Michelle Obama: "please I'm begging you feed kids just one (1) vegetable" RFK: "some children deserve to die. there's a healthy way to eat deep fried burgers" Media: "these are the same, to me"
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Michelle Obama: "please I'm begging you feed kids just one (1) vegetable" RFK: "some children deserve to die. there's a healthy way to eat deep fried burgers" Media: "these are the same, to me"
free Dem slogan idea: "50 for 50 hospital plan" - plan to construct 50 new, state of the art hospitals, one in all 50 states, to help make up for the hospitals Trump is closing that can't be reopened
Kier Starmer will read this post and decide he's not being quite racist or transphobic enough just yet
An M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return. It jibes with the emerging idea that generative A.I., “in its current incarnation, simply isn’t all it’s been cracked up to be,” @johncassidysays.bsky.social writes.
...and people ask why I don't subscribe to that mag anymore...
This is, I swear to Christ, the lead story at the Atlantic Monthly right now
I remember seeing one parked like that in London when it first came out. I heard it was designed to do that but it was the most bizarre thing to see in person.
a very high proportion of centrist punditry now just boils down to "progressives yell at me on the internet and i don't like it." you would think that getting paid millions of dollars per year would give you thicker skin
Your pal @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social at the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn. Genuinely hard to take a bad picture of this dude. That's the @nywfp.bsky.social float behind him - follow them and let's make this man mayor and get him the progressive caucus he needs to get things done, NYC!
NYT: “When Tennessee’s Republican governor @GovBillLee dispatched troops to support Trump’s crackdown on crime, critics wondered why he didn’t keep them within state lines. Memphis has a murder rate twice DC’s, Nashville’s is higher as well.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
Crime is literally lower than it has been in the entire life of every single non-senior-citizen American. If you are under age 65 you have never lived at a time with lower property crime rates, lower violent crime rates or lower homicide rates. Never.
Peter Navarro calls Fed Gov. Lisa Cook a "DEI hire" and an "animal"
Maybe he's salty because he's a few extra tens of thousand of dollars into debt this month from his gambling habit he likes to brag about for god knows what reason...
The data is clear and damning:
I've written a million threads on this theme, it's pointless, I know. But it's insane. Dems have to try, to be responsible, to please everyone. Republicans just have to jump around like fucking gibbons, throwing shit at the wall, and if they occasionally, accidentally hit something ...
But it's always like this. Democrats try to do the right thing. They fall short, like humans do. Everyone teams up to shit on them. Republicans don't even bother pretending. They lie, they smear, they destroy lives, they get people killed, & they face NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.
A pre-dog-walk 🧵 on the pandemic. To me, the lesson of the pandemic is a very familiar one, although as far as I can tell, no one is talking about it or learning it (which is also familiar). It's about the contrast between America's two political parties.
Through its work in disease prevention, the CDC has saved millions of lives throughout the globe. Some of Trump's partisan critics question his plan to dismantle it.
These people are unrepentant racists but also too cowardly to use the slur they so desperately want to.
After banning visas for Palestinian children seeking medical care, the Trump administration is now banning any Palestinian passport holders from entering the United States. Extraordinary bigotry being converted into US policy. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/w...
[CUE MUSIC: “IN THE ARMS OF AN ANGEL” PLAYING SOFTLY] [FADE IN BACKGROUND SOUND: A solemn voice reads names] Nate Silver. Matthew Yglesias. Megan McArdle. Mark Cuban. [FADE IN: SALLY STRUTHERS sits on a stool in a pool of light on a minimalist set. She looks SAD.] /1
“.. Memphis, after all, has long been one of the most dangerous cities in the country, with a murder rate about twice as high as the nation’s capital ..” @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
* Trump Family Amasses $6 Billion Fortune After Crypto Launch @wsj.com
Someone please kill me right now.
I've updated my past newsletter platform cost comparison to incorporate Ghost's recent pricing changes for Ghost Pro. (Note that past Ghost users are grandfathered in.)
Get the hell off Substack before you literally can’t anymore without blowing up your business
“Peter Thiel’s AI Palantir Is Supercharging Trump’s Lawfare” In May, Trump’s FHFA Director Bill Pulte announced a “partnership” w/ Palantir to “establish an ‘AI-powered Crime Detection Unit (CDU).’” The CDU promptly began “work at the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae)” 8/29/25…1/
The MAGA/MAHA dudes who are now propping up RFK Jr’s kooky, deadly anti-vaxx actions—Drs Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, Makary, Oz, Prasad—once upon a time were academics in biomedicine, but now do not have an ounce of courage or integrity. The lure of the right-wing & anti-vaxx podcasts is too great 😢
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Seeing much debate over Trump’s latest remarks on covid and RFK Jr Some relevant reporting Yesterday: Steve Bannon told WaPo (left) that he wanted Trump to post asap on TruthSocial, and his admin to push on vaccine data Today: Trump posts a TruthSocial (right), demanding more covid vaccine data
Unless they are billionaires or big corporations…then the DNC and national Dems are all ears…
It isn’t June 2028 and he’s about to cross the delegate threshold for the party nomination. It is even before the time to let potential candidates flourish and prepare to compete for primary votes. The impulses of people to do “rally around the flag” for anyone this for out is just wrong.
The thing that keeps me coming back to the Newsom stuff is that Democrats who object to our saying we'd never vote for him are refusing to treat us as ordinary voters who need to be won over, like any other demographic.
Fun with bottles in Segundo de Chomon's THE RED SPECTRE (1907). The color was likely stencil-applied.
Anyway...Dems need to break out of the impulse to see 200 white people protesting against Covid restrictions as "the voice of the people which we must heed" while seeing 10X as many people protesting racist police violence as "a niche special interest group that's out of step with real Americans."
The George Floyd protests radicalized a lot of white people AGAINST structural racism. In response, the right tapped into frustration over Covid restrictions (imposed by Red AND Blue states almost equally) and white resentments to organize an old fashioned, racialized backlash against the gubmint.
This is "the one big trick" that the right has mastered. They present their movement as just "the authentic voice of the volk outraged by Democratic overreach," when really what they're doing is just old fashioned political mobilization. Organize a passle of pissed off people & call it a movement.
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
I've never seen such a disconnect between Dem elected/staff/consultants and actual Dem voters. The latter understand what's going on. The former are awash in right-wing brainrot, hence @schatz.bsky.social blaming COVID mitigation and BLM marches for the GOP's wanton destruction of public health.
![@EsotericCD It was in this moment that many of us hanging on to a thin sliver of trust in our institutions irrevocably lost faith in them. One of the most poisonous blows to public trust in living memory - worse than the effect of the Iraq War in many ways. RFK Jr is a direct result of this. Quote Steve Guest @SteveGuest · Aug 31 Politico 5 years ago: [screenshot of article falsely claiming public health officials lied about COVID measures then abandoned them for BLM protests] Views](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ddvus7otnqtlh7fdooxm6qat/bafkreihsypwydo5rcis7mc54cwct6h33l5co477nvh7g7hs7na2fz4jl3q@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Just tried watching Ezra Klein’s latest NYT podcast episode on how the U.S. got to this point where vaccines are so politicized. It’s pretty clear that Klein and his guests—David Wallace Wells and Rachael Bedard—really do not understand why/how the political right turned on vaccines.
Good to see a bipartisan group of former CDC Directors raise alarms in the NY Times about RFK Jr. dismantling US public health. And I can’t help but feel frustrated that they didn’t do this last year when public health was on the ballot—nor did NYT frame it that way—when we had a chance to stop it.
The Revolution Wind project was canceled because of the Trump administration’s decision to stall clean energy progress. This project was nearly finished and already delivering more than 1,000 union jobs. www.cnn.com/2025/08/26/b...
I have spent quite a lot of my life researching parasites and ivermectin is a great anti-helmintic that can treat neglected tropical diseases like river-blindness and trichuris (whipworm) and is also used in veterinary medicine to manage worm conditions 🧪🧵
Dead or alive, Rudy Giuliani brought “broken windows” policing to NYC. “Not only did broken windows policing fail to reduce crime, but it also provided cover for a deliberate targeting of Black and brown communities.” Why? The theory comes from rightwing think tankers
I praise the Democrats that are doing well and scold the ones who are dropping the ball. I try to point out the former more than the latter to show there are many Democrats fighting the good fight. Unfortunately none of them are in national or federal leadership. I hope soon that changes.
Not to belabor the point but: I am not the weird one for being this mad at the Democratic Party and its leaders. Look at polls of your average rank and file Dem voters and how they feel about the party now. It is YOU who are out of touch if you’re asking why people are being mean to Dem politicians
ABC News is still calling RFK Jr. a “vaccine skeptic.” The dude was one of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists for decades. There’s video of him in 2023 saying that there’s no vaccine which is safe and effective. You can call him an anti-vaccine activist!
"Sending away the 'others' to make way for white people to flourish is at the literal center of Gast’s painted vision of the West. That vision is reproduced in Homeland Security’s own videos." ICYMI:
"He noted that snippets of Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts, suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies."
This is some of the hardest shit I've seen in my life
not the first person to make this observation but its rules that the "i wont let my body temple be defiled by putting seed oils or processed food in it" people and the "let me go behind the gym to inject these steroids i bought from a guy i met here" people have merged into the same group.
so i assume governors Kehoe (Twice), Lombardo, Dewine and Landry are gonna get this same federal pressure, right?
“Polarize this debate to the max” is right. Public health is very important, real life-and-death stakes. Today’s America has one pro-disease party and one anti-disease party. “Don’t politicize high stakes issues where you’re right”—in the name of civility or unity or whatever—is a terrible norm.
Reminder: the apparent plan was to spirit these children away in the middle of the night without them ever seeing the inside of a courtroom to challenge their deportation. Children.
Thousands of people detained by ICE are actually held in local, publicly operated jails These facilities–run by elected sheriffs–are making money off of the incarceration of people who are mostly accused of no more serious offense than crossing the border without permission
Is he going to lead by example and move back to South Africa permanently and give up his US citizenship? Something tells me no…
Musk now supporting the deportation of anyone who isn’t white. *Do not* use the term “remigration”. It’s an attempt to normalise Nazi hate.
As America becomes more censorious, more prone to limiting speech and prosecuting individuals for attempting to express their constitutional rights, I do think those of us who work in journalism should start teaching Americans rights and safety while talking to the press. To be careful what they (1)
NEW -- Exactly 10 days after taking the oath early this year, Donald Trump nearly drowned dozens, potentially hundreds, of his own citizens in California’s Central Valley. Why? Because he is one of the most ignorant people you will ever meet. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
Normally they've booked 40% of their fall soybean sales to China at this point. This year, they are at 0% booked, and no, that's not a typo. www.farmprogress.com/soybean/us-s...
Amen! A non-enriched dough bun is my preference too. Burgers are rich enough especially with the usual toppings they put on them.
The media just refuses to deal with a famous person embracing obvious evil. That's why the birther thing continued until 2015 before NBC finally canceled The Apprentice.
"The Republican Party wants to pull YOUR teenage daughter's pants down in the middle of gym class if they think she's too good at lacrosse, this is vile and depraved and only the start of their intrusive government overreach" should be the party line and I don't think it's a heavy lift
My favorite sentence in the New York Times explainer on Mamdani and socialism.
Just saw a video of Bill Maher calling Mamdani a “straight up communist” and I continue to be struck by the depiction of policies associated with the New Deal Order as far-left extremism, which goes along with a refusal to depict Trump’s unprecedented authoritarian actions as far-right extremism.
the thing that was terrifying to them about FDR wasn't so much the policies themselves (which were, of course, far short of socialism or communism) but that they were incredibly popular and lead to electoral dominance until FDR's death (and even somewhat after)
Acting Yemeni Prime Minister Muhammad Miftah says that Israel's assassination of PM Ahmed al-Rahawi will only make Yemen "more willing to make sacrifices", saying to "the crown of our heads in Gaza" that "we are with you...with our blood...with our lives".
wow
JUST IN: Judge Sooknanan ordered the government to file a status report by 4 pm to address whether the children have been deplaned. DOJ blew the deadline. Now she orders them to show cause why they didn’t file the report in time — and sets new 6:30 pm deadline.
why can't the democrat messaging on trans people be "no, we are not going to force children to undergo genital inspections in order to play sports"
i don't debate people on the internet anymore, because in this year of our lord 2025, no one is debating in good faith 🤡 the digital commons has been turned into a weird quest for dominance and gotchas & i'm just so tired. talk to anyone, debate no one 🤮
That’s especially true on public social networks. I miss the days of small, well maintained bulletin boards/discussion forms. They were hard to find but enjoyable. I ran the gauntlet in public ones too in the 1990s and 2000s but I’m wait too old and out of patience for that shit nowadays.
After WWII, social scientists studied the personalities of fascists. What they found perfectly describes today’s Republicans: “ethnocentrism, superstition, aggression, cynicism, conservatism, and an inordinate interest in the private sex lives of others.” (Story by @annaleen.bsky.social.)
These guys are so bad at the whole "militarized police force with unending loyalty to dear leader" thing, it's really amazing
"everyone does it" you are still effectively taking out a gun and firing random shots off when you do this, if you don't treat your car like a lethal weapon you are a bad person
At Union Station, veterans play a speech from General Mark Milley warning soldiers of the threat that President Trump poses.
It's been exciting to live through the transition between a time when planets around other stars were the subject of science fiction to a day when hundreds have been detected and almost 100 directly imaged. Check out this cool story about a recent discovery 🧪 www.sci.news/astronomy/pr...
New research finds that AMOC collapse is far more likely than previous climate models indicated. 🌎 #climate 🧪 www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Jesus fucking christ. The Trump administration tried to send a bunch of children to Guatemala at 3 am and justified it by saying that the kids just wanted to return to their parents in Guatemala, but the kids actually told the court that they are afraid of being sent back to Guatemala.
I wish that just once someone would point out that these clowns, who don’t acknowledge the existence of trans men, are in fact the ones forcing men into women’s spaces.
More likely stablecoins will reinforce dollar dominance & cause the next systemic banking crisis bsky.app/profile/mcop...
100% this!
Yes, or they can look to Pritzker, who’s on offense against not only Trump but also the movement he represents. Newsom absolutely accepts and validates their lies. The danger is that other Dems would take away the idea that throwing trans people under the bus and being “tough on crime” is the way
If Newsom manages to get nominated after alienating a big chunk of the base then people will hold their noses and vote for him. Meanwhile, the fact that people say they would never vote for him in 2025 is an electability argument against him in the primaries. So keep that up.
New York’s hottest club is Blame Zohran Mamdani for Crimes Committed While Eric Adams Is Mayor Under Laws Signed by Andrew Cuomo. It’s got everything—corrections officers who aren’t registered to vote in New York City, etc etc etc
Spanberger is running a campaign different than Zohran Mamdani's? Good! Mamdani is running a campaign different than Spanberger's? Also good! Democrats need to be a big tent that allows their candidates to run in ways that are suitable to the electorate they are attempting to win over.
I am absolutely a broken record but: Trumpers are well on their way of convincing a majority of the public that everything is normal and fine. And that is because @schumer.senate.gov and @hakeem-jeffries.bsky.social are not out in public shouting about the occupations of DC and LA.
The Democratic Party has badly lost its way.
NEW: A week or so ago, one federal agent kept popping up in videos from Trump's violent DC crackdown—so @jsweetli.bsky.social and I investigated. Turns out he's a 26-year-old US Parks Police officer, a lesser known law enforcement unit currently championed by Interior Sec. Doug Burnum. Our report:
Did he ever push back on that BS or just give her a chance to drive it home again?!
To be able to say things like this with a straight face, you have to know with certainty that you are talking to babies
Pritzker on Trump sending troops into cities: "He has other aims other than fighting crime... he would like to stop the elections in 2026 or frankly take control of those elections. He'll just claim there's some problem with an election and then he's got troops on the ground that can take control."
This is why they’re pushing Gov Newsom over Pritzker. Pritzkers talking about the rise of fascism. Democratic Party leadership wants everyone to shut up about it.
Our news media are so broken. There's a way to challenge someone in an interview without looking like you're the press secretary for the other side. ABC's Martha Raddatz badly misses the mark. "Why fight with the president?" she asks.
not just that he has no constitutional authority, there isn't even any particular legal or institutional mechanism by which the president can make anyone treat this as anything other than a weird advisory opinion.
WELKER: Do you have 100% confidence in Secretary Kennedy? LANKFORD: I believe he's who the president picked. He's challenging some of the assumption - what is it about autism? He seems to be following the science WELKER: The science has debunked links between autism & vaccines for more than 20 yrs
REP. BUDDY CARTER: We want to make sure that children are protected from trans and that we keep men out of girls' locker rooms REP. WESLEY BELL: So we're going back to attacking trans folks ... let's talk about what's actually happening here
The supposedly liberal media toeing the MAGA party line on this brownshirts bullshit eh? I'm not surprised but still profoundly disappointed.