Sen. Van Hollen is right: "The United States shouldn’t just be talking about ending the slaughter in Sudan." “We should actually be using our leverage" -- specifically by halting arms to the UAE. Thank you @vanhollen.senate.gov 👏

[Darth Vader when he strikes Obi-Wan down and he disappears leaving only his robes behind] Damn that’s… that’s not what happened to all those kids

Everyone thought all Jedi disappeared when they died until 1999, when one didn’t. It through a bunch of books and comics for a loop.

Some concept art for the #aztecbatman animated movie! Variants of the Batsignal / Emblem, obsidian Batarangs, the Bati-chalupa (more adequate for the canals of Tenochtitlán than the Batmobile!), and some weapons, belt and shield designs. #batman #joker #catwoman #animation

In "world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor--the neighbor who resolutely respects himself &, because he does so, respects the rights of others-- the neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in & with a world of neighbors."

A really good piece from @emilyctamkin.bsky.social which makes the point I also have been making: the *pro-Israel political coalition* was the driver of making Israel so salient in the June 2025 and June 2026 primaries, which in turn helped catapult Mamdani et al because *voters agree with Mamdani*.

Yall better just say some bullshit like “the beauty of the Democratic Party is that it can grow and evolve to better serve its members, and a vigorous primary process ensures we’re doing just that,” tighten your belts for a season, and hope that “beating you in elections” is as radical as it gets.

Personally, if I were one of the Third Way ghouls who helped to hollow out labor, vilify the poor (especially when they’re black), and lay the ground work for furthering private profit over public good, I would shut the fuck up when a new era of young politicians attempted to revive my party.

It would be pretty cute if I got to 300 pre orders this week, just saying

We love the Gross Reflecting Pool story because it is a Groverhaus

US blinds itself from Seeing Like A State.

🦀 See a crab, post a crab 🦀

In summary, the bad news is that the party establishment is incompetent and weak. But the good news is that the party establishment is incompetent and weak :)

One thing about Pelosi as an establishment leader: she wouldn’t be whining with this “how dare you run for our seats” stuff. She’d be trying to convert and make the new electeds work for the establishment.

Going through Mamdani's inaugural for reasons and "We expect greatness from the cooks wielding a thousand spices, from those who stride out onto Broadway stages, from *our starting point guard at Madison Square Garden.*" What a called shot. January 1!

Incredible strategy to try and attack the opposition by identifying it with a generational charismatic talent whose organization has proved in back-to-back years that their GOTV efforts are not a fluke but a durable force.

he's still called Speechboy because his pokemon trainer refuses to allow him to evolve into Speechman

democrats: hey we found messaging and actions that resonate with people and galvanizes them around hope within an era of profound hopelessness also democrats: yeh but i don't like it

Same for Mamdani except in even starker terms bc US has rarely ever grappled with Muslim or Third World perspectives on Palestine at all, and so this is a new thing for a lot of people to see someone who does not even begin to approach the issue from the baseline assumptions that Jews/the US does.

Lander is from a milieu which is only seen as radical because of this: US is uniquely intellectually and politically impoverished on the issue of Palestine so a Jew [elected official] who is serious about his objections comes off as strange when he is actually close to the median Jew [US citizen]

📢"The American people do not want a war with Cuba, especially not after the costly, ill-conceived debacle in Iran." As @welch.senate.gov argues, diplomacy is the path forward with Cuba - not immoral economic warfare and military threats that will only cause more suffering and instability. ⬇️

It's easier for media to portray the election as an attack on American Jews than to delve into what NY-10 really was: The second most Jewish Congressional district in the US having a referendum between two Jewish candidates on what it means to do Jewish politics in the age of Trump and Netanyahu.

Given the role of a prominent real estate development family in our light treasons, we need a Bluth and Reconciliation Commission

Hope there's a scene in the Social Reckoning where Zuckerberg has to watch grown adults say things like "because he felt he was denied seggs he decided to unalive 30 people at a spicy novel conference with a pewpew"

Shot-in-the-dark question for the hivemind: what kind of bag is Rick Dalton carrying here?

Mamdani is the moderate on Palestine in the party

Espaillat's loss can in, part, by directly traced back to ICE's kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil

tough few elections for the better things aren't possible party

It's so funny that The Atlantic started as an abolitionist journal and is now, among other things, the retirement home for Bush-era xenophobes

Tim Robinson's "Dan Flashes" bit but it's just Brad Lander explaining various pride flags

Brad Lander in this hat specifically is a Tim Robbins character, which tbc is praise

wait, i've got something for this...

[taps earpiece] I'm told that if you listen closely you can hear, beneath the sound of monsters and the old world dying, signs of a new world struggling to be born

I would simply suggest that if people want to defend democracy and see defeating incumbent democrats as the way to do that, then the failure lies not with the challengers and voters but with the incumbents who failed, often repeatedly, to meet the moment while squandering energy and donations.

Here's the thing about electoralism: it's way better to be winning races than not contesting them.

Give them food tokens, and give them Black Lotuses, too.

That Musk is on a daylong crashout over this is an indication that somewhere in his little bird brain is the realization that, no matter what else he does, one of the first lines in his obituary is going to be about how he directly oversaw the circumstances for millions of excess deaths globally

It is substantially easier to advance the goals of empire in a world where people are starving, poor, and subservient to your political objectives. A concrete example of this is the renegotiation of PEPFAR through State under bilateral MOUs that link essential medicines to fucking mining rights.

I have worked with (1) USAID, (2) State, and (3) the intelligence community in my professional experience, and while there is certainly cross-pollination and alignment of objectives across the executive branch, the simple fact is that American imperialism is the reason USAID is *gone*

Now in both chambers! www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/u...

reading about every 6-3 decision and thinking about how unseriously those at the highest levels have taken judicial overreach since Bush V Gore and especially since 2013.

The Battle of the Bilge.

I was asked outright what the problem was with doing this at a book Q&A in the fall. The argument was that with all the data ChatGPT takes in, it likely knows its users' political interests better than they do. Wasn't really sure where to start in response.

One of the most important and widely-applicable concepts I explore in the book, as it happens, is small-r republicanism as described (contestably) by Philip Pettit among others — the idea that we should resist not only direct abuses but concentrations of power that might allow an entity to abuse us.

Musk, as cartoon supervillian as ever a person has been, hates when people with relevant expertise in life saving get attention instead of him, and he killed USAID for it, a massacre with outsized harm that serves no master other than his ego internationalpolicy.org/publications...

In the last three hours, Musk has posted that USAID “was central to the creation of COVID-19,” “funded coronavirus research in China that killed millions of people,” “was used for terrorism,” and “killed millions.”

Keir Starmer (Labour, 2024-2026)

this also works for Brandon Flowers solo country album www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

centrist pundits: elite institutions have for too long disdained america's agrarian volk, whose voracious id represents the country's true & enduring essence me, a booze reporter: anheuser-busch made a tractor into a bar because bigots posted some mean things about bud light online three years ago