Here is the list of spineless cowards who think capitulation is an effective strategy against fascism:
- Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto
- Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois
- Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania (basically a moderate Republican at this point)
- Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire
- Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia
- Sen. Angus King of Maine
- Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire
The Trump administration told states on Saturday that they must “immediately undo” any actions to provide full food stamp benefits to low-income families, in a move that added to the uncertainty surrounding the nation’s largest anti-hunger program during the government shutdown. In late-night guidance seen by The New York Times, the Agriculture Department also threatened financial penalties against states.
I’m not sure how I landed here, so apologies if this is a repost. It’s quite worth the read. If anyone still believes the NYT is worth the paper it’s printed on, this is a great example of why it isn’t.
He spent the twilight of his career denouncing Donald Trump as a threat to the republic he loved. But Dick Cheney arguably laid the foundations of Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the United States.
A year out from the 2026 midterms, with Republicans feeling the blows from a string of losses in this week’s elections, Donald Trump and his allies are mounting a multipronged attack on almost every aspect of voting in the United States and raising what experts say are troubling questions about the future of one of the world’s oldest democracies.
Israel’s merciless slaughter of Palestinian civilians, which dates back decades but intensified after the Hamas attack of October 7, is remaking American politics on both the left and the right. As Kamala Harris acknowledges in her recent memoir, 107 Days, Joe Biden’s lack of empathy for Palestinians helped shatter the Democratic Party and was a constant anchor dragging down her campaign against Donald Trump. Even now, although more Democratic politicians are catching up with public opinion by criticizing Israel and eschewing AIPAC funding, left-of-center political leaders remain polarized. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer reportedly sees support for Israel as so core to his personal and political mission that he pointedly refused to endorse—or, by all available evidence, even vote for—New York City’s Democratic Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani due to Mamdani’s criticism of Israel.
Mamdani, just like Johnson, and other popular leftist mayoral candidates like Katie Wilson in Seattle, will all face a common threat: debt from Wall Street and the strings that come with it. This structural challenge, addressed head on by campaigns like #CancelWallStreet, could prove to be even more difficult than winning an unthinkable race.
This runs roughly 100% too long and really could have benefited from an editor (yeah, we got those early points the first time and didn’t need to be reminded), but the points are largely sound.
Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City has thrust the US democratic socialist movement into the national spotlight. If Mamdani’s triumphant affordability platform—which includes plans to provide universal childcare by increasing taxes on high-income earners—is implemented, it could lead to a significant transfer of wealth from the wealthy elite to the working class and provide a blueprint for socialist leaders across the country. Equally, if Mamdani’s mission is stymied, the forces banking on his failure will use it as a weapon to try and banish the left everywhere. In other words, the stakes of a Mamdani mayoralty could not be higher. That’s why it’s so crucial for the left and progressive movements to adopt a mass politics orientation during Mamdani’s tenure, the 2026 midterms, and beyond.
A bipartisan pair of US Senators has introduced a bill that would require companies and government agencies to report AI-related layoffs, and it couldn’t come at a better time. October jobs data suggests AI is driving the largest wave of layoffs headed into the end of the year that we’ve seen since 2003.
This is a deep cut. There’s a solo John Lennon track called “Remember” off the Plastic Ono Band album. He closes it by screaming “Remember the 5th of November!” followed by an explosion.
Once upon a time there was this humorless ogre who terrorized villagers just to hear their screams, twirled an imaginary fiendish mustache as he stockpiled oil barrels in his living room, had a pet dragon named Halliburton, and was the source of all evil in the modern world. Then the ogre endorsed Kamala Harris, and presto! Dick Cheney was no longer the most despised man by the global social set.
The faux “party of free speech” strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true “party of free” speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again we see the Trump administration engaging in blatant and obvious speech suppression.
Voters nationwide delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump and the Republican Party on Tuesday night as Democrats racked up massive victories at every level of the ballot.
The headline story from this year’s elections is simple: Democrats increased their support across the country and swept all the marquee contests in key states. Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger won Virginia by ~14 points, while Mikie Sherrill kept New Jersey blue by a double-digit margin. Georgia delivered two more statewide wins for Democrats, flipping both Public Service Commission seats for the first time in recent memory, and Pennsylvania elected a new Democratic lower-court judge (while keeping all its existing Supreme Court Democrats). And a socialist is now mayor of New York City.
Until recently, if you had asked us to guess whether a mass movement to protect democracy is growing in the United States, we would have expressed skepticism. We’ve watched law firms and universities capitulate, heard little from business leaders, bemoaned the Democrats’ geriatric leadership, and nodded along to many of our friends telling us they’ve needed to stop following the news to maintain their mental health. “News avoidance” has reached an all-time high, with some 42 percent of Americans reporting that they “sometimes or often avoid the news.”
60 Minutes is under new management and things are getting stupid faster than you might expect. Last night’s episode featured President Trump, which is currently being described as “nuts.” There are all sorts of crazy moments to call out, but let’s start with the recursively meta nonsense.
Much of the federal government is shuttered, but that’s not preventing the Trump administration from finding new ways to screw over struggling Americans.
From start to finish, the campaign for New York City Mayor, pitting Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani against former Governor Andrew Cuomo, has been scintillating and suspenseful. But tomorrow night, this bittersweet election, spanning more than twelve months, will come to an end. While not as climactic as the Democratic Primary, a come-from-behind upset of epic proportions, the General Election is nonetheless on course for historic voter turnout, the highest in fifty-six years.
Republicans appear determined to destroy the Affordable Care Act, but what will go in its place? It’s a question the party has struggled to answer since the ACA passed. Remember Trump’s first term promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare that never came to fruition?
An estimated 7 million peaceful protesters took to the streets on October 18, in the second-largest demonstration in US history (after the first Earth Day in 1970), demanding accountability and a return to democracy and the rule of law. In a system of government where citizens can only use the ballot box every two to six years to show how they feel about their electeds, that’s something you’d think would warrant journalistic attention.
Late last month, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which is overseen by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., drew a line in the sand over direct-to-consumer advertising by pharmaceutical companies: In a post on X, the agency declared that drug ads “can push people to take drugs they don’t actually need. Americans often end up harmed instead of helped.”
PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - Authorities are investigating after a fire broke out in a carport at the home of Portland City Councilor Candace Avalos early Sunday morning.
When the president of the United States decides to demolish the East Wing of the White House to construct a ballroom, all that stucco and molding and wood has to go somewhere. So I tried to find it.
For more than fifty years the U.S. right wing has embraced a neat trick: by claiming that literally anything in factual opposition to their beliefs is “biased” and therefore must be discarded as unreliable, they’ve bullied U.S. media into becoming a feckless mess terrified of accusations of “liberal bias.”
Donald Trump looked out across the White House ballroom at his audience of wealthy donors and business figures – people who had given millions of dollars to his extravagant plan to build a vast ballroom attached to the building’s East Wing.
What Mamdani is really testing is whether Democrats can still generate attention through conflict on their own terms. The modern political media landscape only amplifies what bleeds—culture wars, celebrity-like feuds—while ignoring the conflicts that actually define people’s lives: rent that keeps rising, child care that drains a paycheck, transit that doesn’t come. Most Democrats, wary of being cast as divisive, retreat from confrontation altogether or get pulled into the wrong fights.
The video has bewildered those who watched it online, given that the quote itself is real and on the record for Punchbowl News. In the original interview, Schumer explained that Democrats had prepared their healthcare-focused shutdown strategy well in advance, adding: “Their whole theory was – threaten us, bamboozle us and we would submit in a day or two.”
The United States is “on a trajectory” toward authoritarian rule, according to a sobering new intelligence-style assessment by former US intelligence and national security officials, who warn that democratic backsliding is accelerating under the Trump administration – and may soon become entrenched without organized resistance.
The group, "ICE Sighting-Chicagoland," has been increasingly used in the last five weeks of President Donald Trump’s intense deportation campaign to warn neighbors that federal agents are nearby.
I’d not heard about the Montana initiative. But it’s not surprising … it’s an interesting state, politically, as the main throughline seems to be “leave me the fuck alone, and if others aren’t hurting me, let them do what they want.” You know, rugged individualism that we at once enshrine as the basis of the American spirit and also call “woke.”
PieFed DK
Chris Remington
coyotino [he/him]
Powderhorn
ɔiƚoxɘup
ExtremeDullard
Five
alyaza [they/she]
Tony Bark
PhilipTheBucket
Otter Raft
celeste
