Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

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

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

This really is a full service blog.

We still have time to mess this up!

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

People are complicated. Love is not.

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

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

In after Baud. Damn.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Republicans do not trust women.

Bark louder, little dog.

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Thursday Night Open Thread: Amusing Ourselves to Death

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We “report”; you deride!

But just maaaaybe…

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War for Ukraine Day 834: Russia Is Undertaking an Assault on Ukraine on D-Day

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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".

Some quick housekeeping notes. First, so far Rosie is still doing very well since her chemotherapy treatment on Monday. She’s active, eating well/has an appetite, wants attention. Basically normal. Thank you all, again, for the good thoughts, prayers, well wishes, and donations.

Second, I was informed that I misnumbered last night’s post. I have fixed that – it is now 833 – and this is 834.

Third, as I begin this update at 6:13 PM EDT, air raid alerts are up or are going up over 2/3rds of Ukraine. Alerts just went up for Poltava and Sumy Oblasts a minute ago.

Air raid alert map of Ukraine at 6:14 PM EDT on 6 JUN 2024. Air raid alerts are posted for all oblasts (regions) of Ukraine except for Chernihiv in the north and the western oblasts/3rd of Ukraine.

Today is the 80th anniversary D-Day commemoration. President Zelenskyy and First Lady Zelenska travelled to Normandy for the occasion, which is why there is no daily address today. However, this happened:

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D-Day: Remembering John Steele

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I don’t remember how I first stumbled across the D-Day story of American paratrooper John Steele, but it stuck with me because it’s a helluva tale. Here’s a brief account of Steele’s wartime escapades from WKMS, the Murray State NPR station:

In the early morning hours, [Steele] jumped with the 82nd Airborne Division into Normandy, France. His jump ended with an entangled parachute on the steeple of the church in Sainte-Mère-Église.

This left Steele hanging over the city for several hours before eventually being taken prisoner by the Germans. After his capture, escape, and the close of the war, John Steele returned to his hometown of Metropolis [IL].

He later moved with his wife to North Carolina. On the 20th anniversary of D-Day, he returned to France and found he was memorialized by the village with a mannequin on the church steeple and a depiction in a stained-glass window.

“He went back to Normandy and toured the beaches. They had a hotel and a bar named after him. They treated him like royalty basically. He signed autographs for several hours,” [Amanda Quint of the Metropolis Public Library] said.

I’ve read elsewhere that Steele played possum while dangling above the village since the occupying Germans had shot fellow paratroopers. Apparently the paratroopers weren’t supposed to land in the village, and a stray bomb had started a fire that woke the townspeople and occupiers. So the paratroopers were sitting ducks as they glided toward earth.

After dangling for what must have seemed an eternity, Steele was taken prisoner, but only briefly. He escaped in the chaos of the invasion and rejoined his unit. According to Steele’s Wikipedia page, Sainte-Mère-Église was the first town liberated by Americans on D-Day.

***

In the 1990s, a couple of friends and I were talking about their upcoming trip to France. One of the pair was a huge WW II history buff, and she shared their plans to visit Normandy beach towns. I asked if they had heard of John Steele, and they had not, so I told them what I’d read.

When they visited Sainte-Mère-Église, they saw a tavern named for the paratrooper, Auberge le John Steele, which is still in operation today. They bought the above-pictured plate and gave it to me as a souvenir.

This evening, maybe I’ll throw some grapes and cheese on that plate, root around in my liquor cabinet for some Calvados and raise a glass to the memory of John Steele. Long may it endure in Sainte-Mère-Église!

Open thread!

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The Kyle Clark Method

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I’ve been busy with (good) family stuff, but I had a chance to watch the full CO-4 debate that TaMara posted about the other day, and here are my take-homes.

First, debates are a bit of a conundrum.  Most of them — especially the ones sponsored by the Presidential Debate Commission — are terrible.  When they’re not stilted and dull, they’re taken over by the debater most willing to break the rules.  Yet, normies with a bit of a sense of civic responsibility watch them, so they’re important.  If more debates were moderated the way that the CO-4 debate was, I think normies would be able to learn more about the candidates from them, or at least they’d get some enjoyment from watching the moderators shut down a bunch of bullshitting blow-hards.

Second, what Kyle Clark did in that debate looked easy, but it was hard.  Above all, he had the confidence to control the debate because he seems to feel secure in his position.  Being a well-liked news anchor at a local TV station is a job for life if you want it (Rochester residents will know that Don Alhart retired from 13-WHAM a few days ago after 58 years working at the station).  So he doesn’t have to worry about his bosses’ getting pissed at him for asking hard questions.

Like Alhart, Clark appears to see himself as a bit of a community booster — he wants to make Denver a better place, just as Alhart did in Rochester.  So unlike the cult of the savvy that rules DC journalism, his conception of journalism includes talking seriously about issues that have real relevance.  There wasn’t a single “gotcha” question in the debate he hosted.

That said, there are some specifics of his method that can be adopted by pretty much anyone with a little grit:

  • Pack undisputed facts into your questions.  He asked one of the candidates about his DUI and told the whole story in his question.  His real question was “Why should we trust you if you hid the fact you got a DUI from your fellow Republicans?” but if he hadn’t packed the facts into the question, the candidate could have spent his time quibbling or denying.
  • If they don’t answer your question, point that out.  (This seems so damn simple but I haven’t seen many moderators do it as forcefully as Clark.)  Related to that:
    • Give them a second chance to answer yes/no if it is a yes/no question.
    • But if isn’t a yes/no question, just tell them that they chose to spend their time not answering the question so we have to move on.   This is exceedingly rare in a debate.
  • Debate real issues, but be a stickler on facts.  Republicans, especially, don’t want this because they live in bullshit world where they just warp the “facts” to match their agenda.
  • Don’t argue with the candidates.  When he asked Boebert about the Beetlejuice handjob/vaping incident, she tried to turn it around on him.  He just said his piece while she was trying to talk over him and moved on.  (Her argument that “a private moment” was interrupted in a theater full of 300 people was classic, btw.)

Local TV journalists get shit on a lot, but I’ve always felt that they were pretty good reporters. They’re constricted by the brevity of their form, but in our new paywall journalism world, TV station websites are probably the best, free source of local news left.

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FAFO: Stevie Two Shirts Edition

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This just dropped:

CNN — 

A federal judge on Thursday ordered Steve Bannon to report to prison by July 1, giving the former Donald Trump adviser a short window to get a higher court’s intervention.

FAFO: Stevie Two Shirts Edition FAFO: Stevie Two Shirts Edition 1

Bannon was convicted of contempt of Congress in 2022 … The federal judge presiding over the case, Carl Nichols, had initially paused the sentence while Bannon appealed the conviction.

Last month, however, a DC Circuit Court of Appeals panel unanimously rejected several challenges Bannon made to the case, and prosecutors immediately asked Nichols to send Bannon to prison to begin serving his sentence…

The judge, who was appointed by Trump, said that he concluded that he had the authority to lift the hold on Bannon’s sentence, even as an appeal of conviction will continue.

Bannon, predictably, confirming his status as “an idiot, full of sound and fury,” is publicly unbowed:

“There’s nothing that can shut me up and nothing that will shut me up. There’s not a prison built or a jail built that will ever shut me up,” he told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Washington.

We shall see, unkempt Stevie. We shall see.

The thread is open. Let your schadenfreude freak flags fly.

Image: Alessandro Magnano, Interrogations in Jail, between ~1710 and ~1720

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Reflection: Fighting the Enemy Within

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Today we have a thoughtful guest post from Nelle, in honor of the day.  Seems like a good time for contemplation and reflection.

Fighting the Enemy Within

by Nelle

For the last few days, the local news has been full of commemorations of the 80th anniversary of D-Day today and footage of the veterans, now in their 90’s and 100’s, who went to France for the occasion.  I looked for Band of Brothers to watch but came up instead with the Ken Burns documentary, The War, which came out in 2007.  I totally missed it then; we lived in New Zealand.  The first episode has a lot of interviews of veterans and we found ourselves thinking of our dads.

My dad was a Mennonite pacifist, but he accepted the draft, he said, for two reasons.  One, in gratitude for taking him in as an immigrant (he came from what is now known as Ukraine, but then was Russian territory).  He believed that, while he wouldn’t carry a gun, he couldn’t say no to a country that gave him a chance at a new life and allowed him to escape the Holodomor.

Secondly, and he didn’t say this for a long time, he had seen what war does to women and children (the German invasion of WWI and the Russian “civil” war that lingered in his area longer than most anywhere). While he wouldn’t talk about the details, Red soldiers were quartered in their house, with four young women, his mother, and two little boys.  Bucha, Ukraine can give us a clue.  He had an obligation not to turn his back on those who suffer.

In February of 1944, my father-in-law got leave in San Diego i to quickly go up to see his new son, who is now my husband.  Then he shipped out to the Pacific.  I don’t think he saw his family again until the war’s end.

Mr. Lewis, down the street from me when I was growing up, had shrapnel in his body.  Almost all the kids in my cohort, born in 1951, had fathers who were overseas during the war.

As far as I knew, none of our fathers talked about it, but my dad got Christmas cards from guys he served with and even met up, in the 80’s, with a prisoner of war he had cared for on one of the crossings.  The man wrote a book, entitled The Enemy has My Face.  That was a generation of men who faced Nazis and they paid a huge price, as did their families stateside.

What was it like for us, growing up with these men as fathers and grandfathers?  How do we meet their legacy?  What did we know about our mothers and their contributions?  (My mother sewed uniforms in a factory; my mother-in-law, who by then had an MIT degree in architecture, worked for Douglas Aircraft drafting airplane designs).  What do we owe them as we face the fascists within the country now, fascists who co-opt our own warnings about them as the enemy within and project it onto us?

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: I ❤️ Madam Vice President Harris

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A longish piece from the Washington Blade, and well worth reading in full — “Vice President Kamala Harris details what’s at stake in November”:

Vice President Kamala Harris spoke with the Washington Blade by phone on Monday for an exclusive interview in which she outlined the stakes of November’s election for LGBTQ communities and all Americans who are now facing “a profound, unapologetic, and intentional movement to restrict rights.”

The conversation comes at the outset of the Biden-Harris campaign’s roll-out of an aggressive organizing and paid media push for Pride month, which will feature appearances at more than 200 events in June as part of an effort to mobilize LGBTQ and “equality voters” in key battleground states.

Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents in a 2022 poll by the Human Rights Campaign said they consider LGBTQ equality a “make or break” issue, and queer Americans, who comprise a larger share of the electorate than ever before, are considered critical for the president and vice president’s reelection effort.

Harris stressed that these constituents are not monolithic. “What is important to me,” she said, “is that I am in the community where those voters may be, in addition to every other community where I’m listening to their priorities and needs and then being responsive to that.” …

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