Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

Come on, man.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

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

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

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

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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Archives for 2024

Black Women Are Showing Us The Way. Again.

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Busy week working, and I am back at it today, but I took one minute to check in on my buddy, the (fake) jack Smith.

Let’s model Taraji’s behavior, shall we?  We are not famous, but what if each one of us shared Project 2025 information with just one person this weekend.  What would the ripples be?

And if you didn’t catch the awesome poem by niqaeli torres in yesterday’s thread, go check it out.

Four Directions Wisconsin – We Have Angels, and Poetry!

She is right.  All there is is what we do now.  This fight is for everything.  Get up and fight.

Open thread.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Hot Enough for Ya?

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*********

Related, and yet not: This is a very important piece of legislation!

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Late Night Open Thread: RFK Jr, Chaos Agent

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The family may not have shared every unpleasant detail, but all the cousins knew enough not to ask each other too many questions. Bobby Jr was, and is, someone who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Here’s the article that seems to have sparked this week’s agita, Vanity Fair “RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets.”:

… Long before he entered the 2024 race with a wagon train of conspiracy theories, the wider Kennedy family was intimately familiar with RFK Jr.’s problematic personality—the outsize confidence masquerading as expertise, the “savior complex” (as one family member called it) that drives him to take up quixotic causes and cast himself as a lone hero against established powers, and, above all, as one old friend calls it, his “pathological need for attention.” A few months ago I began talking to Kennedy family members and close friends, some on the record, others on background, to get insights into the man they know well, and to ask some pointed questions: Rather than merely rubber-stamping Joe Biden’s already fatally faltering campaign, shouldn’t you be telling voters what you know about your brother and cousin, whose candidacy threatens to swing the presidential election to Donald Trump and upend American history forever? With the future of the country riding on the narrowest of polling margins, shouldn’t you be describing in fine detail the acute dangers of the person you know so well—before your own family’s tragedy becomes the nation’s?…

After initially denouncing his candidacy last summer, most of the 105 Kennedy relatives —including Bobby’s eight siblings, the largest branch of the family—had hoped his campaign would collapse under the weight of his many bizarre claims and alliances with anti-vax cranks and Trumpworld figures like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. Instead the family has played defense, going public only when Kennedy’s statements went so far out of bounds they had no choice, like when he suggested COVID was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people; or his claim that anti-vaxxers suffered worse oppression than Anne Frank (a statement sister Kerry called “sickening and destructive”); or when he claimed there was a mysterious alternative shooter in the death of his father in 1968 (going so far as to interview Sirhan B. Sirhan in prison and proclaim him innocent); or that the CIA was possibly involved in the assassination—claims that caused deep pain for his siblings.

Their private efforts to get Bobby to drop out—or at least wait until 2028 to run—have also come to naught. “I’ve spoken to Bobby about this race, about what’s at stake, about the importance of supporting Joe Biden, of the impact of the Trump presidency on our country and on the world,” Kerry Kennedy, who leads the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights and is disciplined in how she speaks of her brother, tells me, “and I was clearly unpersuasive.”…

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War for Ukraine Day 863: A Brief Friday Night Update

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(Image by NEIVANMADE)

A couple of quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing well. Nothing much new to report. Thank you all, again, for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, just a brief update from the Israel-Hamas war update from earlier today. The news is not as good as Reuters had reported. Basically, Hamas wants some written commitments from the US, Egypt, and Qatar is a problem for Israel, which you can read as a problem for Bibi. Things are much closer than they’ve been, but this is not a done deal. Negotiations are supposed to resume next week.

Back to Ukraine.

Russia seems to be attempting to burn large portions of Ukraine down in addition to blowing them up.

27 fires per day broke out in the Kherson region due to enemy shelling ❗️
8 residential buildings, 10 farm buildings, 13 dryland fires with a total area of ​​22.68 hectares and a wheat field with an area of ​​1 hectare burned.
Repeated attacks and scorching sun did not prevent rescuers from doing their job 💪

In the morning, the enemy shelled the front-line town of Kupyansk and the village of Hlushkivka in Kharkiv Oblast.
Private houses and commercial buildings were destroyed and damaged. 4 civilians were injured in Hlushkivka.
The total area of ​​the fires was about 270 sq.m. Specialists of the State Emergency Service extinguished all fires.

This is a photo of one of the fires that occurred outside the city of Novy Bug, Bashtan district, Mykolaiv region. The dead tree burned, and the pheasant chicks burned with it…
Firefighters managed to save this little boy. They took him to a safe place.
We hope he’ll be fine 🙏

The enemy shelled Kharkiv Oblast. In the village A person died in Losivka. Civil infrastructure was damaged – fires broke out, burning grass and reeds on an area of ​​1.5 hectares.
A warehouse building burned down in the village of Bily Kolodyaz. There were no casualties.
The rescuers worked under constant fire.

Enemy shelling in the Kherson region caused 6 fires in ecosystems. The extinguishing area was 11.5 ha 🔥
Also, 2 residential buildings, 4 outbuildings and garages burned down in populated areas of the region from the hits of enemy ammunition. The fire has been extinguished.

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

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We Better Think

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One of the hardest things about the past two weeks, besides the uproar after the debate – and the concrete things the Supreme Court has done  to break both legs and tie two hands behind the back of democracy – is seeing politically aware people on Balloon Juice getting sucked into the vortex that is trying to kneecap Biden and the Democrats in the election.

Truly, the response to the whole thing leaves me in despair.  Maybe it’s a good thing that I am so busy with my clients right now that I don’t have a lot of time, but at least I can do one concrete thing to help keep democracy on track, and that’s the fundraising to get boots on the ground, on the ground.

Hopefully, boots on the ground will trump panic in the ranks.

Maybe a little Aretha will provide some balance.

In any case, Lapassionara recommended the rant below earlier, in Cole’s post.  Here’s the tweet that starts it off, and the Thread Reader version is below, in its entirety.

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Nuzzi Comes At the King…

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… And misses, badly.

I’m disappointed, but not really surprised. Nuzzi’s longform reporting shows a good eye for the devastating details — Giuliani’s frenetic attempts to revive his reputation, Mehmet Oz on the campaign trail, TFG as Norma Desmond haunting Mar-A-Lago. But she’s apparently got a weakness for bad companions (hell, she married Ryan Lizza), and her latest NYMag ‘report’ is the pixilated equivalent of a middle-school horror story told around a late-night campfire. And when the couple got home from the drive-in… there was a detached arm with a hook for a hand hanging off the window!!!

Friday Evening Open Thread: Nuzzi Comes At the King...

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