Malcolm Gent

Again: for all the moaning about "the groups" and "online leftists," nobody does as much to undermine Dems as elected Dems. Dem voters are rightly suspicious they'll elect someone like @shaheen.senate.gov who leaps in to save the Trumper who disclosed combat operations via a dubious Signal rip-off.

I remain forever disappointed that Marvel never went forward with the Peter as a substitute teacher subplot from the JMS run. So much to mine from that!

Had a chance to read Battle Cry of Freedom seven years ago and liked it a lot.

My prediction is that this will become standard in functioning democracies.

Read the Lydia Davis translation last year and it is very well written.

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

All that relentless complaining about "the groups" and "leftists online" undermining the Democratic party but we can't get leadership to endorse the actual winner of the Dem primary over a sex pest, a crook, and a Republican in a beret. Our leadership is toxic as hell and needs to go ASAP.

You know Stardew Valley does a good job simulating life in a small rural community because I now have seething irrational grudges against half the people in town.

A whole lot of organizations and politicians do not understand just how minimal their 'reach' truly is on X. It's not what Twitter was. You are shouting at bots and right-wingers. Nobody else sees what you do there. Daily users are down, time on site is down, and the algorithm is hostile to you.

Twitter was NEVER good in terms of driving traffic to anywhere except Twitter. All of the most successful posts there asked nothing of the reader but to keep scrolling Twitter uninterrupted.

I was today years old when I realized we could have had a president named *McGovern*

“Senator McGovern” is probably about the closest we’ll ever come to the political version of Boaty McBoatface

There is something so fundamentally telling with people who think that “reading a book” and “knowing what the plot is” is the same experience.

A lot of this country’s problems boil down to straight white men who see themselves as some sort of default “normal” but any variation on that as “an identity” that is “political”

Today I learned that the 346 Free French RAF squadron had a mascot rabbit that flew 30 missions with the captain during WW2
Below: 2 pictures of Cpt. Marchal holding his speckled bunny. Marchal is wearing a aviator uniform in both

You’ve seen this movie before: Maybe Reagan guessed, Bush hoped, and Trump tried—but tax cuts never paid for themselves. Given the mountain of evidence, claiming once again that "tax cuts will pay for themselves" is no longer ideologically motivated optimism.

It's a lie.

the list of Cuomo endorsers is actually a great way to identify people who need to be driven out of the Democratic Party as soon as possible

the story today is of a profoundly low energy military parade being met with millions of americans in nationwide protests denouncing the dictatorial pretensions of the president

Elon Musk believes that a majority of the base for the Democratic Party is subhuman. This cannot be squared. Ever. There's no common ground.

A bad President, for instance, has the power to do what? What can he not do? If he wanted to revolutionize this government, he could easily do it with this ponderous power; it would be an auxiliary power. He could cry “havoc, and let slip the dogs of war,”29 and say to the conspirators: “I am with you. If you succeed, all is well. If you fail, I will interpose the shield of my pardon, and you are safe. If your property is taken away from you by Congress, I will pardon and restore your property. Go on and revolutionize the government; I will stand by you.” The bad man will say or might say this. I am not sure but we have got a man now who comes very near saying it. Let us have done with this pardoning power. We have had enough of this. Pardoning! How inexpressibly base have been the uses made by this power—this beneficent power. It has been that with which a treacherous President has trafficked. He has made it the means of securing adherents to himself instead of securing allegiance to the government.

very fun to read frederick douglass accurately describe the problem with the pardon power in 1867

Read past the headline on this one

For an administration that claims to love America and its history, it's notable the extent to which they are actively working to decimate our ability to learn new things about that history.

Law firms like Paul Weiss, which thought they had escaped punishment by agreeing to do pro bono work for uncontroversial causes, discovered that Mr. Trump saw their agreements as a blank check for them to do his bidding. As my colleagues have reported, the law firms discovered that they had agreed to deals that "did little to insulate them from his whims." One expert at Yale Law School said the "administration seems to think that they have subjected these firms to indentured servitude."

Columbia University, for example, agreed to concessions that included imposing new oversight over its Middle Eastern studies department and creating a security force empowered to make arrests. But that was not enough to restore the more than $400 million in grants that the Trump administration had canceled, or to prevent the administration from making even more demands.

I'm sorry but if you don't have enough fully functional neurons firing in your brain to have seen this coming from the beginning, I refuse to believe you can be trusted with any task or objective that requires more than a third-grade intellect.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/w...

Happy to announce I have completed my Master’s in Library and Information Science at Kent State!

there are, in fact, a ton of positive role models for masculinity out there and if teenage boys choose the whiniest and most hate-filled versions that's at least somewhat on them

"It's time to fight everywhere and all at once" Pritzker says, blasting "the do nothing crowd" of Dems in response to Republicans:

"We have to abandon the culture of incrementalism that has led us to swallow their cruelty and their callousness with barely a cowardly croak."

in New Hampshire, JB Pritzker hits the "simpering timidity" of many Dems:
“Fellow Democrats, for far too long we’ve been guilty of listening to a bunch of do-nothing political types who would tell us that America’s house is not on fire,even as the flames are licking their faces"