Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

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

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

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

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

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

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

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

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

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

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

How stupid are these people?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,021: Bakhmut & Zaporizhzhia

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A quick housekeeping note: Overnight my sinus infection decided to kick my dupa. I’ve been resting all day and am just going to run down the basics. I will get to the new survey data from Ukraine once I’m feeling better.

The Ukrainians bled the Russians, specifically the GRU funded, Prigozhin led Wagner PMC including convicts recruited by Prigozhin, at Bakhmut for 10 and a 1/2 months. Here’s what’s left a year and a half later under Russian occupation:

New pics and video of destroyed and Russian-occupied Bakhmut surfaced on Ukrainian and Russian social media accounts. This image was easy to geolocate: near intersection of Nezalezhnosti and Gorbatova; 48.594981, 38.000822; looking east. 🔴 = pic location + view; 🟢 = gas pipe; 🟡 = apartment block.

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— Christopher Miller (@christopherjm.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 6:55 AM

Then this video of Bakhmut, filmed from SW ‘plane district’, looking NE. Easy to geolocate b/c of distinct view and building with the circles on it, which I passed almost daily en route to work when I lived there. Plus the smoke stack on the center-right and antenna in the distance on Skovorody St.

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— Christopher Miller (@christopherjm.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 6:59 AM

Stills from the video above.

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— Christopher Miller (@christopherjm.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 6:59 AM

The Russians committed more genocidal war crimes today by attacking a medical clinic in Zaporizhzia:

At least eight people could still be trapped under the rubble in Zaporizhzhia. Rescue efforts are ongoing on the site of the russian attack.

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— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 11:41 AM

3 people were killed and 5 injured after the russian attack on Zaporizhzhia. Rescuers are searching for 6 others trapped under the rubble, according to local authorities

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 9:26 AM

They also attacked an IAEA vehicle:

Rashists attacked an IAEA service vehicle with a drone as it was heading for rotation at the occupied Zaporizhzhia NPP. But don’t worry. The IAEA expressed concern and condemned the Russians.
They were lucky the vehicle was armored.
t.me/c/1315043344…

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 1:18 PM

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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So where the hell have I been these past few days. Here, just living. As many of you know, I am a delicate flower who is very sensitive to my environment and change. I mean I handle it fine and will go through with whatever, but whenever there is significant change there’s internal turmoil for a while. So after a couple of weeks of that I finally became accustomed to the new normal and Joelle and I are in a good routine, so we’ve just been working, going to the pool, watching an episode or two of a show each night, and then calling it a day. And with the time zone difference, by the time I go to write something, it will be ten or eleven there on the east coast and I just say fuck it I will write tomorrow.

Joelle has her knee surgery on Monday, so we are not going to be going anywhere for a while so you will probably see much more of me.

***

I’m glad to see Mistermix posted that Popehat piece earlier. I had posted it on bluesky and have just sort of been shaking my head at the reactions to the UHC shooter (whom they have taken to calling the “Adjustor” on various social media.

The reactions were so bizarre. The first group of people who were acting the fool were the purity police, who any time you mentioned the shooting if you didn’t explicitly state it was wrong or show sympathy for the guy was to freak out and say “Murder is wrong I thought you were better.”

Well sure, murder is wrong and if you are following me you must know something about me and are aware I don’t support murder and in fact have been warning about this kind of shit eventually happening for oh I dunno twenty fucking years. Second, people die in the worst way possible every single day, and many of them are far more deserving of my sympathy. I mean ffs, maybe people should work harder to live a life that doesn’t lead to someone planning for months and then staying up all night to shoot you in the back? Don’t get mad at me because my reaction is “yeah that’s bad” and nothing more. Hell even the famous internet sleuths who love identifying people and tracking down shit said “nah we’re gonna pass we don’t care.”

The second group is the people who were treating the UHC shooter the way Republican low info voters treat Trump, which is to just use him as a blank slate for their hopes and dreams despite, you know reality. Lot of people are shocked to know that he is not in fact a left wing class warrior starting the revolution, but instead a rich techbro with a range of weird beliefs who apparently lost it when he personally suffered a great deal of pain. Of course he’s a weirdo. Doing what he did is NOT normal. It’s not normal behavior to spend thousands of hours devising a complicated plot to murder someone. I know our tv shows and books and whatnot make it seem super normal, or murder for hires, but in reality it is just not happening that often. It’s fucking abnormal behavior.

And the final group making me laugh are the people thinking this will lead to real change. It won’t. The only changes you will experience are insurers hiring more security and establishing more security protocols and probably hiring people to do frequent real time threat assessments for their top brass. And who does what in the organizations will be harder to find and they will become more private, and I bet their approval/denial decision making will become more opaque than it already is, but do I expect them to stop looting the American people. Good god no. There is way too much fucking money in medicine, health insurance, and pharmaceuticals, and we are now on the edge of widespread looting of every sector for the next few years.

So no, I don’t think there will be any change. I think things are going to continue to get gradually worse and people will get used to it, and then it will get even worse and people will adjust. This is what happens in plutocracies. We know this because we watched it happen in Eastern Europe for decades and history is rife with examples. It’s why this fantasy some left wingers have about the revolution is so absurd. And maybe in the distant future there will be some sort of uprising, but for now I just expect things to get shittier and shitter for the average American for at least the next 2-3 decades. The party of the rich will just keep chumming the waters with other targets, like those Springfield residents eating your dogs or the Mexicans taking your jobs or the handful of transgender kids in your state who are ruining everything.

I mean this has worked for them since 1980, why stop now? Hell, now they even control the media.

***

To end on an up note, here is Thurston Howl in his new thundershirt for the holidays:

Tuesday Night Open Thread 7

Wretched beast.

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Real America vs Made-Up America

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Ken White (Popehat) has started writing again at his blog, and he has a piece on why it may be uncouth to celebrate the death of a healthcare CEO, but it sure is American:

America is largely aspirational. We talk big and then, more or less, sometimes strive towards goals like justice, equality, decency. Many people are willing to put their shoulder to the wheel of those aspirations even in the face of the many ways America falls short. I’ve written about a formative experience I had as a young lawyer: attending a naturalization ceremony for Filipino World War II veterans who still exulted to become Americans even after America had betrayed them for decades. Those men still believed in the promise of America despite so many years of broken promises. Many of our greatest citizens have worked to better this country even as it has treated them as less than full Americans or even less than human.

But hope should not be blindness. We can hope that America will be kinder, more graceful, more compassionate, more sincerely devoted to all people being created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the truth is that celebrating the death of other human beings because we hate them or what we think they stand for is absolutely American. To ignore that is fantasy, not aspiration. America remains the country that proclaimed that all men are equal while enshrining slavery, that enacted the First Amendment and the Alien and Sedition Acts in the same decade.

When the shooter was apprehended yesterday, the NYC police commissioner couldn’t wait for one second to celebrate the work of her detectives.  I think the rest of us with two eyes and a brain see that a McDonald’s worker in Altoona, PA, deserves at least some of the credit.  But, as it turns out, that person might have their claim for the reward denied.  Irony died and went to hell when I typed that sentence.

While we’re on the topic of real America versus make-believe America, one of Paul Campos’ friends in the JAG got hold of a 60’s vintage legal manual that appears to be designed to inform officers of the laws of the land.  Campos took a screenshot of the page on miscegenation, showing laws against intermarriage of the races that were in effect until Loving v. Virginia in 1967.  That’s during the lifetime of many readers of this blog, including me.

Finally, Jamelle Bouie has screenshotted a few comments by Trump voters in a NYT focus group, if you want to see the fantasmagorical reasons they give for their vote.  They’re clearly living in made-up America.

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It was always about hate, yet we continue to talk about everything else. But not today, not in this thread.

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Auto Draft 122

h/t rikyrah.  If anyone finds this on BlueSky I’ll trade out the screen capture for that.

It’s always about hate, power, and money.

So why are we arguing alternative histories that can never be proven?

No, don’t answer that,  I don’t care why, and I’m sick of alternative histories.

This from Baud was brilliant: I can’t believe we’ve replaced “she didn’t go to Wisconsin” with “she didn’t go on Rogan.”

When we point fingers, we’re ignoring the real issues.

So let’s talk about racism, misogyny, transphobia, white nationalism.  And hate in general – what we can to do to combat this every single day?

This is not an open thread.

Update: vigilhorn makes an excellent point that it’s also about fear.  I would say that the hate and fear go together, but that would be quibbling!

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Omnibus International Post

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This is for whatever’s happening in South Korea or Syria.  I know very little about either, so have at it.

Here are a couple international items that probably didn’t make the major news sites.

In Mexico, a Volaris (low-cost carrier) flight from León, Guanajuato (central Mexico) to Tijuana, Baja California (near San Diego) had a hijacking attempt.  The hijacker claimed that he and his family were being threatened.  The important point on this is that he did try to get into the cabin (and apparently had the door partially cracked), and was threatening a flight attendant with a pen, but the passengers subdued him.  The plane landed in Guadalajara, left him in care of the authorities, and headed to TJ.  I can’t recall the last hijacking attempt in the US but this shows that after about noon on 9/11 everyone knew what to do if their plan was the subject of a hijacking attempt, never mind the 20+ years of “heightened security” that we’ve all been subjected to.  My diagnosis of the path of the current malaise, resentment, etc. starts with our security theater over-reaction to 9/11, continues through the botched Iraq War, makes a sharp turn through the financial crisis of 2008 and then COVID hit.  It’s been a shitty century so far, and the Republicans have done a great job of both being a big reason that things suck, and also hanging that around Democrats’ necks.

One of the things I learned by reading Sarah Jeong’s writing about the South Korean coup / autogolpe attempt was that Koreans drink raisin tree tea as a hangover preventative, and it works.  Here’s the science on the active ingredient, DHM, which gooses the liver to produce more enzymes to digest alcohol, increases the efficacy of those enzymes, helps guard against fatty liver and reduces the release of inflammatory agents.  And you can get it at H Mart.  I plan on picking some up the next time I’m there, and I’ll report back on how it works.  It will be a selfless effort on my part on behalf of all of you who still drink.

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Drowned In A Bathtub

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One technique Repubs use to undermine government is to gain control of it by complaining about public spending since lots of people resent paying taxes. Then, they redirect tax dollars to rich and connected Repubs, starving public programs of funds. Then, they point out that those broke-ass programs suck since they don’t serve the public. Then, they use that twisted logic to justify further cuts that benefit themselves and their cronies.

This scam has been operating all my life in the county where I live, which went for Trump by around 75% in 2020 and 2024 and in which no Democrat holds any elective office and hasn’t for as long as I can remember. I’m currently experiencing how that plays out in real life in an incredibly annoying way.

Our property was flooded after the two hurricanes, and since our water is supplied by a well that was underwater for a few weeks, we don’t know if it’s safe to drink or not. We’ve been using bottled water ever since we got home, which is expensive and a pain in the ass.

I contacted the county health department to find out how to get our well water tested. A woman in environmental services there said the county used to test residents’ water samples but “the state took that away” several years ago. She said now testing is done through state-certified private labs and referred me to the closest one, which is more than 30 miles away.

When I called, the private lab folks told me to drive to their facility (60-mile roundtrip), pick up some testing bottles, go home and collect samples, return the bottles with samples to the facility and pay $50 bucks for the test. I will do it because I need to know if our water is safe.

Theoretically, I could get a commercial water service out here to test our well water, but that would be a pain in the ass because we’re so far out in the boonies that it’s hard to schedule such visits, and that type of company would have an incentive to sell me purification equipment I don’t necessarily need.

But hey, privatization leads to greater government efficiency, amiright? And Florida being Florida, I’ll eat my fucking shoe if the awarding of these state lab certifications is on the up-and-up. I guaran-damn-tee you someone is shoveling money at Repubs.

This is a single small example of how the scam works in a corrupt red state, which doesn’t allow counties to provide water testing services for residents but DOES allow donors to install a $45K golf simulator in the governor’s mansion. (I may have made this observation aloud at the county health department.)

But that’s small potatoes. This country is about to get a much more robust lesson in how Repub grifting screws taxpayers when the billionaire clowns in the Trump administration destroy public programs and funnel trillions into their own pockets. And lots of idiots who vote will conclude that the government sucks because it’s not working for them.

Open thread.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: President Biden in Indian Country

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Biden creates Native American boarding school national monument to mark era of forced assimilation

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— Associated Press 🤖 (@asssociatedpress.bsky.social) December 9, 2024 at 3:11 PM

Joe Biden’s Irish(-American) — we have a bone-deep commitment to preserving memories, even the most painful ones:

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — President Joe Biden designated a national monument at a former Native American boarding school in Pennsylvania on Monday to honor the resilience of Indigenous tribes whose children were forced to attend the school and hundreds of similar abusive institutions.

The creation of the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument — announced during a tribal leaders summit at the White House — is intended to confront what Biden referred to as a “dark chapter” in the nation’s history.

“We’re not about erasing history. We’re about recognizing history — the good, the bad and the ugly,” Biden said. “I don’t want people forgetting 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now and pretend it didn’t happen.”

Thousands of Native children passed through the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School between 1879 and 1918, including Olympian Jim Thorpe. They came from dozens of tribes under forced assimilation policies that were meant to erase Native American traditions and “civilize” the children so they would better fit into white society.

It was the first school of its type and became a template for a network of government-backed Native American boarding schools that ultimately expanded to at least 37 states and territories.

“About 7,800 children from more than 140 tribes were sent to Carlisle — stolen from their families, their tribes and their homelands. It was wrong making the Carlisle Indian school a national model,” Biden told the White House summit…

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