Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

Giving up is unforgivable.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Consistently wrong since 2002

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

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

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

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Repub Venality Open Thread: But Rod Rosenstein Had Only the *Best* Intentions!

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There is nobody within the Trump orbit who isn’t compromised. Another ‘with only the best intentions’ criminal steps forward in this week’s Friday night doc dump, per Politico:

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein authorized the release to the media of text messages between two highly placed FBI employees who exchanged criticism of then-candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, the Justice Department has revealed in a new court filing.

Rosenstein also said in the court filing submitted shortly before midnight Friday that he made the decision to share the messages with the press in part to protect FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI attorney Lisa Page from the drip effect of incremental releases of the texts by lawmakers or others…

Strzok and Page filed separate lawsuits against the Justice Department last year, alleging that the release of their text messages violated the Privacy Act — an almost half-century-old statute that safeguards information federal agencies hold about private individuals.

Despite the litigation, until Friday it remained unclear just who at Justice gave the final OK to give about 375 Strzok-Page texts to journalists — including a POLITICO reporter — on the evening of December 12, 2017.

In a formal declaration submitted as part of the government’s defense to Strzok’s suit, Rosenstein owned up to being the one who made the call. He said he did so in part because the texts’ public release by members of Congress was inevitable in connection with testimony he was set to give to the House Judiciary Committee the following day…

Rosenstein, who stepped down from his position as Justice’s No. 2 official last May, said in his new submission that his aides initially suggested he might want to delay sending the texts to Congress until after his House testimony. But the veteran prosecutor said he concluded it would be “inappropriate” to hold them back, even briefly, for that reason…

While Rosenstein said the disclosure to the media was aimed at putting the messages in context, Strzok and Page have noted that the set of fewer than 400 texts sent to the Hill and shared with reporters that night was just a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of messages the pair exchanged on work topics as well as personal matters…

Rosenstein’s statement does not indicate whether he consulted with Page, Strzok or their attorneys to seek their views on the planned release, but he had them informed that night that the disclosure was forthcoming. The former DOJ No. 2 official said he did have one of his top aides confirm with Justice’s top privacy official that the disclosure would not run afoul of the Privacy Act…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok from his senior role on the Trump-Russia probe after learning of the texts in the summer of 2017. Page, who worked on the earlier stages of the investigation, had already moved on to another assignment.

The FBI fired Strzok in 2018, while Page ultimately resigned from the agency.

In a statement published last month by the Daily Beast, Rosenstein argued the Justice Department was not responsible for the criticism Page has endured. However, without getting into detail or directly challenging Trump, the former DOJ official said some of the attacks on her had gone too far…

Sure, I gave a known character assassin a powerful metaphorical gun, along with the names & addresses of a couple of tempting victims. But you can’t blame me for the fact that he killed them! I only did it to protect them!

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Some Of Our Government Still Works For Us

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The National Archives has an exhibit on suffrage and women’s protests. A big photo of the Women’s March greets visitors. But some things are missing. Criticism of Trump is blurred out. References to women’s anatomy (OMG vagina!) are blurred out.

Let’s hear from the reporter.

Historians and museum curators have been unanimous in saying that the National Archives should not be in the business of altering documents. Most of us can recognize that, just from that sentence.

The National Archives listened!

Kudos to the National Archives!

And open thread!

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Repost: Ben Afquack

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So ICYMI, I broke the blog. Seemed the cute kitteh photos were the culprit. Watergirl said the only fix was to trash it, then dump the trash. It. Was. That. Bad. LOL

Here is Ben Afquack again. I may try the photos again later to see if I fixed the issue – in a post I can quickly trash if it does it again.

Enjoy!

BTW – it took me weeks to convince Penelope Pearl she was actually a duck.

Open thread

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Petty

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Rolling back school lunch changes that Michelle Obama advocated so kids can eat more pizza and fries, and doing it on her birthday, is so on-brand for the MAGA hats in charge. Fuck them.

That said, by a simple twist of fate, I happen to know quite a bit about what schools purchase to feed children. While I agree that the programs Mrs. Obama advocated were a step in the right direction, schools can’t fix families, and the eating habits established in families accompany kids to school. School dietary departments are caught between the rock of what kids will eat, and the hard place of their genuine interest in feeding kids a healthy meal.

Luckily, the invisible hand of the free market stepped into the breach, as it so often does. Chicken nuggets were re-formulated to have whole grain breading, and new lines of whole grain frozen pizzas and other bread items became popular. Whole grain granola bars and other cereal bars, which are nutritionally a baby step from a candy bar, also were pretty widely purchased.

It struck me as the quintessentially American response to the realities of nutrition – pick a few slightly more healthy choices, market the shit out of those slightly more healthy products, and damn the calories. Type II diabetes at 20, here we come.

While you can’t force good food down kids’ throats, the focus on providing more fruits and vegetables probably put more good choices in front of kids, so the smarter ones who are going to buck their upbringing at least could pick out a healthy meal at school. Since those slightly rebellious kids were probably more likely to become Democrats, the program obviously had to be curtailed. Since Michelle Obama is a black woman, even more obviously, the program had to be curtailed on her birthday. QED in a red hat.

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ICYMI Open Thread: The Impeachment Images

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(It’s not so much fun when they’ve got your boy in the spotlight, huh, Chief Justice?)


(Gonna be a loooong weekend for the Oval Office Occupant’s handlers… )


Prediction: The Repubs are not gonna worry about saying anything stupid. Quite the contrary.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Let This Be A Good Omen

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… Clinton appeared at the press tour in support of the Hulu four-part documentary series “Hillary,” which details the former U.S. Senator and Secretary of State’s time on the 2016 Presidential campaign trail through never-before-seen footage. The series also features interviews with Bill and Chelsea Clinton, as well as friends and journalists.

She fielded a range of questions from the audience, including what she feels the most important message of the series will ultimately be.

“I think the most important message is we are…in a real struggle with a form of politics that is incredibly negative, exclusive, mean-spirited, and its going to be up to every voter, not only people who vote in Democratic primaries to recognize that this is no ordinary time,” she said. “This is an election that will have such profound impact so take your vote seriously. And for the Democratic voters, try to vote for the person you think is most likely to win because at the end of the day that is what will matter. And not just the popular vote, but the electoral college too.”…

“It wasn’t so long ago that we actually had a President that we didn’t have to worry every morning when we woke up about what was going to happen that day, or what crazy tweet would threaten war or some other awful outcome,” she said.

“You can disagree with the facts, but there are facts,” she continued. “You can choose not to vaccinate your children but there are facts. You can choose not to believe in climate change, but there are facts. And somehow we’ve got to shoulder that responsibility not only at a political leadership level but literally at the citizen, activist, concerned human being level.”

 
Elsewhere, the end of the beginning.…

… The deadline for voting is still over a month away. But the chance to participate in the state’s first presidential primary since 1992 — and cast a ballot before first-in-the-nation contests have their say — was enough to motivate some voters to brave frigid temperatures and a looming snowstorm to show support for their candidate of choice.

“We can’t afford to wait,” said Sean Duckworth, a Joe Biden supporter who attended an early vote rally for a range of Democratic candidates in Ramsey County. “We need change now, and he’s the person who is best able to do it, so I’m here to vote for him.”

Votes in Minnesota won’t be counted until after the polls close March 3. And some other states, including New Hampshire, have already started accepting absentee ballots for voters who can’t make it out on Election Day. But Minnesota’s election calendar and early voting laws mean the state can “confidently say we’ll be the first state in the country to open up the presidential contest to all eligible voters,” said Secretary of State Steve Simon…

“There’s some kind of special magic to the idea of getting to be one of the first people to cast your vote,” said Mitchell Walstad, a Warren supporter. “I thought it would be kind of fun, to go make a tweet out of it … and have an opportunity to show my support and do it in a loud fashion.”

In Duluth, City Council Member Arik Forsman joined a handful of Klobuchar supporters who showed up at City Hall right as early primary voting opened Friday morning.

“I think she has a really great track record in Minnesota of bridging that rural/urban divide,” Forsman said.

In South St. Paul, two local officials showed up at the polling place early Friday to not only cast ballots for the primary but to symbolically mark the city’s legacy as the first place in the U.S. where women voted after the 19th Amendment went into effect in 1920, officials said…

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Late Night Scary Nature Open Thread: Coyote Lucky

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I say Max, having proved his valor, should now retire with full honors. The Washington Post has a good write-up:

… What the coyotes didn’t know was that Max is a seasoned street life veteran. He survived alone in Long Beach before being adopted by his current family nearly four years ago, Maya Gurrin, his human, told The Washington Post. Max has probably seen and been involved in scuffles for which he has no words — or meows…

Gurrin and her husband, Eliot, saw some tails wagging through a glass door, and decided to go outside to investigate the noise.

“We thought it was a raccoon,” she said. “We went out and saw that he was surrounded by them. The coyotes hurried off when we went out there.”

Max walked back inside unfazed and unsullied.

“He wanted to go right back outside like a psycho,” Gurrin said…

Since his brush with death, Max has been inside, but the Gurrins know that they can’t keep him indoors forever, based on experience…

[T]he Gurrins are working out a compromise that would ensure Max’s safety and give him the freedom to smell the outdoors in the form of a catio or cat patio, which is an enclosed outdoor structure for cats still tapped into their wild side.

Max is very intelligent, according to Eliot, who said Max can open doors with horizontal handles.

“He’s a weird mix of friendly, of independent and loud and sensitive,” he said. “He’s a very hard cat to define. He’s super smart.” …

We’ve always done our best to ensure that our cats are indoor-only companions, but it can be difficult to outsmart a street-hardened rescue. We inherited six-pound Maine-Coon-type Kishkan when her previous owners moved to a country with a six-month pet quarantine. She’d come to live with them (despite one partner’s mild ailurophobia) by the simple expedient of waiting at their door & strolling in whenever it was opened. When they finally broke down & accepted their fate, their vet discovered she’d already been spayed, but nobody responded to their flyers. She was at least six years old when she came to live with us, and she lived another eight years before succumbing to kidney disease… despite regularly taking advantage of the dogs’ potty breaks to dart out for a walkabout. And she regularly brought back mice, voles, and baby bunnies to leave on the back stoop, just to show that we were not the boss of her.

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