I feel sorry for those Polish troops they sent to Iraq in 2003. The deal was that Poland would pretend to believe aluminum tubes posed a threat to the safety of the free world in exchange for us being there when Ivan came knocking and now the president is like “Well, Ivan *does* have a point.”

it is extremely funny that RFK both does not believe in the germ theory of disease and is a lab leak truther

“Never tried therapy before but this is probably it?” See the is the problem. People think therapy is about making you feel “heard and warm” and yes, it can be incredibly validating But uh. No that’s not the intended purpose of therapy and a chat bot can’t give that to you

this is such a funny email to send millions of people several times per week

I feel like "attention hacking" is most of politics now. The Minnesota aid fraud story is becoming a perfect example. Recap: In 2022, the Biden DOJ filed the first charges against dozens of fraudsters, many of them Somali-American, who'd fleeced a state food aid program. (1/x)

The whitewashing of white supremacists by the NYT extends beyond the politics desk: Brigitte Bardot, a star-& virulent racist-dies: NYT vs Le Monde. Headline “renounced stardom” vs “sympathy for far right” Subhed: “devote her life to animal welfare” vs “ Convicted 5 x for racist remarks” 1/

This would look great on a 2026 midterms campaign ad

Anti-trans demagogue and fifth place swimmer Riley Gaines earned $470,000+ last year from a conservative non-profit. Notably, $420k was incentive-based. A neat little window into the way the transphobic grift is being compensated. I wonder what the per-post rate is?

Now that Bari Weiss pulled a segment telling the truth about Trump's deportations to let Stephen Miller have his say (i.e. spread propaganda), it's a good time to check out our deep dive into Miller's real worldview and agenda, which doesn't pull any punches: newrepublic.com/article/2041...

"Kavanaugh Stop" went from a skeet on here to Bluesky meme to crosspollinating over on X to Brett Kavanaugh's burner account seeing it there to a whiny defensive footnote about it in a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States. Juice.

90% of military history is about where the latrines are dug. You cannot make war if you have dysentery.

my festive spirit amidst our grimly stupid reality (2025)

A Trump-appointed judge was so upset with the living conditions in which ICE detained an immigrant in Long Island, New York, that he threatened to hold the government in contempt. “I have never encountered anything like this." trib.al/MUDsbeq

Casual reminder that the myth of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” is a cruel hoax designed to convince poor people from all walks of life that the injustices they face are a result of their own actions, rather than an oppressive system rigged against them.

👇🎯 She is totally uninterested in doing actual, hard, non-performative work, whether that involves her fake journalism or her fake universities. The only thing bigger than her fundamental unseriousness & fundamental grift is her fundamental laziness. bsky.app/profile/mcop...

she's just doing what she was hired to do

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.

This is the story Bari Weiss apparently doesn't want you to hear. Trump has been sending people to the camps. talkingpointsmemo.com/where-things...

i was especially struck by these paragraphs, which rang very true to me. libs who grew up around conservatives aren't embarrassed to be liberals--or confused about what conservatives want. there's a certain kind of elite media man, on the other hand--

"after Epstein had been released from a Florida jail, it was an exclusive gathering..." This 'David Brooks dinner with Jeffrey Epstein' story gets worse by the minute. Read Buzzfeed on the 2011 dinner with Epstein that included Brooks, Bezos, Musk, Brin... www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pete...

I've had the privilege of making several foreign language deals this year. In each case, I've insisted on human translators. Translators are amazing. Translation is an art. Do not cut humans out of the humanities.

Muting a Black woman to claim the vote was unanimous is so incredibly on the nose

The Medicaid ban on healthcare for trans youth - yes, ANOTHER ban - has passed the House with increased Democratic support. Fuck these fascists and collaborators. Trans kids deserve the world.

Breaking News: Investigators identified a person of interest in the Brown University shooting and were looking at a possible connection to the killing of an MIT professor, an official said.

The Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations said the renaming vote was unanimous. Yet Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the board, said she was “muted on the call and not allowed to speak or voice my opposition.” https://wapo.st/4schjzl

They booked a bunch of 14 year old models to come to a Mar A Lago party, told them to dress sexy and tried to ply them with alcohol.

So many people are rushing to see which lickspittles were put on the Kennedy Center board by Trump to get this outcome ...

This part: During a trip to the bathroom, they ran into Mr. Trump's new wife. (Marla) Maples clasped her hands, Ms. Coleman recalled, and looked her in the eye. "Whatever you do, do not let her around any of these men, and especially my husband," she told Ms. Coleman. "Protect her"

Student and veteran journalists say that college newsrooms, indie media and legacy outlets across Chicago are now working together in ways that upend decades of cutthroat competition, building tools to track immigration enforcement and collaborating on information www.reuters.com/business/med...

One of the things that you see at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina is a Jim Crow era Coke machine that was designed to fit into a segregated bus station. One machine two sides. The Coke cost more on the Black side.

I think the bigest difference between the White House staff in the first and second Trump Administrations is that a whole lot of folks in the former assumed they could control Trump or influence him. The 2.0 folks see Trump as a way to burn America down so that they can rebuild a tech dystopia.

Holiday Hot Take Number 14: The modern American Christmas literally would not exist as we know it without a Russian Jewish refugee, one of the pillars of the 20th century American songbook, Irving Berlin. If your version of Christmas is xenophobic or antisemitic, you should call it something else.

This line in the Trump administration National Security Strategy is explicit pro-white prejudice as policy www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u...

ME PRE TRANSITION: lava is so cool THE LADS: hehe yeah bro ME POST TRANSITION: lava is so cool THE LADS: aha easy mistake to make but actually it's very hot

We are in an age where we have been forced to recognise the need for increased media literacy, and yet I haven't seen a single comment noticing that this video does not in fact show this woman breaking anyone's glasses.

bugs bunny was literally the first guy in drag i ever saw but ok

The RFK/Trump Vaccine policy isn’t about “choice.” If it were, they wouldn’t have removed the tool for finding vaccines. And the bodily choice analogy is BS anyway. If I get an abortion, that doesn’t harm YOUR fetus. www.forbes.com/sites/brucel...

Every interview with a right-wing politician is like: "Mr. Hitler is adamant: If we sacrifice enough children, Santa Claus will come back and deliver 5% GDP growth. But I have to ask him: Do you ever worry that your relentless advocacy for working folks offends the rootless cosmopolitan parasites?"

insane local news just dropped. i've lived in a part of KC for ~decade and it's been an inside joke with friends and service workers that the local biz/party district is ran by a cartel of biz owners who bully out new ventures and replace them with generic dive bars for white suburbanites. Well UH

Anyway: If this year has taught you anything, I hope it's that white supremacy is fake as hell, fails without support, and requires extensive enforcement and blatant acts of favoritism and exclusion to survive. All-white/white supremacist spaces, political, social, and professional, are a choice.

It would cost $30 billion to end homelessness in the USA.

THERAPIST: You're tired. You've been masking all day, doing Image Management. It's hard work. ME: Damn. I am tired. That feels right. THERAPIST: Also, in every argument you've ever had, you were always the one who was right. ME (silently breaking down): Wow (nodding; tearful nodding). Wow.

What a lede on this story: Man who complained about narrowing a road in order to protect pedestrians, so much that the city eventually reversed the change, then kills a woman on that very road with his car www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

Scientific naming is great because you'll hear the latin name of an animal and be like wow that sounds so fancy and esoteric and it translates to "Goofy Tooth" or "Potato Ass"

This is absolutely real. The current HBO Max version of this "Mad Men" episode "remastered for 4K" did not include an updated visual effects shot, which originally painted out the crew and equipment. Not just that, the HBO Max episode titles/order is jumbled for s01.

It sucks that meeting a new class now involves not just going over the syllabus, setting expectations, and trying to establish a rapport, but also trying to deduce whether any of your new students are vigilante right wing operatives out to seek viral controversy at the expense of your job

Refreshingly clear language from the NYT

This is an ethnic cleansing campaign

Guzmán, an immigrant from Mexico, had a pending petition for asylum and a pending application for a visa for victims of crime. That didn't stop ICE from separating her from her 15-day-old infant in NICU. 19thnews.org/2025/12/post... via @19thnews.org

A Democratic win in TN-7 is a long shot, but not impossible. This is a district that was created when they gerrymandered the state to take away the Democratic seat in Nashville, and it was one Trump won by 22 points a year ago. If the GOP squeaks by with say 5-7 points, that's a red alarm.