As bad as your wintry travels might get this Thanksgiving, be grateful you’re not these guys:
A UTair flight froze to the ground at Igarka airport in Siberia on Tuesday, and passengers had to get out and push the 30-ton aircraft to get it moving again. One of the men in the video is heard saying: “Real men can plant a tree, build a house, and push a plane,” according to the Siberian Times. The temperatures in the region above the Arctic Circle hit below 52C, and the brakes froze because they used the wrong kind of grease.
We’re staying in by ourselves. It’s cocoon weather.
Today FTW: the surprisingly good politics (so far) of Obama’s executive action on immigration; why “last year was an all-time low for killings of police and a 20-year high for killings by police“; the cosmetic “make-up trajectory” of women; and the meaning of our tatted, inked body culture.
The most popular post of the day was What To Make Of Ferguson? Next up: Will Michael Brown’s Death Be A Turning Point?
Many of this week’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new mugs here. A final email for the day:
Consider this a dispatch from deep in Blue America (I live in the most Democratic precinct in Portland, Oregon). I often chafe at your analysis of the lefty mind and currents in lefty thinking, but I totally agree with the thrust of the thread on Chuck Schumer’s revisionist history and magical thinking.
There was something about the election of Barack Obama that defied reason – and I mean literally. Both sides imagined he was somehow all-powerful. We know the ways in which the right reacted, but the left was just as crazy. The view that Obama somehow squandered an opportunity to remake the country as Sweden is not only universal, it has hardened into rancid resentment. I think it may well explain the midterms; after the unreasonable hopes of 2008, everything looks like desolation. Liberals around here don’t talk about politics anymore – less than any time in my adult life (I’m 46). They voted, but bitterly.
So many liberals look backward and see nothing but coulda-beens. It takes an ignorance of history combined with a lack of sophistication about the political process to see this man as anything but one of the most significant forces for liberalism in US history. And yet now, when we should be flush with excitement and optimism, liberals know only dissipation.
In one key way, the GOP should take pride in this. Their strategy of governing nihilism has indeed had a massive effect. That even a Senator who was in Congress at the time misremembers this history is evidence of how bad things are among the Dem base. It’s been a weird six years.
See you in the morning – and Happy Thanksgiving from all of us.
The Dish 