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theblandone.bsky.social

@theblandone.bsky.social
1.2K followers 591 following 1.1K posts
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Reposted by @theblandone.bsky.social
jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 4h
Given that there is not likely to be a national, bipartisan demand for accountability in the wake of Trump — the major distinction with Nixon — any accountability, civil or criminal, will be a partisan and political project that I think should be pursued as vigorously as possible.
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Elizabeth Picciuto @epicciuto.bsky.social · 5h
It is good to hear Dems talk as if they are aware what trash these guys are spewing.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5h
Ossoff: "I think Pete Hegseth is frankly a deeply unwell person who seems to relish this kind of brutality all the while he's running a department that is falling into chaos. The guy cannot run the military competently and is spending his time with this kind of obscene medieval spectacle."
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Faine Greenwood @faineg.com · 5h
nationalize everything Elon Musk owns.
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Grudgie the Wail @grudgie.bsky.social · 5h
Large scale organized crime depends on the scared silence of its participants
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Ben McAdams (The Resurrection Arc) @purrtah.bsky.social · 6h
Im a tired Democrat and it makes me feel something to see someone hate these fuckers like I do
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Jon Ossoff @ossoff.bsky.social · 6h
That's the problem, Mike. It's not just that you've hired half the Third Reich to staff your Congressional office, and you have promoted neo-Nazi content online, it's that you're robbing your constituents to subsidize your donors.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6h
El-Sayed: "Under Trump and Hegseth, you're seeing extremes that you never would have imagined. The idea that you want to livestream somebody's death for children to watch is truly extreme ... I don't want that to be politics as usual."
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James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social · 5h
I genuinely mean this. I cannot imagine a more bleak dystopian notion than the idea of all art being turned into slop designed to coddle my exact perceived intentions. The point of literature, film, music, and art is to be exposed to the interior lives of others. Who are these people.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 7h
jesus christ i have never heard a democratic talk this bluntly about an opponent
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Albert Pinto @70sbachchan.bsky.social · 9h
perfect tweet
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 6h
Troy Jackson: "The gentleman's name was Johan Sebastian Guerrero. He had a 3 year old daughter. The only mistake he made that morning was going to work. Because Sen. Collins is not willing to stand up to Donald Trump, he was murdered in the streets of Biddeford for doing nothing wrong."
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David Rothschild @davmicrot.bsky.social · 6h
Ossoff is definitely not listening to Yglesias/Klein/PodSave reactionary centrist crowd, he does not think his marginal voter is a white-supremacist, and that is what makes him such an attractive candidate to the vast majority of US who are not white-supremacists.
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Brandon Friedman @brandonfriedman.bsky.social · 6h
This is Nazi rhetoric, full stop. It's not only a call to instigate a race war in the United States, but it's reminiscent of historic European justifications used to incite pogroms against Jews. People who say things like this are incredibly dangerous, as there is nothing they won't eventually do.
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 6h
this country will not be transformed without addressing policing, prisons, surveillance and militarism. Sorry. Cannot get around it. The carceral socialists may make incremental progress but they will ALWAYS come up against state violence.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 9h
To do this through a dissociative medium that already trains us to think of its contents as less real. As so much entertainment. So much content. It is not merely immoral, but the screaming, atavistic *absence* of morality--not coincidentally this defines Hegseth's entire approach to the Pentagon.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 9h
This is part of what makes executions so morally depraved. It is a sober calculation on the part of the state to engage in extreme sanction. In Hegseth's case, he's taking it yet further still. He wants a livestream where people can bathe in blood for pleasure.
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Katherine Alejandra Cross @quinnae.com · 9h
This is a moral atrocity and it needs to be loudly condemned as such. There is a reason that democracies *don't* do publicly televised executions (and why many don't execute people at all): it inculcates and rewards bloodthirst, which corrupts the spirit and corrodes the foundation of the polity.
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 11h
Whoa. @haleaziz.bsky.social has the scoop on a truly insane plan to use some military training ships for deportations, with people presumably shackled or locked in cells for days at a time as they transit to Central and South America. Each journey would be staggeringly expensive — and dangerous.
nytimes.com
Trump Administration Considers Using Ships to Deport Immigrants (Gift Article)
Journeys to destinations including El Salvador and Venezuela could take days and cost millions. Officials cautioned that discussions are still preliminary.
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The New Republic @newrepublic.com · 7h
ICE has quietly launched a 45-day immigration crackdown in California ahead of the midterm elections, instructing its officers to “go after anybody.” trib.al/9oMFlt8
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Ron Filipkowski @ronfilipkowski.bsky.social · 22h
The Russians are barbarians and should be treated as such, not as people to negotiate new business deals with to benefit corrupt oligarchs in the US.
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MAKS 26 👀🇺🇦 @maks23.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
🇺🇸‼️ Top Russian and US officials, including US Special Envoy Jared Kushner, have held talks about bringing a US investor into the Nord Stream pipelines that delivered gas to Germany before Russia invaded Ukraine, - Reuters
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Seth Cotlar @sethcotlar.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This is how historian Robert Paxton defined a certain word that begins with F in his 2004 book.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
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Bill Grueskin @bgrueskin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Is there one person in this administration—say, the person who changes the urinal cakes in the Agriculture Department men’s room—who is not shamelessly using their position to grift every dollar they can? Gift link www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
wsj.com
Exclusive | ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account
Text messages with a MAGA ally show Guilfoyle seeking funds and offering access to top administration officials before becoming ambassador to Greece.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 07/10/2026
wow -- Fox Business is now treating Trump's completely made up economic boasts as though they are factual. Note the citation here -- "The White House" Reminder that the entire US economy is about $32t. If we really had $21t flowing in, you'd notice it Fox thinks their viewers are really dumb
Fox Biz screencap that says: "$21 TRILLION INVESTMENTS POURING INTO THE US"
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 07/10/2026
Trump suggests he wants to cut off almost all trade: "We're gonna very very self-sufficient very soon"
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Tom “T.M.” Wolf @tomtmwolf.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Your 1,384th reminder that the Supreme Court's grant of criminal immunity to sitting presidents was an epochal dereliction of duty. It needs to be wiped from the books as soon as possible.
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Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Didn’t realize we were translating these from German
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Alt USAID/ USAID Forever @altusaid.altgov.info · 07/10/2026
www.ms.now/news/trump-m...
ms.now
Trump administration refuses international election monitors for first time in over 2 decades
The decision not to invite observers from the OSCE puts the U.S. alongside Russia and Belarus, while the Justice Department prepares to deploy its own poll monitors.
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JMay🍁⚖️🏝️🏖️🪖🇨🇦 @bubbles9333.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Robert Morris, 64, who started Texas’s Gateway church and also once served as White House spiritual adviser during Donald Trump’s first presidency, pleaded guilty in early October in Osage county district court on five counts of lewd or indecent acts with child. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
US megachurch pastor released from jail after pleading guilty to child sex abuse
Robert Morris, who started Gateway church, pleaded guilty in October to sexually abusing girl in the 1980s
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Mother Jones @motherjones.com · 07/10/2026
ICE has ordered 6,650 pairs—and says it'll ignore any bans.
motherjones.com
Study: Shock gloves traumatized Army volunteers
After tests, military personnel said "just seeing the glove" that ICE plans to adopt scared them into obedience.
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Nothings Monstered @nothingsmonstrd.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
One excellent remedy for the Male Loneliness Epidemic I haven't seen on the op-ed pages would be to bring union membership up to where it was in the good old days. This would also be useful for non-male loneliness, and other things.
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Democracy Docket @democracydocket.com · 06/10/2026
📮 Your mail ballot could be postmarked too late to count, even if you mailed it on time. New USPS cost-cutting changes put tens of thousands of mail voters at risk of having their mail ballots rejected. Make a plan and check to see if your zip code is affected: demdock.com/4rMi8Ps
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Mark Chadbourn @chadbourn.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Big deal for Anduril, funnily enough shortly after CEO Palmer Luckey joined Hegseth’s new weapons group.
cnbc.com
Anduril lands $2.9 billion Navy submarine shipyard contract days after CEO joins Pentagon weapons group
Defense tech leaders are gaining sway in Washington in President Donald Trump's military reindustrialization push
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/10/2026
The government *still* isn’t tracking how often immigration agents detain U.S. citizens. We are. 500+ Americans have been handcuffed, held at gunpoint or held against their will in Trump’s second term. Our tally is almost certainly an undercount. THREAD (content warning: violence) ⬇️
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Amanda Carpenter @amandacarpenter.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
The TV companies that took our tax money should send it back to the Treasury. It's stolen money. They have no credibility opposing gov't propaganda if they keep it. They should eat their mistake. But the end result here is that Trump still got free-to-him, taxpayer-funded ads.
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John Sipher @johnsipher.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
“The Russian president has reason to believe that he has bought off Trump and his envoys with flattery, fake talk of “peace” and business deals.” anneapplebaum.substack.com/p/who-is-ame...
anneapplebaum.substack.com
Who is American foreign policy for?
Definitely not Americans
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Timothy Snyder @timothysnyder.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Yes, the White House sometimes serves as a branch Kremlin press office, which would be humiliating for anyone who had the slightest hint of patriotism or for that matter personal dignity.
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theblandone.bsky.social @theblandone.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Evil. Pure evil.
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Donovan Schaefer @feelingtheory.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Musician Charles Manson, who led a religious revival in Los Angeles during the counterculture era of the 1960s and later became embroiled in controversy, has died.
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theblandone.bsky.social @theblandone.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
A US president. God help us.
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David Roberts @volts.wtf · 05/10/2026
Holy shit.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
There is more to drop on this story. What the Times does not mention is that Salus, the company that got an almost $1 billion no bid contract was also telling other contractors it could secure them govt contracts - if they were willing to hand tens of millions to her boyfriend, Corey Lewandowski.
Marketing firms were told they were guaranteed a contract, but they just needed to hire a consulting firm who could serve as a pass-through to paying Lewandowski. The consulting firm would get half or more of the contract. The company that was acting as a middleman here, telling the marketing firms they had to pay Lewandowski, was Salus. This is one of the companies owned by the Noem donor William Walters.

Sounds complicated, right? In simple terms, Noem gave almost $1 billion dollars in no-bid contracts to a company that then became a middleman for others selling services to government. That company told contractors they had to pay Noem’s boyfriend an extraordinary amount of money if they wanted to receive a government contract. It seems reasonable to assume that some of the inflated costs of these contracts returned to Lewandowski.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Noem demanded personal control over all DHS contracts over $100K and should be held responsible for the waste and (likely) graft that followed, which conservatively ran into the hundreds of millions. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/governing-...
From what we know of Kristi Noem, the head of DHS at the time, she was focused on micromanaging some aspects of government operations. Not workforce planning, but — you guessed it — the flow of grants and contracts. Any contract worth more than $100,000 had to be personally signed by her. And some of that spending was pretty questionable, such as a $200 million ad campaign prominently featuring Noem. There was no competitive bidding process and Noem directed money to Republican firms with long-term personal and professional ties to her. (The fact that Noem had previously led a “Meth: We’re On It” campaign did not seem to stop anyone from questioning her public relations skills).

DHS also bought 11 empty warehouses that it said would serve as detention centers, overpaid for them, and has since sold seven of them. Apparently Noem told officials to buy the warehouses within 30 days, leading to a rushed acquisition process. After the DHS spent nearly $500 million via no-bid contracts on 10 jets, officially for deportations, the planes are mostly unused, or reserved to ferry Trump officials around. So more likely to be incompetence than corruption in this case.
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Roger Parloff @rparloff.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
In her last hours as DHS Secy, Noem's agency bought 5 planes from a donor at markups. In all, DHS gave $900M in contracts to that donor’s companies during her term. One plane had electronic bidets, 2 bedrooms, bar, wine chiller, a manta-ray skin table. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/u...
nytimes.com
Kristi Noem’s Agency Gave Her Donor a Lucrative Contract Just Before She Left (Gift Article)
The Homeland Security Department signed a multi-million dollar agreement to buy five aircraft from a company owned by a political contributor of the secretary on her last day, documents show.
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thinkingbayonet.bsky.social @thinkingbayonet.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
tl;dr warriors fight for their own honor and to preserve a way of life in which they are at the top of the social hierarchy. Soldiers fight to defend the constitution of the United States. If you don't understand the difference you don't belong in power.
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Barbara Kaskosz @kaskosz.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
An excellent piece by Peter Baker @peterbakernyt.bsky.social
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Betty Ann @vegavannah.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Man, I think I would be able to tolerate all the evil better if it wasn’t being done by the most goddamn embarrassing ugly dumbest fucking losers alive.
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Maria Popova @mariapopova.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
How to hold what harrows you www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/06/m...
themarginalian.org
How to Hold What Harrows You
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffe…
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