…someone…I have not been able to establish that anyone has entirely admitted who exactly
A thing to remember about these people is they're *both* violent authoritarians *and* incredibly bad at basic stuff. It can be very hard to tell these apart, especially on the fly.
…though it appears the thing got filed with the plane people out of the border patrol lot
it remains funny that the GoP’s talent pipeline is like “poaster from the veep’s gc, recent polisci grad, now senior policy @ s/p” and the dems is like “worked twenty years for various congresspeople and is considered a friendly face on capitol hill”
The chief problem is and (probably will always be) that foreign policy is an inherently elite profession with a limited pool to choose from hence shielded from any real accountability
Maybe when Jake Sullivan isn’t the Henry Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order I’ll entertain the notion that a lack of internal accountability in a micro-sect on the far left fringe is what holds back American internationalism.
…interdicted airspace
Furiously Googling whether this is a joke and yikes
…city councillors with aviation-geek-leanings were posting on subreddits about plane stuff to try to say the no-warning thing went for literally everyone from the FAA to all the sorts of local officials there seem to be
…the whole thing very much ran like some dumb-as-a-hegseth fuck-knuckle with no ability to understand what they were actually doing thought they did a clever overnight…& then people with working brains woke up…&…it would have taken less time to unfuck if it wasn’t so fucking hard for people with those to wrap them around the product of something that you expected to involve one but just made less sense the more you found out about it
Trump ignores a shouted question about why the El Paso airspace was closed as he departs his coal event
…the planes could do plane things again before lunchtime…as I tried to follow it, though…I don’t know how you convey how totally without any kind of sense the thing seemed to be…like…military flights were told they were grounded…&…not in a star wars way…but…they killed the balloon…with…a laser cannon…I mean…the cannon part seemed to be meaning “big”…but I actually saw it called that without it looking like they meant it as a joke
This story will make you want to cry, vomit, throw your phone against the wall, or some combination of all three … www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/…
A lot of low level accounting jobs are essentially human control points to prevent fraud, they haven't been automated not because it's impossible but because the amount of fraud you can commit against a fully automated purchasing system is basically unlimited
…”they gave the people who [did some nasty shit] a fucking laser canon?” I saw maybe a few times
i don't know a lot about @samd.bsky.social but as a "congestion pricing stan" and "RFK Jr. hater" i suspect that we're allies on a lot of stuff that matters so … let's not make this an opportunity to yell at him more generally
…but I did also see “so, the thing they’re talking about works sort of like, well, basically it’s a laser canon” stuff that makes me not altogether sure if I’d expect the thing to be…what do they call that shit
I listened to an NPR segment – probably TAL – interviewing AI researchers and I felt like I was listening to a charming, brilliant man calmly explaining how he knew leprechauns were stealing his slippers.
We now have data from Trump's first full year in office. Let's review the performance of Trump and the two parties since 1989 and a new age of globalization began. However you cut the data Trump continues to have worst jobs record of last six Presidents. 1/
In these last 37 years Democratic Presidents have averaged twice as many jobs created PER MONTH – 211,000 – as Republicans have averaged PER YEAR – 90,000. 3/
Here's the ad: Show this graph – VO: 97% if the jobs created over the past ten years were created under democratic administrations. Republicans destroy jobs and futures. Democrats create them.
…&…look…maybe I just don’t want to talk about or read about or learn about the people who got shot in BC…because all that is too tragic all on its own & there’s so damn many things that we could give that tag to
In a sign of how poorly this hearing is going for Pam Bondi, Fox News has cut away from live coverage which is highly unusual for a high-profile hearing of this sort
To me the chatbots pose zero interesting questions about the ‘nature of selfhood’ but dozens about the nature of manipulation. Here the Claude team pretends they are programming the robot for ethical responses but they land on one that is false and disingenuous.
…like 2nd order wagering on the certainty what isn’t gonna save us is the second coming of a christian messiah who at this point might actually sound the way bill hicks imagined him telling his prankster dad “they totally missed the point – I ain’t going back, no…they’re wearing fucking crosses…if they start wearing fishes again, maybe…but…give me one of them fossils…let’s fuck with them some more” [it’s an extended bit – see, the way the bible does all the [creation]>[series of implausibly long-lived members of an extended family tree]>[biblical times] = that’s how old the world is…stuff…is out by a lot on when the clock starts if you think fossils happened the way the science says…also…the crosses…”that’s like going up to jackie onassis wearing a rifle pin – just thinking of john, babe, just thinking of john…”
…when I first heard that bit…I never for a minute thought there’d be a time when rocking pin badges of (semi-)automatic assault rifles would be a species of political norm…so
How it started, how it’s going, would love to be an airline exec right about now (to say nothing of 1,000s of people whose travel plans were completely fucked for no reason)
…I thought that was pretty imaginative at the time
We are on the brink of like 90% literal state media
Larry Ellison and his nepobaby kid are going to just keep harassing Warner Brothers about this until Trump's DOJ boxes out Netflix so they can have their prizenot to be redundant but the goal is to shovel CBS/CNN/HBO and TikTok into the Fox News right wing propaganda state TV alliance
the corporate media is incapable of being honest about this for what I think should be obvious reasons, but Larry Ellison really is trying to build autocrat state televisionthe question is whether they're competent enough to pull it off
as always the New York Times frames this catastrophe in a way that downplays the fact this is an extremely unpopular decision being driven entirely by corporate corruption that will avoidably kill untold millions of people
HEGSETH GAVE THE GUYS SHOOTING CITIZENS IN THE STREET AND BREAKING DOWN DOORS AN ANTI-AIRCRAFT LASER.
Sorry for shouting I just can’t hear my thoughts over the ringing in my ears.
…I mean…the very young are often more foolish than they realize at the time…&…I dunno about the very…but…I was pretty young at the time
“But CBP has had heavy weaponry for a while now.”
Yeah, and that’s bad.
…it…is bad…like…I can’t sit here with a straight face & try to pretend that it isn’t bad…but…did some shitbird give tweet-abilities back to bovino…because
…I’m…about 90% sure that isn’t meant to be funny…or suggest that greg never watched the naked gun…but…you gotta take the funny when they let it slip…the “small, yapper-type” war-lapdog dude getting his woof ticket check book back…is…par for that course, perhaps
re: the el paso thing, I will say as a defense nerd that the answer is probably very, very stupid and benign
but given [gestures at world] there is of course always a chance it is very, very stupid and awful
…but…greg never tasted beaver…call me childish…but…sure greg…you didn’t have to say it for me to say that sounded like it already showed…some things might be acquired tastes…& it’s not hard to see how you wouldn’t have had an opportunity to…uhh…acquire that one…that part kind of radiates off you, as it happens…it’s weird you seem to think it makes you a big man, little guy…but…damn…just a dash of self-awareness & an even slightly broader lexicon & you could still talk about how subsistence-level hobo your diet is for clout without sticking your jaw out like that…I thought you had a thing about situational awareness & shit, dawg…hoss…chief…fucking cheese-dick cosplay-humping dipshit temu darth vader over here…I know…CA≠TX…but…shitbird migrated some already…so…birds of a feather & such
Like the admin story about “cartel drones” is so suspect that even Cruz and Cornyn are calling bullshit.
…anyway…it being sorted sort of depends pretty heavily on what you think the it is…or…if you pick one you could say it about…was…&…it’s just one straw in the haystack your needle’s lost in that’s on the back of a broken camel that’s been a habeas petition away since you carelessly let it get misplaced by nobody who’ll admit to being anybody because they know they’d be bodied…boy…some brave new world we got ourselves, huh?
According to multiple NYT sources, it wasn’t even military personnel at Fort Bliss that fired an anti-drone laser at alleged cartel drones. It was CBP who used the weapon on loan from DoD against a child’s party balloon they mistook for a drone. The Pentagon gave CBP an anti-aircraft weapon.
FWIW, last year DHS briefing officers at the Army Command and Staff College told them that cartels use drones inside Mexico and they INFER that those drones periodically cross the US border but that they don’t have actual substantial data on how many or how often or if/when.
…so…the insane levels of potentially cataclysmic incompetence continue to…somehow…be given their head
“Last May, as a groundswell built demanding public scrutiny of the Justice Department's records on Epstein, the agency ran into a problem: it had already destroyed its master copy of surveillance video from Epstein's final hours in the Metropolitan Correctional Center.”
…no…not like “you, head – off…” is the alternative so “given” like loki got to keep his & later on bill the bard nicked the nifty bit for a thing that will forever be one of the all-time “is it anti-semitic, tho?” classics
…the fuck is it with people being harder of reading &/or thinking than they are skinned…do we think @RNCReasearch knows what they said & just expects that to be part of the self-selection filter to send that one where they want it to land…or…do we think they literally can not grasp the “both sides” of that?
[lady-we-hate] Calls to Execute [our guy] [lady-we-hate] “they execute pedophiles”
“[our guy] in.our.own.words.&.estimations…is…definitely the guy she just said should be executed & not that that’s what would happen to him in somalia *if* he was a thing we keep forgetting to say he isn’t while taking references to him being as definitively & unambiguously about him because let’s face it we all know he’s as guilty as they come so the *real* problem is she said the world would be better if it had been a few inches over to the left that one time…uhh…what do you mean I just called poppa-peach-popsicle-palpatine a p-word?”
…this is why people say stuff to some people like “can you even fucking hear yourself?”
Todd Blanche says “You are fired, Donald Kinsella.” Kinsella was just selected as the US Attorney for the Northern District of New York by the district’s judges, as permitted by statute.
…you didn’t fucking find a qualified body to fill a spot when you took that shot & that can’t lie empty just because you couldn’t/wouldn’t…so the rules kicked in & people who don’t have their heads up their asses about this shit because they know how it works for a fucking living…filled that fucker…in a fashion fully backstopped by said rules in a way you fully fucking aren’t you wile e coyote there’s-no-floor-when-the-dust-settles fuckwits…so…you…or “him”…FUCKING CAN’T FUCKING FIRE THAT PERSON YOU OUTRAGEOUS WISHCASTINGxWISH.COM FUCKSTICK …that…is…not…how…any…of…that…fucking…works
NEW: “CBS Evening News” producer Alicia Hastey sends a bombshell farewell note:Stories are “evaluated not just on their journalistic merit but on whether they conform to a shifting set of ideological expectations.”
…just because you think we all mean “works” with the quotes every time the way you fucking abject losers have to just to make it even seem like your shit could pass for anything that could
…the somethings that gotta give gotta get around to being a different class of things or it’s gonna turn out one of these days the game they give away is going to be so over you can’t get the stains out
The short story of the 21st century in the United States is that out of malice or cowardice or some combination of both, every presidency contributed to building and expanding a federal secret police of goons and thugs, despite clear warning and obvious abuses, until we got to this point.
…so…anyway…if you…don’t think chris hayes is on the same side as wil stancil…which…possibly to some extent in the last day or two it might have seemed like either of those two might even have agreed with…however much that seems like the “give your opponents everything they want” way to look at that…well…then…some parts of even relatively small parts of this picture will continue to make precious little sense
This is not a criticism of Sky or Will, but I do find it kind of weird that I have encountered maybe a hundredth of this kind of user, despite moving in the same circles and being a relatively big account, by BSky standards. It just feels very random.
…but…despite lacking for a recent concordance from “our” correspondent…86-ing gestapo greg has not made any of the shit that had minneapolis out on the frozen streets go anywhere but bad…it’s a suppressive campaign of urban terrorist insurgency…that has the allegedly-some-value-of-either federal “authorities” playing the part of the insurgent terrorists…in a US city where the crime rates were on a downward trend…AKA the good direction…& they have to try to make it a crime to remind people that it’s as illegal to follow an illegal order as it is to give it…& most of all if you wear a uniform & take oaths to be more than mere words
BREAKING: The supporting affidavit for the warrant to search Fulton County election records has been unsealed. Read it via @lawfaremedia.org: www.documentcloud.org/documents/26…
Having one FBI agent affidavit is normal. The contents of this affidavit, though… that’s the bizarre part.
it’s also bizarre that this “Special Agent” from the atlanta field office had to take the affidavit all the way to another one of these interim US Attorneys in Missouri to file in Georgia for the warrant
Not bizarre, so much as telling, but I suspect that was rather your point delivered through sarcasm.
But why is Special Agent in scare quotes? It is any FBI (or DEA, HSI, ATF, etc.) agent’s actual title.
this one got a lot of responsibility in a short time
…think it was one of winston’s that had it that if you’re going through hell
BREAKING: We reached a landmark settlement in our lawsuit challenging the government's unlawful targeting and detention of journalists for their reporting near the southern border.Journalists must be free to report the news without unjustified government scrutiny.
…the alternative…if you can still muster basic logic…is to choose to make hell your new home
ROSS: Tell us who sent Maxwell there, since you agree she shouldn't be there?BONDI: I said I do not agree she should receive special treatment. She was transferred to the same level facility. I don't know why. Instead of talking about Ghislane Maxwell, we should talk about Iryna Zarutska
…five & some hours that bitch ran that act…when they got the epstein survivors to raise their hands to indicate who still hadn’t heard from the department that took the email they were sent to say “make sure you don’t release these names in public” & put that shit out like a fucking press release about what the fuck they had to say about anything…she…& a row of shit-guzzling aides & acolytes between those people standing up with their arms aloft & the back of her head she kept facing them…couldn’t look that in the fucking eye…but she could consult her 3rd binder of just-notes-on-how-to-flame-individual-dems-for-the-stuff-we-came-to-do-today-clippings…& call a woman whose grandfather died in a camp in the holocaust…an anti-semite…& then smug-it-up like a screentest for some bitch that dies in heathers the moment that lady leaves the chamber in outright disgust…like…actual preening happened at that point…if someone had given the bitch a fucking bonio biscuit & called it a scooby snack she couldn’t have smirked in more self-congratulatory fashion…because…that’s the job she thinks she has…& she’s probably right about that part
Rep. Balint: This is not a game, Secretary.Bondi: I'm Attorney General.Balint: Apologies, I couldn't tell.
…& what little sentience there is is devoted to this shit
Perfect illustration of what the Trump regime means by "antisemitism," how it distorts the concept into a weapon.See the end where AG Bondi, after trying to change the subject by smearing a Jewish Rep. as antisemitic and noticeably upsetting the descendant of Holocaust victims, grins with pleasure.
There’s gotta be a German word for the cursed experience of reading the Fulton County affidavit after reporting on the 2020 election in extreme detail. Even redacted, every niche witness jumps out—many conspiracy theorists with no real expertise. The US government treating them as credible is nuts.
I don’t know what Aaron and @acyn.bsky.social get paid to do this work but I hope it’s a lot because I would literally be spending my free time in a padded cell with dull scissors after watching this garbage all day.
Per @pabloreports.bsky.social: Bondi has a “burn book” organized by the names of Democratic lawmakers so she can attack them when they ask her questions.
[…yup…that’s JackinEC making a bid for peak mansplain by miss-spelling the name of the woman he’s trying to school by telling her he couldn’t understand her reference to her references about having the bona fides to bona all fides about the thing apparently his chatbot brainfarted the spelling of the part he could have saved himself by noticing…that…is a thing a thing that’s supposed to have a brain behind it button-mashed into existence so the world could let him know how much smarter than some woman he must perforce be being…how are we not fucking extinct, y’all?]
It turns out that the only thing standing between us and a version of the pentagon that closes airspace to shoot down party balloons were those diversity trainings at work
Is this how I find out El Paso's airspace got shut down due to party balloons?
…FUCK YOU, REALITY…I SEE YOU DUCKIN’ ME…ONE DAY…ONE FUCKING DAY, MOTHERFUCKER…THIS TESTING-ME BULLSHIT GOTTA FUCKING STOP
[…ok…but…it’d be nice if there were an option other than “yup – happens to all of us mortals”]
Please note that she's READING this. She PREPARED this as a rebuttal for questions about Epstein. She planned this, had someone write it down, and read it.
It should be illuminating that prosecuting sex trafficking, the thing that prosecutors and police across the country have been using as a cash cow to fund surveillance and weaponry, is actually not something government prosecutors care about at all. The system does not hold people accountable.
This was interesting from Swalwell, normally a very combative interviewer of Trump admin officials. I think it was an attempt to get her off her prepared talking points, and it worked.
Man, I wish they’d bring back cool trends like bell bottoms or swing dancing instead of COINTELPRO
NEW: CBP signs a new deal with Clearview AI to access its scraped image database for "tactical targeting," including efforts to “disrupt, degrade, and dismantle” networks of people labeled security threats.
if ICE is taking your photograph, seems like one of the best things you can do in the moment is tuck your chin and look down. maybe that's intuitive but the tech does seem to be really weak at that angle, fwiw.
…if you don’t know jerry…you…are probably doing social media wrong…but…probably not in a way you need to be concerned about?
people will think anything on bluesky. “he’s got thousands of followers! he must have good posts.” no they aren’t. that isn’t true.
…some of them definitely aren’t half-bad…some of them are definitely more than half…on purpose…it’s…like a whole thing?
nice bit you got there. would be a shame if i forgot i made the exact bit 186 days ago and posted it anew
caller 12 you’re on bluesky at night what’s on your mind
folks i still got it
…see…le question c’est fucking-begged…non?
Massie: "Here is an email that was sent by the victims' lawyers to the DOJ. It was a list of names not to release. What did the DOJ do with this email? They released it! Literally the worst thing you could do the survivors you did."
This is another very important and revealing exchange. Rep. Scanlon is making a crucial point, one well worth listening to. And she does it calmly. But Trump has created a market for obnoxious, childish defiance of Congress. The Attorney General‘s response is outrageous, even impeachment-worthy.
You can joke about Pam Bondi’s ridiculous unprofessionalism all you want, but I’m deeply shocked by it: She acts as if she fears absolutely no consequences, convinced that there will be no more political power transfers. — This should shake everyone to their core.
Court battle over surveillance footage at the Broadview ICE detention center reaches new levels of kafkaesque absurdity: The DOJ claimed it *couldn't afford* hard drives to put video footage on. Plaintiffs bought THE US GOVERNMENT hard drives. ICE "lost" them.www.404media.co/government-l…
I’ve never felt unsafe in this bougie neighborhood a day in my life. This is a 25 mph zone, full of fancy bars and restaurants, a curling club, salons, boutiques, and one of the busiest coffee shops around. They are doing their damndest to wreck everything here.
This is the aftermath of an ICE kidnapping a few blocks from my home in St. Paul—an hour ago. A quiet street full of broken glass and at least three wrecked cars. The target of the kidnapping was taken away by ambulance. He was on a stretcher and covered by a sheet, though a cop said he was alive.
Video of the ICE-kidnapping victim under a sheet. You will also hear the officer say he saw them moving. I am inclined to believe the person was alive.
i am increasingly bothered by terms like "showdown" or "face-off" or "clash" when used to describe corrupt and fascist power coming up against resistance because there's an implied symmetry that does not exist.
Not for nothing, but from like the very beginning of my career a very common response from smart people when I would tell them what I do is to assume they could just easily do it if they applied themselves the merest bit, and the AI stuff rings real heavy with that horse shit to me
Like my two tech forward friends were like ‘you’re gonna be out of a job’ and I’m like no, you cannot trust the machine to review a 1065 are you fucking mental
I genuinely do think that it is incredibly transformative technology -for people in the software adn tech space- and they just seem to assume that it will also like turn a 50k audit engagement into nothign the same way it would a software contract, and they’re just different things
i call it “software brain.” the obvious mechanics can be turned into a software workflow with minimal effort, but any solution that apes the steps without understanding where the value of the process is, ultimately will never actually be useful
I love how the media uncritically repeats his speed freak ravings, now that’s the sign of a functional and healthy system
xAI all-hands meeting: Elon Musk tells staff that xAI needs a factory on the moon to build AI satellites and a massive catapult to launch them into space (New York Times)Main Link | Techmeme Permalink
everything this admin does falls into the "really stupid" bucket or the "insanely sinister" bucket. by default most stuff goes into the really stupid bucket. while putting a really stupid item in the insanely sinister bucket looks bad, putting an insanely sinister item in the stupid bucket is worse
I know this gets lost in stuff like “Bondi goes apeshit” (though the two are related)(thank you, RIP, for your “Bondi goes apeshit” roundup) but this is an incredibly important shift in public opinion.
…kind of had to backfill some bits today but I did get a run in about the part where 97% of jobs created across the past 6 presidencies go in the (D) column
…I get *why* gallup might want to walk them the remaining distance by not posting grades until after the end of term…but…for real…they wait until it’s a year that lets all the references say *88*…years…I mean…way to knock your dog-whistle out the park…the bitches go wild…we only asked what you thought of the guy in the chair by the button until that routine was [you know] years in & now it’s…look…we don’t have to play that numbers game no more
…how the actual fuck did that make it out of a serious concern
…it’s all just the same fucking dogshit-dinner+please-sir-can-I-have-some-more game of give them all they ask for & more fucking faux-sincere ratfucking insanity?
In a shocking swerve, I kind of agree with Gallup here! I don’t think presidential approval ratings are a particularly strong barometer of anything and a hundred other polling shops do them too so it’s not like they’re going to vanish.
That said: You need to have more sense than to announce it now. You cannot be so clueless about politics in the year of our lord 2026 to not realize that you’re either being incredibly obvious about where your sympathies lie or incredibly clueless about the entire concept of politics. I’m not sure which one is worse!
…I tend to agree…I don’t actually think gallup are closet nazis delighted by the 88 part
…just…you’re in the business of claiming to have your finger on all the pulses of what passes through opinion-canvassing places that want to be seen as seeing the little picture making up the big picture
…&…you…didn’t have that occur to you the way it will to several stripes of those opinion-havers in ways that’re different enough you might find it useful to…I dunno…do polling about?
…but policy by applause-o-meter is no fun when the crowd all came for boo-urns, I guess
This doesn’t actually shed any new information on this, despite the headline, but if you’re looking for a chronological explanation of the El Paso Clusterfuck, this is pretty straightforward.
My wife was getting pretty annoyed at me last night because we had the NBC Nightly News on and they were reporting about the El Paso thing and I was like “say what they actually shot down” 30 seconds in, and then “CAN WE SAY WHAT THEY SHOT DOWN?!” a minute in and then I’m basically screaming it by 90 seconds in. Finally *FINALLY* at the end of the pretty long segment, they hit the “Turns out they shot down a party balloon.” Great! But why isn’t the lead on this “government randomly shuts down airspace over party balloon” versus all this throat-clearing for two minutes first? And the report was fine! It still made them look like clueless amateurs! But somehow the impartial news media still can’t help being like “Yes, Curley has hit Moe with a two-by-four again but surely this time they’ll get that fence up.”
I saw Andrea’s skeet yesterday and I’m with a lot of the commenters on it: Bondi is not coming across as imperious or invincible; she’s coming across as small and terrified. I know she doesn’t care about sex abuse victims, but she does care about looking good on TV because it’s all Trump cares about and she did NOT look good on TV yesterday.
The main point is that Bondi is trying to curry favor with Dementia Donny, and her tactic is to use his: hurling ridiculous insults and throwing out bizarre non sequiturs. Problem is, Donny’s worshippers are conditioned to accept it from him. She just looks absolutely insane.
I think ‘small and terrified’ is pretty accurate. She seems like she’s trying to pull a Hail Mary (poorly) to save her job. These are actions stemming from desperation.
Yeah, even these clowns can’t spin this. I think one of the things that many people don’t get, because they didn’t follow Bondi’s career in Florida, is how deeply incompetent she is. That was absolutely her defining characteristic, and still is.
Trump opponents widely thought that Pam Bondi failed miserably yesterday in Congress. But Republicans also thought she did badly. How do we know? Because they aren't talking about it.Silence about bad news is the number-one right wing media tell: Zero results for Bondi at Fox and Newsmax today.
Allow me to open this with “by saying this I do not condone or agree with it”
But a right-wing woman can’t do what Trump does and expect a positive reaction! They will NEVER like it or accept it because they do not like women! If it doesn’t play well, it’s gonna be her fault (and if it does play well, they’ll either say she wasn’t strong enough or they’ll just wait for the next chance she has to fail). She could repeat a Trump speech to the letter and they’d still call her “shrill” because she’s not a man.
That she’s also bad at it and clearly incompetent, well, that’s just icing on that particular cake.
I said much the same to my wife this morning when we were discussing Bondi’s “performance” and I mentioned that the MAGA reaction was very negative. She was suprised, but misogyny is baked into MAGA. By ranting and raving Bondi just gets written off as a “hysterical woman.” Even by Trump, I suspect.
…so…kinda not the same but maybe still the same…or…at least the
“by saying this I do not condone or agree with it”
…would seem to apply the same sort of way…but…the other day someone I know remarked that they were learning from their kid getting into things 80s & 90s & maybe some 60s & 70s…that…they found films they remembered fondly fucking uncomfortable to watch…& that a lot of it was how if(america):then(good) the whole output of hollywood was to them…&…that person has a tolerance for joe rogan I have never truly been able to grasp given all the ways I know them to be one of the more decent people I know…&…well…among that stuff is your eastwood cop/cowboy era…your john wayne…all the louis l’amour live action remakes…the whole “how the west was won” deal…like…literally…that guy wrote one called that…that they made a movie of…more people probably saw hondo…or a few others…but…those were better books than most of the genre…I had an aunt you wouldn’t have suspected it of on account of being so very scottish & never having been anywhere near the west I ever heard tell of…who was ride or die for zane grey…a cousin who went long on JT edson…the sudden books floated about…but…louis…maybe he exaggerated…but he liked to have a bit in the flyleaf or somewhere about how in some senses he aimed to be truthful…in a “if I say there’s a waterhole & you go there you can find water & drink it” way…&…rose-tinted & romanticized & dramatically licensed as his stuff might be it pushed a few basic principles pretty hard
…the reasons the searchers is a tough watch that’s still maybe not getting what made that book hit hard when it first landed…because what fates might be worse than death in what eyes has moved about a bunch…both between the book & the movie…& the movie & now…but the part where even in the wild west the mark of civilisation is that women can walk the streets unmolested…unless they work in the saloon or whatever…these people think that is the thing it makes it make sense they should get to have a gun to be a bright shining line that can’t be crossed about…only…try asking women who molests those when they try to walk the streets in the normal way not the euphemism…but…ask the other sort & hold onto your hat
…&…l’amour’s sackett clan are like if the mafia was all jack reachers or whatever…& there’s a lot of books & they span a considerable span of generations & locations & assessments of who might be “good enough to ride the river with”…& if a horse with a hobbled hoof could be the margin of life/death…stealing a ride was potentially a proxy murder in too many ways to treat it like it could be less & still live in a world where on the word of a stranger they’d get the one they asked you to loan them back to you before the lack of it pinched you so hard you begrudged the loan when you knew the keenness of the need & would that were the roles reversed you’d be extended the same…the life/death thing turned on how much your word was good that you were as good as your word
…but all the high noon shit was always getting made out to come down to the two big ones…you called a man a coward…one of you had to get dead or out of town
…they’re…seems like…all cowards…first & foremost…& they want everyone else to be the ones that have to go settle someplace else so they don’t have to admit they can’t build shit
…& the other one…is the reason for the stupid convention that makes a simple observation verba-non-granta in politics…can’t call a man a liar…or you might as well bring back gauntlets just to throw the fuckers…that’s…why…even though…if they walked their “old ways” walk…& kept ostentatiously skipping the loophole that you can’t play that game if only one of you is armed…the ubiquitous shooting death news stories would read really quite notably different
…if they had to contend with the sort of reaching all the cowboy heroes did that was never for the sky & always for the hot iron…instead of all the reaching that the talking of would make those guys make them fill their hands…& we all got to hide in the root cellar of the general store until the noises stopped before we planted them all & got on with building something
The people currently in power don’t understand “soft power” to begin with so it doesn’t matter to them, but I don’t think people who do get it — but still gotta chase that almighty four-quadrant yuan banger — have any concept how much Hollywood has helped to cushion America’s reputation over the years. Yeah, sure, armed takeovers and banana republics, but hey, also “E.T.”! You quite literally can’t buy that cultural boost, but you can throw it in a toilet to make a little more money in Q3, so you gotta do that.
Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think we should be taking scientific advice from a demented pedophile who tried to redraw a hurricane chart with a sharpie.
I watched too much of the Bondi thing & my major criticism of the dems is nobody brought up the fact that she was the prosecutor in Florida during the whole Epstein thing & declined to prosecute him! She kept blaming previous administrations yesterday & somebody needed to call her out!
I still remember the massive wingnut freak out about Operation Jade Helm 16. The massive freak out about a military exercise run during an admin pretty mild with military intervention unless it was drone warfare in Afghanistan and Yemen as opposed to another Admin so stupid and gung ho to kill their own citizens and invade allies.
So this is reported on Axios, a right-wing news service. And the polls cited include Trump’s favorite, Rasmussen.
A year into Trump’s term, voters say Biden was better
I know this gets lost in stuff like “Bondi goes apeshit” (though the two are related)(thank you, RIP, for your “Bondi goes apeshit” roundup) but this is an incredibly important shift in public opinion.
…kind of had to backfill some bits today but I did get a run in about the part where 97% of jobs created across the past 6 presidencies go in the (D) column
…I get *why* gallup might want to walk them the remaining distance by not posting grades until after the end of term…but…for real…they wait until it’s a year that lets all the references say *88*…years…I mean…way to knock your dog-whistle out the park…the bitches go wild…we only asked what you thought of the guy in the chair by the button until that routine was [you know] years in & now it’s…look…we don’t have to play that numbers game no more
…how the actual fuck did that make it out of a serious concern
…it’s all just the same fucking dogshit-dinner+please-sir-can-I-have-some-more game of give them all they ask for & more fucking faux-sincere ratfucking insanity?
In a shocking swerve, I kind of agree with Gallup here! I don’t think presidential approval ratings are a particularly strong barometer of anything and a hundred other polling shops do them too so it’s not like they’re going to vanish.
That said: You need to have more sense than to announce it now. You cannot be so clueless about politics in the year of our lord 2026 to not realize that you’re either being incredibly obvious about where your sympathies lie or incredibly clueless about the entire concept of politics. I’m not sure which one is worse!
…I tend to agree…I don’t actually think gallup are closet nazis delighted by the 88 part
…just…you’re in the business of claiming to have your finger on all the pulses of what passes through opinion-canvassing places that want to be seen as seeing the little picture making up the big picture
…&…you…didn’t have that occur to you the way it will to several stripes of those opinion-havers in ways that’re different enough you might find it useful to…I dunno…do polling about?
…but policy by applause-o-meter is no fun when the crowd all came for boo-urns, I guess
This doesn’t actually shed any new information on this, despite the headline, but if you’re looking for a chronological explanation of the El Paso Clusterfuck, this is pretty straightforward.
Reporter reveals new info about ‘super duper secret weapon’ that closed Texas airspace
My wife was getting pretty annoyed at me last night because we had the NBC Nightly News on and they were reporting about the El Paso thing and I was like “say what they actually shot down” 30 seconds in, and then “CAN WE SAY WHAT THEY SHOT DOWN?!” a minute in and then I’m basically screaming it by 90 seconds in. Finally *FINALLY* at the end of the pretty long segment, they hit the “Turns out they shot down a party balloon.” Great! But why isn’t the lead on this “government randomly shuts down airspace over party balloon” versus all this throat-clearing for two minutes first? And the report was fine! It still made them look like clueless amateurs! But somehow the impartial news media still can’t help being like “Yes, Curley has hit Moe with a two-by-four again but surely this time they’ll get that fence up.”
Ha! I also thought of the Stooges when I was hearing about this.
I saw Andrea’s skeet yesterday and I’m with a lot of the commenters on it: Bondi is not coming across as imperious or invincible; she’s coming across as small and terrified. I know she doesn’t care about sex abuse victims, but she does care about looking good on TV because it’s all Trump cares about and she did NOT look good on TV yesterday.
Yes, that was a PR debacle for her. This is an interesting take and I think I agree with it:
Pam Bondi is performing for an audience of one
The main point is that Bondi is trying to curry favor with Dementia Donny, and her tactic is to use his: hurling ridiculous insults and throwing out bizarre non sequiturs. Problem is, Donny’s worshippers are conditioned to accept it from him. She just looks absolutely insane.
And how did that work out for her?
White House ‘less than thrilled’ with Pam Bondi’s handling of Epstein matter: CNN reporter
I think ‘small and terrified’ is pretty accurate. She seems like she’s trying to pull a Hail Mary (poorly) to save her job. These are actions stemming from desperation.
Yeah, even these clowns can’t spin this. I think one of the things that many people don’t get, because they didn’t follow Bondi’s career in Florida, is how deeply incompetent she is. That was absolutely her defining characteristic, and still is.
Allow me to open this with “by saying this I do not condone or agree with it”
But a right-wing woman can’t do what Trump does and expect a positive reaction! They will NEVER like it or accept it because they do not like women! If it doesn’t play well, it’s gonna be her fault (and if it does play well, they’ll either say she wasn’t strong enough or they’ll just wait for the next chance she has to fail). She could repeat a Trump speech to the letter and they’d still call her “shrill” because she’s not a man.
That she’s also bad at it and clearly incompetent, well, that’s just icing on that particular cake.
I said much the same to my wife this morning when we were discussing Bondi’s “performance” and I mentioned that the MAGA reaction was very negative. She was suprised, but misogyny is baked into MAGA. By ranting and raving Bondi just gets written off as a “hysterical woman.” Even by Trump, I suspect.
…so…kinda not the same but maybe still the same…or…at least the
…would seem to apply the same sort of way…but…the other day someone I know remarked that they were learning from their kid getting into things 80s & 90s & maybe some 60s & 70s…that…they found films they remembered fondly fucking uncomfortable to watch…& that a lot of it was how if(america):then(good) the whole output of hollywood was to them…&…that person has a tolerance for joe rogan I have never truly been able to grasp given all the ways I know them to be one of the more decent people I know…&…well…among that stuff is your eastwood cop/cowboy era…your john wayne…all the louis l’amour live action remakes…the whole “how the west was won” deal…like…literally…that guy wrote one called that…that they made a movie of…more people probably saw hondo…or a few others…but…those were better books than most of the genre…I had an aunt you wouldn’t have suspected it of on account of being so very scottish & never having been anywhere near the west I ever heard tell of…who was ride or die for zane grey…a cousin who went long on JT edson…the sudden books floated about…but…louis…maybe he exaggerated…but he liked to have a bit in the flyleaf or somewhere about how in some senses he aimed to be truthful…in a “if I say there’s a waterhole & you go there you can find water & drink it” way…&…rose-tinted & romanticized & dramatically licensed as his stuff might be it pushed a few basic principles pretty hard
…the reasons the searchers is a tough watch that’s still maybe not getting what made that book hit hard when it first landed…because what fates might be worse than death in what eyes has moved about a bunch…both between the book & the movie…& the movie & now…but the part where even in the wild west the mark of civilisation is that women can walk the streets unmolested…unless they work in the saloon or whatever…these people think that is the thing it makes it make sense they should get to have a gun to be a bright shining line that can’t be crossed about…only…try asking women who molests those when they try to walk the streets in the normal way not the euphemism…but…ask the other sort & hold onto your hat
…&…l’amour’s sackett clan are like if the mafia was all jack reachers or whatever…& there’s a lot of books & they span a considerable span of generations & locations & assessments of who might be “good enough to ride the river with”…& if a horse with a hobbled hoof could be the margin of life/death…stealing a ride was potentially a proxy murder in too many ways to treat it like it could be less & still live in a world where on the word of a stranger they’d get the one they asked you to loan them back to you before the lack of it pinched you so hard you begrudged the loan when you knew the keenness of the need & would that were the roles reversed you’d be extended the same…the life/death thing turned on how much your word was good that you were as good as your word
…but all the high noon shit was always getting made out to come down to the two big ones…you called a man a coward…one of you had to get dead or out of town
…they’re…seems like…all cowards…first & foremost…& they want everyone else to be the ones that have to go settle someplace else so they don’t have to admit they can’t build shit
…& the other one…is the reason for the stupid convention that makes a simple observation verba-non-granta in politics…can’t call a man a liar…or you might as well bring back gauntlets just to throw the fuckers…that’s…why…even though…if they walked their “old ways” walk…& kept ostentatiously skipping the loophole that you can’t play that game if only one of you is armed…the ubiquitous shooting death news stories would read really quite notably different
…if they had to contend with the sort of reaching all the cowboy heroes did that was never for the sky & always for the hot iron…instead of all the reaching that the talking of would make those guys make them fill their hands…& we all got to hide in the root cellar of the general store until the noises stopped before we planted them all & got on with building something
…I’d…maybe even pay to watch that?
The people currently in power don’t understand “soft power” to begin with so it doesn’t matter to them, but I don’t think people who do get it — but still gotta chase that almighty four-quadrant yuan banger — have any concept how much Hollywood has helped to cushion America’s reputation over the years. Yeah, sure, armed takeovers and banana republics, but hey, also “E.T.”! You quite literally can’t buy that cultural boost, but you can throw it in a toilet to make a little more money in Q3, so you gotta do that.
cf.
[i-could-do-this-all-day.gif]
I watched too much of the Bondi thing & my major criticism of the dems is nobody brought up the fact that she was the prosecutor in Florida during the whole Epstein thing & declined to prosecute him! She kept blaming previous administrations yesterday & somebody needed to call her out!
https://deanobeidallah.substack.com/p/we-need-to-know-why-pam-bondi-did?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share
Another one bites the dust…
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/with-house-gop-majority-teetering-on-the-brink-florida-congressman-plans-to-retire-early-report/
huh….christopher vanden heuvel of rio rancho?
was rio rancho settled by the dutch by chance?
coz that sure sounds like once upon a time a van den heuvel moved to rio rancho and took the towns name as his own…
I still remember the massive wingnut freak out about Operation Jade Helm 16. The massive freak out about a military exercise run during an admin pretty mild with military intervention unless it was drone warfare in Afghanistan and Yemen as opposed to another Admin so stupid and gung ho to kill their own citizens and invade allies.