Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Republicans: “Abortion is murder but you can take a bus to get one.” Easy peasy.

Books are my comfort food!

75% of people clapping liked the show!

One way or another, he’s a liar.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

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

Good lord, these people are nuts.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

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

Too little, too late, ftfnyt. fuck all the way off.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

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Crimes against humanity

Being Trans? Not A Crime.

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And speaking of “nothing better to do than demonize and torment innocents in the name of power”:

As a non-legal reader, I should not say much on the petition itself. I do recommend reading it, length and all — that said, the crux of the issue is, per that document:

[…]on the afternoon of February 24, 2022, Plaintiff Jane Doe was informed that her family would be investigated in accordance with Governor Abbott’s letter to determine if Jane Doe and John Doe had committed abuse by affirming their transgender daughter’s identity and obtaining the medically necessary health care that she needs.

On February 25, 2022, a DFPS Child Protective Services (CPS) investigator visited the Doe family’s home to interview Jane Doe, John Doe, and Mary Doe.[…]the CPS investigator sought access through releases to Mary Doe’s medical records, which the Doe Plaintiffs refused to sign.

The CPS investigator disclosed that the sole allegation against Jane Doe and John Doe is that they have a transgender daughter and that their daughter may have been provided with medically necessary gender-affirming health care and is “currently transitioning from male to female.”

The issuance of the Paxton Opinion and the Abbott Letter, along with DFPS’s implementation of these, has terrorized the Doe family and inflicted ongoing and irreparable harm.

As a result of DFPS’s implementation and the subsequent investigation of the Doe family, Jane Doe has been placed on leave from her employment.

[Edits and emphasis mine — MisterDancer]

I will also note this line:

Mary Doe is transgender. When she was born, she was designated as “male” on her birth certificate, but she is a girl.

And that’s all that should matter.

Additional reading, especially if you lack time for the petition proper:

Being Trans? Not A Crime.Post + Comments (65)

Open Thread: January 6th Remembrance Continued

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I thought we could use a fresh open thread. I embedded the complete remarks from Vice President Harris and President Biden above for those who may have missed it. I woke up to this, but because of the early hour, I couldn’t listen live, as the animals all needed attention first. One does not delay getting the puppy outside first thing in the morning and it was 1 degree F this a.m. so the ducks needed some TLC. I watched with my first cup of coffee and it was sweet!

How many times could President Biden call TFFG a looooser without actually saying his name? Let me count the times! Let’s Go Biden, indeed.

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Open Thread: A Weird (and Sad) Juxtaposition

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Someone worked their magic on Wikipedia:

Auto Draft 10

Link if you can’t see the photo well here

At about the same time the GOP was flushing their party and the Constitution down the toilet, Great Britain was working to put a strike-through on the Great part.

https://twitter.com/AliVelshi/status/1223381541159690256?s=20

 

 

Weird, sad day. We must do everything in our power to make them pay in November.

Open thread

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And A Lagniappe…

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The AP is reporting another US drone strike in Iraq:

Another airstrike almost exactly 24 hours after the one that killed Soleimani hit two cars carrying Iran-backed militia north of Baghdad, killing five people, an Iraqi official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. The Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces confirmed the strike, saying it targeted one of its medical convoys near the stadium in Taji, north of Baghdad. The group denied any of its top leaders were killed.

I hope that every American in Iraq is taking really good care of their personal security; they are all targets now.

And I really hope against hope that the millions of Iraqis and Iranians in the crossfire don’t get further grief added to the tally of misery they’ve experienced for decades now.

And A Lagniappe...

And finally, I’ll note that war when pursued by sober and prudent leaders, who define their goals, identify strategy and tactics that can plausibly lead to those ends, and enact an ongoing process that can deal with what happens when any plan makes contact with the opposition is still a wasteful, tragic, destructive and always contingent and hugely risky proposition.

And then there is the GOP, and the whole feckless troupe of Trumpanzees.

Fuck.

Here’s a John Prine song that seems way too on point today:

 

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, between 1611 and 1612

And A Lagniappe…Post + Comments (69)

He’ll Kill Again

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Long story in the NY Times about the SEALS who testified against Eddie Gallagher:

The Navy SEALs showed up one by one, wearing hoodies and T-shirts instead of uniforms, to tell investigators what they had seen. Visibly nervous, they shifted in their chairs, rubbed their palms and pressed their fists against their foreheads. At times they stopped in midsentence and broke into tears.

“Sorry about this,” Special Operator First Class Craig Miller, one of the most experienced SEALs in the group, said as he looked sideways toward a blank wall, trying to hide that he was weeping. “It’s the first time — I’m really broken up about this.”

Video recordings of the interviews obtained by The New York Times, which have not been shown publicly before, were part of a trove of Navy investigative materials about the prosecution of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher on war crimes charges including murder.

They offer the first opportunity outside the courtroom to hear directly from the men of Alpha platoon, SEAL Team 7, whose blistering testimony about their platoon chief was dismissed by President Trump when he upended the military code of justice to protect Chief Gallagher from the punishment.

“The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly O.K. with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

Gallagher, of course, claims that he is innocent, and that he is being framed and that he had the odd luck to be attached to the ***ONLY*** SEAL team in history to be composed of a bunch of wimps. I wish I was kidding:

“My first reaction to seeing the videos was surprise and disgust that they would make up blatant lies about me, but I quickly realized that they were scared that the truth would come out of how cowardly they acted on deployment,” Chief Gallagher said in a statement issued through his lawyer.

“I felt sorry for them that they thought it necessary to smear my name, but they never realized what the consequences of their lies would be. As upset as I was, the videos also gave me confidence because I knew that their lies would never hold up under real questioning and the jury would see through it. Their lies and N.C.I.S.’s refusal to ask hard questions or corroborate their stories strengthened my resolve to go to trial and clear my name.”

MMhhmm.

Two things. First, it is not in the least bit surprising that Trump has chosen to rush to this guy’s defense, because Trump’s view of the world and the military is so perverse that he really does think the military is composed of nothing more than butchers and murderers. Additionally, Trump loves to be surrounded by loudmouth bully boys like Gallagher, Lewandowski, his bigmouth longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller, and who can forget how tough Michael Cohen once acted. He, himself, is such a wimp that he compensates by surrounding himself with what he fancies to be tough guys.

Second, if what all these SEALS are saying about Gallagher is true, and I find no reason to disbelieve them, then this is not the last we have heard of Gallagher. He will kill again. It may be his wife, it may be a neighbor, it may be someone who cut him off in traffic, or it may be some person of color who looked at him funny or had the temerity to wear a head scarf in his general vicinity.

Like all loaded guns that are bandied about carelessly, he will go off again. It’s only a matter of when and who the unfortunate victim will be.

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“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”…Modern Republican Update

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The GOP today, and Trump himself, make a lot of noise about how much they love Israel.  What they really value, of course, is the racist and corrupt current Israeli government–and, some of them, the apocalyptic vision of Israel’s Jews massacred in a final confrontation on the plains of Megiddo, which would thus usher in the arrival of their god: Rambo Jeebus.

Trump is mystified — sincerely, I believe* — that his performative slobbering over Bibi hasn’t translated into support from American Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom interpret  the obligation to “Tikkun Olam” (heal the world) rather differently than does our presidential cager of children and patron of war criminals.

Over the weekend, Trump has explored this mystery, and has reminded us what Jews really are to him. Via Vanity Fair, here’s the shitgibbon speaking to the Israeli American Council in Hollywood, Florida:

He started off by once again invoking the age-old cliché about “dual loyalty,” saying there are Jews who “don’t love Israel enough. After that warm-up he dove right into the stereotype about Jews and money, telling the group: “A lot of you are in the real estate business, because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers, not nice people at all,” he said.

"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"...Crayon Edition

“But you have to vote for me—you have no choice. You’re not gonna vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not gonna vote for the wealth tax. Yeah, let’s take 100% of your wealth away!” (It feels beside the point that neither Elizabeth Warren nor any other Democratic candidate has proposed a 100% wealth tax.) He continued: “Some of you don’t like me. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’re going to be out of business in about 15 minutes if they get it. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time on that.”

That’s us.  Jews aren’t really Americans, or not American enough — we’ve got Israel to take care of.  And Cash Rules Everything Around Us. (Not the best acronym, I know.)

You know, the old, familiar hate: the international conspiracy of world Jews, driven only by money, “not nice people at all.”

The Republican Party in any of its forms has not, as I write this, said anything about the shitgibbon’s remarks.

Silence = acquiescence.

That is: GOP is, until clearly demonstrated otherwise, home to and comfortable with exactly the same kind of anti-Semitism that underpinned persecution from pogroms to the Holocaust.  This kind of bigotry doesn’t have to end there, of course, but to avoid an escalation of the same hate that barely a year ago “inspired” the killer in the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, those closest to the President have to respond forcefully.  They haven’t and on the evidence they won’t.

The Republican Party has been playing on white fears of black and brown humanity for a long time, and it has long been a shock to the conscience how readily so many in power have been to do so instrumentally, not because they “in their hearts” hate black people or whoever, but because it works.

Well, it has, too well — and now the next phase is unfolding: when you unleash hate, sooner or later, it always finds the Jews.

And every other vulnerable minority.  We really are in this together, and 2020 truly is an existential election.

Other than that, how was your day, all you Mrs. Lincolns?

*I think that Trump is genuinely mystified by a lack of Jewish support.  He’d do business with someone he loathes if it made him a couple of bucks. Wouldn’t everyone?

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Rabbi, 1635

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DisOrder & UnDiscipline: An Out of Control E7, an Out of Control Fox & Friends Weekend Loud Mouth, and an Out of Order Chain of Command

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The Secretary of the Navy, Richard Spencer, has accepted being terminated (no one told me you could ignore that sort of thing, but what do I know…). His resignation letter is below.

At this point it is unclear what actually has transpired with Secretary Spencer’s termination. The initial reporting was that he’d made an end run around Secretary of Defense Esper, which led Secretary Esper to ask the President to fire him. In this recounting of events, Secretary Spencer is accused of going to the President and ensuring him that if the President let the Naval Special Warfare review board convened by Rear Admiral (RADM) Green, commanding admiral of Naval Special Warfare, play out, then Secretary Spencer would ensure that Eddie Gallagher would retire shortly at the rank of E7, as a member of the SEAL community/with his trident, and with his full benefits.

All of this occurred after several days of reporting that Secretary Spencer and RADM Green had made it clear that if the review process regarding Gallagher remaining a SEAL, as well as three officers in his chain of command at the time of the crimes he’s alleged to have committed, was not allowed to play out, then they’d both resign. This was quickly followed by Secretary Spencer stating he’d never made this ultimatum. So if you’re confused, that isn’t surprising. Until the all too predictable leaks occur over the next several days to fill out the narrative, we won’t really know how this all went down.

We do, however, know that a major problem here is that the President is, as usual, not listening to the people he actually hires and/or promotes into the positions to advise him on issues and manage those issues for him. This leaves the President susceptible to influence by those with their own agendas. In this case Gallagher himself, as well as weekend Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth hosted Gallagher this morning on the Sunday weekend edition of A Blonde with Two Boobs on a Sofa, D/B/A Fox & Friends Weekend. Hegseth honorably served in the US Army National Guard for 11 years, served in Iraq and Afghanistan, earned the rank of major (O4), and has basically been influencing the President’s views on the US military and the VA from both his weekend perch at Fox, in private meetings, and on calls with the President on the President’s unsecured cell phone (Estonia, if you’re listening, and we know you are…) since the President began his campaign. During his appearance with Hegseth this morning, Gallagher publicly went after his chain of command, especially RADM Green, accusing him of being derelict in his duty by trying to suborn the clear orders and guidance of the President, as Commander in Chief of the US military, regarding Gallagher’s case.

I cannot express not only how irregular what I’ve just recounted is, but how BATSHIT FUCKING INSANE it is as well! Serving US military personnel, and to a lesser extent DOD and the Service civilians (civil servants) do not speak to and/or engage with the news media unless it has been approved by the Public Affairs Officer at their command. And they certainly don’t go on a cable news talk show program and publicly accuse their commanding officers of being derelict in their duty and insubordinate. If you were wondering if Gallagher was a disciplinary problem waiting to happen and a real impediment to good order and discipline, wonder no more. What he did this morning should dispel any doubt. And if you were Gallagher and trying to show the review board and the commanding admiral that you weren’t either or both of these things, going on Fox & Friends Weekend and making these statements is a really stupid way to demonstrate that you’re not a problem child and a shitbird.

Even before Gallagher made himself the poster boy for an out of control culture within the SEAL and Naval Special Warfare community, Rear Admiral Green had already begun a commander’s strategic initiative to try to understand the problems that have developed within the Naval Special Warfare community’s culture and develop specific ways and means to address and correct them. His initiative is inline with those of GEN Clarke, the Commanding General of US Special Operations Command, who has instituted a similar strategic review. GEN Clarke, as well as RADM Green and GEN Clarke’s other subordinates at the Army, Air Force, and Marine special operations commands are rightly concerned that the corrosive nature of war, especially a war in it’s 18th year, that is poorly defined at the strategic level, and that is overly reliant on Special Operations at the tactical and operational levels, has done major harm to America’s Special Operations Forces. And the effects of the corrosion that this ongoing war has caused on US Special Operations culture and those within that culture needs to be assessed, analyzed, and understood so that corrective measures can be developed and put in place.

What we’ve seen with the way Gallagher behaves, obviously empowered because he feels that his advocates like Hegseth have the President’s ear and, therefore, the President has his back, is a very public example of the cultural corrosion that GEN Clarke, RADM Green, and their peers in the Special Operations community are concerned with. Just for his actions today, Gallagher should be facing an Article 15 hearing, popularly known as a captain’s or admiral’s mast, first thing tomorrow to answer for his public insubordination. What he did today on Fox & Friends should make whether he keeps his trident the least of his worries.

At this point, however,  I have no idea what is going to happen. RADM Green, GEN Clarke, ADM Gilday the Chief of Naval Operations, GEN Milley the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary Esper, and RADM (ret) Braithwaite, the announced nominee to be the next Secretary of the Navy all know by now they have both a good order and discipline problem and that the public face of that problem’s name is Gallagher, who thinks he’s untouchable. The President’s undue command interference in Gallagher’s trial and the post conviction handling of him as a personnel matter, as well as several other military prosecutions and disciplinary matters all involving accusations of or convictions for war crimes, has created a good order and discipline problem within the ranks. Leadership knows that if they don’t make an example of Gallagher, then any Soldier, Sailor, Airman, or Marine who gets in trouble and can get to Hegseth or anyone else who has the President’s ear, has the ability to short circuit the military justice system. And unless that notion is quickly disabused, then good order and discipline is going to become nothing more than a hollow slogan. And this problem is as dangerous as the message the President’s interference in military justice for Gallagher and others sends both our allies and adversaries about the behavior that will be tolerated by the US military because it will be tolerated by the President of the United States. That makes our allies uncomfortable and provides aid and comfort to our adversaries by giving them seeming approval to conduct war however they like, regardless of the Law of Armed Conflict, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the Rules of Engagement for any specific operation.

Open thread!

Full disclosure: I served as a Senior Special Operations Fellow at SOCOM’s Joint Special Operations University from May through August 2015.

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