Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No one could have predicted…

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Stand up, dammit!

T R E 4 5 O N

Our messy unity will be our strength.

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

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

This fight is for everything.

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

The words do not have to be perfect.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Trump should be leading, not lying.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: The Presidential Medal of Freedom

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A selection of people who genuinely represent the best of America, and the President who takes delight in recognizing every facet of American greatness!

Per the Washington Post [gift link]:

… During a ceremony held at the White House on Friday, Biden said he had the “extraordinary honor to bestow the nation’s highest civilian honor to 19 incredible people whose relentless curiosity, inventiveness, ingenuity and hope have kept faith in a better tomorrow.”

On Friday, Biden introduced all the nominees with brief descriptions of their work and contributions to the nation.

Biden joked that he was forced to write short introductions or else, “we’d be here for 12 hours.”

“[There is] much more to say about them,” Biden said. “But you all know how incredible they are.”…

During his presidential tenure, Biden has awarded the medals to a range of figures, including Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington, inventor Steve Jobs and Sandra Lindsay, a critical care nurse in New York who treated patients during the pandemic…

Here’s the complete ceremony via YouTube, if you want to watch some very happy & deserving people (or their families) be recognized, in alphabetical order. The actual medal-awarding starts at approximately 23min; fan favorite Nancy Pelosi comes on at ~43min:

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Open Thread: May the Fourth…

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Okay, I loathed the first movie, and have never paid much attention to the Star Wars multiverse since. But I’m old enough now to take pleasure in seeing other people enjoy sharing what they love, so: May the Fourth Be with Us All!

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Late Friday Night Open Thread: Because Caring Is Sharing…

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Late Friday Night Open Thread: If Caring Is Sharing...

(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com)

Remember when now-‘bankrupt’ Jim Hoft‘s claim to fame was being The Dumbest Man on the Internet?

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War for Ukraine Day 801: Shaheds Over Kharkiv!

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(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Last night in the comments there was a lively discussion about whether the US will provide any more aid to Ukraine, I want to come back to a point I’ve made repeatedly. Specifically, that the Biden administration should have locked in long term aid via legislation while the Democrats had majorities in both chambers prior to the 2022 midterm elections. In 2016, the Obama administration entered into a 10 year $38 billion Memorandum of Understanding to provide Israel $3.8 billion per year in military aid, requiring it be spent on US made weapons and munitions, and preventing Israel from going around the agreement to seek additional aid from Congress. Congress then appropriated the funding, which is why notwithstanding Leahy Amendment violations, the bulk of US military aid to Israel is locked in for at least two more years regardless of who controls Congress. Pursuing a legislative strategy that provided Ukraine with a steady stream of funding and material in order to ensure that Ukraine can win – win means to inflict sufficient pain on Russia that it seeks to negotiate a settlement that will favor Ukraine and on Ukraine’s terms – would have been a better approach than what has happened.

Especially because it is going to take longer to deliver a lot of the aid to Ukraine.

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1786367200246272280

The New York Times has the details via the Wayback Machine due to the paywall:

Last Sunday, as Russia put pressure on Ukrainian forces across a 600-mile front line, Ukraine received a shipment of anti-armor rockets, missiles and badly needed 155-millimeter artillery shells. It was the first installment from the $61 billion in military aid that President Biden approved just four days earlier.

A second batch of those weapons and ammunition arrived on Monday. And a fresh supply of Patriot interceptor missiles from Spain arrived in Poland on Tuesday. They would be at the Ukrainian front soon, a senior Spanish official said.

The push is on to move weapons to a depleted Ukrainian army that is back on its heels and desperate for aid. Over the last week, a flurry of planes, trains and trucks have arrived at NATO depots in Europe carrying ammunition and smaller weapon systems to be shipped across Ukraine’s borders.

“Now we need to move fast, and we are,” Mr. Biden said on April 24 when he signed the bill approving the aid. He added, “I’m making sure the shipments start right away.”

But it may prove difficult for Mr. Biden and other NATO allies to maintain the urgency. Weapons pledged by the United States, Britain and Germany — all of which have announced major new military support over the last three weeks — could take months to arrive in numbers substantial enough to bolster Ukraine’s defenses on the battlefield, officials said.

That has raised questions about Ukraine’s ability to hold off the Russian attacks that have had Kyiv at a disadvantage for several months.

Yet there is little time for Ukraine to lose against a steady Russian advance.

Avril D. Haines, the director of U.S. national intelligence, told Congress on Thursday that Russia could potentially break through some Ukrainian front lines in parts of the country’s east. A widely anticipated Russian offensive this month or next only adds to the sense of gravity.

“The Russian army is now trying to take advantage of the situation while we are waiting for deliveries from our partners, primarily the United States,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday at a news conference in Kyiv with the NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg.

He noted that “some deliveries have already been done” but added, “I will only say that we haven’t gotten all we need to equip our brigades.”

More at the link.

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

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Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly

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This fucking guy:

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Tex.) and his wife allegedly accepted $600,000 in bribes from an oil company controlled by the Azerbaijan government and a bank headquartered in Mexico, according to a federal indictment unsealed in Texas on Friday.

You know what you call an anti-abortion Democrat like Cuellar?  A fucking Republican.  Unfortunately in 2022 this happened:

The recount wrapped up Tuesday, and Cuellar picked up eight votes, defeating progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros by 289 votes overall, the party said.

Cuellar didn’t have a primary opponent this year, since Cisneros gave up after pushing that rock up the hill in 2020 and 2022, all the while being fought by the DCCC as they supported this anti-abortion sack of shit to the tune of $4.3 million in 2022.  It’s a D+3 district, so it’s not like Cuellar has some special sauce that has him winning in, say, a R+3 district.   If the DCCC had stayed out, we wouldn’t be here today.

Cuellar can withdraw, but it sounds like he’s going to go even lower than whale shit (i.e., Bob Menendez) and stay in the race.

His wife Imelda (irony just died) was also indicted.  The indictment alleges a 7-year pattern of corruption, which means not only can he be bought, but he can be bought cheap.

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Excellent, Important Read: Deb Haaland Confronts the History of the Federal Agency She Leads

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Posting this now, so you can plan to read it over the weekend if necessary. (It includes many fascinating details about Secretary Haaland’s bio.) By no means an easy read, but every word is worth it — especially given our fundraising program! From Casey Cep, at the New Yorker:

When they would not let their children be taken, they were taken instead. A hundred and thirty years ago, nineteen men from the Third Mesa of the Hopi Reservation, in Arizona, were arrested for refusing to surrender their sons and daughters to soldiers who came for them armed with Hotchkiss guns. For years, the United States had been trying to make the Hopi send their children to federal boarding schools—the children sometimes as young as four, the schools sometimes a thousand miles away. The intent and the effect of those boarding schools was forced assimilation: once there, students were stripped of their Native names, clothing, and language and made to adopt Christian names, learn English, and abandon their traditional religion and culture…

Haaland grew up hearing about St. Catherine’s not only from her grandmother but also from her mother, who was sent there as well. Each generation had stories of hardship and separation. Now Haaland has made listening to similar stories a central part of her job. In the summer of 2021, just months after being sworn in as Secretary of the Interior, she launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative to investigate the schools—at the time, there was not so much as a comprehensive list of them, let alone a full roster of students—and to consult with tribes about how to make amends for the harm that the schools caused. After releasing an initial report, in 2022, Haaland decided that archival research and internal investigations were not enough, and began convening listening sessions in Native communities around the country so that survivors and descendants could share testimony. Each session opened with Haaland acknowledging a bitter irony: “My ancestors endured the horrors of the Indian boarding-school assimilation policies carried out by the same department that I now lead.”

Most Americans, if they think about the Department of the Interior at all, likely think first of its natural-resource agencies: the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But, to Haaland and the nearly four million other Native Americans in this country, it is best known for the Bureau of Indian Education, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Trust Funds Administration, which handles the billions of dollars the federal government holds in trust for tribes, a financial arrangement dating back to some of the earliest negotiations of the Committee on Indian Affairs, led by Benjamin Franklin during the Continental Congress. In 1849, when Interior was founded, it took over management of those treaty and trust obligations, and it still manages the nation-to-nation relationships between the United States and its five hundred and seventy­-four federally recognized tribes.

In the long, tragic saga of this country’s relations with its first peoples, almost no federal entity has been more culpable than Interior. Just fifteen years before Haaland’s nomination, a federal judge, who had been appointed by Ronald Reagan, called the department “the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago,” denouncing it as “the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind.” In taking over the department, Haaland, like all her predecessors, was tasked with overseeing one of the most diverse and unruly agencies in the federal government, so sprawling that it is sometimes called the Department of Everything Else. She has also embraced a possibly impossible challenge: not only running the Department of the Interior but redeeming it….

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The Full Kristi

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This is the first page of results from Politico for Kristi Noem:

Politico Wall-to-Wall

Whatever you have to say about that rag, when they go all-in, they’re all-in.  Note the California GOP’s response to Cricket’s demise, and then there’s politico.eu’s contribution:   Which European politicos would shoot a puppy?  That, my friends, is how you separate the amateurs from the franchise players in the political bullshit beat.

Anyway, the story that got pushed into my feed that made me wonder just how many puppygate stories they were going to churn out is Kristi Noem’s VP chances appear as dead as the dog she killed. There are other reasons too.  This is the one where the Trump campaign gets to go on the record saying “it was never going to happen anyway.”  I have to share the lede because it is a perfect encapsulation of Politico:  gossipy and factually incorrect:

Kristi Noem’s damage-control tour is in full swing. It appears destined for the same fate as her late dog Cricket: dead in a gravel pit somewhere near Pierre.

Noem says the Cricket story is from 20 years ago when Kristi was living on her family farm near Watertown, SD, which is almost 200 miles from Pierre.  In her telling of the tale that ended her political career outside the state, her daughter Kassidy was young, and Kristi had her after she dropped out of Northern State in Aberdeen in 1994 when she got pregnant. Politico could have gotten this one right, but research just makes their widdle heads hurt so they avoid it as much as possible.  (I should also note that out in Kristi’s part of the world, it seems that some of the most fervent forced-birthers to have gotten pregnant and kept the baby, or are the parent of a daughter who did, which is a species of crab bucket mentality.)

Anyway, the meat of the story, which starts with an anonymous quote of Trump joking about Noem’s “baggage” LOL, continues like this:

She was widely mocked after filming a bizarre infomercial-style video advertising for a Texas cosmetic dentistry that she said had given her a new “smile,” a promotion that raised ethics questions and led to a lawsuit against her.

Noem released new television advertisements featuring herself, spending millions of state dollars to dress up as a construction worker and state trooper — after filming previous spots pretending to be a plumber, dentist, electrician and welder — in an apparent bid to draw new residents to South Dakota. […]

Conservative commentator Erick Erickson, who on his show this week railed about Noem being a “psychopath,” told POLITICO that sharing the dog anecdote showed “poor judgment on her part.” […]

The MAGA movement, said Steve Bannon, a former top Trump adviser, “is looking for a perfect compliment to President Trump,” which includes “someone who can help him win and help him govern.”

“But shooting an innocent puppy,” he said, “may be a tad too ‘based’ for many.”

Well, there’s nothing I can say about Erick son of Erick and Mr. Many Shirts calling someone “too based” or a “psychopath” that isn’t the obvious.  Still, its interesting to see the level of pile-on here.

Let’s look at who Politico thinks are on Trump’s short list:  North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).

Burgum is a wealthy non-entity who’s only on the list because he could shovel millions into Trump’s campaign.  Stefanik is a shape-shifting Tracy Flick.  Scott is so far in the closet he’s living in Narnia.  Rubio is, well, Rubio.  Vance is a Wall Street piece of shit masquerading as a homespun rural piece of shit.

Politico wants us to buy that Kristi was too weird to be part of this weirdo parade, but, frankly, anyone who would be willing to be Trump’s VP is someone who is ready to flush their dignity down the crapper and kiss his flatulent ass on a disturbingly regular basis.  Nevertheless, Politico will treat them seriously instead of giving them what they deserve:  the full Kristi.  They’ve all done exactly the same kind of groveling on their knees to Trump, misusing their offices to further their personal agenda, and hand-waving about Jan 6.  What they haven’t done is kill a puppy and brag about it.

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