Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

The willow is too close to the house.

T R E 4 5 O N

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

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

Wait, what?

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Most of you should go to bed and try to be better Jackals in the morning.

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

Finding joy where we can, and muddling through where we can’t.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

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Another Thing We Need to Change As Soon As We Get the Reins Back

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The United States Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit (LIVE AUDIO)

I was appalled when I read this.

Judges Fired After Blocking Deportations of Pro-Palestinian Students

The immigration judges’ abrupt dismissals marked the latest efforts by the Trump administration to reshape the country’s immigration courts.

The Trump administration has fired two immigration judges who dismissed high-profile deportation cases against international students who had advocated for Palestinians.

The firings of the judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, marked the latest efforts by the Trump administration to reshape the country’s immigration courts.

The administration has dismissed dozens of immigration judges and, according to those on the bench, has put judges under pressure to deny asylum claims and order deportations. Unlike federal judges in the independent judicial branch, immigration judges work for the Justice Department and are hired and fired by the attorney general.

The two judges, who were terminated alongside four colleagues on Friday, oversaw two high-profile cases filed by the government against the students, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi.

If I ever knew that immigration judges are hired and fired by the A.G., I had forgotten it.  Maybe that wasn’t a problem in administrations that believe in the rule of law, but it sure as hell is a problem now.  I think this is one of the first things that needs to be changed.

The nation’s immigration courts are little known to the general public but have tremendous power. They are often the final stop before a person can be lawfully removed from the United States.

Before Mr. Trump returned to office, it was rare for immigration judges to be fired. His administration has so far dismissed more than 100 of them. In addition to the firings, the administration has hired more than 140 permanent and temporary judges seen as more aligned with Mr. Trump’s immigration enforcement campaign.

Both Ms. Patel and Ms. Froes fit the profile of many judges who have lost their jobs during the second Trump administration: They had been appointed by a Democrat and previously represented immigrants in court.

They also granted asylum at higher rates than other judges. Under Mr. Trump, Ms. Patel granted asylum in 41.5 percent of cases, while Ms. Froes granted asylum in 33 percent of cases, compared with 18 percent for judges overall, according to a New York Times analysis of immigration court data.

Another immigration judge was literally fired by email while she in the middle of an asylum hearing!

Thoughts on that and other things that need to be changed, pronto?   Can we make a list?

 

 

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Ruthless Yet Deeply Incompetent – Sound Familiar?

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Hope for Hungary.

For anyone following the final stretch of the Hungarian election campaign, the past weeks have been nothing short of bonkers. The stakes are sky high. The mood swings between a sense of inevitable opposition victory and fresh waves of horror at how far the regime is willing to go to cling to power. My steadiest source of hope these days: they are ruthless, yes—but also deeply incompetent.

As a constant background hum, there are reports of GRU-linked Russian fixers on the ground to help steal the election—patterns familiar from Moldova and Romania. Rumors of staged incidents, even fake assassination attempts against Orbán, make it into the Washington Post.

And hovering over everything: Orbán’s campaign, which has fully detached from reality. Anne Applebaum aptly called it “cognitive warfare on a new scale”. It is an unhinged, relentless rant about a completely fabricated enemy… Ukraine. Yes, our neighbor, making immeasurable sacrifices to resist a criminal invasion, has been recast as public enemy number one. Zelenskyy’s face is plastered across the country as if he were running against Orbán himself, fear is dialed up to maximum, and the messaging slides into something surreal. One AI-generated video shows a little girl asking where her father is—cut to the father being executed on the Ukrainian front.

This is the atmosphere in which the following unfolds.

Read the whole thing!  I had this article open in a tab, so I’m not exactly sure who to thank for the link.

Inside Hungary’s Election Meltdown

I am beginning to think that all of these corrupt leaders are egging each other on.  Not just “hold my beer” territory – more like “anything you can do, I can do better!”

Ultimately, though, maybe it’s as simple as “he gets away with it, surely I can, too”.   I think the correct spelling is GREED.

Rooting not just for injuries, but for consequences.

No fucking kings.

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Not Sure There’s a Word for Just How Abhorrent and Evil Louisiana Republicans Are

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The story, as I understand it, in just 65 words.

Black man wrongfully imprisoned for 28 years.

Exonerated!

Gets busy rebuilding his life.

Runs for office as Parish clerk.

Runs on pledging to reform the justice system.

Threats from the AG if he continues to speak about his innocence and exoneration.

Wins with 68% of the vote!

Duncan’s swearing in is scheduled for May 4.

Louisiana Senate Republicans vote on 4/8 to scrap Duncan’s new job.

I am livid.  It appears that this bill has passed the Louisiana Senate.  No mention of the LA House or a governor’s signature.

Hoping this gets stopped in its tracks.

h/t Jackie for bringing the story to my attention.

Louisiana GOP races to eliminate an elected office won by an exonerated man

*I first read the title as Louisiana GOP RACISTS to eliminate an elected office won by an exonerated man

I think my read on the title was more accurate.

Read the whole article if you want, but be sure to take your blood pressure medicine beforehand!

I can’t quite decide what his real crime is in Republican eyes:

  • That he fought the system and finally won after 28 years?
  • That he is still capable of joy?
  • That he wants to change the system?
  • That he doesn’t know his place?
  • That he didn’t shush when they told him to?
  • That he made the legal system, and his “betters”, look bad?
  • That their corrupt system is being challenged?
  • That their corruption might see the light of day as a result?

Fuck these people.  We need to win everywhere in November.

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Can We Just Call It the Epstein Visa? Einstein, She Is Not.

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Is it too much to hope that the Third Lady made her bizarre speech yesterday because the whole sordid story is about to come out?

I couldn’t recall the name of the woman – Amanda Ungaro – who was deported, so thought what the heck, maybe this will work, and I googled “baby mama deported”.   Up came all the articles!   I love that for Trump and the First Lady of the Night.

Anyway, I cannot believe that I am the first one to come up with the idea of referring to the Epstein Visa instead of the Einstein visa.  That’s what  my eyes see even when it literally says Einstein.  EPSTEIN.

Speaking of turns of phrase, someone in the comments yesterday suggested calling them Trumpists – or was it Trumpian? – instead of MAGA.

I prefer Trumpists, for two reasons:  First, they proudly wear the MAGA label, so they are proud of it. MAGA is only considered negative by our side.  Second, Trumpists makes it clear that they are Trump-worshiping fools.  Make them own it – It’s not about making America anything; it’s all about belonging to the Trump cult.

 

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All We Have Is Today, What Are We Going To Do With It?

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It would be an understatement to say that the awful reality we are facing today is scary and distressing.  We are most certainly going to have many more days like this between now and November,

But every day we are one step closer to the elections in November, and we cannot afford to simply hold our breath as we face the danger and uncertainty.  Keeping us off balance is a goal, and every day that we pause to hold our collective breath is one more day that this administration and its supporters are taking the fight to us.

I believe we have to find a way to keep working every day for the results we need in November.  And yes, somehow even as T pursues his fever dreams of world domination.  Otherwise, I think we face defeat by distraction.

Interesting times, indeed.

(Simon Rosenberg)

Morning all. I don’t know what’s going to happen today. Bomb Iran into the Stone Age…..some clumsy Trump delay or climb down….a diplomatic deal…..we will see. Whatever happens we know a few things – this war against Iran is illegal. Trump is spending hundreds of billions of dollars and doing enormous damage to America and the world without Congressional authorization. We still don’t understand why he’s done this – take the oil, regime change, kill bad guys, prevent nukes – other than as he told us in that infamous NYT interview there were no longer any checks on his power other than his “own mind” and thus could just do whatever he wanted, everywhere.

The problem of course, as we discussed yesterday in my post He Has Gone Insane, there is no longer an easy way out for him, out of this failed and unpopular disaster, one that may end up leaving Iran and Russia in charge of the Strait of Hormuz and thus in charge of the global economy itself. He may continue to fantasize that Iran will yield, as Maduro did, as Johnson and Thune have done here in the US, but at this point that is hard to imagine……

The war has weakened an American economy already weakening under Trump’s reckless policies. It has sent his poll numbers and the GOP’s electoral prospects in 2026 tumbling down. For weeks the national discourse assumed the war would be over quickly, easy peasy, like the strikes on Iran last year, and whatever short term pain felt by Americans and Republicans would soon ease. Things would just magically snap back to the way things were. This was always wishful thinking. The war has utterly changed the world, and will change our politics here in the US too, something both the discourse and Republicans are slowly waking up too.

The first sign of this new day was when Senator Thune defied Trump right before the Easter recess and passed an unanimous bill to fund DHS without ICE/CBP or the SAVE Act. It was such an unorthodox and panicky move that the next morning Speaker Johnson, perhaps shocked, breached Congressional protocol and mocked Thune, calling a bi-partisan bill passed unanimously to fund DHS – six months after Congress was required to do so – a “joke.”

Last Wednesday, in a highly unusual move, the Speaker, perhaps after a scary polling briefing from Thune’s team, reversed course and embraced the Thune bill, also defying Trump. Within hours it had become clear that the cowardly Speaker faced rebellion on his right for defying Trump and joining in with Thune and his new gambit may have already failed.

How to make sense of all this?

Yesterday, the Senate Republican SuperPAC announced a campaign to spend an extraordinary amount of money, $342 million, to defend their majority. More than two thirds of the money will be spent in the GOP held seats in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio. This was an admission from Senate Republicans that the election was indeed turning hard against them, and their majority was in peril.

It confirms the poll numbers we’ve been looking at here that showed Democrats now ahead in Alaska, Maine, North Carolina, and Ohio, and potentially competitive in Iowa and Texas too (let’s keep an eye on Florida). In DC everyone knew that fractured and broken House was likely to flip to the Democrats, but now we know that things have deteriorated so much for the Republicans that they are taking dramatic and perhaps unprecedented steps to protect a majority that up until a few days ago they maintained was not in danger.

This new $342m campaign is a sober acknowledgement of how much trouble the Republican Party is now in, and how given what we know, and the abject failure of the war, things are likely to get worse for them, potentially much worse. For what they are now dealing with is not just a deteriorating electoral environment, but the very real prospect of a failed Trump Presidency and the unraveling of the regime itself (consider the wild purges of recent weeks).

For as regimes collapse their actions that once appeared strong and righteous start to appear ridiculous. Trump has looked ridiculous these last few days. Vance’s stumping for Orban in Hungary looks ridiculous, not strategic. The budget Trump and Vought submitted to Congress last week was ridiculous, “a joke” to use Johnson’s phrase, something deeply unserious, outrageous, and perhaps even offensive to Congressional Republicans, let alone Democrats.

…

So I think something has changed fundamentally in Washington these last few weeks, and when Congress returns next week things will be different.

What do we do? Two thoughts:

1 – We have to learn from our success in fighting to rein in ICE and fight Trump on more fronts, more often, adopting something akin to the Hopium agenda as our north star. We cannot wait for January of next year to course correct from Trumpism, for the crisis we are now in is far too grave. We should lead and encourage the Republicans to follow.

2 – Recognize that the “whatever it takes” election we talk about here has begun. Despite their many manifest failures, Republicans and Trump are going to do “whatever it takes” to retain their power in Congress. Spend $342 million in the Senate races. Assemble an unprecedented number of oligarch funded SuperPACs to augment this spend. Attempt all types of chicanery and fuckery to prevent free and fair elections this November. It’s all coming my friends. While we can have the election we all want to have this is going to be an incredible dog fight not a cake walk.

We know the other side is going to do whatever it takes to win.  If we want to win, we have to do the same.  I think that includes staying in the fight even as we are holding our collective breath.

What are some things we can do today?

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Open Thread — The IOC: “Look, Over There!… “

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IOC reinstates chromosome testing, banning trans women from competition: defector.com/ioc-reinstat…

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— Defector (@defector.com) March 26, 2026 at 2:51 PM

Whenever the media shows any tendency to investigate the IOC’s myriad failures, the grifters & ticket-punchers have a diversion: Attack the smallest, most vulnerable potential competitors as a Threat To Our Precious Bodily Fluids Integrity. (And they even had a figurehead female official to make the announcement.) But they’re getting some pushback here, at last. Diana Moskovitz, at Defector

The International Olympic Committee announced Thursday that any athletes who do not pass a specific chromosome test will be banned from competition. This means that trans women will no longer be able to compete in the single largest showcase for women’s sports in the world, and neither will any women who test positive for having the SRY gene. The implementation of this policy could lead to similar bans elsewhere in sports, as athletic organizations often take their cues from the global sports powerhouse. The new rules will kick in for the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The 10-page policy doesn’t provide much detail on how and why the IOC, under the leadership Kirsty Coventry, the first female president in IOC history, reached its decision. The policy recaps a lot of closed-door bureaucracy with little explanation. Olympic leadership “conducted a broad-based review” of women’s sports. That leadership decided it needed a “working group.” The working group talked to a bunch of unnamed “specialists.” And the working group reported back to the IOC, which came up with the ban. The New York Times did name one person involved in the decision-making: Dr. Jane Thornton, a former Olympic rower and the medical and scientific director for the IOC, but the same article said the analysis presented by Thornton “has not been made public.”

So while the new policy makes many assertions—men have advantages over women in sports, all contact sports are more dangerous for women than men—there are few explanations given. No scientific papers are cited. No research is detailed. No citations or attribution can be found. There isn’t even a hyperlink. Everything is stated as fact. This includes a statement that “genetic screening for sex does not create significant problems in practice,” despite the entire history of gender testing creating problems in practice…

Also unaddressed in the IOC’s announcement is how this policy represents a solution in search of a problem. As reported by the Associated Press: “It is unclear how many, if any, transgender women are competing at an Olympic level. No woman who transitioned from being born male competed at the 2024 Paris Summer Games, though weightlifter Laurel Hubbard did at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 without winning a medal.”…

Even USA Today is calling this bullsh*t:

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Joyce Vance: An Inadvertent Release

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Two *longer reads to recommend, unless you have already read them.

Joyce Vance talks about the inadvertent release of materials related to the Jack Smith investigation, and Jamie Raskin writes a letter as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee.

Joyce Vance article

Jamie Raskin’s letter

*My idea of what I consider “long” has sadly been downgraded (upgraded?) because we are all being trained to have the attention span of a gnat.  Neither of those is long by the previous standard!

For an administration that is as evil as it is ruthless, and surely competent at the part that involves evil, I am at least grateful for the incompetence they display – which I believe they are displaying more and more.

Judge Cannon forbade the release of Jack Smith’s special report.  Oops, White House releases a key document!

Judge Aileen Cannon forbade it. There would be no release of Volume II of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report, the part that dealt with the discovery that Donald Trump kept classified documents, some at the Top Secret/SCI level, when he left the White House. When Smith testified before Congress, he carefully tailored his responses to avoid violating the court’s order.

But not so much the Trump White House. In what appears to be a sloppy but serious error, the administration released a document to Congress that MSNOW’s Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany reported on yesterday. They write, “In a January 2023 ‘progress memo’ reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.” Although the document isn’t publicly available, it sounds like the sort of reports agents and/or prosecutors might prepare for supervisors. This one contains some fascinating details.

The document was released as part of a regular document production DOJ has been making to Congress in support of the Republican inquiry into Smith. House Judiciary Democrats put it like this: “This particular production contained a memorandum detailing non-public information about the classified documents Trump stole when leaving office. The newly produced materials offer a startling view of evidence gathered by Special Counsel Jack Smith during his investigations into the criminal activity of President Trump, even as DOJ continues to suppress Volume II of his final report.”

First, is the hint at motive. Why did Trump do something so obviously criminal, and not do it particularly well? Why did he lie to DOJ officials when asked to return classified material they had learned was still in his possession? What was so important to the former president?

Jamie Raskin’s letter to the Attorney General

Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, slipped another interesting detail into a letter he wrote to AG Pam Bondi. “These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them.” That suggests a document of extraordinary sensitivity.

How did the memo come to light? Raskin explained it like this in the letter to Bondi: “Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith (despite constantly coming up empty-handed), you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon.”

The reporting so far doesn’t reveal precisely which Trump business interests are involved, but Raskin engages in some educated speculation in the letter, which involves a classified map Trump had. “Without access to Volume II of the Special Counsel’s final report or the investigative files, we do not know what that classified map contained, nor can we determine from this memo the relationship between the classified documents President Trump stole and their pertinence to his ‘business interests,’” Raskin acknowledged. He continued, however, “We do know that around the time of this flight to Bedminster, President Trump was entering into partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and state-linked real estate firm Dar al Arkan.”

Jamie Raskin’s conclusion in his letter to the AG

Raskin’s conclusion is stark because of what is going on today, years later. “If this map is related to our military posture in the Middle East,” he writes to Bondi, “and it was in fact shown to any foreign official, Saudi or otherwise, that would amount to an unforgiveable betrayal of our men and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran.” Raskin includes a list of questions for DOJ to respond to and demands that DOJ “cease cherry-picking investigative materials and produce all remaining investigative files, including memoranda, emails, and analyses prepared by the Special Counsel’s Office by 5:00 p.m. on April 14, 2026.” I suspect he’ll have even less luck with that than Congress has had obtaining the full Epstein files. But as with those files, public awareness and outcry is essential.

DOJ mistaked its way into providing information it has been desperate to withhold and has been able to keep from public view so far, with Judge Cannon’s help. But her decision is on appeal and a panel at the 11th Circuit will hear oral argument in June. That court could order the release of Volume II of the Special Counsel’s report and complete our understanding of the picture that is only hinted at here.

This one letter that has come to light reminds us that Jack Smith had a serious prosecution that was derailed, and not because it lacked merit. Recent reporting suggests that the Saudi’s continue to push the war in Iran. We have the implications of Raskin’s letter at hand. American lives are at stake in the Middle East, fighting a war that appears poorly thought out at best and likely to seriously impact the economy. The classified documents case, which Trump tried to dismiss and then delay, ultimately succeeding, reemerges as an extraordinarily serious matter.

I cannot wait until it all comes out.  Which it will.  Eventually.  Hopefully sooner than later.

 

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