This crackdown has me thinking about one of the greatest weaknesses of US journalism’s “objectivity” paradigm, which is that it has a massive carve-out for “this is My Country that self-evidently deserves my loyalty and deference”

This is where the right’s “media bias” nonsense was always headed. It was always doublespeak and a demand for full control of the narrative

Mario Guevara is here legally and is not facing any criminal charges. He is being thrown out of the country for nothing but reporting news.

"I see no reason why you and I won’t be next on the list, because well-resourced opposition is all but nonexistent."

For years at Tone Madison we talked in circles about whether to cover food, how to add something interesting amid the abundance of (often very good!) food writing in town. Several writers took creative stabs at it over the years, but @jesseraub.bsky.social has really found a special groove

When you meet someone who wants you to be institutionalized, prosecuted, or killed, you should be asking yourself: what do I have in common with this person? Tomorrow from Ezra Klein

Saw someone driving around listening to this specific version of this and I support it, bc this fucks youtu.be/RsKqMNDoR4o?...

Just a reminder that Madison has an incredible resource in @4starvideo.bsky.social, which has an easy DVD subscription plan (they have lots of TV shows too), and a Madison Public Library card gets you access to both physical media rentals and the free Kanopy streaming service, which is pretty good!

News and Politics Editor Juan Carlos Garcia Martinez talks with local activists, like attorney Aissa Olivarez and professor Armando Ibarra, who are putting a renewed emphasis on legal strategy and grassroots movements to defend immigrant rights during a time of relentless fascist threats.

From 2020:

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

Everyone and I do mean everyone must tone down the rhetoric so that we can heal via the time-honored ritual of caging a human being for x amount of years in order to murder him at a later date with a weird contraption

I’m running across this almost a month late, but the people of Madison simply cannot congratulate the people of Seattle enough for this hire

SENATOR: Do you or do you not agree Mr Secretary that American children should not die of rickets all the time RFK JR: [ping pong ball zooming around in a corroded snorkel at varying frequencies]

We don't know what's going to happen so might as well fight for better. That's really my basic political orientation.

This is especially meaningful from Coates because (as far as I have ever been able to tell) he just doesn’t have meanness in him. Not even playful overly-online meanness. At at his most unsparing he is almost uncannily gentle and empathetic. Like a Low song or something. Don’t lose that ever

So much right-wing political violence is baked into the everyday workings of government, economics, and social life. We just don’t always frame it that way, because it seems so normal and because conservatives believe it is their racial/religious/cultural destiny to hold dominion over everyone else

"Homelessness can't be addressed if the City and County aren't on the same page and mutually committed to making good solutions even better." @stinadale.bsky.social assesses Madison's regressing attitudes towards unhoused people in this week's Microtones.

The Ezra Klein column is the ideal tribute: a liberal pundit willfully seeing good faith where there isn’t any. Careful what you get good at

Putting a sentence like this in front of an editor is like saying “this statement is false” to an evil computer

A few months back I stepped down as publisher of @tonemadison.bsky.social, grateful and relieved to leave it in the hands of three wonderful colleagues. They’ve kept on putting out journalism that no one else in Madison is even trying to do. They need your help, because reader support is everything

beautiful writing from @wisconsam.bsky.social here

The depths of evil www.bbc.com/news/article...

The Milwaukee police union calling for national guard troops is of course vile, but underscores that cops don’t reflect the politics or values of the communities they police

Ran across this a few days late but the fact that an article about Epic working with Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services doesn’t mention the context of Trump’s massive cuts to Medicaid is completely insane

And if you want to speak up about this mess, there's a group of us who will be at the meeting tonight in person to give testimony!

1/ Tonight the Dane County Board will vote on a proposal to introduce mail scanning at the county jail, which would eliminate most paper mail for people incarcerated there. Meeting details, and a short thread on this proposal and the messy discourse around it:

Multiple Pulitzers for whichever photographer made Sean Duffy look like a reticulant in an 11th century religious painting

A church in my neighborhood has a little free library/pantry thing with this warning on it, in case anyone wants to risk life and limb for canned corn or a mediocre fantasy paperback

The whole Hippie Christmas thing feels like a way of tricking people into celebrating their squalor, celebrating the fact that almost every landlord in town treats every tenant like a dumb kid. Also having August as the default move time is gonna kill people as it gets hotter

New, from me: America is no longer a functioning democracy. It is a competitive authoritarian system, hurtling rapidly toward authoritarianism. This was a hard piece to write but we can't move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-author...

I get tripped up sometimes balancing “right-wing complaints about media bias have always been manufactured bullshit” and “a lot of commentators need to be reminded that manufacturing optimism about Dems isn’t the assignment,” even though both are solidly true!

Today’s Executive Order creating a *nationwide* military “quick reaction force” and setting up an online portal to permit random fascist vigilantes to join soldiers is one of the scariest things I’ve seen in U.S. politics in my adult life. Why is it not getting more attention?

Like if you don't think centrists use their own impenetrable jargon that nobody likes then I have a commonsense bipartisan opportunity economy where existential threats to fair trade are a national security threat to sell you

This makes me feel agèd but a spot-on appreciation of this record. Relentlessly catchy and always stretching. Listening too long to one song indeed

Right, serious grown-up politics is based on hearing a term you hadn’t heard of yesterday and becoming irrationally aggrieved about it

Thinking about the fact that the US has never ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, mostly because of right-wingers who think hitting their kids and raising them in an atmosphere of cult-compound ignorance is a sacred right of some kind

reMarkable 2 users: is there a case/folio for this thing that isn’t super-expensive or totally janky? I have the basic sleeve-type folio it came with but could use something heftier

One thing I know in my bones about U.S. right-wingers: They often have a fierce sense of responsibility for people in their immediate circles, but it stops, hard, at their own front door until something kicks it down

The thing about Alien: Earth is someone said “what if Alien but add a Vampire Weekend guy in five-figure pajamas” and somehow it worked

Reading this is like watching a master assassin hunker down at the grindstone. Also it’s fucking funny at the least expected moments. I laughed I cried and why are my guts over there?? Fuck

The most misleading statement Barrett makes about mail scanning is this: "The evidence is clear." It is very much not clear. Dane County's own data on mail and contraband is especially not clear, as we found when we actually bothered to check out these claims tonemadison.com/articles/dan...

"Oshkosh Corporation continues to play a fundamental role in the genocide of Palestinians while profiting in the hundreds of millions," reports first-time contributor Julian Cooper. Header illustration by @cmy-kay.bsky.social

Was fully prepared to enjoy this as just-OK slop with xenomorph but so far it fucks. Alien does not remotely need be a franchise, so take risks and go wild if you’re gonna do it. More importantly, Aftermath says it’s good

I am more tired of complaints about blah new buildings than I am of blah new buildings, and here is why!!

Commercial that's like, "Fascism is here. And so are our back-to-school savings"

I made a short off-the-cuff guitar improv track the other night. Recording is pretty bare-bones but it felt good to do

There could be a "Leos, amirite" joke in here but I refuse to claim this flesh-smooshed-into-Funko-Pop-shape-looking fuck

Incredible to have an all-time great labor writer and all-time great metal writer in one person