Feral T. Robot, Oil Swamp Utility Bot #7629

Just so we're clear a work requirement for Medicaid is insane & should never have even been considered. Ever. It's raw ableism, profoundly ignorant of how disability works. That it was ever regarded as on the table is an indictment of Democratic leaders who let it be put there, who all need to go.

Just to be clear: You're saying voters are #1 on the call sheet, so they're responsible for whether Dem leadership has shitty strategy?

Yep. He wins elections because NY balances blue*, NY GOP are insane nutcase idiots who can't win statewide elections anymore, & NY Dem politics is so brutal it's impossible to mount a primary challenge without overwhelming & broad-based popular support.
_
*rural NY is often DEEP red.

...Sure, we've got to vote!
But the people we vote into office have to HOLD UP THEIR END.

Since he's one of my senators & my name isn't "Bailey" the appeal will likely fall on deaf ears, but it's on my to-do list.

The very first profile I ever read of him was framing him as a conservative Democratic populist, & the risk that posed for shift the Democratic center more to the right. But I'd be hard put to find that for you. (They did not mention the jogger incident, IIRC.)

It's 15:45 here. I bet you a dozen donuts that before I wake up tomorrow, I get at least 3 thieves begging me for money so they can really fight for healthcare.

One Day, Britain’s Monuments Will Fall Monuments, museums, and cultural institutions were often created in the image of “militarist realism,” presenting colonialism and enslavement as eternal. Undoing this legacy is not erasing the past bu...

💥New from me in @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social
“Monuments, museums, and cultural institutions were often created in the image of “militarist realism”—presenting colonialism as eternal. Undoing this legacy is not erasing the past but combating a pernicious ideology”
jacobin.com/2025/11/brit...

OTOH I just got an idea for a story about telling an allegedly-repentant ghost to just fuck the hell off.

We cannot let “haunted ICE agent regretfully explores his feelings/past/guilt” become a genre the way we did with every bad actor since the Confederates.

I've never had enough traffic to be there but I totally get the use-case.

Timeline cleanse.⚰️

a lotta yall still dont get it

Senators can use multiple slurp juices on a single senate

so if you have 1 astro Senator and 3 slurp juices you can create 3 new senates

Tonight's slurp juice mint event is essentially a minting event for both Lab Monkes and Special Forces

This has stirred up a lot of these bot-like accounts but the last point I wanted to make here is how this makes the elections that happened last week totally invisible in the “voters need to do more” narrative. They did, they went out and did the thing in droves. This is their reward.

"Pundit" is a weird job. It basically means being famous for being famous. That's how I can differentiate between, say, Ezra Klein & Josh Marshall:
Ezra wants more clicks so he can be more famous.
Josh wants more clicks so he can pay his employees.
Different goals.

Instead of capitulating, why didn't Dems use their vast e-mail fundraising network to encourage people to contribute to food pantries or do "canvassing" with fliers that show where people can assistance?

I mean I'd get a desire to stick with a known evil. I've had a lot of laptops & the only ones that didn't suck in some way were my old 13" PowerBook & the little LG GRAM I've been backup-driving for several years.

Cleaning out my last house I found an old magazine that I'd left folded open to one of your reviews & was like 'oh, yeah, right, that's why his name sounded so familiar when I started seeing it in SF mags.'

My dysfunctional right retina often leads me to read your name as Josh Marshall's & in this case it pretty much didn't matter.

School Spirit can never fail, it can only BE failed.

IOC set to introduce blanket ban on transgender women in female sport The ban is reportedly expected to come into effect early next year

The International Olympic Committee is set to ban trans and intersex women from competition. This is despite the fact that for 20 years, the IOC has allowed trans athletes to compete and only 1 has ever competed and none have ever won a medal.

www.the-independent.com/sport/olympi...

For everyone dunking on Chuck (who deserves it!), read what Josh Marshall has to say here:
Yes, Chuck & the Surrender Caucus are wrong. What's important is the lesson they've FAILED TO LEARN from the shutdown - we can still press advantage if they'll get the hell out of the way.

I always thought that was just whatever "three hearts" signified to the poster.

[WorstGuyYouKnowMakesValidPoint /]

Yep. To be the old white guy with war analogies, the shutdown is a bit like the Battle of Coral Sea: GOP had to take a punch. We also got hurt. Important thing is to get up & fight again. This hurt Trumpists more than I think we'll know for a while.

Shutdown demonstrated "Democrats can go to the mat when the public is behind them and not pay a political price. It dramatically damaged Donald Trump. It cued up the central arguments of the 2026 campaign. It just didn’t go far enough. The ball was fumbled at the end. So we need to demand more."

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

A hand holding a copy of There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm in front of a bookcase

Oh, yeah, it's finally here! Thanks, @qntm.org
#Antimemetics

This kind of thing is subtext to most of the politically-aware British spy fiction I've read, starting with Deighton in _Ipcress File_. Can't trust the Cousins any farther than you can throw them, & they're too big to throw. Shows up in the first book, just doesn't get called out in the show.