Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

T R E 4 5 O N

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

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

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

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

“They all knew.”

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

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

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

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

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Open Thread: FBI Has A(nother) Suspect for Charlie Kirk’s Murder

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The thing that is hard to communicate is that that specific flavor of “brainrotted 4chan slug with incoherent beliefs” is also downstream of the right wing politics factories dumping glowing nuclear sludge into the river
there’s a reason nihilism has risen and it wears Rush Limbaugh’s face

— Ed (@ed3d.net) September 12, 2025 at 10:34 AM


 
The FBI has announced a ‘suspect’ for Charlie Kirk’s murder — third time’s a charm — and it looks like he might be, as the saying goes, Politically Incoherent. Per USAToday, “Here’s what we know about Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder”:

Authorities said they had Tyler Robinson, 22, from Utah, in custody this morning, Sept. 12, and have accused him of killing conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Kirk died after he was shot in the neck during a public appearance at Utah Valley University in Orem Utah on Sept. 10…

Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man who attended school in the south Utah city of St. George, was named as the suspected shooter. Robinson has no criminal history according to state records. Washington City, where Robinson’s family lives, borders the larger city.

Robinson is a registered voter in Utah, but does not have a party affiliation…

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told reporters that Robinson was taken into custody after a family member contacted a family friend, who then informed authorities that Robinson had “confessed to them or implied that he committed the incident.”…

Authorities tied him to the crime through a review of online messages, interviews with his family members and friends and surveillance video. The messages included some sent on Discord, a popular online chatting platform.

President Donald Trump, without naming Robinson, first announced his capture during a Friday morning appearance on Fox and Friends. Trump said that a minister was involved in identifying the suspect.

Neighbors of the Robinson family told USA TODAY that they attended the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whose members are colloquially known as Mormons…

Authorities said there were messages written on the fired casing and three unfired bullets found in the Mauser rifle allegedly used in the shooting.

The fired casing, according to Utah governor Spencer Cox, read, “Notices bulges OwO What’s This?” The phrase references an internet meme tied to animated videos and furry culture. OwO references an emoticon, and “what’s this?” denotes cuteness or curiosity. It’s frequently referenced by video game streamers.

Cox said that another read, “Hey fascist! Catch!” The casing also had a series of arrows that pointed up, right, down, down, and down in reference to a cooperative shooter video game called Helldivers 2. The input is the code for an airstrike. It has morphed into a meme and is used to imply a devastating reaction to something that should be destroyed.

The third unfired casing, according to Cox, said, “If you’re reading this, you’re gay LMAO.”…

More at the link. It’s nice that we can still count on a (suspected) killer’s family and acquaintances to turn them in, because it seems like the current FBI leadership might not be up to the job.

Also, it sounds like Robinson might be another one of the social-media-poisoned ‘spree killers’ Charlie Warzel discussed in the Atlantic last week as ‘performing for one another’.

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Weird Times: Who Are the Audience for ‘Spree Killers’?

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The shooter who killed two children and injured 21 others at a Minneapolis church was seen on video visiting a suburban gun shop the weekend before the attack.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) September 5, 2025 at 12:30 AM

… Krause stressed that nothing in Westman’s conduct raised any concerns among his staffers, who he said are trained to watch for warning signs.

“This person said all the right things, they checked all the right boxes, asked all the questions, they were friendly, talkative, making jokes, laughing, knowledgeable about guns, handled a lot of guns that were not the type of guns you would think are of the interest of somebody looking to do a mass shooting,” Krause told the AP.

Krause said his employees have extensive experience in picking out bad actors, straw purchasers, people who are homicidal, suicidal, mentally unstable or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. He said nothing stood out with Westman.

“We’re still going over it,” Krause said. “We’re still scratching our heads thinking, ‘What did we miss? What could we have done?’ But it always ends with the answer of ‘nothing.’ There was just nothing there. And that’s what makes this situation so unique.”…

The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another www.theatlantic.com/technology/a…

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— Jennifer Ouellette (@jenlucpiquant.bsky.social) September 4, 2025 at 5:04 PM

Charlie Warzel, at the Atlantic, suggests “The Mass Shooters Are Performing for One Another” [gift link]:

Last week, a 23-year-old opened fire outside a church at a Minneapolis Catholic school, killing two children and injuring 19 other people before dying by suicide. Just a few hours later, the shooter’s YouTube videos began to circulate online. In one, the shooter shows off an arsenal of weapons and ammunition laid out on a bed. The killer laughs and offers a stream-of-consciousness monologue. “I didn’t ask for life,” they say, the camera focused on the shooter’s vape. “You didn’t ask for death.”…

… The video was picked apart by people looking for some hints as to the shooter’s motivation or politics. Some right-wing influencers and MAGA-friendly news outlets seized on the killer’s gender identity, insinuating that the shooting had something to do with them being trans. Others fixated on the message about killing Trump and suggested the killer was a deranged liberal. Some left-leaning commentators seized upon the anti-Semitic scrawlings and racial slurs and said the killer was clearly a neo-Nazi.

But the rush to make sense of the shooting based on these messages and symbols is misguided. As incoherent, unhinged, or even cringey as the Minneapolis shooter’s videos might seem, they are part of a familiar template of terroristic behavior—one that continues to spread in online communities dedicated to mass shootings and other forms of brutality. In these morbid spaces, killers are viewed as martyrs, and they’re dubbed “saints.” Really, they’re influencers.

These disaffected communities live on social networks, message boards, and private Discords. They are populated by trolls, gore addicts, and, of course, aspiring shooters, who study, debate, and praise mass-shooting tactics and manifestos. Frequently, these groups adopt the aesthetics of neo-Nazis and white supremacists—sometimes because they are earnestly neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and sometimes because it’s the look and language that they’re cribbing from elsewhere. It’s always blurry, but it usually amounts to the same thing. In an article published by this magazine last year, Dave Cullen, author of the book Columbine, summed it all up: “As you read this, a distraught, lonely kid somewhere is contemplating an attack—and the one community they trust is screaming, Do it!”…

To understand the dynamics at play here, I spoke at length with Alex Newhouse, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies online extremism. He told me that the “proximate goal of these attacks is to entrench the shooter in the broader legacy of violence and propel the legacy further.” The idea, in other words, is to motivate someone else to become a shooter—by creating a public manifesto, leaving a trail of digital evidence, and even livestreaming attacks in some cases. “The more frequently the template shows up, the more likely it will repeat,” Newhouse said. “It’s not ideological in the sense that we tend to think about it. There may be anti-Semitic or fascistic elements therein, but the real incentive is the self-reinforcing legacy of these shooters.”…

Much more at the link.

Meanwhile… speaking of ‘trolls, gore addicts, and… aspiring shooters’:

Inside the gun absolutists’ bold plot to repeal one of America’s strongest firearms laws

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— The Guardian (@theguardian.com) September 5, 2025 at 12:05 PM

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Monday Morning Open Thread

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AI-driven nature apps are changing how people engage with wildlife on their hikes.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) August 28, 2025 at 3:00 PM

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I can remember when fans could barely interest even local media into covering the biggest pop-cult conventions…

Comic-Con Africa has drawn tens of thousands of fans to Johannesburg.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) August 31, 2025 at 2:00 AM

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Exactly. Whatever the problem is – and every state, red and blue, has plenty of problems – dictatorship is not the answer.

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) August 31, 2025 at 11:39 AM

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Honestly Trump being too old & sick to talk to reporters serves my purposes almost as well as him kicking it. "What if Trump was president & it wasn't any fun" is a pretty good summary of why the press hated COVID & I am very happy to bring that back

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) August 31, 2025 at 10:36 PM

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In Donald Trump's America consumers have fewer choices at higher prices thanks to increased taxes on imported goods. www.nbcnews.com/business/bus…

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— Adam J Schmidt (@adamjschmidt.bsky.social) August 29, 2025 at 11:03 AM

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University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index was 74.0 in December, now 58.2 in August. Conference Board’s consumer confidence index was 104.7, now 97.4. Government officials shouldn’t go on TV and blatantly lie like this.

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) August 31, 2025 at 11:36 AM

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Pope Leo XIV denounced the “pandemic of arms, large and small,” as he prayed publicly for the victims of the shooting during a Catholic school Mass in the United States.

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— The Associated Press (@apnews.com) August 31, 2025 at 5:00 PM

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Domestic Terrorism Open Thread: The Shooting At the CDC (Friday)

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Feels like this tragic incident got overshadowed at the end of last week…

My statement on today's shooting at the CDC:

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— Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock (@warnock.senate.gov) August 8, 2025 at 11:08 PM

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CDC employees told me the shooting at CDC was much worse than initial police reports suggested. More than 40 bullets hit buildings. “It’s a miracle more people weren’t hit,” said one staffer who was locked down in a building for hours last evening.

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— Lena Sun (@lenasun.bsky.social) August 9, 2025 at 7:49 PM

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Some CDC staff say that they have long feared the day that escalating animosity toward the agency would culminate in actual violence, @landmanspeaking.bsky.social reports:

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— The Atlantic (@theatlantic.com) August 9, 2025 at 11:10 PM

Per the Atlantic, “‘I’m Actually Surprised It Didn’t Happen Sooner’” [gift link]:

… This was, in one sense, the first attack of its kind on the CDC. The shooter, whom law-enforcement officials have identified as Patrick Joseph White, a 30-year-old resident of an Atlanta suburb, was reportedly fixated on the idea that the COVID-19 vaccine had made him depressed and suicidal. No employees were injured by the bullets that entered the buildings, according to a CDC representative. But an Atlanta police officer named David Rose was shot and later died from his injuries. White, too, was found dead—fatally shot—at the scene. (It is not yet clear if his wound was self-inflicted or if he was killed by police.) When he took aim at the agency on Friday afternoon, he was near a corner where a lone man stands holding anti-vaccine signs nearly every day, several CDC staffers told me.

In another sense, public-health workers have been facing escalating hostility since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. In 2020, armed protesters gathered on the Ohio Health Department director’s front lawn, and the chief health officer of Orange County, California, was met with death threats after issuing a mask mandate. She had to hire extra security and was eventually driven to resign. Anthony Fauci, who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the country’s initial COVID response, has faced regular death threats since 2020. Nearly a third of state, local, and tribal public-health workers reported facing some sort of workplace violence in a 2021 survey.

Last year, Fauci told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that threats of violence to public-health workers correlate with verbal attacks from high-profile politicians and media personalities. “It’s like clockwork,” he said. In the second Trump administration, those attacks have become commonplace—the very selling points, even, that have helped a number of President Donald Trump’s health appointees gain their positions. In 2024, when announcing his own pick for CDC director, Trump maligned the CDC and other federal health agencies, accusing them of having “engaged in censorship, data manipulation, and misinformation.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was already a longtime anti-vaccine activist when he took the mantle as America’s health secretary; he has compared vaccinating children to the abuses of the Catholic church. During his own 2024 presidential run, he promised to “clean up the cesspool of corruption at CDC.”…

The shooter appears to have brought five guns to the scene, and at least four federal buildings were struck by dozens of bullets overall. In the hours immediately after the shooting, while many CDC employees remained barricaded in offices and marooned in conference rooms, they heard nothing from Kennedy or Trump….

To the CDC employees I spoke with, the sluggish response is the latest episode in the administration’s escalating abandonment of the agency. Since January, the Trump administration has hit the CDC with massive layoffs, proposed halving its budget, and forced changes to internal policies governing the fundamentals of its scientific work. Earlier this year, Kennedy purged the committee that advises the CDC on vaccine recommendations. Just this week, he canceled nearly $500 million in federally funded research on mRNA vaccines—widely considered among CDC employees and public-health experts to be the greatest domestic triumph of the U.S. pandemic response—stating incorrectly that they cause more risk than benefit against the flu and COVID…

Even people who have volunteered for risky missions in their public-health work are still getting used to the idea that the danger has arrived at the home front. “I’ve put my life on the line for this agency, responding to outbreaks in some of the most dangerous parts of the world,” a 13-year veteran of the agency told me. “I didn’t expect to face the same risks at the Atlanta campus as I faced in South Sudan.”

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Thursday Evening Open Thread: Live By the Paladin Fantasy…

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The man who tried to shoot up Comet Pizza 8 years ago was killed in a confrontation with police on Monday.

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— Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 4:18 PM

He was clearly not a well man, more shame to the monsters & grifters who manipulated decades of Hillary-hate to send him haring off to a DC pizza parlor. From the local Charlotte Observer, “‘Pizzagate’ gunman fatally shot by police outside Charlotte in traffic stop”:

The Salisbury man who died Monday after he was shot by two Kannapolis police officers over the weekend was the ‘Pizzagate’ gunman arrested in Washington, D.C., in 2016 after he terrified people with a loaded AR-15 inside a restaurant.

Edgar Maddison Welch, the man killed, made national headlines in 2016 when he entered Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C., armed with an assault rifle and loaded revolver. He drove from Salisbury to the nation’s capital in search of an alleged child sex ring linked to Hillary Clinton — something he learned about from a fake news story, The Washington Post reported.

Around 10 p.m. Saturday, Welch was sitting in the passenger seat of a gray 2001 GMC Yukon when an officer pulled it over near Cannon Boulevard, a Kannapolis Police Department press release said Thursday.

The officer recognized the vehicle, having arrested Welch in the past, and knew he had an outstanding warrant for his arrest for a felony probation violation, police said. The press release said the officer spoke with the vehicle’s driver and recognized Welch in the passenger seat as two more officers arrived. The officer that pulled the vehicle over then moved to the front passenger seat where Welch was sitting to arrest him. But when he opened the door, Welch pulled out a handgun from his jacket and pointed it at the officer, police said.

The arresting officer and a second officer at the scene shot Welch after he refused orders to drop his gun…

Sidebar: Can’t say I’m impressed by the general tenet of the BlueSky responses to this. Not to defend Welch’s behavior, but the ‘kinder, gentler, more thoughtful’ vows about decorum on this new platform don’t seem to have survived contact with People We Don’t Like. Peril of rapid expansion, I guess.

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Late Night Open Thread: Retreat of the Gun Groups?

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I, for one, am just as happy that the professional gun humpers have decided Trump is a sunk cost — it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they retreated from politics entirely (fat chance). In my wildest dreams, maybe they’ve actually been spooked, not only by the implosion of the NRA, but by the increasing willingness of survivors and municipalities to hold gun sellers and ‘innocent’ parents / families / law enforcement agencies liable for mass shooting events…

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Come the Dawn Open Thread: What the ‘Kids’ Remember

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It’s not just the Sandy Hook survivors; there’s a whole generation of kids who’ve been subjected to school shooter drills because the ‘adults’ in charge love their guns more than they love their children. Per NBC News, “The first graders who survived Sandy Hook will vote in their first presidential election”:

Grace Fischer survived the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School by staying quiet and huddled, as her first grade teacher softly read “The Nutcracker.”

Then she spent the rest of her childhood watching mostly from the sidelines as dozens of similar shootings shattered other schools across the country.

Now 18, Fischer will vote in her first presidential election in November. It’s a monumental moment, nearly 12 years after she endured one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, and it has given her and her peers hope that they can effect change…

Activists at the time hoped the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, would become a watershed moment and spark significant legislative action, said Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, the gun safety group founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords — a shooting survivor.

“The country was forced to look at this issue in a visceral, terrible way,” Brown said. “The loss of all of those kids in their classroom was so inconceivable and so horrific that even the politicians and the folks who had been trying to act like this wasn’t a growing problem in this country were unable to deny it for the first time.”…

States have since passed hundreds of gun-safety laws, but major federal bills that have been proposed, including bans on semiautomatic weapons and high-capacity magazines, have failed…

Friday marked 20 years since the 1994 federal assault weapons ban expired. Meanwhile, mass shootings have become more frequent…

On Thursday, the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions said guns were the leading cause of death among children and teens, killing more people ages 1 to 17 in the U.S. than car crashes and cancer, for the third year in a row.

“We were told this would be what turns everything around,” said Emma Ehrens, 18, who was next to the Sandy Hook gunman as he shot her classmates. “It really breaks your heart a little bit more every time.”

Ehrens, Fischer and two other first grade Sandy Hook survivors who spoke to NBC News said they are hoping to turn the tide by electing Vice President Kamala Harris as president.

“It’s a no-brainer for me,” said survivor Lilly Wasilnak, 18.

The teens first met Harris at the White House on National Gun Violence Awareness Day on June 6, as they were preparing to graduate high school. They shared their individual accounts of the shooting with Harris, who thanked them for their courage.

“None of you should have had the experience that you’ve had at all,” Harris told them, according to a video released by the White House. “Know that you guys are moving the needle.”

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