Matt Monitto

this is wild: while Stephen Miller's guy was in Minnesota for his uncle's funeral, somebody was able to see his entire phone and take pictures of his Signal group chats talking about military deployments to Portland, and brought them to the Strib (gift link: www.startribune.com/trump-offici...)

Trump’s Rage at Zohran Just Backfired in a Surprisingly Revealing Way The Democrats who are breaking through are the ones who talk about Trump’s disastrous economic record while also leveling with the public about our slide into authoritarianism.

When Trump threatens to nix funding to NYC if Zohran Mamdani wins, it only helps Zohran. It inflates the Trump threat, positions Zohran as a fighter for NYC against Trump, and pushes Cuomo into the role of Trump stooge.

There's a lesson here for Dems.

New from me:
newrepublic.com/article/2011...

Good morning.

The government is shut down because Trump wants to act like a king and steal from you.

Democrats have no obligation to support a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy - and DOUBLES health premiums to fund a tax cut for billionaires.

A top Mamdani adviser tells me internal data shows taking on Trump's authoritarian abuses resonates. It appeals to working class voters across all demographics, countering the frequent claim that this is a "distraction" from issues working people "really" care about.

newrepublic.com/article/2011...

FCC moves to end discounts for Wi-Fi hotspot lending and school bus connectivity The Federal Communications Commission voted to end discounts for library and school Wi-Fi hotspot lending programs on Tuesday, drawing criticism from lawmakers and librarians who say the move will mak...

Trump's FCC yesterday voted to kill a program that provided free Wi-Fi to rural school kids at no cost to taxpayers, falsely claiming the program was "illegal" and was being used to "censor Conservative ideology."

But insofar as Democrats approached the funding deadline without a plan, cobbled one together clumsily and late in the game, and entered the shutdown in a confused posture that they are unlikely to sustain, I have serious misgivings about the terms they set for the fight. The confusion in their posture stems from the fact that the nature of public misgivings over the Trump regime stem from his dictatorial abuses, rather than quotidian policy disputes, but Democrats outsource their strategic thinking to pollsters and strategists who try to steer every crisis toward health care in knee-jerk fashion. In short (and to repeat myself) as long as Democrats insist their bottom-line demand pertains to extraneous health-care subsidies, I suspect they will have a difficult time maintaining an upper-hand in the determinative battle for public opinion. And that risks squandering their latest and perhaps final opportunity to either pull the country back from the brink of constitutional collapse, or tacitly declare “no confidence” in the Trump regime.

Co-signing everything in these three points from @brianbeutler.bsky.social: www.offmessage.net/p/20-thought...

every day JB is out there showing none of this is hard, the democratic party is just that soft

Pritzker compares Trump to Putin, calls for invoking 25th Amendment for suggesting military use Chicago as "training grounds" After President Trump suggested Chicago should be used as "training grounds for our military," Gov Pritzker said the 25th Amendment should be invoked to remove the president from office, saying "there...

"It appears that Donald Trump not only has dementia set in, but he's copying tactics of Vladimir Putin. Sending troops into cities, thinking that that's some sort of proving ground for war.. is just, frankly, inane and I'm concerned for his health"

www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

Overnight, Trump and Republicans in Congress shut down the federal government.

They shut it down because they’re determined to strip healthcare from millions of Americans, to enrich the billionaires they serve, to continue the assault on our rights.

We must fight back.

really need to emphasize the small cities part. i have mentioned this before, but you'll see people on facebook talk about charlottesville like its ridley scott's mogadishu

I don't think this is limited to elite pundits, writers, etc. I think it's a common trap to get to a certain point in your life believing you'd be in one future, and discovering you're in another, and then failing to plan how to move through that actual future.

ICE’s Shadow War on Women Criminals are now impersonating masked ICE agents to kidnap and assault women

Masked men posing as ICE agents are kidnapping and assaulting women—taking advantage of the chaos and fear Trump's detention and deportation policies have fostered. Guest writer Cammy Pedroja exposes how Trump’s fear-driven immigration crackdown is endangering immigrant women.

How it all went wrong for the Twins and whether messy 2025 could cost Rocco Baldelli his job Baldelli's status as manager is still an open question. What, exactly, turned the 2025 Twins into a train wreck is as well.

Good riddance to a terrible Twins season. What the hell happened?

"It tested me as much as anything I've experienced in the game."

"What the f***?"

Where it all went wrong, why it went *so* wrong, and how it put manager Rocco Baldelli's job in jeopardy: www.nytimes.com/athletic/667...

Adonai Mitchell makes a fantastic catch and runs it in for what should have been a TD but he tried to lift the ball to celebrate and lost it without regaining possession.
Touchback.

2025 Minnesota Twins Roster Can you name every player who appeared in a game for the Minnesota Twins during the 2025 season?

The end-of-season Minnesota Twins name-the-roster Sporcle quiz is live. #Twins #TwinsTerritory www.sporcle.com/games/Balin/...

From your article here, I appreciate your pointing out the streak of bases-loaded hitting woes. You might be surprised to learn that it actually extends through 2019 -- that Bomba squad team couldn't hit with three men on either.

Matthew McConaughey says he wants a private LLM, fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations, so he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information, without any outside influence.

this exists it is called thinking

My God. Audra Martin just said, out loud on TV where God and everyone can hear her, that she sometimes eats a spoonful of ranch dressing when she doesn’t want to spoil her dinner.

A threat to authoritarianism anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere

We're close to reaching a chilling moment; the first time in history where the single largest group of people arrested by ICE in the interior and held in detention are people with no criminal record. The gap is now down to fewer than 300 people.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Governor Polis Orders Flags to Half-Staff to Honor the Anniversary of September 11th and the Passing of Charlie Kirk

Someone shot up my kid's school today, and our governor is paying tribute to a guy who thought that is an acceptable price to pay for having the Second Amendment.

Jared Polis has failed Colorado.

on a serious note it's incredible how little they cared about the guy. he wasn't even confirmed as dead, never mind his body cold, before they started pushing "lefist" and "trans" "terrorism" narratives. they saw the blood gush out of his neck and thought "this is an excellent opportunity."

...and while I think it's possible to make an argument that his assassination--that ANY political assassination--is an attack on diversity of thought and free speech, to posthumously hold him up as an example of someone who genuinely believed in those values for his opponents is simply not honest.

One more thing: Being a "Debate me!" guy is not the same as genuinely believing in diversity of opinion; it comes from a belief that you can crush dissent by winning every argument, often with sophistry. Kirk started a McCarthyite website that targeted professors on the left. He was no pluralist...>

And this should go without saying, but I guess it doesn't: You can and should deplore political violence, which is both unacceptable on its own AND because it makes us all less safe, but it does not mean that you airbrush a legacy of malice and darkness as a "spirited disagreement." Tell the truth.

You can write this only if, by virtue of your income, identity, or both, you are utterly removed from the consequences of politics. To pretend that the racist, misogynistic, anti-gay vileness that Kirk spent his life spreading is secondary to the fact that he spread it "the right way" is appalling.

America, the country where people used to sell souvenir postcards of lynchings, takes a very dim view of celebrating violence committed against the people doing the lynching

The most telling thing about this saga is that the mainstream media, bipartisan politicians, the New York Yankees, etc, would not be doing any of these "a nation mourns" rituals, if a shooter had taken out Charlie Kirk's next big debate opponent, Hasan Piker, instead.

The iconic Twitter meme that says “this how the photos be lookin in headlines when a white man kills his entire family” and a picture of a white family riding a jet ski together

This is also the exact vibe of Charlie Kirk obituaries. Nary a mention of how he said he’d hypothetically force his daughter to deliver her rapist’s baby at age 10

you should buy your trans friends coffee or something today