Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

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

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

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

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

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

Donald Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

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You Told A Lie

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You Told A Lie

A couple of Trumpworld items:

First, though it was eclipsed by the Supreme Court ruling this morning, Allen Weisselberg, Trump’s wartime CFO, pled guilty to perjury this morning and got a five-month sentence.  I assume his lips had to be surgically removed from Trump’s anus before he could plead, because you gotta be a brown-noser supreme to go to jail over something this stupid:

But a key moment of his testimony came when Weisselberg insisted he did not notice a discrepancy on Trump’s financial statements: that Trump’s triplex apartment was listed as being 30,000 sq ft when in reality, it is closer to 11,000 sq ft.

“It was de minimus, in my mind,” he said at the time.

Forbes magazine disputed the claim he made on the stand, saying it had emails and notes that proved Weisselberg had actively tried to convince the magazine for years that the triplex was bigger than it actually was, denying what was listed on real-estate documents. Weisselberg abruptly ended his testimony after Forbes published an article accusing him of lying on the stand.

Of all the things to go to jail for lying about.

Second, there’s a lot of talk about Trump’s slide into dementia.  I want to believe, but does anyone have a link to a clear example of him short-circuiting for more than a couple of seconds?  For example, Jeff Tiedrich posted this six second clip, where Trump definitely loses it at the end.  But did he recover?  I don’t know because the clip was chopped.  I definitely think one of the keys to winning the election is more video evidence that Trump is losing it.  An interview with a psychiatrist who says Trump’s “phonemic paraphasias” is a sign of his worsening dementia is find for nerds and eggheads like the readers of this blog, but what might move the needle with the casual voter is a greatest hits reel of Trump’s brain turning into cheerios.  Does anyone have that?

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It’s Up To Us Now, As it Always Was: First Stop, Montana

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THIS IS AN OPEN THREAD.

We’re trying to raise about $9,000 more for Four Directions Montana, where the Native vote is more than the margin of victory in past elections.   We need Joe Biden, and the House and the Senate – and as part of that, we need to keep Jon Tester in the Senate.  He’s not just a Democrat; he’s a great senator.

Reminder: Four Directions Quilt Raffle is still ongoing.  Raffle tickets $25 each – donate through the thermometer, and send email to WaterGirl for the raffle tickets.  Here’s the quilt, in case you missed the earlier posts.

Quilt Raffle for Four Directions Montana – Let's Keep This Senate Seat

Raffle tickets alone aren’t going to get us to the goal of $45,000 in the thermometer, and we have a Balloon Juice Angel to help get us there.  The $1,500 Angel match will match up to $25 per person.  In order to be matched, add your donation amount in the comments.

If you want raffle tickets with these donations that are being matched in the thread, please send me an email message, thanks!

Reminder: If we hit $45,000 in the thermometer, that will be $80,000 for the Native vote in Montana. $45k in the thermometer, a $5k Angel check, plus the $30k external match that we met before Thanksgiving. $80k will go a long way in Montana!

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Serenity Now

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This week’s New Yorker Radio Hour had a fascinating segment on what Joe Biden thinks about the upcoming election. Host David Remnick spoke to New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos, who wrote a book about Biden’s 2020 campaign, “Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, What Matters Now.”

Osnos interviewed Biden extensively for that book a few years ago. In the podcast, he talked to Remnick about a January 2024 Oval Office interview he conducted with Biden for an New Yorker profile that was published earlier today.

Addressing the age issue right off the bat, Remnick asked Osnos if he noticed a change in Biden after interviewing him nearly four years ago and again this year. Osnos said Biden is “slower in movements and gestures” and his voice has changed but said he saw nothing that indicated Biden’s mind is different.

IMO, the conversation reassures listeners who need it, indicating that Biden fully understands the stakes and what he’s up against. Remnick and Osnos touched on the topic of media coverage of the campaign so far, and Osnos reports that Biden is “testy” on the subject in a way that may resonate with readers here:*

Osnos: “He said over and over again that he thought the press was not really engaging either his wins adequately or Trump’s menace adequately.”

Remnick: “Do you agree with him?”

Osnos: “Look, I think the press is doing what the press does, which is it presses hard on questions of significance, so his [Biden’s] age is a legitimate and significant question. I think there is a degree though to which the press has become kind of accepting of the idea that everything Trump does is just another level of endless extremity — ‘what does it really mean?’ ‘how much can he get away with?’ There is a piece of that. I think the press is a part of this election in an awkward way that we’re still trying to navigate.”

Remnick: How do you mean?

Osnos: It’s become assumed that Trump is in this commanding position. The best example of this was in the Davos conference in January, when everybody was essentially assuming, according to the reporting there, that Trump is on his way to winning. And that becomes baked in, to use your term, there comes a sense of ‘this is an inevitability…’

It’s noticeable that the Biden people and Biden himself, they’re not panicking, which frankly gives Democrats a lot of concern. There is an almost ostentatious level of serenity, as if they say, they feel a lot of the numbers and commentary is wrong.

I never want to fall into “unskew the polls” territory since that way lies embarrassing delusion and self-beclowning. But this far out and in this media environment? Yeah, I think the Biden people are probably onto something there.

Osnos believes the race is a “dead heat.” That seems objectively true right now, which is horrifying. But I think Trump is at his 2024 highwater mark, and as more people pay attention, more crazy shit dribbles out of Trump’s pie hole and more footage of Trump acting the fool in court comes out, Biden will pull ahead.

Could be wishful thinking, but that’s what I believe. I also think the perception (and reality) that this will be a close race could dampen enthusiasm for third party votes, as happened between 2016 and 2020.

Specific to polling, several of y’all flagged analysis that calls into question the most recent object of poll panic, the NYT Siena findings. It raised red flags by claiming Biden and Trump are tied with women post-Dobbs and that Dean Phillips has 12% support among Democrats. That sounds like bullshit to me.

Anyhoo, the 20-minute or so podcast isn’t paywalled, and I thought y’all might find it interesting too. Osnos’ New Yorker piece, Joe Biden’s Last Campaign, was published this morning, and I look forward to reading it.

Open thread.

*Kindly note this is my transcription, which was fueled by a single cup of coffee. I don’t think I got anything important wrong or left anything critical out but want to flag that nonetheless.

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Supreme Court Ruling Today – What To Look For and What It Means

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Supreme Court Ruling Today – What To Look For and What It Means
Assuming that the announcement from the Supreme Court today is a ruling in the Colorado 14th Amendment insurrection case, this seems like it will be very helpful as we look to understand what it says and what it means.

Update: Supreme Court ruling  (per curium)  Which means that all justices are concerting on this opinion.

SCOTUSblog is live blogging.

I’ll update with specifics after the announcement, but in the meantime, something to think about.

When the Supreme Court Rules on Colorado’s Ballot, Pay Attention to What It Doesn’t Say  (Slate)

Excerpt

When the Supreme Court issues its opinion in the ballot access case, therefore, smart court watchers will be looking for not only the legal bottom line on whether Trump can stay on the ballot, but also what signal the court sends the public about Trump’s underlying conduct. Because pending before it is a case in which the Colorado courts expressly found that Trump did engage in an insurrection. In fact, every entity that has ruled on the merits of that question—from the Colorado courts, to the Maine Secretary of State, to now the Illinois judiciary, to the findings of the January 6 Commission and the House impeachment inquiry—have so agreed. Will the Court reject all those conclusions? Will the Court take this opportunity to absolve Trump of insurrection? If the Court declines to do that, it will speak more loudly than whatever it formally holds on the technical legal arcana it seems likely to focus on in its opinion.

That doesn’t mean everyone will hear it. If history is any guide, one likely reaction from the press will be a host of “Trump exculpated!” stories, in much the same way the Mueller Report was treated as a blanket exoneration. It’s a forgivable error. Technical legal arcana is technical and arcane and “Trump exculpated!” is journalistic dopamine. But that doesn’t mean reporters should knock over the proverbial phone booths in rushing, en masse to announce that Trump has “won” or “lost” the case once the opinion is released. Journalism focused on the horserace and not the stakes will be unlikely to capture the fact that the court may not dispute Trump’s participation in an insurrection when presented with the chance to do so, although that latter is the headline as well as a fact more relevant to the things voters will need to weigh come November. To our minds, “Court rules Trump can remain on ballot, Declines to absolve him of Insurrection” feels like a more accurate framing of the actual stakes of the Colorado case, assuming the case goes how we anticipate.

h/t Mousebumples for the article

Open thread.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Counting Every Vote, Each At the Same Value

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A spate of reports, in advance of Super Tuesday tomorrow:

It’s best, of course, if people want to vote for President Biden & to encourage their friends to do the same. But, realistically, not every voter will be fired up, especially for a primary in March. Good news is that a ‘reluctant’ (or a ‘spite’} vote weighs in the tally exactly the same as those cast with the greatest enthusiasm. Per the Associate Press, “Fear and loathing in a Super Tuesday state: Democrats angry at Biden back him anyway to stop Trump”:

HOPKINS, Minn. (AP) — Aishah Al-Sehaim laments the 30,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, a grim statistic from a war with Israel that she wishes President Joe Biden would try harder to stop.

But the 38-year-old clinical data scientist, an Arab American from the Democratic-heavy suburb of St. Louis Park, Minnesota, is voting for the Democrat on Tuesday anyway because her top priority is stopping Republican Donald Trump.

“It’s not even about hope to affect change in the coming years, but simply that things don’t get more screwed up nationally and internationally,” she said.

Biden’s campaign isn’t likely to trumpet endorsements such as Al-Sehaim’s. But they give credence to the reelection effort’s strategy of promoting Biden administration programs but also turning out disaffected Democrats by invoking their fears of Trump…

Biden is still expected to sweep Democratic primaries in Minnesota and 15 other states on Super Tuesday and will likely secure his party’s nomination in the coming weeks.

“I’m not sure, because of the poison that’s been injected into the system over the last 10 years, if anybody gets that morning-in-America enthusiasm again,” said Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, referring to Reagan’s famous reelection campaign television ad. “It doesn’t surprise me that much that what you’re finding is people who say they’re going to support him, but it’s not an Obama-type new thing.”

Biden aides argue there is more enthusiasm for the president than the interviews suggest. They point to the 600,000 voters who voted in Michigan’s primary this past week, more than three times the turnout for Obama in 2012…

 

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, “A chunk of Republican primary and caucus voters say they wouldn’t vote for Trump as the GOP nominee”:

WASHINGTON (AP) — A small but substantial chunk of Republican primary and caucus voters say they would be so dissatisfied if Donald Trump became the party’s presidential nominee that they would not vote for him in November’s general election, according to AP VoteCast.

An analysis of the data shows that many of those voters were unlikely to vote for Trump, some even before this year, but it still points to potential problems for the former president as he looks to consolidate the nomination and pivot toward an expected rematch with Democratic President Joe Biden.

According to AP VoteCast surveys of the first three head-to-head Republican contests, 2 in 10 Iowa voters, one-third of New Hampshire voters, and one-quarter of South Carolina voters would be so disappointed by Trump’s renomination that they would refuse to vote for him in the fall.

This unwillingness to contemplate a presidential vote for Trump isn’t confined to voters in the earliest states…

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On The Road – Albatrossity – Bighorn Mountains – 2

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Update: Forgot to include the rest of the schedule for the week!

On The Road - Albatrossity - Bighorn Mountains - 2 10

Albatrossity

After the 2007 solstice sunrise at the Bighorn Medicine Wheel, we spent another couple of days camping and sight-seeing in the Bighorn Mountains and surrounding country. I did not keep a diary, and my camera at the time did not have GPS capability, so some of these recollections are a bit hazy. I guess I need to go back there and poke around some more!

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On The Road - Albatrossity - Bighorn Mountains - 2 9
Bighorn MountainsJune 21, 2007

Back at the campsite I heard a bird singing  a lovely song that I had not heard before. I chased it down and discovered that it was a male Pine Grosbeak (Pinicola enucleator), singing from atop a small conifer. I got several less-than-satisfying photos, and this is the best one. To this day I do not have any other photos of this stunning member of the finch family. I definitely need to go back there! Click here for larger image.

Sunday Evening Open Thread: Remembering Bloody Sunday

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I’d save this for tomorrow morning — Good trouble! — but I suspect there will be much social-media discussion tonight. Not least because of Vice-President Harris’ speech!

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