Our Lady of the Perpetual Flail
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Illinois Gov. Pritzker ahead of Trump National Guard deployment: "To Chicagoans... Look out for your communities and your neighbours. Know your rights. Film things that you see happening... Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud for America."
The president is sending the military to control American cities and if you're a reporter who's framing that illegal power grab as "pushing the boundaries of constitutionality" or "acting boldly to fight crime" or whatever, please go find another line of work where you won't get us all killed.
BREAKING: Gov. JB Pritzker says the Trump administration has sent the Texas National Guard to Great Lakes Naval Base outside Chicago, awaiting orders to deploy to Chicago. Trump administration officials will target Mexican Independence Day (Sept. 16) celebrations. @wttw.bsky.social
Sharereh Moghadam was taken into custody after an immigration meeting, which she thought was a step closer to citizenship, her husband says: “She had green card and passed exam for citizenship and was waiting for the ceremony." Instead, she was transferred to a detention center in Phoenix.
your liver thanks you!
A friend of mine from work said she went to a frat house at MIT once. Someone thought their phone had fallen into the couch, so up came the couch cushion. They discovered a flattened, desiccated disc of a curled-up mouse.
JD is hoping for divan inspiration, I'm sure
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. filling an IV bag from a murky puddle near Trump National's sixth tee. "The president needs parameciums," he tells the assembled media. "It's the only treatment proven to work in real testing." His golf cart is piled high with dozens of dead birds.
this is one of the expressions I taught a Korean postdoc some years ago. Not sure it stuck, though.
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
yep, insomnia-inducing. I'm down to one more guess, and I have only gotten the yellows.
“Over the past 20 years, Paris has undergone a major physical transformation, trading automotive arteries for bike lanes, adding green spaces and eliminating 50,000 parking spaces. Part of the payoff has been invisible — in the air itself.” Leadership, strategy, real action, common sense. #Paris
Labor Day Weekend at Bernie’s is that anything
she's *far* too busy for the Vanity Fair cover shoot....
Yeah the reason RFK jr would be the last to know is because everybody else in the admin would be afraid he'd immediately start eating the corpse like a hyena
“A respected network of hospitals and cancer centers is halting enrollment in clinical trials for children with brain cancer after the federal government said it would no longer provide funding to the group”
I think this is the actual post I was thinking of. In fairness, a lot of people credit him with having been smart as an undergrad, but *enormously* dislikable. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/me-ted
here's some good TPM content (itself quoting a NYT article): talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/britt...
Josh M (TPM) also has -- through his wife -- some good intel on Ted Cruz's precocious weirdness
There are also tales from Cruz's college years about him being the best debater ever, but now I think all of us know that it was 100% being good at the Gish Gallop. Being a firehose of bs ≠ being smart.
This is good: With Trump/RFK destroying CDC, JB Pritzker's officials are exploring the possibility of buying Covid vaccines from manufacturers and distributing them in-state themselves, source tells me. Dem govs must step up and fill the void. New piece from me: newrepublic.com/article/1998...
lack of shame recognizes lack of shame
oops, right
Plus Maria K has noted that emails containing this whistleblower's letter have been deleted from their inboxes, so unless Josh's source did a screen-cap in time, they may not have been able to forward the relevant info to him.
I'm assuming his source was someone other than Maria K and did not want to be named. Hence Josh looking for confirmation.
BREAKING: Social Security Administration chief data officer and whistle-blower Charles Borges has resigned after bombshell report that SSA put highly-sensitive data at risk. He sent out an email to colleagues moments ago. Here is the text of his email shared with me:
Josh's post was time-stamped 12:14. Maria's was posted 12:26. He can't cite her as a source if it's from the future. : )
A reminder that PhD students are also teachers. It'll be much harder to run undergraduate programs too with this change.
“When I call Kennedy a ‘dangerous crank,’ I'm not saying that as an insult or as hyperbole, but honestly as the most economical way of describing the man's views,” says @chrislhayes.bsky.social on RFK Jr.
New rule. A parent may only propose removing a book from the school library only after reading it in its entirety and delivering a book report to the librarian. Until then no discussion shall be entered into.
Takes a child to raze a village.
I have never seen so many public servants protest the mismanagement of a government. Trumpists will point to this as proof of the deep state, but the reality is that these are professionals who are desperately trying to get the public to understand how bad things are.
This is a hell of a letter. “The intentional eroding of trust in low-risk vaccines…will bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer….Eugenics plays prominently in the rhetoric being generated…”
ICE took 2 firefighters OFF THE FUCKING FIRE LINE!?
I know there's a lot happening today, but this is sneaking in under the radar. This proposed new rule would absolutely crush foreign PhD students, potentially making it impossible for them to enroll with any certainty of their ability to finish www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
That's how you beat a wrap!
In a functional government, this would be a five alarm fire where Congress calls in Kennedy and asks him what the fuck is going on
This photo is amazing. www.latimes.com/california/s...
Abbe Lowell and I represent CDC Director #SusanMonarez. Contrary to govt statements, Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor yet been fired. She will not resign. We have issued the following statement:
ABSOLUTE SCENES "Grimsby have beaten Manchester United... in the most dramatic circumstances"
Total value of Grimsby Town: $4.8M
Hi all, me, @richardjbutler.bsky.social and the amazing UK-US-Moroccan team are delighted to announce that.. we have a new specimen of Spicomellus AND IT'S WAY WEIRDER AND WAY COOLER THAN WE EVER IMAGINED!!
Dearest Martha, The National Guard stand solemn watch at the Krispy Kreme tonight. I cannot tell if they defend the people from the donuts, or the donuts from the people. Powdered sugar hangs in the air like cannon smoke. Jensen took a hot coffee to the face, he may never recover. Yours in glaze,
Hero jury saves hoagie hurler from legal grinder www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/u...
NEW RESULT: Democrats have flipped a state Senate in Iowa. This was a seat Trump carried by 11%, but Democratic nominee Catherine Drey has just won it by 10.4%. This is the second legislative flip by Dems in Iowa this year. It also means the GOP loses its supermajority in Iowa’s senate.
For decades, I've been fighting to make sure insurers don't discriminate against patients with mental illness and addiction. I've passed 2 different laws to make them pay these claims. But now Trump is taking the insurers side. I hope you watch this. It's an important story.
“Jimenez Rosa, a legal permanent resident and mother of four U.S. citizens, was detained over what her lawyer believes was a decades-old, personal-use marijuana charge, which is no longer a crime in Massachusetts today… “I was just like, ‘Girls, we might never see your mother again in this country’”
Clearly Dennis Hastert was indisposed
Words/phrases Democrats should never use: * bipartisan * my Republican friends * real, valid, legitimate, serious, important (to describe issue raised by Republicans) * yea (when voting on Republican bills) * distraction (to describe bad thing Republicans did) * woke (in derogatory sense)
F*ck‼️ Fort Bliss Army base used for a WWII Japanese internment is now the nation's largest ICE detention center.
Casually grabbing breakfast Tatshenshini-Alsek Provincial Park, B.C. 🇨🇦
Trump proposes to rescind AIDS funds. Congress rejects the proposal. So Trump and his henchman Russ Vought just refuse to spend the money and try to hide that decision from Congress and the public. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/h...
Extraordinary new detail about the FBI purge. *Senior officials were asked to fire lower level officials tagged by online right wingers as being anti-Trump. *When they asked for a reason - required by law - they were not given any. They refused. Then they were fired. www.cbsnews.com/news/politic...
I've seen some Bluesky folks write in the comments "oh so *he's* why my parents pinched my neck!" 😮
>In death, Dobson becomes a kind of reverse saint, a name to invoke every time a child is struck, or goes into labor, or tries to take their own life. God DAMN
yeah that last sentence did not miss
UPDATE: Fox News reports that ICE told Kilmar Abrego Garcia they are going to deport him to Uganda on Monday.
You've seen his vocabulary, a small language model could do it
This sort of admission—the VP is involved in prosecutorial decisions, the "concerns" arise from political actors, and the administration knows they don't have probable cause—would have prompted the Founders to impeach everyone involved.
On the left: Nate Cavanagh, a 28-year-old DOGE staffer and college dropout. On the right: Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar. This is the story of how DOGE targeted Halimi on social media. Then the Taliban took his family. 🧵
The only thing I can say about this paragraph is read it. Sit with it. Read it again. @michaelharriot.bsky.social
I wrote about Israel’s assassination of Anas al-Sharif, a brave journalist in Gaza, and the work of local journalists everywhere. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/o...
The portrayal of Trump, receiving gifts from leaders of industry and other countries, is both incredibly funny and remarkably accurate. The scenes set in D.C. powerfully illustrate the surreal and illogical situation there. Well done South Park. #DemVoice1 #ProudBlue #Pinks youtu.be/Qmc_R8FShtc?...
Meet Shakira. Ten years ago, she was living in a shelter with her three kids, working at a non-union hotel. Now she's a member of HTC. Unions are how working people can build a dignified life. But in a city as expensive as ours, they need local government on their side.
May this portion of the dissent by Ketanji Brown Jackson haunt John Roberts forever and be the final word on his tenure as Chief Justice.
The history trump wants erased. youtu.be/feUJc28QsD8?...
Tough talk from the man who took the Fifth before the grand jury.
If Democratic politicians do not fight this because it's a "distraction," it will simply happen. They need to get in front of every mic and say that we will not allow Trump to destroy American history. He wants a culture war? GIVE HIM ONE. There are no distractions. Have every fight.
This is the best product listing copy I’ve ever read
ICE agents in Maine arrest local pastor who supported immigrant community ICE spokesperson "didn’t mention whether Michel Tshimankinda had applied for asylum and he wasn’t able to provide further information Tuesday on whether that would have mattered to ICE" www.pressherald.com?p=7484843&uu...
DC should have exactly one statehood and one national guard not zero statehood and seven national guards
A war hero?? Didn't he dodge the draft a few times.. Coward.
If you want to put back statues and memorials and names of Confederate traitors while tearing down museum exhibitions on slavery because they don't show the greatness of the nation... the nation whose history you're celebrating is whiteness. The kind of nationalist you are is a white nationalist.
this guy rocks
the ai bubble is bursting soon thank god
Last week, Boston received a letter from AG Bondi threatening to prosecute officials and withhold funds unless we cooperate with carrying out mass deportations. The US Attorney General asked for a response by today, so here it is: stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures.
Texas State Rep. Nicole Collier spent the night on the House floor after refusing to agree ‘to round-the-clock monitoring by state troopers’ www.keranews.org/texas-news/2...
LFG
A terrorist targeted federal workers last week. There wasn’t much reporting on it. But I’m not finished thinking about it! 🧵 An anti-vaxxer fired more than 500 gunshots into CDC Atlanta, shattering 150 “blast-proof” windows on 6 buildings. Employees were pinned down in terror.
one guy even tried to give us a sandwich
This is step one in how we lose free and fair elections. It’s not that Trump will “cancel” the midterms. It’s just everyone has to vote in person, and urban downtowns will be filled with ICE checkpoints and intimidating National Guard troops to “double check” that only citizens vote.
you had me at "ill-fitting suits"
President Zelensky is not flying to Trump alone — his plane has already taken off after a stop in Brussels. And he won’t be empty-handed: Europe is coming with him.👇
I'm glad someone is doing it... but it's also a major bummer that the current leadership has decided to take us out of the running.
If pundits would like to talk about violence, a terrorist recently shot up the CDC and another assassinated Democratic officials in Minnesota but they sort of let both stories disappear Not as threatening as motorbikes in DC I know but maybe we could circle back?
I didn’t know until now that in the original Rosie the Riveter painting, she is crushing a copy of Mein Kampf under her foot. Happy feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, remembering all the women who crush the serpents of Satan under their heel.
Same, but for "The Alchemist."
I second this. One of my local stations brags about how much money they've helped locals recover from companies / individuals who have tried to screw them over.
don't forget the dry cleaning!
If states are just sending their National Guard places, can NY send their National Guard to Norfolk to walk my dog and pick up my groceries?
Murk especially
They vote for it and tell reporters that they hope the dictator-y parts will be fixed in the House version
164 years later, South Carolina finally occupies Washington.
Declaring a fake emergency as an excuse to deploy the military to police civilians is one of the most canonical examples of authoritarian takeovers. Overseas, people see clearly what Trump is doing. Here in America most people — especially those with power or influence — are in denial.
New from @alexckaufman.bsky.social: U.S. steel producers are stepping back from their clean production commitments, but China is going all in — and starting to secure international green steel deals.
I have lost all patience with the apparently unshakeable conviction that striking a reasonable, moderate pose means assuming the sincerity of transparently pretextual horseshit. Donald Trump does not care about reducing crime in DC. He is testing and normalizing paramilitary deployments in cities.
flexin my legal mussels at the small clams court (yeah i SAID IT)
Imagine if they’d had sandwiches. 🥪