Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

Fight them, without becoming them!

Good lord, these people are nuts.

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

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

If rights aren’t universal, they are privilege, not rights.

“They all knew.”

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Imperialist aggressors must be defeated, or the whole world loses.

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

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

“woke” is the new caravan.

The world has changed, and neither one recognizes it.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

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Saturday Morning Recap Open Thread: The Impeachment KKKlownshow, So Far

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: The Impeachment KKKlownshow, So Far

(Ann Telnaes via WashingtonPost.com)

The impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was already a disappointment before it started on Thursday. In prepared testimony, two of the three witnesses called by Republicans explicitly said there was not enough evidence to warrant removing President Joe Biden from office. This included Jonathan Turley, the law professor and Fox News contributor, who said, “I do not believe that the evidence currently meets the standard of a high crime and misdemeanor needed for an article of impeachment.”…

Republican Lauren Boebert asked Turley, “Where does selling access to an executive office fall in terms of what justifies an impeachment inquiry and what is deemed an impeachable offense?” and got an extended legal discussion, which included multiple references to the U.S. code. “I shouldn’t have asked Turley a question,” she told a staffer, disappointed, as she got up to leave the hearing room. “He was a crappy witness.”…

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer

The GOP Death Cultists found them a new celebrity advertiser…

Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer 1

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America’s Best Idea Meets America’s Worst Idea

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Here’s a good backgrounder on the National Park shutdown that will begin October 2, when I, like tens of thousands of others, have reservations in a National Park campground. In the last bullshit shutdown, Trump kept parks “open” and exposed parks them to overflowing trash, off-road vehicles running all over the place, vandalism and damage that is still being repaired. Biden is going to do the responsible thing and close the parks.

A couple of points on this:

First, depending on the park, many visitors are “tourons” who have no idea that National Parks aren’t Disneyland. These people have no idea that it’s really stupid idea to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon with your kids, all wearing Crocs. Or that bison aren’t fluffy cows that you can pet. (There are Instagram accounts dedicated to the exploits of tourons here and here.) Without ranger supervision these idiots will cause damage or be killed.

Second, National Park visits are way up since the start of the pandemic. Parks like Acadia, Rocky Mountain, Glacier and Arches (among others) have implemented timed entry permits for popular attractions and roads. Many parks rely on shuttle buses to deal with the massive influx of tourists. At Rocky Mountain, for example, the popular Bear Lake Corridor has special, more limited, timed entry and shuttle buses from remote parking lots. Those lots feature overwhelmed pit toilets and long queues to board the bus. Finally, almost every park has implemented reservation systems for campgrounds, and they’re mostly full. Those reservations are managed by park hosts and rangers. In other words, this ain’t your 2018-2019 National Parks. There’s no way these parks can open unstaffed in 2023.

Finally, Trump did not leave all parks and national monuments open, because I vividly remember trying to visit Capulin Volcano National Monument in New Mexico during the last shitdown, and the gates were locked. It was only the marquee properties, like Joshua Tree, that were left open for assholes to go wilding.

Unfortunately, this will be catastrophic to people who have long-standing plans to visit parks, and the both-sides media will not effectively or clearly tie the cost of thousands of cancelled trips (both to tourists and the towns near parks) to Republicans. It will be “Congress” or “Washington”. Local media will also do a poor job because lots of parks are in red states, or in red parts of purple states, and you well know that Freak Caucus reps like Boebert, Gosar and Hageman will be spinning like crazy to blame the mayhem on anyone but them.

These assholes just want to burn everything down and then shove the matches in Democrats’ pockets. Since only Democrats can have agency, and since being bi-partisan is only expected if you’re a Democrat, the obvious and simple solution of a CR without poison pills — a bill that almost 400 House members would vote for — is not being discussed in the press. That said, I’m not cancelling my reservations yet, because MyKevin might just decide to call the bluff of Gaetz et. al. and schedule a vote on a bi-partisan CR just before midnight on Sunday. I wish a motherfucker would, but it’s hard to predict the actions of the craven when faced with the crazy.

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War for Ukraine Day 583: Zchor Babin Yar!

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Picture of the ravine at Babin Yar, Ukraine

(Babin Yar Ravine, Image found here)

Quick housekeeping note: this weekend’s updates will be briefer than usual. I have a bunch of stuff I’m on the hook for. So if I miss anything, put into the comments.

Today is the 82nd anniversary of the massacre at Babin Yar.

It has been 82 years since Nazi occupiers committed their most heinous crime on the territory of Ukraine.
Babyn Yar is one of a number of Holocaust memorial sites in Ukraine. During the Nazi occupation, more than 100,000 Jews, Roma, and Ukrainians were murdered here. Every Ukrainian is reminded each day of this deep wound in the heart of the Ukrainian capital. Never again!

📹 @United24media

Since the history hasn’t changed, here’s what I wrote last year regarding Babin Yar:

As the NAZIs moved on Kyiv in 1941, approximately 100,000 of the city’s 160,000 Jewish citizens were able to flee. On the 26th of September 1941 Sonderkomando 4A commanded by SS-Standartenfuhrer Paul Blobel, were given the implementation order to execute the 60,000 Jews remaining in Kyiv. The precipitating incident was a series of attacks on the Kyivan buildings the NAZIs were using as headquarters. The buildings were actually sabotaged by Soviet NKVD officers who had been left behind in Kyiv to specifically attack the NAZIs and disrupt their operations. Those details were not learned until after WW II ended.

The roundup on the 28th was done as a misdirection; the Jews were told they were going to be relocated to two new developments. This was a lie. On the morning of 29 September, the remaining Jews of Kyiv were marched down the Jewish cemetery in Kyiv and to the Babin Yar ravine. They were ordered to undress, turn over any valuables they had with them, and move the edge of the ravine in groups of ten where the NAZIs executed them using the ravine as a mass grave. Two years later in September 1943 Blobel was ordered back to Kyiv. At the same time orders were given for the disinterment of the mass grave so the Jewish corpses could be cremated. 327 prisoners from the Syretsk concentration camp were brought in as slave labor to destroy the evidence of the NAZI’s crimes against humanity at Babin Yar. 100 of them were Jewish. On the morning of 29 September 1943, two years to the day after the massacre, they learned that the NAZIs planned to execute them as well now that they’d finished the forced labor of covering up the NAZIs crimes. The 327 workers already had an escape plan and they immediately revolted against their captors and put it into effect making a break for the forest. Only fifteen survived. The rest were either shot and killed during the initial break for the tree line or were rounded up and executed by the next morning.

Babin Yar, often with the Russian pronunciation of Babi Yar, became a rallying cry for Jews after World War II and the Holocaust. Zchor Babi Yar, remember Babin Yar, was still being used as the name for a B’nai B’rith Youth Organization (BBYO) chapter when I was a member in the 1980s. In fact I’m pretty sure I have a jersey from that chapter with their name on it in a box of stuff somewhere.

Today, on the anniversary of the NAZIs genocidal acts in Babin Yar, outside of Kyiv, as well as the heroic resistance against those actions two years later, we have 366 days worth of new evidence of Russia’s genocidal acts towards Ukrainians. A fraction of which we document here night after night.

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

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Friday Evening Bad Faith Open Thread: RFK Jr. And His Fellow Ratf*ckers

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I drafted the post below last night, planning to run it over the weekend when people had more time to read. RFK Jr isn’t offering West a vice-presidential slot (from what I’ve seen, that’s Tulsi Gabbard’s role in the spoiler-thon). And West almost certainly wouldn’t run in a VP slot, because he’s already got the Green Party’s funding locked in. But we can count on every political grifter not currently incarcerated to make a jump for the gravy train over the next 13 months…

TL, DR: Peter Daou has always been a ‘strong believer‘ in whatever political campaign would pay him enough, but his unsavory habits — like ‘independently’ praising Bernie Sanders while he was negotiating for a job as Sanders’ press agent back in 2016 — have made it impossible for him to get a job with any self-respecting Democratic candidate. Since there’s already a ton of well-connected competitors on the Republican side of the aisle, Dauo is now (IMO) transitioning by serving for Green Party candidate / spoiler Cornel West (after jumping ship from the sinking SS Marianne Williamson). “Peter Daou’s Theory of Election Interference—by Democrats”:

Peter Daou, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, recently announced that he had become the campaign manager for Cornel West, the radical socialist professor and public intellectual, who is seeking the Presidential nomination from the Green Party. It was the culmination of a fascinating arc for Daou, who was a legendary figure in the early liberal blogosphere, where he became known for his criticisms of the Bush Administration before joining John Kerry’s 2004 Presidential campaign. Four years later, he ran Clinton’s digital operation, and became known as one of her most high-profile and vocal online supporters. Then, in 2016, for Clinton’s second Presidential run, Daou ran the platform Shareblue, a partisan news site that attacked mainstream coverage of the race and fanatically defended Clinton. By 2020, he had endorsed Bernie Sanders; he subsequently left the Democratic Party. (Before joining West’s campaign, he briefly ran Marianne Williamson’s.) Daou now says his career as a fanatical Democratic partisan was misguided, and that the entire political system needs to be uprooted; he believes West’s campaign is the best vehicle for such a change…

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Oligarchs, Insurrectionists, Authoritarians, and Wanna Be Dictators

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So many things happening on so many fronts!

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In indictment news:

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Open thread.

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