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To fight another day

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/31/to-fight-another-day/
Created
Sun, 01/01/2023 - 01:00
You made it through another year If you have gone from cheering the arrival of the New Year to being thankful you survived the last, join the club. Yet many, including the proprietress here, have considered the unexpected accomplishments of the Biden administration this last year. Digby wrote on Friday that she did not see Dark Brandon coming: I think some of this success, paradoxically, is because Joe Biden is our oldest president, not in spite of that fact. There’s a certain YOLO quality to many people his age which he seems to have channeled into a willingness to take calculated risks that have largely paid off. Dark Brandon’s seen it all — he doesn’t scare easily. Biden reminds audiences, repeatedly and forcefully, “It’s never been a good bet to bet against America!” Even among progressive activists (including this one), Biden’s unabashed America boosterism is sometimes cringe-inducing. While glass-half-empty cynics, the nihilists, the MAGAs, the QAnon cultists, and the fascism-curious gnaw like Teredo worms at the nation’s pilings, Biden is still betting on America. Unashamedly fighting the shameless.

Tichy Tiles

https://mirrorsydney.wordpress.com/2021/08/28/tichy-tiles/
Created
Sat, 28/08/2021 - 14:47
In this month’s edition of Artlink: In Public/Inside is an article I’ve written about ceramic artist Vladimir Tichy, and the large-scale ceramic murals he made in the 1970s and 80s. Regular readers of this blog would know that I keep an eye on the remaining city Tichy murals – on York Street, Foveaux Street, and […]

The 2022 campaign awards

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/30/the-2022-campaign-awards/
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 10:00
Dave Weigel’s take on the best achievements in campaigning is one of the more interesting year-end pieces I’ve read. He spends all his time on the trail and I suspect he knows what he’s talking about: Best U.S. Senate campaign: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. Did he get an assist when Donald Trump lifted Mehmet Oz to win the GOP primary? Obviously. Did a decade-plus of ad campaigns, TED Talks, and media profiles of the 6’8’’ mayor of a left-for-dead town help him? Yes, but that wasn’t luck, and he’d already run for Senate and lost before, in 2016. This year’s Fetterman campaign excelled at everything, convincing Democratic primary voters that a candidate Republicans would call “socialist” was electable, then pummeling Oz while its own candidate recovered from a stroke. The best Fetterman gimmicks — like his constant Twitter trolling of Oz, largely for his living until recently in New Jersey — probably wouldn’t work for other candidates, which was the point.

Friday Night Soother

https://digbysblog.net/2022/12/30/friday-night-soother-186/
Created
Sat, 31/12/2022 - 11:30
Happy New Year Hippos! Dispatch from Cincinnati: Stop what you’re doing right now and look at these stinking cute pictures of Fritz, the baby brother of the celebrated Cincinnati Zoo hippopotamus Fiona, stealing the show with his toothy grin. “Fritz showing us his smile… and new teeth coming in!” the zoo tweeted this week. Fritz, who was born Aug. 3, did appear to be smiling as he propelled himself around the 70,000-gallon pool at Hippo Cove. Twitter users couldn’t get enough of Fritz’s broad smile. “I’d lay my life on the line for Fritz,” one user tweeted. “Not to be dramatic,” another user said, “but I would die for Fritz,” Fritz, who weighed 330 pounds at a recent weigh-in, is a bouncing baby boy in the most literal sense. Hippos don’t swim, exactly, but use their powerful legs to propel themselves through water. They spend a lot of time bouncing off the walls and bottoms of pools, according to a piece in The Atlantic written when Fiona was just a wee thing. And tiny she was at birth. Born six weeks prematurely on Jan.
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