Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Everybody saw this coming.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

“But what about the lurkers?”

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

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

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Still with the Incel Shit

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Incel Boy 1

Every new find is worse than the last.  Over on TikTok, creator the_yv_edit has a video out predicting that Trump is going to dump Vance, and she makes a point that “childless” is a far different thing from “child free”.  The latter is what Vance really wants to say — women, couples and men who choose not to have children even though they could.  “Childless” can also mean someone who really wanted kids but couldn’t.

But he’s a political moron who wanted to go 110% MAGA to win a Senate seat, so here he is, channeling weird rhetoric that only misogynist incels would think is convincing.  He’d still get dragged (and with good reason) if he went after the child free women, but instead he’s too fucking stupid to make that distinction.

Yes, someone who went to Yale can be stupid.  Tim Walz went to Chadron State College and he’s smart and, more importantly, he has good instincts.  People who just kiss ass all the fucking time generally have good instincts about which butt to kiss, but not much else.  And if they were smarter they’d be kissing less ass.

Also, Tim Walz’ two kids were IVF babies.  Just saying.

Edited to add:  Walz also drinks diet dew.

Edit #2:  I told my therapist that I’d limit it to one Vance post a day, so:

Still with the Incel Shit

In case you’re living in a cave, Biles just lead the US team to a gold in Paris.  That’s her fifth.

 

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Boots on the Ground, and Out In the Field, Nelle Style! (Take 2)

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Nelle wrote a great post for us last week, and by comment 21, Biden had stepped down.

So I want to give all of us another chance to see how Nelle talks to people she meets, building connections and community, which is great in itself, but it’s also necessary to win elections.

So here you go, take 2, with an updated introduction from Nelle!

Boots on the Ground, and Out In the Field, Nelle Style!

A Whole New World?

That was a week.  I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon.  A week ago, WaterGirl posted my writing on what I am trying to do – in terms of talking to people – to win this next election.  Shortly after it went up, news came that Joe Biden was no going to run.  All kinds of things broke loose with the endorsement of Kamala Harris, leaving the pundits in the dust.  Where I would like them to remain.  Oh, well, we all have our fantasies.

A week ago, I was also writing some short drafts for “Grandma” TikToks to try to find an angle to get young people excited about going to vote.  Those are irrelevant now.  A lot of young people are very excited.  Even a 59-year-old woman looks young, compared to a 78-year-old Donald Trump, to a 19-year-old.

So, I’ve been thinking about how I, a 73-year-old woman, adjust my outreach and pitch.  Frankly, it is time for passing the torch, but it doesn’t mean sitting on the sidelines.  It means that I can truly be more of a grandma, encouraging and supporting young people to take the lead.

Here’s what I thought of so far.  One, helping set up voter registration tables, if possible, on college and community college campuses when school opens in August.  We’ve got experienced D leaders in getting permission and who have the patter down.  So, in this, I’ll likely just be at the booths for some of the two hour shifts.  The high schools generally have a strong voter registration push here, but I also want to be alert to other venues.  Des Moines has a big skate park.  That might be a possibility.

As I’ve noted, I’m big on building community.  Getting young people into the habit of voting in every election is the goal.  It might help if they felt a sense of community. Because we can identify registered voters by age, I’m proposing to my city GOTV leader that we have suppers for the younger people where they can meet each other.  A little politicking but mostly, just a social evening.  Maybe some board games.  The grandmas and grandpas provide the food (asking them to let us know if they are vegetarian or vegan, beforehand, too).

I’m just starting to think in these directions.  I would love to get more suggestions of possible actions from all of you.

Talking to People

by Nelle

I’m focused on building community, both within and beyond political connections.  I’ve moved a lot, mostly due to my husband’s refusal to change scientific data to suit government officials (he’s a water quality specialist).  I have had to build a sense of community over and over (eight states and two countries in our 44 years of marriage).  I don’t have time to waste, waiting for others to come to me.  I usually had a list of ten or twelve things to do the first two weeks in a new place.  I would discard what didn’t work.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Running At Full Speed

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… Harris is planning to make a show of political force with a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday night that will feature a performance by hip hop star Megan Thee Stallion, the latest example of just how much the race against Republican Donald Trump has shifted since Biden abandoned his reelection bid. She will be appearing in the same city where Biden’s dismal performance in a debate against Trump on June 27 sparked a Democratic revolt that ultimately ended his campaign.

Harris is hoping a large rally will help affirm her campaign’s momentum. Her campaign argues that Harris’ appeal with young people, working-age women and non-white voters have scrambled the dynamics in Georgia and other states that are demographically similar, from North Carolina to Nevada and Arizona…

In a strategy memo released after the president left the race, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who held the same role for Biden, reaffirmed the importance of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, a trio of industrial states that have formed the traditional Democratic blue wall.

But she also argued that the vice president’s place atop the ticket “opens up additional persuadable voters” and described them as “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” in places like Georgia…

The Harris campaign and Georgia Democratic officials have 24 offices across the state, including two added last weekend in metro Atlanta. Trump and the Republican National Committee opened their first Georgia offices only recently.

Democrats are betting that a combination of high turnout among traditional, core Democratic constituencies, as well as a strong showing in the suburbs and small pickups elsewhere can be enough for Harris to carry Georgia…

All those GOTV efforts eat money, so this Interim report from last night’s #White Dudes for Harris Zoom rally is great news:

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On The Road – BretH – On The Road – BretH – Australia! Melbourne and Sydney Part 3

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After Melbourne, with my wife’s teaching stint completed,  we headed to Sydney for several days of adventure. We planned to mostly explore the harbor, and take ferries to do some go the amazing coastal walks that looked promising and were high recommended. If we had time we would find another park off a train route and hike that.

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On The Road - BretH - On The Road - BretH - Australia! Melbourne and Sydney Part 3 6
SydneyMay 17, 2024

The flight from Melbourne to Sydney via Qantas is fast and entirely uneventful. Here we opted for an Uber to our room which was a tiny studio apartment in Potts Point, a peninsula not far from Sydney Harbor. To get from our apartment to the harbor (about one and a quarter miles away) we had to pass through the Sydney Botanical Garden. But first thing (and last thing upon returning) was a mini version of the 1000 steps. Actually only 130 (I counted) they woke us up at the start of the morning walk and tired us out nicely at the end of the day.

Monday Night Open Thread: Our Failed Flailing Major Media

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The peasants subscribers refuse to eat our dogfood! How *dare* they resist our wise counsel!…

…. So far, the campaign polling has been the least exciting part of the story of the 2024 election. Tomorrow, it will have been a full month since the Biden–Trump debate—a month of the highest possible narrative drama, culminating in Biden’s unprecedented decision to drop out. But the polling was persistently less feverish than the news. While professional political observers were convinced within the first five minutes of the debate that Biden was ruined, the poll-answering public reacted more slowly. The campaign crisis manifested itself not as a sudden collapse but as a slow deflation of Biden’s standing from week to week. As panicked commenters and Democrats warned of a coming Trump landslide, what seemed to be developing instead was an ever greater number of ways that Trump might collect a modest victory…

But another set of polls was considerably more dynamic. While the candidates were slogging along, the Democratic message-crafting group Navigator Research was asking how people felt about Project 2025, the 922-page strategic guide for a new presidency assembled through the Heritage Foundation by Trump’s advisors and allies. In its June survey on the subject, Navigator reported that 71 percent of respondents said they didn’t have an opinion about Project 2025; its most recent survey found that the no-opinion share had fallen to 46 percent—and that nearly all the newly developed opinions about it were negative….

Here in 2024, in the maelstrom of personality politics, the public is attending to a whole big book of issues. Some of the forces driving that interest are non-wonky—Taraji P. Henson warned the audience about Project 2025 while hosting the BET Awards, making the subject take off on social media; Trump and his campaign clumsily tried to deny their involvement with it, giving the political press license to treat it as a scandal and a cover-up—but also it’s a big, long document full of alarming and demented ideas, ideal for people to dig into and find their own points to warn other people about. It is an unsoftened product of the deepest right-wing ghoulosphere. To pick a topic more or less at random, it goes on for six pages about the importance of stopping the Department of Agriculture from feeding too many people, including urging a new Trump administration to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals” and abolish summertime school-meal programs for kids who aren’t enrolled in summer school.

That people care about things like this is a genuine breakthrough. A longstanding problem for Democratic campaigns has been that voters don’t like to believe Republicans could possibly support the policies Republicans support. In 2012, when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama, the New York Times reported in a profile of the Democrat-promoting Priorities USA Action PAC that “when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the [Paul] Ryan budget plan—and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’—while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.” In 2020, Data for Progress found that 45 percent of likely voters, and 81 percent of Republican ones, believed Republicans wanted to protect health coverage for preexisting conditions, rather than removing it; only 32 percent of likely voters, and 11 percent of Republican ones, understood that the party was in favor of dumping mining waste into streams.

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War for Ukraine Day 887: Russia Is Using Drones To Hunt Civilians in Kherson!

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A painting by Ukrainian artist NEIVANMADE. The words "NEVER AGAIN" are repeated over and over, from left to right and top to bottom, in a faded, washed out black against a white background. Red, the color of blood, runs and drips down across 2/3rds of the painting. "WHILE YOU TOLERATE TYRANTS" is written/painted in the bottom white corner below the three rows of "NEVER AGAIN".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing great. She always gets far more active and more back to pre-chemo/pre-cancer normal in the second week of her two weeks off. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, I will continue to do one update a day, in the evening. I’m not doing these to count comments, I’m doing them because they need to be done. As I’ve written before, these are the only posts I do, these are the only posts I will be commenting in. I do not read other posts on this site unless someone reaches out asks me to look at a comment because they think we have a moderation problem. As in someone needs a warning or to go to the sin bin. I’m not ignoring other conflicts – Gaza, Sudan, etc – or other crises – Israel-Hezbullah, Yemen, etc – not because they’re not deserving of my time or because I don’t care, nor because the people suffering aren’t deserving, but because I have no time or energy to cover them in addition to the Ukraine war updates. I also know that what I do no longer fits what this site has become since the rebuild, though it took a bit for that realization to fully sink in, which is the other reason I do these and only these and do not participate in anything else on this site. I’m not writing this paragraph, nor these posts for thanks or compliments, though you are all most welcome. I do these because they have to be done and I’m providing this explanation so everyone is clear on that. And that’s all I have to say on this topic.

The Russians are using their drones to hunt Ukrainian residents of Kherson:

From the Byline Times:

Drones once primarily used for surveillance, have evolved into weapons for hunting human targets in Ukraine.

During June and July, the Russian military dramatically increased drone attacks on civilians in the Kherson region, with the last two weeks breaking all records. Estimates suggest 50 people have been killed or injured in the attacks.

In the port city of Kherson, drones patrol the skies, hovering over devastated coastal suburbs and villages, searching for an old lady with a bucket here or a teenager on a bicycle there—to eliminate by dropping explosives.

“We’ve got something new here,” said Olha, a grocery store owner in Kherson. “It’s called skid, literally ‘a drop’.”

Daily skid statistics are terrifying: on 24 July, a Russian drone dropped explosives on a woman in Romashkove village, hospitalising her with blast and cranial injuries and shrapnel wounds to her legs. The same day, a private house in Kherson’s suburbs caught fire after a skid attack. While firefighters were extinguishing the fire, a second drone attack damaged the fire truck with shrapnel. And in Kherson city, a drone attack on a 57-year-old woman, left her with a concussion, leg wound, and blast injuries.

The following day, two drones struck residents in the suburb of Kindiyka, injuring a couple and killing a 51-year-old man. In Antoniivka, another suburb, a drone attacked a vehicle carrying humanitarian aid, injuring the driver, and another, later that day, wounded a 72-year-old woman. A resident of Sadove village, also 72, suffered blast trauma, concussion, and shrapnel wounds to his forearm after a drone attack.

“Drones are like flies,” said Volodymyr, a resident of the coastal area. “They see you and they target you.”

“Drones are our curse,” said Tatiana, a resident of the Vostochny district, whose building was attacked on 28 July.

Hiding under a tree in front of her high rise, Tatiana pointed out broken windows and shattered doors. For two months, drones have been patrolling the skies over her home, dropping explosives on civilian cars and people.

Getting outside is extremely dangerous but staying inside can be unsafe, too. Tatiana’s neighbour, Elizaveta, survived a drone attack in her apartment.

“It’s a human safari,” Tatiana said.

Kherson Non-Fake, a popular local Telegram channel, reported that due to “attacks by enemy drones, some stores and even gas stations” are closed.

It said Russian Mavic drones “regularly fly at various altitudes” and while it searches for military targets, it’s often civilians that get killed.

“A drone with a grenade takes off from the left bank and flies for some time in search of anything resembling military targets. If the drone does not find such a target, it looks for any car or a group of civilians. After that, the target is attacked so as not to transport the grenade back to the left bank.”

Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, the head of the press service of the Kherson regional military administration and the spokesman of the Kherson region told Byline Times that previously, for several months, drones attacked mostly Beryslav district coastal zones.

They now target residents in most of the Kherson city coastal districts daily, he said, explaining that often the drones do a Russian signature “double tap”, striking first responders and ambulances arriving to help victims of artillery bombardments.

Much more at the link.

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

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