Notta lotta time this morning. I’m debriefing myself on the State of the Union, which I did not watch, because I never watch. I read the text the following day, absorb several different stories about it from reputable news outlets, and consider myself informed. I gather the laugh lines landed, and the GOP response was even worse than Marco “gimme a sip of water” Rubio’s, way back when.
I just watched a couple clips from Katie Britt’s community-theater-audition response. It’s worse than I thought.
Instead, come with me down my latest media rabbit hole, i.e. photos of people taken at Mar-a-Lago. Why does everyone there look like they are residents of the Capital in the Hunger Games movies?
This one ⬇️ is so weird I wonder if it’s real, but apparently it is. And to think these people have a problem with drag queens.
Kim Guilfoyle, looking practically normal in this gang:
The one on the right here is the same as the one on the left in the first photo. Not sure about the other one.
These two could be a mother/daughter pair. “People are always getting us mixed up, it’s so weird!”
It must be a condition of membership that every woman wear the same hairstyle. This one is giving me “Russian mistress,” how about you?
This must have been the No Strapless Bras luncheon. Second from left is the older one of the mother-daughter pair above. Not sure about the others.
And there you have it, just a glimpse into the membership of America’s trashiest country club. Feel free to make merry, but I have to get ready for the day.
Suzanne said on March 8, 2024 at 9:55 am
Those photos prove that there are some very rich plastic surgeons in Florida!
We stayed up way too late to watch the entire SOTU speech and rebuttal. Biden was on fire and while he did slur a couple of times, I chalked it up to his brain getting ahead of his tongue, which we know stutters. I was incensed, as a cancer survivor, that Magic Mike Johnson didn’t applaud when Biden mentioned trying to eradicate cancer. I guess with no vaccines and no attempt at treating things like cancer, it’s easier to weed out the less desirable specimens in the population and grow the master race. He didn’t applaud keeping kids from the effects of lead in their water either.
The GOP rebuttal was creepy as heck. It was like watching the local high school play, with some girl thinking she’s the next Meryl Streep while the audience is trying not to snicker. I was surprised she didn’t try to sell some essential oils or nutritional supplements at the end.
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tajalli said on March 8, 2024 at 11:03 am
The QOP women are just sore sports because drag queens do a better job of projecting the “yang woman” image than they do. And drag queens can read aloud competently, as demonstrated frequently in libraries to child audiences, not a life skill possessed by women on the far right.
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FDChief said on March 8, 2024 at 11:07 am
Didn’t watch either. It’s political theater and so the only real value is your approach, because it’s the audience and critics responses that matter. FWIW it sounds like Dark Brandon was in full-on Slayer Mode, so good. It’s past time the traitorous Republican MAGAts got the sharp edge of the same rhetorical sword they’ve been swinging since Gingrich. More of that, please!
Oh, yes, the Cult of 45. Occasionally I’m a bit stunned by what wingnuts think is sexycool. But then I remember…wingnuts!
If you enjoy his kind of fiction Carl Hiiasen has a newish one called “Squeeze Me” in which he lambasts the culties in the form of grotesques much like your subjects. His little band of Trump groupies call themselves “Potussies” (POTUS Pussies, natch…) and are all as unselfconsciously over-the-top ridiculous as these botoxed and blow-dried sirens. It’s almost too easy to mock these parasites until you think of how many there are and how happy they will be when Tubby and his Merry MAGAts shove the New Gilded Age down the rest of our throats.
That’s where I reach for my revolver…
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Peter said on March 8, 2024 at 11:14 am
The lady in blue in the second photo – she has to be the daughter of one of the wives in Goodfellas – you know the scene where they’re getting facials and beauty tips at Paulie’s house, and one of them says she was in Miami recently and it was like she died and was in Jew Heaven?
On second thought – maybe granddaughter – that film’s been out for a while….
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alex said on March 8, 2024 at 11:22 am
New idea for a band name: The Pneumatic Floozies.
I’m glad to see that Biden’s speech is being so well received by the press and that the rebuttal is being almost universally panned. I saw a commenter elsewhere comparing Britt’s performance to the quavering voice-overs in those ads for the ASPCA or pleas for money by the Christians for Starving Jews.
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Deborah said on March 8, 2024 at 11:23 am
The women in the photos remind me of ridiculous women I used to see walking around when I was a kid growing up in Miami way back when. Of course they didn’t have Botox back then or as many available plastic surgery procedures but they were as cluelessly tarted up when they were well over the tart age. So maybe something is in the water in Florida and has been for decades. Why can’t they see themselves in the mirror? I don’t get it.
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Dorothy said on March 8, 2024 at 11:26 am
The gal in the salmon colored shirt must need a crane to lift her into her brassiere every morning.
Compared to this array of trashy anti-pulchritude Melanoma’s appearance can almost be called dignified.
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Julie Robinson said on March 8, 2024 at 11:42 am
Squeeze Me was great, though I don’t recall it covered the issues of such enormous boobs. I mean, where do you even buy bras? A college friend planned reduction surgery as soon as she started got a job, to relieve her constant back and shoulder pain.
Anyone notice the Republican response came from a kitchen? ‘Cos that’s where women belong, I guess.
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Heather said on March 8, 2024 at 11:44 am
I’m not one to say that women should just consign themselves to looking like old-school grandmas as they age, but this ain’t the answer either.
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FDChief said on March 8, 2024 at 11:50 am
Julie: IIRC the Potussies’ frontage was mocked along with everything else about them, but I don’t recall anything as impressive as some of that boobage.
The only real WTF was Melania as sorta-romantic heroine. THAT was a real stretch, even for Hiiasen.
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Mark P said on March 8, 2024 at 12:43 pm
“Success! When I woke up from breast enhancement surgery, I couldn’t see my belly roll!”
These women are what classless people think classy people look like.
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Suzanne said on March 8, 2024 at 4:25 pm
This is why I can’t quit the site formerly known as Twitter.
https://x.com/repmoskowitz/status/1766186747900149802?s=61&t=YOnjsG5n5GNlEz7X-ugsGA
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Mark P said on March 8, 2024 at 5:17 pm
Way, way back, when I was taking a Bible class where we read through the entire Bible, the teacher was talking about one of the Old Testament accounts of a battle where some absurdly large number of people were killed. He said that there was a feeling that if they said it was true, it kinda made it true. Or true-ish. I think that’s what the Republicans are doing. They say obviously untrue things, and by saying them, they kinda make it true. At least for their bobble-headed minions.
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Jeff Gill said on March 8, 2024 at 5:26 pm
Eye bleach, stat.
Oh, and this bit of editing: https://x.com/jga41agher/status/1765999600098250756?s=20
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Mark P said on March 8, 2024 at 5:33 pm
Well, at least they brought out their best and brightest.
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Andrea said on March 8, 2024 at 6:10 pm
Looking at these women just makes me sad. What intensive self-loathing they must have, the misogyny they have internalized, that makes them think this is in any way attractive? Who are the men who are reinforcing that this is attractive? Drag queens make me laugh — I get it, it is all in fun. But this display? Creepy and sad. Yuck.
I would note that it appears that all of these women have had “gender affirming” surgery but, whooosh… not really sure what gender they are actually affirming here.
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David C said on March 8, 2024 at 6:21 pm
The people of the People of Walmart can feel a little better about themselves now.
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FDChief said on March 8, 2024 at 7:07 pm
Re: the GQP “response”, apparently the weird creepy affect displayed by SEN Oftrump is a style peculiar to the Talibangelicals. There’s even a name for it: “fundie baby voice”.
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Dave said on March 8, 2024 at 8:19 pm
Those are some scary “ladies”. Some of them look more drag queenish than drag queens.
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Deborah said on March 8, 2024 at 8:50 pm
Sen OfTrump, perfect. And Tommy Tuberville said they picked her to speak because she’s a “housewife”.
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Ann said on March 8, 2024 at 11:16 pm
These photos have made my evening. Thank you. I had a dose of our alternate reality eating dinner last night in a restaurant with Fox News up on the big screen. The volume was off, thank the lord, but the chyron read “Biden brags about giving away trillions of taxpapers’ money.” They really can twist anything. Oh, and the nice taxpayer who every year brings in a couple of boxes of Walmart cookies has a bumper sticker “my governor is an idiot.”
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Deborah said on March 9, 2024 at 1:48 am
Last day in Kyoto, snow flurries with sun in between and sometimes at the same time.
We went to the famous bamboo grove which was loaded with Japanese tourists. A big part of the experience is supposed to be the sound of the tall bamboo trees swaying and knocking, but the tourists weren’t quiet enough to really hear it. Plus the trail wasn’t that long so it was over quickly.
We went back to the ryokan where the small cafe was open, it’s only open on Saturday, it hadn’t been open all week which was a shame because it was very pleasant, it had originally been the carriage house on the premises. We had a coffee and delicious chocolate cake while quite classical music played.
One more meal this evening and then we leave prior to breakfast for the train station in the morning. I hope we get a good view of Mt. Fuji again from the train on our way back to Tokyo.
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Deborah said on March 9, 2024 at 6:07 am
The fundie baby voice https://jesspiper.substack.com/p/the-fundie-baby-voice. Ivanka has that voice down cold.
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ROGirl said on March 9, 2024 at 7:20 am
Scary clown faces on surgically modified bodies in slutty little bo peep dresses.
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alex said on March 9, 2024 at 9:08 am
The fundie baby voice. I’d never considered that it was a cultural identifier, but it makes sense. And I can see why they use it as a voice over in ads begging rubes to part with their money.
Vocal fry and nasally sounding voices seem to get talked about a lot, but there’s another type of female voice that doesn’t seem as common anymore. I would describe it as an operatic whine. Think Julia Child. It has an almost sirenlike quality and the pitch isn’t necessarily high or low. I suspect that it was an affectation bred in patrician society, although I can think of several TV characters from a half century ago who weren’t playing blue-blooded roles but seemed to have it too: Edith Bunker, Gloria Stivic, Aunt Bea.
I think Ann wins the thread with the quip about “gender-affirming surgery.” I also think Caitlyn Jenner pulls off that look better than any of those inflatable dolls at Mar-a-Lago.
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FDChief said on March 9, 2024 at 9:55 am
IIRC the interwar standard elocution that Hollywood used to signify “class” was that semi-English-aristo tone of voice. If you wanted a movie career as an A-picture star – that is, anything other than a cabbie or shopgirl extra – you learned that “posh” voice.
The FBV does that for Talibangelical women. It’s a status marker; “I’m not a scary feminazi! If my Man disagrees with anything I say, I’ll change it immediately!”
That anyone who doesn’t think of women as a sort of fleshbot life-support system for a uterus could even momentarily think of that as okay utterly horrifies me.
But then, I’m not a fundie wingnut…
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Mark P said on March 9, 2024 at 10:10 am
FD Chief, that’s called the mid-Atlantic pronunciation. It was sort of a mix of Midwestern US and RP (Received Pronunciation) English. Some posh American and British actors affected it.
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Mark P said on March 9, 2024 at 10:17 am
This is unrelated to our current conversation, but I think you all would be interested:
https://www.loweringthebar.net/2024/03/is-originalism-bullshit.html
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Brandon said on March 9, 2024 at 1:59 pm
Also unrelated to the main conversation but relevant. Daylight saving time begins tomorrow. Thankfully, we in Hawaii (and Arizona and the U.S. territories) are under standard time. I hope one day that the whole country can be under permanent standard time.
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Sherri said on March 9, 2024 at 2:09 pm
If you haven’t encountered it yet, you should read Kate Wagner’s piece on Formula 1. It was commissioned by Road and Track, but they pulled it after it was up for about an hour, but the world noticed anyway. Kate Wagner is known in these parts for McMansion Hell.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240301170542/https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/a46975496/behind-f1-velvet-curtain/
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David C said on March 9, 2024 at 2:36 pm
No thanks. The last thing I need or want is a 4:00 AM sunrise. Not changing the clock makes sense in Hawaii. You’re nearer to the equator so sunrise/sunset times don’t vary any more than a couple of hours throughout the year. Ours varies by almost eight hours. We tried permanent daylight time in 1973, it didn’t work, and we went back to changing the clocks. I’m sure if we do permanent standard time, it won’t work either. It’s done for a reason. The same reason holds here or in Europe where they change the time too. People don’t want sunrise at 4:00 AM. They’d rather have that hour of sunlight at the end of the day.
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LAMary said on March 9, 2024 at 3:18 pm
My late mother in law affected some sort of New England/Canadian accent. The New England part was somewhat valid. She was born in Rhode Island, but where the Canadian stuff came from I have no idea. She was a pretentious pain in the ass so it wasn’t out of character. Father in law affected slight British accent. He did have a grandfather who was born in Stoke on Trent so I guess it was genetic. He also had the numeral IV after his name. My ex had a V. I refused to continue this BS with sons.
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Deborah said on March 9, 2024 at 4:48 pm
No daylight saving time in Japan.
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Deborah said on March 9, 2024 at 5:36 pm
Kate Wagner certainly has a way with words, I could read her all day. I particularly liked how she described beer that tastes like pine needles, it’s so true but I never thought it before.
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LAMary said on March 9, 2024 at 7:17 pm
Kim Guilfoyle’s boobs look real. Gotta give her a little credit for that. It doesn’t make up for the lips though.
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FDChief said on March 9, 2024 at 8:23 pm
The annual Running of the Angst over changing the clock time a whole hour always makes my head hurt. You know that humans “changed the clocks” for millennia, yeah?
Only it was called “sunrise”, and it woke you a touch earlier every morning, until by June you were waking a couple of hours earlier than you did in January.
Now we’re slaves to mechanical clocks and it’s impractical to set the clock a trifle ahead every morning. So we do it all in a lump.
But the reasons haven’t changed; so our waking cycle is close to sunrise. No, nobody wants to sleep through two or three hours of morning daylight, ugh.
I grew up with it, and I swear I never heard so much complaining about it as I have over the past decade, and I’m kinda baffled. Where were all these poor clock-change sufferers in 1982?
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basset said on March 9, 2024 at 9:00 pm
Meanwhile… if I’m reading the schedule correctly, it looks like Nashville’s no longer a stop on the Shadow Show tour. Too bad, I woulda gone.
And I know a lot of you play the NY Times games, Wordle in particular. I tried it awhile back and just couldn’t get into it. We had a lot of down time while working the election this past Tuesday, and a couple of my fellow poll officials tried to explain the appeal of Wordle to me, and of Connections, but I’m still in the dark on that. I can understand how it works, I can put the words together, I just don’t feel it.
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alex said on March 9, 2024 at 11:09 pm
So Katie Britt’s message was as fake as her delivery, but then we knew that already. Bad faith, bad acting, just bad all around.
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Deborah said on March 10, 2024 at 1:25 am
We’re at the airport lounge for JAL airlines, our flight is JAL but through American Airlines, my husband got platinum status with American when he flew constantly for work which has probably been 20 years ago. He keeps the platinum status for life, which is nice, free food and drinks, more relaxing than sitting at the gate, and the platinum status didn’t cost us a dime since it was a result of millions of work trips. Rare when perks pay off.
The train ride from Kyoto was uneventful thank goodness, I still get freaked out with anxiety. A gummy would have been helpful. We did see Mt Fuji again in all of its glory.
All in all a spectacular trip, one we’ll probably never do again, a once in a lifetime event at our age.
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David C said on March 10, 2024 at 7:03 am
Thanks for sharing it Deborah. I’ll probably never be anything more than an armchair traveler, so it’s nice to see the rest of the world through someone else’s eyes.
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Icarus said on March 10, 2024 at 10:52 am
I grew up with it, and I swear I never heard so much complaining about it as I have over the past decade, and I’m kinda baffled. Where were all these poor clock-change sufferers in 1982?
who were all those with undiagnosed ADHD back in the gOOD oLD dAY? I guarantee some people suffered or were at least majorly inconvenienced by DST but we didn’t have social media to hear about it.
I know it can be hard to conceive that someone else cannot put on their big person pants and deal when you or I could, but I used to feel that way about some things too (dairy allergies for instance) until I was better educated about the impact and effects.
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Julie Robinson said on March 10, 2024 at 3:24 pm
By now, everyone has probably seen the SNL takedown of Katie Britt. After I watched it, I thought about Tina Fey as $arah Palin, and now I wonder if that was Katie’s audition for VP on the Trump ticket. If so, did it hurt her? Or did he like her ability to lie with a straight face? Hmmm…
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David C said on March 10, 2024 at 3:36 pm
I’m going to have to break down and watch the original Katie Britt performance so I can watch the SNL version. I read Katie Britt is on his short list for VP. She’ll be the Alina Habba of Kayleigh McEnanys if he picks her.
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alex said on March 10, 2024 at 4:46 pm
I read about another Katie Britt performance — the one she gave today in a disingenuous defense of her misleading story about the sex-trafficked girl from Mexico. She blames journalists whom she said should have known about the case in question except that they’d always ignored it.
No, beeyotch, they did know about it and they called you out for your breathtaking dishonesty.
The local congressional and gubernatorial political ads around here are something else. Our primary isn’t until May and wide fields of Republicans are falling all over themselves trying to out-Trump each other. Primary campaigns around here are always insulting to one’s intelligence and sensibilities but I never imagined it could go so low.
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Deborah said on March 10, 2024 at 4:56 pm
We’re at our hotel in San Francisco, extremely jet lagged, but the flight back was much faster than the trip over because of the jet stream.
Our hotel, The Palace, is on Montgomery and Market and boy howdy has Market street gone to hell. Xitter headquarters are on Market and when I think how Elon Musk could easily clean it up and give all the homeless people a place to live, it would be a pittance to him. With all the tech money in this city, how could they let it go to seed like it has around here. Really it’s shamefully immoral.
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Julie Robinson said on March 10, 2024 at 7:44 pm
Deborah, our niece just fled SF after less than a year. It wasn’t just the druggies and crime, it was also the job, but she didn’t feel safe. She’d gotten a downtown apartment and gave up her car, then the stores around her started closing and just getting groceries became a chore. She decamped for sunny Napa and suburban life again.
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Deborah said on March 10, 2024 at 9:17 pm
A couple of weeks ago before we went to Japan we stayed in this same hotel and noticed the decline then. 3 years ago the last time we were in San Francisco it was buzzing on Market so it’s depressing to see all of the businesses closing. I’m sure there’s not as much crime as is perceived but it’s uncomfortable to walk on the street with people acting out, screaming and yelling . No one bothered us directly but my lord it was not pleasant. These people need help, someone please with a stake in the city help them.
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LAMary said on March 11, 2024 at 9:10 am
It just occurred to me that the woman on the right in the top photo looks like a Bob Baker Marionette.
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Dexter Friend said on March 12, 2024 at 12:31 am
I remember watching Ike’s SOTU, and every one since unless I was in the army or working 2nd shift before VCRs. It’s must-watch, like the World Series was to Randall McMurphy.
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