Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

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

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

“woke” is the new caravan.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

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

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: It’s Biden vs. Trump — Our Very Serious Media Will Have to Deal

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And it may just break a few of them, over the next eight months…

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Fields of Glory

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Fields of Glory 1
 
From ace gardener and photographer Ozark Hillbilly:

Last year I was able to catch a number of my DiL’s 5K runs. Mostly I stand around waiting for her at the finish line (maybe even catch the beginning of the race!) and be a familiar face when she crosses the finish line (she only competes with herself).
Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Fields of Glory 5

Then we sit and visit for 15 or 30 mins and she heads for home to her family and I wander the back roads to our place.

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Fields of Glory 4

The bonus is I get to see some places I would otherwise never go to. These pics are from a St Charles County park that is heavily invested in prairie restoration. (Sorry, I have forgotten which one and when I searched their website, nothing rang a bell — they have some really nice parks to visit!)

The grasses were glorious.

Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Fields of Glory

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Sunday Morning Garden Chat: Fields of Glory 3

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What’s going on in your garden (planning / prep / memories), this weekend?

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Saturday Night Slap Fights Open Thread: Repubs in Disarray!

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Be a lot more fun if so many innocent peoples’ lives weren’t hanging on the results, but I’ll take some consolation in Preacher Johnson getting handbagged by his own team. Per CNN, “Speaker Mike Johnson once again stuck in the middle as funding deadline looms”:

… With just days until a partial government shutdown and lawmakers out on recess until next week, House Republicans are divided over the best path ahead with Speaker Mike Johnson yet to make a call and House and Senate appropriators still haggling over conservative policy riders deemed poison pills by Democrats.

It’s a messy and complicated situation that comes as Johnson is still grappling with how to lead his unruly and narrow majority and as patience is running thin for the inexperienced speaker who has already punted several funding deadlines since taking the gavel.

“Now, we are in a fully Johnson-run House, and he’s got to own all the decision making in the 12 appropriations bills. That’s probably not best for him. Probably not best for public policy either,” Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said. “It’s actually drug out what is sort of inevitable here, which is we will either perform to the (spending caps) or have a government shutdown.”

In January, Johnson announced a deal with the Senate to fund the government at $1.66 trillion much to the frustration of his right flank. But the fight over where that money goes and what programs get funded has dragged on for weeks now, with appropriators working around the clock to try and reach a deal before the next government funding deadline on March 1. Johnson is facing pressure from members of the House Freedom Caucus to include dozens of policy riders that would never pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Earlier this week, Johnson huddled with members of his leadership team in Florida, but sources present said that Johnson didn’t articulate or lay out a specific path to keeping the government funded, instead summarizing how the process worked and signaling he hoped a deal could come together next week that he could put on the floor…

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War for Ukraine Day 731: Year Three of Putin’s Three Day Genocidal Re-invasion of Ukraine Begins

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. A Ukrainian Soldier leads several Ukrainian civilians. He is holding the hand of one woman. They are painted in golden yello and are standing on the crest of a hill that has concertina wire and other anti-tank and anti-personnel obstacles on it. The hill and the obstacles are painted black. They are facing away and to the right where the sun is rising in the east and the sky is lightening from a light yellow to an orange. Below the Ukrainian Soldier and Ukrainian civilians, written in gold, is "TOGETHER YOU ARE THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

The third year of Ukraine’s defense against Putin’s and Russia’s genocidal re-invasion has begun.

https://twitter.com/PatronDsns/status/1761412503861350432

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1761310441295294925

 

2 years ago, russia started a full-scale war against our people and state.

The enemy planned to destroy us in three days. But Ukrainian unity and bravery broke an aggressor’s plan.

In two years, we eliminated more than 400,000 thousands of russian personnel, destroyed almost 7,000 tanks and 10,000 artillery systems. We sank the cruiser Moskva and shot down two “no-analogue” A-50 planes. We liberated our cities.

We are grateful to every country, leader, and person who has stood—and continues to stand—with Ukraine.

We fight for our freedom.
Ukraine will win!

https://twitter.com/saintjavelin/status/1761197108399407609

https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1761230129714602101

We should not forget that while the third year of the re-invasion begins today, this is actually the tenth year of Russia’s invasion and occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk and the illegal annexation of Crimea. I know the start dates for those events are normally recognized as being in the spring, but the medals that Putin awarded actually date to February of 2014. This most likely reflects the covert infiltration of the Little Green Men into Ukraine. It also reflects that Putin believes that the end of the EuroMaidan Movement protests and the beginning of the overthrow of Yanukovych’s corrupt regime as the beginning of his initial war on Ukraine.

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

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Saturday Evening Open Thread

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We’ll call this an afternoon open thread for my timezone and a early evening open thread for you east coast rabble. Joelle and I just returned from Cat Fest, which I will discuss later in detail, but I wanted to share something with you before then. When we got into the car to drive to Mesa, I told Joelle I didn’t want to take the 202 or any of the highways, it was a nice Saturday afternoon let’s just take University Ave down to North Mesa Drive and see what’s going on and see if we spot anything interesting.

We were about halfway there, and we came across a much earlier model of me, probably a 1952 prototype:

Saturday Evening Open Thread 2

I saw him first and my thought first thought was “so I guess that’s what I look like that’s not too scary.” It was pretty funny because Joelle looked at him, then looked at me and her eyes got really wide and then she looked back at him and looked back at me and was like “How are you two places at once?” We pulled up next to him and chatted him up at the stop light, and told him about my love of overalls and pursuit of an affordable trike. He laughed and posed for us:

Saturday Evening Open Thread 3

We are legion.

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Saturday Afternoon Recipes: Beat The Winter Cooking Blues

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The other day, narya and I were talking about the late winter cooking blues and how we handle it. Seems we both look to fruit recipes to help us make it to the time of fresh spring ingredients.

I start making a lot of recipes with lemons – Chicken Piccata (recipe below), Lemon Nut Pork Chops (recipe here), lemon desserts

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“Are we the baddies?”

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The title is from a sketch comedy set (YouTube link) in which a pair of SS officers begin to suspect that they are the bad guys. It’s funny because it’s true. For every person who consciously chooses to be an evil prick, there are countless others who follow without giving it much thought.

For me, the past 10 years or so of U.S. politics has driven home a lesson implicit in the history of prior millennia, i.e., that with the right prep work, any population can be molded into monsters. As Popehat on Bluesky points out, these guys are building molds right now:

"Are we the baddies?"

They’ll call it “Moms for Consequences” or something dumb like that. And this incel-whisperer asshole will be on the advisory board:

"Are we the baddies?" 1

Popehat describes the pathology that motivates a wingnut plutocrat-funded think-tank and asshole incel-whisperer to appoint themselves contraception cops and puts the scheme in its broader context:

It would be wrong to see this as just a prudish or Victorian or even sincerely religious attitude about sex. It’s about control. It’s about the authority of the state intruding into more and more parts of life, and about making more and more people complicit in the abuse of power.

The Nazis’ increasingly all-encompassing laws didn’t just serve policy goals. They served to normalize the idea of the state having authority in every segment of life, and to make more and more people complicit in enforcing that authority. That’s what totalitarianism means.

The Nazis passed anti-Jewish laws that forced more and more people to be complicit in enforcement and part of the machine excluding, shunning, and abusing Jews. The American Right wants abortion laws, IVF laws, contraceptive laws that will make more and more doctors, nurses, etc. complicit.

The fundamental concept is that most people, rather than stand up and say “I’m a terrible person if I go along with this,” will go along and rewrite their mental map to agree with it rather than think themselves terrible.

The anti-trans movement illustrates this. They KNOW there are very few trans kids, but they want to make as many people as possible — coaches, teachers, administrators — complicit in policing and excluding them. Same with the push for censorship of books.

Exactly so. Moms for Liberty, the Alabama Supreme Court, the Heritage Foundation, Rufo, et al., are totalitarians. They’re the baddies. There are many ways to oppose them, including at the ballot box, but the first step is to refuse to be complicit — to resist normalization of this bullshit on every level.

I feel like we’re due for a good old-fashioned “it’s none of your fucking business” backlash to these totalitarian busybodies. Could be just wishful thinking on my part because I believe so strongly in my bones that these moralizing freakazoids should stop demanding to inspect strangers’ underwear. I dunno.

Open thread.

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