"When Social Security is secure, millions of families are more secure, and so is our economy...81% of older Americans across party lines reject cutting Social Security benefits." - Nancy LeaMond, AARP
SCBernard
@scbernard.bsky.social
Emmy & Peabody Award-winning professor, filmmaker, author. Most recently, "Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies" (Cambridge University Press). "[A] necessary act of historical justice" - Rock & Roll Highway
The founders are calling. They suggest you read the damn Constitution.
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdayCornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president"
Call me crazy, but if a Democratic president had 350 accounts closed by their bank for money laundering it’d be more than a blip in the media
I’m not a constitutional lawyer, but this is nonsense
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterdaySen. Rand Paul: "I've had the debate with this administration ... they told me this isn't a war. I said, why isn't it a war? They said, 'Well, a constitutional war has to have significant casualties' ... initiation or declaration of war is *before* the casualties."
Whitehouse: "The last Q I'm left with is what's left of this committee? What's left when we don't demand straight answers? How many times has this DOJ been asked what became of the $50k the FBI reported it handed to Homan? ... our Republican colleagues see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil"
Whitehouse: "Today I think is a sad and embarrassing day for this committee as it looks like on a party-line vote we are going to advance out of this committee probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of attorney general. Let's start with the Epstein files ... "
The effective federal corporate income tax rate: 1950: 50% 1990: 25% 2020: 13% Stop asking "but how we will pay for it?" Restore the corporate tax rate. That is how we will pay for it.
The Iran War’s Forgotten Captives: Sailors Trapped in the Persian Gulf www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/b...
Sailors Working in Strait of Hormuz Are Caught in Crossfire of Iran War (Gift Article)
Thousands of civilian workers remain stranded on ships at risk of attack by Iran. On one vessel, sailors have been held by the Iranian navy for more than three months.
nytimes.com
America is at war with Iran and we have a HGTV President
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 2d agoTrump: "Now we have a big decision to make. Do we take the pavers that are red -- the red, brick pavers -- and do we change them into a granite?"
Masked ICE thug just casually shooting pepper spray at a few old ladies standing peacefully on the sidewalk filming them in uptown Manhattan today. Just because these monsters are quieter now doesn’t mean they’re not still out there violating people.
Iran is attacking Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. It’s *almost* as if they got their list of targets from Trump. 👀
today in "headlines you'd see on a background TV in a disaster movie" www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Rhine Falls to Lowest Since 1880, Disrupting European Trade
The Rhine River’s water levels dropped to the lowest in nearly 150 years as hot, dry weather grips Europe, threatening to disrupt a crucial route for transporting coal, fuel and industrial commodities...
bloomberg.com
When Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management west, 287 of 328 employees quit rather than uproot their families. Three actually relocated. Now he's running the same play on the Forest Service. Stop it. actionnetwork.org/letters/tell...
Tell Congress: Stop Trump’s Illegal Plan to Destroy the US Forest Service
Contact Congress today!
actionnetwork.org
Genuinely, the vast majority of American voters believe that only laziness or criminal intent could be stopping the average immigrant from obtaining US citizenship. The truth is that becoming a US citizen takes years upon years of work and requires navigating a baroque bureaucratic nightmare.
Secretary of Defense Rock@sodrock.bsky.social · 2d agoI remember a family member of mine saying “isn’t it like going to the DMV?”
🧪 Medical professionals are losing the attention war on YouTube. In a 3,958-video sample, independent creators produced the lowest quality content but captured the highest viewership using exaggeration. #MedSky
The credibility paradox: clickbait, engagement, and information quality in YouTube’s medical ecosystem - npj Digital Medicine
npj Digital Medicine - The credibility paradox: clickbait, engagement, and information quality in YouTube’s medical ecosystem
nature.com
The next time a climate change denier comes at you with that excuse:
When I was a federal prosecutor with the Justice Department, every time I charged someone with a crime I was aware of the massive responsibility I had to do the right thing. David Hearn went through hell, and huge financial costs, before DOJ dropped their case. It was an abuse of power.
RFK told Dana Bash that Lyme disease “almost certainly” came from gain of function research. Which is utterly false. www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdi...
Lyme Disease Did Not Come From a Secret Military Lab, Contrary to FDA Chief's Claim
Bacterium that causes it circulated long before the lab opened, decades of evidence show
medpagetoday.com
This New York Times article, which ran a week before Christmas last year, didn’t get the attention it deserved. It detailed Trump and Epstein's predatory behavior toward women – “a game of ego and dominance” in which “female bodies were currency.” Here’s a gift link and a thread. 1/6🧵
‘Don’s Best Friend’: How Epstein and Trump Bonded Over the Pursuit of Women (Gift Article)
The president has tried to minimize their friendship, but documents and interviews reveal an intense and complicated relationship. Chasing women was a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were cur...
nytimes.com
This got me to finally read the entire New Yorker article on the Tates and... yeah. I don't see how what they're doing is any different than what everyone has accused Jeffrey Epstein of doing. Except they're *more public* about admitting to what they're doing AND getting young men to join in.
David Roberts@volts.wtf · 4d agoHowever horrible you think the Tate brothers are, I promise, it's worse than that. It's insane that Dems aren't making a bigger deal of the GOP embracing these grotesque monsters.
They’re all trying to rewrite history, but we’re all still around and our memory hasn’t been affected. In fact, I still remember that in 2020, they had to build a field hospital in the Javits convention center because NYC hospitals were overwhelmed.
If SCOTUS sides with Trump this week, the consequences could reach far beyond one executive order. This isn't just another shadow docket case. It's about who controls access to the ballot—and who gets to decide whether your vote counts. Here's what's at stake: open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...
The Week Ahead
August 2, 2026
open.substack.com
There was a reason we stopped giving government jobs to people based on connections and contributions 100 years ago. Every day now we see how destructive the spoils system was/is.
Ok that whole thing was a train wreck and she did try to turn to measles. He talks nonsense but best part ever was when she tried to ask if he was researching causes of autism other than vaccines and he had the nerve to say, well you probably don’t understand this bc you’re not a scientist ….
What should horrify us is that the charges were never true. There was no late breaking evidence. There was always, obviously, open lying, apparently even to a grand jury.
I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures – on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850.
