Tuesday, February 28, 2023

QOTD -- Give Ukraine F-16s

 

"... Advanced fighter jets are not a panacea; they are one element of deterrence. If the Biden administration insists, they could be provided on the understanding that Ukraine will not use them to attack targets in Russian territory — where, in any event, Russian air-defense systems would make such sorties too dangerous. Within Ukraine’s own airspace, however, F-16s could narrow the gap between Moscow’s air power and Kyiv’s, and operate relatively safely in coordination with other Western-supplied weapons. Those include U.S.-made AGM-88 HARM radar-destroying missiles that would limit Russia’s ability to use surface-to-air missiles to shoot down fighter jets.

"What’s more, F-16s are becoming more available as a number of NATO countries shift to the more advanced U.S.-made F-35. Yet without an official say-so from Washington, F-16s cannot be provided to Ukraine..." -- Washington Post editorial urging the Biden Administration to provide, or allow allies to provide, F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.  At a minimum, given the learning curve, Ukrainian pilots, mechanics and other personnel should be given training on the jets immediately.  President Biden recently punted to "seasoned military" advising him that Ukraine "doesn't need F-16s now." When, ffs, will they need them?  When Putin's at the gates of Kiev?

Where's the strategic thinking here?


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Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(Rick McKee, caglecartoons.com)

(Dave Whamond, caglecartoons.com)

(Nick Anderson, Reform Austin News, TX)

(Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press)

(Jimmy Margulies, jimmymargulies.com)

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

(John Deering, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

(David Horsey, The Seattle Times)

(Gary Clement, National Post, Toronto)

(Ellis Rosen, @EllisRosen)


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Tweets Of The Day

 

Private backstabbing in Murdoch's media empire --




White right-wingers in diners are a good cross section of white right-wingers in diners--  


 


CPAC's in the defamation business. Dominion Voting Systems lawyers take note -- 



We're betting the Republican regulation busters won't care -- 

 


Jan. 6 seditionist whines he was banned from his barber shop "hair salon" --


 

Inside the brutal prison camp that is today's Russian Federation --  

 


Time to wake Russians up (caution: sound on) -- 



Garfield gets the last word --  


 

 

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Tracking Down The Insurrectionists: "Sedition Panda" Arrested

 


 

More than two years after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the FBI is still rounding up seditionists.  Yesterday they arrested a furry Floriduh felon who had become known as "Sedition Panda" for obvious reasons:

On Monday, FBI agents in Florida arrested Jesse James Rumson, who they claim stormed the U.S. Capitol while wearing a giant panda head, earning the monicker “Sedition Panda” in the process.

Rumson’s whereabouts on Jan. 6, 2021, weren’t particularly hard to track, thanks in no small part to the costume he wore off and on that day.

Federal officials also identified him thanks to his nose ring and a set of wooden rosary beads he carried, along with a silver flagpole and a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.

In an affidavit filed last week, an FBI special agent testified that Rumson was among the first 20 rioters to enter the Capitol through a door on the building’s upper west terrace.  [snip]

Once inside, Rumson apparently lost the panda head ― and gained a pair of handcuffs on his wrists. He then exited the Capitol building, and other rioters helped him to remove the handcuffs, according to photos.

The affidavit states that shortly thereafter, Rumson urged on other members of the mob and yelled at them to “GET A RAM!” as they breached a separate entry into the building.

Photos later show him among a crowd of rioters clashing with a police line as officers tried to clear the property. He appears to grapple with an officer, grabbing him by the head.

A tipster first alerted the FBI to Sedition Panda’s true identity in June 2021.

Rumson faces eight charges, including assaulting, resisting or impeding a police officer, obstructing law enforcement, and two separate counts related to acts of physical violence. 

We don't have an answer as to why he was arrested yesterday when his identity was known to the FBI in June 2021.  But, macht nichts, he's in custody now.  Hopefully, his jailers will be giving him a daily supply of bamboo to munch on.

As an aside, we would be suspicious of anyone named after "Jesse James...", the atrocity-committing Confederate guerilla who went on to kill and rob until his death in 1882.  It makes us wonder if he descends from people who have as bent an understanding of the law and to true American values as he does.  Plus, Floriduh.

There are plenty more crumb-bums needing to have their day in court.  See if you can spot anyone the FBI is looking for.

(Image:  "Sedition Panda" Jesse James Rumson/ Department of Justice)  


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Murdoch: I Could Have Stopped The Lies At Fox




Unsealed court documents in the Dominion Voting Systems' defamation suit against Fox "News" released yesterday reveal more deception and tolerance of lying at the upper levels of the company. Some telling testimony from News Corp. Executive and cancer on the world Rupert Murdoch show that he disbelieved the Big Lie being promoted by numerous talking heads on his network, throwing them under the bus:

"Fox News was 'trying to straddle the line between spewing conspiracy theories on one hand, yet calling out the fact that they are actually false on the other,' Murdoch said in testimony released in the court documents.

Murdoch acknowledged in testimony that some of those hosts, including Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, had done more than just give a platform to baseless claims of voter fraud.

'Yes,' Murdoch said, according to the documents. 'They endorsed.'”  (our emphasis)

The release of this latest barrage of evidence that the Fox crew knowingly lied to their mouthbreather audience for fear of them switching to another Malignant Loser-friendly station and hurting their bottom line. All the while, many of the same crew privately slammed the Malignant Loser and his coterie of kooks for their "stolen election" lie. 

"The new documents were unsealed less than two weeks after an unsealed court filing exposed the communications of many Fox News executives, hosts and producers who saw claims about Dominion to be without merit. They included host Tucker Carlson's saying Sidney Powell was 'lying' about voter fraud docs, Rupert Murdoch's calling statements by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani 'crazy stuff' and 'damaging' and Hannity’s saying he 'did not believe it for one second.'

Murdoch also confirmed that he could have exerted some control over the network, most notably by telling Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott to stop putting Giuliani on the air.

'I could have,' Murdoch said in the court documents. 'But I didn’t.'”  (our emphasis)

That last admission is Dominion's slam dunk in their defamation suit, showing that Murdoch had the knowledge that the "stolen election" campaign was a Big Lie, but went ahead fearing backlash from the right-wing cult that Fox had cultivated for decades. That may cost them over a billion dollars:

"Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and former practicing First Amendment lawyer, said in an interview that Murdoch’s testimony suggests Dominion has 'a really strong case.'

'I can’t recall the last time that I’ve seen so much evidence of actual malice just piled on top of each other,' Kosseff said.

'That’s not to say they definitely will win, but I’d much rather be in the plaintiff's lawyers' shoes,' he said."  (our emphasis)

Justice awaits.

BONUS:  Murdoch also was revealed in court documents to have provided Mr. Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, with a preview of campaign ads for Biden that Fox was scheduled to air. Wouldn't that constitute an unreported in-kind campaign contribution?

(photo: Sky News)

 

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Kimmel Fires Back At "Nostradumbass, King Tutenconman" Trump

 

Jimmy Kimmel's monologue last night covered the weather in California, the upcoming Oscars, and the backlog of Adidas' Yeezy footwear.  But the best part is at the beginning when Kimmel addresses the Malignant Loser's efforts in 2018 to get him reined in by the network because his jokes about and nicknames for the Malignant Loser got under the fool's orange skin.  The nicknames, dozens of which he recounts, remain timeless and hilarious.  Check it out.

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Monday, February 27, 2023

Rep. Slotkin Running For Senate From Michigan

 

Three term Michigan Representative Elissa Slotkin announced today that she's a candidate for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Debbie Stabenow. Slotkin made the announcement in this partly biographical, partly issue focused video:


Slotkin would seem to be the ideal candidate for a state like Michigan. She's grounded in Michigan's economy and culture, served the country abroad honorably, wants to preserve and improve health care, and fight for gun safety measures. She has the essential quality of authenticity and honest passion for what she believes in. Win the primary election or not, she is a formidable candidate.
 
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Book Review Of The Day -- The Courage To Be Unfree (And Scary)

 


Fans of fascism!  Floriduh Gov. Ron "Meatball Ron/ Bootsie" DeSantis' new book, Mein Kampf  "The Courage to Be Free," is out!  The NYT's Jennifer Szalai has read it so we don't have to waste any more time on it.  Here are some of her observations, as distilled in Politico's Playbook, via Mock Paper Scissors:

— “[T]he overall sense you get from reading his new memoir is that of the mechanical try-hard — someone who has expended a lot of effort studying which way the wind is blowing in the Republican Party and is learning how to comport himself accordingly.”

— “For the most part, ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is courageously free of anything that resembles charisma, or a discernible sense of humor. While his first book was weird and esoteric enough to have obviously been written by a human, this one reads like a politician’s memoir churned out by ChatGPT.”

— “Of his childhood baseball team making the Little League World Series, he says: ‘What I came to understand about the experience was less about baseball than it was about life. It was proof that hard work can pay off, and that achieving big goals was possible.’ You have to imagine that DeSantis, a double-barreled Ivy Leaguer (Yale and Harvard Law School), put a bit more verve into his admissions essays.”

— “Take out the gauzy abstraction, the heartwarming clichés, and much of what DeSantis is describing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is chilling — unfree and scary.”

— “Reading books, even bad ones, can be a goad to thinking, but what DeSantis seems to be doing in ‘The Courage to Be Free’ is to insist that Americans should just stop worrying and let him do all the thinking for them. Any criticism of his policies gets dismissed as ‘woke’ nonsense cooked up by the ‘corporate media.’ (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation and News Corp, which owns the publisher of this book, doubtless don’t count.)”

Ouch and then some!  But you can be sure this will be a book Floriduh schools won't be banning!

(Photo:  a picture of Bootsie we'll never get tired of posting)


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Tweets Of The Day


Republicans in disarray ("Swamp" says swampy Medicare/Medicaid fraudster) --

 


Defenders of the afflicted and downtrodden, plutocrat Trump and his ass- kisser "Gym" --

 

 

Watch what they 👆 do, not what they say --

 

 

The Mark of the Loser is passed on --

 


What's that Musk-y smell?  Laying off loyalists, including the sleeping bag lady --

 

 

 


50/50 ? --

 

 

Red sky at night, sailor's delight? --

 

 

 

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Far Right-Wing Conference Starts This Week

 


The annual gathering of various Christofascists, white nationalists, Q-quackers, misogynists, gun-toting militia types and closet sex abusers, also known as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), begins this week outside of Washington, DC. Of course, there's an elephant soiling itself in the room:  CPAC chief Matt "Grabby" Schlapp, who has been credibly accused of "pummeling" the genitals of a male aide to Herschel Walker's campaign last fall in Georgia. He joins a long, long list of lying, hypocritical right-wing predators.

According to The Guardian, CPAC's got quite the rogues gallery of a lineup and message:

"That lineup also includes Trump allies such as former housing secretary Ben Carson, senators Marsha Blackburn and Ted Cruz, representatives Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ronny Jackson, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry and Elise Stefanik, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, ex-White House press secretary Sean Spicer and Truth Social chief executive Devin Nunes.

Then there is Trump’s son, Don Jr, his fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle – infamous for hollering 'The best is yet to come!' at the 2020 Republican national convention – and the main event: a speech by Trump himself that will be akin to an indoor campaign rally. [snip]

Border security, crime, culture wars and parents’ rights are likely to feature prominently at the conference. CPAC’s Twitter bio has the hashtags '#AwakeNotWoke' and '#FirePelosiSaveAmerica' - an outdated reference to the retired House speaker. CPAC’s website promotes a documentary entitled The Culture Killers with the warning: 'The woke wars are coming to a neighborhood near you.'

CPAC will also give the biggest platform yet to growing dissent in the nativist wing of the Republican party over US support for Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression, roughly $50bn and rising. Biden is likely to face criticism for having travelled to Kyiv in the same week that Trump headed to the scene of a toxic train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio."  (our emphasis)

Schlapp remains in the good graces of the extreme MAGA cult, which shows in the guest list. The Malignant Loser's VP Mike "Fly Guy" Pence won't be coming to this years poo-fling. Neither apparently will Florida's aspiring Il Duce, Gov. Ron "Meatball Ron" DeSantis. So, the signal from Grabby Schlapp is that the Malignant Loser and his co-conspirators will not be challenged for primacy at this year's CPAC. It will be, as the article says, an indoor campaign rally for the Malignant Loser. It's fitting that two infamous crotch grabbers, the Malignant Loser and Schlapp, are leading this corrupt gathering of seditionists, conspiracy loons, liars and racists. 

BONUS: We appear to have footage of Schlapp at a pre-conference "meet and greet"....

 

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Today's Tomorrow Cartoon: Hell In A Handbasket

 

 (click to enlarge)



From attacks on women's reproductive rights, to their insane defense of assault weapons, and more, Republicans are trying to push us toward right-wing autocracy with their reactionary views and proposals, despite being rejected by the majority of the public. 

Please go here if you can support Tom's work.

 

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The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

In revealing Friday that it is considering building a U.S. factory for electric vehicles, German automaker Audi became the latest company to signal that the Biden administration’s support for high-tech and green-energy manufacturing is bearing fruit.

The German carmaker joins a string of manufacturers of cars, computer chips, batteries and solar panels that have announced concrete plans or tentative prospects for boosting U.S. production, all drawn at least in part by subsidies and tax breaks rolled out in White House-backed legislation.

Some of the projects could fail to materialize, and there are larger economic factors motivating the investments. But it’s clear that incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) are helping spark the activity, said Willy Shih, a manufacturing expert at Harvard Business School.

“What it’s done is it’s stimulated a huge wave of new capacity building in the U.S. for EVs and EV materials and batteries,” he said. “I used to be a skeptic about the practicalities of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. Now that I see the impact of the IIJA and Inflation Reduction Act, my observation is, well, that seems to be working.”

Cautious optimism abides.

The bad:

The fiery derailment of a freight train carrying hazardous chemicals in eastern Ohio is coming to represent bigger societal failures. It’s a story about profit-driven rail companies underinvesting in safety, lobbyists weakening rail regulation, and the government’s failure to assure residents’ security from lingering toxins.

But in certain right-wing media precincts, the disaster is about something else: A campaign of discrimination being waged against White people.

“East Palestine is overwhelmingly White, and it’s politically conservative,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson recently said of the roughly 4,700 residents of the disaster zone. “That shouldn’t be relevant,” he added, but “it very much is.”

It very much isn’t. But ever since the Feb. 3 disaster, Carlson and his comrades have sought to transform East Palestine’s plight into a tale about “woke” Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland.

What this illustrates is how the right uses race-baiting to deceive people into forgetting that Democrats are now the far more committed party when it comes to investing in such left-behind communities.

Central to Carlson’s insinuation about the “relevance” of East Palestine’s Whiteness is the conduct of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Carlson cites recent remarks by Buttigieg about the construction industry’s racial makeup, sneering that Buttigieg has been neglecting East Palestine specifically to focus on a more “pressing problem,” that “we have too many White construction workers.”

Two-legged rat Carlson, in particular among fascist screechers, is functioning nightly almost exclusively as a rabid, pro-Putin racist perfectly happy to see America burnt to the ground if it accomplishes his cherished goal of a Christofacist autocracy.

The ugly: 

Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”

Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

Musk previously tweeted, then later deleted, a reply to Adams’s tweet about media outlets pulling his comic strip, in which Musk asked, “What exactly are they complaining about?”

The billionaire’s comments continue a pattern of Musk expressing more concern about the “free speech” of people who make racist or antisemitic comments than about the comments themselves. Musk’s views on race have been the subject of scrutiny both at Twitter, where he has reinstated far-right accounts, including those of neo-Nazis and others previously banned for hate speech, and at Tesla, which has been the subject of multiple lawsuits alleging a culture of rampant racism and sexual harassment in the workplace.

Private companies are under no obligation to run Adams' comic strip.  They're free to drop it if they believe its author is a racist slug, or for any other reason.  Adams is also free to make racist comments; it's just the consequences he and Musk don't like.  As for noted American history and constitutional law expert Musk?  Well, what else would you expect from that p.o.s.?


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Sunday, February 26, 2023

Across The Universe, Cont. -- Gravitational Lensing


(click on image to enlarge)


From NASA/ESA, February 20, 2023: A massive galaxy cluster in the constellation Cetus dominates the centre of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This image is populated with a serene collection of elliptical and spiral galaxies, but galaxies surrounding the central cluster — which is named SPT-CL J0019-2026 — appear stretched into bright arcs, as if distorted by a gargantuan magnifying glass. This cosmic contortion is called gravitational lensing, and it occurs when a massive object like a galaxy cluster has a sufficiently powerful gravitational field to distort and magnify the light from background objects. Gravitational lenses magnify light from objects that would usually be too distant and faint to observe, and so these lenses can extend Hubble’s view even deeper into the Universe.

This observation is part of an ongoing project to fill short gaps in Hubble’s observing schedule by systematically exploring the most massive galaxy clusters in the distant Universe, in the hopes of identifying promising targets for further study with both Hubble and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. This particular galaxy cluster lies at a vast distance of 4.6 billion light years from Earth.

Each year, the Space Telescope Science Institute is inundated with observing proposals for Hubble, in which astronomers suggest targets for observation. Even after selecting only the very best proposals, scheduling observations of all of Hubble’s targets for a year is a formidable task. There is sometimes a small fraction of observing time left unused in Hubble’s schedule, so in its ‘spare time’ the telescope has a collection of objects to explore — including the lensing galaxy cluster shown in this image.

[Image description: A cluster of large galaxies, surrounded by various stars and smaller galaxies on a dark background. The central cluster is mostly made of bright elliptical galaxies that are surrounded by a warm glow. Nearby the cluster is the stretched, distorted arc of a galaxy, gravitationally lensed by the cluster.]

Credit:  ESA/Hubble & NASA, H. Ebeling


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"Trump" To East Palestine, Ohio: "Don't Eat The Dirt!"

 

"... You should be eating the cold McDonalds I brought you."

ICYMI, here's last night's SNL cold open, featuring James Austin Johnson's spot- on Malignant Loser, who always makes everything all about himself.

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Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(Monte Wolverton, caglecartoons.com)

(Paul Berge, @PaulBergeToons)

(Clay Jones, claytoonz.com)

(James MacLeod, @MacLtoons)

(Bruce Plante, caglecartoons.com)

(Jimmy Margulies, jimmymargulies.com)

(Dave Granlund, politicalcartoons.com)

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

(Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News)

(Scott Stantis, Chicago Tribune)

(Banx, Financial Times, London)


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Sunday Reflection: An Idea




"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come." -- French novelist, poet and artist Victor Hugo, in 'Histoire d'un crime,' 1852. Author of "Les Miserables," and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" among other works. Born 221 years ago today, Hugo's themes revolved around social justice and the human condition.

In a current context, an invading army has been resisted by the heroic Ukrainian people, whose idea is a free country, aligned with the European community, within secure borders. Their time for that idea has come.

(image: Poet Victor Hugo in 1879, Canvas. Musee National du Chateau, Versailles, France [Imagno / Getty Images])


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Putin's Entry Into Our Culture Wars

 

E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, looking at Russian thug and war criminal Vladimir Putin's recent annual speech on the state of his country:

"Here’s a scoop for you: Vladimir Putin is sounding like someone who wants to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.

How else do you explain that in the middle of his bellicose speech Tuesday promising success in his assault on Ukraine, the Russian dictator fired a series of heat-seeking verbal missiles into our culture wars.

'Look at what they’ve done to their own people,' he said of us Westerners. 'They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.' Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.

Putin didn’t stop there. In one rather convoluted passage, he came out against same-sex marriage, backed off a bit, and then doubled down. [snip]

It has become a habit to cast the struggle over Ukraine in Cold War terms. Maybe that’s natural, given Putin’s old job as a KGB agent and his determination to expand Russia’s imperial reach to something closer to the hegemony once enjoyed by the old Soviet Union.

But it’s closer to the truth to see Putin as trying to build a right-wing nationalist international movement (no pun intended). And it’s obvious that his embrace of social and religious traditionalism is aimed at winning over right-wing opinion in the democracies and splitting the traditional right.

You don’t have to watch Fox News commentators waxing warm about the Russian president to see that this strategy is working. Opposition to helping Ukraine is growing among rank-and-file Republicans." (our emphasis)

Putin is succeeding as far as the extreme MAGA right in this country is concerned. Recent polls cited by Dionne indicate that support for aid to Ukraine has slipped in the past year, no doubt due to the likes of fifth columnists like Tucker "Tovarich" Carlson's yeoman efforts in broadcasting Kremlin talking points. There are examples in other countries like the UK (Nigel Farage), France (Marine LePen) and Hungary (Viktor Orbán) of far right movements that have received support from Putin, overtly or surreptitiously. With the twice-impeached, disgraced leader of the Republican / Secessionist / Shooters party openly admiring and currying favor with Putin, it's not hard to see why his sheeple follow.

 

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Countryside Korea

 

Start your Sunday with scenic views and glimpses of quiet life in rural South Korea (video from one year ago).  You can almost feel your blood pressure drop.

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Saturday, February 25, 2023

Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(Patrick Chappatte, Der Spiegel, Germany)

(David Horsey, The Seattle Times)

(Peter Brookes, The Times, London)


(Walt Handelsman, The Times-Picayune, New Orleans)

(Dave Whamond, caglecartoons.com)

(Robert Ariail, Spartanburg Herald-Journal, SC)

(Clay Jones, claytoonz.com)

(Jeff Danziger, The Rutland Herald, VT)

(Bill Day, floridapolitics.com)

(Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News)

(Ann Telnaes, Washington Post)

(Jason Adam Katzenstein, @j.a.k._)


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Tweets Of The Day

 

Our broken media, bothsiderism edition -- 



The Malignant Loser thinks his photo op in Ohio was about playing for "ratings" -- 



"America's Tokyo Rose" --

 


Speaking of whom -- 



Sick Neo-Nazi clowns proclaim anti-Semitic "Day of Hate." If they so much as spit on the sidewalk, lock them up --

 

 


"QAnon Meme Queen" searches for pedophiles, misses finding her own son --


 

More news from the Republican Christofascist base -- 



Those silly goose Dutch --  


 

 

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QOTD -- Our National Gun

 

"... It is just such a relief to know that the people serving in our legislature asked themselves, 'What comfort can we bring to the parents who wonder every day whether this will be the day they get the most horrible call of their lives? What can we do for the children who have to practice active shooter drills in a place they should be able to learn in safety? What are we going to do for the hundreds of thousands of Americans traumatized by unthinkable violence?' and immediately replied, 'We will declare it patriotic!'

"Instead of screaming with terror, we will scream with recognition. That’s our national gun! That’s the one! Of course.

"That way, it won’t feel like a horrible mistake. It will feel, almost, like we’re doing this on purpose." -- satirist Alexandra Petri, writing about the bill (HR 1095), introduced by fascist Republican ammosexuals Reps. Barry Moore (AL), Andrew S. Clyde (GA), Lauren Boebert (CO), and "sick puppy" George Santos (NY), that would make the AR-15 America's national gun.  We wrote about one of those crackpots, Rep. "Bury" Moore, and gun- humping suckers who think this is an effective way to protect their "Second Amendment rights" that they imagine are in imminent, perpetual danger of being taken away (much as the grifting National Rifle Rampage Association and their coin- operated Republican pols have been urgently warning them for decades --"send money now!").  It's a dark irony, though, that our American culture is already de facto branded by its addiction to guns, particularly military- grade weapons like the AR-15 that can efficiently slaughter innocents by the dozen.  We don't need any law to tell us:  it's already our "national gun."

BONUS:  Jimmy Kimmel has a nickname for the four fascist Republicans who introduced the bill.


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Sanction Incrementalism

 

The Treasury Department announced yesterday that it was imposing “one of its most significant sanctions actions to date” against various sectors of the Russian economy. The sanctions aim at:

"....metals and mining sector, its financial institutions, its military supply chain and individuals and companies worldwide that are helping Moscow avoid existing sanctions". [snip]

Friday’s sweeping actions are meant to fill in gaps in existing sanctions that have been imposed over the past year of the war and are intended to impair “key revenue generating sectors in order to further degrade Russia’s economy and diminish its ability to wage war against Ukraine,” according to a White House fact sheet."  (our emphasis)

A year after the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, nine years after Crimea was invaded, and six years after Russia interfered in our elections and we're still filling in "gaps" in our sanctions. 

At each milestone of Russian abuses, what are described as "punishing," "heavy," and "significant" sanctions are levied on them, leaving us to wonder if that's the case, why are there always new sanctions being applied if previous ones were so devastating? Apparently, they weren't, or Russia is able to sidestep them, or both. Simply put ,our rhetoric needs to match reality, and if we're going to impose sanctions, they should be broad and deep, not ones that chip away at Russia and are incomplete. Just like dilly dallying on major weapons systems, delays and half-measures are costing Ukrainians their lives.

 

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Friday, February 24, 2023

Today's Cartoons

 

(click on images to enlarge)

(Marshall Ramsey, Mississippi Today)

(Bill Bramhall, New York Daily News)

(Steve Breen, San Diego Union-Tribune)

(Kevin Kallaugher, The Economist, London)

(Tom Janssen, @cartoonartsinternational, Amsterdam)

(Rob Rogers, Tinyview.com)

(Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

(Matt Davies, Newsday)

(Tim Campbell, Counterpoint)

(Nick Anderson, Reform Austin News, TX)

(John Darkow, Columbia Missourian)

(Frank Cotham, The New Yorker)


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