Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

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

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

I would gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today.

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Petty moves from a petty man.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

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On The Road – Elma – Iceland, long delayed, in three parts

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Elma

In June 2023, I was two weeks away from a trip to Iceland with a tour company that had taken me all around the world over the years, when I got the email declaring that the trip was canceled. As it developed, the company had not successfully come out of the pandemic and was bankrupt. At least I was still at home when I got the news, unlike some unlucky travelers that got stranded in foreign parts. After a period of anger and depression, I started to look for a replacement trip and found a similar excursion offered by the Smithsonian Institution. Assuming that it was not likely to go bankrupt, I booked it for June 2024. The tour is actually operated by a French company in partnership with the Smithsonian. “French” made for some interesting cultural experiences.

On The Road – Elma – Iceland, long delayed, in three partsPost + Comments (22)

On The Road - Elma - Iceland, long delayed, in three parts 9
Reykjavik, IcelandJune 15, 2024

Some Hawaiians might beg to differ. Not sure it is really a pitch most visitors’ bureaus would choose to make.

Late Night Open Thread: PokeyMan Go – Away!

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Late Night Open Thread: PokeyMan Go - Away!

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

 
As brought to you by…

Save y’all a click (although it is a most *amazing* piece of grifter art): For a mere $99, you can buy an Official Trump Digital Trading Card AMERICA FIRST Edition (Series 1 & 2 Sold Out in Hours), and receive… an NFT. Yes, a (really ugly) digital image of The Felon Himself, styled like those Jesus / Elvis icons your grandmother may’ve displayed.

Buy 75 of these cloud-borne trading stamps — that would be $7,425, credit card or crypto — and you get Dinner with the President at his Private Country Club & A Piece of the Actual Suit from his famous debate!

And unlike so many Trump enterprises, it’s all legal!!!*

*(barring future court decisions)

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Solidarity!

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I love this ad so much.  That is all.

The right person at the right time.  We seem to have several of those, and we need every single one in this fight.

If anyone finds this on YouTube, let me know.  (Thanks, Another Scott!)  He gets to the part where the ad starts at around minute 16.

Open thread.

Totally open, I just wanted to share the awesome ad!

 

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War for Ukraine Day 923: Russian Strategic Aviation Is Up, Russian Missiles Are Inbound!

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(Image by NEIVANMADE)

A quick housekeeping note: Rosie did great at her chemo treatment today. She’s got three more to go with two weeks in between them. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

It is 8:00 PM EDT/3:00 AM local time in Ukraine and Russian Tu-95s are airborne, air raid alerts are up over all of northern Ukraine except for Volyn Oblast, and air raid alerts are starting to go up in the other oblasts. It is likely that another Russian missile attack is underway.

Air raid alert map of Ukraine. All of Ukraine's northern oblasts (regions), Crimea, and Khmelnytskyi Oblast are colored red to indicate the air raid alerts

The Russians had already run the butcher’s bill way up in Poltava this morning.

My deepest condolences to the families of those killed and injured in the russian missile attack on Poltava. This is a shocking tragedy for the whole Ukraine. The enemy hit an educational institution and a hospital. We already know about 47 dead and 206 wounded. Russia is taking away our most valuable thing – lives. We will never forget this. Eternal memory.

The Kyiv Independent has the details:

Editor’s note: The story is being updated.

Russian forces launched two ballistic missiles against the city of Poltava on Sept. 3, killing at least 51 and injuring over 271 people, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

The Military Institute of Communications and a neighboring medical facility were hit in the attack. The building of the educational institution was partially destroyed, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The time interval between the alarm and the arrival of the deadly missiles was so short that it caught people during an evacuation to the bomb shelter,” the Defense Ministry said.

Many people remain trapped under the rubble, while rescuers and medics continue to work at the scene. As of around 2 p.m. local time, the emergency services had rescued 25 people, 11 of whom were retrieved from the rubble, according to the ministry’s statement.

“We express our sincere condolences to the families of the victims. This tragedy is yet another evidence of the enemy’s cunning, which stops at no crime to try to intimidate Ukrainians,” the ministry said.

“We urge everyone to remain calm and trust only official sources of information. Any speculation on this tragedy is unacceptable,” the ministry added.

There were no ceremonies or other events near the military institute at the time of the Russian attack, Dmytro Lazutkin, Defense Ministry spokesperson, said on national television, refuting such unofficial claims.

According to the Defense Ministry, students were studying, and then followed to the shelter after an air raid alert went off, Lazutkin added.

Zelensky said he had instructed an operational investigation into the circumstances of the attack on Poltava. Ukraine’s Ground Forces is conducting an investigation to determine “whether enough was done to protect the lives and health of the soldiers at the facility,” the military said.

Poltava is a city of around 300,000, located in Poltava Oblast in central Ukraine. The city is situated around 120 kilometers (75 miles) from the border with Russia, and 230 kilometers (143 miles) from the eastern front.

The city and surrounding region are regular targets of Russian drone and missile attacks.

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

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Tuesday Night Open Thread

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Tuesday Night Open Thread 3

First things first- big day at the Ohio County Democratic HQ, as the grand opening and ribbon cutting ceremony was at 5:30. I stopped by briefly and said hi to some of the peeps and met some of the newer candidates including a young fellow named Dave Cantrell, a good union guy and electrician with the local IBEW, who is running to replace the GOP rubber stamp that is Jimmy Willis, the 20 something kid that was elected a few years back for the sole reason he had a Trump sticker on his pickemup truck. So that was nice. Are you all getting involved in your local races because that is where much of the quality of life issues in your area can be improved. Very important.

***

In other news, I took a fall today at around 4 pm. Was walking out of a business in Wheeling I had only been in once before, and they have one of those doors where there is a step down to the street and I didn’t know it and walked out and fell. Managed to both get my arms to my side and rotate so I did not hit my head, but landed square on my reconstructed shoulder and it is sore as fuck. Don’t think there is any structural (bone) damage, but I know I messed up some ligaments and tendons. I’m rotating bags of frozen peas on it right now and if it feels like it needs to be looked at in a couple of days I will go.

God damnit. I was so fucking close to being able to do freestyle and was going to start lifting. Fingers crossed this is just bruising. One side benefit of breaking damned near every bone in your body is I knew immediately that I had not broken anything. I just “know” what a bone breaking feels and sounds like.

The least surprising thing about this is that not one person in the store I was in came out to check on me, or the people in businesses next door or across the street. But you know who did? The homeless couple sitting on a stoop about 30 yards away. Got up and immediately raced over to me, leaving their backpacks and possession alone to come to my aid. Asked if I was ok and needed help, asked if I hit my head, etc. Put that in your fucking NIMBY housing construction pipe and smoke it.

In other news, Rosie is still really pissy and not happy to be here, but enough time has passed that it is time for her to go to the vet. I didn’t want her to go through all that trauma and then immediately take her to the vet, so she is due. Plus, the all clear is critical to introducing her to the other cats. I get paid on Friday so I am taking her then.

***

In some exciting news, we about have the Balloon Juice store functional again, and we are planning to have some new election swag in the store in the next few days. This has been no easy feat and I want to thank the graphic designer (they can out themselves) and the person who has been doing the calendar for several years and knows the CafePress system, as well as Watergirl. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes here and you already know about the Wizard being a complete incompetent (I’m talking about me and making a Wizard of Oz reference, Baud).

At any rate, we have two different items that are going to be available as yard signs, car magnets, and stickers. They say, respectively:

“Woke not Weird: Harris/Walz 2024”

And a play on the cat ladies thing but inclusive for all cat lovers, “a picture of Tunch or Steve for Harris/Walz 2024”

Watergirl is sending me the most up to date images and I will post them when I get them.

I have been making all of them mental I am so excited to get these in the store and out there- I’ve been champing at the bit hard. I want to retake the term woke like they did with queer, and I want lots of stuff visible to help get out the vote. Plus, all proceeds go to our pet rescue partners!

One final thing- don’t forget to get your copy and read Steve Benen’s book, “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past”– we’re still on for a zoom book club sometime in mid October and I would love a good turnout!

Time for a new bag of frozen peas.

DRAFT IMAGES – but you get the idea!

Tunch bumper sticker (car magnets & yard signs soon, just no images to share yet)

Steve bumper stickers  (DarkBrandon and regular Steve are available)Car magnets available in Dark Brandon and regular.Steve yard signs in Dark Brandon and regular.

Woke not weird in peace sign, pride, and raised fist.  (raised fist not shown)

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Excellent Read: The kleptocrats aren’t just stealing money. They’re stealing democracy

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It’s hard to extract Anne Applebaum’s articles, because she doesn’t waste words. I didn’t hit a Financial Times paywall when I opened this; hope it works for the rest of you:

Donald Trump opened Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in 1983 and occupied the penthouse himself. The building was intended to advertise its owner’s wealth, and also to attract other rich tenants — including, ironically, the very secretive rich. Trump would sell 43 condos in Manhattan’s flashiest building to shell companies based in jurisdictions such as Panama, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, which conceal corporate records. He sold another six condos, for cash, to corporations based in Delaware, which has historically had the least transparent company laws in the US.

Not that this was anything exceptional: in the four decades that followed, more than a fifth of the sales in Trump-owned and Trump-licensed buildings, more than 1,300 properties, were made to anonymously owned shell companies, for cash, without a mortgage, which meant the purchasers did not have to have any uncomfortable conversations with lenders.

Some of those companies sold those condos again, very quickly, at much higher prices or at much lower prices — usually a sign that money laundering might have been the actual purpose of the purchase. A Trump-licensed building in Florida sold a two-bedroom condo to a shell company on August 12 2010, for example, for $956,768. That shell company sold the condo to another shell company, at a heavy loss, for $525,000 that same day.

All of these transactions were legal and there’s no evidence to suggest that Trump or his companies knew of or were complicit in money laundering schemes. They have been reported and described many times. The examples cited above come from a BuzzFeed investigation published six years ago, in 2018, but it wasn’t the only one. A Financial Times investigation in that same year also found that Russian, Kazakh and other post-Soviet oligarchs had probably been laundering money through Trump-licensed properties…

In the years since Trump’s 2016 election, a lot has been written about his autocratic instincts, about his scorn for ethical norms and about his attempt to retain power after losing the 2020 election. But as illustrated by the story of his real estate company’s reliance on dubious shell companies, Trump was already operating in an alternate ethical universe long before he became president, a world where the rules that most ordinary people live by are easily broken.

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Blue Wave? How About a Silver Wave?

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It’s my opinion that the likely voters polling is off because the powers that be haven’t adjusted their model to reflect the last month or so.  I think they are missing the new “youngs”, the new “olds”, and the new “formerly engaged”.

So I wasn’t at all surprised to see this article from The Rolling Stone.

Will a Silver Wave Help Elect Kamala Harris?

Polls suggest Donald Trump can’t count on older voters this November. Here’s why.
by Bill McKibben

LET’S SAY YOU were going to your high school prom in the spring of 1969, and you turned on the (probably AM) radio in your Mustang on the way to the school cafeteria — the Number One song in America? Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In. Fast forward 55 years, and you’re 73, right about the median age for surviving baby boomers. Which means, as we start casting votes next month, you’re going to play a disproportionate role in the outcome of the coming election. That’s because candidates have to work hard to lure younger voters to the polls, but not so with the old, who have the habit of democracy most strongly ingrained. There’s no known way to stop old people from voting.

Donald Trump might be inclined to think that’s good news for him — that as the oldest man ever to win a presidential nomination and one whose campaign is rooted in nostalgic appeals to past greatness, he should harvest most of those votes from the boomers and the Silent Generation. After all, he won those categories in 2020, though by reduced margins from 2016. But not so fast this time — remember that tune from Hair on the radio. We’re turning out more older voters all the time — about 10,000 people a day pass the 65-year mark. And increasingly, they’re starting to make that caricature — older voters are more conservative — irrelevant. Older voters come from the past — but the past they come from is changing. Which means new polling indicates that something like a silver wave may be building as November approaches.

Consider, for instance, the Fairleigh Dickinson poll last week that found the biggest lead yet for Kamala Harris — a seven-point national edge that came largely from her 16-point lead among people over the age of 65. On Thursday, a Suffolk University poll for USA Today found Harris leading Trump 53-42 among voters over 60 — her largest vote share of any demographic. And it’s the same in many of the swing states: A New York Times/Siena College poll showed her with a modest lead among older voters in Arizona — and there are a lot of older voters in Arizona. In North Carolina, another swing state crowded with retirees, she’s up by 10 points among older voters. In Maine, statistically the oldest state in the union, Harris led by 20 points among older voters. In Vermont, the second-oldest state, 61 percent of older voters thought Trump’s mental and physical health were “very poor,” higher than any other group. (Which is worth thinking about — if anyone’s an expert on gauging decline, it’s those of us who see it around us regularly, and perhaps sense it in ourselves).

h/t Mousebumples

How about you guys?  Is anyone surprised by this?

Open thread.

 

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