The Week in Tweets and Memes

Hoo boy. This week was a doozy. It started off, as so many bad things do these days, with Russia.

Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, one of the few men in Russia we’d actually prefer less than Putin to lead the country, decided he wanted to stage a mutiny, so he fabricated a story about an attack on his own mercenaries by the Russian army, then rolled quickly into the Southern District Military Command center in Rostov-on-Don, meeting no resistance from the local forces whatsoever.

Then his military convoy spend north. Guy was both crazy and determined. At the season finale at the Battle of Moscow, Prigozhin was just 200 km from the edge of the city. This former caterer to Putin had come to collect his bill.

President Putin, apparently caught off guard by the attack, was nowhere to be seen for more than 24 hours.

Yet in a serious anticlimax, Prigozhin managed to swing a last minute deal brokered by his buddy President Lukashenko of Belarus that stopped the mutiny in progress and let Prigozhin go into self-exile that country.

Prigozhin had demanded the sacking of Defense Minister Shoigu and went to near civil war over it. The whole affair left many, including me, wondering whether Putin was really as fearsome and tough a leader as he had seemed. Was the Russian leader like the Russian army, all swagger and no strength?

Back home, the week began with GOP politicians saying dumb things, which made the start of the week feel oddly normal. Here’s the GOP governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, unwittingly destroying his own anti-LGBTQ+ law.

Good job, Greg! Thanks for the help.

Over in another part of the South, GOP presidential hopefully Nimrata Randhawa—oh, sorry, Nikki Haley—decided that she wanted to go back to an imaginary America of her childhood.

That brought out some folks with both thoughts and receipts.

State Rep. Gloria Johnson (of the Tennessee Three) provided a different white woman’s experience than Haley’s.

Oh, sorry, Haley isn’t white, I keep forgetting!

And not every child of an interracial marriage had it so easy, as Soledad O’Brien pointed out.

It was Pride month with all the colorful and wonderful parades around the country, which is always an opportunity for the right to clutch its collective pearls. I loved this take on that.

In the early part of the week, before our democracy teetered once again, people were still talking about that submersible vessel instead of the 700 migrants who died in a Greek ferry accident. They were even honoring the passengers on that Titanic-viewing tin can in some odd ways.

Okay, so then we started getting SCOTUS opinions that were what you might expect from a radical group of billionaire-bought ideologues. First up was the end of race-conscious college admissions, sometimes known as Affirmative Action. But I don’t call it that because Affirmative Action is still alive and well for things like legacy admissions, which are 70 percent white.

The end of race conscious admissions was particularly galling when you consider who benefited from it directly.

Oh look, we’re back to Southern governors saying really absurd, irony-is-dead level nonsense.

The notion that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment—which was enacted to help end systemic racism, particularly against Black Americans—was now being used to protect the privileges of white students and their Asian American whining wannabes? Particularly galling.

Harvard, which was one of the defendants, came out with a pretty amazing statement about how they’re gonna get around this decision. Gotta give the Crimson credit.

There were many takes on what happened, and because the rollback is so earth-shattering for many minorities and the future of our country as a multi-racial democracy, I’m going to list a bunch here. It was time to preach!

Sadly, SCOTUS wasn’t near done messing with established law and fundamental rights.

Quick reaction shot of citizens and their shoes to the horrific rulings.

The right wing of the Court decided, based on a new rule they completely made up called the “major question doctrine,” that the Biden Administration didn’t have the power to waive student debt..even though Congress had expressly granted it the right to waive student debt. Waive does not mean what it means, apparently. (Also, a state like Missouri has standing to sue, even though it has not been harmed.)

Standing? We don’t need no stinking standing!

From there, they undid Biden’s student debt relief program, throwing millions of borrowers back into the red. Folks immediately spotted the naked hypocrisy of permitting massive loan forgiveness for businesses during Covid, but not forgiving crushing student loans even by a much smaller amount per borrower.

This account went around to GOP politicians with receipts.

And Senator Chris Murphy has had it with this Court.

Or more colorfully put,

And lest we forget,

There was another case waiting to ruin everything further. SCOTUS decided it was time to empower religious bigots to refuse to provide services to gay couples. Never mind that the person denying the service hadn’t actually even started her business yet, had never been asked to make a web site for a gay couple, or that her affidavit identifying a gay customer was entirely false (he was actually straight and married with kids).

Oh, but think of that the poor, devout woman, so stressed out that she might one day have to make a hypothetical gay couple’s website! What about her deeply held beliefs and her First Amendment rights?!

Way to tie the two awful cases together, that gets a slow clap from me.

This summed up the ruling well.

And clever resistance ideas have begun to brew!

Chief Justice Roberts had the gall to whine about how Americans were unduly critical and disrespectful of the Court’s decisions. Um…

And on another serious note, please listen to Justice Sotomoyor.

Happy second class citizen day, to all who observe it!

On the subject of Pride, Gov. Ron DeSantis decided it was time to go after his rival for the GOP presidential nomination, Donald Trump, on the issue of (checks notes) his history of acceptance of the LGBTQ and trans community. “You aren’t as bigoted as I am!” appears to be a key GOP campaign talking point.

(Note: Elon Musk is being a douche again. Twitter announced yesterday it is requiring people to have an actual Twitter account and to be logged in to view tweets and videos. I’ll do my best to try and find videos elsewhere. Musk seems hell bent on ruining his own site.)

Watch the ad here if you can, or click the image below.

Chasten Buttigieg FTW on this absolutely correct observation:

Speaking of Trump and bizarre MAGA things, the ex-president addressed a gathering of Moms for Liberty, which is a Proud Boys-adjacent hate group out to ruin local educational experiences for every child. Someone at the Marriott Hotel where they were staying is a hero:

Remember Lance Armstrong? He decided it would be smart to weigh in on trans women competing in sports in order to cheat their way to glory. That was almost too easy.

Sometimes the whole world seems upside down from a total lack of self-awareness.

In lighter news, Pat Sajak is retiring from Wheel of Fortune, and his replacement was apparently HUGE breaking news.

And yes…

That is a tweet about Jeopardy, if it wasn’t clear.

If you’re able to view videos because you have a Twitter account, here’s one of a cat that anyone can do if they’re super bored and want to amuse at home. Watch it here.

I had gathered other videos to show you, but I’ll save those for later and when the Twitter video links work better (if they ever do…) A random closing thought:

Oh, and one puppy shot, poor guy!

And a dad joke to round things out. Say this one out loud if you don’t get it right away.

Have a great weekend!

Jay

A programming note: My roomie Blair and I begin our annual summer vacation Sunday night, which means I won’t be posting as regularly over the next two weeks. Every year, around a dozen of us break open our piggy banks and collectively rent a boat, with my friend and his very Italian brother as the captains, and me as the cook in the galley below! I call it “camping on the water.” Cooking for a dozen people on a rocking boat is a skill that I have somehow mastered over these years.

We’ll only have very spotty internet where we’re going, and I’m using the time to unplug and reset, barring any huge breaking news.

And thank goodness for years of accumulated travel and reward points, because airfares are totally insane, as you might have seen…