Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

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

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

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

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

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

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

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

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

This blog will pay for itself.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

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

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Archives for 2024

Saturday Evening Open Thread: Arizona, Trying to Become the Site of Our Next Civil War

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Arizona - STOCKPILE

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

From the Washington Post, “Clock ticking, an Arizona abortion clinic copes with confusion and fear” [gift link]:

PHOENIX — The staff at the Camelback Family Planning abortion clinic has been through this before, legislative measures and court decisions threatening to block the care they provide to women ending a pregnancy. So they opened their doors as usual on Thursday morning, doctors and nurses steeled for the latest battle, the first appointments already in line and half a dozen protesters clustered just beyond the parking lot entrance of the tan stucco office building.

In a state that has suddenly become a key front in the national fight for reproductive rights, physician Gabrielle Goodrick declared herself ready: “We’re not closing.”

The clinic lobby began to fill with patients in their 20s, 30s and even 40s. Black, White, Latina and Native American. Some were accompanied by husbands and boyfriends. A few cried as they entered, escorted in by volunteers whose umbrellas sought to shield the women from the shouts and signs — “Babies lives matter” — of those abortion opponents…

Goodrick opened the facility in 1999 and seven years later moved it here, near the foot of Camelback Mountain, with a goal of serving as many women as possible in sprawling, booming Phoenix and the surrounding region. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned nationally two years ago, it and other providers in the state have weathered a temporary abortion ban, a prohibition on abortions beyond 15 weeks, restrictions on abortions for fetal anomalies and this week a state Supreme Court ruling that revived a near-total ban dating to 1864 — when Arizona was still only a U.S. territory.

The latest uncertainty, coming seven months before the presidential election, feels punitive. “We’re political pawns,” Goodrick, 58, said Thursday. But she and fellow doctor Barbara Zipkin are resolute. And Zipkin, who began her medical career before abortion was legalized by the Roe decision in 1973, is energized by seeing more and more women engage on the issue.

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Four Directions Native Vote – Arizona and Nevada (Open Thread)

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Hey guys, we are about halfway to meeting the external matches for Arizona and Nevada.  Our external match hopes to get their funds to Four Directions somewhere around April 25, which is just under 2 weeks from now.

Reminder: we have an external match and we have Balloon Juice Angels for both AZ and NV, which means that anything you donate up to $50 will turn into 4x the amount you donate.

To count toward the match, let us know about your donation in the comments, or you can drop me an email message if you prefer.  Let me know which state or state in the comments.

ARIZONA

NEVADA

I think everybody knows what the stakes are, and I’m pretty sure most of us are aware of Four Directions activities organizing the Native vote, but let me know if you want more information here.

Open thread!

Four Directions Native Vote – Arizona and Nevada (Open Thread)Post + Comments (94)

Recipe Exchange: Weights and Measures

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narya and I were talking about using weights to bake – I think I was talking about bread, specifically. She was kind enough to write up a little primer on why it’s better to weigh your items instead of just measuring them, in case you were wondering about the hows and whys of it all.

I lean heavily on King Arthur’s Weight Chart, found here.

Recipe Exchange: Weights and Measures 1

I’m having a friend come over today and we’ll be out and about, but I decided we needed a fun coffee treat, we’ve both had a rough week or two. Their bunny rescue just had 12 baby bunnies show up – five with a mamma and the others were orphans. So lots of hand feeding. Not all of them are going to make it, but they’ll give it their best. She’s up here with a bunny at a vet who specializes in small critters.

That of course, required a sweet treat.  The recipe for my completely improvised Key Lime Cake with Key Lime Glaze is here.  So we’ll have coffee, cake and commiserate.

==========

From narya:

How to Bake (and Cook) Better

When I went to pastry school, one of the first things they taught us was weighing (120 grams of flour) versus measuring (1 cup of flour). The formulae they gave us used grams rather than ounces. I immediately liked this method, even though it took a bit to get used to it. TaMara thought it might be useful to introduce you jackals to this, if you’re not already familiar with it.

Percentage of what?

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Let’s Flush the Rural ‘Resentment’ About Immigration

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Let's Stop Buying the Rural 'Resentment' About Immigration
In November, millions of rural voters will mark their ballot for a man who has pledged to “close the borders”.  In interviews and in rallies, this group of white voters will pretend that they don’t need immigration, yet the evidence of their deep need of immigrants to work on rural farms is all over the heartland.  This picture was taken in a bathroom stall at a Love’s truck stop in Boise City, Oklahoma, a panhandle town on US Highway 287.  Anyone who’s visited non-resort areas of Mexico knows exactly why it’s there — the plumbing can’t handle toilet paper so every toilet has a garbage can next to it for used TP.  Well, that’s not the way we do here in God’s Country, where we flush our TP the way Baby Jesus told us in the Bible.  So the Mexican, Central and South American truck drivers and workers need to be reminded of that fact.

Walk into any small-town Wal-Mart in this area after suppertime and you’ll see at least a few Latino workers in the aisles.  If you look on Google Maps, in some of these towns the highest-rated restaurants serve Mexican food, and they open around 5 AM and close just after noon.  Who, I wonder, needs to pick up food at that hour other than workers who are picking up lunch or having an early breakfast?

These workers, who are treated as the lowest form of human life by the Republican Party, are absolutely essential to the rural economy.  And they work hard.  But, because we’re supposed to venerate the “heartland values” of white rural voters as somehow being better than the rest of us, we tiptoe around the fact that they’ve been fed a fantasy that white kids will somehow come back from the city to do the hard work that documented and undocumented immigrants do every single day.  Well, the simple fact is that those kids aren’t coming back, and everyone needs to accept that fact and start building a path to citizenship for those workers who want to stay in the country.

Every Cletus Safari that I’ve seen goes to the diners where a bunch of old white guys are drinking coffee at 10 in the morning.  Maybe those reporters ought to get up before the sun and head over to La Unica Taqueria, just off Highway 287 in Childress, Texas, to interview people who work for a living instead.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: All We Can Do Is All We Can Do

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Late Night Open Thread: In Case You Missed Lawrence O’Donnell’s Latest…

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The five-minute clip is all over twitter, but of course some of you don’t read twitter…

Bonus goon content: Kevin McCarthy feels confident enough about his party’s current disarray to publicly threaten Matt Gaetz. Interesting to wonder what favors Kevin is looking for…

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War for Ukraine Day 779: The Side that Can’t Shoot Back Loses

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Before we start, I want to make something clear, again: the discharge petition is not going to pass and move the Senate’s supplemental aid bill to the floor of the House for a vote. Even if the remaining dozen or so Democratic holdouts agree to sign on, it would still need four Republicans. The reality, however, is it would need at least six Republicans because Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar will not vote for it because it includes additional military aid for Israel in it’s war with Hamas. I don’t think Congresswoman Bush would vote for it either for the same reason, so more likely seven Republican representatives. That is not going to happen. There is no one weird trick to get this passed. The failure to front load this before the 2022 midterms created the opportunity for Republican obstruction. And before someone in the comments explains to me how defense enterprise management works, it is possible to fund things in the defense appropriations bills for longer than a year.

As I start writing tonight’s update – 8:25 PM EDT – the skies over Ukraine are clear. The only air raid alerts are over Russian occupied Luhansk and Crimea.

That was not the case earlier today:

https://twitter.com/K_Loukerenko/status/1778825419904467233

https://twitter.com/IrynaVoichuk/status/1778781182215196769

When GEN Cavoli, the Commander of EUCOM and Supreme Allied Commander Europe testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) yesterday he repeated a statement he’d made to the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) the day before:

“If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine will run out of artillery shells and will run out of air defense interceptors in fairly short order,” said General Christopher Cavoli, explaining that Kyiv is dependent on the United States for those key munitions.

“I can’t predict the future, but I can do simple math,” he said. “Based on my experience in 37-plus years in the U.S. military, if one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses.”

Cavoli also said the failure of U.S. lawmakers to approve a $60 billion supplemental security package is already giving Russia a significant advantage.

“They [Ukraine] are now being outshot by the Russian side 5-to-1,” he told lawmakers. “That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks.

“We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically,” Cavoli said.

https://twitter.com/ElBeardsley/status/1778892180569866699

 

President Zelenskyy travelled to Chernivsti today. He spoke and participated in the meeting of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities and the Made in Ukraine platform.

Here is the video of his remarks at the former:

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