Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

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

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

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

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

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

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

White supremacy is terrorism.

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

Giving up is unforgivable.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

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

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

The National Guard is not Batman.

Consistently wrong since 2002

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

“They all knew.”

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

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

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

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Late Night Open Thread: Flag Humper’s Day D.C. Parade

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Late Night Open Thread: Flag Humper's Day Parade

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

 

Waste, fraud & abuse

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— Virginia Gewin (@virginiagewin.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 10:06 AM

So, why hasn’t this drawn more general attention yet? Does everyone with a large public platform doubt it’ll actually happen? Per Reuters, “Trump, US Army birthday bash plans include 25 Abrams tanks”:

Twin celebrations of U.S. President Donald Trump’s birthday and the Army’s 250th anniversary will include as many as 25 tanks rolling through Washington in a celebration that will cost $25 million to $45 million, U.S. officials told Reuters on Wednesday.

U.S. military service branches take pride in their history and anniversary celebrations, called birthdays, across the United States and on bases around the world.

The U.S. Army had long been planning to move troops and equipment to the National Mall in Washington on June 14 as part of its anniversary celebration. Plans now include a parade since that coincides with Trump’s 79th birthday.

Two U.S. officials told Reuters, on condition of anonymity, the eventual cost could be as high as $45 million. One of them said the cost included several million dollars more than it would have without a parade.

The official added that the Army is planning on sending about two dozen M1 Abrams tanks for the celebration.

The officials’ latest estimates exclude costs the city of Washington would have to bear, like trash cleanup or road repairs for damage from the heavy tanks…

Critics have called a parade an authoritarian display of power that is wasteful, especially as Trump slashes costs throughout the federal government.

During his first administration, Trump ordered the Pentagon to look into a display of military might after a 2017 trip to France where he and French President Emmanuel Macron reviewed that country’s defense forces marching down the Avenue des Champs-Elysees in Paris.

That effort would have cost $90 million…

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Sunday Diversion: ‘A Dumb New Way To Think About The Dismantling Of The Federal Government’

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Here is a new way to get upset about stuff that I invented, and some thoughts on contextualizing things that are otherwise hard to comprehend. defector.com/a-dumb-new-w…

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— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 3:53 PM

It is impossible to reduce this lovely piece to a ‘nut graf’ or three, but I know we jackals all love a good rant — Dave Roth, at Defector:

At some level, reading some sort of purpose over or onto the ongoing vandalism of the American state is doing a favor to the vandals. Picture a parent holding a screaming toddler on a crowded bus, looking that toddler in the eye, and calmly asking that yowling little booger to explain himself. A tantrum is a tantrum, and it is the nature of things like that to be both unreasonable and unreasoning; in this case, the noisy and furious protagonist of the tantrum is, depending upon your perspective, either the single worst and dumbest member of one generation or the single richest person on earth.

None of this is what you want, but it also just is what it is: incomplete and unreasonable people demonstrating the limits of their capacity to self-regulate in a way that makes everything worse for everyone else, without really offering the tantrum-author much beyond the satisfaction of turning all that un-understood inner chaos outward. You can’t give a child melting down like that what they want, because they do not know what that is. And so thinking about it at all means that you are already thinking about it more than the person thrashing around at the center of it.

There are some identifiable things at work, here, but identifying and understanding them only really does so much. It is true that the ongoing degradation and dismantling of the administrative state is grounded in and done in service to a number of stale, stupid, extremely well-entrenched political delusions—that the public sector and everyone working within it is inherently inferior to the more ambitious and adventurous members of the private sector, that any money spent on the public good is wasteful by definition and fraudulent as a matter of course, that all public endeavors are somehow fake or at any rate not as real as the profit-driven work done by corporations or the hardy pioneers in the drop-shipping or shitcoin spaces. It is also true, in a more specific sense, that it is fueled by Trump’s signature combination of abstraction and omnidirectional spite, which dictates that everything that does not personally benefit him is not just useless but an intentional and intolerable insult. But there’s only so much to do with any of that knowledge. Yes, absolutely, this is a lopsided snowball of elite idiocy idly rolled downhill from on high, but the fact that it is all so shoddy and stupid and careless does nothing to mitigate the fact that it has arrived some time later as an annihilating avalanche for everyone living below.

If there is anything to find at the bottom of all this, it’s a bet that none of this actually matters. Certainly none of it matters to the people overseeing the vandalism, who are finally and solely interested in themselves. The gamble, which is endlessly and compulsively escalated, double-or-nothing, is that none of this matters in a way that will get them in trouble. The idle sadism of it all is real, but what interests them most is the pursuit of getting away with it, and the proof of their suspicion that they really can do whatever they want. Certainly that is much more urgent and interesting to them than, say, funding cancer research or international food aid or whatever. It is the only aspect of any of this that is not abstract to them…

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Failure to Launch (Open Thread)

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This young hawk is capable of flying around and making a play for lizards, etc. — I’ve seen it in action. But mostly, it wants its meals delivered.

Fledged Red-Shouldered Hawk still wants parents to be DoorDash. 🪶

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— Betty Cracker of Florida (@bettycrackerfl.bsky.social) May 18, 2025 at 2:14 PM

I understand completely. The only thing I miss about living in town is food delivery.

Open thread!

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War for Ukraine Day 1,178: Russia Commits Another War Crime in Sumy

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Quick housekeeping note: Another long day and I’m so completely fried it’s like I’m double battered and double fried. Imagine what would happen if the Belgians made deep fried Twinkies. So I’m going to just run through the basics again so I can go to sleep.

Russia attacked a civilian bus in Sumy earlier today:

Imagine the level of cynicism it took to strike an evacuation bus—to murder people who were simply trying to escape their army, to kill those whose lives they had already destroyed.

Well, Russia doesn’t need to imagine.

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) May 17, 2025 at 6:20 AM

Shortly after that happened, this happened:

Trump: “If Putin didn’t get stuck in the mud with his army tanks all over the place, they would’ve been in Kyiv in 5 hours”

The president of the United States spreading russian propaganda point that honestly sounds dumb after 3+ years of full-scale war

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) May 17, 2025 at 6:33 AM

Trump: I have a great relationship with Putin. We’ll likely make a deal; I’m tired of endless meetings. Steve Witkoff did an incredible job, but I’m the only one who can handle this. Putin’s tired, looks bad, wants to seem strong. If his tanks didn’t get stuck, he’d be in Kyiv.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) May 17, 2025 at 4:12 AM

February in Ukraine is NOT mud season!

But wait, there’s more!

“A ceasefire will take place,” but will it, tho? 👀

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) May 17, 2025 at 11:14 AM

A ceasefire will not be taking place.

President Zelenskyy did not make an address today, nor hold a press conference. He did meet with PM Carney in Rome:

Zelenskyy has arrived in Rome and met with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) May 17, 2025 at 12:41 PM

First Lady Zelenska participated and address the Return, the Path to Mental Recovery conference.

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Chasing the Electric Pangolin Open Thread

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This morning, The Child came into the kitchen waving her iPad excitedly. “Mom! There is an exciting new animal in America! The electric pangolin!”

Misinformation and Electric Pangolins Open Thread
(meme unrelated to story)

Naturally, this was also thrilling to me. But then she showed me a news article from MSN news:

Scientists Identified an Electric Pangolin in Mojave Desert

In a stunning scientific revelation that has shocked both wildlife biologists and cryptozoologists alike, researchers claim to have discovered what they’re calling an “electric pangolin” in the remote regions of the Mojave Desert. This discovery has ignited fierce debate within the scientific community, with some experts questioning the validity of these findings while others hail it as a potential breakthrough in our understanding of evolutionary adaptation. The alleged creature, which appears to combine mammalian characteristics with unprecedented bioelectric properties, has become the subject of intense scrutiny and investigation.

Now, this sounds super amazing: a real-life Pokémon! But reading through the article with her, I was immediately on alert, and walked her through why:

  • The original source is “animalsaroundtheglobe.com”, not a more mainstream news source
  • There are no links to outside sources in the article
  • The lead scientist is billed as coming from the “Institute of Desert Ecology”, but there’s no sponsoring organization, such as a university, named for the institute
  • Another scientist quoted in the article is a palaeontologist, which seems like an odd discipline to be commenting on a new species find

We then looked up the names of the scientists mentioned and couldn’t find them. We also searched for “electric pangolin Mojave desert” and found no other mention of an electric pangolin in the news – this site was the only one publishing this claim.

“So it’s probably not real?” she said, crestfallen.

“It’s probably not real,” I said.

We went out for waffles to help cope with the disappointment.

Now, this was a nice teachable moment for The Child about double-checking a story that sounds too good to be true. If only the mothers of numerous economists and journalists had been present to do something similar for them when confronted, last autumn, with an exciting study about how using AI made industrial scientists vastly more productive.

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Excellent Read: ‘This is Democrats’ Masterclass in Resistance’

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26 hours and 33 failed amendment votes: This is Democrats’ masterclass in resistance www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202…

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— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 8:57 PM

Commentor Geminid reminded me I wanted to share a gift link to Karen Tumulty’s latest Washington Post column:

For a party that has been shut out of power in Washington, what happened this week in Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building was a masterclass in resistance.

Over more than 26 sleepless hours that began on Tuesday afternoon and continued into Wednesday, Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee pounded the panel’s Republican majority with 33 amendments, most of which were aimed at stripping the GOP’s “big, beautiful bill” containing politically toxic cuts to Medicaid. In the hallway outside, police arrested more than two dozen protesters, many of whom were in wheelchairs.

Every one of the amendments failed, as Democrats knew they would. But their coordinated assault on the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda framed a powerful narrative that is shaping up to be the party’s most potent message heading into next year’s midterm elections.…

The marathon session laid bare the Republicans’ vulnerability on Medicaid. They claim to be rooting out waste and fraud from the system. But, in its essence, the bill amounts to a declaration of who should be deemed worthy of health care in this country.

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Open Thread: Oh, Really?

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Open Thread: Oh, Really?

NEW — Trump's White House is hiding the vast majority of the transcripts of his remarks.
Why? The White House won't say…
But maybe reading the following might offer a clue:
www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-…

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— S.V. Dáte (@svdate.bsky.social) May 15, 2025 at 11:59 AM

there’s a bizarro dynamic where we can see trump is totally fucking out of it in public but people like bill maher assure us that he’s sharp in private, whereas biden is cogent in public but we’re told by multiple nameless people that he’s demented behind closed doors.

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— mike m (@mmcgrath.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 10:32 AM

Today Trump's main legislative initiative died *in committee*, his main domestic policy initiative was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, & his economic shenanigans got the whole country's credit downgraded.
Let's talk about what's important: Biden Old

— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) May 16, 2025 at 4:49 PM

Open Thread: Oh, Really?Post + Comments (130)