Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

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

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

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

Not all heroes wear capes.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

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

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

DeSantis transforming Florida into 1930s Germany with gators and theme parks.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

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

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

Trump makes a mockery of the legal system and cowardly judges just sit back and let him.

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Late Night Open Thread: We Are All Cynics Now

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When in trouble, when in doubt… Revert to your emotional security (imaginary) Civil War…

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‘Gun Issues’ Open Thread: Not Enough Time Between Public Tragedies

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Would that President Biden, and the rest of us, had that luxury. There are times I’m very glad to be a volunteer aggregator on a not-quite-ten-thousand-top blog, and not a professional journalist. Mr. Charles P. Pierce, at Esquire, on the last ‘Second Amendment’-related tragedy — “The Shooter’s Family Was Begging for Intervention Before She Opened Fire at a Megachurch”:

… Our latest unfortunate public exercise of Second Amendment freedoms took place in Houston, at the headquarters mega-church of Joel Osteen, a prominent teevee huckster Pharisee. (Osteen was the whited sepulcher who refused to open his megachurch so that poor and homeless people would not be left outside to face Hurricane Harvey in 2017.) On Sunday, a 37-year old woman named Genesee Moreno showed up at Lakewood Church with both her seven-year old son and her AR-15 in tow. She set up a firefight with two off-duty cops that ended up with Moreno dead, her son in critical condition with a gunshot wound in the head, and a bystander slightly wounded in the leg. The subsequent investigation has revealed Moreno to be quite insane. From CNN:

“My daughter-in-law when she was taking medication for schizophrenia was a very sweet and loving woman,” Walli Carranza, the mother-in-law of 36-year-old Genesse Ivonne Moreno wrote in a Facebook post that Moreno had been put under an order for emotional detention in 2016. She had a mental health history documented by Houston police, said Christopher Hassig, commander of the Houston Police Department’s homicide division. Carranza, the shooter’s mother-in-law, had unsuccessfully petitioned to be declared conservator of Moreno’s son Sam in 2022. She said Sam was wounded in the head when off-duty officers shot and killed Moreno at the church. Moreno should never have been allowed to own firearms, her mother-in-law said. Texas has no red flag law – also known as an extreme risk protection order law – that would allow authorities to take weapons from a person thought to be in crisis.“

…

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Cold Grey Pre-Dawn Open Thread: Putin’s ‘Interview’ with Tucker Carlson

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Per CNN, “Putin walks away with propaganda victory after Tucker Carlson’s softball interview”:

It’s evident now why Vladimir Putin granted an interview to Tucker Carlson.

Over the course of the more than two-hour sit-down, the former Fox News host turned online commentator largely refrained from challenging the Russian authoritarian, whose brutal war on Ukraine has led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Those expecting a hard-hitting face-off will have surely walked away sorely disappointed by the long-winded and rambling interview, in which Tucker himself at times appeared lost.

Instead of pressing Putin on the many topics at hand, including credible accusations Russia has committed war crimes and the imprisonment of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Carlson allowed the autocrat a free lane to manipulate the public and tell his version of history, no matter how deceptive it may have been. At times, between the airing of grievances, Putin appeared to school Carlson on historical events as the host looked on in bewilderment. Or to put it more plainly, Carlson provided Putin a platform to spread his propaganda to a global audience with little to no scrutiny of his claims…

It was a massive propaganda victory for Putin, who can — and will – now twist the encounter for his own ends. If there was any doubt that Putin did not view the sit-down with Carlson as a big win, a glance at how his own state-run media covered the affair should erase it. Immediately after Carlson published the chat online, Putin’s mouthpieces rushed to amplify it…

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Late Night Open Thread: Feds Against ForPol Outrages, Anyone?

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Hey guys — let’s make it a four-day weekend!

Per Al-Monitor, “US government employees plan walkout over Biden’s Gaza policies”:

US federal employees across nearly two dozen agencies plan to walk off the job Tuesday to protest the Biden administration’s handling of the Gaza war, according to organizers of the dissent effort who spoke to Al-Monitor.

The group — calling itself Feds United for Peace — consists of dozens of government employees who will be observing a “Day of Mourning” to mark 100 days of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The organizers, who are choosing to remain anonymous, say they expect “easily hundreds” of others to join in their walkout after securing commitments from individuals at 22 federal agencies…

One of the walkout organizers said that rather than quit, they felt “a moral obligation and a patriotic duty” to influence change from inside. They blamed the White House for policy decisions they lament, including the obstruction of cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations and weapons sales to Israel that have bypassed Congress…

IIRC, that ‘change from the inside’ defense was endlessly mocked when those in the Trump administration used it.
 
The press release is, of course, being seized as a precious gift by the GOP. Per Axios:

Top House Republicans plan to press federal agencies to punish workers who participate in a planned walk out next week in protest of the Biden administration’s support for Israel…

What they’re saying: “Any government worker who walks off the job to protest U.S. support for our ally Israel is ignoring their responsibility and abusing the trust of taxpayers,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in a statement.

– Johnson said he and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) will “be working together to ensure that each federal agency initiates appropriate disciplinary proceedings” against anyone who participates in Tuesday’s demonstration.

– “They deserve to be fired,” Johnson said.

Between the lines: The conservative magazine National Review made the case that the protest violates federal law, pointing to a statute punishing any federal employee who “participates in a strike … against the Government of the United States” with a fine or up to a year in prison…

Okay, Johnson can’t wrangle a budget resolution past his Angry Toddlers Tantrum Caucus, and Comer can’t find any actual Biden impeachment-worthy facts for all his ‘inquiries’, but — Look! Over there! Dems in possibly criminal disarray!

The sterling FUD idealists are, of course, entitled to do as their consciences dictate. But I’m not tremendously impressed (and I may have been prejudiced in advance by the recent spate of anonymous ‘official’ letters of protest) by those whose proudly shared concerns extend as far as taking a workday afternoon off, but not so far as to give up their jobs supporting the Inferno.

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MLK Day Monday Evening Open Thread: What Are the ‘Democratic’ Candidates Up To?

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(TBF, RFK Jr claims his father & uncle didn’t really want the FBI to do those terrible things, they were just setting things up to give them an excuse to break the agency during a second term… )

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MLK Day Preparations Open Thread: Toxic Seepage Alert

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Charlie Kirk, who first came to national attention prancing around a college quad clad only in a diaper, finds a new way to monetize his humiliation fetish for the benefit of his GOP sugar daddies. Per Wired — “How Charlie Kirk Plans to Discredit Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act”:

… In December 2023, speaking before a group of students and teachers at America Fest, a political convention organized by Turning Point USA, Kirk struck a different tone.

“MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

For decades, conservatives have pointed to King and his idea that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” as a model for equality.

“For a while, Dr. King’s stock was very much on the rise in conservative circles and the Republican Party,” says John Wood Jr., a Republican activist. “It’s been understood on the right that even though Dr. King wasn’t really one of us politically, he was still a ‘good liberal.’”

For Kirk, the shift on King wasn’t an offhand remark, but a glimpse into his broader strategy to discredit the civil rights leader and the landmark legislation most associated with King: the Civil Rights Act of 1964…

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: ‘Speaker Johnson’ Earns His Bat Wings

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MAGA Mike can, and will, lie and smarm and lie some more, no matter how obvious his lies are. This is golden, for today’s GOP. He’s probably earned himself a free pass from the Angry Toddler Tantrum Caucus for at least another round or two of budget ‘debate’ — he might even still hold the Speakership until January, assuming no really revolting skeletons fall out of his ‘Louisiana constitutional lawyer and proud evangelical’ closet before then.

Philip Bump, at the Washington Post, “James Comer’s most dishonest Biden attack yet” [gift link]:

During a news conference Wednesday morning, House Republican leaders escalated their push to impeach President Biden. Those efforts have proved to be a pastiche of superficial allegations, relying heavily on investigatory work that predates the formal impeachment inquiry and that primarily implicates his son, Hunter Biden, in some questionable activity. But if you tell your fervently anti-Biden base of support you are going to try to impeach the guy, you have to try to impeach him.

The intent of the news conference was to show progress. They unveiled a logo for the investigation and pledged a new website containing the evidence they had accumulated to date. The most noteworthy element of the news conference, though, was a revelation about how dishonest they were willing to be to insinuate wrongdoing by the president.

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