Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

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

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

The words do not have to be perfect.

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

How stupid are these people?

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

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

You cannot love your country only when you win.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

Keep the Immigrants and deport the fascists!

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

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

Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

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Election Results Watch – All Eyes on VA & OH (and PA and KY and MS and more)

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Today is the big day we have been waiting for with high hopes and at least some trepidation.  There is a lot at stake in these elections today!

Balloon Juice raised $25,000 for our two candidates in Hampton Roads: Kimberly Pope Adams (HD-82) and Michael Feggans (HD-97).  Both races were rated as tossups, but Pope Adams just moved to Tilt-R and Michael Feggans has moved to Tilt-D.

They are both young, progressive, and African American, and are trying to take the seats back from the Rs who won them in 2021.  We gave it our best shot, now all we can do is wait.

Chaz Nuttycombe has updated ratings and is forecasting Dems getting the narrowest of majorities in the House of Delegates, and losing a state senate seat, but holding the majority in the State Senate.

BlueGuitarist reminded us that most of the Democrats in 2022 Tilt R districts won; so there is still reason to be hopeful.

What’s at stake?

VA – control of the VA House, control of the VA Senate, hopefully stopping Youngkin’s agenda in its tracks

OH – Issue 1 and the right to self-determination for women

Election Results Watch – All Eyes on VA & OH (and PA and KY and MS and more) 4

OH – Legalize Marijuana

Election Results Watch – All Eyes on VA & OH (and PA and KY and MS and more) 6

PA – Supreme Court seat

This is a good election night

KY – Governor Andy Beshear, the best thing KY has going for it, hopefully keeping his seat

Election Results Watch – All Eyes on VA & OH (and PA and KY and MS and more) 3

RI – open US House seat (democratic seat previously held by David Cicilline’s seat)

Gabe Amo has won the #RI01 special election!

MS – Governor of Mississippi, Elvis Presley’s cousin just might have a shot against the awful incumbent

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Serpentine (Open Thread)

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Back in August, coup plotter John Eastman did an interview with a Claremont Institute hack in which Eastman basically admitted that he tried to overthrow the government in 2021 because voters bounced Trump and right-wingers didn’t like that:

“There’s actually a provision in the Declaration of Independence that a people will suffer abuses while they remain sufferable, tolerable while they remain tolerable,” he said. “At some point abuses become so intolerable that it becomes not only their right but their duty to alter or abolish the existing government.”

Among the intolerable abuses Eastman cites as justification for attempting to overthrow the government are the existence of drag queen story hours and alleged OSHA regulations pertaining to chairs in home offices. I am not a lawyer, but I remember thinking it was pretty dumb for a person who was then under investigation for an attempted coup to assert a “right” to overthrow the government on camera.

Now, Eastman is under criminal indictment for trying to overthrow the government, but he’s made the decision to confess on camera some more, this time during a “60 Minutes” interview. He starts off by saying his legal team’s first piece of advice was to shut the fuck up but then makes more damning admissions.

Here’s the entire clip. The relevant bit starts around the 9:00 minute mark and comes in response to a question from Scott Pelley about why no swing state officials (including multiple Republicans) were buying the Trump team’s bullshit fraud claims.

“I think we are quickly turning into a country where, uh, there’s the ‘pro-government party’ or the ‘uni-party’ as one [Steve Bannon] might euphemistically call it, uh, and folks that are concerned about the direction our country is going — the MAGA movement, the tea party movement before that, if you will. And the folks in those government offices tend to be on the one side of that dispute rather than the other.”

To clarify, the “side” Eastman is putting his opponents on is democracy, and in tandem with his earlier assertion in the Claremont interview, Eastman is claiming that MAGA/tea party cranks have “not only their right but their duty” to abolish the government if they don’t like the way the election works out.

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Wee Hours Open Thread

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Rather than counting sheep so everyone who wants to can fall asleep, I’ll start you off with a question, which you can absolutely ignore and instead talk about whatever you please.

How do you sort your physical books and/or music?

And a bonus late-night Henry in case looking at him makes you yawn and feel sleepy enough to go back to sleep.  Just seeing the photo as I added it made me yawn!

Hodge Podge Post #2

Totally open thread.

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War for Ukraine Day 621: Fog of War Inside a Residence

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Before we get underway, I want to put this reply comment of mine from last night up here at the top of tonight’s update in regard to where things stand for Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s genocidal re-invasion:

As I’ve written several times: This is going to be slow going. It will often look or seem frozen until it isn’t. The Ukrainians are not going to stop. And we have been far too slow to give them what they need and then we second guess them doing as well as they are despite us tying one of their arms behind their back.

General Zaluzhnyi’s aide de camp, Major Hennadiy Chastyakov, has been killed by a grenade that went off in his home. Because of the fog of war/imprecision of reporting of fast moving events in a state that is at war, this has been reported as everything from an assassination to under investigation to what it actually was: a stupid user error. Major Chastyakov took a box of grenades, took a grenade out of the box, and was showing it to his son when the grenade went off.

Here’s a machine translation of Interior Minister Klymenko’s thread:

Ihor Klymenko:

The tragedy in Chayki is beginning to be overgrown with various information from “sources”. Therefore, I officially announce:

As a result of primary investigative actions, it was possible to find out the first circumstances of the tragedy. Today was the birthday of the deceased major Chastyakov.

He returned home from work with gifts from his colleagues
began to show relatives.

He took out a gift box with grenades inside and started showing one of the ammunition to his son. These were grenades of the new Western model.

First, the son took the ammunition and started turning the ring. Then the serviceman took the grenade from the child and pulled out the ring, provoking a tragic explosion.

The police found 5 more such unexploded grenades in the apartment. They will be sent for examination.

The police found a fellow soldier who gave a fatal gift. His office was already searched and 2 similar grenades were seized. Primary investigative actions are ongoing.

I urge you not to spread unofficial information.

The pre-trial investigation is ongoing, wait for the official conclusions of the investigation

This was a unfortunate, but preventable accident. If you see anyone claiming this was an assassination, which is misinformation, bonk them. Then bonk them again.

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

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Monday Evening Open Thread: A Curse on Time-Shifting

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Monday Evening Open Thread: A Curse on Time-Shifting

(Arlo & Janis via GoComics.com)

 

Tom Nichols, at the Atlantic, wants to “Overthrow the Tyranny of Morning People”:

I’m a night person, and I say: The rest of the world needs to sleep later…

This is the time of year when opponents of changing the clocks go on about why it’s unhealthy to fall out of sync with the sun, about why a practice first instituted more than a century ago is outdated, about how much human productivity is lost while we all run around changing the hands and digits on timepieces. Those are all great arguments, and I agree with them, but that’s not really why I hate letting go of daylight saving time.

I hate it because, as a general rule, I cannot stand Morning People. I do not like to cede even one minute to those chipper and virtuous larks, the co-workers who send you emails marked “5:01 a.m.” and who schedule “breakfast meetings” at dawn so we can all do some work before we get on with … doing more work. They are my natural enemy, and I refuse to entertain their caterwauling about waking up in the dark…

… Americans still venerate the idea that mornings are super productive, and every year, we’re all forced to give back an hour of sunlight in the afternoon so that our overmotivated friends and colleagues don’t have to endure their first latte in the predawn gloom. Instead, the rest of us have to feel the darkness enveloping us in the late afternoon, when we’re trying to get stuff done at work while the morning people nod off behind their desks.

Yes, I know: Kids will have to get up in the dark for school. Here’s one answer: Instead of setting the clocks back, maybe we should stop sending kids to school so ridiculously early, especially teenagers, who have a harder time learning in the early morning. Doctors and educators have been suggesting this for years, but we don’t listen, because we remain convinced that industrious people get up early in the morning and lazy people sleep in…

So, enough. Leave the clocks alone; better yet, comrades, let us smash the oppressive culture of our lark overlords and reclaim the day.

Or let’s at least just get the time-changers and the early risers to stop bugging us in the morning.

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Petrifying Poll (Open Thread)

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The recent NYT-Siena poll showing Trump leading Biden in all the swing states minus Wisconsin tightened sphincters all across the Democratic cinematic universe. Some folks went full Chicken Little. Others theorized the poll was rigged by Big Journo so they can craft narratives that serve their plutocratic masters. Others shrugged it off (full disclosure: I’m an aspiring shrugger-offer).

News orgs are making much of the finding that reinforces a favorite prior, i.e., 71% of respondents think Biden is “too old,” including a majority of his supporters. Another popular angle is the finding that a “generic Democrat” beats Trump, which is reviving talk about the soundness of the ticket in some quarters.

I think Josh Marshall’s take in this essay at TPM (gift link) is correct. Here’s an excerpt:

The first thing to remember is that there is no generic Democrat. There are specific people with their own drawbacks, their own lack of experience in a national campaign. It’s hard to find out how they play on the big stage. How they poll today isn’t really the issue. It’s what they’d look like next October after being bruised up in a national campaign. Set aside all the shock and turbulence of a de facto presidential resignation and an out-of-the-blue primary cycle contest. I’m not sure any of the current 5 or 6 possible contenders would do better than Biden is now. One or more could do better. But I’m not confident of it. That informs how I engage in the hypothetical of whether it would be preferable for Biden not to run, setting aside the extreme unlikelihood of that happening.

The second point is that the entire news environment today is one focused on Joe Biden – his record with the economy, jobs, inflation, with Ukraine, with Israel and Gaza. Clearly the Democratic coalition and the country generally looks at him and finds him wanting. Part of that is clearly his age or at least generalized misgivings which are collected together in a feeling that he’s too old. But that’s not what a general election campaign news environment looks like. It’s focused on a binary choice – two possible presidents (even if there are more than two voting options) both of whom we know a fair amount about. I think it is highly likely that that news environment will be a significant help to Joe Biden.

In a binary choice, quite a lot of these straying Democrats won’t want to vote for Donald Trump or not vote at all. But that’s not the end of the conversation either. What is absolutely true is that the Israel-Hamas war is wreaking havoc on the Democratic electoral coalition. It’s not only between Jews and Arabs and Muslims in the US. It’s also between the old and the young. Whether that persists or fades in the intensity of a presidential campaign is something I wish I knew.

That last point touches on this truth: We have no idea what the situation will be a year from now — and precious little role in shaping it. The stakes are incredibly high, so it’s understandable if people panic or comfort themselves with pet truisms or insist that polls are utterly meaningless.

But as Marshall notes, fear affects decision-making, and often in a negative way. Exhibit A is Rep. Dean Phillips, who has absolutely no chance of becoming the Democratic nominee. If you take Phillips at his word that he decided to mount a primary challenge out of fear that Biden will lose to Trump, his is an example of panic-driven decision-making.

Even if you allow that his fear is well founded, how does Phillips’ candidacy help? It doesn’t. If anything, it does the opposite.

I guess the moral of the story is this: Keep calm, and carry the fuck on. I can’t think of another realistic choice. Maybe you can.

Open thread.

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Fool for a Client (Open Thread)

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According to the WaPo live update feed, Trump’s testimony in the New York civil fraud trial is not going well!

Shortly into his courtroom testimony Monday morning, Donald Trump received his first set of warnings from a judge instructing him to answer questions directly and avoid meandering comments.

“Mr. Trump, [Attorney General Letitia James] is being very patient. I would like to move things along a little faster. Please just answer the questions, no speeches,” New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron said.

New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron pointedly urged Donald Trump’s lawyer to control his client, repeatedly asking the former president to stay on topic and avoid making long-winded political statements during his testimony.

Engoron instructed Trump’s lawyer, Chris Kise, to “have a talk” with Trump to make him comply with courtroom rules.

“Mr. Kise can you control your client?” Engoron said. “This is not a political rally. This is a courtroom.”

Here’s a gift link to the WaPo live feed if you’d like to follow along. Open thread!

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