Today's MAGA Dolt

Another 'Law-n-Order-Strict-Constitutionalist' Republican voter

saying she puts Trump above the law.

How Do You Say 'Normal' In MAGAspeak?

You don't - there is no word that means anything even close to 'normal' in MAGA World.

Programmable Bags Of Meat

Sorry not sorry, but how the fuck does a Trump MAGAt rate a Dead Head t-shirt - and pretzel yourself to where you can believe you're justified in it? (about 2:45)

But I'm not going to say "make it make sense." Because it's not supposed to make sense.

The people pulling the strings on this shit go out of their way to make it not make sense. They have to keep the rubes off balance and dependent on whatever The Daddy State tells them at any time on any day, in order to keep them compliant.

Today's MAGA Dope

You can't have a real debate about anything if you don't start with a set of facts that we can all accept and agree on.

If one side literally makes shit up, and then insists that shit is ice cream, then there is no debate - because you cannot debate what isn't real.

You and your suite-mates can sit in your freshman dorm room, stoned outa your minds at 3am on a random Tuesday, and speculate about how much pixie dust a unicorn would need to have non-contact oral sex with Bigfoot, but that's not a fucking debate.

The Freakdom Caucus

They've spent decades lying about, and fucking up our government, and then running against fucked up government, and then making sure government stays fucked up so they can keep milking the sheep.

And when 60% of the GOP and 100% of the Dems vote against them in session, they lose their shit because somehow - after all that lying and fucking up - they haven't convinced anybody that government can work, and will work according to what they alone have formulated.

Makes 'em really mad.

Republican Congressman Melts Down Asking What His Party’s Even Doing

Representative Chip Roy began yelling at members of his own party during a House hearing.

Representative Chip Roy went scorched earth on his Republican colleagues on Wednesday, haranguing them for years wasted on inaction and chaos as opposed to doing their jobs.

The Texas Republican and Freedom Caucus member spent his time on the House floor on Wednesday shouting and wildly gesticulating at his caucus, condemning them for capitulating on promises by working with Democrats and lamenting the party’s transparently vacuous approach to building a border wall.

“One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did,” Roy said. “One!”

“Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides well, ‘I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats,’” Roy lamented.

Roy: One thing. I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did. Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done pic.twitter.com/RGc4FTAelt

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 15, 2023

The House GOP finally passed a stopgap spending solution on Tuesday, after months spent ousting their own speaker and bickering over who to replace him with. That bill is now headed to the U.S. Senate, where it will face another round of criticism, just two days ahead of a potential government shutdown.

On Tuesday, Roy argued that the latest bill is “precisely” what got former Speaker Kevin McCarthy booted from the job.

“I am sick and tired of it. I didn’t come here for second place. I didn’t come here for more excuses. I didn’t come here for the speaker of the House to assume the position, and in 17 days, pass a continuing resolution on the floor of this House through suspension of the rules,” Roy fumed during his speech on the House floor.

He then took a jab at Donald Trump, criticizing conservatives for failing to meet their policy goals even when the party had the majority in the House, Senate, and White House during Trump’s presidency.

“With all due respect to former President Trump, they sure as hell didn’t get border security done when we had the White House and the House and the Senate,” Roy said. “Nothing!”

“Talked a big game about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it. Ain’t no wall and Mexico didn’t pay for it, and we didn’t pass any border security,” he added.

Fight!

"He's a bully with 17 million dollars and a security detail."

"He's the type of guy that, when you were a kid, he'd throw a rock over the fence and run home and hide behind his mama's skirt." 

Stay with it to hear how the NPR lady reported it.

And then some jagoff MAGA dick in the Senate decided he wanted to go a few rounds with a witness in committee.

These idiots are not worth the bucket of piss it'd take to drown 'em.

Today MAGA Nonsense

Guns don't kill people, gun nuts kill people - with guns - because they're fuckin' nuts.

Buck Bows Out

Ken Buck is a card-carrying member of the Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives. Unfortunately - for him - he's not down with "The election was stolen from Trump" or "Let's impeach Biden".

So he won't stand for re-election. Which opens a primary to give Colorado voters a shot at picking a Republican who isn't totally bat-shit crazy - which is exactly what would happen if he stayed in it. Voters could choose a semi-nutty Buck instead of some rabid MAGA dingleberry. So I don't know how to read this at all.

Somebody tell me: What the fuck's the difference here?

Congressman Ken Buck won’t run for reelection in 2024, citing GOP’s embrace of election conspiracies

Buck, who was first elected to the House in 2014, cited Republicans’ embrace of election conspiracies as part of his reason for leaving Congress

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck announced Wednesday that he won’t run for reelection to a sixth term in 2024, citing the GOP’s embrace of election conspiracies and Congress’ inability to get work done.

The Windsor Republican’s decision, first announced on MSNBC, is certain to set off a fierce race to replace him in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, a highly conservative part of the state that spans across the Eastern Plains into Castle Rock.

“I have decided that it is time for me to do some other things,” Buck, 64, told reporter Andrea Mitchell on her show Wednesday. “I have always been disappointed with our inability in Congress to deal with major issues and I’m also disappointed that the Republican Party continues to rely on this lie that the 2020 election was stolen.”

He added: “If we’re going to solve some difficult problems we’ve got to deal with some very unpleasant lies.”

In a video posted to his YouTube page, Buck, who was first elected to the House in 2014, thanked his constituents for their support “as we have fought against the left’s policies that have had real world consequences.”

“Our nation is on a collision course with reality,” Buck said. “A steadfast commitment to truth, even uncomfortable truths, is the only way forward. Too many Republican leaders are lying to America claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, describing Jan. 6 as an unguided tour of the Capitol, and asserting that the ensuing prosecutions are a weaponization of our justice system. These insidious narratives read widespread cynicism and erode Americans confidence in the rule of law.”

Buck said “it is impossible for the Republican Party to confront our problems and offer a course correction for the future while being obsessively fixated on retribution and vengeance for contrived injustices of the past.”

The congressman’s announcement wasn’t exactly shocking news. He has been raising eyebrows and drawing conservatives’ ire for months for making the rounds on TV news shows to criticize fellow Republicans, including over the House GOP’s pursuit of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.

Buck also voted against U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan’s bid to become speaker, citing the Ohio Republican’s participation in efforts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. But Buck then backed Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid to lead the House, despite the Louisiana Republican’s leading role in objecting to the 2020 results.

The difference between Jordan and Johnson, Buck told CNN, is that Jordan “did a number of things that were election denialism in their highest degree,” including texting White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows a legal theory on how Congress could block Biden’s win and talking to President Donald Trump during the Jan. 6 riot.

“Jim Jordan was involved in much of the post-election activity,” Buck said. “Mike Johnson was not. (Johnson) voted to decertify (the election results), absolutely. That wasn’t my vote, but we need to move forward. We have some important business.”

Buck added that it wasn’t OK for Johnson to vote to decertify the 2020 presidential election results, but “we’re at a point now where we need to move forward and make sure the government stays open — that we fund Israel, we fund Ukraine, we fund the border efforts. And that’s going to take a human being in that speaker position. Not a perfect human being, but a Mike Johnson, who has done his very best to move issues forward and is a really good person.”

Buck has been a staple in Colorado’s Republican politics for decades.

Buck was elected Weld County’s district attorney in 2004. He went on to be the GOP nominee for U.S. Senate in 2010, running unsuccessfully against Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, who was appointed to the seat in 2009.

He lost by nearly 30,000 votes in a year when Republicans took over both the U.S. House and Senate. Some attributed Buck’s narrow loss to his handling of a rape case as district attorney.

In 2013, Buck initiated another run for U.S. Senate but dropped out of the contest when Republican U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner entered the contest, running instead for Gardner’s seat. Buck was then elected to the House in 2014 and served as Colorado Republican Party chairman in 2019 and 2020.

But Buck’s long tenure in the upper echelons of the state’s Republican ranks have not made him immune from criticism as of late. The Colorado GOP, now under the leadership of Dave Williams, a 2020 election denier, has blasted Buck for his opposition to Jordan’s speakership bid and unwillingness to go along with he impeachment inquiry.

The congressman also said he received death threats and was being evicted from his office, owned by a major GOP donor, for refusing to back Jordan.

Buck is leaving Congress at a time when other Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, of Utah, are opting against reelection, too, because of election conspiracies.

Buck said his departure from the House, however, won’t be his departure from politics.

“I’m not going to be leaving the party and I’m not going to be leaving my role in trying to talk truth to the public,” Buck told Andrea Mitchell.

Among the Republicans rumored to be interested in running for Buck’s seat are

• State Rep. Richard Holtorf, R-Akron
• Heidi Ganahl, a former CU regent who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022
• Deb Flora, a conservative talk radio host and failed 2022 U.S. senate candidate
• Former Colorado GOP Chairwoman Kristi Burton Brown
• Former 18th Judicial District Attorney George Brauchler
• Former state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who is now a Logan County commissioner
• Former Colorado House Minority Leader Patrick Neville of Castle Rock

Buck beat Democrat Ike McCorkle by 24 percentage points in 2022.

Make 'Em Pay

House Speaker Mike Johnson is no friend of American democracy.

Oh, Mr Jordan

Jim Jordan lost again - 3rd time's the charm I guess. And his losing margin got three votes bigger - so he quit the race.

House Republicans retreated into private caucus for an hour or so, where they voted by secret ballot, and Jordan was ... uhm ... de-selected as the Speaker candidate.

86 said, "Yeah, Jim - you're our guy."

112 said, "Fuck off, Jim."

It's interesting that out of those 112 who voted NO in secret, only 25 of them had the balls to vote that way on a roll call vote, on the floor of the House, where they have to say it out loud.

A couple of things to remember.

1. The MAGA strong-arm tactics got even uglier than they usually are - loud and aggressive harassment of members, and their staffers, and their families, up to and including outright death threats. But it backfired, making more people less likely to support Jordan. I'm not feeling all warm-n-fuzzy about maybe this is some kind of turning of the worm, but I may be able to hold out a bit more hope. (as always - hopeful but not yet optimistic)
2. I haven't seen anything in this yet to dissuade me from my belief that Republicans are deliberately causing dysfunction.

Oh yeah - almost forgot. Apparently god got it wrong (?)

Speaking Of American Hostages

Some House Republicans try to change the rules so losers become winners

Once obsessed with the ‘majority of the majority,’ the House GOP is now ruled by small minority factions

House Republicans live in a world where math is upside down.

In this fantasy land, five can be as powerful as 217; eight as big as 433; and, in a new twist this past week, 99 out of 223 can somehow be turned into a strong majority.

This latest example came Friday, when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) claimed the nomination for GOP House speaker, despite a clear majority of the full House not wanting him to be their pick.

On Wednesday, Jordan lost the nomination, running a competitive race but only getting 99 votes — about 44 percent of the 223 ballots cast. He offered a tepid endorsement, at best, to the winner, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), and then sat back as his allies sabotaged the front-runner.

They told Scalise that they would re-create the drama of January when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) failed on the first 14 ballots because about 20 hard-right conservatives voted for someone else, forcing him to make key concessions until they let him win on the 15th roll call.

After enduring about 30 hours of this torture, Scalise said no thanks. He will stay put as majority leader and watch as Jordan now faces the same struggles.

McCarthy, Jordan and Scalise’s long history seeps into speaker fight

Before Friday’s new vote, Jordan’s allies, including McCarthy, who was deposed earlier this month, hyped his candidacy enough that expectations were set for him to blow past Scalise’s initial tally. Instead, a last-minute entrant, Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), a backbencher focused on national security issues who never sought a leadership post, embarrassed Jordan with a strong second-place showing.

Jordan received only 124 votes, claiming about 10 of the protest votes from Wednesday that went to write-in candidates or simply stated “present.” He flipped only about 15 of Scalise’s initial supporters. In a second secret ballot that asked Republicans how they would vote in the required public roll call for speaker, 55 doubled down and said they would not support Jordan.

This sets up the same conundrum that felled McCarthy and prompted Scalise to abandon the race: With 221 on their side, Republicans have just four votes to spare if all 212 Democrats vote the other way.

Jordan’s allies have signaled a political-roughshod campaign that will dare his opponents to vote against the far-right Republican in the public, alphabetical roll call on the House floor. They hope they will crumble from fear of retribution from conservative primary voters.

“I think there’s a clear path to get him to 217. But as long as you’re doing secret ballots, it’s a lot harder to get 217. We’ve got to break cover,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), a leader of a mainstream conservative caucus, told reporters Friday.

But Jordan’s staunchest opponents warned that a pressure campaign would backfire. “Look, when you’re doing it in a positive way, you can usually get a lot,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), a staunch Scalise backer, told reporters.

What to know about Jim Jordan, House speaker nominee

Diaz-Balart, who said he would never vote for Jordan, said it would be an arrogant mistake to ignore the adage about catching more flies with honey than vinegar.

“Usually you do it at your own peril,” he said.

After nine months of watching their hard-right flank essentially extort McCarthy, this band of establishment Republicans has declared that it’s time to stop rewarding the hostage-takers. Instead of giving in to Jordan, they want to adopt the very same strategy: minority-rule tactics to sabotage him.

If as few as five refuse to back Jordan, he can’t win. That’s what happened on multiple key procedural votes last month, when just five Republicans opposed McCarthy’s defense spending bill and voted against the parliamentary vote, sabotaging the legislation.

When the hard right decided to take down McCarthy, those Republicans used the obscure motion to vacate that served as a vote of no confidence. As is custom in votes for speaker, all Democrats voted against the GOP option. Then eight Republicans effectively determined for the rest of the House — currently at 433 members because of two vacancies — that McCarthy would no longer be speaker by siding with Democrats.

Johnson, normally one of the more reserved and earnest lawmakers, proposed forcing the full House to vote early in the week even if Jordan is expected to lose. They would then go through round after round after round, re-creating the chaotic January scene to ramp up the pressure on Diaz-Balart’s group.

“Jim Jordan should continue this fight all the way through,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said on Fox News on Friday evening.

That high-risk scenario has some Jordan supporters urging restraint, including Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who has previously called for no floor vote until the outcome is certain.

“Right now, we just need cool heads and logic to prevail. I think that can occur,” Donalds said Friday.

Jordan’s opponents view the Johnson-Roy approach as another act of deceit.

Before Scalise’s victory Wednesday, Roy tried to change rules so that the nominee would not go to a full vote in the House until securing 217 Republican votes.

Adopting the look and style of a Hollywood movie mad scientist, Roy regularly plots complex strategies, focused on obscure rules and confounding processes. This time, he wanted to force many ballots in the speaker vote: the first involving both candidates, then the winner would go through more grilling and another secret ballot or two, before finally a public roll call in front of all his GOP colleagues.

It seemed designed to deny Scalise, or perhaps anyone other than Jordan, the requisite support to win — which is why Roy’s proposal got trounced by almost 50 votes.

Scalise then won the actual vote, 113-99, but rather than accepting the humiliating defeat, Roy declared he would vote only for Jordan.

A dozen Jordan backers quickly declared they would never vote for Scalise, while about a dozen more lurked in the backdrop, as well as a half-dozen or so moderates who remained loyal to McCarthy.

Pretty quickly, Scalise’s supporters — who include most traditional conservatives on the Armed Services and Appropriations committees — felt that Jordan had reverted back to his original form. In his first dozen years, before McCarthy brought him into his inner circle, Jordan served as the rabble-rouser, threatening to expel speakers and trying to take down bipartisan, must-pass legislation.

Jordan did not offer Scalise an endorsement and left the closed-door meeting without talking to the hundred or more reporters outside the room.

His aides sent word that he offered to give a nominating speech on Scalise’s behalf, but Scalise supporters reported that the offer required him to only stand for one ballot and, if he failed, turn around and nominate Jordan on the next ballot.

Jordan’s supporters denied any double-dealing. “He has said in the most plain, possible English to the conference, entirely wide, that he would support Steve,” Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) told reporters after a Thursday meeting with Scalise.

Still, Mast acknowledged that his plan to support Scalise after he won “just ran into some things” and that he was still with Jordan.

Once Scalise withdrew on Thursday evening, Jordan jumped back into the race anew, this time as the front-runner.

McCarthy thought he could harness forces of disruption. Instead they devoured him.

In public, Jordan’s opponents have walked a careful line to avoid accusing him of treachery.

Instead, they take him at his word that he truly did support Scalise. But they fault the former national collegiate champion wrestler, given his mythological clout within far-right circles, for being weak.

“There’s two alternatives: Either you lied, or you couldn’t deliver,” Diaz-Balart said. “I’ve never been lied to, I’ve never been lied to by him. So therefore, to me, it’s got to be the other alternative, which is he has not been able to deliver on a relatively simple thing.”

So now the Diaz-Balart wing plans to force Jordan to swallow some of the same medicine he has delivered throughout the years.

All these minority-rule moments turn the tables on a GOP conference that used to assert the “Hastert rule,” an unofficial standard often imposed by J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), the House speaker from 1999 into 2007. It said legislation that did not have the support of “the majority of the majority” would not get a vote on the House floor.

Now, the majority of the majority no longer rules, given that both McCarthy and Scalise had such support, as Jordan now does.

Instead, a small bloc — sometimes five, sometimes eight, sometimes 20, perhaps 99 — has turned the math upside down.

With the new “Jordan rule,” it’s the minority of the majority that matters most.

Face-Eating Leopards

... will always eat our face.

Here's Rick Wilson with a few predictions. Let's make a note and see if any of this actually happens.

What He Says He'll Do

... is almost always exactly what he doesn't do.

But this guy is mad - in both the emotional and psychiatric senses.

This is not the kind of comic relief "unhinged" that pundits love to throw around, leaving everybody a plausible way to rationalize that he's just being a little nutty - he doesn't really mean that - c'mon, that's the thing he does to keep the rubes all amped up. It's part of his act.

No. Stop it. Even if it is just that thing he does, this fucker's audience is taking it all very seriously.

Today's Anti-MAGA

Texas Paul

Marge The Impaler Greene is not a nice person.

Today's Lame AF Trump Shit

MAGArubes apparently just can't stop fantasizing about - and fetishizing - that guy.

Take What's Good

... and make it look like something bad - in order to score a few points for a "political party" that's bent on tearing down every tradition of American democratic self-government so they can replace it with a corporate plutocracy.

These are very bad people. They know they don't make any real progress if they tell us what they're actually doing. They have to hide it - dress it up and make it look like something it isn't.

Mr Hitler didn't pop up saying, "Hello, my name is Adolph - I'll be your führer this evening - can I start you off with killing all the Jews?"

Almost exactly the way somebody (not Sinclair Lewis BTW) described it - when fascism comes to America, it'll be wrapped in the stars and stripes, carrying a crucifix, and waving the bible.

When Ken Buck sounds like the voice of reason, you know we've got some serious fucking trouble.

They Got Nuthin'

... and we can expect them to go with it - as usual.

Putin's Reach

Talk about effective optics. 

And timing. Putin memorializes the battle of Kursk, reminding everybody of Russia's brute power, as he re-asserts himself as the personification of the Russian state.

L'État, c'est moi. C'est moi l'État.

And all of that against the backdrop of his having decapitated the organization that most threatens his reign, and the not-so-quiet purge of the upper echelons of the Russian military's command structure.

Putin is the guy who benefits most from the MAGA gang's insistence that we stop helping Ukraine.

And Xi Jinping sits passively, watching our reaction to all this.

With Prigozhin’s Death, Putin Projects a Message of Power

The Kremlin appears to be sending the signal that no degree of effectiveness can protect someone from punishment for disloyalty.

Just as the news broke on Wednesday of the presumed death of the mercenary chief Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was presiding over a televised World War II anniversary ceremony on a dark stage lit dramatically in red.

He held a moment of silence, flanked by service members in dress uniforms, while a metronome’s beats sounded, like the slow ticking of a clock: Tock. Tock. Tock.

The eerie split screen — the reported fiery demise of the man who launched an armed rebellion in June and the Russian president telegraphing the state’s military might — may have been coincidental. But it underscored the imagery of dominance and power that Mr. Putin, 18 months into his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, appears more determined than ever to project.

Mr. Prigozhin may have been brutally effective, throwing tens of thousands of his fighters into the maw of the battle for Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, tying up Ukrainian forces in the process and hobbling Kyiv’s ability to stage a counteroffensive. His internet “troll farm” helped the Kremlin interfere in the 2016 American presidential election, while his mercenary empire helped Russia exert influence across Africa and the Middle East.

But with his June rebellion, Mr. Prigozhin threatened something even more sensitive: Mr. Putin’s own hold on power. After the crash of Mr. Prigozhin’s plane on Wednesday, the Kremlin appears to be sending the message that no degree of effectiveness and achievement can protect someone from punishment for violating Mr. Putin’s loyalty.

“Everyone’s afraid,” Konstantin Remchukov, a Moscow newspaper editor with ties to the Kremlin, said of the reaction among the Russian elite to the plane crash Wednesday that Western officials theorize was caused by an explosion on board. “It’s just that everyone sees that anything is possible.”

Never before has someone so central to Russia’s ruling establishment been killed in a suspected state-sponsored assassination, said Mikhail Vinogradov, a Moscow political analyst.

To some, the fact that Mr. Prigozhin was able to survive for two months after staging his rebellion was more surprising than the crash of his private jet. In an address to the nation on June 24, as Mr. Prigozhin’s forces were marching on Moscow and already in control of a city of a million people in Russia’s southwest, Mr. Putin accused the warlord of “betrayal.”

And betrayal, Mr. Putin has said previously, is the one act that cannot be forgiven. So when Mr. Putin appeared to strike a deal with Mr. Prigozhin allowing him to retreat safely to neighboring Belarus, the act struck some Russians as a sign of the president losing control. The view was magnified when photographs surfaced of Mr. Prigozhin meeting with African officials on the sidelines of Mr. Putin’s marquee summit with African leaders in St. Petersburg in July.

“After he ‘forgave’ Prigozhin, it was understood by those around him as weakness,” said Aleksei A. Venediktov, who headed the liberal Echo of Moscow radio station before the Kremlin shut it down last year.

Mr. Venediktov, in an interview in Moscow on Thursday, argued that Mr. Prigozhin’s apparent death had strengthened Mr. Putin’s dominance in the Russian political system after the chaos of the rebellion. Now, “Putin has shown his elite,” Mr. Venediktov went on, that “any betrayal will be found out.”

U.S. officials are increasingly certain that Mr. Prigozhin was killed in Wednesday’s crash, and that Mr. Putin ordered the assassination. But when it comes to the power dynamics inside Russia’s ruling elite, whether Mr. Putin personally ordered the attack may be beside the point: What matters is that Mr. Prigozhin suffered a violent death after Mr. Putin publicly condemned him.

“He called him a traitor,” Mr. Remchukov said. “And that was enough for everyone to see that this person is no longer invulnerable.”

When Mr. Putin broke his silence about the plane crash on Thursday, some 24 hours after it happened, he described Mr. Prigozhin as a “talented man” with a “complicated fate.” Mr. Putin revealed that his personal ties with Mr. Prigozhin dated back to the early 1990s, and he acknowledged for the first time that he had personally asked Mr. Prigozhin to carry out tasks on his behalf.

“He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results, for himself and, when I asked him about it, for our common cause,” Mr. Putin said.

Mr. Prigozhin had long been suspected of acting in the shadows in Mr. Putin’s interest while giving the Kremlin plausible deniability. His forces deployed to eastern Ukraine in 2014, back when Mr. Putin was stoking a separatist war there while insisting he had nothing to do with it. In 2016, Mr. Prigozhin’s internet “troll farm” intervened in American politics as part of the Kremlin’s attempt to swing the presidential election to Donald J. Trump.

But what Mr. Putin left unsaid in his brief eulogy of Mr. Prigozhin was that by turning against the Russian president after decades of devoted service, Mr. Prigozhin may have signed his own death sentence.

On Friday, another longtime confidant of Mr. Putin, Aleksei Dyumin, issued a statement that made the message a little clearer. Mr. Dyumin, a former bodyguard of Mr. Putin who is now the governor of a region south of Moscow, said he had known Mr. Prigozhin “as a true patriot, a decisive and fearless man.” He said he mourned all Wagner fighters who had died in Ukraine, and added: “You can forgive mistakes and even cowardice, but never betrayal. They were not traitors.”

The apparent subtext was that Mr. Prigozhin’s soldiers and commanders were loyal men worthy of respect. But it also hinted at the notion that if Mr. Prigozhin himself was a traitor — as Mr. Putin had said — then he may have deserved his death.

But Mr. Prigozhin’s death also carries risks for the Kremlin. In Ukraine, Wagner was seen as one of Russia’s most effective and brutal fighting forces, exacting and taking enormous casualties in the monthslong battle for the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut.

In Africa, where Mr. Prigozhin built a mercenary empire propping up autocrats loyal to Moscow in countries like Mali and the Central African Republic, it is far from clear whether Wagner will be able to retain its footprint. Wagner’s top military commander, Dmitri V. Utkin, was listed as a passenger alongside Mr. Prigozhin on the plane that crashed, according to the Russian authorities.

Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Mr. Putin who is now a political consultant based in Israel, said the Kremlin was most likely behind the plane crash, and he argued that the risky decision to kill Mr. Prigozhin in order to send a signal of deterrence revealed the president’s fears of losing power.

“To send this signal, Putin decided to risk a bunch of projects,” Mr. Gallyamov wrote on social media. “This is important for understanding what his priorities are right now: maintaining power, not external expansion.”

Mr. Putin has also long made it clear that he sees his personal interests as inextricable from those of the Russian state. “He believes that if something is important for keeping him in power, then all other concerns are secondary,” said Grigorii Golosov, a professor of political science at the European University at St. Petersburg.

It’s a philosophy that Vyacheslav Volodin, the chairman of Russia’s lower house of Parliament, summed up simply earlier this year: “As long as there is Putin, there is Russia.”

Still A Problem

From Reddit:

MAQA Friend who thought it was all a hoax is dying from long COVID.

We're almost 50 and we've been good friends since high school so this really sucks and I feel partly to blame. It's hard to walk in the middle of the road politically and hate everyone equally but that's how I try to view things. My opinion for years has been that none of these rich bastards care about us average citizens.

Enter my friend who has become a die hard trumper since 2016 and a proud member of the fuck your feelings crowd. Everyday during Trump's presidency he was constantly posting memes and just generally being an ass to anyone who disagreed with him. His views are the same as a lot of others, COVID isn't real, the doctors are all lying, and the only one telling the truth was Trump. He would bash the doctors and anyone even wearing a mask outside would catch hell from him.

After a while I had enough and started trolling the trumpers on my friends list with just random funny memes blasting trump and the gop. I was just doing it for laughs because I refuse to take social media seriously. He pretty much immediately started commenting rude shit on my posts and wanting to argue q conspiracies and other bs. When I would ignore him he would even go to my spouses page to go on about some stuff I posted that he didn't agree with.

Here is where my personal blame comes in to play. I started saying things to him like "if you don't want to trust the doctors now then just stay home when you get COVID and spare them your bs." I'd say "do you ask what they are putting in your iv at the hospital? If you don't trust the doctors how do you know it's not the vaccine?" This was just me trolling trying to get him to realize how dumb he sounds with all the Q bs. He took it serious because he did get COVID really bad and he refused to go to the hospital for weeks. It wasn't until his girlfriend threatened to leave him if he didn't go.

Apparently it was such a huge issue that they did eventually split up. Because he waited he now has long COVID and his heart is only working at 20 percent. He is dying from heart failure. He has also lost his voice from COVID and sounds like the crypt keeper when he talks.

We have both admitted to each other it was stupid and we both apologized but I can feel the animosity towards me and I can't help but feel partly to blame for him not going to the hospital, but at the same time I get so sick and tired of the Q crowds disrespect toward anyone that doesn't agree with them. His rhetoric was starting to affect my teenage sons views but now hopefully he sees the real danger of this cult.

It's a really sad fucked up situation and I hate that it's going to cost my friend his life. He has lost everything over this. His job, his car, his gf, his family, health, friends, everything.

Thanks for reading.

08-19-2023:

2,209 new cases

8 new deaths

They're Losing

We're nowhere near out of the woods or on the road to recovery, but there are some encouraging signs of progress here and there.