Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

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

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Reality always gets a vote in the end.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

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

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

The words do not have to be perfect.

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

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

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

Let me file that under fuck it.

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

How stupid are these people?

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

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

You are here: Home / Archives for Open Threads

The Behind-the-Curve Dems Are Catching Up

by | 137 Comments

This post is in: 

The Vought nomination was a 53-47 affair, and with Fetterman being a no on RFK the lesser and Asset Gabbard, I think he’s finally come to his senses.

Like every other Senator, he looks in the mirror and sees a future President, but I don’t think it’s going to happen for him or anyone else who voted for some Trump nominees. The yea votes on Trump nominees are like the votes for the Iraq War on steroids. They are disqualifying for a large swath of the Democratic base.

That all said, the main point of this post isn’t to talk about the 2028 election, but rather to say that I think the Senate-Brain and splitter Dems have caught up with the base, after a jillion phone calls, a bunch of dunking on social media, and a government takeover by King Musk. They’ve realized that normal rules no longer apply. King Musk wants to dismantle our democracy. We need to fight him, and Trump, with everything we have.

Pritzker gets it, btw. Ridicule, oppose, inform, fight:

An important announcement from the Governor of Illinois.

[image or embed]

— JB Pritzker (@jbpritzker.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 1:34 PM

The Behind-the-Curve Dems Are Catching UpPost + Comments (137)

You Have the Right to Work for Next to Nothing, and the Right To Die in Misery

by | 157 Comments

This post is in: 

I had to do a little shopping around today because the workers at King Soopers, the Colorado Kroger brand, are on strike, and I’m not crossing any picket lines. The union wants a pay raise, and as usual management’s been fucking with them. Service jobs can be miserable, and they’re certainly low paying, so I hope the strike is successful.

Amazon is already claiming that Trump’s takeover of the NRLB means that a union vote at their Whole Foods store in Philly should be overturned. Loomis at LGM has good pieces on unions in Colorado and the Whole Foods union busting if you want a deeper dive.

I wonder how many King Soopers and Whole Foods employees are on Medicaid — I’m guessing a lot of them. Let’s be sure to cut the shit out of our main safety net for workers who can’t get benefits at work, so they can die early, miserable deaths once they’re of no use to the billionaires who run these corporations. The Republicans who “represent” a lot of them don’t even have enough grit to push back when King Elon steals already apporpriated money from their constituents.

As I’ve mentioned before, Claudia Sheinbaum is making car tours around Mexico in part to distribute pension cards for the new Women’s Wellbeing Pension that her government instituted. Here, in less civilized America, we’re trying to cut Medicaid so that old people will be thrown out into snowbanks outside nursing homes.

In related news, Elon’s coding bootcamp incels don’t have an awesome record:

🚨BIG SCOOP: Musk’s DOGE Teen Was Fired By Cybersecurity Firm for Leaking Company Secrets

Edward Coristine posted online that he had retained access to the firm’s servers. Now he has access to sensitive government information.

🎁 www.bloomberg.com/news/article…

[image or embed]

— Jason Leopold (@jasonleopold.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 12:44 PM

Finally, where are my fucking eggs, Trump? $7.19 a dozen at Target, if you can get them.

You Have the Right to Work for Next to Nothing, and the Right To Die in Misery

You Have the Right to Work for Next to Nothing, and the Right To Die in MiseryPost + Comments (157)

Trusk & Mump take some Ls (open thread)

by | 76 Comments

This post is in: , , , ,

Last night, Rachel Maddow* reported on some embarrassing Ls taken yesterday by the pair of loathsome oligarchs who are trying to destroy the U.S government. Here’s a quick summary of the coverage:

  • Tesla sales have absolutely TANKED in the EU. I’m not sure how much that matters, but the Bond villain (and shareholders) can’t be happy about having sales fall by nearly 60% in Germany and more than 60% in France, the two largest markets in the EU.
  • In the U.S., public approval of Musk’s meddling is already worse than approval of GWB after the economy cratered in 2008. Around a quarter of Republicans approve of what Musk is doing, and only 6% of Democrats and independents do.
  • Musk and his DOGE douchebags were scheduled to menace the Department of Labor onsite yesterday, and when word got out, protesters rallied at the building. The DOGE derps didn’t show up after all.
  • A court order temporarily blocked Musk and the kinderchud from accessing DOL data until a hearing scheduled for today.
  • A federal judge paused the deadline on the federal employee “resign or else” offer, which was supposed to be midnight last night, noting that the government can’t spend buyout money it hasn’t allocated.
  • Another federal judge, (a Reagan appointee!), blasted Trump’s attempt to overturn birthright citizenship by executive fiat, writing, “The rule of law is, according to him [Trump], something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether for political or personal gain. There are moments in the world’s history when people look back and ask, ‘Where were the lawyers? Where were the judges?’ In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”

To state the obvious, this doesn’t mean we’re winning. These kleptocratic pricks are causing chaos and death every day by illegally shutting off critical aid abroad, interrupting government-funded services at home and terrorizing government workers.

But after being seemingly caught flat-footed by the ferocious Musk assault, folks rallied, and the opposition racked up some successes yesterday. I think that’s important to acknowledge and evaluate for lessons on how to push back successfully in the future.

Open thread.

*MSNBC posts random clips from its shows on YouTube, but here’s a link to another YouTube user’s recording of the last night’s entire episode on that platform. Or you can listen to it as a podcast, which is what I do when I have time.

Trusk & Mump take some Ls (open thread)Post + Comments (76)

Morning RoundUp

by | 89 Comments

This post is in: 

There’s a good interview of Brian Schatz in the New Yorker.  This is spot-on:

Various people in the Democratic caucuses within the House and the Senate have said some version of “We can’t respond with full panic to every single thing Trump does. You have to pick and choose.” I know everyone’s got different political incentives, but how are you figuring out what to make a big deal about versus what you may oppose but not freak out over?

I focus on preventing immediate harm. When the Medicaid portal was shut down, when the Head Start money was shut down, when construction money for highways was shut down, that was relatively straightforward because it was both immediately harmful and illegal. [The White House claimed the Medicaid portal was unavailable owing to a technical outage.] And then I’m also focussed on maintaining our American system of checks and balances. That’s different from me making that my primary talking point. But I did swear an oath to the Constitution, and I’m not going to let some pundit dictate whether or not I exercise my obligations as a member of the Article I branch. I’m not suggesting we put it into a television ad—

Wait, what are you talking about with “some pundit”? Who are you referring to?

Oh, David Axelrod, James Carville. I mean, those guys have not been in the trenches legislatively or electorally in a full generation. And there’s a cottage industry out there of Democratic strategists. But in order to be a Democratic strategist, you actually have to do politics currently and not just podcast about it.

You are referring to them criticizing what you’ve done around U.S.A.I.D. by saying foreign aid is not good territory for Democrats to fight for?

Yeah. And you think I don’t know that foreign aid is not as popular as Medicaid? Of course I know that. But there are going to be mass deaths from malaria and H.I.V./aids and other preventable diseases and conditions because of what the United States is doing. So do I have to be thoughtful and sometimes clever about how we go about communicating that? Yes. Am I going to wait for a more popular program? No, because what they are doing here is ignoring a federal law.

If you haven’t heard what Axelrod (and Rahm Emanuel) said, this Politico piece details it — they said that Democrats shouldn’t fight USAID because foreign aid isn’t popular.

This is on-brand for the pedophile enabling party:

New — The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) was told this week by DOJ that they'd lose their funding if the org didn't remove any mentions of LGBTQIA+ issues from their public materials, I've learned. Staff were told they need to deadname trans kids in their reports to comply.

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) February 6, 2025 at 8:30 PM


Here are just a couple of recent instances of Republicans enabling pedophiles: Pardoned J6 Rioter Arrested in Texas for Soliciting Sex from a Minor and Conservative Writer who accused drag queens of “grooming” kids arrested for child molestation. It’s always the ones you most expect.

Here’s a little Elon tidbit: The reason that Tesla charging ports are in an inconvenient location (left rear corner) instead of the front fender or left-hand side is because that was a good placement for Elon’s rental in Beverly Hills. That’s certainly not the biggest Elon story of the moment, but I thought it was interesting that it broke a couple of days ago, because much (not all) of the tech press has been fluffing this guy for years. (Walter Isaacson’s Musk bio was especially full of shit.) Now they’ve finally decided to pull their version of a Maggie Haberman and actually report all the dumb shit he’s done over the years. Great work, guys!

Morning RoundUpPost + Comments (89)

Essential Distractions Open Thread: Puppy Bowl!

by | 97 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Tune in to the Puppy Bowl!
www.tvinsider.com/gallery/pupp…

[image or embed]

— Tea4Me (@tea-n-me.bsky.social) February 7, 2025 at 4:02 AM

show full post on front page

Essential Distractions Open Thread: Puppy Bowl!Post + Comments (97)

Cleansing Excoriation Read: Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government

by | 116 Comments

This post is in: , ,

I wrote about the idiotic and anti-human vision that is currently replacing the republic. I will now go back to thinking about what a cleansing flood might look like. defector.com/billionaire-…

[image or embed]

— David_j_roth (@davidjroth.bsky.social) February 5, 2025 at 2:28 PM

This *should* be a gift link, I hope. The irreplaceable Dave Roth, at Defector:

The most important thing to know about both the chittering Renfields gnawing through the ductwork of the American administrative state and the billionaire sociopath they serve is that they don’t care. Every bit of damage they have done and will do springs from and follows this fundamental fact. They don’t know anything about what they’re wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don’t care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.

They do not care about or understand the state because they do not acknowledge that it is valid; they do not care about or understand public service or public servants because they refuse the premise that such things could even exist. This goes beyond the private sector’s familiar and self-flattering disdain for the public sector, which amounts to the load-bearing assumption that everything and everyone operating outside of the free market is somehow the minor leagues. There is another opposition at work here, a crabbed and curdled worldview that reflects libertarianism’s signature balance of ideological resentment and pure childish certitude, and which is defined by the smash-and-grab anti-ethos of the vandal, but which is finally simpler and stupider than either.

Moment by moment, Musk and his strike force of greasy Beavisoid wreckers are rats in the walls, gnawing hideously through the wiring in search of richer fare. There is public money in there somewhere, and they believe it is theirs by right. Musk and his super-class of tech freaks want to get fat on it, to rescue that money from public uses that they view as inherently inefficient and unjust—spending that is “waste, fraud, and abuse” because of the ends to which it is deployed, which are public, and because of who is deploying it, which is not them. It is important to them, as a matter of efficiency and justice, that more of that money end up with them. In more deserving hands, that public wealth will be protected from the grasping public, and can be put to the uses this cohort prefers: building bigger homes behind bigger walls, booking The Chainsmokers to play 45-minute sets at the absolute worst parties in human history, hiring Famously Combative Attorneys and buying political suction, discreetly settling their endless skein of sexual harassment lawsuits. Rich person things. Real stuff…

Doing the work that these captive agencies do—doing, even, the bad things that people and institutions can do—takes knowledge and care and collaboration. You can’t build something, or improve or maintain something that anyone else built, without that knowledge and care. But anyone can swing a hammer, and someone sufficiently eager to swing that hammer won’t really need to know or care where they’re swinging it provided they keep doing so. Enough blows will do the job; eventually, even the blindest swing will hit something important. You can’t build anything enduring this recklessly or this stupidly, but you can kill just about anything that way.

This is not a new observation, to say the very least. The central conceit of American governance, from the nation’s founding, is a recognition of that fact. If that system was in some sense doomed from the start, given the extent to which the powerful people that designed it created its series of infuriating switchbacks and failsafes to some extent as protection against their own comeuppance or usurpation, that system was also elegantly designed, enjoyed a good long run, and was commendably prescient about the greatest threat it would face: some asshole who was unwilling to abide by or acknowledge any of those clever rules or load-bearing social obligations whenever and wherever they inconvenienced or just annoyed him, and who had become powerful enough to make that rejection everyone else’s problem…

… In a system designed to run on heavily qualified but quantifiable systems of consent, Musk has repeatedly refused the premise at every turn; that cocksure and annihilating lack of care is behind everything that Elon Musk has ever done or claimed or stolen or faked or bought. As with Donald Trump, another pig-stupid rich kid and being of pure appetite, Musk’s inability or refusal to believe that any other thing could be more important than him getting exactly what he wants would make him an existential threat to a system built around the idea of public good. That concept just is not real to them in the way that their own hunger is; none of the people they’d immiserate or incinerate would or could ever matter as much as whatever they want at this moment…

show full post on front page

Cleansing Excoriation Read: <em>Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government</em>Post + Comments (116)

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)