Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

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

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

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

So many bastards, so little time.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

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

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

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

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

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

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

75% of people clapping liked the show!

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Petty moves from a petty man.

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Still with the Incel Shit

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Incel Boy 1

Every new find is worse than the last.  Over on TikTok, creator the_yv_edit has a video out predicting that Trump is going to dump Vance, and she makes a point that “childless” is a far different thing from “child free”.  The latter is what Vance really wants to say — women, couples and men who choose not to have children even though they could.  “Childless” can also mean someone who really wanted kids but couldn’t.

But he’s a political moron who wanted to go 110% MAGA to win a Senate seat, so here he is, channeling weird rhetoric that only misogynist incels would think is convincing.  He’d still get dragged (and with good reason) if he went after the child free women, but instead he’s too fucking stupid to make that distinction.

Yes, someone who went to Yale can be stupid.  Tim Walz went to Chadron State College and he’s smart and, more importantly, he has good instincts.  People who just kiss ass all the fucking time generally have good instincts about which butt to kiss, but not much else.  And if they were smarter they’d be kissing less ass.

Also, Tim Walz’ two kids were IVF babies.  Just saying.

Edited to add:  Walz also drinks diet dew.

Edit #2:  I told my therapist that I’d limit it to one Vance post a day, so:

Still with the Incel Shit

In case you’re living in a cave, Biles just lead the US team to a gold in Paris.  That’s her fifth.

 

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Running At Full Speed

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… Harris is planning to make a show of political force with a rally in Atlanta on Tuesday night that will feature a performance by hip hop star Megan Thee Stallion, the latest example of just how much the race against Republican Donald Trump has shifted since Biden abandoned his reelection bid. She will be appearing in the same city where Biden’s dismal performance in a debate against Trump on June 27 sparked a Democratic revolt that ultimately ended his campaign.

Harris is hoping a large rally will help affirm her campaign’s momentum. Her campaign argues that Harris’ appeal with young people, working-age women and non-white voters have scrambled the dynamics in Georgia and other states that are demographically similar, from North Carolina to Nevada and Arizona…

In a strategy memo released after the president left the race, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon, who held the same role for Biden, reaffirmed the importance of winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, a trio of industrial states that have formed the traditional Democratic blue wall.

But she also argued that the vice president’s place atop the ticket “opens up additional persuadable voters” and described them as “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” in places like Georgia…

The Harris campaign and Georgia Democratic officials have 24 offices across the state, including two added last weekend in metro Atlanta. Trump and the Republican National Committee opened their first Georgia offices only recently.

Democrats are betting that a combination of high turnout among traditional, core Democratic constituencies, as well as a strong showing in the suburbs and small pickups elsewhere can be enough for Harris to carry Georgia…

All those GOTV efforts eat money, so this Interim report from last night’s #White Dudes for Harris Zoom rally is great news:

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Monday Night Open Thread: Our Failed Flailing Major Media

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The peasants subscribers refuse to eat our dogfood! How *dare* they resist our wise counsel!…

…. So far, the campaign polling has been the least exciting part of the story of the 2024 election. Tomorrow, it will have been a full month since the Biden–Trump debate—a month of the highest possible narrative drama, culminating in Biden’s unprecedented decision to drop out. But the polling was persistently less feverish than the news. While professional political observers were convinced within the first five minutes of the debate that Biden was ruined, the poll-answering public reacted more slowly. The campaign crisis manifested itself not as a sudden collapse but as a slow deflation of Biden’s standing from week to week. As panicked commenters and Democrats warned of a coming Trump landslide, what seemed to be developing instead was an ever greater number of ways that Trump might collect a modest victory…

But another set of polls was considerably more dynamic. While the candidates were slogging along, the Democratic message-crafting group Navigator Research was asking how people felt about Project 2025, the 922-page strategic guide for a new presidency assembled through the Heritage Foundation by Trump’s advisors and allies. In its June survey on the subject, Navigator reported that 71 percent of respondents said they didn’t have an opinion about Project 2025; its most recent survey found that the no-opinion share had fallen to 46 percent—and that nearly all the newly developed opinions about it were negative….

Here in 2024, in the maelstrom of personality politics, the public is attending to a whole big book of issues. Some of the forces driving that interest are non-wonky—Taraji P. Henson warned the audience about Project 2025 while hosting the BET Awards, making the subject take off on social media; Trump and his campaign clumsily tried to deny their involvement with it, giving the political press license to treat it as a scandal and a cover-up—but also it’s a big, long document full of alarming and demented ideas, ideal for people to dig into and find their own points to warn other people about. It is an unsoftened product of the deepest right-wing ghoulosphere. To pick a topic more or less at random, it goes on for six pages about the importance of stopping the Department of Agriculture from feeding too many people, including urging a new Trump administration to “reject efforts to create universal free school meals” and abolish summertime school-meal programs for kids who aren’t enrolled in summer school.

That people care about things like this is a genuine breakthrough. A longstanding problem for Democratic campaigns has been that voters don’t like to believe Republicans could possibly support the policies Republicans support. In 2012, when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama, the New York Times reported in a profile of the Democrat-promoting Priorities USA Action PAC that “when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the [Paul] Ryan budget plan—and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’—while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.” In 2020, Data for Progress found that 45 percent of likely voters, and 81 percent of Republican ones, believed Republicans wanted to protect health coverage for preexisting conditions, rather than removing it; only 32 percent of likely voters, and 11 percent of Republican ones, understood that the party was in favor of dumping mining waste into streams.

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War for Ukraine Day 887: Russia Is Using Drones To Hunt Civilians in Kherson!

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A painting by Ukrainian artist NEIVANMADE. The words "NEVER AGAIN" are repeated over and over, from left to right and top to bottom, in a faded, washed out black against a white background. Red, the color of blood, runs and drips down across 2/3rds of the painting. "WHILE YOU TOLERATE TYRANTS" is written/painted in the bottom white corner below the three rows of "NEVER AGAIN".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Two quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing great. She always gets far more active and more back to pre-chemo/pre-cancer normal in the second week of her two weeks off. Thank you all for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, I will continue to do one update a day, in the evening. I’m not doing these to count comments, I’m doing them because they need to be done. As I’ve written before, these are the only posts I do, these are the only posts I will be commenting in. I do not read other posts on this site unless someone reaches out asks me to look at a comment because they think we have a moderation problem. As in someone needs a warning or to go to the sin bin. I’m not ignoring other conflicts – Gaza, Sudan, etc – or other crises – Israel-Hezbullah, Yemen, etc – not because they’re not deserving of my time or because I don’t care, nor because the people suffering aren’t deserving, but because I have no time or energy to cover them in addition to the Ukraine war updates. I also know that what I do no longer fits what this site has become since the rebuild, though it took a bit for that realization to fully sink in, which is the other reason I do these and only these and do not participate in anything else on this site. I’m not writing this paragraph, nor these posts for thanks or compliments, though you are all most welcome. I do these because they have to be done and I’m providing this explanation so everyone is clear on that. And that’s all I have to say on this topic.

The Russians are using their drones to hunt Ukrainian residents of Kherson:

From the Byline Times:

Drones once primarily used for surveillance, have evolved into weapons for hunting human targets in Ukraine.

During June and July, the Russian military dramatically increased drone attacks on civilians in the Kherson region, with the last two weeks breaking all records. Estimates suggest 50 people have been killed or injured in the attacks.

In the port city of Kherson, drones patrol the skies, hovering over devastated coastal suburbs and villages, searching for an old lady with a bucket here or a teenager on a bicycle there—to eliminate by dropping explosives.

“We’ve got something new here,” said Olha, a grocery store owner in Kherson. “It’s called skid, literally ‘a drop’.”

Daily skid statistics are terrifying: on 24 July, a Russian drone dropped explosives on a woman in Romashkove village, hospitalising her with blast and cranial injuries and shrapnel wounds to her legs. The same day, a private house in Kherson’s suburbs caught fire after a skid attack. While firefighters were extinguishing the fire, a second drone attack damaged the fire truck with shrapnel. And in Kherson city, a drone attack on a 57-year-old woman, left her with a concussion, leg wound, and blast injuries.

The following day, two drones struck residents in the suburb of Kindiyka, injuring a couple and killing a 51-year-old man. In Antoniivka, another suburb, a drone attacked a vehicle carrying humanitarian aid, injuring the driver, and another, later that day, wounded a 72-year-old woman. A resident of Sadove village, also 72, suffered blast trauma, concussion, and shrapnel wounds to his forearm after a drone attack.

“Drones are like flies,” said Volodymyr, a resident of the coastal area. “They see you and they target you.”

“Drones are our curse,” said Tatiana, a resident of the Vostochny district, whose building was attacked on 28 July.

Hiding under a tree in front of her high rise, Tatiana pointed out broken windows and shattered doors. For two months, drones have been patrolling the skies over her home, dropping explosives on civilian cars and people.

Getting outside is extremely dangerous but staying inside can be unsafe, too. Tatiana’s neighbour, Elizaveta, survived a drone attack in her apartment.

“It’s a human safari,” Tatiana said.

Kherson Non-Fake, a popular local Telegram channel, reported that due to “attacks by enemy drones, some stores and even gas stations” are closed.

It said Russian Mavic drones “regularly fly at various altitudes” and while it searches for military targets, it’s often civilians that get killed.

“A drone with a grenade takes off from the left bank and flies for some time in search of anything resembling military targets. If the drone does not find such a target, it looks for any car or a group of civilians. After that, the target is attacked so as not to transport the grenade back to the left bank.”

Oleksandr Tolokonnikov, the head of the press service of the Kherson regional military administration and the spokesman of the Kherson region told Byline Times that previously, for several months, drones attacked mostly Beryslav district coastal zones.

They now target residents in most of the Kherson city coastal districts daily, he said, explaining that often the drones do a Russian signature “double tap”, striking first responders and ambulances arriving to help victims of artillery bombardments.

Much more at the link.

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

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Open Thread: Livestream of President Biden’s Speech At the LBJ Library

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Biden is due to speak starting at 5pm blog time (4pm Austin time).

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Biden’s Supreme Court Op-Ed

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Biden wrote an op-ed in the Post today about the most corrupt part of our corrupt federal judiciary.  Here’s a gift link if you’re willing to sign in.  His proposals:

  1. A constitutional amendment to reverse the presidential immunity ruling.
  2. Legislating term limits for Supreme Court justices.
  3. Legislating a binding code of conduct for Supremos.

(1) is a non-starter.  (2) and (3) would probably be overturned by the current court, since constitutional law is now whatever they say it is, neener, neener, neener.

This is not to criticize Biden (and Harris’) efforts to draw attention to this issue.  Everything he says is a good idea, and if laws (2) and (3) were passed, watching the Supremes overrule them would just keep the issue in front of the public.

Impeaching Thomas and Alito, which again would not result in a conviction barring some miracle in the Senate, is probably more effective in the short term, because it subjects them to really uncomfortable personal scrutiny and shitty publicity.  I’d expect them to resign if Harris is elected and Democrats take the House and Senate because it would suck for them to go through an impeachment trial and four more years of work.  AOC knew what she was doing when she filed articles of impeachment.

Also, yes, I am traveling, but I happen to be camping in a powered spot so I can run my Starlink all day.  I am in Canada and only licensed outlets can sell beer, liquor or cannibis, and the nearest one is miles away, and for some reason my wife and I decided that a few sober days wouldn’t be so bad.  We were wrong, so now the only addictions I can satisfy are the Internet and politics, and I’m hitting it hard.

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Worker Power Leadership School – Field Notes Vol. 2

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We have news from Worker Power, where we recently funded a student so they could attend the Worker Power Leadership School.  It looks like Worker Power will be sharing their weekly newsletter with us over the 4 weeks of Leadership School.  This is the second I have received.

This is a helpful reminder to me that good things have been happening this week, which will pay off in the fall and for years ahead, even we have been mostly focused on the drama of these past few weeks.

You guys said you are interested in these, so here you go!

Reminder:oOne of the students from this year’s school will be leading the team we will funding for 3 weeks in the fall.  We don’t know who our team leader will be in the fall, but won’t it be fun if it turns out to be one of the students that is featured here?

Excerpts from the newletter

Welcome to Field Notes, our newsletter highlighting students and faculty of the second Worker Power Leadership School, a month-long program dedicated to training the next generation of progressive leaders who will run winning campaigns for working people.

In this volume of Field Notes, we have a faculty spotlight on Fernando Roman, who led a workshop last week on “Reversing Runaway Inequality,” and a student spotlight on Daniel Espinoza, a student from Orange County, CA. Sunari Weaver-Anderson, a student from Los Angeles, shares her experience connecting this week’s classes to her work talking to voters at the doors.

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