Entire staff found under the weather!


No fish today:
Incomparably, our entire staff has been located under the weather.

In familiar award-winning fashion, there will be no fish today.


  1. Feel better soon!

    1. Here's hoping it's nothing that a shot of NyQuil and a sleeping binge can't clear up in twenty-four hours.

  2. We have the equivalent of the right's scorched earth activists on the left. They are the Bernie progressives. Fortunately someone (Bernie?) has talked them out of primarying our incumbents so we might have a shot at winning in 2018. Be we shouldn't be feeling smug when our activists helped cost us the presidency.

    1. Apparently @2:16 PM finds the obvious inscrutable. MSNBC has to pay people to strike that pose, what's @2:16 PM's excuse? In the matter of winning power at every level of government, the right's scorched earth activists are, by nearly any measure, ascendant. If left of center activists in the United States don't wrest control of the Democratic Party away from the corporation serving neo-liberal Democratic establishment as Step 1 in taking on the right, and don't do so soon, the Republic is doomed.

    2. "the Republic is doomed."

      I picture you with your hair awry and your arms waving as you say this.

    3. "...the Republic is doomed."

      The Republic committed suicide last November. With an assist from you, CMike.
      It's all academic now.

      You, numbskull that you are, endorsed and promoted the very scorched earth tactics of the lunatic right that you complain about now.

    4. @4:26 AM with a certain lack of imagination writes:

      "...the Republic is doomed."


      That's actually Larry David's Saturday Night Live impression of Bernie Sanders you're visualizing.

      mm writes:

      The Republic committed suicide last November.

      It's encouraging, actually, to hear that mm is now an ex-cultist who has finally given up on the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to save us in 2020, given that the necessary first step for getting out of a ditch is to stop digging it deeper.

      Don't give up all hope mm, there may yet be a New Testament social democratic member of the tribe who can drive the money changers from the Democratic convention in 2020 and raise the dead.

    5. You know, the sad thing is CMike, you had a grand opportunity to kick the right wing lunatics in the teeth last November and send them a clear message that their scorched earth take no prisoners party over country tactics don't work anymore. And instead you promoted them and proved to them that hateful tactics work. Maybe someday you'll wake up and realize that, but it's doubtful.

      I read this the other day. I think it applies well to you.
      To CMike,


      You don’t live there.

      Grow the fuck up.

    6. Hillary isn't running in 2020. She said so and I believe her. You can stop attacking her.

    7. You can stop attacking her.

      No, actually he can't. It's an incurable disease. You notice the great social democratic progressive never has a negative word to say about the barbarians who are actually, you know, running everything.

  3. Maddow is still sticking up for that crazy Trump dossier about the whores peeing on the mattress, etc. Her viewers must be even dumber than Donald Trump.

    (P.S. I know people here don't like Breitbart as a source, but at the link Breitbart quotes Maddow's exact words.)

    See http://www.breitbart.com/video/2017/10/12/maddow-trump-dossier-holding-despite-gop-attacks/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

    1. There's something wrong with a man who calls women whores, even if they are sex workers. Everyone pees. It was Don's desire that dictated where these women peed. The degree of hate behind such a request betrays major psychological problems.

    2. Anon 8:26 -- Christopher Hitchens is generally credited with popularizing the aphorism that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (I was fortunate to hear Hitchens speak shortly before he died of cancer.) IMHO this is a good rule of thumb.

      This dossier telling the story about the Russian sex workers is surely extraordinary. But the evidence isn't extraordinary. In fact, the evidence is just about worthless.

      We don't know who put the dossier together. We don't know if the dossier's authors are reliable or whether they had an axe to grind. We don't know who allegedly provided the information to the writers of the dossier, so we have no way to estimate their credibility. In fact we have seen virtually no evidence at all for the extraordinary claims in this dossier.

    3. We know exactly who put the dossier together and he has been cooperating with Mueller's investigation. The person is a well known and respected former British intelligence agent who put the dossier together as opposition research for one of Trump's primary opponents (not Clinton). The claims have been investigated also by the FBI and most have been substantiated.

      In this case, because sex workers are vulnerable to Russian power, they have most likely disappeared and will not be found as witnesses. However, the story is known to have circulated before the dossier appeared, and the story was told by one of Trump's own staff, who is available to be interviewed. Many of the other claims in the dossier have been substantiated and there is little reason why this one should be false when others have been verified, when Trump's own people have told the story themselves.

      Few people care who Trump had pee for money, or where they did it. That is sensationalist garbage. We do care very much about the treason that is described in the rest of the dossier. When that is laid before the public, Trump will be impeached.

      Hitchens was talking about paranormal when he made his statement. The stuff about Trump is all too likely given the rest of his personality and his on-the-record behavior. He has no respect for women and he hates Obama.

      You shouldn't have joined this bandwagon. This is a bad person occupying our highest office and he is soiling both the presidency and our national honor. And shame on you for trying to defend him!

    4. Hitchens was credited by contemporaries for Hitchens' razor, "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." Wikipedia points out that was his translation of "the Latin proverb Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur ('What is freely asserted is freely dismissed'), which was commonly used in the 19th century." [LINK]

      Hitchens, himself, often credited Carl Sagan with popularizing the assertion "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence [LINK]," the provenance of which RationalWiki traces out as follows:

      "...Laplace writes: 'The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.' Also, David Hume wrote in 1748: 'A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence', and 'No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.' and Marcello Truzzi says: 'An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.'" [LINK]

    5. So glad you dropped by, Comrade DinC. I hope you brought your Universal Translator of Dumbfuck Gibberish Pronouncements by the Pussygrabber in Chief:

      Please help us poor ignorant folks who try to take what he says literally, and explain what the fuck your Pussygrabbing Lying Sack of Shit Traitor President meant when he said this:

      Just in the stock market alone, we have increased our economic worth by $5.2 trillion dollars….But listen to this because we’ve doubled — in the last eight years of the previous administration, the debt doubled, so that in eight years our debt — literally hundreds of years of debt — doubled in eight years to $20 trillion. But since the election on November 8th, I’ve increased the value of your U.S. assets by more than the $20 trillion that we currently owe. You haven’t heard those numbers.

    6. AnonymousOctober 13, 2017 at 4:22 AM -- You say we know the person who put the dossier together and various other things. Really? Then, please answer these questions?
      1. Do you even know the name of the dossier-creator?
      2. How can you validate that he's "well respected"? Especially if you don't even know his name?
      3. I've seen nothing in the news saying that the FBI substantiated most of the claims. What's your evidence that this is so?
      4. What's the name of the Trump person who saupposedly repeated these claims?

    7. mm -- I have no idea what Trump meant. It's true that Obama increased the National Debt by a huge amount. And, it's true that the stock market went up a lot since the election. But, Trump is comparing National Debt to increase in the market as if one offset the other, which is not the case. Even if they did offset each other, I don't see how a $5 trillion increase in the stock market is more than a $20 trillion increase in the National Debt.

    8. It's true that Obama increased the National Debt by a huge amount...

      Jackass. Obama did that, huh. Is that your story? Prince Iraqwarclusterfuck had nothing to do with it, right?

    9. No fair bringing up the Right-wing's Great Iraq Clusterfuck, in a discussion about needing proof of "extraordinary claims".
      This liberal is still waiting for proof on Saddam's WMDs.

      BTW, can we now discuss how the liberals were 100% correct about the Iraq War without them being called "American-haters"?

    10. Conservatives may have been 100% correct about something once, too, but I'm only 54, so it wasn't in my lifetime.

    11. Anon - 12:48: You want an example where Conservatives were correct? Listen to Thomas Sowell's prediction 27 years ago of the impact of affirmative action on colleges. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVvnTByzTmA

    12. Anon 12:16 "can we now discuss how the liberals were 100% correct about the Iraq War?"

      In fact, just about everyone supported the Iraq War -- liberals and conservatives alike. E.g. below is a list of Democratic Senators who voted for it. For the sake of space I won't list all the Democratic House members who voted for it.
      Baucus (D-MT), Yea
      Bayh (D-IN), Yea
      Biden (D-DE), Yea
      Breaux (D-LA), Yea
      Cantwell (D-WA), Yea
      Carnahan (D-MO), Yea
      Carper (D-DE), Yea
      Cleland (D-GA), Yea
      Clinton (D-NY), Yea
      Daschle (D-SD), Yea
      Dodd (D-CT), Yea
      Dorgan (D-ND), Yea
      Edwards (D-NC), Yea
      Feinstein (D-CA), Yea
      Harkin (D-IA), Yea
      Hollings (D-SC), Yea
      Johnson (D-SD), Yea
      Kerry (D-MA), Yea
      Kohl (D-WI), Yea
      Landrieu (D-LA), Yea
      Lieberman (D-CT), Yea
      Lincoln (D-AR), Yea
      Miller (D-GA), Yea
      Nelson (D-FL), Yea
      Nelson (D-NE), Yea
      Reid (D-NV), Yea
      Rockefeller (D-WV), Yea
      Schumer (D-NY), Yea
      Torricelli (D-NJ), Yea

    13. As he of the clever wording, David in Cal knows: a majority of the Democrats in the two houses of Congress voted against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. All together 147 Democratic Representatives and Senators voted No on the resolution as did Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-VT), 111 Democratic Representatives and Senators voted Aye [LINK].

    14. Christopher Steele

    15. Saying that all who voted for the AUMF thereby "supported the Iraq War" is disingenuous, since W promised the AUMF would be used only as a threat to make Iraq comply with weapons inspections... instead of which, W withdrew the inspectors while Iraq was complying, and launched his invasion... not what the AUMF had been issued for.

    16. David in Cal,
      How'd your purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge turn out?

    17. I recall that, Raven. Also, that France wanted the inspections to last another two weeks before any resolutions by the UN Security Council on this merciless war of aggression were voted upon, whereupon France was excoriated for wanting more time here in the States. Freedom fries? What a shameful period in our history, though at least Jones has expressed his personal regrets of that sordid time. Too little, way too late.

    18. Raven says,

      "Saying that all who voted for the AUMF thereby 'supported the Iraq War' is disingenuous..."

      No it's not. At the time of the vote, everyone knew the resolution invested the power to go to war in Iraq without any further congressional review in Bush 43, and that, therefore, the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld regime was going to use its passage to start the war they wanted.

      The Congress used the resolution to abdicate its constitutionally imposed responsibility to be the branch of government that declares War. It's always been disingenuous for those Democrats voting "Aye," on the resolution and their apologists, to claim in later years, "Who could have known..."

    19. Let's hope that Barbara Lee's legislation comes to pass. The AUMF was one hella piece of legislative shit, and I'm astounded that it's still law.

    20. Just to be clear, Rep. Lee is seeking to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists which passed in 2001 when Lee stood alone as the only member of either house of Congress to vote Nay on that preposterously over broad piece of legislation.

      Lee managed to get a repeal amendment for that 2001 authorization out of the House Appropriations committee in June, 2017 tacked onto the Department of Defense Appropriations for 2018 bill, but the Rules committee removed the amendment from consideration on the House floor. The Appropriations for 2018 bill without the Lee amendment was passed in the House on July 27, 2017.

      Like Wikipedia says, the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists...[is] not to be confused with [the] Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002." LINK

    21. Damn. I am behind the times, and saddened by the news that Lee's amendment on the 2001 AUMF was removed this year. And I didn't even realize that there was a second AUMF, against which she also voted.

      Quite maddening that House rules were applied in this case, since, as Matt Dennis said, that "appropriations bills regularly include authorization language."

      Thanks as always for the help.


    22. CMike: “At the time of the vote, everyone knew [that W was lying about wanting the AUMF only as a threat to force compliance with inspections, and intended to go to war no matter what].

      Gosh, then (1) Why did W bother lying at all, instead of just saying so bluntly, since in your version it would have changed no minds, as they all approved of the invasion? (2) How is this mind-reading verified, against not just Clinton’s but all the other Democratic Senators’ consistent insistence that this was not what they voted for? — Just the one person’s character, Clinton’s, got smeared as a “war-hawk” (despite being top diplomat, Secretary of State, and a human rights advocate rather than a military advocate throughout her career) as part of the long sustained defamation targeting her campaign... but now you’re suggesting all those other Democratic Senators were just as much “war-hawks” against Iraq as W himself? That seems, to put it very gently, implausible. The War on Iraq was PNAC’s baby, a neoconservative goal; it had Republican support for partisan reasons... but it’s not reasonable to suggest that it had Democratic support for the same partisan reasons. Or can you argue that those Democratic Senators have shown themselves to be “neoconservative” on other issues?

      Hint: claims that “neoliberal” inherently = “neoconservative” will be met with the same (bored) skepticism as claims that “liberal” = “fascist”.

  4. Hi all,
    Read my testimony!
    Getting ex back after a breakup.