Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Today’s gop: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

“Alexa, change the president.”

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

Stay strong, because they are weak.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

“They all knew.”

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The National Guard is not Batman.

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

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Saturday Night Gutter Fights Open Thread: Rumble in the Reicht-Wing Jungle

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last night as i was trying to wind down for bed i had a unified theory of what the fuck just happened, and i wrote it down, and filed it under "well, i can't talk about this on main without sounding insane until and unless the perp gets caught and is provably a groyper"
anyways, great news! (1/X)

— J. C. Cantwell 🌻 (@segfaultvicta.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:13 PM

People can say (almost) anything on the internet, but this thread has been circulating on the BlueSky circles I see:

the bitch of it for them is charlie kirk WAS a generational talent who was going to become president someday. he was genuinely extremely fucking good at his job and he’s almost certainly the reason Trump won reëlection

one of the big things that happened in the background that a lot of people didn’t see was the Groyper Wars – Fuentes and Kirk were beefing, Fuentes controls a bunch of insane white twinks who were intimidating everyone at conservative events

it was a whole thing I can’t adequately summarise, but Kirk was the one who, at least for a while, had managed to defuse it – this is why he suddenly tacked hard to the right on immigration and racism, that was calculated.

by kneeling to the groypers, Kirk was – successfully – defusing the tension in the Hitlerjugend, conceding ALL the ground on racism and immigration and, like, channer shit, basically, in exchange for being able to position himself as the intellectual heir to Trumpism.

that was his play here. keep up the gadfly act until he could be, like, Vance’s chief of staff or something, G-d only knows, but the point is, he was the man who could unite Turning Point and the groypers by knowing what to concede to Fuentes et al. and how to do so

recently, Kirk kept calling for the release of the Epstein Files, even after Trump called him and asked him to stop, and Fuentes has been FURIOUS about it, and won’t-someone-rid-me-of-this-meddlesome-priest about it: stochastic terrorism wasn’t a “if”, at this point, it was a “when”.

Kirk thought, i am SURE of it, that if HE was able to get out in front of the Epstein files – he KNEW what was in them, obviously. He knew that there’s SOMETHING there that’s genuinely, actually, catastrophically explosive

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Mistakes Were Made!

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Cold and Wet and No Energy – It Must Be Fall.
This is a JeffreyW photo, so amazing that it is the banner for the Food & Recipes topic here on BJ.

I am using this photo in honor of our beloved JeffreyW, who we recently lost.

Since somebody nearly screwed up their recipe on the Great British Baking Show this week by forgetting to add the flour to their cake mix.  Then I shared my mishap of forgetting to add eggs to the pumpkin pie – I highly recommend that you do not try that at home!

So I thought we might have some fun with a Mistakes Were Made! post.

This can be recipes gone bad.  Or the thing you forgot, or the ingredient you used thinking it was something else.  Or some recipe that you made up that did not turn out as you hoped.  Or the time you made your beautiful [whatever] and you dropped it or the dog ate it or one of the guest was allergic to it.

You get the idea, right!  If mistakes were made and it was related to food, or it’s food adjacent – maybe you weren’t even cooking at all, just some disaster while you were eating somewhere –  this is the place for it.

 

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War for Ukraine Day 1,297: There’s a Club, Ukraine Is, Unfortunately, Not in It

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A black and white cartoon with Popeye the Sailor Man facing forward and to the left. His word bubble says "I Yam Disgustipated"

There’s a club, unfortunately Ukraine is NOT in it!

Shots:

🇷🇺🇷🇴A Russian Shahed kamikaze drone has reportedly entered Romanian territory, according to monitoring channels.

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— 24Hours Ukraine (@24hoursukraine.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 12:05 PM

Is an air raid alert in Poland counts as a wake-up call for Europe?

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 12:47 PM

Chaser:

BREAKING: Poland and NATO scrambled fighter jets to monitor and intercept a Russian drone flown into Romania in latest provocation

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— SlavaUkraini033 (@slavaukraini033.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 12:03 PM

This isn’t a knock on Poland. The Commander of Poland’s Rapid Reaction Force is my former student and, frankly, as well as proudly, Poland and NATO are far, far, far safer as a result as he is on excellent general officer.

Unfortunately, Putin, in line with Lenin’s oft considered apocryphal maxim, is going to continnue to probe for mush.

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— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 2:47 PM

President Zelenskyy met with, addressed, and presented awards to members of Ukraine’s film industry on their national day today. Here is the video of his address:

Here is his address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Open Thread: Lisa Cook Is Not A Crook

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“.. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud ..”
@reuters.com
www.reuters.com/world/us/fed…

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 6:21 PM

… Unlike the Squatter-in-Chief, and his block-headed minion Bill Pulte:

A loan estimate for an Atlanta home purchased by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor accused of mortgage fraud by the Trump administration, shows that Cook had declared the property as a “vacation home,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters.

The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence, two independent real-estate experts said…

Administration officials led by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have used mortgage documents from her Atlanta and Michigan properties to accuse Cook of claiming both as her “primary residence.” The allegedly false claims of residence, which could improve mortgage and tax implications for a homeowner, led Pulte to refer the matter to the Department of Justice, prompting a federal investigation and an order by President Donald Trump to dismiss her.

Cook, who remains at the Federal Reserve, has sued the president to resist her dismissal. Reuters was unable to determine whether Pulte or administration officials are aware of Cook’s Atlanta loan estimate. Spokespeople at the FHFA, the agency led by Pulte, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The documents cited by Pulte include standardized federal mortgage paperwork which stipulates that each loan obtained by Cook for the Atlanta and Michigan properties is meant for a “primary residence.” But documentation reviewed by Reuters for the Atlanta home, filed with a court in Georgia’s Fulton County, clearly says the stipulation exists “unless Lender otherwise agrees in writing.” The loan estimate, a document prepared by the credit union, states “Property Use: Vacation Home.”…

In another point that could help Cook’s case, she never requested a tax exemption for the Georgia home as a primary residence, according to property records and a Fulton County tax official.

A separate document reviewed by Reuters, related to a federal form completed by Cook as she obtained security clearance for her role at the Federal Reserve, shows that in December 2021 she also declared the Atlanta property as a “2nd home.” Though unrelated to the mortgage, the declaration on that document, a supplement to a U.S. government national security form known as SF-86, is consistent with the claim on her Atlanta loan summary…

Last week, Reuters reported that Pulte’s own father and stepmother had declared two homes in two different states as their primary residence, prompting a town in Michigan to remove a tax exemption for their home there and charge the couple for back taxes. Pulte and his parents didn’t respond to requests for comment about the matter.

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Open Thread: Goodbye, Charlie

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“What Charlie Kirk, I think, kind of patented almost was the ability to do this and seem likeable, friendly, open,” said @radiofreetom.bsky.social.
“Kirk kind of pioneered this smiling version of MAGA that, you know, you don’t really see very often among a lot of MAGA supporters.”
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— Washington Week with The Atlantic (@washingtonweekpbs.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 8:20 PM

Murphy the Trickster God willing, this will be background noise by Monday, but I’m in favor of reminding the normies just how weird and dangerous Charlie Kirk — not to mention the rest of the Very Online Reicht Wing — really are.

(Remember — Sharing is caring!)

This essay has been getting a certain amount of well-deserved attention. Elizabeth Spiers, at the Nation — “Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning”:

… Many of the facile defenses of Kirk and his legacy are predicated on the idea that it’s acceptable to spread hateful ideas advocating for the persecution of perceived enemies as long you dress them up in a posture of debate. This is just class privilege. The man who said, “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.

It’s true that we cannot know what was in Charlie Kirk’s heart because we are not telepathic. But we can make reasonable inferences based on the things he said and did publicly because we are also not colossally stupid. He built a large following, and acquired real political power saying these things—to young people, to the president and his minions, to deep-pocket right-wing donors—and there are far too many people who have been ready to suggest that he was able to do this through a combination of natural charisma and good old-fashioned hard work. Speaking about and addressing the late Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, who is Black, he said, “It’s very obvious to us you are not smart enough to be able to get it on your own. ‘I could not make it on my own, so I needed to take opportunities from someone more deserving.’” Kirk was smart enough to ask his father for a check when wanted to found Turning Point, and had always been happy to curtail opportunities for more deserving people when they failed to conform to his own ideology.

It’s this that makes it particularly galling to see him cast by some as a free-speech warrior. He created a professor watchlist explicitly designed to get academics fired who dared talk about the right’s usual assortment of verboten topics—anything to do with race or gender, in particular. He also offered the standard right-wing plaint about left-wing indoctrination in American universities even as he went on campus tours trying to indoctrinate young people into his hard-right Christian nationalist worldview…

Some of the people valorizing Kirk insist that all of his toxicity was acceptable because at least he was open to debate—a bar so low, you’d have to dig into the Mariana Trench to get to it. And he certainly paid lip service to it. “We record all of it so that we put [it] on the Internet so people can see these ideas collide,” he said of his own streaming operation. “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.”

But Kirk’s actions undercut that notion every day. His entire business was saying the other side was evil and dehumanizing them. The debates were simply performances, and he could not have an entertaining public fight without opposition. Turning Point did not work to bring people together; it worked to bring about a country where anyone who wasn’t a white Christian nationalist wasn’t welcome. I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.

They’re just going to scream over the facts, as loudly and often as it takes.

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 9:07 PM


===

Charlie Kirk called Floyd a scumbag and spread the false claim Floyd died from an overdose so I’m not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean

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— Normal One (@normalatty.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 11:14 PM

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Samer Kalaf. at Defector — “This Is Who Charlie Kirk Was”:

… In the last couple years, Kirk was no longer a youth speaking to his peers, but a man in his 30s who still traveled from campus to campus in order to pick on college students for engagement. He stuck to this level of competition because he often found it more difficult with older foes. Kirk was both carnival barker and dunk-tank clown, telling anyone to step right up and “Prove Me Wrong.” He would size up an opponent his audience was primed to recognize as the blue-haired freak or pro-Palestine idiot, then try to make them look stupid for the assembled crowd, as well as any internet user unfortunate enough to stumble upon his work. His YouTube videos offered wish fulfillment to those who couldn’t win arguments themselves, with algorithm-friendly titles such as “Charlie Kirk VS the Wokies at University of Tennessee,” “Charlie Kirk Hands Out Huge L’s at University of California San Diego,” and “Charlie Takes Down Extremely Bouncy Cambridge Student.”

From time to time at these campus events, the person at the mic would reveal—directly or indirectly—their own aspirations to build a career like Kirk’s. In this way, his tour functioned as a sadder version of a reality competition: It was unlikely that they would win, but maybe they could at least squeeze a little clout out of it. Kirk’s participation was for a similar reason. He wasn’t just trying to lure more young voters to conservatism with free hats and epic leftist fails, but to boost his own status as well. The less famous participant in this type of conversation was at least more transparent about it.

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Some Lives Apparently Matter More Than Others

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Is anyone else already tired of talking about Charlie Kirk?

*****

The administration starts the fire and then are shocked when it burns.  Repeat.

I am aware of the troubling incident that has unfolded in Franklin Park.

This is a developing situation and the people of Illinois deserve a full, factual accounting of what’s happened today to ensure transparency and accountability.

— Governor JB Pritzker (@govpritzker.illinois.gov) September 12, 2025 at 2:03 PM

ICE officer fatally shoots man during traffic stop in Chicago suburb.  (Chicago Sun-Times)

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were conducting “targeted law enforcement activity” in Franklin Park when they stopped the vehicle, according to a statement from the agency.

Pritzker said he was “aware of the troubling incident that has unfolded in Franklin Park.

“This is a developing situation and the people of Illinois deserve a full, factual accounting of what’s happened today to ensure transparency and accountability,” Pritzker said in a statement.

The Resurrection Project, a community advocacy group, said the “horrific incident in Franklin Park shows us the real danger that militarized enforcement creates in our neighborhoods.

“A community member is dead, and an officer was injured,” Erendira Rendón, a leader with the group, said in a statement. “These are outcomes that serve no public safety purpose and leave entire communities traumatized. Safe neighborhoods depend on trust, not fear. When federal agents conduct unaccountable operations in our communities, everyone becomes less safe.”

Federal officials said the man had a “history of reckless driving.”

The only Cook County cases for a man with the shooting victim’s name are for traffic violations. He has four cases dating back to 2010, according to court records.

The most recent was in 2019 for operating an uninsured vehicle. The case was thrown out within a month. The other three citations are for speeding, driving with an expired license and again operating an uninsured vehicle.

There have been reports of traffic stops by immigration authorities this week in the suburbs. Legal experts say ICE officers generally don’t have the authority to stop a vehicle unless they have specific reasonable suspicion that the person in the car has violated immigration law.

Officials and advocates in the Los Angeles area said federal immigration officers were targeting people in vehicles there. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer fired his gun during a traffic stop in San Bernardino, Calif., last month, and the family in that case said officers didn’t identify themselves before breaking their car windows.

More.

Federal immigration agents fatally shot a man Friday morning in the Northwest suburbs after he allegedly attempted to flee a traffic stop and struck an officer with his car, officials said.

The shooting comes days after President Donald Trump’s long-promised immigration enforcement campaign launched in the Chicago area earlier this week, generating widespread fear in immigrant communities in the city and suburbs.

A neighbor who knew the shooting victim described him to the Chicago Sun-Times as a family man who he imagined was scared when confronted by officers — in part because he wasn’t fluent in English. Gov. JB Pritzker called for a “full, factual” accounting of what led to the shooting.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were conducting “targeted law enforcement activity” in Franklin Park when they stopped the vehicle, according to a statement from the agency.

During the stop, a man allegedly resisted arrest and attempted to drive his car into officers, dragging one officer, according to the statement.

The officer opened fire and shot the man, the statement said. The man was taken to an area hospital where he was pronounced dead, the statement said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has identified the man as Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. The Cook County medical examiner’s office has not yet identified him.

The officer was also taken to a hospital with “severe injuries.” His condition has stabilized, according to the statement.

“We are praying for the speedy recovery of our law enforcement officer,” a DHS spokesperson said. “He followed his training, used appropriate force, and properly enforced the law to protect the public and law enforcement.”

FBI agents were at the scene Friday assisting in the response, the agency confirmed. The FBI hasn’t provided any additional information on its investigation.

Open thread.

Some Lives Apparently Matter More Than OthersPost + Comments (127)