Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

They don’t have outfits that big. nor codpieces that small.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

Fight them, without becoming them!

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

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

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

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

It’s possible to be a liberal firebrand without crapping on the party.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

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Late Night Open Thread: It’s Been a Day, Elmo Understands

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This is why I hate Muskboy, because before him, while twitter could be a dumpster fire, there was still some fun going on.

Tonight Elmo reminded us of that and I can’t stop laughing. Poor Elmo:

It started innocently enough

And  it went quickly off the rails:

Late Night Open Thread: It's Been a Day, Elmo Understands

 

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Repro Rights Are Human Rights: Brittany Watts Shouldn’t Have to Be This Brave

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I’m deeply annoyed that I ever had to know Brittany Watts’ name, and I’m sure she’s even less happy about that fact than I am. Her personal tragedy was weaponized by forced-birth advocates, with a major assist from bad laws (and, I suspect, local law enforcement that hoped for brownie points & turned tail when exposed). This was the best summary of Watts’ case that I’d seen before last weekend — from CNN, “Ohio woman who suffered miscarriage at home will not be criminally charged, grand jury says”:

An Ohio woman who suffered a miscarriage and left the nonviable fetus at home will not be criminally charged, a grand jury decided Thursday, dismissing a case that highlighted the extent to which women can be prosecuted when their pregnancy ends – whether by abortion or miscarriage.

The felony charge was filed by the Warren Police Department upon advice from the Warren City Prosecutor’s Office, according to a news release from Trumbull County Prosecuting Attorney Dennis Watkins. A municipal court then bound the case over to a Trumbull County grand jury, Watkins said. He noted his office “never assessed the evidence or advised as to charging” Watts.

Brittany Watts, 34, of Warren, was charged last year with felony abuse of a corpse, Trumbull County court records show. In the days before her September miscarriage, Watts went to a hospital with severe bleeding and was told her fetus was not viable, a coroner’s office report states. The hospital staff notified the Warren Police Department, which responded to Watts’ home, the coroner’s office report says.

On Thursday, that grand jury returned a “no bill” for the charge, concluding insufficient evidence for an indictment against Watts, according to the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s office.

Watkins said his office did not believe Watts violated the law, adding, “We respectfully disagree with the lower court’s application of the law.” …

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War for Ukraine Day 705: Another Day, Another Conspiracy

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Quick housekeeping note: Chas, I saw the question you posted early this morning in the Israel-Hamas thread. I will try to get to it this week. This weekend at the latest.

https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1752083015658803672

About 1 PM EST, The Economist’s Ollie Carroll reported that President Zelenskyy was replacing GEN Zaluzhnyi.

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1752017657983877440

This was then quickly knocked down by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense:

https://twitter.com/OzKaterji/status/1752025246087922144

Two hours later Carroll reported the following:

https://twitter.com/olliecarroll/status/1752054147958845490

The Kyiv Independent has something of an explanation of what is or might be going on:

Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi remains in his post, yet may be soon dismissed, according to sources of the Kyiv Independent and several other Ukrainian media.

Zelensky’s spokesman Sergii Nykyforov told the Kyiv Independent on Jan. 29 that Zaluzhnyi wasn’t dismissed and no official decree has been published on the President’s Office website.

The news was first reported in the early evening of Jan. 29 by a group of anonymous Telegram channels, including some that have reported insider information coming from the Ukraine’s President’s Office before. At the same time, Telegram channels have been known to report misleading stories and spread misinformation.

Ukrainian media, including the Kyiv Independent, have been trying to confirm the news about Ukraine’s top commander’s firing. The sources, all speaking on condition of anonymity, have been providing contradicting responses.

A Kyiv Independent source in the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces confirmed that Zaluzhnyi was fired. The source wasn’t authorized to speak to the press.

Neither Zaluzhnyi nor Zelensky have made any public comments on the issue.

Zaluzhnyi serves as Commander-in-Chief since July 2021. Reports first surfaced in November 2023 about disagreements between Zelensky and Zaluzhnyi.

The alleged disagreement between the two received increased attention following Zaluzhnyi’s interview on the state of the war for The Economist on Nov. 1, in which he said there was a danger that Ukraine was walking into the trap of a prolonged war.

Zelensky said he disagreed with this sentiment during a briefing on Nov. 4.

Ukrainian media outlet Ukrainska Pravda then reported on Dec. 4 that Zelensky was allegedly “bypassing” Zaluzhnyi in communication with some military commanders, citing anonymous sources.

President Zelensky said during a press conference on Dec. 19 that he has a “working relationship” with Zaluzhnyi, responding to a question about their alleged dispute.

“He and the General Staff (of Ukraine’s Armed Forces) are responsible for the situation on the battlefield. There are many issues to address there,” Zelensky said during that press conference.

Like so many things these days, we will have to wait for further reporting.

More on this after the jump.

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

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He’s Nothing

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Saturday Afternoon Open Thread 20

This is so inspirational. I did not expect to be this moved by hearing E. Jean Carroll talk about this.

Open thread.

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Open Thread: This Is How It’s Done

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This fellow from CBS News Miami shows the big boys (and girls) in the Media how it’s done.

Rep. Salazar is utterly shameless, outright lying even after he calls her on it.  Liar, liar pants on fire.

So refreshing to see real journalism in action.

Open thread.

Update at 3:15 pm:  Bonus!  This from Tony Jay is too good to be lost in the comments.

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Blooms and Bums (Open Thread)

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I’m in charge of fauna in our household. Bill handles the flora. He’s the landscaper and gardener who has been nurturing seedlings for peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, etc., for more than a month now.

But in December 2022, someone gave me a flowering phalaenopsis orchid, and it was so pretty I decided to see if I could not only keep it alive but maybe get it to flower again. A year and change later, success!

budding orchid with one bloom

After the initial blooms dropped off, I repotted it. It got a spike before the holidays, then acquired buds that stubbornly refused to open. According to Google, it may have been because I was protecting it from the cold a little too well. It lives on the porch, but I was whisking it indoors when the temps dropped below 60 F.

Apparently exposing it to temps in the 50s triggers blooms. I left it out one night and voila! I probably should have saved this for a garden chat, but I was so excited I had to share.

***

Now for the bums portion of the post. I thought Donald Trump had a planet-sized ego, and he does, but Joe Manchin’s self-regard is similarly scaled, and I’m not sure he has Trump’s excuse of being a deranged narcissist with a compulsion to cultivate external validation lest he confront the existential truth of his own utter worthlessness. Or maybe he does, I dunno:

CNN — Sen. Joe Manchin says he “absolutely” can see himself as president…

You don’t say…

In public, during stops in states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina and Georgia, Manchin says he believes there’s a role for him as a national icon in the “fiscally responsible and socially compassionate” middle, comparable with the role Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders plays for the progressive left…

We already have “a national icon in the ‘fiscally responsible and socially compassionate’ middle” — he lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C. He is reducing the debt that exploded under Trump and doing what he can to protect people’s rights in states run by members of the fascist cult party.

Manchin is hoping to get a meeting with Biden to urge the president to change the way he’s campaigning – for example, to focus more on how inflation declined after the more fiscally constrained Inflation Reduction Act that he forced Biden to retrench; or to talk less about climate change and more about energy security…

So Joe Biden — who was a U.S. senator for as long as he wanted the job because he kept getting reelected, who was twice elected VP and who beat an incumbent president to earn the top job — is supposed to listen to Paw-Paw BlackLung, who is retiring now because his home state’s governor, a folksy buffoon whose primary asset is Babydog, was definitely going to bounce Manchin out of his senate seat?

As Biden tries to assert the success of his presidency, Manchin says he shaped “everything” in the president’s agenda. In an interview with CNN as he drove in New Hampshire, Manchin said the country would have been worse off if he hadn’t used the 50-50 Senate to force Biden to do things his way, arguing, “The way it was presented and the way it ended up are two different things.”

Good lord, what an egotistical prick. It sucks that someone from the fascist cult party will replace him, but I look forward to the day when no one gives a shit what Joe Manchin thinks anymore. I hope he wilts like a neglected orchid when denied the attention he so desperately craves.

Open thread.

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