Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

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

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

Hey Washington Post, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was supposed to be a warning, not a mission statement.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

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

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

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Usually wrong but never in doubt

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

Everybody saw this coming.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

You are here: Home / Archives for Open Threads

War for Ukraine Day 1,078: Who Benefits?

by | 8 Comments

This post is in: , , , , , , ,

As of 8:45 PM EST/3:45 AM local time in Ukraine, there are only air raid alerts for Donetsk, occupied Luhansk and Crimea, those two are always up, and Sumy and Chernihiv Oblasts. There are drone alerts on the maps for the last two.

I have been saying for the past two weeks or so that the important question to ask every time Trump or Musk or one of the former’s surrogates and the latter’s minions do something is who benefits. We now know the answer to that in regard to the illegal efforts to shut down USAID. From Gizmodo:

Since coming into power, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has barraged USAID, the international aid agency that dispenses food and supplies to nations all over the world. It is likely that the agency will soon be shuttered and could be subsumed into the U.S. State Department. Now, new reporting shows USAID was actually investigating equipment from one of Musk’s companies at the time that he attacked the agency.

The Lever reported Tuesday that USAID’s inspector general was in the process of investigating its own public-private partnership between Musk’s Starlink and the Ukrainian government at the time that the billionaire’s DOGE crippled the agency. Publicly available information about that probe is still online. An announcement from last May reads: “The USAID Office of Inspector General, Inspections and Evaluations Division, is initiating an inspection of USAID’s oversight of Starlink satellite terminals provided to the Government of Ukraine. Our objectives are to determine how (1) the Government of Ukraine used the USAID-provided Starlink terminals, and (2) USAID monitored the Government of Ukraine’s use of USAID-provided Starlink terminals.”

Musk has called the agency “evil” and a “criminal organization,” though the fact that USAID was investigating the Starlink activities may suggest ulterior motivations for the billionaire’s vitriol. It’s unclear what the Starlink probe’s status is right now.

Musk’s “criminal” remarks are funny since it increasingly looks like Musk’s DOGE activities represent breaches of federal law and, therefore, may be construed as rampant criminal behavior. On Tuesday, the Washington Post noted that officials at half a dozen federal agencies had raised concerns over whether what Musk was doing was illegal. Those agencies included the “Treasury Department, the Education Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the General Services Administration, the Office of Personnel Management, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the White House budget office, among others,” the newspaper reported.

As we know from other reporting, this is why Musk has been going after the FAA and NHTSA, as well as other agencies, because of investigations into his own actions, SpaceX, and Tesla.

In better news:

French Mirages have arrived in Ukraine

[image or embed]

— Ulrike Franke (@rikefranke.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 8:48 AM

🇳🇱🤝🇺🇦It has also been officially announced today that the Netherlands has transferred the second batch of F-16s to the Ukrainian Air Force. t.me/ministry_of_…

[image or embed]

— 🦋Special Kherson Cat🐈🇺🇦 (@specialkhersoncat.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 9:17 AM

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

show full post on front page

War for Ukraine Day 1,078: Who Benefits?Post + Comments (8)

Well Now (Open Thread)

by | 259 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Here’s a shocker (not):

DOGE Staffer Resigns Over Racist Posts

Employee has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics

By Katherine Long

From that commie WSJ rag, no less. Per Ms. Long’s Bluesky account:

I linked DOGE staffer Marko Elez to a deleted X account that advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act, backed a “eugenic immigration policy,” and wrote, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.”

More shit like this will come out. I’d bet the farm on it. This Musk kinderchud was the 25-year-old with direct access to the federal payment system, by the way.

The WSJ has been better than the NYT so far in Trump 2.0. Not a high bar to clear though.

Well Now (Open Thread)Post + Comments (259)

Facebook Engagement

by | 93 Comments

This post is in: 

Commenter Gloria DryGarden sent me a cut/paste from a Facebook poster named Connie Willis who posts a daily news roundup called “CW Daily”.  I’ll post it below to see if it’s your cup of tea.

I’m not on Facebook (have a fake account for work purposes), but I think it (and most social media) presents a dilemma about participation.  On one hand, Facebook especially is how older folks in a lot of areas get their news.  On the other hand, fuck Zuck.

Share your thoughts about that or anything else in this open thread.

show full post on front page

Facebook EngagementPost + Comments (93)

Know Your Enemies (Open Thread)

by | 149 Comments

This post is in: , ,

In today’s member newsletter, TPM’s Josh Marshall identifies three factions in the Trump admin that are currently cooperating to destroy common enemies within the U.S. government and the differences in their motivations and aims. Here’s a gift link to the whole piece. Here’s Marshall’s overview of the three groups (in list format for easier reading):

  1. First, you have MAGA, which wants to punish and displace the people who made life hard for Trump in his first term and replace them with loyalists. That’s mostly about power and personal fealty to Trump. Ideology is mostly secondary to the core aim.
  2. Second, you have Christian nationalists who want to seize the power of the state to execute a top down re-traditionalization of American society and culture. Russell Vought is key to this group. The basic theory goes back into the aughts, when a faction of conservatives decided (essentially a counsel of despair) that they had lost control of American culture and that state power was required to get it back.
  3. Third are people like Elon Musk who want to radically hollow out the government, outsource its functions and replace many of those functions with novel technologies — AI, cryptocurrency, etc. This is a mix of Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” business culture combined with “dark enlightenment” Yarvinian degenerate thought.

Marshall points out that the groups’ short-term aims overlap right now; they all want to gut the federal workforce and replace career government service people for reasons. But their long-term goals aren’t 100% overlapping, and at some point, conflict is likely to emerge.

I think the groups outlined above roughly correspond to groups of voters and lower-level politicians. There’s 1) cult of personality members whose ideological allegiance and voter propensity are strongly linked to Trump, 2) culture war-obsessed evangelicals who want to spread patriarchal white nationalist propaganda instead of teaching history, stuff queer people in the closet and herd women into the kitchen, and 3) very online, wannabe edge lord types like the kinderchud Musk recruited to bust into Treasury.

What I am wondering as a political opponent of all three types: where are the seams in that coalition into which a saboteur might insert a crowbar? How can a person sow distrust and doubt on a personal level if we encounter people in any of those groups?

I’m thinking faction #1 might grow annoyed with Musk for overshadowing Trump. Factions #1 and #2 might resent faction #3 for gaining access to their private data and be (rightly!) suspicious about their intentions. Stuff like that.

Any thoughts? Our coalition does a great job of ripping itself to shreds in the face of adversity, and maybe theirs will too when challenges inevitably arise. But if there’s an opportunity to help that along, I don’t want to miss it!

Otherwise, open thread!

Know Your Enemies (Open Thread)Post + Comments (149)

Self-Castration

by | 161 Comments

This post is in: 

Rep. Jasmine Crockett:

What we are against is this idea that we will evade the Constitution or we will evade our own constitutional–. In fact, it’s not even an evasion at this point.

It feels as if y’all have just decided that y’all are going to castrate your constitutional duty and hand it over to someone who is unelected. It doesn’t matter how many cheerleaders he had on the field campaigning for him, that doesn’t mean that he gets to go in and sit atop any of our agencies. And the fact that we had a vote today and we asked to bring him [Musk] in because we have a constitutional duty.

We all took our oath. And maybe some of your just don’t take you seriously. But I take it seriously when I take an oath to do a job. And my job is to look out and make sure that we don’t have any kings or queens in this country.

But it seems like y’all have decided that is going to be Mr. King and his queen — and y’all can pick which one is which.

Like a lot of people, including David Anderson, I came into Trump 2.0 thinking that the big fight would be in the House, and that a lot of the Trump agenda would be stymied because, as David rightly points out, the House is tight and there are reps in tight districts who are vulnerable.  Instead, the Republicans in Congress have decided to just let President Musk run the show.  They might have been able to pass a bill to eliminate USAID, eliminate or reduce the Department of Education, lay off a bunch of workers at the FBI, CIA, etc., but that would have happened slowly, they wouldn’t have gotten everything they wanted, and there would have been a lot of friction over it.   Friction drives coverage, and coverage drives victory for Democrats when people understand what is being taken away.

Instead, it’s a King (Musk) and whatever Trump is, with a couple of concerned faces in the Senate and Mike Johnson getting upset because a couple of Democratic reps (Judy Chu and Gwen Moore) “barged in” to his office to ask him if he’s going to do anything about the King essentially shutting down Congress.  Short answer:  he ain’t.  He wants to skim the cream off of this coup — getting what he and the other evangelicals want — with the misguided view that in the end things will got back to semi-normal and Congress will have a say in things.  Why the hell would Musk and Trump let them have a say when they’re getting what they want without Congress?

Self-castration is the right metaphor, because once it’s gone, it will never come back.  Same goes for John Roberts and the Supremes, by the way.  When Musk starts ignoring their rulings, might as well shut down the courts and shove the savings on heat and light into King Elon’s pocket.

Self-CastrationPost + Comments (161)

Thursday Morning Open Thread – Breaking: Eggs

by | 160 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Thursday Morning Open Thread - Breaking: Eggs

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

This *should* be a gift link… Lora Kelley, at the Atlantic, on “The Breaking Point for Eggs”:

One sign that the egg-cost crisis has gotten dire came in the form of a bright-yellow sticker on a laminated breakfast menu: On Monday, Waffle House announced that it would be adding a temporary 50-cent surcharge to each egg ordered.

Egg prices have risen dramatically as of late. First, inflation pushed up their cost. Then the ongoing bird-flu outbreak led to shortages. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump assured Americans that he would get food costs under control: He vowed last summer that he would bring food prices down “on day one”—a promise he did not fulfill. As egg prices have kept ticking up in recent weeks, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, has blamed the Biden administration for high egg costs, citing the standard, USDA-authorized measure of killing millions of egg-laying chickens that were infected with bird flu (something the previous Trump administration also did). The average price of a dozen eggs in U.S. cities remained below $2 until 2022. Eggs now cost an average of more than $4 a dozen—it’s a lot higher at some grocery stores—and the USDA has forecasted a 20 percent further price jump for eggs in 2025. As a spokesperson for Waffle House said in a statement, high egg prices are now forcing customers and restaurants to make “difficult decisions.”

As egg prices shift, so does the pricing logic that grocery stores and restaurants have long used. For decades now, grocers have helped maintain eggs’ affordable image, even when the amount they themselves spent on eggs was fluctuating. Many stores consider eggs “loss leaders”; they effectively subsidize the cost of eggs in order to draw in shoppers (who, they expect, might then splurge on higher-margin items). This was possible for stores to do because eggs were cheap to produce and readily in supply. Innovations in industrial farming, incubation, artificial lighting (to trick hens into thinking it was morning and time to lay), and carton technology meant that, by the early 20th century, cheap eggs were bountiful in American markets.

But when wholesale costs soar, as they are now, the loss-leader rationale starts to strain. (The cost of a dozen eggs for restaurants and stores is about $7, compared with $2.25 last fall, according to one recent estimate.) A few grocers are keeping egg prices consistent despite rising costs, but many more have started passing high prices over to shoppers. Eggs are also ingredients in lots of grocery items, such as baked goods and salad dressing—so those may see price increases too…

Anybody want to recommend a good source for ‘I did that!’ Trump stickers?
 
Speaking of fragile things once considered eternal…

show full post on front page

Thursday Morning Open Thread – Breaking: EggsPost + Comments (160)

Response Team Trump Open Thread: ‘Inoperative Statements’ Wetware Upgrade

by | 260 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

It’s the hair-flip at the end that makes it… up to the moment. Sure, Elon has his trash-talking code kiddies, but can *they* dismiss their God-Emperor’s most inflammatory / insane statements in front of a room full of baying presstitutes with such sneering elan?

“None of us knew he was going to say that, there’s no way to make it sound not-crazy, so next question”

[image or embed]

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 1:34 PM

Ron “This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative.” Ziegler — to whom Leavitt is compared more often than I, for one, would be entirely comfortable with, in her place — would be proud. Or at least envious.
***********

I’ve been looking for a slot to use this for the last week. From the Guardian, “Trump’s press chief shows she’s more than capable of going full North Korea”:

“Clear a path!” shouted the big shots of TV news as they tried to squeeze their way through reporters packed like sardines into the White House briefing room to get to their front-row seats. Tempers frayed, foreheads perspired and necks strained similar to those of passengers itching to get off a plane.

The first press briefing of a new administration is always a standing-room-only event. This time, it was the second Donald Trump administration and the debut of Karoline Leavitt, who pointed out that she is the youngest person to serve as White House press secretary. The 27-year-old beats the record of Ronald Ziegler, who was 29 when he was Richard Nixon’s spokesperson.

If you’re loyal enough, you’re old enough. On Tuesday, Leavitt showed the media hordes and TV viewers that she is more than capable of going full North Korea. Smoothly, serenely and pugnacious-enough-but-not-too-much, she defended her boss’s federal funding freeze and draconian immigration crackdown. She also talked him up as a sort of Renaissance man and Goat (greatest of all time) rolled into one.

In Leavitt’s telling, Trump is “the most transparent and accessible president in American history” and there has never been a president who communicates “as openly and authentically”. He is “the hardest-working man in politics” and “there is no negotiator better”. His policies are “wildly popular” and he is responsible for a new “golden age”.

Her slick delivery style, with almost no “ums”, “ahs” or verbal stumbles, was a radical departure from the way Trump’s first ministry of untruth began…

… Leavitt, who worked at the White House in Trump’s first term and ran for Congress at the age of 23, is the most finely honed version of all. She personifies the Trump 2.0 upgrade: faster, smarter, leaner, meaner, better organised and less chaotic. Executive actions have been more ruthlessly targeted and leaks have been fewer. In the struggle between incompetence and malevolence, malevolence is winning…

show full post on front page

Response Team Trump Open Thread: <em>‘Inoperative Statements’</em> Wetware UpgradePost + Comments (260)