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Maybe They’re Right After All

From Jeff Tiedrich:

it’s probably not a good sign when your homeys have to swear that you weren’t blitzed out of your mind when you did that thing you definitely did.

who among us hasn’t woken up to discover that we did something ill-advised after a night of over-enthusiastically bending the elbow?

oh fuck, I did what?

for most of us, it’s generally something low-stakes — like going online and buying some fugly sweater that we don’t even remember ordering until it shows up a few days later.

for others, it’s bombing the shit out of another county.

Alexa, show me the least-reassuring headline, ever.

Pete Hegseth was not drunk when he discussed plans to bomb Yemen in a group chat which included a journalist, the director of the CIA has said.

you can trust the CIA, because they would never lie to us, right?

but how does the CIA director know that Plastered Pete wasn’t plastered? was he there? does the Signal app have a built-in breathalyser?

by the way, Donny’s DOJ won’t be prosecuting anyone over this Signal clusterfuck, because of course they won’t — because reasons, and also because something something look over there, it’s Hillary Clinton!

reporter: “the Signal chat controversy that’s going on. is DOJ involved at this point? if so, why? if not, why not?”

Pam Bondi: “well first, it was sensitive information, not classified, inadvertently released, and what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission … if you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton’s home.”

so, we’re playing semantics games now. the intel was sensitive, not classified. (spoiler alert: it was classified.) and Pete didn’t mean to do it, so no harmsies, ok? and besides, Yemen got the shit bombed out of it, very successfully. so what’s the big deal?

by the way, handwaving away a major security breach by saying ‘it was a successful mission’ is like justifying drunk driving by pointing out that you managed not to run over anyone on the way home.

speaking of which — Plastered Pete is playing semantics games, too. check this out.

oops, sorry — wrong clip! here’s the one we meant to show you.

“nobody is texting war plans. well I noticed this morning, out came something that doesn’t look like war plans. and as a matter of fact, they even changed the title to ‘attack plans,’ because they know it’s not war plans. there’s no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods…”

Piss-Drunk Pete is so good at being indignant, isn’t he? it’s a he skill honed through years of being a weekend chat-show bobblehead on Fox News. just the talent you want in someone who may not remember who he bombed last night.

whether we call it war plans or attack plans — that’s not the fucking issue here. let’s recall exactly what Pete did: he took classified intel — specific times of air strikes — and cut-and-pasted it into his phone.

then he sent it to all his homies (and a reporter!), hours before the attacks took place, over a janky app that he was warned by his own NSA not to use— because it’s so fucking easily hacked by foreign actors — giving advance notice of bombing runs to anyone who might have gained access to his personal, unsecured phone.

but look, let’s not bicker and argue over war plans and attack plans.

the administration has bigger fish to fry. apparently, the National Zoo has been suffering because of all the woke.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology” from institutions such as the National Zoo.

what in the world? how can a zoo be woke? I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure this out. are they just inventing things for JD to do, because he’s a clueless dope and they want to get him out of the White House?

‘hey there, JD, when you’ve finished fucking the furniture, could you run over to the National Zoo and make sure there’s no DEI going on in the elephant house?’

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It’s Happening

From Palmer Report:

Last month I wrote that by the time we got to the hundred day mark in Donald Trump’s presidency, if he was unpopular enough, House and Senate Republicans would begin selfishly prioritizing their own reelection prospects over their support of Trump. You can almost never count on Republicans to do the honest thing, but you can nearly always count on them to do the self interested thing.

We’re still only sixty-seven days into this debacle, which means that in theory Trump should still have some more time to get his act together. But the funny thing about political scandals – real scandals, the ones that move the ground under everyone’s feet – is that they can throw all the timetables out the window.

This brings us to Donald Trump’s Signal-gate scandal (it’s going to need a better name than that). Half of Trump’s top handpicked people, including Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Mike Waltz, John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard, are now embroiled in a scandal that keeps getting worse by the hour. It was bad enough that they all committed a felony just by discussing military attack plans in Signal. They’ve since all blown the coverup entirely. They can’t get their stories straight, it’s top headline news every day, and it’s just not going away. Trump’s refusal to fire anyone over it is making it an even bigger scandal.

Suddenly it no longer appears to matter that Trump is still in his first hundred days. He had his chance to make this scandal go away by firing people, and he missed his window. Now he’s at a point where he’ll probably end up having to fire people over this in the end, and it still won’t make the scandal go away.

How do we know this? Because House and Senate Republicans are now making it very clear (not with their words but with their actions) that they know this scandal is toxic and isn’t going away. On Thursday the Republican House forced Trump to pull the plug on his cabinet nomination of Elise Stefanik, for fear the Democrats could win the resulting special election and take control of the House. That’s a Republican plus-nine district. But things are just that ugly for Trump and his Republican Party right now.

The Republican Senate is also taking its own first steps toward insulating itself from Trump’s Signal-gate implosion. The Republican Chair and the Democratic Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee have jointly asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate this scandal. We know that Trump and Hegseth aren’t going to allow the DOD to investigate this. But this letter is the Senate’s precursor to launching its own investigation into the matter, likely complete with public hearings where all of these Trump buffoons will have to testify (or make the headlines even worse for themselves by fighting the subpoenas in court).

We all know that the Republican House and Senate won’t go one inch further in this direction than they think is necessary to protect their own reelection prospects. But they are indeed going in this direction. As has been said many times, ignore their words and instead focus on their actions. House and Senate Republicans are afraid that this Trump scandal will cost them their seats and majorities unless they selfishly do something to distance themselves from it. Whether you trust them or not – and you shouldn’t – this does tell you just how damaging and long lasting this scandal is going to be.

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The Weird and Wonderful (World) of AI Art

Kind of reminds me of the works of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag (whose work I adore, by the way).

If you like the look of this, check out The Electric State (Netflix) and Tales From The Loop (Amazon Prime); both projects where Stålenhag was directly involved. And Tales also features the music of Philip Glass. ????

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A Blue Banded Blood Moon

A Blue Banded Blood Moon
Image Credit & Copyright: Zixiong Jin

What causes a blue band to cross the Moon during a lunar eclipse? The blue band is real but usually quite hard to see. The featured HDR image of last week’s lunar eclipse, however — taken from Norman, Oklahoma (USA) — has been digitally processed to exaggerate the colors. The gray color on the upper right of the top lunar image is the Moon‘s natural color, directly illuminated by sunlight. The lower parts of the Moon on all three images are not directly lit by the Sun since it is being eclipsed — it is in the Earth’s shadow. It is faintly lit, though, by sunlight that has passed deep through Earth’s atmosphere. This part of the Moon is red — and called a blood Moon — for the same reason that Earth’s sunsets are red: because air scatters away more blue light than red. The unusual purple-blue band visible on the upper right of the top and middle images is different — its color is augmented by sunlight that has passed high through Earth’s atmosphere, where red light is better absorbed by ozone than blue.

[source]

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Area Fascist Demands Voters Show Their Papers

From Mock Paper Scissors:

Yesterday, Lord Damp Nut signed another Executive Order, this time demanding that the states surrender election control to the federal government or else he will pull funding to the offending state, which is impoundment and is patently illegal:

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul elections in the U.S., including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day.

The order says the U.S. has failed “to enforce basic and necessary election protections” and calls on states to work with federal agencies to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes. It threatens to pull federal funding from states where election officials don’t comply.

The move, which is likely to face swift challenges because states have broad authority to set their own election rules, is consistent with Trump’s long history of railing against election processes. He often claims elections are being rigged, even before the results are known, and has waged battles against certain voting methods since he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and falsely blamed it on widespread fraud.

[Before we fall too far into the rabbit hole, remember the executive orders are essentially memos, and not laws. And duh, a memo that instructs someone to break a law is definitionally not allowed. ]

We’ve covered the civics of elections before, our pals at Electoral-Vote explain to us why this memo is stupid:

Broadly speaking, this XO is mostly bark, and not a lot of bite. The federal government has very little role in administering elections, and so has little right to dictate terms under which elections are conducted. Indeed, even the provision of federal law that prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections, which was only adopted in 1996, might not be legal—it just hasn’t been tested in court. Whoever it is that is writing Trump’s XOs for him clearly knows all of this, which is why “enforcement” of the order rests not in any existing legal authority, but instead in the threat that if states don’t do what they are told, they will lose federal funding.

The emptiness of the order is best illustrated by looking closely at the portion that made all the headlines yesterday, namely the part about proving one’s citizenship in order to be able to vote. Since there is absolutely no way that blue states are going to go for that (as doing so would effectively justify Republicans’ phony arguments about mass voter fraud), what the order actually does is order the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to change the federal voter registration form to include a proof-of-citizenship requirement.

There are many problems here from the vantage point of the Trumpers. First, the EAC is an independent agency, and not subject to presidential orders. Further, like the FEC, it is deliberately set up to have an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners (2 of each in the case of the EAC; 3 of each in the case of the FEC). So, there is no reason to think the EAC is going to play ball here. And even if they do, then people who don’t have proof of citizenship, or don’t feel like proving their identity just ’cause The Man says so, will just use their state’s registration form. And all of this is before we talk about the lawsuits that are coming, and that the administration will lose. Oh, and if Trump does try to yank funding in order to punish a state for not following his decrees, that’s a different set of lawsuits, since that would be impoundment, which is illegal.

So we’ve seen this movie before, we know the ending. I’ll add to the mix that the Constitution very clearly gives election management to the individual states, and to change that it would require an amendment to the Constitution, requiring ⅔ of both houses of Congress to approve and ¾ of the States to ratify.

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You Can’t Make This Shit Up! ???? ???? ????

From Politico:

Judge targeted by Trump is assigned to Signalgate lawsuit

Judge James Boasberg will preside over a case alleging that Trump administration officials violated federal record-keeping laws when they used Signal to discuss military plans.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg was randomly assigned to preside over the Signalgate case. | Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images

By KYLE CHENEY

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg — the object of President Donald Trump’s fury for blocking his effort to summarily deport Venezuelan nationals using wartime powers — just got a second crack at the administration’s handling of national security: Signalgate.

Boasberg on Wednesday morning was assigned to preside over a lawsuitalleging that Trump cabinet secretaries and national security aides violated federal record-keeping laws when they used a Signal chat group to discuss a planned military strike in Yemen — and inadvertently included an Atlantic journalist in the group.

The twist of legal fate arrived just as the scandal exploded further with the Atlantic’s release of the full text exchange — in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth previewed, with specific references to timing and weapons, an attack on Houthi militants. The exchange, initiated by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, included Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.

A spokesperson for Boasberg confirmed that the case was assigned to him through the court’s typical random assignment process. There are 20 judges on the federal district court bench in Washington, D.C.

The assignment of the case to Boasberg comes just two days after the Trump administration, in the Venezuela deportation case, invoked the “state secrets” privilege to refuse to share details with the Obama-appointed judge about the timing of deportation flights to El Salvador.

Boasberg is pressing the administration for details about the flights to determine whether officials violated his order earlier this month barring Trump from deporting people under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law last invoked during World War II. But administration lawyers argued that “disclosure would pose reasonable danger to national security and foreign affairs.”

Rubio, notably, submitted a declaration to Boasberg justifying the state secrets invocation, saying that sharing details about the flights with Boasber—even under seal or in a classified setting—would endanger national security.

“The more widely information is shared the greater the risk that the information will reach the public (even if unintentionally),” Rubio wrote.

Now, Rubio is a defendant in the Signalgate lawsuit brought by American Oversight, a left-leaning government watchdog group. He is being sued not only for his involvement in the text exchange but also for his dual position as acting head of the National Archives, which is responsible for preserving records used by government officials in the course of their work. The Atlantic reported that Waltz set the text thread to automatically delete.

Boasberg prompted a furious backlash from Trump and his allies when he halted the administration’s deportation efforts earlier this month, ruling that the administration appeared to be violating due process requirements by tagging Venezuelan nationals as terrorists and rushing them onto planes with virtually no chance to contest the designation.

Trump called for Boasberg’s impeachment, a call that was echoed by some members of Congress, and has unleashed near-daily attacks on the judge

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