BlueSky, June 2026 Part 1

Let's see, the first half of June 2026... I'm sure nothing much happened, right?

It began with continuing reaction to the Supreme Court and Republicans attempting to gut the Voting Rights Act and reinstating Jim Crow. 

As Elon Musk exhorted an anti-immigrant pogrom in Belfast, SpaceX had its IPO, making Musk a paper trillionaire. There's a whole section of reaction posts about that. 

The last couple of days went from the farce of Trump trying to hide his name being removed from the Kennedy Center, to his big boy birthday party (previewed yesterday), to his fake deal with Iran (details still unclear). 

In between all of that, there was screw worm in Texas, the California elections, the Knicks winning the NBA finals, the World Cup coming to North America, and lot of other stuff.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance. 

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Iran Says Strait of Hormuz Won’t Have ‘Tolls’ but It Will Have ‘Fees’ – lol
Bill Kristol

needed a new portrait for various things so decided to take a self-one with my new hat:


jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I am begging cisgender people to stop using the pronoun part of their introductions in meeting to say nouns that are clearly not the pronouns they actually use. I don't care if you have ~feelings~ about being asked pronouns. You are mocking trans people.
Dex Anderson

They're gonna pay Iran back for damages but not Minneapolis.
Gourdon P. Squash @dewterium2.bsky.social

Wow — Netanyahu reportedly used to refer to President Obama as “boy.” File this as yet another piece of information that is shocking but not surprising.
Leah McElrath

I feel it’s sort of underrated the extent to which a Dem Congress and/or states could (1) absolutely destroy car dealerships as a business, and (2) this would cripple a lot of GOP state and local parties
Vituperative Erb

i have been obsessed with this for years. allowing manufacturers to sell direct to consumers would be good for consumers and also destroying the car dealership would be an existential crisis for republicans
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Custom-made tarps just so the tangerine baby doesn't have a tantrum that his name has been taken off a building (which shouldn't have been there in the first place)?


Ann Telnaes

Trump promised an unconditional surrender in Iran. Today, he delivered on that promise.
NY Times Pitchbot

Drivers: “You’re gonna get yourself killed!”
Cyclists: “Who’s doing the killing?!?”
Bill Winterberg

It's honestly not that hard to go through life without anyone "confusing" your gestures for a Nazi salute.
Patrick Chovanec

Everything I have learned about UFC is against my will.
Nate Pentz

Trump also had the Thunder birds do a flyover during the National Anthem at the UFC event at the White House. How many million did that cost taxpayers. And the honor guard escorts for fighters at the Lincoln Memorial? And cost of Secret Service?
Sherry @sherry2.bsky.social

may we remember speaker hortman every time a kid in Minnesota eats their free lunch. 
every time a trans person moves to mn for safety. 
when an undocumented person gets their driver’s license or a returning citizen gets to vote.
when we have clean energy and electric school buses and warm homes.
when we ride the buses that are funded with new taxes and see low-income kids go to college for free.
when we see solar panels on schools.
when we know we can access abortion care and live in homes without lead pipes.
her memory will be a blessing.
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com


Ramin Nasibov

it's notable to me that the administration tried to frame tonight's UFC event as a "gift to Americans" but you can't watch it unless you have a paid subscription to Paramount+
Aaron Rupar

“More than 700 women have been murdered in the UK since 2020, but we didn’t see those claiming that their actions are about ‘protecting women and girls’ riot over those, because the majority of perpetrators were white.”
Liberal Currents

Men who commit this kind of violence with this kind of rhetoric are not protecting women and girls; they are trying to legislate which men have the right to harm women and girls (and of course it's men like them and not those other men).
Rebecca Solnit

Think of all the people who died just for Trump to re-establish a weaker, unenforceable version of Obama's nuclear deal.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

The president waged an unnecessary war, cratered the economy and wound up losing it anyway, and to celebrate his failures, he's going to throw himself a big birthday party with UFC fighters and dirt bike ramps and fireworks and cake and ice cream and
Kevin M. Kruse

Among the many reforms we need is a ban on every federal official of any importance, appointed or elected, from filing defamation lawsuits or claims for monetary damages against the United States. Hard to justify them in normal times and we've seen rampant abuse of them lately. End them entirely.
Max Kennerly

For National Pigeon Day, some very fancy pigeons courtesy of Emil Schachtzabel's Illustriertes Prachtwerk sämtlicher Taubenrassen (1906):


The Public Domain Review

A company called Surron realized parents think “electric” means “slow and safe” so they’ve made a fucking fortune selling incredibly dangerous electric dirt bikes to middle schoolers, who then do not use them responsibly on roads because they are 12 years old
Kelvin Q Goblin @stuntbirdarmy.bsky.social

Your reminder that fairy tales are full of stepmothers because women once routinely died in childbirth, from postpartum sepsis, or from other infectious diseases and left behind housefuls of motherless children. Stable nuclear families are made possible by vaccines, antibiotics, and safe abortions.
Dr. Sandra Steingraber

The Knicks only lost one game in the last two months and it was the one Trump went to lmao
Molly Knight

Last time the Knicks were NBA champions was the year the DOJ charged Fred & Donald Trump with housing discrimination based on race.
Dana Houle

It's truly astonishing to look at the personal backgrounds of the past six presidents:
Dems:
1. Poor child of a single mom
2. Biracial child of a single mom
3. Scrappy son of Scranton
GOP:
1. Scion of wealth, son of a senator
2. Scion of wealth, son of a president
3. Son of a millionaire slumlord
D Lavoie



Tom Flood

Ian Fleming might have made the world’s first trillionaire as evil as Elon Musk, but only Philip K. Dick could have made him such a pathetic drug-addled loser, desperate for attention and adulation but incapable of human relationships, and now terrified to go out in public.
Carl T. Bergstrom

By the way, Elon Musk didn't start Tesla. By the time he invested in Tesla, the original founders had already started building the Roadster THEY had designed. When he bought them out, he changed the history of the company to make himself a founder. I'm not joking. He's always been a fraud.
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com

To be very precise, on top of being a useless conman, he is one of the biggest mass-murders in history, a genocideer on par with any of history's other monsters.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

It’s all very explicit. Musk wants to use his wealth and influence to undo multiracial democracies across the world. He doesn’t try to hide it!
Denny Carter

Elon Musk accumulates $17.6 billion per week. That's about what Kansas spends in a year. It's more than the annual budgets of nineteen states.
Bryan Edward Stone @bestonetx.bsky.social

It’s partly about state capture. He has tapped the federal government
Holly Brewer @earlymodjustice.bsky.social

it's so wild to see so much wild-eyed hand-wringing about Elon Musk when we could have simply let Tesla go bankrupt at any of like 15 separate moments of crisis and never had to deal with three quarters of this bullshit
e.w. niedermeyer

We have forgotten our history. The reason elites finally capitulated to representative forms of government and regulations is that they got tired of angry mobs doing angry mob shit. I am NOT ADVOCATING VIOLENCE, thank you very much, I am simply noting that every period of wild economic disparity has resulted in the 99% wrecking shit and committing murders. Like, it just keeps happening. And now we have a trillionaire.
Sigrid Ellis

a little on the nose for capitalism that the world’s first trillionaire is a nazi conman
Micah @rincewind.run

1 million seconds = 11.5 days
1 billion seconds = 31.7 years 
1 trillion seconds = 31,700 years
Erin Maye Quade

I've reported on Musk for around 8 years. I've co-authored a book on him. I don't think folks understand the rate of his wealth accumulation. Shortly after he helped elect Donald Trump in Nov 2024, his net worth was around $350 billion. That net worth has nearly tripled in less than two years.
Ryan Mac

On the day before Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire, all I can think about is that time in 2021 when the head of the UN World Food Program asked Musk to donate $6 billion to save 42 million people from starvation and he refused.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

By @myvoicemychoice.bsky.social:


Trains Trams Tracks

Anti-fash counter-protests outnumber fash marches all the time and it would be cool if the press made a big deal about it.
Sooz Kempner @soozuk.bsky.social

LLMs telling people they can talk to Holocaust victims or enslaved people from hundreds of years ago is a repeat of the Guilded Age obsession with seances. It's tarot cards brought to you by tech bros who refuse to read. it is literally sacrilege to pretend that your computer program can reverse a genocide
Craig Johnson @cajohnson-craig.bsky.social

The president is trying to downsize the U.S Forest Service and eliminate wildfire and smoke research as the American West is facing a potentially epic summer fire season.
NPR

Explain to me like I’m 10 years old: CO₂ removal (CDR) requires a lot of renewable energy. When we’re still burning fossil fuels for energy & releasing billions of tonnes of CO₂, why wouldn’t we use that renewable energy to curtail the use of fossil fuels?
David Ho

Some doctors and medical organisations have jumped on the pearl clutching“e-bikes are evil” bandwagon while never ever having spoken out on the *orders of magnitude* greater adverse societal effects of driver violence or the negative effects on health of car dependency. Infuriating and embarrassing. The fact is most serious injuries/deaths in e-bike/motorcycle accidents are caused by drivers of cars or the blame/responsibility is shared or is partially caused by poor infrastructure/parked cars blocking sightlines etc. The media chooses not to focus on this.
Dr. Lesley Barron, MD, MPhil, FRACS 

Just as I predicted, they’re covering up the removal of his name from the Kennedy Center just like, you know, the Epstein files.
Kiera @kieragorden.bsky.social

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN VERY CLOSE TO A DEAL WITH EURASIA
Dan Hon

If 50% of the people in the United States gave up on car dependency, it would transform our society and politics in ways we can't even imagine.
Pedestrianize it @mplsdromomania.bsky.social
 
Is anyone in the FBI still going after criminals, like drug dealers, extortionists, sex traffickers and the like, or are they all going after Donald Trump's political enemies?
Dean Baker

The Ellisons now own TikTok, Paramount, Warner Bros, CBS News, HBO, Comedy Central, and CNN, among other major channels. They are also the largest private donor to "Friends of the IDF." They also paid $7 billion for streaming rights to UFC, which is hosting an event at the White House.
Wajahat Ali

When a mass call for justice goes out, as it did during the Summer of 2020, you can either embrace it, or you can do countless other things, big and small, to enable a fascistic response to it. Obama’s election made racial resentment even more salient, but it’s the Summer of 2020 that truly catalyzed the organized, bigoted street thuggery, supported by supremacist elites, we see today.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

The hilarious thing about people complaining about 14-year olds on e-bikes that are too powerful is that in less than two years these kids will be able to drive 500hp, 5000lb vehicles.
Andrew Blum

Every bike is just doing recreation and every car is carrying thirty-eight sick grandmas
lumberjack wharfie

MAGA throws out the welcome mat:


Pat Bagley

Friends and Seinfeld are the perfect example of white culture, because those shows are not funny to Black folks. Just nothing about it strikes us as funny like for y'all. I'm pretty sure tons of us feel this way. So if you're curious about what is actual white American culture, it's those shows.
Chantal James @chantalalive.blacksky.app

I often think that Economics, the field, doesn't explain, or aspire, it justifies. And what it usually ends up justifying is why capitalism must be, with all of its racism, rapaciousness and hollowing effects. The human spirit demands and deserves more, and our imaginations can get us there.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

We have no idea just how far behind the United States will be in 2028. We'll have nothing: no national science infrastructure, no agricultural progress, no medical progress. The oligarch class has decided to hollow America out in a hedge fund takeover. We are being robbed of our future.
Elf M. Sternberg

Watching the right wing Belfast reaction and understanding how a lot of outlets would have covered the Tulsa race massacre
Tim Dickinson

And bus stops that you can actually walk to, and aren't just a snow bank in someone's front yard in the winter.
Jon @jonvw4.bsky.social

NEW: In 2022, Bitcoin miners promised Corpus Christi millions in tax revenues in exchange for the de-annexation of their water-sucking cryptomine. Four years later, the city is in a water crisis & the mine has yielded only a minute fraction of what was promised. –The Texas Observer
Candice Bernd

Mississippi’s state auditor does not have the authority to sue to recover misspent welfare funds from Brett Favre or other defendants, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled today. The court said only the attorney general can do so, but the auditor has accused her of refusing to pursue all the funds.
Mississippi Free Press

So only some states get accused of fraud, and only if they are not white.
quick13

Illustrations of various strains of pollen in extreme magnification, as featured in Ueber den Pollen (1837), a book by St. Petersburg based German pharmacist and chemist Carl Julius Fritzsche: 


The Public Domain Review

Remember a little while ago when we all found out that a bunch of prominent right-wing influencers were straight-up paid by Russians and everyone just shrugged?
David Roberts @volts.wtf

We are experiencing a radical deconstruction of our republic, and the only answer to radical problems are radical solutions. Expand SCOTUS to 27. Pick up the “good behavior” clause and weaponize it. Affirm the ERA. Normalize Constitutional amendments. Expand the House by population density. We should also be introducing aggressive anti-corruption ideas like a Constitutional amendment affirming the right of citizens to vote, public funding of elections at a max of 1.5-2% of the federal budget, and preventing Authorized Uses of Military Force from being passed without an audit of military spending.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Compared to e-cars, e-bikes use about 2% of the material, 5% of the energy, 10% of the lane-space, and 10% of the parking space.
Ellie Saurus

Whenever we talk about this administration or Republicans in general wanting something positive regarding people, it can no longer be unspoken that they mean WHITE people. The White House wants more WHITE doctors, so its deadly immigration policy is not contradictory to that desire in any way.
Amadi Lovelace @amaditalks.bsky.social

And to think that God created this whole mess.
MaryMM

I’m a pretty cynical person, yet I never thought I’d live to see a post-Jim Crow American political party take the position that “racist pogroms are good actually.”
Seth Cotlar

My family left what is now Ukraine because of anti-Jewish pogroms -- and those who stayed behind were killed in the Holocaust -- and I am completely comfortable calling what is happening in Belfast a pogrom
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

If your response to discussions sparked by drivers hitting and killing pedestrians is to always show up and say "but also pedestrians need to do better," genuinely with all the kindness I can muster: Fuck off.
Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social

So this happened. "A senior figure in the Ukrainian defence industry told New Scientist that a test took place two years ago involving fully autonomous drones set to destroy anything in a given area, with confirmed casualties"
Social Media Lab

st. joseph auto and furniture fabric slip cover sign, saint joseph, missouri, 1988:


old roadside pics

Unconscionable: ICE deported one the organizers of the Union of People Kidnapped by ICE, Rogelio Bolufe Izquierdo, after he organized a hunger strike at the Tacoma, WA. detention camp. Bolufe Izquierdo is a Cuban national. They deported him to Guayaquil, Ecuador.
Whitney Curry Wimbish

The policy of the Trump Administration is straightforwardly that there are too many black people achieving things
jesse @jesseltaylor.bsky.social

Each ICE operation generates roughly $196,000 in monthly losses for nearby businesses and communities. (That's 11x the government's administrative cost of a deportation.) Why? ICE activity decreases foot traffic in those public areas.
John Holbein

Trump is not just a bad president. He's the Confederacy in control of the White House. Not merely an administration violating the Constitution in this or that particular matter, a regime fundamentally without legal validity in all respects whatsoever. A rebellion against the supreme law of the land. That is the framework we must work with if post-Trump Reconstruction is to build a lasting constitutional settlement and not just be another pause before we're right back to square one with the next traitor and tyrant. And that can not happen with his judicial enablers still in unchecked power. If you hate that court packing has, in just a couple of years, gone from unserious fringe idea to the mainstream Democratic position and something they’re very likely to do, the target of your ire should be the Roberts six. They have brought it on themselves. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Court packing isn't setting off a judicial legitimacy crisis. We are faced with a judicial legitimacy crisis that is already here, a court that half or more of the country has good reason to see as not just conservative but as enemies of the republic. "Too bad, accept it" isn't an answer that works.
Andy Craig

one thing I definitely don't remember about the Bicentennial is Gerald Ford hanging huge banners of his face everywhere, but I was just a kid, I might have missed that
Tom Tomorrow

I hope later in the season I'll have a bit more to work with to really fill the frame but it's June, dangit, it's rainbow time!


The Andrea Borden @thislitgarbage.bsky.social

The words "pen" and "pencil" are unrelated. Pen is from Latin penna, meaning "feather", and pencil is from Latin penis, meaning "tail"
Present & Correct

Congress voted to give ICE and CBP another $70 billion through 2029. "There is no question that this bill passing will make it incredibly difficult to reverse the creation of a huge deportation machine at the hands of President Trump,”
American Immigration Council

In the last 18 months, Congress has given DHS $240 billion — a quarter of a trillion.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

this is a form of state looting with the side effect of reorienting the economy into that of a garrison state
utopia deferred

This is why all of you have a DUTY to stop parroting austerity language at the Federal level. The money is there. It's just not going to supporting life affirming institutions and programs.
Prisonculture

I find it amazing that we're in the middle of a historic oil crisis and the most energy-intensive industry in history is seeing valuations shoot to the moon.
Patrick Chovanec

i don't know how we proceed as a society if every time someone somewhere does a crime and they happen to be from an outgroup then that isolated incident can be blown up all over social media into a total war fantasy that instigates sustained hate campaigns and pogroms
ben chambers

For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal
Grist

Democrats should also be really thinking now about insane it's going to feel if we win in 2028 and Musk is babbling about the need for a race war and calling the president a satanic pedophile while also being the most important government contractor in the country.
Nathan Goldwag

The Iran War bumped inflation over nominal wage growth for 2 months. That means real wages actually shrank last month by 0.8%.
Steve Rattner


Bethankit Hums @tangibullah.bsky.social

It’s a pretty weird week when a guy who wants to be a trillionaire is simultaneously getting headlines for the economy-shattering IPO expected Friday and the racist pogroms he is accused of stoking — but these stories are viewed as separate and in no way connected or prescient of the future.
Molly McKew

The violence in Belfast is a reminder of something I don’t want to take for granted: The fascists here hoped the response to the depredations of ICE would be similar, with people turning in or attacking their neighbors. That it was the very opposite is worth remembering in this season of despair And most leaders in politics, media, and business were pretty much ready to go along. If Americans had committed some pogroms, there would have been hand-wringing and denunciations, but ultimately immigration itself would have been blamed and we’d have been told we had to listen to the violent racists.
Levi Stahl

Folks, there was never a “ceasefire.” Both sides only adjusted the tactics they were using the win the war. For the U.S., the high-intensity bombing campaign wasn’t getting us closer to any clear goal, and was rapidly depleting our weapons stockpile. So we shifted to a blockade, which is still an act of war. For the Iranians, shooting missiles at third countries wasn’t clearly accomplishing anything either, that they couldn’t achieve better by just stopping traffic in the Strait and waiting.
Patrick Chovanec

If Democrats were actually “rigging” elections, then we sure as shit wouldn’t have Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in the House and Senate. The entire narrative is ridiculous and serves as a screen for the Republican belief than only votes from white people should count.
Leah McElrath

The East India Company: arguably a better historical analogy for AI imperialism than the first industrial revolution.
Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social

the vision for positive masculinity is feminism.
Marisa Kabas

I think the thing undermining confidence in elections is the sitting president and his political party constantly trying to steal them
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

So, the biggest IPO in the history of the world has the vast majority of its future value being created by an AI platform whose only distinction, thus far, is that it is the only one that's generated sexualized imagery of children? And they're going to force it into our 401ks so we're bag-holders?
Anil Dash

Me, a smart free thinker who won’t surrender to the Woke mob: how is it possible a Republican lost in Los Angeles
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Sea levels are now rising by 4.3 mm per year. That's really fast
Dr Charlie Gardner

Spotted on the NYC subway. “One prompt, job gone!”


Kathleen Bachynski

Call me an idealist, but I think that a prerequisite for hosting an international sport event should be that you're willing to host an international sport event.
Tom Phillips

ACTUAL GOOD NEWS ALERT: battery discharge on Australia's main grid just overtook gas peaking plants. Not long before it overtakes *all gas combined*. Not long before renewables overtake coal, too. None of this was meant to be possible!
Ketan Joshi

Banks poured $906bn into fossil fuels last year. Either way it's a bad bet. If we don't decarbonise, the physical damage wrecks the economy they're betting on. If we do, those assets strand and they eat the transition risk. Heads you lose, tails you lose. Don't trust them with your money.
Dr. Aaron Thierry

At the risk of stating the obvious: when reactionaries say elections are "rigged," what they mean -- in their hearts, in their guts -- is that their opponents are illegitimate and it only counts if they win. That's what they've always meant.... Progressives should try to make things better, for everyone, but they should not take those feelings as *evidence of anything*. They reveal nothing about the actual world, as evidenced by their persistence through wildly differing circumstances. They only reveal the character of those feeling them.... And like everything else in reactionary politics, it is a *feeling*, not a conclusion drawn from evidence. No amount of procedural reforms (however badly they are needed in many cases) will eliminate that feeling.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Trump's Agriculture Secretary dismisses the deadly, flesh-eating New World Screwworm as "just a little pest"
FactPost

Seriously, if you're a congressmember, why not hold a press conference to announce that, using Mike Johnson's own standard of evidence-free evidence, you're demanding his immediate removal from the House.
Kevin M. Kruse

"Something remarkable happened in April. For the first time in history, wind and solar generated more electricity than gas across the entire planet. Not in a country. Not in a region. Globally."
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I suspect this might be the best photo I ever take:


TLDR Jack

I’m so frustrated that I have to argue 20th century philosophy about whether machines are people and 18th century science about whether germs are real and fucking 15th century colonial bullshit about whether people are human beings.
Chris Dwan @somershade.bsky.social

An idiotic reality TV star running one of America's largest cities. Ha. Can you imagine. Dodged that bullet
Thor Benson

A City of Chicago employee who planned bike infrastructure projects was killed on Friday afternoon riding his bike in the Bridgeport neighborhood. His name was Riley O’Neil and he and I went to high school together and played on the lacrosse team together.
Infest The Pat’s Nest @derblutenpat.bsky.social

When you hear people complain about bike lanes, please remember that there's a reason for streets designed to keep bicyclists and pedestrians safer. No one should be killed because someone opens their car door. Yes that person should have looked remember: bad design kills.
Sheila Regan

Rubbing our faces in rank hypocrisy is another form of bullying. It’s a key feature of modern-day Republicanism.
Elizabeth Gormley

"What the Wounds Tell" just won this year’s European Press Prize. "Doctors in Gaza observed a disturbing pattern: children with a single gunshot wound to the head or chest, a sign that they had been deliberately targeted."
Amarnath Amarasingam

By far the biggest problem with delegating judgement to machines is the people who own the machines can tune them towards outcomes they prefer but those who don't own anything can't. It's not the technology. It's a transfer of decision making power from rational accountable systems to capital.
Mallory Moore @sexabolition.blog

The LA election discourse is a good reminder that Democrats are overly process focused and build well-intentioned systems that move far too slowly, whereas Republicans are really stupid.
James Medlock

I live in a building of 374 apartments and about 550 residents. We have five elevator cars. The problem is, two elevator cars are nearly every single weekday reserved from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm for move ins, move outs, and deliveries. I count 4 move ins and 7 move outs in next month. That's a lot!
Conrad Lange Zbikowski @czbi.org

sign at mt. kisco, new york anti-trump protest this past week:


Rachel Maddow

most Americans do not realize: your car already has a speed governor in it — it's just set at a super high speed to avoid damaging your engine, not for safety. "Install a speed governor" is literally just changing a setting in your car's computer and that's it.
mtsw

At this point, Trump could slap a journalist dead in the face and the corporate media would dumb it down to "tense," "contentious" or "controversial." Dude had what sure looked like a mental health break on camera. And I'm sick of journalists not clapping back when he calls them stupid.
Joy-Ann Reid

There are currently more bills attacking trans youth’s right to play sports across the U.S. than there are trans youth in school sports.
ACLU

MAGA: "Cities are all disgusting hellholes that need to be ground under Trump's bootheel."
Also MAGA: "Why do none of our guys win in cities? There must be some giant conspiracy going on!!!"
The Alternate Historian

The reason Men are panicking about Gender is that thanks to the internet, we (everyone who isn't a Man) have been able to compare notes on Men worldwide and WOW it's not looking good
Sarah Walsh @bigdamnherossir.bsky.social

Any deal made with Trump should be honored just as much as Trump honors any deal he makes. Tell him if he wants deals that favor him honored, he should go back and pay every contractor he stiffed, with interest. And then, if he actually does it and pays them back, prosecute him anyway. Fuck him.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social

We quite literally have a whites-only refugee program and somehow the media won’t call the Administration white supremacists.
Grudgie the Whale

That is so the truth!


@cheryl2877.bsky.social

If there was more space between the story of "corporate brilliance" and the story of "extracting from living systems and leaving degraded complexity in your wake" we wouldn't keep ending up in these situations.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Bitcoin is down more than 50% from its peak, converging on its fundamental value (zero)
Dean Baker

DOGE's goal of declaring 2.7 million living people dead was to make "immigrants so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested," the whistleblower said. (Washington Post story)
Penelope Wang @pennywriter.bsky.social

seeing stores roll out insanely large sections of patriotic bullshit right now feels so out of touch and makes me feel even more queasy than usual
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com

"maga leads to flesh eating disease" – headlines just write themselves
Shiv Ramdas @nameshiv.bsky.social

Again, Bill Pulte is a 38-year-old -- no really, 38 -- who only holds a BA in broadcast journalism and absolutely zero experience in the intelligence field. He has no qualifications for this job at all. Aside from being a psychotic lickspittle to the president.
Kevin M. Kruse

The Republicans honored a person whose only claim to fame was murdering a Black man in broad daylight. But hey, they're not racist!
Dean Baker

I wish politicians were more 'open-minded' about preventing the destruction of everything we know and love:


Dr Charlie Gardner

The American people are paying $1.5 million A DAY to keep 2,800 Guard members in DC. "The presence of the Guard had no effect on violent crimes, including robberies, which were already on a downward trend before Trump came back into office."
Celeste Headlee

My crankiest old man take is that referring to all art/entertainment/journalism/criticism/comedy/advertising as “content” helped pave the way for broad-ish acceptance of AI slop.
Josh Gondelman

the datacenter backlash is depressing because no one can imagine regulating something novel directly anymore
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social

It's ridiculous that police departments make up around 30-50% of the average municipality's budget, but those same police look at you like you're stupid if you ever ask them to investigate a crime.
Stan Oklobdzija

back in the “defund the police” days I kept trying to find an alternate slogan like “make police work for their funds”
Hyperlexic

I'll say this for the Supreme Court: they're making it easier for me to convince people of the necessity and urgency of court reform
Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app

It’s the Segregationist Court of the United States, and should only be referred to as such.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

What's happening to CBS News is what the tech oligarchs call "parallel" strategy. Buy an existing institution, gut it, and convert it into a right-wing zombie version of itself. They are doing this to media, government, education, biotech, defense tech, etc. Some call it the "Network State." This bundling of all institutions into one quasi-religious political cause is a hallmark of fascism. as are the lies, the purges, the scapegoating of minority groups, the stoking of tensions around gender and sexuality, etc. Corporate is government is religion.
Gil Durán

John Roberts: “Turns out the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution is unconstitutional.”
Scrooge Jones @fitzador.bsky.social

these bastards think they own us:


Dr. Samantha Hancox-Li @sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com

This will not end with voting rights. The fundamental premises of these SCOTUS opinions are:
1) Anti-discrimination is actually unconstitutional discrimination;
2) Intentional discrimination isn't actionable if any alternative rationale is presented.
It's the beginning of the end of civil rights law.
Corey Rayburn Yung

Enrique Tarrio claimed that the end of the Abominable Slush Fund is no big deal because the Justice Department will just settle the lawsuits with individual J6 rioters in the same way that they were going to settle in bulk through the slush fund. He claimed the admin told him so.
Lindsay Beyerstein

Much like the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute is a terrorist organization disguised as a think tank.
@scarpity026.bsky.social

The new owner of the network bought it to tear down its news department's ability to annoy him. The new head of the news department took the job to settle scores with an industry that had rejected her low-effort, high-bias style. None of this is about building anything.
Sam Bergman @violanorth.bsky.social

There are lots of reasons to believe in the effectiveness of nonviolence in protest and resistance movements. But I no longer buy the idea that remaining non-violent will ensure more favourable media coverage. Media will demonise any protest that's against the interests of the billionaire class and more favourably frame any protest that aligns with the interests of the billionaire class. I'm not advocating violence, coverage of climate and social justice movements would undoubtedly be worse if they were violent. But violence isn't what determines the frame.
Dr Charlie Gardner

New research examines Waymo's California robotaxi trips btw Aug 2023 and Dec 2025. Conclusion: 46% of miles driven involved no one inside the car. That's 40 million miles of deadheading, with Waymo vehicles using road space w/o transporting a human.
David Zipper

Not great! Sounds like charging these companies based on miles driven (VMT fees) will be even more essential. Maybe a higher rate when the vehicle is empty.
Regina Burstein @mplsfietser.bike

For an assignment, I spent 1.5 hours at a stop sign by U of Toronto. Out of 228 vehicles, 208 did not stop. 59 when pedestrians were waiting or actively crossing. I saw 20/228 (9%) lawful interactions w/ that stop sign. If police showed any force to even one of those 208 drivers, there would be riots.
Shane Gates

Imagine being so unable to love your child that you set fire to the whole damn world instead:


George Wallace @mrgeorgewallace.bsky.social

If you think, as the MN GOP does, that a man convicted of murdering a black person is being vilified, it’s because you think it’s okay to murder black people. All decent human beings must come to the conclusion that the Republican Party deserves destroying.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

Pro tip: if you want to live in a suburb, go live in one. Don’t try to make the largest city in your region one
Alessandro Rigolon

"I spent about as much as people spend on parking at the office for 4 months." or "Around 30 tanks of gas." or "Less than the 50,000 mile service at the dealership." or "less than one year of car insurance", or "About 1/15th as much as my car."
Christopher Schmidt

When someone asked me how much my bike was, I’d be a bit sheepish and give a disclaimer acknowledging it’s “expensive”. But I stopped doing that because as a mode of transportation, high quality bicycles are cheap. I suggest bike people stop saying good quality bikes are "expensive."
peter k @peterskim.org

One must imagine Socrates reading his teaching evaluations
Paul Musgrave @professormusgrave.bsky.social

You may soothe yourself, with an assist from elite propaganda, by thinking two equal forces are duking it out, but the reality is, your fellow citizens are being illegally bludgeoned by barbaric agents of the state, at the behest of a leader who anti-fascists are meant to believe is their ally.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social

my favorite time on bluesky is the liminal space early in the morning in the US, when British people are rightfully complaining about how unsafe and inadequate their infrastructure is for non-drivers. Just before Americans start posting and show how much worse transportation can be.
Politics of Cars @thismachinekillsfascists.bike

Here’s my pied-à-terre idea: a $100,000 fee on every chopper flight between JFK and Manhattan, which is truly the dumbest chopper flight to ever exist
Nolan Hicks @ndhapple.bsky.social

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE:


Maggie Wiggin

June 14

It was one year ago today that a right-wing zealot shot and killed the former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives and her husband, after shooting and severely wounding a member of the State Senate and his wife — both in their homes in the middle of the night while he pretended to be a cop. He had a list of dozens of other elected Democrats and abortion advocates in his fake cop car, along with their addresses. 

When he pleaded guilty to his crimes in federal court last week, he admitted that he followed Melissa Hortman into her house, after initially wounding her, to shoot her directly in the head, killing her. 

Today, on that first anniversary, our Dear Leader is having a party, pretending that it's in honor of the 250th anniversary of this country. But it's really because it's his 80th birthday, and also it's probably not a bad think that it's a wink and nod to the ugliest part of his base that it coincides with the first anniversary of Vance Boelter's campaign of murder. 

These are the BlueSky posts I have accumulated about Trump's celebration of self over the past four days. Everything below the line is in chronological order, and is quoted from the attributed account.

___

It seems overnight the White House has been replaced by a Monster Energy Drink branded UFC cage:


Kate Klonick

I remember when “Obama watches too much basketball” was a criticism that was lobbed from the both sides of the aisle.
@chadstanton.blacksky.app

All the people crying that we need  “regular sports guy” Dems are the same people who told Obama—an absolute regular sports guy—to tone it down.
@rahulastrohl.bsky.social

The thing for me about the UFC fight is not just that it's happening and the cost, but that Trump is planning it while he continually fails to end an absolutely disastrous war. Just another weekend in the Trump White House that would have been a Presidency-ending scandal for Obama.
Gravel Influencer

Some serious Hunger Games energy right here:


Patrick Chovanec

"It's a republic, not a democracy" say the people cheering for gladiatorial combat in the capital city in a mixture of patriotic fervor and celebration of the ruler's birthday.
Jacob T. Levy

The promotion for Trump's UFC cage fight says “The most historic sporting event of all time.” The NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup and the World Cup are all going on right now. This is maybe the fourth biggest sporting event of the weekend.
Kevin M. Kruse

The perfect name for this time of oligarchs: “the Re-Gilded Age.” [Prompted by Trump's regilding of Arts of War sculptures near the Lincoln Memorial.]
Sherrilyn Ifill

I object to the stuff this administration has done to the White House because it’s ours, and not theirs to destroy. But I’m having a visceral and personal reaction to [the activities] at the Lincoln Memorial. They’re trying to usurp the rights of citizens and make us all gawking spectators to their carnival.
Anjali Dayal

Remembering a multi-day conservative freakout because Lizzo briefly played a founding father’s flute
Patrick Monahan @pattymo.com

Trump used the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon — soldiers who escort fallen heroes and heads of state — to usher UFC fighters past Abraham Lincoln’s statue like they’re celebrities on a red carpet.
Jennifer C @thejenniwren.teamlh.social

the real political correctness is that you can’t go on the news and say that this is hick shit:


Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

It’s funny because when kids ride dirt bikes in the city it’s taken as proof we need a totalitarian police state. 
@chadstanton.blacksky.app

Donald Trump's birthday is a great time to remember that Hillary Clinton won by a larger margin in 2016 than he won by in 2024.
Dean Baker

What's Next, the League of Women Voters?

While the Trump regime distracts us with its arch, ballroom, and vile UFC tacky-athon desecrating not just the White House but the Lincoln Memorial, they're also working their sick little hearts out to prevent free and fair elections this fall. 

They continue trying to impede access to mail-in balloting, and of course there's all the racist gerrymandering and anti-voting rights work. But the biggest news last week was the FBI raid in Cleveland on Thursday. MSNOW, led by veteran Carol Leonnig, reported agents raided offices of the Ohio Organizing Collective. They also went to the homes of individuals connected to the OOC – without warrants: 

“They had agents all across the state going to civil rights leaders’ and community leaders’ doors intimidating them, coming and demanding that they talk about literally anything they would ask... [they] asked them if they’re committing voter fraud, just on their doors, in front of their houses with their children, and just following them to work and school.” 

Benjamin McKean, an associate professor of political science at Ohio State University, said of the raids,  

The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is, for lack of a better phrase, a completely normal NGO. For the FBI to raid them – and people who are just associated with them – is a serious attack on ordinary civil society and almost certainly an effort to influence Ohio’s midterm elections. 

And:

[It] sure sounds like the Republicans are planning to run the ACORN playbook, but this time led by the FBI instead of and James O'Keefe 

In his responses to his post, McKean quoted a Cincinnati.com story that said more than 100 agents were deployed across the state of Ohio to question people. 

In its coverage of the raid, the Ohio publication The Rooster positioned it in the context of recent polling that found Republican U.S. Senator Jon Husted 8 points behind his Democratic challenger, former Senator Sherrod Brown.

Hallucinated Citations and the Matthew Effect

A month or so ago, I heard about a study that found 85% of LLM-hallucinated citations in scientific article preprints were also in the later journal versions. That means they were not caught by peer review. Bad, right?

It gets worse. The fake citations also disproportionately gave credit to male scholars, who already have many citations. In the BlueSky post where I saw the study mentioned, this was called "a fake-citation Matthew effect."

I had never heard of the Matthew effect, so looked it up. The term goes back to 1968. Robert Merton and Harriet Zuckerman named it (ironically, Merton is the one usually credited with it). 

The name comes from the Parable of the Talents from the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible. In general, it's the tendency for the rich to get richer, but in academia, it's the way "eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is similar; it also means that credit will usually be given to researchers who are already famous."

So the fact that LLM-generated fake citations credit more-established, male scholars is just one more thing to hate about them. They can't even hallucinate fairly.

The People on a Bridge Say No!

For the past year and more, there have been dozens and dozens of highway bridges and street corners in the Twin Cities where people show up weekly to protest the Trump regime and what it’s doing to this country. I’ve been participating in one of them since last summer.

We stand during rush hour on a noisy bit of concrete that arches over an urban freeway. We hold long banners with messages in large letters, readable from a distance, created by the person who started the bridge brigade, plus a variety of other signs and flags that people bring with them.

We wave at the drivers going past below us, many of whom honk or flash their lights in return. We celebrate when semi drivers blare their air horns. 

There are about 20 regulars on the bridge, almost all retired, and several over 80 years old. It’s hard for any of us to talk to more than one other person at a time as we line up in a row facing traffic because the vehicles are so loud. The traffic also creates a wind-tunnel effect, which always makes it at least 10°F colder than elsewhere. Yes, we were out there all winter, too. 

We don’t come out to the bridge because it’s comfortable. Why do we do it? Who are we?

I began to think about documenting this place and these people, to record one piece of the resistance to the fascist Trump regime: who we are, and why we’re doing what we’re doing. 

It makes me angry that I have to anonymize this and don’t even feel comfortable saying which bridge it is, because a violent right-winger stabbed a person at a different local bridge brigade last fall. 

But know this: the full record exists, and if it’s ever safe to keep it in a Minnesota state archive, it will be available. One small example of the resistance that exists in this country. 

Who we are

Of the 20 people I interviewed, there are 13 women and seven men (my assumption about genders). Six are from Minnesota originally and grew up in the state. Four are from states close by. There are two immigrants, both who experienced repressive governments in their countries of origin. The other eight are originally from many different parts of the U.S., though all have been in the Twin Cities for at least 15 years except maybe one.

The University of Minnesota was by far the main reason people came to the Twin Cities from out of state, either for education or a job, followed by coming here for a job or school elsewhere — whether for self, a parent, or a spouse. 

I did the interviews on the first anniversary of the bridge brigade. It began in early June 2025, when the founder of the brigade saw two women on the bridge, one wearing an Uncle Sam costume. They had a boom box and were dancing. They told her they would be out there the same day the next week at 7:30 a.m. for an hour, so she went to the bridge to meet them then, carrying her grandfather’s World War II veteran’s flag and a sign that said ENOUGH in large letters:



But they weren’t there — she was alone! Her husband came by after a half hour and stayed for the rest of the hour. This was the week before the Hortmans and Hoffmans were shot at their homes by the right-wing murderer Vance Boelter. 

After that, she let her neighbors know what she was doing, and the gathering has grown from there. She began making banners a month or so later. Some of her closest neighbors were the first to join and still are part of it, and many of the people come from the surrounding neighborhood, but not all. 



Why we do it

There are common threads in the reasons the regulars give for coming to the bridge:

• “I have to do something: your nervous system gets so wired.”
• “This is something I can do.” “There’s so little we can do at our age.” (The bridge is close by and physically accessible.) “I can’t run if I protest in the streets – my hips and knees, I can’t get away.”
• Don’t obey in advance. Make your voice heard. “Heather Cox Richardson says visibility has real power.”
• To spread awareness: “Give the people who go past something to think about, have conversations at work.”
• It gives permission to other people.
• “To be in community with like-minded people.” “It’s selfish, but it helps me deal with it to be with like-minded people.” “To be part of a community resisting Trump, a critical mass.”

More specific reasons:

• “My husband’s aunt was in a prison camp during World War II, and was sent home in winter, wearing only a summer dress. The least I can do is put on a frog costume and stand on an overpass once a week. Another friend was born in a Chinese prison camp in 1941 and lived there until 1943.”
• One person was visiting his adult son in Europe from Christmas through January, including when Renee Good was killed, and seeing it happen from there was shocking. Another of his sons is a nurse at the VA hospital and knew Alex Pretti.
• “I hate authoritarian regimes. I experienced one and suffered from it as a child.”
• “Being here is a tribute to the people of Minneapolis.”

In addition to opposing ICE and Metro Surge, specific issues that were mentioned:

• “Every day this administration does something that should cause people to be out in the streets. My head is going to explode every day.”
• “I am a scientist by trade. The pancreatic cancer breakthrough recently announced is based on 50 years of basic science research [which they are gutting].” He also gave the example of the recent removal of ocean censors and the regime’s graft and corruption.
• “The undermining of democracy, Project 2025.”
• “I’m mad about the corruption.”

What people bring

Signs:

• Long, handmade banners, usually three 6-foot panels wide. Each week they carry a different message, ranging from "Democracy Needs Your Vote" to "Orange Lies Matter" to "Time for the 25th" to "GOP Sold Us Out," and more. For many weeks, there was an Epstein files counter. 
• Peace
• Stop the criminal war regime
• Close the Camps – VOTE (sign made with tape and pins on a flattened popup tent)
• Keep Hope Alive
• No Kings
• ICE Out Now (these signs were given away at a Minnesota Timber Wolves game)
• Stop the Lies

Flags:

• A large hand-painted hand to wave up high, carrying a small American flag
• American flags
• Minnesota state flag: “It’s a symbol of our unified resistance, because Minnesota has been targeted."

Wearables:

• Hand-lettered shirt: “Trump steals from you”
• Inflated frog suit
• A large hand for waving, printed from a photograph of a hand

Intangibles:

• Enthusiasm
• Yourself
• Energy
• Solidarity

Reality:

• A chair to sit in because of a bad knee

We’ll be back out next week, and the next, until this regime is history, when we’ll be working on the reconstruction this country will need. Then we won’t have time for the bridge brigade. 

As one of the banners today said: ONE YEAR – STILL HERE. 

Salah Sarsour: A Political Prisoner

He isn't the first and he won't be the last, but Salah Sarsour is a political prisoner of the Trump regime, and even worse, they're trying to kill him.

Sarsour, 53, is a Palestinian-American who is president of the largest mosque in Wisconsin. He has been in the U.S. since 1993, where he is a permanent resident with citizen children and grandchildren. According to this AP story, his Type 2 diabetes is not being handled at all properly and he has lost 30 pounds. At the Indiana jail where he's being held, he's being told to eat pork products and being deprived of religious freedom in multiple other ways. 

Wisconsin Public Radio reported on his detainment back in April, when it seemed as though this might be a short-term thing, but obviously, that was not to be. 

From the AP story: 

An investigation by KFF Health News and the AP found that hundreds of detainees in at least 33 states have filed federal lawsuits with similar allegations of medical neglect. Those lawsuits include other detainees who say they were denied medication or had treatment delayed for conditions including cancer, high blood pressure, epilepsy, Parkinson’s, HIV, diabetes, infections, depression and more. 

As with everything the Trump regime does, this is being carried out in our names. 

Sickening Incompetence, Denialism

Two adjacent posts in my BlueSky feed just now:

Five cases of New World screwworm have now been confirmed in the U.S., Texas has declared an emergency, and Canada immediately restricted livestock imports. Most people had never heard of screwworm until last week (or maybe just now). That's because we eradicated it from the U.S. in 1966.
Your Local Epidemiologist

Camp East Montana in El Paso is currently under quarantine following a measles outbreak and cases of tuberculosis.  
Jeff Abbott @palabrasdeabajo.bsky.social

Combine that with the ebola news from Congo as part of the ongoing public health crisis caused by stopping USAID funding for HIV and other chronic illnesses, and reports of RFK Jr.'s total disengagement and the vacancies and acting figures in top roles within our U.S. health infrastructure, and we have a perfect set of circumstances to sicken and kill many people, all while wreaking lots of economic damage along the way.

Oh and then there's the recent raw milk news. As Adam Serwer said today on BlueSky, 

The raw milk thing is proof that you can trick conservatives into literally eating shit and liking it.

But how different is from vaccine denialism, really? They're both just different forms of the naturalistic fallacy. 

Solar for the Future…Except Here

If you put the word "solar" into the search engine on Daughter Number Three, you get a whole lot of results. So much has changed in the world of solar since I started this blog, though, it means posts from 10 or more years ago are probably pretty out-dated.

Here's one from February and another from December 2025, both still relevant.

I bring this up because I just read a Financial Times article about how China's solar product has now exceeded demand, leading to a surplus of solar panels and therefore industry fallout. 

That may sound bad, but get this quote:

Clean power, on a scale that would have seemed utopian at the time of the Paris climate treaty in 2015, is now within reach. The price of solar panels has fallen to rock bottom. 

And:

The real surprise... is that it cost China less than $18 billion in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.

As Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò pointed out on BlueSky, 

conservatively, the United States spent two-thirds of that figure in the *first week* of the war on Iran. it's genuinely difficult to overstate how many world-historical own goals US politics has accumulated over the past few decades

How does it feel to be part of a country led by the stupidest, vilest people imaginable while we are in the midst of a civilization-threatening climate crisis? 

Pretty bad. Pretty bad. 

A New Clinic, Medical Censorship

There were two medical stories on the same page of today's Star Tribune, both local, though one with a national focus. One good news, one bad news. 

At the top (page 3 within the local section), the headline is "U expands community clinic in S. Minneapolis." It tells about the new clinic building now under construction at Community-University Health Care Center, which is located on Franklin Avenue in the Phillips neighborhood in the heart of the Native American community. 

CUHCC has been there since 1966, providing health care to people regardless of ability to pay. Last year it served 12,000 patients who, according to the story, speak more than 50 languages. In addition to the clinic's staff, medical students and residents from the University of Minnesota can be found working with patients there. 

The new building is being funded by the University and its foundation. So overall, a good news story, despite the parts that referred to operating funding streams that have been or may be affected by federal policy changes (Medicaid cuts, the Minnesota legislature's decision to stop allowing undocumented people to access MinnesotaCare).

In contrast, at the bottom half of the page was a story that could only happen during the Trump regime. The headline is a bit vague: "U professor ousted from conference." Well, that could be almost anything —  maybe it was for a good reason.

But no. 

This was the national conference of the American Diabetes Association, and the U of M professor, a pediatrician who is co-director of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine, was physically forced to leave the conference because he "violated the event's code of conduct, which requires professional and respectful behavior."

What was the violation? 

He was helping to pass out an editorial from one the ADA's own flagship medical journals. Of course, the editorial criticizes the Trump regime for cutting NIH staff, grants, and "destroying what generations have built." 

The lead author of the editorial (who is editor of the ADA journal as well) was also removed from the conference. He had been scheduled to present and to lead another session. Three other people were removed.

The Star Tribune story quotes the U of M professor as saying he was "chest-bumped by a police officer several times" and cites video that shows him being shoved by a cop.

These are the times we live in: a medical organization lets the federal government say who can attend its conference. It kicks out people who want conference-goers to know what the organization's own publication says. 

This is a gift link to a Washington Post story about the ADA conference with more details, which make it even clearer that this was censorship. 

Saint Paul in a Single Image

On a bad day, this photo can be used to represent the state of the city of Saint Paul:

Okay, I can see that it's a little hard to tell what's what there. 

The roundish brownish thing is a pot hole in one of our city streets. The photo was taken during a street festival, where there were many people on foot. 

Some thoughtful person had placed a tiny orange warning cone (it was no more than 6" high) in the pot hole in hope of keeping people from turning their ankles in it. 

And that's Only One Thing

From a Washington Post story today: "Ballroom donors won $50 billion in contracts after giving to the Trump ballroom project, watchdog group finds."

Georgia State University political scientist Jeff Lazarus noted on BlueSky that $50 billion in contracts is 555,000% larger than Teapot Dome, "the worst scandal in American history prior to Watergate, [which] involved $9 million changing hands. That’s adjusted for inflation."

I can't even comprehend 555,000%. Sometimes the level of depravity hits you all over again. 

A separate Washington Post story reported that DOGE wanted to declare 2.7 million people dead, so that immigrants would be "so miserable that they self-deported or went to Social Security offices for help, where they could be arrested." This is according to a whistleblower. (Gift link https://wapo.st/4uOlIJt.)

That exact plan didn't happen as DOGE intended, but many other bad things have happened to our immigrant neighbors, as we know. 

Currently mass "asylum" hearings are happening at Trump's deportation courts all over the country. The Star Tribune reported today that they have begun happening here in our local Fort Snelling courtrooms, with up to 73 cases being heard on the same docket. 80% of the people in one judge's list had no representation. That sure is the way to have your case heard fairly. 

Meanwhile, in New Jersey's Delaney Hall, there are people who are begging to "self-deport" [terrible term] because the conditions are so bad, who are not being allowed to do so. 

And reports of ICE smash-and-grabbing people out of vehicles on the streets here in the Twin Cities and in Chicago are ramping up once again.

How quaint is this idea, that there would be outrage over the equivalent of $9 million worth of corruption? 

Sniffing for Fraud

From yesterday's newspaper, a photo from Tuesday's primaries in California:

The caption says that the sheriff's deputy and his dog are "inspecting" ballots at the LA County Ballot Processing Center. 

What does that even mean? How would a sheriff inspect the ballots in any meaningful way, let alone a dog? What does sniffing the ballots do to validate anything? Would a ballot be disqualified if it smelled like drugs? Can the dog sniff out the scent of undocumented voters? Or maybe Republicans who voted twice?

And this is from Los Angeles, not some county in a red part of Arizona or even California. wtf.