Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

If a good thing happens for a bad reason, it’s still a good thing.

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

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!

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Celebrate the fucking wins.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Consistently wrong since 2002

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

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

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

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

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

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Here’s Something We Didn’t Get Credit For

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Even the relatively minor changes made at DOT under Mayor Pete’s leadership were too much for our corporate overlords:

The chief executive of Delta Air Lines says the incoming Trump administration will be a “breath of fresh air” for airlines after what he calls government “overreach” under President Joe Biden.

The airline industry has chafed under consumer-protection regulations imposed by the Biden administration. And Delta is facing a federal investigation into its slow recovery from a global technology outage this summer.

I don’t even know what people mean by “working class” anymore, but I’ll tell you who gets screwed the most by airlines:  no (mileage) status, infrequent leisure travelers.  They don’t know all the ways that the airlines will fuck them, and they book tickets in the classes most likely to get bumped or otherwise have their travel disrupted.

Delta is one of the better airlines in this regard (just as the one-eyed man rules the kingdom of the blind), so who knows what the budget carriers like Frontier will come up with in the next couple of years of government “under reach.”

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Compare and Contrast…

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Compare & contrast, healthcare edition:

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Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: We’re Rooting for Injuries

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Very simple solution to get rid of him: Call him “Dad.”

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— L O L G O P (@lolgop.bsky.social) November 20, 2024 at 7:31 PM

Rolling Stone reports — “Republicans Were Ready to Torch Elon Musk for Blowing the Election. Then Trump Won”:

Had Donald Trump lost the 2024 election, several Republicans close to him, GOP lawmakers, and conservative megadonors would have been quick to blame his top billionaire surrogate: Elon Musk.

In fact, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, a number of these sources — including one senior Trump campaign official — said they were each willing to go on the record with Rolling Stone about how furious they were at Musk and his America PAC operation for comically botching the Trump ground game in the battleground states, thus blowing the presidential race for Trump. The catch was: These sources were only willing to vent, with their names attached, if Trump actually lost. And some of these Republicans were indeed anxious that he would…

The Trump campaign official went as far as to concede to Rolling Stone that “we never should have outsourced” so much of the ground-game operations to that “very strange man.”

Yet the embattled former president nevertheless came out on top — and now Musk is more firmly embedded within the MAGA and GOP elite than ever, to the frustration of some of the president-elect’s longtime advisers. They are, at least for the time being, stuck with him, due to a victory that many in the MAGA upper crust see not as the result of Musk’s efforts, but in spite of them.

Musk spent at least $119 million on his pro-Trump Super PAC — and now he’s set to help lead Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked with dismantling government bureaucracy, waste, and regulations, as well as restructuring federal agencies. Musk — who runs Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly known as Twitter — is a major government contractor, and federal agencies are investigating some of his companies.

At this moment, he is a protected man in Trumpworld, in the good graces of key members of the Trump family, Tucker Carlson, and other MAGAville luminaries, and the president-elect — even though a few short months ago, Trump was privately trashing Musk as “boring” and awkward.

It is also true, as multiple news outlets have reported lately, that a number of top aides and confidants in Trump’s orbit have grown visibly annoyed at what they view as Musk’s overstepping and ham-fisted meddling as the second Trump administration takes shape…

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War for Ukraine Day 1,002: Russia Responds with an Experimental Medium Range Ballistic Missile

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Three quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is doing great. It was only in the mid to high 60s late this afternoon and she was ready to go. We did a 1.1 mile walk with a 22 minute pace, which is both the farthest she’s walk and the fastest pace since she was diagnosed. In fact it was her dragging on our usual two mile walks that made me take her to the vets right away back in the late winter. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations to help with her chemo.

Second, I am fried! So, just the basics tonight.

Third: the dark chocolate mousse sets up properly if, and only if, you put the right amount of chocolate in the ganache. Easy fix.

For most of today people were playing intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM), new old ordnance, new new ordnance, Iranian ordnance?

Russia launched something awful at the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, home to ~1 million people. What type of missile is unclear. Kyiv claims an ICBM; some western officials say not so but a ballistic missile. Regardless, Moscow used a terrifying and devastating weapon on a densely populated city.

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— Christopher Miller (@christopherjm.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 7:31 AM

The Russians have now confirmed what they launched at Ukraine in reprisal for the Ukrainian ATACMS and Storm Shadow strikes.

New: ‘President Vladimir Putin has said that the Russian army has struck Ukraine with one of its newest medium-range missile systems – a conventional ballistic missile called Oreshnik.’ www.kommersant.ru/doc/7313697?…

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— Shashank Joshi (@shashj.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 12:26 PM

‘According to the president, the Russian strike fell on the “Southern Machine-Building Plant” (Yuzhmash). This is a large Ukrainian enterprise for the production of rocket and space technology, located in Dnipro.’

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 12:35 PM

The first rule of  intermediate range ballistic missile is we don’t discuss intermediate range ballistic missile:

During the briefing, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova received a phone call and was asked not to comment on the strike on the Dnipro by an intercontinental ballistic missile.

But thanks to Masha’s intelligence, “no one heard anything.”

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— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 6:03 AM

Tatarigami puts today’s Russian IRBM strike in perspective:

Since day 1 of the invasion, Russia has struck Ukraine with nuclear-capable missiles like Iskander, Kinzhal, and Kh-101/102. Another ballistic missile launch is no different, just more blatant nuclear blackmail

If Russia doesn’t like strikes inside of Russia, it can simply leave

— Tatarigami (@tatarigami.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 10:39 AM

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

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Open Thread: When It Comes to Deportations, Do Not Comply in Advance

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I have faced fascism before, in this very country. I was one of 120,000 Japanese Americans summarily rounded up and expelled from our homes at gunpoint, all for the crime of looking like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor.

I spent my childhood behind barbed wire. My parents lost everything. 1/

— George Takei (@georgetakei.bsky.social) November 15, 2024 at 7:43 PM

But we did not give up on this country. We rebuilt our lives, and we worked to ensure that something like this never happened again in America.

Now, I fear there are echoes from that dark chapter of our history. They are speaking once again of camps to hold people, this time for the crime of /2

…being undocumented. We must not repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn from them. I know it feels bleak out there. I know it feels hopeless. But I am living proof that out of that darkness can rise great hope and optimism.

I will fight for the principles of this country until my /3

… very last breath. I ask you to join me in that fight. It is a noble one. It is a worthy one. And it is one we fight on behalf not just of ourselves, but of generations to come.

When you are my age, you will be able to look back upon this time and be proud of what you did, what you stood for. /4

So don’t give up hope. Do not despair. That is what they want, and we shall not give them that satisfaction. In Japanese, there is a word my mother used to say to me.

“Gaman, Georgie,” she’d say. It means to endure with fortitude and dignity. We all could benefit the spirit of Gaman. /5

Look to community. Look to friends and family who stood with us and who suffer the grief of this loss with us. In their company find comfort. And when you are ready to stand up and fight, I will be with you, too.

We will prevail. For the light always defeats the darkness. /end

Go read this. ??

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) November 21, 2024 at 7:52 AM

Dara Lind, “What ‘Mass Deportation’ Actually Means “ [gift link]:

… Donald Trump’s team has construed his victory as a mandate for carrying out what it has described as mass deportations. Even before Mr. Trump announced a nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security, he named Stephen Miller, an immigration hard-liner, as deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser, and Tom Homan (who was the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during part of Mr. Trump’s first term) as a White House-based czar to oversee “all deportation of illegal aliens back to their country of origin.”

It is tempting to assume that after his first term and four more years of planning, Mr. Trump and his administration will find no obstacles to impose their will swiftly and completely.

But that’s not true. No executive order can override the laws of physics and create, in the blink of an eye, staff and facilities where none existed. The constraints on a mass deportation operation are logistical more than legal. Deporting one million people a year would cost an annual average of $88 billion, and a one-time effort to deport the full unauthorized population of 11 million would cost many times that — and it’s difficult to imagine how long it would take.

So the question is not whether mass deportation will happen. It’s how big Mr. Trump and his administration will go, and how quickly. How many resources — exactly how much, for example, in the way of emergency military funding — are they willing and able to marshal toward the effort? How far are they willing to bend or break the rules to make their numbers?

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On the Ground Report

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John Avlon, formerly a CNN reporter, was the Democrat who ran for the NY-1 House seat and lost.  Here’s his report from the trenches:

That’s why the core message of my campaign was a commitment to “rebuild the middle”—both the middle of our politics and the middle of our economy. These things are directly connected. It’s not a coincidence that the middle of our politics has been hollowed out at the same time that the middle of our economy has been hollowed out. Until we rebuild a strong middle class, our politics won’t have the ballast needed to steady the increasingly intense partisan swings.

The irony is that Democrats ran on this. Joe Biden consistently warned about the dangers of the middle-class squeeze since it accelerated during the Reagan era, when American manufacturing began moving overseas. He was more of a pro-union president than any other occupant of the White House in recent memory.

And while no one wants to hear this right now, President Biden’s record also included landmark legislation that over time—if it is not repealed out of partisan spite—will do a lot to rebuild the middle class through the re-shoring of essential manufacturing and through historic infrastructure spending. While inflation spiked early on his watch, America’s economy is “the envy of the world” in the words of the Economist.

But President Biden was hobbled by legitimate perceptions of reduced vigor while Democrats were denied credit for the bipartisan legislation they passed during his presidency. At stops at diners while on the campaign trail, I noticed that Biden’s age was a punch-line offered up by kids while their parents offered a pox-on-both-houses assessment of the two parties, often mentioning things like defund-the-police.  There was pervasive anger at Albany for bail-reform laws, despite the fact that violent crime has fallen under Biden.

Talking with those voters, I was often reminded of one of my favorite quotes from the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” The results of this election show that collective reasoning around common facts in hopes of finding common ground is an increasingly rare quality.

NY-1 is eastern Long Island.  It was recently redistricted and is supposedly R+3, but it went for Trump by solid margins in 2016 and 2020, and Avlon got beat by 11%, and Trump won by 11% in 2024, so I think R+3 is going to be revised upwards.

Also, AOC is having a AMA on Bluesky and it’s pretty good.  Hit the “Replies” link to see it.

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Urban Archipelagos

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One of the places were Democrats didn’t perform as well as expected was the cities (certainly in swing states). This has sparked discussion about the housing crisis and NIMBYism hurting our chances there and in the future.

In 2004, Dan Savage, then-editor of the Seattle alt newspaper The Stranger, commissioned a piece on the role of cities in the future of the Democratic Party.  It likened cities to an “Urban Archipelago” — “islands of sanity, liberalism and compassion”:

For Democrats, it’s the cities, stupid—not the rural areas, not the prickly, hateful “heartland,” but the sane, sensible cities—including the cities trapped in the heartland. Pandering to rural voters is a waste of time. Again, look at the second map. Look at the urban blue spots in red states like Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico—there’s almost as much blue in those states as there is in Washington, Oregon, and California. And the challenge for the Democrats is not just to organize in the blue areas but to grow them. And to do that, Democrats need to pursue policies that encourage urban growth (mass transit, affordable housing, city services), and Democrats need to openly and aggressively champion urban values. By focusing on the cities the Dems can create a tribal identity to combat the white, Christian, rural, and suburban identity that the Republicans have cornered. And it’s sitting right there, on every electoral map, staring them in the face: The cities.

So, obviously, a maximalist case for Democrats catering to city voters.  Anyway, Dan was interviewed by David Roberts for his podcast Volts:

David Roberts

Well, to once again draw a parallel, like Biden’s whole administration was devoted to policy meant to revive precisely those red areas of the country that have been hollowed out by globalization, et cetera, et cetera, minimum wage stuff and care stuff. Like Biden fought for those people and in response, they hated him. You know, like the working class in those areas, the white working class in those rural and exurban areas hated him like Satan. Even though on any sort of like tangible policy level, it was the most sort of like, you know, most working-class-friendly Democratic administration in years.

Dan Savage

And imagine, imagine if the same sort of investment and prioritization had been targeted at cities, not just during the Biden administration, but the Clinton administration, the Obama administration. There’s this constant sense that, well, these people out there in rural areas will come around if we just shoot enough ducks and pour enough money into their communities, and we can take for granted — one of the lessons, I think, from this, what we’re looking at from 2024 is that it was a mistake to take for granted the urban vote, which is also a way of taking for granted the votes of black and Hispanic people, queer people. Although LGBT people were one of the few sort of bright spots in this election where the Trump vote among LGBT fell from 2020, where it was an appalling, I think, 27% to just 12% in this election.

So, good on my fellow queers for recognizing the threat. But imagine if we had had the same campaign, not just of funding for the cities, building the cities, building public transportation in the cities that can alleviate people not of the freedom to own a car, but the burden of having to own a car, which is a form of anti-freedom, and building housing and poured money into the cities and encouraged in cities an identity among voters of “This is what Democrats do.” Democrats build big things and cities are big things that Democrats have built and are going to continue to build. And we haven’t done that.

One of Savage’s key arguments is that any kind of urban density leads to more Democrats: “you live in a very dense place and you get an immediate and very real sense of how interconnected we all are and reliant on each other we all are.”  If you accept that, then the last 20 years of urban non-development in cities has hurt Democrats.  Savage’s diagnosis:

The problem in cities is these twin pinchers between which our political “leaders” have been captured, which are these NIMBYs who tend to be white, tend to be wealthier homeowners who don’t want anything to change, who want to pull up the ladder behind them, who want to benefit from living in the city but never pay the price of living in a city, which is living with a certain amount of change and ferment and dynamism. […] But also the left, which misidentified development as the driver of gentrification and displacement, when it’s actually scarcity that is the driver of gentrification and displacement, that you can have density and development without gentrification and displacement if you don’t have scarcity. We have scarcity because that’s what the NIMBYs want, because it drives up their property values and it locks their neighborhoods in as these unchanging, frozen in amber Mayberry blocks like we have in Seattle, like the one I live on.

He thinks the cities are so far gone that the only way to get more housing is for states to cram multi-family housing laws down the throats of cities.

Worth a listen if you’re interested in the maximalist case for the role of cities in the future of the Democratic Party.  Also, related to the discussion of podcasts in this morning’s post, this one is packaged up the way it should be:  with a transcript.  I didn’t even listen to it, just read it.

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