Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

Fight them, without becoming them!

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

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

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: In Elon’s Mind, We Are All NPCs

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Maybe I’m just an aging Cynic, but it surprised me that none of the professional commentors I’ve read saw this clip and didn’t (ahem) grok that soutpiel Elon Musk lost it when a guy Musk perceived as Coloured didn’t automatically support him. Elon does not grant uppity not-Whites an audience! His minions failed him when they allowed this pretender into his magnificent domain!

NPCs are non-player characters — less-than-autonomous ‘filler’ in tabletop or video games, virtual-world spear-carriers. It’s become a gamer insult that ‘people who don’t agree with my opinions’ are ‘NPCs’… not actually human. Gosh, why would an Independent Thinker like Mr. Musk resort to neck-beard level slang like that?…

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Repubs Trying to Dodge Consequences

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Now that the Senate has made it clear his vaunted impeachment is going nowhere, I guess Green plans to slither back home to Tennessee and present his ‘achievement’ as a personal best. Per the Associated Press, “House Homeland chairman announces retirement a day after leading Mayorkas’ impeachment”:

Tennessee Republican U.S. Rep. Mark Green on Wednesday announced that he won’t run for a fourth term, pointing to the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just the day before as among the reasons it is “time for me to return home.”

“Our country – and our Congress – is broken beyond most means of repair,” Green said in a statement. “I have come to realize our fight is not here within Washington, our fight is with Washington.”

As chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Green was a driving force behind the Mayorkas impeachment push over border security in a deeply partisan and highly unusual attack on a Cabinet official. His panel conducted a months-long investigation of Mayorkas, his policies and his management of the department, ultimately concluding Tuesday that his conduct in office amounted to “high crimes and misdemeanors” worthy of impeachment…

Green flirted running for governor in 2017, but suspended his campaign after he was nominated by former President Donald Trump to become the Army secretary. He later withdrew his nomination due to criticism over his remarks about Muslims and LGBTQ+ Americans, including saying that being transgender is a disease. He also urged that a stand be taken against “the indoctrination of Islam” in public schools and referred to a “Muslim horde” that invaded Constantinople hundreds of years ago.

After winning the congressional seat in 2018, Green once again made headlines after hosting a town hall where he stated, without citing evidence, that vaccines cause autism. He later walked back his comments but not before state health officials described the Republican as a “ goofball.”…

Presumably because it’s frowned upon to use the (correct) word ‘asshole’ in an official document.

Green’s not the only Repub sidling towards the exits:

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Good News, Bad News Open Thread: Repubs Against Feeding Hungry Children

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Catherine Rampell, at the Washington Post — “There’s nothing pro-child about the GOP’s resistance to food aid” [gift link]:

In the 18 months since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, Republican officials have had ample opportunity to prove they’re not merely antiabortion but also pro-child. They keep failing.

GOP politicians across the country have found new and creative ways to deny resources to struggling parents and children. Take, for instance, the summer lunch program.

Under a new federal program, children who are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches can also receive food assistance during the summer. The policy, created as part of the bipartisan budget deal in 2022, gives eligible families $40 per month per child, or $120 total over the summer. It often works essentially as a top-up for food stamps, since these families must buy more groceries when their children lose access to nutritious school meals when classes go out of session. (It’s similar to a temporary program offered during the pandemic, though it’s much less generous.)

The federal government pays the entire cost of the benefits associated with this new food program and half the administrative costs. The program isn’t automatic, though; states had to opt in by Jan. 1.

Republican governors across 15 states chose not to, as my Post colleague Annie Gowen reported. Up to 10 million kids will be denied access to this grocery aid as a result…

So, potentially, almost half of the children eligible for this program live in just fifteen states.

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Kissinger: A Retrospective

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Best I can tell, Kissinger’s youthful experience fleeing the Nazis taught him one thing, the credo by which he would live the next 90 years: The strong take what they can, and the weak bear what they must. Young Kissinger chose to support whatever he perceived as the latest version of the ‘strong’ side, and there’s always an International Relations market for a sufficiently glib version of that.

Erik Loomis, at Lawyers Guns & Money, has the best summary of Kissinger’s criminal career that I’ve seen so far — “Kissinger is Dead, Finally Something Good Has Happened in 2023”:

One of the most vile individuals to ever befoul the United States, Henry Kissinger is dead. A man responsible for the deaths of millions of people around the world and yet the most respected man within the American foreign policy community for decades, Kissinger’s sheer existence exposed the moral vacuity of Cold War foreign policy and the empty platitudes and chummy gladhandling of the Beltway elite class that deserves our utter contempt.

Born in 1923 in Bavaria to a Jewish family, Heinz Kissinger and his family fled the Nazis to the United States in 1938. Kissinger went to high school in Washington Heights in Manhattan. He entered City College to become an accountant. If only that had been his fate. Imagine how many people around the world would still be alive if Kissinger had been a bookkeeper somewhere. Sigh.

But he was drafted into the U.S. Army in World War II. He became a U.S. citizen while stationed in South Carolina in 1943. He was a smart guy—and Henry would never let you forget that—and did well on standardized testing. So the Army sent him to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania to study engineering. Once again, here was another career path for the man. Sometimes we romanticize the roads not taken. But sometimes, we realize that any other road literally could not be worse than one the path taken. That’s certainly true in this case…

It’s a long list of atrocities — one I suspect Loomis has been waiting (im)patiently to put to good use.

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer

The GOP Death Cultists found them a new celebrity advertiser…

Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Sheriff Elon, Border Enforcer 1

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Good News, Bad News

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Any day where people are reminded that Roger Stone should be in jail is a good day…

On the other hand:

I have said before, and will no doubt say again, that Tara Palmeri is the journalistic equivalent of a botfly. I won’t be listening to the podcast she’ll be doing with some of the worst offenders against media integrity — and not just because I can’t deal with podcasts (mild auditory processing disorder) — but I’m sure her every tidbit will be endlessly recycled in print media. *Sigh.*

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Hustling McConnell Off, Stage Right

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Because the modern GOP Death Cult is never happy unless it’s eating its own, some misfortunate ‘leader’ was bound to be targeted as the one non-Demoncrat individual responsible for Trump’s various indictments. The choice of Mitch McConnell as the scapegoat is neither surprising nor particularly saddening…

Wheeling out the big journamalistic guns, even in advance of the Georgia indictments:

Mitch McConnell has made it his practice to dodge questions about Donald Trump. Whether it be Trump’s bid to reclaim office, the mounting indictments leveled against the former president or even Trump’s racist mockery of McConnell’s wife, the Senate Republican leader avoids engaging a man he disdains.

Which is why it was so striking last month to sit in McConnell’s Capitol office and have him repeatedly steer our conversation toward Trump. I was there to discuss his forceful and out-of-vogue campaign to keep Republicans defending Ukraine and, more broadly, on the Reaganite path of projecting strength abroad. And at every turn, McConnell made plain it was his way of battling what Trump has done to the party…

From the Senate floor and Washington fundraisers to awards banquets and congressional delegation trips overseas, Addison Mitchell McConnell is on what could be his final political mission. And the results may illuminate what has become of his party.

After a relatively harmonious first half of this year, House and Senate Republicans are on a collision course this fall over four issues, three of which pertain to McConnell’s quest: spending, supporting the Ukrainians and Trump’s candidacy. (The fourth is impeaching President Joe Biden, which is intended as retribution for Trump’s impeachment over, well, spending and Ukraine.)

This confluence of issues will test who has the upper hand in the GOP, at least in the halls of Congress. Is it the McConnell-led Senate, which largely wants to spend more on defense, deliver additional aid to Ukraine and is not exactly enthused about Trump’s resurrection? Or is it the House, where Speaker Kevin McCarthy is handcuffed to his party’s hardliners on spending and has little appetite to imperil his job by pushing through a supplemental package for Ukraine that Trump is sure to decry and perhaps pressure rank-and-file lawmakers to oppose amid demands that they, and McCarthy, endorse him?…

… [A]s somebody who’s covered McConnell for years, it’s jarring to see his decline. He told me at the end of our interview that, yes, he would be at the Fancy Farm picnic this month. The gathering is Kentucky’s annual political bacchanal, a 142-year-old church barbeque fundraiser in which pigs, lambs and politicians are all roasted in their own way to please an audience that descends by the thousands the first Saturday in August to a hamlet that’s anything but fancy.

Sure enough, there was McConnell, in his first major public appearance since his freeze-up, on stage gamely getting off zingers at Biden, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and other Democrats.

Yet his voice was diminished, he mostly read his lines without looking up and his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had to help him up from his chair each time he stood…

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