Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
I have no words for the news of the day.
All I’ll say is that after today, I think we need two of these.
.
Even Henry is pissed about everything that’s happening. That’s all we’ll say about that.
No talk of The Horrors, please.
Bonus happy Henry. Because we probably all need him.
Okay, maybe a yawning Henry, in the hopes that maybe we can yawn, too and perhaps even get some sleep.
Mostly open thread.
The cost and the reason:
16 Ukrainian children rescued from russian occupation.
17yo Milanа’s mother was held in a basement w/o food for 3d bc girl’s dad serves in Ukraine’s army. Since then, Milana lived in constant fear she’d lose mom.
Mark, 17, was taken from school straight to a conscription office after a “test.”
— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 10:31 AM
2yo Solomiya survived a night with a fever of 40°C. Her mother was forced to carry her across a pontoon bridge on foot after russians blocked their car from reaching a hospital.
Today these children are safe.
But thousands more remain russia’s hostages. Don’t abandon them. Don’t forget them.
— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 10:31 AM
These children are rescued by Save Ukraine initiative.
Source: Zmina Ukraine
— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Six years in captivity: Svitlana finally reunites with her daughters. In 2019, russians arrested her right in front of the girls, denying any info of them ever since. First, the girls lived under occupation w/ their granny, then moved w/ their dad to Germany. ❤️🩹
Source: Dmytro Lubinets— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 3:32 PM
At the end of August, Just Security published an article reporting on how the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) had dismantled another vital office fighting to keep Americans safe: the Foreign Maline Influence Center (FMIC).
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently announced that the functions of the intelligence community’s Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC) would be reduced and absorbed into other parts of the U.S. intelligence community. In doing so, Gabbard has dismantled the last remaining U.S. federal government organ dedicated to tracking and analyzing State-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society. After the Trump administration shut down related units at the State Department, Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and Department of Justice earlier this year, Gabbard’s announcement is a particular blow to U.S. national security and a gift to America’s adversaries, who have no interest in slowing down malign influence operations that harm U.S. national interests.
In the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the FMIC meticulously documented State-sponsored threats, particularly from China, Iran, and Russia, that targeted candidates and the electoral process itself. It also made public the process by which the executive branch would notify key stakeholders, including the American public, of threats to the election. The FMIC posted regular notifications to the American public, outlining the tactics, techniques, and procedures that State-sponsored actors used to influence the American public surreptitiously. The center highlighted specific instances of deepfake videos that sought to undermine confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, such as a Russian State-sponsored viral clip that purported to show mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania being destroyed. FMIC’s transparency contributed to bipartisan efforts to quickly debunk the video.
The FMIC and Gabbard’s predecessor as DNI, Avril Haines, also publicly outlined the objectives that China, Iran, and Russia apparently had for conducting interference operations against the United States. This helped to shed light on similarities and differences in the three countries’ strategies, including their preferred presidential candidate(s).
To its credit, the FMIC didn’t fixate on one threat actor (say, Russia). Nor did it only fixate on attempts to help then-former President Donald Trump and undermine his Democratic opponents, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, as “Russia hoax” conspiracists claim the intelligence community did during the 2016 presidential campaign. In fact, the FMIC went to great lengths to explain how some actors, notably Iran, clearly wanted to undermine Trump’s candidacy.
One would think the Trump administration would have an interest in preserving government functions that monitor nefarious foreign government activity targeting the president of the United States. Instead, in her Aug. 20 announcement of the broader ODNI reorganization and the dismantlement of FMIC, with its remaining work spread across other units, Gabbard claimed the office had politicized intelligence (a charge she also leveled at the intelligence community when the administration recently declassified materials purporting to support its claim that Russia did not interfere on behalf of Trump’s 2016 campaign). To the contrary — not only did the FMIC avoid putting its thumb on the scales of the election results, but it also avoided doing anything that could be misconstrued as censorship of free speech. The FMIC did not recommend censoring specific sources of information, nor did it tell citizens what to read or what to believe. There was no deep-state plot to deplatform conservative voices or denigrate the Trump campaign.
While the law passed by Congress in 2019 to authorize the FMIC stipulates that the center cannot be formally closed until 2028, ODNI’s decision to cripple it now means the United States has effectively ended any meaningful government role in addressing the foreign interference threat. In the meantime, China, Iran, Russia, and other nation-States will continue to use information operations, cyber operations, and other hybrid threat vectors to destabilize the U.S. government, subvert American society, and damage U.S. national security. For example, Russia is ramping up efforts this year to inject Russian State propaganda into the data sets informing AI chat bots, a tactic certain to be copied by other adversarial governments. In July, Microsoft unmasked a cyber operation by the Russian State Security Service (FSB) to target foreign embassies in Moscow with malware.
Much, much more at the link. The reason Gabbard has gutted the FMIC, Rubio shut down the remnants of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), why Bondi shut down the KleptoCapture Task Force, and they’re all hell bent on defunding, diminishing, or minimizing America’s already degraded and limited counterintelligence capabilities is because they have rightly figured out that these offices, teams, and task forces are hostile to their intentions as well as those of their boss. This is akin to their complaints that content moderation designed to flag hard right extremist content is actually censoring conservative and Republican content. Which is true because the content is largely indistinguishable and has been for years. Rather than leading Republicans and conservatives to reflect on why the language they use for messaging is often indistinguishable from those of violent white supremacists and neo-NAZIs, asl well as homophones, Islamophobes, xenophobes, etc, the response is that content moderation is really designed to target conservative speech and the speech of Republicans. It isn’t, it’s just doing so because what conservatives say and how they say it is often indistinguishable from hard right domestic violent extremists.
Unfortunately, it amounts to the leaders of agencies and departments that are supposed to be working to protect all Americans functionally removing the capabilities necessary to do so. Which makes these leaders the most insider of insider threats. If we were in the Star Trek universe, this would be equivalent to taking your own shields down before engaging with the Jem Hadar.
President Zelenskyy held a joint presser with Roberta Metsola, the President of the European Parliament who was visiting Ukraine today.
👀 “Someone didn’t arrive and didn’t fly.” Zelensky announced a successful operation on Russian territory.
We are waiting for details!
— MAKS 25 👀🇺🇦 (@maks23.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 12:31 PM
Those should be very interesting details!
Video of the joint presser below, English transcript of his prepared remarks after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 1,301: The Insider ThreatPost + Comments (17)
Disney’s ABC said it would take Jimmy Kimmel‘s popular late-night show off its schedule “indefinitely” after one of the biggest owners of TV stations in the U.S., Nexstar Media, said it would pre-empt airings of the program following remarks the host made about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Nexstar said Wednesday that its “owned and partner television stations affiliated with the ABC Television Network will preempt “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for the foreseeable future, beginning with tonight’s show.” The company said it “strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.”
In his monologue Monday night , Kimmel said that the “MAGA gang” was trying to score political points off Kirk’s murder.r. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets.”
Open thread (while we still have some free speech left)
ETA: here is his monologue before it gets banned
Sep 16, 2025
I thought I would share an update on how things stand after the anonymous Angel match yesterday, and where I’m thinking we’ll go from here.
I think we’ll take Virgil Thornton off the board as soon as we hit $5,000.
As I write this, we are about $360 away from our revised goal of $5,000!
Virgil Thornton has no idea who or what Balloon Juice is at this point, and I’m certain that our $5,000 will give us a huge boost in his effort to unseat the only Black Republican in the VA House of Delegates.
As I write this, we are $2,000 away from our goal of $7,500 for Kimberly Pope Adams, and I hope we can make our goal.
Either way, I think we’ll end our fundraising for Kimberly Pope Adams at whatever time I wake up on Monday morning.
I’ll contact Kim on Monday and let her know that we have completed our fundraising for her for this cycle. Dollars go a long way in these Statehouse races, and whatever we raise will make a big difference!
Thermometers to donate are in the sidebar.
After Monday, we’ll have just 6 weeks left before the November elections.
I’ll be talking with the folks at National Ground Game tomorrow – I want Virginia to be a wake-up call for the people currently running the show in Washington.
I hope to have an update from Four Directions later this week.
The UK should just keep laying on the flattery and then ask Trump for like a whole Blue State and see how he reacts.
— Craig Harrington (@craigipedia.bsky.social) September 17, 2025 at 8:10 AM
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He demands the public adoration he didn't get from his staged parade
— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha1.bsky.social) September 16, 2025 at 4:53 PM
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Swear to Murphy, I was *sure* this photo was AI slop…
Nice hat, Melania: defector.com/nice-hat-mel…
— Defector (@defector.com) September 17, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Albert Burneko, at Defector:
President Donald Trump is in the United Kingdom, meeting with the British royal family. Here we see him with the King and Queen of the U.K., plus a British functionary of some sort, and also Kung Lao of Mortal Kombat fame, presumably representing the peoples of Earthrealm…
Ah, hm. I am being told that is actually Melania Trump, the First Lady of the United States, wearing Christian Dior. I like her outfit very much! I liked it the first time I saw it, leering through a window in Insidious. Kudos to whatever stylist absolutely nailed her request to go to the royal palace in “Babadook Mode.” Maybe this outfit works better in other environments, but in a room of shriveled 200-year-olds it carries all the metaphorical subtlety of a nationally syndicated political cartoon. I admire the chutzpah it takes to dress to a meeting with the British royals as what dear departed Prince Philip saw lurking behind him in the mirror, exactly seven days before he died…
But seriously, don’t clown poor Melania for this getup. It would have made a lot more sense if the other Spy had shown up to the photo op.
Can’t blame the woman for wanting to signal as publicly as possible that She’s Not With Him — one way or another, her ‘marriage’ is toast within a few months, so she’s gotta update that C.V. — but one assumes this has already inspired another spate of Body Double!!! comments on QAnon social media.
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Putting the ‘Blight’ in ‘Old Blighty’Post + Comments (121)
Stevie Chick, in the Guardian — “‘This country’s gonna fall on its face. There’s nobody coming to save us’: Boston punks Dropkick Murphys take on Maga”:
Backstage at the Rock la Cauze festival in Victoriaville, Canada, where Boston punk-rock institution Dropkick Murphys are headlining, founding bassist/singer Ken Casey is experiencing an uncharacteristic moment of anxiety.
“We have concerns about going back over the border tonight,” he says, gravely – not for the illicit reasons touring musicians usually fear border crossings, but because Casey’s regular on stage rants against Donald Trump have gone viral. “We’re not worried about being arrested,” he adds. “But we have a show in New York tomorrow. Are we gonna get harassed or held up? We used to come over that border and they’d be, ‘Dropkicks! Come right through!’ But what’s it going to be like now?”
By “now”, Casey means during the second Trump presidency, which has brought the political element always present within Dropkick Murphys’ bolshie, Pogues and Clash-influenced bruisers to the fore. The group’s resistance has found its sharpest expression at their shows, where their anthem First Class Loser is accompanied by videos depicting Trump and former chum Jeffrey Epstein, while Casey’s skirmishes with a vocal minority of Maga Dropkicks fans in the mosh pit have lit up social media. He admits these fans often provoke the worst in him. “How do you know if someone’s in a cult? They hold up a hat all fuckin’ night,” he rages in one clip.
“People tell me, ‘You didn’t use-ta soapbox like this’,” he says on our video call, gathering steam. “Well, we didn’t use-ta be in the midst of an authoritarian takeover!”
Dropkick Murphys are still commanding big blue-collar crowds as they approach their 30th anniversary in 2026. Over the years they’ve scored numerous US Top 10 albums, Bruce Springsteen collaborations and a platinum-seller in the form of civic anthem I’m Shipping Up to Boston, boosted by its appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. But their value system, Casey says, hasn’t changed since the now seven-strong band formed with the aim “to be a voice for working people”. Class and the labour movement are key to the 56-year-old’s identity. “My father died when I was very young. I was raised by my grandfather, a labour organiser who instilled in me the value of a union. In the Boston suburb where I was raised, everyone owed their lives to a union job. It put a roof over our head.”…
Open Thread: Gawd Bless the Dropkick MurphysPost + Comments (51)
Dr. Monarez is testifying at a Senate hearing today. Unlike the wizened nutsack who used to be her boss, she got through her testimony without shouting and flapping her arms around like a lunatic.
HASSAN: When you pushed back on Kennedy’s demands, how did he react?
MONAREZ: He was very upset. The entire meeting was very tense. He was very upset throughout the entirety of our discussion and it was not a productive exchange of information
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 17, 2025 at 11:50 AM
If Democrats in Congress are going to lay down markers related to healthcare in exchange for the votes necessary to pass the continuing resolution, maybe they can add replacing the nutcase who’s destroying our public health infrastructure to the list.
Open thread.
