Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

Also, are you sure you want people to rate your comments?

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

I don’t recall signing up for living in a dystopian sci-fi novel.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

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

Giving up is unforgivable.

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

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

Petty moves from a petty man.

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Receipts? (Open Thread)

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Joseph Tacopina is no longer on Trump’s legal team in two different cases.  A bit of speculation from Andrew Weissman.

Fair warning.  The NYT article that’s linked in the tweet is Maggie H, so click at your own risk.

🌼

Follow up on the thread about Fani Willis that I posted yesterday.

Receipts?Open thread.

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PSA: Chiricahua

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PSA: Chiricahua 1
Chiricahua National Monument

John’s posts about his move to Arizona reminded me to add a heads-up about one of the least-well-known beautiful places in the US:  Chiricahua National Monument.  Arizona politicians want it turned into a National Park, so go see it before it becomes overrun with tourists.  It’s a relatively small park, with a tiny campground and visitors’ center, so if it does become a National Park, it will be crowded (since every National Monument that’s been turned into a National Park sees a spike in visitation).

While you’re in the area, Bisbee is also worth a visit, as is Karchner Caverns State Park.  (I’m using “in the area” in the way that someone used to traveling in the Southwest uses it — within a couple hours drive — not in the way that someone from West Virginia uses it.)

When I started traveling a couple of years ago, John encouraged me to write about my travels.  I haven’t, and I’ve been thinking about the reasons why.

First, I write as a diversion, and when you’re traveling, there’s no lack of diversions.  This is especially true in my case, where I’m working part-time as I travel. As soon as I’m done with the work I need to do on my computer, I’m done looking at a computer and want to do something outside.

Second, much good travel writing is about misadventure.  “I drove across country with my well-medicated pets and nothing out of the ordinary happened.” isn’t an interesting story — John’s posts are interesting precisely because of what isn’t ordinary about his trips.  I’m not that familiar with the travel writing genre, but I do read books about places I want to visit.  Paul Theroux’ On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey includes a lot of fascinating encounters with Mexicans, but it also has a misadventure where he stupidly takes a back road near Mexico City.  Drive Nacho Drive, a book about driving the Pan American Highway, is, to put it mildly, a misadventure where two people jump in a car and make a bunch of bad decisions.  See also:  almost every YouTuber who travels south of the border.   I like adventures, but I don’t seek out misadventure.

Third, the thing I would like to write about the places I visit is the politics and culture of the area, and I just haven’t spent enough time in those places to understand enough to write anything meaningful.   As some wise philosophers once said, everybody hates a tourist, and that hatred is well-earned if you toss off a few hundred or a few thousand words about something that you know nothing about.  A great example of this genre is a New York Times writer who rented a van for a week and wrote an ignorant piece about it a couple of years ago.  Another example is Maureen Dowd’s infamous trip to Denver where she stupidly chowed down on a pile of edibles and whined about it.  (No links for either of those because fuck the NYT.)

Anyway, enough rambling.  My point:  Chiricahua, worth a visit.

PSA: Chiricahua
Also Chiricahua

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Something to Celebrate

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I wouldn’t just say this is a big deal.  Seems like a big Joe Biden deal to me!  No wonder the Rs want to hobble the IRS.

And this!  (CNN)  It wasn’t that long ago that people were saying this couldn’t happen.

Although this requires legislation like the REPO Act, which surely can’t pass until we win back the House and keep the senate.  Still, it’s a big deal that he has been working toward this.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  This is a good reminder that even when it looks like noting is being done, there’s a lot of groundwork that happens before we even see the tip of the iceberg.

Top Biden administration officials have spent the last year quietly trying to figure out how to divert billions of dollars in frozen Russian money to cash-starved Ukraine.

The proposal the US has hit on, described in detail here for the first time, is based on a novel legal theory to justify seizing and transferring to Ukraine the roughly $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets which have been frozen in the West since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

“The White House and the US government believe Russia should be on the hook for paying for all of the damage and destruction they have caused in Ukraine,” a US official said.

But the rare maneuver would require buy-in from US allies in the Group of 7 (G7) to have a real impact, officials said. The vast majority of Russia’s central bank assets that were frozen by the G7 and the European Union are held by the EU, with the US only holding around $5 billion worth, officials told CNN.

It would also require Congress to pass a bill introduced last year, called the REPO Act, that gives the president authority to move forward with seizing Russian assets held in the US.

Senior Biden officials have been working both with G7 allies – which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the EU – and US lawmakers to refine the proposal, which rests on the idea that nations affected by Russia’s violations are permitted under international law to try to force Moscow back into compliance using the law of countermeasures.

The issue has taken on new significance as Congress continues to balk at the White House’s request for billions in supplemental funding to help support Ukraine’s war effort. But US officials insist that the initiative is not a substitute for the $61 billion the administration says it needs now for Ukraine.

The discussions have intensified ahead of the second anniversary of the war on February 22, multiple officials told CNN. The US proposal was discussed among senior leaders at meetings of the G7 in November and December, a US official said, and will be reviewed again at the next G7 meeting at the end of February, around the anniversary.

The US has emphasized to allies that the seizures would be done for a “very specific legal reason,” one of the officials told CNN, and not one that is so broad that it risks spooking financial institutions with assets held overseas—a key concern of some G7 allies, including Germany, which has led to some hesitation over the US proposal, officials added.

With the Biden administration, it seems like nothing is off the table,   We have to have faith.  Not blind faith, but faith in the people who are doing the work.  The Rs and the courts throw up roadblocks, and the administration comes up with another way.  Very proud of Biden as our president, and proud of (nearly) all of the Biden Administration.

Open thread.

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House GOP Rejects ALL Immigration Bills

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If you’re on speaking terms with any MAGA dopes, you know they’ve been spun up into a frenzy about the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. Republican demagoguery on the issue has been a constant for decades, despite St. Ronnie of Rancho del Cielo committing amnesty. It reached new heights with Trump.

Simultaneously stirring panic about “migrant caravans” and refusing to entertain solutions makes sense for Republicans because immigration is a stick they can use to beat Democrats. There’s no political incentive for them to seriously address it, which is why Republicans haven’t acted on the issue aside from performative cruelty stunts for decades.

The bad faith is clear as day. But now GOP House Speaker Johnson has basically admitted out loud that his caucus is cynically using the border as a political weapon by flatly refusing to take up any immigration reform bill unless a Republican is president. Via TPM:

The White House, as you know, has been under immense pressure to offer concessions to address the continuing large number of migrants coming to the US-Mexico border. Now there’s a bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate. Last night Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that bill in DOA in the House. But Speaker Johnson said something more specific and revealing. He refused to bring up the bill and according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl said “Congress can’t solve border until Trump is elected or a republican is back in the White House.”

Two things to note here. First, Johnson isn’t saying they won’t consider this bill. He’s saying they won’t consider any bill until Trump is elected. Sherman appears to have accepted the GOP wording – that “Congress can’t solve [the] border until Trump is elected.” But there’s more here. Johnson is saying openly that they won’t pass any bill until Trump is elected. In other words, however out of control they claim the border is they want to keep it that way through November to use it as a political issue. There’s a bipartisan deal but House Republicans are rejecting it out of hand. That’s not terribly surprising. But your political opponents seldom state it so openly. It’s an opening for the White House. Let’s see if they take it.

My guess is Democrats will unwrap that unexpected present, but they’ll have to go around the political media to get the message to voters. That won’t be easy, but I thank Speaker Johnson for handing me a quote I can use next time one of the Republicans in my life raises the issue. Also, I’m starting to think Johnson is bad at his job. Who could have guessed?

Open thread.

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Monday Morning Open Thread: MLK Day

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Per NPR — “Service helps on MLK Day, but some say it’s not enough”:

… The service project at Herzl was one of countless others planned throughout the U.S. on Monday, in what has come to be known as “A Day On, Not a Day Off” since 1994, when Congress designated King’s birthday — observed as a federal holiday since 1986 — as a national day of service. But many familiar with King’s life and work say one day of service does not do justice to his legacy.

The Rev. Frederick Haynes III, who leads the civil rights group Rainbow PUSH Coalition, said the day of service was a result of efforts by “those who were determined that it not become the typical, commercialized American holiday where we take a day off, go shopping, and while shopping, we get discounts in honor of Dr. King.” Among these advocates were King’s wife, the late Coretta Scott King, and fellow civil rights activist and late congressman John Lewis, Haynes said.

Still, he added, the day to mark King’s legacy has been diluted over time.

“We have dumbed down the legacy of Dr. King by calling it a day of service,” he said. These “niceties of service,” continued Haynes, will “make you feel better, touch your life, but then you go back to business as usual. We still have an immigration policy that is broken, we still have what is raging over in Gaza, nothing has changed. Because we are so caught up in doing something nice for a moment that we don’t deal with changing the world for a lifetime.”…

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On The Road – Albatrossity – First-of-the-year Birds

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This week we’re finish up the Amsterdam trip (thank you Captain C) and starting a new adventure with frosty!

(click the image below for a bigger, non-blurry version of this week’s schedule.)

On The Road - Albatrossity - First-of-the-year Birds 10

Albatrossity

As many of you have suspected for a while, birders are weird. Many of them obsessively keep lists of birds seen anywhere (life list), birds seen in their yard, birds seen in a particular county, birds seen pooping (shit list), birds seen on heard on live TV shows, birds seen in their dreams, etc.

One of the more common manifestations of this obsession is keeping a list of the first bird heard or seen in a New Year. I don’t subscribe to all of these obsessions, but I do keep track of the first birds seen in a New Year, and so here is a post with some images of those birds from the past 10 years. Most of these images are not the actual individuals I saw or heard on January 1 of those years, since it is usually pretty dark at the time of the actual sighting or hearing. But these are good memories nonetheless!

PS: Happy MLK Day! And if you didn’t get a wall calendar for Christmas,, to help keep track of holidays and birthdays and such, you can still order one at reduced prices this week. After that, they will be retired and the year will roll on regardless.

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On The Road - Albatrossity - First-of-the-year Birds 9
Wellington NZJanuary 1, 2015

In 2015 we happened to be in Wellington, New Zealand on January 1, and my first bird (heard, not seen at the time) was a New Zealand endemic species, the Paradise Shelduck (Pūtangitangi, or Tadorna variegata). This is a noisy and gorgeous species, with conspicuous differences in the plumage of male and female birds. The white head marks this one as a female. Learn more here, and click here for a larger image.