When Trump assassinated Qasem Soleimani to look tough during an election year, he justified it by lying that four(!) U.S. embassies were imminently about to be attacked by... someone? He believes he can kill or abduct anyone if he just says "blah blah imminent threat."

Tulsi Gabbard for sure going to resign tonight, right? Right? Why are you laughing?

The Mt. Rushmore of movie deaths: -Sonny (The Godfather) -Quint (Jaws) -Boromir (Fellowship) -Malone (The Untouchables)

Twelve Monkeys 30th anniversary rewatch. Mostly holds up! One of the best time travel movies ever made and maybe the best Bruce Willis performance. I just wish I liked Terry Gilliam better as a director. Wild that something this dark and niche made $169 million.

MVP was a two horse race between Jokic and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (with Jokic comfortably ahead), so with Jokic out for a month, it's SGA's to lose. It's his if he stays healthy.

The standard for vindictive prosecution claims is very high, so it's virtually impossible for the government to lose a motion to dismiss on those grounds, but man oh man the Trump administration is trying as hard as it possibly can.

The number of defendants convicted of government benefits fraud more than tripled during the Biden administration. 93% of those defendants were U.S. citizens. www.ussc.gov/research/qui...

I said women tend to vote for left-wing parties more than men because women tend to read more than men, and reading builds empathy, and some dude absolutely lost it. Multiple posts telling me to F off, DMed me, and then blocked me. Proved the point quite nicely.

51% of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen, 41% believe the US govt either did 9/11 or knowingly allowed it, and 37% believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen at all, but canceling a few Kennedy Center performances threatens their "social trust."

A federal court found the mandatory detention provision of the Laken Riley Act unconstitutional in September, and the DOJ chose not to appeal that ruling. They know how illegal all this is.

This tweet by Harmeet Dhillon is intended to assuage MAGA that the statute of limitations has not yet run for the coverup of the stealing of the 2020 election, but it intentionally obscures that the statute has run for the alleged stealing of *the election itself,* and they never charged anyone.

It Ends is terrific. There's a part of your brain that, when you're driving on a lonely road at night, feels a creeping dread and asks "This is going to end... right?" and this absolutely nails that feeling. Incredible chemistry from all four actors. Maybe the first great Gen Z horror.

"Avatar has no cultural impact" checklist: -A on Cinemascore -90% audience score on RottenTomatoes -3.6 on Letterboxd -going to make $2 billion -has an entire section of Disneyworld devoted to it It's fine if you don't like these movies. Just say that! But clearly a lot of people do.

The serious answer to "what's had less cultural relevance than Avatar?" is all the live action Disney remakes from 2014-present.

I'm ready to be the type of Democrat the Democratic Party has needed this entire time. The type of Democrat who will fight Trump’s authoritarianism by showing up, not with strongly worded letters. The type of Democrat who will fight, not fold.

"The government is trying to create a list of trans people, including trans children" is one of those things that's so horrible and orwellian that if you just straightforwardly explained it to normie voters they wouldn't believe you.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar was on a ton of top 10 lists for 2024, and I mostly get the hype. It's beautiful and soars a lot of the time. Didn't see the twist coming (or rather, guessed the wrong twist). Ending didn't really stick the landing for me though.

This happened because Georgetown Professor Martin Lederman filed an amicus brief on his own arguing that the term "Regular Forces” in 10 U.S.C. § 12406 refers to the U.S. military, not to the National Guard - an issue that Illinois and Chicago did not raise. A good amicus can turn the tide.

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Oh is that how that works, Bari Weiss? Once a story has been reported, it doesn't need to be reported anymore? We've checked that invisible box? So Hillary's emails, Hunter's laptop, Biden's age, "cancel culture," inflation, the Twitter files... just report it once and we're good, right?

Bari Weiss, an administration loyalist handpicked to turn CBS News into state media, intervening to suppress a story that would make the administration look bad would have been a massive, earth shattering scandal just a few years. There would have been Congressional hearings. Resignations. Firings.

300,000 black women have left the labor force this year.

9th Cir. affirms right wing terrorist Robert Justus's conviction for aiding and abetting the murder of federal court security officer David Underwood during the George Floyd protests in Oakland in May 2020.

Still trying to get my mind around Avatar: Fire and Ash and will definitely see it again. It's an absolutely amazing spectacle that puts Marvel and DC to shame. The story is almost verbatim what you'd expect. But the portrayal of the Ash People bothers me for reasons I'm still trying to work out.

No sugarcoating it: this is really awful news. It's the first of the administration's sham prosecutions to be successful. Every victory will embolden them and dissuade other heroes like Judge Hannah Dugan from standing up and doing the right thing. We took another step toward tyranny tonight.

Dallas Humber, California woman who lead the white supremacist accelerationist recruitment network Terrorgram, sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for soliciting hate crimes, soliciting the murder of federal officials, and conspiring to provide material support to terrorists.

There's always a lot of noise in every jobs report but the bottom line is that the 12-month average for jobs created has fallen from 167,000 in January to 78,000 today - a staggering decline of 53% in just one year under the Trump administration.

New study of 20,000 people in Canada shows that pregnant women who got the COVID vaccine were 90% less likely to require intensive care, 60% less likely to experience severe disease, and 30% less likely to give birth prematurely.

Ask JD Vance why a white supremacist murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and he would positively trip over himself calling it a lone wolf, isolated incident. But 1 Afghan refugee kills 1 person and it's the fault of an entire race of people.

(1) Posting on Twitter is not "combating the excesses of the Right." (2) Twitter's algorithm renders it an inevitably rigged game. (3) We had 15 years of leftists engaging on Twitter to look back on from 2008-2023 and the right became significantly more radicalized and powerful over that time.

Incredibly sad development. In 2016, Rob Reiner directed a movie called "Being Charlie," which was co-written by his son Nick, who was then 22, and was a semi-autobiographical account of Nick's experiences with drug addiction and recovery.

You can’t “fix” X, The Everything App by going back and posting there because the owner has this thumb on the scale of the algorithm to promote the worst ideas and people. It’s not a viable solution, you have to let it go.

The world's richest man thinks the MacGuffin from Avatar 2 is real.

Hamilton County Prosecutor dismisses the case against Elwood Jones after it was revealed that prosecutors in Jones's murder trial in 1996 withheld 4,000 pages of discovery from the defense and subsequent forensic testing excluded Jones as a suspect. He spent 27 years on death row.

I think it’s also true that loneliness among women has historically been treated as an individual problem, while loneliness among men is treated as a societal problem. That, in turn, comes from an assumption that women are supposed to earn the company of others while men are entitled to it.

Vincent and Linda McMahon are and always have been hideously evil people, and even a few years ago this would have consigned them to the dustbin of history alongside Jerry Sandusky, but watch them appear on stage for Stephanie McMahon's WWE Hall of Fame induction in April and get a standing ovation.

As the Trump Administration dismantles protections against prison rape for trans people, a new study from DOJ finds that 49,300 inmates - 4% of all inmates nationwide - reported being sexually victimized within the past 12 months.

Kent was always a borderline case but the effect of creating a "Contemporary Era Committee" for everyone to elect their friends while excluding Bonds, Clemens, and ARod is that we have ended up with the dreaded Hall of the Very Good.

New study of nearly 30 million people in France finds that vaccinated subjects had a 74% lower risk of death from severe COVID-19 and a 25% lower overall mortality rate compared with unvaccinated subjects over a median follow-up of 45 months.

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

Recall that when they struck down the ATF's ban on bump stocks last year, Alito wrote that if the text is clear, you don't even get to original intent/understanding.

Liked a lot about Hamnet, but it tries too hard for tears, and it doesn't quite get there. It's tear-adjacent. Cringed at the scene of Shakespeare standing on a dock debating whether to jump and spontaneously reciting the "to be or not to be" speech.

The average Republican voter is unfathomably evil. It's not that they're being lied to by right wing politicians and media (though they are), or that they've been left behind economically (though they have been), or distracted with culture war issues (again, yes). They're just cruel, stupid nazis.

Still upsetting honestly

Understandable that people would freak out, but this basically had to happen. It's a nationwide executive order and the fact that the 1st and 9th Circuits have found it unconstitutional isn't going to be enough to kill it. There was never a chance that SCOTUS wasn't going to have the final say.

This is not an answer, it's an attempt to blow off the question. How would you even know who they were contacting? Did you tap their phones while the boat was sinking? The toughest question Dems can ask is just to invite Hegseth and his idiot thugs to try to actually explain how this would work.

When asked how history would view his and his troops' actions during the Rape of Belgium, German General Max von Hausen famously said, "We should write history ourselves." That's what this testimony is going to be. A gang of dumb brutes clumsily trying to impose their will at the end of a gun.

Even this Supreme Court, as debased and sycophantic as it is, is not going to allow a president to revoke pardons issued by a former president. Not only would it be impossible to enforce (everyone who's been pardoned is just supposed to report to prison?), it would nullify the pardon power.

Gen. Pickett weighing whether to reform and hit the Yankees again or just declare victory now.

The Venezuelan strikes are so flagrantly, flamboyantly illegal they don't even have talking points to defend them. It's literally just "yeah we talked to some people who said this was fine, don't worry about it, no further questions please."