Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

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

… gradually, and then suddenly.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

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

He really is that stupid.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

All hail the time of the bunny!

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

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

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

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

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

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

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

In my day, never was longer.

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ProPublica: Now Here’s a Tip Line I Can Get Behind!

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ProPublica

An email from a reader helped a team of ProPublica reporters uncover secret tuition payments Harlan Crow made for a family member of Clarence Thomas. Now we’re looking for tips on the election, and you can help.

Excerpts from the story:

A few hours after we published a story on the luxury travel a billionaire provided to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the email arrived in my inbox.

A reader had tapped out a single sentence on their iPhone and hit send: We should look, it said, at a relative Thomas had taken in and raised as a son. The reader informed me that Harlan Crow, the same politically connected billionaire who had bankrolled the justice’s travels around the globe, had also paid private school tuition for the relative.

My colleagues and I chased down the tip; a key break came when we found direct evidence of the billionaire’s tuition payments in some bankruptcy filings for one of the private schools in question. As we reported in the resulting story a few weeks later, the billionaire had paid roughly $100,000 for private school tuition, essentially a gift of cash to a sitting Supreme Court justice.

Crow’s office told us that he “has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate.” Thomas didn’t respond to questions for the story. On Friday, the justice acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that he should have publicly reported two free vacations he received from Crow.

Going from a tip or rumor to a confirmed story can take weeks or months of reporting, of course. That’s especially true because I focus on the rich and powerful: people, companies and organizations that use money and influence to shield themselves from scrutiny. My ability to home in on those important stories relies on hearing from people like you.

Right now I’m reporting on the election. There’s no shortage of political coverage, but I’m still convinced there are important stories about wrongdoing that haven’t been told yet. I’m interested in the world of Donald Trump — his campaign, businesses and the people around him — as well as the broader 2024 political scene. Tips about other candidates, Democrats and Republicans, are also welcome.

Now Here's a Tip Line I Can Get Behind!

I would rat these people out in a heartbeat, and no one would even need to pay me $10,000.

Open thread.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Trekking Right Along…

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Per the Chicago Sun-Times:

The Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August will have a prime-time roll call after all, the Sun-Times has learned, even though President Joe Biden will already have been officially nominated weeks before.

A spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee confirmed that the 2024 roll call will revive elements of the virtual 2020 “Roll Call Across America,” with final format decisions over the virtual and live components still to be made.

The 2024 planners are aiming to recreate one of the biggest hits from the 2020 convention, which was virtual because of the then-raging COVID-19 pandemic…

Conventions are basically four-night television shows. The 2020 virtual roll call turned out to be much better for the audience at home watching the show over what had been the standard, often chaotic roll call from the convention floor, which got somewhat repetitive by the time states starting with the letter “C” got their turn. The virtual roll call also eliminated the potential for unwanted surprises.

Democratic convention producers were on a path to reviving the best parts of the 2020 virtual hit for the 2024 roll call at the Chicago convention, running Aug. 19-22, even before Ohio Republicans seemingly scrambled things…

On Thursday, members of the Democratic National Committee approved moving up the Biden-Harris nomination and to allow for an “electronic” roll call. The vote was 360 for, two against and five abstaining.

The date for nominating Biden and Harris has not been set, but it will be before Ohio’s Aug. 7 deadline…

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Squishable Wee Hours Open Thread

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Check out this handsome eggplant-colored dragonfly:

Squishable Wee Hours Open Thread

It was hanging out where the swamp behind our house borders the crappy dirt road. In other words, the dragonfly is my neighbor across the street.

The swamp on that side of the road is mostly dry because the river is so low due to lack of rain. South Florida is getting biblical floods, but the northwestern coast has been dry as a popcorn fart.

The low pressure system off the northeastern coast is getting organized and turning west, but it looks like it will soak Georgia instead. Damn.

Open thread!

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War for Ukraine Day 849: All of Ukraine Is Currently Under Air Raid Alert

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Air raid alert map of Ukraine as of 9:12 PM EDT on 21 JUN 2024. All of Ukraine is under air raid alert and the map indicates Russian air force are launching missiles from just over the border in western Russia.

A couple of quick housekeeping notes. First, Rosie is still doing very well after this week’s chemo. Here next treatment is Monday and then she gets another two week break. Thank you all, again, for the good thoughts, well wishes, prayers, and donations.

Second, I’m going to keep tonight’s update on the shorter side. I’m still trying to kick whatever this low grade cold or flu I’ve got and am just feeling bleh. Part of the reason tonight’s update is so late is I took a four hour nap earlier.

As you can see in the map above, as of 9:13 PM EDT, all of Ukraine is under air raid alert. And as you can see, the map indicates that Russian air force is launching cruise missiles from just over the border in western Russia. It is currently 4:18 AM in Ukraine. The small hours, as they’ve been since the beginning of 2024, are going to be long, tense, and, unfortunately, deadly.

At 1o:07 PM EDT the air raid alerts have come down for all of Ukraine with the exception of Kharkiv and Donetsk Oblasts. The 24/7/365 air raid alerts for Russian occupied Luhansk and Crimea remain in place.

Kharkiv had already been attacked earlier today.

As a result graduation had to be held in a shelter:

Vovchansk too:

Russian FPV-drone struck a post office vehicle delivering pensions in the Vovchansk district of Kharkiv Oblast, the prosecutor’s office reported. The assault killed the 45-year-old mobile post office manager and wounded the driver. “The site of the attack is currently inaccessible due to intense shelling,” the prosecutor’s office specified.

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

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Gardening, cats, owls…

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Long time no see! I’ve been pretty disconnected from politics ever since I left Twitter, and weighing in on any of the threads here has just felt like a heavy lift. Been working a lot, writing/programming a lot on the video game (website btw, more on that soon), house stuff, travel (nowhere exciting). You know how it goes.

But, I have been meaning to drop a note about my garden, so, here it is! For all pictures, click to embiggen; the small versions are a little blurry. I’ll start you off with a picture of these lovely irises that TaMara gave me last fall:

Gardening and what-have-you
My phone doesn’t like focusing on flowers sometimes, but you get the idea…

When we bought this house, it was just surrounded by a dirt lot. The builders put some low-maintenance stuff out front, but the rest has been up to us, which is to say, up to me. I’ve been throwing stuff at the proverbial wall to see what sticks. It’s been pretty tricky—we get a crazy amount of sun in a lot of places, even on the narrow strip between houses because of the way we’re facing, and I’ve been avoiding bluegrass, because it’s boring and so thirsty. So I’ve been shotgunning ground covers around. The creeping thyme and sweet woodruff have been big successes; the phlox isn’t creeping like I’d like it to, though it still has lovely flowers in early spring. So this year, I planted a bunch more thyme, and phlox, and some strawberries for good measure. Hopefully I’ll have a nice jungle going on in the back by this time next year.

I have had pretty good success with my roses. They didn’t do so hot last year, but I did plant them in June, which is not ideal. This year, though, my hybrid tea and top gun roses are looking great. I have a floribunda that’s underperforming–thrips, I realized. Trying to get rid of them. I also planted some columbines this year. Wasn’t expecting any blooms, but it looks like they managed to get one out. Er, ignore the bugs… still figuring everything out!

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Donald Sutherland, RIP

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Donald Sutherland, RIP

Sutherland died yesterday.  He’s on my list of “greats.”   I’ve been thinking of what was great about him, and I’m going to pick one performance, his role as Calvin Jarrett in Ordinary People.

One of the aspects of Sutherland’s greatness is that he turned in great performances in so many genres by taking up just the right amount of space.  Ordinary People had so many good performances:  Timothy Hutton, as Conrad Jarrett, the boy who lived when his brother drowned, and then attempted suicide.  Mary Tyler Moore, playing against type as Beth Jarrett, the mother who wants to appear to be perfect yet has her world shattered.  Sutherland’s reserved performance was, in my opinion, the best of the bunch.  He had a tough part to play, an apparently superficial, successful Lake Forest attorney who spouts platitudes in an attempt to keep his family together.

He never intruded on his co-stars performances.  But there are two pivotal scenes where the mask comes off the superficial glad-hander Calvin: one is when he has a talk with Conrad about how he’s the stronger kid in the family, and the other, painful, awful scene where he tells Beth that their marriage is over.  Each is played with emotion that’s just so much and nothing more, consistent with the self-censorship and oppression of their WASP environment.  He inhabited the character — the ability to be Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H, the stoner professor in Animal House, and Calvin Jarrett, showed his versatility and talent.

Contrast Sutherland’s performance with Judd Hirsch chewing up the scenery as Conrad’s therapist.  Sutherland could have been supercilious, maudlin or cardboard in his role.  He was none of those things, and that’s greatness.

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Let’s Check In with the Life Appointed Kings and Queen

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Let's Check In with the Life Appointed Kings and Queen

I want to be a wet blanket about the “big win” in the Rahimi domestic violence gun case from the Supremos.

First, the well-worn doctrine of constitutional law, first expressed by Holmes and reinforced by Brandeis*, that “even a blind pig finds an ear of corn once in a while” is in full operation here.  Most of these amateur politicians in robes knew god damned well that this case was a political loser:  Rahimi, a drug dealer, fired a shot at a bystander while Rahimi was beating up his girlfriend in a parking lot. She escaped, and he called her to tell her he’d shoot her if she told anyone about the assault.  She got a restraining order that suspended Rahimi’s gun license, making him a prohibited possessor.  After that order went into affect, Rahimi was involved in five shootings.  When the cops arrested him (on some other charge, not a gun charge), they found a shit-ton of guns in his house, so he was charged with illegal possession.  Even old white men who don’t give two shits about a woman’s life have to at least acknowledge that Rahimi’s girlfriend and mother of his child was in a wee bit of danger from the arsenal this motherfucker was maintaining.

Note that I said most of the amateur politicians in robes knew this was a sure political loser:  Thomas was the lone dissent. Clarence has transcended the realm of mere petty political considerations to an exalted plane of existence where all that matters is whether his rulings will satisfy the most inflamed, butthurt Fox-News-watching paw paw.  (A lawyer I know says that Thomas’ last act as a justice will be to write the opinion overturning Loving v Virginia.)

Second, these fuckos just threw us all a bone.  Just as with the mifepristone decision, where they ruled the “right way” on a case that was a slam-dunk and should never have made it to the court, the Rahimi decision was supposed to show everyone that there’s a kinder, gentler side to the Supreme’s brand of sharia law.  They just want to soften the blow of whatever fuckery they’re going to throw down on the Trump immunity decision.  Also, mark my prediction well:  there will be a case with better facts where they’re going to take a bite out of gun restrictions for domestic violence convicts. ( The current law is that anyone who was convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence can’t own firearms.)

Finally, the really sad thing is that the press is aching to portray these fuckers as “kinder gentler facists”.  Here’s a Politico piece on how philosopher-queen Amy Coney Barrett is going to “split” the conservatives on the court, based on her concurrence with the majority opinion where she took a couple of shots at Thomas.  Baby Jesus save us from the soft bigotry of low expectations on display there.

In closing, Democrats should never press pause on their constant efforts to portray the court for what it is:  a bunch of corrupt hacks out to take away our rights.

——-

* This is bullshit I just made up, similar to most recent Supreme Court decisions.

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