no chance Trump will ruin the vibes for the USWNT next year at least, he hates them and the feeling is mutual

Did the FIFA disciplinary committee suspend the U.S. defense

Platner aide lists terms for dropping out: “If he was to step down it would only be with a guarantee of being replaced by a candidate who he believes is true to the values and vision and policy agenda of the campaign that Maine voted for." @shanegoldmacher.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07...

whoopsie

What people perceive as authenticity, I think, is actually for a politician to fit into an archetype.

I can't believe we still have to remind people of these things but: most rape victims don't file police reports. (You're reading one right now.) Shock, denial, need to appease the rapist, nominally friendly behavior toward the rapist, etc. are all common reactions

let this be a lesson to deal with your feelings of gender anxiety and masculine inadequacy with a hobby or therapy or something and not a high stakes senate election

For his backers, the main argument for Platner was that his affect and identity would appeal to working class whites—that his rough past and questionable choices would actually endear him to these voters. At least according to this data, the opposite seems to have been true.

Yeah. Even he and his campaign were trying to think of a way to stay in it, this has reached a completely unsurvivable point for him as a candidate if the state party is calling on him to bail out.

the track record of people with democratic campaign introduction videos that get people excited is kind of bad, be they "im just a regular maine lobsterman" to "im a former combat pilot"

The US Senate is not a place to send people hoping they will grow as a person, you're getting that confused with a rehab facility

He has to actually drop out, though

I have edited a lot of sexual-assault-accusation articles, and this one easily clears every veracity check: contemporaneous emails with her therapist, a boyfriend who knew, a woman she warned—all before Platner ran for office. Good on Politico for nailing it, and on Jenny Racicot for speaking up.

it's certainly reasonable to be highly suspicious of new candidates who have never before been vetted and are made up entirely of thirty-seven red flags in a trenchcoat.

“‘One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,’ she said. ‘I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.’”

perhaps we should view nazi tattoos as disqualifying from here on out. i kind of assumed we'd already view them as disqualifying but was unpleasantly surprised so maybe from here we could all agree not to downplay nazi tattoos since they seem pretty indicative of broad disregard for human dignity

Every Platner story is like this

Platner seems to strongly suggest he’ll drop out in a video he just posted to his twitter He denied the allegations but roughly said that he understands the political impact, and is assessing the best way to support the movement and defeat Susan Collins

Florida is expanding the role of artificial intelligence to help local police track down immigrants. One well-connected technology firm - Peregrine Technologies, whose lobbyists have close ties to Gov. Ron DeSantis - is getting most of that business. www.orlandosentinel.com/2026/07/05/f...

A woman who dated Graham Platner says he sexually assaulted her. The Maine Democrat denied the allegations and said, “Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.”

“In his Instagram post, Encina thanked Gomez, the Getty photographer, whose presence on the train he said was ‘quietly reassuring.’ In the interview, he said seeing a photographer there gave him some comfort because someone was documenting what was happening.”

You know you have a great political system when you get one “is that congressman alive” scandal per month

The deadline for him to withdraw is Monday.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ www.huffpost.com/entry/latest...

trump intervening to get a red card suspended seems like hegemonic behavior until you realize that the u.s. president caring about soccer in the first place is actually a blow to american exceptionalism

From @benkail.bsky.social at the @bangordailynews.bsky.social: "Graham Platner has postponed a string of events Sunday and Monday as rumors circulate among Maine Democrats and over social media about another potentially damaging story to come about the oyster farmer’s past."

yeah...i don't know about *that*

The U.S. military shot and killed an American on U.S. soil this morning

Latest: I got records showing how officials launched a threat investigation into an elderly Florida man for sending a postcard to Florida CFO Blaise Ingoglia that just read: "You lack values." Ingoglia's office was flooded with similar postcards after the man went public reason.com/2026/07/06/7...

The Trump admin has been deporting huge numbers of kids who came into the country alone. Trump has been doing it at 3x the rate of his first admin. www.propublica.org/article/unac...

A regional ICE headquarters being located at Fort Snelling is one of those facts about our present situation through which you can expound most of American history

Trump is now using his platform to attack kindergarteners because they are Muslim

Op-ed: John Oliver made a lot of jokes about the right-wing takeover of New College of #Florida. Here's why we shouldn't be laughing. www.heraldtribune.com/story/opinio...

If you went into a lab to design the perfect 21st century sports scandal, you'd get the Flo Balogun red card mess. It's perfect, it allows everyone to be outraged at the same time. danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-perfec...

We cannot know what the Black woman on the train was thinking or feeling at this moment. But we recognize the image as an indictment. It should make all of us pause to consider what it is that we are celebrating as America turns 250. The latest from @errinhaines.bsky.social:

FIFA: this was an orderly process, conducted according to the rules, with no political interfere-- TRUMP: I told em to do it

There it is

quiet part out loud -- Ted Cruz thanks Trump for "getting rid of that ridiculous red card," then tells him, "there was a reason the FIFA trophy sat here for as long as it did"

Good lord, this is bleak. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/04/u...

Trump, almost in the same breath, announcing that "I didn't think it was a foul" and "I didn't know what the hell a red card was".

This is like in 2016 when The Boston Globe made a parody front page with imagined negative headlines from a future Trump presidency, except it's the front page of the Wall Street Journal, the details are worse, and it's real.

Well, there's a quote for you. "They may have realized it was simply bad business to say that your great new product will destroy the economy."

Washington, DC has never looked as bad as it has in the past few months—and it’s not just the reflecting pool

There's a part in the book "Careless People" where the author beats Zuck at Settlers of Catan, and he is absolutely wrecked by it. Someone pulls her aside to explain everyone else has been letting him win for years. I think about this a lot re: why tech bros think everyone will love AI chatbots.

"He wanted to understand what the red card meant" hell yeah. HELL fucking yeah. Intervening and not even really knowing why someone handed him the phone

“He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.”

Look, I know this is an obscure third-tier America First candidate that won’t go anywhere, but I don’t think it’s great that we’re repeatedly seeing figures like this in our politics who could play the villain in “The Plot Against America”

The White House attack on the Smithsonian is nuts. It slams an 11 YO girl, calls Toni Morrison "an anti-white activist," and criticizes an exhibit that mentions women "bobbing their hair" for encouraging women to embrace "more masculine dress and hair styles." www.whitehouse.gov/releases/202...).