DL Open Thread: Sunday, June 4, 2023

The False Equivalency Between ‘Hard Right And Hard Left’ In Debt Ceiling Debate.  Meant to write about this when I saw the WaPo headline about this.  It’s lazy journalism and lazy editing, and it perpetuates a lie:

Here’s how, in its lead story Thursday, the New York Times described the House’s vote to resolve Republicans’ self-imposed debt-ceiling crisis:

“With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks.”

It’s not just the Times. This false equivalence between the two parties’ activist wings has been on display in press coverage throughout the debt-ceiling votes. Politico Playbook on Sunday described Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal’s mixed reaction to the debt-ceiling compromise as indicating that the bill may have “a chance to win votes from some on the far left.” A Washington Post sub-headline that same day noted that “far-left and far-right corners of the House have criticized the compromise.”

These descriptions conjure a world in which the wing of the Republican Party defined by Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Elise Stefanik (R-NY), Chip Roy (R-AZ), Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ) is somehow balanced out by the wing of the Democratic Party defined by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jayapal, Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Greg Casar (D-TX), Cori Bush (D-MO) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY).

This idea is, of course, farcical — both in terms of the vote on the debt-ceiling bill and our politics more generally. Yet whenever Congress is debating a high-profile piece of legislation, the media returns to the easy description of pressures exerted by the far-right and far-left, as if these are similar forces.

No doubt CNN will address this in their search for ‘absolute truth’. Or not. (Ya gotta read that Atlantic article I posted yesterday.)

ShowerCap’s Weekly Evisceration Of Teh Stoopid.  Perhaps not as funny as last week’s, but perhaps the news wasn’t as laugh-inducing.  Plus, it’s still funny. A sample:

If Ron DeSantis truly hopes to get elected President, at a certain point, he’s going to need to figure out how to at least approximate human behavior. I can’t be the only one who sees a self-loathing Conehead who’s had extensive cosmetic surgery.

He even bullies the press awkwardly. He’s aiming for “macho MAGA strongman,” but hitting “bratty libertarian dweeb.”

The sloppy doofus can’t even decide how to pronounce his own name. Not quite done focus testing it with Proud Boys and Three Percenters, y’see. “Which way sounds more foreign?” “Would you be more likely to kidnap a Governor Duh-Santis or a Governor DEE-Santis?”

Anyway, DiSappointus is a wad of gum rapidly losing flavor, destined for the underside of the Starbucks counter of history, so forget him, forget, if you’re able, the unsettling echo of his inhuman laughter; the new n’ improved savior of traditional, apple-pie-and-warning-labels-on-rap-cds conservatism is none other than…Chris Christie!

That name-pronouncing thing, it’s weird.

Speaking Of DiSappointus, His Anti-Woke Campaign Legal Costs Are Mounting:

As a result of the mounting lawsuits against DeSantis, the governor’s legal costs, which the Miami Herald reported last December to cost at least $16.7m, have been soaring.

In DeSantis’s legal fight against Disney following the corporation’s condemnation of his anti-LGBTQ+ laws, it is going to cost the governor and his handpicked board nearly $1,300 per hour in legal fees as they look into how the corporation discovered a loophole in DeSantis’s plan to acquire governing rights over Disney World, Insider reports.

Meanwhile, in another case covered by the Orlando Sentinel, DeSantis’s administration has turned to the elite conservative Washington DC-based law firm Cooper & Kirk to defend the governor against his slew of anti-woke laws. The firm’s lawyers charge $725 hourly, according to contracts reviewed by Orlando Sentinel. As of June 2022, the state authorized nearly $2.8m for legal services from just Cooper & Kirk alone, the outlet reports.

The Chicago Cop Who Got Out Of Paying 44 Tickets.  His girlfriend stole his car–44 times:

Each time he stood before a Chicago traffic court judge and told his story, the judge asked his name.

“Jeffrey Kriv,” he’d say. That was true.

Then he’d raise his right hand and get sworn in. What came next was also consistent.

“Well, that morning, I broke up with my girlfriend and she stole my car,” Kriv, who had been ticketed for running a red light, testified in January 2021.

“Yeah, I broke up with my girlfriend earlier that morning, had a knock-down, drag-out fight, verbally, of course. She took my car without my knowledge,” he told a different judge when fighting a speeding ticket in August 2021.

“I broke up with my girlfriend that day and she took my car without my knowledge. … I didn’t get my car back for like three days. But it was her driving the car,” he said while contesting a speeding ticket, once again under oath, in May 2022.

The excuse worked, just as it had many times before.

At the ticket hearings, Kriv often provided what he said were legitimate police incident reports as evidence of the car thefts; they had officer names and badge numbers, and he explained that he got the reports at police headquarters.

But Kriv did not let on that he, himself, was a Chicago cop.

Perhaps he’s just a ‘make-up sex addict’:

You don’t get this on any other daily Delaware political blog.  But, I digress.

Drink Pee, Win Prize.  All Delawareans’ bladders should swell with pride at this accomplishment from one of our own.  In this case, one of our very own pee drinkers:

Smyrna-based kickboxer Jonathan McNatt won the $10,000 grand prize on the new TBS competition show “I Survived Bear Grylls” Thursday night.

And all he had to do was drink his own pee to do it. Also urine from a pig and horse.

While some may debate whether it can be considered a “win” after doing all that, McNatt shed tears of joy after beating four competitors in several survival challenges.

OK, two things:  You drink pee on a national TV show, and all you win is $10,000??  What was the point? I mean there’s not (as of yet) a Professional Pee-Drinking Circuit.  Is there?

Oh, right, second.  Perhaps you might have a career as a pee connoisseur.  Edit yet another Wine Spectator spin-off.  You’ve already sampled horse, pig, and your very own house brand of pees.  You could well have a market to wax rhapsodic over the varied flavor profiles of different pees.  Complete with food pairings, as in “What kind of shit sandwich goes best with aardvark urine?”

That, right there, is not a sentence I expected to write when I woke up this morning.

But that’s the unfettered glory of the open thread.  Life is like a shit sandwich.  You never know what kind of shit you’re gonna get.

What do you want to talk about?