Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

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

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

An unpunished coup is a training exercise.

No Justins, No Peace

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

A consequence of cucumbers

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

“Cheese and Kraken paired together for the appetizer trial.”

People are complicated. Love is not.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

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Late Night Open Thread: Light / Shadow

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Two sports obituaries, two different legacies…

Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire — “Dikembe Mutombo, Who Died at 58, Was a Man of His Home and a Man of the World”:

… [W]hat marked Mutombo’s life was not his unsurpassed ability to block shots, nor was it the iconic finger wave that he gave to the unfortunate victims of his hijacks. It was that Dikembe Mutombo was a man of his place, and also a man of the world. His charitable efforts in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo, and all over the continent, were as vast as his work in spreading the sport of basketball in Africa. Both he and Hakeem Olajuwon, born in Nigeria, opened the continent to the NBA and to the world. Now African stars are all over the Association, from Pascal Siakam to Joel Embiid.

I first encountered him during my last years of covering college basketball, when Mutombo was a mystery recruit at Georgetown whom John Thompson had paired with established star Alonzo Mourning. Thompson kept all of his players under wraps, but he was especially stringent with Mutombo. But even with the limitations on access to him, Mutombo’s intellect and humor shone through. This all blossomed as his career went along. This great tower of a man was obviously brilliant—he spoke nine languages, including five African ones—but he could be positively impish. There were very few NBA players who were both as respected and as liked as he was. He became the NBA’s first Global Ambassador.

Meanwhile, Mutombo’s efforts in his home country were legendary. He built a hospital in Kinshasa that has treated over half a million people since it opened. He worked constantly to improve education and health care in his embattled homeland. And, in a week in which the former president* went out of his way to scare people with his lie about Congolese convicts flooding into America, Mutombo’s pride in his country and his people stands out as hope for a better, more empathetic world. His life was a celebration of life and a celebration of hope. Dikembe Mutombo Mpolondo Mukamba Jean-Jacques Wamutombo died on Monday at 58 of brain cancer. May his memory be the blessing that his life was.

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Tom Scocca, at Indignity — “Exit the hustler”:

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Fun Read: ‘Disgraced Conservative Media Creep Gets Commanders Employee Fired With Hidden-Camera Video’

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Since there’s a gift link, here’s the always brilliant Dave Roth’s evisceration of JOKeefe’s latest grift:

Back when the conservative activist James O’Keefe first made his mark in the deceptively edited hidden-camera sting video business 15 years ago, he probably did not envision spending his early forties masterminding an operation that would lead to the firing of a mid-level Washington Commanders employee for some out-of-pocket things he said on a pair of secretly recorded dates. O’Keefe, one of the more baroquely damaged defectives in reactionary media, is destroying less notable lives now than he did during the years when the videos he produced led to the resignations of NPR executives and the collapse of the activist organization ACORN, but his rancid body of work is compelling proof that the destruction is something like its own reward for him.

O’Keefe’s taste in enemies has never been especially creative, which reflects both what vintage of conservative he is—vain, pretentious, and relentlessly aggrieved, with strong notes of metro-NYC suburbia psychosis on the finish—and the business that he’s in. Project Veritas, which O’Keefe built by crafting videos that exposed various conservative culture-war enemies in ways built to fit their laziest media caricatures, was a nonprofit business supported by rich conservatives, and so generally aimed to scratch the recurring itches of those old, dull, nasty people. Sometimes, as with ACORN, O’Keefe got the results he sought. Mostly, he succeeded in helping people whose politics revolve around being scandalized and upset remain in their desired state of agitation, and in raising money from them to help with his many lawsuits…

Project Veritas, which O’Keefe left in 2023, isn’t officially dead. But the organization that produced the video recorded over a pair of dates in June, by a woman whom former Commanders employee Rael Enteen met on the dating app Hinge, is called O’Keefe Media Group. It’s his old endeavor with a new name, and with more of him in the monitors. “O’Keefe is seen frequently in the video that goes nearly 11 minutes long,” Alex Simon at SFGate wrote. “Clips of Enteen speaking to the O’Keefe Media Group agent are interspersed with narration by O’Keefe himself.” The comments for which Enteen was first suspended and then fired were rude: He called NFL fans “high-school-educated alcoholics,” players “dumb as hell,” and commissioner Roger Goodell “a puppet” of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who Enteen said he believed “hates gay people, black people.”

The news value of a middling NFL team’s Senior VP Of Content popping off on what he thinks is a date is hard to plot on any kind of politics. By now, most of the dreariest conservative dead-enders have let go of calling the league elitist and woke. It might be easier to understand as O’Keefe emphasizing the beat over the lyrics, and trusting the nastiness to get him over in the absence of anything more significant. In a recent feature for Rolling Stone, Laura Jedeed suggested that this was the direction O’Keefe had in mind for his new enterprise, which he “envisioned [as] a decentralized empire of citizen journalists across the country—’the Uber of Journalism,’ as he put it to podcast host Jack Posobiec—where would-be citizen journalists could sign up for O’Keefe Academy and buy a master class on undercover reporting for $497. They could buy or lease hidden cameras and sell scoops to OMG: $3,000 per story, with a bonus if that story went viral.”…

Truly, it is nearly impossible to go broke overestimating the gullibility of today’s “conservatives”.

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Non-Political Open Thread: Also in Atlanta, the Copa América (Soccer)

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Will Leitch, at NYMag — “The U.S. Men’s Soccer Team Is Excellent. Does Anyone Care?”:

Last Thursday, my soccer-obsessed 10-year-old son and I sat in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and witnessed 70,000 people humming the Argentine national anthem together. This was just before the first game of the Copa América, the South American soccer tournament hosted this year by the United States, and almost everyone in the stands wore the national jersey of reigning World Cup champions Argentina. The true attraction, of course, was Lionel Messi, the most famous athlete in the world. That a crowd this massive could gather in Georgia to cheer him on may have once been surprising, but certainly isn’t any longer. Last year, SSRS, a research firm that’s been surveying Americans for three decades, found that the most popular athlete in this country was not LeBron James, Tom Brady, or Stephen Curry, but Messi. Some portion of the crowd was surely singing along to the anthem in what must have been a profoundly moving moment for any Argentinian in attendance. But most of us were just humming along. We didn’t know the words. We didn’t speak the language. We were just there to see Messi.

This week, the United States men’s national team (USMNT) will play its second Copa América match, also in Atlanta. I’ll be attending that as well, and let me tell you: Tickets are a lot cheaper. This is partly understandable: The U.S. is playing Panama, not Messi and Argentina, after all. But as someone who attended the last game the USMNT played in Atlanta, a miserable Gold Cup loss in 2015 to Jamaica at the since-demolished Georgia Dome, the lack of anticipation for the U.S. men’s national team playing in Atlanta — a city that has, in the years since that Gold Cup loss, launched a highly successful, championship-winning MLS team that regularly plays some of the most well-attended soccer games on earth — is palpable. Eight years ago, the Georgia Dome was packed with maniacs dressed up like Benjamin Franklin and wearing T-shirts with bald eagles on them; this week, I can’t find anyone around here who even knows the team is playing…

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Monday Morning Open Thread: And Still, We Dance

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Defy the Haters, Celebrate the Positive

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… Harris’ team told the network she would debate in-studio on Tuesday, July 23, or Tuesday, August 13, and encouraged the Trump campaign to agree to one of the dates for his eventual vice presidential pick. The Trump campaign didn’t immediately comment on the debate invite.

Trump, in an interview with TMJ4 taped from New York, said there was “a pretty good chance” he would announce his vice presidential pick at the GOP convention in Milwaukee, which begins on July 15, rather than before…

 


Details here:

President Biden has an excellent social-media team:


 
Sports updates, for the weekend:

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Sunday Morning Open Thread: Spring, Sprung!

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Blessed Orthodox Easter, to those who celebrate!

Somehow, this seems to sum up all media in 2024…

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — On a recent weeknight at this bar in northeast Portland, fans downed pints and burgers as college women’s lacrosse and beach volleyball matches played on big-screen TVs. Memorabilia autographed by female athletes covered the walls, with a painting of U.S. soccer legend Abby Wambach mounted above the chalkboard beer menu.

The Sports Bra is a pub where women’s sports are celebrated — and the only thing on TV.

Packed and buzzing with activity, the bar has successfully tapped into a meteoric rise of interest in women’s sports, embodied most recently by the frenzy over University of Iowa basketball phenomenon Caitlin Clark’s records-smashing feats.

“Things have happened at light speed compared to what my forecast was,” founder and CEO Jenny Nguyen told The Associated Press. “This tiny spot that I built for my friends and I to watch games and give female athletes their flowers means so much more. And not just to me, but to a lot of people.”

Under the plan, bars and entrepreneurs elsewhere will be able to apply to use The Sports Bra brand for their franchises. Nguyen is open to working with people who already have a physical space, as well as those who may only have a business plan. What matters, she said, is that the potential future partners share The Sports Bra’s values…

The expansion will be boosted by funding from a foundation created by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, who is married to tennis legend Serena Williams. Nguyen said she already has received hundreds of inquiries…

 
Hooray, hooray, the month of May / Outdoor [redacted] begins today… Taking ‘shake your tail feathers’ both literally *and* seriously:

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Late Night Open Thread: Will Leitch Is A Good Read

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I just finished reading Will Leitch’s latest novel THE TIME HAS COME, which is probably one of the first American novels about our sorta-kinda-maybe-post-pandemic world. Highly recommended, if you’re in the mood for a narrative where most people are basically doing their (however ill-conceived) best, putting one foot in front of the other, trying to make their world a little better. There is genuine horror and tragedy — such being an inescapable part of life — but it’s basically a gentle book, and right now ‘gentle’ is what I can cope with in my long-form reading.

Even though I can barely tell a baseball from a hockey puck, there are a handful of professional sports writers among my cherished favorites: Damon Runyon, Charlie Pierce, Hunter S. Thompson, Roy Blount… and Will Leitch. Leitch’s Medium newsletter is always a bright spot in my (e)mailbox, and I always look forward to reading his work at NYMag.

Here’s his latest there — “We’re at Peak Sports Right Now for a Reason”:

… I think you could argue that sports writ large are booming in a way they haven’t in decades. Just about every single professional and college league, even Major League Baseball, has seen a dramatic uptick in television ratings over the last year, and most are well-positioned in a TV and streaming world that values sports advertising dollars more than ever. The NBA playoffs are as thrilling as they have been in years. (BANG! BANG!). The NFL Draft, which is several hours of huge men awkwardly stuffed into suits reading names off Excel spreadsheets, will be watched by tens upon tens of millions of people. College football is so popular that it has fundamentally and forever changed how athletics on college campuses work. And, perhaps most exciting, women’s sports are exploding with more people now watching women’s basketball than men’s. People are even optimistic about the Olympics this summer, and people are never, ever optimistic about the Olympics. You could make a very strong argument that we are at peak sports right now.

This is partly because, well, sports are awesome and people (and buffalo with the voice of Buck Bennett) enjoy watching awesome things. But I believe the main reason for this is that sports are fulfilling their primary purpose — to serve as a distraction from the outside world — particularly well at the moment. Regardless of how much time my fellow Knicks fans and I invest in the team’s playoff run, sports do not actually matter much to our lives, which is why they’re so fun to obsess over. They’re an ultimately harmless place to put all those emotions and hopes and anxieties that we struggle with every day. If my team wins, I am happy, and if they lose, I am sad. That is pure; there is nothing else in the world like it. This is why sports are the perfect distraction — distraction from despair, distraction from boredom, distraction from loneliness, distraction from the fact that someday you and I and everyone we know is going to die. The more people need distraction, the more they are going to turn to sports.

And in this election year, if there’s one thing the people are clearly saying, over and over, it’s that they want to be distracted…

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