Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

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

Nothing worth doing is easy.

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

Republicans in disarray!

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

Consistently wrong since 2002

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Petty moves from a petty man.

So many bastards, so little time.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

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Thursday Evening Open Thread

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I’ve been feeling kind of out of sorts for the past couple of days, so I don’t have much to say, but it looks like we could use an open thread.

I updated the OS on my mac, and I like some changes, but hate some of the others.  Where is Steve Jobs when you need him?  I kind of think the folks at Apple have forgotten their origins, and it’s pissing me off.  Hideous fonts, everything looks cold and unfriendly like a Microsoft product.  They even made all their interestingly shaped icons in the sidebar into squares!

I guess I could mention that someone suggested that it might be nice to have a different photo in the sidebar every day to help remind us that there’s still beauty in the world.   So I’ll try that for awhile and see how it goes.  I’ll be using photos that have been sent in as part of On the Road posts.  If you click on it, you get a full-sized image.

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War for Ukraine Day 1,044: Russia Strategically Uses False Alarms To Terrorize & Attempt To Demoralize the Ukranians

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Three quick housekeeping notes. First, I’m a bit fried, so just going to run through the basics tonight.

Second, let’s try to keep the over the top bloodthirsty remarks out of the comments. Let’s dial things back down below ten.

Third, and again, I do actually read every comment, even if only the next day because I’ve racked out before you’ve posted them. If I haven’t replied in comments it’s because it’s usually twelve to fifteen hours later. You don’t have to repost them the next night. With that said, both last night and the night before, YY_Sima Qian asked:

Thanks Adam! Posted the below to yesterday’s thread after it was dead, but I think you were a bit hyperbolic in your criticism of the Biden FP team:

Very late to this thread, but Biden’s natsec team can’t be worse than Trump’s, even the one in the 1st couple of years of Trump’s 1st term. Heaven knows I have levied plenty of criticism at Biden’s team, but at least they are competent crises managers, even if they do little to alleviate (& often exacerbate) the broader dynamics that precipitate crises. Can’t say the same about Trump’s team, & the 2nd term is set to be much worse

OTOH, I saw a quote attributed to Sullivan floating around X, which asserted that Biden thinks in terms of decades, while everyone criticizing him & his team think in terms of months & years (I am paraphrasing). They can’t be that obtuse & tone deaf…

No, I was not. I am specifically leaving the President-elect’s first term team, especially a lot of the replacement appointees that came along late in the game, out of the discussion. The reason for that is the President-elect and his appointees were, are, and will be so far outside of the normal boundaries from which these appointees had previously been drawn from that they are something different and, as a result, in a different category. For all that President Bush 43 had religious delusions of grandeur in regard to how he understood his foreign, defense, and natsec policy, his appointees were bog standard GOP and conservative appointees. Though they, as well as VP Cheney, quickly figured out W’s delusional understanding of his role in the world and manipulated him for their own ends. So, yes, the President-elect’s senior nat-sec team was overall worse in terms of the original appointees and the replacements, just as the designees for his second term will be even worse than those from the first term. And this includes the retreads. But they’re in a very different category from everyone who came before his first term and the throwbacks that President Biden appointed during his interregnum.

Putin and the Russians have begun triggering air raid alerts even though they have no intention of attacking.

Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile (Oreshnik) threat triggering countrywide air raid alert. Fascist Russia will probably be using this threat regularly to keep Ukrainians on edge now that its MiG-31K-launched Kinzhal missile threat has proved not very effective.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 7:22 AM

Alert over after 34 minutes. No missile launch.

— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 8:54 AM

These are themselves a type of attack. I’m still trying to think through if they’re strategic terror or a form of Military Deception (MILDEC) or some combo. Most likely a combo. Regardless, the purpose is to terrorize the Ukrainians, stress them out, and demoralize them.

President Zelenskyy and First Lady Zelenska sat for a long interview with Ukrainian TV earlier today. Video with English captions turned on below.

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

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Medical Malpractice Open Thread: You Do *Not* Have to Hand It to RFK Jr.

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There’s a good market for people saying dumb things

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) January 2, 2025 at 1:11 AM

Jerusalem Demsas is usually smarter than this article makes her seem (part of that — my personal bias — is that podcasts tend to make people sound dumber than they are), but the Atlantic is deeply, historically committed to its brand of Smug Libertarian Contrarianism.

What if this man’s dumb, dangerous fixations were actually… good, at least in parts? Or, at least, if they sounded good, if you edited them carefully enough?… Then you’d have deceptively edited bullshit conspiracy theories, maximized for profitable grifting!

the first step in any “maybe there’s something to what RFK is saying” argument is to substitute in something better that the author imagines he’s saying

— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 2:18 PM

This is what happens when narrative overcomes reality. You can't correct someone when they're trying to tell their story, after all. And if someone has a really exciting & unexpected story, how could you deny them the microphone?

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— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) December 31, 2024 at 2:34 PM

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Malefactors of Great Wealth II (Open Thread)

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I’m looking forward to seeing how the post-Biden Democratic Party takes shape. It will be different in ways we can’t know yet, but it’s a mystery to me how will it evolve.

I’ve seen two arguments about how Dems should move forward that both ring true to me, but they are potentially in conflict. The first is that losing an election fairly narrowly under decidedly anomalous circumstances shouldn’t prompt a party to fundamentally change.

The second is that institutions in this country are broken and have been for a long time, and the resulting discontent gives rise to demagogues and makes it perilous to seem to defend the status quo.

My sense was the “status quo” Biden and then Harris were defending was liberal democracy itself. On the domestic side, Biden made solid attempts to dismantle a status quo that really does suck by empowering workers and taking steps to make the rich pay their fair share, and Harris indicated she’d continue that.

But maybe that approach was too subtle for the relative handful of low-info swing voters who decide close elections. If they’re pissed about the pandemic or price of eggs or whatever, they’ll punish the party in power. That landed on Trump in 2020, and it landed on Biden (and Harris-Walz) in 2024.

This piece from Josh Marshall suggests that while yes, it obviously sucks that Trump won, it’s liberating in the Pottery Barn sense for Democrats. That’s because Trump and the kleptocratic billionaires are now the establishment. [gift link]

2024 was a deeply disappointing year. It capped two or three years that all had the feeling of playing out bad hands — a presidency defined by the jagged aftermath of COVID (a first-in-half-a-century inflation shock being the jaggedest), an increasingly frail president who couldn’t easily be replaced without doing even more damage than having him run for reelection. This doesn’t address decisions that should have been and could have been made differently. I focus on these because they were based on earlier decisions or events which were either right at the time or very difficult to avoid. Again, that steely but trapped feeling of playing out bad hands.

In 2025 we all face the consequences of those failures. But we are equally liberated from much of that history. Everybody is being dealt a new hand. We can make decisions differently, with more clarity, with less paralyzing concern over sunk costs. If there’s a message of the Biden years, it’s that there’s no simply going back to whatever we thought was the system that more or less worked before Trump arrived on the scene. You have to go forward on the basis of all we’ve seen over the last decade.

I think billionaires — including and maybe even especially over-leveraged and publicly subsidized frauds like Trump and Musk — always were the establishment. It’s nothing new. Teddy Roosevelt called the same type “malefactors of great wealth” 130 years ago.

Plutocrats of previous generations bankrolled conservative politicians to secure favorable tax treatment and deregulation. But that’s not the platform the conservative pols ran on because low taxes for rich people and weak public safety and environmental protections aren’t popular.

Old school conservative pols, like the current crop, mostly ran on bigotry and culture war bullshit and advanced the plutocrat agenda behind the scenes. Trump and Musk cut out the middleman and merged the front and back of house agendas.

Who knows, maybe that will be clarifying? We’ll see.

Open thread.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Turn the Page

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Happy New Year!
(my cartoon for @newscientist.bsky.social)

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— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 5:04 AM

I say good for President Biden, and bad cess to the people who will undoubtably bitch & moan about it. Per the Washington Post, “Biden to honor Liz Cheney with Presidential Citizens Medal”:

President Joe Biden will honor former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney and 19 others on Thursday with the Presidential Citizens Medal, a tribute given to those who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country or fellow Americans.

Biden will bestow the honor on Cheney — one of the GOP’s most outspoken critics of President-elect Donald Trump, who joined Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris on the campaign trail last year in a bipartisan push to defeat him — less than three weeks before Trump is inaugurated.

Cheney served as vice chair of the House select committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters, and in October, she urged Americans to reject his “depraved cruelty” as she rallied alongside Harris. A majority of voters were not persuaded by that argument…

Alongside Cheney, Biden will award Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi), who served as the chairman of the Jan. 6 House select committee, with the Presidential Citizens Medal.

Other honorees include attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage and argued before the Supreme Court in the landmark marriage-equality case Obergefell v. Hodges, and lawyer and activist Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage-equality movement.

Veterans, health-care advocates and former lawmakers, some with close, decades-long ties to Biden, are also on the list. Among them are former senators Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) and Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut), as well as two-time NBA champion and former senator Bill Bradley (D-New Jersey), a Hall of Fame forward who played for the New York Knicks before embarking on a career in politics.

I checked President Biden’s official twitter account (there doesn’t seem to be an official BlueSky account), and there wasn’t any news (yet) about the Presidential Citizens medals, but I did find this:

A little nostalgia, for my fellow Olds…

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War for Ukraine Day 1,043: Putin Bombards Ukraine on New Year’s Day

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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)

Putin and Russia celebrated the new year by bombarding Ukraine.

On this New Year’s night, Ukrainian air defense destroyed 63 Russian drones over our country.

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 8:13 AM

Kyiv city center. On New Year’s morning, Russia attacked Ukraine with 111 Shahed drones. The only language this country understands is power, nothing less

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— Maria Avdeeva (@mariainkharkiv.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 3:05 AM

A Russian attack on Kyiv tragically claimed the lives of renowned neurobiologist Igor Zyma and his wife,” a friend of the family shared.

“Our friend, Dr. Igor Zyma, perished alongside his wife and their beloved cat. The attack occurred in their own home, while they were peacefully sleeping”

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 1:02 PM

⚡️Prominent scientists among victims of New Year’s Day drone attack in Kyiv.

Married couple Ihor Zyma and Olesia Sokur both worked as scientists with the Institute for Biology and Medicine at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. They were killed in a Russian drone strike on Jan. 1.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) January 1, 2025 at 6:10 PM

From The Kyiv Independent:

The two victims killed in Russia’s Jan. 1 drone strike on Kyiv were a married couple who both worked as scientists, Education and Science Minister Oksen Lisovyi announced.

Prominent neurobiologist Ihor Zyma and doctor of biological sciences Olesia Sokur were killed in the attack, Lisovyi said on Facebook. Zyma and Sokur were married.

“The family devoted almost their entire lives to science,” Lisovyi said.

Zyma was a senior researcher and associate professor at the Institute for Biology and Medicine at the Taras Shevchenko National University in Kyiv. Sokur also worked at the Institute as a deputy director of scientific work and a member of the Academic Council.

“My sincere condolences to the relatives and friends of the deceased, as well as to all who suffered from today’s morning terror,” Lisovyi said.

Russia launched a drone attack on Kyiv on the morning of Jan. 1, killing two people and injuring six others, including two pregnant women. The attack also damaged a building of the National Bank of Ukraine.

Russia’s full-scale invasion has taken a severe toll on Ukraine’s scientific community. According to a study published by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) on Dec. 11, 23.5 percent of scientists still living in Ukraine have lost access to critical input for their research, and 20.8 percent cannot physically access their institution.

Around 18% of Ukraine’s scientists have fled the country amid Russia’s ongoing war.

As I am writing tonight’s update, almost half of Ukraine – all of eastern and almost all of central Ukraine – are under air raid alert at 8:05 PM EST/3:05 AM local time in Ukraine.

President Zelenskyy did not make an address today.

The cost and the reason:

A special trip to the Carpathians for the children of fallen soldiers was organized by bikers who are now soldiers in the 93rd Motorized Rifle Brigade❤️

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— Sofia (@sofiaukraini.bsky.social) January 1, 2025 at 8:20 AM

More on the New Year’s Day attacks after the jump.

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