#luciantruscottIV
The result is the same: Trump has now fully taken the side of Russia in its war on Ukraine. It’s as if in the middle of World War II, President Roosevelt started saying nice things about Adolph Hitler and cut back the shipment of arms and food to our troops on the front lines and reduced support for our allies in the war. That is exactly what Trump is doing by calling for Zelenskyy’s ouster as president of Ukraine. It is a betrayal of everything we have ever stood for as Americans.

@newyorktimes But Paxton is singularly sleazy and widely despised. As astonishing as a Talarico victory would be, Republicans could explain it away as the fault of a particularly bad candidate.They won’t be able to do that if Hinojosa wins. Abbott has been elected governor of Texas three times by double-digit margins. If Hinojosa even comes close to beating him, it will be because the Republican coalition that Trump assembled is collapsing, and a new Democratic one is perhaps starting to take shape. “There are people who are responding to our message the same way they were responding to Trump’s message,” she said. “They want power. They want to feel like they’re in control of their lives again, and I think that they want to return to a time that feels like it makes sense again, where hard work pays off.”

@newyorktimes Uh, so greed is bad now. But if Hinojosa can find a way to make them less salient, it could portend not just seismic change in Texas, but the beginning of a political realignment. If some fraction of socially conservative voters conclude that rapacious billionaires threaten them more than supercilious liberals, it would remake America’s political map. For decades now, we’ve lived in an era dominated by what scholars call post-material politics, in which values, identity and self-expression have often taken precedence over economic concerns. What if that era is coming to an end? What opportunities would that open up, and what ideological sacrifices would it require?

@newyorktimes Taking a page from Trump, she’s promising $1,500 checks for every Texan from the state’s plush rainy-day fund — she calls it the “Greg Abbott Corruption Tax Refund” — and to “DOGE” the Department of Education’s dodgy vendor contracts.

@newyorktimes Oh and schools operating at 80 percent. What do parents do on that missing day five? Hinojosa seems to be hitting her stride as a politician. She’s long had a talent for making people feel heard, but O’Rourke said she’s become dramatically better on the stump. “I campaigned with her in El Paso a few weeks ago, and I’ve never seen her speak so well,” he said.

Her message is simple: Life has gotten too hard for hard-working people in Texas. Schools are underfunded — hundreds have gone to four days a week — and new artificial intelligence initiatives are no substitute for a good teacher in the classroom. Data centers are both a blight and a symbol of Abbott’s misplaced priorities. “It’s impacting people’s homes and lives, and it is a demonstration of the governor doing the bidding of moneyed interests and leaving the people to fend for themselves,” Hinojosa told me.

Literally blood money is keeping some Texans alive under Abbutt and Trmp.. #michellegoldberg @newyorktimes She describes blood plasma centers popping up in middle-class areas — she visited one next to a Sephora — as more people seek to sell their plasma to make ends meet. Hinojosa told me about meeting a lobbyist for the plasma center industry who was excited about all the opportunity in the state. “That’s, I think, a shocking example of where we are in Texas in 2026,” she said.

@lucianktruscott All these nincompoop idiots in their red ties and their blue suits and their government armored cars and big, fancy government aircraft to ferry them around…every single one of them is a self-satisfied, abjectly unqualified, inept, fool who should not be within a hundred miles of a military command. Can you imagine being one of the 18 soldiers in the Middle East who was killed or one of the more than 400 who were seriously wounded by Iranian drones and missiles these idiots were unprepared to defend against?

@lucianktruscott It’s bad enough that we couldn’t defend bases that were only one Persian Gulf away from Iran, most of them within a couple hundred miles. But an Air Force Base nearly 3,000 miles away? Stocked with the most expensive combat aircraft the U.S. has? We couldn’t defend that base, and Iran doesn’t even have missiles capable of flying that far.

So, what was the threat to our bomber base in Great Britain, anyway? Well, it appears that Trump and Hegseth and Vance and the rest of the macho men who pretend they are Great Warriors in command of “the most powerful military in the world” were afraid of the five men with the three white vans and a sixth man who was arrested later – none of whom have been identified, but all of whom have been released from police custody. That’s who they were afraid of.

The stupidocracy: @lucianktruscott
Did we have any of our latest technology anti-drone weaponry that is supposed to be capable of shooting down Shahed-style Iranian drones, the kind that use a motorcycle engine to power a delta-wing aircraft armed with about 100 pounds of explosive? No.

Why. The. Fuck. Not.

Because Hegseth fired the generals and the Secretary of the Army who were trying to drag the Pentagon into the 21st Century and get it focused on the kind of drone warfare that is taking place in Ukraine .... Hegseth fired General Chris Donahue, who ...was focused on studying Ukraine’s use of drones against Russia. Hegseth forced out Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, who had supported Donahue... in modernizing the army’s warfare capabilities using AI-powered aiming and tracking technology .... He fired General David Hodne, who commanded the Army Transformation and Training Command, which did exactly what its name says – modernized weaponry and trained soldiers to use it.

So the MAGAts want to protect girls and women: But the intense focus on allegations that a Cornell University student was assaulted by multiple men at a fraternity party has barely drawn a response from the federal government. The hands-off stance reflects the more muted approach that Mr. Trump’s administration has taken to sexual abuse cases on campuses in his second term.

“I don’t know that much about it,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday in response to a question about the case. “But Cornell is a fine school, and I’m sure they’ll do what’s right.” @newyorktimes

@newyorktimes 🧵 Exactly how that will work is still unclear. Tobacco companies fought off litigation for decades before attorneys hit upon the idea of the states suing for Medicaid costs. Lawsuits that held asbestos manufacturers responsible for causing mesothelioma in workers succeeded only after years of failed attempts. With those precedents, it’s no wonder the fossil fuel industry appears desperate to avoid wrestling with attribution science in the courtroom. A long, well-documented history of deception about how much they knew about the harms that the burning of their products causes to people and the planet only adds to their vulnerability. Several fossil fuel-friendly states have already passed legislation to protect the industry from liability. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Harriet Hageman of Wyoming — two of the best friends the industry has ever had in Congress — have introduced bills to give fossil fuel companies sweeping immunity from virtually any kind of climate accountability.30-

Where’s the piper? Time to pay him.

There are too many confounding local factors. But what attribution science does, writes Prof. Aisha Saad of Georgetown University’s law school, is “bring about an epistemic shift, rendering climate change not only legible but litigable.” @newyorktimes

So the Big Mac is a big lie. #mattstoller McDonald’s was operating consistent with a trend among many other large corporations. Seven years earlier, Home Depot acquired data pricing firm BlackLocus to optimize its pricing strategies. RealPage, the company that has become synonymous with rent fixing among the nation’s largest landlords, acquired algorithmic pricing firms Yieldstar in 2010 and Rainmaker Group in 2019. A few years later, Instacart acquired algorithmic pricing firm Eversight in 2022.

Each of these acquisitions constituted a broader trend in which major sectors of the economy have gained access to tools that process immense portfolios of data - including personal data and proprietary data shared between competitors - to “optimize” price. As part of this trend, predictable pricing has given way to constant price experiments, and price competition has given way to vast cartels. “Optimization” became a euphemism for maximizing corporate profits.

Oops. The cat is out of the bag. #mashagessen @newyorktimes #NAZA

The word “terrorism” appears in a different context in a clip the makers of “NAZA” pulled from a 1986 episode of the PBS program “Firing Line,” in which a young Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting his edited volume “Terrorism: How the West Can Win.” In his perfectly unaccented American English, he offers a clear definition of terrorism: “The systematic and deliberate attack, the murder, maiming and menacing of innocents, of civilians for political goals.” Unspoken but unmissable is that this definition applies to the actions of the Israeli military and to the state it serves.

The letter to MSNOW

Ty #joycevance Side point: The letters themselves are just…off. Boutrous said today that he “didn’t think they were real” at first. Here’s the MSNOW letter, with no letterhead. It has no signature either. Tell me the President acted without any advance preparation, without coming out and saying it.

This situation is reminiscent of when Trump went after Jim Acosta by taking away his hard pass because he was “rude.” This same judge found that the due process violation alone was enough to temporarily block the White House’s action against Acosta, without even reaching his First Amendment claim. After he made that decision, “Presidential press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said…that Acosta's press pass would be restored and the White House would ‘develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future.’”

For those in Bible belt states : https://www.illegalposter.com/

Straight of the “how to negotiate with a moron” chapter of The Art of Diplomacy: Diplomats involved in the process of drafting the 10-page agreement released on Tuesday said they spent months on the language — and then waited for what they hoped would be the right moment to present it to Mr. Trump. And even then they were nervous, acutely aware that after the United States signed an agreement on nuclear energy with Saudi Arabia over the summer, Mr. Trump announced, the next day, that he was changing key terms.

The diplomats spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. @newyorktimes

RE: https://mastodon.social/@openletterbot/117304103209759263

Amen

From the #handsOffTheKennedyCenter demo on Friday night: