Josh Gee

"oh the 'agency', hey fellas, the 'agency', la di da mr. french man"
"well what do you call it?"
"detective hole"

This is Brad Lander doing pulltabs in the Uptown VFW. He’s one of us now

This month, campaign finance filings show, Building a Better California gave $6 million to an initiative that would help middle-class residents buy newly built homes by creating a new down payment assistance program funded with $25 billion in bonds.

California billionaires, surprisingly, do not like the idea of a billionaire tax as much as selling tax-free state debt to billionaires for a nice profit.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/28/u...

Best read (if at all) after refreshing one's recollection about the rants in his interview with Isaac Chotiner www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

YouTube video by Rep. Ayanna Pressley In Minneapolis, Ayanna Pressley and Ilhan Omar Condemn ICE Violence, Renew Calls to Abolish ICE

“… Finally, I will say this: Donald Trump is a dictator. And the only way to beat a dictator is with defiance.” —Ayanna Pressley in Minneapolis

youtu.be/hIsbo8C5gbI?...

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence:

"Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

I love this line.

5-Year-Old in ICE Detention Is Sick, Says Top School Official The 5-year-old who was taken by federal agents in Minneapolis is being held behind bars with his father in Texas.

NEW: Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old who ICE agents in Minneapolis nabbed last week and shipped off to a Texas detention facility with his dad, is now in poor health, his school superintendent told me today www.huffpost.com/entry/liam-c...

YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio)

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

Once again, comments from NYers about “newcomers” are indistinguishable from MAGA rhetoric about immigrants. Especially when the subject matter is the mostly-immigrant delivery workforce.

In press materials providing topline findings and an overview of the study, the ADL notes Claude’s leading performance — but does not mention that Grok performed the worst of the bunch. When asked about why, Daniel Kelley, senior director of the ADL Center for Technology and Society, provided the following statement: “In our report and press release, we made a deliberate choice to highlight an AI model that demonstrated strong performance in detecting and countering antisemitism and extremism. We wanted to highlight strong performance to show what’s possible when companies invest in safeguards and take these risks seriously, rather than centering the narrative on worst-performing models. That doesn’t diminish the Grok findings—which are fully presented in the report—but reflects a deliberate choice to lead with a forward-looking, standards-setting story.”

The ADL found that Grok was the most anti-semitic chatbot in its testing -- and did its best to minimize that finding, because everyone is afraid of Elon. @miasato.bsky.social runs it down www.theverge.com/news/868925/...

Someone put a scarf on the Grand Army Plaza dinosaur to keep him warm this week.

Screenshot of a Bernie 2016 "Issues" page from his campaign website. On the right it shows Bernie Sanders, an older white gentleman, smiling and waving from behind a lectern. To his left, a real policy plank has been altered to instead read: "Give Ilhan Omar a Gundam. Ilham Omar is a leader of courage and grace, who stands firmly against the horrors of war and western imperialism. When I am the President, we will finally give her a Gundam". Below that is Bernie's signature.

It's time to revisit this 2016 platform plank

See you there.

Plenty of good tickets still available for MELANIA on Friday night in Boston

‘They killed her little by little’: Parents speak out after daughter died in border patrol custody | CNN CNN’s Rosa Flores speaks to the parents of the 8-year-old who died in the custody of US immigration authorities in Texas in May, 2023 after the family made repeated requests for medial care for the gi...

www.cnn.com/videos/us/20...

Video from this morning shows ICE agents deploying tear gas outside a Minneapolis preschool as parents shout, “This is a preschool! There’s kids here!”

I grew up with Alex Pretti The kind-hearted ICU nurse shot by ICE agents was my childhood best friend.

I wrote about my childhood friend Alexi Pretti. Please read it and share it and remember him as a human being. @theverge.com

Verge headline: I grew up with Alex Pretti by Kristen Radtke Photo: An old picture of a boy and a girl at a birthday party

"I didn’t realize, in the hours before his name was released to the public, that the man millions of people had seen lying facedown on the pavement from multiple angles of eyewitness video was my childhood best friend."

Read more from @kristenradtke.bsky.social: www.theverge.com/policy/86856...

But even beyond the demographic specifics of early Gawker, to be a regular commenter anywhere1 is to constantly put yourself in a subject position all but guaranteed to develop the kind of resentment that powers Trumpist politics: Your voice is (literally) suppressed, made subordinate, often hidden; your intelligence and expertise receives a fraction of the attention of the glib P.M.C. blogger you’re responding to, whose attention and approval you both scorn and desire. Among the altogether too many “unfortunate and stressful experiences I had at Gawker that in retrospect prefigured the political dynamics of the Trump era” was the Gawker Hack, in which chat logs between Gawker writers (among other proprietary information) were leaked to the press, including one in which Richard Lawson (now writing the great Premiere Party newsletter) referred to commenters as “peasants.” Any sane person who has ever read ten words of Richard’s writing could immediately and easily identify this as a joke--but many Gawker commenters, paranoid about their own position relative to the writers, neurotic about their emotional investment in a site that mostly ignored their contributions, took real and sustained offense. For years afterward,2 commenters would sometimes refer back to the gag with geniune hurt, seemingly imagining themselves as the Forgotten Men of the Gawker empire (such as it was), discarded and disdained by the haughty bloggers.

That was commenter resentment. Smith mentions that many Trump administration staffers and appointees are “people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms.” I think just as important to the actual silencing in the self-conception of many Trump ghouls is the sense that some other, less deserving voice was being heard or elevated. There are obvious resonances here with the structure of political feeling that characterizes Trump voters in general. But it’s also basically how angry regular commenters feel about the blogs to which, for whatever reason, they’ve shackled themselves. I suppose my point is that one way of thinking about the Trump era is as: The commenters are running the show now!

an administration of commenters maxread.substack.com/p/the-commen...

As I mentioned on MS NOW yesterday, it’s really important that no one, including the media, let Trump distance himself from this thing that he has vociferously defended and over which he has power.

God that’s good.

I have genuinely *never* seen an NYC mayor get an ovation from a TV crowd before. I thought we were contractually obligated to boo them.

NYA Times-Contrarian

Today I learned that Neil Young has what I might describe as his own version of Drudge.

neilyoungarchives.com/news/

I hate to be that guy, but the NY Daily News broke this story more than four hours before this Times piece sauntered along to get everyone’s eyeballs.

Here’s a gift link.

www.nydailynews.com/2026/01/26/a...

Cannot repeat the Obama-era dodge of saying "we tortured some folks" and not holding accountable the torturers and especially the chain of command. You want to stop state-sanctioned crimes? Trials not words are the only way.