Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

The desire to stay informed is directly at odds with the need to not be constantly enraged.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

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

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

We still have time to mess this up!

… gradually, and then suddenly.

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

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

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

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

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

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

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Dan Pfeiffer Is Worth Listening To: Don’t Believe the Hype, Trump’s First Moves are Very Unpopular

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Dan Pfeiffer is one of the people whose substack I pay for, and it’s worth it. I’ll share some of today’s here because I think this is important.  And because it’s important for us to not contribute to the narrative that FFOTUS (First Felon of the United States) is all powerful.

Trump’s inauguration was a truly surreal event.

[…]

Amid this bizarre collection of people and unintentionally ironic location, Trump claimed a massive mandate. and proclaimed the beginning of a “Golden Age” for America. Trump made big and specific promises many of which were executive orders he signed within hours of being sworn in. Later in the day, Trump pardoned 1500 January 6th defendants.

This is all part of a specific strategy,

In the lead-up to the inauguration, Trump aides described this flurry of executive actions as a “shock and awe” campaign (perhaps Team Trump could use a primer on how the Iraq War went). The New York Times reported:

Narrator: just assume the usual bullshit from the NYT, I won’t copy that here.

[…]

The Republicans, his tech oligarch allies, and some in the media are eating it up, but new polling shows that the public is not on board with Trump’s agenda.

Broad Support for Trump’s Narrative

Look, we have to be honest with ourselves; this is not 2017. Back then, Trump stumbled ass backward in the presidency. In many ways, his victory was a fluke. He lost the popular vote and didn’t get above 47% in most swing states. The public didn’t support him or his agenda. This time, Trump won the popular vote, and he entered office more popular than ever.

The public is very open to his message of change and upending the status quo. A New York Times and Ipsos poll found that nine in ten Americans believe the political system is broken and that a majority supported “mass deportation.”

Now for the better news:

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Protecting Where We Can

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I love this so much!
At the inauguration, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wore a distinctive collar adorned with cowrie shells, which are believed to offer protection from evil in African traditions.
This choice mirrors the late Justice Ginsburg’s practice of using collars to convey a message.

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— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) January 20, 2025 at 8:19 PM


 
I’m not gonna call her our Shadow President, but if that’s who she wants to be…

New on MSNBC: Vice President Harris will fly back to Los Angeles today with an all-female U.S. Air Force crew — the first time an all-female crew has operated a C-33.
Upon landing, Harris will visit a local fire station and then distribute food to community members impacted by the wildfires.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 1:30 PM

Former Secretary of State has an opinion:

Peltier has always refused to petition for a pardon, on the grounds that he’s not apologizing for crimes he didn’t commit. He’s an old man, and he’ll get to live out his remaining time surrounded by his family and his community:

Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier will return home nearly half a century after he was imprisoned for the 1975 killings of two FBI agents. President Joe Biden commuted Peltier’s sentence Monday following decades of community-led advocacy calling his imprisonment an example of the U.S. government’s mistreatment of Native Americans.

The White House said Peltier, who is now 80 and of declining health, will transition to home confinement. The commutation is not a pardon for crimes committed, a decision some of Peltier’s advocates welcomed since he has always maintained his innocence. But the last-minute move as Biden left office angered law enforcement officers who believe he is guilty.

The National Congress of American Indians celebrated the “historic” decision in a statement saying the case “has long symbolized the systemic injustices faced by Indigenous Peoples.”…

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War for Ukraine Day 1,062: Russian Drone Storms Over Ukraine

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, I am going to keep tonight’s update very brief for obvious reasons.

Second, before anyone asks, yes, I saw the clips of what Musk did. Those gestures are definitely NAZI salutes. They are not a symptom of Asperbergers or being on the spectrum or whatever other bullshit is being promoted to try to gaslight everyone. That’s all I have to say about that.

History has had extremely dark times when humankind had all reasons to be ashamed and terrified of itself… but I’m trying really hard to recall a time when so many things around were such a grave insult to basic human intellectual capabilities.

— Illia Ponomarenko (@ioponomarenko.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 5:41 PM

I mean, the world’s richest man doing the Nazi salute at the U.S. presidential inauguration ceremony… there’s something fundamentally wrong about this world right now.

— Illia Ponomarenko (@ioponomarenko.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 5:41 PM

Right now, 9:22 PM EST/4:22 AM local time in Ukraine, all of eastern and central Ukraine, from north to south, is under air raid alert with the exception of Chernihiv Oblast. The alert maps are showing drones, but it is important to remember that the drone swarms are often used to try to overwhelm Ukrainian air defense so that the missiles and bombs can get through.

This was last night’s Ukrainian air defense tally:

On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, fascist Russia makes huge drone attack against democratic Ukraine: of 141 drones, 93 Iranian/Russian Shahed attack drones shot down, 47 decoy drones’ location lost (two flew back to Russia). Shostka in Sumy Oblast came under Russian ballistic missile attack.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 3:51 AM

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

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A Real Fucking Mystery

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A Real Fucking Mystery

Elon did this twice* at a rally.  Let’s see how our news media responded.

AP:  “Elon Musk pumped his fists as he spoke at the Inauguration Day viewing party at Capital One arena. He celebrated Trump’s victory, calling it “really important” and highlighting the new president’s promise to plant the U.S. flag on Mars — a longtime goal of Musk’s.”

NYT:  “Elon Musk ignites online speculation over the meaning of a hand gesture.”

Washington Post:  Nada, no mention at all.

Guardian: Elon Musk appears to make back-to-back fascist salutes at inauguration rally

The Guardian wins this round — wish they didn’t have so many TERFs working there.

Also, Amy Klobuchar is on BlueSky bragging about how great it is that we had a peaceful transition of power.  She also had some kind of a role at the Inaguration (I saw it on the gym TV so I’m not sure what it was).  The absolute inability to read the moment should be shocking, but after the last few years, it isn’t.

Edit: * Josh Marshall saw this and said Elon did it three times.

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‘Shock and Awe’ Only Works if You’re Shocked and Awed

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'Shock and Awe' Only Works if You're Shocked and Awed
Ben’s got it right, as does Josh Marshall:

I’m not one to tell people how they should react to or experience things. But for me I’m taking all of this in with a serene impassivity. They won. They’re entitled to their day. The Trump people have been signaling for days that they’re going to hit the ground running with what they describe as an executive ‘shock and awe’. I don’t see any reason to be shocked or awed. I don’t say this in any grand metaphysical sense. I mean that I’ve seen headstrong winners of close elections high on their own supply before. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, all of this is meant to hit you with so much sensory stimulus that you become overwhelmed. But the images you see wrapped around you in an iMax theater aren’t real. It’s still a movie.

I saw a bit of the inauguration on TV at the gym, and it seemed small and cramped. Two soldiers (Marines?) marching down the aisle as tightly as they could ended up physically pushing through the packed crowd. Then Trump got up and I stopped looking, because whatever he yaps is bullshit, and I’ll be focusing my energy on the fights against the certainly unconstitutional executive orders that he’ll be shitting out today.

Another good attitude about the inauguration was AOCs, who said on TikTok and Insta that she’s not attending the inauguration: “Let me make myself clear. I don’t celebrate rapists. So, no, I’m not going to the inauguration tomorrow.”

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January Made me Shiver

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Today’s the day.  In preparation, Biden has issued a number of preemptive pardons:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden on Monday pardoned Dr. Anthony Fauci, retired Gen. Mark Milley and members of the House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in an extraordinary use of the powers of the presidency in his final hours to guard against potential “revenge” by the incoming Trump administration.

The decision by Biden comes after Donald Trump warned of an enemies list filled with those who have crossed him politically or sought to hold him accountable for his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss and his role in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has selected Cabinet nominees who backed his election lies and who have pledged to punish those involved in efforts to investigate him.

“The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense,” Biden said in a statement. “Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”

Good.

Now to the infighting that will characterize the Trump administration.  Vivek Ramaswamy is out at DOGE and signaling a run for Ohio Governor.  LOL at that last bit.  Steve Bannon says he wants state AGs to use the (execrable) Laken Riley Act to sue to block H1-B visas.  That’s a shot across Elon’s bow, since he loves his H1-B employees and has a lot of operations in Texas, where Ken Paxton would I’m sure love to file yet another performative lawsuit.

In other news, not only did Trump move the inauguration indoors, he also had the Jumbotrons in the National Mall taken down, so any of his supporters who travelled to DC to watch the inaugural will do so from their hotel rooms or at the hotel bar.  The mistreatment of the rubes who bought his snake oil starts now.

Anne Laurie posted that remix of “Everybody Wants to Rule The World” in Latin below, and it’s a worthy contender for the theme song of the Trump Administration, but given the number of whiny-ass broligarchs in his orbit (“Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, as well as Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos” went to church with the Trumps this morning), I nominate this song:

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Lodestars for the Present Moment

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(Yes, I miss them already.)
 

She wrote a whole essay on this: commongood.cc/reader/a-few…

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— Caitlin (@constantcait.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 5:00 PM

Been saving this for the right moment. From the Common Good Collective, the wise & prescient Octavia Butler, twenty-five years ago, with “A Few Rules For Predicting The Future”:

Octavia Butler was an author of moving and prophetic science fiction novels. She wrote an essay in 2000 for Essence Magazine that teaches us the capacity we have to understand the future, as well as our limitations.

Reflection: When a student asks Butler what the answer is to ending the suffering in the world, she replies, “…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers–at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’…

Learn From the Past
Of course, writing novels about the future doesn’t give me any special ability to foretell the future. But it does encourage me to use our past and present behaviors as guides to the kind of world we seem to be creating. The past, for example, is filled with repeating cycles of strength and weakness, wisdom and stupidity, empire and ashes. To study history is to study humanity. And to try to foretell the future without studying history is like trying to learn to read without bothering to learn the alphabet…

Respect the Law of Consequences
… I don’t believe we can do anything at all without side effects–also known as unintended consequences. Those consequences may be beneficial or harmful. They may be too slight to matter or they may be worth the risk because the potential benefits are great, but the consequences are always there. In Parable of the Sower, my character put it this way:

All that you touch/You Change
All that you Change/Changes you
The only lasting truth/Is Change
God/Is Change…

Monday Morning Open Thread: Lodestars for the Present Moment

(John Deering via GoComics.com)

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