Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Petty moves from a petty man.

Not all heroes wear capes.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

The willow is too close to the house.

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

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

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

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

Republicans in disarray!

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

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

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

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Prepping for the Big Vegas Event

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Prepping for the Big Vegas Event

After all, Yahoo Sports has been tracking Swift’s journey from her Tokyo arena performance to Las Vegas as though it were NORAD following Santa. Possibly useful information, from NYMag:

… What time is the Super Bowl?
Swift has given this classic SEO query new relevance. Here’s the answer from CBS, which will air Super Bowl LVIII:

This year’s NFL championship game, concluding the 2023 season, will be played on Sunday, Feb. 11, 2024 at 6:30 p.m. ET. The action will take place at the home of the Las Vegas Raiders, Allegiant Stadium, located on the Las Vegas strip in Paradise, Nevada.

As long as we’re here, I’ll spare you another Google search. Here’s how to watch the Super Bowl this year:

TV: CBS, Nickelodeon Stream: Available via Paramount+ on all platforms, or sign in with your TV provider on CBS.com or CBS Sports apps

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War for Ukraine Day 717: The Russians Used Drones To Try to Burn Kharkiv

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Screen shot of new artwork by NEIVANMADE. The background is black. In the bottom foreground are grey Ukrainian homes and apartment buildings being bombarded by red Russian missiles with the Special Military Operation "Z" symbol on them. Above the missiles, written in red is the word "Ruzzians". Below the buildings being attacked is the statement "Turns Homes Into Graves".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Just a quick housekeeping note before we begin. On Thursday the President issued a new National Security Memorandum. This is National Security Memorandum/NSM-20, which deals with safeguards and accountability for defense articles services transferred to partners and allies. For those not sure what a NSM is, it is a statement of official policy regarding a national security matter. In this case, and clearly partially driven by Israel’s actions in Gaza, it provides the official guidance to the Departments of Defense and State, as well as others, regarding what has to happen when we provide or sell weapons to allies in partners if they misuse them. This is intended to create a forcing dynamic so that our allies and partners ensure that they are doing whatever they can to assess and then mitigate potential civilian harm when they use our equipment, ammunition, and material. This has been a huge initiative of this administration. You can read about that here if you like. I expect this was timed to try to focus Bibi’s attention before Israel does something galactically self defeating in Rafah. If you want a good analysis of where things may be at, I recommend Daniel Seidemann’s in this thread.

I want to make one other quick point. I am NOT ignoring what is happening in Gaza, nor Yemen, nor Sudan, nor 1/2 a dozen equally bad ongoing conflicts I could rattle off from memory without having to look up whats going on where. But I’ve only got so much time, energy, and appetite to cover this stuff right now. And I made a commitment that I would do these Ukraine updates. It isn’t that I don’t care. It isn’t that I don’t think they’re important. As I’ve been doing, I’ll try to do occasional weekend posts on them when I can.

At the beginning of last night’s update post I wrote:

It’s the small hours in Ukraine and reports are starting to come in of Russian strikes. It may be that a pre-dawn bombardment is starting. I’ll have some of the preliminary reporting on that after the jump.

This was in regard to social media reports, a couple I included in the update, that the Russians were once again targeting Kharkiv. Unfortunately, I was correct.

https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1756236227676606517

Overnight, russia attacked Kharkiv using “Shahed” drones. 7 people died, including 3 children—4 and 7 years old, and an infant.

The UAV hit civilian infrastructure—a gas station. There was a spill of diesel fuel and gasoline, which spread along the street with private houses. 14 houses burned completely, 50 people were evacuated.

 

https://twitter.com/maria_avdv/status/1756213020206706798

https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1756224749212942570

https://twitter.com/Lyla_lilas/status/1756269176124039513

It is impossible to fix the baby’s body in place

The burning temperature was such that the baby’s bones and body turned to almost ash.

A medical examiner is on site.

“We collect everything and take it to the morgue for examination.
We assume that the mother held the children by hugging and pressing them to her chest,” — Serhiy Bolvinov, head of the Kharkiv Oblast Police Investigation Department

There are a lot worse pictures and video of what the Russians did to this family – including their dog – and several others. I’m not going to post them here. I suggest you not go looking for them. I’ve seen them and decided you don’t need to. Let that be enough.

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

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Taylor-ing the Experience

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Taylor Swift, still propping up the national economy!

… “I think it’s amazing,” said Katie Mabry van Dieren, owner of Shop Local KC, which sells merchandise made by local artists, including the Karma sweatshirts. “I have never shipped so many items from our stores to different states.”

She said she thought the busiest weekend would be when Kansas City hosted the NFL draft in April. But she said Swift’s The Eras Tour concert stop at Arrowhead Stadium over the summer blew that away…

About 73% of adults say they plan to watch the game this year, about 10% higher than in recent previous years. And the romance that has been dominating headlines throughout the NFL season might be helping drive interest…

I’ve decided that Taylor Swift is my personal next-gen Mary Chapin Carpenter, and I really love Mary Chapin Carpenter. There’s a lot more tech work supporting Swift’s music, which is fine — music tech is so much better and cheaper than it was forty years ago, when I was going to MCC concerts in Michigan church basements!

Interesting Vulture article on last week’s Grammys — “How Taylor Swift Beat Sinatra”:

… With her win for Midnights, Swift broke a four-way tie with Frank Sinatra, Stevie Wonder, and Paul Simon to become the artist with the most AOTY wins. This means 40 percent of her albums have been recognized by her peers as the year’s best: Fearless at the 2010 Grammys, 1989 in 2016, folklore in 2021, and now Midnights.

While it’s hard to call Swift’s first-place finish an outright shock — Midnights was a wildly successful album buoyed by a just-as-successful tour while Swift dominated over a year of conversation — it’s surprising to see her break a Grammys record so handily and to do it over competition like the night’s top nominee, SZA, who was up for her second album, SOS. Here’s how Swift pulled it off.

She wasn’t just successful — she gave the music industry hope.
Prior to October 2022, most industry observers thought a million-album week on “The Billboard 200” (a number combining album sales, song sales, and an equivalent amount of streams) was no longer attainable in today’s streaming economy. Adele couldn’t do it, Drake couldn’t do it, and successful newcomers like Morgan Wallen and Bad Bunny couldn’t do it. Then Midnights posted a stunning 1.5 million units, the first seven-figure American debut since Swift’s own reputation in 2017 (and since Billboard tightened up its bundling rules). As the music industry became even more resigned to streaming’s dominance, there was Swift, doing the impossible. For good measure, she did it again with 1989 (Taylor’s Version) last fall…

She held on to her new folklore fans.
In such a plural Academy, your own genre alone can’t carry you to AOTY. That’s how Jon Batiste surprised for We Are back in 2022, with nominations across R&B, American roots, and contemporary-classical categories (plus jazz for Soul). Swift last won AOTY for 2020’s folklore, an ostensibly pop album that drew on folk and country and was largely produced by the National’s Aaron Dessner, a rock musician. From the way her peers heaped praise on that album, it seemed as if she’d stacked votes from all those corners of the Academy to come out on top…

She had key technical voters’ support.
Swift may now have the most AOTY wins among artists, but someone else still beats her outright: Serban Ghenea, an audio engineer who has worked with Swift since Red. He may be one of the most respected collaborators in pop right now, and this was his own fifth AOTY win (he has also won for Adele’s 25 and Bruno Mars’s 24K Magic). The Academy is full of people like Ghenea — the engineers, writers, and producers often standing behind an artist when they win — and if you want to win big, you’ve got to earn their votes. Swift has. It’s not just the engineers, either, since Antonoff, her right hand, once again cleaned up in Producer of the Year…

She’s Taylor Swift.
Whenever Swift attends an awards show these days, her peers turn into fans. Everyone’s clamoring for a photo with her, and people shout her out when accepting trophies that have nothing to do with her. She’s like the music world’s Meryl Streep — even when Streep is also in the room….

And also, she’s driving the right people out of their tiny minds!

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Just Absolutely Jizzing Themselves, Repeatedly

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Just Absolutely Jizzing Themselves, Repeatedly
Washington Post Front Page a few minutes ago.

Looking over the unrestrained joy on display in the DC press’ reaction to the Hur Hur Hur report puts into focus the excitement they feel when they are given implicit permission to chew over some gossip.  Hur opened the door to them speculating about Biden’s mental fitness, and they ran through screaming like a bunch of five-year-olds getting free ice cream.  The Post even trotted out “fact checker” Glenn Kessler, who defines a “fact” as something that fits into his narrow, conservative, parochial DC press fossil worldview.  (I didn’t read his piece since I didn’t want to puke up lunch.)

When your “impartiality” is really “acting like a credulous idiot,” having some a document that basically attaches the DoJ’s imprimatur to gossipy speculation is manna from heaven.  There’s no complicated policy to understand (i.e., work to do), and no need to worry about staining your shorts because a right winger with a platform threatens you because you wrote something they didn’t like.  You can act dumb and wave that fucking report in the face of anyone who questions why you’re spending so much time on what’s really a non-issue.  (And it really is a non-issue:  as Kevin Drum points out, nobody, Democrat or Republican, has ever said that Biden has a problem with his mentation.)

Even Biden getting pissed at the press was a story for just a few hours.  This story is going to last for days or weeks, because it’s what they wanted, and when they get what they want, they just can’t let go.

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When America Needed A Hero

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When America Needed A Hero

 

When America Needed A Hero 1

 

From the New Republic:

Just Say It, Democrats: Biden Has Been a Great President

His achievements have been nothing short of historic.

Because it is.

Yes, the desire to see the 2024 election as a choice between a normal, stable president versus an erratic thug under indictment in multiple states is seductive. But don’t base a campaign on that contrast. Don’t go into 2024 with the game plan to win because Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy. That’s true, he is, but that’s only making the case that Donald Trump shouldn’t be president. It’s not the reason Joe Biden should be reelected.

Joe Biden should remain president because of his historic level of achievement here at home while standing on the side of freedom versus tyranny in the largest land war in Europe since World War II, a role no American president has played since the Roosevelt-Truman era. Be bold. Walk into this campaign with swagger and confidence and pride.

It’s become a 2024 trope that Donald Trump is the only Republican whom President Biden could beat, and that Biden is the only Democrat whom Trump could defeat. Like a lot of things in politics, it’s true if you accept it. But that acceptance is voluntary. Reject that framing for the industrial political complex bullshit that it is, brought to you by the same class of experts who knew without question that Bill Clinton was dead in June 1992, when he was running third to Ross Perot and George Bush, with 24 percent of the vote.

Stop the nonsense that only a weak opponent gives Joe Biden a chance to win.  Read the rest here.

Alicia Menendez, Cornell Blecher and David Jolly had a lively discussion on this article during the last 10 minutes of Deadline White House (MSNBC) on Friday. If you can find it and watch it, it was excellent. I’ve been trying to track it down to no avail. I think eventually it may end up here, but it’s not there yet.

Is Biden perfect? No. Is he a damn good President? Absolutely. Is he better than any of the GOP alternatives? You bet – because even the least repugnant of them still wants to take away your rights: voting, healthcare, body autonomy, separation of church and state, who you can love, to name a few.

This is an open thread

 

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