iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

My kidding-but-not opinion is, death penalty views aside, if the state actually goes through with your execution and they fuck it up so badly that you survive, they should have to just let you go after that, fair's fair.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 12m

Ben Shapiro, obviously, dunno how Dave got in there.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 3h

It is genuinely weird how many conservative villian origin stories—from Steve Bannon to Dave Shapiro to JD Vance to all Fox personalities and on and on—are basically star fuckers who wanted to be famous in entertainment but couldn't quite get there so they turned it into everyone else's problem.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This is exactly what is going to happen unless Democrats feel a real sense of existential, go-for-broke urgency when it comes to institutional reform and bare their teeth on accountability. "Reach across the aisle" reconciliation efforts or turn-the-page Biden/Pelosism needs to be wholly exorcised.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Genuinely don't understand why the courts don't step in. Though it would probably help if Congress as a body had any interest in asserting its powers rather than individual members grousing lightly in TV news hits but otherwise being content just to electioneering from it and nothing more.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In two years we've gone from a standard where the President's budget proposal was a set of suggestions Congress would ignore to where Congressional appropriations are now a set of suggestions the President ignores.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

So it should be clear by now that it's not even foreign-born US citizens like Ilhan Omar that they think aren't real Americans, it's just non-whites generally.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Immigrants are good. We should have more of them. Immigration should be made much easier. We are a much stronger America with robust immigration. By every single metric except racism immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are a net positive for society. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

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Jim Lokay @jimlokay.com · 29/09/2026

If you want to really know how the outrage machine gets fired up: 1. Schmitt plans to drop “bombshell” on Smith 2. Someone plants story that Schmitt is a Vance VP contender to run same day 3. Right-wing Twittersphere gets talking points 4. Schmitt steps in it 5. Scheduled tweets go out anyway

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

How that is not criminally chargeable, I have no fucking clue. The fact that this is not a slam-dunk "right to jail" thing is a damning indictment of the state of our judicial system. So, yeah, you can and should run responsibility right up the chain, but fuuuuuuck her.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Btw, part of her misconduct was vouching—she got in front of the grand jury and explicitly told them to trust her because she would NEVER ask them to charge somebody if she didn't personally believe it was the right call. Her resignation letter explictly says this was a bald-faced lie.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

It would appear that he is?

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

A sentence like this appears in every one of these articles: "Sure I object to everything Trump has ever done, but on the other hand I also disagree with some things about Democrats I made up."

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is true for a great many things these days. We have sort of collectively given up the idea that laws are enforceable against the rich and powerful. Make Crime Illegal Again.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Once again, the Supreme Court prioritizes imaginary harms done to Trump by not allowing him to indulge in his conspiracy theories, as opposed to the very real harm done to citizens who may lose the ability to vote in this case.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This is not a nice-to-have, this existential. Every death of a thousand cuts in making voting more difficult makes our democracy less representative and empowers Republicans to rule with a smaller and smaller minority. Dems need to do something with the votes they have, while they still can.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Democrats cannot keep up a resistance strategy solely predicated on electing more Dems in whatever election is coming up next, on a playing field that is requiring a higher and higher percent of the vote share just to break even. You already need a +4-6 Dem advantage just to get a 50/50 Congress

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Adam Rogers @jetjocko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A lot of things make me feel kind of dumb, including how to take at face value the logic of “we are a multibillion dollar transnational industry building a vengeful elder god, and we definitely won’t stop unless you regulate us the way we want, which is a secret.”

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Rarely has an election result narrative more outpaced the evidence than the whole "Trump flipped Hispanics!" bullshit. It was never real to begin with, just catnip for Beltway idiots trying to find something to point to to avoid saying Trump won because his voters like racism and are idiots.

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Cristian Farias @cristianfarias.com · 18/09/2026

In a Manhattan federal courtroom today, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued that Article II of the Constitution lets the president fire a federal employee because he’s Black, and there’s nothing a court can do about it. www.politico.com/news/2026/09...

politico.com

DOJ says recent Supreme Court ruling shields Maurene Comey firing

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18/09/2026

i simply cannot imagine the level of delusion and sheer ignorance it takes to believe that the rise of Republican Nazis is some outside imposition and not something that has come from within the American right.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Oh no! Almost two years in, they are beginning to "strategically lay the foundation for contempt." To the hills, lads!

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Wandering Hoo @wanderlib.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

So why aren't any of them in jail for contempt?

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

People get mad at me for saying so, but Bernie Sanders had every conceivable opportunity to make his case, over many years, in every conceivable race dynamic (crowded field, head to head, every kind of caucus and primary), with money, endorsements, name ID etc. He just couldn't get enough voters.

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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 14/09/2026

Your regular reminder: If the Russians stop fighting, the war ends. If the Ukrainians stop fighting, their land will be occupied, their leaders will be killed, their history and language will be erased, their children will be kidnapped to serve Russia.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Vividly remember when a lady published a story called "Terror in the Skies Again" about her freaking out on a recent flight because she was sure some muslim passengers were planning an attack. And nothing happened, it was a wedding band, but that part never mattered en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwe...

en.wikipedia.org

Northwest Airlines Flight 327 - Wikipedia

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Tasha @toshyou.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In America you can get arrested for giving water to people waiting in line to vote but the president is offering you $5k to vote for his party. - Too old for this shit

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Don't print lies in the newspaper.

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Eric Columbus @ericcolumbus.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Happy 72nd Birthday to Ruby Bridges, who at the age of 6 desegregated the New Orleans public schools. She’s younger than 30 senators and our last two presidents—and only 7 years older than Barack Obama. The past isn’t past.

Ruby Bridges flanked by three U.S. Marshals on the steps of her school

Norman Rockwell’s painting depicting the event, “The Problem We All Live With,” originally published as a centerfold in the January 14, 1964 issue of Look magazine.

Ruby Bridges talking with President Obama as they look at Rockwell’s painting while it was temporarily displayed at the White House in 2011.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

I stand corrected, lots of Jays fans here today!

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

If you see a dude in a Vlad shirt with a wife and two little girls in Jays gear that's us, a little island of #BlueJays fans here in KC!

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Psyched to go to my only #BlueJays game of the year in 2026 as they play the Royals in KC this evening. Me and my girls are the extremely rare Kansas #BlueJays fans, gonna be out there repping the team in 100 degree heat LFG!

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I.e that he wasn't a serious enough person who would be able to get things done in professional Washington. That he'd turn into a Fox News hit Trump apologist Manchurian Candidate who hates his job was on literally nobody's bingo card. I don't think there's anything to really generalize here.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I was his neighbor in Pittsburgh and followed his early career closely. The version of Fetterman that was popular was the local organizer turned pro-lgbtq pro-immigrant pro-weed anti-Trump Lt. Gov. gadfly. The case against him (w/ Lamb say) was always more like the Cuomo dynamic against Momdani.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

This isn't quite right - Fetterman is a pretty singular case in that he really did genuinely change in a way nobody, not even his critics, predicted (or could have). This is not a case where the seeds were there all along and obvious in retrospect—he is a fundamentally different guy today.

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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

"What's behind the appeal of the far right?" is one of those questions pundits keep asking but wherever you look, the answer is simple: Racism and lying www.dw.com/en/germany-i...

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Not to be ageist or anything, but Susan Collins sounds like shit.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Huh. Worth the read. Maybe I've been too blase in poo-pooing the impending hostile AI takeover.

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

It’s mind-blowing that we have literal white nationalists in the White House carrying out unfathomably cruel, abusive, white nationalist policies, and the punditariat has spent the last two weeks debating if some people were too intemperate after a Black man was murdered by cops six years ago.

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Rodger Sherman @rodger.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Remember if you’ve ever heard a Republican claim they’re actually ok with immigration but just want all the immigrants to do it legally, they were lying

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Something that is long overdue is national reform of how NDAs are allowed to work. What was intended as a limited way to protect trade secrets has become a catch-all accountability shield for the rich and powerful. www.npr.org/2026/08/26/n...

npr.org

In Louisiana, NDAs covered up a data center deal that residents didn't know was coming

Residents of tiny Boyce, La., yelled at local officials for signing agreements that hid a pending deal for a data center. NDAs, common in Louisiana data center deals, are coming under more scrutiny.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I used to have a list of "if I could wave a magic wand" creative projects that'd only be possible with a VERY specific celebrity involvement, and one of my favorites was a remake of "Oh God! You Devil" with Dolly Parton in the George Burns dual role. Tell me that's not a beloved classic.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

I also used to say this about Roe, that if we really felt an urgency to protect abortion rights we need to enumerate them, that the actual Roe case was not that, and was instead a fairly shaky work around and someday we'd be sorry that such an important base right was delineated so flimsily.

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

This is apropos of nothing save that people are always skeptical when I tell them the right to privacy isn't guaranteed, just "implied", and by unfortunate quirk of history all the major precedents establishing it are wrapped up in sexual and reproductive freedom (i.e. if someone comes for those...)

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BA Porter @baporter.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

A niche argument I used to make back in the early blog days is that somebody really ought to make a nonpartisan, broad-community push for a constitutional amendment explicitly naming privacy as an enumerated right, because some day we'll be sorry we never actually did that.

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mtsw @mtsw.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

The "school security industry" is a way to bankrupt school districts by redirecting funding away from teachers and giving it to various kinds of cop-adjacent chuds instead. The Plot To Enslave America

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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

The single most impactful social/cultural development over the last decade (that virtually no retrospectives of "woke" have engaged in) is the new elite consensus that moral judgement is itself inherently illegitimate.

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