Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

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

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

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Open Thread

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Good evening, everybody.
I hope to be around these parts more often.
And honestly, it’s mainly for me, but I hope that you all get something out of it.
Sometimes you just gotta scream into the void.
But sometimes you need to hear from others that you’re not alone.
So quick update–

I’ve dropped Twitter. You can find me, well here more often, and on Bluesky: soonergrunt.bsky.social

The union local is doing well. Membership isn’t where I’d like, but that will probably always be the case. We’re working now to convince more people that membership is in their best interests.
We’re also negotiating our Collective Bargaining Agreement with the agency. Shitty timing that, but it can’t be helped. We’ll get the best deal we can for our bargaining unit, and we’ll continue to support the unit and the agency’s mission.
I bought a new truck. 2024 Ford Ranger. Probably good that I bought it now because it will be too expensive in a year.
If you’re considering any capital or large purchases, there’s probably one more interest rate drop on the near horizon, but after he gets in office, all bets are off.
Soonerson and Soonerdaughter are both doing well, in job and college respectively. They’re both smarter than I am, which IS a brag, even if it’s not saying much.
Soonerwife works HR for a non-profit here in UT and she’s loving it.
Going up to Park City tomorrow for a drive in the mountains, some hiking, and to get away from social media and turn my phone off.
What are your plans? Anyone else have a long weekend?

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War for Ukraine Day 989: When the Going Get’s Tough, the Tough Get’s Weird?

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Three quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie’s appointment with her regular, as in non-oncology, vet went well. Her vet was very pleased with how she looks. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, as a brief follow up to last night’s post regarding the election results, several of you have emailed me some questions. All are a variation of “I’ve done X during the election, donated X during the election, etc, should I be worried?” While I’ve answered you individually, I think the answer should be up here. The answer is I don’t think you have much to worry about. The threats, including threats of violence, and actual violence are intended to get you scared, keep you scared, and, as a result, preemptively comply. The combination of these, which are the guerrilla warfare part of where we’ve been at with the political action or threat of political action, are intended to establish a competitive system of control that sets the conditions to subvert (out administrate) the state and other political, social, religious, and economic actors and institutions. Recognize it for what it is, adjust your internal calibration so you have a sufficient level of paranoia, and, as the counter-IED instructors say, “stay alert, stay alive!”

Third, whether we like it or not, the President-elect is the president-elect, the Senate will have a small GOP majority, the House looks like it will have a slim GOP majority, and 25 states are still GOP trifectas. Come January 2025, this will all be the legitimate government of the US and those 25 states. Be alert, do not preemptively give in to fear, threats, and intimidation, do not knee jerk, and take it one day and one event at a time.

President Zelenskyy had a phone call with the President-elect and the Starlink Snowflake. Because, apparently, the Starlink Snowflake was jus hanging around Mar-a-Lago and having dinner. Barak Ravid from Axios (also CNN and Israel’s Walla News) has the details:

Donald Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday included two surprises: Elon Musk was also on the line, and Zelensky was somewhat reassured by what he heard from the president-elect, two sources with knowledge of the call tell Axios.

Why it matters: The new details of the call underscore how influential Musk could be in the second Trump administration, and the uncertainty over how exactly Trump will approach Ukraine.

Between the lines: Trump’s public messages throughout the election campaign — promising a quick resolution to the war, declining to say which side he wanted to win and criticizing the massive aid packages flowing from Washington — raised alarm bells in Kyiv and throughout Europe.

  • The Biden administration is now looking for ways to get as much military assistance as possible to Ukraine ahead of Jan. 20, when Trump could turn off the spigot.
  • But the private conversations Trump and his team have had with Zelensky and his advisers over the last two months — including on Wednesday — were somewhat more reassuring to the Ukrainians, the sources say.
  • Zelensky himself felt the fact that the call happened so soon after Trump was declared the winner was a positive sign, one of the sources told Axios. Trump has yet to speak with Vladimir Putin since the election, but the Russian president said he will pick up if Trump calls.

Behind the scenes: The call between Trump and Zelensky lasted around 25 minutes, according to the sources who were briefed on its details.

  • After Zelensky congratulated Trump, the president-elect said he will support Ukraine, but didn’t go into details.
  • Three sources briefed on the call all told Axios that Zelensky felt the call went well and that it did not increase his anxiety about Trump’s victory. One source said it “didn’t leave Zelensky with a feeling of despair.”
  • Musk also weighed in during the call to say he will continue supporting Ukraine through his Starlink satellites, the sources said. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
    • Starlink has been crucial to Ukraine’s war effort, though Musk has also mocked Zelensky’s requests for U.S. aid, and Zelensky rebuked the billionaire for proposing a peace plan of his own in 2022.

Reality check: Much went unsaid, and much remains unknown. Trump and Zelensky did not delve into policies like Trump’s purported plan to end the war, or the prospect of further U.S. aid, the sources said.

What they’re saying:

“Nothing of what Zelensky and his aides heard from Trump and his team in private has been alarming or made us feel that Ukraine is going to be the one who pays the price.”

— Source familiar with the conversations

“I had an excellent call with President Trump and congratulated him on his historic landslide victory — his tremendous campaign made this result possible,” Zelensky wrote on X after the call on Wednesday.

  • “Strong and unwavering U.S. leadership is vital for the world and for a just peace,” Zelensky said, adding that he and Trump agreed to maintain close dialogue.
  • Yes, but: In a speech in Budapest on Thursday, Zelensky made clear that despite his positive call with Trump, he “cannot yet know what his actions will be.”

The intrigue: Musk also joined Trump’s call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who told reporters that Musk and Trump had been having dinner together at the time.

What to watch: Even though they’re wary of potential peace talks, the Ukrainians see some upside in breaking with the current “negative status-quo,” one source briefed on government deliberations said.

  • Three sources with knowledge of Ukrainian government assessments said that Kyiv expects that if peace talks do take place, they will agree to participate but Putin will either reject the talks or take steps that doom them to failure.

There is more at the link.

Well that seems not so bad. Weird, but not so bad.

Also, I don’t know if you all saw the pictures of Apartheid Clyde with the President-elect and the latter’s family on election night. Melania was NOT in the picture. As I wrote last night, the Starlink Snowflake is a black hole of neediness. He’s also a not particularly smart junkie with no social skills, which would be worthy of sympathy and empathy if he wasn’t a racist, antisemite, homophobe, and misogynist. He is going to try to hang out with the President-elect 24/7 365. I expect he’ll quickly wear out his welcome and then the President-elect will shiv him.

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

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Friday Night Open Thread

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I don’t have much to say tonight and am still figuring out if I am going to leave tomorrow. I’m very distracted and not doing too great with decision making and executive function. I mean I am fine and I don’t want you to worry about me or anything like that, but I am also very not fine. And I think you know what I mean.

I find this to be very nice:

Hope is a Sewer Rat (Caitlin Seida)

Landscapes thrill me. Like this one above, driving through Montana last week. It’s all of it. The clouds. The snow-capped mountains. The open fields. All of that opens my imagination. It casts a spell of wonder.

Landscapes of other kinds also thrill me. Like the one below, written by Caitlin Seida (shared by Shawna Lemay). It’s the invitation to know Hope’s bad-assed side. The teeth and claws. The chewy determination. All of that, too, opens my imagination and casts a spell of remembering.

For inspiration.
Hope Is Not a Bird, Emily, It’s a Sewer Rat

by Caitlin Seida

Hope is not the thing with feathers
That comes home to roost
When you need it most.

Hope is an ugly thing
With teeth and claws and
Patchy fur that’s seen some shit.

It’s what thrives in the discards
And survives in the ugliest parts of our world,
Able to find a way to go on
When nothing else can even find a way in.

It’s the gritty, nasty little carrier of such
diseases as
optimism, persistence,
Perseverance and joy,
Transmissible as it drags its tail across
your path
and
bites you in the ass.

Hope is not some delicate, beautiful bird,
Emily.
It’s a lowly little sewer rat
That snorts pesticides like they were
Lines of coke and still
Shows up on time to work the next day
Looking no worse for wear.

Talk to you all tomorrow. I’ll either be on the road. Or I won’t.

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Not Everyone’s Going to Pull Out Their Gun and Shoot Themselves in the Foot

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The Initial Pushback Is Starting

I’m not the hopium peddler on this blog, as regular readers know, but I want to offer an observation about the Republican party in 2024.

If you believe, as I think most of you do, that they tell lies in service of the rich so the agenda of the rich can be enacted, then the logical conclusion is that Trump will be curbed when the rich don’t like what he’s doing.

So, in this case, where the normally retrograde Abbott should be spitting fire about how the deportations start on January 21, he’s dissembling: talking about the time it will take ICE to get funding, etc., etc.  This is a guy who deployed the National Guard to the border to lay razor wire.  He fucking knows that was all theater, but if the crops don’t get picked and the cattle die because he deports the migrants who do the work, he’s in a shitpot of trouble with his rich supporters.

Similarly, does anyone think that Pfizer, Novartis and the rest are going to sit still for RFK Jr as Secretary of HHS?  Vaccines are incredibly profitable.  Plus, putting a bunch of fuckhead play docs on TV in charge of the FDA is a big problem for them.  They might not love the FDA’s oversight, but they certainly don’t want to go through a bunch of brand-damaging nonsense that will follow from the FDA approving coffee enemas or crystals at the same time it approves their new statin.  (You may argue that Trump hurt them already with his anti-vax COVID response, and he did, but there’s a big gap between that one instance and a complete meltdown at the FDA.)

I’m also skeptical about tariffs to the degree that Trump has babbled about on the stump, for similar reasons — the global supply chain is interconnected and tariffs will fuck up corporate supply chains.

This is not to say that there won’t be deportation — there will and it will be ugly.  This is not to say that he won’t appoint a moron to run the FDA, but a certain kind of moron, not RFK the lesser.  And there will definitely be some kind of tariffs.

So, a lot of bad things are going to happen, but I think it’s a mistake not to consider the interests of the rich donors in the way this whole thing is going to shake out.

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More Good Reads

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Jeff Tiedrich has a good run-down of the responses of blue state governors to the threat of Trumpism.  Newsom, Hochul, Pritzker and Tierney have already come out and pre-non-complied.  More of this, please.  If DeathSantis can run Florida like his own personal fiefdom and ignore the feds, so can blue states.

Erik Loomis has a good, measured post-election analysis piece.

In Loomis’ piece, he mentions comments from one TPM reader who is a newspaper reporter in North Carolina:

I’ve been a reporter in North Carolina for 30 years, covering the coast and rural counties. For many months, and continuing to this day, there are millions and millions of dollars of Biden Infrastructure and IRA funds pouring into rural communities here for projects to address needs that have been neglected or ignored for decades: wastewater treatment system upgrades, removal of lead pipes in water systems;  repairs of rotting boardwalks and docks in small waterfront and fishing communities; mitigation of saltwater intrusion in farm fields, flood resilience in low-elevations; etc, etc. They’re all necessities that will result in real honest-to-god improvements in people’s lives. Virtually none of the beneficiaries — fishers, farmers, residents in communities vulnerable to sea level rise— have any idea that Biden was the reason they have those improvements, or will be getting them soon (when Trump will no doubt take credit.)  The Democrats and the administration should have been bragging constantly and everywhere about the funds and the economic recovery. Government subsidies have lifted a nascent renewables industry into a booming profitable job-creator. Again, the messaging to the public about all of these economic factors should have been short, sweet and constant. […]

This seems to be part of the Democratic DNA — we don’t need to repeat it because everyone knows it.  We just lost an election to vibes voters who know almost nothing about politics.  We need to hammer, hammer, hammer it home whenever we do something good.

Steve M’s explains the election in two charts, the amount of credit card debt and credit card interest rates.

Marcie Jones at Wonkette has a good piece on how an independent Baltimore newspaper was able to (probably) beat the Sun, which is now owned by Sinclair Media.

Why throwing trans folks under the bus wouldn’t help the Democratic party, nevermind that it is an incredibly horrible thing to do.

Finally, a programming note.  John and Adam’s advice on personal security and how to respond to nazis is important, but it isn’t my wheelhouse.  I won’t be posting about that, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize its importance.

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Cover Boy (Open Thread)

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Earlier this week, I posted this photo to illustrate how our dog Pete has misappropriated a sofa cover in our rental that is intended to protect the upholstery from pets:

Keep Calm-ala and Carry On-ala (Open Thread)

He’s the lump above. Here he is using the same sofa cover as a medieval friar costume:

Cover Boy (Open Thread)

Or maybe he’s supposed to be a racehorse. I’m not sure. But I need to cut his claws. Today.

When we go home, he’s going to miss that sofa cover. We might have to buy one just for Pete.

Open thread!

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A Piece of Advice

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Being an asshole won’t change the outcome of the election. Being nice won’t either, but there is no point doubling down on misery. Take care of your friends and family, distance yourself from those who seek to harm you and yours, prepare for the worst, but try to be kind to others for your own mental sake and theirs. That includes here in cyberspace as well as in the real world.

And try to remember that people process grief in different ways. If someone is being a dick in the comments, ignore them. If it is egregious, we’ll clean it up. But odds are it’s just someone going through their own angst and fears and misery- sometimes we lash out at even the ones we love.

There is a clearly defined enemy out there- focus on them.

And for the record, this website will not be spending thousands of hours processing poll results to try to determine which minority didn’t vote for Harris in sufficient percentages to determine who “cost us” the election. We lost the election because tens of millions of white Americans did what they always do, which is go into the booth and vote for their tribe. The end.

I’ve seen a video of a young Latino talking about how he knows several Latinos who voted for Trump who have undocumented relatives, so to give them a dose of their medicine, they are going to report them to ice:

I don’t know if you need to be told this, but just in case you do, DO NOT FUCKING DO THIS. DO NOT FUCKING REPORT ANYONE TO ICE. I hope Adam’s post last night made things clear for you all what we are up against, but if they did not, let me explain this to you in the simplest of terms.

DO NOT HELP NAZIS EVER.

Turning in someone to ICE even if you think they deserve it makes you a fucking collaborator. Would you have turned in a Jewish person in WW2 because you suspect one of their relatives may have voted for Hitler? No. Again, for the slow learners:

DO NOT HELP NAZIS EVER.

Second, were I a Nazi, this is exactly the kind of video I would make to get the opposition to turn on each other to make my job easier. Don’t be stupid. Anything you view or hear, do not take it for granted. Think to yourself- “Who will benefit from this action?”

You need to mentally put yourself on a war footing. The only thing you say to authorities is effectively “I don’t know nothing about nothing.” That is it. If you interact with the police or ICE or the coming gangs of brownshirts, you shut the fuck up, and borrowing phrase “I don’t know nothing about nothing” from the black community should be part of your daily vocabulary. It’s a powerful six words, because not only does it shut down their attempts to get information about what they are specifically asking you, it says you don’t know anything about anything else. Say it to yourself over and over- “I don’t know nothing about nothing.”

Here is a list of things you are ok saying to the authorities:

“Am I under arrest?”
“Am I free to go?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“I do not consent to any searches.”

That is it. The end. You offer no information. You offer no defense. You do not act aggressively. You say nothing. You know nothing about nothing. You don’t answer any questions about where you were going or what you were doing. You give them nothing. Nazis are gonna nazi, and you don’t give them a fucking shred of help.

They have an enormously difficult task ahead of them- the logistics of their goal of locking up and deporting millions of undesirables is a massive task both in terms of manpower and logistics, so you give them nothing. They are going to need hundreds of thousands of people to do what they want, and they will not be the best and the brightest this nation has to offer.

Bogging them down and leaving them drowning in paperwork and giving them NOTHING to work with is our best and safest collective defense, and even with the courts on their side, there will be good folks bogging them down in the system with challenges and appeals and everything else. Slowing them down to a crawl and giving them nothing is an extremely effective tool of collective action and it is safe for you to engage in. Especially if you are white.

Again:

“Am I under arrest?”
“Am I free to go?”
“I want a lawyer.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“I do not consent to any searches.”

Do I need to make balloon juice stickers that say “I don’t know nothing about nothing?” Because I will. That should be your motto in these times.

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