Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Dear legacy media: you are not here to influence outcomes and policies you find desirable.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

Find someone who loves you the way trump and maga love traitors.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

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

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

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Open Thread: ‘Look, Everyone Dies’

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As I've written, Democrats face long odds in all of Iowa's statewide races in 2026, because of the structure of Iowa's electorate & the longstanding GOP turnout advantage in midterms.
www.bleedingheartland.com/2025/06/15/r…
But an open seat would be less of a long shot.

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— Laura Belin (@laurarbelin.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 4:54 PM

Per Politico, “Joni Ernst is the next GOP senator on retirement watch”:

… The two-term Iowa senator hasn’t officially announced her plans for 2026, and she’s gone through some of the motions of launching another campaign, including recently hiring someone to manage it and announcing her annual fall fundraiser.

But three people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions said there is rising concern among fellow Senate Republicans that Ernst will retire rather than run for reelection, giving Republicans another seat to defend next fall.

Many will be watching closely for clues next week when Ernst files new campaign fundraising totals. She raised just over $1 million in the first quarter of 2025, a solid but not overwhelming number for an in-cycle senator.

Asked about the senator’s 2026 plans, Ernst spokesperson Palmer Brigham declined to say definitively that she would run again: “Senator Ernst is focused on her work delivering for Iowans in the Senate to make Washington ‘squeal,’ making President Trump’s historic tax cuts permanent through the One Big Beautiful Bill, and advancing a strong NDAA.”

Ernst has told people as recently as the past month that she is still considering whether she wants to run again, according to a fourth person granted anonymity to discuss the matter…

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Odds & Ends (Open Thread)

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These are truly depraved and despicable people, and if I saw them in the jaws of a gator, I’d throw the reptile some tartar sauce. Or maybe cocktail sauce. I’m not sure which condiment best complements turds.

Ron DeSantis talked to Jesse Watters tonight on Fox about Florida’s Everglades concentration camp and between the smirking and mocking, Fox played video of gators feasting.

They’re just really, really garbage humans…all of ’em.

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— SFDB (@sfdb.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 9:33 PM

Seriously, fuck those clowns.

Also, can it be possible that dawn is breaking on Marblehead?

Gallup has new polling on immigration. Topline findings:
-Americans hate Trump’s immigration policy (35% approve, 62% disapprove)
-Share who say immigration is a “good thing” for the country just hit an all-time high (79%)

news.gallup.com/poll/692522/…

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— Catherine Rampell (@crampell.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 8:09 AM

So all it took was weeks of watching masked goons roll into U.S. cities in troop carriers to round up gardeners, nannies and grandmas? Jesus, what a deeply stupid country.

Open thread.

Odds & Ends (Open Thread)Post + Comments (141)

War for Ukraine Day 1,232: The Cost

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A painting by NEIVANMADE> In the center of the painting is a green swing set. It is over a targeting reticle with the red dot dirctly under the swing. Behind it on both the left and right are residential apartment buildings and trees. Above the swing set is an incoming Russian missile. It is red with a yellow "Z" symbol on it. To it's left if the caption "Russian "Ceasefire" in red. Below the reticle, in black, is Stop Child Killers!

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

During the last night air raid against Kyiv, russians killed 22yo police officer Mariia Dziumaha. So many beautiful lives are cut short every day by the russian impunity and barbarism.

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— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 9:30 AM

I can’t let go of what russia did yesterday murdering a 1-year-old boy in Kherson region. The horror lies in how it was done: with a first person view (FPV) drone. The operator saw it all in real time and chose to kill a child.

— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 8:17 AM

The situation with Russians killing a toddler with a drone is especially despicable when you realize this wasn’t a stray artillery shell that landed 50 meters off, or a Shahed drone that hit a tall building, but an FPV drone, guided in real time by an operator watching it live

— Tatarigami (@tatarigami.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 3:55 AM

It doesn’t make firing missiles into homes any less horrible, but there’s a mental side to it. When different people pick the target, set the location, and fire – it’s one thing. But hunting civilians live while watching through an FPV feed? That’s a whole new level

— Tatarigami (@tatarigami.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 3:55 AM

The reason:

💙💛 Even in war, there is room for love and romance!
This recognition means being there, fighting, and keeping in line… Together!
Bohdan and Bohdana. Both are from Donetsk region. From there, they took away the most important things—faith, love, and the dream of defending Ukraine.

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— Vitalis Viva (@vitalisviva.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 12:59 PM

Here’s the Ukrainian air defense tally from last night:

“Only” 415 weapons used in fascist Russia’s latest overnight attack on Ukraine on July 9-10 (it was 741 previous night). With Kyiv the focus of the Russian terror attack, it felt like a lot more – explosions rocked the Ukrainian capital for hours as drones and missiles rained down.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 3:37 AM

President Zelenskyy did not give an address today. He did hold a press conference at the Ukraine Recovery Conference.

“Our intelligence and that of our partners have information that Putin will try to prolong the war.” — Zelensky.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 1:50 PM

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Sweet Dreams (Open Thread)

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Tesla "Optimus" humanoid robot.

Yesterday we talked about how the xAI chatbot Grok went full “MechaHitler” (as it called itself) on the former Twitter platform Tuesday. It made a series of repulsive antisemitic comments and praised Hitler. It also told right-wing users how to break into a specific liberal user’s house and indulged in lurid rape fantasies concerning that individual. You know, totally normal stuff.

As I mentioned in my post on the incident, the timing was unfortunate for Musk since he was scheduled to release Grok 4 this week. He forged ahead with that plan (WSJ):

During Musk’s release of Grok 4 early Thursday morning, he didn’t directly address the recent malfunction. He said he believes the new iteration of Grok will make major scientific discoveries as soon as next year.

He also said the next step would be to embed Grok into humanoid robots, like Tesla’s Optimus fleet, so that it could learn more from the existing world. But before then, it needed to have the right values instilled in its core.

“You can think of AI as this super-genius child that ultimately will outsmart you,” he said. “But you can instill the right values and encourage it to be truthful and honorable, the same values that you’d want to instill in a child that would grow up to be incredibly powerful.”

God help us if people like Musk get to define “the right values” for a robot fleet. But it appears we as a society are actually going to let arrogant, angry shitlords like Musk be the arbiters of that.

The only comfort I can find in this news is that Musk says Grok will be making “major scientific discoveries” in a year. He’s always full of shit when he makes projections about products, so maybe we’ll get to live out our natural lives before his anti-woke robot posse is capable of hunting us down.

Open thread!

Sweet Dreams (Open Thread)Post + Comments (95)

GOP Venality Open Thread: May Van Orden Be the First of Many Defections…

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He must have been drunk again

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— Jim Manley (@jamespmanley.bsky.social) July 8, 2025 at 11:43 PM


===
(Backstory)

Let's see what's going on here!
Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) has posted more than a dozen times since Friday that he deserves credit for his state getting $1 billion, or as he prefers to write it, $1,000,000,000.

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— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:00 AM

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He keeps posting a letter he sent to WI Gov. Tony Evers on July 2, pleading with Evers to hurry up and pass a state budget with a higher Medicaid provider tax rate in it, before the BBB passes.
State budget with higher tax rate in it = higher federal match. vanorden.house.gov/sites/evo-su…

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— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:04 AM

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Van Orden claims his letter, on July 2, is proof that he is the reason the governor and WI state legislature moved fast to pass a state budget with a higher Medicaid provider tax rate, and secured that extra $1B a year.
Except Evers’ spokesperson told me Van Orden played no role in any of this.

— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:07 AM

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Me: Was Van Orden was the reason the WI governor + state legislators moved fast to pass a state budget and secure this $1 billion in federal funds every year?
WI governor's spokesperson:

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— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:10 AM

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Gov. Evers worked with Dems in the WI congressional delegation for months to monitor potential federal changes to hospital payments under Trump’s bill, says Evers' spox.
Van Orden didn’t reach out to Evers’ office until June 30 — after Evers and GOP state leaders had already reached a budget deal.

— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:15 AM

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“Put simply, if Congressman Van Orden wanted to take credit for supporting Medicaid and protecting Wisconsinites’ access to healthcare, perhaps he shouldn’t have voted to gut Medicaid and kick 250,000 Wisconsinites off their healthcare," said Evers' spokesperson. www.huffpost.com/entry/derric…

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— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 8:16 AM

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So why does Van Orden keeps taking credit for getting his state $1,000,000,000 in federal money when he apparently had nothing to do with it?
Trump's tax law, which he voted for, is extremely unpopular and he's in a competitive House seat.

— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 9:38 AM

===

Join me, and let’s take back Wisconsin’s 3rd: secure.actblue.com/donate/cooke…

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— Rebecca Cooke (@rebeccaforwi.bsky.social) June 16, 2025 at 10:04 AM

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Wednesday Night Open Thread

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Betty covered Musk’s digital monster, Mechahitler, aka Grok, in a good bit of detail, and it is worth noting that Musk’s idiot mouthpiece Yaccarino is now stepping down, presumably to count her money or whatever she was given for agreeing to take that job.

The thing that I think is most important about what happened is that when the X engineers “loosened the controls” on Grok, basically all they did was let Grok become any one of millions of unsuspecting kids ages 10 and up who are algorithm’d on youtube or whatever social media and just placed in a puke funnel of misinformation, misogny, racism, bigotry, cruelty that for years unsupervised. I mean there is a pipeline of normies to all these redpilled “your body my choice” douchebags like nick fuentes. If you are remotely surprised that fed the same diet of gibberish and bile with the “controls loosened,” grok became any one of the hundreds of thousands of racist fuckwads currently in a call of duty or other fps shooter lobby, I don’t know what to tell you. Many billions were made by Musk and company turning a lot of y’alls kids and grandkids into walking talking 4chans.

Honestly, this predictable metamorphosis is the most human thing I have seen from AI.

Also, let’s pause and give some effusive praise to Betty for this title: “Goebbels in, Goebbels Out”. That’s fucking art. Just no fat- you can’t add or take anything away from that to make it better. And the double entendre! /swoon

***

Remember when Republicans demanded we read bills:

The massive tax and spending bill that President Donald Trump signed into law last week contains a provision limiting tax deductions for gambling losses that has professional bettors howling about being driven out of business.

The provision surprised many in the industry as well as numerous Republican senators involved in drafting the legislation, who told HuffPost they didn’t know how or why it was inserted into the bill. GOP lawmakers were under pressure to pass the bill by Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.

“If you’re asking me how it got in there, no, I don’t know,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said during an interview on Tuesday.

“I don’t know anything about it. I’m not sure what it does,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) added.

Whoopsie! Apparently big gambling is livid, and I am also ok with that outcome.

***

I suppose it is time for our annual summer comments section blowup, with people pissy with each other, making unverified and evidence free assertions about each other and the blog, assertions of piling on, assertions of victimhood, and so on. I am not targeting anyone here when I say this, because you are all assholes. Actually I am targeting all of you.

What are we fucking doing? This is the easiest politics will ever be when it comes to decision making. There are clear cut sides here. There are the fucking nazis. And then there is everyone else.

We don’t need to be attacking each other for shits and giggles. There are no star stickers on your report card for winning the comments section for the day. I’m tired of hearing about squabbles between ‘teh left.’ I am tired of the Bernie wars. I am tired of false allegations of racism and anti-Semitism. I’m tired of people just deciding in their head that another commenter thinks something and then launching into a tirade about them.

I want people to argue and debate. I want people to joke and have fun. But I don’t need to deal with made-up bullshit that exists only in your head. There’s bona fide real badness out there that needs our focus.

And every time I say something like this, someone yells “That’s easy for you to say but what ABOUT MY ISSUE WHY WON’T YOU LISTEN AND AGREE WITH ME?” Because maybe I don’t, or maybe I am focused on something else and have my own personal issues and priorities, but what I can tell you with 100 fucking percent certainty is that commenter “sassyfrassfarts” on balloon hyphen juice dot com, a person you have been raging against for four months in the comments and have emailed me about 12 times, IS NOT THE ONE CAUSING THE PROBLEMS YOU CARE MOST ABOUT.”

All you do when you do that is alienate people. And if you are doing that here, you are ALIENATING THE PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO HELP YOU.

Debate things, argue, go at it, but stop making shit up about each other and try to remember there is a human being on the other side of that screen. And if you can’t don’t understand that last part, step away from the keyboard, go outside, and touch some fucking grass. Hell, try saying the shit you think nothing of saying to people on here to your neighbor or spouse. Tell me how that works out.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,231: Wednesday is a Repeat of Tuesday and Thursday Will Likely Be a Repeat of Wednesday

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A painting by Ukrainian artist NEIVANMADE. The words "NEVER AGAIN" are repeated over and over, from left to right and top to bottom, in a faded, washed out black against a white background. Red, the color of blood, runs and drips down across 2/3rds of the painting. "WHILE YOU TOLERATE TYRANTS" is written/painted in the bottom white corner below the three rows of "NEVER AGAIN".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Once again Ukrainian air raid alerts are up for threats of Russian drone swarms over almost all of Ukraine at 1:50 AM local time/6:50 PM EDT.

Ukraine is yet again under russian drone attack ‼️ Every. Single. Night.

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 6:49 PM

The cost:

WARNING!! WARNING!! GRAPHIC IMAGERY!! WARNING!! WARNING!!

An absolutely horrific and unspeakable crime has been committed by Russians. A drone strike targeted civilians, killing a 14 months old baby boy instantly – before emergency services could even arrive.

This happened today in Pravdyne of Kherson oblast.

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— Tatarigami (@tatarigami.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 10:10 AM

2/ His toys lay scattered, thrown by the force of the blast. According to Olexandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, the little boy was inside the house with his great-grandmother at the time. She was injured in the attack.

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— Tatarigami (@tatarigami.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 10:10 AM

Attacks on civilians are a common occurrence by Russian forces, especially in Kherson. They are training their drone crews by targeting ordinary people: children, cyclists, women, the elderly. It doesn’t matter who.

— Tatarigami (@tatarigami.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 10:10 AM

ALL CLEAR!!!!

This is not the first time russians deliberately target children with drones.

A few days ago, they killed an 8yo boy in a civilian car in the Kharkiv region. Today, it’s 1yo Dmytryk.

Targeting kids.
With drones.

I hate russia — and deeply despise everyone who cheers this terror on.

— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 2:47 PM

Here’s what Russia launched at Ukraine last night:

Just look at this. Russia launched 728 drones at Ukraine tonight — the most so far. The attacks are escalating. Russia grows bolder with every delay and every silence.

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— Maria Avdeeva (@mariainkharkiv.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 2:00 AM

Here is Ukraine’s air defense tally from last night.

FFS. In someone’s imagination, russia wants peace, unicorns and butterflies.
In real life: 728 drones (!), 6 ballistic and 7 cruise missiles launched at Ukraine over just one night. That’s a new record.
This isn’t good faith. It’s pure terrorism.

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— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 2:02 AM

I expect tonight’s will be similar.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 3:25 AM

President Zelenskyy was traveling today, including to a meeting with the Pope. There is no daily address.

Zelensky and Pope Leo XIV met to discuss the return of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia and joint peace efforts.

While about 19,500 cases are officially recorded, independent researchers estimate the number could exceed 35,000 since the full-scale invasion began.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) July 9, 2025 at 10:10 AM

First Lady Zelenska, however, welcomed the University of L’Aquila to the Global Coalition of Ukrainian Studies.

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