Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

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

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

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

We do not need to pander to people who do not like what we stand for.

We still have time to mess this up!

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

Stay strong, because they are weak.

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

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Decision time: keep arguing about the last election, or try to win the next one?

“When somebody takes the time to draw up a playbook, they’re gonna use it.”

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

So fucking stupid, and still doing a tremendous amount of damage.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

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

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

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Deconstruction Continues

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We’re getting a combo platter of shit from the Supreme Court today on its last day of term. The challenge to preventative care provisions in Obamacare failed. The nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive order redefining birthright citizenship was struck down. Deconstruction is still in progress:

This is an assault on the Reconstruction Amendments by a Neo-Confederate Court wedded to the far-right argument that those amendments were illegitimate and destroyed the original intent of the Founders, which was to create a white man’s country

— Adam Serwer (@adamserwer.bsky.social) June 27, 2025 at 3:35 PM

SCOTUSBlog has a live thread here. There’s a Bluesky thread by lawyer Matt Cameron which has some informed hot-takery on where this leaves us, but it is only viewable to those who have a BSky account. If you have one, click here to read. If not, this is the meat of the thread, for me:

Deconstruction Continues

Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which challenged Texas’s Internet age-verification law, is also out (FSC lost), and if you want to read Clarence Thomas’s decision, it is here. This case has been assumed to mainly impact porn sites, but as this January 2025 article at The Verge notes, (archive.is link here if you hit the paywall) it also has grim implications for an awful lot of internet content:

Numerous states have passed age verification rules for online porn, and FSC v. Paxton could directly impact whether they stand up to legal challenges. But its impact could go beyond porn. Both TikTok v. Garland and this case deal with whether the government’s interests — national security for TikTok, protecting kids in FSC — should override free speech concerns. “We’ve got two major cases in five days dealing with whether or not traditional First Amendment law still applies to internet content in the same way,” Terry says.
And several state and federal lawmakers have demanded stronger age verification for social media, sometimes alongside a proposed ban on minors using it. Opening the door to porn verification wouldn’t guarantee those efforts would succeed, but Hans says it could make legislators far more likely to try. “I think that if the Supreme Court said that some form of age verification could be constitutional, that if you’re the state in other situations, they’re going to say, well, extend that reasoning to other substantive areas of internet regulation,” he says.
There was also a Louisiana redistricting case before the court, but they have kicked it down the road to next term. I’ll let the great Tom Tomorrow play us off:
Deconstruction Continues 1
Mostly open thread. If any of you are reading good analysis, please do link in the comments – I’ll check back in 20-30 minutes to update the main post with any useful stuff.

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Names for the Primary List

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Stepped away from events to watch the latest episode of Severance. I see that Schumer got eight Nevilles Chamberlain to vote for cloture along with him. I could make the obvious Severance-related joke about wanting to have a chip in my brain so I can skip to 2028, but this meme that references a different hit TV show is more fitting:

Nine Nevilles Chamberlain Open Thread

A bit dark, maybe, but what isn’t these days?

Open thread.

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Please Adjust Your Own Mask

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“Ah! Well, nevertheless,” remains undefeated, it seems.

Please Adjust Your Own Mask

From over here it feels like something has snapped between me and the home country. I’m now a small craft adrift from the big boat. More numb than grieving so far. The big, immediate anxiety for me is financial: I rely on US-based clients, and higher tax and a weaker dollar could leave me unable to meet bills over here even if I keep all of them. I’m already looking for more UK-based work and talking to an immigration lawyer about naturalization.

I’m worried about my trans relatives, about my parents’ healthcare, about my in-laws and other loved ones who are green card holders or recently naturalized Americans — Stephen Miller has made it clear he wants an office of denaturalization. I’m worried about my daughter’s US citizenship rights and mine, and so much more besides.

I hate “self-care” talk — nowadays it smacks of influencers and elaborate bubble baths and related bullshit. But I’ve been reminding myself all day to complete basic tasks, so I’ll share those reminders with you:

  • Take care of your food and hydration
  • Rest – if not able to sleep, read something simple and distracting on paper, away from devices
  • Exercise (screaming counts)
  • Talk to others who feel the same way
  • Clean something in your space, no matter how small
  • Look after your pets and your young ones

You really cannot give from an empty cup.

If you are in a dark and completely hopeless place, please follow John’s advice from earlier and call for help.

The LGBT National Hotline: (888) 843-4564

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273-8255

Tell us in the comments, please, one good, non-politics thing you saw today – anything that gave you even a picosecond of relief. Here’s mine: Monty and the current regular stray I’m feeding, Crusty Oliver, seem to be on a foes-to-bros character arc. This morning they were sleeping on the patio table in proximity to one another. This is a photo of them hanging out on my garden shed from the other day:

Please Adjust Your Own Mask 1

I’ll get that wily little scruffball to the vet yet.

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Sunday Night Funnies Open Thread (Extremely On-Line Social Media Edition)

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Yes, you *have* heard the name Bari Weiss before, at least if you’ve skimmed the posts sharing my unhealthy compulsion to mock Bari and all her cronies. On the other hand, their ‘ideas’ are so weightless and insubstantial that perhaps they slide off your minds, unregretted.

It’s the end of the weekend, after one chaotic week and facing into another, and mocking the deserving is as much energy as we can spare… (Bonus: Elon Musk’s most mock-worthy ex!) From Kerry Howley at NYMag, “Scenes From the End of the Sexual Revolution”:

The question “Has the Sexual Revolution Failed” contains within itself a number of other questions (failed at what? Failed whom? Why are we talking about this?), precisely none of which were answered Wednesday night at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where 1,600 plaid-skirted e-girls and be- khakied normies and the aspiring canceled paid as much as $165 a seat to hear a British ideologue, a deft Dimes Square shape-shifter, an ex-Muslim podcaster, and Techno Mechanicus’s mother debate the resolution. You can’t really fault the organizer, even if the organizer was Bari Weiss. It ought to have worked. An ill-defined proposition, half of Red Scare, a random British lady very upset about BDSM, and Grimes? No notes…

The alt-right’s inchoate longing for sexual repression in the absence of religion remains mysterious. Fifty-six percent of the audience, polled beforehand by text at an event featuring four ambitious women and moderated by a queer married media mogul, agreed that the sexual revolution had “failed.” The debate was drawn from Louise Perry’s book, serviceably titled The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, which takes as its presumed reader an extremely credulous liberal raised up in isolation from any information beyond the feminist blogosphere circa 2004 and who needs to be informed, at truly extraordinary length, that men are, on average, physically stronger than women. Women have been pressured to “fuck like men,” a situation that leaves alpha males very happy but all women depressed, abused, vulnerable, and commodified. If there is nothing here that went unsaid by Kay Hymowitz or Christina Hoff Sommers in the dark heyday of the hookup-culture think piece, at least everything sounds better in a British accent.

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The Measure Of An Epidemic: New Coronavirus Units

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Let’s review:

The first confirmed COVID-19 death on US soil occurred on March 1, 2020.   four p.m. EDT on April 2, 2020,  the United States’ cumulative coronavirus death toll hit 5,808.  Four days later, that number crossed the 10,000 line. There’s a long history behind the saying that while any one death is a tragedy many deaths —a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million— become statistics, but it certainly applies now:  the American pandemic has entered its statistical phase.

The Measure Of An Epidemic: New Coronavirus Units

This much is known about the tragic start to America’s  epidemic.  The first person to die  was a man in his fifties, who had been hosptialized in King County, Washington.  His name was not been released at the time, but it’s possible to reconstruct a part of his story: he was someone in the middle of a life who, only a week or two before its end, had no reason to think he faced his last days on earth. That’s a story we can tell ourselves; a loss we can recognize; a human being, however anonymous, we can mourn.

That one death is a marker in more than just timing.  Health officials noted one key fact about that particular case.  The dead man had no connection to the original coronavirus outbreak in China. He caught his disease here, from someone else in the United States who was already infected, in what is called “community transmission.” President Trump reacted to the news of his death within hours—by imposing travel restrictions on Iran.  That gesture was preceded by reckless inattention, to be followed by a disastrous series of performative decisions by the Trump administration that has produced the current best-case scenario of 100,000 to 240,000 Americans dead by summer.

It’s virtually impossible to grasp the losses implicit in such large numbers. When quantities break the bounds of ordinary experience they begin to disappear from view.  That’s the challenge: to see into what’s happening now, to extract from mere numbers both memory and meaning.

Here’s one way to do so: on September 11, 2001 2,996 people were killed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC.  As I write this on April 3, the US has already suffered almost two 9/11s.

Another: between 1956, when the first American died in the conflict, and 2006, when the last American fatality attributed to the war was recorded—half a century–58,220 members of the US armed services died in the Vietnam War. COVID-19 has climbed to ten percent of that casualty count in a single month.

Looking forward, if the most optimistic current projections hold, coronavirus will bring between thirty and seventy 9/11s to the United States, or two to six Vietnams.  At those heights, the sheer scale of the misery again turns particular memories (where I was when the towers fell, what it felt like to run my fingers along the wall) into abstractions.

And beyond such numbers, should the best case scenarios fail to pan out, we’ll find ourselves in territory at the limits of national mourning. It took 405,000 American lives to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  And should the US epidemic wholly overwhelms the still-patchwork effort to contain it, the only remaining national memory to measure our tragedy against will be America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, in which an estimated 750,000 Americans lost their lives.

Back on the first of March, just one man lay dying of this awkwardly named new disease. Those who knew him could mourn him in his human singularity. Glimpsed now, through the lens of almost six thousand more dead, he is the unknown soldier in this viral campaign.

More than three 9/11s.

And counting.

Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562

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Everything Dies, Baby That’s A Fact

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I was raised by a guy who had a really hard life as a farm boy, dealt with a lot of death, and pretty much was never fazed by much during his career as a small town doctor. When he retired, his colleague, who was an incredibly talented physician, good friend, and fitness buff, said that whenever there was a crisis, everyone felt better when my old man showed up, because his indomitable confidence made them all think everything would be OK. Dad gave the eulogy for his younger friend after he died in his 60’s of a very malevolent form of cancer.

Two of my brothers had lymphoma in their mid-40s. One of them almost died on the operating table as they were inserting his port prior to treatment. The other had complications that required chest surgery and two weeks in a specialty hospital. Both were in perfect health before diagnosis, and, in each case, their lymphoma was diagnosed late because doctors seeing hoofprints were late to see the zebras. They are both fine today. My mom is currently fighting lung cancer even though she never smoked, was on no medicine, and was fit and flexible when she was diagnosed at 79.

Dad is still around and he was the voice we listened to when my brothers and mom got sick. We first got sad and angry about the diagnosis, then we listened to the experts, informed ourselves as best we could from reliable information sources, made our best treatment decisions, and moved the fuck on with the ugly work of dealing with cancer.

What we sure as hell didn’t do, by nature and by conscious decision, was panic. My Dad is pretty easy going with his kids, by my God I couldn’t imagine the anger and withering disapproval he would have had if any of us had panicked. Because everyone dies. And someone dies every moment of every day. Only blithering idiots think they can dodge death, or that there’s some justice in who the grim reaper chooses to hack into pieces. Panic wouldn’t save anyone. Panic would make us stupid, and we all needed to use our brains if my brothers and mom were going to live.

It’s with that perspective that I view the current virus panic. We can’t do anything about the cowards in charge (except work to vote them out), but we certainly can avoid being infected by panic. We can also plan for something good to come, and make sure that we hang every stupid, cowardly move they make firmly around their over-entitled, moron necks.

So, put your makeup on and fix your hair up pretty, because you’re alive today and odds are that you’ll be here tomorrow, no matter what any of the pants shitters in DC have to say.

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Faster Faster Disaster

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Lamar Alexander’s rationale for the preordained conclusion that will probably be ratified today is that Trump’s behavior was “inappropriate” but didn’t rise to an impeachable offense. “Inappropriate” is what a high school teacher tells a student cussing in class. It’s what a manager tells an employee who wears jeans on a day that isn’t casual Friday. It’s not the word for the rampant criminal activity perpetrated in this White House.

We all know that the next time Republicans control the House, a Democratic President will be impeached, for something. And we know that if a Democrat wins the White House, he or she will be picked to death about minutiae like clothing, attitude and perceived slights. We know that having a Senate majority will mean that some of our agenda will get passed, but not all, because some of the same Democrats who appear poised to vote to acquit Trump have to appease Republicans.

And all this in a country with a clear majority wanting the Democrats to rule. As the X-rays clearly show, this was broken long ago — the vote to acquit will just make it clear to everyone: IOKIYAR is the law of the land.

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