Ford’s pardon of Nixon as a “wise and farsighted decision, one that served the cause of justice better than the prosecutorial process could have done,” a large reason we are in that situation is because a whole generation of Republican criminals was allowed to evade legal accountability.

    If previous criminal presidents had been seen in the dock, Trump very likely never would have become president in the first place. Rauch says that Trump and Nixon are the only modern presidents to have been “credibly accused of serious crimes while in office,” but this is not true at all. George W. Bush openly admitted to ordering torture, along with half his top-level staff, while George H.W. Bush pardoned several of the Iran-Contra criminals when the investigation was closing in on his own role. Many of Trump’s top staff were Republican lifers who avoided accountability right alongside their former presidential bosses. One of the people deeply involved in the Iran-Contra pardon decision, for instance, was William Barr, who would go on to serve as Trump’s attorney general and attack dog.

    If even a quarter of the Times reporting on his pre-presidential life is true, Trump should have been put away on several occasions for about every kind of financial fraud there is. When elites can commit crimes with impunity, a nation tends to develop a case of moral rot. With nothing holding them back, the worst, most shameless, and most unscrupulous people worm their way to the top of society — people like Donald Trump. Allowing him to get away with what he’s done will just make it clear to all the other aspiring despotic criminals that achieving high office is a ticket to being immune from prosecution. Lock him up!

    Fuck that mamby pamby reconciliation nonsense. Why can’t we just round up all the Republkikkkins and put them to the sword? They voted for that supervillain, and there is no more heinous crime imagineable.

    • Brochettaward

      …where one party out of two does not recognize the legitimacy of its political opponents.

      I mean, they say this and then proceed to rant how every Republican president since Nixon should have been prosecuted…

      The question I have these days is whether I’m dealing with a true believer/useful idiot, or a propagandist. I’d say the former here.

      • BakedPenguin

        I mean, they say this and then proceed to rant how every Republican president since Nixon should have been prosecuted…

        …and spent 4 years pursuing impeachment over obvious bullshit, while totally ignoring very relevant evidence of everything they accused 45 of in their own guy.

        Their hypocrisy is palpable.

    • Chipwooder

      “a large reason we are in that situation is because a whole generation of Republican criminals was allowed to evade legal accountability.”

      Donks are just pure as newfallen snow. It is known.

    • Rebel Scum

      Only Republicans commit crimes in and out of office. It is known.

      the United States is a corrupt, rickety, unstable semi-democracy, where one party out of two does not recognize the legitimacy of its political opponents

      Lol…the US is not a democracy. And enough about how the left views its opposition.

    • Agent Cooper

      ” what Trump has already done.”

      WHAT? WHAT IS IT? ENUMERATE IT YOU FUCKS!

  39. The Other Kevin

    “Unions that endorsed Biden are now criticizing him for canceling Keystone pipeline”

    Good ole working class Joe from Scranton took union support for granted and screwed them over at the first opportunity. Color me shocked. I’m just happy it happened so fast, while people still remember him promising not to go hard left during the campaign.

    • creech

      Did the rank and file give a crap whom the “union” endorsed? Probably not. In Penna., in the areas that produce fracked natural gas, they went overwhelmingly for Trump. The problem is, there aren’t enough voters in those areas to offset the woke suburbs around Philly and the Burgh who believe pipelines are icky, dangerous, and so anti-climate change. Same suburban voters will someday be shivering and ruing their huge heating bills and blaming those Big Oil profiteers, not the politicians who caused it.

      • The Other Kevin

        That is my experience, too. The two biggest Trump supporters I know are both union guys. But causing a rift between union management and the rank and file is another positive, IMO.

      • Chipwooder

        My father in law is a retired welder, worked building locomotives for GE for over 30 years. He was very active in IBEW while he was working, voted Dem for most of his life, and you won’t find a more diehard Trump guy.

    • The Other Kevin

      At least it’s 100% effective at protecting you from SOMETHING.

  40. The Late P Brooks

    Sell the sizzle, baby!

    President Biden’s team has reviewed their predecessors’ agenda for COVID-19 vaccine distribution and reportedly discovered the plans had the significant problem of failing to exist. “There is nothing for us to rework,” an unnamed source with knowledge of the new administration’s COVID-19 efforts told CNN. “We are going to have to build everything from scratch.”

    In that it means months of potential progress have been needlessly lost — that the abysmally slow vaccination pace we’ve seen since mid-December was not inevitable — this is a horrifying revelation. But there may be an advantage here: The Biden administration can craft its vaccine distribution plan and, crucially, its messaging with a free hand.

    The message the Biden administration should be preaching is this: The vaccines are good. In fact, they are remarkably good. They are best-case scenario good. Our goal now is to get these good vaccines into as many people as possible as rapidly as possible so we can return to normal as soon as possible, because that is what the vaccines will enable us to do. Do you hate masks? Are you tired of social distancing? Do you want this whole stupid, awful thing to be over? That is what the vaccines can do — if we get them into our bodies, for, as epidemiologist Walter Orenstein observes, “vaccines which remain in the vial are 0 percent effective.” It is vaccinations, not vaccines, that save lives.

    Joe Biden, Carnival-Barker-in-Chief.

    Hone the message. Get the trained seals to sit up and flap their flippers. That’s what it’s all about.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Spare me.

      This is just constructing an excuse framework.

    • limey

      Deceive, obfuscate, inveigle. The mill of lies is upgraded all the time to increase and concentrate output.

    • R C Dean

      What utter bullshit. No plans at all! Zip, zero, nada. Those millions of vaccines are just . . . showing up in the states.

      The bottleneck isn’t supply, at this point. Its giving the shots. That will change someday. The states are responsible for getting the vaccine to the localities, who in turn are responsible for making the shots happen.

    • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

      Letting the states manage their own distribution is a plan. What they mean is that there is no massive, bureaucratic, centralized, top-down plan that will likely slow things down.

      • juris imprudent

        We have to be told what to do because otherwise we have to make decisions of our own. What kind of world is that?

      • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

        Unfortunately, that is a pretty accurate description of what they are thinking.

      • rhywun

        Passthebuckworld.

      • Akira

        What they mean is that there is no massive, bureaucratic, centralized, top-down plan that will likely slow things down.

        Most Leftists agree with me that big corporations typically suffer from stupid managerial decisions resulting from being too “high up” to see how things actually work on the ground.

        But when it comes to government, they think that the more centralized it is, the better.

  41. The Late P Brooks

    More Week sauc e:

    “We’re underselling the vaccine,” one expert told Leonhardt. “It’s driving me a little bit crazy,” said another. A third: “It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now.”

    There are two very different sources for the underselling Leonhardt describes. One is what we saw with the Trump administration: unjustified skepticism of vaccines generally, of the COVID-19 vaccine specifically, and (somehow, after 400,000 deaths even with all the lockdowns and distancing and so on) the reality of COVID-19 itself. This is the mindset encouraged by an ex-president apparently unwilling to get his own shot even though it might enhance his personal immunity and convince millions of his followers this vaccination is safe and desirable.

    Focus on the positive? Like the 999 people out of 1000 who DON’T die from this terrible plague? The minimal risk to young healthy people?

    BAH! Why would you do that?

    • R C Dean

      One is what we saw with the Trump administration: unjustified skepticism of vaccines generally, of the COVID-19 vaccine specifically,

      I seem to recall the Trump administration spending kajillions on accelerated development, and flogging the hell out of it. The “skepcticism” came from Governors who refused to administer any vaccine they got from the Trump administration.

      • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

        We’ve always been at war with East Asia.

      • Charlie Suet

        And daughter-in-law elect Kamala Harris, who openly stated that she didn’t trust a Trump developed vaccine.

        I’d say that’s been memory-holed, but Orwell was wrong on that issue. A party with real control doesn’t bother removing the evidence of its inconsistencies and hypocrisy, because they have nothing to fear from people pointing it out.

        Post an older tweet welcoming peace with Eastasia with one saying we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, then realise it makes no difference to the social standing of the people you’re criticising.

    • Muzzled Woodchipper

      How is a vaccine going to enhance his “personal immunity” when he’s already fucking had it?

  42. Festus

    I’m out, fellow Glibs. Don’t let the Devil know before yer dead.

    • limey

      Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

    • Tres Cool

      We have the same devil, just different demons.

  43. OBJ FRANKELSON

    It seems that there is a bit of buyer’s remorse coming from the left. They are getting pissed about Mushhead getting us re-involved in the forever wars, the union flacks are up in arms. I am enjoying the schadenfreude. It is like ‘Orange Man Bad’, wasn’t the wisest way to allocate your vote. Of course, I am assuming that they have some self-awareness and a basic understanding of cause and effect, which is not a safe assumption these days.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      I’m not seeing it yet. Of course I unfriended/muted a lot of people over the last few weeks as they quickly went rabid.

    • The Other Kevin

      I haven’t seen it yet, but I would expect gas and home heating prices to go up very soon, and that’s going to be very hard to spin.

    • wdalasio

      A few rank-and-file union members might get pissed. The leadership will happily tell them to screw off. It’s not like the union top leadership (at the level above the actual union in question) sees much future in the private sector unions. And the local or industry leadership will be kept insulated from the consequences.

      As to the few on the left who really object to the forever wars (as opposed to forever wars when Republicans are in charge), they’ll get slurred as Putin Stooges(tm) the same way Gabbard was.

      The truth is the modern Democratic party is an alliance between the political elites, low-capital industries, academia and the cultural class. And they’re more than happy to send kids off to come back in body bags while driving their parents into the poorhouse.

    • EvilSheldon

      Any buyer’s remorse that we’re seeing, is simply the bourgeois being upset at being cut out of the graft.

      Look, the whole American experiment is done. Long-term thinking is out, we’re well into the hospice care/pain management phase now. The pols and their higher-level enablers are all about stacking up the chips while they can, in the hopes that they can be someplace else by the time the hungry mobs hit their neighborhood…

  44. Viking1865

    So I went to the grocery yesterday. Usually grocery bill is between 90 and 120. This time it was 138. I always buy whats on sale, so thats not different. So I start checking the actual prices. Ground beef went from 1.99 on sale to 2.68. Stuff I usually get 3 for 5 dollars is now 2 for 5. So on and so forth.

    Buy hey printing presses go brrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

    • Chipwooder

      Thank god there are no more mean Trump tweets! Normalcy is BACK!

    • trshmnstr the terrible

      I started putting together a spreadsheet last night to track the grocery prices. We’re having trouble keeping it under $500/month in groceries, and it’s not obvious why. That price point included plenty of room for bulk buying as recently as a year ago. Some of it can be written off to short term newborn expenses, but not all of it.

      We could certainly cut back and get on target if need be, but it’s hard to get out of Aldi under $100 a trip anymore and we cant get out of Walmart under $150/trip.

    • Ownbestenemy

      Our budget is probably about $250-300(up to 500 if we do a Costco trip) a month of grocery purchase excluding alcohol. We have seen upticks in some items, but not in others. Meat is the biggest price jumps that I have seen but we wait til their is a glut of supply at the market and they run discounts; $.99/lb chicken breast, 1.99/lb ribs, etc.

    • wdalasio

      Ugh! You silly peasants! That’s not inflation! Everyone knows that only inflation absent food and energy really counts (There is actually a point there, but the Cathedral inevitably mangles it beyond any recognition.)! And like my company’s outside “experts” assured me last week, inflation doesn’t have anything to do with printing money.

    • DEG

      I’ve noticed my grocery bill going up. Part of that is changes in what I buy and where I shop. The rest is.. inflation.

    • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

      Not only that, but there seems to be less wine in the wine bottles these days.

  45. The Late P Brooks

    The goal in the public health response to this pandemic never was (or never should have been) no risk. That is unachievable, particularly for the great bulk of the public without the luxury of working from home and outsourcing risk to delivery drivers. No, the goal was managed, informed, minimal risk with adequate medical capacity until the vaccine arrived. Think harm reduction for the real world, not all-or-nothing maximalism with which many are unwilling or unable to comply.

    Where the fuck has this vapid twat been for the past year?

    • BakedPenguin

      I’m Shocked! Shocked, I say!

  46. DEG

    Biden also will put into place a ban on most non-US residents entering the country after having recently been in South Africa — amid the breakout of a new, more infectious mutant strain of COVID-19 in that nation, the officials said.

    Rules for thee, not for me!

    “We can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace — only bitterness and fury. No progress — only exhausting outrage. No nation — only a state of chaos,” Biden said.

    But only after sending those deplorables to the camps.

    In one of his first actions in the White House, President Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. Now, the unions that supported Biden are criticizing the newly-elected president for the political move that they say will “kill thousands of good-paying union jobs!”

    Dumbfucks.

    “The remedies of the 14th Amendment certainly may be appropriate for someone who incites an insurrection as Donald Trump did,” Blumenthal said.

    It was the worst insurrection ever.

    Not long after the Governor’s announcement, a Virginia teachers union came out and told everyone to stuff it. They’re not going back to work unless their demands are met. This is looking increasingly like a hostage negotiation where the children are the hostages. (Free Beacon)

    Fuck ’em. Fire their asses.

    bottlenecks in the supply chain caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are driving up prices and signaling a rise in inflation in the months ahead.

    It was the government that fucked everything up.

    “NEWS: South Dakota’s unemployment rate dropped to 3.0% in December,” Gov. Kristi Noem announced on Twitter Friday. “That’s lower than it was BEFORE the pandemic.”

    I like Kristi Noem.

    Good song. I thought the picture in the video was taken in Salzburger Dom. No, it’s not. This is the organ in Salzburger Dom.

    • R C Dean

      Biden also will put into place a ban on most non-US residents entering the country

      And he’s also lifting the ban on immigration from terrorist hot spots (tendentiously mislabelled the “Muslim ban”).

      So is the new policy no immigration from anywhere except terrorist hot spots?

      • R C Dean

        Oh, and I do wonder how they will square the circle of banning non-US residents from entering the country, and giving a path to citizenship to anyone from Latin America who crosses the border.

      • Ownbestenemy

        That is the beauty of it. The government no longer has to square it up. The media will do that for them.

      • juris imprudent

        And by do that you mean scream “RACIST” at anyone who questions it. Then stick fingers in their ears and run around going “la la la, I can’t hear you”.

      • mrfamous

        It’s called, “we’ll do whatever is in the best interests of the Democratic party, and if some folks don’t like the inconsistency of it all, tough titty toenails.”

      • juris imprudent

        Biden can propose all he wants – the chances of that even getting pushed by the Dems in Congress is minimal. In the Senate – hahahahaha.

  47. Sean
    • limey

      *burp*

      A little tough and gristly, but pairs well with a cheap vodka.

    • Count Potato

      LOL

  48. Mojeaux

    So, in my gut I understand why printing money is bad and makes prices go up. XY was opining that the money being handed out was good. I said it wasn’t, printing money, blah blah blah, raising prices, inflation, blah blah blah, but I never could explain it in a way that made sense to him. To be fair, I can’t define words I use, either. I just know how to use them and they’re too much for the kids to glean from context, so this is a ME problem, not a THEM problem.

    How can I explain inflation in 15-year-old boy terms so as to make him understand Printing Money Is Bad?

    • The Other Kevin

      Does he collect anything? Baseball cards, comics, coins? (I’m dating myself here, I know). Those are a good way to demonstrate that the less rare something is, the less value it has.

    • mrfamous

      Food. No matter how much money you have to buy food, you can’t buy more food than there is food available.

      There has to be an equilibrium between the money available to purchase goods and the amount of goods available. If you increase money without increasing available goods, the price of the available goods will have to rise or you will run out of them.

      What’s going on with our money supply is obviously more complicated than that (by design), but that’s the core dynamic: productivity drives wealth, not money.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        How can I explain inflation in 15-year-old boy terms so as to make him understand Printing Money Is Bad?

        Explain or convince?

        Explain:
        “Money isn’t magic, it’s a commodity like chickens or bags of flour. It’s subject to supply and demand just like any other good. If you add too much supply, the value of money decreases. This is inflation and is why things cost more over time. It didn’t always happen this way, but it is the standard these days.”

        Convince:
        Good luck. I doubt you can find many products that a 15 year old boy likes whose prices are primarily influenced by inflation. Most of the tech stuff is ruled by other factors.

      • Mojeaux

        Good luck. I doubt you can find many products that a 15 year old boy likes whose prices are primarily influenced by inflation. Most of the tech stuff is ruled by other factors.

        Yes, this is where I am. He can see no downside. The best I could possibly do is gas prices because he pays attention to those (lawnmowing), but then I’d have to explain regulation/government meddling, Greta Thunberg, etc. There are SO MANY external factors.

      • kinnath

        You have a good relationship with your local dealer. Decent weed at a decent price.

        One day, a new guy moves into the neighborhood. And his pockets are flush with cash. He meets your dealer and buys everything the dealer has. So you can’t buy anything.

        A few days later, the dealer has restocked, but now he has doubled the price on weed. The new guy doesn’t care, and still buys it all. Again, you can’t buy anything.

        Eventually, the dealer charges four or fives times as much as he originally did. The new guy buys a lot of it but not all of it. You now you can buy some, but only a little bit for whatever money you have in your pocket. Life sucks.

        More dollars chasing the same amount of product, means any given dollar is worth less (the product does not get more expensive).

      • Mojeaux

        That’ll work. Thanks!

      • R C Dean

        then I’d have to explain regulation/government meddling, Greta Thunberg, etc. There are SO MANY external factors.

        No need to get bogged down in that. The amount of money spent on gasoline will not really change much as a percentage of the money supply. If that means gasoline is $3.00/gallon now, increasing the money supply by 50% means it will be $4.50/gallon.

        If he starts pursuing this with reasons why that won’t happen or isn’t a bad thing, congratulations, you’ve got him thinking about economics.

        From the other end, you could point out that as the supply of anything increases, the price of that thing goes down (assuming demand is static). Rather than him buying gasoline with dollars, think of the filling station buying dollars with gasoline. The amount of gasoline they will exchange for a dollar will go down as the supply of dollars increases, just as the amount of dollars you would exchange for a gallon of gasoline will go down if the supply of gasoline increases.

      • Fatty Bolger

        Yes, supply and demand, that’s how I explained it to my kids and they all got it. If there’s more money, then money is worth less. If there’s less money, then money is worth more.

    • Brochettaward

      The simplest way I can think of explaining it is that there are a finite set of resources out there. Increasing the demand for goods and services without an increase in the supply is going to cause prices to rise. If there’s more money circulating, demand rises but the supply does not keep up. Raising the costs of goods. I mean, economists make this shit sound way more complicated, but that’s the gist of it.

    • wdalasio

      Maybe,

      “Prices rising sound fine if wages keep pace. I could see where maybe it wouldn’t be a problem, if, say, you spent your money right away. But, think about this. Let’s say your friends spent their allowance (or pay from their job) going out to the movies. But, you wanted to save up and buy yourself a car. Well, the problem is, while your friends would still have the terrific time at the movies, you’d never get that car. Every bit you put away gets shrunk by inflation. To bad for you. You just sit in your room like a sucker while your friends go to the movies.”

    • KromulentKristen

      There was a scene in one of the Hitchhiker’s books about people using leaves (from trees) as currency. I’ll see if I can track down which book.

      • mrfamous

        I think it was the third one. The joke was that the idiots on pre-historic Earth kept doing random stupid things, and by accident these things were essential to their continued survival. For example, because the leaves were being used as money, people were stuffing their clothing full of leaves. This allowed many of them to survive a harsh winter due to the insulation the leaves provided.

        IE, he was making a joke about natural selection: that humans evolved from these stupid people, not because they had some innate positive trait, but due purely to dumb luck.

      • DEG

        Yes, there was.

        And the Golgafrinchams (sp?) decided to burn down whole forests in order to get inflation under control.

        What could possibly go wrong?

      • mrfamous

        Right. But the joke was, it didn’t go wrong, it went completely right, but simply by accident instead of any particular insight on their parts. Basically every stupid thing they did wound up accidentally saving them.

    • Ownbestenemy

      Apply Brooks + TOK lines of thoughts and I think you might be able to drive that point home.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Money is not wealth.

      Define wealth first. Wealth is resources, wealth is comfort, wealth is lifestyle.

      Money facilitates the trade of wealth. Increasing the available money without an increase in overall wealth (productivity and assets) simply makes everything cost more by making the unit of money worth less.

      Put in a very simplistic fashion, let’s say I have $1,000,000 in wealth (assets) and $1,000,000 in cash in the year 2020 when the money supply is $1,000,000,000,000.

      In 2021, the government doubles the money supply to $2,000,000,000,000. Now my assets are worth $2,000,000 and the relative value of my cash is $500,000, because the overall wealth hasn’t changed but the money supply has.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Sorry, the last sentence should be

        “the amount of my cash hasn’t changed, but it is worth half what it was in terms of wealth”

    • Tulip

      Use an auction as a metaphor. Say, 10 people and 5 things to bid on. Everyone starts with 100 dollars and people start bidding. Then everyone is given more cash. What happens to the the prices? Did you actually get more stuff? There’s still only 5 things. Are you better off?

      This would at least show that this doesn’t help. Then a few days later you can talk about how it can make people worse off. For example, the government doesn’t give everyone the same amount. Etc.
      For that look at what happened in Bolivia or Brazil. People were getting paid 2x per day because they had to go spend the money before it eroded.

    • Nephilium

      There’s several economic board games that model it in certain ways, but if he’s not interested in board games, probably a hard sell.

    • Surly Knott

      I think Suthen came up with the best example.
      You need, say, 75 feet of 2×4 lumber to construct a project. That’s resources and needs/wants.
      The government comes along and creates more inches, and thus more feet. But that isn’t done with resources, it’s done with the measure.
      Creating more inches/feet means adding them to the measuring devices.
      Now your needs/wants haven’t changed, the resources haven’t changed, but the measure has. And what now measures as 75 feet of 2×4 lumber is smaller than then resources you need for your project. That’s inflation at work.
      [I’ve elaborated a bit on Suthen’s short post, but the ideas are his.]

    • Cannoli

      My Dad liked to use the example of the Gilligan’s Island episode where they find gold on the island, start charging each other thousands of dollars per meal, then botch their escape attempt because everyone snuck their gold onto the boat and it sinks.

    • Charlie Suet

      Where ignorance is bliss ‘‘tis folly to be wise.

      Kinder to bring your children up as socialists, since that what they’ll be getting anyway.

    • Agent Cooper

      Get him a job.

  49. Pope Jimbo

    Uffda. The Feds are going to throw a shit ton of money ($300M) to bail out Minnesoda colleges and universities. This is on top of $148M they already got.

    The only bright spot might be a big fight between the university administrations and the students. I’m sure the administrators will want to use all that money to save (if not expand) the diversity staff and other phony baloney jobs. The students have their own ideas though.

    Students are also calling on Minnesota State to buy more laptops and Wi-Fi hot spots for those learning online, invest in mental health services and refund students for a 3% tuition hike that took effect this spring semester.

    • rhywun

      Poor dears.

    • Mad Scientist

      Refund? Why bother even worrying about the cost of college now? Just keep borrowing and wait for Uncle Joe to forgive the loan.

  50. The Late P Brooks

    Today, on the news-

    The scrupulously! fastidiously! apolitical Federal Reserve Bank is busily telling anyone who will listen about the dire need for a massive Pandemic Porkfest. Now, more than ever.

  51. The Late P Brooks

    How can I explain inflation in 15-year-old boy terms so as to make him understand Printing Money Is Bad?

    If you tear a ten dollar bill in half, it doesn’t become twenty dollars. It’s still just ten.

    • Mojeaux

      It’s still just ten.

      It seems to me that it’s nothing because no one will accept half a $10 bill. (In the past I’ve had trouble unloading a taped one and an otherwise nearly-destroyed one.)

      • But Enough About [this space intentionally left blank]

        Huh.

        In Canada, the banks will accept any portion of a bill as long as the serial number is intact and readable. Their job is to get that damaged bill out of circulation, replacing it with an undamaged one.

    • Endless Mike

      This reminds me of the Piaget Experiments – they had young children tell them if portions were equal (graham crackers was one of the methods)
      The kids were happy to have 2 each 1/4 pieces of graham cracker to the adults 2 each 1/2 pieces because they both had two.
      They still had a graham cracker they could eat, but their “2” graham crackers was worth the same as the adult’s “1”. The point being it takes kids a while to develop spatial relation perception.

      Look at Trevor at 2:21 – he WATCHES her break his graham cracker in half, but he’s cool with it because now he has two.
      https://sites.google.com/a/bhmschools.org/piaget-experiments/group-4

      Maybe it’s not just kids…

  52. The Late P Brooks

    As usual, I’m too lazy to provide details, but what are the chances of a Biden administration investigation into, and prosecution of, massive corruption in a national union similar to what the Trumpistas inflicted on the UAW?

    • Pope Jimbo

      Maybe that is why that pipefitters union endorsed Biden? Biden told them that if he won and they didn’t endorse him, the NLRB would be auditing their books?

      I’m sure almost every big union leadership would throw their members under the bus to avoid any scrutiny in how those dues are used.

  53. The Late P Brooks

    And- to expand a bit, I’m going to say that’s why (contra any theatrical press releases about “lost jobs”) the folks at the top of the union pyramid are perfectly delighted with the prospect of four or more years of Biden/Harris Democracy.

  54. Rebel Scum

    This should be fun.

    Dominion Voting Systems sues Giuliani over election claimsBy COLLEEN LONG Associated PressThe Associated PressWASHINGTON

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Dominion Voting Systems filed a defamation lawsuit on Monday against Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who led the former president’s efforts to spread baseless claims about the 2020 election.

    The lawsuit seeks more than $1.3 billion in damages for the voting machine company, a target for conservatives who made up wild claims about the company, blaming it for Trump’s loss and alleging without evidence that its systems were easily manipulated. Dominion is one of the nation’s top voting machine companies and provided machines for the state of Georgia, the critical battleground that Biden won and which flipped control of the U.S. Senate.

    Yeah, sure…

    • robc

      Can you use a sort of Streisand Effect as a defense?

      Giuliani should argue that there was $0 damage because no one was familiar with Dominion before and now they are well knows and respected for the quality of their voting machines. At least, that would be my argument if they failed to turn up anything after going line by line thru the code.

      • Count Potato

        ” going line by line thru the code”

        Not going to happen.

    • Endless Mike

      Truth is a defense against a defamation suit – the discovery phase may end up biting Dominion in the ass.

      • R C Dean

        I’m thinking that unless Dominion is squeaky clean, top to bottom, inside out, this was really stupid. Rudy had no basis for discovery before, but he damn sure does now.

      • BakedPenguin

        I’m guessing they’ve already scrubbed and re-written the code to make it look clean.

        Then again, considering the overall sloppiness with which they conducted the fraud, they may have well just stepped in it.

      • robc

        I would be asking for a digital copy of their source code repository (git, subversion, cvs, whatever) so you could see all the changes made.

        Discovery will be the interesting part of the trial.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        I’m guessing they’ve already scrubbed and re-written the code to make it look clean.

        All it takes is one machine or one thumb drive sitting in some warehouse somewhere, and that all comes crumbling down.

    • Charlie Suet

      Them quoting that “Big Lie” description on the first place is quite striking.

      • Charlie Suet

        Page not place

    • rhywun

      I see the DNC is still getting the AP to write its press releases for them.

    • ignoreLander

      “former president’s efforts to spread baseless claims about the 2020 election”

      “a target for conservatives who made up wild claims about the company”

      “alleging without evidence that its systems were easily manipulated”

      “one of the nation’s top voting machine companies”

      Holy shit is this really an article from AP? For real? This is so over the top it truly looks like the Bee (I know people say that too much but it really does read like parody).

      This is what passes for reporting over there? It’s way worse than I thought.

    • limey

      Oh boy. How do you split the vote between a “Patriot Party” Trump ticket, and Rand finally being on the Republican ticket? Democrats would be all over that.

    • mrfamous

      I’m glad he laid into Stephanopoulos. “You’re a lying liar who lies” should be called out for idiocy it is every time it’s tried.

    • Pope Jimbo

      Every headline I saw about that appearance was “RAND PAUL REFUSES TO ACCEPT ELECTION RESULTS!!!!”

      And everyone buried Rand’s quote of “I voted to certify the results because I don’t think it is appropriate for Congress to overturn them, but I think we should investigate the results more thoroughly” way down at the bottom of the story.

  55. Mojeaux

    I was thinking last night.

    The problem with the entire political spectrum and, well, human interactions boils down to one thing:

    “Those people over there are icky.”

    • limey

      [richardattenboroughintenseapplause.gif]

  56. Rebel Scum

    She hasn’t been unpersoned for having the audacity to have been Trump’s press-sec?

    Sarah Huckabee Sanders is running for governor of Arkansas in the 2022 election, CBS News has confirmed. She announced her campaign in a video posted to her Twitter account Monday.

    In the nearly eight-minute-long announcement, Sanders highlighted her tenure serving as White House press secretary under former President Donald Trump and called for an end to violence and return to peaceful protest.

    “With the radical left now in control of Washington, your governor is your last line of defense. In fact, your governor must be on the front line. So today I announce my candidacy for governor of Arkansas,” Sanders said. “As governor, I will defend our right to be free of socialism and tyranny, your Second Amendment right to keep your family safe and your freedom of speech and religious liberty. Our state needs a leader with the courage to do what’s right, not what’s political correct or convenient.”

    • Brochettaward

      your governor is your last line of defense. In fact, your governor must be on the front line.

      Expert communicator.

    • Swiss Servator

      ATTENTION SUGARFREE. SugarFree to the red courtesy phone, please.

    • SugarFree

      “A Chicken in Every Pot, A Pie for Any Governor”

  57. Count Potato

    “If you haven’t read The Amistad Project’s report on Zuckerberg’s Center for Tech and Civic Life, you need to read it. Will explain a lot about what happened in battleground states in 2020”

    https://twitter.com/nedryun/status/1353338010809495553

    https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/20428534/hava-and-non-profit-organization-report-final-w-attachments-and-preface-121420.pdf

    A very long read about Facebook using their money and data gathering.

  58. Pope Jimbo

    I have an uncle who is a pro-union Democrat who worked at a Koch refinery almost his entire life. He will tell you that his union allowed him to have a six figure salary with just a high school degree. He’s pretty sensible about it.

    He’s been upset with the Dems since the Obama years. Mostly because of pipelines and other stuff involved in policies around oil and refining. It is the classic case of him being conservative about stuff that he knows a lot about. He’s beside himself about the greenies fighting pipelines. According to him it is a disaster in the making. Rather than build a new safer pipeline they are going to either keep using the old pipeline until it breaks or switch to more rail cars (which he will tell you are all owned by Soros/Buffet).

    He was also upset by the demonization of the Koch brothers. He’s met both of them and thinks they are great. Sure they are tight fisted bastards, but that is to be expected of a good owner. They are good businessmen though and treat the union as a respected partner.

    Interesting to talk to him. Spend an hour talking about oil with him and you realize no one arguing about these pipelines really knows what the hell they are talking about.

    • Mojeaux

      Spend an hour talking about oil with him

      Which brings me to something else I was pondering last night: Time to go back into oil futures?

      A. Yes – oil becomes more dear, but still used
      B. No – the greenies succeed in getting oil regulated out of existence

      Yes, I know this ties in with the The Talk About Inflation, but right now I’m eyeballing my savings account and getting itchy for market play again. (Don’t worry, Mr. Mojeaux would never let me do that.)

      • But Enough About [this space intentionally left blank]

        The Greens can’t regulate hydrocarbons (oil or natgas) out of existence; too much of the stuff they like is made out of either oil or natgas. Our use of dead dinosaurs for fuel could grind to a halt tomorrow, but we’d still be using millions of barrels of oil (Hell, even electric cars need synthetic rubber tires) and millions of gigajoules of natgas every day.

    • Ownbestenemy

      Its been terrible here in Vegas. We flaunt the rules so our kids get to see girlfriends, friends, etc but not all of their friends’ parents are on the same page. Both teens, who have solid peer groups, are now asking if they can talk to someone about what they are going through.

      It is beyond fucked.

  59. The Late P Brooks

    It seems to me that it’s nothing because no one will accept half a $10 bill. (In the past I’ve had trouble unloading a taped one and an otherwise nearly-destroyed one.)

    You’re being too literal. Maybe I should have used a stock split as the example. It’s just pieces of paper. More pieces of paper do not, in and of themselves, represent an increase in value or purchasing power.

    • Mojeaux

      I understood what you meant. XY is extremely literal. The first thing he would say is, “You can’t spend half a $10 bill” and then tune out of the conversation (even though he asked).

      • Ownbestenemy

        You have one of those too!? You know how many times I sent my oldest to the store and said give me back the change and I get the coins and not the bills? Little bastard.

      • Mojeaux

        I’m not quite sure when he’s doing it on purpose to derail a conversation he doesn’t want to have or when he’s really thinking of whatever in literal terms.

        The “well ackshually”s in my house are eyeball deep and we’re trying to break him of it. “There is no boss in the world who’ll put up with that more than once.”

      • Ownbestenemy

        Youngest teen is an “I know” and “That’s not what is wrong” kid. He will be the one that gets canned day one on the job. My guess is yours has learned that applying literal terms will get them out of conversations that start to go beyond the scope of what they want to know.

      • Mojeaux

        My guess is yours has learned that applying literal terms will get them out of conversations that start to go beyond the scope of what they want to know.

        That, too, but he tries to get out of conversations where he is forced to look at his responsibility for any given situation he’s gotten himself into.

        And he is also an “I know” person.

        I see a lot of things going on in him (not just the “well ackshually”s and “I know”s) that I had problems with as a kid/adolescent/20something, but mine weren’t nearly so severe/pervasive and still got me in trouble. It was when I got on the internet and found out there were lots and lots of people smarter than I that I started to sit back, relax, and learn.

        Usenet’s “Call for references!” was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

        I mourn that in terms of politics because now there are no references that will satisfy an opponent. I have managed to do it once in the Facebook era, and that was because it was actual legislation and I could pull from the primary source.

  60. robc

    GME opened at $98, immediately dropped into the 80s, and is now above $130!!!

    • robc

      I don’t know why I am enjoying something I am making $0 off of. I actually owned some GME stock many years ago, but sold it a long long while back.

      • robc

        GME has already had trading halted once today. I expect another circuit breaker to be hit soon.

      • Mojeaux

        Dafuq?

        How? Corona keeping everyone at home?

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Short squeeze that has gone bananas.

      • Mojeaux

        Thanks.

      • robc

        This has nothing to do with fundamentals. It is a short squeeze and maybe a bit of manipulation to get it started.

        Short interest is over 100% of shares outstanding, over 200% of float.

        Or it was, the shorts are getting slaughtered. Hedge funds are freaking out.

      • robc

        If you shorted, for example, a 1000 shares at $19 hoping to make an easy $10,000 bucks or so as it declined to below $10 in the next year, you are looking at losses over $100,000 right now.

        And it will still happen, but few to zero shorts will be able to outlast this.

      • robc

        There were about 70MM shares short as of the end of the year.

        So that is roughly $7B+ dollars lost by the shorts this month.

      • robc

        Volume this morning is already 77MM shares traded.

    • Brochettaward

      It’s been stated already, but if they were actively attempting to make coronoa as painful as possible to get rid of Orange Man Bad, they’d have done nothing differently than what they did. See California, the largest state economy in the country, suddenly re-opening.

      • Viking1865

        Yep. They did it on purpose, and it worked like a dream.

      • Idle Hands

        The problem is they just completed the largest punctuated economic shift since the industrial revolution in 9 months and they think people are just going to go back after they made the necessary lifestyle adjustments on the new normal for the foreseeable future.

      • Idle Hands

        some of the mos t ardent branch covidians in my facebook feed are no longer talking about how unsafe it is to go back to normal but how awesome things are for them and their companies working remote this change in narrative has been occurring the last week.

      • kbolino

        Trump was never going to win California. That state is almost entirely responsible for Clinton’s margin in the 2016 popular vote. Shutting down California to go after Trump doesn’t even rise to the level of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

      • Pope Jimbo

        It might not have had any real impact on the Trump’s chances in Cali, but Newsome has designs on higher office in the future. If you want to run for Pres in 2024, you can’t be a Rona denier.

        I’m pretty sure that any Dem governor trying to run in 2024 would get roasted in the primary debates if they didn’t get their authoritarian emergency dictator groove on. In fact, I’m sure the candidates will brag about how they singlehandedly shut their states down and ruled with an iron hand.

  61. Mojeaux

    Bitcoin’s holding steady around $33-34k. There was a slight bump before the election. I don’t know what I’m expecting it to do now, because I thought it would head up relatively sharply post-election.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Given the structural disaster that is the US Dollar right now due to the ballooning debt, do you think there is any chance at all that the US government will not take serious action to prevent an actual alternative to the USD?

      Personally, I think the US government is willing to slaughter an entire nation in order to protect the fiction that is the dollar.

      • Mojeaux

        That probability escaped my thought process, sadly.

  62. Count Potato

    “Media skepticism toward free expression actually began long before the Capitol riot – and before Trump was elected. The New Yorker’s Kalefa Sanneh anticipated the rising ambivalence toward the existing First Amendment regime when he likened “speech nuts” to “gun nuts” in a 2015 essay. Today, support for the mainstream American free speech norms of earlier, less-Trump-addled times is increasingly cast as a kind of sinister eccentricity, as when Slate declared in the days after the Capitol assault that “We have come to a moment in which one half of the country is fighting to be free of crippling, life-ending acts of stochastic terror, while another half of the same country is chillingly preoccupied with their right to just talk shit.”

    How chilling, to be preoccupied with one’s individual rights—or at least to not understand that the legitimacy of one’s constitutionally guaranteed freedoms depends on the “moment” that “we” might be “in.” Sanneh wasn’t quite so sneering, and in the end he predicted that custom would override any late-breaking sense of national emergency: “Perhaps America’s First Amendment, like the Second, is ultimately a matter of national preference,” he mused. In any case, Sanneh wasn’t calling for anyone to suffer criminal penalties for protected speech.

    Sanneh’s seeming lack of enthusiasm for fining or jailing people who disagree with him is getting less common among members of a media class determined to show that “enemies of the state” are its enemies, too. In a 2019 Washington Post opinion piece, Richard Stengel, the former managing editor of Time magazine and co-author of The Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela’s now-classic autobiography, argued that the U.S. was in need of hate speech laws, contending that “the First Amendment … should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.” As the Biden administration’s transition team leader for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, he will no doubt find plenty of support for his vision for state-regulated speech among a long list of regimes that journalists once professed to abhor.

    Here’s a look at other outlets and media figures who have gone into hall monitor mode, revealing themselves to be skeptics of the very system of law and custom that enables their profession to exist in the first place.”

    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/jounalists-against-free-speech

    It’s a long list.

  63. The Late P Brooks

    Yes, this is where I am. He can see no downside. The best I could possibly do is gas prices because he pays attention to those (lawnmowing), but then I’d have to explain regulation/government meddling, Greta Thunberg, etc. There are SO MANY external factors.

    *muses*

    If you flip the argument on its head, you can ask him what would happen if another lawn service or two popped up. Competitive sellers drive down prices. (Their exchange value in money)

    Double or triple the money supply, and those “competing” dollars drive down their exchange value in goods.

    • Mojeaux

      another lawn service or two popped up. Competitive sellers drive down prices

      So what happened was, we have a neighbor with a lawn service. He took XY under his wing and taught him everything he knows and Tom is the only person XY actually respects and will listen to. He does not want anything bad to happen to Tom. Tom now needs him to help quite a bit because Tom is old. Tom pays him a fair wage.

      When XY started mowing lawns on his own, I told him not to take Tom’s customers and not to underbid him. He asked why. I told him because Tom is old, he’s not going to be able to work much longer, he doesn’t charge enough for his services as it is (Tom’s fault, not XY’s), and, most importantly, that’s a shitty thing to do to your mentor.

      I told him there’s a delicate balance between charging what your labor is worth and underbidding someone just to get the job. He actually listens to me on that because I have the kind of job where I have to take all that into account and I’ve spoken of it before.

  64. The Late P Brooks

    Or you could offer to trade him some magic beans for his lawnmower.

  65. The Late P Brooks

    In a 2019 Washington Post opinion piece, Richard Stengel, the former managing editor of Time magazine and co-author of The Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela’s now-classic autobiography, argued that the U.S. was in need of hate speech laws, contending that “the First Amendment … should not protect hateful speech that can cause violence by one group against another.”

    “Telling people what we’re up to isn’t fair. They’ll get pissed off and try to stop us.”

    • Pope Jimbo

      Yup. The loudest voices advocating the curtailment of speech are the ones espousing opinions that don’t hold up in arguments.

      If those Trump Nazis are so dumb and stupid, why are you afraid to debate them? Could it be that maybe your arguments for a top down authoritarian government don’t do well?

      • Pope Jimbo

        They used to be able to simply shout “RACIST!” and shut down an argument. However, like super-gonorrhea, the rampant overuse of that tactic has made the deplorables immune to it.

    • juris imprudent

      People have no right to stop us, we are on right side of history (because after we crush you, we will write that history).

    • kbolino

      There is no one fit to judge what is and isn’t hate speech. There are people who will say, with a straight face, that “transgenderism is a mental illness” is hate speech but “TERFs deserve to die” is not.

      It is not a question of stopping hate or violence, it is only a question of giving selective sanction and reproach to different kinds of hate and violence.

    • Pope Jimbo

      I thought dogs could get the Rona too?

      What sort of monster would risk the lives of those heroic K-9 officers in such a reckless manner?

      Wonder what age in dog years the Rona becomes super fatal? And if the response to any questions about risking the dogs’ lives is “well we use young dogs that are pretty much immune to the Rona”, I would lose my shit given that that reasoning doesn’t hold water when talking about kids and schools.

  66. The Late P Brooks

    The problem is they just completed the largest punctuated economic shift since the industrial revolution in 9 months and they think people are just going to go back after they made the necessary lifestyle adjustments on the new normal for the foreseeable future.<

    Whaaa? That's ridiculous. The new captain just rings that bell thingy on the bridge next to the steering wheel, and calls down to the engine room, and it's "all ahead full" just like before the mutiny.

    • Idle Hands

      The economy is basically a light dimmer.

  67. The Late P Brooks

    Trump was never going to win California. That state is almost entirely responsible for Clinton’s margin in the 2016 popular vote. Shutting down California to go after Trump doesn’t even rise to the level of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

    Much as I find it difficult to believe in the supernatural, I find it difficult to believe in large, complex conspiracies perpetrated by shadowy cabals of political puppeteers.

    Opportunistic crookery and galactic self-serving idiocy and hubris are more believable.

    • Master JaimeRoberto (royal we/us)

      It’s probably more along the lines of “Trump said A, so we must say B and call it Science”.

    • Idle Hands

      sure but all the blue state’s stay at home orders being lifted in the immediate aftermath of the Biden inauguration is kind of interesting. Especially California’s we can’t show you the metrics we are determining it’s okay to do this because we wouldn’t want to confuse you excuse they are currently settling on. The political class and media need to be held personally responsible for this bullshit. I would not be surprised if we had multiple candidates run on that concept of holding some of these pols liable for the millions in losses suffered by business’s and their policies that caused pain and misery on an enormous scale and lead to excess deaths.

      • hayeksplosives

        Yo, slow your roll, dude.

        Trying to run against incumbent democrats is insurrection nowadays.

        They were duly elected once, and they shouldn’t have to be inconvenienced by doing so again.

        No take-backs.

    • R C Dean

      I think there was a consensus on the Democrat side that Trump couldn’t be beat if the economy was healthy, and the lockdowns had that as part of their motivation. There were other motivations, but I think that was definitely in the mix.

      It wasn’t about swinging any particular state, it was about undercutting him nationally. Economic lockdowns were absolutely not anyone’s plan for dealing with a pandemic coming into this thing. here was zero proof that they would work, public health doctrine was that they wouldn’t work, outside of a very local and unusual emergency. Which raises the question: why did they suddenly become everyone’s plan? T

      The sudden about-face when Biden was inaugurated, even though the pandemic is much worse than it was when the lockdowns were put in place, is hard to explain without some component being to take down Trump. Are there other reasons to lift the lockdown? Sure. But the timing is such that I can’t dismiss some

      • Chipwooder

        The timing is exactly right – those reasons to lift the lockdowns are the same reasons that existed before the inauguration. The only thing that has changed is the guy in the White House.

      • kbolino

        I think it’s simpler than that.

        The People Who Matter hate Trump. Trump lives rent-free in their heads as a caricature. Anything that can be seen as going after Trump is inherently Good. Even when they did something similar to what Trump said to do, if they said they did it because of “lack of political leadership from Washington” then it’s a Good Thing. The TV and mobile screens will dutifully build the narrative and TPWM will not consider for a second to go to YouTube or certainly not some far-right wing disinformation terrorist platform and find out for themselves. To these people, Trump is whatever Brian Stelter says he is.

        Newsom and most of the other governors are entirely surrounded by The People Who Matter (making the definition a bit circular). TPWM are neurotic, emotionally unbalanced, and immature. They live like Real Housewives but without a TV crew. Everything is a drama, and they are the lead characters in the Dramatis Personae. As protagonists of this noble struggle, they can rarely do wrong but are constantly beset by the forces of evil. If there is no Satan-Hitler, they will invent him. These are the people who make the Big Decisions and who staff the judiciary and legislative offices, executive agencies, corporate and nonprofit C-suite and boards, etc. There are enough of them, their apologists, and their groupies that they constitute a sizeable voting bloc. Keeping them appeased is of the utmost importance to today’s political class.

        And so, while hurting Trump is gratifying to them, feeling good about themselves is what it’s really about. Now that they are in euphoria over the Restoration of the Proper Establishment, their emotional needs are being fulfilled and sticking it to Bad Orange Man isn’t as important anymore.

        Forget Hanlon’s Razor. We need a new razor: never attribute to a carefully designed plan what can be adequately explained by the appeasement of mental toddlers.

      • kbolino

        I think Jimbo is right above when he says that the governors have aspiration to higher political office. What I wrote dovetails nicely with that; the path to higher office is paved by keeping even more of TPWM happy. Also, the TPWM don’t worry about making their next paycheck. “The economy” is an abstraction to them that only really affects other people (and, so far, they’ve been proved right). This does not mean they aren’t greedy; indeed, many of them are insatiably greedy. Rather it just means that they are not trading between putting food on the table or not, but instead between being merely a comfortable peasant and being a proper duke.

  68. hayeksplosives

    ”It’s an idea that’s out there that I think people are contemplating in the accountability space,” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) said.

    I keep reading this and wondering how to distill it into its plain meaning.

    Accountability space?

    Wtf?

    Just 15 years ago, even Tim Kaine would have wondered what that phrase meant, had it existed at that time.

    • trshmnstr the terrible

      In progspeak, accountability = punishing personal responsibility.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      From a man who has never been held accountable for anything

  69. The Late P Brooks

    Accountability space?

    Is that when you seal the exits of the safe space and fill it with water?

    • BakedPenguin

      No, it’s the comptroller’s office and all the bookkeepers around it.

  70. The Late P Brooks

    This just popped into my head. I’ll go ahead and stir it into the dying embers of this thread.

    The moral of the “Trump’s America” era:

    Hate the Player, not the Game