US Politics, December 2019: Profound procedural deficiencies

"Flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once" for January title.

It's beyond parody! The President is filling his toilets full of shit and he doesn't understand why he can't make the doody go away so he held a press conference!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfP_e3hsb4

He's very sad and concerned. So many White House toilets have been utterly obliterated.

The gold leaf just gets stripped off, like some corrosive substance is being dumped into the bowls.

i'm guessing he personally mishandled toilet complaints from residents at his father's properties

Flint still has lead in its water. jfc

Given Trump’s diet, he hasn’t had a normal shit in 70 years.

the nice thing about this clip is that you can watch it on mute and still know exactly what bullshit they're both saying

WATCH: @SenTedCruz says he believes Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. #MTP #IfItsSunday pic.twitter.com/OPAxpe6T6t

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) December 8, 2019

Hard to trust a man whose dad murdered JFK.

also someone who is the zodiac killer, shame

nah this is Bizarro Cruz, look at the facial hair.

#KremlinCruz has the same ring as #KremlinKennedy

I'd love to see an expose on how the cynical spreading of Russian propaganda by the GOP is undermining morale in the intelligence community. Though my understanding is that open partisanship is deeply frowned upon, its well known that the FBI was a bastion of conservative voters and the other 16 agencies probably were as well. I wonder how this open betrayal is felt, whether its shifting party identification, etc.

Still SMH about how this is the timeline in which the right is swoony over Russia and some on the left wax wistful about the institutional integrity of the FBI and CIA

(not a diss on Sanpaku, there, just general SMHness)

You don't have to like the CIA or FBI to nonetheless find it chilling when a President fires someone for investigating him, or dismisses CIA intelligence in lieu of urban legends he hears from Sean Hannity

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/473543-trump-calls-warren-pocahontas-knocks-wealth-tax

Just keep him talking about the 'wealth tax', whatever else he's on about.

(Obviously not excusing the racism but it's par for the course at this point.)

again mr Heidecker is hauntingly prescient

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LDdleGP_yY

remember when Ilhan Omar took a massive shitstorm from both sides because of that "all about the Benjamins" pun, I'm sure all those people are gonna be super outraged by Trump's suggestion here that Jews have no principles but money

Is Trump suddenly going to morph into a black Muslim woman?

Starting to think that was reeeally about something else

Xpost

The words are just value-free phonemes. All that matters is which mouth they're issuing from. We're nearing peak 'speaker >>>>> utterance' although I'm confident that we'll surpass that peak soon enough.

People are asking me what I thought of this. I read it as a confession: We're out of ideas. "Both sides" and "so divided" is all we got. https://t.co/u6gvIB0ZdE

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 8, 2019

i will take any opportunity to bump linda ronstadt in the us politics thread

Singer Linda Ronstadt didn’t hesitate to rip into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a State Department reception at the 42nd Annual Kennedy Center Honors in Washington on Saturday night, according to a Variety report Sunday.

During his first turn as the official host of the event, where honorees receive their Kennedy Center rainbow ribbons, Pompeo wondered aloud: “As I travel the world, I wonder when I will be loved,” referring to lyrics in Ronstadt’s 1975 hit “When Will I Be Loved,” according to Variety.

When Ronstadt, who is known as an ardent critic of President Trump, took the microphone to receive the honor, she took aim at Pompeo.

“I’d like to say to Mr. Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump,” Ronstadt said, according to Variety.

Variety reported that Ronstadt immediately sat down after her remark, which drew gasps, slow-building applause and cheers from the audience.

i don't want to see or hear documentation of this, because in my head it was a classic hollywood slow-clap and it's perfect

That is great but I really want to know if anyone shouted "now tell us about playing South Africa during apartheid"

^^^

That completely cut from context clip that Twitter folks were going gaga over this weekend was driving me crazy.

ouch, i didn't know that. i will take anyopportunity to learn about how linda ronstadt is a giant dumbass in the us politics thread

She was....stubborn about breaking the boycott.

RS piece from 1983:

https://www.ronstadt-linda.com/artrs83.htm

In her dressing room after the concert, Linda Ronstadt talked some more about her beau who used to work for the government, Jerry Brown, the former governor of California. The political beau had advised his rock star girlfriend not to perform in South Africa, where a minority of 4.5 million whites rules over a majority of 21 million blacks.

"I don't take his advice very much," she said. "He doesn't want me to do things that are controversial. He's political. I'm not. He tries not to say no to me because he knows it won't work. He just looks into his napkin and writhes."

The offer to sing in South Africa had come at the last minute, when another singer and a boxer had to cancel out. Boom Boom Mancini, who killed a man in the ring last year, was supposed to fight. And Frank Sinatra, whose eyes are apartheid blue, was supposed to sing and help announce the fight. It was all a cable-television package. But then Boom Boom broke his collarbone. Sun City, needing a fill-in, turned to Linda Ronstadt.

"I was getting ready to go to Italy," she remembered. "They wanted me to pinch-hit for Sinatra and boxing. I had two days to decide. I talked to everyone. I called friends of mine at Motown. Their story was: 'Black artists go, so we can't tell you not to go.' I called up John Rockwell at the New York Times and got him to send me clips on South Africa."

(Rockwell remembers that call this way: "Linda had pretty much made her decision to go. She had passed the time when she could bow out. It didn't strike me as a thrilling idea. I had personal reservations. I'm not a big fan of South Africa. I didn't seem enthusiastic, but she's a voluble person. She does what she wants to do. What can you do?")

"If I won't play a repressive government, a police state," Linda continued, "then I couldn't play the black countries or Alabama or Boston"

I asked her if she thought there was any difference between playing Bophuthatswana and playing South Africa.

"Clearly there's no difference to me, Bophuthatswana or South Africa," she said. "The policy of the homelands is wrong. This isn't in any way an endorsement of the government."

She maintained that she did not learn of the United Nations' cultural and economic boycott of South Africa until after she arrived in Sun City. The UN resolution supporting the boycott was passed in 1968, but it has evidently not been popular reading material in the capitals of American music. A number of American musicians have defied the boycott and played South Africa: the Beach Boys, Glen Campbell, Cher, the Osmonds, Sha Na Na, Tina Turner, Frank Sinatra and even a group called America. Linda Ronstadt is different only in that I thought she was special.

'It's very strange performing here," she said. "I seem like a mirage to them, they to me. It's scary, like the Twilight Zone. Things seem nice. Then people get drunk and talk about their fear of a knock in the night."

Still: "I'm glad I came."

She took a bite of chicken.

"The last place for a boycott is in the arts. I don't like being told I can't go somewhere. Like when they told Jane Fonda she couldn't go to North Vietnam. Of course she should have gone to North Vietnam."

But, of course, Jane Fonda was not paid a half-million dollars to visit Hanoi.

last quarter of that quote is very yikes

jfc

When the party broke up, the band went out to prowl through the casinos and bars and discotheques in search of that most elusive game...the South African woman in heat, The rare wildewoman.

"What did she mean?" they kept asking each other. "What's wrong with our bodies?"

"I've been to black Africa," she told him. "I wanted to see what this would be like. I'll be criticized a lot when I get home. But I don't think it's fair. You can't not go to a country because there are some evil people in it. I'd love to get the chance to come back, but who knows? One of the things I'm trying to figure out while I'm down here is if I'm supposed to be here. I'm playing devil's advocate with myself."

The farm boy hoped she would come back.

"I'm trying to decide if it isn't a good idea to get a dialogue going," Linda said. "Now I have a whole other idea about what 'Desperado' means. Everybody here is a desperado. Everybody is a 'Prisoner in Disguise' because all the people feel so misunderstood by the outside world."

I'm not going to say it's always true but it's probably true in at least a majority of cases that a declaration of apoliticism basically = a declaration of amorality.

A lot of those quotes seem Kanye-esque.

Frank Sinatra, whose eyes are apartheid blue

my Crayola 64 box in 1983 didn't have this shade iirc

Alfred just beat me to re-posting that Sinatra quote. Having it framed as we speak.

It's either cherry red or Apartheid Blue

I just freeze every time you see through me

In her defense how else were oppressed South Africans able to receive the biting political commentary that is You're No Good?

Fairy tales can come true
It can happen to you
If you're Apartheid Blue

I just freeze
Everytime you see through me
And it's all over you
Apartheid blue

On my knees
Help me, baby
Tell me, what can I do?
Apartheid blue

lol crut

alfred!!!! that’s the joke!!

but you never had Icehouse sing it to you

She didn't speak to RS for a decade after the interview ran. She must've loved this:

At breakfast the next morning, Linda Ronstadt was still wrestling with herself.

"What we are trying to decide," she said over granola and fresh fruit, "is if we did right in coming down here. We're talking about morals."

Snow White wrinkled her brow and took a bite of apple.

Snow White wrinkled her brow and took a bite of apple
and she walked the length of her days under African skies

This is the story of how we begin to remember
This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein

(Ladysmith Black Mambazo does a dance)

(bouncy guitar figure)

https://www.khou.com/mobile/article/news/local/houston-police-chief-acevedo-blasts-the-nra-senators/285-4a9ec308-0ecb-4593-9249-7b30a9d2dec6

“We all know in law enforcement that one of the biggest reasons that the senate and (Senate Majority Leader) Mitch McConnell, (Texas Sens.) John Cornyn and Ted Cruz and others are not getting into a room and having a conference committee with the House and getting the Violence Against Women’s Act (VAWA) is because the NRA doesn’t like the fact that we want to take firearms out of the hands of boyfriends who abuse their girlfriends. And who killed sergeant? A boyfriend abusing his girlfriend.”

that video gets going at 2.39, that's a guy who can't put up with this shit anymore. the faces of the men and women surrounding him say a lot.