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potatocouch.bsky.social

@potatocouch.bsky.social
616 followers 769 following 606 posts

Just some woman in Germany interested - unfortunately - in American history, politics and culture

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Reposted by @potatocouch.bsky.social
Michael Scherer @michaelscherer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
NEW: NEW: John Fetterman's fundraising firm, MissionWired, quit working for him in June. So he started offering right-wing groups like RedMajorities and TrumpTruth a hefty commission to raise him money. Even Sen. Mike Lee has joined the rush for cash. Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202...
theatlantic.com
Right-Wing Groups Are Making Money Off John Fetterman
After losing his Democratic fundraisers, the Pennsylvania senator found a new firm with MAGA-world ties.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 11h
Nixon was pardoned already. This is an effort to rehabilitate him as the victim, and his investigators as villains.
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Gender Liberation Movement @genderlib.com · 13h
As hospitals across the country cave to the Trump administration’s threats to cut federal funding and abandon trans youth, actor Elliot Page speaks out. In New York City, NYU Langone, Mount Sinai, and NewYork-Presbyterian abruptly ended care for trans kids in response to these threats.
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Audrey Dutton @audreydutton.bsky.social · 12h
Emma Joyce was sick and vomiting for days when she died. The next summer, Ava Joan got sick: wouldn't eat or drink, rapid breathing, and her vomit was black. It was untreated diabetes. The girls' toddler brother was next to die. Years later, another brother. www.propublica.org/article/idah...
propublica.org
Four Kids in One Faith-Healing Family Died. Authorities Could Do Nothing.
An exemption in Idaho law shields faith-healing parents from criminal prosecution for conduct that otherwise would be charged as neglect. It also keeps police and social workers from stepping in to pr...
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ElieNYC @elienyc.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Trump will not be held accountable for his illegal commercials. But it is still important that we recognize the commercials as illegal. There. Are. FOUR. Lights. My latest in @thenation.com www.thenation.com/article/poli...
thenation.com
PSA: Trump Continues To Commit Crimes
While the president is unlikely to face any consequences for his patently illegal, taxpayer-funded ads, it’s essential to remember he should.
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Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 12h
If you've willingly consumed alcohol, a NY law makes it extraordinarily difficult to prove that you were unable to consent to sex. That includes situations where a victim is slurring words or falling down. Advocates say the law was critical in a DA's decision to decline prosecution at Cornell.
motherjones.com
The loophole that likely doomed the Cornell rape case before it even started
Accusers who voluntarily drink have little protection under an antiquated law many see as "victim-blaming."
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The Associated Press @apnews.com · 14h
BREAKING: Renee Good’s family sues the U.S. government and immigration officials over her killing in Minneapolis.
bit.ly
Renee Good's family sues US government and immigration officials over her killing in Minneapolis
Renee Good’s family has sued the U.S. government and several immigration officials, alleging wrongful death and other violations of federal law in the 37-year-old woman’s killing by an immigration officer during a federal crackdown in Minnesota.
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Perry Bacon @perrybaconjr.bsky.social · 16h
"For America to right itself, we need changes on the scale of Reconstruction and the New Deal. And I worry that’s not going to happen if Democrats and the broader anti-Trump left are taking their cues about what’s necessary and politically possible from the Times." newrepublic.com/article/2160...
newrepublic.com
The Left Must Fight The New York Times’ Monopoly Too
The paper’s editorial vision is out of step with the robust liberalism needed today.
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Authors Against Book Bans @authorsabb.bsky.social · 15h
So many different people, groups, and organizations have come together to push back against the attack on the freedom to read, including students themselves. Read more about what students in Florida are doing here:
theguardian.com
No more book bans: how Florida students are pushing rightwingers out of school boards
Local communities are fighting back against the influence of conservative groups like Moms for Liberty in education
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David Dayen @ddayen.bsky.social · 14h
Data center construction has migrated to places of low resistance: poor, often Black areas where corrupt deals are commonplace and the harms to residents invisible. Lowndes County, Alabama, in the heart of the Black Belt, is one of those places. 🧵 prospect.org/2026/10/01/d...
prospect.org
‘I Know I Couldn’t Live Here’: Standing Up to a Data Center in Alabama’s Black Belt - The American Prospect
Faced with little transparency about a mammoth facility, Lowndes County fights back.
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 17h
I'm not sure if y'all saw a CNN report on how the US had almost started WW3 with China based on fabricated information generated by a chatbot, claiming that a Chinese vessel was carrying components of nuclear weapons. That was an "existential threat" to humanity www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender
The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals
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Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social · 16h
So, we are putting the equivalent of Flock cameras on Postal Trucks to create “valuable data”? Valuable to whom? Will it be sold?
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Austerity doesn’t work. Instead, it creates a death spiral, where reduction in services leads to reductions in revenue, which lead to reductions in services, which leads to reduction in revenue, which leads … you get the idea. H/t UKHE
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Emily Crockett @emilycrockett.bsky.social · 15h
Hey @politico.com can you explain why @thirdway.bsky.social is the source for what the Democrats' SCOTUS platform will be, when they don't even have the word "Democrat" in their name and routinely diss the party? I'll wait.
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Jared Yates Sexton @jysexton.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Anyone who, in 2026, is already saying “I don’t want to vote for Newsom but I will” is part of the problem. This man is a fucking monster and has betrayed everyone imaginable. He is unacceptable in every possible way. There is no world in which this piece of shit should be trusted with power.
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Carl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 01/10/2026
"An ambulance was seen arriving at the prison where Pike was to be executed and then leaving. Medical aid was being administered, according to online federal court records." The utter absurdity of the state trying twice to kill someone and then calling an ambulance. We must end the death penalty.
nbcnews.com
Tennessee inmate still alive after being administered two lethal injections, her lawyer says
Christa Pike, 50, was 18 when she murdered a classmate. She would be the first woman the state has executed in more than 200 years.
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southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social · 23h
Executing prisoners is not a legitimate power of government, despite its long and barbaric history, and we should put an end to it. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/30/u...
nytimes.com
Tennessee Death Row Inmate Christa Pike Still Alive After Attempts to Execute Her, Lawyers Say (Gift Article)
Christa Pike was convicted of murdering a classmate in 1995. It was not clear what went wrong in the execution or what her current medical condition was.
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Kashana @kashana.blacksky.app · 30/09/2026
I love the tech industry and their cool new product: fraud
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Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
abolish the death penalty
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ElieNYC @elienyc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
But, as I wrote in my newsletter, these 8th circuit judges should actually be impeached. We simply can’t have “a judicial system” if Republican judges are going to literally defy the *Republican* Supreme Court just to try to give the GOP one more House seat.
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Charlie Angus @charlieangus104.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The US-owned National Post is urging Canadian Jews to take matters into their own hands to punish Avi Lewis for speaking up against the genocide in Gaza. They reference the Bible to bury alive and consume by fire. This is extremist hate. It needs to get called out. nationalpost.com/opinion/yoni...
nationalpost.com
Yoni Goldstein: Jewish law tells us how to deal with Avi Lewis
His Yom Kippur message was indefensible
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Truthout @truthout.org · 30/09/2026
Fetterman joined nearly every Republican senator in voting against a resolution that would have required the Trump administration to produce an unclassified report on Israeli abuses in the illegally occupied West Bank, including the imprisonment and killing of Palestinian Americans.
truthout.org
Fetterman Joins GOP to Block Effort to Expose Israeli Abuses in West Bank
The measure would’ve required the State Department to issue a report on Israeli human rights practices in the West Bank.
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The Real News Network @therealnews.com · 30/09/2026
Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair wrote Wafaa Akila, the name of an 8-year-old girl killed by Israel, on his face tape.
therealnews.com
NFL threatened to ban player from game for honoring slain Palestinian girl
Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair wrote Wafaa Akila, the name of an 8-year-old girl killed by Israel, on his face tape.
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Tina Vasquez @tinavasquez.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
NEW: H-2A worker Carlos Vargas Moreno experienced a catastrophic heat stroke when his employer, Florida Orange Gold, subjected him to unsafe working conditions. The same company was cited two years prior for the heat-related death of H-2A worker Carmen Sebastian Hernandez Mosqueda.
prismreports.org
Despite farmworker death and another disabled by heat stroke, employer keeps sending people to fields
Florida Orange Gold has exposed workers on H-2A visas to extreme heat, but continues to bring hundreds of migrants to North Carolina
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amanda moore 🐢 @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Received a phone call this morning letting me know they started moving people from Guantanamo Bay to Somalia late last week. Working on getting in contact with them now.
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Alex DiBranco @alexdibranco.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Why would some women support misogynist movements? I discussed for this article how such women see themselves as different from the women these ideologies demonize. “It gives them status and elevates them over the oppression they would otherwise face.” But this is an imagined distinction.
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Geoff Brumfiel @gbrumfiel.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
SCOOP: Valar Atomics is planning a massive nuclear powered data center on public lands in Utah. The 9,600 acre site would include 456 reactors, along with fuel fabrication and waste storage facilities. www.npr.org/2026/09/30/n...
npr.org
A startup wants to build a massive nuclear-powered data center on public land in Utah
Valar Atomics wants to place over 450 reactors on more than 9,500 acres in Utah to power a huge data center project.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
These ads go in the same category as brazen, easily disproven lies after ICE killings. It’s not about persuasion. It’s a display of power. They could have passed them off as PAC-funded. They added “paid for by the U.S. government” because they want us to know they can break the law with impunity.
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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”
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public health guy @publichealthguy1.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
i genuinely forgot how bad this was
buzzfeednews.com
Nobody Believed Neil deGrasse Tyson's First Accuser. Now There Are Three More.
No one believed Tchiya Amet when she said Tyson had raped her in the 1980s. Now, three other women tell BuzzFeed News that he harassed them, including one who’s sharing her story publicly for the firs...
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Barred and Boujee aka Madiba Dennie @audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app · 30/09/2026
I wrote about the Supreme Court's nonstop lawless cruelty ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/ketan...
Screenshot of a paragraph excerpted from the linked article, with the text highlighted in green from the word "But" onwards. Excerpt reads as follows:

In places like Thursday’s speech and Friday’s dissent, Jackson has continuously sought to call attention to the deeply perverse ways that the Court is exercising its equity jurisdiction on the shadow docket. Under the Court’s precedents, emergency applicants are supposed to show that they’re “likely to succeed on the merits” of their appeal from a lower court’s ruling, that they will be “irreparably injured” without immediate relief, and that the balance of the equities tilts in their favor; in other words, fairness is both the explicit purpose and the explicit standard. But the Republican justices have repeatedly abandoned those standards in service of their own purposes. And when the people empowered to wield equitable jurisdiction are actively hostile to the concept of equity, they produce injustice instead.
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Movies Silently @moviessilently.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
It’s particularly cruel to do this to Garbo, who protected her privacy and peace but it’s not surprising she was chosen. After all, she told the world “no” and AI pushers love to run roughshod over consenf www.theguardian.com/film/2026/se...
theguardian.com
SKF advert review – let’s hope this dull AI Greta Garbo is not the future
Swedish-American actor exhumed for bizarre, humourless 99 seconds that give us another reason to resent AI
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Bryce Covert @brycecovert.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"The average household in the top 0.1% holds over 3,000 times as much wealth as a bottom-half household does." www.wsj.com/economy/the-...
wsj.com
The Gap Between the Rich and the Very, Very Rich Is Getting Wider
The 0.1% are worth $28 trillion, or about 15% of the nation’s total wealth. The average wealth for a household in this group is over $200 million.
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Arizona Right Watch @azrww.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The person claiming to have doxed Jane Doe in the Cornell rape case is Aidan Thompson, a groyper nazi who runs "AF Post" which he took over from Ali Alexander (who also once faced sexual assault allegations of his own). Thompson described himself as a "rape expert" in his videos leading up to this.
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elia ayoub @ayoub.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
How the f- is any of this normal? Labour can choose to undo this immediately. Deproscribe Palestine Action. It was a disastrous decision by the Starmer admin and Burnham can undo it.
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Tony Ortega @tonyortega.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Xavier Becerra debates Steve Hilton tonight in the campaign for California governor. Becerra has said nothing about his former days as a shill for #Scientology after his campaign said he had 'disengaged' from the church back in May. How does he really feel about it?
tonyortega.substack.com
Xavier Becerra debates Steve Hilton tonight: Will someone ask him about Scientology, please?
Tonight at 9 pm Eastern, 6 pm in California, the candidates for governor in that fair state will face off for the first debate since they advanced in a June primary.
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Brooke Harrington @ebharrington.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
One of the things to come from GamerGate was the gamification of torturing real, live women...hounding them out of their homes, making them look over their shoulders for years. It was treated as a joke, nbd, the work of a few bad apples--as all terrorism against women is--& that failure leads here.
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Nicole Bedera @nbedera.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I spoke to @usatoday.com about data on sexual violence at Cornell. Victimization rates are increasing and reporting rates are falling. “Together… those two trendlines tell me that all students, including victims and perpetrators, believe that there is impunity for sexual assault at Cornell.”
usatoday.com
Cornell rarely expels students in sex assault cases | Exclusive
A third of undergraduate women say they've been sexually assaulted. But on average, Cornell reported expelling just one attacker per year.
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Robyn Swirling @rswirling.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
After being raped by a man on my hall sophomore year, I couldn’t leave my dorm room for weeks and failed several classes. I had to take out student loans so I could retake those credits. We almost never talk about the financial toll of campus sexual assault on survivors.
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Adam Mallinger @bitterscriptreader.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Everyone demanding Senator Schmidtt apologize to Jack Smith are again setting the bar too low. They should be demanding his resignation from the Judiciary Committe. He's unfit to serve Pound the table. Make some noise. Turn this into a multi-day story
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Saul Staniforth @saulstaniforth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"In the past 24hrs 10 Palestinians have been killed.. the number is expected to rise" Hind Khoudary reports on Israels latest attacks in Gaza, including on a tent housing displaced people in Al Mawasi, a woman asleep in her house in the middle of the night, & someone fishing for food
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Byline Times @bylinetimes.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A *third* Byline Times journalist has now been barred from Conservative conference – Chief Reporter @josiahmortimer.bsky.social. It comes after Political Editor @adambienkov.bsky.social and the late, great David Hencke were barred last year. bylinetimes.com/2025/10/08/c...
bylinetimes.com
Conservatives Accused of ‘Trumpian’ Tactics After Barring Second Byline Times Journalist From Conference
The National Union of Journalists described the bans as a threat to media freedom which "undermines the Conservative Party leader’s repeated pledge to fight for free speech"
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NPR @npr.org · 29/09/2026
Jaimie Bethea, a 21-year-old mass communication specialist, had been deployed on the USS Fort Lauderdale for more than 11 months. She died by suicide in June. n.pr/4ymLaYr
n.pr
A young sailor died by suicide. Her family blames health care gaps and long deployment
Jaimie Bethea, a 21-year-old mass communication specialist, had been deployed on the USS Fort Lauderdale for more than 11 months. She died by suicide in June.
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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Not just impeachable. Impeachment, both pres. and agency heads, is the only option. It's impeachment or nothing. Courts won't stop it. Other tools are impotent. Put them on trial the only way you can. Even if you can't get 2/3, use process as punishment. Make it miserable and costly. It can be done.
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Sherrilyn Ifill @sifill.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A great deal happened today. But nothing more important than this. SCOTUS allows Trump Administration to continue sending detained migrants to third countries with which the migrants have no prior connection. Just appalling.
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Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A truly heinous man has doxxed the Cornell victim on X and the comments are predictably vile. Based on countless interviews I’ve done with survivors, the trauma they are subjected to for coming forward is oftentimes even worse than the initial trauma they experienced. There is no real justice system
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
This is so important. They’ve broken the economic models that fund journalism is because they recognize the *purpose* of journalism threatens their bullshit-based valuations, ie, the sources of their wealth and power. Yet actual-existing journalists were instead crucial for creating their myths.
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Karl Bode @karlbode.com · 29/09/2026
automakers are some of the worst on privacy and security of any industry in America, which makes their push to ban Chinese EVs "for privacy and security" extra fucking annoying
theverge.com
Your car’s data privacy problems are worse than you think
“There’s a lot to be worried about,” the project lead said.
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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Cornell University treating Gaza protestors more harshly than gang rapists is a real statement of values. It’s almost like violent domination by the powerful is the core belief of leadership.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Tennessee plans to execute a woman tomorrow. She was 18 when she committed the crime. She's now 50. Like most on death row, she's also a victim. And like most on death row, she's a far different person now than she was then. No one humanizes the condemned better than @lilianasegura.bsky.social.
theintercept.com
The “Satanic Panic” Made Her a True-Crime Obsession. The Truth Is More Haunting.
After 30 years on death row, Christa Pike faces execution for a grisly murder she committed at 18.
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