Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

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

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Welcome to day five of every-bit-as-bad-as-you-thought-it-would-be.

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

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

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

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

Peak wingnut was a lie.

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

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

The lights are all blinking red.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,241: The Reasons

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A painting by Ukrainian artis NEIVANMADE. The background is white. In the center, which is black with blood red bordering, is an hourglass. Inside the hourglass is a Ukrainian Azovstal POW painted in blood red. He is shirtless. His arms are upward along the outer edges of the upper half of the hourglass forming a saltire cross. He is chained with steel gray chains shackled to his wrists. Above his head, in grey, is written "Ruzzian Captivity." below his torso in the lower half of the hourglass, written in gray, is "Kills." To the left of the hourglass "He Saved Others" is painted in gray. To the right of the hourglass "But He Can't Save Himself" is painted in gray.

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

The cost:

🫡🕯️🇺🇦 Odesa has suffered a heavy and irreparable loss: on Friday, July 18, while performing a combat mission on the front line, a legendary figure died – the president of the Odesa Aeroclub, chairman of the board of the Odesa Region Parachuting Federation, Konstantin Oborin.

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— Vitalis Viva (@vitalisviva.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 7:19 AM

🫡🇺🇦 In 2022, rising into the sky above Odesa, Konstantin Oborin fulfilled the last wish of his student, Hero of Ukraine Vladislav Buvalkin, to scatter his ashes over his native city. That same year, the mayor awarded Colonel Oborin the Order of Grigory Marazli, III degree.

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— Vitalis Viva (@vitalisviva.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 7:19 AM

16yo Tigran Ogannisian and Mykyta Khanhanov were posthumously awarded the Order of Freedom. The boys were brutally murdered by russian occupiers in Berdiansk. Their last words, recorded before execution, were: Glory to Ukraine!

Let the world remember their names. russian occupation is not peace.

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— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 12:09 PM

The reasons:

Ukrainian children share their heartfelt thanks to the brave soldiers defending their country.

📽️ bambilviv

United 24 Media / Instagram

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— Eugene McParland 🇺🇦 (@eugenemcparland.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 2:41 PM

🏆🇺🇦 Ukrainian veterans won gold at the World Dragon Boat Championships, beating Canada🍁💖 by just half a second!
“In the Ukrainian boat, there are guys without legs. Guys in wheelchairs. With serious injuries. With pain that cannot be seen—but it is there. They are determined to win.”

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— Vitalis Viva (@vitalisviva.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 5:24 PM

Usyk being awesome once again

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— Mira of Kyiv 🇺🇦 (@reshetz.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Undisputed. Our Champion! Congratulations Oleksandr , congratulations fellow Ukrainians! 🥊🏆

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 5:42 PM

🥊Usyk: I want to thank all the guys who are currently defending our country. I received many messages yesterday and today too. From the various units that defend my country on the front lines. Guys – Glory to Ukraine! You are incredible! You allow me to be here now.

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— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 6:33 PM

Usyk🥊
Ukrainian cossack🇺🇦

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— Iryna Voichuk (@irynavoichuk.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 5:52 PM

Usyk, a UNITED24 Ambassador, becomes two-time undisputed heavyweight champion

Ukrainian National Anthem, performed by Ukrainian singer Nadya Dorofeeva before the fight in London

United 24 Media / Instagram

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— Eugene McParland 🇺🇦 (@eugenemcparland.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 5:56 PM

It’s night in Ukraine. our usual wartime curfew, but just listen to how people are celebrating Usyk’s victory, each from their own home. This is how most apartment buildings in Ukraine sound tonight.

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) July 19, 2025 at 6:19 PM

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

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Amy Sherald, Unabashed Black Artist

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‘Amy Sherald’s more recent works have a winning clarity of composition: a single figure, thrown against a coloured background, and realised in such a way as to make us ask what it costs to present oneself with this degree of polish.’
Eleanor Nairne at the Whitney: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4…

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— London Review of Books (@lrb.co.uk) July 19, 2025 at 11:20 AM

I really envy the people who will be able to visit the Whitney Museum in NYC for this exhibit. Eleanor Nairne on “Amy Sherald’s Subjects“:

At his final​ White House Correspondents’ dinner, Barack Obama joked that he had been grizzled by the presidency while Michelle had barely aged a day. ‘She looks so happy to be here … That’s called practice. It’s like learning to do three-minute planks.’ Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama speaks to the effort of looking relaxed in the public eye, not least because, of all Sherald’s paintings currently on display at the Whitney survey of her work (until 10 August), it’s the only one behind glass and the only one with its own room and security guard. Sherald usually gives her works enigmatic titles – Well Prepared and Maladjusted; The Lesson of Falling Leaves – but here we have simply Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, three generations distilled into one persona.

Sherald was commissioned to paint the portrait in 2017, after the end of Obama’s second term. It was an intriguing choice at the time. She was in her early forties, had only recently been able to give up her job as a waitress and was barely known to the art world. Her painting career had been stalled by the need to care for ailing relatives and her own diagnosis of congestive heart failure (it isn’t often you see an organ donor thanked in a catalogue). Michelle’s husband, by contrast, picked for his portrait the artist Kehinde Wiley, who had already been the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum and whose work had sold to institutions including the Met.

Sherald’s star had begun to rise after she won the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian in 2016. The prize painting, Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance), is displayed in an early room at the Whitney and it gives a sense of why she might have had an edge over more established artists for the presidential commission. It shows a young woman, perhaps only a girl, wearing a polka-dot shift dress, white gloves and a red pillbox hat. She holds an oversized tea cup and saucer, lending a note of whimsy to the painting, but everything else suggests furious restraint. Sherald portrays her sitters with a particular tautness. She also has a feeling for vivid colour. Miss Everything is a vision in vermilion and turquoise. Sherald pays meticulous attention to the seams of her gloves and the pompom on her hat, but the girl’s skin is painted with shades of grey in what has become the artist’s signature technique: rendering Black skin as grisaille in order to make us think again about notions of colour and race. Like most of Sherald’s figures, Miss Everything casts an appraising look at the viewer. The overall effect is one of graphic self-possession.

Sherald almost always paints Black subjects, most of whom are strangers she approaches in the street. Together, they select an outfit from the sitter’s clothes (this is another key aspect of her work: her lively interest in the ways we fashion ourselves). Long before she was commissioned to paint a celebrity, Sherald understood that anyone who feels scrutinised in public is likely to use appearance as a kind of armour. After the clothes comes a photography session, which produces the source material for the painting – an image already shaped by hours of posing for the camera (it isn’t surprising that her portraits often feature on magazine covers)…

On entering the exhibition, the viewer immediately encounters a curved wall on which are hung five of Sherald’s most striking paintings, all the same size and placed unusually low: Sherald says she wants visitors to meet her subjects’ gaze. Every detail bristles with life: the fine halo of soft black fur against the salmon pink background in Mama Has Made the Bread (How Things Are Measured), the woven gold of the straw hat in Mother and Child – details that testify to Sherald’s fluency with her materials.

Alice Neel liked to say that she painted all of a person: ‘What the world has done to them and their retaliation’. The opposite might be said of Sherald: she seems less concerned with the bruised interior than with the exterior shell we create under duress. When Ta-Nehisi Coates edited an issue of Vanity Fair in September 2020, he commissioned Sherald to make a cover painting of Breonna Taylor, who had been killed by police earlier that year. Sherald worked with Taylor’s family to create an idealised portrait, a painting of her subject in the future conditional. This is Taylor the way she might have been and would have liked to have been seen, dressed to impress in shades of Tiffany turquoise with fabulous hair and an engagement ring that may have been on its way…

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Excellent Read: ‘William F. Buckley’s Bill Never Came Due’

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"'Buckley' is very clearly the result of slow thinking and methodical research, which makes it precisely the sort of work that its subject could never produce." defector.com/william-f-bu…

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— Defector (@defector.com) July 18, 2025 at 3:59 PM

Even if (like me!) you’re not a sports fan, Defector is absolutely worth price of a subscription. Political fads tend to age like a dead fish in the summer sun, and the National Review is a publication whose inception was as ludicrous as its current much-mocked state. Here’s Brandy Jensen with a book review:

Perhaps the highest praise I can offer a book that took 27 years to complete and runs over 1,000 pages is that I can see why, and that it doesn’t feel like it. Sam Tanenhaus’s extremely long and anxiously awaited biography of the man who founded National Review, and is often regarded as the architect of modern American conservatism, arrived with a resounding thud on my doorstep. There is no way that a book the size of Buckley: The Life and The Revolution that Changed America could arrive quietly. It is, in many ways, a remarkable accomplishment: exhaustive but not tiring, serious yet lively, both affectionate and suspicious. It is almost dizzyingly populated with recognizable characters—the result of Buckley’s famed and enormous social influence—which offers regular satisfaction both to readers who like knowing what Sylvia Plath thought of the Buckley family home, and ones who yearn to learn more about cranky Viennese ex-Leninists. Most of all, Buckley is very clearly the result of slow thinking and methodical research, which makes it precisely the sort of work that its subject could never produce.

William F. Buckley Jr. went for quantity instead. He wrote dozens of books, including non-fiction and a bestselling series of spy novels, both of which were mainly dashed off while on skiing vacations in Gstaad. He also produced three columns a week for decades, generated prodigious written correspondence, and appeared in 1,504 episodes of Firing Line, all while editing the magazine and accepting regular speaking gigs. For years, Buckley promised to write a serious work of political theory—he managed to produce thousands of words railing against his liberal enemies, but was ultimately thwarted by his inability to offer a coherent elaboration of what conservatives were really about…

For that deep thinking, Buckley relied on his frequent collaborator and brother-in-law, Brent Bozell, along with mentors like Whittaker Chambers (the subject of Tanenhaus’s previous, much-lauded work of biography) and protégés-turned-apostates like Garry Wills. These were the men with the ideas; Buckley provided the packaging, and a singular talent for holding together groups with potential disparate motivations under the banner of a revived conservative movement. Or, anyway, this is the received wisdom: Buckley the gatekeeper, yoking these headstrong types together in common cause while expelling more distasteful elements like the Birchers, in service to lacquering the American right-wing with a sheen of respectability. It is a strong brand, but it has some visible wear and age on it by now.

Buckley’s legacy has been somewhat troubled since Tanenhaus first began work on this book, years before the first episode of The Apprentice would air; reading it today, it’s tough to avoid the sense that Tanenhaus was caught in a bit of a bind. The man who gave us Reagan, as Buckley is often known, is a thorny enough historical consequence; Tanenhaus largely leaves alone the question of whether he paved the way for something worse. Reagan is elected president on page 824, and the remainder of Buckley’s life and legacy gets fewer than 50 pages. For all the minute attention paid to how Buckley did it, we are still left wondering what exactly he did.

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Saturday Late Morning Open Thread

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Warning: meandering post about nothing in particular, so feel free to skip to the comments.

Does anyone else have a Saturday morning routine?

I do.  But I don’t really have anything like that for the other days of the week.

I set my alarm so I can get to the farmer’s market that’s across town by 7 am.  I like it better when it’s quieter and before it gets hot.   That farmer’s market has the best sweet corn and fresh peaches, so I make sure to get those, and then whatever else strikes my fancy.  On the way home, I stop at the grocery store on the way home for whatever stray items I need to make whatever food I plan on making over the weekend,

The last stop is for fresh ciabatta and a local store.

Then at close to 10 am I head out again to the other farmer’s market where they have the best tomatoes and the best watermelon.

I have a million tomatoes on my 6 tomato plants, but they are all still green at this point.  I swore I would only get 4 plants this year, but I couldn’t help myself.  I bought 8, but I gave one away to my best friend and one to the great neighbor across the street.

It just started  raining, and I hope the weather report is correct that it will rain for the next 10 days.  I’ll take 90 – 105 degrees and rain any day, over 90 – 105 degrees and no rain.  It was most definitely not raining between the two farmer’s market trips when I was out fertilizing my annual flowers, dripping with sweat.

My back yard gets brutal sun, and with all the heat this year I couldn’t keep anything alive along the back of the porch, and all of my hydrangeas were so wilted every day, even with watering.  So on Thursday I put up some plant umbrellas.  I figured they would look dumb but I was tired of seeing my plants tortured.

Lo and behold, my hydrangea were happy in the heat yesterday, and my replacement plants by the porch didn’t fry.  The vinca were only $1.99 for 4 plants, so I didn’t feel too bad about ditching the dead ones and replacing them.  Everything that had an umbrella yesterday was totally happy.  I closed the umbrellas on the hydrangeas last night because we were supposed to get rain.

That’s probably enough rambling for now.

What’s everybody else up to?

 

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Everybody Needs A Hobby

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Dogs & their sticks: #AGoodPlace
Source: www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmil…

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— Michelle says: Be kind. Always. ?? (@snarkysillysad.bsky.social) June 24, 2025 at 3:47 PM

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Looming Epstein vote has Republicans eager to leave Washington.

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— Politico (@politico.com) July 17, 2025 at 12:44 PM

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trump is insanely unpopular and declining in popularity as more voters realize he was tied in with the most famous pedophile in US history. his power is propped up by two things: 1) corrupt control of the judiciary 2) conservative control of the information environment through media and social media

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— mtsw (@mtsw.bsky.social) July 18, 2025 at 11:10 AM

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"Hitler purging Jews from the civil service is just a distraction from him reoccupying the Rhineland."
"Hitler demanding Czechoslovakia is just a distraction from his euthanasia policies."
Nothing is "just a distraction". It's all just different parts of the same story.

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) July 18, 2025 at 7:39 PM


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The answer isn't to say "look at this tree not that one." It's to say "look at the forest".

— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) July 18, 2025 at 7:40 PM

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Raffle Tickets for Four Directions in Virginia – Please Check This List

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Raffle tickets are still available until Saturday evening at 7 pm.

In the meantime, f you donated through the thermometer to “buy” raffle tickets, please check this list and confirm that you are on it.

If you donated to buy a raffle ticket and you are not on this list, please chime in below and then send me an email message with your nym and the number of tickets.

Full details about the raffle, the auction, and the upcoming fundraising, check out this post.

Darkness Has a Hunger That’s Insatiable and Lightness Has a Call That’s Hard To Hear

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