Plastic Paddy

On Jan. 16, defense attorney James Mayer — who is also representing Dingus in a separate criminal matter — contacted the sheriff’s office to advise that his client would not be making any statements, according to the Richland County Sheriff’s Office.

From Bongiorno’s The People’s Party: “Still, Labor candidates and activists often embraced a very broad definition of the ‘working class’. Joseph Winter, a bookbinder and PPL candidate for Melbourne South, thought that the workers included everyone who toiled by hand or brain: All producers must be on their side. That large section of the community known as shopkeepers were toilers who should be with them. Those who only soiled their hands with ink, teachers, educators, actors, artists, and all who employed the higher and brighter faculties of human nature were well within their ranks.”

The Australian Labor Party early in its formation grappled with this question and would agree!

“Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said… The writer should, of course, omit extraneous syllables like ‘um’ and may judiciously delete false starts.”
-NYT ethical guidelines

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A lot of people on here talk a big game about primarying do nothing democrats. In Sacramento we got a young candidate endorsed by unions, DSA, and the Working Families Party challenging and 82 year old millionaire married to a billionaire. Donate and help us win:

secure.actblue.com/donate/maifo...

bird

bsky.app/profile/padd...

Second Inaugural Address (1865) National Constitution Center Historic Documents Library record for Second Inaugural Address (1865)

constitutioncenter.org/the-constitu...

From Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural: “maybe it’s a bummer but we deserve this war because everything, including slavery, has a cost”

“Woe unto the world because of offenses, for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe unto that man by whom the offense cometh.”

Founders Online: First Inaugural Address: Final Version, 30 April 1789 First Inaugural Address: Final Version, 30 April 1789

founders.archives.gov/documents/Wa...

“since there is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the œconomy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity”

Republicans today would take appeals to virtue, duty, and magnanimity as attacks on their policies.

From Washington’s first inaugural address: “On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years”

George Washington, aged 56, taking his first oath of office: “dang I’d rather stay home ‘cause I’m so tired but my country called me even though I’m basically on death’s door”

Manhattan Transfer

More Americans claim German heritage than any other ethnicity. By Musk’s British-centered definition below, a plurality of this country (to include him, Trump, and Thiel) are not truly American.

a standard mercator map of the world, with minneapolis at its center, and lines radiating outward to all the major cities on the globe. the title reads "WORLD WIDE DISTRIBUTION twin city products manufactured by MINNEAPOLIS STEEL & MACHINERY CO." 1928

Accompanying text to the advertisement "MADE IN MINNEPOLIS TWIN CITY tractors and treshers. IF you started out today on a trip around the world, you would find friends of Minneapolis - users of Twin Cities Products - in all principal agricultural countries. Twin City Tractors and Threshers have by their successful performance records established an international reputation. Payrolls build a community" May 1928

"If you started out today on a trip around the world, you would find friends of Minneapolis, everywhere."
Minneapolis Steel & Machinery Co. advertisement, May 1928.

global.oup.com/academic/pro...

“There would be no real concrete effects of a Lincoln presidency that would be materially different from a Davis presidency because they all work for the capitalist ruling class and not for us, yes including Lincoln.”
—Karl Marx, never

From Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment: “For most white Republicans, the choice was not hard; party professionals, more enamored of election results than theories found the politics of sectionalism—“waving the bloody shirt,” in the contemporary expression—to be far more persuasive to voters than the elaborate defense of black rights that were necessary to justify Reconstruction policy in the South. As early as 1868, the Freedmen’s bureau was, in effect, allowed to lapse, and the GOP thereafter gradually abandoned both the cause of the freedmen and the commitment to a “reconstructed” South that it implied. Given the known prejudice toward blacks of a large of the party’s white adherents in the North, the superiority of the bloody shirt as a campaign appeal was unassailable. As Negro spokesmen grimly noted, blacks were steadily losing their political influence—though their votes were still counted by the reoriented Republican Party. The orientation, it soon became apparent, belonged to business. Indeed, the decline in abolitionist zeal was more than balanced by the triumphant spirit of business enterprise that suffused the remodeled Northern GOP. Though all participants in the world of commerce did not habitually march in perfect political lockstep, particularly on monetary policy, a workable hegemony within commercial ranks was fashioned in the 1870s and 1880s as a precursor to its near total ascendancy in the 1890s. Thus, the many-faceted Republican coalition that had come to power in 1861 became in the postwar years a much narrower business party, closely tied to the politics of sectional division. Only faint echoes of the multi-sectional impulses of prewar Whiggery remained.”

Goodwyn would argue that this was a feature, not a bug, of the postwar Republican coalition. Getting back on the gold standard, and therefore shielding the Northern bond holders who had funded the war from depreciation, was more important than cultivating the newly emancipated Southern freedmen.

Like Mamdani’s, Mejia’s victory is one of labor over capital by focusing on mobilizing people rather than relying on fundraising for advertising, etc.

Civil War-era pin with an image of a man hanged from gallows and “Jefferson Davis, 1861” on the obverse and “Death to Traitors” on the reverse.

*humming of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” intensifies*

Anyway have some selections from a rip roaring oratory before the Athenians defeat the Spartan-imposed, oligarchic Thirty Tyrants:

It’s going to be very important for him to die penniless.

From p.342 of Kagan’s The Peloponnesian War, the chapter “Revolutions in the Empire and in Athens”: “…out on that island, marked by bitter class hatred. Aided by Athenian sailors, the common people rose up against the aristocrats of the governing oligarchy, killing two hundred Samian noblemen, exiling forty more, distributing their land and houses among themselves, and stripping the aristocrats of their civic rights, including the right of intermarriage with the lower class.”

Thinking more and more about this episode of the Peloponnesian War:

Many such cases during the ongoing Revolt of the Bosses

Donate to Washington Post 2026 layoff fund, organized by Rachel Siegel On Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2026, The Washington Post laid off hundreds of journalists. We ar… Rachel Siegel needs your support for Washington Post 2026 layoff fund

One immediate effort (and the @postguild.bsky.social will likely share more): www.gofundme.com/f/standing-t...

Grim,,,

Anti-ICE protest sign saying: DEARLY BELOVED. WE ARE GATHERED HERE TODAY TO DISMANTLE THIS THING CALLED ICE with a picture of Prince in the lower left hand side of the sign.

Here is a better angle of this sign. I originally received this from a friend, but it came from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Post by John Ganz saying “They’re gonna call it Stancilgrad” followed by a post by Will Satncil

The TL right now

“Sometimes Again”

I haven't liked to talk about politics on this account. I wanted to have a fun spot for Vikings fans, like me.

Many have been scared of backlash, losing friends or followers... but I am saying clearly:

1 am NOT okay with reckless violence condoned by the Trump Aministration. I am NOT okay with people being murdered in own own communities.

1am NOT okay with people being taken from their homes and families being ripped apart. lam NOT okay with people being denied due process.

Pro Football Hall of Famer John Randle posted a statement about ICE as text overlays on various portraits of himself and I kind of love it