It's a good commentary on 2025 that the US President announces a major military attack on a foreign country and even the straightest arrows think, 50% chance it's an attack, 50% chance president is on another cognition bender.

Thank you @schiff.senate.gov for acting with courage in these &$%*\€ times. @padilla.senate.gov I don’t see your name here. Your constituents are counting on you both to take leadership.

This is just straightforwardly insulting to anyone who hears it

Dave explains the circle jerk of right wing media and MAGA outrage over lies as clearly as I’ve seen.

I wasn’t aware that there was anything interesting to say about Trump’s Rob Reiner tweet, let alone that that interesting thing would also involve fairy forts, but Henry Farrell shows that I just hadn’t imagined hard enough. www.programmablemutter.com/p/classy-is-...

Once again raising the question -- why is the president's son-in-law at this official event?

Gift link. “We are the people who save small children,” said Bachirou Agarbel, who was employed by P.M.I. in his village, Ginadji, since the start of the program. “Of course we had to keep doing the job.” We are the country that could afford to pay him, but we just turned away.

This is not Trump being stupid, tho Trump is a very stupid person. This is not Trump being played, tho Trump is one of the most easily manipulated people who’s ever lived. No, the truth is scarier. This is Trump working for & siding with Putin. This is Trump, the Russian asset.

Transit's main competition is cars. If you raise fares from $2.50 to $3, you're still way more affordable than driving. But if you cut the bus from every 15 to every 20, you're screwed because cars have infinity frequency and 24 hr service span.

Elon Musk's trick has always been making big promises, the media reporting it and hyping him up as some sort of real-life Iron Man, and then the media failing to follow up when those plans don't come to fruition because they're too busy hyping his next big false promises.

This is a **one-time tax** that applies to a very small number of very well-resourced people based on their residency on a **specific day.** This is not "they will uproot their lives" like "rich people will leave New York." This is "they will go to their vacation home for a short time."

How are these fits of presidential incontinence never covered as their own news events in NYT? Hours of sick hateful bile from the curdled joyless leader of the Christian nationalists sitting in the ruins of the tinsel trimmed White House he’s demolishing — seems like a story to me.

It's almost as if the Enlightenment figures who founded the US had learned the lessons of Europe's wars of religion and created a secular state that would both protect worshippers from political interference, AND protect the polity from becoming dominated by religious sectarians.

Oh man, the closing shot here is perfect

Side note: Sinatra’s mom Natalina “Dolly” Garaventa, a midwife by trade, ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party www.irishtimes.com/opinion/eamo...

As I detailed in ONE NATION UNDER GOD, the religious nationalism of the Cold War era was deliberately broadly drawn. Invocations of a broadly drawn "God" were fine, but references to Jesus Christ were understood to be far beyond the pale.

This is in reference to the unjust firing of Melissa McCool, but it’s true of every right-wing harassment campaign Universities and elite media need to be aware of this

A smarter model for paying for college: income-based repayment. You start paying your student loans only once you earn enough to comfortably get by. That turns higher ed debt into something more like a tax surcharge on success, not a choke collar on people who are struggling.

RFK: “Where did all this autism come from? It never existed when I was a kid!” “A Christmas Story”, a 1983 movie based on a 1971 memoir about a childhood in the 1930s: “This is my brother Ralphie. He has a ton of sensory issues and behaviors we don’t understand. Every family has a child like him.”

It was entirely predictable but if Kamala D. Harris randomly conjured up a battleship on a wholly unrealistic timeline with weapons not actually in production with the same cost as a carrier, these guys would be hurling slurs not seen since reconstruction, instead it’s just:

I mentioned this before...it makes me LIVID....Me, my organization, & many other organizations worked hard for these commutations and this is just disgusting behavior from the Trump Administration Furious, sad, and I feel terrible for all of these human beings being used by Trump to send a message

Curious. If someone with millions of followers tweeted “enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas” at people in the Trump administration, what do we think the FBI would do?

Kind of wild how the take that some of Trump's supporters were "deplorable" was some huge scandal, but regularly screaming about "radical left scum" is just a thing he'll say with no media backlash.

I’m mostly baffled why anyone on the White House staff let him do this.

I’m nobody special and I’ve had right wing extremists try to ruin every aspect of my personal and professional life, including showing up in person and leaving written death threats at my work and home. This “problem” is an inherent part of right wing extremism; it’s a feature not a bug.

Pancreatic cancer is still one of the deadliest cancers. However, there are promising strategies currently under investigation that have been delayed or harmed because of the Trump administration and Elon Musk's DOGE. CDMRP cuts left no money for many forms of cancer research including pancreatic.

the fact that there is free parking at all in manhattan is wild to me

I remember students complaining about hand cramps when I was proctoring finals as a TA thirty years ago. And uh, you’re not supposed to “like” the final exam.

Via @liamjscott.bsky.social at the other site here’s the full email from 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. She’s putting her career on the line by fighting here. And she’s fighting for all of us.

The New York Times investigated 346 people who donated at least $250,000 to Trump and found that more than half of them (197) have received pardons, jobs, government contracts, special treatment, or favors.

Censoring a story about the outsourced regime gulag is not consistent with freedom of speech. But it is consistent with the belief that “free speech” is when conservatives can say what they want and when you can say what they want.

A reminder: Bari Weiss signed the Harper's Letter.

This is straight-up, unvarnished Klan language from the Vice President of the United States. We've had a lot of racist vice presidents and this one might be in the running for top of the list.

Impressive student journalism by Harvard Crimson reporters about some of their absolutely vile classmates.

Why decline all these chances to defend feminism? Because to participate would be accepting the premise that our rights and humanity are up for debate in the first place. Once you’ve conceded that it’s reasonable to ask whether women’s equality was a mistake, you’ve already lost.

I get it, but I do sometimes wish people spent as much time linking to articles they’ve enjoyed reading, than articles they want to expose as trash.

this is the greatest feeling, when the cord box proves its utility to a family member

The women in this 1964 photo of Beatles fans (yes, that's what they used) could not get a credit card at Bank of America without their husband or father cosigning. So, no. The answer, CBS and Bank of America, is no.

Forcing the AG to publicly defend every redaction, line-by-line, would be a fun exercise.

Every so often it really gets to me: the thought that my government, with my money and in my name, perpetrates such cruelty for no reason at all.

He didn't even match the existing font!

If you want to take one thing away from the art of the New Deal it is - in my humble opinion - that throwing money at *NORMAL* artists to decorate public buildings makes the world a much nicer place, particularly if you charge them with making the decorations evoke the history of where they are.

Trump’s Pick For Ambassador To South Africa Actively Opposed Fight To End Apartheid talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trumps-...

Specifically, lawyers who look at the plain meaning of laws and constitution as something to be gamed if they are clever enough, like looking for the loophole to help their rich client beat the murder charge. Dershowitz would sell out the constitution for a dozen pierogis.

Feels to me like the last quote here is more devastating and incriminating than even the birthday book and the photos and the rest.

It's still very bad the extent to which we've normalized this idea that the president can spend money because he feels like it

the occasional reminder that if you are watching and live-posting about a presidential address, the way you engage with politics is notably atypical from that of, say, the average persuadable or low-propensity voter

Notice that the parts of Trump's economic program that help working and middle class Americans — DOGE checks, tariff rebates, and warrior dividends — are popular, progressive, and non-existent. Tax cuts for the rich are unpopular, regressive and very very real.

Deciding when to recess the House to "district work periods" isn't some inherent or longstanding power of the Speaker. It was only added to the rules for the first time in this Congress. Otherwise this would have required the full House to vote on it, which could have been defeated.

This is ever more evidence of the shrinking influence of white evangelicals in Trump's second term (as opposed to rad trads and groypers and Millerites and broligarchs etc). International adoption by evangelical families is literally an article of faith. See: @kathrynajoyce.bsky.social