Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

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

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

In after Baud. Damn.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

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War for Ukraine Day 975: Russia Has Been Bombarding Central & Northern Ukraine for Hours

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie seems to be coming out of her chemo reaction. Thank you for all the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, I’m going to just run the basics again as I begin to recover from a very, very long week.

Russia had strategic aviation up as of 11:40 PM local time in Ukraine. Air raid alerts have either been up or gone up and down over most of central, northern, and eastern Ukraine for hours. The alerts just went up – 8:05 PM EDT/3:05 PM local time in Ukraine – over all of eastern Ukraine. As of right now 1/2 of Ukraine is under air raid alert.

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

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Repub Venality Open Thread: ‘Black Insurrectionist’ Just Another White MAGAt

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So: The perfect exemplar of a True Trumpist ‘Patriot’!… Per the Associated Press, “The ‘Black Insurrectionist’ was actually white. The deception did not stop there”:

… With a profile photo of a Black soldier and the tagline “I FOLLOW BACK TRUE PATRIOTS,” the account on the platform X amassed more than 300,000 followers while posting dubious claims about Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Some were amplified by former President Donald Trump, his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance, and their Republican allies in Congress. The most salacious claims have come in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Last month, the account posted what Black Insurrectionist claimed was an affidavit from an ABC News employee, alleging Harris was given questions in advance of the network’s debate with Trump — which ABC News vigorously disputed. Trump approved, though, declaring, “I love the person.” More recently, Black Insurrectionist posted a baseless claim alleging inappropriate behavior between Walz and a student decades ago, a falsehood that U.S. intelligence officials said sprang from a Russian disinformation campaign.

The reach that the Black Insurrectionist account attained with assistance from Trump and his allies demonstrates the ease with which unverified information from dubious sources can metastasize online to shape public opinion. The speed and scale of disinformation has been an animating force in the presidential campaign, with the potential to affect the outcome in a close election.

The Black Insurrectionist account is linked directly to Jason G. Palmer, who has his own questionable backstory, starting with the fact that he isn’t Black, according to an Associated Press review of public records, open source data and interviews with a half-dozen people who interacted closely with Palmer over the past two decades. The records and personal accounts offer a portrait of an individual who has repeatedly been accused of defrauding business partners and lenders, has struggled with drug addiction and whose home was raided by the FBI over a decade ago. He also owes more than $6.7 million in back taxes to the state of New York…

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Cowardice At The Post

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The Washington Post announced today that the paper isn’t endorsing a presidential candidate for the first time in decades. The paper’s publisher and CEO, sketchy former News Corp guy William Lewis, attempted to explain the decision in a logically incoherent column. (For real, go read it. It’s smug, inconsistent bullshit on stilts and absolutely unconvincing.)

Post sources suspect the paper’s owner, Amazon gazillionaire Jeff Bezos, killed an endorsement of Harris because he’s a chickenshit. Former editor Marty Baron called the paper out on right-wing oligarch Elon Musk’s crappy hellsite:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

Baron is alluding to the time when Trump corruptly steered a $10B government cloud computing contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon because Trump was pissed about The Post’s critical coverage of his disastrous presidency. The implication is Bezos is hedging his bets in case Trump wins. The LA Times’ controversial decision to not endorse a presidential candidate was apparently also made by a chickenshit billionaire owner.

From the vantage point of a regular person, you might suppose that a man who has more money than 20 generations of descendants could spend in a thousand lifetimes would have the courage to stand up to a feeble, two-bit thug like Trump. But as we’ve seen repeatedly, amassing billions of dollars tends to morally deform people. They just want more, more, more.

The non-endorsement doesn’t amount to a hill of beans as far as the current presidential race is concerned; it was unlikely to move a single vote. But it is yet another sign of institutional rot. And that sucks.

Open thread.

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Unlike the LA Times & Washington Post, Muslims in Palestine Take a Stand On the Election

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One of our BJ peeps sent this to me.   It’s a great video from a pro-Palestinian group making the case anyone engages with a voter on this issue – this is an excellent video.

It’s Muslims in Palestine encouraging people to vote for Harris.  The American acknowledges how upset he is about the the lack of adequate support from the US, but they still encourage people to vote for Harris, making it clear that Trump would be far, far, worse.

I can’t embed from Instagram. but if you find it on YouTube or twitter, please share a link.

In the meantime, here’s the Instagram link.  If you click the X to close the login/ signup screen, you can still watch the video.

It seems important to share this with all who have concerns about this.

Thoughts?  (Assuming you watch the video.)

Update at 4:45 pm (info from commenter Torrey)

Here’s the link to the page containing that and related videos on the Oakland Corps website. You can link from there to the YouTube videos for each of the people shown in the video, as well as the general video. Unfortunately, the man doing the voiceover does the same voiceover for each of the participants, when I want him to shut up and let them talk. So, annoying video voice-over management, but you can at least see each of the videos individually and follow the transcript of their words on the screen.

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One more stop in Nebraska?

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DougJ got in touch with me this morning – he has a personal connection to Tony Vargas (NE-02) and wonders if we are up for raising another $2,500 for Tony?  I’m game if you guys are!

Nebraska

North Carolina

We also have a bit of color commentary from on the ground in North Carolina, shared with me by email from one of our BJ peeps.  I don’t know whether we’ll win North Carolina, but enthusiasm seems to me to be at least a better measure than the polling.

I have a friend whose husband works in the Democratic Party organization in Orange County (Chapel Hill) NC, and she called me to tell me about what they’re doing there, and eventually had to just put her husband on the phone, b/c he was the source of her stories. The rest is my recollection of what he told me: first the bad, then the good.

He told me a troubling story: even to this day, in a nearby precinct there are husbands who try to enter the voting booth with their wives to surveil their vote. Sigh. The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.

I’ll just say ugh to that, and a hearty fuck you to any man who wants to control how his wife votes.  On the other hand, if she doesn’t object, I guess the wife is okay with that?

And now the good.

From June 2022 thru June 2024 (TWO YEARS), they had 126 volunteers sign up. The month of July, they had 95 new volunteers. Twelve days before the election they have over 760 volunteers in total, and are getting 5-8 new volunteers sign up daily.

Right after the Apocalypse in 2016, at the first plenary meeting of Dem activists, their precinct (many in Orange County) chair told them that in previous years, they’d had -two- people show up: the chair and the vice-chair. At that meeting, they had 13 people show up. The level of volunteer activism has been off-the-charts.

There’s a story of a local donor who observed that there were so many Trump signs on the roadsides, and said “I wanna buy 1000 signs, just give ’em out!” It’s clear there are Trumpers out there taking down Harris/Walz signs, but they’re getting put back up.

Any more anecdata, vibes or stories from other key states?

Open thread.

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: The Only Way Out Is Through

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Look, I’m a devout Cynic. That means I accept that terrible things will happen, innocent people will suffer for no reason, and a dispiriting percentage of the human population are idiots or monsters or both. I do my best to prepare for the untoward, but frankly, it’s a sin against Sekhmet, Goddess of Consequences, to waste my energies worrying about things that are not under my control.

Come November 5th, either a new era of joy & comity shall begin, or we’ll all need to buckle down to save what we can of our national heritage. And… If we must live without hope, there is always vengeance.

Meanwhile, I refuse to let some of the smallest and vilest humans ever grown in right-wing petri dishes destroy my mental and physical health. Sometimes refusing to doompost is a very special form of resistance.

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