Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

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

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

Stand up, dammit!

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

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Late Night Open Thread: Our Very Serious Media Has A Big Sad

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… And even some of their most social-media-engaged colleagues are losing all sympathy:

Yep. Biden, wanting to Uphold the Norms, agreed to keep on a Trump-appointed prosecutor who was probing his son. Created a special counsel to probe his own post-VP document retention. Kept on Durham so he could finish a Trump-ordered probe of 2016.
What did he get? Nothing. So here he goes.

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— Dave Weigel (@daveweigel.bsky.social) December 1, 2024 at 7:45 PM

Trump will never have to pardon Jared for his two billion dollar Saudi deal since it was never investigated.

— Schooley (@schooley.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 3:28 PM

A norm that restrains only one side isn't a norm at all–it's a trap.

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— Garrett Epps (@garrettepps.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 12:03 AM

Late Night Open Thread: Our Very Serious Media Has A Big Sad

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

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War for Ukraine Day 1,013: Scholz Visits Ukraine

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A quick housekeeping note: Rosie is doing great. In order to avoid someone walking what appeared to be a pair of long haired guinea pigs on retractable leashes, we took an alternate route that increased our walk from the planned 1.3 miles to 1.5 miles. Rosie did great the whole way. Ruby was, of course, Ruby. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations to help with her chemo treatments.

Let’s start with yesterday’s butcher bill:

⚡️ Russian attacks across Ukraine kill 4, injure 23 over past day.

Russian attacks against Ukraine killed at least four people and injured 23 across multiple regions, authorities reported on Dec. 2.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) December 2, 2024 at 4:39 AM

From The Kyiv Independent:

Russian attacks against Ukraine killed at least four people and injured 23 across multiple regions, authorities reported on Dec. 2.

Russian forces launched 110 Shahed-type drones and other unmanned aerial vehicles against Ukraine overnight, the Air Force said.

Fifty-two were shot down, 50 were lost across Ukraine thanks to electronic warfare countermeasures, and six flew to Belarus and Russia, according to the statement.

A Russian drone hit an apartment building in the western city of Ternopil, killing at least one person and injuring four, officials said. Around 100 people were evacuated from the damaged building. The blast also damaged windows of the surrounding buildings, a school, and 20 cars.

In Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a 60-year-old man was injured during Russian attacks against Nikopol and the Marhanets community, Governor Serhii Lysak reported.

Russian attacks against Donetsk Oblast injured five people, Governor Vadym Filashkin reported. Two injuries were reported in the town of Pokrovsk, two in the village of Shevchenko, and one in the Andriivka village.

In Kherson Oblast, three people were killed and 13 injured in Russian attacks over the past day, Governor Oleksandr Prokudin said. The three fatalities and 11 injuries were reported after Russian forces struck a minibus in the city of Kherson on Dec. 1.

Cherkasy, Chernihiv, Chernivtsi, Khmelnytskyi, Kyiv, Luhansk, Poltava, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Sumy, and Zaporizhzhia oblasts also came under attack but no casualties were reported.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Ukraine today. He came bearing gifts. Sort of.

⚡️ Zelensky, Scholz meet in Kyiv as Germany unveils military aid.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Dec. 2, together paying respect to Ukrainian soldiers killed during the war with Russia.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) December 2, 2024 at 7:27 AM

Scholz visited Ukraine’s capital for the first time since June 2022, promising 650 million euros ($680 million) worth of arms to be supplied this December. A government spokesperson clarified that this will be part of a 1.4 billion euros ($1.5 billion) package already announced in October.

— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) December 2, 2024 at 7:28 AM

President Zelensky and Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz paid respects to fallen Ukrainian troops at the makeshift memorial on Kyiv’s central Maidan today. video via Zelensky’s Telegram.

Scholz will “announce further military equipment worth 650 million euros, which are to be delivered in December.”

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— Christopher Miller (@christopherjm.bsky.social) December 2, 2024 at 7:46 AM

He also got an earful.

⚡️’This does not strengthen Ukraine,’ Zelensky on Scholz’s call with Putin.

Separate talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin do not strengthen Ukraine and may lead to improving his standing, President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Dec. 2.

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— The Kyiv Independent (@kyivindependent.com) December 2, 2024 at 1:25 PM

Here’s the video of their joint press conference:

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

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Monday Evening Open Thread: What We Could’ve Had

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Love this 100th birthday post by VP Harris for Shirley Chisholm. Kamala knows she is walking in Shirley’s footsteps! ????

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— ?? @FlyWithKamala | WHATEVER KAMALA WANTS 202X! (@flywithkamala.bsky.social) November 30, 2024 at 4:26 PM

Shirley Chisholm was one of my earliest political idols, and yes I am still bitter at the way she was treated by her fellow ‘establishment’ Democrats in 1972, and I guess now I can be bitter about the way Kamala Harris is being treated by all too many of our Very Serious Democratic Insiders. (Case in point: CNN’s Ronald Brownstein, at the Atlantic, just gave four Harris campaign surrogates who should’ve known better ten thousand chances to blame everyone but themselves [gift link].

Politico does its best to scare the horses in this pre-Thanksgiving story, but I’m actually looking forward to seeing what Madam Kamala does next… “Harris is telling her advisers and allies to keep her political options open”:

Kamala Harris has been lying low since her defeat in the presidential race, unwinding with family and senior aides in Hawaii before heading back to the nation’s capital.

But privately, the vice president has been instructing advisers and allies to keep her options open — whether for a possible 2028 presidential run, or even to run for governor in her home state of California in two years. As Harris has repeated in phone calls, “I am staying in the fight.”

She is expected to explore those and other possible paths forward with family members over the winter holiday season, according to five people in the Harris inner circle, who were granted anonymity to discuss internal dynamics. Her deliberations follow an extraordinary four months in which Harris went from President Joe Biden’s running mate to the top of the ticket, reenergizing Democrats before ultimately crashing on election night.

“She doesn’t have to decide if she wants to run for something again in the next six months,” said one former Harris campaign aide. “The natural thing to do would be to set up some type of entity that would give her the opportunity to travel and give speeches and preserve her political relationships.”

Most immediately, Harris and her advisers are working to define how and when she will speak out against Donald Trump and reassert her own role in the Democratic Party. Closing out her term as vice president, she’s set to preside over certifying the November election she lost to Trump, and then appear at the once-and-future president’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

“There will be a desire to hear her voice, and there won’t be a vacuum for long,” a person close to Harris said…

I insist that we re-use VP's FREEDOM rhetoric because that's what this country was supposed to be founded on

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— Tony Moonbeam Returns (@moonbeamii.bsky.social) November 29, 2024 at 11:47 AM

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Pardon My Enthusiasm

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Pardon My Enthusiasm
I’m fine with Biden pardoning his son, Hunter.  I’ve been reading through the takes and I’ve settled on “who fucking cares”.  So I agree with Josh Marshall:

[…] I’m glad he did it. Biden learned the right lesson: no one gives a fuck about norms. It’s unquestionably true that Hunter Biden wouldn’t be in this position if not for his dad. That’s basically the justification Biden gave. And he’s right. It may sound angry or cynical to say “no one gives a fuck.” But I mean it both in a general way and in this particular way: the reason for Biden not to do this was to allow his son to remain collateral damage of the GOP war against his presidency and to leave him in the hands of the Trump DOJ for at least the next four years all to make a point of principle about being better, different, more righteous, more norm-honoring than Donald Trump.

 

Truly. No one gives a fuck. If anything, that logic I just laid out sounds like one of those fastidious, hyper-process-oriented and baroque bits of reasoning that have of late left Democrats mesmerized while the real world is passing them by.

If you do want to read more fastidious takes, Brian Beutler thinks Biden should have commuted the sentence instead of issuing a pardon (my take is that it makes no political difference and this is fundamentally a political act, so who cares.) Merrick Garland’s #1 fan Marci Wheeler thinks that Hunter should be allowed to go through the appeal process (my take is what the fuck is she smoking — an appeals process would end up at the corrupt Supreme Court who would looooove to shit on Hunter 6-3.  But, at least in this instance, she admits that Garland fucked up.)

Anyway, one point I’d like to make is relevant to some of my recent posts:  People who think that I’m wrong about calling out the abusers in Trump’s cabinet because you can’t just repeat what they did every day should remember that repeating what he did every day is exactly what Hunter Biden’s persecutors did.  Obviously, they repeated it with different variations on a theme, such as wanting to post pictures of his dick.  But, it’s been more or less the same basic facts for years.  And, guess what, as his dad would say:  they won.  They beat Hunter Biden. He pled guilty to charges that almost nobody else in the same situation would ever face. Republicans: 1, Democrats:0.

Now, we can either look at this evidence and decide that we’re too good to do this for some reason that I can’t fathom, or we can understand that we’re not sinking to the same level as Republicans if we call out Hegseth, RFK the lesser, Gaetz and any other sex pests that I probably forgot about since there are so fucking many.  Hunter Biden was not a cabinet appointee.  He had no power in the Biden administration.  His peccadilloes were, in main, personal, not political.

Hegseth, Bobby Very Junior, Gaetz, et. al. are about to be put in charge of big government organizations.  Are there dick pics?  Let’s see them.  Are there scuzzy details?  Let’s hear them.  I frankly don’t know what to do about their victims, but this is a conundrum that faces anyone who wants to stop a sex pest.  The people they abuse get abused again when the abuser’s crimes are revealed.  The good news is that sometimes the abuser dies in prison, like Harvey Weinstein is going to do.  And if they don’t go to prison, at least, maybe, they will go away.

(Edit:  I almost forgot:  Fuuuucccckk Jared Polis.)

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Party Boys

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We know the Fox News personality Trump nominated to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is a creep who abuses women. Heck, his own mother said so, as Anne Laurie covered in a recent post. In case you missed it, Penelope Hegseth emailed the following comments to her son (source is the NYT):

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.

She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

She took it all back when contacted by the Times for comment and claimed Hegseth is a good husband and father. That’s the mother’s version of a horndog politician’s wife standing stoically next to her man during a press conference called to address a gross sex scandal.

Women are routinely expected to endure this sort of humiliation to preserve men’s hold on power. There’s no payoff for them, of course. Just ask Hillary Clinton.

I thought maybe that would change eventually, but we’re going backward in this country on women’s equality. An adjudicated rapist will put his tiny hand on a bible soon and be restored to the highest office in the land. The parade of sex offenders around the sex pest in chief is a big FUCK YOU to women, whether they acknowledge it or not (and many do not).

But the Hegseth nomination is also a giant FUCK YOU to basic competence, as The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer revealed in an article published yesterday. I suppose it’s paywalled, but here’s a link. Excerpts below:

…Hegseth’s record before becoming a full-time Fox News TV host, in 2017, raises additional questions about his suitability to run the world’s largest and most lethal military force. A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

To sum up, Hegseth is a blackout drunk who sexually harassed female employees and tolerated the same behavior from other members of his team. He’s an accused rapist and alleged bigot. That would normally be a problem for the potential leader of the DoD, but “norm” flew out the window a long time ago. However, Hegseth’s incompetence is disqualifying even if the character issue is moot these days:

Margaret Hoover, a Republican political commentator and political strategist who worked as an adviser to V.F.F. between 2008 and 2010, recently told CNN that she had grave concerns about Hegseth’s ability to run the Pentagon, the largest department in the federal government, given his mismanagement at V.F.F. “I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly, I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals.”

Good question, Ms. Hoover.

One amusing aspect of this disgraceful mess: Hegseth allegedly lied to the Trump people and said no skeletons would tumble out of his closet if he were nominated, so they were “blindsided” when the rape accusation and payoff surfaced.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s transition team was blindsided by the sexual-assault story because Hegseth had failed to disclose anything about it, including the fact that he had paid off his accuser. He also failed to disclose that he had received a copy of the police report in 2021, long before the Monterey police’s recent release of it. The series of damning revelations has reportedly infuriated the transition team. “When we ask, ‘Is there anything else we need to know about?’ that is usually a good time to mention a police report,” a Trump adviser told Rolling Stone. “Obviously he remembered that this all happened and there is no way—I don’t think—he could have believed this wouldn’t come out once he got nominated.”

Well, maybe Hegseth is yet another scumbag following the corporate ethos of an organization led by Donald J. Trump, so he felt no need to disclose anything. If the boss can sexually assault and defame women with impunity and be reelected, why should Hegseth see his own sordid history as an obstacle to an important job?

The truth is, a critical mass in this country despises women and scoffs at basic standards of competence — or else is so indifferent that it amounts to the same thing. That’s not a hot take; it’s been cooling on the windowsill like a rancid pie for decades.

Open thread.

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Medicaid is Considered an Entitlement

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Medicaid is Considered an Entitlement

I just re-upped for Obamacare, and I’ll quickly mention that it is shitty insurance that costs $1,300 a month for my wife and me.  Even though we’ve used healthcare services in the past 3 or so years that we’ve been on Obamacare, we haven’t seen a single penny from the insurance company because our massive deductible has never been satisfied.  It’s medical bankruptcy insurance that I’m lucky enough to be able to afford.  My personal situation tempers any talk of how people ought to be grateful for Obamacare, especially considering the almost $50K I’ve spent on healthcare plus insurance over the past 3 years.

That all said, Medicaid plus Obamacare is a huge working class benefit in red states, because it actually pays out to a lot of people who work for a living but don’t have employer-sponsored plans.  I have some Trump-voting relatives who are on Medicaid or premium support or “buying off the exchange” or whatever else they call it.  Some of them run small ag businesses where they pay little or no tax because they’re plowing every spare cent back into the business.  (They are not tax cheats — anyone who’s run a small business that makes big capital investments can work it so they don’t really pay much.)

Though they’re probably on the same exact insurance as what Fox and Friends would characterize as “welfare” for undeserving brown poors, they wouldn’t acknowledge that they’re on anything like”welfare”.  They work and pay taxes (well a little bit) and, in their minds, they deserve their “insurance”. I’m sure they have not even an inkling that Trump wants to take away what they consider an entitlement in the most basic sense of the word.

This will be a great opportunity for the opposition party to point out that (a) they only have their insurance because we worked our asses off for them to get it, (b) the guys they vote for have wanted to take it away, repeatedly and (c) the reason is tax breaks for rich dipshits.

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Pet Calendar Update

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As you can see, we didn’t hit our goal of having the calendar available for oder by December 1.

I can assure you that we have spent countless hours on the calendar and are working as fast as we can.  We had about 250 submissions, so that means 2 calendars – at 20 photos on a page, they would all have to be the size of postage stamps. :-)

Hoping to have spreadsheets available in a day or two so you can make sure all your guys are in the same calendar, that everything is spelled right, and that heart status is correct.

In the meantime, though, you can have a sneak peek at the 5 finalists for the calendar covers.

In no particular order…

Open thread.

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