Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

So many bastards, so little time.

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

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

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

The lights are all blinking red.

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

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

“In this country American means white. everybody else has to hyphenate.”

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

In my day, never was longer.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

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Weekend Post with Angel Matches and Thermometers

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In case you missed it, we are raising funds for 3 US House candidates and State Races for PA, WI, and OH.

Need somme inspiration?

On TikTok if you prefer:  Link

Angel matching – to be matched, tell us about your donation in the comments or in email to WaterGirl.

We have Angels – WISCONSIN!

$1,000 Angel match for Rebecca Cooke (WI-03) who is running for the US HOUSE  (matching up to $100 per person)
Angel:  Mousebumples

We have Angels – PENNSYLVANIA!

$800 Angel match for Matt Cartwright (PA-08) who is running for the US HOUSE  (matching up to $50 per person)
Angel: Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

$1,000 for the Pennsylvania State Races thermometer (matching up to $50 per person)
Angel: Mike S (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

We have Angels – OHIO!

$1,000 Angel match for Greg Landsman (OH-01) who is running for the US HOUSE  (matching up to $100 per person)
Angel: goldengirl

$600 for the Ohio State Races thermometer (matching up to $100 per person)  matching not retroactive
Angel: Mac

THERMOMETERS!

Details about candidates are here.

 

Weekend Post with Angel Matches and ThermometersPost + Comments (31)

War for Ukraine Day 969: The Glide Bombing Continues

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A quick housekeeping note. Rosie, Ruby too, are doing great. Rosie’s last chemo treatment is Monday, so we’ll have more on that then. Now that the humidity has come down a lot and the heat as well, it is safer to walk her. We did a 3/4 mile walk earlier and she did very well despite not doing a lot of walking during the course of her treatments because of the effects of them on her combined with the outrageously high heat and humidity. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Now that I’ve gotten a bit of rest, I want to take a moment and spend a little more time on the North Korean soldiers issue. The Republic of Korea’s (ROK/South Korea) National Intelligence Service (NIS) has reported that the soldiers that Kim has dispatched to Russia to fight against the Ukrainians are DPRK Special Forces. These are elite soldiers. They are not conscripts doing their mandatory service. They get special privileges in exchange for their service, proper food and access to sundry goods and commodities included. They are committed to the concept of Juche. These are not troops you want to take lightly. While there’s a lot of sturm und drang right now over whether they’ve actually been deployed to Russia or that they have been, but they’re not going to be used to fight the Ukrainians, these guys are what the Russians thought and mythologized their own Special Forces to be before the Ukrainians chewed them up in February and March 2022. It is also important to remember that it gets VERY, VERY, VERY cold on the Korean peninsula during the winter, there’s a lot of mountainous terrain, and the North Korean Special Forces are trained and acclimated for winter and mountain warfare, so the Ukrainian winter is not going to phase them. If they are assigned to fight the Ukrainians things are going to get very, very, very sporty very quickly.

On the other side of the DMZ, the ROK has their own elite Special Forces. I’ve got friends and colleagues who have worked with them. Even the Special Forces (Green Berets) and Rangers tell stories of agreeing to get up early and do PT with the South Korean Special Forces and getting completely smoked by the latter. They’re in amazing condition, highly trained and skilled, and excellent Soldiers.

The larger issue here is that we are looking at an expansion of one of the kinetic/lethal theaters of operation in Putin’s world war against the US, the EU, NATO, and other US allies and partners. The other three primarily kinetic/lethal theaters are the Russian occupied parts of Georgia; Syria, where Russia attacked civilian targets in Idlib just last week; and the Sahel states. Again, Russia’s world war is primarily being waged with the elements of national power – Diplomatic, Informational, Economic, Financial, Intelligence, and Legal – other than Militaray power except in these four theaters of operation. It is a world war where the aggressor’s/Russia’s military power is not normally distributed as most of the targets are being attacked with the other elements of Russian national power. Where Russian military power is used outside of these four theaters, it is the result of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence, undertaking it’s sabotage and wetwork campaigns. Campaigns that are also being conducted by Russia’s SVR as the two agencies are in competition with each other. Putin’s world war is being resourced by Iran, North Korea, and, based on recent reporting, the PRC. Russia is killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian infrastructure with Iranian and North Korean weapons systems and munitions. We are now waiting to see if the North Korean Special Forces will actually be deployed against the Ukrainians. And while it is out of scope for the Ukrainian war updates, Kim has cut the roads and rail lines near the DMZ while redeploying additional forces to that area.

I do not expect President Biden and his senior natsec appointees to actually figure this out. They have been incredibly resistant to actually recognizing the geo-strategic reality of the past four years. Even if it was not apparent from their response to and handling of Putin’s genocidal re-invasion of Ukraine, it is visible from space in regard to their mismanagement of the Israel-Hamas, Israel-Hezbullah wars. I read the Israeli news reporting, commentary and analysis, and subject matter experts every day. All of them, every single one, are repeatedly amazed about how Biden, Blinken, Austin, Sullivan, Hochstein, McGurk, et al have been played by Bibi, Dermer, and the rest of Bibi’s people over and over and over again.

Their belief, shared by the rest of the Blob inside and outside the Beltway, that the PRC is the pacing threat and we have to pivot US natsec to meet it before 2027 is based on a significant misunderstanding of Chinese political, strategic, and military culture, Xi, and what the PRC is actually doing in its own geo-strategic activities. Their fundamental misunderstanding of China’s political and military geography has now come home to roost with the latest North Korean developments.

Quite simply, there is not a part of the world that is safer and more stable than it was four years ago. Yes, had Trump been reelected, it would all be worse, but just because Trump and his team would be worse, and that he and they have been actively working to subvert Biden and his team’s natsec efforts, doesn’t excuse the strategic malpractice, mismanagement, and failures of President Biden and his senior natsec appointees.

But just because these are the wrong men – and every single member of the senior natsec team handling these issues are men – to meet this moment, does not mean we should fail to recognize the moment for what it is: an ever expanding world war.

Here’s a summary of Russia’s drone swarm attack last night/early this morning:

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

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War for Ukraine Day 969: The Glide Bombing ContinuesPost + Comments (30)

Saturday Night Slap-Fights Open Thread: It’s A Hard Knock Life

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Captain Obvious strikes again!

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Saturday Night Slap-Fights Open Thread: It’s A Hard Knock LifePost + Comments (122)

Barack Obama Just Made My Day in 5 minutes or less

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When he’s not campaigning, we don’t get to see Barack Obama at his absolute best.

I see him giving these speeches and remember all over again just how much I love this man, just how charming and funny he is, and how lucky we were to have had him as president for 8 years.

We have to win this!

Open thread.

Barack Obama Just Made My Day in 5 minutes or lessPost + Comments (145)

Fun Read: Code Red: Watching the Tim Walz Magic Trick Up Close

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There is a joke among those of us with ADHD that sometimes people will follow after us even when we have no idea where we’re going. We look confident! — or at least, like we might do something interesting, at any moment, that a curious bystander wouldn’t want to miss. (I personally believe this has been the secret behind a lot of political successes, including both Bill Clinton and Dubya Bush.)

Kerry Howley, at NYMag, has obviously been instructed to bothside be rigidly neutral in her report, and yet:

… There is no obvious connection between an ability to commune with strangers and an ability to govern; one might even be inclined to posit the opposite, in that an easy fluidity masks false intention. The fact remains that Walz is so natural with people that every encounter comes across, through no fault of his own, as trolling his opponent, a man who cannot so much as order a doughnut or answer a question (“What makes you smile?”) without expressing a mysteriously motivated sense of resentment (“I smile at a lot of things, including bogus questions from the media”)…

Tim Walz, as anyone who has tried to quote him in print well knows, does not speak in “sentences” nor adhere to a common “grammar.” This is a dream sequence, scenes conjured out of thin air and only later explained. “They always do, Oh, the guy sitting in Racine, Wisconsin, in the bar, what’s really concerning him? I damn sure guarantee you it’s not banning Animal Farm.” You do not know where you are going until you’ve arrived. “You come home from work. You throw the Frisbee to your pup, he gets it, you give your good boy a belly rub,” he said in February, inexplicably. And only then: “Picture that guy” — Trump — “doing anything normal like that.” On August 5, no one outside Minnesota with a healthy relationship to current events knew the name Tim Walz. A few weeks later, he was the best-liked candidate on either ticket in the most high-stakes presidential race anyone could remember…

The ability to be fully present in the selection of banana bread suggests an unusual distribution of attention; indeed, Walz once told a classroom of high-school students that he had ADHD.

“Undiagnosed,” his wife, Gwen, gently added.

“No, I’m not diagnosed,” he said, “but it’s pretty obvious.”…

His political origin story, like all such stories, feels overpolished, a touch too narratively useful, but the facts are there. In 2004, two teenagers, Matt Klaber and Sierra Burkhart, had been denied entry to a pro-Bush event on suspicion of Democratic tendencies. They attempted to get into a second rally with the most inoffensive adult imaginable, universally beloved teacher Tim Walz. They were again denied, and though Walz managed to argue his way in (“I’m in the National Guard, and I’m here to see my commander-in-chief”), he was indignant. The field organizer of the local Kerry campaign was Leah Solo, a former student of Gwen’s. Tim and Gwen folded right in…

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Fun Read: <em>Code Red: Watching the Tim Walz Magic Trick Up Close</em>Post + Comments (99)

Saturday Morning Open Thread: Dems *NOT* in Disarray

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Dems *NOT* in DisarrayPost + Comments (226)