COPE, The Musical
Who Could Replace Graham Platner?
Democrats’ brief experiment in letting their hair down and nominating a Senate candidate who makes them feel edgy has all but concluded.
After a well-corroborated Politico story in which an ex claimed that Graham Platner sexually assaulted her, the party has seen enough. Democrats ranging from Chuck Schumer to Zohran Mamdani have called on Platner to drop out. Prominent early endorsers like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have withdrawn their support and encouraged him to step aside. The national Democratic Party said it won’t invest in the race so long as he’s the nominee, and the Maine Democratic Party wants him out too. The bottom has fallen out.
While Platner—whose lead in the race had evaporated after a previous wave of stories about his relationship history—has not yet relented, he has suggested that he’s reassessing his run. The Platner campaign told Politico on Monday that he “vigorously denies” the new allegation. But in a video statement, Platner said the campaign would be “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward.”
If he drops out, where do things go from here? Who will run against Sen. Susan Collins this November?
Well, I got fucked out of time, so take this as a semi-open post….
The band’s name comes from a poem by Richard Brautigan:
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
Silly technohippie dribble. The Rise of the Machines is the death of humanity.
If he drops out, where do things go from here? Who will run against Sen. Susan Collins this November?
Whoever it is, that person will have to have Zeron’s stamp of approval.
[AOC seethes in background]
The Democrats should run Susan Collins against Susan Collins.
The Alaska Strategy
AOC was first elected in 2018. How long can your political 15-min of fame last? (Omar’s getting paunchier. Doesn’t help.)
I get those two. They’re cute. Helps command an audience. Zohmar? Nope. Don’t get it. Middle East Mid. Honestly? Brown + beard. I guess the brown is pretty big, cuz Dems are real fuckin’ identitists, but I don’t get the ‘spice’ he delivers. (Brown. That’s it.)
You mean Zohran? He’s not even all that brown.
Zomar sounds better. And YEEESH. I’d heard about that, but damn. WhoTF raps shirtless, in an apron, WITHOUT being utterly jacked, which is the only possible excuse I can think of? Or an on-purpose comedic bit. His accidental embarrassment needs to be further unleashed on the world. Champagne socialist, indeed.
I refuse to listen. For now. I might want material later. SF will likely grace us.
The video is easy to find. But you might not want to.
I got fucked out of time
STEVE SMITH hijacked Warty Hugeman’s space time continuum portal?
Warty Hugeman makes time SWOL!
Maine seems like a truly awful place.
It was nice when I was there. Admittedly I went to a few tourist spots and to the New England School of Metalwork, so I don’t have a representative sample size.
I can’t speak to the politics but it’s beautiful. Acadia is just fantastic.
I haven’t done any of the quests there in either of my playthroughs.
Portland is nice to visit despite the politics. Just don’t stick around long because of the politics.
Interior Maine is a different and much nicer place. Though very economically depressed.
Also, interior Maine had a lot of defiance of Janet Mills’ Rona Panic orders.
Portland is Portland, no matter the coast.
I don’t have anything to say about the maine Nazi.
Open post: It won’t be long before Trump starts casting eyes on making the Canary Islands the next state. Canada, Greenland, Cuba, Venezuela, Mexico, where will it end? World hegemony!!!
Speaking of dropping out:
Student pilot, 22, is forced to land her plane alone after instructor leaps to his death from cockpit mid-flight in Argentina
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15959187/Student-pilot-instructor-leaps-Argentina.html
Dude, not cool. No matter how obnoxious the student, you do not step out with a job half done.
What the what?
Guess he didn’t want to waste an airplane and trusted she could handle it.
Still a selfish way to do it, but most suicides are selfish I believe.
I heard it put this way: Someone is going to find you. A regular person, a cop, a firefighter. And they will have to go home with that image in their brain.
I had a friend who was a cop, and he did a wellness check on a family with kids the same age as his. There was a gas leak, and they were all dead. That’s not something you just get over.
I don’t have a lot of sympathy for cops, but the things they see and giving death notifications to next of kin have to be horrific.
I am generally of the opinion that anyone who is at the point of needing to end it all is so far past any concept of selfishness, and probably in so much pain, as to make the concept meaningless and more of a sop to the emotions of the survivors.
“giving death notifications to next of kin have to be horrific.”
I’d think so too. But on Law & Order it’s “We are sorry for your lost. And where were you on Tuesday night around 11pm?”
Maybe he was a commie who had an epiphany.
^ I wanted to make this joke.
Burying an important bit: “…the student, who is believed to have a pilot’s licence but few flying hours under her belt, has claimed he opened the plane’s window and jumped. Despite watching Mr Bertazzo plunge to his death, she still managed to land the Cessna C-150 safely and unaided at Coronel Olmedo Airport…”
Atta girl! That would be, uh, quite stressful. I’d put that shit on my resume/ cover letter.
Legit thought: Was he just trying to murder her, someone? Make his death very famous? Hrm.
Or she murdered him.
^^ OUTSTANDING point. Dammit, Gumshoe Ev. That’s sloppy NON-thinking from me. hrm. Maybe she was getting ripped off, figured she could fly it anyway, and just wanted the plane.
Fun bit: That Cessna, or a similar one, is the type I flew as a kid. Took off and flew, never landed. Brother kinda worked at the airport in high school to get ‘free’ lessons. Coulda got his flying license, or very maybe he actually did, but he never did anything with it. Strange man, he.
Who will run against Sen. Susan Collins this November?
They could try Janet Mills again.
I’ve seen clown cars at the circus, but I’ve never happened upon this.
I guess they were trying to C R-V how many people they could Fit, it was a sort of Pilot program.
At least they were Civic about it.
It was their civic duty to stop them from completing that odyssey.
Did they do a Focus group to Kicks it off?
Do you think they can aFord that?
You guys and your puns are so automatic. Something original would be impreza.
That’s a Honda ad.
Or Subaru Horror Theater
The end with crushed woman who can’t move…
So, some good out of Iran.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/08/europe-us-nato-iran-00990570
Send more French speaking diplomats.
Oh great, WW3 is coming.
Again?
Mandatory military service in Europe, like S Korea or Israel, would be fucking hysterical. In every way of that word, especially if they went the Israeli route, which would add even more joy to me. To break the cognitive dissonance, they’d have to man-up and riot a bit, which the locals (IMO) don’t have the heart or ability to do anymore.
I hope it ends well for them, but damn. They need a much harsher Trump and I don’t know how they get it. (Big Event.)
Germany had mandatory service until 2011.
and then everybody will respect us
*derisive laughter*
No they won’t.
They’ll have their own military just in time for the horde to take it over.
Professional courtesy
Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was spared from prison Wednesday for ushering a Mexican defendant out of her courtroom to evade U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. A federal judge fined her $5,000 and cited her otherwise law-abiding life in issuing the sentence.
——-
Dugan resigned the Milwaukee County circuit judgeship she had held for nine years in January amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers who labeled her an activist judge. In her resignation letter, she said her prosecution threatened “the independence of our judiciary.” Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a fierce Trump loyalist running for Wisconsin governor, urged authorities to “lock her up” in a social media post following her conviction.
Two Marquette University law professors spoke on her behalf, including a former state Supreme Court justice and a Jesuit priest who read a statement describing Dugan as a defender of oppressed people and saying he didn’t believe there was a need for punishment. “Hannah models what it means to be a Christian,” Gregory O’Meara said.
Truly heroic. She deserves a medal. A judge should always ignore the parts of the law which she finds inconvenient.
I hope some Jeet truck driver runs her off the road.
That would be a good fate.
True. Although I believe she is still a convicted felon.
And I believe, as a convicted felon, she is no longer eligible to be a judge.
Now do a Muslim judge deciding to follow Sharia law in a U.S. court.
I can imagine what he’d say if she as a fundamentalist refused to marry gays, or as a Catholic ruled against abortion clinics.
Yep. The judiciary is the one I’ve lost the most respect for. Their sweeping injunctions, lusty moments of (fulfilled!) top-down power. It’s not good. And the system is designed to not stop it. Slippery judicial slope is icier.
Warty Hugeman in history?
***
Mills Darden (October 7, 1799 – January 23, 1857[1]) was an American who became famous as one of the largest men ever in human history. His enormous size both in terms of his body weight and height made him one of the biggest humans to have ever lived. It was said his resting blood pressure averaged 237/138. He was officially confirmed to have stood at a height of 7 ft 6 in (229 cm) tall[2] and weighed more than 1,000 lb (450 kg), with a shoulder-to-shoulder width measurement of about 6 ft (1.8 m).[3]
***
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_Darden
Geez. if he lived another five years he could have won the Civil War all by himself.
Are we sure his name wasn’t Mills Darden SMITH?
Was that wrong? Should I not have done that? (Archive like cuz paywall)
The Florida Supreme Court has again rejected a proposed punishment for an Orange County circuit judge who wrote hundreds of political checks and now wants the judge to be suspended and fined.
What’s nine hundred separate violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct between friends?
Dear God, is she trying to smile in that picture?
Is that the best photo ever? One wonders what her face looks like normally.
Death rictus?
She smiles like Bob from Twin Peaks
What’s nine hundred separate violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct between friends?
Tuesday?
Jury duty for a cat
I think I remember that Monty Python sketch.
Mystery
The state’s Division of Petroleum Market Oversight has officially released its list of scapegoats: President Trump, Iran, and branded gas stations like Chevron conspiring to “add to the pain at the pump.”
Conveniently missing from the indictment is the man who spent years taxing, regulating, restricting, suing, and otherwise making California one of the most hostile places in America to produce energy: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
The report conveniently avoids discussing Newsom’s nation-leading gas taxes, years-long regulatory onslaught and political war against villainous “Big Oil,” the refinery closures that followed, and all other unique-to-California policies that have steadily reduced fuel supply while increasing the cost of producing it.
——-
Unfortunately for Newsom, California’s tax code is a matter of public record. California’s $1.40 per gallon is the highest gas tax in the nation. California now makes more money off each gallon of gasoline sold than the refiners who are actually producing the gasoline.
And that extra $1.40 comes before accounting for the extra expenses of California’s boutique fuel mandates, its cap-and-trade regime, refinery restrictions, and lawfare campaigns charging billions of dollars to the oil and gas industry that helped build much of the state’s economy.
Paradise don’t come cheap.
Petroleum Market Oversight
What will they oversee when they’ve banished petroleum from their glorious world?
“…list of scapegoats: President Trump, Iran…”
They’re just bombing each other to throw us off the trail of collusion!
Today I learned that Nixon is responsible for the removal of two statues from the Capitol entrance: The Rescue, which depicts a white man disarming an Indian and The Discovery of America, which shows Columbus in armor and holding a globe.
Indians started complaining about them in the 1930s, but nothing changed until the statues were removed to do maintenance. By that time, they needed expensive restoration, so Nixon and a small committee decided not to replace them.
It seems even Republicans aren’t very good at defending historical heritage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rescue_(sculpture)
***
In 1976, a crane accidentally dropped The Rescue while moving it to a new Smithsonian storage area in Maryland, thus reducing it to several fragments. Today they lie next to Discovery, also said to be in poor condition.[8]
In a collaboration between the Middlebury College Museum of Art and the Office of the Architect of the Capitol, the pioneer’s dog from The Rescue was exhibited during a temporary show, “Horatio Greenough: An American Sculptor’s Drawings” in late 1999.
***
[head desk]
Well, at least the dog didn’t offend anyone.
Did the statues represent white supremacy? I guess so, but if white supremacy led to America, then maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Europeans have produced superior civilizations. That’s why they spread and were imitated. If America is white supremacist, so is liberalism because both are the products of Western civilization.
Prosperous, stable countries tend to have a dominant ethnic group. Some, like Indonesia and Pakistan, have a plurality and do OK. Countries that have neither a majority nor plurality ethnicity tend to be poor and unstable. There are outliers like North Korea and Somalia (homogeneous, but poor/unstable).
Well, Nixon did a pretty good job of removing himself, so…
Americans have been quite kind to the tribes and nations we’ve defeated, even (some might say “especially”) the Confederacy. It’s a historical anomaly.
White, heterosexual, Christian, American men have a pretty good track record as gracious victors. If you’re gonna lose to somebody, better them than the Mongols, Lakota, Maori, Romans, Zulus…pretty much anybody.
Foreigners come here because life is better here, so we ought to celebrate the people and ideas that made that possible, not “everybody gets a trophy” diversity.
The way things are going, soft balkanization might be the only way to keep the peace.
There are many examples of American cities that lost their white majority, and things did not get better. If the whole country loses its white majority, the same problems will happen on a larger and possibly catastrophic scale. Most multicultural countries with no majority ethnic group are one-party states with lots of corruption, violence, and poverty.
At this point, I think immigration should be a privilege reserved for the extremely rich and/or intelligent. Letting the country fill up with swarms of mediocrities will just drag everything down.
It’s all out of my hands, but it’s interesting to think about.
What we have now is probably better than what’s likely to come.
“At this point, I think immigration should be a privilege reserved for the extremely rich and/or intelligent. Letting the country fill up with swarms of mediocrities will just drag everything down.
It’s all out of my hands, but it’s interesting to think about.”
We can talk about details, but it’s pretty much where I’m at. Conversely, if the immigrants who came were similar in assimilation and work ethic as, say, the 1920s, fewer would come and they’d be of higher quality.
Getting my pants hemmed and got a few shirts to resemble a wardrobe. Updated Meijer on the situation. Still feels strange, but likely the first day predictably will be ho-hum everyday. Oooh. I still have that paperwork for the onboarding to do by then.
Me in an office? Huh. Minnesota Munch is excited for me, still desperate to get outta that place into a meaningful job Stateside. Though it’s ‘local,’ still feels more foreign than Korea and all the others. I will say, like those, it’s a remarkably rewarding gear shift. And tremendous incentive. Would shift into my own place in ~six months or so if I’m comfortable, ‘competent enough,’ with the work.
Oh, goodness gracious, my-oh-me.
Good luck in the new endeavor.
Good for you EV. The wife is on day three of her new job, post lay-off. Not making as much, but we have a plan for that, though it will be tight for a bit.
Dear universe: If Platner pulls out, please let him be replaced by a young Hitler impersonator. Mustache and all.
There was one, many years ago, at Burning Man, God, the REEEEing that would cause today.
My favorite Hitler impersonateor.
RIP Gilbert Godfrey.
The host asks him if he’s OK because he looks nervous, Gilbert replies, “I think I left the oven on”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HcIRmGQSwg