Althouse: At the Wednesday Night Café...

February 26, 2025

At the Wednesday Night Café...

... you can talk all night.

23 comments:

Boris Badenov said...: Two nights ago one of the usual suspects here was crowing about how someone at HUD had hacked one of the video monitors and put up an AI-generated video of Trump sucking Elon's toes. Oooh, burn!

Well, two days later... another one bites the dust.

Really y'all, you keep outing yourselves, it's like shooting fish in a barrel.; 2/26/25, 6:56 PM
Boris Badenov said...: I've been thinking for a while, once enough of the of the crooks and crapweasels in the bureaucracy are purged, maybe the honest rank and file remaining will start coming forward with the receipts. No longer fearful for their lives and livelihoods.

Looks like it's starting to happen all across the government.; 2/26/25, 7:03 PM
Jupiter said...: The rain in Maine falls mostly on the sane.; 2/26/25, 7:05 PM
Eva Marie said...: I love this photo. The arch the trees form further down the path. The stained glass effect of the bare branches. The bare tree trunk on the right then the bare tree trunk on the left. The shadows on the left. I had Groc write a poem for you:

The trees rise tall, their branches bend,
A vaulted hall where shadows blend.
Roots grip the earth, a silent creed,
A cathedral grown from ancient seed.
Leaves whisper hymns in breezes light,
Traces of snow in morning’s sight.
No stone, no spire, yet holy still,
A sanctuary standing still.

To the side, two forms take shape,
Faint silhouettes in winter’s drape.
Trunks or souls, the dark deceives,
A quiet pair the silence weaves.
Bare and stark, they rise from earth,
No snow to mark their shadowed birth.
In this nave of wood and air,
A moment lingers, cold and rare.; 2/26/25, 7:10 PM
Eva Marie said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 2/26/25, 7:13 PM
Eva Marie said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 2/26/25, 7:16 PM
MaxedOutMama said...: i was thinking about several of the posts today, and I just wanted to say that the Biden/Trump presidential debate of 2024 was a pivotal moment in which the citizens lost a great deal of trust in both media and government.

In less than two hours, it became clear that a massive conspiracy between government and all those "trusted and reputable" news organizations had been launched to convey a lie - that of Biden's mental fitness.

After that, it's no wonder that people trust Rogan more than the NYT. That people spend more time with alternative media than with traditional media. That people are less trustful of the government.

This situation probably is worsened by the current Dogey revelations that the government didn't track its spending in a way that even your local club must. We are experiencing a blizzard of revelations with respect to government and government hanger-ons of dishonesty and indifference to the basic norms BY WHICH MOST PEOPLE LIVE.

It's a shock.; 2/26/25, 7:36 PM
Dave Begley said...: Just saw the WH Press Secretary on Fox repeating that non-traditional media will be in the Briefing Room and on Air Force 1. Imagine Althouse and Joe Rogan on AF1 on some Big Time foreign trip.; 2/26/25, 7:49 PM
john mosby said...: Jupiter, ref the Maine state rep:

Nevertheless, she persisted.

JSM; 2/26/25, 7:52 PM
Jaq said...: Apparently people in the press are just figuring out how reckless Joe Biden was.; 2/26/25, 8:39 PM
Big Mike said...: I've been thinking for a while, once enough of the of the crooks and crapweasels in the bureaucracy are purged, maybe the honest rank and file remaining will start coming forward with the receipts. No longer fearful for their lives and livelihoods.

@Boris, how poorly you understand the federal bureaucracy. The crooks and crap weasels are precisely the people who tend to survive reductions in force (or RIFs in government slang). The “honest rank and file” are the ones most likely to get their termination notices. I lived in or in a suburb of Washington, DC, forc47 years so I’ve seen the game played often,; 2/26/25, 8:43 PM
Boris Badenov said...: I've been around as long as you have. "The game" that you refer to isn't limited to government agencies, it's everywhere.

My point is, this time doesn't look like a typical reduction in force. It's more like a hostile takeover, but most of the crooks and the crapweasels don't believe it's really happening, and they just can't keep their pieholes shut. To their increasing detriment.; 2/26/25, 9:07 PM
Mason G said...: "and the crapweasels don't believe it's really happening, and they just can't keep their pieholes shut"

Even if they do believe it's really happening, they're not used to being held accountable and, for now anyway, don't recognize that drawing attention to themselves with their antics is not going to end well for them.; 2/26/25, 9:22 PM
Rory said...: "Apparently people in the press are just figuring out how reckless Joe Biden was."

The Dem line is that Joe was competent to assess himself as incompetent. It's all on him.; 2/26/25, 9:27 PM
David53 said...: Every civil servant above GS-13 with more than 35 years of government employment should be forced to wear a name tag that says, “Official Crapweasel.” Retire before you are embarrassed.; 2/26/25, 9:47 PM
Peachypeachy said...: Joe Biden was a puppet. his illegal personal grift in Ukraine…the dem party controllers had him.
The democrat party is a sewer; 2/26/25, 10:05 PM
Jim at said...: the Biden/Trump presidential debate of 2024 was a pivotal moment in which the citizens lost a great deal of trust in both media and government.

I remember the usual suspects on this board were claiming Trump didn't want to debate Biden. That he was scared to debate him ... while the rest of us knew what would happen. And it did.

Makes you wonder are they so insulated in their bubble they didn't know what was going on? Were they delusional? Were they lying? Were/are they insane?

They make prediction after prediction after prediction and rarely, if ever, do they come true. You'd think they'd wake up, question the bullshit they're being fed and become better informed. But, no. They double down and act like none of the shit they said was actually said.

It's almost as if they want to remain ignorant.; 2/26/25, 10:11 PM
DINKY DAU 45 said...: More lies from MAGAS musk This guy is in strong competition with trump in who lies the most. Musk running todays cabinet meeting with his lies.No efforts to turn on anything': Ebola officials say Musk never 'restored' prevention
Elon Musk’s claim that his Department of Government Efficiency initiative “very quickly” corrected an accidental cancellation of Ebola prevention funding to the U.S. Agency for International Development got a dose of reality Wednesday evening.
The tech billionaire and DOGE head admitted to the snafu during the first cabinet meeting of President Donald Trump’s new administration, where he conceded that his team would make mistakes – and promised to quickly correct them.
So, for example, with USAID, one of the things we accidentally canceled very briefly was Ebola prevention,” Musk said Wednesday. “I think we all want Ebola prevention, so we restored the Ebola prevention immediately.”
But that claim is being roundly disputed by current and former officials inside the agency. Initiatives to combat Ebola and other diseases “have been gutted,” they told The Washington Post.
There have been no efforts to ‘turn on’ anything in prevention” of Ebola and other diseases, according to Nidhi Bouri, who served as a senior USAID official during the Biden administration.
The full spectrum — the investments in disease surveillance, the investments in what we mobilize … moving commodities, supporting lab workers — that capacity is now a tenth of what it was,” Bouri, who oversaw the agency’s response to health care outbreaks, told the Post.
Aid have never been back online,” one current agency official told the Post. “USAID has been frozen: staff and money.”
A former agency official worried about the lack of readiness if a response happened to be necessary.
If there was a need to respond to Ebola, it would be a disaster assistance response team, or DART,” the former official is quoted as saying. “There is no longer a capability to send a DART or support one from Washington. Many of those people are contractors who were let go at the very beginning.”The Trump administration’s recent actions were described as “a double whammy” to global efforts to prevent Ebola, according to Beth Cameron, a senior adviser to the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. She told the publication that the agency’s “critical” purposes to stop outbreaks abroad had been frozen or gutted. Fired the Nuclear team,,fired the Ebola team and who the fuk knows who else,Had to take down his bogus reports about $$$ they found waste...8 billion OH i meant 8 million, $68,000 x3 oh must have been a typo..Where is the oversite committee. ? All criminals..; 2/26/25, 10:12 PM
MaxedOutMama said...: Jim at 10:11 wrote "Makes you wonder are they so insulated in their bubble they didn't know what was going on? Were they delusional? Were they lying? Were/are they insane?"

I rather think that this was a case of a big lie. They either had to accept that Biden was pretty well gone about half the time, AND that the press and high government officials were lying about this, OR they had to believe the lie. It was easier, and less frightening, to believe the lie. It is really terrifying to think that the man we saw at that debate was the top decision-maker in the USA.

However, the people in the government knew, and the journalists knew.

When they were forced to accept reality, it was twice as painful.; 2/26/25, 10:19 PM
MaxedOutMama said...: Jim at 10:11 wrote "Makes you wonder are they so insulated in their bubble they didn't know what was going on? Were they delusional? Were they lying? Were/are they insane?"

I rather think that this was a case of a big lie. They either had to accept that Biden was pretty well gone about half the time, AND that the press and high government officials were lying about this, OR they had to believe the lie. It was easier, and less frightening, to believe the lie. It is really terrifying to think that the man we saw at that debate was the top decision-maker in the USA.

However, the people in the government knew, and the journalists knew.

When they were forced to accept reality, it was twice as painful.; 2/26/25, 10:19 PM
Eva Marie said...: via CFP:
A longtime Trump associate, Peter Ticktin, is representing Rochford. The Ticktin Law Group has identified a systematic breakdown of internal election controls that affected the FL-14 race and other races far beyond. They have found duplicate voters called “clones” in the voter rolls.

These fraudulent clones are digital people created based on the identities of real people, with minor variations in name spelling, birth dates, and addresses. Multiple clones can be made based on the identity of a single real person. As a result, fraudsters can manufacture unlimited numbers of these cloned voters in the cyber world.
https://www.rodmartin.org/p/the-florida-voter-fraud-case-that; 2/26/25, 10:50 PM
Jupiter said...: I am thinking about a T-shirt;
"I got the five bullets e-mail!".
The few, the proud, the fired. To my chagrin, I'm a contractor, and I have been left out of this drama.; 2/26/25, 10:57 PM
gadfly said...: A funny thing happened in the lawsuit that Attorney Peter Ticktin filed in Pinellas County, FL against Election Supervisor Julie Marcus. She is a Republican pesonally appointed by Puddin' Fingers DeSantis.Throughout the Sunshine State, votes are counted until all the ballots are counted and she rightly counted them all. Neither Rochton nor his opponent received anywhere near the Tickton claim that 200,000 fake mail-in ballots had been added. Tickton likely took the case because Rochton had some unused donations that could be ripped off as fees. Has anyone figured out that Trump won Florida?; 2/27/25, 1:05 AM