Shit that Pissed me Off – 12/15/17
Roy Moore Lost But He Is Just as Much of Petulant Asshole as Ever
I mean, I guess we should applaud Moore, who has a history of not listening when those who wield more power than him (be it the Supreme Court or the people of Alabama) tell him no. He may be stubbornly refusing to concede an election he lost but at least he’s consistent. You have to admire a guy who will always stubbornly marshall on even when he has so clearly lost.
Except you really don’t. The thing to do when you lose an election is to admit you lost the election and move on. Hell, even Hillary Clinton was able to deliver a concession speech and she was beaten by Donald Trump.
Oh boy – this is gonna suck worse than the Benghazi hearings.
Let me tell you something, Roy Moore, the only thing worse than conceding victory to Donald Trump would be conceding victory to…you. Given that, I think you should be able to concede an election to Doug Jones.
You don’t have to wait long. You can run again in 2020. And even though you are a racist, misogynist, child molester, you only lost by 1.5 percentage points. If you can figure out a way to get just a few more white people to the polls, you can deliver one hell of a victory speech.
For now, however, why don’t you try to exhibit some class and concede?
Net Neutrality is Repealed by the FCC
This is a big old liberal talking point and as a liberal, I wanted to make sure that it really made sense to bitch about it.
So I did some research. I even read a few pieces by people who think repealing neutrality is a good thing. Maybe there was some nuance here that I didn’t really understand.
I think I get it.
This decision is bullshit. The FCC wants us to believe that we are eliminating a whole bunch of government regulation that is preventing rich and successful corporations from becoming more rich and more successful.
It is really easy to be anti regulation in theory. Regulations are annoying. They get in the way of getting stuff done. And much of the time, they are useless.
In this case, however, these regulations were there to create a more fair internet. They existed to prevent the companies with the most money from consolidating control and limiting access to the companies with less money. They basically meant if a company got ahead, it had to fucking work for it.
And yeah, this is all a lot more complicated than big companies = BAD.
In the end, though, the Republican party did what they seem to think is the solution to every problem – they took the shackles off of big business because they have a misguided impression that if big business can make more money, the poor and middle class will be better off. It’s an impression that has consistently been wrong. And yet here we are.
So our President, who is a sexual predator, took to Twitter once again to claim the women who have accused him of sexual harassment are lying because he has never met them. I’m sure that his Tweet is more than enough for those people who have convinced themselves that nobody but Trump ever tells the truth.
The problem, of course, is that the Tweet is a lie. An objective lie. One of these women claims he grabbed her while she was interviewing him for a magazine article, which exists. He’s basically trying to claim that the published interview is somehow not actually a real thing.
Trump bitching about fake news is the equivalent of fire complaining about dry weather conditions.
And here’s the the thing – he probably doesn’t remember meeting these women because he doesn’t give a flying fuck about them. They floated in and out of his bafflingly charmed life and that was the last he was aware of their existence. Failing to remember something because you are a self centered asshole is extremely different from that thing not having actually happened.
Trump gets a pass from too many people who aren’t interested in the actual truth. They are only interested in the Trump version of the truth. It is a version that is completely at odds with reality but they didn’t like reality all that much anyway.
Judicial Nominee Can’t Answer Basic Legal Questions
Lest we turn this into me being partisan, let me acknowledge that both the left and right regularly appoint completely unqualified boobs to be judges. It should be the job of the Senate to ensure these unqualified idiots don’t get appointed to such an important position for life.
At odds with this problem, of course, is the partisan nature of our Democracy. If a judicial candidate is ideologically aligned with the Republicans, they are more likely to get appointed when the Senate is controlled by Republicans.
Their qualifications, then become less important then whether or not they are going to uphold laws restricting abortion and same sex marriage.
What makes the situation worse is a country being run by a President who is a Republican and who is completely unqualified for the job of making judicial nominees. I mean, he’s not qualified to do any fucking thing that he’s supposed to be doing but nominating judges is near the top of a very long list.
So he sends complete rubes like Matthew Spencer Peterson to be confirmed even though he can’t answer basic legal questions. And this guy gets a hearing and may well become a judge who will never be subject to any kind of review.
Because what is important right now is which side the judge is on and not whether or not he’d actually be able to competently carry out the job.
Grail Diary 