Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Books are my comfort food!

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Second rate reporter says what?

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Open Thread: We Rate Dogs Bringing the Truth Bombs Again

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I loved this explanation because you can send it to your grandma or grandpa and they will totally understand.  Your crazy uncle might be a loss cause.

 

These guys are not afraid to tell the truth, regardless of consequences. I haven’t seen any slowing down on their favorite causes – raising funds for injured and rescue dogs. They seem to be raising funds like crazy every time they need to.

I have a bunch of backlog good news and climate change info, I just need to find the time to write it up for the blog.  We could all use an emotional recharge, so I will make it a priority this weekend.

Here’s the requisite pups photo:

Two great danes on a couch, one resting her head on the other

I have no idea what’s going on, except poor Scout always so put upon. And I’m sure I’m being judged and found wanting. What’s new, LOL

Totally open thread…

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Falling Down (Open Thread)

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Official government jobs data is set to be released tomorrow, not just for January (which private data indicates is the worst since 2009) but also revisions for last year. The White House’s nonsensical and braggadocious “don’t be a panican” press release from yesterday was perhaps a sign they are trying to get out in front of yet another bad news cycle by pre-admonishing Americans not to freak out.

Another sign: the admin sent serial fraud Peter Navarro out to tell preposterous lies about the strong job market during Biden’s presidency. Navarro’s gigantic whoppers function as verbal bubble-wrap, protecting Trump’s massive and fragile ego so it won’t fracture when the numbers reveal Trump era shrinkage.

Peter Navarro: “The jobs report comes out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like … Wall Street has to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of the job market.”

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 10, 2026 at 9:19 AM

Navarro says “all of the jobs we were creating in the Biden years were going to illegals.” That’s patently nonsense. But suppose for a moment there’s an alternative timeline where that’s true — wouldn’t the “millions” of deportations Navarro refers to increase rather than decrease job openings?

Fox’s Bartiromo, a thoroughly ridiculous person, nods credulously and chirps “good point” when Navarro peddles absurd crap that would insult the intelligence of a middle school economics class. Navarro cautions Wall Street not to “rain on that parade,” but the raindrops look suspiciously yellow, and the rain clouds appear to be located in Navarro’s trousers.

Will Wall Street believe Trump admin bullshit or their lying eyes? I don’t know, but their track record of rewarding conmen who spin utterly ludicrous tales that never quite pan out isn’t great. Still, it does sort of feel like the entire house of cards is teetering on collapse, no?

***

Speaking of disgusting perverts, if U.S. voters toss the pedo-fascist party out of power and Congressional Democrats assemble a group to examine the Epstein files and expose elite kid-diddlers, I hope someone like Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) leads it.

Vermont US Representative Becca Balint being interviewed by Drop Site News shortly after reviewing more, unreleased Epstein files saying
“They’re all a bunch of sick fucks”

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— Raider (@iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:02 PM

That’s exactly the energy we need because these are a bunch of sick fucks. Those who can be prosecuted should be perp-walked (investigate now-identified trafficking co-conspirator Les Wexner, for example), and those who were in a position to know what was happening and did nothing to stop it should be drummed out of high-profile jobs and shunned.

This includes the president, by the way. Fresh reporting from the Miami Herald‘s Julie K. Brown:

President Donald Trump has repeatedly maintained that he had no knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes. But in July 2006, just as Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal sex charge became public, Trump called then-Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter to tell him that Epstein’s activities with teenaged girls were well known in both New York and Palm Beach.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter, according to a 2019 FBI interview with Reiter contained in the Justice Department’s Epstein case files.

Big “guy in hotdog suit” energy there, right? It contradicts what Trump told reporters in 2019 when Epstein was rearrested. Then, he claimed he had no idea his once-close personal friend was molesting girls.

Trump’s commerce secretary Howard Lutnick also lied about his relationship with Epstein. In an October podcast, Lutnick congratulated himself for immediately intuiting that Epstein was a creep after they met as new neighbors in 2005:

Lutnick described his first meeting with Epstein during an interview on the “Pod Force One with Miranda Devine” in October 2025. Lutnick explained that he and his wife toured Epstein’s New York City home soon after they moved into their house. One room had a massage table in the middle with candles around, said Lutnick, who added that he asked Epstein why it was there. That’s when, he suggested, Epstein used sexual innuendo.

Lutnick said he and his wife quickly excused themselves and left Epstein’s home. “And in the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

“I was never in the room with him socially, for business, or even philanthropy,” he added. “If that guy was there, I wasn’t going ‘cause he’s gross. So I look back at it as a gift. He gave me a gift.”

Turns out all that was bullshit, as Lutnick admitted today in Congress:

WASHINGTON—Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012 with his wife and children, years after Lutnick said he had cut off ties with the convicted sex offender.

“My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple. They were there as well with their children, and we had lunch on the island,” Lutnick said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Tuesday. Lutnick said he and his family spent roughly an hour on the island and then left. “We were on family vacation,” he added.

I’m glad he included the detail about the four children and nannies, plural. Wholesome family fun on a pervert’s private island. The lying shithead should be fired, but since his boss is also a liar and an Epstein associate, here’s the official White House response:

“President Trump has assembled the best and most transformative cabinet in modern history,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement. “The entire Trump administration, including Secretary Lutnick and the Department of Commerce, remains focused on delivering for the American people.”

Desai isn’t wrong about the cabinet being “transformative;” it has transformed the government into a grift and sadism machine for perverts and psychopaths. It does seem like more people are finally waking up to the malevolent and mendacious nature of this regime. About goddamn time.

***

Finally, in the morning thread, we talked about Project Salt Box, a grassroots effort to oppose DHS as it stands up a vast network of immigrant detention sites. Rachel Maddow interviewed one of the founders yesterday. Here’s a link to a SubStack that explains how ordinary people can use Salt Box data to pressure officials and businesses to stop cooperating with DHS.

Project Salt Box maintains a warehouse tracker where users can find the nearest sites that have been targeted by the rogue agency. It lists sites that have been purchased, places where purchases were thwarted and sites currently under consideration. Local opposition has already resulted in five cancelations, some in deep-red areas.

The Trump administration is unpopular, and that’s only going to get worse as the wages of their incompetence, malice and greed become even more undeniable to even the most obtuse among us. Authoritarians under fire tend to get more extreme, not less, so we’re in for a rough ride. But we can beat these motherfuckers. We have to.

Open thread.

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Multiple Things Can Be True at Once

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An exchange in the morning thread sent me off to google for more information on voting in 2024, and I found some interesting 2024 stats from Pew Research.

Overarching view

For the most part, voting patterns across demographic groups in the 2024 presidential election were not substantially different from the 2020 and 2016 elections.

But Donald Trump’s gains among several key groups of voters proved decisive in his 2024 victory.

Hispanic voters

Hispanic voters were divided in 2024, a major shift from 2020 and 2016. In 2020, Joe Biden won Hispanic voters by 25 percentage points, and Hispanic voters supported Hillary Clinton by an even wider margin in 2016. But Trump drew nearly even with Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, losing among them by only 3 points.  Black voters also moved to Trump but remained overwhelmingly Democratic.

Black voters

Trump nearly doubled his support among Black voters between 2020 and 2024: 8% voted for him in 2020 vs. 15% last year. Still, 83% of Black voters backed Harris.

Men – especially men under 50 – backed Trump by larger margins. Men supported Trump by a wider margin than in 2020. Trump narrowly won men under age 50, a shift from 2020 when men in that age group favored Biden by 10 points.

Democrat vs. Republican

As in prior elections, a change in voters’ partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump’s victory than differential partisan turnout.

In the overall electorate and among key demographic groups, Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.

Education

And despite some notable changes in the coalitions, many familiar divisions in demographic voting patterns were once again evident. For example, voters with at least four-year college degrees and urban residents voted for Harris by wide margins. By contrast, Trump retained sizable advantages among noncollege voters and voters living in rural areas.

Gender

Men favored Trump by 12 percentage points in the 2024 election, while women favored Harris by 7 points. Trump made gains among men compared with 2020 and held roughly steady among women:

55% of men voted for Trump in 2024, up from 50% of men in 2020.
46% of women voted for Trump in 2024, compared with 44% of women four years earlier.

Race

A 55% majority of White voters cast ballots for Trump in 2024. An identical share of White voters favored Trump in 2020, and 54% selected him in 2016.

White men favored Trump by a margin of 20 points in the most recent election. White women favored Trump by a narrower 4-point margin.

Though most Black voters continued to prefer the Democratic candidate, a larger share of Black voters cast ballots for Trump in 2024 than in 2020 or 2016.

Roughly eight-in-ten Black voters (83%) reported voting for Harris in 2024, while 15% favored Trump. In 2020, 8% of Black voters reported voting for Trump, and just 6% of Black voters favored him in 2016.

Black men and women alike were more likely to vote for Trump in 2024 than in 2020. One-in-ten Black women and 21% of Black men voted for Trump in the most recent election.

Increased shares of Black voters who favored Trump were driven not by individuals shifting their preferences, but by changes in who turned out to vote. While some Black voters did indeed switch from Biden in 2020 to Trump in 2024, these defections were largely canceled out by Black voters who switched in the opposite direction.

A lot of this won’t be surprising to those of you who pour over polls and statistics. I generally do not.

Definitely a reminder to me that multiple things can be true at the same time, which is not a bad thing.

Definitely a few surprises in there for me, like this one:

White men favored Trump by a margin of 20 points in the most recent election.

White women favored Trump by a narrower 4-point margin.

Not surprising, I guess, given that Roe was thrown overboard, but I had not taken note of how stark the gender gap was.

Anything stand out for any of you?

 

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Robert Reich Call to Action

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Please contact your Congressional Reps AGAIN (or for the first time) and demand that they rein in ICE – the timing is perfect –  DHS funding runs out on Friday!

This is a chance to do something constructive.

ICE, ICE, ICE

There was so much in this call to action post (below) from Robert Reich that it’s impossible to summarize.  But it’s important, so I hope you’ll read the whole thing.

Many of you tell me you feel powerless in the face of Trump’s reign of terror. You view and read horrific news reports about what ICE and Border Patrol are doing, but you don’t know how you can reduce or stop this horror.

Let me assure you: You’re not powerless. In fact, you have enormous power.

Start with ICE and Border Patrol detention facilities, now holding some 70,000 people in 224 facilities across the country that reportedly are rife with abuses. Last year, deaths in ICE custody reached a 20-year high. The first days of 2026 brought more deaths. Medical neglect, isolation, and overcrowding are routine.

CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) is the largest owner and operator of ICE and Border Patrol detention centers. It has a record of abusing detainees. Among the detention centers CoreCivic lists on its website is the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. In December, The Interceptreported that there were at least 15 medical emergency calls to 911 from the Stewart facility every month since the start of the second Trump administration.

If you’re as outraged about this as I am, here are five things you can do now.

1. You and I are paying CoreCivic through our tax dollars. You can demand that our senators and representatives in Congress not fund the Department of Homeland Security until these abuses stop.

At this moment, congressional Democrats are trying to condition their votes for the Department of Homeland Security’s spending bill on placing guardrails around ICE and Border Patrol.

You might contact your senators and representatives and urge them not to vote for funding of the Department of Homeland Security. Or at the least, demand that in order to receive funding, their agents cannot wear masks, must wear identification, cannot use racial profiling, must have search warrants, cannot use lethal force, and must give arrestees due process, and that those detained must receive adequate medical care and accommodation.

You can reach your senators and representatives through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

2. You may own CoreCivic indirectly. You can withdraw your savings from institutional investors that are financing it.

CoreCivic is a public-held corporation, meaning that it’s listed on the stock exchange. We may not own its shares directly, but many of us entrust our savings to institutional investors such as Black Rock and Vanguard, which own significant shares in CoreCivic.

Black Rock accounts for 16 percent of CoreCivic’s total shares. Vanguard Group Inc. holds 12 percent. They are CoreCivic’s largest shareholders. As such, they have the most influence (other than the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security, if DHS were acting responsibly) over how CoreCivic runs its detention facilities.

Find out if your savings are held by one or both of these two giant institutional investors. (Check with your broker or look at the reports they send you.) If they are, you might instruct your broker to withdraw your savings from them and put them in another institution that doesn’t hold shares of CoreCivic.

3. You may support the Democratic Party, specifically the Democratic Governors Association — which has been accepting donations from CoreCivic. You can contact the DGA and tell it to stop accepting such donations.

A Politico review of campaign finance records published Saturday shows that the Democratic Governors Association has taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from CoreCivic. These are not charitable contributions by CoreCivic, but attempts by CoreCivic to influence state legislation.

From 2017 through at least 2025, the DGA took in $1,246,050 over 46 donations from CoreCivic. The most recent publicly reported donation to the DGA came in May 2025, according to records, around the same time White House officialsbegan pressuring ICE to ramp up arrests.

The Republican Governors Association has undoubtedly taken in as much if not more donations from CoreCivic, but I’m assuming that more of us are affiliated with, or at least more influential in, the Democratic Party than the Republican.

You can contact the Democratic Governors Association and tell them to stop taking donations from CoreCivic. You can reach them by writing to the Democratic Governors Association, 1300 Eye Street NW, Suite 1200 West, Washington, D.C. 20005. Or telephone them at (202) 772-5600.

4. You can also express your outrage directly to CoreCivic — and tell them you refuse to support them with your tax dollars or your investment savings. Write them directly at CoreCivic, 5501 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027. And phone them toll-free at 1-800-624-2931.

5. In addition to your power as a taxpayer, investor-saver, and voter, you’re also powerful as a consumer. Although you don’t purchase CoreCivic’s detention services directly, you buy from corporations that every day enable CoreCivic, ICE, and Border Patrol to do their nefarious work.

For example, ICE’s latest recruitment ads — built around music and language drawn straight from far-right neo-Nazi memes and aimed at extremists who are most fervent about guns, tactical gear, and vigilantism — are being distributed by and are profiting two companies you probably use all the time: YouTube and Google.

Meanwhile, AT&T, Home Depot, Amazon, and Microsoft are providing ICE and Border Patrol with cloud computing, surveillance software, and logistical support that’s central to how they function. This corporate collaboration makes large-scale enforcement possible.

And Verizon — through a 10-year, $176 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE — supplies the communications infrastructure that facilitates raids, detention centers, and deportations.

Without these corporate partners, ICE could not carry out violent raids, operate sprawling detention centers, or deport people at scale. These corporations are enabling violence on the streets and death behind barbed wire.

Yet these corporations also spend billions of dollars each year on their brand images and public relations in order to attract your consumer dollars. None wants to be seen as underwriting civilian killings like those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. None wants its brand associated with record numbers of deaths in custody. None wants to be linked to detention sites with names like “Alligator Alcatraz” that are rife with abuse.

Your consumer dollars are critical to these corporations. So, at the least, you can demand that they stop profiting from their collaborations with ICE. (Click on the word “demand” in the previous sentence to send them a message.)

And tell Verizon to end its contracts with ICE and stop profiting from violence, detention, and abuse.

You can go a step further and boycott the giant corporations now helping ICE. See here.

In these and many other ways, you are powerful. As a consumer, saver-investor, taxpayer, and voter, you keep these corporations going.

Together, we’re even more powerful. We need not tolerate their complicity in the inhumane acts now being done by ICE, Border Patrol, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

You are not powerless. You can take action now. Please do.

 

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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"No I'm fine, you just make sure you get your fucking video first"

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— Paul Bronks (@slendersherbet.bsky.social) February 5, 2026 at 8:09 AM

Democrats will stop Trump from trying to nationalize midterms, Jeffries says

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) February 8, 2026 at 12:45 PM

Democrats will stop Donald Trump from trying to steal this year’s midterm elections, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the US House of Representatives said on Sunday.

Jeffries’ comments come amid widespread concern after Trump said Republicans should “take over the voting”. The US constitution gives states the power to set election rules and says Congress can pass laws to set requirements for federal elections. The constitution gives the president no authority over how elections are run.

“What Donald Trump wants to do is try and nationalize the election – translation: steal it. And we’re not going to let it happen,” Jeffries said during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. He added that Democrats so far had successfully blocked Trump’s efforts to federalize the national guard and countered a nationwide push by Republicans to redraw congressional district boundaries to their advantage.

“This is going to be a free and fair election,” Jeffries said. It “is going to be conducted like every other election where states and localities have the ability to administer the laws”…

Senator Adam Schiff of California also said it was clear Trump was trying to interfere in the election and also questioned why Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was at the Fulton county raid.

“He fully intends to try to subvert the elections. He will do everything he can to suppress the vote. And if he loses the vote, and I think the Republicans now expect they’ll get a real drubbing in the midterms, he’s prepared to try to take some kind of action to overturn the result. And we really shouldn’t question that,” Schiff said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week. “I think all of this is intended to send a message. And the message is: ‘We will not tolerate or accept an election that we lose.’”

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the vice-chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, also condemned Gabbard’s presence at the Fulton county raid saying on Sunday he was concerned Trump was trying to interfere in the midterms.

“We have not been informed of any foreign nexus. The job of the director of national intelligence is to be outward facing about foreigners, not about Americans,” he said during an interview on Face The Nation on CBS. “My fear is now [Trump] sees the political winds turning against him, and he’s going to try to interfere in the 2026 election, something a year ago I didn’t think would be possible.”

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Late Night Open Thread: Crazification Factor Unlocked!

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Only 27 percent of respondents say they support all or most of Trump’s policies, down from 35 percent when he took the oath of office. Nearly all of that decline is attributable to *Republicans.*

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— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) February 6, 2026 at 11:00 PM

It’s no suprise that the Bulwark people would very much prefer that ‘normal, decent Republicans’ be separated from ‘those mouth-breathing weirdos who followed in Trump’s wake’, but it’s still amusing:

AS WE SURVEY THE WRECKAGE of Trump’s second term, it is often said that half the country voted for this, or worse, half the country is fine with this. Though it is undeniable that something is deeply awry with a nation that can give a popular vote majority to a moral degenerate who did not hide his authoritarian plans, we shouldn’t act as though public opinion hasn’t shifted since the 2024 election. The question for now is: Is MAGA a majority?…

The first step is recognizing how big the problem really is. MAGA is a bit of a moving target, but a recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 27 percent of all voters described themselves as “MAGA supporters” and a perhaps surprisingly low 54 percent of Trump voters so identified. In other words, a minority of the voting public and only a little over half of the GOP is Trump’s loyal base.

A new survey from More in Common, an international pro-democracy organization (I sit on its global board), offers a more granular look at Trump 2024 voters and provides further evidence that MAGA is definitely not half the country. Between April 2025 and January 2026, they canvassed more than 18,000 Americans, including nearly 11,000 who voted for Trump. In looking over their findings, the group categorized the Trump voters into four clusters: MAGA Hardliners, Anti-woke Conservatives, Mainline Republicans, and the Reluctant Right. Their conclusion? Trump voters were a coalition, not a cult.

The MAGA Hardliners

These are the people we usually picture sporting red hats. They are highly religious (or at least they think of themselves as God-fearing), are 91 percent white, mostly Gen X (32 percent) or Baby Boomers (42 percent), and less educated than other Trump voters—only 24 percent hold a college degree or higher compared with 29 percent of total Trump voters. They have little trust in institutions, believe that a sinister cabal runs media, business, and politics, and are not averse to their leader ignoring the Supreme Court or other constitutional checks in order to “get things done.”

A lamentable majority (62 percent) of the Hardliners say Trump should “punish his opponents for the damage they’ve done” and 60 percent support their man attempting to serve a third term. (In case you’re wondering, yes, they do know the Constitution imposes a two term limit, because it was included in the question.) Nearly three quarters think we should “use our military to round up everyone who came to the US illegally, put them in mass detention camps, and deport them.” Seventy-four percent say voting for Trump is part of “living out my faith,” and 94 percent (75 percent strongly) believe that God intervened to save Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania so that he could make America great again.

This crowd cannot be trusted with power. They are conspiratorial, cultish, dismissive of constitutional limits, and punitive toward their perceived political enemies. There isn’t much good to say about them except this: They represent only 29 percent of Trump 2024 voters….

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War for Ukraine Day 1,446: The Plot Thins

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The cost:

This is Mykhailo Spitsyn. He was ten. His mother, Svitlana, was killed beside him when a russian drone hit their house in Bohodukhiv, Kharkiv Oblast.

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— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:05 AM

I’m running out of new words, because russia isn’t running out of violence. The only thing that changes is how easily the world absorbs it — another mother, another child, folded into the background noise of a long war.

— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:05 AM

Vladyslav Heraskevych, who wore a helmet with photos of Ukrainian athletes killed by Russia’s war, says the IOC has banned him from using it during official training sessions and competitions.

Please listen to his words!

“The world must know the price of freedom.”

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 5:06 PM

Given recent Russian statements, it seems reasonable to conclude that Trump agreed to give Putin Donetsk Oblast if not all of the Donbas at least:

Lavrov blames the US for the lack of a peace deal on Ukraine.

So let me guess: in Anchorage, Trump must have promised Moscow the quiet handover of the entire Donetsk region without fighting.

They just forgot to ask Ukraine what we think about surrendering territory we actually control.

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— Maria Drutska (@mariadrutska.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:59 AM

There’s a growing sense that even the participants of the so-called “understanding reached in Anchorage” aren’t entirely sure what, exactly, it is they’re talking about.

— Maria Drutska (@mariadrutska.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:59 AM

We are outraged that US has backed out of deal to give Russia land we can’t conquer and isn’t America’s to give away.

A blow against anti imperialism.

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— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 6:51 AM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the Trump administration of refusing to implement alleged Russia–U.S. agreements on Ukraine and pursuing a policy of “economic domination,” in comments to Russian-registered TV BRICS published on Feb. 9.

The remarks mark a sharper turn in Moscow’s rhetoric toward Washington, with Lavrov claiming the U.S. has backtracked on what he described as “Anchorage agreements” allegedly reached in 2025 that envisioned Ukraine surrendering the entire Donbas region to Russia without fighting.

“They tell us that the Ukrainian issue needs to be resolved. In Anchorage, we accepted the proposal of the U.S.,” Lavrov said. “They made an offer, we agreed, and the problem should have been resolved. It seems that they proposed it and we were ready — and now they are not.”

The White House has not confirmed the existence of any such agreements, and earlier declined to acknowledge them in comments to the Kyiv Independent.

Lavrov said that despite declarations about moving toward “full-scale, broad cooperation,” Washington continues to pursue what he described as an anti-Russian policy. He pointed to new sanctions and Western actions against Russia’s shadow fleet of oil tankers as evidence.

“In practice, everything looks the opposite: new sanctions are being introduced, and a war against (shadow fleet) tankers is being waged on the high seas,” the minister said.

Russia has long demanded that Ukrainian forces withdraw from Donbas and has increasingly tied any future peace deal to such a move after more than a decade of fighting in the region.

Ukraine has ruled out a withdrawal, though Ukrainian officials have said alternative arrangements, including a demilitarized zone, could be considered.

While we have to wait for further reporting to clarify what was and was not offered and/or accepted, this seems extremely plausible given what we know about Trump and his lack of acumen as a negotiator, as well as his self selected submissiveness to Putin.

OTD in 1990 James Baker said they would “think about NATO expansion”. *Not* that they promised none would happen. It’s why later that year in Malta President Bush that the US would not accept limits on anyone’s sovereignty.

But facts are imperialist.

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— Darth Putin (@darthputinkgb.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 10:52 AM

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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