Bette Davis was the only white performer who agreed to be part of Hattie McDaniel's performing troupe to entertain Black servicemen during WWII. www.tumblr.com/themidcentur...
In the Renaissance people theorized, since the Aeneid is great, if you wrote poems made only of words & phrases from the Aeneid rearranged they should be great too, since a great source regurgitated should yield greatness. They produced NOTHING we still read. Thinking about that a lot lately.
Integrating the US and Israeli militaries comes with real dangers. In 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu was able to veto US officials who wanted to provide air defense systems to Ukraine in its war against Russia’s illegal invasion, even though the systems were made in the US and paid for by US tax dollars.
Maybe I’m missing something but I’m not seeing any second-day reporting on the DSCC and DCCC suppressing a political scientists’s report about their shady email + text fundraising practices. I checked Google News and searched for related terms on here. Anybody else seeing anything?
We have a major Democratic law firm, two major party committees, and two media outlets dead to rights suppressing research into how digital fundraising firms scam seniors and barely a peep from the national press corps or elected officials. A goddamn shame.
Aaron Huertas@aaronhuertas.bsky.social · yesterdayMaybe I’m missing something but I’m not seeing any second-day reporting on the DSCC and DCCC suppressing a political scientists’s report about their shady email + text fundraising practices. I checked Google News and searched for related terms on here. Anybody else seeing anything?
“Okay, well let’s see if you can fight, and he couldn’t.” 👨🏿🍳💋
Mikki Kendall@karnythia.blacksky.app · 15h agoI just want to know who's baby this is? Because I am proud of her like she's one of mine. This is perfection
“Bonica found that out of some $670 million in donations, just $11 million wound up in the coffers of campaigns, national party committees, and individual candidates. The other $659 million stayed with the fundraising groups themselves.” Look at this graphic:
The Nation Magazine@thenation.com · yesterdayDemocrats really, really, really don't want people investigating their scammy fundraising. https://bit.ly/4bPctBy
Margaret Hamilton, a pioneer of software engineering who led NASA's in-flight software team for the Apollo mission, was born #OTD in 1936. 🧪 🔭 👩🔬 Image: NASA
If you haven't by now read the full deep dive by @adambonica.bsky.social into spam and scam PAC fundraising practices on the Dem side, you absolutely need to. So, read this if you haven't, but I have a lot of thoughts about how we got here: data4democracy.substack.com/p/hook-and-s...
Hook and Squeeze
How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.
data4democracy.substack.com
“The party’s platform champions protecting the vulnerable. Its fundraising apparatus exploits them. The party’s official campaign committees, which should set the standard, are instead some of the worst offenders.” Read the whole thing, as they say. Whew! Thank you @adambonica.bsky.social
Adam Bonica@adambonica.bsky.social · 2d agoThe fundraising texts you delete are working on someone. It’s infuriating and heartbreaking. An 85yo in Ohio gave more than double the value of his home. A 91yo in an Indianapolis senior facility gave 25K times. The DCCC/DSCC don’t just tolerate the spammers who exploit seniors. They take part.
14 hours later and my mentions are still full of angry treatises about badly behaved cyclists. Bike lanes are not a reward for good cyclist behavior! They are infrastructure proven to make cities safer for ALL ROAD USERS. Whatever way cyclists have wronged you is irrelevant to the discussion!
Katie Mack@astrokatie.com · 2d agoEvery conversation about bike lanes is like: "Car crashes kill a huge number of people every day, including pedestrians, cyclists, & car occupants. Good bike infrastructure has been shown to make everyone safer (& doesn't increase congestion)." "But sometimes cyclists break rules & hit people!"
Fox News’ website is leading with “the WNBA’s transgender athlete debate.” There are no trans athletes in the WNBA now. The “debate” is Fox‘s attempt to foment hatred and distract people from Trump’s illegal war and vandalism of the economy.
Perhaps professional associations of journalists should convene a working group to address these kinds of non-responses. A new norm is needed here to dis-incentivize it: if a *professional politician* claims to be unaware of a serious news item, end the interview there.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 3d agoTAPPER: You voted for Blanche. Do you think it's appropriate for the AG to be participating in a partisan political event? CASSIDY: All I saw was that little snippet. I'm going to reserve comment because I was not aware of that before this. I will say Republicans are very strong on law enforcement
Starving the navy was one of the ways the Kaiser found himself out of a job
Remembering how during the Claudine Gay scandal, one of its biggest promoters of the story was Bill Ackman. Then someone uncovered that Ackman's own wife was a professor alleged to have committed much more serious academic misconduct than Gay and then nothing happened to her.
IT’S OFFICIAL: The DNC has voted to confirm the early window states for the 2028 Democratic presidential nominating process. These states reflect the diversity of America and will help ensure our nominee is best positioned to take back the White House in 2028.
The billionaire bro in charge of Forest Service, Michael Boren, ordered underlings to deploy a fleet aircraft to put out a tiny fire near his megaranch Acre-size of fire: 7 Number of aircraft sent: 9 “it was easily accessible by ground,” said an official www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026...
Top Trump official asked for more aircraft to fight a small fire near his Idaho ranch
Michael Boren, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, asked for more resources to contain a seven-acre blaze last month, officials said.
washingtonpost.com
His comment about becoming "head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard" seems to confirm that his whole DEI/race/woke-obsession is just him never having gotten over the fact that he was rejected at Harvard
Democrats need to run ads with this clip in every congressional district with a sizable military community.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 4d agoQ: The family members of US service members are concerned about the conditions on the USS Lincoln TRUMP: No they're not Q: Has the deployment gone on too long? TRUMP: No no no. Not nearly long enough.
THIS is how you be an actual trans ally! 🙌 variety.com/2026/tv/glob...
‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Loki’ Directors Say They Rejected HBO’s ‘Harry Potter’ Due to J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia: ‘Absolutely F—-ing Not’
Top TV directors Ally Pankiw and Kate Herron rejected the chance to join HBO's forthcoming series adaptation of J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" novels.
variety.com
being a decent human being in secret only is NOT a plus lol, some people have fully lost the plot
There is no good use of generative AI because the technology was built on theft of creative labor. If that position surprises you from an artist whose life's work was scraped and used without permission to train trillion dollar technology, educate yourself. www.michaelwhelan.com/faq/#digital...
The White House normally gets $2.5 million a year for maintenance. Trump’s team has allocated $875 million. That’s 350 years’ worth of the usual budget spent by a single administration.
The president is refusing to spend taxpayer money assisting Americans suffering from natural disasters solely because their states didn't vote for him. I know there are a thousand scandals at the moment, but this one deserves some more oxygen at every level.
Don Moynihan@donmoyn.bsky.social · 2w agoIs this just business as usual in politics? No. Approval rates of federal disaster aid requests were about the same regardless of the state and did not vary much with the party of the President. This graph powerfully conveys the scale of the partisan discrimination now.
This is why Sen. Johnson (WI) is freaking out about the turnout in the primary Total Democratic votes: 792,009 Total GOP votes: 490,819 Gap: >300,000
MacFarlane: The park service records that I obtained show where the priorities are. $323 million allotted for the White House grounds alone, beautification and vanity projects…
New: Robot arms kept catching on fire. Machines kept ruining artillery shells. A $533 million General Dynamics project failed to produce a single usable shell. “It was a waste of government money, and it was a waste of our time,” one former technician said. www.propublica.org/article/gene...
Fiasco in the Factory: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing
General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a...
propublica.org
An important reminder: In Wisconsin, unlike many states, election officials are barred from starting to process mail before Election Day. Why? The GOP has refused to change the law to allow this, despite election officials long asking. (And then Republicans use that to baselessly suggest fraud.)
I’m seeing a lot of people hang their hopes and all their attention on the midterms. Electoral organizing matters, but full-time spectatorship won’t build the power we need. I wrote about checking in with yourself about where your attention is going and what you’re doing with it.
Resisting Total Electoral Absorption
It may be worth checking in with ourselves, from time to time, about what, if anything, our attention is cultivating.
organizingmythoughts.org
the fact that a billionaire can randomly throw $100,000,000 into a campaign against taxing the rich seems like the best argument yet they can afford it