Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Republicans do not trust women.

The way to stop violence is to stop manufacturing the hatred that fuels it.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Every reporter and pundit should have to declare if they ever vacationed with a billionaire.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

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

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

Human rights are not a matter of opinion!

He really is that stupid.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

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

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Late Night Open Thread: (Even) Chris Christie Rejects No Labels

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Late Night Open Thread: (Even) Chris Christie Rejects No Labels

Cynical professional Ed Kilgore, at NYMag — “Chris Christie Rejects No Labels, Accepts No Voters Want Him”:

When former New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced his 2024 presidential candidacy last June, the general reaction was bewilderment. He had, after all, run in 2016 and dropped out of the race after finishing ninth in Iowa and sixth in New Hampshire. He ended his two-term tenure in Trenton thoroughly loathed by his constituents. So irrational were his aspirations for the presidency that my colleague Gabriel Debenedetti suggested in a piece on “Chris Christie Syndrome” that the man seemed haunted by his failure to run in 2012…

Running against Trump again in 2024 had all the hallmarks of another attempted Christie do-over. But even more than his 2016 race, it represented comically poor timing. He chose to be the loudest-and-proudest anti-Trump candidate at the very moment the party emphatically gave its heart to Daddy. He began the campaign with the highest unfavorability ratings among Republicans (and, for that matter, the general public) in the field. His announced strategy of driving Trump weeping to his knees in candidate debates fell apart when the former president decided against participating in debates at all. He didn’t even bother to compete in Iowa and never rose beyond a distant third place in New Hampshire, far and away his best state and the place where he concentrated all his resources.

With much of the non-Trump portion of the GOP shrieking at him to get out of the race and give Nikki Haley a clean shot at the front-runner, Christie finally dropped out with few votes and no delegates, but on his way out the door he damaged Haley by commenting on a hot mic that she was “going to get smoked” by Trump…

Yet Christie 2024, bizarre as it may seem, didn’t end there. It has now come to light that the twice-humiliated Republican presidential candidate had an extended dalliance with the nonpartisan No Labels organization, which has been searching high and low for someone (preferably a Republican) to head up the “unity ticket” it has been planning to launch at some point this spring. Christie, who had once referred to the entire No Labels enterprise as a “fool’s errand,” apparently considered becoming its champion very seriously, as the Washington Post reports…

… “I appreciate the encouragement I’ve gotten to pursue a third-party candidacy,” Christie said in a statement to The Washington Post on Wednesday. “While I believe this is a conversation that needs to be had with the American people, I also believe that if there is not a pathway to win and if my candidacy in any way, shape or form would help Donald Trump become president again, then it is not the way forward.”

This last remark had to come as a rude shock to the No Labels folks. They dismissed past warnings that they might inadvertently help Trump as Biden-campaign agitprop — but it seems the Republican agrees. But it appears that Christie took a long, hard look at the numbers and decided the whole thing might backfire…

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War for Ukraine Day 768: A Brief(ish) Monday Night Update

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Before we start, the Israelis appear to have killed four World Central Kitchen staffers in an air strike in Gaza around 6 PM EDT. Video and pics of the casualties are circulating online. Trust me, you do not need to watch them or loock at them. Expect more clarity in tomorrow’s news reporting.

Russia appears to have taken the night and day off from the mass bombardment of Ukrainian civilian targets and infrastructure Right now – 6;35 PM EDT – only Dnipropetrovsk and Russian occupied Kherson Oblast have air raid alerts up. While air raid alerts over any part of Ukraine are bad, let’s hope things stay quiet overnight and tomorrow.

I have now had a chance to read The Insider‘s deep dive reporting on the Havana Syndrome, which, apparently, was the focus of last night’s 60 Minutes. I’ve also read their in depth interview with now retired CIA Senior Operational Service officer Marc Polymeropoulos. I have a few thoughts. The first is that I am not qualified to determine if a directed energy weapon is even feasible. The second is that a whole lot of people who have been definitively saying it isn’t are also not qualified to do so. What I do know, however, is a whole lot about Russia’s premier wetwork unit: the GRU’s Unit 29155. While the evidence presented in the reporting about Unit 29155’s involvement is circumstantial, there is just too much of it to discount as coincidental; leaving aside that at this level of national security there are no coincidences. The open-source evidence of the Havana Syndrome being a Russian wetwork operation in The Insider‘s reporting, as well as other open-source reporting I’ve seen on the topic, is similar to the type of evidence presented in Buzzfeed’s detailed seven part series on Russia’s assassination program.

The Insider‘s reporting places the first attacks in 2014, which is several years earlier than has previously been reported. Moreover, they place them in Europe. This fits with what we know about the timeline of Putin’s largely non-kinetic world war primarily using the elements of national power other than military power against the US, the EU, and NATO. Moreover, as is the case with so much of that war, it is designed to wrong foot the US. As I’ve written here several times over the years, the US’s counterintelligence capability has two distinctive features. The first is that its conclusions are never intended to see the light of day. So even if it has been determined that Russia has spent the past decade targeting US intelligence and military personnel, as well as at what the reporting seems to indicate was at least one political appointee, those findings would never see the light of day unless leaked. The second is that our counterintelligence capabilities are a shadow of their former self. This is a result of year on year, decade on decade lack of resources and, quite frankly, lack of emphasis on this important capability. Given these two unfortunate realities, this type of wetwork is the perfect type of Russian op, just as the poisoning and beating operation that Buzzfeed documented extensively was/is.

It is also the perfect type of operation to ramp up and expand during the Trump administration as none of his political appointees would do anything about it. Either because they were in agreement with Trump’s views on Putin and Russia or because they were scared to get crosswise with Trump and his enforcers in the White House personnel office and wind up losing their phony baloney jobs. As a result, the senior civil servants wouldn’t either. They saw what happened to senior career DOJ and FBI personnel who got crosswise with Trump over Crossfire Hurricane and the Mueller investigation and learned the intended lesson. This is reflected in Marc Polymeropoulos’s recounting of how the senior appointed and career leadership at the CIA treated him and his colleagues that were suffering from Havana Syndrome. While it is true that the US nat-sec bureaucracy has a long, sad, and unfortunate history of either actively covering up or just ignoring the effects of war, warfare, and American uniformed and civilian personnels’ exposure to all sorts of noxious substances and the resulting negative health effects*, what The Insider reporting and Polymeropoulos’s interview indicate is that this both included this almost reflexive response and, at the same time, went far beyond it.

As I indicated in my first paragraph, I cannot speak to the weaponry, but I can speak to what we know of the tradecraft. And everything I know about that Russian tradecraft tells me that this is a Russian wetwork operation and Unit 29155 is up to their eyeballs in it. I’d be very interested to see whether there’s also a pattern of attacks on French personnel, especially in Africa, given that the GRU’s private military contractor (PMC) front group – Wagner PMC – spent years working to undermine French interests in the Sahel that led to the wave of coups in the central and western Sahel last summer and fall, which forced France out of the region and realigned those Sahel states with Russia.

I think that’s enough of that.

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

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Florida to Ban Abortion in 30 Days

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Breaking news from the Tampa Bay Times:

TALLAHASSEE — Florida voters will get the chance to vote on protecting abortion access after the Florida Supreme Court on Monday allowed the amendment onto 2024 ballots. But the court on Monday also released an opinion upholding the state’s current 15-week abortion ban.

Upholding the current law triggers a six-week abortion ban that lawmakers approved last year to go into effect. That law offers limited exceptions for rape and incest, and will go into effect 30 days after Monday’s ruling.

The change will disrupt abortion access not only in Florida, but for women across the southeastern U.S., giving them fewer places to turn to for legal abortions in a part of the country where many states ban abortion almost entirely.

Though the court was expected to rule on the abortion amendment because of an April 1 deadline, its decision to release an opinion on the state’s current 15-week ban came as a surprise.

This is a developing story. Check back at tampabay.com for updates.

Every one of the justices is a Republican appointee, and the majority were elevated to the state supreme court by DeSantis. The wingnut wife of one of the judges introduced the 6-week ban bill that DeSantis signed while running for president. (No, the judge didn’t recuse because Republican.)

Consider the contradictions heightened. Will the voters of this state turn out to reject this theocratic bullshit by a margin of 60% or more? I wish I were more confident they would. But at least everything is on the table and the stakes in November are perfectly clear.

Open thread.

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Deplorati Donny-Brook

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I thoroughly enjoyed this CNN account of Republicans rhetorically punching each other in the snot-locker, stomping fellow caucus members’ insteps and kneeing one another in the beans with great force. The donnybrook concerns an upcoming GOP primary in the Virginia 5th between arch-conservatives Bob Good, the incumbent and GOP House Freedom Caucus chief, and challenger John McGuire.

House GOP reps are blasting each other with a level of rancor I can’t recall seeing before the whole party went feral. It’s hard to guess who is on the side of whom, given that everyone involved is a hard-right creep:

“Bob Good didn’t come here to govern. He came here to be famous,” [Derrick] Van Orden, a Wisconsin Republican, told CNN. “Bob Good’s wearing our jersey, and he’s not on the team.”

Van Orden added: “If you look at what we have not been able to accomplish in this Congress, it’s predominantly because of Bob Good and his ilk.”

Van Orden is a gigantic dick in his own right — you may recall him as the asshole who screamed and cursed at Senate pages who were lying on the floor in the Rotunda taking photos at the end of their term last year. And speaking of massive fore/dickheads:

“This is the most important primary in the country,” said [Florida Rep. Matt] Gaetz, who led the charge to oust McCarthy and has targeted two other sitting Republicans in their primaries so far this cycle. “Bob is our masthead. Bob Good is our leader among House conservatives to get us on the same page to ensure that it is the people’s interests that rise above the special interests. They know that they hate us. But you know what, there are more of us.”

Good backed DeSantis in the primary, which is the focus of most of the verbal slap-fights. Earlier this year, Trump advisor Chris LaCivita told a Virginia paper that “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him.” But LaCivita declined the opportunity to slam Good anew for the CNN article, so perhaps Trump’s attention is on other things right now, like hoovering up RNC money.

Other members of the Deplorati also expressed opinions on Good:

Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, a former Trump Cabinet member who is backing McGuire, added: “We can do a lot better than Good,” he said. “We can do great.”

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene – who was booted from the Freedom Caucus last year after sparring with her GOP colleagues – has endorsed McGuire, saying Good “cannot be trusted and will work against Trump.”

“John McGuire endorsed and supported President Trump while you stabbed him in the back,” she posted on X.

Good angrily dismissed her.

“Nobody cares what Marjorie Taylor Greene says or thinks. And she’s a one-man show, she’s grandstanding and she wants attention,” Good said.

It would be a shame if these irredeemably terrible people kept hurling insults at each other, right up until the June primary vote! (I assume they’ll all scuttle back under their rocks if Trump opens his fat orange yap to endorse one of the candidates.)

I know nothing about the district, but my guess is if it elected Good, it probably isn’t gettable for Democrats. (Maybe knowledgeable friend of the blog Geminid or someone else with local knowledge will weigh in with a more informed take?)

Anyhoo, here’s hoping crushing pressure and high temperatures harden already hard feelings into a diamond-like consistency in the House GOP. Open thread!

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Institutions – Martin, Promoted from the Comments

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Martin had something really interesting to say about institutions the other day, and I think it deserves a wider audience.

So, here is my philosophy of institutions.

Institutions do not care about people. That’s not their job, and assigning that to them leads to a lot of disappointment. Institutions are a mechanism for organizing people to solve problems that we cannot solve individually (this can be government or businesses). You still rely on the people in that institution to care about people, because that’s the real source of it.

You design institutions to do a given job. If you’re a business, that job is to make money – in the short term/in the long term. If you’re a government, that job (should be) to serve the voters. Sometimes that job is to consolidate power. Sometimes it’s to make money for yourself (graft).

Remember: ‘‘Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets’

If the system gets corruption, it was designed to get corruption. Someone did that. Someone made it that way. Democrats like to believe that government institutions have neutral designs. It’s a different kind of hagiography for the founders that liberals tend to believe that the constitution is this divine machine that will always spit out neutral results if only people stop fucking with it, when the only reason it spits out neutral results is because people within and without the institution demand that it do so. USSC is not departing from what the Supreme Court is supposed to do with decisions like Dobbs, because the only thing it really ever can do is a be a vehicle for the judgement of its members to inform lesser courts how to act. Its members are how the machine works.

What then matters with the design of the institution is how you identify the right people to work within it and how the institution gives them agency to do good work. This is a double-edged sword because that same agency usually allows bad work to be done as well – with the difference being found in who you invite into the institution.

So how you qualify people for the job is incredibly important. If the qualification is you must be a white male lawyer, well, you’re going to get a very specific set of outcomes. if the qualification is the you represent a different part of society and have experience in public facing, ideally hands-on policy, you’ll get a very different set of outcomes.

In the end we’re responsible for that, not just in how we individually vote, but in how we culturally shape who is qualified. If ‘government should be run like a business’, that will shape how people select. If ‘government needs to support the needs of the people’, that will shape it very differently. Democrats are very shy about expressing their theory of qualification. They need to unlearn that. It’s most of the game here.

Democrats also need to get real about how to wield institutions and stop pretending that they will naturally, of their own accord, revert to some mean of civility. That only ever happens when the people in the institution agree to do that. If half of them don’t agree, the other half need to respond to that, and stop pretending that they do agree.

This is the lesson of ‘tire rims and anthrax’. Not everything can be negotiated. Some things need to be coerced (and there are good and bad ways to coerce an outcome).

Your thoughts?

Totally open thread.

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Late Night Schadenfreude Open Thread: The Higher the Monkey Climbs…

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… the more he expose!

For entertainment purposes only… Ed Zitron, at his blog Where’s Your Ed At, on “The Descent of Elon Musk”:

… Musk is, on paper, the most successful man in the world. He’s a social media star, a multi-billionaire with his own social network, and he owns a 20.5 percent stake in the world’s most valuable car company by market cap. He knows — or can easily get in touch with — almost anybody in the world, and has the means to start or incubate any venture under the sun.

Yet with the world at his fingertips, Musk seems joyless, marinating in misery, surrounded by an air of existential bleakness…

Lemon’s interview is fascinating for many reasons, chief of which is that Elon Musk sounds really, really stupid. The supposed real-life Tony Stark is ineloquent, stumbling through his answers with the verbal agility of somebody that just woke up, his dialogue a buffet of “uhs” and “ums,” with even his answers to softball questions feeling like he’s making the answers up in real time. Within five minutes, he effectively admitted to not watching Don Lemon’s show, claiming Don (and CNN) were “center-left,” yet not appearing to have a clear answer as to why.

Elon Musk, a man with unimaginable money and power, has the elegance and eloquence of a nervous teenager. His delivery is stilted, convoluted yet specious, echoing a lack of research or real understanding of anything he’s talking about beyond what he might have glanced at in between posting stolen memes and begging people to use his website. He seemed uncomfortable, and professionally-speaking, these aren’t the actions of an introverted or shy personality, but somebody who hasn’t had to answer a real question in decades. It’s remarkable that we’ve never seen an interview like this with a tech founder, let alone Elon Musk, made more-so by how much even the lightest brush with criticism aggravated and frustrated him…

Fundamentally, he seems miserable. He looks tired, not the kind of tired you get from doing something you love, but from the exhaustion one gets when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel…

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War for Ukraine Day 767: Russia Bombarded Ukraine Again Overnight

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Screen shot of new artwork by NEIVANMADE. The background is black. In the bottom foreground are grey Ukrainian homes and apartment buildings being bombarded by red Russian missiles with the Special Military Operation "Z" symbol on them. Above the missiles, written in red is the word "Ruzzians". Below the buildings being attacked is the statement "Turns Homes Into Graves".

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

Just a quick housekeeping note to start. While Ukraine is in the process of moving itself onto the western calendar, including for Christian religious holidays, they have not yet done so for Easter. Eater will be celebrated in Ukraine on 5 May this year.

Before we get fully started, I want to address the question as to why Avdiivka was important for the Russians. I’ve answered this at least once before, but since the question has arisen again, I’m going to go over it again. Russia, right or wrong, believes that Avdiivka is a key location that they have to take in order to fully occupy Donetsk Oblast and the entire Donbas. Reuters has a really good summary of the Russian strategic logic:

Both sides regard Avdiivka as key to Russia’s aim of securing full control of the two eastern “Donbas” provinces – Donetsk and Luhansk. These are among the four Ukrainian regions Russia says it has annexed but does not have full control of.

Avdiivka is seen as a gateway to Donetsk city, whose residential areas Russian officials say have been shelled by Ukrainian forces, sometimes from Avdiivka.

Seizing it could boost Russian morale and demoralise Ukrainian forces, which have made only incremental gains in a broad counteroffensive since June. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy himself visited in December.

“If the Russian army takes control of the (supply) road, the Ukrainian armed forces will evidently be forced to withdraw from Avdeyevka. That will be a great victory for the Russian army,” Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin adviser, said on Feb. 5.

Mykola Bielieskov of the National Institute for Strategic Studies, an official think-tank in Kyiv, said taking Avdiivka would not decisively tip the situation in Moscow’s favour but “would make the situation more tenable for occupied Donetsk as a major Russian logistics hub”.

Bielieskov believes the battle is driven by a Kremlin desire to strengthen the hand of Western sceptics calling for a cut in support for Kyiv, citing the limited impact of billions of dollars in military aid.

I know that this makes no sense to some of you and I understand why. But regardless of whether it does or does not make sense to you, it apparently makes sense to Putin and people.

Russia targeted Ukrainian civilian targets, including more energy infrastructure, in another overnight bombardment. This time they went after the second largest natural gas storage in Europe.

Poland once again scrambled their fighters and put a combat air patrol up:

https://twitter.com/revishvilig/status/1774270455072878842

There were other air raid alerts throughout today. As I type this, at 7;00 PM EDT, other than the air raid alerts for Russian occupied Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea the airspace over Ukraine is clear. But, as the Ukrainians have learned the hard way, that can change with a moment’s notice.

Remember, Putin has several objectives with these bombardments. The first is to overwhelm Ukrainian air defense and force the Ukrainians to deplete their stocks of air defense munitions because the US has stopped resupplying Ukraine thanks to the dysfunction of the House majority GOP. The second is to capitalize on the stretched too thin Ukrainian air defense in order to stress and terrorize the Ukrainians to the point where morale collapses and socio-cultural cohesion and resilience crack and crumble. The third is to destroy as much of Ukraine’s energy generation and transmission infrastructure and capacity as possible. The fourth is to do the same to the Ukrainian agricultural sector.

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

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