Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

We still have time to mess this up!

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

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

Bark louder, little dog.

The revolution will be supervised.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Putin versus the West

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Adam will probably cover this later with far more insight and geopolitical acumen than I can summon, but Putin gave a speech this morning to commemorate the bogus referenda in the Ukrainian territories Russia occupies (for the moment), and I was reading commentary on it from Max Seddon, Moscow bureau chief for FT, on Twitter. The tweets that summarize the speech start here.

In one of the earlier threads, folks who were paying attention before I did noted the homophobic, transphobic, macho nonsense in the speech, and there was plenty of that:

Putin may have lifted whole sections of the speech from a Tucker Carlson episode earlier this week:

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Winnable House Races in Purple Districts (OH-13)

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In our last post in this series, Balloon Juice peeps made the case for adding Emilia Sykes (OH-13) to our list.  She has been added!

About Emilia Sykes, from the comments yesterday:

Our candidate is is Emilia Sykes.  She is great with years of government experience in the statehouse. Their candidate is basically Marsha Blackburn with a law degree. Also with a beauty degree. Also on RWNJ talk radio. I think she had her own show.

I am in the new 13th, too! And Emilia’s opponent is totally unqualified.

Yes the most recent filing shows Emilia had $40,000 less than Gilbert but that was in June. I just got an email that said she was $13,000 short of her goal for the quarter. I know they always say that! But I contributed anyway! I am so excited there is a chance to be represented by a Democrat!

Always good to see yet another awesome Black female politician in the early stages of a great career.

Unless you customize the amounts, donations to this thermometer will be split 9 ways.  

These 4 have reached over $4,700 each, so they are currently paused on the list.

*Marcy Kaptur  (OH-09)
*Sharice Davids  (KS-03)
*Gabe Vasquez  (NM-02)
*Elaine Luria  (VA-02)

Current Recipients

Susan Wild (PA-07)
Josh Riley  (NY-19)
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez  (WA-03)
Eric Sorenson  (IL-17)
Tony Vargas  (NE-02)
Yadira Caraveo  (CO-08)
Susie Lee  (NV-03)
Mercedes Krause  (NV-02)
Emilia Sykes  (OH-13)

 Winnable House Races Purple Districts

If you want to learn more about the folks on the list, click on the Targeted Political Fundraising Fall 2022 tag up top and check out some of the other posts in this series.

NOTE:  Mercedes Krause (NV-02) was added to the list yesterday, and we have a $1,000 match offer for her donations.  Mercedes is kind of the exception to our rule.  Her race is not a toss-up, but the folks at Four Directions think there is a chance that she may be able to pull it off.  Bret said that the Native voters are VERY EXCITED about Mercedes, as she is a great candidate and is Native herself – so even if she doesn’t win, they believe she will help bring out the native vote for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.

Bret will personally match $1,000 of Balloon Juice donations to Mercedes.  I will watch the thermometer on the back end, and as soon as we hit $1,000 for Mercedes, he will add his $1,000 to the thermometer.

Here’s where we’re at right now:

Winnable House Races in Purple Districts (OH-13)

Reminder:  our next thermometer will be Election Protection in Key States, which will be a series like this one.  Only we’ll be rolling out key races that have a huge impact on election protections, like Secretary of State, Attorney General, Governor.

Reminder: all of the targeted fundraising thermometers for this fall (so far) are in the sidebar, and also at the link below.  I have a link to each one in the sidebar now.  The link doesn’t show the thermometer itself, but it takes you to it.  I thought it might be easier to remember what all the options are if they are listed.

All Targeted Fundraising Thermometers

Totally open thread!

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Ian: Biden Today on Ongoing Federal Response Time Change LIVE at 1:30 (and Check-in)

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When I checked the President’s schedule, I did a double-take and checked the date twice.  Biden is indeed speaking again today about the ongoing federal response to Hurricane Ian.

You know, if President Biden had just thrown the rolls of paper towels on the first day, he would be totally done with this!  //

I have not heard from my godmother yet, and my goddaughter is in Ian’s path today in North Carolina.

I watched a video of a storm surge, and I cried watching it.  It’s one thing to read about it, but it’s another thing to see it.  Anyone who wants to shelter in place when evacuations have been ordered should be forced to watch a video like that.  On the other hand, if you told me I had to leave and that my dogs and cats would have to fend for themselves in a natural disaster, I don’t see how I could do that, either.

Is anyone else still waiting to hear about homes, friends or family?

May this be the worst that anyone else has to experience from the storm today.

h/t someone in another thread, but I don’t know which thread or which person.

Open thread.

Update: time changes from 11:30am  to 1:30 pm

 

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TGIFriday Morning Open Thread: Drafting

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(Watch, if only to see what happens when Guerra passes the police officer on the motorcycle leading the pack)

… The bill finances the federal government through Dec. 16 and buys lawmakers more time to agree on legislation setting spending levels for the 2023 fiscal year. It passed by a vote of 72-25 and now goes to the House for consideration. All of the no votes came from Republicans.

As has become routine, lawmakers waited until the final hours before the shutdown deadline to act. But passage of a bill to fund the government was hardly in doubt, particularly after Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin agreed to drop provisions designed to streamline the permitting process for energy projects and greenlight the approval of a pipeline in his home state of West Virginia. Those provisions had drawn opposition from both sides of the political aisle.

Still, the bill merely puts off for a few months the maneuvering that will be required after the midterm election to pass a massive government funding package, as negotiators will have to bridge their differences over spending on hot-button issues such as abortion, border security and climate change…

Full details at the link.

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, Sept. 29-30

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: Thursday / Friday, Sept. 29-30
Not great…

Nearly 3 years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 faces a formidable challenge: finding new ways around the immunity humans have built up through vaccines and countless infections. Worrisome new data show it is up to the challenge. Several new and highly immune-evasive strains of the virus have caught scientists’ attention in recent weeks; one or more may well cause big, new COVID-19 waves this fall and winter.

“We can say with certainty that something is coming. Probably multiple things are coming,” says Cornelius Roemer, who studies viral evolution at the University of Basel. Whether they will also lead to many hospitalizations and deaths is the big question.

“It’s not surprising that we’re seeing changes that yet again help the virus to evade immune responses,” says molecular epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Bern, who notes that SARS-CoV-2 faces “the same challenge that things like the common cold and influenza face every year—how to make a comeback.”

The strains that look poised to drive the latest comeback are all subvariants of Omicron, which swept the globe over the past year. Several derived from BA.2, a strain that succeeded the initial BA.1 strain of Omicron but then was itself outcompeted in most places by BA.5, which has dominated in recent months. One of these, BA.2.75.2, seems to be spreading quickly in India, Singapore, and parts of Europe. Other new immune-evading strains have evolved from BA.5, including BQ.1.1, which has been spotted in multiple countries around the globe.

Despite their different origins, several of the new strains have chanced upon a similar combination of mutations to help scale the wall of immunity—a striking example of convergent evolution. They all have changes at half a dozen key points in the viral genome that influence how well neutralizing antibodies from vaccination or previous infection bind to the virus, says evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center…

Sheward and Murrell agree we should expect lots of infections in the next few months, as happened last winter when Omicron entered the scene. But they’re less pessimistic than Cao, noting that many more people have recovered from an infection now or have received additional vaccine doses, including Omicron-specific boosters, whose rollout began this month. Those will boost overall antibody levels and will likely broaden the antibody repertoire, Sheward says: “I don’t think we’re quite back to square one.”

“The choice to put BA.5 in the vaccine booster is still looking like a good one,” Bloom adds. “The boosters are always going to be a step behind, but the good news is that the BA.5 booster is going to be one or two steps behind the virus’ evolution, instead of five steps behind.”

Just how brutal a comeback the coronavirus has managed will become clear once more people become infected with the new strains. The next wave may also provide better clues about what factors trigger or prevent severe disease, Murrell says: “I think we’re going to learn a lot this winter.”

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On The Road – JanieM – Mendocino 5 of 5

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JanieM

The Village and Good-bye

As I write this post, autumn has arrived in New England. Again.

A year ago—though it feels like just last Tuesday—Steve from Mendocino was saying that autumn would round out four seasons of picture-taking with my new camera. And now another year has passed with barely a blink. At the same time, so much is going on that historians will be busy analyzing it for decades.

Time runs differently when you get older, and I was still trying to adjust to that change when the pandemic came and threw any remnants of time passing normally into the dustbin. For over a year I never went anywhere (my son did my grocery shopping for me) except to get in the car and go for a drive once a week, just to remind myself that the world was still out there.

Then, in the summer of 2021, it seemed like maybe we were heading back to “normal” life. Steve first raised the question of a Mendocino visit in June, but he and his wife thought we should wait until after fire season, not to mention that my first grandchild was due in November. So we planned a trip for February.

January brought the omicron variant, a new wave of covid infections, and a postponement until April.

But the trip did happen at last, and a very lovely one it was.

And then it was over.

Most of these pictures are from the last set I took in Mendocino, on a day when I sweet-talked Steve into taking me on one last, unscheduled jaunt. Unlike my younger self, my older self wasn’t surprised that a long-awaited adventure was coming to an end. But these last pictures still have a bittersweet feel to them, an echo of what I wrote in my first barn post over a year ago. Part of the reason I take pictures, I said, is that “someday I’m not going to be here, but right now I am. Everything changes, and my pictures are my ongoing attempt to capture the flow, one moment at a time.”

I was in Mendocino, then I wasn’t. In fact, another half-year has gone by since then.

Autumn has arrived in Maine, and I’m grateful that I’m still here to try to capture it.

Again.

On The Road - JanieM - Mendocino 5 of 5 9
Mendocino, California

My very first raven: Until that morning, I had somehow managed to get into my seventies without ever knowingly having seen a raven. This one posed for a picture, and I was standing by with a camera.

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Late Night Open Thread: Lizzo & the Crystal Flute

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I popped up a quick post about Lizzo’s performance yesterday because I was genuinely charmed by the idea — here’s a classically-trained flutist (who happens to be a major pop star) helping the Library of Congress publicize its many-faceted holdings. There are people (not just at that concert) who didn’t know the Library of Congress existed, outside of a Nicholas Cage movie maybe. Heck, *I* didn’t know about the LoC’s instrumental holdings, and I love libraries!

And, yes, I assumed there’d be some sniping from the usual suspects… but not that it would be the Topic of the Day on political twitter. These dudes (just about entirely dudes) are definitely exercising their outrage glands in preparation for the upcoming election, and it’s good our side is also on alert…

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