US Politics, December 2022: "They're now the working class party, man."

honestly i kind of enjoyed that washington post profile! worth it for this alone:

“People here do not like change,” said Connie Underwood, the clerk at the Citgo, explaining life in Fairmount one day. “Like if I moved the beef jerky, they’d get mad.”

yep

If we can't trust the jerky to be next to the sunflower seeds, who can we trust? And what is Citgo trying to distract us from by doing this?

Citgate

That Post profile does a great job conveying what life is like in that part of Georgia and why its politics are what they are

there's not nice gossip about the behavior of sh0r in the nyc tech/ds community (beyond the ludicrous NYT profile)

agreed by the low low standards of "let's talk to lobotomized swing voters because we're embarrassed that we don't live in real america" that was a solid piece.

“I feel like it’s like Game of Thrones, when everyone was fighting with each other over land and ignoring the Night King,” said Danielle Deiseroth, who replaced McElwee as interim executive director. “We have real fights we need to focus on and not this ongoing drama. The Republicans are the Night King.”

At least it’s not a Harry Potter reference.

could die happy never hearing HP's name ever again

“So the Republicans, they’re Valcheck. Progressive ideas, those are Frank Sobotka. The Greeks, uh, that’s Joe Manchin.”

So the vice president is the dead parrot, Biden is the pet shop man, and progressives are John Cleese in a fully-buttoned up plastic mac.

that rumor that mcelwee was betting on election results was something. just so many things dropping at the same time that blew up his spot

on certain days near christmas the washington post opinion section goes into really champagne mode

https://i.imgur.com/qY1DLd6.png

Petri's usually hilarious.

And the Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticised Zelenskiy for wearing green fatigues to Congress.

he should have gone naked with only a ball tanning light for modesty

Alfred, on this, we do not agree. but politically themed humor is a tough genre. even the best of it usually produces the stifled "hmph!" reaction in the nostril area, the one where something is kind of mildly amusing enough so we feel compelled to acknowledge it by hmph-ing some air out of noses. Petri is not horrible (she's no borowitz report) but it's not for me i guess

McArdle's still funny

i have a friend who still sends me links to borowitz reports captioned, inevitably, "😂", and would it surprise you to learn he is a a non-elected dem public relations official

i feel close to the end of 1984 where i finally want to believe in the borowitz report

i want to read the borowitz report and slap my knee hard

Oh, that Andy Capp Borowitz

had totally forgot it existed since i stopped reading facebook

😂

https://i.imgur.com/lbnzZ0J.png

😂

thats honestly slightly more of a recognizable joke than i recall them being

it's so funny because it's true!!!!

Petri can be funny; Borowitz is never funny.

the babylon bee-orowitz

Yes, Petri can be extremely funny. Borowitz has never been funny once.

cant believe you guys are out there reading washington post columnists, real sicko shit

it's how i keep my finger on the pulse of america

I versed Alexandra Petri in quiz bowl in high school

She was an aggressive player which meant that she got wrong answers for -5 points known as a “neg” a lot while still doing generally well, I think I awarded her at least one “neg prize” at a tournament

cant believe you guys are out there reading washington post columnists, real sicko shit

― lag∞n

some of us are sodomites too *shudder*

There is a masochism booth at Folsom Street Fair that just projects WashPo columns at a slow pace, fwiw.

"I Wrote A WashPo Column Just To Watch Democracy Die"

fwiw the only columnist I seek out is Jamelle Bouie

can't believe silby was out there negging columnists as a teen. some alpha shit

No way man I thought she was cute I was simping hardcore

game respect game

fwiw the only columnist I seek out is Jamelle Bouie

i used to find his linguistics podcast to be a pretty entertaining diversion and he just came off as a slightly out of his own time academic dork but yeah he has gone insane.

McWhorter has always had bad politics. I think he used to keep it more separate from his academic linguistics writing, but having a perch as a NYT columnist means that his entire worldview is laid bare in one place.

But yeah, he was blaming black people for being poor over 20 years ago.

https://books.google.com/books/content?id=UvMGxQrbQREC&pg=PP1&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U1m_iDKns0WJRXhQ-uId8uMiTj6WA&w=1280

In terms of WaPo columnists, I like Perry Bacon Jr.

xp There is mad bank to be made in telling white people what they want to hear.

i.e. the existence of Pete Buttigieg

i'm not sure anyone has a good idea of what a trump schism in the GOP would or will look like in practice, but i think it would probably involve stuff like this.

Charlie Kirk, the 29-year-old activist who leads Turning Point USA and a network of conservative affiliates, wrote with a warning.

In a Monday email to the 168 members of the Republican National Committee, he told them that donors and activists would desert the party unless it changed. The result, he said, would be colossal failure in the 2024 presidential election.

“How do we plan to win in 2024 if you so boldly reject listening to the grassroots, our donors, and the biggest organizations and voices in the conservative movement?” he asked in the message, which was obtained by The Washington Post. “If ignored, we will have the most stunted and muted Republican Party in the history of the conservative movement, the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.”

...
Kirk alerted the RNC members to a new initiative of his group’s political arm, Turning Point Action, that would seek to pick off RNC members deemed “disconnected with grassroot conservatives.”

He said the effort, called the Mount Vernon Project, will “recruit leaders to serve on the RNC and at the state level who wish to better represent the grassroots voice.”

The initiative, which was previously reported by Politico, is “funded graciously by donors who are vocally disenchanted” with the RNC’s members, Kirk wrote.

The project brings to the national stage a model of bare-knuckled politicking used by Turning Point in its home state of Arizona, where it has worked to purge GOP officials who stood in the way of Trump’s efforts to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election. Now, the focus is on the race for GOP chair, with Kirk saying at his group’s weekend summit in Phoenix: “Turning Point Action might remove members of the RNC if they vote incorrectly.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/23/charlie-kirk-rnc-ronna-mcdaniel-harmeet-dhillon/
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/12/20/tpusa-ronna-mcdaniel-rnc-chair-00074826

Turning Point Action further commented that the RNC has ruined the word "conservative" and that Kirk is forming a new splinter party called the Not C party.

LOL

Charlie Kirk's nickname in Trump World is "Fräulein Anna."

i left it out of that excerpt above because i didn't want to copy/paste a mountain of text, but a key part of it (was about Turning Point/Kirk's efforts to replace RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel with the supposedly more trump/fascist loyal Harmeet Dhillon. the politico link focuses on that.

but what's crazy is that Ronna McDaniel was _already_ a loyal trump fascist? the jan 6 report that was released last night talks about that. here she is just a couple weeks before jan 6:

But the report provides new details which tie the scheme to national party leadership.

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, for example, personally gave Trump an update on the fake elector effort on the evening of Dec. 14, the day that the slates all voted.

Her involvement was previewed on Monday, when the committee released the executive summary, which stated that Trump “solicited the RNC’s assistance with the scheme. McDaniel agreed to provide that assistance.”

The full report goes further. McDaniel’s message purportedly said that “President Trump’s electors voted” both in “states that he won” and also in six “contested states.” It’s a funny formulation — both a cop to Trump’s ego and a partial admission that the effort was all a sham.

Trump’s executive assistant replied to McDaniel 101 minutes later, the report says. “It’s in front of him!” she wrote.

Ronna's terrible and I support anything that makes her unhappy