Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

So very ready.

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

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

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

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

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

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

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

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

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

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

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Friday Morning Open Thread

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Open Thread 40

Anyone who wants to complain about Democratic message can fight me.

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I thought I would share this, in case anyone is looking for simple, clear messaging to anyone who has “concerns” about Biden.

Open thread.

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Dems Work for America, Repubs for… Foreign Oligarchs

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A modicum of good news, per the Associated Press:

Congress passed another short-term spending measure Thursday that would keep one set of federal agencies operating through March 8 and another set through March 22, avoiding a shutdown for parts of the federal government that would otherwise kick in Saturday. The bill now goes to President Joe Biden to be signed into law.

The short-term extension is the fourth in recent months, and many lawmakers expect it to be the last for the current fiscal year. House Speaker Mike Johnson said negotiators had completed six of the annual spending bills that fund federal agencies and had “almost final agreement on the others.”

The House acted first Thursday. The vote to approve the extension was 320-99. It easily cleared the two-thirds majority needed for passage. Democrats overwhelmingly voted to avert a partial shutdown. But the vote was much more divided with Republicans, 113 in support and 97 against.

The Senate then took up the bill and approved it during an evening vote of 77-13.

“When we pass this bill, we will have, thank God, avoided a shutdown with all its harmful effects on the American people,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said moments before the vote.

Biden called Thursday night’s vote “good news for the American people” but added, “I want to be clear: this is a short-term fix — not a long-term solution.”

Next week, the House and Senate are expected to take up a package of six spending bills and get them to the president before March 8. Then, lawmakers would work to fund the rest of the government by the new March 22 deadline…

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Open Thread: Hunter Biden Is, After All, A Biden

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No ‘On The Road’ behind the FYWP curtain this morning (there’s a bunch queued up for next week, don’t worry), so here’s a bonus post from me. From the rapidly-becoming-a-must-read Philip Bump, at the Washington Post, “Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn’t want”:

Hunter Biden’s appearance in front of investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees unfolded a bit like a Bruce Lee movie.

Republican legislators and interviewers challenging the president’s son on the House majority’s behalf would throw out an allegation, often one that’s been worn smooth after tumbling around in the right-wing media universe for the past year or two. And Biden would invariably swat it away, stripping off the layers of innuendo that had been applied by Donald Trump and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) or Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or any of myriad Fox News commentators.

This included epic battles against well-known foes, like an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), or repeated, extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). But at no point was a question left unanswered — including through an invocation of the Fifth Amendment — or, to an objective observer, left answered with obvious incompletion.

The discussion was centered on the Republican effort in the ongoing impeachment inquiry to demonstrate that President Biden had benefited financially from Hunter Biden’s business endeavors — and, they hoped, that the elder Biden had used his position as vice president to that end. They were unsuccessful in making that case from the hearing’s first moments.

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Late Night Open Thread: His Parents Say Sam Bankman-Fried Is Too Pretty Frail to Go to Prison

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One can’t say this defence is totally worthless, since it has provided some salutatory content for us plebes. Molly White, at her Citation Needed newsletter, on “I am Sam’s low-level culpability”:

Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentencing is coming up in a month. He has now formally swapped out Mark Cohen and the rest of his rather unimpressive defense team for Mukasey Young [I49]. Concerns over potential conflicts of interest stemming from their simultaneous representation of Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky have been formally acknowledged by both Bankman-Fried and Mashinsky, and both have waived the potential conflicts. It seems Mukasey Young is mostly focusing on Bankman-Fried’s sentencing, because he’s hired a separate attorney — former prosecutor Alexandra Shapiro — to focus on his inevitable post-sentence appeal.

Mukasey and team have been busy on the sentencing side of things, on February 27 filing a 100-page-long sentencing memorandum that ends with a request that Bankman-Fried be sentenced to only 63–78 months imprisonment (5½ to 6½ years). The filing contains a long rebuttal to the as-yet-unfiled pre-sentencing report, which Bankman-Fried’s legal team says recommends he serve 100 years in prison. They describe such a sentence as “grotesque” and “barbaric”, and the kind that should be reserved only for “heinous conduct” like mass murder.

The filing also contains a glowing description of Bankman-Fried, starting at his early life, with headings like “Sam Is Not Motivated By Greed,” “Sam’s Caring For Individuals”, and “Sam’s Remorse”…

A final section on “Sam’s Condition” outlines Bankman-Fried’s neurodiversity, and says that he has already been suffering in jail as a result of harassment from other inmates, poor food options as a result of his vegan diet, and the generally grim conditions of MDC Brooklyn…

Bankman-Fried’s veganism comes up… a lot. Like a lot. In this sort of “ah, well your honor, I know he committed one of the largest financial crimes in history, but have you considered that he is a vegan?” way. One fellow effective altruist and vegan, David Pearce, writes of Bankman-Fried’s veganism: “here we have a person who (literally) wouldn’t hurt a fly incarcerated in a place that wasn’t built for folk with such soft hearts”. [Footnote: He would for sure steal all a fly’s money, though.] I actually found myself looking up if Judge Lewis Kaplan is himself vegan, because it’s so (excuse my phrasing) hamfisted that I wondered if it was an attempt to appeal to a bias of his.My guess is that so many of the letter-writers are effective altruists and vegans themselves that they see it as an impeccable testament to his character, and don’t realize others don’t necessarily assign it the same moral value. That, or they realize that “vegan” is a convenient way to signal “white, wealthy, and well-connected” without having to say it. Probably both…

 
Jeff John Roberts, at Fortune, on “Sam Bankman-Fried’s final con game”:

If you are a 31-year-old who is charged with major crimes, the normal course of action is to take a plea deal in order to reduce the sentence, and then hope for the best before the judge. You will probably also resign yourself to spending decades in prison. Unless you are rich and connected, of course. Then you may try a different strategy.

Take Sam Bankman-Fried. Even though he faced a mountain of evidence showing he committed one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history, he chose to roll the dice on a three-week trial. For his trouble, Bankman-Fried got rung up by a jury in less than four hours. And now that he faces a maximum sentence of 100 years or more when he goes before a judge next month, he is doing something else only wealthy and entitled people can do. He is trying to spin his way out of the whole mess…

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Open Thread: Closing Out Black History Month…

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… With a BANG!

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War for Ukraine Day 736: Ukraine Downs Three More Russian SU-34s While Putin Rattles His Brittle Saber

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The House has passed another short term stepped CR to get through to 8 and 22 MAR 2024, when the appropriators are supposed to have completed their bills in both chambers and have them ready for votes. Now we see which member, if any, of the GOP minority caucus in the Senate decides to hold things up there using procedural gimmicks or whether this passes the Senate quickly and keeps the government open past tomorrow.

The Ukrainians downed three more SU-34s today.

February is the shortest month of the year, but our sky defenders have achieved the greatest results in downing russian jets since October 2022.

The Ukrainian Air Force destroyed:
◾️ten Su-34 fighter-bombers
◾️two Su-35 fighters
◾️one A-50 long-range radar detection and control aircraft.

It seems like being a russian military plane pilot is the worst job in the world.

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

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