COUNTDOWN TO MY 24TH BLOGIVERSARY FUNDRAISER - DAY 2!

Surveying the current state of politics, it's quite funny that I used to be criticized for incivility (saying mean things about people who mattered).

It's also quite funny that people still try to use that tactic against The Left, even now.

A bunch of big meanies!

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More Like 5K Peace Talks, Amirite???

I did not think that sending JD Vance was a sign that anyone expected success.

No agreement: US Vice President JD Vance says no agreement was reached with Iran after marathon talks in Pakistan. Iran would not commit to forgoing a nuclear weapon, Vance said. Iran’s foreign ministry told state media that disagreement over “two, or three” key issues prevented a deal.

Though given all of the positive press Vance's people planted, I don't think he was in on the "joke." 

The NYT got the "marathon" talking points memo as well.

As did many other outlets!

Amazing stuff.

...and now Trump says that "we" are blockading the Strait.

...

Morning

Sunday funday

Saturday Evening

 Don't forget, fundraiser Day 1!

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Purging Trump

Any fretting about this is just acknowledging that Dems won't let Interior Secretary Mamdani send the bulldozers and wrecking balls to it in February of 2029.

The White House has unveiled plans for a gold-accented giant victory arch dubbed the "Arc de Trump", that Donald Trump wants built in the nation's capital.

The 250ft (76m) monument, if approved, would be taller than the US Capitol building and the Lincoln Memorial, and feature a golden Lady Liberty-like torch and crown.

Trump's Capitalism

He isn't entirely wrong, of course, but it is very funny that Trump sees capitalism operating entirely as a system in which big companies gouge their customers when they can, and not as some perfectly competitive Econ 101 model.

Whatever, Gramps

I do think the press takes these kinds of pronouncements a bit less seriously now.

Previously there would be front page writeups about WHAT TRUMP MIGHT DO (narrator: but Trump never did any of it).

COUNTDOWN TO MY 24TH BLOGIVERSARY FUNDRAISER

"What will you do after the 2004 election, when blogging will be over, of course?" they asked, frequently. I suppose blogging as it was then is over, but somehow I am still here, thanks to your generous support!

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Always The Ones You Most Suspect

Swalwell has set off my spidey sense for years. Not for this kind of thing, precisely, but generally being a regular bullshitter who threw out red meat (laudable) to cover for being a shithead (not laudable).

A former staffer of Rep. Eric Swalwell, a leading Democratic candidate for California governor, says that the congressman raped her when she was heavily intoxicated and left her bruised and bleeding, an allegation Swalwell strongly denies.

It isn't just this accusation or this woman. There are many allegations.

Morning

Slacker Saturday.

Happy Hour

Get happy.

I Guess Trump Had Better Do Some Unhinged Posts About China

Who knew American hegemony was so fragile.

China has indicated it will halt exports of sulfuric acid from May, hitting metals and fertilizer industries already strained by raw material bottlenecks resulting from the Iran war.

Some sulfuric acid producers in the country recently received notifications about the change, and one large buyer has been told about it by their Chinese supplier, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information. The ban will cover sulfuric acid that’s a by-product of copper and zinc smelting in China.

Cash Up Front

I have no idea what Iran's strategy is, precisely, but they do know what everybody except DC political reporters know, which is that President Deals does not believe that he is bound by deals.

Trump’s warning: If a peace deal is not reached this weekend, the US is prepared to renew and intensify strikes on Iran, President Donald Trump warned. Iran’s parliament speaker said the talks cannot start until the US meets two conditions: a ceasefire in Lebanon and the release of blocked Iranian assets.

But, Atrios, surely political reporters understand this too! They just pretend not to, because journalism.

Fair enough.

Vance, Chief Diplomat

I am sure this dumb asshole has the necessary smarts and charm to pull off a miracle.

What Was That About

Does anybody know?

Washington — First lady Melania Trump on Thursday delivered remarks denying any friendship or relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and she called on Congress to hold a public hearing with Epstein's survivors. 

Not Enough Teen Pregnancy

Teen sex and pregnancy were once the great social and moral problems of the country, consequences of our extremely generous welfare state and of course LIBERAL PERMISSIVENESS and FEMINISM.  Now apparently teens aren't fucking and getting pregnant enough.

Teens aren't fucking enough, because of woke.

I'm so old I remember when journalists would happily maintain the fiction that all young Republican staffers and politicians were virgins until marriage, and believed strongly that gross personal hypocrisy never justified contrasting "private" (very public, actually) lives with public proclamations and policy positions.

It is one thing to respect privacy, quite another to just ignore what is in front of you and present a completely fake narrative to the public. I don't mean they should have been dragging low level staffers by name, just that they should not have been maintaining the general facade of fake Christian Conservativism.

Morning

Get your morning on.

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How Dare You Vote Against The Troops

Not that I was a fan - either on the substance or politics - at the time, but I did understand the difficulties of voting against military budgets and war supplementals in the post 9-11 era. I don't think there are actually any such difficulties now.

 
Trump is unpopular, the war is unpopular, and while they play the press on easy mode, they aren't actually very good at catapulting the propaganda in the way the Bushies were.

Still I do not expect a united front against it. There are hawkish Dems who love war with neocon fervor, more that love giving money to the defense industry, and even more who are just cowards who fail to understand the current moment.

Opposing that and supporting stuff people like should be easy, and yet...

Donald Trump’s failed Iran war is at last making the question of his sanity into a first-tier political issue that Republicans can no longer duck. But that’s only the beginning of the political reverberations created by the president’s decaying mental acuity.

As Trump blurted out the other day, he believes that the direct costs of the war combined with his unprecedented request for a 44 percent increase in military spending mean that the federal government can no longer afford Medicare. This is of course preposterous—most of the cost of Medicare is financed by the dedicated payroll taxes that workers pay. Trump has also floated cutting Social Security’s disability program, another form of social insurance with a dedicated stream of tax revenue.

When the press rediscovers the pressing urgency for deficit cutting, you can laugh and tell them to eat shit.

Confidently Asserted

In the old days, a google search never promised to give you The Answer. That wasn't what it was for. A search might lead you to some information which could help answer your question, but we all understood that it was caveat lector. It was a search engine, not a definitive answer provider.

The AI "answers" pretend to be that.

Google’s AI Overviews are peddling misinformation on a scale that may be virtually unprecedented in human history.

A recent analysis conducted by the AI startup Oumi at the behest of The New York Times found that the AI-generated summaries, which appear above Google search results, are accurate around 91 percent of the time.

In a sense, that may sound like an impressive figure. But here’s an even more impressive one: five trillion. That’s roughly the number of search queries that Google processes every year, translating to tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour — and hundreds of thousands every minute, the analysis calculated.

The issue isn't just google, of course. The misinformation peddlers are being emedded into everything, and as they are eating each other's output, they are likely to get worse, not better.