Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

This country desperately needs a functioning Fourth Estate.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

It could be worse. Vance could have said “post-menopausal sows.” Waiting for that audiotape to surface.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

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

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

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

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

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

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

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

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

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Something Good Open Thread

Monday Night Open Thread: Happy Thought

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Just saw Alex Wagner interview Angelo Curosone RE palace intrigue at Fox & the strong possibility the other three Murdoch children in the family trust might overpower Lachlan & change the direction of the entire corporation, including Fox News, & now I may be more eager for Rupert to kick than Trump

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 10, 2024 at 9:28 PM

Backstory, per the Guardian:

A Nevada court dealt nonagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch a major blow on Monday. And one that could – potentially – shatter his plans to secure his rightwing legacy.

Behind closed doors, Murdoch has been involved in a legal battle for control of the family’s media assets, pitching the mogul and Lachlan Murdoch, his political protege and heir apparent, against the patriarch’s three other oldest children.

The battle isn’t about money – it’s about power. The senior Murdoch wanted to change the family’s trust to ensure that Lachlan, CEO of Fox Corporation and chairman of News Corp, would control the empire after his death rather than sharing power with his siblings James, Elisabeth and Prudence…

The spat will not end here but by failing to secure his eldest as his rightwing successor, Murdoch now faces the prospect that following his death – more liberal Murdochs may want a say in the the content flowing from what is now the world’s most powerful conservative media empire.

That Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the Sun, the Australian and others under the News Corp umbrella could move in a different political direction would be bad for business, as Murdoch’s attorneys are believed to have argued in court. Fox News is the most-watched cable news show in the US and reported revenues of $14bn for fiscal year 2024. But while that may or may not happen, the business won’t benefit from replacing a media titan like Murdoch with squabbling siblings.

“This is the end of News Corp,” said a former high-level Murdoch lieutenant speaking on condition of anonymity. “The whole point is that unless one person runs it they can’t make decisions so they will fight over the direction of Fox News. Who is the editor of the Wall Street Journal? It will be controlled by the kids, become directionless, and lose its rightwing focus,”…

Just losing this fight can’t have been good for the old man’s blood pressure, either, I’m thinking.

Open for debate, if you’re squeamish about karma, but…

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Rebuilding the Cathedral of Notre Dame

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The whole of Western society has enjoyed this transformation–more or less–over the past 50 years, thanks to anti-pollution efforts & the marginalization of cigarette smoking. But we are apparently blind to all the ways our lives are better than they've ever been before

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— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) December 5, 2024 at 6:06 PM

Notre Dame's reopening will begin with an archbishop's knock on the doors. Here's what comes next

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— Associated Press ?? (@asssociatedpress.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 12:23 AM

The reopening this weekend of Notre Dame is a succession of ceremonies to breathe life back into the iconic cathedral and celebrate the recovery from its devastating fire in 2019.

Forecasts of stormy winds forced a late change in plans Friday, moving all of Saturday’s events indoors. Still, the weekend’s high points are expected to be the ritualized reopening of the cathedral’s massive doors, the reawakening of its thunderous organ and the celebration of the first Mass. For both France and the Catholic Church, the televised and tightly scripted ceremonies will be an opportunity to display can-do resilience and global influence…

During part one of Notre Dame’s rebirth on Saturday evening [2pm EST], Archbishop Laurent Ulrich will lead more than 1,500 guests through a reopening service. Part two, on Sunday, is an inaugural Mass, with special rites to consecrate the main altar.

On Saturday, Ulrich will first reopen Notre Dame’s great doors — by tapping them with his crosier, or bishop’s staff.

The staff was created for the occasion by designer Sylvain Dubuisson. The wood — bearing visible black traces from the blaze — came from pieces of the cathedral roof that collapsed in the inferno, Dubuisson told The Associated Press.

In response to the archbishop’s door-knocks, the cathedral will erupt into song, its choirs once again filling the cavernous spaces.

That back-and-forth will happen three times and the doors will then open…

The voice of Notre Dame’s great organ hasn’t been heard in public since the blaze coated the nearly 8,000 pipes with toxic dust released when the lead roofing burned.

After the door-opening rites, Ulrich will reawaken the giant instrument. He’ll address it directly with a series of eight incantations, starting with “Awaken, organ, sacred instrument: Sing the praise of God.”

That prompt will launch a conversation with the organ, with four organists (Olivier Latry, Vincent Dubois, Thibault Fajoles and Thierry Escaich) taking turns to play its responses.

They’ll be perched high above the congregation, seated at the newly renovated giant console that controls the instrument — through five keyboards of 56 notes each, foot pedals for 30 notes, and 115 stops…

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Successful Cat Rehoming Thread: Ms. Bunny Is Settling Down in Seattle

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Successful Cat Rehoming Thread: Ms. Bunny Is Settling Down in Seattle

An update from CCKids:

Satby asked that I send pics of Ms. Bunny to you when she had settled in from her scary plane/car experience on Tuesday. So here goes!

Ms. Bunny spent the first 36-48 hours straight-up hiding. She was back in a corner behind a desk and tower computer; I could lay on the floor on one hip, with an arm fully extended and stroke her a bit, and she’d even lean her head into my hand for scritches, but there is a short limit to my spine’s tolerance for that position.

By Thursday, though, she had moved to a more accessible hiding spot, under a dresser that’s missing its bottom drawer. If I sat by it and talked to her, she’d peek out but didn’t emerge until I tried a suggestion from Laurel, her former person’s daughter, and asked if she wanted to be brushed. And that brought her out. This makes her unique in my pet experience!

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Friday was much the same, a gradual growth of trust, which sadly was violated when my landlord showed up to change my CO2 detector. Ms. Buns did not approve, and wedged herself behind a tall, heavy, FULL bookcase. After a few hours, it seemed that she was stuck, so I emptied it & shifted it enough so she could get out. Back to full-on under the bed hiding.

BUT, it seems that all my effort spent in furniture moving paid off, because Saturday when I called her name, she immediately came out, asking for pets & generally being super lovey. To my great surprise, when I fell asleep with a book Sat. night, I woke up to find her snuggled at my side. She’s a darling girl, and I’m so happy to have her here!

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Thank you Satby, for all your care and efforts. You’re fantastic!

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I think we can all agree that Satby — and CCKids — are fantastic!

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Happy Birthday, President Carter

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This is excellent… James Fallows, who was a speechwriter for Carter back in the 1970s, on “Jimmy Carter: Unlucky President, Lucky Man”:

… Americans generally know Jimmy Carter as the gray-haired retiree who came into the news when building houses or fighting diseases or monitoring elections, and whose political past became shorthand for the threadbare America of the 1970s. Most of today’s Americans had not been born by the time Carter left office in 1981. About one-fifth are old enough to have voted when he won and then lost the presidency. It is hard for Americans to imagine Jimmy Carter as young—almost as hard as it is to imagine John F. Kennedy as old.

But there are consistent accounts of Carter’s personality throughout his long life: as a Depression-era child in rural Georgia, as a hotshot Naval Academy graduate working in Hyman Rickover’s then-futuristic-seeming nuclear-powered submarine force, as a small businessman who entered politics but eventually was forced out of it, as the inventor of the modern post-presidency.

What these accounts all stress is that, old or young, powerful or diminished, Jimmy Carter has always been the same person. That is the message that comes through from Carter’s own pre-presidential campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, and his many post-presidential books, of which the most charming and revealing is An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood. It is a theme of Jonathan Alter’s insightful biography, His Very Best. It is what I learned in two and a half years of working directly with Carter as a speechwriter during the 1976 campaign and on the White House staff, and in my connections with the Carter diaspora since then.

Whatever his role, whatever the outside assessment of him, whether luck was running with him or against, Carter was the same. He was self-controlled and disciplined. He liked mordant, edgy humor. He was enormously intelligent—and aware of it—politically crafty, and deeply spiritual. And he was intelligent, crafty, and spiritual enough to recognize inevitable trade-offs between his ambitions and his ideals. People who knew him at one stage of his life would recognize him at another.

Jimmy Carter didn’t change. Luck and circumstances did…

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Unexpected Respite Open Thread: To Save the Birds…

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Because even a DC journo is capable of growth and grace… Dana Milbank, at the Washington Post — “To save the birds, I’m killing my farm” [gift link]:

Not long after I bought a dilapidated farm in the Virginia Piedmont, I was surprised to learn that it came with its own farmer.

For years, a cattle farmer from up the road, a salt-of-the-earth guy named Travis, rode his big John Deere over and cut the hayfields in late spring and then again in early fall. The arrangement, common out here, works for both parties: The farmers get hay for their cows, and the landowners get their fields mowed for free.

But this summer, I delivered bad news to Travis. I asked him not to cut most of my fields and paid him so he could buy his hay elsewhere. For decades — perhaps a couple of centuries — this has been pastureland and hayfields. But no longer.

Now, this place is for the birds.

I’ve begun turning the hayfields into pollinator meadows of wildflowers and native grasses, with the goal of providing food and cover for grassland and shrubland birds, as well as for all the other critters who need these biomes to live.

These birds desperately need a break. A landmark study for Science in 2019 found that bird populations in the United States are down by nearly one-third over the last 50 years, the equivalent of removing 3 billion birds from our skies, because they’ve lost their habitat to development and their food sources to the overuse of pesticides. Birds are an indicator species — it’s much easier to see and hear them than, say, amphibians and small mammals — so it’s likely that other critters are declining similarly as our planet hurtles into a crisis of shrinking biodiversity and accelerating extinction…

Before humans began their meddling, grasslands and shrublands were created by natural disturbances such as fires, windstorms, landslides, insect infestations, beavers and bison that turned portions of forest into meadows and the like. These areas, technically known as early successional habitats, would gradually revert to forest, but for a decade or two would provide temporary havens for the creatures that thrive in grasslands and shrublands. Now, however, people have disrupted that process of natural disturbance, mostly by suppressing forest fires. Forests remain forests, and cleared areas for homes, industry, farms and manicured lawns offer little food or shelter for birds.

“Nobody actually creates this shrubland on purpose,” Rosenberg observes. Yet that is what I am about to do…

It’s not easy to convert hayfields into bird-friendly meadows. You have to kill off the fescue and other non-native grasses, fight off the invasive weeds that will try to spread into the fields, and drill in the seeds of native grasses and forbs. Then, every couple of years, you have to level the meadow with prescribed burning or mechanical means to prevent it from growing into forest, thereby mimicking what happened in nature for thousands of years before humans messed everything up.

Creating these shrublands isn’t cheap, and there are all kinds of ways in which it can go wrong. But, for the sake of the birds and the other creatures of the fields, I’ve begun the process — on a wing and a prayer.

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: An Underrated Miracle Drug

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Seriously!

Per NPR, “U.S. overdose deaths plummet, saving thousands of lives”:

For the first time in decades, public health data shows a sudden and hopeful drop in drug overdose deaths across the U.S.

“This is exciting,” said Dr. Nora Volkow, head of the National Institute On Drug Abuse [NIDA], the federal laboratory charged with studying addiction. “This looks real. This looks very, very real.”

National surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already show an unprecedented decline in drug deaths of roughly 10.6 percent. That’s a huge reversal from recent years when fatal overdoses regularly increased by double-digit percentages.

Some researchers believe the data will show an even larger decline in drug deaths when federal surveys are updated to reflect improvements being seen at the state level, especially in the eastern U.S.

“In the states that have the most rapid data collection systems, we’re seeing declines of twenty percent, thirty percent,” said Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, an expert on street drugs at the University of North Carolina.

According to Dasgupta’s analysis, which has sparked discussion among addiction and drug policy experts, the drop in state-level mortality numbers corresponds with similar steep declines in emergency room visits linked to overdoses…

It’s a hard stat to brag about, because every story gets bombarded with comments about ‘spending taxpayer dollars to keep worthless addicts alive’ and ‘it wouldn’t be necessary if not for Demon-crat’s open border policy.’ But fewer dead community members is a good thing. And a lot of those ‘worthless eaters’ have family and friends who are also voters, so there’s got to be ways to point that out, yes?

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Something Pleasant Dawn Open Thread: ‘Kamala’s First Gentleman’

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John Heilemann, at Puck:

Long before Doug Emhoff became our nation’s first-ever second gentleman, and even before he married a woman who now has even odds of becoming the first female president of the United States (and, yes, also the first Black and South Asian female president…), he was a superstar entertainment litigator whose nickname at his Los Angeles firm was “the Smiling Assassin.” Indeed, if the nation is still trying to figure out who, exactly, Kamala Harris is, the same is exponentially more true of Emhoff.

In this candid and lightly edited interview, which has been excerpted from today’s full episode of Impolitic With John Heilemann, we discussed his trajectory from uber-lawyer to political super-spouse, the budding somethingship between Donald Trump and Laura Loomer, the feminism of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, and much more…

John Heilemann: Tell me about your speech at the convention. You had been a political spouse, and you’ve given your fair share of speeches, but this was a whole different thing.

Doug Emhoff: I knew I had to really dig deep. Of course, prior to [Biden dropping out of the race], I was preparing to maybe speak, and maybe have some role introducing [Kamala]. Then when she got to the top of the ticket, they said, Well, now you have a bigger role. And then they told me that I was going on primetime Tuesday night with the Obamas. I was like, You mean Michelle and Barack Obama? …

Really, you’re there as a window into your wife, the nominee. And right now, if you look at the polling, people who haven’t decided say, We need to know more about her. I’m curious about the challenge that presents.

We thought a lot about how to bust through the caricature of her. There was such a false view of her that was out there. So part of it is like, Here’s the Kamala Harris that I know—the joyful warrior. She’s a mother to the kids, she’s a massive part of our family, she’s always been there for us, she’s going to be there for you. She’s been in the Oval Office, she’s been on the world stage. She’s ready to lead on day one, and she’s a badass. I had to get all that out in 12 short minutes, and a little bit about myself, too…

In D.C., political perceptions are filtered through the media for good and ill. Is it gratifying to see the world catch up with what you’ve always seen?

It’s a testament to her, her character and diligence. All this chattering-class bullshit and the media never affected her. It never got her down. She just kept going, and that’s why you’re seeing her be what she is right now.

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