I admit I am pretty apathetic about things as my question is: Is America ever going to change the cultural anti-patterns that got us here? Even if we somehow get Democrats back in, won't people just vote for the same bad Republicans again in two years as we never permanently changed our thinking?

OK, so, I hate to have to say this but... What was the intended point of the No Kings protest? Like, what direct tangible action are we intending to result from it?

Hasan: The great irony is of course that Donald Trump is the son of an immigrant. The grandson of an immigrant and married to an immigrant. In fact two of his three wives were immigrants, proving yet again that immigrants will do the jobs that even Americans are not willing to do.

Based on early numbers, there are easily more people participating in the second No Kings Day than in the first. Trump's strategy of constantly talking about this on TV and GOP govs sending in the national guard obviously energized the left. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

The biggest part of this to me is that if they were brought here and forced to explain themselves, it would have torpedoed the government's lies that these were drug boats. They cannot have survivors telling us through affidavits and testimony that we are openly committing war crimes.

I've been noting this year feels like the whole thing how when Covid started time lasted forever, just instead of it being March [large number], it's January 271st.

June feels like years ago, not four months

As I told folks in New Jersey, we won’t bend the knee, bow down, or kiss the ring of any king.

The NYT home page currently has photos of Trump, George Santos, a Metropolitan Opera soprano, Trump again, Jeffrey Epstein, lentils, an empty football stadium, and the Wirecutter's favorite sweatpants, and no photos of the mass protests being held across the country at this moment

Yeap. Basically, ICYMI, all of the official Trump Admin departments are on Bluesky now and in full trolling mode. So that's, you know, fun.

"The criminal case is unfolding as Smartmatic is pursuing a $2.7 billion lawsuit accusing Fox News of defamation for airing false claims that the company helped rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election." Any questions?

BREAKING: U.S. prosecutors charge Smartmatic with alleged money laundering over bribes paid to Philippines election officials.

www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-... Three labor unions represented by Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Trump administration on Thursday over a program that is searching the social media posts of visa holders, arguing that the practice violates the First Amendment rights of people legally in US.

I made a feed, it's an ongoing collection of things Mike Johnson haven't seen or heard about. bsky.app/profile/numb... Based on great clips posted by @atrupar.com

If you attend a No Kings Day event, please record the number of people in attendance in our crowdsourced crowd-counting sheet. We prefer official estimates above ad-hoc counts — if you count yourself, pls be conservative (people are bad at estimating crowd sizes). docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Recall that Trump's father was the child of immigrants, and that his mother and two of his wives were immigrants.

I'm never going to understand how a website where every post is only 300 characters still has people misunderstand everything on a regular basis. Or why people's brains are so pathologically unwilling to ever just maturely admit they misunderstood something when corrected.

Seems to be a trend here, just can't put my finger on it.

Dems are up 6 and 10 points, respectively, in our new polling averages for the New Jersey and Virginia gov races. This is generally higher than competing args , which don't account for pollster house effects or poll partisanship (lots of GOP polls out there) www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democrats-...

Liberal democracy, (democracy,) is riding on 'swing voters.' Imagine being stupid enough to consider voting for the fascists because you think the Democrats didn't present an alternative with enough "style," or maybe the Dems just don't give you enough stuff? This is what freedom is riding on.

Breaking News: Brown University became the second college to reject a White House deal offering preferential treatment for federal grants.

Only 15 people had signed the Defense Department’s new press policy as of Thursday afternoon. Journalists from nearly every major U.S. news outlet, including The Post, turned in their press badges after refusing to adhere to the new rules.

I saw my first Cybertruck in person earlier this month (MA is not exactly Musk fanboy land), and neither the pictures nor the word "ugly" really fully describe the sheer weirdness of it. It's like looking at a spot where someone turned off the textures for reality. It's Uncanny Valley: The Truck

We believe knowledge grows through sharing. Together with friends at Midwest Games, Fireshine, Gaijin, and 11Bit Studios, we created GameDev Learning Drop—a free directory of 350+ resources for devs, who dream of creating worlds! Let's rise together! owlcat.games/learning

Police Quest 4: Open Season. No contest. PQ 1-3 were genuinely reasonable: Created by a genuinely ethical cop and mostly encouraged genuinely responsible police work. The 4th game was instead by Daryl Gates (yes that one) and written by Tammy Dargan who *even Gates thought was too bigoted*. Yeah.

One thing that strikes me about "Steam Deck killers" is so far only one of them has had trackpads. When to me the trackpads are the Deck's killer feature. It means you can genuinely play anything vs being limited only to controller-friendly games, and even those benefit from custom radial menus.

Congrats, Microsoft, you have apparently invented a worse and more expensive Steam Deck. ---> Happy Steam Deck owner

You assume a brilliant lawyer would voluntarily have anything to do with Trump. Even if you set aside ethics and morals, pure pragmatism would still indicate not taking him on as a client if you don't need to.

Ooh, Sosiel fanart! Poor fellow rarely gets any despite being a fine painter himself.

If they were going to help us they'd say "no" to being deployed in the first place. People who follow illegal orders are intentionally harming people.

Today's extremely obvious fake troll account. No real human being with any real sincere concern strawmans points this hard and this badly. This was on a convo of far leftists trying to claim that there was no consequences of letting Trump win because things were "kind of the same".

This. Because Republicans get rewarded with accolades and power the more crass, abusive, dishonest, and/or bigoted they are. Because most of us in America have decided this is what we value, or at least what we consider not a big deal.

And this is why ageism is not actually a shorthand for "more progressive": Because Seth Moulton is actually *less* progressive than Ed Markey is despite being younger.

So like this is funnier and more offensive than anything anyone else said about Kirk that got them fired

What is it we're supposed to do again, when they tell us who they are?

White male video game players are now the Reaganite welfare queens.

OK, this reminds me I have yet another unhinged literary take. Superhero fiction is essentially modern mythology.

Ah what the heck. Finally my literary opinions that are just plain old oddball: My fave Ray Bradbury story is "No Particular Night or Morning". My fave Isaac Asimov characters are Powell and Donovan. My fave Discworld character is Reg Shoe. My fave Stephen King novel is Wizard and Glass.

Aside that my other possibly unhinged literary opinion is that Dave Barry is required reading for anyone who wants a primer on American humor and culture.

Hemingway is a terrible writer, and is only propped up by English/Reading teachers having some inexplicable compulsion to assign him as reading. (Only time I remotely liked him was when Jay Underwood played him in Young Indiana Jones.)

This man has nothing. His politics are odious, his personality is odious, and he has nothing going on physically either. And I say that last as someone who finds dweebiness attractive. This man is too dweeby even by dweebyphile standards.

i appreciate how apparently Alex Jones is so beyond the pale that even the current Supreme Court just went "nah go away" and declined to save him.

Irony for me of Democrats getting "reverse" tone policed to be more angry or dumbed down is I am passionate and have a potty mouth so I get normal tone policed a ton. And you know what? Tone policing is bad. Period. Across the board. It's not "criticism", it's you shutting down conversation.

Yeah, this is becoming A Thing. And it's so obnoxious. As Jeffries and to a lesser extent Cory Booker get it too. When ironically almost certainly the reason they're all so even-keeled is because black people are pressured to *avert* this trope if they want to be successful in white collar work.

this crowdsourced crowd counting was a big success previously (no one else is doing something like this, and researchers cited it) and i'm happy to help out again.

The whole thing lately where it feels like every Democratic politician calling out Trump gets a "why don't you use plainer language/spell it out more" or whatever is so tiresome. Is "Dems need to understand Americans are morons that need to be talked down to" really a criticism against *Dems*?

This right here is what Pelosi actually meant when she said we need a strong Republican Party: That we need two viable parties that can be trusted to govern halfway reasonably, not just one.

Basically, America as a whole needs to be willing to vote for Democrats until Republicans stop being fundamentally evil. As conservatives need to start being forced to vote for the comparatively more reasonable Republicans in the primaries if they want to stand a chance of beating Democrats.

When authoritarians tell you they like authoritarianism, over and over and over and over and over again, believe them

This article will publish tomorrow at 7:31 am www.gelliottmorris.com/p/independen...