This is the honest to goodness truth.

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They are performing The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Dallas was not alone.  Boston got nasty emails, too.

The Lenox company has received roughly 40 such messages, including one that wished the theater “the worst possible life you could have and hope you all get sick and die.” At Shakespeare Dallas, executive and artistic director Raphael Parry says his company has received about 80 messages, including threats of rape, death, and wishes that the theater’s staff is “sent to ISIS to be killed with real knives.”

By the way, this is not the first time the play has used contemporary figures as Caesar or Antony. And, obviously these people don’t know what happened after Caesar was assassinated.  This is not a pro-assassination play.

Yeah, you should know that I’m shaking my damn head as I type this.

Remember when Republicans were calling for more civility after last week’s shooting of a Republican congressman?

Remember when Charlie Brown would try to kick the football and Lucy would pull it up at the last minute?

Yeah, the Lucy Republican strikes again …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh7ZiddrkmI

The Atlanta Journal Constitution covers the story.

Our readers who are Hillary loyalists don’t like when I write about the disaster of her campaign last year and the mess that is the Democratic Party.  Like it or not, though, the criticism is true, and I’m not the only one.  Tim Dickinson wrote a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone this last week that talks about how the party got hollowed out during the Obama years especially during Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s term which set a low watermark for corruption and plain ol’ incompetence.  Even Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate and former DNC chair, got into the act and was quoted in the piece saying, “That congresswoman had no idea what she was doing.”  And that was the polite criticism.  Rather than grow the party, she actually used her position for self promotion to launch a campaign to land her in House leadership.  That blew up and she dug in when even Obama tried to oust her from the job.  We all know how that story ended.

It gets worse, especially for Hillary’s campaign.  An unnamed Democratic strategist described her candidacy in blunt terms:

“And she was really surprised by how strong Trump was – and part of it was she just sucked. At a really fundamental level we gotta get people to acknowledge what a f*****g piece of sh*t her campaign was, because Donald Trump should not have won this election.”

Well, OK, then.  That’s about as blunt as it gets (even more blunt than me).  The rest of the article speaks of how Tom Perez is trying to un-fossilize the party, recruit new candidates, and resurrect the money machine that it became under Howard Dean and Barack Obama during the very successful 50 state strategy in 2006 and 2008.

However, the job is not a simple one.  During the Obama administration, Democrats lost all over the country in state and federal elections due to simple neglect (and DWS’s incompetence).  No one, including Obama, was in charge during that time, and his staff had no national plan except to get him re-elected in 2012.  There’s now a huge deficit to make up for all that neglect, and Trump is certainly leaving a huge opportunity for the Dems to hoover up if only they don’t blow it…again.

This Rolling Stone article is a sobering read, and will certainly piss off loyalists.  But truth is truth, and facts is facts. This chapter is long from over, and the sooner progressives recognize what a complete disaster 2008 to 2016 actually was, the sooner they can fix it.

Seattle is giving voters four vouchers worth $25 each in a publicly financed municipal election.  It’s hope, y’all.

When elections can be bought by corporations, a publicly financed campaign is a game changer.

“For us it really is about creating a new pathway for participation,” says Alissa Haslam, executive director of the Win/Win Network, a progressive Seattle coalition that led the initiative campaign. Haslam says organizers were “shocked” that they won the ballot initiative by such a large margin, particularly since it included a property tax increase that will generate $30 million over ten years to underwrite the vouchers.

It is cheaper to pay for an election this way than to have to pay the mark-up city vendors charge for all the campaign money they have to give candidates.  If a concrete company has to give city council members a large campaign donation to get their vote on a contract, that cost is passed along to you in higher taxes anyway.  At least this way, you get to decide who gets the campaign money instead of a cement company in another city.

Most importantly, it totally screws the Koch brothers.

Thanks to Alfredo over at the Dairy Queen for the heads up.

File under Sumbitches:

Yesterday, Newt Gingrich, career philanderer and prolific liar, made the head-snapping pronouncement that a US president “cannot obstruct justice“, and can fire anyone he wants to fire, regardless of legality.  His comments were made at the National Press Club where he was peddling his new collection of fairytales, Understanding Trump, which is his usual pile of manure delivered with the gravity of a college professor.  Apparently to Gingrich, there is a completely different set of rules for a Democrat in the WH than for a Republican.

Never burdened by the truth or a sense common decency, Gingrich is famous for delivering these kinds of proclamations that swing from one wild lie to another, changing his “sincere” belief to match whatever argument he’s positing at the time.  This proclamation, though, is especially egregious; when he was speaker of the house, he lead the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about having a sexual affair and obstruction of justice.   To make matters worse, at the time of the impeachment, he was having an affair himself with his current wife, Calista, while going after Clinton for his affair.  He was forced out of the Speaker job in 1999 under a storm cloud of ethics violations and election losses.

Gingrich is a shameless liar and his books are useful as two things: Kindling and toilet paper.

Sir, your lawyer’s lawyer is on line 2.

Yeah. It really is happening.

So the lesson here is – if you have ever touched or met Donald Trump, or know someone who has, you might need to hire a lawyer.  Now. Before all the good ones are gone.

As customer Deb says, “it’s almost like one of those Russian nesting dolls.”

Thanks to Deb T for the heads up.