It was not the dead senator announcement we expected this morning, but Lindsey Graham, the US senator from South Carolina who went from warning in 2016 that “If [Republicans] nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it” to being one of Donald Trump’s most loyal lap dogs, died Saturday night at the age of 71 after what his office said was “a brief and sudden illness.” We doubt it was a sudden attack of conscience for his career of demanding the US bomb every adversary at every opportunity, or for his epic toadying to Trump.

NBC News reports that a top Graham staffer said there hadn’t been any signs that Graham had been feeling sick before his death. He had been scheduled to appear Sunday on NBC News’s Meet the Press, and if producers hurry they can probably cobble together an AI version of Graham from his 63 previous appearances on the show.

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Graham died just a day after visiting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, where Graham told Zelenskyy that Congress was working on toughening sanctions against Russia and Zelenskyy said it would sure be nice if the US could help Ukraine defend itself from Russian missile attacks. (Being Tuff on Russia vis a vis its invasion of its neighbor Ukraine is one of the only times we can think of where Graham’s warboner, which definitely lasted longer than four hours, was warranted.)

At last week’s NATO summit, Trump agreed to allow Ukraine to build Patriot missile interceptors under license. Graham has been one of Ukraine’s more vocal supporters even as Trump has wavered between half-hearted support and willingness to let Russia win so Trump can say he gets a Nobel Peace Prize.

In a statement on Graham’s death, Zelenskyy said, “Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and of the values that make our world safer.” That was a lot nicer than in March 2025 when Graham called for Zelenskyy to resign after Trump insulted the Ukrainian president for not wearing a suit to that disastrous Oval Office meeting. At the time, Zelenskyy offered to grant Graham Ukrainian citizenship so his opinion might at least carry a little weight.

Graham’s weirdly flexible sycophancy toward Trump was a hallmark of his last years in office, what with his apparently clear-eyed 2016 assessment of the danger Trump posed, and his insistence after the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump’s mob, which led Graham to declare — for five minutes — that he was breaking up with Trump, insisting, “All I can say is a count me out. Enough is enough.” Soon enough, enough was not enough, and he was right back insisting that Trump shouldn’t be impeached, and that his prosecution was a witch hunt.

As Wonkette’s Evan Hurst said in 2018, when Graham was simultaneously carrying Trump’s balls on the golf course and warning that Trump shouldn’t interfere in Robert Mueller’s investigation,

At times, Graham seems like he's trying to hump the line between sanity and staying in Trump's good graces, and maybe if we got into that weird little brain of his, we'd learn he thinks he's still doing that. He pays lip service to protecting the Robert Mueller investigation — his name is even on a Going Nowhere bill to do just that! — but then he gets up on his little high horse and says “NO COLLUSION! WITCH HUNT!” out of the other side of his mouth, and honestly we do not know what the hell is going on here.

Over time, it became clear that it wasn’t so much that Trump and Vladimir Putin were blackmailing Graham to keep him in line; instead, Lindsey Graham stayed true to his most deeply held moral principle: Keeping himself in the news and doing whatever he thought would be good for Lindsey Graham.

Now Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell (probably? we are pretty sure?) are dead, and we should get ready for Senators Nancy Mace and well we can’t think of a Kentucky Republican worse than Mitch McConnell who isn’t already in the Senate, but we’re sure the God who’s in charge of the current timeline in this particular universe has some pretty hilarious ideas up her sleeve.

[NBC News / NPR]

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Like Bette Davis, He's Dead. Good.

The summer job. Learning about life and making some cash.

Back when a warm weather gig meant twentysomethings trying to earn some extra income for fun things, which was apparently a gazillion years ago. Now those jobs are being done by older people trying to make some money to pay the bills.

James has just graduated from college and discovered that his parents can no longer afford to send him on his long planned dream trip to Europe, or pay for his grad school. James needs to get a job, and with no experience he ends up at the only place that doesn’t care about experience, Adventureland amusement park.

He works in games and is educated in the ways of this unamusing amusement park by Joel — how all the games are rigged, the rides are risky, and the food is questionable. But it does foster a family of sorts, this group of young people, who fall in love and out again, lives that are caught between childhood and becoming an adult. Their relationships are more complex and they see the world differently.

When James meets Em there is a spark and they slowly build a relationship, while at the same time their hearts are pulled in all kinds of directions by others. Will this summer romance become something deeper, will it be there when the summer ends?

Filmed in Pennsylvania at the historic Kennywood amusement park, Adventureland was written by director Greg Mottola about his own youth spent working at the real Adventureland in Farmingdale, Long Island, in New York. “Adventureland 110 Playland” opened in 1960, and it somehow survived the fate of many other amusement and theme parks, those that failed and were left to decay. It is still in operation today and has only grown with new rides and arcade games.

And in what is oddly reflective of the film, just 2 weeks ago, several kids had to be rescued from the “Wave Twister” after being trapped 75 feet off the ground for nearly 3 hours.

I can imagine park manager Bobby unloading some funky but still edible corndogs on these kids as an apology.

In 2009 the film received high honors from High Times magazine, with the “Stoner Movie of the Year Award,” and also awarded Kristen Stewart the “Stonette of the Year Award.”

Adventureland stars Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Ryan Reynolds, Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Martin Starr, Margarita Levieva, Matt Bush, and Wendie Malick. Directed by Greg Mottola.

Adventureland is available for free with ads on Pluto TV; with subscription on MGM+; $3.99-4.99 in the usual places.

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

The animated short is Coaster from EmotionalFulls and directed by Amos Sussigan.

Next week’s Movie Night selection is 12 Monkeys, available for free with ads on YouTube; $3.99 in the usual places.

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Your Wonkette wishes to issue a correction. On Wednesday, burly sex fiend Graham Platner announced in a rambling and self-pitying video that he is withdrawing from the race for a Maine Senate seat after an ex-girlfriend accused him of sexually assaulting her. At the time, we wrote that Platner “dawdled as long as possible” in making this decision.

It turns out, he could dawdle quite a bit longer! On Thursday, news leaked that Platner was for no reason waiting until Monday to file the paperwork with Maine’s Secretary of State that will officially remove his name from the ballot. That’s four extra days of dawdling! We regret the error.

Then, while we were writing this, he changed his mind and officially withdrew after all.

Here is why Platner’s putting off filing the paperwork made some people nervous: After 5 P.M. Monday, Democrats could not have legally replaced him on the ballot. They would have been stuck with the world’s horniest oysterman through November.

And to be clear, there was no reason to delay. The Maine secretary of state said Platner could file the paperwork by email. He could do that at any moment and then go spend the rest of his day debarnacling the hull of his boat or yelling about AIPAC or whatever.

He initially chose to drag it out instead. Maybe he thought he could spend the weekend negotiating more terms of surrender with the Democratic Party. Maybe he thought some miracle might occur over the weekend that saved his campaign. Maybe he was just having a childish snit over being forced out of the race.

But none of this stopped some of Platner’s fans from fighting on like Japanese soldiers still holding Pacific islands in the 1970s because nobody ever bothered to tell them the war was over.

For example, here is reporter Ryan Grim inventing a journalistic “scandal” in which POLITICO in its original story left out a piece of information that ... in no way changes anything about Platner’s alleged actions:

See, what’s important here is that no matter what flip comment she might have made about needing her tushie massaged, she told Platner not to come over, he did anyway and forced himself on her (ALLEGEDLY). Grim’s implication here was very clear. It was so clear that his own outlet, which he was retweeting, felt the need to apologize:

Hilariously, by Friday Grim had moved on to the “But but but Cal Cunningham!” stage of grief:

For those of you who don’t remember Cal Cunningham, he was the idiot who tanked his campaign for a North Carolina Senate seat when it came out that he had been sexting a woman who was not his wife, a relationship that eventually became a physical affair. There are subtle differences though, and we mean subtle very sarcastically.

For one, Cunningham started this affair during the campaign. So while you could yell at his campaign manager for not knowing her candidate had started cheating if you’re feeling ungracious, you can’t say she failed to vet him thoroughly before signing on. Unless he had a string of floozies he had been having other affairs with, which he has never admitted to.

But more importantly, Cunningham’s was a consensual affair! He was not accused of going over to this woman’s house after she told him not to come over and then raping her. And there was no pattern of past bad behavior towards women for which this latest accusation could serve as an exclamation point.

We’re singling out Grim, but Lord knows there were plenty of others for whom Platner’s history, sexual assault allegations, and obvious poor judgment were not dealbreakers. But flail harder, guys, maybe you’ll go hard enough to bring your credibility back.

This all just gets dumber the more we read about it. One of the people who recruited Platner was named Dan Moraff, an organizer who is the grandson of a founder of Toys “R” Us and a graduate of Brown and Yale Law School. Now, keep that in mind when you read what we learned from Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times about the process that had a couple of out-of-state political operatives recruiting Platner to run:

Moraff, this wealthy Ivy League boy, and his partner almost literally went window-shopping for a burly white guy who fit their paint-by-numbers stereotype of a gruff, populist white workingman. They saw tattoos and a beard and went nuts. Then they didn’t bother to dig nearly deep enough into the guy’s history to find any dirt that could derail him. And boy was there plenty of it.

Meanwhile, we spent months being lectured by the likes of the Pod Save America boys that the Democrats need to stop continually nominating cookie-cutter candidates recruited by their Ivy League classmates. Than an Ivy League guy tried recruiting a working-class guy and totally shit the bed.

How insulting and condescending. We don’t know if people in Maine are offended, but we very much are.

And to top it all off, Moraff has his own history:

Congresswoman Summer Lee barred Moraff from her 2022 congressional campaign after receiving at least three complaints of sexual misconduct against Moraff.

Ah, yeah. No wonder he had a blind spot where Platner’s behavior was concerned.

In short, for all the complaints about how voters are sick of candidates who are “vat-grown,” to use Maroff’s phrasing, Graham Platner was grown in his own sort of vat. At least that’s what his recruiters saw when they looked at him, whether they realized it or not.

There is plenty of room to go around for this fuckup, and maybe one day the Platner diehards will accept that a lot of it falls on him. Probably not any day soon, though.

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PEOD (Penultimate End of Day) was this by Robyn and DANG this guy is WHOA! The headline isn’t even it!

Going back back back in time to the hour before that we had UGH BLORK BLECH.

Nobody else will play Marco Rubio’s stupid Antifa games :(

A Nice Time from Robyn :D

And today I learned we can make our text different colors, which is obviously the BIG NEWS OF THE DAY!!!!!

Sometimes, you write a cocktail because you’re trying to find a vehicle for a clever flavor combination that you’ve just discovered. Sometimes you want to try a recipe you’ve read on social media and end up riffing on it to create a brand-new cocktail. Sometimes you write a crowd-pleaser to welcome the start of a new season.

And sometimes you write a cocktail because one of the owners of Hemingway’s drops a bottle of carrot juice in front of you at the beginning of a shift and says, “Make a cocktail out of this.”

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Well, like they say, necessity is a mother. Let’s make a Silly Wabbit. Here’s the recipe.

I don’t hate carrot juice. I can’t recall ever having tasted it on its own before this; most of the time I’ve had it in a nine-ingredient juice cocktail from a “healthy” smoothie bar. That’s pretty much consistent with its history. Carrot juice was first promoted as a health food by Norman Walker in 1936 at the dawn of the fresh juice movement. Ever since, carrot juice has been recommended as a natural, healthy beverage that promotes well-being. No one has ever claimed that it’s tasty.

It’s not bad. Honest. Sweet, a little creamy, vegetal, but not “green” tasting. My first impulse was to lean into the vegetable flavors and make something with a mezcal base. A little genepy, some lemon, and some other odds and ends, and I had … something. I offered it to the hostess and owner for tasting. They nodded, smiled, and said it tasted “nice.” Not what I was hoping for.

I called my wife and asked her to pull one of my reference books off the shelves — The Flavor Bible (Wonkette cut link) by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. This book is worth its weight in gold when dealing with a new ingredient. It’s a “cookbook” with no recipes; just a list of what flavors go well with specific ingredients, an endless list of flavor pairings and inspiration. According to Karen and Andrew, carrots have a cooling flavor that pairs well with soft, round flavors like butter and cream. Lemon was a solid pick. So was maple. I kept looking.

I stumbled across a recipe from Robbie Dow from Bespoke in Wilmington, North Carolina. He’d written a version of the Surfer on Acid — a banging ‘90s cocktail featuring Jaegermeister, rum, and pineapple — and elevated it using some broad rum choices and lime juice to balance things. A splash of coconut rum intrigued me. Carrot and coconut had great potential. The idea of building a shell of a tiki drink, with multiple rums, pineapple, and citrus, to surround and elevate a problematic ingredient had potential. Could I use the core of this drink to make something special?

The answer was a resounding “yes.” When I offered a “carrot and coconut” drink to my audience, there were a lot of oohs and ahs over the notion. The final flavor profile was rich, smooth, comforting, and funky all at once. A parsley garnish for brightness and color completed the drink. Who says carrots have to be good for you?

Let’s talk ingredients:

Planteray 3 Star: This clear rum doesn’t taste a thing like Bacardi. Not all clear rums taste the same, or are made the same. Bacardi is an aged rum; it’s filtered for clarity, sort of like cristallino tequila. Planteray 3 Star is an unaged rum with mildly funky Jamaican notes. Find this rum and try it. It’s a real eye-opener.

Pineapple Juice: Pineapple and rum provide a stable base for this drink, a platform to tame and smooth out unfamiliar flavors. It worked for Jaegermeister in the original Surfer on Acid, and it works here. I use canned pineapple juice; fresh pineapple is too acidic.

Carrot Juice: All-natural, obviously. If you can juice your own, more power to you.

Maple Syurp: Carrot and maple play together wonderfully. I tried a turmeric syrup out of curiosity, but it didn’t add much to the cocktail.

Lemon Juice: Some acid to brighten the drink. Always use fresh.

Planteray Cut and Dried Coconut Rum: One of the advantages of working in a craft bar is that I’ve got access to wonderful, pricey ingredients like this. It’s an indulgence. Use coconut syrup at home; be ready to add more lemon juice to balance the cocktail.

Leblon Cachaca: Wray and Nephew would be even better here, if you’ve got some lying around.

OPEN THREAD!

On Thursday night, a man named Victor Marx (sort of), an outsider candidate and ministry founder, became the Republican nominee for governor of Colorado — and boy … is he ever something special.

Now, if you were to just look at Marx’s website, you’d think to yourself, “Gee! This guy seems almost normal for a Republican!” The site itself makes no mention of social or cultural issues and sticks, pretty firmly, to his various fairly bland ideas for improving things in the state.

But that’s until you get to the “about” page, which reads:

Just last year, I built a team and led them directly into ISIS territory so we could save a group of girls who had been kidnapped. Today, as the founder of All Things Possible Ministries, I’ve led more than 150 high-stakes missions across some of the world’s most dangerous regions—delivering trauma relief, medical aid, and hope to victims of terrorism, trafficking, and violence. Our teams have served more than 45,000 women and children, some of whom needed to be rescued from captivity and given a second chance at life.

Well, that certainly is impressive.

It does not, however, mention that his stepfather supposedly forced him to kill a man at the young age of seven, or that, when he was three, that same stepfather forced him to behead a cat and then wear the dead cat on his head in some capacity.

It doesn’t even include a video of him as the world’s fastest gun disarmer, for which he claims to hold the Guinness World Record, despite the fact that no such record exists. But you can see one here, in which, supposedly, his eyes even “go black.”

Not sure what that means, but it’s probably something!

It also does not include this video, of Victor Marx and his wife being accosted in an elevator on their way to whatever it is one would go to with the man in a tuxedo and the woman in business casual attire.

That, by the way, is the opening scene of the documentary he did on his own life, titled Victor Marx: When Impossible Is The Only Way.

It also does not mention that he is an exorcist who will not only get rid of your demons in person, but over the phone. He says this is just as effective.

He did, however, discuss these things (and more!) in an absolutely riveting interview with 9News’s Kyle Clark.

In the interview, Marx was unable to name even one of the 30 countries he claimed to have been to during these 150 missions rescuing 45,000 women and children — and claimed this was because he needed to protect the identity of the victims. However, even he seemed rather surprised that the numbers were that high and demanded to know where Clark had even gotten them. He also told Clark that he could not explain to him how a civilian could order a military strike, as he had claimed elsewhere. For security reasons. Oh, and he couldn’t explain why the group that actually led that ISIS raid did not list his “team” as one of the many teams that assisted in that mission.

Probably just an oversight!

He also could not or would not get specific about the number of people he has killed, a thing you’d imagine voters might want to know about

Clark continued to attempt to get answers about how “truthful” Marx’s claims were during a debate a few weeks later. Marx refused to answer but pointed to his dog, Reagan, said that the dog was with him during some of these missions and asked Clark if he thought his dog was a liar, too.

What the website does mention is his acquaintance with Charlie Kirk — at a memorial for whom he announced his candidacy for governor, which is a very normal thing to do. Indeed, his campaign materials have frequently featured a picture of him hugging a crying Erika Kirk, because what’s a grieving widow for if not promoting one’s gubernatorial dreams?

Marx — who was known varyingly as Vaughn/Vaugh/Vaught Victor Kennedy, Kennedy being the last name of his stepfather — also makes a pretty big deal out of being a Marine, insinuating that he was involved in some pretty serious missions with that as well.

However, according to his Certificate of Release or Discharge from Active Duty, he was a “High Frequency Communications Center officer.”

Marx has made a lot of claims about the abuse he suffered from his stepdad (and his three stepfathers afterwards), even beyond the dead cat hat and the murder. He also claims that at one point, at a party, he and other children were chloroformed and put in coffins and forced to watch a six-year-old girl get molested, and that at the age of five he was molested by his neighbor and left in a cooler to die. At another point, he was tied to a chair and forced to watch his stepfather and his pals dismember someone.

While child abuse is obviously a serious issue, this kind of child abuse is more akin to the elaborate ritual abuse people would claim they recalled during the Satanic Panic and in thoroughly debunked books like Michelle Remembers, Satan’s Underground, The Satan Seller, and Sybil. While it is entirely possible (and likely) that his stepfather was abusive, coffins are a pretty major investment for one party. Also, how many child size coffins can one buy without a single dead child to show for them, without arousing some kind of suspicion?

Now, Marx is not explicitly QAnon — perhaps because that seems to have gone out of fashion — but his preoccupation with sex trafficking and what appears to be Satanic ritual abuse suggests that he may have dipped his toes in those waters.

This is not even the end of it — I’m going to just have to drop the rest of these Marx facts in list form, or we will be here all day:

• Marx practices a brand of karate called Cajun Karate or “Keichu-do” invented by his dad, Karl Marx (seriously), a former drug dealer/pimp/world-renowned martial artist who abandoned him when he was an infant and, I guess, popped back into his life later to teach him how to fight. Admittedly, there’s a 2004 article about the guy and a 2013 obituary on a karate website that suggests at least some of this is true. Unless his father is also a crazy liar, which does seem possible.

• He has a multi-level marketing company called Living R3, which sells vitamins and probiotics and what have you — and claims that 90 percent of the proceeds goes to support his ministry’s “rescue missions.”

• He started some weird thing called “Skull Games,” in which a bunch of volunteers get together to compile data on sex worker ads, using facial recognition software and other surveillance tech, in order to “identify” them as victims of human trafficking. The operation was actually written up by The Intercept back in 2023.

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I will admit that both Marx and his real dad seem like they are/were pretty good at fighting, but it does seem like practically everything else about his life has been a lie, right down to the talking dog. The rest seems a tad sketchy!

He will now face off against the Democratic nominee, Colorado state Attorney General Phil Weiser, to replace the term-limited Governor Jared Polis (D). It’s certainly going to be an uphill battle for the humanitarian/exorcist/murderer/post-it-note inventor, but we can be certain he feels up to the task.

And hey! Even if he loses, he can always just stick “Governor of Colorado” on his resume, next to the 150 rescues of 45,000 women and children in 30 countries he can’t actually name.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Our awkwardly boyish vice president had a quiet week. A couple of speeches, getting sued by an Instagram influencer, perhaps a trip into the Oval Office while Donald Trump was away to daydream about how he’ll redecorate it if the president’s 80-year-old heart, which was in the process of flying on Trump’s bribe jet to the NATO summit in Turkey, should give out sometime in the next two years.

Imagine it: JD Vance sprawled in Trump’s desk chair, feet up on the Resolute Desk, eyeing the boatload of gold filigree Trump has glued to the walls and wondering if he’ll get Trump’s support for the 2028 nomination if he agrees to leave it all up, when Susie Wiles walks in, sees him, and chases him out of the room by swatting him with a rolled-up newspaper and yelling, Bad Vice President! You know you’re not supposed to be on the furniture! That’s a very bad Vice President!

The highlight of Vance’s week has to have been the speech he gave in Milwaukee — which some of you may recall is Algonquin for “the good land” — on Wednesday. Vance was in America’s Dairyland to talk about the administration’s efforts to combat waste and fraud in government programs while completely ignoring that the president was at that moment high above Turkey in a very prominent example of it.

No, Vance meant the fraud committed by people he hates: immigrants, the poor, people of color, and anyone with politics to the left of Supreme Leader Snoke. He managed to invoke an updated specter of Ronald Reagan’s “young bucks buying T-bone steaks with food stamps” canard, this one involving a woman who was recently convicted of Medicaid fraud in Wisconsin.

Granted, this has been the Republicans’ governing strategy for 45 years at this point. It’s just that this example happened to be particularly glaring. Literally.

Check it out starting around the 14:54 mark:

The glare off the photo means you only have a second to see that “the woman with the smug look and the Louis Vuitton bag” is Black. Her name is Markita Barnes. She used to run a Milwaukee-area prenatal care coordination company (PNCC), which “are meant to help connect low-income pregnant women and mothers with badly needed health, counseling and referral services,” as described by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

A couple of things here. One, how does JD Vance know that’s not a knockoff Louis Vuitton bag that Barnes bought off the back of a truck for $20? He doesn’t.

Second, Barnes was sentenced this past March to 10 years in the pokey for swiping approximately $2.3 million in Medicaid funding and pocketing it herself. You know when she was indicted? In 2023, when Joe Biden was the president, and before the Trump administration absolutely gutted the Justice Department by eliminating thousands of jobs and driving out thousands more who decided they would rather upend their careers than work for a bunch of Trumpist assholes. Despite the Trump administration setting up a dedicated fraud unit, the fact is that understaffing at DOJ is likely to make it harder to prosecute these crimes.

And she’s not the only one. The Journal Sentinel lists a half-dozen other cases of PNCC owners being convicted on federal fraud charges in Wisconsin as a result of the same investigations that snagged Barnes. These were joint investigations between state and federal law enforcement agencies.

The point here is that the pursuit of charges in these cases has long been a nonpartisan issue that JD Vance, with all the subtlety of a plumber’s wrench to the nuts, is trying to make into a partisan one while invoking that old “BLACK PEOPLE ARE STEALING YOUR TAX MONEY TO BUY LUXURY GOODS” chestnut. That he’s doing it on behalf of an administration that has cut nearly $1 trillion in Medicaid funds nationwide is particularly galling. Vance and the Republicans are responsible for far, far, far more damage to the health of poor young mothers and their babies than Makita Barnes and the other recently convicted PNCC owners combined.

Besides, if the administration is looking for fraudulent theft of tax dollars, we’ve got a few other places they can look. Starting with that fucking plane Trump was on while his VP was making noises with his mouth hole in Wisconsin.

Vance also gave a speech on the Fourth of July from the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship that was docked in New York for a bit. The speech was your usual rah-rah patriotic July Fourth argle bargle, but one moment was particularly funny.

Vance was talking about James Eads, the 19th-century inventor and civil engineer who had built the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi River. Eads also built ironclads for the Union in the Civil War, which led to this moment at the 14:24 mark, when Vance claimed he had built 700 ironclad ships in 100 days:

That sounded wrong to us, so we looked it up. It turns out Eads built seven ironclads in about five months in 1861. Either Vance misread his teleprompter, or his speechwriter made an absolutely absurd error. Or he was purposely trying to make American ingenuity sound even more expansive than it already is and didn’t think anyone would notice. Sorry, JD. Wonkette remembers.

Finally, and obviously most important, is that JD Vance got the government sued by an Instagram influencer because his aides couldn’t stand a little trolling at a public appearance.

Amanda McGonicle runs an account called @CatsOnACouch, which she says “exists purr-ly to troll the current administration & have more followers than J.D. Vance.” (Over two million followers, she claims.) McGonicle started it as a petty joke after Vance’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment during the 2024 campaign. Her goal was to see if a few cats lying on a couch could get more Instagram-famous than the Vice President of the United States. Which seems to us like probably not a very hard thing to do, frankly.

McGonigle’s account has trolled Vance with a variety of gimmicks, from sharing memes about him getting intimate with a couch, to printing out mock “Wanted” posters depicting him as a suspect in the death of Pope Francis. She also uses the account to engage in mutual aid efforts with her followers, which she calls her “petty besties.”

Back in May, McGonicle was attending a Vance speech in Maine, where the VP was set to brag about the Trump administration’s efforts to combat healthcare fraud. She claims it was a public event, though she still registered and received “advance guest guidance” for attending from Vance’s office.

Then, while standing in line to get in, McGonicle says she was approached by five armed Secret Service agents who told her the event was private after all and they couldn’t let her in because “we know where you stand.”

McGonicle is now suing the Office of the President and the Secret Service for violating her First Amendment rights. And she’s got the ACLU behind her:

“It’s absurd that the Secret Service is wasting their time tracking a satirical cat account on social media,” McGonigle said in a Tuesday statement released by the ACLU, who represents her.

It is absurd, and may we add, the fact that this woman’s free speech is being abridged should give all her fellow Americans paws.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio is planning a great big meeting in Washington with senior ministers from a bunch of countries next week so they can all get to work fighting what the Trump administration calls the “resurgence of transnational far-left terrorism.”

The only problem is that terrorism experts and other countries don’t believe there’s any such thing, because it’s not the 1970s anymore, there’s no more Red Brigades or Baader-Meinhof Group, and in both the US and Europe, the majority of lethal political violence comes from far-right extremists. (There’s some lefty violence too, but it tends to be directed at property and infrastructure.)

The rest of the world simply doesn’t share MAGA’s pants-wetting fear of antifa super soldiers, and as the Washington Post reports (gift link), there’s plenty of reason to believe the fear of “far left terrorism” is little more than an excuse to use “powerful counterterrorism tools to crack down on U.S. activists they view as left-wing extremists.” Golly, ya think?

Still, some members of Team Trump, like “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, are very gung-ho on linking “antifa” to foreign terrorism, however tenuously, to legally or semi-legally use the power of the state to go after perceived enemies on the Left, like anyone who protests ICE violence or Trump’s dismantling of democracy. One anonymous US official told the Post that connecting domestic opposition to foreign groups “can unlock certain investigative tools,” including surveillance, because who doesn’t love having a Big Brother to watch out for them and keep them safe?

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In a statement positively brimming with the banality of evil, State Department flack Tommy Pigott said next week’s confab is taking place because alleged “far left terrorism” is

“an old threat re-emerging with strong transnational links and new convergences.

“Because this threat has not been adequately addressed in the past, each engagement, designation, or security assistance program creates a compounding effect supporting countermeasures at home and abroad,” Pigott said in a statement.

Translation: We’ve had too much freedom up to now, so it’s time to construct a framework of mutually reinforcing “responses” to the imaginary threat of leftist terrorism, in hopes that suppressing political opposition might hold up in court.

Even Trump’s Chief Goon Stephen Miller is in on the act. At last fall’s “roundtable” of wingnut influencers and conspiracy freaks worried about antifa, Miller told Trump, presumably with big tears in his skullface eye sockets, “It’s true. There are extensive foreign ties. I think that would be a very valid step to take.”

Foreign ties! For instance, there’s no denying that most of the inflatable animal costumes worn by antifa protesters in Portland and elsewhere were manufactured outside America.

Sadly for Rubio and the other dipshits organizing next week’s meetup, virtually nobody outside the MAGA faithful thinks there’s any real threat from antifa’s vast army of zine-makers and ultra-violent truck-kickers. The Post notes that “at meetings of national security officials from various agencies, some intelligence analysts have declined to brief on antifa because they do not regard antifa as a serious counterterrorism threat.”

A number of officials with foreign governments, speaking anonymously to the Post lest Trump set tariffs on their countries’ exports at 1,776 percent, “expressed dismay about the Rubio invitation, citing what they call its vague aims and the short notice.” Several said their nations’ foreign or interior ministers wouldn’t attend because summer is prime international summit season and they have prior commitments, plus they’ll be washing their hair, their jet has a flat tire, and their grandma died.

Here’s a fun little trio of beggings-off:

Some said, too, they were unsure why they had been invited. “We don’t have antifa,” said one European diplomat.

“I don’t think we can find any reason why we would be interested in attending such an event,” said another.

“Our law enforcement authorities have not focused on left-wing terrorism because this is not considered a high priority threat in our country,” said a third.

None of the diplomats outright said Trump was a sundowning weirdo or that Rubio’s obsequiousness made them want to vomit, so that’s some diplomacy for you.

The Post story also reviews the administration’s several sad attempts to get US allies to play along with its delusions, like a meeting the State Department held in The Hague on “antifa and left-wing terrorism.” Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials from several European countries showed up, but the government of the Netherlands actually decided against co-hosting, so the meeting took place at the US Embassy. According to two anonymous insiders, the event was a flop. Many of the officials who did show up politely cleared their throats and said “we don’t see it quite the way you do,” according to one of the insiders.

Then in June the administration tried again to drum up interest in the topic, this time with a get-together at the US Institute of Peace, the formerly independent think tank overrun by DOGE in the early days of Trump’s second term. Once again, the goal was to spread the word that “far-left political terrorists” are a threat to the USA, but the meeting was a “dud,” according to a (paywalled) report at Puck News. An hour into the meeting, Puck reported, organizers were still desperately emailing people to beg them to join online.

Again and again, the State Department has tried to get other countries to help find information on the scary leftwing extremists MAGAland is sure are out there, only to find out nobody agrees they’re much of a threat. In November, State designated four European groups as “foreign terrorist organizations,” but terrorism experts and even European governments say they aren’t a particular threat. But members of the groups have committed vandalism, so you can’t say they’re peaceful, now can you?

But Marco Rubio, warrior of statesmanship, will not give up his fight until the last can of spray paint is seized from the last leftist graffiti terrorists in Berlin or Rome. Rest easy, America!

[WaPo (gift link) / PBS]

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Come November, Americans will have a choice: Do we do something to end this nightmare, or do we keep it going for the next several decades? Because not only do this year’s midterms offer a chance to throw a wrench into the havoc that Trump has been causing now … but they could also keep him from adding one or two new Supreme Court justices to the bench. It is entirely possible that Alito (79) and/or Thomas (78) may make a calculated decision to retire while Trump is in office so as to ensure that a Democratic president doesn’t get to pick the next nominees. If we win the midterms and the next election, we have a chance to right the ship.

On the bright side, the latest polls are showing Democrats with an advantage in gaining control of Congress. On the not-so-bright side, thanks in large part to Republican gerrymandering, things could still go either way. But back to the bright side — recent polling from Data for Progress provides some insight on what Dems can do to win over swing voters, and they’re all really good things! Nice!

So, what do we know about this year’s swing voters? Well, for one, they consume far less political news than likely voters. That’s not too surprising — in this environment, that’s just about the only way to not feel strongly one way or another.

They also are not quite as jazzed about voting in the midterms as likely voters are, which is not exactly shocking either.

Much of the time, the “wisdom” on swing voters is that they are easily frightened moderates who like things as middle-of-the-road as possible and don’t like candidates who stand out too much — ideally a tall, thin, white, middle-class-looking man of medium good looks (but not too pretty!), a full head of hair (but not like John Edwards!) and extremely vague, focus-grouped policies. The kind of guy who could be the President on their favorite non-CW network show. A guy they couldn’t necessarily pick out out of a lineup, but aren’t opposed to checking a box for? That seems about right.

But that really does not feel like the vibe right now — and the polling seems to bear that out. According to Data for Progress’s report, the top three things that swing voters say Democrats could do to win their vote are actually pretty bold and exciting: Raising taxes on the wealthy, establishing a Medicare for All health care system, and banning AI from setting prices or wages based on personal data.

This is good information to have, and I’d like to think it means we can probably focus more on policy than on aesthetics in these races. In fact, I don’t think we even need to know which of the female candidates’ voices might be annoying to male voters. As long as she wants to tax the shit out of Elon Musk so we can all have healthcare, they can probably look past it.

Now, I recognize that some may hear “tax the rich” and immediately feel that pit in their stomach that says “Oh no, if we say we want to tax the rich, Republicans will fire back with ‘Why do you want to punish people for being successful?’ and everyone will hate us and vote for them instead!” I will grant you that this is a line that seems to work on a lot of people, or at least has in the past, but we are experiencing unusual times right now. It’s not just that we’re in a bad economy, that the cost of everything but our wages is going up, it’s that we’re also headed towards a very uncertain economic future, thanks to advancements in technology. Meanwhile, we have to hear all of these billionaire (and trillionaire) tech bros gush about the exciting future when AI takes all of our jobs.

We’ve also got Elon Musk throwing his entire body on the scale to help Trump and then getting the “opportunity” to purge the entire government of things he didn’t realize were necessary, the Ellisons buying CBS just to turn it into a Trump propaganda outlet, Michael Dell seeing his company’s stock go up after Trump tells people to buy Dell computers, billionaire donors like Linda McMahon, Scott Bessent, and Howard Lutnick getting positions in Trump’s Cabinet, and it turns out that people really don’t seem to like that kind of shit.

And hell, if these fuckers are determined to use their money and power to affect our government, our social lives, and our futures, we may as well make them use it to benefit us instead of Donald Trump.

The second-most popular thing swing voters say could do to swing their votes our way is supporting Medicare For All, which does a lot to explain why candidates who have embraced the single payer system have been killing it in the primaries. I know it’s not what everyone wants to hear, but people are frustrated with our healthcare system, they’re uncertain about the economy, and something that takes as much off their plate as Medicare-for-All is extremely appealing right now.

If it seems unbelievable that swing voters really want these things, one need only consider the nation’s reaction to Luigi Mangione’s (alleged!) assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealth. I’m not saying everyone thought it was great, but no one was exactly struggling with the question of “Why would anyone do such a thing?” either.

That being said, it should alleviate some of the anxiety I know some folks have over whether or not these candidates can beat Republicans in the general elections. They don’t have to worry about the Medicare-for-All-of-it-all scaring people off now, because of how it’s something people really seem to want. In fact, polling shows that 49 percent of Republicans want it. Isn’t that nice!

Now, maybe you are thinking “OK, well that’s great news for progressives, but what about the Dems who aren’t quite there yet?” Well, the third most popular initiative is something I would have to assume everyone can get behind, not to mention something that would not be that complicated to accomplish. After all, we’ve gone for all of human existence without AI setting prices or wages based on our personal data, we can certainly put a stop it to it now.

If you’re wondering what that’s about, precisely, it’s what’s called “surveillance pricing,” when companies charge you more for things you search for based on how much the algorithm thinks you can afford. For instance, when my dad and I were looking for rental cars last year, I was shown far cheaper cars and prices than he was. I also mysteriously always have lower Uber prices than the people I am with, even when we’re trying to go to the same place. It’s started to become prevalent in a variety of industries — rideshares, airlines, e-commerce stores and even groceries — and it’s pretty safe to say that it’s creeping everyone the hell out. No one’s trying to live in an economic Minority Report.

Companies have also started using surveillance data on potential and current employees, including whether they’ve taken out a payday loan, their personal credit, their social media activity, how quickly they’ve taken other job offers, to determine the lowest salary they might accept or whether they’ll stay without getting a raise — rather than basing the salary on experience or the current market.

States have already started cracking down on surveillance pricing, but taking a strong stand on these issues is a really easy way to grab the attention of voters who, as noted, are not paying a ton of attention to political news — and there’s no real downside.

It’s not all good news. I am admittedly more than a little nauseated to see that increasing oil and gas drilling and banning trans women from playing sports both ranked higher than protecting abortion rights, but I guess if they really cared about those, they wouldn’t be swing voters to begin with.

Data For Progress also polled the swing voters on the issues most important to them, in general. Their top priority, by a mile, is the “economy, jobs and the cost of living,” which suggests that both moderate and progressive candidates really need to be pushing the economic reform angle.

What is also interesting, and a very good sign, I think, is how low immigration ranks on the list. Because as much as we may hate it, a whole lot of people in this country were with Trump on immigration. Perhaps seeing with their own eyes what “cracking down on immigration” actually looks like, and also realizing how much our economy relies on the work these immigrants do, has made that less of a priority.

Whom do they trust on these issues, though? That’s a little murkier, but they do trust Dems more on “inflation or the cost of living,” “programs like Social Security and Medicare,” and health care (the latter by a lot), and that’s great. They trust Republicans a teensy bit more on “jobs and the economy,” which, frankly, is ridiculous of them. Given the state of things, that ought to be something Dem candidates can turn around with quality messaging.

I’d also like to point out that, while it’s clear that these things are not priorities for these voters, they do trust Democrats more on race relations and racism, 40-18 percent, on abortion, 46-19 percent, and on LGBTQ+ issues, 42-17 percent. I don’t know if this helps much, but it doesn’t hurt. And it makes me feel a little better about things, to be honest.

The issues that swing voters say they have with the Democratic Party specifically aren’t too terribly surprising. They say the leadership is “too old and out of touch” and that “they are not doing enough to lower costs.” “Too old” is something we realistically can’t do too much about right now, as we’re a little far along for that. However, as of right now, all of the octogenarian candidates are incumbents in safe seats, so perhaps it won’t be a huge deal in actual elections. But people of any age can be in or out of touch, so hopefully we can work to ensure that’s not a problem (not with TikTok dances, please not with TikTok dances).

The second is something I believe Dems can flip into a winning issue for them, so long as they present serious policy ideas that address it directly. Job creation is a great thing to talk about, but job security is one where they can really shine — and it’s just a more concrete thing to promise. For instance, strengthening layoff protections and protecting the right to unionize. Also, I know I keep saying this, and it may not be right for every candidate, but the smartest damn thing Democrats could run on is getting rid of at-will employment and requiring companies to have a good reason if they’re going to fire someone.

Oh, and I’m not totally crazy, either. A 2021 poll found that “71 percent of voters in battleground congressional districts—including 67 percent of Republican voters—supported the adoption of just-cause laws.” Those are some sexy numbers right there, I tell you what. Weirdly enough, I think most people don’t want to be fired from their job because their boss was having a bad day and did not like their socks.

People also want to know that if they are laid off or fired, they’re not going to be completely screwed. This could look like supporting laws mandating severance pay, expanding unemployment benefits to cover part-time workers and gig workers, supporting public employment initiatives in areas with especially high unemployment rates, barring forced arbitration contracts, regulating non-compete clauses in contracts — all sorts of things. Also, candidates on Team Medicare for All should press the fact that it would mean that losing your job (or quitting to take a new job where benefits might not kick in for 90 days or to start your own business) wouldn’t mean that you or your family lose access to health care.

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Again, these midterms are extremely important and have the potential to affect life in this country for the next several decades. This isn’t the time to play around, and it’s clearly not the time to shy away from bold ideas to improve the economy and people’s lives. Things are bad, and when things are bad, that’s when people are willing to try things they might not have considered before.

Also, TAX THE RICH. It is what most Democrats want, it is what will make swing voters vote for Democrats, and it will make all of our lives better. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was a better man than any of these puds, and he taught his birthright citizen children how to be better men than any of these puds, and that’s why they’re so terrified of immigrants. Which isn’t exactly what this Bulwark post says but it’s what I’m thinking about while I read it. (The Bulwark)

The three top people who might replace Graham Platner (PTOOEY! SPIT THREE TIMES AND TURN AROUND!) on the Maine ballot in … fuuuuuck 117 days. (Liberal Currents)

Open this longread tab for later, it’s really good! On who’s the base and which faction is trying to ratfuck whom and the original sin of how we became Weak and ever so much more. We all share some of the blame! Some share more blame than others. (Brian Beutler)

The stupid mortifying embarrassment that was the MAGAfied nation’s birthday party for the glorification of Trump may not have just been a stupid mortifying embarrassment, but also a crime? (Our Liz at Public Notice)

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Wait, so the farmers just got an actually binding agreement on “right to repair” from John Deere via Trump’s FTC? Well … I will take yes for an answer! (404 Media)

Last week I got real fuckin earnest and asked you all to share Wonkette — particularly those of you we’re linking to every day in these here tabs AHEM — and y’all DID NOT. Well, here’s just one reason why we’re getting clobbered. Surprise it’s Google and the AI! (Drew Magary at SF Gate)

This made me laugh out loud for being so terrible: FEMA is threatening to withhold anti-terror funds unless states promise to do illegal things with their voter rolls. (Democracy Docket)

It’s not actually funny, though, terrorism is awful! This 1975 LaGuardia bombing I never heard of because I am a spring chicken of only 53 — and the huge, still unsolved bombing, which was the biggest act of terrorism in the US since the Wall Street bombing in 1920, is no longer part of New Yorkers’ collective memory. (Elon Green at Slate)

It’s not just getting to yell at “dictator” Zohran Mamdani, it’s Trump’s war on energy efficiency literally so we’ll buy more fossil fuels, and it stinks! (Gift link Bloomberg)

Why? Because solar’s doing awesome, even in the US! DO MORE SOLAR, GUYS! (Inside Climate News)

Everything you need to know about John Oliver, soap opera villain! (Type Click Type)

Bonnie Tyler has died at 75. Spin around ninjas!

Parties upcoming! MISSOULA (July 25), CLEVELAND (Aug. 8) AND PITTSBURGH (Aug. 9), and SONOMA/SF (Nov. 30)! Atlanta has been postponed. TIME TO PARTY!

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Perhaps you will share my artisanally curated morning news link tabs (although perhaps not, it seems fairly late in the day to share morning news links, unless you are in Hawaii maybe). (I know many of you are in Hawaii, because I met you!)

Maybe this is the one you will be sending to a friend or a social media site: ugggggh Graham Platner ughhhhhhhh. SO MAD RIGHT NOW.

A lot of people are sharing this by Robyn, about this Heritage Foundation lady the New York Times is writing about so often she might as well be a Black lady running Harvard or gender-affirming care! Except those things and or people are cool, and this lady is a weirdo who wants to get teens big-preg and ban IVF.

Oh oh oh oh this beautiful ICE-murdered man and his beautiful family, oh oh oh oh.

The president’s gilded Qatari bribe zeppelin strikes again, is a thing you could share.

Marsha Marsha Marsha!

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Have a gander at this new Marsha Blackburn for Tennessee Governor ad and tell us if you would have given her permission to do this, were you her husband and/or pastor. (It is unfair to assume Blackburn chose this herself, as conservative white women in the fascist Christian system she is fighting for really aren’t supposed to be wilding out like this without written permission.)

A few notes/questions, aside from “wow, that’s racist”:

1. How many times did she run her lines? Because her delivery is extremely awkward and stilted and mush-mouthed and “Fiddlesticks, Mamaw left her teeth in the ladies’ room at the wine bar in Franklin again.”

2. To be clear, the entire commercial looks and sounds like Marsha filmed this after a long afternoon at that wine bar, which we are somehow sure exists.

3. How many goddamned fortune cookies did Blackburn take?

4. How many goddamned fortune cookies did she proceed to play with and smush in her granny claws?

5. As a home ec major from the Mississippi State University class of 1973, Marsha Blackburn should know that none of this is how we eat fortune cookies.

6. Did she even go to cotillion? And if so, can they see her now, with crumbs in her hair like she spends her days at saloons?

7. You are really supposed to only have one fortune cookie, maybe two if you get a garbage one on the first try like “Put on a red dress and go dancing!” That is not a fortune, and the user is entitled to one (1) more try. Not 46 more tries while she furiously, ravenously searches for a fortune that says “CHINA COMMUNISS PARTY SUX.”

8. Did Marsha clean up after her own nasty ass, or did she leave the employees at the Chinese restaurant she invaded to do that?

9. Speaking of, were they amused by this display from Confederate Nana?

10. Is this even the first time she’s done this?

For God’s sake, look at this:

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In the commercial, Marsha’s narrator says that as governor, she will “hunt down every communist,” which is slightly unhinged. But again, with that home ec major, we do not know what in her background (besides mouth-frothing, ignorant redneck racism) makes her think she’s got the skillset to do whatever she imagines it takes to “hunt communists” as the governor of Tennessee. Also not sure what she thinks going after China will do to rescue Tennessee from its status as a backwoods pigfuck state with nothing going for it besides the musical contributions of liberals in Nashville and Memphis whose political voices fascists like Blackburn are always trying to smack down.

Haha just kidding, she’s one of them backwoods racist pigfucks, pandering to her fellow backwoods racist pigfucks. Backwoods racist pigfucking is all any of them understand. That’s why she’s going after China.

Also, does she know (of course she doesn’t, she’s an absolute moron) that fortune cookies, if they actually come from anywhere in Asia — they’re kind of thoroughly American these days — come from Japan, or as Donald Trump calls it, the Islamic Republic of Japan? Indeed, there is lots of Japanese shit in that video, including the soy sauce.

But again, she’s a dumb racist pig, from a long line of dumb racist pigs. The last thing on her mind is trying to see through her overly hairsprayed Southern lady Designing Women meets walk-of-shame bangs to try to tell Asian people apart.

The gong at the end of the commercial is a nice racist touch.

In case you missed it, here is a fun video from last week where a reporter asked Marsha why, considering how she is running for governor, she won’t hold town halls or actually talk to voters in any meaningful way. Confederate Nana was NOT pleased. And then the elevator she had been waiting for, which she had just entered, started betraying her, hilariously.

And here’s another fun video that just dropped of Marsha completely unable to offer an opinion or string together words on whether she agrees with the University of Tennessee Knoxville’s recent $1.9 million settlement with former professor Tamar Shirinian, who the school fired last year during the MAGA pitchfork parade against anybody who expressed anything but mourning and regret over the untimely passing of Ch*rl*e K*rk, whose memory blesses no one and whose name shall be forgotten, PBUH, in hell.

Good thoughts ‘n’ thinkin’, Marsha!

But again, to be fair, Marsha’s husband and/or pastor weren’t there, so she might not know what she thinks on those subjects yet.

She knows what she thinks about fortune cookies, though, which is SMASHY SMASHY PLAY WITH FOOD RUIN ENTIRE BOWL OF FORTUNE COOKIES. Also racism.

This a serious woman who would like to be the governor of a state.

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Bestest boy Donald Trump’s $400 million Qatari bribe jet made its overseas debut this week, hauling the president and a rogue’s gallery of the rogue’s gallery that is his entire administration over to the annual NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. (Seriously, look at that flight manifest — a mischievous Air Force One steward could have had a lot of fun with some cans of soda and several boxes of Ex-Lax. Just sayin’.)

Whose hearts, even those that beat in the chests of the haters, could fail to fill with patriotic pride at the sight of this magnificent jet with its new red, navy blue, and gold livery soaring across the Atlantic, arriving at the summit in all its American majesty, announcing that the United States is still the classiest and most glorious of all nations?

And who could fail to snicker when Trump had to meekly leave the summit in one of the old Air Force One jumbo jets that he has decried as barely functional relics, because the new one doesn’t have all the necessary security features yet?

To answer the first question: Us, because Air Force One is a flying bribe scheme that was carrying our braying ass of a president, who embarrasses this nation every time he opens his mouth. We dread his overseas trips to meet with our allies like we used to dread eating vegetables when we were four.

And to answer the second question: Not us, because rolling out a new project before it is ready is such a common Trump move that backfires on him every time. Think of all the fuckups that fell flat and generated huge backlash due to rushed, shoddy workmanship and poor planning. All because President Baby was too impatient to do the job right: the Reflecting Pool, the Great American State Fair, the war with Iran, the ballroom, the parenting of his children ... the list is endless.

But Trump has been drooling over this jet ever since the Qataris offered it up in early 2025. Being Trump, he was impressed by the plane’s luxuriousness. Also being Trump, who is so personally cheap that he probably still has the first dollar he ever made screwed to the floor somewhere, he was impressed that it was free. Also also being Trump, his ego was doing somersaults over his belief that a bunch of grotesquely wealthy Middle Eastern sheikhs were gifting him a 747 because they just love and respect the United States so darn much now that he’s president again.

What might have impressed Trump the most was that as part of the deal to take the plane, he gets to take it with him when he leaves office, allegedly to be part of his presidential library. Which would seem to contradict his assertions that the plane was a gift to the people of the United States, not just him personally.

In the reality in which the rest of the world dwells, the Qataris had been trying to offload the plane for five years and had found no takers. The possibility that that might have been because it was the luxury jet version of a 1973 Ford Pinto, and that they might just be happy to have found a sucker who would take it off their hands, would not occur to Trump.

The obvious fact that the plane would need so much retrofitting to be as secure as the jets he uses now that it wouldn’t be available until almost the end of his presidency also would not have occurred to him. Or if it did, he wouldn’t care because his need to be ferried around in such a plane would outweigh any concerns for safety: DURRRRR LOOK AT MY COOL NEW JET EVERYONE BOW BEFORE THE CLASSIEST PLANE EVER NO ONE CAN BELIEVE HOW CLASSY IT IS DURRRRRRRRR.

Thus, he decided to roll out the jet by flying it to Turkey. Which shares a border with Iran. You know, the country with which we are currently at war. A country that he broke a very fragile ceasefire to bomb just this week while he was in the country next to it.

So for all the fanfare surrounding the maiden international flight of the new Air Force One, it is no surprise the Secret Service wouldn’t let Trump return on it. The plane has not yet been retrofitted with required security measures like missile defense systems and hardened wiring that protects its electrical systems against electromagnetic pulses caused by nuclear weapons detonating. The little things upon which the lives of a couple of hundred people rely every time Air Force One flies anywhere.

Being the Trump White House, they couldn’t admit that the big wet boy had complicated everyone’s lives again with his childishness. So they pretended the flight out was all a grand security plan, as Oddjob impersonator Steve Cheung claimed in a statement:

“As the president has said recently, there are many enemies of America who have their sights on him, and we use every tool at our disposal — including distraction and misdirection — to address those threats.”

It ... doesn’t seem like a great security precaution if you tell everyone exactly what you’re doing, but what do we know.

After the summit, both planes left Ankara on Wednesday and flew to an American airbase in England. Hilariously, Trump claimed he was taking the new Air Force One to the airbase because all the Air Force people stationed there are clamoring to get a look at it:

“We just landed and met up with our new Air Force One, which was sent earlier to RAF Mildenhall, so we could show the wonderful Servicemembers, as per the entire Base’s request,” the Republican president said on social media. “They were very excited.”

Oh sure, we bet this was the biggest thing to hit Mildenhall since Zsa Zsa Gabor’s last USO tour.

Once everyone in England got a good luck at the big new jet that they will never fly in, Trump boarded it for the flight home. Which means he took two separate Air Force Ones, which cost who knows how many taxpayer dollars per hour to operate, on a round trip to Turkey because he had to show one of them off like he’s ten and the plane is the latest offering from Hot Wheels.

On the other hand, we had all those taxpayer dollars just sitting around unused after massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. What else were we going to do with them?

Yes, yes, feed people and give them healthcare. It was a rhetorical question.

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After national outrage at ICE’s murderous mass-deportation campaign in Minnesota brought millions of Americans out into the streets in over 3,300 cities and towns, the agency has tried to take a lower profile while actually ramping up arrests. As Robert Reich points out, ICE hasn’t backed off at all, it’s simply trying to be less visible:

ICE has quietly doubled its immigrant arrest quota. It’s now arresting 2,000 people per day.

But you’re not hearing about it because the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has decided to quietly spread ICE agents around the country instead of targeting one Democratic-controlled city at a time.

Rather than fueling media spectacles, lawsuits, and community backlash, ICE is now going about its ruthless business in more hushed tones.

But it’s not quite possible to carry out Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s ethnic cleansing agenda in complete silence, especially when the goons are as brutal and trigger-happy as ever, as we see this week in Houston, Texas.

Tuesday morning, an ICE agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented immigrant who had been in the US for 35 years, building the American dream — quite literally: He worked in home construction, building up a small business, eventually building his own home, and raising three sons, whom he was able to send to college. But he crossed the border a few years after the 1986 “Reagan amnesty” that legalized millions of people, so his American dream, and his life, were forfeit.

ICE issued the usual statement claiming that the shooting was completely justified, although so far there’s been no video to confirm (or to refute) the feds’ story. Gee, where have we heard language like this from Trump’s Secret Police?

“From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense.”

Why yes, that statement is nearly identical to the lies DHS told after ICE and Border Patrol goons murdered Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and after any number of non-fatal incidents where the government claimed someone was trying to “attack,” “ram,” or “run over” officers — only to be disproven once video of the shootings became available or when the allegations fell apart in court.

Sure, maybe this time the official statement is true, and will be supported by evidence. But given the long history of constant lying by everyone in DHS, we have ZERO reason to expect that ICE’s version is anything close to what actually happened.

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Feed The Kitty

According to his son Ronaldo Salgado, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s Tuesday morning began like any other workday: Lorenzo got up at 5 a.m., ate “a hearty meal prepared by my mom,” and headed off in his white van to pick up members of his construction crew.

Ronaldo got a call from his mother, who said his father was in trouble and asked him to go find him.

The first inkling of what had happened surfaced on his phone. Community activists were posting about Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the heart of a Houston neighborhood many Mexican immigrants call home. When he reached the site, Ronaldo Salgado saw his father’s white work van. Then a video popped up on his social media feed: It showed a man struggling on the ground after being shot by an ICE officer.

“I recognized him immediately,” Ronaldo Salgado said, sobbing as he recounted the events to reporters. “Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”

Ronaldo Salgado wrote on Facebook Wednesday that he “spent the majority of the day at the crime scene waiting to hear anything about my father,” but learned nothing. At a press conference, he told reporters that his father was a law-abiding man who had no criminal record, and that the feds’ claims that Lorenzo had tried to run over ICE agents didn’t sound anything like his father.

Ronaldo also told the Texas Tribune yesterday that he believed his father thought he was going to be carjacked. “I know this in my heart, he thought that he was going to get robbed for his tools. […] One of his worst fears is that someone took away his work tools because that is how he made his livelihood.” He added that his father almost certainly would have pulled over and complied if the ICE vehicles following him had been marked, or if he’d known the masked men were law enforcement.

Then all the bigots on social media howled that of course Lorenzo Salgado Araujo couldn’t possibly be peaceful or law abiding, because he was ILLEGAL and if he had simply self-deported years ago this never would have happened. The only relevant thing to MAGA is whether someone is an immigrant or not — and as we increasingly see, the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” isn’t even relevant anymore.

On that note, Ronaldo Salgado also told reporters at yesterday’s presser that his father

had filled out paperwork for a legal work permit and submitted good character affidavits and fingerprints. Ronaldo Salgado said 18 months had passed, and they expected the permission to be approved.

In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Ronaldo Salgado said that he had sponsored his father’s application for legal residency — all three sons are US citizens — and that his father carried a copy of the paperwork with him at all times. He also said that the family had planned for the possibility that his father might be stopped by ICE: “He’s always been aware of what to do in the event that he got pulled over, he was detained […] He knew he wasn’t supposed to sign anything, he knew that he wasn’t supposed to give them a hard time.”

Online chuds then insisted that doing it the right way didn’t matter because Salgado Araujo lived here for 30 years without magically becoming a citizen, which they think is easy to do even though it’s incredibly difficult. (Then they default to “never shoulda been here illegally.”) Republicans will continue opposing any attempt to fix the broken immigration system, because it’s simply too effective an issue for stirring up angry rightwing voters and getting them to the polls.

After the shooting Tuesday, three others in the van were also detained, including Salgado Araujo’s brother. ICE’s Inspector General is investigating the killing, which in the past might have suggested an objective review, but let’s not get our hopes up. Oh, and the FBI is investigating, too, but they’re investigating the dead man for “the potential assault on a federal law enforcement officer.”

The family and advocacy groups, including the League of United Latin American Citizens, are calling for a transparent, independent investigation of the shooting; LULAC is offering a reward of $5000 for information or videos that will lead to “the arrest, indictment, conviction, or exoneration of any person involved in this potential murder.” The family is also taking the initial steps toward filing a federal wrongful death claim against the government.

[Robert Reich / WaPo (gift link) / Civil Discourse / Texas Tribune / Bulwark]

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American Dream (Void Where Prohibited)

“A Conservative Role Model for Ending the Fertility Crisis”

That is the actual title of a New York Times profile (gift link) on Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst Emma Waters — an ideologue in the mold of Phyllis Schlafly, who also famously traveled around the country telling other women to stay home.

It’s not the first. As writer Jessica Shortall pointed out on Bluesky yesterday, Waters has been the subject of at least two other New York Times profiles on her quest to replace standard fertility treatments with some bullshit called “restorative reproductive medicine” and downplaying her desire to force other women back to the 1950s: “White House Assesses Ways to Persuade Women to Have More Children,” published in April of 2025, and “As Trump Weighs I.V.F., Republicans Back New ‘Natural’ Approach to Infertility,” published in August of 2025.

I guess they figured that after a whole year we’d need a reminder.

Waters and other advocates try to present “restorative reproductive medicine” as some kind of “all natural” approach that takes into account infertility’s “root causes.” As per the August 2025 article, “[p]hysicians who specialize in the approach analyze patients’ diet and exercise habits, while helping them “chart” their menstrual cycles, a process that can help expose certain reproductive health conditions, like endometriosis, that may lead to infertility.” (Nota bene: “restorative reproductive medicine is not a recognized medical specialization.)

But this is not some “natural” approach that practitioners of modern medicine ignore in favor of pushing unnatural medicines and procedures on patients. Fertility doctors absolutely do all of those things. They are standard practice and there is no difference between “restorative reproductive medicine” and standard infertility treatment other than what it doesn’t include. What it doesn’t include is IVF, intrauterine insemination (IUI), or fertility preservation, because its proponents are ideologically opposed to those things — which is why the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) explicitly states that it is “not medical practice but ideology.”

Now, we of course have no damn problem with people who actually do have personal moral issues with IVF or any other fertility treatments trying everything but those things. That’s not my business or yours. The problem is the fact that these folks want this “method” promoted by the government as an alternative to those treatments for everyone. This is a very bad idea! Because it means that patients, older patients especially, could waste time that they don’t have doing something that isn’t going to be as effective.

Of course … that’s the whole point. They want to keep people from getting IVF until IVF is no longer an option for them. Because of how they love embryos.

The article from yesterday makes brief mention of a “report” she co-wrote with other Heritage Foundation employees, explaining that it included “proposals to give Americans financial incentives to marry by the age of 30 and a “large family bonus” for married parents with more than two children.”

You see, just as the Heritage Foundation set out their plans for the hell we’re living now in Project 2025, they also have a blueprint for rolling back all of the gains made by women and LGBTQ+ people in the last century. Isn’t that fun? That’s the report she co-wrote.

The report, titled “Saving America by Saving the Family,” advocates ending no-fault divorce, ending same-sex marriage, somehow eliminating the concept of “gender identity,” encouraging young people to marry not for love but for “duty and virtue” (that duty being “have children”), encouraging women to be financially dependent on their husbands, tearing apart the social safety net in order to make things more difficult for single parents, denying the problem of climate change (to combat people not having kids due to concerns about the planet) and, of course, Christian nationalism. Because if people are Christian, they’ll be more likely to get married and have babies in “traditional” households.

The data are strong that religious people are more likely to get married, marry earlier, divorce less, have more children, and beneficially influence their children’s social development. Because religion has an outside impact on marriage and family, it merits outsized social and cultural support. One of the biggest impediments that religious Americans must confront, however, is widespread cultural and government-enforced secularism.

Oh yeah, you know — that thing that makes it so everyone can believe what they believe without having anyone else’s beliefs forced upon them?

The report goes on quite endlessly about how feminism, the sexual revolution, and the War on Poverty ruined everything by giving women the ability to provide for themselves financially (and get help when they need it), choose when or if they want to have children while still enjoying recreational sex, and generally live the lives they want to lead as best they can.

The fact is, the only thing that really gets them what they want is reducing women’s choices — because, as it turns out, when women are able to choose, they don’t tend to choose “marry at 17 and sit home broke for 25 years until your husband divorces you.”

It would never occur to me to tell Emma Waters how to live her life. It would not occur to me to say that she shouldn’t be Christian or get married or have children, because none of that is any of my goddamned business. I am firmly on team “people should do what they want, and we should work to make things so that individuals can make these choices for themselves, depending on what works best for them.”

For all their complaints about us supposedly “shoving things down their throats,” you really never see us doing anything nearly as extreme as trying to force them to live exactly as we do, simply because we don’t like living in a world where people do things differently from us.

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Because, ultimately, that’s what this is about. The Right is using this idea of a “fertility crisis” to try and get their way on cultural issues, and the New York Times seems to have few qualms about helping them. And, as overplayed as the analogy may be, I’m going to have to point out that it is literally the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale.

According to a panel of Harvard researchers, much of the decrease in the birth rate both in the US and internationally is due to the sharp decrease in teen pregnancies (and is made up for, in part, by women having babies at older ages, thanks to IVF). Most people who are not enormous creeps would agree that that’s a good thing. The panel also pointed out that we might want to be more concerned about the fact that our maternal mortality rate is three times the rates of other wealthy countries, and that having a baby represents an “economic catastrophe” for most American families before we start pushing people to have more babies. “Expanding child care access, postpartum care, and maternal health services […] would improve outcomes regardless of their impact on fertility,” they argued.

I, personally, would like to point out that we do not even have enough ob-gyns for all of the people currently giving birth, particularly in areas run by people who are ideologically aligned with Emma Waters. Areas where it is now even more dangerous to give birth than it used to be, thanks to the anti-abortion laws that force doctors to wait until the last possible minute before providing care to patients in crisis. Also, there are 330,000 to 345,000 children living in foster care in the United States and 10 to 11 million living in poverty. Maybe we should consider taking care of the pregnant people and children we have before we start talking about any “birth rate crisis.” Certainly before we start exploring “rolling back the last century of cultural progress” as a viable solution.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Well, if there was any doubt what kind of man Graham Platner is before the past couple days, watching how he’s handled his exit from Maine’s US Senate race filled in all the rest of the blanks. He refused to simply gather his things and leave, he dawdled as long as possible, and then he released an 11-minute video explaining why actually all of this is The Establishment’s fault, like The Establishment was asking for it, like The Establishment had sore glutes.

Ultimately, somewhere in there, he announced he was quitting the race.

There’s a lot in this video, but spoiler, there’s not a moment where he takes any responsibility, so if you’re looking for that, you can skip it:

“This is all false,” he says early on. Not only is it false, he says, but “it’s not real.” We guess his accuser has just been hallucinating all these years.

“We were not looking to get into politics,” he says, setting himself up as the one who deserves praise and glory here, not condemnation. “We had no desire to run for office.” (He wasn’t referring to himself as the royal “we,” he started that part by talking about him and his wife collectively.)

“I just want you to think about, like, what you would do, as a regular person, in a position where a much larger world, large forces were working against you personally to accuse you of the worst thing that a person could do. [biiiiiig deep breath].”

He’s still only a minute and a half in. He whines right there that the “corporate media system and the political establishment got to act as judge, jury and executioner.” As if we didn’t all read the extremely detailed, well-sourced, well-corroborated allegation and decide for ourselves.

“Accusations are supposed to be the beginning of things, not the end!”

Sorry, wrong party, this one doesn’t give out merit badges for sexual assault accusations like the MAGA Epstein Republicans.

“I think it’s really important to understand why this is happening in the timeline.”

Because a woman says you raped her and she has the receipts? But nooooo, it’s not his fault! He says it’s all rigged because this was the last week to get him off the ballot! It’s a set-up!

“It’s not the false allegations, though, that have brought us to where we are. It’s the fact that they are being used by the political establishment to put structural pressure on us.”

Hate it when the political establishment puts structural pressure on guys just because a woman credibly says he raped her.

“We live in a political system that is not built for normal people.”

Normal folks who aren’t altar boys who are always getting accused of salt-of-the-earth rape?

“It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish.”

Oh my fucking God, ask all the other progressive and DSA candidates who haven’t been accused of anything like this, who are currently winning races nationwide, how they feel about that. Ask folks like Zohran Mamdani why their endorsements got lost in the mail to begin with. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who we are guessing clocked who this guy was the second he walked into the bar. Are they part of tHe sYstEM?

He’s only three and a half minutes in. You know those split seconds during Kyle Rittenhouse’s testimony just before he started doing those clown cries? That’s Platner’s demeanor throughout this video. It’s remarkable that he hasn’t bloodied his knuckles punching the bumper of his truck on camera yet.

“They’re going to take everything away from us. Those in power who have the ability to do so are using these allegations as an excuse to take away all of the things we need to run a campaign.”

Yep, it’s a conspiracy, literally everyone is against you. Bye, though!

“They would rather see Susan Collins win than have me be the nominee.”

Uhhhhhhh, sorry, buddy, but do you think all your voters are still with you? Yes, yes, he does. (Very, very doubtful!) Because he thinks he is God’s gift to everything, which is remarkable because Graham Platner, for all his alleged bad boy ruggedness, is nowhere near hot enough to be pulling this poor-me, please-feel-sorry-for-me kind of shit. Dude looks like a Temu Build-A-Bear version of a sexy, blue collar bad boy. Dude looks like he still stinks even after he comes home and takes a shower to wash off a day of oyster-touching.

Dude looks like he knows actually hot bad boy types, but like they run rival oyster farms and give him dirty looks at the diner, because they know he’s a scumbag too.

But no sorry, this is happening because people would like a chance to at least try to salvage a win out of what was setting itself up to be Susan Collins’s easiest re-election yet.

Susan Collins is concerned today, because her entire campaign strategy of dropping oppo on Graham Platner every two weeks until November likely just got flushed down the toilet.

You may have more patience in you for the rest of the video, but we sure didn’t. Unsurprisingly he tries to dictate what comes next, because he thinks he’s still got leverage here. He keeps blaming the “donor class” and the “entrenched forces,” like he’s a hero in a fucking video game. He finally, after holding you hostage for seven and a half minutes with his sob story, announces that he’s getting the fuck out.

“This is incredibly difficult because I know that some will think it’s an admission of guilt, and it most certainly is not. We’re not doing it because of the allegations. We’re doing it because of the structures that are being taken away from us by those in power.”

Are the powers in the room with us right now? Did they say you drunkenly raped them like a common drunken rapist piece of shit with a Nazi tattoo?

So anyway, that is where we closed tab.

By the way, look who can’t help but defend the credibly accused rapist:

Just cannot help himself. Game recognizing game?

The only thing we do agree with Platner on — but more like we agree with Dean Obeidallah, who made the same argument but isn’t a scumbag — is that Maine Democratic Party leaders do indeed need to read the room and not fuck this up, that this is not the time for trying to snake somebody “mainstream” back into the race, to try to find a way to let senile James Carville-type thinking claw its way back into this race. The voters have indeed said they want something different, a different kind of politics and a different kind of (progressive) candidate.

Dean writes, “If Maine’s Democratic party leaders want to win, then the choice is clear: Pick a candidate that most aligns with Platner’s economic populist message that inspired people to support him. That is why he won 72% of the vote just last month in the Democratic primary.” And Dean mentions a few names and gives background, without pushing any of them specifically. And we cosign that.

The Maine Democrats released this statement on where things will go from here:

And more from the Bangor Daily News:

The Maine Democratic Party’s state committee voted Wednesday to hold a nominating convention to select a replacement for U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, according to a party statement and an account of the meeting shared with the Bangor Daily News.

More than 100 state committee members attended the meeting and voted in favor of the convention process, the party said in a statement. The convention would include 500 delegates elected proportionally by county committees, along with the entire state committee, according to the account of the meeting.

This is salvageable, and indeed, the Maine Democrats are the only ones who can ruin this at this point. (No pressure!) We’re only around 100 days out from the election, which we are sure will activate PTSD in a lot of people, but Maine is a lot smaller than the United States of America. We’re sure they can find a bold progressive who doesn’t stink like Graham Platner stinks right now, and we’re sure that campaign can chart a course to beating the shitfire out of Susan Collins.

In this electoral environment? Lord. The Senate races in Texas, Ohio, Alaska, and Iowa are tied up. Literally anyone should be able to find the momentum to beat Susan Collins in a state Kamala Harris won after 107 days by seven points.

Don’t fuck it up, Maine Democrats.

[Bangor Daily News]

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Whose turn is it to be fucking furious at Graham Platner and his dickfor (collective noun) of bros? (And Ryan Grim hadn’t even posted this yet.) Charlotte Clymer, you’re up! (Charlotte’s Web Thoughts) Yes, “the establishment” tried to take down Zohran Mamdani by supporting a sex pest (and olds murderer), but they didn’t take down Graham Platner. That was women looking out for each other, and the media. (Noah Berlatsky at Everything Is Horrible)

If Only There Had Been a Sign That the Face-Melting Nazi from Indiana Jones Wouldn’t Make a Good Senator. (McSweeney’s)

Ah well, nevertheless! Elaine Chao said her husband Mitch McConnell’s health — maybe most sincerely dead? — “didn’t warrant” flying back from China. (She is apparently back in the US now.) (Daily Beast)

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Did Ken Paxton vote fraud? WELL DID HE? (Pro Publica)

Oh yeah, we’re hauling off the flu experts and COVID scientists. (Gift link The Atlantic)

ICE keeps killing people and lying about it, and absolutely nobody believes them, Houston small business construction man dad edition. What a beautiful family! (The Bulwark) Yay we didn’t put the Wisconsin judge in jail? I guess? (The Guardian)

Pretty damn fast for Trump to ditch his gilded Qatari bribe zeppelin. But he claims he needed to tour it around some bases for the poor enlisted rubes to gawk at, as one does with Air Force One without a president in it. (Mediaite)

Margaret Killjoy wrote this short story a decade ago about driverless cars driving you to jail. It’s not fiction anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Vice)

AI is useless and can go screw and nobody better bail it out either, it is NOT too big to fail. (Where’s Your Ed At) Christ, no, don’t let Meta let all its users AI-up all your Instagram photos! Go opt out right now! (Wired) Burying this one about Elon Musk’s Grok letting men AI-sex-up their young-child stepdaughters, and then not cooperating with law enforcement. (Ars Technica) Here’s a much better one to end this graf on, hero Maine librarians teaching residents how to get that AI garbage off their phones! (Bangor Daily News)

The elderly among us will remember Mystery, who showed dudes how to get laid by insulting women. He has a robot girlfriend now! Congratulations Mystery, you’re doing awesome sweetie. (Wired)

Parties upcoming! MISSOULA (July 25), CLEVELAND (Aug. 8) AND PITTSBURGH (Aug. 9), and SONOMA/SF (Nov. 30)! Atlanta has been postponed. TIME TO PARTY!

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How did we start our day, dear friends? The same way we do every day, trying to take over the world!

Evan had a one-two on Trump at NATO — ugh — and how Canada and Europe will never love us again :/

and also

So there’s this MAGA rep., Brandon Gill (?) who is married to Dinesh D’Souza’s daughter and has little babies with her and is VERY WHITE SUPREMACIST and also has dumb Clark Kent hair but that’s not really the point.

Paris Hilton is legit a hero on this topic, remember when she went and got Matt Bevins’s (adoptive) son from one of these horrorshows in Jamaica, because the place had been shut down and the Bevinses … just left him there? Ugh.

We call it a lorry.

And now we have read the second installment of the Wall Street Journal’s excellent report about Europe’s, and also Canada’s, efforts to simultaneously manage Donald Trump and also chart a path toward removing themselves from the relationship. (We discussed the first installment here.)

In the second installment, which focuses on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s role in shepherding Canada and Europe away from relying on the US, hopefully in a way that brings the two entities closer together, it becomes a lot clearer how managing Trump and planning the work/working the plan to extricate from the US when The Time comes are intimately linked.

It’s not at all unlike an abused spouse setting up secret bank accounts and ensuring the children have a safe place to go when/if Daddy goes nuclear (literally) when he finds out.

And it brings up a thought for us, having just watched Donald Trump’s latest ass-kissing session with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. (Trump is obviously the bottom who’s receiving the ass-kissing, not the other way around.)

Rutte has a new phrase during this NATO summit, the “Trump Trillion,” AKA the amount Europe and Canada have upped their defense spending in response to Trump’s constant bitching and threats.

You can watch Rutte talk about it here:

Rutte said, “I could not do this without you!” Trump interrupted to bitch about Obama and Biden. “But hey, you are here now!” said Rutte, soothing the baby. “In total more than $1.2 trillion. I call this the Trump Trillion! The excess spend by Canada and [Europe].” Trump continued whining about Biden and Obama, which this time he pronounced as “Obuma,” because he is obsessed with putting “U”s in words these days. “It’s your win!” said Rutte, redirecting the baby.

Trump is, of course, obsessed, like a two-bit greater New York City mall developer/mafioso, with the notion that somebody is screwing him, which is always projection for those types, because they are supposed to be the ones doing the screwing. (In a flaccid MAGA brain like Trump’s, there is no such thing as an arrangement where everybody wins. Their masculinity issues can’t take it.)

So he’s been fixated for years on the notion that Europe is screwing the US by devoting far less of its collective spending to defense compared to the US, which could have nice things if it didn’t spend all its money on new bombs.

And indeed, during Trump 2.0, many of those nations really have upped their pledges! It’s the Trump Trillion!

But this WSJ article today about Carney really lays out that the game here — a game that we’re sure includes Rutte — is two-pronged, an effort to keep a pacifier up Trump’s asshole long enough for Europe and Canada to get their affairs in order.

Makes us wonder if Rutte’s “Trump Trillion” actually refers to something Trump is far too stupid and vain to understand.

The article is about Carney, but it starts when Justin Trudeau was still in power, revealing that literally batfucking shitcrazy Trump threatened in a phone call with Trudeau to fully blow up the 1908 agreement that established the US-Canadian border. “I tear that up and your whole country unravels,” Trump told Trudeau.

Which led at one point to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where people on Trudeau’s team tried to redirect the baby’s attention away from stealing Canada by helpfully explaining that Canada would just be a great big huge fuckin’ blue state. But, the WSJ explains, “the president came up with a neat solution: just split the northern neighbor into two states, one red, the other blue.”

Would it be just like American blue states, where all the population actually is, and the red state would be Alabama, we mean Alberta?

Trudeau’s administration had been trying in vain to get Trump to stop babbling about the fentanyl coming from Canada by, at Jared Kushner’s suggestion, making a video showing how FORD TUFF Canada is about the border. That’s what got Trump so obsessed with tearing up the agreement about the border, as it turned out.

Trudeau’s administration, seeing the writing on the wall, had also inquired with UK intel services about how to manage it if/when the US left Five Eyes, AKA the open intel-sharing agreement that unites the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The UK at the time was like PIFFLE-ROT! because that’s the accepted British word for being sceptical about leaving intelligence-sharing agreements.

So then Carney, the former head of the Bank of England and the first foreign Canadian ever to run it, comes in to office amidst all Trump’s babble about Canada becoming the 51st state, and immediately HEREBY DEMANDS a review of just how tied up in Twister fuck-knots Canada and the US really are. That, of course, would serve as the beginning of a roadmap for getting out. (Sidenote of interesting trivia: The WSJ notes that on top of Carney, Emmanuel Macron used to be a banker with Rothschild, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz used to run the German arm of BlackRock, and Finnish President Alexander Stubb came from the European Investment Bank. Interesting skillset/background for a discussion of de-linking the EU and Canada from the US economically and defensively.)

The article paints an interesting picture of who’s been on what side here, who’s needed convincing of how serious things really are. Carney and Macron always saw eye to eye, sounds like, and Carney went to see Macron at the Élysée Palace in Paris two days after his swearing-in to discuss how to tell America, “It’s not me, it’s you.”

Just two days after assuming office, Carney traveled not to Washington—a conventional first stop for a new Canadian prime minister—but to France. Standing alongside Macron at Paris’s Élysée Palace, he called Canada “the most European of non-European countries.”

Over a private lunch, the two leaders animatedly exchanged ideas on how France and Canada could help each other dial down their reliance on America. Canada had the critical minerals needed by France, whose state-backed tech firms were taking early steps into the U.S.-dominated spheres of AI and quantum computing.

French diplomats joked that since Canada and Denmark share a land border on an uninhabited Arctic island off Greenland, that could make the North American country a legitimate candidate to gain fast-track membership in the EU. Carney laughed.

Yeah, we bet he laughed. IN EUROPEANUNION-ESE.

So Carney is seeing the writing on the wall, and has been seeing it. Meanwhile on the other side were Mark Rutte and now-outgoing UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who were advancing their theory that if they butter the insides of Trump’s asshole frequently and lovingly enough, they can keep him onside.

It’s not that the UK hasn’t seen it at all. Apparently they have commissioned their own reports on how to break up with the US, and Fiona Hill, former Trump 1.0 Russia expert and impeachment witness, was a co-author. She compared Trump to Mikhail Gorbachev, “weakening a superpower he meant to strengthen.” Hill does tend to have receipts on these sorts of things.

But Starmer, whose ass is on the way out the door, he is the one who has always been sceptical.

This is the stupidest fucking paragraph:

Carney would have to try again to bring Starmer on board in November, when they headed to the G-20 in South Africa. The U.S. was boycotting in protest of what Trump had called “white genocide,” which gave Carney more time with Macron, Finland’s Stubb, and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, all of whom shared his perspective.

Sorry Trump can’t be here today, he’s protesting white genocide.

Anyway, Starmer. He’s told Carney they have to patch things up with America. “We don’t have a relationship to keep!” Carney has replied.

There’s so much in this article, you really should read it yourself and stop making Wonkette do all the word-interpreting for you.

There was the January 6 meeting of Ukraine backers at the Élysée Palace. Trump had just kidnapped Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela. He had also just had dinner with Katie Miller, wife of Nazi, who reportedly reassured him like he was terminally ill (????) that he still had time to rape and murder Greenland, so it was on his mind. (In case you were wondering what her foul husband saw in her.)

That was the meeting where someone, an aide to a European prime minister, passed a note that said they can’t count on the US anymore. “All we have is international law.”

Then came Carney’s speech at Davos a few days later, the one that was heard round the world. That speech really pissed Trump off, the way Carney basically said the world, especially western powers like Canada and Europe, had a choice, either to stand up for themselves, or “be on [Trump’s] menu.” Carney said, “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

Oh grrrrr he was being “ungrateful,” impotent Trump whined from Air Force One. Oh grrrrrr, “Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements,” Trump bitched in his speech.

Ever since then, and ever since Trump really started grunting about invading Greenland again, it sounds like Europe is more on the same page every day. They know they need time to put in the investments in tech and defense so they can break up with the US, and they know they have to keep the baby distracted until that time comes.

Basically Rutte’s job is to be in the front tonguing Trump’s ass, to keep him distracted from how Europe and Canada are doing all this under his nose:

Europe was going to have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars replicating systems America traditionally supplied. Carney, in another lunch with Macron at the Élysée Palace and during a jog through London’s Hyde Park with Finland’s Stubb, was discussing how Canada could better integrate into—and augment—those systems. In February, Canada joined a new €150 billion EU defense fund and launched the Sovereign Technology Alliance with Germany, to deepen collaboration on AI security and compute capacity.

Canadian and European officials began to meet more frequently for discussions that would have once included their American counterparts. During preparations for the G-7, officials met in the French city of Toulouse in March, discussing quantum computing, food security and AI between conversations on how Canada would join Europe’s student-exchange program, Erasmus, or its song contest, Eurovision.

Ahead of it, some of Carney’s top national security officials stopped using Starlink.

France meanwhile ordered its 2.5 million civil servants to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with Visio, a domestically built videoconference platform. Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium started rolling out their own homegrown texting services—discouraging civil servants from conducting official business on Meta Platforms’ WhatsApp. German officials complained about the clunkiness of the non-American software they were now expected to use. Germany’s parliament passed an act favoring European suppliers for its defense needs.

“Even if Biden came back it would not be the same,” said Alice Rufo, deputy defense minister of France. “The time of warnings is over. Now is the time to do.”

They’re even getting off WhatsApp? If you know anything about Europe, you know that’s a HOO BOY moment.

Some of it, Trump and his minions have indeed noticed:

The Pentagon said it would retaliate if the EU enacted policies to favor domestic arms manufacturers. To smooth things over, Rutte visited the Oval Office in April, bringing papers listing how many billions of dollars in American weaponry Europe was still purchasing. “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” he said, careful not to imply the president didn’t know these facts.

The president threatened he would leave NATO. No, you won’t, Rutte pushed back.

As butt-sniffing goes, “No you won’t,” exudes a confidence we don’t see from Trump’s butt-sniffers in the US. It does indeed suggest that Rutte, as gross as he is in his interactions with Trump, knows exactly what his role is in all this, and he’s committed to staying in character.

So we go back to our question at the top: Who is that Trump Trillion really for? Gonna be interesting to see if it’s not necessarily for Trump, at least not in the way he thinks.

Also gonna be interesting to see whether Canada or the UK is the first to join/rejoin the European Union, but that’s a whole ‘nother itch to scratch on another day.

In conclusion, get a load of this Danish reporter giving Mark Rutte the business about kissing Trump’s ass at NATO today:

Hahahahahahahahaha, well done, Danish guy!

We guess it’ll also be interesting to see which parent Rutte actually goes to live with after the divorce.

Some of his ass-kissing is indeed li’l too real.

OPEN THREAD.

[Wall Street Journal]

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Back in 2017, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik argued that maybe the American Revolution against Great Britain was a bad idea, in an article summed up by the perfect headline, “We Could Have Been Canada.”

Look north to Canada, or south to Australia, and you will see different possibilities of peaceful evolution away from Britain, toward sane and whole, more equitable and less sanguinary countries. No revolution, and slavery might have ended, as it did elsewhere in the British Empire, more peacefully and sooner. No “peculiar institution,” no hideous Civil War and appalling aftermath. [...] We could have ended with a social-democratic commonwealth that stretched from north to south, a near-continent-wide Canada.

I’ve been thinking about that idea a bit, especially after listening to this terrific “On the Media” podcast interviewing the hosts of “The Rest is History,” offering a British perspective on the American Revolution and how our two countries have evolved since then.

The hell with Donald Trump taking over Canada; the other way around would make the world a much nicer place. (I suppose now ICE will start trying to deport me even though I was born in Oregon, another formerly-British territory.)

The other big advantage of remaining in the UK Commonwealth, of course, is that we might have a multi-party parliamentary democracy, which 1) allows for quicker disposal of a head of state government who’s flat out terrible, and 2) invites more raving loony* candidates to seek office, such as “Count Binface,” a character played by comedian Jonathan Harvey. Count Binface will be the only person running against creepy fascist Nigel Farage in an upcoming by-election (what the Brits call a special election).

It’s a pretty clear choice for voters in the Clacton district in southeast England. Unlike the racist, anti-migrant Farage, Count Binface is only pretending to be garbage.

Assuming he can get the 10 nominating petitions he needs to get on the ballot, this would be Count Binface’s second run for office this year, after his unsuccessful run in Makerfield against a candidate who was already serving as mayor of Manchester. Binface tells the Sky News reporter in this video, “I believe elected mayors should serve out their terms before they're eligible to stand for Parliament,” and by golly we like him for that. (Count Binface received a respectable 95 votes, just 68 votes behind the “serious” Liberal Democratic candidate.

*We should note that Count Binface is not officially affiliated with the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, which is why we didn’t capitalize it.

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Farage is the leader of the far-Right Reform UK Party, and in his role as the leader of the campaign for Brexit, a sort of John the Baptist for Trumpism and its weaponized racism. Unfortunately, Farage’s head remains attached to his neck. He triggered the by-election Tuesday by suddenly “resigning” from his parliamentary seat in an effort to short-circuit an investigation by the House of Commons Standards Committee into millions of pounds of donations from “friends” including crypto bro Christopher Harborne (£5 million, or $6.7 million in real money) and from “George Cottrell, a political ally who was convicted of wire fraud in the U.S. in 2017.”

This raises a serious question for the Special Relationship between the US and Britain: Why hasn’t Donald Trump pardoned this Cottrell fellow?

Not surprisingly, Farage is trying to run the Trump Playbook, insisting that the investigation into his hinky donations is a mean witch hunt by the “establishment” that just wants to ruin him and the UK, claiming that if he’s reelected by his constituents, that will prove he’s innocent because why would anyone elect a crook?

“The establishment has now decided that they can’t beat us fairly... they have chosen to use foul means,” Farage said, having earlier described scrutiny of his finances as an “establishment hit job.”

Virtually all of the serious British political parties quickly announced that they wouldn’t legitimize (or legitimise) Farage’s sleazy stunt by putting up a candidate to run against him, leaving Count Binface the only candidate willing to stand up for democracy against the (alleged) crook Farage. As Binface (and under a previous identity, “Lord Buckethead,”) Harvey has run against three prime ministers and other candidates for office, using his gravitas as an “intergalactic space warrior” to mock political stupidity and clichés by turning both up to twelve or even thirteen.

He pledged on social media to be “a unity candidate and to build at least one affordable house,” which is one of his favorite/favourite campaign promises. In a beautiful moment of stonefaced going along with the bit, BBC Breakfast anchor Sarah Campell interviewed Binface, who also promised to pursue his agenda of “nationalizing Adele, bringing back CEEFAX [a pre-internet news-text service], and of course moving the hand dryer in the gents’ toilet in the Crown and Treaty pub Oxbridge to a more sensible position.”

Look upon his works, ye Silly, and weep!

When Campbell asked Binface if he’d ever actually been to Clacton, he sensibly replied “No, because I understand from the current incumbent that is part of how you do the job. So, I deliberately stayed away. Is that how it works?”

Hell yes. The people of Clacton have an opportunity to tell Nigel Farage to GTFO in the funniest way possible. Count Binface doesn’t need to win, he only needs to rack up a substantial protest vote in order to make a joke of Farage’s insistence that he’s a victim of establishment politics or the “deep state.”

As for Farage’s attempt to disrupt the investigation into him, his resignation does put a temporary end to it, but if he’s reelected to Parliament, it can be reactivated. For that matter, the investigation by the Standards Committee can continue even if an MP quits, if the members decide it’s “appropriate and proportionate” for the alleged offenses/offences. And even if he somehow wins against Count Binhead, Farage could still be the subject of a recall byelection a few months later, because Britain takes democracy seriously.

In conclusion, we urge the voters of Clacton to declare Bindependence from that wanker Farage while we draft this petition to be admitted to the Commonwealth.

[CNBC / BBC / Reuters / Guardian]

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Count Binhead-Vermin Supreme '28!