Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

I did not have this on my fuck 2024 bingo card.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

A lot of Dems talk about what the media tells them to talk about. Not helpful.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Democrats are back in array!

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

Wednesday Night Open Thread

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I have nothing to report other than that fuckboy had issued an order that has shut down all NIH study sections. If you do not know what this means, it means that they’re fucking with grant distribution to medical and scientific research. If I had to guess it is being done for them to create a new review process to make sure that only white people benefit.

In other news, we are on the third season of Deadwood (Joelle’s first viewing), and Joelle has threatened to kick me out if I refuse to stop talking and forming sentences like EB Farnum. “May I query as to whether that sandwich will fulfill your dietary requirements, or shall I inform Richardson to formulate a second course so as to sate your gastric desires?”

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War for Ukraine Day 1,064: The Russians Bring Their Human Safaris to Kharkiv

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

The Russians have brought their human safari attacks to Kharkiv:

Bodies lay on the ground because Russia decided to murder them.

They attacked Hoptivka village in the Kharkiv region with FPV drones.

Yes, FPV, against civilians. Two people died.

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 22, 2025 at 9:33 AM

Bodies lie still on the frozen ground, the silence heavy with stolen life.

In Kharkiv Oblast, russian troops used a drone to attack and kill two civilians.

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— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) January 22, 2025 at 9:26 AM

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

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Trump Abandons Our Afghan Allies

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Exclusive: Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the US government to resettle in the US, including family of active duty US military personnel, are having their flights canceled under President Trump's order suspending US refugee programs reut.rs/3PIJRyc

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— Reuters (@reuters.com) January 20, 2025 at 5:36 PM

Nearly 1,660 Afghans cleared by the U.S. government to resettle in the U.S., including family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel, are having their flights canceled under President Donald Trump’s order suspending U.S. refugee programs, a U.S. official and a leading refugee resettlement advocate said on Monday.

The group includes unaccompanied minors awaiting reunification with their families in the U.S. as well as Afghans at risk of Taliban retribution because they fought for the former U.S.-backed Afghan government, said Shawn VanDiver, head of the #AfghanEvac coalition of U.S. veterans and advocacy groups and the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. decision also leaves in limbo thousands of other Afghans who have been approved for resettlement as refugees in the U.S. but have not yet been assigned flights from Afghanistan or from neighboring Pakistan, they said.

Trump made an immigration crackdown a major promise of his victorious 2024 election campaign, leaving the fate of U.S. refugee programs up in the air…

“Afghans and advocates are panicking,” said VanDiver. “I’ve had to recharge my phone four times already today because so many are calling me.

“We warned them that this was going to happen, but they did it anyway. We hope they will reconsider,” he said of contacts with Trump’s transition team.

VanDiver’s organization is the main coalition that has been working with the U.S. government to evacuate and resettle Afghans in the U.S. since the Taliban seized Kabul as the last U.S. forces left Afghanistan in August 2021 after two decades of war…

VanDiver and the U.S. official said that the Afghans approved to resettle as refugees in the U.S. were being removed from the manifests of flights they were due to take from Kabul between now and April.

Minority Democrats on the House Foreign Relations Committee blasted the move, saying in a post on X that “this is what abandonment looks like. Leaving vetted, verified Afghan Allies at the mercy of the Taliban is shameful.”

They include nearly 200 family members of Afghan-American active-duty U.S. service personnel born in the U.S. or of Afghans who came to the U.S., joined the military and became naturalized citizens, they said.

Those being removed from flights also include an unknown number of Afghans who fought for the former U.S.-backed Kabul government and some 200 unaccompanied children of Afghan refugees or Afghan parents whose children were brought alone to the United States during the U.S. withdrawal, said VanDiver and the U.S. official.

An unknown number of Afghans who qualified for refugee status because they worked for U.S. contractors or U.S.-affiliated organizations also are in the group, they said.

Per the Washington Post, “Afghan refugees feel abandoned after Trump executive order halts flights” [gift link]:

… Under President Joe Biden, nearly 200,000 Afghans were resettled in the United States, according to the State Department — most of them evacuated during or soon after the chaotic U.S. military withdrawal in 2021, when the Taliban seized control of the country. Tens of thousands of men and women who had worked for the U.S. military, American diplomats or government-funded organizations were left behind.

Between 40,000 and 60,000 Afghans around the world are actively seeking resettlement in the United States, and thousands had already received U.S. government approval, estimated Shawn VanDiver, the president of AfghanEvac, a volunteer organization formed during the U.S. withdrawal that has helped Afghans flee the country. About 1,700 people were expected to be moved out of Afghanistan over the next four months, he added.

“These are folks who for one reason or another are at risk because of their association with the United States — and they’re hiding because they’re scared,” VanDiver said. They include family members of Afghans serving in the U.S. military, as well as women and minorities who fear persecution under the Taliban.

The U.S. president has broad authority to decide how many refugees are admitted to the country in a given year, and to allocate funding for resettlement. During his first term, Trump dramatically reduced refugee admissions, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. Biden swiftly raised the admissions ceiling when he took office in 2021, but it took years to build up the country’s resettlement capabilities. In the last fiscal year of Biden’s presidency, the United States took in just over 100,000 refugees from around the world.

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A Shameful Vote

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When I say that what I’m seeing from Democrats reminds me of the time around the Iraq War, I’m talking about votes for terrible bills like the Laken Riley Act, which just passed the House with 46 Democrats voting Yea. And it is a terrible bill, mandating detention of undocumented immigrants for minor crimes. It assists the Trump Administration in its mass deportation goals, because being accused of a non-violent crime (not convicted) as minor as shoplifting is enough for detention and ultimately deportation. ICE is going to have a fucking field day with this kind of power.

Here’s AOC on the floor, showing the proper amount of anger and disgust over this:

AOC: "I want folks at home to look at what members of Congress are invested in private prisons companies, and look at the votes on this bill. It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 22, 2025 at 12:54 PM

Anyway, whenever I post about this, there’s a bunch of comments about how some of the Democrats who voted for the bill must have had a good reason. Perhaps that’s true for the Senators from Arizona. But one of the House Democrats who supported the bill was Rochester’s own Joe Morelle, my Representative in NY-25. The closest border to Rochester is the Canadian border. Immigration is not a big issue in Rochester — the crime there is generally in the inner city and generally the criminals are residents. Joe won his latest election by a landslide margin (not a Trump “landslide”, a real 60/40 landslide). This is a pretty safe seat, and it is very unlikely that Joe will have a serious primary challenger. (If he did, it would be someone to the left of him.)

The simple reason he voted for the bill is cowardice and bandwagoning. It wasn’t a leadership-encouraged vote (Jeffries voted against). It was just like a lot of the votes for the Iraq War — it seemed like a good idea at the time and Democrats were afraid of looking weak. The appearance of weakness on immigration is the analogue of the Iraq War weakness on terrorism charge. In hindsight, that war was one of the worst things to happen to this country in my lifetime. I’m afraid this broadly-written piece of legislation will be another similarly terrible thing.

As Truman said, “Given the choice between a Republican and someone who acts like a Republican, people will vote for the real Republican all the time.” There is no win for the party in general for these kinds of votes.

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Hegseth et. al.

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Kay dropped this in the comments of the last post:

Pete Hegseth, President Trump’s pick to run the Pentagon, regularly abused alcohol to the point that he passed out at family gatherings, and once needed to be dragged out of a strip club while in uniform, according to an ex-relative’s account of his behavior that was given to U.S. lawmakers and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The sworn statement, submitted in response to a request from Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, was signed by Hegseth’s former sister-in-law, Danielle Hegseth. It states that she was with Hegseth when he passed out from drunkenness in the bathroom of a bar in Minneapolis in about 2013. It also describes another night, when she said Hegseth drank so much at a restaurant in Minneapolis that the Uber driver had to pull over on Interstate 94 so he could throw up.

The ex-relative is his former sister-in-law, and wife #2 (Samantha) has issued a denial no-comment statement (probably due to a NDA), but the guy is obviously a scumbag.

Anyway, what are Democrats going to do?  Here’s Kate Riga, the DC correspondent for TPM:

The “blockbuster” hearings on Donald Trump’s most unavoidably unfit Cabinet nominees feel completely hollow.

Republicans have no interest in running afoul of Trump (look what happened to Joni Ernst), and Democrats are largely too demoralized and limp to execute a compelling campaign against the nominees.

The crusade against Pete Hegseth petered out into repetitive women in combat gotchas (which he was prepared for) while Republicans complimented him on his musculature. During the hearing last week, everyone seems either elated or resigned that he will likely be confirmed.

[…]

This is the trap Democrats keep falling into. They don’t want to come out against a Trump nominee too aggressively, out of fear of alienating Republican fence-sitters. But in the same breath, they’ll tell you that Republicans aren’t actually open to listening to what they say, as they’re determined to pass Trump’s fealty tests. So Democrats land in a place where they can neither mount an aggressive campaign, perhaps at least incurring some cost to the Republicans senators and the Trump administration, nor have any hope of swaying their GOP colleagues to their side.

So we end up where we are on Hegseth. Democrats have all but given up, and Republicans can embrace Trump’s darkest choices without even a chance that they’ll be made to feel uncomfortable about it.

Note that Riga filed that piece after the news Kay mentioned came out.  By the way, I think she’s a hard-working, smart reporter, and I listen to her every week on the Josh Marshall podcast, which is free.

Josh Marshall has a follow-up on this that he published this morning.  (That should be a gift link but they seem not to work after a few people visit them.)  Josh’s prescription for Dems is two-fold.  First, for the nominations, attack the Republicans like Collins, Tillis, maybe Ernst and the new Florida Senator Ashley Moody.  For the rest of the many shitty things, for one example, Democratic reps should go to the well of the House and start reading off what some of the J6 shitbirds that Trump pardoned did.

I’m getting real flashbacks to the Iraq War discourse with the current crop of mainstream Democrats:  scared to oppose what they perceive as a popular juggernaut.  Trump not getting a majority of the popular vote means very close to half of the population doesn’t like that asshole.  They’ll like him less the more noise that our electeds make about his bad choices.

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The Fun is Back

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This Columbia Journalism Review piece about the DC press is making the rounds:

“I think it’s important for people to understand the context, that we’re coming out of four years of Biden and things haven’t been great,” one White House print reporter told CJR. “There’ve been fewer eyeballs on the press briefings and less attention than under Trump, so people just don’t understand some of the very frustrating things that we’ve dealt with and that we hope are going to be rolled back.”

Among those frustrations: the Biden press office largely kept reporters at a remove from the president, who—as Cameron Joseph noted here last year—had agreed to far fewer formal interviews than any president before him. Instead, White House reporters say, the Biden team preferred to offer background quotes from in-house experts whose job it was to speak to the press; when the president did meet with a large number of outlets, like during his pre-election rounds of interviews on Black radio stations, it was through highly orchestrated conversations, sometimes including preapproved lists of questions. Inside the briefing room, reporters who didn’t hold coveted front-row seats felt they got much less opportunity to ask questions.

“For a lot of people, what was the point in even going?” said a veteran White House reporter.

Trump, on the other hand, adores the attention of the media, even as he frequently maligns the reporters themselves. During his first term, he regularly chatted with White House reporters during strolls to Marine One, and held a number of high-profile, if occasionally ill-conceived, televised sit-downs, with everyone from Axios’s Jonathan Swan to Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy. (On his first night back, Trump spent forty-five minutes casually answering media questions in the Oval Office, while he signed executive orders.)

I have a few thoughts on this.  First and foremost, I think this is the election where the codependent relationship between Democrats and outlets like the Times and Post has finally been severed.  We’re cancelling our subscriptions to those outlets, supporting our local media if it’s good, reading newsletters and blogs, and curating our social media.  I think we’ve finally realized that there’s nothing there for our party at the big outlets.  No amount of yelling will change the double-standard that is just baked into the DC media:  Democrats have agency; Republicans don’t. Democrats need to hew closely to norms or they’re scolded; Republicans are treated like wayward kids who don’t know any better and can’t change.  Democrats’ skill at governing and legislating is boring; Republicans breaking all the glass and generally stinking up the place is exciting.

My second thought is that the gripe about not having enough Biden time is worth addressing.  The old standard of having a press secretary run a briefing every day, and rarely seeing the President, doesn’t cut it.  Seeing clips from Claudia Sheinbaum’s daily press briefings has shown another way that a President can engage with the public via the press.  She appears before a giant screen, has a theme of the day, and invites experts to discuss the theme of the day.  It is an effective way to get her message out.  But, as far as I can tell, there’s not the same polluted press culture in Mexico City as there is in DC.   So, if the next Democratic President wants to do this, he or she will have to learn to do some of what Trump does when confronted with stupid questions from the press:  call the questions stupid.

I think that having more press conferences, not less, is worth trying.  And, frankly, I think Democrats get caught up in the wrong notion that the President has such limited time that they can’t do this daily.  We need to change our conception of the President’s job to be more of a public face.  His staff can do more.  He can delegate more.  I get it that Trump doesn’t do shit, so he can be on TV more, but there’s a middle ground between not doing anything and not delegating enough.

Breaking the dysfunctional relationship between Democrats and the big mainstream outlets can start now, we don’t need to wait until we’re back in power.  Our electeds could be doing more with their socials, not just the anodyne messages that they push out once a day or a couple times a week.  Last night, I watched AOC’s latest “reel” on Instagram, which I recommend highly to anyone who’s feeling down about the events of the week, because she’s ready to fight.  One of the points that she made was that she finds it much more difficult to post frequently when Democrats are in power, because she’s busy with the work of legislating.  Now, it’s the Republicans’ show, and her job is to oppose, loudly.  That’s a message that I’d suggest sharing with your Democratic elected officials in DC.

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The Gulf (Open Thread)

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Here’s a news report from yesterday about the substantial snowfall in the Florida Panhandle. Great googly moogly!

It didn’t snow where I am, but the white stuff wasn’t all that far north of my location. I haven’t seen snow in decades and briefly considered driving up to gawk.

But then I remembered I don’t know how to drive in snow, and neither do lots of other people who would be on the road. So I thought “fuck that!” and stayed home with a hot mug of Irish coffee. Good call!

In a press release, our contemptible wretch of a governor used the occasion of the unusual weather to pucker up and kiss ass by referring to the body of water on the west side of the state in the manner demanded by Emperor Tang:

WHEREAS, an area of low pressure moving across the Gulf of America, interacting with Arctic air, will bring widespread impactful winter weather to North Florida beginning Tuesday, January 21, 2025…”

God, it’s all so stupid and embarrassing, and you can’t escape by ignoring the news. Even the fucking weather bulletins are subject to the Sharpie treatment.

The Florida Politics site set out to gauge public sentiment on changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America by asking some residents of Cedar Key what they think. Here are a couple of samples:

Cedar Key, a quaint fishing town in Levy County, is a cluster of islands that extend about three miles into the Gulf of Mexico from Florida’s mainland. One resident for more than a decade, 78-year-old Air Force retiree Thomas McKee, said he sees no reason for changing the name.

“Donald Trump is just blowing his horn again,” he said.

McKee, who isn’t registered with a political party, said he thinks many residents will continue to use the Gulf’s original name, which dates at least to the late 1600s. “It’s been too long the Gulf of Mexico to be all of a sudden known as the Gulf of America,” he said.

Amy Henderson, a Cedar Key resident and registered Republican who owns a gift shop and hotel overlooking the Gulf, was initially surprised by Trump’s proposal. Her first thought, however, was practical: “I would have to change a lot of T-shirt designs.”

But, she added, “Anything that shows pride for America, I am 100% for.”

The national pride angle sure doesn’t resonate for me. I’ve never been more embarrassed to be an American.

Anyhoo, my favorite comment from the surveyed Cedar Key residents came from the town’s mayor:

For Cedar Key’s Mayor, Sue Colson, the name change is a distraction from the country’s aftermath of natural disasters — including three major hurricanes recently that hit her town in a span of just 13 months. She offered a different moniker for the Gulf instead, an homage to a popular seafood harvested in the shallow waters nearby.

“I prefer it to be the Gulf of Clam,” she said. “I’m serious. If we’re going to do it, then everybody’s going to call it what they want.”

It makes sense from the mayor’s perspective. Apart from tourism, Cedar Key is known for its clams.

It wasn’t nicknamed “Clamalot,” when my ancestors arrived in Cedar Key about 180 years ago, but after they cut down most of the trees to sell to pencil factories and hurricanes washed away the rest and fishing fleets were destroyed by storms and then by gill net bans, the town settled on clam cultivation.

So “Gulf of Clam” — why not? Like the mayor said, we get to call it what we want.

Most people who live on it just call it “the Gulf.” That’s appropriate too, and not just in the geographical sense. “Gulf” can also mean an abyss or seemingly bottomless chasm, and I kind of feel like we’re in that right now.

Open thread!

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