stillshimpy

She can't ever run for a lesser office again, stormy. She's spent her entire life in public service, she's going to have an eye on what this will mean to women who come after her. She cannot be seen to run for a lesser office as if she has learned her place. I mean, the woman has been through a lot to try and advance women, she can't compromise at this stage. As horrible as it is to even contemplate, after all the flatly made-up shit she had to weather throughout this, she's going to care how this will look historically.

Thank you, DeLurker and mustbekarma, I really needed that laugh. It's the "excessive misery!" that makes it art, really.

He also has the good sense to look scared in an overwhelming situation, so he has humility too. Pretty much, we missed out when we missed out on Rat/Cheese 2016 representing the GOP.

Truly, and that's why it's actually really important that she does go. If we have any kind of future in democracy here, it really is important for her to be seen as strong, unashamed, unbowed, unbroken....this is not the candidate that gets to be petty on any level. God help the woman, she's clearly going to try and do one more thing for the team.

Gah. I've just realized that I've been on edge all day, thinking that something would happen with the ACA just immediately and that if stepped away for too long, I wouldn't be around to help with some kind of "Halt!! Citizens Arrest!" outcry. I realize this is almost entirely insane on my part but I'm freaking out a little, clearly. 2017 thus far? Just delightful. On the upside, I'm bound to be dead from the stress or aging like someone who takes the office of presidency seriously, so I should probably go stare at a daisy or something for a while.

Okay, I have partially lost my mind. At 8:10 he states that people will have access for a year at minimum, if they sign up now. Then he goes on, at length and eventually speculates that they'll repeal it now and not have the law take effect for three years. So three years was his speculation so that will allow them to come up with their own plan in the interim thereby allowing them to repeal it, without it being an issue of taking people's insurance away. The 1 year of coverage was something he stated. I'm sorry guys, I thought I'd lost all hope already but apparently my hearing hadn't gotten word. As speculations go, it should be a good one. In a sane world where they wanted the appearance of keeping their word, while not callously fucking over the people they swear to serve. It really should be like that, so.....yeah. It won't in anything resembling any likelihood.

Edit to help avoid misunderstandings, I was wrong, it's one year. Details to follow. So, I'll go off to try and find this clip because it was in Trevor Noah's interview with Obama, I believe, since I swear that's the only one I've seen super recently but in it President Obama states something pretty key to remembering: the way the ACA is structured, it will take three years to dismantle it entirely. So even if it is repealed as the very first thing that they do, people who signed up by the last enrollment date (Obama was urging people to sign up) they would still have access to coverage for three years. That that was better than nothing. Now, let me see if I can find the freaking clip anywhere to back me up on that, but that's one source I'm willing to forgo the full vetting treatment on. Good news, I found it. Bad news, it's 22 minutes long. I'll report back with the minute mark for when it shows up because I'd like to make sure I'm not actively losing the tiny shreds of my mind that are left to me: http://www.cc.com/video-clips/zwlq5r/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-exclusive---barack-obama-full-interview

I'd vote for a better reality, personally, but then I already tried that and it didn't go very well, so perhaps a new reality? I suppose we could all be frogs in that scenario and one thing we can all say with one voice is, "Frog? Not my first pick for new realities, thank you." So as we're stuck in this one, what I wish would happen is someone -- someone who actually cared and holds elected office -- would make an official stink about all of the ways Trump is in violation of the constitution already. And there's a few "we should consider a section 8, maybe?" concerns too. I've been doing everything within my power to make that known to the people who speak for me. So that should be all elected officials, basically, as they are supposed to at least visit the constitution at Christmas, or something equally "sworn to serve" etc. stuff. Thus far that consists of five or so, so my wish for a reality in which everyone would do their damned jobs ethically is similarly looking a bit bust. The reality check better come soon or Frogs are going to win this round. Again.

By the way, that picture is from the beginning of November. I just didn't ever think the story was appropriate for the Soft Kitty thread for reasons relating to...clearly psychic vermin trying to hitch to the nearest port of call "rats always know to get off a sinkin' ship" type of vibes didn't really seem the stuff of mind cuddles.

Monster or redbull energy drink, I'd say. Larger than a can of Pepsi, smaller than Yorkie, not a very prosperous rat judging by his lack of girth. I think he must have crawled into my engine while I was parked near an office building, adjacent to a storage facility. Only reason being, he can't have been in there long and he seemed just about as pleased with the situation as I was, as his fur is standing pretty much straight out from his body. When we opened the hood, he just stood there and stared at us like that for a really long time which is not, I'm guessing, normal street-rat behavior. This will remain a guess, as sweet lords of mercy, I would prefer to do no further research on that. Plus, I wish I had an emoji to convey how equally "WTF is even happening now?" the eye that met mine through the windshield seemed to be saying. Trump's America, people, even the rats are freaked the hell out.

Awesome. I have a recruit for you: Answer to questions you will likely ask: 1. Yes, that is my car 2. The focus is so bad because I was using zoom from a distance of way-the-hell-away 3. Yes, he looks as traumatized as I felt 4. Yes, he's still alive, to the best of my knowledge as we just sort of raised the hood and fled the area for a good long while. 5. That peered out at me from around my windshield wiper blade area while I was sitting at a light and I got to drive home for ten minutes chanting, "You are not allowed to freak the hell out at 45 miles and hour, you are NOT allowed to freak the hell out at 45 miles per hour." 6. When I got home, I totally freaked out for at least ten minutes complete with the "ookie, that is ookie and icky, and yucky and..." dance of "I've discovered the fountain of youth, apparently it lies in freaked out disgust and will turn you into a nine-year-old. 7. Yeah, yeah, back to politics. Enough about our Rodent Fantasy Football league.

Oh, that's just wonderful. The side that benefited hugely from people believing fake news is now saying the real news is fake. I'm sitting here eating this ludicrously healthy lunch, carrots, broccoli, black-eyed peas and barley, I should swap that the fuck out for twinkies and bourbon so at least the coroner will be able to find some reason when I inevitably perish from an apoplectic event brought on by these horrible human beings, who want to take health care away from people while having no plans for what those people are supposed to do in the meantime. Die, I guess. Seriously, I'd give him five years off my actual freaking lifespan to try and help him keep it up. Also, is that a tiny rodent wearing a football helmet in your avatar?

Yeah, I know, there's no direct rebuttal of the numbers, but then that seems to be because there was no accurate source for those numbers in the first place. Don't get me wrong, I gave money to Jill Stien's recount efforts -- sure, she's a conspiracy theory pandering lunatic herself but she could file the request for the recounts so....any port in this shit storm, was my mindset -- and I can't track down an accurate source on those numbers anywhere. Can you guys? The initially reported "5,000 vote adjustment" seems to have been the misreport, that the error was caught on election night and corrected. Frankly, it's just freaking galling that we can't get information that we know to be accurate, partially because journalists don't bother to fact check in their rush to report. They are so anxious to get a scoop, they don't do due diligence before sharing things as facts. Also, I will never understand why we have to announce on election night, or the next morning, who won the bloody thing when all votes have yet to be tallied. In Australia this year they had a very close (and equally dismaying in the results, by the way) election. You know what they did? They all settled their asses down for a nearly 8 week "we won't know until everything has been counted" result. I guess part of the reason I'm not as "where did the votes go??" is that....where's the source on that initial information? Where's the backup on that? I've spent a lot of time saying that I can't believe that the right-wing of conservatism allowed themselves to be fooled by fake news. That's part of the reason that unless I'm finding actual backup of the initial report, I'm not going to get as het up over that as I am over the fact that our system is setup (projections are the same as results! Woooooooo! Wait...what? That's not accurate, look at our fucking polls for why that's a really stupid idea) to pretty much guarantee that we hardly ever really know the real numbers. Partially because we have a system that says we don't have to wait for them....and that's just baffling as hell. We may have ADHD'd ourselves into a Trump presidency. But I do know that in the days following the beginning of the recount efforts, I saw reports from that same site linked to above (politicususa.com) that were not accurate and that its factual rating is listed as "mixed" because it does tend to sensationalize and misrepresent. I hate that I am stuck in the position of having to fact check our alleged news sites but that's the gig. Since all the journalists seemed to have shuffled off the truthful coil and fucking died, we're all turned into fucking cub reporters. My journalism prof practically lit a candle at an altar after I was out of his life because -- note the wordiness -- I am not suited to journalism by my personal writing style. I really kind of resent having to fact-check the shit out of everything and I sincerely hate that too often that entire exercise turns into a snake eating itself because hardly anything matches up anywhere. On that particular one, it isn't that I'm putting such faith in Snopes, although they tend to be pretty good, but rather that I can't find anything to substantiate the original claims....and apparently neither could snopes. The words misrepresented and misreported are two indicators of that. It truly isn't that I'm saying, "That's bullshit and don't believe it" it's that I'm saying, "I can't find multiple, independent sources on that one....and apparently neither could snopes." Has anyone? Other than that same "this number, that number, these numbers!" I can't find anything that substantiates where that came from in the first place. It's genuinely such an awful feeling to have to cross-check and cross-reference the hell out of things that are reported as news. I'm doing their freaking job, they're making bank and I'm getting a headache trying to separate the truth from the exaggerations and to find out which exaggerations were part of fabrications. So I won't forget it either, but for rather different reasons.

Here's the Snopes on that, candall. Basically, all furor stopped because the initial information released was not actually all that accurate. ETA: There was a lot of money to be made in this "fake, misrepresented and sensationalized" news game in this election. So whenever I see something that makes me say "Whaa......?" I run a trustworthiness check on the site and then try to find articles that back them up. The debunking link was the first one to show up in my search. So there was an adjustment at one precinct in Wisconsin but it isn't quite that obviously indicative of fraud.

In case anyone needs help in the "finding out who your representative is" department, here you go:

Heh. Okay, so that's actually my banner picture here and on Facebook and I feel like I should probably credit the real estate agent's post that I originally lifted it from a while back. Then I realized, it likely wasn't his in the first place and might have actually been formed by the thoughts milling about in the ether: "Let's kick 2016 off a cliff." The Graphic that our collective will formed. I couldn't make it through the Obama pictures because I felt such crushing sadness throughout. President Obama is a man who exudes decency, compassion, he got a lot done, navigating terrible roadblocks and disrespect at every turn. He wasn't a perfect president but I knew in my heart of hearts that he actually cared deeply about people. The American people, people in general, the people of the globe. That he took his responsibility to us very seriously and knew that our safety and well-being could be positively or negatively influenced by every action he took, every word he shared. He was careful with that responsibility. I'm going to miss him, just in general, not just because Creep à l'orange is currently engaged in trying to provoke a man who is pretty much the blueprint for an unstable dictator with absolutely no regard for his own people.

This is still randomly cracking me up. Truly, as these people who yodeled about the greatest generation, yadda yadda "Man it was good to be a white guy...and pretty much no one else" voted for someone who has a lot of accurate comparisons to the rise of the Third Reich I honestly have wondered, "Um....do you actually understand which side that generation was fighting against? Because there's some present-day evidence to suggest that you kind of don't...." Revisionist history for everyone!! And you get misled, and you'll get misled....and you....It's like the worst Oprah special ever.

Thank you, PastyandEddie, I can honestly say I'm not often told I put something succinctly (or concisely) ;-) Could be my habit of always using 15 words when 3 would likely do, but that was a super kind thing to say and I appreciate it. You're absolutely right, izabella, that is another factor. As are the single-issue voters who would have voted for Beelzebub if it meant fewer regulations in the banking industry. Or looked at the last eight years of obstructionist government and decided this "He's an outsider!" (and that also means he has no fucking clue how to do any of this....oh what giddy prospects that brings with it....WASF) was a selling point that they would take any nasty terms of service agreement addition to try and see if that would help. The single-issue voter played a big part and I'm not very good at guessing their motivations. I should add, I did not tell my friend, "Don't say that, it's racist" I told her a version of "don't say that because the Orient was a trade route, so that's why objects, such as rugs can be called Oriental but people are......" I didn't tag it with any shaming words. There's actually no sin in being ignorant of anything. The problem comes in when people reject learning new things or take not knowing something as a mark against our own intelligence. It never will be. None of us can know everything that is to be known. We're all going to be learning throughout the course of our lives and we are all, if we are lucky enough to live that long, going to be the dinosaurs to future generations. Everything we believe right now is likely to grow, evolve and change, hopefully for the better and we will all look positively quaint and backward to those that come after us. It pays to be kind when encountering it in others because man, we are all going to be in that hot seat sooner or later, as the world changes around us.

I pulled this quote because it's the sentence that got me thinking about something: absolutes in any direction, any form of inflexible thinking is kind of the way this stuff happened rather than "if everyone else would just shape up and be more like me, we'd have a better world" because everyone believes the way they do things is the right way and others should follow suit. They are just as convinced that however they do things is how things just ought to be done. Realistically, part of the reason people are constantly shoving phones into the hands of tiny children is that it gets them to be quiet and well-behaved in public. Same reason I always had toys, or a book, or moms used to carry giant diaper bags packed with stuff you hoped would keep your kid quiet enough in public so that you wouldn't be running the gauntlet of disapproving stares everywhere you went, lest your kid act too kid-like in public. It also helps give parents a freaking break. People on dates, at dinner, just constantly attached to phones like to have a social buffer between themselves and others. There really are a whole host of reasons that people do things and it usually isn't just down to one thing. For every "I just don't want my kid to scream the restaurant down around us, okay?" parent, there's going to be one that just wants to put their kid on pause for their own sake. There are a lot of complex reasons that go into that, some of it has to do with the constant fear of judgment that our "never read the comments" social media world both instills in people and instigates at the same time. People seeking to engage while also trying to insulate themselves from others. It's this contradictory thing but it plays a part. I think that historians -- if we actually make it that far -- will have a field day breaking down the reasons this shit show has happened. There's going to be a lot to it. For instance, why did journalists feature so much Trump material? A big reason is ratings. Hardly anyone under forty watches TV in any conventional sense any longer. Hell, the only people I know who have cable TV are older than fifty (or big sports enthusiasts as that's one of the few things that still benefits from "I tune in live, quite easily" ). People who stream everything hardly ever saw any actual political ads or commercials for anything. I saw exactly one and it was while we were out to dinner. God knows what it was saying, but I glanced behind the bar and a cartoon Hillary Clinton was rampaging around with a chainsaw on the TV. I'm not kidding. It was such a case of "What the fuck was that?" and it was almost absurdly sinister. It made me laugh because I thought "who in the world is that gullible?" Apparently lots of people. Then I end up with the knowledge that I'm clearly a little naive myself, as I did not believe people full-grown people could be convinced of such idiocy. One segment of the vote that Trump just wrapped up with a bow was the senior citizen vote. Trump's Graying Army, as The Atlantic termed them. I'm truly not seeking to demonize senior citizens, either, but just as in the above quote: they are more easily convinced of conspiracies and are actually a segment of the population targeted for fraud a lot of the time because it's part of the aging process: aging people are very attracted to being told what they already want to think. This is also a group with a lot of internalized misogyny because they've witnessed a sea change in the world during their lifetimes and some don't like that. They are also treated as being less and less important by those around them and because we're social creatures that tend to group by type, there have been a lot of studies about how that also adds to views of anything that sparks the "that's an Other" designation. That's not to say all seniors are racist either, just that Trump killed in a particular segment of the population who didn't mind hearing racist, sexist things constantly because they'd likely heard them as children. Heard people they loved growing up saying worse. They weren't the natural disqualifiers that they were for people brought up in places where objectifying women into a menu of body parts or calling people from other places horrible names was called out as bad. Then they are also the group that was most likely to see those ads I just referred to. The most likely to tune into TV news broadcasts. That's going to be one part of what the hell just happened. There's bound to be some bright-eyed doctoral student who, having shed her body weight in tears over the last month, will now commence a long thesis on the workings of internalized misogyny in America because that played a big fucking role in this too. The positively idiotic things people convinced themselves Hillary Clinton had done is almost hilarious....except for how now that Woman Hating Tangerine Tumor and Pence are on deck and represents such danger to the LBGTQ community, I can't think about it for more than three minutes at a time without wanting to go crawl under the bed and pull the world in after me. Then there's also things that played a part in getting us to this Trumpocalypse which Bill Maher has talked about and has to do with excessive word policing and extreme political correctness. That part of what went into "Well, alarmingly it seems that a fuckton of people are terrifyingly comfortable with racism and sexism in the most overt terms, in 2016, what the actual hell?" is going to be the segment of the population who felt like they never got anything right anyway, since the goal post kept moving in ways they didn't understand. I do know several people I suspect voted for Trump, one is a small business owner, she's actually a very nice person and very caring towards others in most ways. She's exceptionally proud of her daughter-in-law for all the foster children they take in, the first to donate to one charity drive I helped with to benefit mentoring of women in the inner-city by donating interviewing outfits, complete with accessories. Just saying, she's not a bad person. She lived in Texas for years though and I met her in when I lived in Missouri. We never talk about politics because she knows I'm very liberal, but I had to explain to her one day that one of our neighbors was not, in fact, "married to an Oriental" as only objects could be termed Oriental, as it was a trade route, etc. To her credit, she understood that, put it into use and understood the distinction, but she said something during that conversation that is part of what I'm talking about, "I have to update my vocabulary more than an update my wardrobe" and she chuckled kind of ruefully. We had that conversation in 2014. She's in her late fifties and one thing that she said just kind of stuck with me, "that was the polite term when I was growing up, the racist term was....." (and she proceeded to say something that I'm just flat-out not going to repeat). She has a college degree in Art History, she's traveled, met all sorts of people and she thinks she's open-minded. She doesn't know that she's engaging in coded racism pretty much all the time. So there's that factor too, people who aren't horrible racists in the classic sense, engage in coded racism (like telling me the race of one of our neighbor's spouses for no other reason than to randomly bring up his race), thought they were trying to get it right and felt like they were always getting it wrong anyway. So that when people very rightly pointed out things like, "Holy shit, how can you be okay with this blatant racism??" I'm assuming that part of what went into is that feeling of "Well, hell, I get accused of that.....and I know I'm not....." etc. And yes, I'm aware, this otherwise nice woman, who does try to help others, is actually racist. It's just she really doesn't actually know that about herself and I'm sure that's part of why she discounted it in Trump. This list could just go on and on. How we got here is a long road that includes things like the role of algorithms in determining the content that you see in your ads online, and all that. People hang out in echo chambers and just scream a lot anyway. That's all before you get around to factoring in Russian-aided, strategically planned info dumps by people like Julian Assange. Or the even stranger thing that a lot of people became more kindly inclined towards Russia when they sheltered Edward Snowden, who is a key figure in people really understanding that the government has a tendency to view all of us as potential enemies, that it can be a lot more difficult to get het up over promised civil rights violations against other people when you've already accepted that your own are routinely violated. That's still not even close to the whole ball of wax on that "How the fuck did we get here? That man isn't just offensive, he's dangerously unqualified and giving ample evidence that he's unfit to serve and may be mentally unstable on top of everything else." Somewhere in the future, a sobbing cultural anthropologist will weep for our lack of sense. Remember all the things you learned that people did in the past, that are just so damned stupid that you can't believe it ever caught on? "Oh, they used arsenic in fabric dyes and wallpaper and powdered their face with lead-based cosmetics. Used opium to soothe crying babies and....." and you thought, "Wow, before the spread of easily accessible and reliable information, we were really our own worst enemies." It turns out that with almost limitless information, we're just as self-destructive. We went from a bunch of "we'll believe anything, have some more laudanum!" types to people who used the tools to seek out information to further shore up fallacies in their own minds. I mean, when you can honestly use the term "fake news" and there are clearly still people happily yumming down on that stuff the answer isn't that "it all has to do with our phones" but that the freaking call was coming from inside the house, you know?

I too am hoping that this almost nonstop proof that Trump can't be trusted to housesit a plant, let alone run a country will help us on some level and soon. Vladimir Putin can be sort of an easy man to poke fun at because he does some things that can make it seem like he's slightly goofy. Being photographed shirtless, etc. As ridiculous as that sort of vanity is, that doesn't alter the fact that Putin is a truly terrifying man. He's ex-KBG (and he was high level) he's almost single-handedly eradicated the beginnings of what looked like an attempt at democracy within Russia. Putin is so far out of Trump's league it would be funny if it wasn't so terrifying. For one thing, there's not a lot of respect for Trump's brand of dealing with people. Do you all remember the Moscow Theater Hostage Crisis in 2002? Here's a link to the Wiki page on it, it's got a lot of good source links on it also but that's the man that Republicans are so jazzed about Trump being buddy, buddy with, pretending that Trump has the kind of anything it takes to deal with someone that truly sinister. tl;dr version: There's nothing funny or good about Putin. That man killed Russian hostages, on purpose. Only two of the deaths were from the terrorists. The rest of the deaths were because of the gas Putin ordered deployed. Forget party affiliations, or causes of social justice, just for a second because this is not a party politics thing. Vladimir Putin is insanely dangerous and he thought nothing of killing almost 140 of his own people....to make a point. I call Donald Trump a lot of names because he infuriates me but truly, this has nothing at all to do with disliking him in this instance: Trump truly has no grasp of how dangerous his bed-fellows are in this. He's either tragically dim, or mentally unwell, but this is like giving an anthrax coated salt block a big lick. I volunteer for a non-profit housing provider that has a food bank and tutoring program, as well as services available for the disabled. I'm actually a fairly affluent person but I am sick to god damned death of the attempt to criminalize poverty and try to spin it as a character flaw, rather than a result of the geographic and socioeconomic circumstances of one's birth. These legends of welfare queens and people swearing up and down, "I saw it with my own eyes, paid for filet mignon with food stamps!" It's bullshit. It's utter fucking bullshit. First of all, I see EBT cards regularly, they look like credit card/debit cards. You'd practically have to be standing inside someone else's underpants to be able to spot a person using them. Then also, all kinds of things are disallowed on them. Like deodorant. Soap. Personal care items. The charity I volunteer for has local events sponsored at places like country clubs, where people "shop" for the personal care items they will donate to the food bank: toothbrushes, shampoo, tampons, dental floss. I think people try to dehumanize and accuse people in need because it's the only way they can justify being so incredibly hateful to people who live in the richest country in the world and yet, simply to maintain their own personal hygiene our existing system seeks to humiliate them even further. The push to keep women from having access to birth control will condemn women to a life of poverty unless they are able to find a non-profit, or charity that very specifically offers the kind of mentoring and full community services that the privately-founded organization I volunteer for provides. Does it just never occur to people that someone incredible, wonderful, an absolute gift to the world could be cut off from ever helping the rest of us because of the circumstances of their own birth? The rush to demonize people for simply needing help sickens me deeply.

I took a few days off to hang out with my husband, my dogs, to watch something less stressful (I chose a BBC drama called Paranoid, by contrast, it was incredibly relaxing). I'm glad I did. So Tweety Turd has been up to his infantile antics again, I see. Please, everyone, enjoy New Year's Eve with all your be-happy-while-you-still-can-might. Okay, so once again, here's why it isn't comparable on any level: Bakers who object to baking cakes for people based on a disapproval of the couple's sexual identity and a truly creepy fixation on what that entails. Do they obsess equally about what straight people do in bed...'cause bakers o' the world, boy do I have some freaky news for you...you're already baking wedding cakes for people who get up to all sorts of things you claim to disapprove of on religious grounds, you'd best just go find a different career if your fixation with others bits and parts is really at the root of this stuff. So the bakers wanting to discriminate blindly, against people they do not know anything about, other than their obsessions and fixations on their sex lives is actual discrimination. A business can reserve the right to refuse business to anyone, but it has to be based on that individual, not some sweeping, "I don't like your kind". It's the blanket application by type that makes something discriminatory practices which are illegal. The Rockette who basically said, "Yuck, I do not want to perform for Donald Trump" is stating an opinion based in disliking a particular individual. She's also not saying, "I should have the right not to dance for someone I don't like!" She's saying, "I do not like that I am going to dance for this man who has given me ample reason to dislike the hell out of him, as a person, as an individual." They are only comparable in the way that one illustrates discriminatory practices and the other illustrates a pointed dislike of a person, while still planning to do their job. In yet another sentence I thought I would never type because we live in those times. NPR was kind enough to do a segment on where this rise of the use of the word "cuck" has come from and I'm sure you will all die of shock to learn that it is yet another gift from the alt-right, Ayran Nation, White Supremacist, Hood-wearing, cross-burning segment of conservatism. Link to the December 14th NPR podcast What the Cuck? For anyone who doesn't wish to listen to that, let me sum up: It was adopted by the White Supremacists (I genuinely don't give a flying fuck what they wish to be called, that's what they are) from the term "cuckold" which is the derogatory term for the cheated upon spouse (the male) and it is meant to imply that if a man couldn't keep his wife at home, it was due to some deficiency on his part (yes, it's a sexist as hell term) and so it is meant to imply impotence and weakness. Lack of virility, that sort of thing. ETA: and before this one even gains traction, here's why the Mormon Choir singer's resignation is also not comparable. She's actually resigned rather than do the thing that is against her conscience. The reason the baker-conscience-dilemma is not comparable to that is that these bakers are not saying, "My conscience and belief system demands that I cannot bake a wedding cake for a LBGTQ wedding, therefore, I have decided that I can no longer be a baker and am closing my business, to pursue something that won't ask me to compromise my values." The "Help! I need a prayer circle to help me with this terrible fate, oh Jesus!" bakers want to continue to run their businesses and profit from them while employing discriminatory practices. Any of those bakers could have said, "No. I cannot do that. If the law demands that I must, then I would rather pursue another line of work."

Forgive me for speaking for you, sistermagpie, but I absolutely guarantee beyond a shadow of any doubt that sistermagpie was actually referring to "In Tucker Carlson's limited grasp of the world and women...." not in any definitive, "If you write about fashion, you cannot write about...." overall because that's a daft notion and she's best described as having a keen grasp. I am willing to bet chocolate on that one. Lots and lots of chocolate. She was just pointing out that the Tucker Carlson is a fucking moron. ETA: Since it is Christmas, I will throw our right leaning friends a bone and let them smile and say, "I fucking knew it...." ....excuse me while I go remove the meatless, stuffed "Turk'y" that I have baking in the oven. Merry Christmas, season's greetings and yes, the theory is that they set December 25th because of the solstice, in case you were wondering, to us all.

That and theologians don't actually believe that Christ was born on December 25th, so there's an awful lot of ignorance about ....you know Christ going on in there. Not limited to the "watch as I randomly bring up America and Kings....because that's not in the least contradictory to our entire democracy or anything...." I'll be over here buying both Jesus and the founding fathers some kleenex to help stop the flow of tears all around, I guess.

I'm actually quite well versed in the bible. He wasn't talking about Christ as the whole "He shall reign forever and ever" thing, or he shouldn't be, as that is no more or less pertinent this Christmas than it was any other year "Christ, the redeemer, King of Kings, Prince of Peace" so the fact that he ties it to America specifically, looking to a new King....you just said you're not very religious, but Priebus tying "New King" to this year too specifically for Priebus to be referring only to the birth of Jesus and the thing that you are apparently finding so hilarious, is that you're assuming we don't know that Christ was called a King...because I guess we don't get out much in your imagination? I seriously have no idea why you think it's a bunch of "secular leftists" misinterpreting scripture. Nothing funnier to me than watching power grasping Republicans trying to co-opt religious scripture in a hypocritical attempt to tie Christ to politics, where he never, ever belongs at his own insistence. That's what Priebus was trying to do, co-opt "Christ the redeemer, prince of peace, king of kings" to make some weird, muddied, religious comparison to a new time dawning in America. It's not just gross and grasping, it's more than a little weird and no, he wasn't comparing Trump to Jesus, just trying to say, "A new time is dawning in America too...." and then trying, somewhat bafflingly to anyone who knows much about Jesus (kind of like I do, it's interesting that you assume that no one in here would know much about Christ or the bible) to tie that into political power structures in America.

Yeah, I have to admit to sort of raising an eyebrow about Ivanka flying Jet Blue, in the first place, then it's clear she's in coach and that's the part that makes it seem like it was a set-up. I also have sort of a difficult time believing that she doesn't employ a full-time nanny to ferry her children to-and-fro. So there are a few things that make me skeptical. However, since they are trying to pretend they have anything in common with regular people, I just assumed that the staged part was "I fly Jet Blue, get some PR shots of me in coach with hoi polloi, to further promote the insane notion that I give a shit about any of these people" and that it went awry. So I completely believe that taking a commercial flight that had her sitting in coach was staged. I don't think the rest of it was for the simple reason that barely anything happened. You really have to have a high standard of human decency to stand up for the rights of everyone else around her, and her children. So I think if they'd staged it, there would have been a shit ton of video, the guy would have acted like a slavering lunatic, instead of a guy who was taking an opportunity to tell her she sucks (and she does). Yup, that's why I think it wasn't staged: you have to be trying to work up any actual sympathy for Ivanka. I actually have pretty much none for her but the other people didn't deserve to be lambasted. Her kids are....kids. It's just not okay to drag them into the fray. Plus, if they'd staged it I'm sure they'd have had some very specific stuff where the guy would have been screaming about wanting abortion vending machines, free healthcare for Muslims on a watchlist, and likely would have featured a bunch of other stereotypes that their base could just dig their dentures into and chew on for days.