Zero_Grade posted:

Anyone buying a box of Mirage boosters for $10k (or hell $3k) was/is dumb as poo poo. It was a fun set back in the day and I do wonder how it is to draft, but power creep has completely eclipsed it. You aren't pulling that many LED to justify that price, come on now. It is annoying that so many other cards have retained their jacked-up price levels.

PT6A posted:

Things are worth whatever you can convince enough losers to pay for them.

Kalli posted:

Early 2021 the NBA licensed a line of NFT's called top shots, and 180k people spent $45m on them in like 2 weeks

And then the market evaporated to nearly nothing in a couple of months.

Boris Galerkin posted:

I just saw Biden salute to the British guards around Charles. I hope this isn’t gonna be the next scandal.

Morrow posted:

the saluting

Madkal posted:

It would be a bigger deal if Obama did it. I feel like RWM don't amplify meaningless poo poo like how low the president bowed or how they shook hands or whatever if it wasn't Obama doing it

Shrecknet posted:

which an actual marine put into perfect perspective ten years ago

FLIPADELPHIA posted:

lol I can't even tell if this is satire

Poe's Law man

zoux posted:

No today's invented Biden Scandal is that he's too mean

https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1678407680514314240

selec posted:

I read that as dementia lampshading. People can get temperamental and lash out from it. The comments on record from staff are just PR.

Mellow Seas posted:

I feel like that story can be interpreted as Biden being a no-nonsense badass. It's certainly not nice, but does the president have to be nice? It's pretty hard to imagine that somebody could rise to that level without having the ability to really go off on people when they feel it's necessary. As long as it doesn't rise to the level of like, a hostile employment situation, then he can yell and swear as much as he wants if that's what he needs to do to get his point across.

I always thought the Hartman sketch was pretty flattering to Reagan even if the point was that he was an evil bastard.

Mellow Seas posted:

Pretty sure it was a satire of the right wing reaction; I remember it being posted in the Political Cartoons thread. The author of that comic is a Marine but not a chud.

Really I think any military member would be incredibly honored to hold the loving President’s umbrella, even if they didn’t vote for him.

Mellow Seas posted:

I feel like that story can be interpreted as Biden being a no-nonsense badass. It's certainly not nice, but does the president have to be nice? It's pretty hard to imagine that somebody could rise to that level without having the ability to really go off on people when they feel it's necessary. As long as it doesn't rise to the level of like, a hostile employment situation, then he can yell and swear as much as he wants if that's what he needs to do to get his point across.

Rappaport posted:

...this specific invented scandal is about cussing at a subordinate which seems mean. If this random Axios story is true or not doesn't seem to matter, since your argument is specifically that the POTUS can cuss and yell at people because the POTUS doesn't have to be nice. Which, well, on the face of it fair enough, each of them have been war criminals since Truman, but I am not sure how to de-lineate a hostile work-place situation from people being cussed at for getting a point across.

Twincityhacker posted:

The questioning the staff is interesting to me, but that's only because I heard an interview on someone who worked in the Obama adminstration and the Biden adminstration, and he mentioned that he does more intense prepwork becausw Biden basically grills the staff every meeting about the policy they are in discussion about.

zoux posted:

It seems like these staff stories are completely partisan: Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, Biden now. We don't ever hear stories about how GOP figures are bad bosses, and I don't think it's because there aren't any bad Republican bosses.

Mellow Seas posted:

I feel like part of conservative ideology is that your boss is allowed to be mean to you, and if you don't like that, well, you should've thought of it earlier and worked harder so you could be the boss. So nobody gives a poo poo if Chip Roy is out calling his staff motherfuckers; of course he is.

All of conservatism is basically a psychological coping mechanism for "I love my dad but he was really mean to me."

It's also interesting that those previous targets of this type of attack were all women - I feel like it's the kind of attack that, among the general public, would be much, much less effective against men, because misogynistic culture gives them more license to be aggressive.

zoux posted:

There could be more men, that's not an exhaustive list, just what I could remember off the top of my head. I would not be surprised however if it was overwhelmingly women.

zoux posted:

It seems like these staff stories are completely partisan: Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Marianne Williamson, Biden now. We don't ever hear stories about how GOP figures are bad bosses, and I don't think it's because there aren't any bad Republican bosses.

Fork of Unknown Origins posted:

There were multiple books written and published about how terrible a boss Trump was.

zoux posted:

No today's invented Biden Scandal is that he's too mean

https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1678407680514314240





This is literally like that one SNL sketch about Reagan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5wfPlgKFh8

He cannot be both of these people.

quote:

“Like Napoleon, Biden had captured his personal Toulon at a very young age,” Connaughton writes of the man who was elected to the Senate before his 30th birthday.

He tells of raising money for the senator and getting little in the way of appreciation – not even a thank-you note until he dropped a hint he wanted one – and of Biden treating young aides poorly.

Connaughton recalls a story from the lead-up to Biden’s ill-fated 2008 presidential run.

“Later in the campaign, a twenty-three-year-old fundraising staffer got into a car with Biden with a list of names and phone numbers: ‘Okay, Senator, time to do some fundraising calls,’” Connaughton writes. “Biden looked at him and said, ‘Get the f**k out of the car.’”

Connaughton fell hard for Biden in 1979 when the vice-president, then a young, ambitious senator, gave a typically fiery speech at the University of Alabama and Connaughton, a student, rode back in the car with the senator to the Birmingham airport.

By 1988, Connaughton had found his way to Biden and worked as a junior aide for the then-senator’s first presidential foray before landing a job on his Senate staff. After graduating from law school, he explains that he wanted to land a job in the White House Counsel’s office. So Connaughton says he asked Kaufman, then Biden’s chief of staff, if the senator could put a call into Abner Mikva, Bill Clinton’s White House counsel. Kaufman told Connaughton that Biden wouldn’t do it because Biden didn’t like Mikva.

“Ted tried to console me,” Connaughton writes of Kaufman: “ ‘Jeff, don’t take this personally. Biden disappoints everyone. He’s an equal-opportunity disappointer.’ ”

In an interview, Kaufman said he doesn’t recall this specific conversation but emphatically denied that he would say such a thing about Biden, his former boss and close friend.

“In general, I would never say ‘Biden disappoints everyone’ because I don’t believe it,” said Kaufman, adding that he never recalled hearing Biden say anything negative about Mikva.

He declined to discuss the book or Connaughton further.

Connaughton writes that the turn of events left him to conclude that Biden was not interested in helping those who had been loyal to him.

“His ambitions, I was coming to understand, were mainly about himself,” writes the former staffer.

Connaughton did wind up landing the White House job and ultimately made his way along the well-trod path to K Street, joining Covington & Burling and wasn’t disappointed enough in Biden to not use the senator to his benefit

“In my new career as a lobbyist, I dropped Biden’s name shamelessly,” writes Connaughton. “Perpetuating the myth that I was close to him enhanced my cachet and standing in Washington. It was like a political version of codependency. Biden’s slights could be painful, but it seemed too late to break ranks, even though the relationship never actually helped me when I went to work with [Washington lawyer-lobbyist] Jack [Quinn]. Biden never lifted a finger for me or for one of my clients.”

Still a lobbyist when Biden prepared to run for president once again 5 years ago, Connaughton signed up to serve as the Treasurer of the senator’s PAC.

Mocking Biden’s long-windedness, Connaughton recalls a Houston dinner fundraiser he organized

“As a longtime staffer, I knew to keep flexing my knees while standing through a Biden speech,” he writes. “After awhile, I noticed that the room was getting uncomfortably warm. Suddenly, a woman fainted. Two men caught her and carried her out a side door. Biden just kept on speaking … As the guests filed into the dining room, I stood in the foyer and asked a couple of them for their impressions. ‘He’s got senatorial disease,’ one said. ‘He talks too much.’ At that moment, the front door opened, and the foyer was bathed in the flashing red lights of the ambulance into which the fainting victim was being loaded.”

Connaughton briefly returned to Bidenworld in the days after the 2008 election, but quickly had to resign his position as chair of the vice-president’s inaugural committee because of the new administration’s tough rules on lobbyists.

“It didn’t seem fair,” he writes. “Biden had never helped me once as a lobbyist, yet I was paying the price.”

quote:

Connaughton didn’t immediately head to Washington. First, he went to the University of Chicago business school. (Biden had written a letter of recommendation.) It was 1981, and Time ran an article, called “The Money Chase,” about the vogue for M.B.A.s; the cover image showed a graduating student whose mortarboard had a tassel made of dollars. Connaughton, the son of a government engineer and a homemaker, had never had money, and Wall Street’s allure was almost as strong as that of the White House.

For two years, he worked at Smith Barney—first in Manhattan, then in Chicago. In 1985, missing the South, he passed up a large bonus and joined the E. F. Hutton office in Atlanta. Several months later, the firm pleaded guilty to two thousand counts of wire and mail fraud. In Washington, Joe Biden, who was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, began talking on TV about the epidemic of white-collar crime on Wall Street and the failure of the Reagan Justice Department to police it. In a speech at N.Y.U., Biden said, “People believe that our system of law and those who manage it have failed, and may not even have tried, to deal effectively with unethical and possibly illegal misconduct in high places.” He was getting set for the big race.

The guilty plea cost E. F. Hutton business and began hollowing out the firm, but Connaughton survived. He worked in the public-finance department, specializing in underwriting tax-exempt bonds issued by state and local governments. One day, he came up with a marketable idea: in Florida, many towns and counties had huge pension liabilities, so why not arbitrage them? Create a fifty-million-dollar pension bond, borrow at four per cent, then invest the tax-free money for a few years, at six or seven per cent. “It was a kind of scam on the U.S. taxpayer,” he said later. But his boss was pleased.

At twenty-seven, Connaughton was an assistant vice-president, making more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, but this was not what he wanted to do with his life. By the end of 1986, it seemed clear that Biden would run for President in 1988. Connaughton knew an E. F. Hutton lobbyist who had connections to the campaign, and he got a job as a junior staffer, at twenty-four thousand dollars a year. No longer able to afford the lease payments on his new Peugeot, he traded it for his parents’ 1976 Chevy Malibu. As Connaughton recalled, “I had done Wall Street, and I was going to do the White House next.”

World Famous W posted:

yep, the guy making it was a marine making fun of the people complaining at the time

Main Paineframe posted: