Sorry, can we just... can we just discuss what does and doesn't constitute a "gaffe"?

Now I’m remembering Bill Donahue of the Catholic League going on CNN and rationalizing the church sex-abuse scandal with “they were ACTUALLY teenagers in many cases so the issue is they were GAY” like he really thought he’d found a secret cheat code.

This, from when the birthday letter came out, seems worth re-upping.

I’d like to apologize to every cartoonishly sleazy journalist character who was a secondary villain in a ‘90s-era thriller, I rolled my eyes at you because you seemed so implausible but I now know you walk among us and were in regular email contact with Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s nonfiction but “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” closed the gap for me between “they don’t know what they’re doing” at a policy level and what that actually looks like on a human level to the people affected.

I like that the producers are now going full Annie Wilkes about their own decision, and every response to this is people going “I don’t give a shit, just pretend it didn’t happen.”

I’ve written about a lot of forensic charlatanism over the years, but this is might be the most laughably stupid garbage I’ve ever seen. Hope this woman sues the pants off of them. www.theblaze.com/news/former-...

Oh wow, for anyone who had to cover him in the late ‘00s, this feels like a Glenn Beck fuckup of a kind we haven’t seen since the glory days of the Eric Massa interview.

I missed this story when it first came out, and hoo boy.

football’s all like gimme that coconut i want it it’s beautiful but tennis is all like fuck this stupid lemon i hate it

Following up on this. This remains a ‘cave is minutes or hours away’ situation. If you want to impact how this plays out you need to contact senators literally now. I want to add additional points of context. What I’m relaying is what I’ve picked up from highly reliable sources.

The thing I like best about “Pluribus” is that it’s like “make the whole plane out of the black box”, but for “the ‘Better Call Saul’ scenes where Kim Wexler has no patience for this bullshit”.

With a “WOW!,” President Trump posts a claim about DOGE and “royalties linked to Obamacare” that originated on a satirical website. That site’s own About section reads: “Everything on this website is fiction… If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined.”

It’s nice to watch Jeff Bezos’s Charles Foster Kane fantasy of directing the tide of public opinion run aground on the fact none of his existing readers want this, and the massive, well-funded right-wing media complex means the only writers he can hire are sub-Free Beacon level.

I assume someone has done it but —

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

All else aside, this in-store "Pluribus" experience sounds creepy as hell.

Uncritically publishing an article like this is like a bat-signal summoning @poetofcode.bsky.social and @timnitgebru.bsky.social to set things straight.

The fine print at the top of this chart is so small that for a brief moment I just thought to myself, “Wow, good news for Fred!”

Maybe this was obvious to everyone but I’ve spent the day thinking “don’t they have someone there who can make a nicer sign?” And it only just hit me: They absolutely do, and that person deliberately chose to tell the President, “This is the best I can do.”

I'm not sure why the sandwich jury is still deliberating but if they wait till after lunch tomorrow to deliver their verdict they have the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

I’m looking for folks with IDD and their families who rely on SNAP and want to talk to a journalist about it. DM me here, email me at sluterman dot 19thnews dot org, or hit me up on Signal at slooterman.18.

“The future of finance is here, and it’s the Smart Con wait shit have the signs already been printed? They have?”

“Oh wow, how bad could a rebranding be?” [two paragraphs into the story] “Oh.”

And it shouldn’t be at all unusual to hear a campaign suggest that the quality of life in your city/state/country is something you should ascribe to the choices of people *more* powerful than you rather than the failings of people *less* powerful than you. But it felt unusual to me. (3/3)

In light of the stunning size of the blue wave, I’m also thinking of all the important races that Dems left on the table by not running a candidate:

The story I want to read more than any other right now — and that I’m assuming a lot of people are working on — is the inside story of Cuomo’s campaign. The good news for reporters is, no one in that campaign seems capable of either discretion or good judgment.

It's very odd to frame this as ranked-choice voting unseating "a popular incumbent" in favor of "a pol most voters didn't choose" when that "popular incumbent" has just 34% of the first-choice votes. Like, by their own definition, even if Frey wins, he'll be someone "most voters didn't choose."

A thing I’d be curious for New York election writers to answer is — given I’m guessing there are a lot of first-time voters today — what happens to a ballot where someone fills in both ovals for a candidate who appears twice? Does the machine reject it? Does the vote not count?

You can tell the campaign staff is good because you don't know any of their names.

Wait until I tell you about the percentages with which Bill Clinton, patron saint of triangulation, won the presidency and reelection.

Oh hey cool what’s Andrew Cuomo’s wife been up to?

i understand that this is an important thing related to the direction a major news organization is currently hurtling toward but you’re gonna need to give me a minute to get past “Laurie Orlando”

these people are just pathologically stupid

I mean, the thing about this kind of mistake is, you know exactly what sort of person made it and why.

You laugh, but this is how the exododus went extinct

I don't ask for much, just for Edi Patterson to eventually play Nancy Mace in a biopic.

Technically the story after the semicolon is about the Guinness Book of World Records, but boy does it feel Freudian for the new CBS News

The thing about Dhar Mann videos is, you watch them and you think the villains are too cartoonish, too broadly written, and then you remember there's exactly one guy who actually does talk like that, and he's the president.

We’re now two days out from the election and still nothing. I really hope some reporter does a forensic dive into where all the Cuomo campaign funding went, because…

If you're looking for some food banks to donate to, we vetted a ton all over the country back in 2020, in conjunction with our marble league sponsorship, a sentence that I swear made sense in context. Anyway -- there are links to 17 of them in this thread. (And apologies for linking to... y'know.)

Look folks gen AI videos are out in the wild so if you weren't already being careful about sharing rage bait videos then now is a great time to start If you can't trace a video back to a trusted source then I recommend leaving it where it is, like a slice of bologna you found on the street

The simplest reason why the Trump administration is cutting off SNAP, despite adequate reserves, is that they hate the program and don't care about the people who depend upon it. They are breaking the law not to provide SNAP while also enforcing the "equal treatment rules" to hurt SNAP users.

For those who already know Bolts is one of the best sites out there covering local government around the country — they’re having a fundraising drive starting today! boltsmag.org/donate-page/...

Oh man, this post now has Benjamin Sisko’s pronunciation of “base-ball”, with an audible hyphen, stuck in my head.

Well, this is just lovely, and the B-roll of CBS journalists hard at work is well-chosen.

The hit single that consists of a us state abbreviation followed by its capital is Ms Jackson.