Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

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

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

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

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

Fight them, without becoming them!

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

“But what about the lurkers?”

“Just close your eyes and kiss the girl and go where the tilt-a-whirl takes you.” ~OzarkHillbilly

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

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

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

The revolution will be supervised.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Since There’s Talk About Vote Rigging…

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…Having sat with a lot of election and data analysts on election night, I can tell you that anyone who’s worked enough elections knows how to analyze data, and there were people I was with who saw lower than expected Dem votes in key counties in MI, PA, Wis etc who had a sinking sense that Harris might lose all of the swing states. It wasn’t official and wouldn’t be for many hours still, but they knew where the votes needed to be to win and just weren’t seeing them. This was all from publicly available data on various states and county elections websites as results were being posted in real time.

(Mallory McMorrow is the Michigan State Senate Majority Whip.)

Monday Evening Open Thread: Since We're Talking About Vote Rigging...

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War for Ukraine Day 992: Veterans’ Day/Remembrance Day/Armistice Day 2024 During Another World War in Europe

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A calipraphic representation of a Remembrance Day poppy by Satwinder Sehmi. The poppy is drawn with the words to the poem In Flanders Field.

(Image by Satwinder Sehmi)

A quick housekeeping note: Rosie is still doing great. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

We’ve made it to another Veterans’ Day. Which, as everyone is tracking, is different in the US than for the rest of our allies and partners that observe today as Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. For us, today is about celebrating those who have or are serving. It is about the living, while Memorial Day is about those were killed in action or who have subsequently passed on. Though America being Mericuh and Americans being Mericuns, there’s a lot of confusion between the two holidays.

That aside, on this the 11th day, at the 11th hour, of the 11th month of 1918 the guns in Europe fell silent and World War I came to an end. I’d like to highlight two more recent military histories that I think are important not just for our understanding of World War I, but for where we are now because while history may not repeat, it rhymes.

The first is Christopher Clark’s history of 1914 entitled The Sleepwalkers. Clark’s primary thesis is that with the exception of the extremists, none of the key leaders or actors in 1914 wanted war. They all thought they were communicating clearly in words and deeds and that what they were communicating was being received and understood clearly and as intended. Because what they were communicating was not clear, nor being received and understood as intended, they sleep walked into what we know as World War I. His secondary thesis is that no women were involved, just a bunch of men working within their states’ and societies’ traditional understandings of masculinity and militarism. I think this is a good shorthand for what we’ve been watching and dealing with in the Middle East for the past year. And that includes the secondary thesis. You’ll notice that there is not a single female diplomat or decision-maker involved in the Israel-Hamas or Israel-Lebanon negotiations. Nor the attempts to cut a deal with the Saudis.

The second is Gerwarth’s The Vanquished. Gerwarth’s work is a revisionist history of the ending of World War I, the interwar period, and the start of World War II. His central thesis is that both world wars are simply the two interstate and large scale combat operations (LSCO) phases of the same conflict. Between them was an almost twenty-year period of low intensity conflict between non-state actors and between some of these non-state actors and the states and societies that they were part of. Or, in some cases, apart from.

We are at a current set of inflection points that are akin to what both Clark and Gerwarth have written about.

To adapt COL McRae’s final verse:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though sunflowers grow
In Ukraine’s fields.

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

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Checking in with the Walz Family

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Checking in with the Walz Family
Hope posted this on her Instagram.

I went to TikTok to watch a video, and the algorithm pushed Hope Walz’ TikTok to me.  She was very active on the campaign trail with her family, and she’s got some raw, honest reactions there.

Anyway, I think Tim Walz was the big discovery of this cycle.  He’s still Governor of Minnesota until 2026, and there are no term limits.  Going forward, I’d like to see him play a bigger role in the party as the progressive  Dad.  I think he did a good job on the VP run, given the constraints, and I don’t think that VP candidates get the same one and done treatment as Presidential candidates.

That said, another Californian VP, Dick Nixon, came back after losing a Presidential run, so don’t rule out Kamala Harris.

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Compare and Contrast Two Post-Mortems

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A Couple of Honest Post-Mortems

AOC asked her Instagram followers who voted for Trump to give their reasons (cut/pasted above).  She also answered a number of questions.  Her explanation for the degree New York shifted red was because Trump campaigned there and Harris didn’t.  (That’s an explanation, not a criticism, she made it clear that the Harris campaign was effective in slowing the red shift in states where they campaigned.). She also noted that many immigrants who could vote have family who couldn’t and they have been waiting decades for immigration reform, and as well they’re quite susceptible to messaging saying that the asylum seekers were unjustly moved to the front of the line (us vs. them works, she noted).  Overall a pretty honest appraisal of the election, as far as I’m concerned.

Some of the comments from her followers are relevant to something Adam mentioned about conspiracy theories in his post today.  The notion that we can spin some sort of election interference tale from undervotes is the stupid opposite of what we should be thinking about undervoters.  People who voted for Trump and left the rest of the ballot blank were demonstrating their political ignorance and their belief that Trump alone is the savior — they don’t trust the down ballot of either party.  I’d like to find a few and look at their media diet, not spin some grifter conspiracy.  And they’re evidence for some hope when Trump isn’t on the ballot, since they probably won’t be voting.

Let’s move on to the dishonest takes by DC insider Democratic consultants.  This piece is a good roundup of comments from a few of them.  They’re the people getting invited onto CNN to spout off.  Philip Reines, some Clintonworld advisor, went on CNN to say that Democrats’ kowtowed to the extremes of the party (including trans activists).  Another blamed us cuddling up to the Columbia protesters.  A third, anonymous Hill source, said it was because we didn’t give enough credit to Trump for his insights on the border.  The piece ends with this:

The ugly truth for these people is that Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory. She downplayed discussions of her race and gender. She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans, and Republicans into the fold. She told Black men that one of her priorities for them was…crypto. She made her past as a prosecutor a cornerstone of her pitch.  She bragged about owning a Glock and joked that she would shoot people who broke into her house. She stuffed the Democratic National Convention to the gills with cops and Border Patrol agents while crushing even the tiniest dissent over her support for the genocide in Gaza. She promised the most “lethal” military in the world. She was seemingly joined at the hip with Liz Cheney for weeks. She even praised Dick Cheney! It’s hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives.

But admitting that would mean that the CNN favorites and the anonymous politicos had to confront an even more uncomfortable reality: that, ideologically at least, Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed.

Maybe this is a little harshly worded, but whatever you think of the Harris campaign (and I think it was pretty good), the fantasy “woke” campaign that these consultants are straw manning never existed.  Harris didn’t say word one about trans folk.  Walz was put on a tight leash and was coached to look for points of agreement with Vance in the debate, which was a huge missed opportunity.  Harris’ Gaza position was pretty much Biden’s.

She really was the consultant’s ideal candidate, except for being female and black. These people need to be ignored the next time around, and we don’t need to listen to their fairy tales about how Democrats should become even more like Republicans to win.

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Significant Read: ‘Tracking the U.S. bird flu outbreak has been hard. It’s about to get harder’

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This article was published at the end of October, when it looked like we might be lucky enough to be living under an administration that understood science, not to mention law. Conditions which, of course, no longer hold… Helen Branswell, at STATNews — “Health systems will likely struggle to differentiate the virus from flu-like illnesses”:

If one can point to anything good about the H5N1 bird flu outbreak in dairy cattle — to be honest, there’s nothing good about this situation — it’s the timing. Transmission of the virus through U.S. dairy herds took off when last winter’s flu season was effectively over, making the job of looking for people infected with H5N1 an easier task in theory, though there have been plenty of human hurdles impeding those efforts.

But in the months since the outbreak was first detected, the spread of the virus in cows has not been contained, with infections reported in 380 herds in 14 states so far. Now, with cold and flu season looming, it is likely to become significantly more difficult for the country’s public health departments to track the virus.

In the weeks and months to come, when dairy farmworkers or others culling infected poultry flocks develop influenza-like symptoms, what ails them could be a common cold, Covid-19, regular influenza, or a bird flu virus. Spotting a new flu virus before it starts to transmit more easily among humans and stopping that spread — if it’s possible — could make the difference between a close call and something no one wants, another pandemic.

Trying to do this surveillance at any point in the year is devilishly tough. Doing it in flu season will be next-level hard, experts warn.

“It’s going to be more challenging. You’re going to have more viruses that are in circulation, more cases coming forward. The labs are going to have much more to do,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, the World Health Organization’s acting director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention…

You may be wondering: Can wastewater testing help in what’s going to be a more challenging situation? Long used elsewhere to detect transmission of polio viruses, it is proving to be a useful tool to detect levels of a number of pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19. And it can detect H5N1, differentiating it from seasonal flu viruses, said Marlene Wolfe, an assistant professor of environmental health at Emory University and program director for WastewaterSCAN. But if wastewater testing turns up H5N1 virus in a community’s sewage system, it cannot say if the virus came from a person, a cow, or discarded contaminated milk.

Here are three ways in which H5N1 surveillance is about to get more difficult.

The risk of more infections and maybe worse, co-infections…
Reassortment is something flu virologist Florian Krammer worries about. “By reassorting with seasonal influenza viruses, [H5N1] could get a replication machinery that just does much better in human cells,’’ said Krammer, who teaches at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York. “That could get hairy.”…

In an effort to lower the risk of a reassortment event, the CDC is calling for farmworkers who might be exposed to H5N1 to be vaccinated against seasonal flu. Knowing that many do not have health care coverage — and may be unlikely to prioritize getting a flu shot they have to pay for — the CDC is providing 100,000 doses for farmworkers in 12 of the states where H5N1 has been seen to circulate in cows. (Wyoming and Oklahoma, where the virus has also been detected in cows, declined to take part in the program, a CDC spokesperson said.)

The approach, however, is far from perfect. For starters, 100,000 doses divided by 12 states isn’t a lot of vaccine. California, for instance, is the country’s largest milk producer, with over 1,100 dairy herds in the state, and an estimated dairy farm workforce of between 17,000 and 18,000 workers. It is getting 5,000 doses of flu vaccine through the CDC program — in effect 4.5 doses per farm…

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In the Street of the Blind, the One Eyed Man Is the Guiding Light*

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What they doin ova der IS GRIFTING!!!!!

I’ve now seen several posts on social media by the usual suspects amplifying conspiratorial thinking about the 2024 election. While this stuff isn’t originating with the “hopium – we’re the resistance” grifters since 2017, they are amplifying it. No matter what Mueller She Wrote retweets, the Harris-Walz campaign is not raising post election funding to do a manual recount in the battleground states. That isn’t going to happen under any circumstances.

No matter what Pam Keith from Florida tweets, she doesn’t understand that undervotes are regular occurrences and that an undervote, or undervoted ballot, is any ballot where the top line/highest office on the ballot was voted for, but one, more, or all of the rest of the races on the ballot where not voted. No one tampered with the actual ballots.

There are some legitimate calls for people to phone bank to cure ballots for the still being counted PA Senate race and helping out on that is legit, but that’s not what’s being peddled. Again. By the usual suspects looking to steal your money.

These two, and dozens and dozens of others, have stolen enough of you money, your time, your hope over the past decade. DO NOT GIVE THEM ANY MORE OF ANY OF IT!!!!!

The only way out of where we’re are, as I’ve repeatedly explained, is Counter-Guerrilla Warfare+Counter-Political Action+Civic Action. You all did an amazing job on the Civic Action. With a few notable exceptions, the people – primarily the Democratic elected and appointed officials –  that had to do the Counter-Guerrilla Warfare and the Counter-Political Action didn’t do their jobs.

Maybe someone will step up and fill the gap of their myriad failures, maybe not, but you now need to protect your time, your finances, and your physical and emotional well being. You need to do this in order to be able protect yourselves, your families, those that will not be able to protect themselves. We will all have to do the small work that because the people that had the power and the positions to be able to take action did not.

Don’t give these grifters, charlatans, and thieves pushing or promoting these ridiculous scenarios any more. They’ve stolen enough from you. DO NOT GIVE THEM ANY MORE!!!!!

Open thread!

*Genesis Rabbah (300-500 CE)

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Morning Bluesky Thread

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Yesterday afternoon, I posted commenter Mousebumples’ Bluesky tips.  Worth a read if you’re a morning-only reader.   Like reading legacy media, being on Xitter is a habit I think we all need to break.

Speaking of habits that need to be broken, am I the only one sick and fucking tired of having to call my Democratic Senator and beg them to do the obvious, right thing?  I was on Bluesky last night and saw that someone had posted scripts to call your Senator, and a specific script for Schumer, to have them do as much as possible in the lame duck session.

First, if you are an elected official in a party that claimed that the other party was led by a fascist who will bring fascism to government, shouldn’t you be leading, not following, on doing everything possible to batten down the hatches before the fascists take over?  Or was all the talk of “fighting for you” just talk?

Second, if this is some PAC that is ginning up an issue so that you’ll use their script and maybe give them some money, that would be consistent with what I saw during this election:  “Democratic” PACs fundraising for their own benefit off of major political issues, and even for candidates who should have gotten direct donations instead of PAC-mediated one.  And I have to tell you, man I’m tired of the scammy PACvertisements that I saw this election.  I’m glad our fundraising efforts here went to legitimate organizations that actually spend their money on what they promised to do.  But it’s unfortunate that we have to put much analysis and care into finding legitimate organizations.

Finally, I’m not saying “don’t call your Senator” — I’m saying, “I wish I didn’t have to call my Senator” and I hope that we’re able to elect a few new Senators who have a bit more fire in the belly for the task at hand.

Anyway, join us at Bluesky. The end.

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