Not Again

Here's the thing about tipping blue, even if it's one perfect storm election. This would mean that a cohort of Repubs dislike Paxton enough to vote D for the first time. As someone who voted straight R until '16, I can tell you that breaking the taboo is a watershed for the rest of your voting life.

“Departures from these practices should never be countenanced because they risk allowing prosecutors to impact national elections.” -Todd Blanche on DOJ’s 60-day rule, September 2024

Big Beautiful Lawsuit

Reminder that Vice President JD Vance has said that he considers Curtis Yarvin a friend

Holy shit.

BREAKING: A while back, I sued DOGE (FOIA) to get Musk's communications. DOJ argued that Musk wasn't a govt employee anymore, BUT Hegseth just hired him again to work on a Pentagon warfare initiative called Project Meridian. So we noticed Judge Boasberg. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Gas prices up, mortgage rates up, inflation up, employment faltering. New taxes, new hostilities, new wars. More people struggling to pay for necessities. Look at this shiny new box for your passport, though. Nice fit and finish on that cardboard.

While I'm enjoying the humiliation justifiably being heaped on Senator Eric Schmitt, I don't don't think enough mockery is being directed at his accomplice, Senator Kennedy, the Cornpone Clown, with this stupidly victorious expression as he smugly holds up the ridiculous "evidence."

36 minutes before the hearing started.

The funniest thing about the Schmitt rake stomp is that if it'd been a Dem we'd have a week of think pieces about how Dems lack of hoops literacy was alienating them from real America.

Wtf?

A-fucking-men

Anyone who believes this is beyond help.

Huge bummer when you’re just innocently trying to join and promote a movement that hates Black people, immigrants, and Jews — but then you discover that they have a dark side. apple.news/A9g-feRPSTme...

Amazing find. GO HOME SUSAN.

Incredible. First Secretary Mullin claimed that DHS had identified 15,903 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter roll. Then DHS officials told a skeptical Nevada, no no no, that’s just people we flagged. Here are the names of 185 people we KNOW aren’t citizens. All 185 were citizens. DHS got 100% wrong.

How can our President go to a meeting of World Leaders and threaten to obliterate a whole country without Congress calling an emergency session to impeach him? Come on, people. This guy is nuts & is not what we want for a leader. Even his former voters have had enough.

It's depressing how many accounts on here are scam accounts.

I found watching Trump’s UN speech today deeply depressing. It is a matter of national shame and humiliation that he is our president. Every country in the world, friend and foe alike, sees we are governed by a vainglorious fool.

DAVE MATTHEWS: “I said it last night, but I’ll say it again - man, I’m so tired of this fuckin’ President.”

Trump threatening "annihilation", clearly the worst war crime in the history of mankind, should have him impeached and removed by sundown. Completely unacceptable. Beyond comprehension that we go on like this.

The Russian government has long been accused of efforts to influence U.S. elections. This week, we revealed an extraordinary development: a member of Putin’s circle financially supporting the president’s son. Join us Sept. 23 for a virtual conversation: events.propublica.org/don-jr-weddi...

Remember when Jake Tapper dug in his heels to defend Fox News when Obama dared to move them to the second row of the press room? Well, now that the roles have reversed, I'm sure that Fox News will -- come on, stop laughing, let me finish

Every day a new embarrassment and alarm bell.

Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenses at Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding, including renting out a private island. National security experts say it raises an urgent question: What motivated Kremlev to spend a fortune cultivating the connection?

The US already got a do over. A mulligan. A second chance. Much of the world, especially US allies, were ready to write off Trump’s first term as a fluke. The American people’s choice to put him back in power—as a convicted felon, after an openly bigoted, anti-democracy campaign—showed it was not.

Reading the Internet today is like: "Submarines are impossible because humans can't breathe water. Prove me wrong, be specific. If you won't, you acknowledge I'm correct."

I said it at the time (and before!), but I truly believe that American voters electing Donald Trump for a second term in 2024 was the dumbest and most self-harming choice made by an electorate in the history of humanity

Russian oligarch, who is besties w/Putin, bankrolled Don Trump Jr.’s wedding to Bettina Anderson, the daughter of the banker who vouched for Jeffrey Epstein’s character. The details, incl. a trip down memory lane on Jr.’s proclivities to associate himself w/Russian things: youtu.be/rcPPCdo-gLc?...

Nathan Felder has a hell of a marketing dept. I am interested in the doc, but how many stories on how people are reacting to a trailer or screening can you really put out there and pretend it's organic?

No fucking shit buddy. This is what we were trying to tell you.

Started / Going

Ok, I wasn't making much of this Natalie Harp thing, but every new nugget that drops is a new wtf. Besides the creepy letters that sound like an insecure schoolgirl, her brother says it's not her first obsession with a President, going back to her childhood?

Amen

Ossoff: "Now the Trump administration it seems will give the stamp of approval to the Trump family bank. We're in banana republic territory here ... they're trying to get money. And they're getting money."

For the umpteenth time: He’s a sociopath. He’s humanly incapable of caring about our sailors. He’s humanly incapable of caring about anyone or anything but himself. In a weird way, it’s almost not his fault. He’s. Humanly. Incapable. Of. Empathy.👇

So Trump is now saying the "ballroom" is actually "the desperately needed Military Center, required for the National Security of Washington, D.C., and our Country, itself" He's also extended soldiers in D.C. until Jan. 20, 2029, his last day It's impossible to not to imagine the very worst

It sometimes feels like we're living in a ridiculously exaggerated folk tale with wildly implausible villains. For example, as the president takes billions for himself and his family and *coats his things in gold,* the soldiers fighting his war can't get toothpaste, hot water, or a clean toilet.

Booker: "Ghislaine Maxwell is sitting in the lowest possible confinement after giving no information that helped us get one more investigation started and has been silent, and the man responsible for that we're about to make the attorney general of the US ... this is farcical."

I can’t believe we’re doing another cycle of pretending to have a deal with Iran. This is so stupid.

MAGA masculinity means declining to publicly criticize the man your daughter has accused of physical abuse, because doing so might prompt a senile 80-year-old man to write mean things about you.

Let’s not forget that this illegal Reflecting Pool indictment was also overseen by Todd Blanche. He could have stopped this at any time, but he was a corrupt and willing accomplice to this fraud upon the court. How can any decent person possibly vote for this man as AG?

Make America Mad About COVID Again appears to be the midterm strategy.

Israel is giving Trump's former campaign manager millions of dollars to fill the internet with pro-Israel articles written by AI, not so that anyone will actually read them, but so that *LLMs will train on them* & regurgitate their perspective. This is the future of the information environment.

watched the odyssey last night. film ruined by everyone speaking english instead of ancient greek.

When I worked in WaPo Opinions in 2017-2018, senior editors specifically told junior editors not to factcheck Marc Thiessen and other MAGA columnists, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to publish anything by them at all, and “we need them for intellectual diversity.”

Admittedly a US thing, but I think folks should reflect that Kimi, the open-weight AI model by $20b-valued Moonshot AI everyone is freaking out about, was developed by someone who went to CMU and then didn't stay in the US mostly because visas would prevent him setting up a US business

"Stop criticizing us or will keep murdering people" is just a jaw-dropping thing for a government official to say.

"According to public reporting, Mr. Blanche spent approximately nine hours meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell. He did not even spend nine minutes meeting with a survivor." -- Dani Bensky, testifying this morning before the Senate Judiciary Committee