“No, I’m not a king,” our president said. “I-- I get-- I-- I don’t laugh": American Politics, May 2026

Boom.

here we go! Another month of chaos, high prices, and general discontent

hey at least DHS got funded

/s

And Powell is staying on for the ride!!

Trump fumes as Jerome Powell plots future at Federal Reserve

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is drawing backlash from Trump administration figures and allies after announcing his plans to stay at the central bank beyond his chairmanship.

From the Washington Post:

Pope Leo on Friday named a formerly undocumented immigrant who was smuggled into the United States in a car trunk to be bishop of West Virginia; he also elevated to bishop Howard University’s chaplain, who has called attacks on diversity “un-American” and “un-Christian.”

Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala, 55, migrated to the U.S. in 1990 and in 2023 became the first Salvadoran bishop in the country, serving as auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Washington. Believed to be one of the first U.S. bishops born in Central America, he has publicly called for Catholics to speak out against President Donald Trump’s treatment of immigrants.

I really, really want Trump to order this guy deported. You can do it, Donny! Go to absolute war with the Catholic Church! You know you want to...

Oh yeah, Trump would like 3 more wives.

i hope the democrats don't fight fire with redistricting fire, because that would be gauche

https://newrepublic.com/article/209830/trump-supreme-court-gerrymandering-voting-rights

love to mix some useless corn into my gasoline

bullshit!!!

sorry, i gotta say that. i represent missouri

long arms of big corn reaching right into ilx, scary

show me

do your research

*walks into corn*

Listen, Zach, do your research

show me

i like this joke btw

thank you

this state is fucking crazy

what is needed is 100% ethanol, all corn. the food and energy systems need to be completely integrated. all cereals should be used as fuels, but especially corn, or whatever missouri is good at. count chocula is banned not because of the real pain that he caused his community but instead because he is not enough of a fuel

my salary goes up every time you say corn so keep it rolling

https://i.postimg.cc/pTRVBth9/image.png

Keep it corny

xp sorry but there's no AI images allowed in the thread. you can tell it's AI because the kernels are backwards

on the other hand, if we could get corn-powered data centers, we might be on to something

name one thing that has corn in it

haha yeah, i know. take your time.

https://i.postimg.cc/jdHbZ1TL/image.png

lagoon probably wants legumes to replace corn

still makes me crack up that the guy who really kicked off the hybrid corn thing later became vice president of the US only to fumble the bag because he went from
being relatively centrist to socialist so they dumped him from the ticket. also he got into theosophy for some reason and they thought that was weird

i’m eating tortilla chips right now xxp

but what i really want to talk about tonight are the future farmers of america

also I am drinking a little whiskey but I think this one is mostly rye. should be bourbon to support corn

I was at an ag expo once and some kid who looked like he was 14 wearing FFA gear asked if I could get him one of the free samples a tobacco chew company was handing away at a booth. I told him I was there for work and they wouldn’t like that

also wtf at the free tobacco samples. they don’t grow that here

that kid is probably playing candy crush in an auto-driving john deere tractor cab now and spitting his chew into a mountain dew bottle

thats what i would do

god bless corn. it’s the perfect plant, similar to how bananas are the perfect fruit, spiritually

it’s funny, my friend I’ve known from college is so allergic that he starts projectile vomiting about twenty minutes after accidentally eating a banana. i’m only mildly allergic but it’s apparently related to a latex allergy, or so i tell the ladies?!

Sorry to bring everyone down but I have some sad news to deliver: The Daily Wire laid off half of its staff today due to declining popularity.

their leader making insanely bad movies that no one wants to watch to burn money is probably the main culprit. it’s also been floated that hungary was sending them money and oops

story just came out about a huge gop donor whos gone awol maybe he was their guy

No longer quite the audience there used to be for ultra-zionism

Only 200k views for their “Sabrina Carpenter is secretly Right Wing” video.

tough out there

when a huge gop donor goes awol it usually means they died on the toilet

maybe we should see if they got a little too weird rod dreher style

hey at least DHS got funded

But now they're gonna try to get ICE funded via a budget reconciliation bill with no Dem reforms . Their goal is to get it through in May

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5858561-funding-ice-border-patrol/

Senator Collins will ride in on an white horse to save us! Sidesaddle!

really stressing about this U.S. troop withdrawal from Germany, not sure I'll sleep tonite

1946-2026 It was a good run

Can I just get in on the corn and say that is is one of the worst things you could make alcohol from. Not only does corn liquor taste like arse but it is energy negative - you get 0.8kJ of energy out for every kJ you put in. It’s fucking moronic to make alcohol to blend into gasoline from corn.

By way of comparison, sugarcane gives you 7-8 kJ out for every kJ you put in.

It’s moronic and keeps the red states red but it also stifles change and innovation. Some of the most productive agricultural land in the world panted for the stupidest fucking purpose because of a dumb vote buying subsidy that keeps farmer poorer.

And then (as we saw recently in Virginia) we get hit with the pious scolding of "no farms, no food" and "where do you city slicker snobs think your food comes from?"

this was the height of the ethanol boom, but Martin County, MN, the county next to us, excellent farmland and a corn growing county,actually started to import corn to feed the ethanol plants in the late 90s. an absurd situation. Corn is pretty hard on the land too, you usually rotate with soybeans for that reason, but because of ethanol farmers were trying to do two or three rotations of corn on a field.

good morning!

https://i.postimg.cc/pd5P1RDP/image.png

So yeah our terrible governor is calling our terrible legislature back into session on Tuesday to carve up Memphis into Republican-friendly congressional districts. I’m going to go over to Nashville to cover the scene. Doubt I’ll be able to get into the galleries, but people are furious, I expect/hope for big crowds outside.

hey how about some good news

‪Lav‬
✧@lavenderb✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 18h
Considering that Daily Wire are going bust almost three weeks after Péter Magyar announced that Hungary will no longer fund CPAC, it's at least plausible that Ben Shapiro was more or less dependent on Orbán cash to stay afloat.

osamathumbsup.jpg

I hope there’s some hungarian guy on the internet just fuming at the implication his government was funding the insanely doofy daily wire content

george soros bucks still flowin’ you fuckers, just remember that shit all night

jk ive no idea what open society or whatever is doing

Inside the Quiet Republican Effort to Flip Fetterman

It’s a few days after the election this November, and the results have become clear: Democrats have netted the four seats they need to claim a Senate majority.

But then there’s a disturbance in the force: Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump persuade Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) to switch parties or at least become an independent to ensure Republicans retain power in the chamber.

It’s a scenario that’s becoming less fantastical by the day.

The political environment is curdling for Republicans, and the quiet campaign to lure Fetterman across the aisle is underway.

Trump has made the sell, offering his patented total and complete endorsement plus a financial windfall to the Pennsylvanian. A handful of Senate Republicans are also gently feeling out Fetterman and responding to his concerns over the prospect of defecting from the Democratic Party, multiple high-level GOP officials tell me.

If Fetterman does flip, according to officials who were given anonymity to talk about sensitive matters, it will be thanks in large part to his deepening friendship with a pair of senators and their high-profile spouses: Sen. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.), and his wife Dina, and Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.), and her husband, Wesley.

But the first-term Democrat — who’s infuriated his party with his harder line on immigration and staunch support for Israel, Trump nominees, government funding bills and most recently the president’s ballroom — isn’t yet persuaded.

“I’m not changing,” Fetterman told me in an interview Friday when I asked if he was ruling out both becoming a Republican or turning independent. “I’m a Democrat, and I’m staying one."

I don't actually think there's any chance of Fetterman switching parties. He hates the job. He hates himself. His constituents hate him. He's basically guaranteed a primary challenge when he's up for reelection, and he's likely to lose.

i could see him doing it hes extremely stupid unstable and contrarian

I would rule out Fetterman running as an independent after losing the nomination, Leiberman style, but he might just bow out and go home to stare at his toes.

"I wouldn't rule out" that is

he should just go home right now he can wear all the basketball shorts he wants there

I do not see any evidence he hates the job. In fact, he seems to take the job to be needling liberals, which he loves.

He bitches about having to show up for votes. Says everything the Senate does is performative bullshit. Hates answering questions from reporters.

Who cares? I will believe it when he decides to voluntarily give up the cushy paycheck and awesome healthcare.

Of course he would think about it, why would he not? If he does want to stay in the job, his odds of doing that as well-funded Republican incumbent are probably better than vs. a well-funded Democratic primary opponent. He probably loses either way, but making the switch at least theoretically sets him up for a long afterlife in right-wing media. Maybe someone would give him a show or underwrite a podcast for him.

He's more valuable in the right wing media as a Democrat who trashes his party than as another Republican.

we should consider just how delusional he is too little while ago their was talk that he wanted to be president, this was after he was already very unpopular and had all sorts of negative stories about his behavior out

Well, he won a Senate race when he could barely speak so he may think anything's possible.

he comes across as a perpetually grumpy asshole who like many other men seems to take pride in being a perpetually grumpy asshole and as such doesn't come across as someone who exactly likes things, who knows why he does anything not to mention i think he seriously got fucked up by that stroke and seems to be out of his mind

brain damaged oaf '28

He's more valuable in the right wing media as a Democrat who trashes his party than as another Republican.

It's also worth noting, as the article points out, that he votes with the Democrats 93 percent of the time. The big splitting points seem to be his rabidly pro-Israel stance, his willingness to make the occasional "just give the president what he wants" statements, and his love of shit-talking other Democrats on Fox News.

The main reason I don't think Fetterman will run again is that he would have to run around the state making speeches and talking to people. I don't know if he's done any public appearances in PA since he became Senator. Unless waving an Israeli flag on the roof of his house counts.

he would be absolutely slaughtered if he made an announced appearance in Philly. people here hate him

yeah he doesn't seem to be physically able to do the whole kissing hands & shaking babies thing that a retail campaign requires... he'd rather sit in the park, staring off into the distance

thanks for the new dn

that was borrowed from Jello Biafra's San Francisco mayoral campaign, I can't claim credit

thanks jello. he's getting better from his stroke apparently.

Maybe he can be a Senator then.

Some interesting information on why and how The Daily Wire is dying.

Earlier this month, I wrote about all the evidence piling up that something has gone wrong with the right-wing content industry. Hungary’s new prime minister says he’s cutting funds for Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are publicly feuding with President Donald Trump, Ashley St. Clair is spilling Republican secrets on TikTok, and Tim Pool was complaining last year he can’t pay the bills. Something’s up in Trump World.

Well, here’s even more proof for you. The Daily Wire, the digital media company founded in 2015 by right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro is crashing and burning right now. They’re laying off a significant chunk of their workforce (after a previous layoff last year) and they’ve lost nearly 90% of their YouTube audience since 2023, according to some estimates I’ve seen. There are some recent videos on Shapiro’s channel that have less than 25,000 views. A pretty massive drop, considering he was averaging millions of views a video barely four years ago. So what gives?

For those who do not follow the right-wing ecosystem, The Daily Wire has always been a bit different from other conservative digital publishers. It was much more focused on appearing like a legitimate news site. I’ve always found them easier to understand as a traditional neocon outlet in MAGA clothing. They invested heavily in Facebook and by the end of the 2010s, they were one of the biggest publishers on the platform. According to the Facebook data from Newswhip my team and I have been tracking month to month since 2023, The Daily Wire basically disappeared from the app around 2023, came back for a brief period during the 2024 election, and then vanished again.

On YouTube, the story is a bit different. Shapiro’s channel, which has always been The Daily Wire’s flagship, started dropping off last fall. Slumping around August, it saw a small bump back to baseline after Charlie Kirk died, and then completely fell off a cliff at the end of October.

Which, when paired with the Facebook traffic data, gives us enough information to put together a fairly definitive picture of what happened. The Daily Wire is actually in a pretty typical digital media death spiral.

Facebook was The Daily Wire’s bread basket from 2018 to around 2022. This also appears to be the peak of their YouTube penetration. They were doing well enough to launch their streaming service DailyWire+ around then, as well. They were pulling in a lot of traffic and, assumedly, a lot of revenue. Though I think it’s safe to assume The Daily Wire, like every other right-wing publisher, was also getting a lot of dark money from pro-Trump organizations and using it to inflate their traffic (we’ll get to that in a sec).

But Facebook traffic started to dry up and then, after a spring 2024 update to the News Feed, was nuked entirely. That same year, tensions between Shapiro and Daily Wire host Candace Owens got so bad they fired her. Owens had been on an especially anti-Semitic tear at the time, which didn’t fly at a company run by Shapiro, who is Orthodox Jewish. But Owens being fired for anti-Semitism was a perfect launchpad for her own YouTube channel, which is now pulling in millions of views a month. Owens has similarly used her close friendship with Kirk to wage a one-woman war against the MAGA establishment since September. And it doesn’t get any more establishment than The Daily Wire.

So not only does The Daily Wire now not have Facebook traffic to fall back on, they also have Owens cannibalizing a huge chunk of their audience, who are hungry for more reactionary content. This isn’t quite a leopards eating my face situation. A closer metaphor would be an oxycodone dealer losing customers to heroin.

Owens is a deeply unreliable narrator, but she claimed this week that the majority of the traffic still going to Shapiro’s videos is completely fake. “He’s been buying views for his main show and you can tell by the comment ratio. (And the fact that I know the person who bought ads-per-view at DW),” she posted on X. Which is actually backed up by what we can see on Google’s Ads Transparency Center. The Daily Wire is running around 40 of Shapiro’s videos as ads at the moment. Ouch.

If you add the amount of money The Daily Wire has lit on fire over the last five years producing Tubi-original right-wing movies no one watches, a floundering streaming app no one is using, and a shrinking roster of relevant pundits to hire, it’s hard to imagine how they could reverse this. Speaking of relevant pundits, there’s also the Israel problem. The MAGA civil war that’s been happening since Kirk died largely boils down to whether or not American conservatives should support Israel or not. Kirk was something of a bridge there. The “cool” new far right, led by figures like Owens and Nick Fuentes are both anti-Israel and blatantly anti-Semitic, while Shapiro, of course, is not. The age old problem with working at the racism factory! They eventually make a new racism that includes you.

Since 42 Dems helped pass Speaker Johnson's bill to extend FISA 702. FISA’s Section 702 allows the US government to surveil electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence information, without a warrant. However, Americans’ data is also swept up, and supporters of the current section oppose reform. Now the Senate will vote on this at some point

, 42 Democrats—including House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Ranking Member Jim Himes (Conn.)—still joined most House Republicans in advancing the legislation.

In addition to Himes, the Democrats who voted for the bill are Pete Aguilar (Calif.), Ami Bera (Calif.), Sanford Bishop (Ga.), Nikki Budzinski (Ill.), Janelle Bynum (Ore.), Ed Case (Hawaii), Kathy Castor (Fla.), Gil Cisneros (Calif.), Herb Conaway (NJ), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Lois Frankel (Fla.), Laura Gillen (NY), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Josh Harder (Calif.), Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.), Steny Hoyer (Md.), Greg Landsman (Ohio), Susie Lee (Nev.), Kristen McDonald Rivet (Mich.), Jared Moskowitz (Fla.), Frank Mrvan (Ind.), Donald Norcross (NJ), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Scott Peters (Calif.), Mike Quigley (Ill.), Josh Riley (NY), Brad Schneider (Ill.), Kim Schrier (Wash.), Terri Sewell (Ala.), Eric Sorensen (Ill.), Darren Soto (Fla.), Marilyn Strickland (Wash.), Tom Suozzi (NY), Derek Tran (Calif.), Gabe Vasquez (NM), Marc Veasey (Texas), Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), and George Whitesides (Calif.).

https://www.commondreams.org/news/fisa-section-702-reauthorization

And the hits keep on coming

WASHINGTON, May 4 (Reuters) - The ‌U.S. Secret Service said on Monday its officers confronted an armed and "suspicious individual" near the White House who later fired at them before fleeing on foot and being shot by law enforcement.

The incident led to a ​brief lockdown at the White House.

It might be possible for trump to go ahead and hide in his new ballroom underground until the anger and resentment about his white supremacist policies recedes

Seems like he would be safe in there, and they could just watch movies until it’s over. What’s his favorite? Bloodsport?

Probably not Downfall

Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, obviously - his cameo on a loop.

probably not the Melania docu

NY Times Pitchbot

Opinion | I often hear liberals say that Trump is the worst president of their lifetimes. Then I think of my precious 8-month-old granddaughter and realize: Trump is the *best* president of *her* lifetime. Perspective is a gift.
2:40 PM · May

Lol

i could see him doing it hes extremely stupid unstable and contrarian

Fetterman is the most egregious bait and switch candidate I can remember

more like "Bait and Stroke"

God bless America babyyy

The Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act last week came about thanks to a conspiracy theorist who participated in the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.

Democracy Docket reports that Phillip “Bert” Callais, the lead plaintiff in Louisiana v. Callais, has long claimed U.S. elections are rigged on social media. Callais posted photos and video from the scene at the infamous “Stop the Steal” protest prior to the 2021 Capitol riot, and his Facebook page is full of MAGA and right-wing content, including attacks on vaccines and anything to the left of President Trump.

https://newrepublic.com/post/209973/plantiff-callais-supreme-court-case-voting-rights-act-jan-6er

And Justice For All

Several hundred people at a rally outside the Tennessee State Capitol today. Should have been thousands, but it was a Tuesday afternoon and of course there was only a few days notice. Lots of good speeches, including by state Rep. Justin Pearson, who's a phenomenal speaker and would be a good congressman but most likely won't get the chance because the district he's running for is the one that's being sliced up. People are mad and there was a lot of talk of fighting, but it's not really clear how much fighting they can do. The GOP will ram it thru in the next few days (they haven't even actually produced a map yet, but they voted down an effort to ensure 72 hours of public review of any map before voting). I'm sure there will be lawsuits. The thing is, the Memphis district is not actually a "racial gerrymander," it's mostly just ... Memphis. A city that happens to have nearly a half-million Black people. You have to do a racial gerrymander in order to turn it into several majority-white districts. But with SCOTUS saying that as long as you can say it's "partisan" it's fine, I don't know if any possible claims are even left. Pretty grim.

Gas jumped 40 cents from filling up before work to when I got off. Maybe Talarico does have a chance in November…

Joe Biden playing the long game, inflicting super high gas prices 15 months after he left office in order to usher in ultra-communism.

Maybe Biden is planning a run for president.

Reposting on the correct thread:

Gotta say things feel pretty grim this morning down here in MAGA land. Besides the smash-and-grab of Memphis' congressional district, at the local level we had several moderate/reasonable Republicans lose to MAGA kooks in primaries. Our already conservative school board and county commission are going to get even moreso (unless a couple of Democrats can pull off unlikely but not impossible general election wins), and our county mayor is likely to be a straight-up Moms for Liberty school board member who mostly distinguished herself by being enthusiastic about vouchers and banning library books.

I know it maybe sounds funny to even talk about moderate Republicans at this point, but at the county level they've still been a pretty big presence. We're a relatively big (500,000+ people), diverse, and well-educated county relative to most of the state. The local GOP going further and further right maybe opens opportunities for Democrats at some point, but in the near term it just feels like a neverending red shift.

A fascinating article about a professor in Oregon who teaches a class on the history of the American right, and his students, who are all 19-21 and have never known a non-Trumpian America. Lots of quotes from the students, who I really feel sorry for in a way.

great article. I get the feeling there are a ton of kids like Tommy out there right now.

plays by sense of smell, I hear.

what's happening in TN is really fucked up!

Yeah buddy. At one of the committee hearings today, Memphis state Sen. London Lamar — who like the entire Black Memphis delegation is just simmering with rage this week — tried to get the asshole Republican sponsor of the new map to admit that it was going to break up a majority-Black city among three districts that would just happen to each have 30% Black population. He first said that he didn't know what the city limits of Memphis were, then said he had no idea what the city's racial demographics were. The Republicans have all obviously been told not to say anything about race or acknowledge it in any way, since that's the one thing that could seemingly trip them up under the new Callais rules. Just totally playing the, "We don't even see race" card.

And racist assholes online talking about how "finally we're getting rid of these unfair racial gerrymanders," on the assumption that only way you could ever have a majority-minority district is "racial" line-drawing — but majority-white districts are of course just the natural order of things, even if they have to snake for hundreds of miles across multiple counties like the new West TN districts will.

Nazis have always been all-in when it comes to telling shameless lies in order to advance their power. For example: Project 2025? Never heard of it. Those people have nothing to do with me. I'll give you health care that's not just cheaper, but better than anything you've ever seen. Those ICE officers were only protecting themselves from violent radical left-wingers. The list is long and ever-growing.

Good luck, non-fascist Tennesseans.

The other thing they're doing of course is citing all the blue states doing big redistricting, as if that in itself wasn't in response to Trump and Texas.

Anyway. I get disgusted by our state government all the time, but this week feels like a new low. I'm sure next year or in the near future they'll also come for the majority-minority state legislative districts, so they won't have to listen to all these Black Democrats calling them racist.

there's also this assumption that white folks will consistently vote against their own self-interest... and I'm not sure that's still true

there's also this assumption that white folks will consistently vote against their own self-interest... and I'm not sure that's still true

That's kinda where my head's been for a while. There's a real risk that this makes the margins narrow enough in each of those three districts that in a serious rage-wave year Democrats could flip them all. They're certainly going to be motivated to actually contest them, that's for sure. Time was, if your district was skewed enough, you could basically run unopposed. No more. Democrats are likely to contest every district this year and going forward. There'll definitely be enough small-dollar donations to go around.

what if their self-interest is white supremacy?

The recruitment and support of good candidates is much more difficult in areas where the party has been allowed to atrophy or effectively disappear. It's hard to build up an organization like a pop-up Halloween store. We tend to push a small donation toward our local County Democrats in election years, just to encourage them to stay alive and active.

what if their self-interest is white supremacy?

yes, and there's probably a pretty big number of folks who will only vote for a name with (R) next to it... but the myth of 'Republicans are better at the economy' is fading fast, people see it every time they buy gas or ground beef

heh. i'll believe it when i see it

^^^^

Biden shouldn’t have started that war with Iran.

I knew it was his fault somehow

Way xp. Thanks for posting that link, unthread. Leah Sottile is a great journalist. Check out her book, “When The Moon Turns to Blood.”

but the myth of 'Republicans are better at the economy' is fading fast, people see it every time they buy gas or ground beef

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, May 6, 2026 4:35 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

heh. i'll believe it when i see it

― Cattedrale metropolitana di Santa Maria de Episcopio, Wednesday, May 6, 2026 4:38 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^

― Brenton Wood Conference (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, May 6, 2026 4:57 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

my nuanced take is that people WILL notice that it’s a myth, and will vote against republicans this year, but also that, in a sudden wave of unexplainable national amnesia and selective memory, in two years absolutely everyone in the entire voting universe will have seemingly forgotten the years 2016-2028 and we’ll have to do it again

also alfred otm upthread, the self-interest of several dozen million people in this country is white supremacy, christian nationalism, or both

The economy will be in the shitter “because of those fucking (insert racial epithet for middle-eastern person).” These people are so anti-woke, they’re brain dead.

Something connected to that, I put up an interview this week with a really interesting South Carolina writer named Rick Pidcock. He is basically newly emerged from the heart of the Southern white evangelical world, after being born into it, and one thing he emphasizes a lot is how foundationally authoritarian it is. It is a belief system built around dominion and control -- not at all coincidentally, one entwined with slavery and white supremacy -- and people inside it very much see the world as a struggle for power. They win or they lose. They win or GOD loses, and God can't lose.

Related, I've been watching increasingly naked and public displays of bigotry and hatred at my local and state level throughout the Trump era, and the thing that always strikes me is how much people relish it. It's not just the excitement of breaking taboos or social courtesies, it's this very deep sort of joy at dehumanizing other people. You can see the sense of power it gives people, it's visceral. And kinda terrifying.

So when LBJ was talking about taking that away from people, it wasn't something superficial. It runs deep in how people think of the world and especially their place in it.

When Obama and Biden took over the economy still didn't feel good for the majority of Americans. (Even with Clinton, despite our rosier memories of the pre-dotcom bust economy I remember people generally being pretty anxious, NAFTA was kicking in and the WTO protests and Nader2K didn't come from nothing.) People realizing Republicans aren't good for the economy doesn't matter if there's not an alternative who they think is good for the economy.

He is basically newly emerged from the heart of the Southern white evangelical world, after being born into it, and one thing he emphasizes a lot is how foundationally authoritarian it is. It is a belief system built around dominion and control -- not at all coincidentally, one entwined with slavery and white supremacy -- and people inside it very much see the world as a struggle for power. They win or they lose. They win or GOD loses, and God can't lose.

i remember when i called my dad an authoritarian (this was the day after the election, 2016), he scoffed in disbelief, despite being a founder of a police academy. but i was like “aren’t god’s laws the authority for you?” and that was like the one thing i ever said in my entire fucking life that both caught him off guard and that he also accepted. everything else bounced off

worldly authority is different than divine authority, of course. irl, we have real life fucking authorities, people who can punish us, watch us, monitor, assess penalties, provide “justice”, lip service to restorative justice if you’re lucky. we recognize that our authority and laws are sometimes horribly wrong, for example, slavery used to be legal etc

the crossing with divine authority, where there is no possibility of wrong, is where things get incredibly fucked up. believing the bible literally is a funny thing when it involves dinosaurs and it being 10k years ago, and lasers, but it’s a lot less funny when it starts to involve divinely-inspired genocide and there’s no way they can be wrong

to wrap that one up, merging a nihilist and self-absorbed trump administration with an apocalypse-obsessed white evangelical christian nationalist base is an absolutely worst case scenario

(and if you think ‘apocalypse obsessed’ is going overboard i honestly don’t think you understand how many people hate their lives here and really want to die and move on to the next thing - it is very, very, very, very, very fucked up)

a nihilist and self-absorbed trump administration with an apocalypse-obsessed white evangelical christian nationalist base

As the saying goes, "game recognizes game".

In more "The Kids are Alright" news:

A viral TikTok trend using audio from the moment conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk was assassinated last September is drawing intense backlash from Turning Point USA, which demanded the audio and videos be taken down.

The audio from Kirk’s assassination was largely being used for fashion transition videos, where users show off outfit changes.

Ts Change my mind vs change my outfit

have we discussed this? the midterm ads write themselves

One of President Trump’s economic advisers projected a “very, very strong” job market future in the U.S. on Wednesday, despite price hikes amid the Iran war.

“I had the head of one of the big five banks in my office yesterday going through credit card data … and credit card spending is through the roof,” Kevin Hassett told Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo.

“They’re spending more on gasoline, but they’re spending more on everything else too,” he continued.

People realizing Republicans aren't good for the economy doesn't matter if there's not an alternative who they think is good for the economy.

― Lady Sovereign (Citizen) (milo z), Wednesday, May 6, 2026 9:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm. I think Dems are going to clean the Republican's clocks this year, but that isn't necessarily going to carry over to 2028 (or beyond) if Dems don't show some real results. (cf. The Obama Years).

xp lol they think that’s good

Dems aren't going to show any results with Trump still in office

https://i.ibb.co/KxGCsdK1/Screenshot-2026-05-07-at-1-15-54-PM.png

Memphis' congressional district has been dismantled. I wasn't in the chambers but was in the hallway outside with the protesters earlier. This is from the official video feed of the state Senate, just before the final vote was called. They had to clear protesters from the galleries, and that's state Sen. Charlane Oliver of Nashville up on her desk with the banner. Lots of yelling, but of course the outcome was a given. Most of Memphis' Black population has been split between two congressional districts that will be about 70 percent white and will run through multiple mostly rural counties, ending up in the suburbs of Nashville about 200 miles away.

So that's one more district the GOP has stolen this year. If they somehow end up with a 1-seat majority, there you go.

Dems aren't going to show any results with Trump still in office

― The Quaker Gurvitz Army (President Keyes), Thursday, May 7, 2026 2:30 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Not with that attitude they won't.

Did this get posted anywhere on ilx? https://www.thewesternedge.media/p/the-age-of-no-innocence

It's a story where a journalist spent time with college students whose earliest political memories start with Trump (also school shootings, etc.). They're at Willamette U in Salem, OR, which I found particularly interesting as a contrast with my partner's experience teaching at UO in 2011-14 (not that those two schools are directly comparable)

^^^^ posted yesterday by Unperson I believe

Distrust in Democrats is going to take a lot longer to fix than two years in opposition or even a four year Presidency. One place to start is not bullshitting and rah-rahing when their team is in power. During the Biden admin we had plenty of people even on ILX going "actually, the economy is fine" when the economy was very much not fine and for working people under the age of 45 has never been fine. With any luck we'll avoid the "you're a Russian bot if you don't think the Mayor Pete economy is booming" mindset come 2029.

xp ah my bad. It's worth thinking about imo. I just saw someone on bsky lamenting how comparatively muted the response has been to the SC killing the VRA and the subsequent, explicitly racist redistricting, and I think that's probably going to persist given the context younger people have now grown up in

yeah, we all grew up with the idea of embracing 'norms' (like divesting yourself from your businesses, for instance) but that's been wiped clean and now using the office to personally enrich your family might be the new 'norm'... and these kids might not know that it wasn't always like that

hmm

https://bsky.app/profile/brianbeutler.bsky.social/post/3mlbomsv2tk2q

I got no dog in that fight but I do wonder who even watches Tucker now that he's bailed on the magasphere

As long as he hasn't bailed on tanning his balls.

while everyone else turned off the tanning machine and went back to their lives, only i stayed in the machine and continued tanning my balls. i bought high and the only way i’m going to recoup my investment is to remind folks of the benefits of tanning your balls and then sell high

wait, you guys stopped tanning your balls?

no, but I only do it with natural sun

Kash Patel now polygraphing his team

FBI Director Kash Patel ordered the polygraphing of more than two dozen former and current members of his security detail, as well as other staff, and has been described as being in panic mode to save his job and find leakers among his team, according to two people briefed on the development.

Patel walled himself off from some senior bureau leaders this week after multiple media reports raised red flags about his leadership, according to three people familiar with his recent actions. Two of the people told MS NOW that the director ordered the polygraphing this week of former and current security detail members, as well as several information technology staff.

The director has also avoided meeting this week with some key operational leaders of the bureau, the people said, raising concerns inside the FBI about Patel’s ability to stay abreast of pressing threats and investigations in order to make the best decisions.

FBI spokesman Ben Williamson declined to comment on whether Patel ordered polygraphs. He disputed claims that the director was walled off from his senior staff, saying Patel has regularly met with operational leaders, including his two deputy directors, assistant directors and an intelligence briefing team.

...

The FBI director demanded the polygraph examinations to determine if any members of the team that accompanies him on his travels or staff who have access to sensitive details about his decisions have communicated with reporters, according to the people, who asked to speak anonymously due to the threat of retribution.

This new detail comes a day after MS NOW revealed Patel ordered a team of FBI agents to open a criminal leak investigation into a story by The Atlantic last month that described him as drinking to excess and being difficult to rouse the following morning.

Sources told MS NOW that agents were deeply concerned about opening such a probe, in which they were expected to examine the contacts of a journalist who engaged in newsgathering and, in their view, lacked reasonable justification. Those sources said the agents who were directed feared Patel would fire them if they did not agree.

are people asking about Platner and Carlson bc they both live in Maine?

Patel's personalized FBI bourbon is not really helping the narrative he's trying to put forward

does anyone here know about out the validity of polygraph tests?

i know a bit, but not much. as i understand, they are accurate, like, 70% of the time, and under specific circumstances? if you google and get ai crap back, it tells you that proponents claim more like 80 to 90%, but even if you grant that, that’s not high enough for trust. that’s actually a problematic area, 80-90%, because, like ai crap responses, it’s probably pretty right, but not really, and you shouldn’t trust it, but people do

my personal story with polygraph tests is that when i was a kid, maybe 10 or so, i wanted to have holes in my jeans. so i took scissors and cut big triangle holes on the knees of my jeans. my mom asked me if i cut them with scissors, and i said no. my dad brought home a polygraph machine from work and it found that i was lying. in this case, i’m sorry to admit that it was right, i was lying about not cutting big triangle holes in my jeans. but then later in life it was interesting to see that polygraph tests were being used in court as if they proved shit

if you're a complete psychopath and you really believe, you probably could've passed that.. but you got nervous

the triangle-cutting killer

the Isosceles Slasher

wait zach your dad gave you a polygraph test because of jeans? for real?

yeah but it was lighthearted! i was telling my therapist about this a couple weeks ago and she was kind of shocked at first. so i’m kinda reliving that, but for real, it was like very family sitcom style. my dad came home with a briefcase. “honey i’m home! and i’ve brought a truth-telling briefcase!” *moderate audience laughter* cut to my face, i say “what is that?” and my dad goes “it’s a polygraph machine. i use it to determine who is telling the truth, and i have no idea what the scientific method is, not even close tbh” *moderate audience laughter* my mom says “oh goodness” *lite laughter* dad lays out the machine on the kitchen table. it’s a briefcase. it opens up and becomes twice as large, filling the whole table. “i have to plug it in” says dad, “there’s an outlet over here” helps my sister. cut to my isosceles triangle holes on both of my knees,
it was all like that, it kept going like that, he asked if i cut the holes in the jeans

honestly i don’t know what i answered. i either told the truth because i was afraid or i lied and the squiggles were large. but whatever it was, we were all laughing the whole time

(narrator: they lived down the street from the prison)

I love that Patel is suing the Atlantic journalist for the "he's a drunk" story so she's doubled down and done a new story about how much of this leak-plugging polygraphing is because someone stole one of his fancy bourbons. You can't make this shit up.

it’s wild how much of this was in dr strangelove, these wild pastiches, and then irl now we have rfk jr, patel, hegseth, the emperor without clothes, even more satirical than the original

Pls let Hesgy bullride a bomb. As long as said bomb isnt going to land anywhere important. Maybe on maralago

Mar-a-LaGone more like

Are airports still a mess generally? Anyone flown lately? (I have to fly on Thursday and haven’t had a chance really dig into whatever is happening with that. And feel free to point me to another thread.)

Depends on the airport. Laguardia is great now ime. Charlotte is a dream. JFK, Atlanta, O’Hare still hellscapes iirc

I've been through DCA, Houston, and Huntsville with no problems.

Lga and louisville were fine; ft Lauderdale was a mess but i will chalk that up to spirit shutting up shop that day

polygraphs are considered pseudoscience by scientists who study such things, they do not detect lying, doesnt stop cops corporate weirdos and various other authoritarians from using them of course

Well shit. Virginia Supreme Court throws out redistricting. I hate to say it, but that could be the ballgame as far as the Democrats taking the House.

https://www.axios.com/local/richmond/2026/05/08/virginia-supreme-court-redistricting-vote-decision

really? i would be shocked if they don't take back the house

Using 2024 maps, they almost certainly would. They were down 5 seats after the '24 election. But since then, Republicans have netted at least 8 new seats (counting the Tennessee one just added). At least one more is coming from Louisiana, and it's possible Mississippi and Alabama will add another 1 or 2. So round number of probably 10 new GOP districts, net. Add that to the 5-seat margin in '24, and that's 15 seats Democrats need to flip to have a shot.

That's not an impossible number, we've had bigger midterm swings. But there are fewer flippable seats than there used to be because of the way districts are gerrymandered now. Virginia adding 4 Democratic seats would have helped a lot. A few of those existing Va. districts may still be flippable, I don't know, but nobody should be assuming Democratic House control imo.

Here's the Ballotpedia page tracking all of this (does not yet include Tennessee): https://ballotpedia.org/Redistricting_ahead_of_the_2026_elections

Actually my numbers are slightly off — they were down 5 seats in '24, but only needed to make up 3 of those to get to 218. So the starting margin is more like 12 or 13 seats, depending on redistricting still to come.

Illinois' gotta get in the game.

This Democratic org is targeting 19 allegedly flippable seats — https://swingleft.org/house

If they get all or most of those, yes they can do it. But they'll need all or most of them.

this is some bullshit

bleak shit for sure

Virginians voted for the bill = unconstitutional
Florida and Tennessee legislators ram it through = you go, girl

This is blood boiling

Thank you for breaking it down

My hope is that the energy / outrage inspires some fence-sitters and apathetic folks to come out.

Illinois' gotta get in the game.

it's wild to me that these republican states were locked and loaded to take advantage of this and it definitely doesn't feel the same on the other side, it's infuriating.

So much for that blue wave! Oh, well

As usual, it mystifies me as to why the Virginia Dems can't just hold a press conference and say "Ohio, Utah, and Florida currently have unconstitutional and illegal district maps in use. We will join them in using our current voter-approved maps in this Fall's midterm elections until all three of these states agree to revert to the court-mandated versions as well."

Like, your audience is American voters not the blatantly corrupt state and federal courts. That's who you need to be pleading your case to.

Because Dems hate winning but love corporate money and making their voters afraid thus yielding contributions that they will then pack away without showing tangible results for anything

“we need to fight fascism and Trump”

*does absolutely squat to do so*

“please contribute so we can fight fascism and Trump”

rinse repeat

has one prominent Dem came out and said "when we retake power, we're going to punish the villains"? because it very much seems like this is something the median voter wants now, feels like half the conversation right now is "nobody's gonna pay for this are they?"

If Virginia Dems held a press conference denouncing the VSC and announcing their own plans, I missed it. Please correct me.

has one prominent Dem came out and said "when we retake power, we're going to punish the villains"? because it very much seems like this is something the median voter wants now, feels like half the conversation right now is "nobody's gonna pay for this are they?"

― frogbs,

Ossoff, surprisingly, has come closest.

If Virginia Dems held a press conference denouncing the VSC and announcing their own plans, I missed it. Please correct me.

"Today's decision by the Supreme Court of Virginia is, with respect, wrong on the law and unprecedented in its consequences. For the first time in the 250-year history of our Commonwealth, our Supreme Court has set aside the results of a statewide election in which more than three million Virginians cast ballots and a majority voted to ratify a constitutional amendment." said Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D–Fairfax).

"Their votes have been set aside not because of fraud, not because of intimidation, not because of any defect in the casting or counting of ballots, but because four Justices have adopted a definition of 'election' that conflicts with state statute, federal precedent, and the considered legal advice of the nonpartisan staff who guided the General Assembly through this process."

https://www.vpm.org/generalassembly/2026-05-08/scova-redistricting-reactions-miyares-spanberger-kilgore-surovell-scott-trump

Ossoff has the benefit of an extremely pissed off Black Georgia voting base, and motivating them to come out in big numbers is his best shot at re-election. He should be raising all the hell he can.

that’s about the strongest response from a Virginia Democratic leader. the article has other more muted responses from other including Governor Spanberger

‪Streetwise, Cville Safety Cat: Interested Female Vocalists Write‬
✧@averysafe✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 5h
Don't expect Spanberger to do a thing about the Virginia Supreme Court's ruling. This is the woman who allowed an entirely rigged Board of Visitors to stand at UVA, the same one who had just rammed through a puppet president for the outgoing MAGA Governor.

!!

The Downballot‬
✧@the-downbal✧✧✧.c✧✧‬
· 1h
We don't ordinarily publish posts at [checks watch] 8:51 PM on a Friday night, but state constitutional law expert Quinn @yeargain.bsky.social has an outside-the-box idea for reversing the VA Supreme Court that is very much worth taking seriously:

Dems can simply lower the retirement age.

https://www.the-downballot.com/p/how-virginia-democrats-can-overturn

My so-unbelievably-over-it-you-can't-even-imagine state rep just posted a voice mail some psycho left her after the redistricting session, calling her a "dumb liberal cunt" and saying "I hope you get tit cancer." He also said he can't wait for her to get voted out of office. She commented "Michael is so emotional. He’s really going to be big mad when he finds out I don’t have an opponent and I will win again in November. BTW, I’m proud to be a cunt! #blesshisheart"

xp the problem with that solution is that it requires democrats to take decisive action rather than stand around and whine asking for money

I haven't watched this whole 90 minute thing yet (David Axelrod interviewing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), but I saw some clips on Bluesky that were pretty good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbzYO_e9xnw

In no way do I agree with this or understand all of it, but elected Democrats should probably read it https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mark-cuban-health-care-ai-crypto.html

which part of it?

he talks a lot about healthcare and also about ai, and also basketball haha

oh man, this interview just keeps going holy shit. i did think his interest in healthcare is surprisingly….good? if it leads to actual transparency in costs and he’s kicking some healthcare ceo ass. but then he says all this other stuff, about ai and crypto and other stuff, just his general investor mode, hard to take, i had to stop reading

By the way, Kamala could have. The first time I met Kamala, she invited me to lunch in 2024, probably early 2024. She was, “Fuck this, fuck that, fuck this,” I’m like, “We can curse?” She’s like “Fuck, yeah, we can curse.” I’m like, “I like you.” We were just getting along, but her team would not let that side of Kamala come out and would not let her do those interviews.

lol that’s kinda cool i guess!

As someone who works with teenagers I am intimately familiar with deploying the "I too can curse" card as a way to appear cooler than I actually am

this is very Veep

So lamebrained, further evidence there's no such thing as a good billionaire. Cuban could do a lot better by investing in real political and media infrastructure than by telling us all what HE thinks about everything, but of course telling everyone your genius thoughts and insights is billionaire behavior.

Melinda Gates, excellent billionaire.

The incredibly rare exception.

Mackenzie Scott, maybe?

they can have a guillotine pillow

I guess my point is that the Democratic Party has got to grapple with reality a little better.

Or, more accurately, the multiple realities this country contains.

To be more specific: the young men who Trump won. How to WE win them?

Offer a coupon good for one free scrotal inflation if they show an "I Voted" sticker and promise it was for a Democrat?

Maybe get them some AI girlfriends

Young men for Trump have been seduced by a false vision of reality, and false promises of ascendance within society, and false measures of meaning and happiness. Until they experience these as falsehoods and empty promises there's no way to reach them. The manosphere isn't that far from Q-Anon in how it functions as a cult that offers human connection via shared delusions.

Show some legitimate anger about how fucked up the world is instead of saying everything is fine.

Or maybe sub, "everything was fine 10 years ago" for "everything is fine".

Meanwhile, the con goes on: SCOTUS allows Alabama to throw out its maps — which SCOTUS just affirmed TWO YEARS AGO — in the middle of voting for a May 19 primary. All of this is how you actually steal an election.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/scotus-greenlights-11th-hour-alabama-redistricting-plan-for-2026-election/

In their version of "the world is fucked up" they blame that on very different causes, so they will demand entirely different solutions than what progressives believe needs to be done. They'll probably notice that.

Supreme Court is cooked beyond belief xp

They've been cooked for a long time, they just reached the point where they can act with total impunity and no one in power cares enough to challenge them.

To be more specific: the young men who Trump won. How to WE win them?

Back to the '24 suggestion of nominating The Rock

And the 5th Circuit just gave Mississippi the green light to throw out its maps. So there goes its one majority-Black seat, out of four districts in the state. (Mississippi is 38% Black, the highest proportion of any state.)

So out of curiosity, I did some math. If we assume that the net result of the SCOTUS decisions on redistricting is that states with one-party rule will (and can) eventually draw all their congressional districts to elect the dominant party, under the current map of trifecta states, that would give you 176 locked-in Republican seats, and 175 locked-in Democratic seats (I'm including Vermont as a locked-in seat even though it technically has a divided government, because Vermont is not going to elect a Republican to Congress). With 84 seats at play in states that currently have divided government.

Of those divided states, it seems possible though not a given that several can become Democratic trifectas: Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Others could become Republican trifectas: Alaska, Kansas, Kentucky. The others based on my cursory knowledge seem likely to remain somewhat divided: Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina.

If you hypothesize that those divided states sort themselves into those trifectas within the next few cycles, and that they then do complete partisan gerrymandering of their states, you could add 47 locked-in Democratic seats and 11 locked-in Republican seats, for a 221-187 Democratic edge with 27 seats at play in the three remaining divided states.

Which is to say that the map is pretty challenging for Democrats, but even with all of this panicked redistricting it's also challenging for Republicans to try to lock in an unbeatable House majority. What Democrats in the near term should focus on is locking down those Midwestern swing states with Democratic trifectas that can attempt to draw completely or near-completely Democratic congressional maps.

Also, this math will get a bit worse for Democrats after 2030, because New York and California are probably both going to lose seats to Southern red states.

Also this is a terrible way to do representative government, but this is what SCOTUS has made inevitable, at least unless/until there can be a national redistricting law.

at least unless/until there can be a national redistricting law.

which seems as likely as electoral college reform, unfortunately

it is a pickle

I think a lot more House seats should be added, but that is also unlikely to happen

uh oh, they're talking about treason in the oval office

Rattled by leaks from within his own administration about the Iran War, President Trump has directed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to target reporters and news organizations who are the recipients of the leaks, according to new reporting.

“In one meeting, Trump passed a stack of news articles he and other senior officials thought threatened national security to Blanche with a sticky note on it that said ‘treason,'” an administration official told the WSJ, which was itself the recipient of a grand jury subpoena in a leak case.

I love that they're leaking about leaking

dare someone to put the sticky note that says treason on trump's back while he's sleeping

Trump was busy overnight and this morning on Truth Social posting about Obama and re-posting racist viseo clips

https://newrepublic.com/post/210294/donald-trump-accuses-obama-treason-crashout-racism?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=tnr_daily

okay I am NOT reading that.

dare someone to put the sticky note that says treason on trump's back while he's sleeping

I mean, if anyone's leaking it's that gross fuck

Trump posted more than 55 times in just three hours on Monday night

they just let you do it when you're a star

is this all just a coverup for the cellphone scam coming to light?

Jamelle B on his IG suggests AOC is running for president, which I agree with, the signs all seem to be there

I see nothing indicating NY is going to gerrymander in favor of the Dems.

dare someone to put the sticky note that says treason on trump's back while he's sleeping

I mean, if anyone's leaking it's that gross fuck

― an uncharacteristically irritated Mr. Rogers (stevie)

you're right, it's gonna take more than a single sticky note to keep him from leaking, probably will need hundreds of them

Jamelle B on his IG suggests AOC is running for president, which I agree with, the signs all seem to be there

She spoke at Raphael Warnock's church in Atlanta the other day.

I am not super enthusiastic about an AOC presidential run, I would rather see her run for Senate first. Partly I just think she needs more campaign experience, she has only ever won in one extremely Democratic House district. It would be good to have a whole state under her belt. But who knows, maybe she runs and catches fire. I just think there’s kind of a too much too soon danger there.

As for NY, they are talking about redistricting, but it’s not going to happen this year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/04/scotus-jeffries-redistrict-new-york.html

New - 2028 president poll

🔵 AOC 26%
🔵 Buttigieg 22%
🔵 Newsom 21%
🔵 Harris 13%
🔵 Beshear 4%
🔵 Booker 4%

Atlasintel #A - 5/7 pic.twitter.com/mtTCVzpswG

— Political Polls (@PpollingNumbers) May 12, 2026

in the past Trump sometimes was the “senior administration official familiar with the President’s thinking” being quoted, and there was one anonymous quote when Trump chose Vance as his running mate that could only have been him when the “source” said something like “women will love him (Vance) because he looks like a baby!”

xp poor Rahm!

xp idk i'm not ready to settle for only 1 of 6 front runners not being an utter POS

Atlas Intel is supposedly a pretty reputable pollster, so this is good to see

I could see her running a widely popular yet heartbreaking grassroots campaign with huge crowds and small donations from the downtrodden Americans with medical bankruptcies

Yeah. It would be great to have more than one candidate with any kind of left credentials at all. And I know that bench is pretty shallow, which is a problem in and of itself. And maybe 28 is going to be one of those extraordinary years where unusual candidates can breakthrough. I am not opposed to an AOC candidacy on its merits, it’s just the idea of her being the one basket that all of the left-populist eggs are in gives me pause.

well at least this time around somebody is going to have to win the Dem primary

idk Maybe it's better not the have the left-populist vote split between multiple candidates?

Of course all those Butt-Newsom-Harris centrist votes add up to a pretty big percentage

I can see AOC getting trounced. This is no longer a country of nuance, and there are a million things she has said that will be twisted unfairly/inaccurately against her that require a modicum of intellect to parse, and this country does not have the patience for that. Plus she is a she. But every day is a month and every month a year, so who knows where we will be in 2028. If we're here at all.

Idk i like anyone saying medicare for all and fuck those other guys, in public. Let her run.

xpost That's going to happen to any leftist though. They all say things that sound insane to the average CNN viewer.

Yep.

"Medicare for all" vs. "She's a pet-eating Communist who will come for your guns, make you drive an EV, and force your kids to learn Spanish."

She spoke at Raphael Warnock's church in Atlanta the other day.

this is literally what the IG video is about.

"She's a pet-eating Communist who will come for your guns, make you drive an EV, and force your kids to learn Spanish."

I don't think this shit is going to work when Trump is not in the picture

"She's a pet-eating Communist who will come for your guns, make you drive an EV, and force your kids to learn Spanish." would also be said about Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Fetterman if they ran for national office.

aoc is obviously the one and i don't think there's really any question

They're gonna ratfuck every Dem who runs, guys. So let's go with AOC.

there are a million things she has said that will be twisted unfairly/inaccurately against her that require a modicum of intellect to parse

comes with the territory of running for office come the fuck on

the earth is screaming for a left populist who can tell the AI pedo cabal to go to hell

Just stop worrying about what the dumbest Americans (Republicans, op-ed columnists) will say about any Democratic politician.

and offers a positive message that better things are possible

But what if they say she's shrill?

i used to be a “vote blue no matter who” simp and I swear to god I will not vote for a Mark Cuban endorsed lizard person anymore

this is where you get tim kaine to run as your vice president nominee

I think AOC's age is a big + in her favor... sensing a real groundswell of 'all these fuckers are too old'

The attack ads write themselves:

Acyn

in tears “Mr. Trump cares so much for the little guy like me”

finally a glimmer of honesty

he tells it like it is and I’m proud of the billion dollar ballroom I’ll never set foot inside

Trump: Not even a little bit. I don't think about Americans’ financial situation. Have you seen the new ballroom?

fixed it

I'm less concerned about the type of bullshit the GOP will use to bury AOC in a presidential run than her ability to cut through it. Which is something she can do and Buttigieg can also do, and zero of the other candidates in that poll can do at all.

yeah, their main line of attack this many years later is still "she was a bartender."

not sure why Pritzker was not included

They're gonna ratfuck every Dem who runs, guys. So let's go with AOC.

Yeah, any Democratic nominee will be "radical left lunatic socialist Marxist baby killer" etc etc.

My major reservation is that I don't know how actually good a politician she is. Winning elections is hard. You need a good message, a good team with smart people who you listen to, a good strategy for maximizing your votes. The retail side of it I think she's very good on, she can talk to crowds, she can tlk to people one on one, she's pretty good in interviews, she's good on social media etc. The organizational stuff is a lot harder to know, because she just hasn't done it. (This was Bernie's biggest problem, which I know Bernie people hate to hear, but it's still true.) But w/e, it's not like there's some better candidate she's crowding out.

idk "Bad at organizing" isn't something I associate with AOC.

get the Mamdani team, I'm sure they'd love to do it

Mitch doing well

https://bsky.app/profile/trumps-a-moron.bsky.social/post/3mloffphuec2x

xps Unclear! She's literally won one competitive race in a very low turnout primary in a heavily Democratic district against a sleepy incumbent. That's like pitching a no-hitter in AA ball — impressive, but not exactly predictive.

I agree the Mamdani team would be good.

i think any criticism of AOC in this respect would have to acknowledge that the rest of the Democratic party as a whole over the last however many years has been incredibly pathetic and strategically inept to a degree that she has avoided, like she's unproven in a sense but they are proven failures.

xpost Yeah but she's done endless events around the country and is a fundraising powerhouse. She's been omnipresent in the public eye for about 10 years.

xposts

go for attack ads, sure why not, but i'm not sure who they're for. have people not heard bad things about donald trump? conservatives are beyond reach of reason or an attack ad enlightening them. it's undecided voters (ugh) and, more importantly, demoralized democrats who might not vote, who need to be reached.

to energize voters, i would much rather see AOC and/or any democratic nominee talk about the world they want to see, a positive vision of the future. in fact, how about _any_ vision of the future! what do they want the united states to be known for? shitty ai? imperialism? assassinating people without trials? cutting off humanitarian aid and millions of people across the world dying? we are living with biff from back to the future 2 as our president, and for some young people, that's the only world they've ever known. can a democratic candidate offer a possible future that is positive instead of bleak?

aoc should lean into the new green deal / paris agreement that got obliterated by trump and tie it directly to iran, the strait of hormuz, and how it's forcing the world to switch to renewable energy on a faster timeline. meanwhile we're not keeping up, and not only that, we're going in the wrong fucking direction!

i think any criticism of AOC in this respect would have to acknowledge that the rest of the Democratic party as a whole over the last however many years has been incredibly pathetic and strategically inept to a degree that she has avoided, like she's unproven in a sense but they are proven failures.

Yep. The Democrats have mostly been bad at running national campaigns ever since Obama. And one plus for her is that she will presumably not hire the same old losers who get recycled from election to election.

shoot, go back to 2000, obama is the outlier. the dem norm is turgid.

omar little truth bomb with that post. AOC's biggest advantage is she does not have gale-force loser energy wafting off her

If anything, she has gale-force powers to transform opponents into losers.

otm, there is a bit of an Obama-like quality to her in that regard

not sure why Pritzker was not included

― Andy the Grasshopper, Tuesday, May 12, 2026 2:35 PM (forty minutes ago)

he's got time to improve, but I hope he can do better on Israel than his answers in a Politico (iirc) interview he gave recently

oh, missed that. I honestly don't have a good grasp of his politics other than he's pretty effectively anti-Trump

All I pray is any consultant who tells AOC not to act angry gets removed immediately.

here's the interview: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2026/05/05/pritzker-illinois-2028-trump-antisemitism-00905867

and the most relevant bit:

And the summation of your views is you’re an unapologetic Zionist who is deeply, deeply uneasy about the current government in Israel. Is that fair?

I’m unapologetically in favor of having a peaceful sanctuary that Jews can live in, in Israel. I’m also unapologetically in favor of a Palestinian State where Palestinians can live peacefully in the Middle East.

And by the way, we’re never, ever gonna get to peace until we have that.

But right now, I want to be clear, Netanyahu has made that near-impossible at the moment with his leadership. So we’ve gotta make sure that moving past Netanyahu... And FYI, let me just point out, there are a lot of people who don’t like Netanyahu, but you shouldn’t take it out on Israel. It’s a democracy that elected him. There are a lot of people who don’t like Trump. I mean, should we be tossed into the Hague as a country because of Trump? I’m just saying that we have to be careful about how we’re treating other countries when they elect somebody that we don’t like.

I wouldn't rule him out due to this tbc

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see AOC run. I'd love to see her win. But after Trump won *again* - this utter piece of shit, one of the most contemptible people in history, a cheat and a liar and a predator and a moron and all the things, literally making the GOP and Federal government itself over in his image - I just have extremely low hopes that this stupid country will or can make good choices.

Well, we gotta offer the electorate good choices!

I mean, sure? Trump is such a piece of shit that that should have been enough, but clearly he wasn't, and if it takes even more work to beat someone like that, I just don't know what "good" even means.

(it wasn't, not he, he's plenty, lol)

Trump won't be on the ballot in 2028, recall.

You're half right. Barring the arrival of Celebration Day, we have no idea how involved he'll be or what sway he'll have.

Like, it's been so long since he hasn't sucked all the air out of the room that I don't even know what breathing regular air feels like anymore.

the job of the Dems right now is to smear EVERY republican with Trump's filth.... make sure to pin gas prices, inflation, all the bad shit on the entire party and don't let up. No more 'Party of Lincoln' it has to be 'Party of Trump' from here on out

I mean Trump's popularity is at an all time low and the GOP is getting utterly trounced in every single election, prices are only climbing higher and Trump is straight up saying he doesn't give a fuck, maybe it's now or never for a truly progressive candidate

The fun thing is that if Trump is still President but not on the ballot, the GOP nominee will still have to suck up to him no matter how unpopular he is. No daylight whatsoever.

I'm not sure how important the polls are until we start seeing an effect, any effect, his low numbers actually have on his ability to do whatever bad bullshit he wants. I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, it's just been eons since we've seen repercussions for any number of crimes, mistakes or infractions, from his first term to the current, no matter his popularity. Even after any GOP ground lost at the ballot box. Maybe that will change. But I mean, I live in a blue state with a Dem super-majority, and even that security feels precarious to me.

I almost think the GOP will do the work for the Democrats in that respect, the Democratic candidate should not waste a minute telling people what we already know about Trump. They need to offer a different future instead of reminding everybody what a piece of shit he is. We already know.

Pritzker's answer to that question is fine IMO

my point was not just about attacking Trump, but making sure to attach every single other GOPer to him and 'his party'... as Keyes says, show them a single unified cabal, not a big tent

They need to offer a different future instead of reminding everybody what a piece of shit he is.

I mean they could also do both.

otm

Pritzker's answer to that question is fine IMO

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Tuesday, May 12, 2026 3:53 PM (eight minutes ago)

tbc I find it incoherent (what does it mean to throw a country in the Hague?), not insufficiently pro-Palestine

He also says a Palestinian state should be "in the middle east." Any particular place?

yeah exactly, all I'm saying is that I would like to see any presidential hopeful (that I might support) be ready to answer questions on this issue with maximum clarity as it's become pretty crucial politically. He should have the state's borders in mind, for example -- we've already had decades of disingenuous 'two-state' solutionists who don't lift a finger to stop Israel from foreclosing the possibility of a habitable Palestinian state

Netanyahu could be out pretty soon

but that's for a different thread

the biggest factor contributing to trump's 2nd win was kamala being another dem small-potatoes-dicing stand-for-nothing. not how she looked to middle america chauvinists. look in your heart you know it's true.

i am .. slightly enthused by an aoc run. i think she could win. i think she has the best chances out of this group in spite of her identity. i also think she would be a great president. she's farther left than obama but still a game-player. i feel like post-mamdani the country is ready for something like that on the national ticket. i think now is a good time for her.

tbc I find it incoherent (what does it mean to throw a country in the Hague?)

hi!

total tangent but poor bernie has been losing me lately with the "ai is going to bring in the apocalypse" nonsense. afaict it's just an amplified wave of the same inequality trend that's been breaking over us for the last 40-50 years. time for the bern to pass the torch.

yeah I just saw an Insta post where he said AI is the 'most transformational technology in the history of mankind' and I'm like 'what about the wheel? or the steam locomotive? the smallpox vaccine?'

yeah that's bad, writing itself is a technology!

Ari Berman‬
✧@ariber✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 1m
Breaking: South Carolina Senate rebuffs Trump, declines to take up redistricting before midterms, preserving Jim Clyburn's majority-Black district

South Carolina State Senate Majority Leader Shane Massey: "We are the most gerrymandered Republican state in the country already"

The fun thing is that if Trump is still President but not on the ballot, the GOP nominee will still have to suck up to him no matter how unpopular he is. No daylight whatsoever.

Frontrunner Carlson might have a different approach.

Frontrunner?

President Trump celebrated his win against conservative commentator Tucker Carlson in GOP favorability ratings in a Truth Social post on Friday morning.

The president was responding to a CNN segment highlighting the results of a recent poll from UMass Lowell’s Center of Public Opinion. Only 31 percent of Republicans reported a favorable view of the former Fox News host in the poll, against 24 percent who viewed him unfavorably.

that kinda begs the question as to what the other 45% thinks, yeah?

Sort of amazed by South Carolina. I have zero expectations of anything but rapacity from Republicans, especially in the South.

yeah same, it would be nice if the dam started breaking finally

Frontrunner?

Just using a magic Dead Zone-like crystal ball.

putting real pressure on the second-most gerrymandered republican state to stand up for democracy

I could have sworn there was another state whose GOP legislature recently declined to redistrict. Indiana?

c'mon man, take the win xp

and yes I believe Indiana is also correct

omar little truth bomb with that post. AOC's biggest advantage is she does not have gale-force loser energy wafting off her

― rob, Tuesday, 12 May 2026 19:16 (one hour ago)

If anything, she has gale-force powers to transform opponents into losers.

― boners for bombs (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 12 May 2026 19:17 (one hour ago)

c'mon man, take the win xp

oh i'm just being silly! i'm very surprised as well, it's great

Indiana was where trump exerted his primary threats for anyone who *didn't* go along with the redistricting plan

Trump’s hold on Republicans (to the point where they’ll shank their former heroes) is something I just don’t think I’m capable of understanding. White supremacy, authoritarian mindset etc etc etc but they can have that with Tucker or any other Republican of my lifetime.

Yeah the explanation I've kind of settled on for Trump's particular magic is that he sells them the complete package fantasy of white male supremacy. He enacts it in a way that mere politicians or pundits can't approach. The literally gilded life, the showy opulence, the Euro-model wife, the porn star dalliance, even his rapes and assaults — the constant taking by force, by fraud, by any means, the complete refusal to ever accept accountability or acknowledge fault. The closest analog I can think of is like a prosperity gospel preacher, Trump signifies the dominance and dominion that his followers believe is rightfully theirs.

Virginia does something, but with this supreme court I will eat my hat if it works:

https://www.arlnow.com/2026/05/11/democrats-ask-the-supreme-court-to-halt-a-virginia-ruling-blocking-new-congressional-districts/

xp really sad to see Lindsey Graham debase himself to try and catch some of that 'magic'... he's become like a cartoon sidekick that says "Yeah Boss!" to ever stupid idea, just a fawning sycophant at this point

there's something about how easy Trump makes everything look. I think being a giant doofus who refuses to learn anything is a big part of it, he appeals to every dipshit who fantasizes about money and women and power but isn't willing to do anything to make those things happen. they don't want to defeat their opponents with carefully laid debate club traps, they just want to live in a world that naturally bends to the will of scumbags and rapists

Rod Stewart otm.

Rod Stewart says to King Charles on Donald Trump: “You put that little ratbag in his place”

The singer hit out at the US President earlier this year too, after the latter made false claims about British troops in Afghanistan

It puzzled me back during his first term that when journalists would ask one of Trump's supporters what they liked about him they'd answer in the most general way, saying that he's doing great things for our country. When pressed to name a single thing that exemplified his great achievements, they'd be at a complete loss to name one. Yet, they never seemed to show any sign that this discrepancy between their perception and the facts bothered them. His whole appeal was not in what he did, but how he acted, talked, and projected himself.

I was thinking "really funny" rather than "really sad" re: Graham's self-abasement.

would wager the "great things" he's doing mostly boil down to infuriating everyone who's ever scolded them for being dumb and racist

xp yeah I'm not losing sleep, but to see a vocal critic become such a brown noser, just begging for money and endorsements... I guess it's right where he belongs

His whole appeal was not in what he did, but how he acted, talked, and projected himself.

Someone posted this on Bluesky yesterday:

"People always act really confused as to why people could possibly vote for Trump and the answer is pretty easy. He never tells them no. He never chuckles and says 'we can't do that.' He never tells them not to use slogans that may upset people. And if you clap for Space Force, you get one."

This was meant as a contrast with Democrats, but I think it's also more true of Trump than it is of other Republicans.

back in 2015 I was driving to work and saw the "finally someone with balls" bumper sticker and yeah I knew it was trouble

see also the "no more bullshit" slogan, criminally appropriated from Camper Van Beethoven

Ocasio-Cortez will be in Montana next Friday, campaigning for Sam Forstag, who's running for the House. (I just mailed in my primary ballot; I voted for him.)

xpost Elvis Presley died and no one knows why ...

Take the Skinheads Voting

He never chuckles and says 'we can't do that.'

Trump last month: “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things,” Trump said. "We can’t take care of day care. We’re a big country. We have 50 states. We have all these other people. We’re fighting wars."

"We're kicking you in the nuts, repeatedly, until you throw up and you're lying on the ground, and then we just keep doing it, it's beautiful. Thank you for your attention to this matter!'

xp he’s becoming a Democrat!

the FDA head was too uptight

Trump signed off on a plan to fire Makary earlier this month, after the president scolded the FDA chief for not approving fruit-flavored vapes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

A new Satan just dropped

Putin hails Russia's test launch of new ICBM known as Satan II, calls it "most powerful missile in the world"

jesus for sure coming out of retirement, cant wait to get raptured house of jealous leaders babyyyy

he's still got it!

Patel then claimed that documents filed by the senator’s office showed that Van Hollen “ran up a $7,000 bar tab in Washington DC at the Lobby Bar”.

“The only individual in this room that has been drinking on taxpayer dime during the day is you,” Patel shouted.

“You drink during the day, that’s you,” Patel said, jabbing a finger in Van Hollen’s direction.

In the senate you’re supposed to drink on the job though

Charlie Wilson to thread

some context: The $7,128 payment to the Lobby Bar, the senator’s office explained, “was a catering charge at a local restaurant where the Senator hosted an after-hours holiday reception as a thank you to the 50+ members of our team, paid for by campaign funds – not taxpayer dollars.”

$7,128/50 = $143. Not that hard to pay that in catering per person at a DC restaurant.

fuck all these

The delegation of chief executives joining Trump on his China trip include:

Tim Cook of Apple

Larry Fink of BlackRock

Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone

Kelly Ortberg of Boeing

Brian Sikes of Cargill

Jane Fraser of Citi

Jim Anderson of Coherent

Larry Culp of GE Aerospace

David Solomon of Goldman Sachs

Jacob Thaysen of Illumina

Michael Miebach of Mastercard

Dina Powell McCormick of Meta

Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron

Jensen Huang of Nvidia

Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm

Elon Musk of Tesla

Ryan McInerney of Visa

What's good for billionaires is good for America!

Tim Apple is there but where’s Marilyn Lockheed?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDteahOW0GY

Louisiana State Senator Sam Jenkins confirms the proposed 6-0 congressional map has died in committee. They are still trying to advance other racist maps though

This

the explanation I've kind of settled on for Trump's particular magic is that he sells them the complete package fantasy of white male supremacy. He enacts it in a way that mere politicians or pundits can't approach. The literally gilded life, the showy opulence, the Euro-model wife, the porn star dalliance, even his rapes and assaults — the constant taking by force, by fraud, by any means, the complete refusal to ever accept accountability or acknowledge fault

...is not only right but, spun as a positive, is also the best explanation given from the right. I hate giving oxygen to a corpse but Charlie Kirk saw exactly this and said so: the Trump vote is "a middle finger to the hall monitors."

If you're a young white male apparently the worst thing that's ever happened to you is that a teacher told you to stop wedgie-ing the nerds, and you're still mad about it.

(If you're an older white male it's an HR rep warning you about sexist jokes, and you're still mad about it.)

Mad enough to wreck the nation and the world out of adolescent spite.

Seen from the right, the bug is a feature. what tipsy writes is the mirror-universe version of what Kirk says here.

https://omny.fm/shows/the-charlie-kirk-show/sunday-women-will-follow-where-men-lead-charlie-on-the-man-rampant-podcast

Apologies for quoting a hideous ex-person at length but I think it's illuminating.

what people missed is that there's a lot that you can call Donald Trump. No one has ever called him feminine in a toxically feminie world... all the media missed this, in almost every cultural critic missed this that we didn't in a toxically feminine world. You have the absolute inverse of that, which is like ultra masculine, never apologize, red tie, big play, super rich, supermodel wife. Right, it's gonna be big and Mexico's gonna pay for it, and we get more tariffs and it's like as bravado as strong man as you can get. And young men didn't care that, you know, I don't. It wasn't even about policy. That's what people don't understand is that it was partially policy. Was like, no, he is the middle finger to all of the screeching hall monitors that have told me I have to use certain pronouns, that have told me that like I'm bad for existing, that have penalized me for my existence. And Trump is the big fu to the feminist establishment that has not been challenged my entire life.

Take as a given that this alleged persecution by female power is a delusion. But if you want a clear distillation of how the other side sees things, I have never seen a more concise version than that.

real men love Broadway musicals

I know a lot of folks have brought this up but mentally all these folks are about 12

and dick sizes to match

https://i.discogs.com/crXeYcOtWl34U4g-kBqcvOQUI8rliEY7SBIRN1rS4VA/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:580/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTExMzU5/OTctMTE5NDk1NjQz/OS5qcGVn.jpeg

If wanting a hot wife and my own plane is wrong, I don't wanna be right

That's 12cm dicks not inches let's be clear

But wait, there are 14 tracks on that album. Oh...I guess there are two extra inches of Snow if you buy the cassette.

The ancient Greek’s thought, small penises were signs of intelligence

The GOP!

https://www.notus.org/congress/william-paul-mike-lawler-confrontation-antisemitism

Fetterman provides vote to block Iran war powers resolution 50-49.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/trump-iran-senate-war-powers

The Senate on Wednesday rejected the seventh attempt by Democrats to force an end to American involvement in the war on Iran, even as the ranks of Republicans opposed to Donald Trump’s strategy grew.

The war powers resolution proposed by Jeff Merkley, a Democratic senator of Oregon, failed in a 49-50 vote. All Democrats with the exception of John Fetterman of Pennsylvania supported its advancement.

Since the conflict began in February, Democrats have repeatedly offered such resolutions, without success. But for the first time on Wednesday, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski voted in favor, joining fellow Republicans Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine. All other Republicans in attendance voted against it...

fuck he really needs to wander off into the forest, never to be seen again

jfc what a stupid dickhead he is

Turning into a prolific serial killer would have been a legitimately better outcome from his TBI.

Not least because a couple of his human-skin rugs could have potentially been fellow Senators.

GILLIBRAND: What is your record?! I don't want to just hear about what you don't like about the Biden administration

SCOTT TURNER: During the Biden administra--

GILLIBRAND: Stop talking about Biden! Talk about your record

TURNER: During the Biden administration--

GILLIBRAND: Oh my God!

zing

As Trump Meets Xi, Iran Lets Chinese Ships Through Strait of Hormuz

I guess the “Victory Arch” is going to start soon? should fuck up traffic across the Potomac for a while cause the Roosevelt Bridge is under construction

Love is not a victory arch
It's an addled king shitposting "I will sue ya!"

I assume the Victory Arch will be made of plaster of paris & gold spray paint, and will dissolve in the first heavy rain

no its an antiquated Beaux Arts thing that will obscure the Lincoln memorial and will be a hazard to planes landing at National Airport

a hazard to target for planes

I feel like this sums it all up:

NEW: The health official who led the public response to the Hantavirus outbreak has little background in public health and previously was a penile implant specialist who hosted a podcast where he questioned the 2020 election and compared the Biden administration to Nazis.

ABC News reported late Thursday that Trump is expected to drop his lawsuit in the coming days “in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration.” The money would come from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which pays out court judgments and settlements against the federal government.

i think we're beyond "the system is broken" at this point

Yeah, but think of all the money they'll save by having penis implants in-house.

Beginning to feel like the only way you solve this is by hanging those responsible from lampposts, Mussolini-style

I think we have a better shot at penis implants for all.

A Cock In Every Pot

Wait, Trump is doing something that will, yes, benefit his cronies but not directly benefit himself? Is he dying?

They have to promise to use the money to buy Trump NFTs

$1.7 billion fund to compensate allies

aka his family

Part of that settlement is the Trump family will be exempt from being audited by the IRS for life or some shit

Yeah, I heard that... fucking nuts

I'm sure the SC will sign off on it

Tax return is just FUCK OFF LOSERZ in Sharpie

he's the most transparent president in history, why would you wanna snoop around in his finances

wish I was rich enough to not pay taxes and get away with it. I feel like not paying federal taxes ever again and just write the check to our kleptocrats directly.

Don't know if anyone's been following the saga of Chud the Builder — https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-rights-worst-new-star-just-shot-someone-chud-builder-racist-streamer.

Loathsome racist streamer who has been building an audience by livestreaming his race-baiting and finally got someone to punch him, which he responded to (as he clearly planned to do) by shooting them. Anyway, I had never heard of this guy until a week or so ago when a Facebook friend of mine who works in the service industry posted that she'd had an encounter with him at a Nashville bar where the guy put his camera in her face and called her a fat liberal lesbian and said he can't wait for her to die. She just walked away but was deeply upset and shaken by the whole thing, because she was then hounded on social media by his horrible followers. (fwiw and not that it matters, but she's not actually queer tho she is very queer-friendly.) So I was like who the hell even is he?

And then a few days later he got arrested for refusing to pay a bill at a Nashville restaurant, and a few days after that, this shooting. So now my friend is really feeling weird, like on the one hand there's a karma quality to it but also she's the kind of person who doesn't actually want anyone to get shot or arrested and is having a hard time with all of her feelings about it. Which is just to say, this is a hellish age we're living in.

best not to give that stuff oxygen or clicks imo. applies to all streamers but especially racist ones

yeah he's been arrested for attempted murder as well? dude is a choad

but the growing 'trend' of saying really racist shit and then filming the provoked reaction is not just this one asshole, there are others doing it

xp yeah the link I posted isn't to his content, it's an article about how terrible he is.

Oh also, our local school system just pulled Roots from all of its libraries because of scenes of "sadomasochistic abuse," which violates a state Age Appropriate Materials Act.

Not gonna lie, things feel pretty shitty.

well yeah chattel slavery had a fair amount of sadomasochistic abuse

Everybody knew this was going to happen,” popular streamer Asmongold said Wednesday after the shooting, describing the event as a “huge, huge aura loss.”

Building a Unabomber cabin sounds better every day.

If I had the wherewithal to decamp to a place where I could be fairly sure all this insanity couldn’t touch my life, it would be very, very tempting to do so.

Asmongold already lives in a Unabomber cabin afaict. (This is the guy who has cockroaches crawling on him as he livestreams.)

Carrying eggcases?

rethinking my retirement plan and betting it all on Kalshi that this dude gets pardoned on Trump’s way out and becomes the next Senator from Tennessee

"I think the Democrats have a weird, a weird candidate," Trump told reporters May 15 on Air Force One as he returned to Washington From China. "Six genders. A real hit on Jesus. I mean, this guy is bad news. His masking from relatively recently. And he's a vegan. He's a vegan. All of a sudden he's not a vegan.

"Texas doesn't like vegans," Trump added.

it still bothers me that the Harris campaign didn't run with the 'Weird" criticism of republicans.

No our next senator is going to be someone much more dignified …

https://www.wwe.com/f/styles/talent_champion_xl/public/all/2020/01/Kane_Pro--97fd51c6219810ef02070c332958e10a.png

Like most sensible people, I had forgotten all about the existence of Current Affairs, but YouTube served me this video, and I watched it for a minute or two. It's absolutely hilarious to me that this guy

- dresses like that
- talks like that
- chose those props for his video

Anyway, "enjoy" a short lecture on populist insurgency from a guy who has without a doubt been stuffed into a locker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNmZz4SOOrg

Ah yes, the guy who fired his entire staff when they unionized.

I clicked out of curiosity. I bailed after the third sentence spoken in that weird cadence, like a robot who has heard of human speech, but never experienced it.

Always feel like Nathan J. Robinson is doing a bit. But not a good one.

yeah i'm not sure i see the velours allure

The weirdest thing for me is the Mid-Atlantic accent/affectation as though he want to Phillips Exeter in the 1920s when in fact he went to public school in Florida?

Robinson should be swirlied every morning but to be fair the “he fired his staff for unionizing” thing wasn’t actually true.

Robinson should be swirlied every morning but to be fair the “he fired his staff for unionizing” thing wasn’t actually true.

Polis granting clemency to Tina Peters for election fraud in Colorado. I kind of don't care if she's in prison or out, she's 70 and unlikely to have any power or influence again, but this only makes Polis look extraordinarily servile and weak. what the fuck is wrong with him.

yeah i lasted 20 secs before “this is a shitty modern bill buckley bit”?

as to my governor fuck his bitch libertarian concerned ass.

I rarely say this kind of thing, but I wish all of the people who went to this event a very death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/us/trump-prayer-rally-national-mall.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jVA.0UvN.PbwR9RhLP_fs&smid=url-share

A dirty act done publicly.

Boards of Canada Tape05-ass event

drama in the Senate

Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough dealt a major setback to Republicans on Saturday by ruling that their plan to provide hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for Trump’s ballroom violated the Senate’s Byrd Rule and could not pass the Senate with a simple majority.

violated the Senate’s Byrd Rule

Sad balls of Roomney

I rarely say this kind of thing, but I wish all of the people who went to this event a very death.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/us/trump-prayer-rally-national-mall.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jVA.0UvN.PbwR9RhLP_fs&smid=url-share

I know it gets mentioned a lot here but the fact that Trump has completely captured the hearts and minds of the religious right makes me feel like I'm going insane. I can see how they'd fall for hucksters like Jim Bakker or Joel Osteen or Kenneth Copeland, people who can at least quote scripture and pretend to fear God, Trump on the other hand is not only the living embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins, he barely even pretends to believe any of that shit. its almost like the "everyone who isn't like me needs to be punished" thing is all that actually appeals to them about religion and they see a lot more of Trump in themselves than they do Jesus

he pays lip service to controlling women's reproductive systems, maybe that's all they require

He came right out and said he was going to appoint SC justices who were going to overturn Roe v. Wade. No hemming or hawing.

I know it gets mentioned a lot here but the fact that Trump has completely captured the hearts and minds of the religious right makes me feel like I'm going insane.

It's only crazy if you accept their fiction that they're motivated by some kind of scriptural morality. They're the (often literal) descendants of people who also used the Bible to justify and dignify slavery, they're mostly interested in Biblical ideas like "dominion" and "headship." Some of them might wish he said "God" more, or ever, but he definitely fits their m.o. otherwise.

Hegseth is actively campaigning for the guy trying to unseat Massie in Kentucky. This administration is so fucked

I saw that the MAGA faithful apparently turned on Kyle fuckin Rittenhouse for his endorsement (!) of Massie. People have gone insane.

Can there please be a maga civil war and all decent people keep their heads down for a minute while these fucks all shoot each other

It’s more likely the MAGA civil war will break out after the old man kicks it and I am afraid it’s mostly going to be over how anti-Semitic and racist to be.

young republicans have always been bad. the coming generation is going to be horrific

right before a star dies, it gets really big and bright and obnoxious

obnoxious isn't the first word that comes to mind when i think of a star's death

but i'm on board and frankly supernovas can get fucked

Xp makes sense they're Red Giants

but i'm on board and frankly supernovas can get fucked

i’m always asking what the sun has actually done for us

https://www.enworld.org/media/mr-burns-gif.155214/full

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys_zYL7K3KQ

I know it gets mentioned a lot here but the fact that Trump has completely captured the hearts and minds of the religious right makes me feel like I'm going insane. I can see how they'd fall for hucksters like Jim Bakker or Joel Osteen or Kenneth Copeland, people who can at least quote scripture and pretend to fear God, Trump on the other hand is not only the living embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins, he barely even pretends to believe any of that shit. its almost like the "everyone who isn't like me needs to be punished" thing is all that actually appeals to them about religion and they see a lot more of Trump in themselves than they do Jesus

Idk if they quite meet the Religious Right Voter criteria, but my parents are Southern Baptists. I’d say mostly cultural and out of habit, not particularly pious or churchy in their day-to-day. Pretty sure my dad goes to Sunday school/ bible study but it’s prob more social for him than anything. I don’t even think he stays for the actual service, and I’d bet my mom hasn’t been to church in years.

I have distinct memories of them being pretty critical of the showboat begging ass TV evangelists of the 80s-90s (except Billy Graham, he was always the real deal to them), so it was absolutely bizarre to me that they’d go all in on the biggest TV show conman who’s ever lived. Maybe their brains went soft as they aged, eg I also remember my mom briefly falling under the sway of Cryin Glenn Beck and his whiteboard.

But afaict when it comes to Trump it’s a toxic mix of the Hank Hill/ Buck Strickland dynamic, and more importantly, the only conceivable means of retaliation against the cultural forces (and def 100% NOT neoliberal late capitalism rot oh no can’t ever be that) that they’re convinced robbed them of their post-War middle class honky birthright.

a toxic mix of the Hank Hill/ Buck Strickland dynamic

lol this is so otm

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/05/memphis-safe-task-force-still-operating-aclu-lawsuit-cameras-filming-ice-harassment-homeland-security-tennessee-highway-patrol/

on ICE's occupation of Memphis

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hnqlt57pdj4xdxnxmyigopbs/post/3mm7ugicne22s

Had to look up the context for that, which is that Trump just endorsed Ken Paxton (over John Cornyn) in TX.

This would seem to be good news, but who knows.

Senate Republicans, welcome to your fuller understanding of "we are fucked".

against the cultural forces (and def 100% NOT neoliberal late capitalism rot oh no can’t ever be that) that they’re convinced robbed them of their post-War middle class honky birthright.

i mean there is some truth to this. capitalist prosperity works by creating a phantom class, poor and immiserated. you start making that class something more uhh inclusive and the people who benefited from the skin color divide see it as an attack on their status and their prosperity. trump is basically embodied resentment so he rides that wave very naturally.

xp yeah, you can't gerrymander a statewide office

I’d say mostly cultural and out of habit, not particularly pious or churchy in their day-to-day. Pretty sure my dad goes to Sunday school/ bible study but it’s prob more social for him than anything.

this strikes me as true for the large majority of white evangelical-leaning conservatives. it's less an interior evil thing and more about social cohesion.

kind of true for "purple hairs" too in my experience. people display tribal belonging markers but are the majority of them leftists or even that liberal? nah it's just important that they show which side they're on as a matter of social cohesion. because socially human beings really need their in groups and their out groups.

yeah my sarcasm in the parentheses is p clumsy just that they’ll forever be marks for cultural resentment peddled by capital and never once interrogate the investment

lol Vance is doing the press conferences now that the Leavitt is out on maternity leave

Isn't there like an assistant press secretary?

lots of people doing double duty in this administration— Marco is not just Secretary of State, he’s also the National Archivist! Richard Grennell want just destroying the Kennedy Center, he was also the Special Ambassador (whatever that meant) to Venezuela!

Republicans respond to the deeply unpopular redistricting drive

Their message is simple: Democrats started it.

“This started because we had some of our blue states that got overly aggressive trying to displace Republican representation,” said Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas). “When you look at New England, 40 percent of their voters are Republican voters, and yet they have zero representation in Congress.”

“The Constitution protects every American equally,” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters last week in the Capitol. “Democrats spent decades trying to engineer electoral maps that divided Americans, and this decision from the Supreme Court hopefully ends that terrible practice once and for all.”

Vermont has exactly one seat in the US House of Representative. So, how should they arrange their state's elections to give Republicans a fairer chance to win?

Unmentioned were the red states that have no Democratic representation in Washington.

Roughly a third of Oklahoma voters, for instance, supported former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, but all five House seats are Republican.

In Utah, Harris won 38 percent of the vote, but Republicans represent all four House seats. Thirty-nine percent of Nebraska voters picked Harris, while Republicans control all three House seats. And in Iowa, where Harris won 43 percent of the vote, the state’s four seats are all controlled by Republicans.

I know it gets mentioned a lot here but the fact that Trump has completely captured the hearts and minds of the religious right makes me feel like I'm going insane. I can see how they'd fall for hucksters like Jim Bakker or Joel Osteen or Kenneth Copeland, people who can at least quote scripture and pretend to fear God, Trump on the other hand is not only the living embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins, he barely even pretends to believe any of that shit. its almost like the "everyone who isn't like me needs to be punished" thing is all that actually appeals to them about religion and they see a lot more of Trump in themselves than they do Jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srYfuOnmXFk

Going to post this link from a talk Tad Delay gave on “Theses on Reactionaries”, getting into the functions of what he actually provides to his most vocal supporters. Tad is an ex-evangelical who has written a lot of great stuff on this topic, a couple books, and I interviewed him on my pod 5 years ago.

I do think that partisan gerrymandering in general is pretty unpopular except with super-partisans, who are a minority of the country. So I think there's an opening to make national reform a popular issue. And why not? Democrats in Alabama would get more representation, and so would Republicans in California.

Anyway, speaking of Memphis, I spent the last week working on a long take on not just the redistricting but the whole history of the way Black Memphis has been treated by the state's white leaders. It's even in two forms! There's the podcast, and then a long article from the same script, with photos and audio clips.

Text article: https://theprogressivesouth.org/the-memphis-massacre/

Podcast: https://sites.libsyn.com/576820/ep-53-the-memphis-massacre

Also, should be noted that as horrible as GOP types are, the fact that they got anywhere near where they are without getting a lot more resistance from the ostensible opposition party(or the actual hyper rich folks who backstop so much of the ruling structure) signals that there is a lot of folks in prominent positions who either don’t care much about stopping this enough to risk their own sinecures, or that they _can’t_. All of the previous check valves or levers have been systematically destroyed over decades for the stupidest reasons.

The rot has been existing for a long time, like Congress ditching its own control over war powers getting passed back in the early 80s when the Dems controlled it.

In the early 80s, because of seniority, the leaders of the Democratic party in Congress were still heavily dominated by their experiences of the New Deal, WWII, and the Cold War. They were the architects of the military-industrial complex. The major lesson they derived from Vietnam was that President Johnson had chosen the wrong war and fought it the wrong way. The War Powers Act only codified the de facto abandonment of their constitutional role, which they thought that ICBMs had rendered obsolete. The rot has been a stepwise process.

re: Ken Paxton endorsement

if this helps Paxton win the primary, it absolutely gives Talerico a boost, but it will still be a very difficult race to win, and Paxton winning would be very bad (though perhaps life in TX would be a bit better with him out at AG)

In the Senate, Paxton would simply fall into line, just as Cornyn did. His influence would be diluted as only one out of 100 votes, but he could hold onto the seat long enough to cash in on the boodle, and be set for life with little effort expended. He could also grab at the brass ring when Trump leaves.

Senate Republicans are bummed on the endorsement

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), who lobbied Trump hard for months to back Cornyn in the primary, was stone-faced when he walked out of his Capitol office and into a lunch meeting with fellow Republicans.

“It’s his decision,” Thune said somberly of the endorsement.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) remained completely silent with his head bowed as he walked into the Tuesday lunch meeting, ignoring several reporters’ questions about the endorsement.

Paxton's nothing without his ability to sue his own cities.

Not surprised that Trump abandoned Cronyn in a long-winded Truth Social post that said over and over again it's because he didn't kiss my ass enough.

Bill Cassidy is officially in his spite/DGAF era.

Senate advances bill aimed at ending Iran war as Cassidy, after primary loss, flips to support it

The Senate advanced legislation Tuesday that seeks to force President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran war, as a growing number of Republicans defied the president’s wishes.

Since Trump ordered the attack on Iran at the end of February, Democrats have forced repeated votes on war powers resolutions that would require him to either gain congressional approval for the war or withdraw troops. Republicans had been able to muster the votes to reject those proposals, but Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy — fresh off a primary election loss in which Trump endorsed his opponent — switched sides to deliver a crucial vote to pass the legislation.

The 50-47 vote tally demonstrated the small but crucial number of Republicans voting to halt the war with Iran. The legislation will get a vote on final passage, but the timing was not immediately clear.

Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska had all previously voted for similar war powers resolutions and did so again Tuesday. Cassidy voted for the legislation for the first time.

After his primary election loss last week, Cassidy returned to Washington saying that he was proud of his work to uphold the Constitution and would carefully consider how he would vote on several priorities of the Trump administration.

To quote Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda: that spineless bimbo.

If Cornyn and a few other scum lose their primaries and grow spines in the process, it could be a fun few months between June and November.

retiring Thom Tillis has already been this guy

The Senate advanced legislation Tuesday that seeks to force President Donald Trump to withdraw from the Iran war, as a growing number of Republicans defied the president’s wishes.

This is his way out of the stupid war. Wonder if he even realizes it.

Massive loses

Ha ha Massie

JD Vance happily telling a crowd to "vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C." because they're so used to knocking "the elite" they seem to have forgotten THEY ARE IT NOW.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jd-vance-crazy-leadership-speech_n_6a0babbfe4b0df718a16edab

Chris Rabb has a slight lead in the PA-3 results. would be very cool if he wins.

And he did win. Yay.

A story about KY GOP Senate nominee Andy Barr:

In 2019 he got mad at AOC and demanded she come to his district to visit a coal mine.

She said yes, which he didn't expect, so he withdrew the invitation.

Then it turned out there were no working coal mines in his district. Because he's an idiot.

I looked for news articles about that, and they all say he invited her to Kentucky, not specifically to his own district. I'm sure he's an asshole though.

Wherever I saw the anecdote relayed again tonight, there was also a link to a WaPo account of it (https://archive.ph/qOdzu#selection-367.143-371.144), which features this quote from a story I can't get to at the moment:

Barr then challenged Ocasio-Cortez to come to his district and “go underground with me and meet the men and women who do heroic work to power the American economy.”

But it doesn't matter really, because yeah, I'm sure he's an idiot and and asshole regardless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt3FKNujzx8

Maybe someone told Barr that AOC would probably win over any of the miners she met and end up more popular with them than he was.

Rep. Andy Barr invited AOC to come meet coal miners in his district mad that the Green New Deal will take away their jobs. She accepted. Turns out there are no active coal mines in Barr's district because it's 2019, not 1919. So now Barr is uninviting AOC. https://t.co/JOY8Mai82O

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 17, 2019

that GQ article says "in his state." the coal industry is definitely active in his district, even if there aren't any mines in it.

this is ryan grim’s fault!

I am admittedly somewhat surprised by Rabb’s showing, despite living in his district and voting for him. If Ala Stanford had backed out, it is almost certain that Sharif Street would have won, which wouldn’t have been horrific, but wouldn’t have been great. People are sick of political dynasties! (Street’s father was once mayor)

What this means , though, is that Rabb has the seat as long as he wants it, since this is the most blue district in the country.

Bluer than MN5?

More than $19m was spent to benefit Gallrein, with nearly $9.4m of that coming from American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel interest groups. These outside organisations targeted Massie because he had previously voted against US aid to Israel.

From Al Jazeera on Massie losing his primary

Bluer than MN5?

― einstürzende louboutin (suzy), Wednesday, May 20, 2026 4:02 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well, besides two districts in the Bronx.

The 3rd congressional district of PA has PVI of D+41. The 5th of MN, Ilhan Omar's district, is D+26.

Raul Castro indicted on murder and conspiracy charges by Trump admin. Surely a pretext for an invasion.

sure let’s add another war to the list

Raul's indicted because, stories of behind-the-scenes skullduggery aside, he's irrelevant.

and as somehow pointed out: you can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, it's a pretty low bar

Seth Bodnar, independent candidate for Senate in Montana, has issued a statement about the recent Iran war vote:

“I applaud the US Senate’s vote to move forward with a War Powers vote. It is time for Congress to retake its Article I responsibilities for declaring war, providing oversight of the Executive Branch, and guarding our nation’s purse strings. After weeks of inaction, I’m pleased to see a small number of Senators buck party leadership to try to reestablish Congress as a co-equal branch of government. We need more of that in Washington, and as Montana’s Independent US Senator, I will always stand up to DC bosses and put the people of Montana first.”

I'm still worried about this guy. Tester has endorsed him, but I feel like even if he wins (and he could, Steve Daines was the kind of Republican people voted for by reflex and the fact that Daines hand-picked his successor has pissed a lot of people off) he's much more likely to "go Fetterman" than Graham Platner.

I was wondering who the best plaintiffs would be to challenge this insane "weaponization" slush fund. Two Jan. 6 cops seems like a good start:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.292539/gov.uscourts.dcd.292539.1.0.pdf

Good first line:

In the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century, President Donald J. Trump has created a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to finance the insurrectionists and paramilitary groups that commit violence in his name.

that 'never audit the trumps again' addendum seems to be as rickety as a stack of rusted patio furniture. The Justice Dept doesn't have that kind of control over the IRS, who can just ignore it without a second thought. Probably just a lapdog gesture by Blanche so Trump will let him lick his hand

Yeah, it’s all Calvinball

I don't think anything will happen with this current government, but there's no reason the next administration can't restart it

This is probably just the first of many brazen movies to directly steal money from the treasury. The loyalty he still seems to command is remarkable. I should not have been shocked by the Massie election, but I was.

CO Gov Polis has been censured by the Dem party for pardoning Tina Peters

Ooooh that'll show him

i heard a history of cuba that makes the “what did cubans want and get thru time” that makes me have no idea what cubans or cuban americans might really want now

Finally, the ideal politician for ILX:

Democratic leaders are condemning Texas congressional candidate Maureen Galindo over her latest round of antisemitic comments.

Galindo finished first in the Democratic primary for Texas’ 35th Congressional District and is in a runoff election against Bexar County Sheriff’s Deputy Johnny Garcia. Democratic leaders in Washington and Texas have backed Garcia amidst a mysterious six-figure advertising campaign to boost Galindo, a sex therapist and housing advocate.

Last weekend, Galindo said in an Instagram post that she intends to write legislation to “turn Karnes ICE Detention Center into a prison for American Zionists and former ICE officers for human trafficking.”

as that post continues, it's very VinceMcmahonShocked.GIF

I'm with Galindo

why shut down the concentration camps when you could be using them for jews instead? can't wait for this to happen in my home state

This one weird trick

i don't think people should be put in camps for holding morally reprehensible beliefs

I think people should be put in camps for being children at summertime

Camp, like feather boas and such, right?

Galindo's rhetoric aside, the PAC backing her is pretty sketch: https://www.notus.org/2026-election/campaign-legal-center-complaint-lead-left-pac-federal-election-commission

xxp

Hate to break it to you, but that is also a bad idea in Texas. 20 kids at a summer camp got swept away in a flood last year, and now they are closing down a lot of camps in that area.

DNC report on 2024 election

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/May-20-2026.pdf

you say that but the very first line says

"Disclaimer: This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC."

in red

I haven't looked at it in detail but it sounds from the article like it's standard Dem received wisdom like "we need to focus on swing voters in the Midwest and South" and completely avoids more controversial topics like support for Israel, begging the question, "why were they afraid to release it?"

Either it's been scrubbed on controversial stuff, or the scuttlebutt was correct that they didn't release it because it kind of sucked.

why shut down the concentration camps when you could be using them for jews instead? can't wait for this to happen in my home state

― whimsical skeedaddler (Moodles), Thursday, May 21, 2026 8:38 AM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was being facetious, for what it's worth. not trying to get anyone in jail for their beliefs.

Either it's been scrubbed on controversial stuff, or the scuttlebutt was correct that they didn't release it because it kind of sucked.

― The Quaker Gurvitz Army (President Keyes), Thursday, May 21, 2026 9:25 AM (forty-four seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is probably the case– they're just that clueless.

It's not even a finished document, seems to have been abandoned at some point. And yes, on a skim it doesn't seem to say very much interesting or useful. Doesn't really seem to talk about policy much at all, it's much more about messaging than message.

quote of the day

“He wants Greenlanders to be grateful to Donald Trump. You are way in over your head, man. Way in over your head. Go home,” said Gifford in a video posted on social media.

I saw on reporter/stenographer type journalist Jake Sherman's x account that Congress is going on its Memorial Day weekend leave until June and will then supposedly address their "concerns" over the Trump slush fund; and vote on their terrible reconciliation bill that can be enacted by a simple majority and fund ICE with none of Dems proposed changes

Yeah, but the actual key there is that they don't have the votes to pass it right now, mostly because a couple of senators are mad about the slush fund.

GOP are really uncomfortable with the ballroom money as well, not something they want to bring home to their constituents right now

Today in "Yes! Yes! Fucking do it, you fucking asshole":

Semafor's Burgess Everett reporting the White House is privately threatening to Senate Republicans that he will veto Republicans' party-line reconciliation bill that funds ICE and CBP if they block funding for his ballroom or his slush fund

Last of the charges dropped in the so-called "Broadview 6" detention center protester case here. Judge dismissed them with prejudice (so they can't be refiled), reportedly citing Federal grand jury shenanigans that tainted the case.

I hope all six of them file claims with the DOJ for money from the "weaponization" slush fund.

James Comey, Jerome Powell, and Letitia James should sue the DOJ for $1.7 billion.

Comey should sue for 864.7 million

Comey should walk into the path of speeding train.

Why not both?

i don't think people should be put in camps for holding morally reprehensible beliefs

Now _aesthetically_ reprehensible beliefs, on the other hand, are a different matter…

lol

BREAKING:

Mitch McConnell just slammed the Trump slush fund:

"So the nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick."

Cocaine Mitch rides again

why is he retiring, the bum? Grassley's staying in for the long haul

Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick.

June thread title contender

parka protest... can't believe we're still trying to pull this shit in 2026

Hundreds of Greenlanders took to the streets Thursday to protest the opening of the U.S. Consulate, chanting that the Americans must “go home.”

Protesters waved Greenlandic flags and held signs that read “USA Asu,” or Stop USA,” The Guardian reported. Others shouted “Greenland belongs to Greenlanders” outside the Greenlandic Parliament.

https://www.washingtonblade.com/2026/05/20/vt-lawmaker-equates-transgender-identity-with-bestiality/

it is hilarious how much he hates his loser sons

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/21/trump-son-wedding-invite

NY Times is hailing Senate Republicans for standing up to Trump on ballroom and Slush fund, but will they stick with their “concerns” ( as led by Maine senator Collins) in June when they return from their break?

their gonna wake up with horse heads

what the hell why is everything so weird now

https://bsky.app/profile/dominicervolina.com/post/3mmfqiqwpkk2r

Another possible June thread title thing:

I have a thing called Iran, and other things

A piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla, Iran and one other thing.

the mask thing frogbs posted is insane. i have no explanation for why that was done.

‪Capricious‬
✧@capigh✧✧✧.b✧✧✧.soc✧✧✧‬
· 12h
The simplest answer for what this is, Occam's Razor if you will, is that Fox News like most media outlets is using AI to upscale their video resolution. This can often create weird effects like this as AI frequently will create mirages in the image.

maybe this is what happened

I'm sure that's the explanation they'll go with if they have to answer for it, but one would think if this was really the case you'd see stuff like that all the time. from what I've seen when AI does things like that it tends to morph in and out but here it looks like he's wearing a mask the whole way. also worth mentioning this guy has a fairly pronounced chin cleft which is mysteriously completely smoothed over

he doesn’t blink!

Occam's Razor is good for slicing off lizard masks

https://clairemcc155.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/790_v.jpg

tulsi out

seriously? Well, she *is* a female, one check against her

I'm still waiting for the promised announcement of the very important and much needed job in the private sector that Pam Bondi will be transitioning to.

Tulsi soon to become a highly-placed consultant to Gazprom.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has confirmed that he will not be attending his son’s wedding in The Bahamas this weekend.

He wrote on Truth Social moments ago:

"While I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so. I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time. Congratulations to Don and Bettina!"

what a martyr

'Sorry son, Daddy wants to be there, but he needs to pick out the fabric for the ballroom drapes... I know you'll understand.'

I assumed this means he has another aide giving him blowjobs when the family is away

hes prob just afraid of getting assassinated

honestly, I think it's because the bride & groom will be the centers of attention... he can stand that shit, someone else having a special day, even his own family

I'd forgotten that Tulsi claimed Iran *wasn't* trying to restart their nuclear programs after the strikes last summer, which obv flies in the face of the bullshit they're feeding us now

lol he's 100% gonna be spotted golfing at Mar a Lago tomorrow

what about his not flying a lot due to health conditions?

that was where my head went anyway

Gabbard is allegedly resigning to be with her husband who has bone cancer, not being fired for incompetence. And to be fair, she hasn't racked up nearly as many embarrassing news stories as Bondi, Hegseth, or Patel.

He could be mad she hasn't gotten the 2020 election thrown out yet.

lol he's 100% gonna be spotted golfing at Mar a Lago tomorrow

actually his official schedule shows him
at Bedminster in Jersey

And to be fair, she hasn't racked up nearly as many embarrassing news stories as Bondi, Hegseth, or Patel.

ridiculously high standard of embarrassing news stories though, lol. it’s like murderers row in this cabinet

also, did they ever figure out what’s in her safe?

Jimmy Hoffa iirc

I love it when tony American enclaves are named after slightly déclassé parts of British cities (Bedminster in Bristol is gentrified now, but in the ‘80s was pretty rough).

I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time.

and he’s going golfing in jersey!

A federal judge in Nashville has dismissed the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, ruling that he was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Trump Justice Department.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/breaking-abrego-garcia-prevails-on-vindictive-prosecution-claim

I assumed this means he has another aide giving him blowjobs when the family is away

i just saw this week that it's speculated he and his aide Natalie Harp are boinging. at least to the extent that he can boing anything.

garcia needs to get in there fir that “malicious prosecution” slush fund

He isn’t going to the wedding because he died rip

damn

we'll know he died when Official State Television FOX News drops all its regular programming to broadcast dirges played by the Moscow Orchestra non-stop.

Nah, YMCA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1P153_sN0N8

I’m afraid this is a set-up for a Memorial Day Sunday massive attack on Iran. Try to seize the narrative, show dominance, all that.

But I’d be happy to be wrong.

The stories of folks making bank on lawsuits for getting fired for social media posts re: Charlie Kirk has been warming my heart.

has = have

The thing with the "admiral" in a mask, I reckon its the same actor Fox wheel out all the time to interview when they need a random isis fighter/antifa activist/bikie thug etc, its a known thing they use this one guy all the time. No effing idea why aside from "Fox makes everything up".

https://www.reddit.com/r/thescoop/comments/1o2cyy0/fox_news_bad_actor_unmasked/

Wouldn’t the real guy object? It’s too weird.

imo its just bad lighting + ai upscaling/face tuning

is it ai upscaling or just something similar to the filters you can use on many social media platforms for the last several years? de-cleft chin enhancer?

either way, yes it’s kinda weird lol

a tv professional on bluesky explained the lighting thing hes lit from front/above which creates a chin shadow so they throw another light under his chin but then his collar is casting a shadow too so the weird bottom of the mask effect is where the chin and collar shadow overlap

person didnt mention ai but imo thats whats making it look so uncanny, i saw a video the other day of an older man who had perfect skin except for two deep wrinkles on either side of his face that were fading in and out, it looked so fuckup up man

cleft is prob being blown away by a combo of lighting and ai

cleft is prob being blown away by a combo of lighting and ai

thing about ai upscaling is it just is inherently face tuning its ai so it works though statistically averaging a bunch of faces rather than the non ai way of working off of the existing pixels of the image, now they can intentionally tune it to desirable qualities which they prob do too

ai, please maximize unearned hubris in my eyebrows and cheeks

Mehdi Hasan on Bsky:

How did I only just discover that Don Jr is marrying the daughter of a prominent Epstein enabler?

Her late dad, a banker, wrote Epstein a reference letter calling him "a gentleman of the highest integrity" to help get him tax breaks &… his island.

Is this another (of infinite) reason why Trump is avoiding his son's wedding day?

Whole lotta gunshots fired at the White House today. You can hear them as an NBC reporter is talking about the Iran "peace deal":

https://bsky.app/profile/jeromecylin.bsky.social/post/3mmkifchhf22a

Amazing that gunfire at the White House is barely breaking news these days.

Price of freedom

CNN cites "dozens of shots fired", two people in critical condition, with one being "a suspect" and the other "a bystander". Good job, Secret Service agents. Sounds like you managed to put as many bullets into the ground, the trees, the nearby walls, and a bystander as you did into the perceived threat.

Choking back tears, Michigan US Senate candidate Haley Stevens exclaims, "ISRAEL COMES TO ME IN MY DREAMS!" pic.twitter.com/XQgw03tpKt

— gato fumante (@KweenInYellow) May 26, 2026

Every second of the night, I live another life...

No surprise that AIPAC has raised millions for her. She slots right in with the knee-jerk, no-strings-attached, pro-Israel views that dominate Congress in both parties. It's big happy bandwagon full of money.

this is an actual headline today

RFK Jr. wrangles pair of snakes as wife, Cheryl Hines, looks on: ‘Honey, let them go!’

"But honey, we need the oil."

is that not an episode of Curb your Enthusiasm?

the vid of RFK trucking it out of the Coorespondants Dinner while Cheryl got left behind felt like Larry-coded behaviour to me

The Daily Show had a joke about it being a new addition to the 'Kennedy Family Abandoning Women To Their Fate' Wikipedia page.

I mean, what IS reality?

(That’s how I feel about every other news headline now)

is that not an episode of Curb your Enthusiasm?

is it not an episode of The Iliad?

https://www.livius.org/site/assets/files/9635/hercules_antakya_sii.jpg

"I have had it with these motherfucking snakes in these motherfucking hands!"

Unless he also bit the heads off the snakes while laughing maniacally I can't be bothered to follow this story.

snake wrangling you just don't care about

MAHAcoön

What if he tries to bite the snake heads off but bites off his hands instead and they are made of paste.