Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The other day, narya and I were talking about the late winter cooking blues and how we handle it. Seems we both look to fruit recipes to help us make it to the time of fresh spring ingredients.
I start making a lot of recipes with lemons – Chicken Piccata (recipe below), Lemon Nut Pork Chops (recipe here), lemon desserts
Saturday Afternoon Recipes: Beat The Winter Cooking BluesPost + Comments (89)
The title is from a sketch comedy set (YouTube link) in which a pair of SS officers begin to suspect that they are the bad guys. It’s funny because it’s true. For every person who consciously chooses to be an evil prick, there are countless others who follow without giving it much thought.
For me, the past 10 years or so of U.S. politics has driven home a lesson implicit in the history of prior millennia, i.e., that with the right prep work, any population can be molded into monsters. As Popehat on Bluesky points out, these guys are building molds right now:
They’ll call it “Moms for Consequences” or something dumb like that. And this incel-whisperer asshole will be on the advisory board:
Popehat describes the pathology that motivates a wingnut plutocrat-funded think-tank and asshole incel-whisperer to appoint themselves contraception cops and puts the scheme in its broader context:
It would be wrong to see this as just a prudish or Victorian or even sincerely religious attitude about sex. It’s about control. It’s about the authority of the state intruding into more and more parts of life, and about making more and more people complicit in the abuse of power.
The Nazis’ increasingly all-encompassing laws didn’t just serve policy goals. They served to normalize the idea of the state having authority in every segment of life, and to make more and more people complicit in enforcing that authority. That’s what totalitarianism means.
The Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws that forced more and more people to be complicit in enforcement and part of the machine excluding, shunning, and abusing Jews. The American Right wants abortion laws, IVF laws, contraceptive laws that will make more and more doctors, nurses, etc. complicit.
The fundamental concept is that most people, rather than stand up and say “I’m a terrible person if I go along with this,” will go along and rewrite their mental map to agree with it rather than think themselves terrible.
The anti-trans movement illustrates this. They KNOW there are very few trans kids, but they want to make as many people as possible — coaches, teachers, administrators — complicit in policing and excluding them. Same with the push for censorship of books.
Exactly so. Moms for Liberty, the Alabama Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation, Rufo, et al., are totalitarians. They’re the baddies. There are many ways to oppose them, including at the ballot box, but the first step is to refuse to be complicit — to resist normalization of this bullshit on every level.
I feel like we’re due for a good old-fashioned “it’s none of your fucking business” backlash to these totalitarian busybodies. Could be just wishful thinking on my part because I believe so strongly in my bones that these moralizing freakazoids should stop demanding to inspect strangers’ underwear. I dunno.
Open thread.
Since Roe was overturned, we have seen an erosion of reproductive freedom in states across the country.
The decision by the Alabama Supreme Court is only the latest attack – and it’s why we won’t back down from this fight. pic.twitter.com/ofuqzLRCXG
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) February 23, 2024
I don’t know how far Joe Biden could see into the future when he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate, but we have all been very much the better for that choice!
“In America, freedom is not to be given, not to be bestowed, but it is ours by right. And that includes the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body, and not have the government telling people what to do.”
– VP @kamalaharris pic.twitter.com/l88jL4RocQ— Madam Vice President (@MadamVPOTUS) February 23, 2024
Keep in mind, the Washington Post is the company paper for the town whose main industry is national politics. Which is why I’m happy to share a couple of excellent articles showing how much Vice-President Harris has won over a sometimes skeptical press corps. First, Jen Rubin — “Kamala Harris is an underrated asset” [gift link]:
Vice President Harris was never as flawed as her critics made her out to be. From the onset of her term, she maintained a rigorous and effective diplomatic travel schedule and bolstered President Biden’s fight for voting rights. Unlike Biden, she never got ahead of the president on policy. Unlike former vice president Dan Quayle, she never made a late-night-comedy-worthy gaffe. And she has avoided her predecessor’s cringeworthy fawning…
However, whatever one thought of her early days in the administration, those who look carefully will see that she has hit her stride, providing Biden with key support among critical constituencies. Most prominently, her fierce and eloquent defense of abortion rights post-Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has “broken through” with voters, according to respected Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. Her empathic rhetoric tying abortion to “freedom” has helped reset the pro-choice message…
In particular, she has excelled in her role as Biden defender and prosecutor of the case against four-times indicted former president Donald Trump. She launched a succinct and compelling indictment of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s lapse in prosecutorial judgment. “As a former prosecutor,” she declared Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and memory “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”
She concluded that “the way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and, clearly, politically motivated — gratuitous … We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.” Her delivery was crisp, her tone appropriately indignant and her eyewitness account of Biden’s actual performance the single most effective rebuttal to the age issue…
Saturday Morning Open Thread: Vice-President Harris Is Our GiftPost + Comments (122)
CPAC is very sleepy this year.
As I was preparing I reached out to people I met here previously, 95 percent of them said they weren’t coming this year. pic.twitter.com/riMSsyytPf
— Ben Goggin (@BenjaminGoggin) February 22, 2024
There’s a couple of competing events this weekend, but the main reason CPAC attendance is down just might be Matt Schlapp’s legal problems (no good ‘conservative’ wants that stink on them!). Per the Daily Beast:
SCOOP: Another round of subpoenas in the Matt Schlapp sexual assault case, including to an official who allegedly oversaw the shredding of personal records belonging to Schlapp in the CPAC office—days after the allegations broke. Me @thedailybeast https://t.co/WBc8WrOZwq
— Roger Sollenberger (@SollenbergerRC) February 22, 2024
… On Wednesday, the opening day for CPAC 2024, the Alexandria City Courthouse posted a batch of eye-popping new filings in the sexual battery and defamation lawsuit against Schlapp—including a subpoena to a CPAC official alleged to have overseen document destruction days after the accusations were first publicly reported. Schlapp was on notice at the time about potential legal action.
The court records show subpoenas to other key witnesses, as well, including CPAC officials and other alleged victims. Two young men who previously reported unwanted physical advances from Schlapp have been deposed, including in connection with an alleged incident where the conservative icon, drunk and stripped to his underwear, rubbed his crotch on a young man at a fundraising event months before the alleged assault at the center of the lawsuit…
The event has in years past been a magnet for conservative stalwarts and rising stars alike, a staple for Beltway Republicans looking to make inroads with the party’s most well-wired players. However, with the arrival of Trump and the MAGA movement, CPAC’s star began to dim. Recent years have seen notable shifts in attendance, as CPAC scrapped its mainstream conservative bona fides and instead embraced fringe and frivolous figures on the far right—celebrating the likes of Jan. 6 insurrectionists and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, while platforming authoritarian leaders across the globe.
It’s unclear how much of that branding pivot was pre-planned and how much was simply an inability to forestall Trump, leading Schlapp and his crew to adopt a “sour grapes” attitude that recast MAGA critics within the GOP as scurrilous political enemies. Regardless, the shifts have led to declines in attendance, revenue, and influence, a trend the Schlapp allegations exacerbated last year…
Still a hardcore bunch of chaos agents, wannabe kapos, and genuine foreign heads of state (Nayib Bukele, Liz Truss) ready to rile up the rubes:
Steve Bannon opens CPAC with QAnon fan art and D-list book promotion https://t.co/Fdydu5ODJk
— Media Matters (@mmfa) February 22, 2024
Dank Grey Dawn Open Thread: CPAC — Fewer, But <em>Meaner</em> ‘Conservatives’!Post + Comments (132)
I think one of the funniest political tv shows ever was, of course, Veep, and I love the line when she says “with our corn tweet we were hoist by our own retard.” It’s so fucking wrong and inappropriate yet you know EXACTLY what she means. At any rate, I am loving this shit:
As Republicans rush to understand what the procedure entails and the ripple effects from the Alabama ruling, conservative leaders warn that a failure to quickly reach a consensus will open up candidates to more attacks from Democrats, who are eager to recycle playbooks from recent electoral successes and paint Republicans as extreme and out of touch with most Americans.
“My best advice for Republicans, if they don’t want to deal with Democrats doing unfair attacks, is to come up with a reasonable policy,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project, a right-leaning think tank. “They should come up with what they actually believe and support and stand for, and it should be popular and in line with where the American people want to go.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee on Friday released talking points instructing Republicans to voice support for the procedure, a process millions of people who might oppose abortion support and that some, like former Vice President Mike Pence, have used. But they’ve eschewed the thornier details amid private disagreements among those in the anti-abortion movement about whether viable but unimplanted embryos count as life — and, by extension, whether destroying them is tantamount to abortion.
Don’t get me wrong, this is an awful decision and terrible for everyone. But this shitshow will at least be entertaining to watch until the media bail them out. But right now, the entire Republican party right now is “In Vitro? In Vitro who? Never heard of her. Are you talking to me on a cellular phone?”
Gotta love it.
In other news, the Air Canada Chatbot lawsuit thing is quite a hoot. For those who have not heard or read about it, apparently a guy’s mother died, so he was trying to buy tickets from Air Canada to go home. He didn’t have time to wait for an approval from them, so he went to their website, used the chatbox, and asked if in their bereavement policy it was allowed to buy the tickets ahead of time and request a refund later. Unbeknownst to the man, he was not actually talking to an employee at Air Canada, but an AI chatbot. And that AI chatbot had just created that policy out of the ether. Which just goes to show you that artificial intelligence has more common sense and empathy than the MA’s and corporate lawyers at a major corporation.
At any rate, the obvious happened. The guy said “Ok that seems reasonable” and went and purchased his tickets. Later on, he tried to get reimbursed, and living Air Canada employees told him to go get fucked that that was not their policy. So he sued, and the Air Canada lawyers actually argued in court that technically the AI chatbot on their website is not an Air Canada employee so technically we are not liable and don’t owe him a refund.
At which point, everyone on the tribunal said “get the fuck out of here with that bullshit” and found them liable:
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. “It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website,” read tribunal member Christopher Rivers’ written response. “It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.” The BBC reached out to Air Canada for additional comment and will update this article if and when we receive a response.
Gabor Lukacs, president of the Air Passenger Rights consumer advocacy group based in Nova Scotia, told BBC Travel that the case is being considered a landmark one that potentially sets a precedent for airline and travel companies that are increasingly relying on AI and chatbots for customer interactions: Yes, companies are liable for what their tech says and does.
That last line ought to scare the fuck out of Elon Musk.
I feel like a broken record, but it was another beautiful day here. Broke up the workday with some nice long walks, just sucking in all the sun I can. No big plans, prolly gonna watch some tv and get ready for catfest.
OH! Mom is not taking the tie-dye overalls well. I posted a picture of me in them in the family text chat and her initial response was “I don’t understand.” Later on she asked “Are you really wearing them?” I think she may disown me or just pretend I don’t exist like Gary’s mom in Weird Science.
Wait till she sees the tattoo.
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Tomorrow will be the end of the second year of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s genocidal re-invasion and the beginning of the third year of that defense.
Let’s start with a bit of good news:
Reports indicate another A-50 downed—Russia's eyes in the sky. If confirmed, this marks a major success. Last time it was seen over the Azov Sea. pic.twitter.com/q4XzJ2r5uB
— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) February 23, 2024
Woohoo! Confirmed! A-50 downed!!!🎉 pic.twitter.com/8SyZHTexse
— Maria Avdeeva (@maria_avdv) February 23, 2024
Again? Again!
The Ukrainian Air Force destroyed another enemy A-50 long-range radar detection and control aircraft, worth $330 million.Great job by Ukrainian warriors! pic.twitter.com/HcLsaGEln5
— Defense of Ukraine (@DefenceU) February 23, 2024
The Russians had nine of these modernized A-50s. Now they have seven. The point of taking them out, however, is to make Russia exceedingly shy in regard to using them. Ukraine’s continually pushing back the distance at which it can destroy these platforms, as well as other Russian aviation assets, makes it harder for Russia to actually use them for their couple of times a week barrages on Ukrainian civilian targets. More on this, as well as this morning’s barrage, after President Zelenskyy’s daily address and the jump.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
A New York state jury on Friday said the former long-serving National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre – as well as other executives of the gun rights group – were liable in a a lawsuit centered on the organization’s lavish spending.
The jury found that LaPierre, who was the NRA’s CEO for three decades, misspent millions of dollars of the group’s money on private flights, vacations and other lavish perks.
[…]Attorneys working for James are asking that LaPierre and others be forced to pay penalties and to reimburse the NRA for the money taken from the organization.
Serious gun humpers probably already have another organization that serves their fetish picked out, but the NRA is the big name in human/gun intercourse, so let’s hope LaPierre has to live in a tent under a freeway underpass by the time the penalties are assessed in this case.