Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

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

When we show up, we win.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

So many bastards, so little time.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Some judge needs to shut this circus down soon.

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

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

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There Is No Deal (Open Thread)

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Republicans still don’t get it.  Women are not stupid.  Not most of us, anyway.  Women understand when legislation takes away their inherent right to self-determination.  After Dobbs, women as incubators is more polite, but women as breed mares is probably more accurate.

“We’ll only take away your rights part of the time” does not sound like a good deal.

Let me spell it out for you, Republicans.  There is no deal on abortion that will be okay.  There is no fucking deal.  They think there can be a deal if they get the time limit just right, or if they add just the right exceptions (theoretical ones, of course, that will never be approved),  Or if they say just the right words!

I am so heartened that the Democratic leadership understand this  Republicans are chasing the impossible, and that will be good for us in November.

I love Hakeem Jeffries.

h/t PaulB

Open thread.

Update:  So of course, 2 minutes after I press Publish, I see that someone on twitter said it better than I did.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Total Eclipse of the News

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This would be the perfect day for the mother of all ‘Friday doc dumps’, so we’ll see who’s got stuff they want to get generally ignored.

… It promised to be North America’s biggest eclipse crowd ever, thanks to the densely populated path and the lure of more than four minutes of midday darkness in Texas and other choice spots. Almost everyone in North America was guaranteed at least a partial eclipse, weather permitting.

“Cloud cover is one of the trickier things to forecast,” National Weather Service meteorologist Alexa Maines explained at Cleveland’s Great Lakes Science Center on Sunday. “At the very least, it won’t snow.”…

The path of totality — approximately 115 miles (185 kilometers) wide — encompasses several major cities this time, including Dallas, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Buffalo, New York and Montreal. An estimated 44 million people live within the track, with a couple hundred million more within 200 miles (320 kilometers). Add in all the eclipse chasers, amateur astronomers, scientists and just plain curious, and it’s no wonder the hotels and flights are sold out and the roads jammed.

Experts from NASA and scores of universities are posted along the route, poised to launch research rockets and weather balloons, and conduct experiments. The International Space Station’s seven astronauts also will be on the lookout, 270 miles (435 kilometers) up.


Stay hopeful:

… In Waxahachie, there’s a sense of deja vu around the town of 45,000 residents.

A banner in the museum’s front window, displaying newspaper headlines from the July 29, 1878, eclipse, detailed the cloudy skies all morning. But just before the moon lined up between the sun and Earth that afternoon, the sky cleared..

None so blind…

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A Grotesquerie of the Present Age

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Grotesqueries of the Present Age

The leering degenerate pictured above (the one who is unfortunately still breathing) plans to issue a statement this morning on reproductive rights and women’s bodily autonomy. Here’s the heads up on the Defendant’s wildly overvalued crappy knock-off Twitter site:

Grotesqueries of the Present Age 1

Notice anything weird about that message, apart from the mindboggling presumptuousness that would inspire an amoral dullard like that to weigh in on the medical decisions of tens of millions of American women and their doctors? I think maybe it finally dawned on the halfwit that he can’t actually “negotiate” a ban at a gestational cutoff that will “make both sides happy” and bring the country “together,” as he has preposterously suggested in the recent past.

Nope, it sounds like Lumpy is starting to understand that the plurality of anti-abortion fanatics in his party won’t be content with the demise of Roe. They want abortion banned in the U.S., and that deeply unpopular mandate is a threat to their party’s electoral fortunes. Hence the bullshit about “an obligation to the salvation of our Nation” blah blah blah.

It’s fundamentally a defensive message, IMO, a plea to the fanatics not to flip the fuck out and refuse to turnout for the Defendant when he declines to commit political suicide by endorsing an unpopular federal ban or signal approval of the 6-week abortion ban that will go into effect in the Defendant’s adopted home state in a few weeks. Well, good luck with that, Lumpy. Fanatics are by definition irrational.

Open thread.

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On The Road – Albatrossity – Westward 2015, week 3

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It’s Albatrossity Monday!  (Big thanks to Albatrossity for the April Fools fun last week.)  We go to a parade on Tuesday and then head to Cook Islands for the rest of the week.

(click on the image blow for a bigger, non-blurry version of the schedule for this week)

On The Road - Albatrossity - Westward 2015, week 3 10

Albatrossity

I hope you all had fun with the April Foolery last Monday. Now we can get back to real birds, catching up on a trip to the Palouse from 2015.

While Elizabeth was hobnobbing with friends and colleagues at her conference at the University of Idaho, I was free to explore eastern Washington and western Idaho. Wandering around on my own certainly means that I missed some good spots, but I did see a lot of beautiful country, for sure.

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On The Road - Albatrossity - Westward 2015, week 3 9
Eastern WashingtonJune 24, 2015

The margins of some of the fields in the Palouse were rimmed with poppies, and they added a nice splash of color to the landscape. Click here for larger image.

Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Baltimore Updates

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Per the NYTimes, “What We Know About the Francis Scott Key Bridge Collapse in Baltimore” [gift link]:

The giant container ship that struck and downed the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in the early hours of March 26 remains pinned under the twisted remains of the bridge. Officials have outlined plans for their effort to recover the bodies of victims, free the vessel, dismantle the wreckage and reopen the city’s port as quickly as possible.

They have begun to clean up the debris to clear the channel to one of the nation’s busiest ports, and so far have removed a 200-ton piece of the bridge, officials said. As part of the operation, officials brought in a crane capable of lifting 1,000 tons.

On Thursday, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it hoped to open a channel for limited access by the end of April, and reopen to normal port traffic by the end of May.

On another front, federal investigators said that they were interviewing key crew members and examining hours of data recordings. But the investigation into the ship crash could take years, they said.

The bridge is a part of Interstate 695 and a critical transportation link on the East Coast. The disaster has become America’s deadliest bridge collapse in more than a decade…

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Medium Cool – Guilty Pleasures!

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Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in.  We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered.  We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.

Today let’s talk about guilty pleasures.  No, not the X-rated kind, unless it involves books or TV or music or movies or comics or anything else you can come up with that’s related to culture.  (Do I need to say no p0rn?)

Any idea why you are drawn to your guilty pleasures.  You just want something mindless?  You used to do or watch whatever it was with someone you were close to?  The road not taken?  Memories?  You like bubblegum music because it reminds you of 8th grade?

Whatever your guilty pleasure is, besides telling us the what, can you tell us the why?

 

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War for Ukraine Day 774: It Appears that Russia Has Decided To Reduce Kharkiv

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Graphic by NEIVANMADE of a Russian bomb with a "Z" symbol on it crashing through the roof of the Ukrainian Postal Service delivery hub. "Everyone Is a Target" and "Stop Russia" are written in the space between the destroyed roof and the fins of the bomb.

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

As I draft tonight’s update – 6:15 PM EDT –  almost all of the central Ukrainian oblasts, from Chernihiv in the north through Kyiv to Kherson and Odesa in the south, are under air raid alert. As I typed the previous sentence air raid alerts were just posted for Zhytomer Oblast immediately to Kyiv Oblasts west!

I’ve written here far too many times since FEB 2022, that a significant portion of Putin’s strategy for Ukraine is to reduce it completely. As in if he, and by extension Russia, cannot have and control Ukraine, then no one including the Ukrainians can have Ukraine. And if that means he has to destroy every building, every bit of natural or man made infrastructure, every person, then Putin is willing to pay that price.

In practice, this clip from the movie, which I’ve posted here before, sums up the strategy well:

 

Kharkiv is a the most current example of this. Ever since Russia resumed its large scale bombardment of Ukrainian civilian targets and infrastructure, Kharkiv has been under nearly constant bombardment for the better part of the past several weeks.

As we’ve also discussed, there are overlapping Russian strategic objectives at work. Specifically, stretching Ukraine’s air defense to the breaking point by forcing the Ukrainians to use up their precious stocks of air defense munitions. By forcing the Ukrainians to deplete their air defense, Russia hopes to set the conditions to be able to actually strike the weapons systems and take them out. And they’re doing this knowing that the US is not going to backfill and resupply Ukraine’s munitions or weapons systems needs any time soon.

President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today addresses this problem. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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