Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

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

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Everybody saw this coming.

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

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

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

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

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

“Alexa, change the president.”

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

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

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

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

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War for Ukraine Day 828: Russian Tu-95s Are Reported Airborne, Air Raid Alerts Are Up Over Western, Central, & Eastern Ukraine!

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Air raid alert map of Ukraine from 7:19 PM EDT on 31 MAY 2024. Air raid alerts are up over most of Ukraine.

In the three minutes it took me to get started on tonight’s update (7:16 PM EDT) and save the screen shot of the air raid alert map, air raid alerts went up over Sumy, Poltova, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts. As soon as I was done saving the map above, air raid alerts were activated for Donetsk Oblast! It is now 7:30 PM EDT and Volyn and Mykolaiv Oblasts have been added to the air raid alert map. Now, at 7:50 PM EDT Kyiv and Kherson Oblasts have been added to the map. It’s now 8:30 PM EDT and as I finish up the update, all of Ukraine except for Lviv and Zakarpattia Oblasts are under air raid alert warnings.

The small hours of the night before dawn are once again going to be a long and fraught.

Here’s the butcher’s bill from Russia’s attack on Kharkiv last night.

President Zelenskyy travelled to Stockholm today for the Urkaine-Nordic Summit. Here’s the video of his joint press conference with his colleagues from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

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Friday Night Open Thread

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I’ve been very much enjoying the right wing freakout today over Trump’s conviction, and it just cracks me up what all these guys are saying. My favorite is the stuff about the trial being rigged, which just boggles my mind. In order to believe it was rigged and Trump is innocent, you have to discount the following:

Michael Cohen, his lawyer, saying it was true and going to jail for it.
Weisselberg, his accountant/ceo, saying it was true and going to jail for it.
Pecker at the National Enquirer saying it was true.
Stormy Daniels having to admit to the world that she slept with Donald Trump said it was true.
Donald Trump says it is true.
The jury says it is true.

So if you discount all of that, then you can go to crazy land and claim the judge is biased and that is why the jury voted that way.

It’s insane.

My favorite is the Republicans who want to prosecute Democrats. Go for it! We’re prosecuting two right now and it is long overdue. If they have done something illegal, knock yourself out. Therein lies the catch.

***

I have a busy weekend ahead of me. This has to be dealt with:

Friday Night Open Thread 8

For reference, that is an 8′ tall fence. The stuff under the tarp is topsoil that was delivered to even out the backyard by the deck, because we removed 2/3 of the god damned thing because I was sick of replacing it. So all the plants around where the deck was had to be moved, and all the uneven land where the deck used to be needs to be addressed.

Here’s a view of the house from the back yard:

Friday Night Open Thread 9

And here is the train wreck around the deck:

Friday Night Open Thread 10

As you can see, everything in the backyard has been cut back and cleared to the ground where possible, and we are going to fill and then cover with pine mulch on the areas I do not want things to grow.

I got the pine mulch for free from the tree cutters when they cut down the felled pine in my neighbors house, and today I went to Kroger and got about 80 boxes from them from their recycling bin. My plan is to throw the boxes down everywhere I am going to put dirt or mulch, soak em down, and then pile the stuff on and leveling. I don’t like landscape paper, and this was free, so that’s the route I am going. Because I am cheap as hell, that means the only thing I needed to pay for was the dirt, and I splurged and got it screened instead of screening it myself this time. I have a college kid coming down to move most of it while I spread and “supervise,” but it is still going to be a long weekend.

Then, next year, once I have things growing back the way I want, I am going to put some flagstones down and create a little patio on ground level. Or if I hit the powerball, then that will be for the pool.

I want a bumpersticker that says “Trump is a draft dodger and convicted felon.”

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Excellent Read: “Everybody’s Mad At Biden”

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Julia Ioffe was a Jewish child refugee from the crumbling Soviet empire, and of course she’s got relatives and friends in Israel. I think even the fiercest Balloon Juice critic of the Biden admin’s current behavior would find much to agree with in this article.

Gift link:

As the war in Gaza drags into its eighth month, and as the Palestinian death toll mounts and their suffering continues to flood social media, and as Israeli hostages return as bodies rather than living people, Joe Biden and his national security team are continuing to try to thread a seemingly impossible policy needle: How do you maintain America’s traditional support for Israel while reining in the Netanyahu government’s prosecution of a war that, even according to the State Department, has likely violated international law? And how do you do all this while mollifying your domestic critics, both on the left and the right, on an issue that has become one of the most polarizing in a generation?

The answer, according to multiple administration officials and people close to the president’s national security team, seems to be: You can’t. Biden’s policy, which stems from his own deeply held views, has evolved with the war but has still managed to infuriate just about everyone. To wit: When Biden announced that he would be pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel because of the civilian carnage in Gaza, absolutely no one was happy with the micro-adjustment. The left sneered that it was too little too late, and the right screamed that Biden was abandoning Israel during a time of existential danger. Senior officials and Biden advisors sighed: What could they do that wouldn’t precipitate this kind of bipartisan fury?…

For decades, after all, America has committed itself to a foreign policy of bipartisan support for Israel, with very few conditions. And, despite the loud criticism from progressives over the past few months, most polling indicates that a majority of Americans believe this is the right course of action. They still see Israel as a key ally—even if Americans do increasingly feel bad for the Palestinians—which means there’s only so much wiggle room any president has, let alone one who hails from a generation of American politics when unflinching allyship was an article of faith. “Joe Biden’s support for Israel is reflexive; it’s not analytical,” said a source close to the administration. “Once you commit to that, there are costs to departing from that that are just as big as there are to sticking with it.”

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Nothing of Interest

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I think it’s worth noting that Trump had a press conference this morning, and neither the Post nor the Guardian (the two news apps I have on my phone) believed that anything he said was breaking news.  That’s because Convicted Felon Trump just blathered as usual, as far as I can tell from skimming the reporting, which is all I’m willing to do.

I’m not saying that he’s just going to be ignored in the future, or that he isn’t a threat, or anything like that.  What I am saying is that, at least in a media environment where his shock value and novelty was click bait, his schtick is getting old, and it’s getting boring because it’s predictable.  It’s also low energy.  I mean, look at this picture:

Nothing of Interest

I frankly thought that he’d fight back with a little more energy, but instead we get this.

Anyway, hope everyone enjoys the rest of today more than Convicted Felon Donald Trump will.  He’s clearly miserable.

 

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Today We Celebrate the Rule of Law, Tomorrow We Get Back to Work

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Guessing that I’m not the only person who slept better last night than I have in quite awhile.

With any luck, next week I hope to be able to tell you about a new group we want to be support.  So if you didn’t blow your whole budget yesterday on expensive champagne and decadent desserts, hang on to your wallets because next week we’ll be fighting for democracy and the rule of law on another front.

And if you want to feel good about a group we regularly support, take a look at this.

Today We Celebrate the Rule of Law, Tomorrow We Get Back to Work

Montana’s Tribal Voters Could Determine the Makeup of the Senate  (Politico Magazine)

Following a major turnout dip in 2022, Native American voters are now a key target in the Montana Senate race, where their votes could make or break Jon Tester’s chances of heading back to the Hill.

Aside: Why is Politico Magazine so much better than Politico?

Native Americans are always an important voting bloc in Montana, where they make up 6.5 percent of the population, per U.S. Census data. But this November, their involvement could potentially impact the entire nation.

Control of the Senate may hang on the outcome of the Montana Senate race, where Democratic Sen. Jon Tester is up for reelection in this reliably red state, likely facing off against Republican Tim Sheehy, whom former President Donald Trump has endorsed. Trump won Montana by nearly 17 percentage points in 2020, and Tester won by 3.5 percentage points — or nearly 18,000 votes — in 2018. Montana’s tribes comprise about five percent of the voting bloc, nearly twice the margin by which Tester won his last race.

The article also talks about Four Directions!

“Where there’s been enough money … we’ve been nearly able to close that Native to white voting gap,” says Bret Healy, a consultant with Four Directions Native Votes, a multi-state nonprofit working on tribal turnout.

Three voting precincts in Montana’s Blaine County — which is about half Native and half white — illustrate this gap. Four Directions analyzed data on the portion of eligible voters in these two tracts who turned out to vote in the 2022 election. That year, turnout in two majority-Native tracts was 22 percentage points lower than in the majority-white tract. In addition, the decrease in Native turnout between 2020 and 2022 was higher than that of white voters, by five percentage points.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing!

Remember, we raised over $50,000 for Montana and on top of that, we had an external match through Four Directions.

Open thread.

 

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: But SERIOUSLY…

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread 9

(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com)


 
From a campaign professional, just *before* the verdict was announced:

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