Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The baseball post will be going up soon and I don’t see anything happening in the back room, so I thought an open thread would be good.
Time for me to go walk on the treadmill. Not thrilled about that today.
Is anyone watching the new season of Slow Horses? Or The Morning Show? I am waiting until the whole seasons are up and then I’ll subscribe again and watch. The great thing about streaming is that you don’t have to wait a week between episodes, dammit!
Greedy bastards!
Open thread.
Our friends at VAAC (Voting Access for All) just sent me this action item.
If voted in, this change would disenfranchise millions of eligible Americans—including students, Black and Brown voters, returning citizens, rural residents, lower-income and working-class individuals, and married women—all who could face severe difficulties obtaining or producing these documents. We can’t let it go unanswered.
Michigan has seen efforts to pass this requirement in the statehouse, and we’re currently facing a looming threat in the form of a ballot initiative. This is obviously a multi-pronged effort to undermine the will of the people and a direct attack on voting access.
Here’s how you can take action right now:
Submit a Public Comment (it takes only one minute!). Feel free to copy and paste the message below into the EAC’s comment form, but adding your personal flair to the message is always recommended!
Here’s what you need to say: (no need to include this specifically, just supplying info you can use)
I’m against requiring citizens to submit a passport or other documents to prove citizenship to register to vote. Only half of American citizens have a passport, and 69 million citizens lack a birth certificate that matches their current legal name—most of them women. States already verify eligibility. We don’t need to add more barriers to the ballot.
Click here to submit your comment to the EAC now!
Thank you for taking urgent action,
Voting Access for All Coalition
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Note from WG:
They submitted 200,000 comments in an effort to stop people from voting.
Let’s be like Elliott Ness:
“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”
Submit your comment today, and ask everyone you know to submit a comment opposing this un-American policy.
Sounds like a good time was had by all!
Present at the meetup!
piratedan
lowtechcyclist
Mr. Bemused Senior
PAM Dirac + Observer (Karen)
Rekoob
I believe there might be plans to have another one in the Spring – seemed like there were a lot of people who wanted to attend, but they timing didn’t work for one reason or another.
Virginia Meetup – Proof of Life – Oct 11, 2025Post + Comments (45)
Here’s a cartoon that cleverly illustrates how right-wing extremism gets mainstreamed by ostensibly liberal pundits:
New comic: Pundit Bro Doom Loop www.dailykos.com/stories/2025…
— Jen Sorensen (@jensorensen.bsky.social) October 1, 2025 at 10:21 PM
That’s definitely a thing, liberal pundits bonding with right-wing extremists over their shared experience of people being mean to them on the internet. And people ARE mean to each other on the internet, and it really sucks to be on the receiving end of a dumb, self-righteous pile-on.
But the proper response isn’t to assume the ideas or actions that attracted the pile-on deserve a mainstream platform because they’re “out there.” It’s to examine the ideas or actions on their own merit.
Charlie Kirk’s murder is a recent and extreme example of how this plays out. It’s possible to condemn the shooting without implying Kirk had anything worthwhile to contribute. The latter mainstreams extremism.
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A Bluesky post by commenter Sister Golden Bear a while back highlighted a related phenomenon. She reposted a cite from a Prospect article about how “reactionary centrists” are driving politics in the UK to the right, with disastrous results for trans people in that country.
“In 2012, 60 trans-related articles were published by Britain’s media. By 2022, it was more than 7,500, according to figures from Trans Media Watch. The media is not responding to public rage against vulnerable minorities; it is helping to create it.” www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/709…
— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper.com) October 1, 2025 at 9:52 AM
In her post, SGB points out that the NYT is playing the same role here in the U.S. Other oligarch-owned platforms and news outlets are also all-in on the effort. Now that an oligarch family has put Bari Weiss is in charge of CBS News, we can expect that formerly venerable source to double down on its reactionary narratives too in the guise of centrism and objectivity.
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Trans rights are a major focus of reactionary centrism, and so is immigration. A couple of excerpts from the Prospect piece:
(Reactionary centrists) are people who—while not exactly supportive of the political right—tend to view it as without agency, as if the radicalisation of US conservatism is the result of people responding to the excesses of social justice, incivility from the left or cultural disrespect. So-called reactionary centrists both blamed the victims of the populist right, and spent a lot of time humanising the perpetrators.
If only liberals could understand what drove Maga voters. Reactionary centrists admonished liberals to be very careful in their language, to not call very obvious fascists fascist, lest they be further provoked. The solution was to give ground; if democrats made appeals to the centre, particularly if they moved right on immigration and trans rights, they could regain votes lost to Trump. …
This desire to meet the hard right halfway, to find a middle point, is hopelessly exploitable. In an age of radicalisation, you simply get pulled further and further to the right, while tacitly validating those values at every step…
Emphasis mine: it’s a form of Murc’s Law, i.e., only Democrats have agency, in action. The article’s author, Toby Buckle, borrows the U.S. term “reactionary centrist” to describe what’s happened to Labour in the UK under PM Kier Starmer:
The motivation for this move against LGBT rights seems to have been to take the issue off the table for voters. Morgan McSweeney, the Starmer aide most associated with the government’s political strategy, operates on classic reactionary centrist logic: we need to meet the public where it’s at and understand the concerns of defectors to Reform (while aggressively ignoring the concerns of the, much more numerous, defectors to the Lib Dems or Greens).
To put it mildly, this has not worked. The theory was that feeding the wolf would starve it. But, somehow, the beast is stronger than ever. Reactionary centrists simply cannot account for this outcome. All they can think to do is keep throwing more meat.
The only thing I know about Labour is what I read about it here from Tony Jay and Rose, but we see the same impulse described above in U.S. politics. The phrase “meeting voters where they are” isn’t inherently bad, IMO — you have to show up were voters can hear your message.
But tacitly validating existing prejudices is fatal; it inexorably moves the framing to the right and throws vulnerable people under the bus. It also doesn’t work to take issues off the table for voters.
Ten years ago, there wasn’t widespread hysteria about trans people in the U.S. Remember in 2016 when Trump said Caitlyn Jenner could use any bathroom she chose? The right deliberately manufactured anti-trans hysteria, which implies that it can be dismantled too. The same goes for immigration and reproductive rights and other issues Dems are urged to “moderate” on to win elections.
The article notes that while the Democratic Party has some members who could be described that way, reactionary centrists don’t dominate the party like they do in the UK. I think that’s true and hope and trust we can keep it that way.
Open thread.
??MAJOR BREAKING: Rep-Elect Adelita Grijalva announces her election results will be OFFICIALLY certified tomorrow, destroying Mike Johnson’s last excuse to delay her swearing in.
“Mike Johnson needs to do his job so I can do mine.”
No more lies.
No more delays.
Swear her in!— Harlow’s Musings (@harlowsmusings.bsky.social) October 13, 2025 at 10:53 PM
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THEN WHAT DO YOU DO ALL DAY??
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) October 13, 2025 at 12:23 PM
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There's probably enough material for media outlets to be doing front page stories just about every day on foreign government efforts to influence Trump through deals involving his family business. Not sure why the media isn't doing more with this.
— Simon Lester (@simonlester.com) October 13, 2025 at 2:56 PM
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they’re scared fucking shitless of this weekend, or, at the least, are scared fucking shitless of trump seeing it on the television
— GHOULLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) October 13, 2025 at 10:57 AM
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'Confused' Trump told to sit back down amid attempt to speak out of turn: report
www.rawstory.com/donald-trump…— ❌👑 Becki (@sagan10.bsky.social) October 13, 2025 at 7:14 PM
Intercontinental air travel is hard on an old man, and we all remember how much grace our Very Serious Media granted President Biden concerning that problem.
'No one has an annual physical twice': Trump insider baffled by Friday hospital visit – Raw Story www.rawstory.com/trump-health…
— Sue Stone (@knittingknots.bsky.social) October 10, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Probably this ‘annual physical’ was nothing more serious than an effort to make sure Trump’s ‘chronic venous insufficiency’ was up to the challenge of a 12-hour-plus flight, even in Air Force One, but… who knows? It would be irresponsible not to speculate… especially with JDivan Vance throwing himself in front of every camera he can spot, babbling about how he’s ready to take the big chair at a moment’s notice.
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Leukemia is among the illnesses treated with once monthly infusions that could have side effects that last more than a day or so. There are also 2 new monoclonal antibody drugs for early stage Alzheimer’s that are administered monthly & through an IV.
— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) October 4, 2025 at 6:27 PM
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Late Night Open Thread: <em>It’s Quiet… *Too* Quiet…</em>Post + Comments (60)
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
The Russians dropped a glide bomb on a hospital in Kharkiv about four or five hours ago. I’ll get to all of that, as well as the other genocidal war crimes after the jump.
One quick note on another matter: the twenty surviving hostages and, as far as I know the remains of the others who did not survive, have been exchanged for a large number of Palestinian prisoners. That’s basically where things are for Israel and the Palestinians in Gaza. My professional assessment is this is about as far as we’re going to get. I expect the Israelis to start dragging their feet and come up with an excuse to restart their war on Hamas, which is functionally an ethnic cleansing of the Gazan Palestinians bordering on/overlapping with a genocidal campaign in Gaza. There’s no reason now for Bibi to go beyond Phase 1. There are multiple reasons – keeping the most extreme members of his coalition (Ben-Gvir, Smoltrich, and their extremist constituents) happy so he can keep his tuchas out of court and potentially out of prison. This is not that Hamas doesn’t have agency, they do, and whatever they do will be used to justify whatever Bibi will do going forward. This is what Bibi did to every previous agreement, as well as in southern Lebanon.
President Zelenskyy met with Kaja Kallas, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, today, Here’s the video of their joint press conference.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address to the 71st annual session of the NATO parliamentary assembly. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 1,327: Another Day Another War CrimePost + Comments (21)