Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

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

White supremacy is terrorism.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

I really should read my own blog.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

I was promised a recession.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

No one could have predicted…

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

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Archives for 2023

Late Night Open Thread: Sam Bigly Fraud Bankman-Fried, Still Grinding His Grifts

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Barely had SBF’s lawyers signed the latest set of ‘revised bail conditions‘ designed to keep their client from further incriminating himself than… Surprise!

In new charges unveiled in the US, officials accuse the entrepreneur of authorising a bribe of “at least $40m” (£32.5m) to try to gain access to trading accounts frozen by Chinese authorities.

The allegations add to the fraud case filed last year after FTX’s collapse…

The updated indictment says Mr Bankman-Fried authorised the bribe after Chinese authorities froze accounts holding roughly $1bn (£811m) worth of cryptocurrency that belonged to his trading firm, Alameda Research.

The accounts were released after the transfer, which went to a private cryptocurrency wallet, according to the filing…

The incident happened before FTX’s dramatic collapse last year, when reports about the company’s finances led to a rush of withdrawals, pushing the firm into bankruptcy.

In the wake of the collapse, which left many people unable to access their funds, the US filed criminal charges against Mr Bankman-Fried, accusing him of improperly using customer deposits at FTX to fund his other firm, Alameda Research, buy property and make millions in political donations.

The episode cast a dark cloud over the crypto industry, which was already suffering from big falls in the values of Bitcoin and other assets.

It was also a sharp fall from grace for Mr Bankman-Fried, who had been one of the most high-profile figures in the sector, leading an exchange which had more than 1 million users and ranked as the world’s third largest trading platform by some measures…

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I’ll Never Get Used to It

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The horrible shooting in Nashville has dominated my thoughts the past few days. It feels as if the Republican response has been more shameless than before, and while I will never get used to news reports of children gunned down in schools, they certainly seem to be getting used to it. One jackass legislator said there’s nothing we can do about it, another wore an ar-15 pin on his suit, and I watched a Representative blame it on… Biden and the border “crisis.”

It’s insane.

I will never get used to this, and I will never understand how 35-40% of the country, when given a choice, choose guns over people every fucking time and have the power to block the majority who choose otherwise.

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War for Ukraine Day 399: The Strategic Strike Beaver! Wait, What?

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

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Republican Venality Open Thread: Ginni Thomas, Shadow SC(R)OTUS Judge

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She (and her husband) aren’t doing this for the money — I’m willing to accept that their idea of a good time is trekking between Walmart parking lots in their RV – she’s doing it in support of the retrograde, authoritarian, domestic-terrorist-enabling beliefs espoused by the worst dark-money groups in American politics. She doesn’t care who knows about her actions… but her funders very much do want to stay out of the spotlight.

So delegitimizing such funding is probably all that can be done to prevent future revanchists from funneling money to groups who have as much respect for democracy as I do for household mildew, and for approximately the same reasons.

(As the old political saw goes: It wasn’t against the law when they showed up, but as soon as they did, laws had to be passed forbidding it.)

Everyone should absolutely read the whole article, so here’s an unpaywalled link:

… The previously unreported donations to the fledgling group Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty were channeled through a right-wing think tank in Washington that agreed to serve as a funding conduit from 2019 until the start of last year, according to documents and interviews. The arrangement, known as a “fiscal sponsorship,” effectively shielded from public view details about Crowdsourcers’ activities and spending, information it would have had to disclose publicly if it operated as a separate nonprofit organization, experts said.

The Post’s investigation sheds new light on the role money from donors who are not publicly identified has played in supporting Ginni Thomas’s political advocacy, long a source of controversy. The funding is the first example of anonymous donors backing her activism since she founded a conservative charity more than a decade ago. She stepped away from that charity amid concerns that it created potential conflicts for her husband on hot-button issues before the court.

Thomas’s activism has set her apart from other spouses of Supreme Court justices. She has allied with numerous people and groups that have interests before the court, and she has dedicated herself to causes involving some of the most polarizing issues in the country.

In 2020, she privately pressed White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to pursue efforts to overturn the presidential election, and she sent emails urging swing-state lawmakers to set aside Joe Biden’s popular-vote victory in awarding electoral votes. When those efforts were revealed by The Post last year, they intensified questions about whether her husband should recuse himself from cases related to the election and attempts to subvert it…

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Spy Story In Real Life

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God, how I loathe Putin.

He came to D.C. as a Brazilian student. The U.S. says he was a Russian spy.

Wow.  Shocking how close this guy got.

Gift link to the Washington Post – but read the whole story, it’s worth it.

His real name is Sergey Cherkasov and he had spent nearly a decade building the fictitious Ferreira persona, according to officials and court records. His “team” was a tight circle of Russian handlers suddenly poised to have a deep-cover spy in the U.S. capital, positioned to forge connections in every corner of the American security establishment, from the State Department to the CIA.

Using the access he gained during his two years in Washington, Cherkasov filed reports to his bosses in Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, on how senior officials in the Biden administration were responding to the Russian military buildup before the war in Ukraine, according to an FBI affidavit.

After he graduated, he came close to achieving a more consequential penetration when he was offered a position at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. He was due to start a six-month internship there last year — just as the court began investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine — only to be turned away by Dutch authorities acting on information relayed by the FBI, according to Western security officials. Officials in the Netherlands put him on a plane back to Brazil, where he was arrested upon landing and is now serving a 15-year prison sentence for document fraud related to his fake identity.

Another short excerpt:

The details that have since emerged provide extraordinary visibility into highly cloaked aspects of Russian intelligence, including the Kremlin’s almost obsessive effort to infiltrate Western targets with “illegals” — spies who operate as lone agents with no discernible link to their home service — rather than diplomats with the legal protections that come with working out of an embassy.

The case has revealed lingering vulnerabilities in Western defenses more than a decade after the FBI arrested 10 Russian illegals in a sweep that made global headlines and spawned a popular television series, “The Americans.” U.S. officials acknowledge that the bureau discovered Cherkasov’s identity and GRU affiliation only after his arrival in Washington. The FBI declined to comment on the case.

The revelations have also exposed serious lapses in Russian tradecraft. Authorities have mined Cherkasov’s computer and other devices and found a trove of evidence, according to court records and security officials, including emails to his Russian handlers, details about “dead drops” where messages could be left, records of illicit money transfers, and an error-strewn personal history that he appears to have composed while trying to memorize details of his fictitious life.

Score one for the FBI.

Open thread.

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Devasting & Disgusting: The Nashville Shooting

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This is Transgender Visibility Week, so I was bouncing around ideas this morning about what to post, but when I checked in on different internet communities where trans news abounds, things are squarely focused on how afraid people are from the backlash of the Nashville shooting that happened Monday.

I don’t think it’s an appropriate thing to focus on an individual shooter’s identity because no person goes out and shoots up a school who just isn’t simply sick in the head first and foremost. Our attention should be focused on the grieving parents, students, and communities who want tangible action against gun violence.

Three nine-year old children are dead: Evelyn Dieckhaus, Hallie Scruggs, and William Kinney. Three staff members are also dead: Katherine Koonce, 60, the head of The Covenant School; Mike Hill, 61, a custodian at the school; and Cynthia Peak, 61, a substitute teacher.  You can read more about all the victims here.

This is devastating, but now it is getting disgusting as the Right wing, media, and all our usual suspects (MTG, Musk) have latched onto this shooting as an anti-trans Reichstag Fire.

Even before police officials in Tennessee identified the person responsible for murdering three children and three adults in the latest mass school shooting in the U.S., far-right extremists and transphobic people began spreading misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation focused on transgender people and not guns.

Interesting how no one is talking about how the shooter is a “biological female” (eyeroll).

Some facts:

  • According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 130 mass shootings this year, 647 in 2022. In total, they calculate 2,871 mass shootings in the U.S. since 2016. Some of those incidents involved multiple shooters.
  • In that time, 3 of those shooters have been identified as transgender or nonbinary (I’m not counting the Club Q shooter since that has largely been debunked).
  • That’s roughly 0.1% for those of you running the math in your head.
  • Re: Hale. It’s quite unclear whether they are transgender or not, since there are conflicting reports from family and friends. Again, it’s not the damn point. Since the overwhelming percentage of mass shootings are carried out by white cis-men, it reeks that this shooter’s identity is the hot topic du jour.

Multiple members of my family lived in Newtown, CT during the Sandy Hook massacre, and I remember thinking at the time… this will stop, this has to stop. I fully expect that this tragedy will instead be used as a rallying flag for the right to gin up more anti-trans and christo-fascist nonsense, instead of actually doing something to protect children from guns.

Joyful Trans Visibility posts will be forthcoming later this week.

 

EDIT: Thanks @Matt_McIrvin and @SpaceUnit for pointing out my typos. I blame my terrible ADHD.

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A BFD on regulatory action

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This is a big deal. NARCAN is extremely effective at reversing opioid overdoses. The more people are carrying it, the more likely a dose will be readily available when someone is in trouble.

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