8 thoughts on “Monday Open Thread”

1. The Slithergadee has crawled out of the sea.

   He may catch all the others, but he won’t catch me.

   No, you won’t catch me, old Slithergadee.

   You may catch all the others, but you wo–

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   1. Just curious … is that Slithergadee related to the dangerous Sugaree that Jerome J. Garcia & Robert C Christie Hunter warned us about???

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      1. Only Shel Silverstein knows for sure.

          

         But as far as Sugaree goes, the Sippie Wallace version was the best.

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2. So how do we make 'The Big Lie' useful to the present and the future?

   Defeat every politician we can who believes in it starting with Tina Peters.

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3. Interesting turns of events in the Hanks – O'Dea contest are outlined in the Colorado Sun

   O’Dea, a wealthy, self-funding first-time candidate who owns a Denver construction company, has also hired a campaign manager with experience working on political races across the country. 

   “This nearly $325,000 tv and radio buy is the start of our June blitz,” said Zack Roday, the new campaign manager, whose resume includes a stint with former House Speaker Paul Ryan.  “We are ramping up our advertising and adding key staff to close out this primary strong.”

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4. Josh Marshall has an NYT Editorial: “Abortion rights is the Key to Dems winning in 2022“

   Alito’s trial balloon has the Republicans frothing at the mouth to ban abortions the moment the Supreme Court rules. This opens up the elections this Fall because Republicans are waaay over-reaching. Popular opinion on abortion rights is skewed dramatically in favor of the Democrats.

   Therefore, the Dems have an issue that unambiguously benefits them.

   No ambiguity, no haggling, no living in Senator Manchin’s head for a year. You give us this, and we’ll give you that. That tells voters exactly what will be delivered with a Democratic win. It also defines what constitutes a win: control of the House and two more Senate seats.

   The campaign message is clear: If you want to protect Roe, give us those majorities. If this is your passion, here’s where to channel that passion. These are the Senate seats we need to hold (in New Hampshire, Arizona, Georgia and Nevada) and here are the ones we need to win (in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and possibly in Ohio, Florida and North Carolina). With those commitments in hand, one question should be on the lips of every Democratic candidate. Will you make a firm commitment to never vote for a federal law banning abortion nationwide?

   Few, if any, Republicans would be able to make that pledge. And their evasions wouldn’t just make them look ridiculous; that would put squarely on the table the very real threat that Republicans would enact a nationwide abortion ban as soon as January 2025. That could prove enough to win Senate races in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio.

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5. Empty Greene hires ex-Brietbart provacateur Milon Yiannopolous as an UNPAID intern.

   This is a public service announcement that mis-spelling (remember Moran? and making stupid statements is intentionally designed to get the media to spread your message. BooBoo here in Colorado is just another example.

   Jared Holt, who has worked as a journalist and reporter covering extremism and far-right fringe groups for some time, grappled with this gray area well today in this piece on Substack, commenting on a point the “@LOLGOP” Twitter account made in a recent post about Greene: “Her job is to say something terrible every day so we do all her viral marketing for her.”

   The cruelty is the point. The shit-posting and the unintelligible language mix-ups (“gazpacho police,” “peach tree dish”) and the outlandish remarks and the racist scapegoating and the offensive legislating are all the point. And collective outrage about said remarks or policy points help fuel people like Greene and Trump and their bombastic self-serving skill sets.

   It keeps them in the headlines. AND it does the work necessary for riling up the most far-right extreme members of the Republican base so fanatically over non-existent issues (think: outrage over banned books and trans rights) that it makes a Republican vote at the polls a practice equivalent to and centered solely upon owning the libs.

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6. Paul Krugman has an OpEd on Dunning Krugerands: “CryptoCurrency Bubble Fraud“.

   As a number of analysts have pointed out, stablecoins may seem high-tech and futuristic, but what they most resemble are 19th-century banks, specifically U.S. banks during the “free banking” era before the Civil War, when paper currency was issued by largely unregulated private institutions. Many of these banks failed, in some cases due to fraud but mostly due to bad investments.

   What purpose, then, do these assets serve?

   You can ask the same question about crypto in general. I’ve been in a number of meetings in which skeptics ask, as politely as they can, what cryptocurrencies do that can’t be done more easily with more conventional means of payment. They also ask why, if crypto is the future, Bitcoin — which was introduced in 2009(!) — has yet to find any significant real-world uses. In my experience, the answers are always word salad devoid of concrete examples.

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