Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

This really is a full service blog.

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

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

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

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

T R E 4 5 O N

When I was faster i was always behind.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

We are learning that “working class” means “white” for way too many people.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

People are weird.

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

You cannot shame the shameless.

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Open Thread: What We Could’ve Had

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lolsob — Kamala Harris with a couple callbacks to her infamous "nothing comes to mind" answer during her The View appearance just before the election

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 23, 2025 at 12:08 PM

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Kamala Harris on The View on election night: "That night — I grieved in a way that I have not since my mother died. The pain was not at all about losing a race. I knew what it was going to mean for the country … all I could say over and over was 'my God, my God, my God.' It was very difficult."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 23, 2025 at 12:00 PM

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Kamala Harris: "We also need to remember those 107 days around some other stuff that he said — mass deportations, that he would weaponize the DOJ against his political enemies, that he would silence critics. And he has done that consistently."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 23, 2025 at 11:47 AM

******

But nooooo…

Don't think I've ever felt this embarrassed to be an American. There's shame and anger too. But mostly embarrassment. We're the laughingstock of the developed world. And we should be.

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— Radley Balko (@radleybalko.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 11:27 AM

(Yes, the entire UN speech was an embarrassment to all thinking people… but those aren’t the ones Trump was talking for. The clips designed to go viral on Reichtwing media will show a proud leader speaking of his many triumphs, and the fact that every word is a lie and every promise an empty threat will be overlooked by his cultists.)

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True Patriot Open Thread: ‘Pain Only Hurts’

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Fun story this morning. I spoke with Curtis Evans, the retired Marine in the viral photo below who took part in the anti-ICE protest at Broadview. He's a thoughtful guy, well read and with a dry sense of humor. Story @taskandpurpose.com taskandpurpose.com/news/marine-…

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— Nicholas Slayton (@nslayton.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 11:22 AM

Full props to Curtis Evans! From Task & Purpose, “The Marine veteran behind this viral photo at the Chicago ICE protest”:

As tear gas billowed around him on Friday, Curtis Evans found himself drawing on his time as a Marine.

“My Marine Corps training hit me. They’d gas us every year for fun, just for training, not just in boot camp, you got it later, too,” Evans told Task & Purpose over the weekend. “One of the things you learn from Marine Corps training is that it sets off all of your body’s alarms. You can’t breathe, you can’t see, it hurts, but it’s just the alarms. But boy, all of the nerves are screaming.”

Evans was taking part in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at a facility in Broadview, just outside of Chicago on Sept. 19. As federal agents fired tear gas canisters and pepper balls into the more than 100 people outside the building, Stacey Wescott with the Chicago Tribune snapped a photo of Evans. As people ran away from the gas, Evans stood there seemingly unbothered, holding an American flag high. The next day, Wescott’s photo was on the front page of the Chicago Tribune and had gone viral on social media, both on military channels and wider platforms. (On the unofficial Marine Corps subreddit, a photo of Evans with his large flag and a secondary, smaller flag tucked in his side pocket — should he ever lose control of his primary flag — was widely viewed and commented on.)

The man in the viral photo is a 65-year-old Marine Corps veteran who speaks with a methodical nature and a dry sense of humor. Curtis Evans, of Evanston, Illinois, said that as multiple tear gas grenades went off around him, he was soon shoved to the ground, but was unhurt. He had joined the anti-ICE protests, he said, in part due to his convictions and ideals. Evans told Task & Purpose he was “a patriot” and that patriotism is why he joined the Marines in 1980, a day after his 20th birthday.

“Our country is wonderful, our ideas are fantastic. I thought if I’m going to do anything, I’m going to go all of the way and join the Marine Corps,” Evans said. “It was outside of what people would expect. I wasn’t one of those guys you think, ‘Oh he’s going into the military.’ But I’m glad I did.”

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If Robert Reich Had Waited Just a Couple More Hours…

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If Robert Reich had waited just a couple more hours before posting his substack, he could have included the national embarrassment of the speech this morning!

I don’t normally post the whole thing, but this one is too good not to get the word out.

h/t Felony Govt

I would have found it later today, but so glad she pointed it out to us in this morning’s thread.

If Robert Reich Had Waited Just a Couple More Hours... 1

The Past Week

Friends,

I can’t tell you exactly how I know but after sixty years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.

This past week did it.

On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.”

On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them.

On Wednesday, after Brendan Carr, his lapdog chair of the FCC, pressured ABC to suspend Jimmy Kimmel, he claimed that Kimmel being “CANCELLED” was “Great News for America,” and urged NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers next.

On Thursday, he said broadcast networks have been mean to him and that Brendan Carr might have to start taking their licenses away. “When you have a network and you have evening shows, and all they do is hit Trump,” he said, “they’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re an arm of the Democrat Party.”

On Friday, he suggested that negative coverage about him is “really illegal.” Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office he said: “They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad. See, I think that’s really illegal,” adding “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”

On Saturday, he demanded that Bondi prosecute several of his political rivals even though grand juries and federal prosecutors couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing. He demanded that she do it “NOW!!!”

On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

After Last Week

You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar “what the hell is going on here?”

Immediately after Kimmel’s suspension, Disney viewers and customers began to cancel their subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu and threaten a broader consumer boycott.

According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.

Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.

Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship.

By then the giant was roaring and stomping.

By Monday, Disney decided to put Kimmel back on the air.

Trump’s poll numbers were dipping even before last week’s explosion of authoritarianism. Now they’re in free fall.

I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before.

Joe McCarthy’s communist witch hunt destroyed countless careers before the giant roared: “have you no sense of decency?”

McCarthy melted almost as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West. His national popularity evaporated. Three years later, censored by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party, and ignored by the press, McCarthy drank himself to death, a broken man at the age of forty-eight.

The giant roared again a decade later, after television showed civil rights marchers getting clobbered by white supremacists. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act.

It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.

It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the coverup of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.

It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.

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Overstepping His Mandate

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“Empires always have the hubris to think they are indestructible, when in fact they are always unsustainable.”

Dan Pfeiffer

Trump Is Overstepping His Mandate

Donald Trump likes to pretend he won a massive victory with a strong mandate for his MAGA agenda.

Like most of what Donald Trump says, it’s delusional nonsense.

Trump may have won the popular vote and swept the battleground states. Still, a majority of Americans voted for someone else, and he had the narrowest popular vote margin in American history. In this century, only Al Gore won the popular vote by less.

At the risk of oversimplifying the complex nature of elections, Trump won the presidency because a significant number of voters who did not particularly like him voted for him, believing he would do a better job of lowering costs and securing the border.

That’s it. That’s Trump’s mandate — lower costs and secure the border.

Sure, his fanboys and the MAGA base had big visions of upending American democracy, implementing a right-wing agenda, and exacting revenge on political opponents. But that’s not what the voters who decided 2024 — and who will decide the 2026 midterms — were looking for from Trump and the GOP.

The narrowness of Trump’s mandate matters because the fastest way to lose the midterms is to forget why you won the election.

Most people do not want their president policing speech or micromanaging the late-night lineup. If the economy were roaring and prices were coming down, people might have more patience for this unconstitutional sideshow, but the opposite is true. Prices are up and the economy is flashing warning signs, so voters are rightly going to ask why Trump is so focused on Jimmy Kimmel instead of them.

In another particularly potent example of the dumb stuff at the top of Trump’s to-do list, on Friday the White House Press Secretary announced that Trump would not approve a deal to build a new stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the local NFL team changed its name back to “Redskins.”

Seriously.

Where We Go From Here

Perhaps I am just desperately seeking optimism in a particularly dark time. Maybe all the rules of politics are null and void when it comes to Trump. But if you take a step back, it’s clear that Trump — and therefore Republicans on the ballot next year — are politically weak. They are unpopular, keep doing unpopular things, and are likely to be running in an environment that is very unfavorable for incumbents. And most notably, they keep making their situation worse, not better.

Now it’s up to all of us to make sure they pay a price for what they are doing. If they don’t, the next two years of Trump will be so much worse than what we are living through right now.

The policies and actions of the right are so bad that it seems like they are inadvertently offering us an opportunity.  Every crisis is an opportunity, right?  So how do we make hay out of some of this awful stuff that’s going on?

I still love the idea of the “hit and run” method of dropping a simple comment at every opportunity when in public.  About the prices of everything.  About the crazy rambling by T.  About everything.

Thoughts?

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread

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To those who observe, Shana Tovah!

It’s perfect that the rapture that some Christians believe is coming lands on Rosh Hashana, the literal new year for Jews when Adonai opens the Book of Life to scribble down which of us will live this year and which of us will die.
Good luck, everyone, is what I’m saying.

— Josh Sternberg (@joshsternberg.com) September 22, 2025 at 10:28 PM

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Kamala Harris: "It feels chaotic, but what I would offer you is what we are witnessing is the swift implementation of a plan that was decades in the making. Project 2025 didn't just drop out of thin air. That's a product of decades of work. Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation … "

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 22, 2025 at 9:26 PM

Kamala Harris: "We used to compare the strength of our democracy to communist dictators. That's what we're dealing with right now in Donald Trump. And these titans of industry and not speaking up … at some point they've gotta stand up."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 22, 2025 at 9:23 PM

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Q: How does Trump saying "I hate my opponent and I don't want the best for them" square with bringing down the temperature of political violence?
LEAVITT: Look, the president is authentically himself. I think that's why millions of Americans across the country love him.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 22, 2025 at 1:36 PM

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Honestly I can't blame them for raptureposting, because it's the simplest way out of the mess they're making

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 2:27 PM

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Late Night Open Thread: GWAAAAAAARRRR!

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Imagine trying to cancel GWAR

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— Bobby Big Wheel (@kleinman.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 7:33 PM

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GWAR has been tailoring its act to provoke vapors in the religious right and moralizing TV talk show hosts for 40 fucking years so good luck getting them to flinch

— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 8:05 PM

I think we can safely say that Charlie Kirk’s moment is over, if grifters like LibsofTikTok are reduced to faking outrage at a satirical (satyrical?) riot band. GWAR’s response, per Consequence:

To quote one social media user, GWAR are equal-opportunity beheaders. Over the years, the shock metal band has staged faux executions of every president of the last four decades (Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, and Biden), as well as Hillary Clinton, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, and even Jesus Christ. Chances are, if you’re a famous person, they’ve killed you onstage. The band’s set at Riot Fest this weekend was no different, as they beheaded Elon Musk and stabbed Trump.

This time, though, MAGA picked up on GWAR’s antics and is crying foul. Both conservative-leaning websites Brietbart and New York Post have published articles on the band’s performance at Riot Fest, while videos of GWAR circulated widely on X/Twitter throughout the weekend. “Listen I know they do this to every leader and even did Obama but after what happened with Charlie Kirk last week it’s just retarded timing,” one user complained. Libs of TikTok called GWAR’s performance an act of “incitement,” adding that, “Democrats can’t help themselves. They love promoting violence.”

A representative for GWAR pushed against the New York Post’s article a statement: “Normalizing violence? Humans don’t need GWAR for that. There is nothing normal about the Looney Toon violence acted out on a GWAR stage. GWAR is absurdist spectacle. GWAR is to violence what the New York Post is to journalism. Ridiculous.”…

The kicker? The viral clip that set off the controversy may have been planted from inside GWAR’s own orbit. The clip was the very first post from an account called @hottakekaren, whose bio reads “GWAR’s biggest fan.” The post tagged @RiotFest, @GWAR, and @ElonMusk, while subsequent uploads from the same account tagged @realdonaldtrump, @JDVance, and even @FBI. Whether it was the band, Riot Fest, or a devoted fan, the stunt clearly worked. If the goal was to rile up MAGA and give GWAR a burst of viral attention, consider it mission accomplished.

GWAR are an American institution & liberals have every right to be proud of ensuring their right to bring cartoon violence & hearing loss to the American people

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 7:54 PM


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Authority is Brittle and Oppression is the Mask of Fear

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We would all do well to remember these words from Gov. Pritzker:

Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.

All too often we ascribe more power to MAGA than they actually have, thinking we can’t win, believing that they are an overwhelming force.  They’re stinking up the place, so that’s an easy trap to fall into, but we should fight that because it’s giving them more power over us than they deserve.

“Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.”

Looking forward to seeing Jimmy back on the air.

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— Governor JB Pritzker (@govpritzker.illinois.gov) September 22, 2025 at 3:22 PM

I will truly be interested to see whether Kimmel has to apologize in order to get his show back.  I certainly hope not.

Kimmel returning or no, I hope this has all the late night people thinking about how they can leave the networks behind and get to say what they please, since this is after all the United States of America, where we believe in freedom of speech.

Let’s hope the overreach of these fuckers, and the backlash, has gotten the attention of the people who believe they can do what they please, the law be damned.

Seriously hoping the elections in Virginia have the same result.

Speaking of which, I got a nice note today from the Kimberly Pope Adams campaign, saying how pleased they are that we not only met our goal but blew past it, and to let us know that our contributions are allowing them to reach people they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to reach.

Open thread, though I do kind of like to have an evening thread that’s more positive than not, giving us all a chance to cool down before bedtime, and maybe even get some good sleep.  Kind of the like the cool down after exercise!

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