Thank you, America, you understood the assignment.

But also, Jesus, what a faceplant for Trump and all of the Republican party. Do you understand how much you have to have fucked up that Kansas elected a Democratic senator? That literally hasn’t happened since the New Deal. Do you know how much you have to have fucked up to have Mississippi still in play as of the writing of this post? MISSISSIPPI. You don’t get any more Republican territory than Mississippi, goddamn. Except maybe South Carolina, which just elected a Democrat to Lindsey Graham’s old seat. North Carolina elected a Democratic senator and flipped one of their state legislative bodies to Democrat.

And holy shit, Texas! Not just senator Talarico, not just Governor Hinojosa, but as far as I can tell every single statewide office went blue, down to and including the railroad commissioner. The Democrats look like they’re going to flip the Texas house, too. FUCKING TEXAS WENT BLUE Y’ALL. Not just a little, but a lot.

(And Ohio, too, where I live, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

Now, credit is due to the Democrats actually fielding decent candidates this year and doing the work — you don’t get Abdul El-Sayad into the senate (as an example) without Abdul El-Sayad being a generationally sensational candidate. But let’s make no mistake that this blue wave is a response to an administration and political party so corrupt and awful and, yes, actually fucking evil, that a certain number of people who have perennially voted red either voted blue or stayed at home, and a lot of blue-voting people who might have stayed home for a mid-term went out of their way to get to the polls this time around.

This election was a rebuke and a repudiation, and I hope to the sweet and merry God above that the Democrats remember that when they’re seated in January. They were not elected to office to play nice with the fascists in the halls of power. They were elected to punch them in the face, repeatedly, the president most of all, but, be assured, not only him. There is to be a lot of punching going on.

Now, Ohio. When I went to bed last night Amy Acton was elected governor and Sherrod Brown senator, but all the other statewide offices were still showing as red. Well, I just checked this morning, and holy buckets, every state office but auditor, including the Ohio Supreme Court seats, looks to have gone to the Democrats. By extremely small margins, to be sure! But you know what you call a win by an extremely small margin? A win.

And the US House races, with a new map that the state GOP designed to be gerrymandered as fuck to their advantage? Seven seats went to Democrats, which brings them to near parity with the GOP in a state with fifteen congressional districts. Shit, in my district, OH-8, Warren Davidson, who since 2016 has won his seat with between 60%-70% of the vote every election, scraped by this time with just 52% of the vote. The GOP nearly just gerrymandered themselves out of a state congressional majority. The GOP also looks to have lost its supermajority in the Ohio house, so, goodbye ignoring the governor’s veto for them. This is all excellent news.

As I noted the other day, and without taking away from the work of Acton, Brown and all the rest of the Democrats, it’s the fact the GOP voters, in their infinite wisdom, chose Vivek Ramaswamy as their candidate for governor in the primary, largely on the endorsement of Trump, that helped tip Ohio back into purplehood. It’s hard to overstate what a historically bad candidate Ramaswamy was, and ultimately how poor a fit he was for the Ohio GOP (much less any other Ohio voter). And even then he still got 44% of the vote, because tankies gonna tank. But 44% was not enough. So much for the power of a Trump endorsement in 2026.

Speaking of Trump, I have no doubt if the Democratic margins had been smaller this year that Trump would be doing his usual thing of belching about fixed elections and other such nonsense, but at the end of the evening the wave was high enough that even he couldn’t pretend that it was anything other than a wipeout. He rather meekly went on record that he would “respect the results” and then went on Truth Social to bluster that if he had been on the ballot things would have turned out differently. Motherfucker, you were on the ballot. Everything you’ve done in the last two years is why this election went the way it did.

I still expect Trump and his odious cronies to pull hijinks, and never forget that he is actually still president for two more years, unless he dies, resigns, is impeached, or just one day boards a plane for Russia just for fun and never comes back. We’re still stuck with him through January 2029. Adjust expectations accordingly.

But no matter what, last night was the beginning of the end of the Trump era. I’ve said such things before, mind you, and have been wrong. But I feel pretty good about this time. This wasn’t a normal election. Ask Texas about that. It’s not just a wave. It’s a sea change.

— JS

sins-sanctuary:

the-big-mood:

It became impossible to lose them on the evening walk. 😂

Awe ☺️

nostalgia-eh52:

FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND, Australia — Australia is famously a place with some of the world’s most dangerous and frightening animals. Venomous spiders. Deadly snakes. Jellyfish with fatal stings. 

But it is also home to one of the world’s cutest: the flying fox, also known as the giant fruit bat. I mean, look at this animal. 

This is a baby bat taking a bubble bath. If it doesn’t melt your heart, nothing will. 

In northeastern Australia, not far from the coastal city of Cairns, is a place called Tolga Bat Hospital. It is, as its name suggests, a hospital for bats — one of the only such facilities on the planet. And it’s also one of the few places you can see a baby bat getting a bubble bath.

The hospital, which has just one full-time paid employee but a cadre of volunteers, has been treating bats for more than 30 years. It comprises a few small buildings with treatment rooms, cold storage for fruit, and a nursery for orphan bats, as well as several outdoor wire enclosures. The largest cage is akin to a long-term care facility; it’s for bats that can no longer fly and will live out their lives at the hospital.

Tolga Bat Hospital cares for as many as 1,000 bats a year, the bulk of which are spectacled flying foxes, an endangered species and one of four distinct kinds of flying foxes in mainland Australia. They come in with disease, heat stress, or injuries from barbed wire. The hospital also cares for hundreds of baby spectacleds — named for the lighter fur around their eyes that makes it look like they’re wearing glasses — that have lost their mothers and can’t survive on their own.

On a warm afternoon in December, I visited the hospital with Australian photographer Harriet Spark. We met a lot of cute bats — and they were hard not to love. Flying foxes are furry with expressive eyes, large ears, and a dog-like snout. But it was the hospital founder and director, Jenny Mclean, whom I found even more endearing.

“You meet a bat, and they’re worth caring about,” Mclean, 71, told me that afternoon, as she fed a sick adult bat fruit juice from a syringe. “They have serious threats that they’re facing, all of them human-induced.”

Mclean, who works around the clock at the hospital and doesn’t pay herself, said she feels a responsibility to help these creatures — not only because they’re suffering at our expense but because they help keep our planet healthy. Flying foxes are exceptionally good at pollinating plants and dispersing their seeds, Mclean said. 

Giving back to these animals in some way, she said, is the least we can do. 

Why Australia’s flying foxes need a hospital

The nursery is a small, two-story building with a verandah that looks out onto the lush grounds of the hospital. Most of the babies were outside when we visited, hanging with their feet on several mesh metal shelves. Spectacled flying foxes are enormous: These animals were about 2 months old and already football-sized. By the time they grow up, their wingspan could reach more than three feet.

The bats, still too young to fly, hung upside down, wrapped in their own wings, alongside stuffed animals. The stuffies, which Mclean buys from a local secondhand store, are meant to mimic mother bats, and the babies will often cling to them for comfort, Mclean told me. Some of the bats were drinking from bottles of flying fox formula attached to the shelves.

Even younger bats were in a room inside the building. Infants under one week are kept in an incubator because they have trouble regulating their body temperature. Slightly older babies are kept in plastic boxes with heating pads and socks that they can cling to. For feeding, “box babies” are swaddled in cloth around a small rectangular pillow so their wings are contained — forming baby bat burritos. A few had silicon pacifiers in their mouths.

Nearly all of these orphans lost their moms to Australian paralysis ticks: parasites that carry a potent neurotoxin in their saliva. When paralysis ticks bite bats and other animals without natural immunity, such as pet cats and dogs, the insects can, as their name suggests, cause paralysis and, eventually, heart failure. 

During tick season, which typically runs from October to December, hospital workers search the ground below colonies, or “camps,” for infected bats, which often fall out of trees. If the infection is mild, workers treat the animal with an anti-toxin at the hospital. The babies, meanwhile, are often spared from paralysis. Mothers likely pick up ticks while they’re foraging without their young, Mclean said, and the parasites latch on before they have a chance to crawl onto the babies. That leads to an abundance of orphans in need of care.

Paralysis ticks live all across eastern Australia, but they only seem to affect spectacled flying foxes in the Atherton Tablelands, where the hospital is located, Mclean told me. The reason is still a mystery. One explanation, Mclean said, is that spectacleds in this region feed on the berries of an invasive shrub called wild tobacco, where they encounter the ticks. While the plant grows in other parts of Australia where both ticks and flying foxes are found, Mclean said, the moist climate of the Tablelands may make ticks more likely to venture out of the grass and into the branches of the invasive shrub. That’s where the flying foxes feed.  

That afternoon, I followed Mclean into the main hospital building, where she treats adult bats with paralysis. Rows of small metal cages and cloth boxes sat on shelves along the wall. In some of the enclosures, large flying foxes hung calmly from the top, whereas in others, the animals — still facing the effects of paralysis — were lying down. 

Using a towel, Mclean gently grabbed one of the bats from its cage to see if it would eat. The animal was having trouble swallowing, Mclean told me, as she placed a syringe with apple and mango juice in its mouth. The bat took a few sips and then pulled its head away. Mclean moved it into a small plastic bin for plan B: seeing if the animal would eat a small piece of pear instead. The bat began to chew, but then spat it out. “You have not got a good swallow, my girl,” Mclean said. 

Tick paralysis is just one of the threats to Australia’s flying foxes, many of which are getting worse. Little reds, another species, get tangled in barbed wire, causing tears in their wings. Spectacleds in the Tablelands, meanwhile, are increasingly born with cleft palate syndrome (for reasons that are not yet clear), which makes it hard for them to feed. And more recently, severe heat waves tied to climate change have decimated flying fox populations. In 2018, unrelenting heat killed about 23,000 spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland, nearly a third of the entire population. Mclean says she received about 500 orphans that year from the heat wave alone.

Nonetheless, these animals lack support — they’re “maligned,” Mclean said — especially compared to koalas and other furry animals in Australia. “There are not that many people who will champion them,” she told me.

Bats have a bad rap, in part, because they can carry diseases. Flying foxes are no exception — in rare cases, they can carry Australian bat lyssavirus, a relative of rabies. What gets less attention is the fact that humans almost never contract a disease from flying foxes. “We get about a thousand sick and injured bats a year, and we get a lyssavirus bat once every three years,” Mclean said. (Workers at Tolga Bat Hospital get vaccinated before handling bats as a safety precaution.)

Ultimately, flying foxes are not a real threat to humans, she said. Disproportionately, humans harm them. “It’s this whole thing of, are we willing to share the planet or not?” she said. “If you’re not willing to share the planet, you are going to destroy the planet.”

If flying foxes continue to disappear, so will essential services like pollination and seed dispersal that keep forests alive, Mclean told me. “You can’t have a healthy person unless you’ve got healthy wildlife and a healthy environment.”

7-en:

These three bats at a wildlife rescue center look like characters from a storybook. In this video you can see them tucked into a little bed together, safe and cozy. Each one's wrapped in a pretty blanket like a tiny fairy. — Read the rest

The post Watch: Baby bats cuddle together during wildlife rehabilitation appeared first on Boing Boing.