kellyverdeck

Trump dozes while Marco Rubio speaks to him directly next to him. Just insane optics.

Anyway China is absolutely kicking our ass. It has made a clear-eyed strategic decision to pursue a clean economy & is investing accordingly. We're flailing around like drunken dipshits, suppressing our domestic renewables, shoveling subsidies at coal, & killing random Venezuelan fishermen.

Dude's falling asleep while his ministers lavish him with praise for his energy and work ethic. "Surreal" doesn't even begin to describe it.

one of the problems I have with Democrats (and other critics) labeling these "war crimes" is that it accepts the underlying claim that the people being murdered are enemy combatants. They're not! it's just murder!

the media went on and on about the price of eggs and milk under biden, meanwhile trump is conducting an illegal war in south america that he says he doesnt know anything about and the media's big concern is their invite to the white house christmas party

It's not a foolproof plan but every political debate from now on should be a Normal Guy competition. Ask them to describe grocery shopping in detail. Talk about what it's like to have a friend

Little TV screens at the gas station pump blaring ads directly in your face as you spend $70 on a tank of gas is enough to radicalize a person

When your approval rating is cratering because, among other things people think you’ve lost your grip on reality, maybe insisting it’s at a record high isn’t the move.

it is amazing how so much tech gets unremittingly worse year on year at whatever you once used it for and less pleasant to use and more bound up with creepy politics as well as personal and environmental harms and yet also still less productive of actual goods and these are somehow great visionaries

The best way to understand what the modern Republican party is doing is gleeful civic blasphemy.

Perry: The pro-Hitler problem with the American right "We need to get back to the basics: Hitler was bad. The people who suggest otherwise are also bad," David M. Perry writes.

Hitler was bad.

An essay that, you know, I didn’t think I’d need to write.

This seems like the kind of declaration by a U.S. president that should be mentioned *somewhere* on the front page of CNN or the NY Times, but the fact that it isn't (as of right now) tells us so much both about how this president is covered and the credibility of the U.S. government.

The president has illegally declared war to stop fentanyl trafficking from a country that does not traffic that drug, claiming its leader is trafficking drugs himself, the day after pardoning a former leader of a country who is a convicted drug trafficker.
Just to level set

It’s clear that the primary interest of the US in “peace negotiations” is to create opportunities for Trump, Witkoff, their family members, business partners and cronies to make billions from business deals with Russia, and Ukraine is just the annoying nuisance in the way.

The crisis isn’t refugees. It’s not that one person committed one tragic crime and killed one other person. The crisis isn’t that America’s 250-year old history of hosting immigrants turned out to be a mistake.

The crisis is that STEPHEN MILLER, a hateful little maggot, controls the government.

'But we can use slop for good!' No we cannot. A world where nothing is true but everything is possible will always benefit authoritarians.

to keep functioning society must discourage baldfaced lying, especially by authorities

The DC shooting story is really getting to me because we literally trained this man as a child soldier for a death squad in a forever war and Stephen Miller et al want to blame it on other cultures? It's our culture, American culture, that killed that woman.

a young woman who signed up to serve her community and our narcissistic, despotic president decided to use her as a prop for his ego

Ahead of launching a war on Venezuela, the US would like to announce that no one in Venezuela should help US forces, it'd be stupid to do so, the US will denigrate you and screw you over no matter how much you help, and blame you if even one Venezuelan who also helped the US ever does something bad.

Every year I share this work with my students. We read it aloud.

Cybertruck stuck nearly vertically on a utility pole's support wire

nose down ass up
that's the way we cyberstuck

I think that it is bad that the National Guard is deployed in a city for absolutely no reason and today's tragedy could be easily avoided by not deploying the guard for made-up reasons.

As a retiring but still sitting member of the House, MTG has the opportunity to read into the public record documents that otherwise could not be released... and would be protected by the constitution's speech or debate clause from prosecution.

living through the previously-absurd scenario of an out-of-control president looting the nation, ignoring the law, inciting violence, pardoning criminals, working with our enemies, but instead of some titanic political struggle most of society is just trying really hard to avoid mentioning it

The domino meme and the smallest domino is "Craigslist destroys classified ad revenue for local newspapers" and the big domino is, well, everything happening now

Crisis (a Democrat is president): grocery prices rise 2% annually

Not a crisis (a Republican is president): the president ignores the Constitution to destroy half the federal government, deploys troops to US cities, surrenders Ukraine to Russia, and then calls for the mass execution of Democrats

For thirty years I worked in the post-Soviet successor states in Central Asia and observed over and over again precisely the cycle that Bill Kristol describes. Corruption leads to authoritarianism, directly. The path is utterly predictable.

I just don’t see how we can pretend even for a moment that anything involving our federal government is remotely normal when the president is covering up his involvement in a child sex trafficking ring. Like, what are we doing here

This is them: