MTBinDurham

MS NOW confirms Corey Lewandowski is also out at DHS.

Summary of recent HHS departures:

-Unqualified weirdo Jim O’Neill out as CDC Director

-“Measles outbreaks are the cost of doing business” Ralph Abraham out as his Dumbass Deputy

-Venomous podcaster Vinay Prasad out at FDA.

Yet human cassowary and denim enthusiast RFK Jr. remains.

My entire journalistic career, editors & owners & bosses told me again & again that my stuff was too long, too in-depth, too wonky, no one would read it.

Again & again, readers flocked to the longer, wonkier pieces, passed them around, wrote me to thank me for them, cited them years later.

We have the data. My longest columns have more readers, who read longer, and who share them the most.

Incorrect: Gorton and Denton are actually the British names for the two grumpy Muppets

I tried to take a photo of a grasshopper on my windshield, but now it looks like a gigantic bug destroying the town.

Opinion | A New Jersey Primary Shows the Depth of Democratic Fury

This @michellegoldberg.bsky.social piece is a must read on how angry the Democratic electorate is and how badly some moderates are still misreading it

(gift link)

"I'm coming to Boston and I'm bringing hell with me."
--Homan in February

"Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely."
-- Tom Homan in March

"I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room"
-- Homan in July, referring to a D congressman

Bad Bunny isn't an immigrant...

Screenshot from LOTR: “Perhaps we could give the ring better training.”

“He might be dead, but it sure seems like Jeffrey Epstein won.”

That is a sentence.

Oh, snap! Just like that, politics comes to my D+∞ district

Just a quick update from the Twin Cities. (Please forgive the unsolicited message). THINGS ARE NOT BETTER IN MINNEAPOLIS. The media is mostly moving on, Trump is focused on other stuff, BUT NOTHING HAS CHANGED ON THE GROUND. More than 2,000 DHS thugs continue to roam the streets, abducting people 24/7, assaulting legal observers with impunity, and routinely denying 1st, 4th, and 5th amendment rights. Drones and helicopters are overhead every day. Hundreds and hundreds of terrified families have not left their homes since mid-December ... relying on the community to bring them food and help with rent and other necessities. (Those people are NOT violent drug cartel sex offending murderers, as DHS would tell you. Most are legal residents or citizens.) If anything, things have just become more stressful and intractable (think trench warfare as a suitable metaphor): The resistance is better organized and numerous, but DHS has become more clever and better at disguise... and the county sheriff's office is increasingly supporting them . Do not let anyone tell you that Homans (the new person in charge of the occupation) is making anything better. Do not let anyone tell you that 700 ICE agents leaving the city has made much of a difference; the remaining force (again, ~2,000) is still larger than the entire city's police force (which is legally unable to do anything). Please call your congressional reps ... especially if there is any chance the administration might listen to them.

A desperate plea sent to me by a Minneapolis resident who's been on the front lines since the beginning of the ICE occupation:

I can't be the only one who has so many subscriptions to so many things that every other day is a shock to see another thing renewed that I didn't even remember I subscribed to...

No, just me? LOL

Vaccinate your kids, you friggin nuts.

Charles Yang of Time for Three absolutely slaying me. I would lose my mind if I heard this live. Even crappy phone speakers made me scream and cry.

Disabled son of ICE detainee dies after 30 days of hospitalization It had been months since Wael Tarabishi seen his father. The family is calling on ICE to release Maher Tarabishi so he may attend his son's funeral.

In October, ICE grabbed Maher Tarabishi.

He was a 24/7 caregiver for his disabled son Wael.

At the time of Maher’s detention, disability advocates warned that taking away Wael’s caregiver put his life at risk.

Wael died on Friday at age 30.

ICE caused his death.

They didn’t get to say goodbye.

i realized watching OBAA is a completely different experience as a Black person (this will be a read only thread... you know who you are... you know why)

Do you imagine Black women to be aggressive ... violent... hyper sexual ... untoward... dominate... and domineering

Good only to be broken down and exploited by state resources ... severed to their pieces

and why is that your fantasy?

Like, we think of 1960s as being a big counterculture moment but in many ways the Beats and Black artists of the 1950s were the ones who formed the foundations of it.

It's no guarantee that something like that is coming in the next 10 years, but I think it's possible.

Huh. I'm working this over and I keep coming back to, for a counterculture to be noticeable by a "director emeritus," it has to be at least somewhat successful in gaining attention. And that involves the sociotechnical/media landscape.

I think the seeds of radical counterculture are germinating.

Great feedback, team. Keep it up.

He goes on to describe one of his officers being stopped when she was off-duty solely because she's non-white, harassed by ICE goons who slapped her phone out of her hand as she tried to record, only to be let go when she finally revealed she was a cop.

From Senator Chris McDaniel: “Lately, some folks have taken to calling ICE “the Gestapo.” It sounds fierce. It feels righteous. But it isn’t true, and it isn’t harmless. The Gestapo was a secret police force. No warrants. No courts. No lawyers. And no appeals. People vanished in the night, not because they broke the law, but because the law no longer meant anything. The knock on the door was the sentence. ICE isn’t that. Not even close. ICE is a public agency enforcing laws passed by elected officials. Its agents file reports. They seek warrants. They lose cases. Judges stop them. Lawyers challenge them. Some detainees go home. That’s not tyranny. That’s bureaucracy, for better and worse. You can hate immigration policy. You can argue enforcement is too harsh, too sloppy, or too broad. You can work to have the law changed if you wish. That’s a republic doing what it’s supposed to do. But when you call ordinary law enforcement “the Gestapo,” you cheapen real evil. You turn history into a slogan and suffering into a metaphor. And once every badge is tyranny, no tyranny is left to recognize. In Mississippi, I was raised to believe words should earn their weight. This one hasn't yet. It throws around the language of dictatorship while living under a system where courts still rule, lawyers still argue, and the government still loses. That difference matters. Because the day enforcement becomes secret, unchecked, and answerable to no one, we won’t need to borrow names from history. We’ll know exactly what we’re dealing with. And we’ll wish we’d kept our words honest.”

“ICE isn’t the Gestapo. The Gestapo was…” (proceeds to describe qualities that apply to what ICE is currently doing)

Inter 1 (sucic 18) Arsenal 2 (Jesus 10, 31)

Inter doing pretty well considering who they’re up against

i do not like how my career and my life both keep getting more and more cyberpunk without my consent

i think this MLK day the thing to focus on is the strategic focus and tactical brilliance of the civil rights movement and the way it was laser focused on a set of achievable goals

every single successful general strike in US history has had union backing through the local AFL-CIO

this is the first time it’s been called for since the 1940s