Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

We will not go back.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

This is dead girl, live boy, a goat, two wetsuits and a dildo territory.  oh, and pink furry handcuffs.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

A norm that restrains only one side really is not a norm – it is a trap.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

All hail the time of the bunny!

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

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

There are times when telling just part of the truth is effectively a lie.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

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Saturday Evening Open Thread: Arizona, Trying to Become the Site of Our Next Civil War

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Arizona - STOCKPILE

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)

From the Washington Post, “Clock ticking, an Arizona abortion clinic copes with confusion and fear” [gift link]:

PHOENIX — The staff at the Camelback Family Planning abortion clinic has been through this before, legislative measures and court decisions threatening to block the care they provide to women ending a pregnancy. So they opened their doors as usual on Thursday morning, doctors and nurses steeled for the latest battle, the first appointments already in line and half a dozen protesters clustered just beyond the parking lot entrance of the tan stucco office building.

In a state that has suddenly become a key front in the national fight for reproductive rights, physician Gabrielle Goodrick declared herself ready: “We’re not closing.”

The clinic lobby began to fill with patients in their 20s, 30s and even 40s. Black, White, Latina and Native American. Some were accompanied by husbands and boyfriends. A few cried as they entered, escorted in by volunteers whose umbrellas sought to shield the women from the shouts and signs — “Babies lives matter” — of those abortion opponents…

Goodrick opened the facility in 1999 and seven years later moved it here, near the foot of Camelback Mountain, with a goal of serving as many women as possible in sprawling, booming Phoenix and the surrounding region. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned nationally two years ago, it and other providers in the state have weathered a temporary abortion ban, a prohibition on abortions beyond 15 weeks, restrictions on abortions for fetal anomalies and this week a state Supreme Court ruling that revived a near-total ban dating to 1864 — when Arizona was still only a U.S. territory.

The latest uncertainty, coming seven months before the presidential election, feels punitive. “We’re political pawns,” Goodrick, 58, said Thursday. But she and fellow doctor Barbara Zipkin are resolute. And Zipkin, who began her medical career before abortion was legalized by the Roe decision in 1973, is energized by seeing more and more women engage on the issue.

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Four Directions Native Vote – Arizona and Nevada (Open Thread)

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Hey guys, we are about halfway to meeting the external matches for Arizona and Nevada.  Our external match hopes to get their funds to Four Directions somewhere around April 25, which is just under 2 weeks from now.

Reminder: we have an external match and we have Balloon Juice Angels for both AZ and NV, which means that anything you donate up to $50 will turn into 4x the amount you donate.

To count toward the match, let us know about your donation in the comments, or you can drop me an email message if you prefer.  Let me know which state or state in the comments.

ARIZONA

NEVADA

I think everybody knows what the stakes are, and I’m pretty sure most of us are aware of Four Directions activities organizing the Native vote, but let me know if you want more information here.

Open thread!

Four Directions Native Vote – Arizona and Nevada (Open Thread)Post + Comments (94)

Let’s Flush the Rural ‘Resentment’ About Immigration

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Let's Stop Buying the Rural 'Resentment' About Immigration
In November, millions of rural voters will mark their ballot for a man who has pledged to “close the borders”.  In interviews and in rallies, this group of white voters will pretend that they don’t need immigration, yet the evidence of their deep need of immigrants to work on rural farms is all over the heartland.  This picture was taken in a bathroom stall at a Love’s truck stop in Boise City, Oklahoma, a panhandle town on US Highway 287.  Anyone who’s visited non-resort areas of Mexico knows exactly why it’s there — the plumbing can’t handle toilet paper so every toilet has a garbage can next to it for used TP.  Well, that’s not the way we do here in God’s Country, where we flush our TP the way Baby Jesus told us in the Bible.  So the Mexican, Central and South American truck drivers and workers need to be reminded of that fact.

Walk into any small-town Wal-Mart in this area after suppertime and you’ll see at least a few Latino workers in the aisles.  If you look on Google Maps, in some of these towns the highest-rated restaurants serve Mexican food, and they open around 5 AM and close just after noon.  Who, I wonder, needs to pick up food at that hour other than workers who are picking up lunch or having an early breakfast?

These workers, who are treated as the lowest form of human life by the Republican Party, are absolutely essential to the rural economy.  And they work hard.  But, because we’re supposed to venerate the “heartland values” of white rural voters as somehow being better than the rest of us, we tiptoe around the fact that they’ve been fed a fantasy that white kids will somehow come back from the city to do the hard work that documented and undocumented immigrants do every single day.  Well, the simple fact is that those kids aren’t coming back, and everyone needs to accept that fact and start building a path to citizenship for those workers who want to stay in the country.

Every Cletus Safari that I’ve seen goes to the diners where a bunch of old white guys are drinking coffee at 10 in the morning.  Maybe those reporters ought to get up before the sun and head over to La Unica Taqueria, just off Highway 287 in Childress, Texas, to interview people who work for a living instead.

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Late Night Open Thread: In Case You Missed Lawrence O’Donnell’s Latest…

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The five-minute clip is all over twitter, but of course some of you don’t read twitter…

Bonus goon content: Kevin McCarthy feels confident enough about his party’s current disarray to publicly threaten Matt Gaetz. Interesting to wonder what favors Kevin is looking for…

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War for Ukraine Day 779: The Side that Can’t Shoot Back Loses

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Before we start, I want to make something clear, again: the discharge petition is not going to pass and move the Senate’s supplemental aid bill to the floor of the House for a vote. Even if the remaining dozen or so Democratic holdouts agree to sign on, it would still need four Republicans. The reality, however, is it would need at least six Republicans because Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar will not vote for it because it includes additional military aid for Israel in it’s war with Hamas. I don’t think Congresswoman Bush would vote for it either for the same reason, so more likely seven Republican representatives. That is not going to happen. There is no one weird trick to get this passed. The failure to front load this before the 2022 midterms created the opportunity for Republican obstruction. And before someone in the comments explains to me how defense enterprise management works, it is possible to fund things in the defense appropriations bills for longer than a year.

As I start writing tonight’s update – 8:25 PM EDT – the skies over Ukraine are clear. The only air raid alerts are over Russian occupied Luhansk and Crimea.

That was not the case earlier today:

https://twitter.com/K_Loukerenko/status/1778825419904467233

https://twitter.com/IrynaVoichuk/status/1778781182215196769

When GEN Cavoli, the Commander of EUCOM and Supreme Allied Commander Europe testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) yesterday he repeated a statement he’d made to the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) the day before:

“If we do not continue to support Ukraine, Ukraine will run out of artillery shells and will run out of air defense interceptors in fairly short order,” said General Christopher Cavoli, explaining that Kyiv is dependent on the United States for those key munitions.

“I can’t predict the future, but I can do simple math,” he said. “Based on my experience in 37-plus years in the U.S. military, if one side can shoot and the other side can’t shoot back, the side that can’t shoot back loses.”

Cavoli also said the failure of U.S. lawmakers to approve a $60 billion supplemental security package is already giving Russia a significant advantage.

“They [Ukraine] are now being outshot by the Russian side 5-to-1,” he told lawmakers. “That will immediately go to 10-to-1 in a matter of weeks.

“We are not talking about months. We are not talking hypothetically,” Cavoli said.

https://twitter.com/ElBeardsley/status/1778892180569866699

 

President Zelenskyy travelled to Chernivsti today. He spoke and participated in the meeting of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities and the Made in Ukraine platform.

Here is the video of his remarks at the former:

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Rural Resentment

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Rural Road Trip 2024

I traveled to Texas to see the eclipse, and most of my travel was on US Highway 287. Between Denver and Amarillo, there’s not a hell of a lot to see. Google Maps calls US 287 the “Heartland Expressway” in Colorado, but if this is the heart of our land, we need to cut down on the cheeseburgers and get to the gym a little more often. Though I’ve spent plenty of time in rural America, the level of decay in small rural towns seemed worse this time. Maybe it’s because I’ve been living in metro Denver for the last few months. Denver definitely has its problems, but it is a bustling, booming place, with lots of new construction. Not so in eastern Colorado, and the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.

The pictures I’ve embedded were taken in Eads and Hugo, Colorado and Paducah, Texas, but there are a lot of other towns with the same decaying buildings on the side of the road. It’s not all bad: there are signs for fundraisers, and monuments like the Eads town sign, that show the community making an effort. There are also a lot of Trump signs, “Impeach the Democrats” signs, and other associated signals that these areas are about as red as you can get in the West.

I’ve been following with interest the “debate” between the authors of White Rural Rage, Paul Waldman and Tom Schiller, and political scientists like Nicholas Jacobs. John linked to Waldman and Schaller’s piece addressing their critics, and here’s Jacobs’ piece in Politico. Jacobs, who wrote The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America thinks that “rage” isn’t the right word — rather, we should say “resentment”. I’ve always thought that resentment was rage after it had curdled, soured and burrowed itself deep into someone’s head, but Jacobs makes big noise about the distinction. He also picks through polling research to present a picture of rural America (by which he clearly means white rural America) as a place that’s not quite as racist as you’d think.

Jacobs can certainly read polls, but he has very little insight about how the views reflected in those polls came to be. The words “Fox News” are nowhere to be found in his piece. Having seen the evidence of radicalization firsthand in my rural relatives, talking about heartfelt views of heartlanders without talking about the diet of right-wing propaganda that they regularly ingest is missing the story. Or, as Waldman and Schaller put it:

What isn’t said enough is that rural whites are being told to blame all the wrong people for their very real problems. As we argue in the book, Hollywood liberals didn’t destroy the family farm, college professors didn’t move manufacturing jobs overseas, immigrants didn’t pour opioids into rural communities, and critical race theory didn’t close hundreds of rural hospitals. When Republican politicians and the conservative media tell rural whites to aim their anger at those targets, it’s so they won’t ask why the people they keep electing haven’t done anything to improve life in their communities.

Also, cut me a break with the patronizing views of rural folk as the simple-hearted (and simple-minded) moral backbone of America. Maybe, overall, people treat each other a little better than average in a small town, but people in those towns know each other, and humans are far more likely to be good to people they know than to strangers. I find it condescending and wrong to treat rural folk as somehow better then everyone else. But there’s enormous pressure to do so — here are Waldman and Schaller again:

We call this phenomenon the “shouts and whispers” approach to social science discourse about rural whites. Find no difference between the political attitudes of rural whites and other Americans, or show that they have admirable values? Shout it from the rooftops. Uncover transgressive political beliefs among rural whites? Whisper it at a conference panel with a dozen people in attendance and no media to be found.

Rural America gets all the breaks in our political system. They get more representation, more federal money and more positive attention than urban dwellers. Yet their towns are in decay, their health is terrible, and they are under the sway of a bunch of big-city liars who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. If we’re going to understand rural voters, we need to start with the bare facts, not some fantasy.

Corrections: It’s “Schaller” not “Schiller” and the last picture was taken in Hugo, Colorado.

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