Denise Lee

Feel like its a bad sign about the health of the republic that Pritzker has to talk about TX Dems like they’re the Polish government-in-exile in London

Not a rust belt but a cotton state, I have to wonder what NC would be today without the Research Triangle?

Tesla hit with $243 million in damages after jury finds its Autopilot feature contributed to fatal crash The verdict follows a three-week trial that threw a spotlight on how Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have marketed their driver-assistance software.

A hugely important verdict.

The victims were pedestrians, so Tesla can't argue they knew/accepted Autopilot's risks.

People walking, biking, and inside other cars didn't consent to be Elon Musk's guinea pigs.

Why do Sunday morning news shows book known liars if they have no intention of confronting them with facts? Week after week, show after show. Makes it seem they want to make sure the lies are spread far & wide. Lies about climate, health, ed, nat sec, trade, finance, law, history + more.

The Stephen Miller plan for America is to make the nation dramatically poorer in the aggregate in order to shift which types of people are the wealthiest and most influential.

The idea is to make America a gigantic Alabama.

Former Trump prosecutor Jack Smith faces investigation by Office of Special Counsel Jack Smith, who pursued two cases against Donald Trump, is being investigated for potentially violating the Hatch Act.

Let me see if I understand this. Jack Smith will be investigated for investigating Trump and others for political corruption, which Senator Cotton claims is a prohibited political act. Which means we can’t investigate political corruption anymore. Did I get that right? wapo.st/4oeBkmR

F*k larry summers all the way to hell. Proving that he was, is & always will be an idiot by admitting he was played in no way excuses him for enabling that wretch in the WH.

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

one of the most obvious lies imaginable (that wasn’t reported as such by our political press corps)

A Fight Over a West Point Job Reveals Two Visions of America Under Trump

A conflict between two Americans: one, a West Point grad, combat vet, Rhodes Scholar, expert and academic. The other… a woman banned from Uber because she was too abusive to Muslim drivers.

Guess who wins.

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/u...

The story of how Trump sells access to the White House - to benefit himself and his family financially and to benefit his political operation - is shocking and sordid.

No President has ever monetized access like Trump has.

1/ It's a story you need to know.

@rebeccasolnit.bsky.social “violence against women is global and enduring, a constant rather than an event.”

Obama tried this. Biden tried this.

And both times within minutes of Trump assuming power, ICE turned into a full-on gestapo.

There's something inherently wrong with ICE as an agency that cannot be fixed with Democrats wishing it was something else.

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

Looking outside from Europe what strikes me is that too many Democrats still consider Trump as a government to be beaten within the system. Instead they have to start looking to successful opposition movements in authoritarian states if they want to begin turn the tide.

"[D]uring droughts when California has enforced restrictions on delivery of surface water to its farmers ... the enormous agriculture enterprises that dominate the Central Valley have drilled deeper and pumped harder, depleting the aquifer — which the state regulates less precisely — even more."

Brooks and Capehart on Trump's firing of labor statistics head after weak jobs report New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC join Amna Nawaz to discuss the week in politics, including President Trump fires the head of the agency that produces the monthly j...

"I don't think it can cross Donald Trump's mind that there are neutral arbiters who are objective and not politicized. But this is the weakness of authoritarian or pseudo-authoritarian regimes. They create an atmosphere in which it's not possible to be honest with the executive."
to.pbs.org/47hCLKW

Heads up: the Bureau of Labor Statistics also calculates the Consumer Price Index.

The White House landscape now matches our national political one.

More on Trump’s nominee to lead the office investigating Jack Smith:

➡️ He said that the descendants of slaves should pay reparations to the descendants of slave owners

➡️ He urged Congress to make J6 a national holiday

➡️ He called for Trump’s birthday to be made a national holiday (“MAGA Day”)

“We’ll Smash the Fucking Window Out and Drag Him Out” We’ve documented nearly 50 incidents of immigration officers shattering car windows to make arrests — a tactic experts say was rarely used before Trump took office. ICE claims its officers use a…

The surge in smashed windows may be only the beginning.

Speaking about Trump’s signature spending bill, which triples the size of ICE, border czar Tom Homan told a conservative Christian conference: “You think we’re arresting people now? You wait.”

By @nicolefoy.bsky.social & @mckenziefunk.com

BILL BURR: “There’s nothing wrong with being a billionaire, but if someone’s working 40 hours/week and can’t make rent you’re not paying them enough… maybe you should just be worth $900 Million. How do you take an 8 figure bonus and none of your employees have dental insurance?”

Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research

The esteemed climate scientist Michael Mann said the report was akin to the result he would expect “if you took a chatbot and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites”.

Please read my essay about the quiet threats sexual assault survivors face daily and the necessary and continual survival calculus in a world that protects powerful predators.

Should I speak up? What will I lose if I do? Rinse, repeat,

As power works to silence Ghislaine Maxwell, read my new essay that is very blunt about horrid women who prop up sexual predators.

“I will continue praying for an alternative ending: one where the sexual protection racket finally falls apart, and nobody gives a damn whether a rapist is red or blue.

Other, more serious countries have actual constitutional courts, where things like the law, precedent, the Constitution, history, data, empirical evidence, & the meaning of words matter. We, alas, have a nine-member superlegislature that analyzes entrails, does alchemy, & thinks we are (👇) idiots.

INBOX: A soldier in TN’s Army National Guard tells us his command requested volunteers to support ICE in KNOXVILLE.

“I have deep concerns… I joined to help people. Not this… People in Knoxville deserve a warning before we get another LA.”

The email they circulated (not independently confirmed):

Hegemonic masculinity *is* always in crisis, because it's a set of divisive assertions at odds with lived reality, constantly challenged by the shifting frontiers of real knowledge, committed to trying to make people be things they aren't, and forced to continually make up new excuses for itself.

Column: The Corporation for Public Broadcast is ‘winding down.’ What does that mean for public radio and TV? The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it is “wind-down” operations. What does this mean for public radio and TV?

I gave an in-depth interview with my hometown Chicago Tribune about what’s going to happen to NPR and PBS, and how cutting public media is part of a broader anti-democratic ideological project.

We’re officially in Donald Trump’s mad king era All the books that are fit to cook.

The BLS did exactly what it's supposed to do: provide accurate, nonpartisan data. When the numbers showed Trump's "economic boom" was actually a bust (33k jobs vs claimed 291k), he fired the messenger. After all, when it rains too much, true leaders fire the meteorologists.