Saturday Evening

 Go

Afternoon Thread

Think I deserve some credit (only cash accepted) for telling you all what a dipshit Musk is for years 

How Corrupt Are Things

One always has to be careful of suggesting things are getting worse, as it risks implying there was some earlier golden age, however I do think members of Congress get away with an incredible amount of corruption (whether legal or not) that would've violated NORMS twenty years ago. 

Generally I think "not technically illegal (maybe)" has justified things which were once just understand to be scummy whether or not you could get the prosecutors (themselves, also, too, often corrupt) involved.

Bring It

 

Morning

Slacker Saturday.

Friday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Freedom Friday!

Liberty For Me

Amazing and unsurprising, as these things are.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the woman who led an ultra-conservative movement in Florida education that sought to put gays back in the closet was having a long-term, three-way lesbian relationship with a lover she shared with her husband, the state’s GOP chairman?
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That’s the allegation being made about Bridget Ziegler — co-founder of far-right Moms for Liberty and a Sarasota School Board member — by an unnamed woman accusing Christian Ziegler of rape and sexual battery.

Hypocrisy on steroids, if true.

I don't think 'hypocrisy' is the right word for this stuff, though. Hypocrisy is me lecturing on the evils of meat eating while having my daily Big Mac. This goes beyond lecturing..

Humanitarian Pause

Did no one think about what would happen when the "not a ceasefire" ceased?

Inverted Power Structure

Our elite publications will still be fretting about imagined intolerance of 19-year-olds in universities instead of the explicit bigotries of the most powerful people in the world. If you're one of the lads, they let you do it.

Nobody made the New York Times invite Musk on stage, and no one made them then overlook the "news" that was actually made, even though the point of such an event is, actually, to make news.

They had scripted the personal redemption arc and they weren't going to back down.  

The New York Times says Musk apologized, but doesn't note that the apology was followed up by a repetition and elaboration of what he was supposedly apologizing for.

Lunch

eat

Bye George

Santos expelled.

Almost wrote DeSantos.

Debate Me, You Coward

I really don't want to encourage random politicians who aren't running against each other to randomly stage public debates so I will not be commenting on the DeSantis-Neswom "debate."

Redemption Tour

Musk's supposed "apology" was just doubling down, and most people pretended not to notice.

During the sit-down, interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Musk about his post agreeing with an X user’s accusation that “Jewish communities” push “hatred against whites.” After ostensibly expressing regret for the post, which led to companies like Disney and Netflix pulling ads from X, Musk effectively reversed course. “Prominent people in the Jewish community,” he claimed, helped fund “demonstrations for Hamas in every major city in the West.”

He added: “If you generically, without condition, fund persecuted groups … some of those persecuted groups, unfortunately, want your annihilation.”

Unfortunately, Sorkin tried to move on instead of realizing what it was: Musk doubling down on antisemitism. In so doing, Sorkin displayed how so many in the media have failed in properly addressing Musk’s bigotry.

Musk’s comments were essentially an attempt at a more “acceptable” version of saying that Jews are the funders behind the minority groups trying to destroy the Western world. This is, in fact, the Great Replacement conspiracy theory — the same one that he supposedly apologized for backing. Musk’s latest version is more qualified, and an attempt to be more specific, but it’s still a conspiracy theory based on the idea that Jews are manipulating world affairs in order to destroy white civilization.

In his defense (not really), he probably said this stuff to Greenblatt and Netanyahu and they told him he was correct.

Morning

Funky Friday.

Thursday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy.

Eulogy Flashback

From Osita Nwanevu:

The trouble with this is that people aren’t sent to Washington to have giving hearts for their colleagues, or to charm reporters, as McCain did. They are sent to craft and enact policies that have concrete consequences for ordinary people. It has never been clear whether Obama’s and McCain’s shared civic vision—that preserving civility matters more than achieving ideologically desired outcomes—allows for any point at which the American people should assess the character of political leaders on the basis of the policies they support. Whether, for instance, it was incumbent on Bush to acknowledge on Saturday that his and McCain’s advocacy for, in his words, “the true peace that comes only with freedom” led the United States into a war that brought neither peace nor real freedom to the Iraqi people. Or whether it was appropriate for McCain to select Henry Kissinger as one of his eulogists—a man who remains in Washington’s good graces despite a career that has likely killed millions. (Kissinger’s assistance with Richard Nixon’s sabotage of Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace talks with North Vietnam may have helped extend the torment and suffering of the war not just for McCain, then a prisoner of war, but for thousands of American soldiers and the people of Vietnam.) Much has been made of the fact that President Trump did not attend Saturday’s service. But any doubts that the keepers of American political norms stand ready to fully embrace more rule-bound, polite, and magnanimous representatives of Trump’s bigotry should have been quelled by élite indifference to the presence of John Kelly, one of the architects of the still unresolved family-separation crisis.

It is true, as Obama said in his eulogy, that political discourse can tend toward the “small and mean and petty” and “phony controversies and manufactured outrage.” But, for all the coruscating idiocies that the Trump years have brought us, they have also made clear that our most heated and significant fights are the product of a substantive divide between the values animating the left and the right in this country. The hope that Obama and McCain seemed to share was that we might ultimately come to find these values compatible—that we might commit to a politics uncurdled by wildly different and competing notions about what it means to be an American and which classes of people in our society are truly deserving of wealth, security, and power.

But the rise of Trump should raise doubts about whether that hope can or ought to be realized. It may instead be the case that there are political decisions about which one has a moral responsibility to be mean and unforgiving—that it shouldn’t, for instance, be considered churlish or unsporting to insist that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi or Vietnamese civilians or the traumas inflicted on children needlessly separated from their families should forever stain the legacies of the leaders who caused them. On Tuesday, protesters loudly interrupted the hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, on the grounds that a conservative majority will have grave implications for women’s health and corporate power, among other issues, for decades to come. The restive and unruly voices on the rise in our politics may not live up to the shining example set by our fables about the Maverick. But, then again, not many people ever have. Not even John McCain.

WHAT CAN BIDEN DOOOOOO

Absolutely nothing, you fools, you imbeciles.

WASHINGTON (AP) — National security adviser Jake Sullivan told lawmakers this week that the White House is not seeking to place conditions on U.S. military assistance to Israel, days after President Joe Biden signaled openness to the notion that was being pushed by some Democrats as the civilian death toll in Gaza from Israel’s war against Hamas climbed.

With A Spoon

And if he violates it...

Donald Trump is once again prohibited from attacking the law clerk at his ongoing bank fraud trial in New York, now that a four-judge appellate panel has reinstated a gag order that was briefly lifted this month.

The two-page appeals court decision on Thursday wiped out Trump’s lone victory—albeit a minor one—during the trial that threatens to destroy the business tycoon’s real estate empire.