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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 6h

An opportunity to recall my favorite blog post title of all-time, by @johngcole.bsky.social:

Rock Salt, Paper, Morons (alternate title: We Will, We Will, Rock Salt You!)

by John Cole
| October 13, 2009
4:42 pm
| 372 Comments

This post is in: Clown Shoes, I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To

The moment I heard Snowe was going to vote for the bill, I began furiously refreshing Red State for the reaction. Finally, they deliver:

imlaughingtoohardtonamethis

That is right, folks. To show unhappy they are, they are going to ask you to buy rock salt through their amazon store and mail it to Olympia Snowe. They don’t call them the Red State Strike Farce for nothing.

Seriously, how do I make a joke about this?

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 7h

Stop with the AI-generated flyers.

This is some other pastor in Texas, not James Talarico.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 11h

You mean like what Obama's Iran Deal secured and Trump torn up because he wanted to placate Israel hawks?

Iran Ramped Up Enrichment After U.S. Withdrew from Nuclear Deal

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 14h

It puts Wahab in a hijab and the Afghanistan flag behind her. Just gutter racism.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 14h

Melissa Hernandez's allies released an anti-Aisha Wahab attack site on the eve of their debate tomorrow. Spoon feeding people bullshit with fake AI images, it is not very subtle with the Afghan flag colors and Arabic font choice. It even lists Newark as within the district. (It is not.)

Not so subtle racist attack on Aisha Wahab.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 06/10/2026

What direction is this?

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 06/10/2026

Me, if my sons get auto-enrolled for Trump Accounts

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 05/10/2026

Morgan Freeman's youngest son Alfonso looks like if you asked AI to generate an image of Morgan Freeman. (Alfonso doubled as the younger Red in the photos attached to his parole papers in "The Shawshank Redemption.")

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 04/10/2026

This is literally what came to mind:

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 04/10/2026

Fouled directly off the junk. Yikes.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 03/10/2026

It is exceptionally dumb to put your child's photo into a CSAM generator. You can use any number of free tools to remove a background from a photo and then download a typical school photo background. It would take even the most inept person like 10 minutes.

On TikTok, user Carlie Bond went viral for what she tagged as a #MomHack: taking photos of her three school-age children against a plain backdrop, then putting them into ChatGPT with the prompt, “Keep them exactly the same but make it look like a school picture.”

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 03/10/2026

"Entertainment made fun of us white guys while we enjoy most of the blessings of America and that's unfair." Scenes like this one must really upset people like JD Vance.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 02/10/2026

New (existing?) Jeremy Culhane "SNL" character just dropped.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 02/10/2026

$5,000 "DOGE dividend" $2,000 "tariff refund" $1,500 "rebate for HSAs"

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 01/10/2026

I ran for Congress in #CA14 for this very reason and concluded my announcement in late December this way:

The wreckage of this administration requires a new direction for a new time. We can't afford the status quo. Something different must take its place. This great struggle rests upon a bold vision for the American people and I intend to offer it.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 01/10/2026

Just noticed this season's "South Park" opening includes a naked Trump desecration of the American flag.

A naked Trump desecrates the American flag in the opening of "South Park."

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 01/10/2026

All three Alex Bregman teams eliminated from the playoffs on the same day. Houston Astros (eliminated by Chicago White Sox) Boston Red Sox (eliminated by New York Yankees) Chicago Cubs (eliminated by San Diego Padres)

Houston Astros (2016–2024)
Boston Red Sox (2025)
Chicago Cubs (2026–present)

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 01/10/2026

I mean, on some level, they are General Ripper.

"Peace on Earth" scribbles from "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 01/10/2026

The closing of Justice Robert Jackson's summation: "If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime."

It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this Trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: "Say I slew them not." And the Queen replied, "Then say they were not slain. But dead they are..." If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 30/09/2026

A U.S. Army psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert interviewed Nazi war criminals on trial at Nuremberg and famously wrote in his 1950 book, "Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy." It was the *lack* of empathy that made the Holocaust possible.

U.S. Army psychologist noting all the Nuremberg war criminals lacked empathy.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 30/09/2026

Astros once again losing early. Ths is not your older brother's Houston Astros.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 30/09/2026

This is Palmer Lucky, for the uninitiated.

Palmer Lucky looking even more douchey than usual.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 30/09/2026

Katie Britt's inner monologue:

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 29/09/2026

Congressional Republicans and their consultants:

Hans Christian Blech in the 1962 filmer, "The Longest Day," as Major Werner Pluskat, the first German credited with viewing the Allies' Normandy invasion forces in France, 1944.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 26/09/2026

On the first campaign I worked on in 2006, she came to our precinct walk for GOTV weekend. (I was working for an environmental IE.) Ben Affleck was supposed to be there, too, but was “not feeling well.” She was very nice.

Jennifer Garner at a campaign event in 2006.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 23/09/2026

bsky.app/profile/jami... bsky.app/profile/clea...

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 23/09/2026

Cronkite's final commentary three days after Kennedy's assassination.

Cronkite's closing remarks on Nov. 25, 1963, after Kennedy's funeral.

"It is said that the human mind has a greater capacity for remembering the pleasant than the unpleasant.

"But today was a day that will live in memory and in grief. Only history can write the importance of this day: Were these dark days the harbingers of even blacker ones to come, or like the black before the dawn shall they lead to some still as yet indiscernible sunrise of understanding among men, that violent words, no matter what their origin or motivation, can lead only to violent deeds?

"This is the larger question that will be answered, in part, in the manner that a shaken civilization seeks the answers to the immediate question: Who, and most importantly what, was Lee Harvey Oswald? The world's doubts must be put to rest.

"Tonight there will be few Americans who will go to bed without carrying with them the sense that somehow they have failed.

"If in the search of our conscience we find a new dedication to the American concepts that brook no political, sectional, religious or racial divisions, then maybe it may yet be possible to say that John Fitzgerald Kennedy did not die in vain.''

"That's the way it is, Monday Nov. 25, 1963. This is Walter Cronkite, good night.''

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 21/09/2026

You spineless piece of shit. Time to take out the trash.

Rob and Mia Bonta with corrupt Andy Duong.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 21/09/2026

I've had my eye on the N.C. Wyeth "Buy War Bonds" propaganda poster from 1942.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 20/09/2026

I had to look up "Star Wars giant walking robot" because I've only seen one film all the way through (*dodges tomatoes*) but the Arch could be an AT-AT Walker.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 20/09/2026

The "Pro-Peace" Ticket strikes again, expands Iran war to Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 14/09/2026

The engineer responsible:

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Matt Ortega @mattortega.com · 14/09/2026

Every time Trump wants something—a parade, an arch, a ballroom—there's board meetings across the world where groans are heard because they want the last bribe to last longer. "Now President Trump wants us to donate to a ballroom for the White House."

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