Aimee Rawlins

The Unexpected Rise of the Oat Mafia Oat farming has declined in the U.S. in recent decades — but a growing group of more than 100 Midwestern farmers is trying to bring it back.

When Midwestern corn and soy farmers started growing oats a few years ago, they had a hard time finding places to process and buy them. So 125 farmers banded together and created the "Oat Mafia" — and they're building their own mill!

New from @aimeerawlins.bsky.social:
ambrook.com/offrange/cro...

Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses "The legislature did not include a grace period."

It seems all Kansas-issued trans drivers' licenses are invalid, effective tomorrow

It is now illegal for trans people to drive a car until they surrender their license at a DMV (that most will need to drive to) and have it reissued with the wrong gender marker

This was never about woman's sports

They beat a blind refugee who speaks no English for failing to obey police commands he could not understand. Then instead of apologizing, they charged him with possession of a “weapon”—HIS WALKING STICK. Then they dumped him miles from home without notifying anyone, after which he was found dead.

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, appears to have deleted his tweet after these Democrats responded

Some day we'll all regret this & we'll hold hearings & rend garments & pledge "never again" & we'll be just as full of shit as we were last time.

And so if you really *mean* "never again" -- if you're serious about it -- then the time to intervene, the time to speak up, the time to stop it, is *when it is still small*. When it's just a casual slur. When it's just sports. When it's just asking questions. When it's framed as anti-PC.

Opposition to Mega Prison Project Shapes a Local Election in Rural Arkansas - Bolts Incarceration has become a central issue in Western Arkansas, where the governor wants to build a new prison that has angered and mobilized residents.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders' plan to build a huge mega-prison in rural Arkansas has drawn major opposition, with some residents saying it's made them think differently about incarceration in the face of organizing.

Now that's bleeding into a local election, as candidates vow to fight the governor.

NEW:

‘Andor’ Creator Tony Gilroy Gives the Interview He Couldn’t During Its Release While promoting his cautionary tale about fascism, Disney asked Gilroy to refrain from using the word. Nine months after it aired its finale, the 'Star Wars' series feels scarily prescient.

“We were stunned [about the prescience] for a while, but we’ve really gotten to the point where it’s really sad. It’s just sad how predictable and lame and obvious and wrong it all is. Fascism is just a total fail in the end.” www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-featur...

Georgia Is Letting a Railroad Seize Land a Black Family Has Owned For 100 Years Descendants of enslaved people are fighting an attempt to use eminent domain to carve a spur through one of Georgia’s largest Black‑owned farms.

In the 1800s, a slave owner purchased over a dozen people in Georgia and set the foundation for his family’s generational wealth

Generations later, a railroad company owned by one of his descendants is using eminent domain to seize land of Black farmers

notorious radical left communist rag says tax the rich

Maybe my expectations for how dogged journalists can be were set too high by college reporters but I find it wild that there are people on Reddit essentially claiming to have knowledge of the (alleged) circumstances of the collision in Capitol Hill and no outlet is apparently digging into it at all

CFPB Staffer Alexis Goldstein Fired for Confronting DOGE Members, Announces Run for Congress The Trump administration has fired Consumer Financial Protection Bureau program manager Alexis Goldstein for documenting a meeting a year ago between the agency and Elon Musk’s Department of Governmen...

@alexisgoldstein.bsky.social is a real one and she's running for Congress. www.democracynow.org/2026/2/18/al...?

I got an email notification about the Raising Canes opening but not the person who died under a car outside one of my favorite coffee shops.

100% this! I went looking for a story about it on ST site this morning and was shocked that it wasn't anywhere prominent.

So when thousands of women (and children) were being duplicated--including in non-consensual AI porn--it was no big deal. But it took "only a 15-sec clip" of these two famous white men to draw outrage and fear. Gotcha. Cool cool.

Have you ever once seen the New York Times quote Trump like this?

“The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.”

“I don't see any plan, any strategy, any end game,” says Pat Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the University of Vermont. “I don't see anything from this administration, just fuck everything up as much as you can. You can print that.”

we need to talk about that Ring Super Bowl ad

Tough night for Pats fans. Zero points scored, halftime show wasn't in English, and your best player’s last name is “Gonzalez“

I'm not familiar with football--is "struggling on the offensive end" how people say "That team didn't score any points"?

My latest investigation, and first in a series for @towcenter.bsky.social
: How ‘Pink Slime’ Publishers Are Weaponizing FOIA

In the past year, we found a news-appearing network called Metric Media filed more than nine thousand Freedom of Information Act requests across all fifty states.

Claire Lehmann: Who would be a good person to write an essay about the Epstein story being a moral panic?

The War against Trans People: Common Sense

The War against Pedophilia: Moral Panic

While reporting this, I had something happen that's never happened. A comms rep for one of the co's disputed my reporting and said what I was telling them was untrue because it was not in Grok, xAI's chatbot.

I was looking directly at the files. And this person was using AI to challenge the truth.

Picture of central Pontevedra, Spain from the air

“It's not my duty as Mayor to make sure you have a parking spot. For me it's the same as if you bought a cow, or a refrigerator, and then asked me where you're going to put them.” — Mayor of Pontevedra, Spain (re-elected 6 times)

one thing the trump era has made clear, i think, is that the american people themselves are far more committed to the values of our founding documents than our elites

A close friend was marching with the nurse's union. @sarahjeong.bsky.social's excellent reporting captures how she described it to me as well -- the horrific ICE tactics alongside the resilience and resolve of Portlanders who prioritized helping + protecting others after the tear gas.

What it's like to see ICE tear gas kids Attendees at a Portland, OR protest describe a vicious, unprovoked and sudden attack

New — I spoke to eight people who were present at the ICE protest on Saturday in Portland, Oregon when federal agents deployed tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of families, children, elderly and disabled people, and their pets.

These are their stories:

People say we can't compare this to the Third Reich because of the atrocities but we only found out about the atrocities after the fact when it was all said and done and we're not done with this yet so I am sure the worst stomach churning shit has yet to be revealed.

This is still one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read. Can't recommend highly enough. The governmental response is horrifying, a fact I imagine most people today are far too distanced from.