historically the pardon power has in fact been used for a bunch of corrupt shit, which is why I am not a big fan the difference is timing and scale - presidents would save this shit for the last week before they left office now? sure, yeah, billion dollar bribes for pardons on a random Thursday

Wow, over lunch at this event, I was chatting with a woman and she mentioned how she failed Mississippi's "literacy" test 3 times, keeping her from the vote Just now I learned there are a couple people here who integrated their schools This ain't ancient history y'all

Trump demolishing the East Wing of the White House to build the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom is a bigger priority to him than doing anything to help the American people, including re-opening our fucking government.

New satellite images show the scale of demolition that has occurred on the East Wing of the White House in less than a month.

How about a press conference made up of Democratic leadership near the White House with the demolished East Wing in the background, talking about the government shutdown and Trump's warped priorities and demolition of public goods, including not just the East Wing but health care and so much else?

Make Atrocities Great Again

He should be locked up for the safety of the whole planet. And the rest of the galaxy, to be honest.

People are opening up Meta AI Ray Ban glasses and modding out the LED recording light, then selling them on eBay. There is huge interest in disabling this functionality, which means basically you cannot trust anyone wearing these (i'm sure you already weren't) www.404media.co/how-to-disab...

my most lib opinion: so long as we have law enforcement officers, they should probably be able to pass an exam about what the law allows them to do without consulting notes

It flies under the radar because it is overwhelmed by the sheer repulsiveness of the physical destruction of the east wing, but there is no way that a president should be allowed to use private money to change public property. It circumvents the power of the purse.

The problem with "We don't even know if they were really drug traffickers" response to the Trump/Hegseth murder spree is it suggests if they were it's okay for our government to go full Rodrigo Duterte.

thread.

The US government: Well, we might have zip-tied children and/or shot them with rubber bullets, but not the young ones! (not a joke or an exaggeration)

It's not even necessarily about what you come to believe in your heart of hearts. It's about what you come to believe is normal

OK, so we get the state intervening in the market, but not in a socialist way, in a right-wing nationalist way that’s corrupt and corporatist. A social nationalism, if you will. We can workshop the name later.

It's exactly like when he said that he would preserve the friezes from the historic Bonwit teller building give them to the Met. And then he just fucking destroyed them and said it would have been too expensive to save them. He never intended to save them & always intended to destroy the East Wing.

More gambling will pull the country out of this mess for sure.

The Epstein Ballroom it is

I couldn't even get the fucking gas turned on in my apartment without con ed approval. If none of this is legal how is the construction company just doing it?

Just stepped off the Senate floor after almost 23 hours. The fight isn’t over—we need to keep standing together to resist Trump’s attempts to tighten his authoritarian grip.

We’ve updated our story with an additional comment provided by the United States Justice Department.

I feel like people missed this. On the $230 million shakedown, when Trump said, "I'm the one that makes the decision," he accidentally confirmed that he is appropriating for himself the power to order Todd Blanche to approve it: newrepublic.com/article/2021...

Setting aside The Horror for a quick second, what is even the business strategy here? They are making their stores actively hostile to and unsafe for the guys who go in to make big bulk materials purchases every day

I suspect that the vast majority of people on the broad left do not have a hard time understanding that a Nazi tat is a deal breaker but a handful of pudding-brained “contrarians” with big platforms create the appearance that the coalition is divided over this question.

the extraction class desperately wants to turn the internet into a badly automated ouroboros of engagement slop that shits ad money with no pesky labor but researchers across three universities found that the more LLMs are trained on clickbait slop, the worse and more "hostile" the models become

While we’re at it: from my 2018 comics essay “About Face,” laying out the normalization of fascist presence via pop culture & consumer goods. It’s also the central chapter of SAVE IT FOR LATER. popula.com/2019/02/24/a...

Don't think all the people defending Platner would be defending Hegseth for having that same tattoo

Liberals when candidates defend trans people: "We can't do this, it's too unpopular." Liberals when candidates have a nazi ss tattoo: "it's ok, not all candidates are perfect." Do y'all hear yourselves?!

Free him.

there are good & worthwhile historical & legal arguments for why the unitary executive is nonsense but to my mind the most straightforward argument is that it makes no logical sense that the president has absolute removal power over the people whose job it is to keep the executive branch accountable

Collaborators:

Does the Speaker of the House know what's going on in the country? It's not clear that he does, as Mike Johnson's communication strategy seems to rely heavily on being unaware. When faced with questions he should be able to answer, he has a reliable response: "I don't know."

Klobuchar and Schiff approving Republican judges while Rep Grijalva waits to be sworn in. Fucking asswipes, the lot of you

Dems, I bet of you, STOP VOTING FOR TRUMP JUDGES JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

a reminder that ICE received an astonishing influx of money with the megabill this summer: boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-...

I believe in redemption in a great many cases, but it has to include regret, which you signal by doing all you can to reduce the harm as soon as possible.

Ok, let's say you accidentally got a nazi tat. Would you not break the speed limit driving to the shop to get it covered up the second you found out

Ideally your president doesn't think Hannibal Lecter and Darth Vader were the heroes.

“I just thought it was so beautiful, and it made death a little bit more like a celebration of someone's life.” Michele Herrmann for @smithsonianmag.bsky.social: www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture...

You’re allowed to say “I backed the wrong guy” and move on. When your first response to “your candidate has a Nazi tattoo” is to start making excuses, you’ve rather thoroughly lost the plot.

I guess where I’m landing is less “oh no he’s a Nazi” and more “I just went through this shit with Fetterman and Sinema and a six year term is too long for me to take on faith that your Nazi tattoo was the accident but what you’re saying now is the truth.”

EXCLUSIVE: One Saturday afternoon in October, my phone lit up with a notification. I glanced down at the message. “Anna, Lindsey Halligan here,” it began. So began my text exchange with the woman who is prosecuting the president's perceived political enemies. www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anna...

I am posting this 2021 article for no particular reason transparency.eu/corruption-o...

Another mystery: By 2013 concerns over Epstein's criminal activity boiled over at JPMC. Top execs finally agreed to ditch him as a client. They then waited SIX YEARS to flag his suspicious transactions to FinCEN, even though federal law requires they be flagged right away.

also, what an image. the president demolishing a portion of a humble people’s house to make room for his royalist monstrosity

The whole point of democracy is so one person's derangement does not become everybody's problem. It's social hygiene. The fact the richest men in the West are a mix of grotty twelve year olds and deranged apocalypse fanatics is a problem, and we should be honest about it.

If you say accurately that enslaved laborers contributed to the building and maintenance of the White House then that’s desecration. If you demolish parts of the WH for a $250 million project during a shutdown as unemployment creeps upwards, that’s just patriotism.

This part blacksky.community/profile/did:...

The White House is a public building and a National Park, maintained by the National Park Service. The President is a tenant. He has zero authority to tear up this building.

Trump sharing that obscene video was totally disgusting. Any regular person could say as much. It's genuinely pathetic to see elected leaders like Speaker Johnson twisting themselves into pretzels to put on a show for the President like this.