Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Your Uncle Sméagol after being captured by Gandalf and Aragorn pic.twitter.com/QXqDzRVbKn
— Michael Fry (@BigDirtyFry) January 18, 2024
Happy birthday to Edgar Allan Poe – born in Boston, Massachusetts, today in 1809. Here are the Poe Museum cats Edgar and Pluto celebrating ?? pic.twitter.com/efxi3Rs9op
— Dr Jane MainleyPiddock FRSA ?? (@DrJMainPidd) January 19, 2024
Late Night Open Thread: Balloon Juice Book Club After DarkPost + Comments (50)
Suppose y’all are settling in for the night. Same.
Just finished a slice of key lime pie- at this burn rate I think we have enough pie for us to have a slice after dinner for the next three nights. I’m just throwing that out there so that you all can marvel at my supernatural self control, because I could eat that entire thing in one setting and then be ill for the next 12 hours and NOT REGRET IT AT ALL. If you have ever heard anyone talk up the Rock Springs Cafe pies and thought “they can’t be all that” well I am here to tell you that yes, they in fact are all that.
Dinner was open faced roast beef sandwiches- found a sale on that shredded beef stuff at Fry’s which is the local Kroger affiliate, had everything else in stock, and Joelle is in watching a movie called Anatomy of a Fall. I’m relieved that we are to the point that I do not need to buy a bunch of stuff every time I cook- the pantry is pretty much stocked, so I can get in and out of the grocery store under 20 bucks.
Tomorrow Joelle and I are doing a deep clean of the house and looking at paint colors.
Went to a dispensary to check things out and maybe pick something out for myself, and the young fellow took my id and asked me what I had in mind and I asked him if he had anything that would “make me feel 21 and skinny.” Without missing a beat he looked me directly in the eyes and said:
“We don’t sell cocaine.”
I got the giggles at a dispensary without having to even use any of the product.
The dispensaries just piss me off for two real reasons. One, when I grew up you had to spend an hour in some weird dude’s basement watching Faces of Death or watching them play shitty video games for an hour before he would sell you an overpriced eighth full of stems and seeds (that would never fucking grow no matter how hard you tried) and now you walk in and they have like 50000 varieties in every possible way to consume other than suppositories and it’s legal.
I’m kidding, that doesn’t piss me off at all. It’s awesome. It’s safe, affordable, regulated, and no one is getting fucking shot in the parking lots.
But what really does piss me off is that for at least the last ten years some Democrat in WV has introduced a bill to legalize weed and every year it gets shot down. Weed grows fucking wild in WV- when I was in the National Guard I would earn money in the summer by going on Weed Eradication Duty. We are perfectly located in between major metro markets like Baltimore and DC and Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and weed consumption goes hand in hand with the legions of mountain bikers and river rafters and hikers who come here every year.
We could have done so much with that money, and maybe we wouldn’t have so many dead people who turned to pills to manage pain when other more effective options are out there. Just a fucking tragedy.
The reality of the House GOP caucus’s intransigence combined with the Biden administration’s strategic risk aversion has begun to sink in in DC.
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1748345745218957784
Politico has details:
With Senate negotiators expected to unveil their elusive bipartisan border deal any day now — and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer floating a vote on the White House’s $106 billion supplemental as soon as next week — the watercooler chatter on Capitol Hill has turned to one elephant-sized question: How the hell do you get this thing past the Republican House?
Speaker Mike Johnson is under tremendous pressure from former President Donald Trump and other conservatives not to give President Joe Biden a win on border security — an issue that has plagued him in the polls — ahead of the 2024 election. And members including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are openly threatening to oust the Louisiana Republican if he allows a new tranche of Ukraine aid through the House.
But given the stakes in Ukraine and the political fallout from the migrant crisis, some Democrats are considering a once almost unthinkable idea to land the plane: trading a border deal for protecting Johnson’s gavel.
Several Democrats — including House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith (D-Wash.), House Homeland Security Committee ranking member Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and border Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) — said yesterday that if Johnson puts the Senate deal on the floor, some in their party would likely step in to make sure he holds on as speaker.
“Our job is not to save Johnson, but I think it would be a mighty pity, if he did the right thing … for us not to support him,” Thompson said. “Up to this point, he’s been a fairly honest broker.”
First off, let’s be clear: There are a million reasons why this idea will probably never come to pass. For one, Johnson is very unlikely to ever go there. He’d utterly ruin his relationship with Trump — not to mention alienate large swaths of his own conference by relying on Democrats to keep his job.
But the fact that some Democrats are even talking about the idea shows how desperate they are to find a solution. The party knows that time is running out to help Ukraine. And they’re getting pummeled on the border issue politically and need to do something to alleviate the situation.
It might seem like a major change in thinking from just a few months ago, when Democrats refused to lift a finger to help Kevin McCarthy keep his speakership. But more than half-dozen senior Democratic aides and lawmakers told us that there is a huge difference between the two men.
For one, Democrats largely viewed McCarthy as a bad-faith actor who lied to them and was instrumental in resurrecting Trump after Jan. 6. Johnson, they note, hasn’t shown himself to be untrustworthy, even if he’s even more conservative than McCarthy.
“People really underestimate the degree to which people really didn’t like Kevin McCarthy,” said Smith, who has personally implored Johnson to find a way to yes on a border deal. “The argument I’ve made to Mike is: You’re going to make an enormous amount of progress on the border however this comes out — and you’ve still got your political issue because you think there’s more that needs to be done.”
Not all Democrats agree. Some told us that Johnson would likely be asked to pay some sort of political ransom in the form of a power-sharing agreement, more committee seats or other rules changes. But, realistically, Johnson wouldn’t need all Democrats— only a few to counter the Republicans who vote to oust him. (Note: For McCarthy, that was eight.)
Democrats aren’t the only ones desperate to find a path through the House for the supplemental agreement. Some Republicans truly want to see Ukraine aid pass, while others are eager to provide relief to constituents in overrun and exhausted border towns. Already, a host of Republicans are hitting TV airwaves to counter the pressure from the right to hold off on border legislation till after the election.
Much more at the link.
This is what happens when you either don’t have a strategy or don’t have one that is feasible, acceptable, and suitable. I wanted to give it a day or so before I addressed the question in comments of what could have been done differently in 2022. Leaving aside that I covered the 2022 Ukraine supplemental at the time in an actual update and that I’ve answered this several times before, the answer is that the Biden administration should have gone back to the Democratic majority (in both chambers of) Congress in Fall of 2022 and requested an additional supplemental. Specifically, one that would have had enough money to get through the end of 2024. As to the contention that no Congress can bind a future Congress in terms of spending, this is true, but… In order for the current Congress, with a slim GOP majority House and a Democratic majority Senate to claw back the theoretical funding I’m describing they would have to pass a bill to do so – remember they passed 27 bills in 2023, so they’re not particularly good at that – then it would have to pass the Democratic majority Senate, and finally President Biden would have to sign it. Neither of those last two things would happen. In Fall of 2022 I wrote here several times that you cannot out organize an extreme gerrymander, let alone a hyper-extreme gerrymander and that it was highly likely that the GOP would retake the House just on the basis of the gerrymanders. Which is exactly what happened. However, I’m not the president, nor any of his senior advisors all of whom had a responsibility to recognize this possibility and reality and then plan, and act accordingly. They did not. At every step along the way, the Biden administration’s national security policy and strategy regarding Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s genocidal re-invasion have been exceedingly risk averse. This includes their legislative strategy. The chickens have now, unfortunately, come home to roost.
There will be more on related matters after the jump.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 695: Bracing for a Long Difficult 2024Post + Comments (67)
One American political party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile prodemocracy coalition. I miss normal politics.https://t.co/chQewJK4rV
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 18, 2024
This is the period, every year, when I start emerging from my bleak midwinter SAD funk… and sometimes that means getting aggravated instead of depressed about the state of the world. I get the impression I may not be the only jackal who’s going through this right now…
Anyway… here’s Tom Nichols, at the Atlantic, on “The Age of Incoherent Partisanship”:[gift link]
On Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik called for an end to the GOP primary season—in January, after one caucus in which some 56,000 Iowa Republicans chose Donald Trump. “I am calling on every other candidate – all of whom have no chance to win – to drop out,” she said in a statement, “so we can unify and immediately rally behind President Trump so that we can focus 100% of our resources on defeating Joe Biden to Save America.”
Maybe I spent too much of my career studying the Soviet Union, but Stefanik to me sounded like one of the old-school Kremlin Bolsheviks nominating the new general secretary and calling for an end to all this messy voting. Comrades, we have heard the voices of the Iowa regional party organization; they speak for the entire nation. The unreliable cadres who support the deviationists must now unite with us to defeat the wreckers and saboteurs.
Stefanik, of course, is just one of the many Republicans who have jettisoned their inconvenient principles and sworn loyalty to Trump. Such reversals are still shocking, if we care to remember them: GOP leaders such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham once declared Trump unfit for office but now sing the praises of the Great Leader. As my colleague Mark Leibovich put it last night on MSNBC, this is “white-flag week,” when even the last peeps of primary-season dissent in the GOP are being snuffed out.
Long before Stefanik’s call for less democracy, I wondered what it means to be a Republican or a Democrat in 2024. The Republican answer is easy: To be a member of the party is to abandon all political principles, of any kind, and bend the knee to the personal needs of Donald Trump. For Democrats, it’s more complicated. The Democrats were always a gathering of several constituencies under one roof, and their electoral house is even more crowded now that the guest rooms have been taken up by appalled independents and apostate former Republicans. And yet, in a historical irony, the once-fractious party is now more ideologically coherent than its GOP opponents…
Partisan inconsistency is hardly news: Political scientists have known since at least the 1960s that voters are attached to parties but are far less coherent about policies. (Although much of this work is about the American system, plenty of evidence indicates that irrational partisanship is something of a natural human tendency that’s affecting other democracies as well.) But one American party has collapsed; the other is holding together a fragile, but so far dominant, prodemocracy coalition. In this unprecedented situation, our politics have been largely emptied of meaning beyond the existential question of democracy itself.
This is as it should be. Nothing is more important than the survival of the Constitution, even if some voters (and some legislators) insist on being mired in their own particularistic interests. I wrote in 2020 that I can never again be as partisan as I once was; I long ago quit the GOP and will never remarry another party. But I miss politics as a process, a series of arguments, among people united in their wish to better the country while disagreeing about how to do it…
Friday Evening Open Thread: <em>The Age of Incoherent Partisanship </em>Post + Comments (150)
My dad and I have a ritual of 5 o’clock cocktails and TV/cable news when I’m visiting, so I watched way more MSNBC over the holidays than the none that I normally would watch. 5 PM Central means Ari Melber on MSNBC, whom I usually don’t mind too much, but he seemed to be on a mission to spout breathless encomiums to the prosecutors going after Trump. I’m not talking one episode — it was multiple lead-off pieces about Jack Smith, Fani Willis and Tish James, to name the ones I can remember.
Maybe I’ve spent too much time listening to my lawyer siblings, and to Ken White (Popehat), but I sure don’t have a huge amount of confidence in your average — or even above-average — prosecutor. The deck is very stacked in their favor in most cases, with clients lacking resources to mount a decent defense, with elected judges who are invested in appearing to be “law and order judges” and with clients who are likely to plea out when they see the charges stacked up against them. So, I think they get lazy and/or sloppy.
This seems to be what happened to Fani Willis. I don’t know what she was thinking when she hired her boyfriend Nathan Wade as the outside counsel (paid $650K) in the Trump and friends RICO case, but it’s definitely sloppy work to think that someone wouldn’t make hay from accusations of self-dealing based on that decision. And here we are today, with news that she traveled with Wade (gift link) to Miami and San Francisco using tickets he bought. Tomorrow or the next day will bring another drip in this drip drip scandal, because Wade is going through an apparently acrimonious divorce, and his wife seems to be more than a little interested in fucking him over. That does tend to happen with divorces, especially when one member of the couple is a lawyer. At minimum, a major fail by Willis that taints the case. At most, it destroys the case when she has to recuse and another prosecutor without the same level of interest/drive is appointed to the case.
I’m all about getting Trump in front of as many judges and juries as possible, but this Willis scandal is a great reminder that prosecutors are quite fallible, often look at prosecutions as a way to advance their political careers, and sometimes have the hubris that comes from easy wins. Also, with regard to the Department of Justice January 6 investigation, prosecutors are sometimes too timid — I’ll outsource the commentary on Merrick Garland’s timidity to Josh Marshall (gift link). In other words, we can’t count on them to do the heavy lifting in getting rid of Trump.
Careful With the Deus Ab Accusatore StuffPost + Comments (144)
According to this Times article by DeSantis beat writer Nicholas Nehamas, Ron DeSantis knows he’s not going to be the GOP’s 2024 nominee and is looking for an exit that preserves his 2028 prospects:
After a humbling loss in Iowa, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is starting to signal that he is building an off-ramp from the race for the Republican presidential nomination, a seeming acknowledgment of his dim prospects of defeating Donald J. Trump given his low poll numbers in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
So far this week, Mr. DeSantis has cast his eyes forward to 2028 with anecdotes about Trump supporters saying they would vote for him next time around if he runs again in four years. He has conceded that Mr. Trump’s thumping victory in Iowa on Monday made for a “good showing in terms of him winning the nomination.” And he has openly admitted that he believes he made a strategic mistake by icing out the traditional media earlier in the campaign.
It all amounted to a kind of frankness that Mr. DeSantis has not always shown in his public comments about the nominating contest — and a marked change in tone for a candidate who spent most of last year brashly promising he would win Iowa, which he lost by 30 points.
With any luck, the back half of DeSantis’s governorship won’t go as smoothly as the first now that statehouse toadies have no immediate motivation to cower and suck up. There’s also reason to hope that wingnut donors who got torched by Ron in 2024 remember how wantonly he squandered their millions and keep their wallets shut in 2028.
Most of all, I hope Trump settles the heir apparent question once and for all this year by getting clobbered by Joe Biden. (Again.) Maybe such a glorious event could finally prompt Republicans to eschew candidates with Trump loser stink on them. That group definitely includes The Beast’s imitator Ron DeSantis.
Open thread.
PS: I will probably not be able to resist dancing on DeSantis’s political grave for a few more weeks. Don’t feel constrained by the topic of the post — talk about whatever!
Commenter Lobo added this comment to the end of a thread on Wednesday.
I hope this helps:
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham JailWe have to have each other’s back. They are after all of us.
For anyone who missed the conversation in this thread…
… I posed the following question:
Is there any interest in a guest post series?
What it’s like to be __________ right now?
Trans, gay, Ukrainian, female, Jewish, Palestinian, black, Russian, undocumented…. the list is much longer, and I am not signaling importance by whether a group is listed, or the order in which they are listed.
We could have one or two people writing from each group that feels particularly threatened by the authoritarian threats around us? Because I’m betting that even within a particular group everyone may not see it the same.
Happy to hear feedback, whether it’s yay or nay.
With this post, I am not trying to re-litigate things that were discussed in that thread, just trying to get a feel for whether there’s interest in a series where we hear about what life looks like from different points of view.
Life is complicated right now. If anyone wants to write a guest post for this, please send me an email message.
Otherwise this is a TOTALLY OPEN THREAD. What do you want to talk about?