Gift article. 🎁 Think back to the rambling briefings Trump gave during the Covid pandemic, when he…repeatedly promised that the virus would disappear naturally. “When this conflict is over, the strait will open up naturally,” Trump said Wednesday night of the Strait of Hormuz…Sounds familiar. 🤔

OK so basically he’s saying black players are getting too much compensation. 🙄🙄 “Trump has continued to fixate on the issue in recent appearances, saying that colleges’ and universities’ finances are imperiled by the gyrations affecting revenue-generating sports like football and basketball.”

🎁 "One way to look at the rise of Trump is as part of a decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability. Since Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people...have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions." 🤑

Gift article. "You, too, can be a lone, rugged wolf rising above the masses of sheep. ... That’s exactly how the cryptolords and gambling companies and supplement salesmen want you to feel, because if they can sell you that feeling, they can sell you anything at all. That goes for politicians, too."

Gross 🤮 "The tension with Hegseth was not rooted in substantive differences over the direction of the Army...rather it is the product of Mr. Hegseth’s long-running grievances with the Army...and the defense secretary’s decision to block the promotion of four Army officers to be one-star generals."

Wow, just wow, an actual moment of clarity from Trump. 😳 For anyone hoping that he was going to help lower the cost of daycare (which his private equity bruh friends are relentlessly jacking up 🤑) or would be able to make healthcare less expensive by keeping us out of wars...you got SCAMMED!! 💸💸

No paywall here. "Iran has slowly realized that, unbelievably, it can actually get away with throwing a tollgate across the strait. Thanks to Trump and Israel, Iran has gained immense economic and diplomatic leverage." 🤦🤦

Sounds like socialism to me... I'm ok with that, but let's call it what it is and not pretend that people don't benefit from it in the US!! 🤨 "Americans age 65+...received an estimated $2.7 trillion in federal outlays last year, six times as much as the $449 billion for Americans under 26..."

🎁 article. Good luck to every military officer and NCO trying to maintain good order and discipline in their units! Every idiot E1 is now gonna think Kegsbreath will save them from punishment for their shenanigans. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️ Also, let's not forget these idiots buzzed a "No Kings" demonstration too... 😳

🎁 article So glad we have been pulled into helping Bibi! "This is not a new war. It is the same war on a loop of exhaustion, adrenaline, and worry for your children. To those feelings I must add despair and frustration with the apparent determination of my government to maintain the loop endlessly."

Gift article. 🎁 "Hegseth tries so hard—too hard—to project a tough-guy persona, as if a lot of unresolved issues, a lot of brokenness, are playing themselves out in his life. He seems to be trying to prove a great deal, to himself and to others." 💯

🎁 "conspiracy theories [re:] Trump being blackmailed by the Russians are actually somewhat sympathetic to him. People can at least imagine knuckling under... blackmail; the alternative is that [he] just isn’t all that bothered by anything Putin does, up to and including attempts to kill Americans."

Gift article on why so much misery at a time of such wealth. "We can’t have what we can’t afford, and we can’t have what we used to afford, and that combination can make even a middle-class American who may be well-off by historical standards feel very poor indeed." PREACH!

Gift article. Sounds like socialism for the rich to me! 🤑 "Even by French standards, a wealthy retired couple receiving nearly six figures from a national pension program is absurd. A more typical maximum public benefit for a retired couple in the developed world is between $30,000 and $40,000."

🎁"It’s a heavier lift for a great power to exert control over a waterway than it is for a smaller power to simply put the waterway at risk ... US adversaries surely see the Iran war as an...opportunity to bleed the U.S., with Russia already supplying Iran targeting information and advanced drones."

🎁 Gift article, great thought piece: "The Republican Party’s only force still resisting anti-Semitism is committed to the fantasy that it barely exists. ... The Republicans willing to condemn anti-Semitism on the right are either afraid to or simply refuse to blame the figure who legitimized it."

Gift article, a good overview of the report's shortcomings: "Mueller was a man who believed in the rule of law and the value of precedent, and he abided by an unspoken code of honor. He did not understand and so could not anticipate the moves of those who did not share his values or his code." 🤦🤦

🎁 "If a public figure today talked the way conservatives once talked—about the virtue of compassion; about the importance of good character in our leaders and resisting our baser impulses; about the need to encourage courtesy and decency, and refine manners and morals—they would be mocked as woke...

Just heard a clip of Sam Alito talking about mail in ballots today and he sounds **indistinguishable** from a run of the mill YouTube conspiracy theorist. You can tell his mind is basting in right wing propaganda all day long.

Gift article 🎁. So many good quotes in this about Trump's plans to destroy DC with his venal tackiness and the impacts of this on the country; here is my favorite: “We find ornaments increase in proportion as art declines, or as ignorance abounds." -Benjamin Latrobe (1806)

“As the cost of oil continues to soar, the Treasury Department on Friday lifted sanctions on 140 million barrels of Iranian crude already loaded onto vessels, which the Trump administration says will help ease prices — but which is also likely to provide revenue for Iran’s war effort.” 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

[Imagining "conservatives" reacting to Obama even joking about a coin EVER having his image on it, even after his death...] 🤔

Gift article. 🎁 George F. Will nails it: "Longevity is a social triumph. But in the context of increasingly competent (and expensive) medicine, and an entitlement state, it can be ruinous. And is regressive: It involves huge annual transfers of wealth upward from current workers to retirees..." 💯💯💯

🎁 art"GRT is...the ideological fetters by which the rich persuade the white, heterosexual, Christian working and middle classes to prefer their own domination by oligarchic elites over the prospect of shedding their privilege and struggling for freedom in solidarity with more vulnerable minorities."

Gift article: DISGUSTING!! 🥴🤢🤮🤑 "The email said Mr. Trump was 'opening up spots on the National Security Briefing Membership,' and that people signing up would...receive his 'private national security briefings, unfiltered updates on the threats facing America.'"

Gift article 🎁: "Just as the Roman empire survived for two more centuries after it started to decline, the United States isn’t in danger of imminent collapse. But Trump’s rejection of planning, expertise, and diplomacy is beginning to have real-world consequences."

Wow, this just OOZES with empathy…from a guy with his own f’ing security detail… 🙄🙄

Not a personality cult, nor pagans cosplaying as Christians! Seriously I think one of the 9/11 hijackers would be a more appropriate co-pilot here.

Wow, just DRIPPING with empathy. Yeah, guess that’s the way it was for your generation when your daddy had some shady doctor make it not the way it is for you 🖕🏻🖕🏻 And now the way it is for “suckers and losers” who volunteer

Gift article 🎁 “I’ve long argued that anti-Zionism and antisemitism aren’t the same thing. Yet as antisemitism rises in the United States, contempt for Israel sometimes gives way to anti-Jewish paranoia and hostility.”

Gift article. Sound eerily familiar to anyone? 🤔

🎁 "Given the sharp differences between Trump and every other Republican president of the modern era...evangelicals are desperate to rationalize their support for a man who gratuitously and intentionally inflicts unnecessary suffering on his opponents. That’s exactly how empathy becomes a sin."

All so Bibi can cling to power and some whackos can have their stupid settlements... 💔 "Jewish parents around the globe will soon be in a position they never dreamed of: watching their children and grandchildren learn what it’s like to be Jewish in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state."

How is anyone surprised that Trump sided with the pesticide industry over MAHA moms?? 🙄🙄 TP podcaster Jones: “Women feel like they were lied to, that MAHA movement is a sham. How am I supposed to rally these women to vote red in the midterms? How can we win their trust back? I am unsure if we can.”

Nothing to see here people! 🫣🤮 Fascism expert: it’s about "showing the omnipresence of the leader...They’re looking at you wherever you go if you see them in front of the building, so that the idea is that the power really emanates from that leader and not from the institutions or the personnel.”

Truth! 🙏🏻🙏🏻 Per the judge: “Each person who visits the President’s House and does not learn of the realities of founding-era slavery, receives a false account of this country’s history.” 👏🏻👏🏻

🎁 Be very afraid for our country's soul: "Two judges from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling that, if allowed to stand, could result in the indefinite detention of millions of immigrants in inhumane, overcrowded facilities scattered across the United States." 😱😱

Hey y'all, concentration camps are here. 😱 While the ultimate objective is not killing these detainees, remember that such camps pre-date the Holocaust; the British were among the first to use them, during the Boer Wars. The point is, humans are being held en masse in inhumane conditions in the US!

🎁 “Rather than trying to shrink the 1A liberties of retired servicemembers, Hegseth...might reflect and be grateful for the wisdom and expertise that retired servicemembers have brought to public discussions. If so, [he] will more fully appreciate why the Founding Fathers made free speech the 1A!” 👏

Pam Bondi has nothing more to say about why she hired a Jan. 6 insurrectionist who was indicted on multiple charges and yelled for the killing of police officers defending the Capitol

Such a hypocrite!! 🙄 "In his 2013 graduate thesis, Hegseth was an admirably bipartisan advocate for the “laudable goal” of closing racial achievement gaps; he supported “equality, diversity, and accessibility” in public education and called for allying with Democrats to improve such opportunities."

Had to repost + gift this, it's so damn good: "JD Vance never tires of pointing out that America is a philosophically Christian nation...but the administration is doing more than any antifa foot soldier to dismantle that philosophy as the fundamental basis of our government’s political legitimacy."

Gift article: 💯💯💯 "Part of the point of messages like Guichet’s is to absolve her audience of the need to engage in a subject that makes them uncomfortable. [According to one professor] 'It’s emboldening people to say, I am not required to speak on this, and that doesn’t make me a bad person,'"

THEY ARE TRYING TO ERASE THE LGBTQIA+ COMMUNITY! One more step in this effort: "The Trump administration removed the rainbow-colored Pride flag from a flagpole outside the Stonewall National Monument, outraging local leaders who called the decision an affront to the gay rights movement."

INSANE! 🤪 "One evening last summer, Donna Hughes-Brown was handcuffed and led into a filthy holding cell somewhere in Kentucky, where insects crawled out of a drain and feces streaked the walls. Her crime? Writing two bad checks, for a combined total of less than $75, more than a decade earlier."

Re: Miller's claims that might makes right: "To sympathetic ears, Mr. Miller sounded refreshingly unsentimental and cleareyed. But the 'niceties' he disparaged aren’t just some naïve fantasy. They are the values of Christianity, the faith the Trump administration purports to defend and uphold." 🤔

💔"In the first years of the war, it was more than coincidental that the frontline fighters were disproportionately Black. The [LBJ admin] scheme, known as Project 100,000, protected the white middle class by preserving college deferments. Nearly half of those brought in by the project were Black..."

In a previous Dept of Labor post this punk made: The typeface in the post, called Fraktur, had been used in early Nazi government documents and on the original cover of Hitler’s book, “Mein Kampf”... [the post also] showed 11 stars, the same number as appeared on one of the Confederate flags. 🙋‍♂️🙋‍♀️🤦

Wow, big surprise, the biggest targets are entities that serve the LGBT community...so yes, they want LGBT people to die.