Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Giving up is unforgivable.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

No Kings: Americans standing in the way of bad history saying “Oh, Fuck No!”

Second rate reporter says what?

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

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

T R E 4 5 O N

Radicalized white males who support Trump are pitching a tent in the abyss.

“They all knew.”

These are not very smart people, and things got out of hand.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

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

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

No one could have predicted…

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

When we show up, we win.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

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

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

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National Security

Open Thread: Our Current FBI, An Insult to Honest Goat Rodeos

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This article gives the impression that local authorities and the FBI have essentially no leads at all in the shooting of Charlie Kirk. I'm curious how much of this has to do with the post-purge state of the FBI and its previous focus on domestic extremist activity. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/u…

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) September 12, 2025 at 12:01 AM

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Note the date:

Absolute Christmas for actual gangs, terrorists, spies, crime syndicates, child predators and…most crucially…white collar criminals.

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— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) September 9, 2025 at 4:33 PM

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Donald Trump is diverting law enforcement from going after human traffickers, child predators, and terrorists. He's the most pro-predator president in history.

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— Senator Ron Wyden (@wyden.senate.gov) September 10, 2025 at 12:43 PM

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Current status:

Time to bring in the experts.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) September 11, 2025 at 3:42 PM

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Politics Open Thread: It’s Not Paranoia…

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Exactly as predicted, now that DOGE has scraped all your personal data from government agencies, it's all being given to Peter Thiel's Palantir. It was always going to be Peter, who has dreamed of dictatorship for decades, patiently built his "political project". 1/
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t…

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— capitolhunters (@capitolhunters.bsky.social) May 30, 2025 at 9:14 AM

Per the (very neutral,of course) NYTimes [gift link]:

In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.

Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.

The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)

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Revolutionary Warfare=Guerrilla Warfare+Political Action

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I’m going to keep this short as I still have to do the Ukraine war update later and I’m very fried from work despite this being day 1 of my mini-staycation.

I want to make this very clear at the outset, this is not a victory lap. It is not an I told you so. I really don’t want to have to write this post at all. I am no happier than any of you.

Let’s start with where we are now.

Where we are now is a revolutionary movement that revolves around a revanchist, reactionary racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic, nativist, isolationist, and (white) Christian nationalist ideology fused with a cult of personality around the President-elect will soon have control of the executive branch, the Senate, most likely the House, the Supreme Court, a number of the federal appellate courts, and 25 state trifectas.

I think the model or heuristic for understanding what the President-elect’s second term will be like is a combination of two historical examples. The first is Yeltsin and Putin. Yeltsin was old, ill, and infirm from both his alcoholism and other health issues. Putin was an ambitious, angry, revanchist backed by (owned) by powerful and ultra-high net worth individuals. I think this is an apt description for the dynamic between Trump and Vance. History rhymes, it does not repeat, so this does not mean that Vance will eventually be president for life or anything.

The second is the fascist co-president that George Herbert Walker, Prescott Bush, and their co-conspirators wanted to force onto FDR in the first months of his first term of office in what is called the Business Plot. Vance is the vehicle for the current equivalents of Walker, Bush, and their co-conspirators – Thiel, Musk, the Uhliens, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc – to quietly achieve their goals in the background while the President-elect does whatever he’s going to do in the foreground.

There is also going to be a LOT of chaos. Not everyone that is going to get a senior political appointment is on the same page. They all have their own agendas. There is going to be jockeying for position, the President-elect’s family members, including in-laws, are all going to want their pieces of the action or, at least ill gotten gains. And given how we’ve been watching the President-elect very visibly decline in real time over the past two months, there will be infighting over who is his actual, real successor. I fully expect the President-elect and his team to shiv RFK Jr as they don’t need him anymore.

The fight to be his successor will begin almost immediately. The President-elect’s movement is a cult of personality. But there’s no actual heir apparent to him. None of his children have what his followers see in him and want, which is a combination of anger, spite, bigotry, and entertainment. Same with other GOP officials and MAGA movement conservative elites and notables. Vance, DeStupid, Cotton, Scott, Cruz, etc all have the anger, spite, and bigotry, but they’re not entertaining. Youngkin is just boring. He presents as normal. With the exception of his youngest son, whom we only see so we have no idea if he can do entertaining, the President-elect’s other children don’t have the entertainment value and come off as whiny and spoiled, because they are whiny and spoiled. Stephen Miller has the anger, spite, and bigotry down to a science, but the President-elect’s movement isn’t going to move their allegiance to him because he’s Jewish. Musk is not entertaining at all. He’s just a black hole of entitled, coddled, failed his way upward neediness. Thiel hits the same repellent cords as Rick Scott. Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Green seem to hit all the characteristics like the President-elect, and as I’ve speculated here before I could see either of them making a play for his mantle, but I don’t know if either could or would pull it off.

After the jump I’m going to go through how we got here and why I thought it was likely we would get here.

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Thursday Night Open Thread: Today’s Teacup Tempest, Courtesy of Special Counsel Robert Hur

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Remember how some (outdated, unimportant) TOP SECRET papers turned up during a search of President Biden’s property, at the same time the FBI was toting box after box of highly sensitive material out of Mar-A-Lago? (Don’t worry, very few people *did* remember.) Well, after a thorough investigation, the Republican special counsel in charge of weighing Biden’s culpability decided he couldn’t make a case that wouldn’t be thrown out of court… but that didn’t stop Hur from trying a little Comey-dance for the compliant media.

Per NBC, “Biden won’t be charged in classified docs case; special counsel cites instances of ‘poor memory’”:

Special counsel Robert Hur has declined to prosecute President Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents but said in a report released Thursday that Biden’s practices “present serious risks to national security” and added that part of the reason he wouldn’t charge Biden was that the president could portray himself as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who would be sympathetic to a jury.

“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” the report said, but added that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The report from Hur — who previously appointed by former President Donald Trump as one of the country’s top federal prosecutors — also made clear the “material distinctions” between a theoretical case against Biden and the pending case against Trump for his handling of classified documents, noting the “serious aggravating facts” in Trump’s case.

Biden said in a statement after the report became public that he was “pleased to see they reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach — that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed,” adding that he “cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays.”…

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Open Thread (Mendacious Menendez and More)

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Until this morning, I was only aware of two of the five items on this list from Just Security..

How Dangerous is Menendez to Our National Security?

Short answer? VERY>

Let us count the ways…

  1. Disclosing the United States’ Staffing Blueprint in its Egyptian Embassy
  2. Providing Advance Information on U.S. Military Aid
  3. Ghostwriting a Letter Requesting U.S. Military Aid from the Government of Egypt
  4. Providing a Heads-Up on Questions U.S. Senators Intended to Ask of Egyptian Officials
  5. It’s Impossible to Know How Much Leverage Egypt Continues to Have Over Menendez

Surely his girlfriend – now his wife – who was in the middle of all these things, must have been pivotal in his recruitment.  That’s just my opinion, but it’s hard for me to see otherwise.   Not just in their pocket; definitely in bed with them.

Read the whole thing.  (Just Security)

Also, the polls that we probably won’t hear much about in the media:

Also, I cannot believe that a formal dress code for male senators passed unanimously today.  Seriously?

Open thread.

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Nat(In)Security Open Thread: Glee Amongst the Peanut Gallery

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“I want a list of the top 50 customers at the sword and knife kiosk, and I want you to cross-reference that with troops who have straight-faced asked their PSG if they could carry all seven magazines on their thigh in a drop-leg pouch.”

[touches earpiece] …he’s wearing his uniform… to his girlfriend’s prom… she’s a SOPHOMORE?? Okay wake up a federal judge, there’s no time to lose.
 
“Lieutenant, please unlock your phone… open the ‘Photos’ app… uh-huh, just like that. Now what I’d like you to do for me is type ‘Pepe the Frog’ into the search box-yep, thought so.”…

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Enough With the F*cking Secret Memos Already

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The media’s already bored with the existing revelations, but I have a feeling there will be more surprises as the (sigh) 2024 primaries heat up. Justin Ellis, at Defector:

We are a petty and venal and lazy species on balance, and there is no distance the human mind can’t quickly traverse to convince itself that something you want won’t be missed. In this calculus, the most important factor is opportunity, and what better window is there than when you leave your job?

There is, of course, some difference between letting a pair of Skechers fall in your lap on the way out the door from Foot Locker, and, say, snagging that memo listing Kim Jong-un’s favorite episodes of Rick and Morty after you’ve run out the clock on your time in the Oval Office.

With the revelation that Joe Biden, as well as Donald Trump, had classified documents stuffed away in their homes, the keepers of the nation’s collective memory are growing worried that former presidents are hoarding stacks of sensitive files in their mud rooms or junk drawers…

The whole mess was made worse this week when Mike Pence signaled that he, too, had “inadvertently boxed and transported” classified papers back to his suburban manse in Indiana. Now everybody that held office as far back as the Reagan administration is on notice. (Jimmy Carter is exempt from tearing up his attic; the Presidential Records Act went into effect after he left office.)…

Context matters here. Trump used the Secret Service to rack up tabs at his namesake hotels. He is also the man whose protracted tantrum after losing the election gave way to an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. Whether Trump was looking to use the files to cut deals with dictators or create a shadow box, he filled his suitcase with state secrets, however important or banal they might be, while displaying the same level of forethought generally associated with stealing a commemorative mug from Hooters. This is typically dumb, and potentially dangerous, but it is also another signal that the many veils of security clearance placed around aspects of doing the public’s business have gotten way out of hand…

Typically it takes an Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning to remind the public of the sinister campaigns that the government conducts behind the classified lines of a memo. But beyond special favors to allies, the usual greed mongering, and ill-conceived foreign combat fantasies, the government puts entirely too much shit in the Top Secret bucket. As Elizabeth Goitein, who studied national security at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, told NBC News: “You have 50 million classification decisions each year—90 percent of which are probably unnecessary. That’s a lot of rules that have to be complied with every hour of every day. And some of that is going to slip.”

Enough with the fucking memos already.

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