Whatever …. They will not listen to reason. Fuggedboudit.
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Via WSJ: Jeffrey Katzenberg has some Hollywood role models in mind as he urges the nation’s first octogenarian president to embrace his age. The movie mogul has joined with other advisers in counseling President Biden to “own” his age and turn it into an asset, according to people familiar with the conversations. If Harrison Ford, 80 years old, can star in a new Indiana Jones movie and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, who turns 80 next month, can strut around a stadium stage, Katzenberg says, then Biden should lean into his longevity as a sign of wisdom and experience while offering a sense of humor about it. It’s the only way. It can’t be ignored. So lean into it. I’d say this guy is good role model too:
They keep Hitler quotes handy why, exactly? Jezebel: An Indiana chapter of the rightwing Moms For Liberty organization apologized on Thursday for printing a quotation from Adolf Hitler—yes, the genocidal leader of Nazi Germany—in its newsletter. “We condemn Adolf Hitler’s actions and his dark place in human history. We should not have quoted him in our newsletter and we express our deepest apology,” chapter chair Paige Miller said in a truly dystopian statement posted to Facebook. In the June newsletter for the Hamilton County, Indiana, chapter of Moms for Liberty, Hitler’s short quote from a Nazi rally in 1935 is printed the front page of the issue. “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future” (emphasis theirs). They hope to (informally, anyway) return a wannabe dictator to the White House and stomp out the LGBTQ community, one presumes, when they are not banning books or hanging out with terrorist groups like the Proud Boys. Don’t you still want to know why they keep Hitler quotes handy?
And it shows Mediaite: Former President Donald Trump told attendees at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday night that he rejected some of the biggest law firms and lawyers in the country because he doesn’t “need any help.” Earlier this month, two of the former president’s top lawyers resigned from his defense team after the DOJ announced it would charge Trump with 37 counts related to his handling of classified material at his Mar-a-Lago estate. Jim Trusty and John Rowley, who previously led Trump’s legal team in Washington, D.C., indicated they would no longer represent him in the Jack Smith probe and his $475 million defamation suit against CNN. However, despite difficulties retaining new legal representation, Trump bragged to a group of supporters at a fundraiser at Bedminster that some of the “biggest” firms and lawyers have called him asking to represent him in the upcoming federal trial. “I tell all these people, they all come in — they want to help,” Trump said speaking about the upcoming 2024 election.
Vlad’s buddy has this to say Yeah. There are too many moving parts to properly analyze the Russia situation at the moment. But let’s just say that Prigozhin is a monster and so in Putin and the only thing we can root for is destabilization of the Moscow regime without too much destabilization and some kind of resolution that results in withdrawal from Ukraine (not on the Prigozhin plan, BTW) and Russia gives peace a chance. I will just put this up for now in case you forgot this part of Prigozhin story: Kremlin-connected entrepreneur Yevgeny Prigozhin admitted Monday that he had interfered in U.S. elections and would continue to do so — confirming for the first time the accusations that he has rejected for years. “Gentlemen, we have interfered, are interfering and will interfere. Carefully, precisely, surgically and in our own way, as we know how to do,” Prigozhin boasted in remarks posted on social media. The statement, from the press service of his catering company that earned him the nickname “Putin’s chef,” came on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections.
Both Prigozhin and Putin are nightmares This analysis from the Financial Times about Prigozhin is quite informative. They have been following the story of Putin and Prigozhin for some time and if you’d like to bone up on the various dynamics, I would suggest that’s a good place to start. When they first appeared in 2014 to fight covertly in Ukraine, the masked militiamen of Russia’s Wagner group epitomised how Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin had mastered a new, underhand form of warfare. But after Wagner paramilitaries took control of at least one Russian city on Saturday and began a “march of justice” on Moscow, the blowback from nine years of war in Ukraine threatened the very foundations of Putin’s state — with a problem of his own making. After months of lurid public infighting, the conflict between Yevgeny Prigozhin’s paramilitaries and the Russian defence ministry has boiled over into the first coup attempt in Russia in three decades.
Could history repeat? In his speech, Putin kept referencing 1917, which stuck many people as … bizarre. Here’s Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic on how apt it might be: The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real. Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, the Central African Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement yesterday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.
Well said. It’s been a year and we are seeing the ramifications of the repeal of Roe v Wade. It’s as bad as we could have anticipated. As she says, women are dying, families are in crisis, lives are being ruined. By the way, don’t rest on your laurals if you live in a blue state. Yesterday at the faith and Freedom convention, Mike Pence backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a 15 week national abortion ban. Graham was there and proclaimed, “we’ll be saving babies in California.” “Fucking angry” doesn’t even begin to describe my reaction to that.
Lot’s of palm trees and sunshine in both states but that’s where the similarities end: Florida Governor and floundering presidential candidate Ron DeSantis traveled to California’s Bay Area this past week to fundraise and to cut a new ad. He stands on a San Francisco street corner and portrays the city as a lawless, drug-infested hellhole that people are fleeing, in favor of Florida, because of “leftist policies.” But he offered no statistics to back up his claims. Here’s one stat he should know, from the CDC: Drug overdose mortality by state, per 100,000 residents, for 2021 Florida: 37.5 (18th worst state) California: 26.6 (35th worst state) It’s really galling to have most of the country subjected to this calumny about California every single day by assholes like DeSantis when their own states are actually much worse off. I really wish that Democrats would start fighting fire with fire on this stuff.
Aaaaaand… a view from a Real American: