Dark Passage starts from the point of view of a man who has just escaped prison. This first-person POV allows you to feel empathy for the character; it also transfers his distrust and his desperation as he encounters different people and worries about being caught onto the viewer, pulling you into the film.

Vincent Parry was convicted of murdering his wife but he claims to be an innocent man. As he tries to hide from the police and people who may recognize him, he meets a woman who believes in his innocence. She brings him to her apartment where he discovers why this woman of affluence would risk everything to help him.

She believed her own father had been wrongly convicted of murdering her stepmother. She also believed the same thing had happened to Vincent and closely followed his trial. He wants to find the real killer of his wife and she wants to help him. But something is stopping him — his very recognizable face.

A sketchy plastic surgery says he can help, for $200 Vincent is going to look like a new man. Healing from the surgery with a bandaged face and unable to speak he spends his time with Irene who cares for him and protects him while he heals. Soon the puzzle pieces start to fall into place.

Vincent begins to understand who the real killer is while people continue to die around him. And Vincent and Irene’s time together turns into love. Can Vincent prove he is not guilty while still protecting the woman he has fallen for?

Who wouldn’t fall in love with this woman?

In real life they did fall in love.

Bogart and Bacall were married at the Malabar Farm in Ohio, home to his friend the writer Louis Bromfield, in 1945. Bacall was 19 and Bogart was 44; they had two children and remained married till his death in 1957. They made four films together, To Have And Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948).

You can find photos from the original San Francisco filming locations used in Dark Passage here.

Dark Passage stars Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Agnes Moorehead, Bruce Bennett, Clifton Young, Douglas Kennedy, Rory Mallinson, Tom D’Andrea, and Houseley Stevenson. Directed by Delmer Daves.

Dark Passage is available for free with ads on Tubi and Plex; $3.99 in the usual places. Free on OKRU.

To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules, go to WonkMovie.

The animated short is Black and White by Jesús Pérez and Gerd Gockell.

Next week’s movie night selection is Arsenic And Old Lace, available for free on the Internet Archive. $5.99 in the usual places. A colorized version is available for free on Alugha.

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Fundagelical god-botherers who shout about Jesus in public have always fascinated and grossed us out, going back to when we were an editorial-we-using undergrad at Northern Arizona University and Brother Jed Smock would swing by to castigate “forrrrnicators and harrrrlots” on nice spring days. He too had been a hippie and fornicator himself, but met a street preacher at “Burger King, where I met the KING of Kings!” We see he met his eternal reward in 2022, so we’re sure that Jed, Jesus, and Jack Chick are having a fine time up in heaven right now.

But there are always heathens who need to be told at high decibel levels that Jesus loves them, a thing they have never heard before, so with the rise of social media there’s a whole new crop of selfie-recording evangelists seeking to yell about Jesus at everyone who’ll listen. That includes those who don’t want to listen, like people trapped inside an airliner waiting to take off. It’s enough of a trend that the Washington Post recently profiled some of these spiritual warriors (guest link) who can’t resist sharing the Good News to captive audiences.

Here’s “Evangelist Whitney Lynn Inc” of Orlando, Florida — that’s her TikTok username, so be sure to use it in full — annoying her fellow passengers before they could deplane in San Diego in early July, for their own good. She captioned the clip with “I just love a captive audience!” She knows there’s not much anyone can do except escort her off the plane, which is better because then she can get sympathy and outrage from other likeminded Jesus People, even if they aren’t literally her fellow travelers.

@whitneylynn123I just love a captive audience. 😄 About 200 people on that plane got to hear the Gospel! I didn’t get many hecklers on the flight, but I sure did once I started preaching in the airport. It doesn’t bother me at all. That kind of boldness and thick skin only comes from Jesus. I have the truth, the power of God, and time is running out. Jesus is coming back, and people need to hear the Gospel again and again. Many of them will never step foot in a church—you might be the only messenger God sends. Let’s be bold in these last days. 🙏🔥 Whitneylynn.org | Igniteyourlightkidz.com | Spotify #Jesus #Jesuschrist #airplane #sandiego #gospel

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Ms. Lynn Inc. told WaPo travel reporter Hannah Sampson this is the best thing ever, because “They have no choice but to hear the truth. […] When I have a gift and I have a life raft, if you’re drowning, I want to give you that life raft so you can be saved.”

In the unlikely event of a water landing, please do not preach so long that you are unable to blow into the manual tube to inflate your life vest, and do not inflate your life vest inside the aircraft because it will impede your exit.

You can also use the button below to donate an amount of your choice at Paypal, or we have a Patreon too.

Feed The Kitty

Ms. Evangelist Inc is also plagued with the insufferable fake cheerfulness of many street preachers — at least the ones who don’t go on forever about the eternal lake of fire awaiting all of us if we don’t repent — as she explained in the caption of a follow-up video to that first one. After inconveniencing and annoying the 200-some people on the plane, she says, the cops showed up, but she WON because God didn’t want her to be arrested!!!

They thought they got me by calling the cops after I preached a few times at the San Diego airport. But God had other plans—I ended up sharing the Gospel with the officers and praying over them. It was such a beautiful, divine encounter. I love how God always turns what the enemy means for evil into something good.

In the video, the cops, Crom bless them, just wanted to get out of there without having to do all the paperwork an arrest would entail. They did try patiently to explain that the First Amendment doesn’t necessarily protect “creating a disturbance,” but Inc the Evangelist appeared not to catch the subtle hint that she might not want to cross that line.

In one of her more recent videos, EvWhitLynInc documented her recent preflight removal from a United Airlines flight, where she harangued a flight attendant who informed her that the pilots didn’t feel safe with her on the flight. It’s peak Annoying Christian, really, complete with her pretended shock and sense of persecution: “I didn’t know the message of Jesus Christ was unsafe. Wow! … So Freedom Of Speech is ‘unsafe’?”

@whitneylynn123Part 2 (even though you haven’t seen Part 1 yet! 😄) Part 1 is the message I preached on the plane, and I’ll be posting that soon. There’s also even more footage after this, so stay tuned to this “Kicked Off the Plane for Preaching the Gospel” series. I can honestly say… wow. There is so much more you’re about to see. It’s absolutely unreal. We are truly living in the last days. But here’s the amazing part: God still moved. Two people gave their lives to Jesus! 🙌 I’ll be sharing the full story behind those salvations soon. Stay tuned. Whitneylynn.org | Igniteyourlightkidz.com | Spotify #Jesus #Jesuschrist #plane #preach #persecution

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“I’ll tell you what this is,” she announces. “It’s called spiritual warfare, you know why? Yeah, ‘cause demons don’t like the name of Jesus!” She shouted to everyone on the plane that her being removed proves “We’re in the Last Days! We’re being persecuted! Persecuted to be a Christian! It’s comin’! We’re gonna go to jail!”

In subsequent videos — we think she posted at least eight about the cruelties inflicted upon her — EvieWhitieLynnieIncie complained that a flight attendant had “pushed” her bag and lied about it, as Satan’s minions will, and speculated in a caption that “I truly believe there were demonic influences at work, and you can see it in the way people were acting and in their faces. Then they all stood at the doorway of the plane like I was some criminal.”

Oh yes, and just for good measure, she demanded to know if the gate agent escorting her down the jetway was some kind of foreign devil.

@whitneylynn123I’m telling you, demons are real. This guy literally tried to shut the door on me. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to notify the airline, and sure enough, he didn’t. I called the airline, and they had no idea what had happened. Praise God for His favor—they didn’t charge me a fee. I never even told them the situation. That was the Lord. He tried to set me up so I’d have to pay to change my flight after they kicked me off the plane. But wait until you see what he tries to do next. It’s unbelievable. I truly pray for this man. Whitneylynn.org | Igniteyourlightkidz.com | Spotify #Jesus #Jesuschrist #plane #preach #persecution

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“I can't really understand what you’re saying. […] Where are you from? ‘Cause I can’t really understand you. I can’t really understand you. Are you from Puerto Rico? You speak Spanish? Is that your main language?”

As he tried to get away from her by retreating into the jetway and closing the door, she reminded him, “God have mercy on your soul, ‘cause Hell is real, my friend.”

In another video, while telling bicycle police about her ordeal, she explained that when you talk about Jesus, “the demons just go crazy,” and concluded that the gate agent was upset “because he’s a homosexual, that’s why. You know, he knows he’s in sin and he knows he’s wrong, so the demons started.” At that, one of the bike cops explained that you can be kicked off a plane for arguing with a flight attendant, too.

Nice lady. Judging by the Praise Jebus! replies to the videos, we can only assume that the next step will be a wingnut boycott of American Airlines, followed by Sean Duffy and Donald Trump implementing a policy to protect Christians from being persecuted by gay homosexual gate agents.

[WaPo (gift link) / Friendly Atheist]

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Holy Rollers, Pitchers, And Yaw-ers

Imagine, if you will, the great Gilda Radner doing her Emily Litella bit. There she is on a 1970s “Weekend Update” set, ranting and raving about vandals defacing the Reflecting Pool. Then Jane Curtin leans over and tells her no, Emily, further investigation revealed that the cause of all that paint peeling off the pool’s bottom really was caused by a “rushed and flawed installation process,” no one cut a 300-foot long slit in the pool’s concrete bottom with a knife, and there is no criminal case here to prosecute. Emily, as is her wont, turns to the camera and gives her famous line: Oh. Never mind.

In case you haven’t figured it out, the Trump administration is Emily Litella and Jane Curtin is either the Department of Justice or every damn poster on BlueSky with a little knowledge of painting and an ounce of common sense.

Oh boy, the administration really Emily Litella’d this whole story. Trump and his sycophants spent weeks going on TV and forcefully, with all the seriousness they could muster, told the public there had been vandalism, it was no laughing matter, it was done by antifa commandos who hate America, and the full weight of the United States government would come down on those responsible.

MeidasTouch put up a video montage of Trump administration officials and right-wing journalists making total asses of themselves with their usual screeching that sounds like two horny condors fucking:

In fact, they all huffed, they had already arrested one man, a former Olympic canoeist named David Hearn who had been seen picking up a chunk of paint floating on the surface of the pool. Hearn was accused of actually tearing the paint up himself, “forcefully and violently” ripping and tearing it, purposely marring the repainted Reflecting Pool’s beauty. And all because he hates Donald Trump, and beauty, and MAGA, and America.

Then on Friday night came the “never mind.” The US Attorney for Washington DC, Jeanine Pirro, filed a motion with the court seeking to dismiss the felony vandalism charge against Hearn. In the motion, Pirro admitted that the DOJ had, among other evidence, uncovered photographs taken by a Park Service employee proving the paint liner was already peeling well before Hearn was even seen in the area, and that the liner had failed due to a “rushed and flawed installation process” by an unqualified hack of a Trump crony contractor.

Hearn was arrested on June 19. A few weeks later, the pool was drained so that the alleged vandalism could be repaired. On July 17, Pirro and her staff visited the drained pool and noticed that there was extensive damage to the liner everywhere. They then requested that the Department of the Interior, which oversees the Park Service, give them all the records the department has about the installation of the pool lining.

Why Pirro’s office hadn’t looked at some of those documents before is beyond us. If the defense had requested and gotten them, that would have killed their entire case and been hugely embarrassing. It turns out the defense didn’t need to bother; Jeanine Pirro is perfectly capable of embarrassing herself without any help.

The most hilarious part of this motion is watching Pirro not only throw the Department of the Interior under the bus, but then backing the bus up so she can run over it a few more times:

Based on this request, USAO-DC received 695 megabytes of additional documents from DOI, which took days to review. These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool. This was the first time that DOI made USAO-DC aware of such information.

Later on, Pirro accused the DOI of providing “less than fulsome information at the outset of this case.” Translation: We at DOJ are just smol beans, Your Honor. We’re only guilty of being too trusting of people who work in the freaking Trump administration. Pwease, pwease yell at them and not us.

The brief also revealed that the Park Service was aware of some paint peeling in the area where Hearn was later accused of pulling it up eight days before Hearn committed his horrific crime. That would have been good to know sooner!

About the only hitch here is that the DOJ is seeking to dismiss the charges without prejudice. That means they can be refiled. This seems like Pirro covering her ass with Trump: Yes, Mr. President, of course we still think he’s guilty, of course we’re not giving up, of course we’ll continue to investigate whether Mr. Hearn conspired with the contractors to do a bad job to purposely embarrass you.

Of course, your average mommy blogger could have told Judge Drunky McWinebottle in June everything that she apparently learned in the last two weeks: The contractor was unqualified and did a shit job with materials that were not right for the purpose. Trump rushed the whole thing because he wanted it done by his birthday. No communist super-soldier made the effort to get into the pool while it was full of water, squat down, and drag a box cutter for 300 feet to make a gash as long as a football field in the paint liner, Jesus Christ, are you people even listening to yourselves.

In fact, we did tell her. Several times! Judge Jeanine, why are you not reading yr Wonkette?

Given this latest development, it’s fun to watch the judge’s press conference announcing the charges a month ago. She was so dramatic, as if Hearn’s alleged act had been a defiant blow aimed at the very foundations of the Republic:

“The most offensive images that I hold in my mind are the images of national monuments that are being defaced, roped, torn down, graffitied, and damaged by individuals. I have a vivid memory of this happening several years ago and over time where our national monuments and statues are being torn down. This is not the way of a civilized society. It is anarchy. And our nation has weathered moments of anarchy and chaos in the past.”

If you are screaming What about January 6 at your computer screen, be assured that a reporter later asked Judge Pinot how she could justify charging Hearn with a minor amount of damage while at the same time supporting the pardons of thousands of January 6 rioters. This sent her into a paroxysm of spittle as she snapped, “Are you really talking about January 6? I’m not. Who’s next?”

Well. Excuuuuse us for asking.

This is another embarrassment for the Department of Justice after a solid year and a half of embarrassing itself. Or it would be another embarrassment, if Trump administration officials were capable of feeling that.

[Motion / WaPo / YouTube]

Happy Weekend!

None of the holidays for today are especially silly (National Girlfriend’s Day? BLAH), so we are instead going to celebrate the birthdays of Jim Carroll and Yves Saint Laurent, two people who I’m pretty certain have nothing in common with one another. Sorry, astrology believers!

As such, your first present is Jim Carroll performing “People Who Died” with Lou Reed!

Your second present is me going on about the artistic genius of Yves Saint Laurent for however many words, because I honestly just know a lot more about YSL than I do about Jim Carroll (yes, I saw The Basketball Diaries, but I was like, 12 or something at the time). You are welcome!

Yves Saint Laurent, the master of both haute couture and ready-to-wear, got his start at Dior, was an absolute prodigy and took over the fashion house at the age of 21 after Christian Dior died of a heart attack at 57. His first collection for Dior was the Trapeze Line, which expanded upon Dior’s A-Line and introduced, for the first time, the trapeze silhouette that seems to annoy the shit out of heterosexual men to this day. This, unlike his later work for Dior, was a major success (although that was likely because it was just too “edgy” for the brand — for instance, he was the first to bring a sort-of motorcycle jacket into the world of high fashion). He lasted just a few seasons there before getting the boot, in 1960, right after he was drafted into the Algerian War — although he didn’t even make it a month before the harassment from his fellow soldiers drove him into a military hospital for psychiatric care.

In 1962, he launched his own fashion house with his partner (business and romantical — Saint Laurent was openly gay in the fashion industry for decades, though he didn’t come out publicly until 1991) Pierre Bergé, with his first few collections garnering far more positive reviews than his later work at Dior did. However, it was his 1965 Mondrian Line — which lives on today in the form of tacky vinyl “mod” Halloween costumes — that really launched him as a designer to be reckoned with. YSL developed the line in collaboration with artist Piet Mondrian, based on his famous paintings. The originals, however, were not vinyl but made of wool and silk.

Behold!

The next year, he came out with the Le Smoking, a rather androgynous tuxedo for women, famously worn by French style icon and yé-yé singer, Françoise Hardy. Now, you might think that, for reasons of Marlene Dietrich, that this would not be a super huge deal, but it absolutely was. Many restaurants at the time barred women from entering while wearing trousers, and, at one point, socialite Nan Kempner was told by the maître d’ at La Côte Basque that they couldn’t let her in while wearing the pants from the suit, so she actually pulled them off in the middle of the restaurant and ate dinner in her suit jacket, with nothing on underneath. Good for her, eh?

If you’d like to know more about Saint Laurent, here is a documentary about him from 1991 — enjoy!

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Talk amongst yourselves!

We began the day with some tabs, your morning news roundup. They weren’t terrible!

We are so embarrassing.

Go screw, Todd Blanche.

They are really something aren’t they? You can literally be in hospice and not be exempt from work requirements!

World Peace.

Time for a drink.

Greetings, Wonketeers! I’m Hooper, your bartender. It’s garage sale season here in Ohio. Every weekend, our neighbors spill the contents of their garages/basements/attics onto the front yard and hope you’ll pay them for the pleasure of hauling their junk away. At Hemingway’s, we’re doing something similar — we’re planning the fall menu, which entails using up bottles of stuff we don’t want taking up shelf space. In that spirit, let’s rummage through my liquor cabinet and cobble together a cocktail from bottles I need to use up. Let’s make a Garage Sale. Here’s the recipe.

First things first: I do not, in any way, shape, or form, advocate making this particular cocktail. If you comment on this post with, “I’d make this, but I don’t have the ingredients!” I will reach through the Internet and gently smack you on the wrist with two fingers. I mean, if you wanted to go pick up a bottle of Another Hendrick’s just on principle, I wouldn’t say no. It’s really good gin. But that’s not the point of this exercise.

This is a fridge-cleaning cocktail, a rummage through my (admittedly eclectic) liquor cabinet in an attempt to find ingredients that love each other enough to make a cocktail. The orange blossom and cocoa nibs Hendricks has been staring at me for weeks. It’s delicious. But you can’t make a G&T with it, and diluting it with soda water felt like a crime. Aperol is a kissing cousin to Campari — another bright red bitter Italian amaro. I infused this Aperol with orange for a cocktail competition months ago. Gin plus Campari is two-thirds of a Negroni. Orange in the gin, orange in the Aperol … we’ve got some synergy here. Do we have sweet vermouth to finish the drink? Yes, we do, and that vermouth is close to expiring. Bingo.

Pulling this stunt off requires some cocktail knowledge. As a professional, I’ve memorized most of the basic recipes, and it’s easy for me to take those templates and swap in some ingredients to make something good. But you can perform this trick with very simple recipes. Do you love Mount Gay rum and cola? What if you cook down that bottle of yesterday’s flat soda into a syrup, stick it in the fridge, and splash a little into tomorrow’s cocktail? What if you add two lime wedges instead of one? How about a pinch of salt over the rum before you add the pop? A basic drink, like a gin and tonic, can be that much better if you think a bit about how to use your leftovers.

Look at your liquor cabinet. Think about what tastes good with other things. Are you a vodka fan? Good news. Vodka goes with everything. Pick bold flavors, things that taste good together. Don’t be afraid to try something that isn’t ordinary, but uses stuff you have already. Be brave. Try something you haven’t tried yet. Raid the fridge — if I didn’t have a bag of fresh limes in the citrus drawer, I would be utterly lost at the end of the shift. You already bought the bottles of booze. Be bold.

Let’s talk ingredients:

Another Hendricks: This is an amazing gin. But if you’re building a cocktail using the Negroni as your base recipe, non-amazing gin is fine. Beefeater works. So does Citadelle Jardin d’ete, if you want a cheap citrus gin. So does vodka, if you want something that isn’t as intensely flavored. If you use bourbon, you’ve made a Boulevardier, a perfectly respectable cocktail. Tequila? Rum? Why not? Put things into a glass that taste good. There are no rules.

Orange-Infused Aperol: If you’re following the Negroni as a base recipe, this is where the rubber hits the road. I am of the opinion that you should stick a bitter Italian amaro in your liquor cabinet on principle. A flavor bomb that isn’t laden with sugar is always going to be useful. Aperol is the default — Aperol spritzes will never go out of style. But if you fall in love with Cynar or Fernet Branca, who am I to say no?

Sweet Vermouth: Use dry vermouth if you have that. Use leftover wine if you have that. Put whatever you think is tasty into the glass. Experiment. Be bold. Your favorite cocktail is waiting for you. You just have to try.

OPEN THREAD!

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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Donald Trump has solved the Israel-Gaza crisis!

Oh, you have heard that one before? A whole bunch of times? And like every other solution to this crisis he has ever claimed to have negotiated, it turned out to be vaporware? Much like every other crisis ever where he has prematurely announced victory, be it Israel or government funding fights or something else? Like every time he has announced Iran has agreed to all his demands to open the Strait of Hormuz and surrender to the US? So all you must do is read what the representatives of Israel and Hamas are saying to know that this is the latest in a long, long, long, long line of occasions when Trump has gotten way out over his skis? Not that he would ever get on a pair of skis, because skiing takes physical effort? And oh, isn’t the image of Trump stuffed into a snowsuit careening down a ski slope like someone rolled a pumpkin down a mountain at high speed hilarious?

Yeah, us too.

Still, it’s kind of entertaining to watch anyone report the latest “deal” with a straight face in the geopolitical equivalent of a visit from the wallet inspector. Starting with Trump himself, who made a very frenetic post on TruthSocial on Thursday evening:

Today, the Board of Peace reached a HISTORIC agreement for the COMPLETE DISARMAMENT of Hamas and all other armed groups in Gaza. This is a monumental step toward lasting PEACE and SECURITY.

First of all, Trump’s Board of Peace, which was ostensibly established to oversee Gaza’s reconstruction, is either another one of his shakedown schemes and/or one of his pathetic attempts to stand up a rival to an established organization (the United Nations) that he controls. The BoP has almost no support from Western nations. Joining it requires paying $1 billion. In all, the BoP has reportedly taken in roughly $17 billion in donations. But that money has gone into a private bank account at JP Morgan instead of its established account at the World Bank, which has public reporting requirements.

All $17 billion could have gone to buying Trump GLP-1 pills for all anyone knows. Or to pay Barron’s college tuition or Don Jr.’s dealer. So many possibilities.

Second of all, as mentioned, we’ve heard this shit before. More than once.

As disarmament is completed, Israeli forces will withdraw, and the International Stabilization Force will work with a new Palestinian police force to take responsibility for Gaza being safe for its residents and its neighbors.

All that sounds neat, until you head over to the Wall Street Journal and read what spokesmen for Hamas are saying:

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’s negotiating team, said the group agreed to place its weapons in a storage facility overseen by the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, a Palestinian-run technocratic group charged with the enclave’s political and security transition.

So not really disarmament, more Hamas giving their weapons to a new group, overseen by the Board of Peace and whose members haven’t been allowed into Gaza yet, to hold in escrow.

“We didn’t say disarmament, we didn’t say handing over the weapons, and we didn’t agree on any Israeli involvement,” Hamad said, adding that the plan is contingent on Israel ending military operations in Gaza and allowing humanitarian aid in.

This is always the deal. Hamas says its disarmament is contingent on Israel withdrawing from Gaza, and there will be no concessions until that happens. Israel says its withdrawing from Gaza is dependent on Hamas disarming, and there will be no concessions until that happens. This new plan doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for resolving that tension any more than any other agreement ever has.

As for Israel, it has apparently not agreed to any of this. The only comment we have found is from Itmar Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister of national security. Ben-Gvir stated that the deal is “unacceptable to Israel,” and that any Israeli military actions should continue to encourage Palestinians to leave Gaza. The far Right has still not given up on its goal of ridding Gaza of all the Palestinians and then building Israeli settlements all across it. And the far Right is still the most powerful force in Israel.

Ben-Gvir’s comments bring up another reason no one should believe this: As far as we know, Benjamin Netanyahu did not dissolve his war cabinet and form a new government with moderates or leftists who want peace. Bibi is facing an election in October, he’s not alienating the hard Right that makes up most of his support now. Or probably ever, if he thinks it will cost him power.

This alleged agreement comes out of the 20-point peace plan that Hamas and Israel allegedly agreed to last fall. You can imagine Trump is desperate for a victory right now, what with his approval ratings tanking and the midterm elections that are on track to wipe out his party’s congressional majorities. And he’s Trump, so he’s going to over-interpret everything as another great victory.

But like everything else since the October 7 attacks and anything else he has ever said ever, this should all be taken with a salt mine’s worth of salt.

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[TruthSocial / WSJ]

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Last year, Donald Trump used his Big Beautiful Bill to give a whopping $2.3 trillion tax cut to the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans. How nice for them! It’s not clear what more they’ll actually be able to purchase with all that extra money, given that they probably already have everything they need, but I’m sure it brought a smile to more than a few of their faces. And isn’t that what really matters?

The one problem with that plan, however was how to pay for said tax cut, while still paying douchebags to kidnap migrants and kill peaceful protesters and funding this war that no one (except maybe one recently deceased fella) really wants. After all, the House did just pass a $1.5 trillion defense bill.

Well, don’t worry your pretty little head about that, because they’ve got some plans in the works. On Thursday, US District Judge Richard Stearns of Massachusetts (a Clinton appointee) denied a request from Democratic attorneys general of 25 states and the District of Columbia to postpone the implementation of a new rule that would require Medicaid patients with terminal diseases to prove that they are too “medically frail” to be able to work 80 hours a month or be cut off entirely.

And don’t you go thinking that being in literal hospice or palliative care is an excuse, or that a note from your doctor counts as “proof” that would automatically allow an exemption from the work requirements. Or that a late-stage cancer or HIV/AIDS diagnosis would provide an automatic exemption. Because they don’t. You can be on your literal deathbed and you will need to convince some random bureaucrats that you really are too sick to work, in order to not get kicked out of it.

Under normal circumstances, when slightly more normal human beings are in charge, being at or below 138 percent of the poverty line and having a terminal diagnosis — meaning you only have around six months left to live — is enough to qualify for Medicaid. Now, the Trump administration wants to require that these people work, volunteer or go to school for 80 hours a month or fill out an ungodly amount of paperwork to prove that they are “medically frail or otherwise have special medical needs.” They will also need to demonstrate that their condition will “significantly impair” their ability to work. The rule does exempt those with “serious or complex medical conditions,” but does not state what those conditions might be.

Via Politico:

Democratic attorneys general from 25 states and Washington, D.C. [argued that] the rule is both too strict, in not offering blanket exemptions to people with certain diseases, and too vague, in failing to guide states on how to determine who is too sick to work — and [asked] the judge to block the stricter medical frailty policy.

“This is one of those cases where it’s really hard to overstate how dire the consequences could be,” said North Carolina’s Democratic attorney general, Jeff Jackson, who has joined the lawsuit with other Democratic state officials challenging the policy. “You’re going to have 50 states doing 50 different things, and we’re all going to have to create a whole new bureaucracy. …You are talking about a lot more paperwork, more evaluations, more doctor visits, and a lot more work for doctors themselves.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the changes made by the Trump administration to healthcare policy will result in about 12 million people becoming uninsured, about half of whom will be Medicaid recipients who failed to meet the new eligibility requirements or “because of procedural reasons (such as missed paperwork), because of problems with communication, or because of difficulty with navigating reenrollment.”

It’s not especially easy to navigate bureaucracy while also being very, very sick — and that’s not meant to be a bug, but a feature. Rather than making unpopular cuts to programs, the Trump administration seems to have gone the route of simply requiring that people who receive any kind of assistance fill out a ridiculous amount of paperwork, in the hope that they will just give up or screw it up somehow.

Via Common Dreams:

[In an article for Real News Network published earlier this week, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis] wrote that what has happened to recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) illustrates how burdensome these new requirements may become.

As The New York Times reported earlier this month, in Arizona, 440,000 people have already been dropped from SNAP after it enacted a formidable regime of paperwork for low-income recipients to prove eligibility, including requiring some people with panhandling income to obtain documentation from donors who drop them a buck on the street.

“If this is what people receiving SNAP benefits have been subjected to,” Graham and Janis wrote, “imagine what’s going to happen to people who will need to navigate the new [Medicaid] requirements while struggling with a debilitating or terminal illness.”

Nothing good, we’d imagine.

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According to a March 2026 Gallup poll, 61 percent of US Americans say they worry “a great deal” about health care access and affordability. The concern ranked higher than 15 other domestic issues, including the economy (51 percent) and inflation (50 percent). In fact, only 6 percent say they don’t worry about it at all. Fully two-thirds (66.5 percent) of bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills. Three in 10 Americans say that either they or someone in their household has had trouble paying medical bills in the last year.

The fact that we live this way, that we are planning to kick poor cancer patients off of Medicaid at a time when practically every other modern nation has universal healthcare, is beyond obscene, even more so because that money is going to go to invading other countries instead of taking care of our own citizens.

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Donald Trump on Thursday said that since Republicans in the Senate don’t have enough votes to confirm his personal lawyer Todd Blanche as attorney general, he may withdraw the nomination and submit it after the midterms, leaving Blanche in place as (acting) AG until Trump gets his way. Two lame-duck Republican senators, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said they can’t support Blanche’s confirmation unless Trump accepts limits on the sweetheart tax immunity deal Blanche announced in May as part of Trump’s fictional “settlement” of his bogus lawsuit against himself.

Cornyn told reporters Wednesday that Trump refused to put in writing a commitment to really kill a $1.776 billion slush fund for January 6 criminals and other “victims” of “weaponization,” and to clarify the details of the tax immunity deal. Cornyn said that he wants written agreement that the immunity would only apply to current IRS audits of Trump, his family, and his billion or so front companies, and wouldn’t prevent the IRS from looking at future tax criming by Great Leader.

In a pissy little post to his personal Twitter knockoff Thursday, Trump whined that “Todd Blanche is a STAR” and that Cornyn and Tillis are just big meanies who are retaliating against Trump for throwing them into the cornfield not endorsing them for reelection.

Trump wrote that he had “no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” which assumes that Republicans will still hold the Senate after the midterm elections.

We’ll just note here that a new Fox News poll shows former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D) nine points ahead of Republican Michael Whatley in the race to fill Tillis’s seat. And in Texas, Democrat James Talarico has a five-point polling lead over corrupt creep Ken Paxton in the election for Cornyn’s spot. Wouldn’t electing both — and flipping at least two other seats — be the funniest way to make Trump mad?

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Cornyn responded to Trump’s online tantrum with a Twitter message saying that Trump would be “mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis,” completely ignoring the objective fact that Blanche is a STAR and you’ll all be sorry you got in his way.

That point was echoed Thursday by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who told reporters she was “hopeful” that discussions with the Justice Department might result in a written deal to curb the bullshit “settlement” of Trump’s grifty lawsuit. She said that when she met with Blanche, she’d told him, “I have real concerns about this. What can you do to narrow the scope of the IRS settlement? How can you give us assurance that this anti-representation fund is truly dead?”

Murkowski didn’t say how Blanche replied, but we suspect it may have involved grunting.

With typical circumlocution, the New York Times tut-tutted (gift link) that this is all most unseemly and without precedent, my word:

That the fate of an attorney general would be jeopardized by the administration’s apparent determination to keep in place a tax deal offering a sitting president enormous financial advantages illustrated a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s second term: a president’s personal interest, along with public interest, is now a factor in governing.

Yes, that is somehow still surprising.

Just to underline how committed he is to keeping his tax deal and throwing $1.8 billion to his pardoned rioter brownshirts, Trump began Friday morning by insisting on his Lie Social site that the slush fund is definitely still a thing (link to Joe.My.God) and he will reward the “great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration,” et cetera, ad infinitum.

Cornyn, who in his final months of power seems to at least enjoy stirring the proverbial shit, was a little skeptical of Trump’s brilliant plan to simply bring Blanche back after the midterms. Trump, Cornyn said, “has a unique way of negotiating,” he said, and we will assume he pantomimed the universal hand gesture for “jerking off.” Cornyn continued, “He may think that, you know, he’s got us where he wants us, but the fact is, there’s no guarantee who the senators are going to be to replace Senator Tillis and myself, and he may have a weaker hand next year than he does now.”

He did not, however, follow that by adding “You know what? Fuck him. Y’all should vote for that Talarico fella, he’s way better than that asshole Paxton.”

[NYT (gift link) / AP / NYT (gift link)]

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Blue Wave, OK?

You know, maybe Marco Rubio’s State Department should spend a little less time prissing at longtime allies who dare to suggest that our credibility on human rights is fully shot, and a little less time humping Nazi parties in Europe, and a little more time looking at a fucking map of the earth.

This is so embarrassing, you are going to die, this is one of those moments where you are going to die of embarrassment for what a clown country the United States of America has become.

Marco Rubio’s State Department marched its too-big Florsheims down to Brazil for an AIDS conference, which is weird because Elon Musk’s woodchippering of USAID and the rest of the Trump regime’s cuts to AIDS funding, not to mention its obsession with forcing any remaining recipients to comply with Trump’s bigoted, inbred anti-DEI rules, is likely already killing people with AIDS all over the world.

(To be fair, the Guardian notes that PEPFAR’s main work has “largely resumed” after initial Trump pauses, but this brand new study says PEPFAR disruptions “hobbled global HIV care.” Also to be fair, that Guardian link doesn’t say “kill” or “die,” we are just sloppily extrapolating what happens when poor people who were getting HIV/AIDS treatment suddenly can’t get it anymore, or if it suddenly “pauses” without explanation. For fairness’s sake, perhaps we should simply say the Trump regime is Making AIDS Great Again. Here’s more about how Trump and Elon Musk and Marco Rubio are Making AIDS Great Again, especially for kids.)

In the course of their presentation, the US used this map, which was obtained by Reuters and is now going viral (definition of fair use):

What’s awesome about that map is that Africa is on it, which is good, because they were intending to talk about Africa.

And the correct answers ended there.

One incredible thing about that map is that the countries it purports to list are not even shaped like that (we know, we are looking at Google Maps as we write this, because we are a JOURNALISM SCIENTIST), nor are the countries that are actually in those spots shaped like that.

That’s right. They’re all shaped wrong, and they’re also wrong in all the other ways of geographical wrongness.

Is that Nigeria? Noooooo, the country right there isn’t shaped like that, but it’s called Niger. (We understand that at the Trump State Department those country names likely send viewers into paroxysms of rage over NO FAIR! WHAH THEY GET TO SAY IT AND I CAIN’T?)

Where is Nigeria? Directly south of that.

Is that Mozambique? Nooooooo, the country right there isn’t shaped like that, but it is sort of where Ethiopia is, maybe a little bit of South Sudan.

Where is Mozambique? Waaaaay down south, same coast, facing Madagascar.

Is that Uganda? Noooooooo, but that’s probably the closest. It’s not shaped like that, but it’s approximately there.

Is that Côte D’Ivoire? We dunno, dumbass, what the fuck does “Côte” mean? Does it mean “inland country that’s not shaped like that next to where we should have fucking put Mozambique on this goddamned map”?

Where is Côte D’Ivoire? Right about where they put “Cameroon,” but that’s the one where the pointer line gets lost and goes nowhere, so who the fuck knows.

Cameroon is just east of and heading down and around the coast from Nigeria. The real one, not the Little Marco State Department Nigeria.

Which brings us to Malawi. Is that Malawi? Noooooooo, the country/ies there aren’t shaped like that, but that appears to be a bit of Botswana, a bit of Zimbabwe.

Where is Malawi? Maybe Marco Rubio should call Madonna’s children and fucking find out.

And this is what happens when you use Open AI to make your map for the conference about all the non-white people you’re leaving alone with their AIDS.

It’s also what happens when your State Department has been hollowed out of all experts, all diplomats, all geography geeks who do nothing but stare at maps all day, and replace them with incel Nazi buffoons and racist human garbage. At literally any other president’s State Department, scores of people would have immediately seen this map — even if they were using AI to help them make their reports! — and immediately said, “Yeah that map is not correct. Learn a fucking map, AI robot!”

But this is the Trump administration, where the racism is only matched by the stupidity of every single one of their homeschooled loser hires. We would say maybe they would’ve done better if they were working with a continent they and their Dear Leader don’t believe is full of “shithole countries,” but honestly, we don’t think they’d do any better with Europe.

“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to ​check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in [a post on LinkedIn that received 40,000 views].

The State Department says it’s sorry, “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners,” it was an underling who did it, oh boy, how embarrassing.

Fuck them, apology not accepted, go to prison and take a fucking globe with you, you absolute morons.

[Guardian]

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Three days starting with a Nice Time! Now those are some poll numbers how you say in the shitter. (The New Republic)

Hooo, at link is a GREAT picture of (pic isn’t there any longer, but he was SO GRR MAD IN IT) Todd Blanche, whose attorney general nomination Trump is considering pulling because even the Republicans (or at least the ones Trump threw into the cornfield) won’t vote for the guy who promised the J6ers one BILLION dollars. (New York Times)

Rockin’ roadkill with RFK Jr. (Some fucking cooking show page ugh gross)

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Trump’s trying to grift up your science. I mean, he already broke it, but he’s trying to do that special thing he does. (Lisa Needham at Public Notice)

Fifteen years for Colin Gray, the dad who was told by local cops “hey looks like y’all got a buddin’ school shooter here,” paraphrase, so he went and bought him an AR-15. What the fuck is wrong with all y’all, no paraphrase. (ABC News)

Mandela Barnes has dropped out of the Wisconsin gov race, and if this story is correct, it seems he was … single and slutty? Is that really all? No milkshake duck, just bein’ young and hot and a lieutenant governor and chicks accepted to bone him? Damn. Anyway, Francesca Hong seems cool. (NOTUS)

And St. Paul MN Mayor Kaohly Her, it sounds like your sense of humor is super terrible, like eh uh whut? And I say that as somebody who dated one subordinate and then married a second one, all of this sounds worse as you read on, what you doing man. (MPR)

V. Marx Demon Hunter still hunting demons and running for Colorado gov! (9 News)

My goodness, that’s a big tax cut for Montana corporations and millionaires while everybody else’s property taxes went up 40 percent, yowch! (Monica Tranel)

G. Elliott Morris talks to Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler — who most Democrats are probably regretting about now they didn’t vote in to chair the DNC BUT ALSO I’m not mad at the current DNC chair Ken Martin for doing a Fifty State Strat either — about how to unfuck democracy should we get the (very shortlived) chance to in 2028. It’s a podcast, but you can click ‘transcript’ up top. (Morris)

Gosh I hope Republicans’ really disgusting gerrymandering and Supreme Court Voting Rights Act-killing don’t backfire on them with Southern voters of the less-Pantone Color of the Year persuasion. (The Guardian)

All of Europe to boycott FIFA World Cup for real if they sell a big fat stake to Jared Kushner’s vulture fund brother. Is this why FIFA’s been up Trump’s ass? All for a little bit of money? Well I just don’t understand it. (ESPN)

Where is the country of Africa and can Marco Rubio’s State Department get it 100 percent wrong? Bless the rains. (The Guardian)

What are y’all watching with ZiggyWiggy for Wonkette Movie Night this Saturday night at 9 p.m. Eastern? Dark Passage, available for free with ads on Tubi and Plex; $3.99 in the usual places. Free on OKRU. So hop to!

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Hi hi hi hi hi. We may or may not have (definitely did) skipped some One-A-Days for you since I’ve been back from vacation. So here’s today’s!

Here were tabs! They were good tabs!

They included these important announcements.

There will be info on Cleveland’s wonkmeet in tomorrow’s tabs. You should probably read tomorrow’s tabs!

Evan watched the Fauci hearings. It was actually really upsetting, watching their hard-on to throw him in jail :/

Okay.

No reason, just noting that there’s still plenty of cocaine around, why do you ask?

MMHMMM.

I learned a lot of things reading Robyn. Very very stupid things.

And I’ll give you one from yesterday since I didn’t do a One-a-Day for what I’m sure was an excellent reason (AND IT WAS).

See you bright and early for tabs! :D

For the last seven months, Elon Musk has been raging, quite endlessly, about the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. And while we’re certain that, being as racist and petty as he is, he actually was very upset about the casting of a Black woman as the “face that launched a thousand ships,” it’s also more than clear that he intended this to be a real flex, as solid proof of his power and influence, as proof of the cultural relevance of his army of Xitter goons.

He likely looked forward to being able to use the epic’s epic failure as a “go woke go broke” talking point for years on end, the same way the Right has bragged about getting Cracker Barrel to change its logo back to an old white man sitting next to a barrel (a tad literal if you ask me, but okay) and how their boycott pressured Bud Light into advertising to heterosexual men only. You know, because Cracker Barrel and Bud Light are both very relevant cultural touchstones in this, the year 2026.

Alas, as proof that either no one is listening to him or that no one cares about his critiques of movies he hasn’t even seen yet, the movie has done very, very well. In fact, after just 12 days in theaters, it pulled in $727.9 million, which is really a lot of money, especially given that people don’t really go to theaters so much anymore.

But Musk continues to thrash. Last week, he announced his plans to have his AI pal Grok (neé MechaHitler) make his own “historically accurate” version of The Odyssey by the end of the year. This will be difficult as the story involves people and gods that did not ever actually exist, and none of whom were ever described as having six fingers. (Briareus/Aegaeon, of course, had 100 hands and 50 heads, but he really only figured into The Iliad.)

Here is the weird, sad clip someone else made that inspired this oath:

It’s not very good!

The especially awkward thing here is that the movie has done so well and is apparently so good that even several of Elon’s pals have been trying to get the Right to back off of this one before it becomes very embarrassing and everyone notices that they did not have the social power necessary to stop people from going to see it.

Perhaps the first to defect was Ben Shapiro, who encouraged right-wing filmgoers to calm down about the fact that Lupita Nyong’o played Helen of Troy in about three minutes of the movie and see that it was a “masterpiece.” He also tried to flip the script and claim that Nolan actually made the film with a Christian moral framework because at the beginning, Zeus suggests that it’s a good idea to treat people well, because you never know who is a god, and that’s basically “the Golden Rule.” (The Golden Rule is apparently a lot like Undercover Boss.)

Here is Shapiro’s quote, because it really is something.

Okay, this is actually a Christian allegory. How do you miss this? Honestly, it is a Christian allegory because the whole thing is a biblical take. Okay, Christopher Nolan establishes at the beginning of the film something that he calls Zeus's rule. What is Zeus's rule?

Zeus's rule is treat others as you would be treated because you don't know who is a god in disguise. Now you may notice that treat others as you would be treated is the Golden Rule. The silver rule appears in the Old Testament. That's don't treat others as you would not want to be treated.

The Golden Rule comes from the New Testament. Okay? And usually it finishes because God made man in his image. Nolan takes that and flips it and says because any person could be a God. Okay? This is not something that the Greeks cared about.

This is not something that the Greeks cared about, said Shapiro, while also somehow muddling the Golden Rule with the lesson of Sodom and Gomorrah: treating people you don’t know well because you never know when you might be serving a Touched By An Angel.

Of course, Shapiro was still very upset about Elliot Page, who is a trans man, being cast as Sinon (a character who was actually in Virgil’s Aeneid and not The Odyssey), because it confused him.

I’m actually not entirely shocked that Ben Shapiro couldn’t manage to get all that het up about the casting. Not because he’s not racist, but because he is a musical theater nerd. One thing about musical theater, and live theater in general, is that, apart from when sex or gender is intrinsic to the role, “colorblind” casting and non-traditional casting (and setting) is the norm. This is particularly true for very well-worn stories, like The Odyssey.

Michael Knowles — who had also spent months talking up how the film was going to be an absolute disaster — attempted to do a little spin himself, by insisting that he knows that Christopher Nolan is conservative (he does not publicly identify as either conservative or liberal) because The Dark Knight was a conservative film about what a fabulous president George W. Bush was (it was not), and thus tried to find the secret right-wing subtext in the film. He really stretches it in terms of suggesting that casting Elliot Page as Sinon was some sort of gesture to Sinon’s role in The Aeneid and in The Inferno as a fraudster (though he is not depicted that way in the film).

Sure. Either that or Christopher Nolan just wanted to work with Elliot Page again after having worked with him in Inception. You know, because that’s a thing directors do. Sort of like casting actors — like Lupita Nyong’o and Zendaya — who are especially hot and in demand at the moment in their films, in the hope that this will make people want to go see them. Not everything is a secret evil Trojan horse of wokeness.

But perhaps the greatest betrayal of all comes from one of Musk’s most dedicated acolytes, Joe Rogan, who, in a recent discussion with actor Tim Robbins derided the Right’s culture war against the film (without explicitly mentioning Musk, because that would surely be too much).

“[The Odyssey is] like one of those movies that’s so big people are scrambling to go see it in the movie theaters, and it’s getting people excited about it. Along with a lot of the culture war controversies that … everybody that I know that’s seen it — I haven’t seen it yet — says ‘Fuckin’ throw all that away. The movie’s amazing.’

“They just like — it’s almost like a good way to bait people into getting really, uh, you know, confrontational. You getting tired of that though?” he asked Robbins, who was, in fact, tired of it.

“I was like, ‘Come on, guys. Calm down. Calm down.’ Like, I don’t care. It’s just is it entertaining? Is it good? It doesn’t have to be correct. That doesn’t mean anything to me. There’s never been a time in history where correct was important to me.”

Truer words! Rogan also noted that we’re dealing with mythology here and none of these characters were ever real people to begin with, which is … well, correct.

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This feels a little like a last gasp. I think at one point, right-wing political correctness and culture war hysteria started feeling a little less “One Million Moms” and more transgressive to some (stupid) people, but now they just look like old men yelling at clouds (possibly clouds that are actually Zeus, disguising himself in order to bang a mortal princess without his wife finding out, and yet she always found out). Elon thought he had the power to bring down a movie that people actually wanted to go see and were excited about, but he doesn’t. He just flew, to reference another Greek myth, a little too close to the sun. Which is a little ironic, given that I’m pretty sure he was supposed to be on his moon base by now, not sitting around on the internet crying about Black women and trans men being in movies all the time.

OPEN THREAD.

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Hello there! Do you live in a blue state? Was that blue state recently hit by a natural disaster so huge that it overwhelmed any preparations the state had made? Maybe there was a particularly violent rainstorm that caused flooding, or a blizzard that dumped apocalyptic amounts of snow on you that you spent days digging out from under. Sure, you got some funny videos of dogs trying to get out of the house to poop, only to be confronted with near-Himalayan conditions that both excited and confused their shallot-sized brains. But mostly, it really sucked.

Maybe your state leaders realized that they lacked the resources to keep up with this unfolding disaster. So they appealed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for some financial assistance to help cover the costs of snow removal or cleaning up the mountains of mud left behind when the waters finally receded. You jumped through whatever hoops you had to jump, and FEMA approved the aid.

All that remained was for President Donald Trump to sign off. But you are a blue state, so fuck you.

A couple of weeks ago, Trump denied $227 million in aid to New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island that the states had requested to help clean up from February’s record snowstorm. Politico has now gotten hold of some emails showing that while regional FEMA and NOAA offices determined those states met certain government thresholds for aid, the giant baby overrode the determinations for no obvious reason.

Well, there was a reason, and it was that when the aid request landed on his desk, his dementia-addled brain spit out something like BLUE STATE THEY DON’T LOVE TRUMP THEY CAN HAVE MONEY WHEN THEY LOVE TRUMP WHERE DIET COKE I PUSH DIET COKE BUTTON WHEN DIET COKE GET HERE, and you were shit out of luck.

This almost never happens. Presidents this century have approved 69 requests (nice) for “snow assistance that met FEMA standards.” A former FEMA official told Politico they could not remember a time when such a disaster declaration was denied.

Even Trump in his first term didn’t deny disaster requests — or rather, not at the rate he’s denying them now. It’s amazing how much worse he is in his second term, when his first term was a hideous clusterfuck unmatched in American history. It turns out, we still hadn’t touched bottom.

If you ask the White House about the disaster relief, they make it sound like your state is full of moochers who should have been prepared for an amount of snowfall that hasn’t been seen in the roughly century and a half that records have been kept:

“There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. Trump handles disaster requests “with great care” to ensure state aid is used “to supplement — not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters.”

Meanwhile, Trump has approved 90 percent of the aid requests he’s received from red states. Sorry, mid-Atlantic and New England regions, you should have elected Republicans if you wanted help digging out of the snow.

And it is not just disaster relief requests. The administration is being sued by a bunch of researchers whose grants were canceled. In a recent court filing, an attorney for the Energy Department admitted — in remarkably plain English — that the cancellations were driven solely by partisan politics:

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing Senators (‘Blue State’ grants),” the filing stated, contradicting previous public statements by officials.

We all suspected this was the case, but it’s nice for the administration to put it in writing. It should make the lawsuits go worse for them.

The country, thanks entirely to Republicans, has been on this “make disaster aid a political football” trajectory for years. Chris Christie’s presidential campaign in 2016 was fatally sunk partly because he had not only accepted disaster aid from the Obama administration after Superstorm Sandy, but he had even hugged the Kenyan usurper out of gratitude. In public! Where people could see it!

But Trump has taken it to a whole new level, starting with the grief he put California through when it needed help after massive wildfires early in his second term.

All of this makes us wonder whether, if we lived in one of those snow-bombed states, we would have bothered writing the IRS a big check in April. Why bother paying federal taxes if the government is going to take them and then tell you to fuck off when you have an emergency? The four states that saw their aid requests rejected haven’t been colonies for 250 years, but that is exactly what Trump is turning them into.

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[POLITICO / The Atlantic]

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Oh, how the Trump regime and its one or two friends in the world want to have their cake and bomb it too!

Any American who’s traveled abroad for more than nine seconds during the second Trump regime can tell you — assuming they’ve spoken to anyone in the countries they’ve visited who isn’t currently being bribed by the administration — that the rest of the world is pretty much fucking through with the United States. They pity us for what we’re going through, but they’re not about to go through it with us, nor are they going to hold our hair back while we throw up all over the planet. Not this time, not anymore. Oh, and they don’t want to visit, especially now that the World Cup is over.

As one person told this writer during a trip back in the fall, “What a way to squander your entire reputation forever.” You will be shocked to hear he wasn’t talking about men in women’s sports or Dylan Mulvaney’s Bud Light can or school libraries being allowed to carry books Southern Baptist parents might not approve of.

We see Canadian leader Mark Carney bringing his nation closer to Europe, and we’re watching them work together to forge new things, trade and defense alliances and agreements where they don’t need the United States, where they don’t turn into our adversaries so much as they just write us out of the story entirely wherever possible. Art of the fucking deal, beta cucks!

And today, we can talk about US Secretary of State/National Security Advisor/Token Spanish Knower Marco Rubio and the rest of the US “diplomacy” team having a reaaaaaaaal huffy pissy bitchy poopy pantsy rabieta because a French diplomat dared to say out loud that the United States has lost all credibility on the issue of human rights, like a common Russia or North Korea.

Which it has.

Sorry, is that a controversial thing to say, Little Florsheim?

Fuck off.

What happened is that the current human rights boss at the UN, Volker Türk, was up for reappointment, and basically everybody supported it except the US and a couple other human rights abuser nations. (To be exact, the vote was 144-10 with 13 nations abstaining. Opposed: the United States and similar countries like North Korea, Russia, Argentina, Israel, and a few others. Lot of overlap with the list of that opposes the International Criminal Court, shockingly.)

The fight started Friday when France’s mission in Geneva tweeted this in response to that vote:

That #AmericaAlone hashtag at the end sure is rough. That tweet was itself a response to some bitching from Trump’s man at the UN about how Türk refuses to be mean to whatever nations Trump wants him to be mean to, whenever he wants it.

And oh boy, now Little Marco and his fellow Trump sniffers have kicked them big old clown dress shoes off like drag queens about to throw down!

On Monday, the US delegation dramatically walked out while the French were speaking at the UN. After that, the deputy US ambassador to the UN huffed that it’s not gonna take this kind of hurtfulness from the Frenches, no longer:

[D]eputy U.S. ambassador Dan Negrea accused France of feigning “moral outrage” and pretending to lecture the world about every topic, including human rights.

The United States has stood by France in every conflict where its “freedom has been imperiled” and tolerated its grandstanding “out of a sense of camaraderie and mutual respect,” he said, but no more.

‘Kay.

Mike Waltz, US ambassador to the UN, got off Signal long enough to tweet:

‘Kay.

Then there was more bitching on Monday from Dan Negrea:

“Today, I remind them that it is the United States that remains the beacon of liberty for the world,” he said. “As such, we will not be affording them the benefit of listening to their politicized drivel until they renounce their condescending and disrespectful rhetoric and behave in a manner commensurate with their seat on this council.”

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, what did he say the United States remains? In the eyes of whom, please? The same United States currently run by a criminal grifter conman the entire world recognizes as Stupid Hitler or worse?

Reached for comment, the world bent over so the US delegation could eat their ass.

The Guardian with some more context as to why the Americans hate Türk so much:

Last March, Türk said he was “deeply worried by the fundamental shift in direction” in the US. In June, Türk took sharp aim at the Trump administration by calling for “prompt, independent, impartial and effective investigations” into the deaths occurring in US government immigration custody.

Türk has mentioned the Trump regime’s attacks on minorities, immigrants, women, “[d]isinformation, intimidation and threats, notably against journalists and public officials.” Oh look, here’s some of that last thing! Obviously there’s also the million countries Trump has bombed for no reason, all Pete Hegseth’s prematurely ejaculatory boat murders that have stopped no cocaine, Elon Musk feeding USAID into a woodchipper just to watch brown babies die … (He bitchily insists he’s killed no one, but we know what it will say on his tombstone before everybody pissing on it washes away the inscription.)

Yes, it sure is hard to imagine what Türk or the French mission could be referring to!

Oh yeah. Bankrolling Israeli madman Benjamin Netanyahu’s murder adventures in Gaza. There’s that.

And now, Little Marco’s latest bitchy huffy puffy Florsheim-y stompy berrinche continues, with the State Department considering “delaying, or even blocking” France’s next ambassador to the US, Aurélien Lechevallier, reports Reuters, which says that social media post “sparked genuine anger” in the Trump regime, haha, bless their hearts.

“The United States is very disappointed in the irresponsible and disrespectful rhetoric from the French,” said a State Department official, boo hoo, priss priss. “We are responding appropriately to their comments.”

Reuters notes that a source told them that the Americans have vetted that social media statement from the French and do not believe it was an underling or “junior staffer acting independently” who posted them. It’s not amateur hour in France like it is in the US, after all!

They were already mad that French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot (whom the new ambassador designate currently works for) had recently been critical of the Trump State Department’s grants to European groups that promote “civilizational self-confidence,” wink wink, is that what we’re calling Nazis today? “France and ​the Europeans will not tolerate any attempt ⁠at foreign interference in their electoral processes, regardless of where it comes from,” Barrot had said.

Reuters also notes that the French hate Jared Kushner’s criminal dad, who is currently the ambassador to France, no joke, in case anybody is curious who really disrespected whom first.

France’s response to the kerfuffle appears to be along the lines of “Allons, allons, let’s all put on our big boy pantalons and reason together like grown hommes.”

France’s support for the renewal of Turk’s mandate “does not preclude close dialogue with the United States,” a French diplomatic official said.

“Differences of opinion regarding a ​vote do not call into question the quality of our relationship or our ability to work together,” the official added.

We’re sure that’ll fix the Trump regime’s hissy.

Expect new tariffs on cartoons starring the weak, overrated, and honestly not even that stinky Pepé Le Pew by afternoon.

[AP / Reuters / Guardian]

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Just in time for the midterms, the Trump administration is rolling out yet another increase in healthcare costs for seniors, although the higher prices won’t hit until January.

As the Wall Street Journal reports (gift link), the latest kick in the teeth to older Americans will eliminate a subsidy that has held down subscribers’ monthly premium costs for Medicare Part D, the optional prescription drug plans used by about 25 million folks on Medicare. The subsidies, a result of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, were supposed to run though 2027, but Trump will instead cut them off at the end of 2026.

Unless Congress votes to stop that, we added for the sake of hollow mordant laughter.

According to a Trump administration official who spoke to the Journal, some 45 percent of Part D subscribers will see a monthly premium increase between $11 and $20, which is kind of hefty considering that the average Part D premium is around $36 a month, per the healthcare policy boffins at KFF.

Another 30 percent will have an increase that’s “less than $10” a month, which is practically nothing for people on a fixed income. Just eat less avocado toast, Grammy. Oh, but the remaining 25 percent would see either no change or even a slight decrease in premium.

Incidentally, the Journal article listed those likely changes in reverse order, starting with the sliver of the Part D subscribers who wouldn’t be harmed. Funny, that.

Oh yes, and since the lower monthly premiums were achieved though about $3.6 billion in annual subsidies to the private insurance companies that provide Part D plans, the administration is pretending this is a huge win for Americans, because Trump is sticking it to Big Insurance. Way to go!

All at the low, low cost of higher premiums for 75 percent of the people on Medicare Part D. Woohoo. Surely the folks seeing their premiums go up by $240 a year will enjoy thinking about how those insurance-company leeches are suffering as a result.

Hey, remember when Trump said at a rally way back in 2017, “You will end up with great health care for a fraction of the price and that will take place immediately after we go in. Immediately! Fast! Quick!”

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Announcing the change, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz bragged on social media, “We are stabilizing the market so this bailout is no longer needed.” Every time a Trumper says this is eliminating a “corporate subsidy,” make sure you shout back that the costs will be borne by seniors who will now pay more for their prescriptions.

Also, let’s just take a moment to remind y’all that the whole idea for Medicare Part D was that the Magic of the Free Market would keep seniors’ medication costs down. Once private insurers got their sticky little fingers into the lucrative market for life-saving prescription drugs for folks on Medicare, they were supposed to compete to offer the very best plans. Whether Part D has actually managed to do that, though, is a big enough question that we’ll save it for another day.

One thing that’s quite clear, however, is that the subsidies really did result in lower premiums for Part D subscribers. (Yes, little libertarian screamers, those subsidies were paid for with taxes. We live in a society, fuck you.) Per the Journal:

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a federal watchdog agency, estimates the subsidy program, which was supposed to stabilize Part D, reduced the average Part D plan premium by about 40% in 2025. This year, it cut the average rate by an estimated 27%.

Next year, you’re going to have to hope that sticking it to the insurers won’t cost you too much.

In addition, the Journal points out that the higher Part D premiums are likely to “push more Medicare enrollees into Medicare Advantage, the private-insurer version of Medicare, which generally wrap in drug benefits and often charge no premiums at all.”

That might work out OK for those seniors or not (please tell us about your Medicare Advantage experiences in the comments, which we do not allow). But it isn’t likely to save taxpayers much of anything, because while Medicare Advantage can reduce out of pocket costs for most subscribers, it actually costs the federal government more per person covered than regular Medicare.

Perhaps we could improve society somewhat by dispensing altogether with the kludgy mix of privatized profits and socialized costs in our current hodgepodge of a “system.” What about expanding and improving regular Medicare to cover all Americans, with European-style limits on what providers charge, so everyone gets medical care at a reasonable cost. But that would be communism, like the happy, healthy people in Scandinavian social democracies must endure.

To avoid that horror, we suppose we’ll need big cuts to Medicare next.

[WSJ (gift link) / ABC News / Center for Medicare Advocacy]

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And Yet We Participate In Society!

Dr. Anthony Fauci didn’t not want to answer the Senate’s questions yesterday. It’s just that he and his lawyer know Rand Paul is a sniveling clownpiss little anal carbuncle, the type of guy whose neighbors try to run over them with lawnmowers, and they knew Paul was trying to use yesterday’s hearing find a way to gin up a fake perjury referral to send to Donald Trump’s team of ass-suckers at the Justice Department. Fauci explained in a short opening statement that Paul’s “obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution” was what brought us all together yesterday.

“The sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

Therefore, “Under the advice of my attorneys, I will invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refrain from answering your questions.” He said it over 100 times.

It’s not like they can find anything else to charge Fauci with, unless US Attorney Boxwine gets drunk and asks Grok to make a movie of Fauci licking the Reflecting Pool.

So Fauci pleaded the Fifth, and he exercised that right with every single question those thatches full of ingrown grundles asked him.

What was left was just Republican Dickhole Theater, footage for MAGA voters who say “You sound vaccinated” in comments sections.

The Theat-uh!

There was Rand Paul, of course, who raged from the beginning that his little genius plan wasn’t working. At the beginning of the hearing, Dr. Fauci’s attorney David Schertler was trying to speak, and it made Rand so mad he had his body physically kicked out of the room. Here is that temper tantrum:

It should be noted that before the hearing, Rand put out 1,100 pages of Dr. Fauci’s diary. We guess Hunter Biden’s laptop shop keeps that in stock too. Just kidding, RFK Jr. had it lying around, because if there’s anything RFK Jr. likes more than whale semen, it’s libelslandering Dr. Fauci.

Anyway, Rand was so mad that now he’s going to call a vote to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress, for invoking his constitutional rights, for refusing to tell him and moron Republicans what they want to hear about how Fauci secretly created COVID in a lab and then gave it to everyone for fun and profit.

We don’t have a clip of Fauci doing this yesterday because he pleaded the Fifth, so here is a video of Fauci from five years ago calling Rand Paul, Mall Optometrist, a fucking dumbass. (We know he’s a self-certified ophthalmologist and those are different things, it’s a joke, fuckheads.)

Now back to yesterday’s theat-uh!

There was Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, doing somehow the inverse of “Have you no decency, sir!” when he shrieked like a little bitch about “WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU WERE” for doing whatever cowardly lunatic white Republicans think Dr. Fauci did.

Big man. Big maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!

There was former stupidest man in the Senate Ron Johnson, who spent his time with the good doctor explaining that Republicans’ two favorite drugs, hydroxybonercialisencephalitis and horse paste, do too cure COVID, and also all other diseases, and demanding to know if Fauci was involved in the FDA “attack” on horse paste. He also told very sad stories about how people who are “injection injured” are committing mass suicide like Jonestowners because nobody will listen to them about their injection injuries. He called the COVID vaccine an “experimental gene therapy.”

Ron Johnson lives here with us, in the world.

Neat guy.

There was “Democratic” Senator John Fetterman, who could have used his opportunity talking to the doctor to say “Hey, would you check my brain with your doctor skilz?” but didn’t. Instead he explained that he now believes the Republican conspiracy theory that COVID leaked out a lab. It was not a worthwhile two minutes of our life so we will not include the video here.

There was Laura Ingraham, not a Republican senator but a spectator, who dramatically rolled her eyes throughout the hearing like she was trying to audition for the new washed-up elderly person Broadway cast of Heathers, as if anybody can take her seriously without remembering that she used to engage in sexual congress with Dinesh D’Souza’s d’penis, d’intentionally.

The Daily Show put together the montage that you need to see:

After the hearing, Republican Senator Josh Hawley yapped with his little rat lips on Twitter that no innocent person pleads the Fifth, as if liar, felon, and adjudicated rapist Trump hasn’t done it a thousand times. People quickly reminded him of that.

And of course, Republicans used yesterday to do what they do best, which is go on right-wing TV and grift and bitch and spread right-wing talking points, etc.

Peter Navarro, chief Trump grift-n-bitcher/economics crank, whined that he had a million doses of hydroxybonerviagraprolapse cream that he was totally ready to give to hospitals, but Dr. Fauci wouldn’t let him.

We had a similar experience. We found two unopened bottles of ammonia and some rat traps under our sink, and Dr. Fauci wouldn’t let us cure COVID with those either!

Roger Marshall, another senator who is a doctor (not one we’d ever trust to give us a fucking Band-Aid), went on TV and asked who doesn’t know somebody who had complications from the COVID vaccine.

Finally, below is current reigning title-holder of Stupidest Man In The Senate Tommy Tuberville, pigfucking and bibble-babbling on Newsmax that when he is governor of Alabama, he is going to find a way to prosecute Dr. Fauci and put him in jail for something.

“We lost 20 to 30,000 people in Alabama alone, and I hope every damn one of them sues this Dr. Fauci,” Tuberville explained, about what dead people should do to this Dr. Fauci.

More good Tuberville quotes:

“If we can’t put him in prison, let’s put him in court every day for the rest of his life, where he has to be punished and listened to the deaths that he caused.” Just make him sit there in court! Why? “The vaccine! The death! The lies!”

“Who knows what any of these people that are dyin’ every day are dyin’ from, and a lot of it, I think is from that vaccine that he forced on the people and used us as guinea pigs!” Who among us can forget the time before the COVID vaccine, when no one died?

Tuberville explained that the preemptive pardon Joe Biden gave Fauci was a “federal pardon from an autopen, so that will be contested,” but concluded that “I promise you one thing, we will find out if there’s a possibility that we can bring him to Alabama, to put him in front of a court and a jury, to see if we can put this guy in prison. He killed millions of people, folks. I mean, this was a catastrophe.”

OK, LOL, sure, Senator Jock Itch.

When Tuberville tried to accuse Fauci of killing “nine million people” on Fox Business the host there at least suggested that it’s hard to prove that Fauci did such a thing. Yes we can, he insisted.

“He was in on the gain of function!” said Tommy Tuberville, who can definitely define “gain-of-function research” without asking Grok.

They are going to harass and terrorize this man until he dies if they’re allowed to.

We’ll conclude this article with a good post we saw on Bluesky that captures exactly what Republicans are doing here with Fauci. It applies not only to this situation, but to every single event Republicans try to rewrite after they fuck it up, after their braindead ideas about how the world works are laughed out of the room by reality yet again:

If you need a refresh on your history, check out this link.

Same old fuckin’ shit.

Of course, we would say that, because we’re vaccinated.

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Good morning, it’s tabs time!

Let’s start with a Nice Times, as has been our habit now for two whole days in a row: Serpico’s 90 and still alive, and his mentee is NYC’s new sheriff in town! (Yes, New York City has a sheriff. And he’s ADORABLE.) (Gift link New York Times)

Elon Musk’s whole Turner Diaries-infused “hang the traitors” thing (he means race traitors, he means all of us) is grosser and scarier and ickier than you thought. The media should notice that more! (Gift link Jamelle Bouie New York Times)

Speaking of, why does Musk lie that no children were killed by his DOGE cuts to USAID? Because he wants us to understand that he’s lying but it doesn’t matter: No children were killed who matter to him. (The New Republic)

He should spend more time being mad about The Odyssey and less time killing children and threatening to hang us, except his Odyssey thing is ALSO about how we’re all race traitors, ugh. (Charlotte Clymer)

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That was good of [J]eff [T]iedrich to watch Lindsey Graham’s funeral for us and also gif the moment when the dude behind Trump got a snootful of poop. ([T]iedrich)

Most Senate Democrats except for the usual good ones, in order to “honor Lindsey Graham” hahahahaha horck, just voted to give Trump vague tariff authority, supposedly for sanctions on Russia and Iran but in no way limited to that? Lol WTF. (The Hill)

Democrat and cutie (and nephew of Wonker Leslie) Sam Forstag might WIN for Congress in Montana? What a weird midterm cycle! (The New Republic Blue Book, scroll down)

Mona Charen’s THE DSA IS COMING bullshit is … oh I already said it’s bullshit? Right, that. (The Farce)

If you are an old in a nursing home, you have the right to vote! So Donald Trump rescinded a reminder to nursing home operators reminding them of that fact. Now why would he want to do that? (Brian Beutler)

Christian preachers proselytizing to the whole plane? OH NO THANK YOU. (Friendly Atheist)

From the comments, Meta and Newsmax joining up to create AI news is some real dystopian shit! (Newsmax)

Department of Justice fucked around, and verily diddeth it find out. (Our Liz at Public Notice)

Trump lawyers sued BBC and now whoops there is discovery. (Status Kuo)

But who will perform “Fairytale of New York” at Glen Hansard’s funeral?

WONKMEETS AHOY. CLEVELAND (Aug. 8), PITTSBURGH (Aug. 9), SAN FRANCISCO IN HONOR OF FUKUI (Aug. 21), WINDSOR, MASS (camp near but not at Paul and Holly’s, Labor Day weekend)! Atlanta has been postponed. TIME TO PARTY!

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Montana hasn’t sent a Democrat to the US House of Representatives in this century, not since nine-term Rep. Pat Williams left office in 1997. Sure, the state elected Jon Tester to the Senate a bunch of times until two years ago, by which time the state was so pickled in red MAGAjuice that it replaced him with lying carpetbagger millionaire Tim Sheehy, the equivalent of the proverbial brick with the letter R following his name.

But this year, Montana might very well send a Democrat to Washington again. Not just your conventional centrist red-state Dem who promises to be less awful than Republicans, but a populist progressive Democrat named Sam Forstag. He’s a “smoke jumper” — a wildland firefighter who jumps out of airplanes to fight fires far away from roads — and state leader of the labor union that represents federal employees. Yr Editrix also notes that Forstag is the nephew of Wonkette reader Leslie, too, so we figure that must be one proud Aunt Tifa.

Oh, did we mention the polls are tied?

In a move that sounds awfully familiar in Montana, former Trump Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke decided in March not to seek a third term in Congress. But he only dropped out at the last minute, leaving the Republican primary field mostly open for his handpicked successor, Aaron Flint, a rightwing talk radio host who spouts conspiracy theories and warns Montana listeners that scary socialists like “AOC, Mamdani, and Bernie” have conquered DC and are “coming for Montana next.” You know, because the commies are taking over everywhere.

But instead of waltzing right into office with Donald Trump’s endorsement, Flint is up against Forstag, who appears to be the progressive blue-collar champion people thought that guy in Maine was, only without anything like the awful baggage. (If there’s awful baggage, we will just scream.)

Forstag’s “All of Us” campaign ad from January is a 95-second masterpiece of compact messaging, hitting all the right populist notes about how the economy is rigged against workers, with the “richest people in the country trying to burn it all down so they can buy it all up.”

That audio appears over a quick cut of Elon Musk waving around his bejewelled chainsaw at CPAC in February 2025, a gift from Argentina’s elected strongman Javier Milei. Seconds later, Musk’s purely decorative CPAC chainsaw is visually contrasted with a gritty shot of Forstag (we think?) wielding a real Forest Service chainsaw while fighting a real wildfire, with very real flames close to him in the foreground.

There’s your class war in Montana, Charlie Brown.

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After Elon Musk’s arbitrary budget cuts last year eliminated around 2,300 federal workers from agencies that manage the West’s wildlands, Forstag repeatedly tried to request meetings with Zinke to discuss the firings, but the millionaire congressman ignored him. In April of 2025, when Bernie and AOC really did come to Montana as part of their “Fighting Oligarchy” rally tour, Forstag accepted an invitation to join them onstage at the University of Montana in Missoula so he could speak for those who’d been fired. The anticipated crowd of about 3,000 instead turned out to be something more than 9,000, and they were primed to hear Forstag’s appeal:

“What we’re facing today isn’t a wildfire, but it’s damn sure an emergency. […] What we’re facing today is greed burning out of control. Somewhere I read that hope is a state of mind, not a state of the world. And when I see the thousands of us who are here today to say that we’ve had enough, I’m starting to feel the kind of hope it’s going to take to fight this thing.”

People started telling him he should run for office. So what the hell, he did, and now he’s getting coverage not only in the political press, but also, thanks to his smoke-jumper cool, in places like Outside magazine, a perfect platform for him to spread the gospel of protecting public lands from greedhead developers, but also to fight back against the Current Darkness, explaining, “We don’t have to settle for a government that lurches from crisis to crisis, and we don’t have to settle for elected officials who warp public goods into sources of profit for themselves. We can make our land management more efficient and effective by investing up front and ensuring those investments go to working people, not corporate profits.”

Talk nerdy to us, please.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee thinks Forstag has a pretty good chance, and this week added him to its “Red to Blue” campaign aimed at flipping winnable seats, prompting an especially pissy statement from the National Republican Campaign Committee that smeared Forstag with all the scary words they could Luntz up on short notice:

“National Democrats are propping up lobbyist Sam Forstag because he's the perfect socialist stooge: obedient, shameless, and desperate to do whatever the radical left demands. Montanans know a bought-and-paid-for fraud when they see one, and Forstag will sell out Montana's values every single time.”

Those are some very impressive empty generalizations, to be sure.

Forstag clearly has wingnuts worried; earlier this month, Fox News ran a hit piece aimed at connecting him with all the Culture Wars issues he isn’t actually running on, because that is how they do. Supposedly, Forstag can’t be a real blue-collar firefighter at all, because he “previously worked as a registered lobbyist” for “far-left groups” like, umm, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, the Montana Library Association, and the City of Missoula. You know how those librarians love to wear their Che Guevara shirts and plot the dictatorship of the proletariat. (They do.)

As part of his lobbying work, he engaged in dangerous radical un-American activities like testifying against some of the more unhinged wingnut bills in the Montana Lege, like legislation “involving drag performances in schools and libraries, transgender-related medical treatments for minors, boys competing in girls’ sports, voter ID, and local cooperation with federal immigration authorities,” oh my!

Fox News unearthed Forstag’s comments on the drag ban bill, which we guess are too radical for Montana. He called the bill “the latest of a series that I expect you’ll see that are intended to stir up fear and distrust of our fellow citizens” and called it overly broad because it could lead trans or nonbinary people to be banned from public libraries altogether, which of course is a good and holy thing.

To his credit, Forstag didn’t shy away from defending his prior work, saying it simply reflects his belief that the government has no business getting in people’s private lives.

“Between fire seasons, I fought for working people in a state capital that too often ignores us,” Forstag told Fox News Digital. “Instead of accepting a system where the extremes and the rich have the loudest voice, I worked my tail off to defend Montanans’ constitutional rights and freedoms and fight for policies that actually improve our lives.”

He even went full libertarian in his defense of his opposition to bills banning gender-affirming medical care, explaining, “I believe the government’s got no place getting involved in peoples’ private, personal decisions. […] Politicians have no place coming for our guns, and no place inserting themselves into medical decisions that should be up to patients, parents, and doctors.”

Yes, he said that freedom is good for guns and for trans people. Is that even legal? Fox tried to make clear that such talk is blasphemy by following it with a terrifying animated gif of a transgender flag superimposed over a still image of the Supreme Court.

Also too, the Koch-funded rightwing group Americans for Prosperity, back in May, had a nice panicky post attacking Forstag and Ocasio-Cortez for saying climate change is real, whining that Forstag is bent on destroying Montana with “Green New Scam” ideology when what Montanans really want is strip mines, coal-burning powerplants, and clearcutting, for prosperity.

They’re frightened. Good. OPEN THREAD.

[Outside / Esquire / Fox News / TPM / Flathead Beacon]

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No Milkshake Ducking, OKAY?

For the last several decades, any time a politician has gone and supported anything that might actually help people in some way, we have heard the all-too-expected angry chorus from Republican politicians and conservative pundits of “That’s SOCIALISM! They’re trying to do socialism to us! The next thing you know, we’ll all be in bread lines!” Obama, they insisted, was an especially terrifying secret socialist, not to mention a secret Kenyan Muslim who was going to force everyone to do Sharia law.

Well, it seems that this strategy may have backfired a little bit, causing more than a few people to say to themselves, “Well gee, if that’s socialism, then fine! I’m a socialist! Bring on the health care and higher wages!” Candidates openly identifying as Democratic Socialists have been consistently winning primaries and general elections. Hell, the largest city in the nation happily elected a guy who is not only a loud and proud Democratic Socialist, but an actual Muslim from Uganda.

Naturally, there have been all different flavors of backlash and armchair analysis of this phenomenon, from both sides of the aisle, but over the last week or so, I’ve suddenly seen an unusual number of social media posts and comments trying to make the case that the Democratic Socialists have hoodwinked people into thinking that social programs, the Nordic model, the economic practices of other European nations are socialism, when in fact … they are capitalism.

Here, we see it on an Instagram post promoting an article titled “I Was In The DSA, Here’s What They Really Believe” from Bari Weiss’s Free Press. It was written by Jake Altman, a guy who left the DSA in a huff a few years ago over their support for Gaza, opposition to colonialism, and “outright hostility toward anti-Communism.”

The same argument pops up in several Xitter posts similar to the one below, from people who — it ought to be said — don’t actually want the Nordic model either.

A particularly stellar example, however, comes from newly minted Wall Street Journal associate opinion editor Mary Julia Koch — who, yes, is in fact the daughter of David Koch. Koch’s mother, Julia Koch, is the third richest woman in the world, with just about $74 billion to her name.

In a video published to the outlet’s Instagram, and an op-ed published to their “Free Expression” vertical, Koch decried the tendency of Democratic Socialists to compare what they want to do to what goes on in Nordic countries, just because Nordic countries are doing all of the things they want to do.

She explains, with the the kind of smug look you only get from never having not been a billionaire:

“America's Democratic Socialists are obsessed with the Nordic model. Universal healthcare, big welfare states, all sold with Instagram-worthy aesthetics. The only problem: These countries aren't socialist.

“Their economies are highly competitive free markets built on private ownership and global trade. Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden consistently rank among the top 15 countries with the most economic and personal freedom. Scandinavian countries do offer more public services in the US, but they're paid for by broad and steep taxation, and it's not like the citizens are just sitting around collecting benefits.”

I like that the implication here is that what the Left wants is for people to just “sit around collecting benefits.” No, that’s just the right-wing fantasy explanation for what it is that we want, because they want to be able to characterize our want of “more public services” as actually a secret, sinful desire for sloth. It can’t ever be that we just want people to have health care, it’s that we want them all to do nothing with their lives but mooch off the hardworking heirs of billionaires who definitely got their job at the Wall Street Journal because “merit.”

“In Norway, labor force participation is higher than it is in the US.”

Again, we like it when people have jobs. That is why we support unions and labor rights and other nice things that make people’s jobs better and more secure.

This also seems like a good time to point out that in Norway the usual workweek is 37.5 hours, people get 25 mandatory paid vacation days a year plus 10 national holidays, 16 days of paid sick leave (and more funded by the nation’s social insurance if 16 days isn’t enough), as well as 10 to 30 days to stay home with a sick child (depending on the number of children), 49 weeks of parental leave for a new child, “objective justifications” for being fired or laid off (as opposed to at-will employment) … I could go on.

I guess now when Republicans hear us talking about those things now, they’ll have to cry “That’s capitalism!” instead of “But that’s socialism”?

“Yes, these countries have lower levels of crime and economic inequality and higher levels of public trust, but they're ethnically and culturally homogeneous and so much smaller than America.”

Boy, that certainly took a hard turn into white nationalist territory, didn’t it? Is this meant to suggest that the reason we have higher crime rates in the US than they have in Nordic countries is because of Black and Brown people? Really?

The reason these countries have lower crime rates is not because they are “ethnically and culturally homogeneous” but because there are lower levels of economic inequality. Because people can trust that they will be able to lead nice lives, that their future is secure, that their children or future children’s future is secure.

In a world where the term “hangry” exists, it should not be hard to understand why a country with extreme economic inequality would have more of an issue with crime than a country that does not. Poverty leads to crime, and not just the “stealing a loaf of bread to feed your sister’s children” kind of crime. If people don’t believe they have a future, they are more likely to act recklessly. Also, if people feel that the system is working against them, they will create new systems or work outside the system. This isn’t actually that hard.

(Of course, if she’s suggesting that the reason we can’t have nice things is because racist white people would rather go without than see people of color have the nice things as well, she’d have a point — but I don’t think that’s where she was going with that.)

“The population of the New York City metro area is four times the size of the entire country of Norway. We're comparing apples to oranges.”

This actually has nothing to do with anything. The programs we want would actually be better supported by larger populations, single payer health care in particular. (Though we’ve gotta give Koch credit for literally holding a basket of apples and oranges to demonstrate this.)

“By the way, Norway is Western Europe's largest oil and natural gas producer. That’s the reason for their economic success, not the welfare state.”

So if the US made more money from oil and gas, we could have a welfare state? She’d be okay with that? Because I feel like she might not.

Of course, the idea that the United States doesn’t have enough money for a welfare state (which, by the way, should not be a disparaging term) is absurd. We have the money, and, frankly, we’d ultimately have more money if we were to have a system in which people could thrive. It’s a lot harder to make money selling things if no one can afford to buy them.

“If today’s socialist sympathizers really want inspiration, they should look to Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Soviet Russia. I wonder why they never mention those countries.”

Because they’re not socialist in the way anyone is advocating for in the DSA. The USSR was not actually a socialist or communist nation any more than it was a democratic nation (which, nota bene, it also claimed to be). It was a totalitarian nation with an economy that would more accurately described as “state capitalism.”

The closest thing to a purely capitalist society that has existed in the world was probably Chile under Pinochet, and they had to kill a whole lot of people to make that work. Though it’s probably worth noting here that Koch’s father and uncle were heavily inspired by Milton Friedman and the other Chicago School economists and free-market libertarians who inspired Pinochet’s economic policies. I don’t know if Mary Julia Koch shares her daddy’s sensibilities, but if she does, would it be fair of me to claim that she therefore also supports taking dissidents on “helicopter rides”?

Koch is just two years out of college, which may explain why she does not appear to be familiar with the concept of a “mixed economy,” or the fact that practically all modern nations are “mixed economies.” That means that they are a mixture of capitalism and socialism. The United States is a mixed economy. Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are all mixed economies. Hell, even Cuba, to a degree, is a mixed economy, as people are permitted to have small and medium-sized businesses. It’s all just a matter of degree.

If we were a truly capitalist society, things would be pretty much exactly the way her father wanted them to be. When he wrote the 1980 Libertarian Party campaign platform, he called for the abolition of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid; the “deregulation of the medical insurance industry”; the privatization of the postal service, public schools, public roads, railroads, and national highway systems; the abolition of minimum wage laws, of all “personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes” and ultimately all taxation whatsoever, of compulsory education laws, “all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs,” the EPA, the Department of Energy, the FAA, the FEC, the FDA, OSHA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission … the list goes on.

Does that seem like the kind of glorious free market capitalism that the Nordic countries are doing?

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I will say, however, that I’m not entirely disappointed by this being a talking point on the Right. Really, it means that they are admitting that social welfare programs are good things that people want, to the point where they want capitalism to be able to take credit for it. That’s a big step. Because that allows us to say “Well, fine then! We’ll take that flavor of capitalism, please and thank you.”

Ultimately, people just truly don’t care what anything is called anymore, they just want policies that are going to improve their lives. They want universal health care. They want childcare. They want to be able to send their kids to college without taking out a second mortgage on their home. They want to be able to get a home in the first place. They want the normal things that everyone wants and they are realizing that we may need to add a little more socialism to our mixed economy if we want to get there. You want to call that capitalism? Fine. You want to call it socialism? Fine. You want to call it Hans Glukens Flanken? Sign us up!

I guess, if Republicans really didn’t want people to be socialists, they probably should have stopped screaming that every program meant to help people was “socialism” for the past hundred years.

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