This is an excellent point and it explains much of the disconnect we see on the milktoasty Democratic messaging that sends Bluesky posters into a fury on a daily basis.

This myth of McConnell governing with senate minorities is widespread on Bluesky, despite it being utterly false. I must see it ten times a day. Where did this myth come from, and who injected it into the American leftist brain?

I mean, at least it's a day that will live in infamy and not our new national holiday?

Obviously this is both petty and ludicrous. But what it does is give license to any Trumpers running a national park gate to charge anti-Trumpers an entrance fee whenever they feel like it.

The do-something replies on this are wild. I've never seen anyone fetishized the way American Leftists fetishize Mitch McConnell and the fictional story of him running the US from a Senate minority.

Continuing to use a site that makes CSAM material available is generally considered acceptance of receipt. At the federal level, that is a mandatory 5-year prison sentence. This suggests continuing to use X after running into CSAM is unsafe. Musk may also be liable for enabling distribution.

Good lord, this editorial could be copied and pasted from 2004.

It is hard to imagine a better example of the Utah legislature's endless grift than Utah code 10-2a-502: literally rich developers writing their own laws to expropriate political power from democratically elected county officials.

Good thread, but a simpler explanation is that the Trump regime doesn't know what the fuck it's doing here, just like it doesn't know what the fuck it's doing anywhere else.

Great story, and so many like this monster in positions of power across the US. Fundamentalist Christianity is a mental illness.

Jon Stewart is trash, part 34872.

It's weird that we can't know what's inside Trump's head so we can't call him a liar, but somehow we just know JD is antisemitic due to calculus and not conviction.

One can only hope that the grown woman who wrote this bigoted and sorry excuse for an essay in order to get her transgender TA fired gets all the publicity she wants, and is therefore unable to get a real job when she graduates.

I will never understand why a publication like the Atlantic would feel the need to validate right wing propaganda by both-siding an obvious situation like this and hanging fellow journalists at CBS out to dry. RIP journalism.

USAID is not a "smallish agency". It has global impact. Makes you really wonder what Trump actually knows. Which is scary because somehow he's managed to surround himself with people worse than he is.

The real Trump Derangement Syndrome is people like Glasheen somehow agreeing to beclown themselves like this. This guy has worked in counter-terrorism for 25 years. He was head of the Joint Terrorism Task Force! And yet...

I remember a leftist moment when (a) student loans were the most important thing in the universe, and (b) Biden was just not doing enough. It was a whole thing until other distractions came and of course SCOTUS ended it all. But now Trump doesn't even merit a leftist peep of disapproval for this.

Excellent article. Much of the trouble we're in right now with the effective death of public health comes from the combination of right-wing ratfucking and people who know better refusing to fight their lies. Even the perception that COVID mitigations were unpopular is one of those lies.

Before 2020 it seemed like political coverage was the nadir of journalism: impossible to do the job worse. But then the pandemic arrived, and somehow political journalism infected public health journalism and we got bothsides coverage of a virus and the people trying to fight it.

I will admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude seeing all the covid minimizers who I was told were just reasonable centrists, unlike those childish zero-coviders who just want the moon, finding their true homes in the eugenicist filth of the Trump administration. Like... we told you so.

Good thread. A shorter version might be that the Nazi interns who worked with Grok to write this are basically doubling down on spreading white supremacist fascism throughout the world while not understanding in the slightest what actually made the US a powerful nation.

I will say Jeffries gets a lot of flak for stupid things, but this... this is disqualifying. Being anti-corruption in this day and age is just the lowest of bars.

I actually kind of hope that we end up with SCOTUS deciding that you can revoke a pardon via executive order. That will solve a number of future problems.

One of those things that could turn out to be the biggest discovery in medicine in quite some time.

It is somewhat surprising that the SecDef who made "war crimes are good, actually" his brand while on TV is now telling the troops to commit war crimes.

Not sure how to federalize it, but I 100% support this initiative.

100% this, and it was the plan all along. Put vaccine makers out of business. Congress needs to intervene fast.

Fascinating thread. It's hard to know what's going on because we don't have control groups anymore. Everyone in these cohorts faces the same global-scale trauma, has been overexposed to social media, has been pushed to use LLMs, and has been repeatedly infected with a brain-eating virus.

This is a pretty good analysis of MAGA. They are not all racists, and not all corrupt, true. But every one of them is at least one or the other. And neither faction minds what the other is doing as long as it furthers their own goals.

I will say that after reading the 28 point plan, it was pretty obvious that the author was a Russian speaker and it was probably translated from an original Russian draft. If you're familiar with that kind of thing, you'll see it in the doc.

US foreign policy continues to be dictated by 13-year-olds with oppositional defiant disorder. Good job, everyone.

Somehow, this makes me happy, sad, amused, and depressed. All at the same time.

If anyone thinks this SCOTUS will allow some lowly federal judge to block Republicans' precious gerrymander for the 2026 midterms, I have a few bridges to sell them.

And so here we are...

This is shaping up to be the most embarrassing episode in the history of US foreign policy.

In a fair media environment, Republicans would have been branded years ago as the party that simply cannot govern and are incapable of producing any kind of policy proposal beyond sloppy tax cuts and deregulation. That perception should hang on them like an albatross every election.

Sadly ironic that all those QAnon voters voted for the Epstein Administration.

The Republican party thinks you are really really stupid. Vote accordingly.

MAGA will 100% land on "what Epstein/Maxwell did was actually fine" rather than turn on Trump.

Wow, that's a massive hazard ratio on that study. If this were anything other than covid it would be major major news.

I know nobody wants to hear this, but the way we normalized COVID in the last few years while pathologizing those of us who want to remain healthy has massively empowered anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and all sorts of eugenicists. This is the result. And it's only just beginning.

Why doesn't the media do a full-court press on Trump's myriad of issues, the way they did on Biden's age. This is why.

It would actually (and unfortunately) place him directly in the mainstream of today's American left wing.

This is correct. Unless we're much better at detecting espionage devices than I think we are, the White House is toast as a secure structure. And honestly, it probably already was in 2016.

Good god. Leftism in a nutshell.

When the opposition is authoritarian, it's the only short-term strategy. There is no authoritarian-proof constitution or set of laws that can survive the sort of assault we're under. "Why didn't the Dems protect us" is utter bullshit amateur hour.

Motherfucking NYT... Who will be performing the mass layoffs, and why? And is it even legal for them to do that? But no, passive voice all the way to hell.

This is correct. Obviously Comey will never be convicted. But it's not really strategy, just giving Trump warm revenge fuzzies for the day because his enemies have been indicted. And to the extent that there is strategy, the harassment is the point.

Like much of MAGA lore, this is of course both insane and scarily racist. But... it opens up a window for counter-programming with memes of Kirk doing completely insane things. Raise the bar on credulity.

I mean sure, let's get a bill through congress on this. Get everyone on the record.