Protect and defend editorial cartoonists this World Press Freedom Day

We all must stand up every single day.

"If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written." -Judge Howell

Imagine if the media pointed out there was already a Government Accountability Office whose job it is to go after actual waste and fraud, not just things Elon doesn’t like, and found $70 Billion in savings last year and $2 Trillion in waste since 2003.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governm...

Trump appoints speechwriter fired for attending conference with White nationalists to top State Department role | CNN Politics Darren Beattie, a former Donald Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after CNN revealed he spoke at a conference attended by White nationalists, has been elevated to a top job at the State Departm...

“Beattie repeatedly said Black lawmakers, policymakers, and groups need to ‘learn’ their place and take ‘a knee to MAGA.’”

“‘Shithole countries’ was the high-point of Trumps presidency,’ he wrote in 2020.”

amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/02/...

President Musk

Read this. It's important.

Opinion | A new era of government censorship has dawned Donald Trump fancies himself a champion of free speech. Oh, really?

A new era of government censorship has begun.
It started with the silencing of scientific speech, when the admin blocked release of research on bird flu. But MAGA has also cracked down on other wrongthink—on race, geography (!), and of course Trump himself
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

The Soviet-style purge is intensifying

Opinion | Trump Is Already Making America Weaker and More Vulnerable Favoring TikTok over national security, releasing rioters, undermining global health efforts — these actions put all of us at risk.

@nickkristof.bsky.social: On his very first day in office, Trump made America weaker and more vulnerable -- by pulling us out of the WHO, pardoning domestic terrorists, and breathing new life into TikTok www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/o...

AOC: I don’t care what Elon Musk is doing behind the presidential seal, but in this country we hate Nazis. Kind of like a foundational defining thing. Two of the foundational things about American history is that we beat the confederates and we beat the Nazis.

BREAKING — Joe Biden has pulled off the impossible: positive job growth EVERY SINGLE MONTH of his presidency.

The last negative month was the last full month of Trump’s first term, December 2020.

Everyone wants to talk about the goofballs driving two hours for a loaf of bread. I would also humbly point out that there was one campaign that had an actual policy plan to address the cost of "groceries, housing, higher ed, and healthcare" & the press simply buried or panned it

Biden World Thinks He Should Have Stayed in the Race. What Are They Smoking? The question is not whether he should have dropped out. It’s why he didn’t do so earlier.

"Handing the reins to Harris in July, rather than sticking it out, wasn’t one of his mistakes. His mistake was that he didn’t do so sooner."

New from @saletan.bsky.social, on the fantasy that Biden would have beaten Trump:

This is good

None of this is normal.

77 Nobel Prize Winners Write Open Letter Urging Senate Not To Confirm RFK Jr. As HHS Secretary They know what's at stake.

I hope the Senate hears this important message.

If we as a nation have no standards, then we are ultimately saying that we will go along with anything, as long as our team is winning.

This is how nations fail.

So, right now, I have little patience for think pieces that talk about how Democrats just need to X, Y, or Z. There is a larger problem at play here. One that I fear may already be insurmountable.

Palin was the beginning of the end for the GOP. Once they saw how a charismatic, deceitful, unqualified populist could succeed in their party, they haven't turned back. They have only doubled down. Nationwide, they have elevated and celebrated swagger and bluster over quality and integrity.

"NO! Standards matter. That person is not qualified by any standard that we have ever held as being necessary to hold high office. There is no coversation to be had. There are no nuances. There is no room for debate. The only question is why would you ever think that is okay?"

I keep thinking back 12-13 years ago when a Republican friend was pushing back on my Palin criticism. They kept trying to point out her good points. My response then is the same as now -

It has become acceptable voters to vote for someone who wouldn't be permitted to get a job as a police officer or other civil servant. Who wouldn't even pass a legal background check.

While I understand the impulse to self-reflect on what Dems might have done differently, I think we are ignoring the elephant in the room -

And we really think the problem is that the candidate who said she was for ALL Americans, who was laying out clear plans that would help small businesses AND the middle classes, who had decades of service both in the system and challenging the system didn't use THE RIGHT VOCABULARY?

- Was bankrolled by a man who singlehandedly spent over a quarter of a BILLION dollars, while openly saying how he would destroy economic regulation
- Repeatedly told debunked lies about his own plans and his opponents

- Was found guilty of criminal fraud in his business
- Was found guilty of 34 felonies
- Was found to have classified documents with international secrets stored in an unprotected toilet

- Bungled pandemic response so badly (and worse than other nations) that one study found that 500,000 American deaths could be laid to his bad decisions
- Was impeached
- Led a violent insurrection against our nation
- Was found liable of sexual assault

It is the think piece of a group that is trying to fight the previous election cycles while ignoring the larger problem:

Our nation is losing (has lost?) any real metric of qualifying standards.

One party just successfully ran a person who, in the last five years:

The Conversation Democrats Need to Have The party should stop talking to itself and start hearing what voters have to say.

I have a longer post coming (I swear), but this is the kind of think piece that is making me so mad right now.