Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

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

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Cancel the cowardly Times and Post and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

T R E 4 5 O N

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

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

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

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

This really is a full service blog.

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

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Consistently wrong since 2002

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

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

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: The GOP’s Hunter Sideshow

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: The GOP's Hunter Sideshow

(John Deering via GoComics.com)

Best summary I’ve seen so far of the GOP’s latest media-seeking circle-jerk: Philip Bump, for the Washington Post — “Weighing action against Hunter Biden, GOP resorts to falsehoods ” [unpaywalled]:

… Hunter Biden was subpoenaed for a deposition but through his attorney said he would appear before Oversight in an open hearing instead. (His attorney, in a letter to Comer, pointed to the chairman’s statement during a podcast that he would welcome either public or private testimony.) The date of the deposition came and went, and Republicans moved forward with approving a contempt-of-Congress referral.

What Hunter Biden no doubt knows is that a closed-door deposition allows Comer and other Republicans to cherry-pick claims much more easily — if they release the transcript of the deposition at all. (Most of the depositions that have taken place, Oversight Democrats note, have not been made public.)

During the meeting, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.) was pointed on this subject.

“Let me tell you why no one wants to talk to y’all behind closed doors,” she said to her Republican colleagues. “Because y’all lie.”

This is demonstrably true, including when considering the Archer testimony itself. It is fair to question the legitimacy of Hunter Biden’s failure to participate in the subpoenaed deposition, certainly, but it is indisputably justifiable for him to be wary of doing so.

When it was his turn to speak, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Tex.) raised a related, valid point: If Republicans were so desperate to hear from Hunter Biden, why didn’t they just go ahead and hold the open hearing anyway? The younger Biden had unexpectedly appeared in the hearing room, allowing Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) to ask for a show of hands from the committee members about their willingness to swear Hunter Biden in for questions right then and there. None took him up on the offer…

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I Like What I’m Seeing

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I really wanted to title this post Balls to the Wall, but I was able to to exhibit at least a modicum of self control.

Whether it’s our awesome members in the House, or President Biden, or a bunch of young women in MN, I like what I’m seeing.

I’ve been working all day, so apologies if you have already seen all of these already.

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Totally open thread.

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War for Ukraine Day 686: Kharkiv Comes Under Fire, Again!

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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)

Russia opened up on civilian targets in Kharkiv again:

More on this after the jump.

President Zelenskyy addressed the both the Ukrainian and Lithuanian people today during his visit to Vilnius. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: … ‘Comedy’ Tonight!

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Last Big! Serious! Head-to-Head! GOP debate before next week’s starter gun at the Iowa caucus, and all journos want to talk about is Chris Christie officially dropping his campaign. (And, apparently, getting ‘caught on a hot mic‘ slagging Haley on his way out.)

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Long Belated Tribute: Nothing Compares 2 Sinéad O’Connor

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Per Rolling Stone:

Sinéad O’Connor died from natural causes, a coroner in London has determined.

A statement said that the coroner has “ceased their involvement” in O’Connor’s death and no other comments would be made.

O’Connor died on July 26 at age 56. The singer’s family confirmed her death in a statement but did not share a cause of death. “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Sinéad,” her family said. “Her family and friends are devastated and have requested privacy at this very difficult time.”…

Following her death, tributes to O’Connor poured in from admirers like Phoebe Bridgers, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tegan and Sara, Tori Amos, and others. Tegan and Sara recalled seeing O’Connor live right before the Covid-19 lockdown began, saying, “Can’t express what an absolutely massive impact Sinéad O’Connor had on us from childhood through adulthood. Her voice, her brain, her bravery.” …

More details will come out, eventually, but let me put this into the record: Irish women are medically notorious for a stoic resistance to seeking medical assistance — we historically tend to treat anything short of gushing blood or passing out in public as ‘it’ll heal, given time.‘ People who have been physically abused, especially as children, also learn to avoid acknowledging pain or distress. Given these factors, it is not at all implausible that O’Connor died of (possibly untreated) heart failure or another one of the medical conditions all too familiar to those of us past our youth — no matter how much more exciting the popcult narratives.

and pursued the woman. Thirty metres down the road the friend and the woman embraced and he waived me over. There under streetlights with mist on my breath, I met Sinéad. She looked in my eyes, and uttered with disarming softness “ oh, it’s you Russell”.

She came with us back to the table and sat in the cold and ordered a hot tea. In a conversation without fences we roamed through the recent Dublin heatwave, local politics, American politics, the ongoing fight

for indigenous recognition in many places, but particularly in Australia, her warm memory of New Zealand, faith, music, movies and her brother the writer. I had the opportunity to tell her she was a hero of mine.

When her second cup was taking on the night air, she rose, embraced us all and strode away into the fog-dimmed streetlights.
We sat there the four of us and variously expressed the same thing. What an amazing woman.

Peace be with your courageous heart Sinéad.

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“The Fallen and the Damned”

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I’ve been reading Slate law and politics writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern for years now. They’ve chronicled the conservative-led hollowing out of the U.S. Supreme Court about as well as anyone could, in my opinion. They write about the court’s decline with a horrified detachment that is reminiscent of a steely safari guide describing a pack of braying hyenas taking down a wounded elephant.

But in their latest piece, the veteran Slate editors achieve a level of cold fury I can’t recall seeing before in their work. The article addresses the contemptuous disregard red state officials and judges are now displaying toward pregnant women:

Any woman who seeks to terminate a pregnancy is wicked, any woman who miscarries is evil, and any woman who—for reasons of failing health, circumstance, or simple bad luck—does not prove to be an adequate incubator deserves whatever she gets. Every unborn fetus is the priority over the pregnant person carrying it and must be carried to term at all costs. So goes the moral calculus of the death-panel judges who now determine how to weigh the competing interests between real, existing human life and a state’s dogmatic fixation with a fetus that, by definition, must be seraphically innocent.

One need only look at red states’ scramble to defend their draconian abortion bans to witness this perverse moral hierarchy in action. In the wake of Roe v. Wade’s demise, the victims of these laws are no longer hypothetical: They are flesh-and-blood women, directly and viscerally injured by the denial of basic health care, and some of them have even had the gall to fight for their rights. Republican attorneys general have responded with furious indignation, openly demeaning these women as liars, wimps, partisans, and baby killers.

If that sounds hyperbolic, read the whole thing, and you’ll find Lithwick and Stern’s fury is fully justified. They cite the hideous legal harassment of an Ohio woman who miscarried as well as corrupt Texas AG Ken Paxton and the state’s supreme court’s papal decree that blocks local emergency care access.

They point to Idaho AG Raúl Labrador’s grotesque insistence that “women forced to carry dangerous, nonviable pregnancies merely ‘disagree with the legitimate policy choices made by the Idaho legislature.’” Lithwick and Stern also call attention to a particularly egregious filing by Tennessee’s Republican AG:

(AG Jonathan T.) Skrmetti has been fighting a lawsuit filed by a group of Tennessee women denied emergency abortions under the ultranarrow medical exception to that state’s ban. The women plaintiffs suffered an appalling range of trauma, including sepsis and hemorrhaging, because they could not terminate their pregnancies. The attorney general’s response to their complaint is a scathing, shockingly personal broadside against the victims of the ban. He accused them of attempting to draw “lines about which unborn lives are worth protecting” by imposing a medical exception “of their own liking.” He mocked them for asserting that ostensibly minor conditions like “sickle cell disease” might justify an abortion. And he insisted that the lead plaintiff, Nicole Blackmon, lacks standing, because she underwent sterilization after the state forced her to carry a nonviable pregnancy and deliver a stillborn baby. The attorney general viciously suggested that, if Blackmon really wanted to fight Tennessee’s ban, she could have tried for another doomed pregnancy.

Perhaps Skrmetti deserves half credit for candor, because he did not even pretend to treat these plaintiffs like compelling moral human beings. Instead, he wrote that Tennessee may allow different standards of care for pregnant and nonpregnant women. A pregnant woman, the attorney general averred, may be refused a treatment if it “has the potential to harm unborn lives—an issue not implicated” when treating nonpregnant women. “No equal-protection rule,” he concluded, “bars lawmakers from acting on that difference to protect unborn babies.” In other words, once a woman is pregnant, she becomes a vessel for “unborn babies,” giving the state authority to cut off her access to urgently necessary health care.

Jesus. Under Tennessee’s outlier system, Skrmetti was appointed to an eight-year term as a “nonpartisan” AG by the state’s supreme court in 2022, so he’ll be crapping on Tennesseans’ rights for the better part of the next decade. Skrmetti is another Harvard Law grad, by the way. The wrap-up from Lithwick and Stern:

The mother will never be able to show that she wanted the pregnancy enough, took good enough care, made every correct predictive decision. And as such, the state will happily dismiss her interests as not only irrelevant, but self-serving, greedy, and dishonest. That it’s being said aloud in courtrooms, in pleadings, and in affidavits should not surprise anyone.

The pregnant woman has always been the fallen and the damned. Now, according to red states, it’s acceptable—necessary, even—to ensure that she knows this, from the very moment of conception until the moment she loses the power to make any choices about how she gives birth. Even if she dies, she was forever that which stood in the way of flawless, purest life.

I wish Lithwick and Stern were wrong, but it’s there in the documents, in black and white. We know about the cases they cite because those matters wound up in court, but how many women will die without challenging substandard care in the legal system? That number may be unknowable. But this we know: No matter how high the toll in women’s lives and health, it’s acceptable to red state Republican officials.

Open thread.

“The Fallen and the Damned”Post + Comments (113)