Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This isn’t Democrats spending madly. This is government catching up.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

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

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

That meeting sounds like a shotgun wedding between a shitshow and a clusterfuck.

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

The willow is too close to the house.

He really is that stupid.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

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

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

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

When they say they are pro-life, they do not mean yours.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

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Late Night Open Thread: Rich Men on Epstein Island

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A faithful man shall abound with blessings: but he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent.

There are 1400 mentions of DOGE founder Elon Musk in the Epstein files.

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— People Who Work (@deptofworkers.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 2:35 PM

NEW: Elon Musk has insisted that Jeffrey Epstein invited him to the notorious island and he declined. But new emails show the opposite — Musk was practically begging to party with Epstein in the Caribbean, years after Epstein's sex convictions were public knowledge
futurism.com/future-socie…

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— updog sinclair (@jonchristian.net) January 30, 2026 at 3:25 PM

Of course Epstein would be interested in a man with as much money, and as little sense, as Elon Musk. But the only thing worse than being exposed as a visitor to Pedophile Island is being exposed as a needy creep who got ghosted after endlessly whinging to hang with the big kids:

Somehow, Elon Musk’s infamous outburst accusing Donald Trump of being in the Epstein files has managed to age both incredibly well and incredibly poorly…

… [T]he government released a new batch of millions of more files on Friday. They show that Musk had more than a few email exchanges with Epstein, including one correspondence where he asks to visit the convicted sex trafficker’s notorious island, where he allegedly brought dozens of underage girls to be abused…

The exchanges — which took place years after Epstein was first convicted of sex crimes against underage girls in 2008 — clearly contradict Musk’s claims about his relationship with Epstein in the past, which he has spent years downplaying. In 2019, he told Vanity Fair that he visited Epstein’s Manhattan house only on a single occasion, and just for half an hour. And the way he tells it, that was that. “He tried repeatedly to get me to visit his island. I declined,” Musk insisted.

Musk has firmly held that line ever since. For that matter, so has his chatbot Grok. But according to the newly released emails, Musk wasn’t declining Epstein’s invitations: he was inviting himself over…

Even more damningly in December 2012, Musk sent an email practically begging Epstein for an invitation to some debauchery.

“Do you have any parties planned? I’ve been working to the edge of sanity this year and so, once my kids head home after Christmas, I really want to hit the party scene in St Barts or elsewhere and let loose,” Musk wrote. He added that “a peaceful island experience is the opposite of what I’m looking for.”

Those were far from the only time the pair made plans. In April 2013, Epstein asked Musk if he’d be around to have “dinner with woody allen and crowd at my house,” referring to the influential filmmaker and actor who’s also been accused of child sex abuse. Musk replied that he “might be in town.”…

The documents alone won’t tell us how many of these get-togethers with Epstein materialized. But the mountain of exchanges make it clear that Musk’s angle that he barely knew or talked to the guy was a lie, which warrants further scrutiny into their ties. And while none of them rise to the level of being incriminating, they are awfully suspicious…

******
Ambassador Tom Barrack, you say?

In terms of American democracy this is probably the most important information I’ve seen from the Epstein files. This is probably much bigger than the Trump tower meeting, Manafort giving Deripaska info via Kilimnik, etc. This is a direct link btwn the Russian gov’t & the top of Trump’s campaign

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— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) January 30, 2026 at 8:28 PM

******

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Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Heckuva Ball Player, That Robinson Fella

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"I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler's Germany" – Rockefeller delegate Jackie Robinson watching the hard-right psychos take over the party at the 1964 RNC.

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— Zeddy (@zeddary.bsky.social) March 18, 2025 at 10:40 PM

Murphy the Trickster God is notoriously *not* a subtle scripter, but the thing is: Lauding Jackie Robinson, ‘one of the good ones’, has been a snark subject for as far back as I can remember, growing up in a less-than-genteel very white working class Bronx neighborhood back in the 1960s. Approving one of America’s greatest sports icons and civil rights leaders: Low Bar achieved, have a cookie, Truth Speaker! Archie Bunker gradually coming to appreciate Robinson’s talents was part of the ongoing evolution of one of the 1970’s most popular TV shows, back in the days when ‘popular television’ had an actual sociological impact. I honestly think this had to be a ‘dumb bot in the hands of idiots’ issue — even Elon’s script kiddies can’t have been this deliberately clueless…

Per ABC News, “DOD says it ‘mistakenly removed’ Jackie Robinson, other content from website amid DEI purge”:

The Pentagon said Wednesday that in “rare cases” it may have deliberately or mistakenly removed some webpages in efforts to remove diversity, equity and inclusion content after a tribute to Jackie Robinson’s Army service was suddenly scrubbed from a Department of Defense’s website.

A DOD official told ABC News that the Robinson webpage, among other content recently removed from Pentagon websites, was “mistakenly removed” due to the search terms used to scrub DEI terms from platforms.

The official said Robinson’s page and others that were unpublished, including content honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, the Enola Gay, the Navajo Code Talkers, history-making female fighter pilots and the Marines at Iwo Jima, would be republished.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the webpage for Robinson, which was headlined “Sports Heroes Who Served: Baseball Great Jackie Robinson Was WWII Soldier,” had been restored and seemed to be identical to its original version, which included language noting the “racial abuse” he faced and that he was “the first Black person to serve as a vice president of a major U.S. corporation.”…

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Saturday Night Slap-Fights Open Thread: It’s A Hard Knock Life

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Captain Obvious strikes again!

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Dank Grey Dawn Palate Cleanser Open Thread: Michigan’s Current GOP

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Thank you, WaterGirl, for tipping me to I owe one of you a hat tip this great article with a dumb headline. From Ben Mathis-Lilley, at Slate — “Even Donald Trump Doesn’t Know What He Created in the MAGA Swamps of Michigan”:

At 2 p.m. in the basement of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, the mood was distrustful, the air was humid with human moistness, and the disagreements over minor procedural issues simply would not end.

The people assembled in this particular conference room were delegates from Michigan’s 9th Congressional District. They were among those who had come to Grand Rapids this past March for a statewide meeting to help nominate a Republican presidential candidate. And despite all of them believing that the nominee in question should be “Donald J. Trump”—as they insisted on saying his name, for some reason—they had already been there for four hours.

One of the major points of contention was which of these delegates would get to attend the Republican National Convention later this year in Milwaukee to take on the largely symbolic act of officially certifying Trump’s victory in the primary. And things took a particularly sour turn when the meeting chair, Deb Ross, said that a delegate named Billy Putman, who was seeking to represent the district, may have submitted paperwork identifying himself as “uncommitted”—rather than as a supporter of Trump’s.

Putman is a bearded man whose suit jacket and evident enjoyment of public speaking marked him as the room’s most likely aspirant to higher office. (He lives with his parents, his siblings, and their families in a single home, an arrangement which was featured in a 2017 TLC reality series called Meet the Putmans.) He and others considered the allegation that he might not be a Trump supporter to be slanderous. In turn, he accused Ross of being “bogus,” and “disenfranchising everyone in this room.”…

This scene was a small expression of the absurd dysfunction that has characterized the operations of the Michigan GOP for nearly a year. It is also a window into the problems of the current Republican Party writ large—one of many intraparty conflicts at the state and local level that are exploding across the country.

The problem, in short, is that the MAGA activists in charge are eating each other alive. States in which old-guard “establishment” Republicans were run off—seemingly paving the way for unified efforts on behalf of Trump—are instead beset by resignations, lawsuits, and financial crises. Conflicts are ongoing in Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Georgia as well as Michigan, and are tearing apart smaller chapters at even more local levels…

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Late Night Epistemic Bubble Open Thread: Literary Predators / Parasites

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What is a voice of a generation?” Honor Levy asks me at Corner Bar on Canal Street. “Is it the most controversial voice? The first person to write in the way that everybody writes? The person that most people hate or love?”

She’s not quite sure she qualifies as a VOG, as she calls it (rhymes with dog), though, as a 26-year-old writer with a lot of hype around her first book, titled My First Book, which she has been tweeting about since she was at Bennington College, she knows that is part of the reason people might read (and write about) her.

Levy was one of the niche icons of Dimes Square, the scene that bloomed on the little patch of the Lower East Side where we are currently drinking Diet Cokes. During the pandemic, it was synonymous with a squad of smart if somewhat bratty young people with vaguely anti-woke artistic ambitions. Their provocations can seem a little beyond their sell-by dates today…

Back in the dinosaur days, when I was still in high school, the NYTimes Sunday Magazine gave its cover to a frog-faced Yale frosh with an essay titled “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back On Life“. Upon reading it, I thought This chick is Going Places, and I only hope some of them will be as repugnant as her writing here. Apparently the piece did attract fan mail from a number of Serious Literary People, among them J.D. Salinger, who would enter into some kind of a groomer / stalker relationship with that 18-year-old and further precipitate her literary career…

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Requiescat in pace, Flaco (Junk Food’ll Kill Ya)

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New York City has always had a soft spot for a louche European with a reputation as an apex predator… Although, actually, Flaco was born (at a captive bird park) in North Carolina. He lived twelve years in a small enclosure, and might’ve lived another forty there, but thirteen years is a good lifespan for eagle owls in the wild even in their natural habitat. Per the Washington Post:

After Flaco the owl escaped a vandalized cage at the Central Park Zoo and became a local celebrity last year, animal experts warned the public of the risks the bird faced in the wild. On Monday [March 25th], the Wildlife Conservation Society, which oversees New York’s Central Park Zoo, announced that those hazards led to Flaco’s death.

Flaco died last month after an apparent collision with a building on the Upper West Side. A necropsy exam later revealed that at the time of his death, Flaco had a herpesvirus from eating feral pigeons and had consumed four rodenticides used for rat control, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement.

Paul Calle, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s chief veterinarian, told The Washington Post that the virus, the rat poisons and the injuries Flaco suffered after flying into a building might have all contributed to the 13-year-old Eurasian eagle owl’s death.

“Sadly, they’re all things that we’ve seen in the past,” Calle said. “They’re kind of some of the risks that wildlife have when they live in the city.”

Flaco was transferred to the Central Park Zoo in 2010 after he was born at a North Carolina bird park. The owl lived there for nearly 12 years until someone cut the steel mesh of his exhibit in February 2023.

While zoo staff found Flaco and started tracking him, they were unable to capture him with bait and owl-call recordings. The New York Police Department posted on social media that Flaco even evaded officers. Zoo officials were initially worried the owl wouldn’t find food in the wild, but witnessed Flaco hunting and eating prey in Central Park within days of his escape…

The Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement at the time that the person who damaged Flaco’s exhibit was “responsible for his death.” A spokesman for the New York Police Department told The Post on Tuesday that officers are still searching for the perpetrator.

Eurasian eagle owls, which are native to Europe, Asia and the Middle East, typically live for one or two decades in the wild and up to 60 years in captivity, said Jessica Wilson, the executive director of New York City Audubon, a group that protects wild birds…

Wilson told The Post that rodenticides can cause muscle weakness and hemorrhages when consumed by birds, and those side effects might have caused Flaco to fly into a building.

“The minute he flew out of the Central Park Zoo, he was presented with so many different threats — threats that wild birds face every day,” Wilson said. “And it was really just a matter of time before one or multiple of those threats did him in.”

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GOP Venality Open Thread: In the Fallen Warlord’s Court: Purging Disloyalty / Rewarding Fealty

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The warlord has been driven into exile, at the moment, but he — and more importantly his backers — still hope to regain control of his former empire. While they regroup for the next battle, the ‘impure’ are purged, and the hoped-for future satrapies are divided…

I owe someone a hat tip for this gift link. Josh Dawsey, at the Washington Post — “Was the 2020 election stolen? Job interviews at RNC take an unusual turn”:

… In recent days, Trump advisers have quizzed multiple employees who had worked in key 2024 states — and who are reapplying for jobs — about their views on the last presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private interviews and discussions. The interviews have been conducted mostly virtually, as the applicants are based in key swing states.

“Was the 2020 election stolen?” one prospective employee recalled being asked in a room with two top Trump advisers.

The query about the 2020 election startled some of the potential employees, who viewed it as questioning their loyalty to Trump and as an unusual job interview question, according to the people familiar with the interviews. A group of senior Trump advisers has been in the RNC building in recent days conducting the interviews…

President Biden’s reelection campaign on Wednesday sharply criticized the RNC’s practice of asking prospective employees whether the 2020 election was stolen.

“In Donald Trump’s America, elections are only fair when he wins and nothing is off the table to stay in power — including violence like on January 6th and being a dictator on day one,” Biden spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “And, now, Donald Trump is demanding fealty to his extreme, anti-democratic beliefs to be part of his Republican Party.”

Instead of having employees based in Washington, Trump advisers have told prospective employees that many will be expected to move to Palm Beach, Fla., to be near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, hollowing out the RNC headquarters. RNC officials have said it is about combining the operations of the campaign and the committee for maximum use ahead of the general election…

This is great news for the media’s horse-race touts! Tina Nguyen, at Puck — “Trump’s Transition Circus Heads to Palm Beach”:

The polling and prediction markets may show Joe Biden and Donald Trump in a statistical dead heat, but fortune favors the drape-measurers, and for Trump allies and hangers-on eying roles in a putative Trump II administration, the jockeying has begun. As I reported in October, there are currently two dueling conservative groups working to staff the next Trump regime: Project 2025, spearheaded by the storied Heritage Foundation, with the participation of every right-wing organization under the sun (the Tea Party Patriots, Stephen Miller’s legal firm, Moms for Liberty, etcetera); and the America First Policy Institute’s Transition Project, featuring a who’s who of Trump has-beens (Kellyanne Conway, Hogan Gidley, Larry Kudlow, Pam Bondi, etcetera etcetera). Both organizations, each obviously headquartered in Washington, D.C., are focused on vetting the next generation of Trump-aligned foot soldiers to parachute into federal agencies on Day One.

But the real action of staffing a Trump White House will be occurring closer to Trump himself. Presidential candidates typically establish transition teams in Washington, where they are separate from the campaign, and where staffers can meet and evaluate the thousands of potential employees required to run the federal government. Trump, however, plans to establish his transition directly from the comfort of Mar-a-Lago, according to three people in the know. Also unlike previous transition teams, I’m told, staffers on the committee will have direct access to Trump, too. As a result, whomever ultimately chairs the group is more likely to be a gatekeeper than a true decision-maker—though gatekeeping is a tall order given the fates of his four White House chiefs of staff. “They’ve learned nothing,” sighed a former Trump administration official, predicting more 2016-style mayhem.

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