Kelsey D. Atherton
@AthertonKD
Followers
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War, robots, & bad futures, but imagining better. EIC @CIPolicyJournal , opinions my own. Unitarian Universalist. He/him. Husband to @alymaybe , new father.
ABQ. Avatar/cover by @MattBors
Joined May 2008
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Epstein
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4th of July
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#WeBackBidenHarris
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水分補給
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ゼンゼロ
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ファンタ学園
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Independence Day
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#矢野くんの普通の日々
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Neil Gaiman
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熱中症警戒アラート
• 13759 Tweets
Willow
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Palácios
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Pinned Tweet
I have stolen
The cars
That were in your
Race
And which
You were planning
to use
In crimes
Forgive me
They were
So fast
And so furious
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Amazon announcing a change in leadership to bury news that 1) it's trying to prevent the formation of a union in its warehouses, and 2) the FTC found the company guilty of stealing from drivers it hired
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broke: debating your uncles
woke: organizing your cousins
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we fought a war to not have to do this
Speaker Pelosi has ordered the flags at the U.S. Capitol to be flown at half-staff due to the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
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nearing supercritical levels of youth pastor energy
.
@BetoORourke
challenges staff to a push-up competition in SUX Airport. Our flight is delayed so he says “we gotta make use of this time.”
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Oh, you're experiencing a structural problem? Have you ever considered trying different personal choices instead?
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Pardoning Nixon got us Iran Contra. Pardoning the people involved in Iran Contra got us the Torture Program. Refusing to even pursue charges against the Torture Program got us Trump, who regularly pardons war criminals. We've tried elite impunity and it has unequivocally failed.
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replace every confederate monument with a statue of Hot Lincoln
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We take it for granted today, but a single day on Twitter has more bad opinions than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.
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Lincoln Project's primary function is to, in the event of a Biden victory, convince people the deciding factor was the center-right and to repay that the nation should immediately expand austerity and the forever war, the exact conditions that created space for a Trump presidency
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The language Pelosi used is reminiscent of that adopted for the obituaries of civil rights martyrs, framing it as knowingly risked sacrifice with political aim. She fundamentally misunderstands how Floyd's murder was violence police chose to inflict on him during his daily life.
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McManus: Want a different U.S. Senate? Elect different senators
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These men are sweaty, elves weak, dwarves are heavy
There's hobbits on middle earth already, orc machete
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today a perfect trifecta of failed governance:
- the Senate refuses to change its rules to allow it to act on simple majority, so
- the White House governs by mandate
- which Supreme Court invalidates, saying Congress needs to pass legislation
we have, largely, anti-governance
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@FrankLuntz
@ImperialVienna
the Imperial Vienna is privately held but speaking of socialism, congrats on being publicly owned
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Man if you're surprised that John Bolton did this in a way that maximizes his personal benefit at the expense of democracy and national security, wait until you hear about literally everything else he's done in his entire career.
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J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER [ to himself]: now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.
KENNETH BAINBRIDGE [to Oppenheimer]: now we are all sons of bitches
GOOFY [present at the Trinity nuclear test, July 16, 1945]: Gawrsh
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"we replaced jobs with the surveillance state" is the 21st century in a phrase.
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Me, watching Revenge of the Sith in 2005: the thing where democracy ends thanks to dull speech from a senator of a minor province seems a bit far-fetched
Me, 2018: uggggggggh
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1900s: Fuck Around
1910s: Find Out
1920s: Fuck Around
1930s: Find Out
1940s: Find Out
1950s: Fuck Around
1960s: Fuck Around & Find Out
1970s: Find Out
1980s: Fuck Around
1990s: Fuck Around
2000s: Fuck Around
2010s: Fuck Around
2020s: Find Out
agree with this framework for history: we oscillate between fuck arounding and find outing. however, the 20th century was, imho, an extended period of find outing
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The Covid numbers are rising because the political apparatus of the US as a whole was simply unwilling to meet a pandemic with the baseline action of "pay people to stay mostly indoors for 4 months," or the follow-on of establishing comprehensive testing and tracing.
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this is dangerous levels of youth pastor energy
Well, I've seen it all. In Sioux City, IA, a girl asks Beto O'Rourke if he'll go to prom with her. O'Rourke says “First of all, as someone who did not go to prom because no one asked me, this means more than you know," before making his counter-offer: "Will you caucus for me?"
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"you wouldn't get hit by robot cars if only you subscribed to our monthly 'let the robot cars know where you are at all times' service" is somehow the worst version of the trolley problem yet
Should we all wear sensors to avoid being run over by driverless cars?
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This is just to tweet
I have ruined
the site
where you spent
your days
And which
you were planning
to use
forever
Forgive me
I was
So rich
and so stupid
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American soft power remains undeniable
Cyclist passes Russian troops in Rostov while blasting "Because I got high".
That's it, that's the tweet.
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I guess I'm just incredibly naive and thought they were salaried or at least paid a flat rate per day. This work is paid hourly? For all they have to deal with? unreal.
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$1.8 Trillion may seem like a lot, but it can also be written as "roughly one lifetime cost of the F-35 program" only instead of an underwhelming tool of war, this gives us a planet.
Entirely achievable.
Climate change: 'Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt'... "it is an urgent moral obligation of richer countries to invest in adaptation measures that will benefit the world"
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Police doing execution-style murders against a meditating protestor a hell of a way to make the public case that police should get a special new playground to practice murder techniques across a range of terrains.
The autopsy confirmed that Tortugita was shot at least 14 times, by various weapons, all over their body, and was most likely killed by a fatal shot through the head.
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when will we have a DNC where Reagan isn't praised? maybe by the 2050s?
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Hello yes I'd like to speak to the manager of protests
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This is journalistic malpractice, a naked and unquestioning endorsement of military escalation that obliterates context or understanding. It would make more sense in a Verhoeven satire than the real world, but here we are, in hell.
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Welcome to the Roberts Court, where union dues violate the first amendment but religious tests for immigration and travel do not.
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It's not the whole of the story, but I think an underrated part of the present crisis is the media habits of elites, where the sweeping rollback of bodily autonomy is treated as an intellectual curiosity to debate but protests against such a rollback are seen as mortal threats.
The Senate just PASSED by unanimous consent a bill to extend protections from the Supreme Court Police to the immediate family members of Supreme Court Justices.
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tired: this is a watergate redux
wired: we've collapsed into like a late-Hapsburg or late-Ottoman state, where advisors and aides all govern according to their own whims and manage up by distracting the angry and inept leader with theater, trying to ride it out before collapse
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@cafreiman
for someone with no understanding of what socialism is, I admire your commitment to being publicly owned
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The United States preparing for war in a thawing arctic as it fails to provide power in a freezing Texas is a little on the nose.
As the Arctic warms, sea ice melts, shipping lanes emerge and resource exploitation booms, the chance for conflict between nations in the region will increase, so the Army wants to be prepared.
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Congrats to Space Force for stealing the coveted "watched Star Wars, loved Star Wars, did not understand Star Wars" trophy from the Air Force, which had it several decades running
Maj. Gen. DeAnna Burt, head of Combined Force Space Component Command, is sworn in to the Space Force by 2nd Lt. Wellington Brookins of the 533rd Training Squadron during an International Space Day celebration May 7 at Vandenberg AFB, Calif. (Space Force photo: Michael Peterson)
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For more on the Russian invasion, we turn to the author of the last internationally reviled war of choice, whose actions resulted in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths
NEW: Former Pres. George W. Bush condemns Russia’s attack on Ukraine, calling it the “gravest security crisis on the European continent since World War II.”
“We cannot tolerate the authoritarian bullying and danger that Putin poses.”
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Maybe the single most toxic modern idea in US politics is the notion of red and blue states as fixed, ideologically homogeneous entities, whose plight and even moral worth is intimately linked to what party won the last presidential election there.
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"young people don't vote" is a heckuva way to turn obstacles to voting faced by people with limited resources into a lecture based on individual failing, at scale
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I...I just wanted trains
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every single one of these officers and the departments that support them are a greater threat to speech than basically anything that happens on twitter
WATCH - Portland Police officers knock a protester off of his bicycle and arrest him outside of Lownsdale Square Park near the Federal Courthouse downtown
#LiveOnK2
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the early 2000s sucked and set the stage for so much of what is happening and it's insanity that people fondly remember it as a calm, polite era when it saw the birth of DHS & the forever war.
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W E W O U L D L O V E T O D I S C U S S W I T H Y O U T H E M A N Y B E N E F I T S O F C O R N
.
@BudLight
America’s corn farmers are disappointed in you. Our office is right down the road! We would love to discuss with you the many benefits of corn! Thanks
@MillerLight
and
@CoorsLite
for supporting our industry.
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standing barefoot on an expansive neatly trimmed lawn, in a soft-pink polo and an assault rifle pointed at protesters, in front of a building that easily looks like a museum but is apparently a house, is a strong case in favor of like a 90% marginal tax rate
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a fun game to play is "is this single pentagon contract bigger than my state's entire budget for a year" and while it isn't always the case it sometimes is!
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you ever think about how CIA was caught spying on the Senate's investigation of CIA torture & then the CIA's Inspector General was told by Deputy NatSec Advisor Avril Haines not to discipline the personnel who did it, & then the Senate confirmed Haines to be Biden's DNI
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wild to me that this guy, of all senators, is getting primaried
Qualified immunity makes it almost impossible for a victim of excessive force by a police officer to hold that officer accountable in a court of law.
That must end.
Today,
@SenSanders
,
@SenWarren
, and I introduced legislation to once-and-for-all abolish qualified immunity.
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Weird that Andrew Sullivan's editors keep giving him 2300 words when he clearly only wants 14.
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this is the most Warhammer 40K thing I have ever seen
Upgraded face-masks now available in seasonal colours for clergy. Ideal for most liturgical settings. Please don’t be fooled by cheap imitations. These are the original. Genuine authentic features. Made from recycled brass and other materials. BOGOF. Ideal for large processions.
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The Pentagon spending bill is just shy of twice as much money per year as the Build Back Better act, and it keeps getting bigger
BREAKING: Senate defense appropriations bill is out giving the Pentagon more than $10 billion than requested, $725.8 billion
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@JeffBezos
cheer up, you've got 30, maybe 40 years to shed your wealth and bend public memory such that children are not celebrating in the streets when the news comes that you've passed
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McGrath gonna spend half an F-35 on her campaign and lose by 10 pts
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Everything happening in Portland is downstream from the War on Terror, which itself is downstream from the War on Drugs. Every president for not just my entire adult life, but the adult lives of all Gen X and almost all Boomers, have facilitated this violent repression at home.
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The death of ACORN is the prologue to this whole rotten era; a genuine social good attacked in bad faith by a sloppy gimmick, then abandoned rather than defended in the interest of politely moving on.
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is this in any way related to the rising cost of having kids across all swaths of the population
But over the past decade, as more women of all social classes have prioritized education and career, delaying childbearing has become a broad pattern almost everywhere.
The result has been the slowest growth of the U.S. population since the 1930s.
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gonna be something when McKinsey ingests "defund the police" and spits it out as "what if we created an ACA-style marketplace for private security, and let HOAs opt-in"
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"cut the Pentagon's budget by 10%" is virtually identical to "set the Pentagon's budget back at somewhere between 2017 and 2018 levels"
I'll be championing a proposal this week that cuts the Pentagon's budget by at least 10%. That's $74 billion—and an important first step to reining in a military budget that is larger than the military budgets of the next 11 nations combined.
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the arguments against DC statehood are bad because no coherent argument exists that doesn't immediately reveal itself to be an argument against democracy in general
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what do you mean the wallet inspector isn't real
who did I just give $80 to
During his 2018 confirmation hearing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declared that he considered Roe to be settled law, winning him the crucial support of Senator Susan Collins. A reversal by him would be politically explosive, says
@hillhulse
.
Listen live:
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A fun quirk of history is this man almost sparked a shooting war with Russia over an airport in Kosovo in 1999 and James Blunt (yes, that James Blunt) is on record saying if his commander hadn't refused the order to fire on the Russians, he would have refused it himself.
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take literally any history class, I am begging you
I’m okay with a US Space Force. But what we need most is a Truth Force — one that defends against all enemies of accurate information, both foreign & domestic.
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We are, all of us, at best no more than a decade of misrule and one bad natural disaster away from this
BREAKING: A boil water notice is now issued for all of Austin. The city’s main water treatment plant has sustained a power loss, which officials are trying to fix now.
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Like the imagined aesthetic of pre-Vatican II Catholicism but don't want to engage with any of the realities of religion in the 21st century?
Have you considered, instead, getting really into Warhammer 40K?
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I am begging everyone to at least ask what series of events led to the US holding Guantanamo Bay in the first place
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Bold choice to update the cover for the next printing like this.
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public defenders are good and essential and underfunded and undervalued and it's gross to use who they have to defend to denigrate that
*Larry Brock, the Texas man seen with zip-tie handcuffs on the Senate floor, makes 1st court appearance after his arrest.
*He provided financial documents to secure a public defender.
*So U.S. taxpayers will fund his defense for attacking the U.S.
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The same America that liberated concentration camps also maintained internment camps. A narrative that remembers only the first and forgets the second can lead us to a place where the cruelties committed in our name seem alien, rather than a deep internal flaw to strive against.
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the reason the left doesn't have a think tank infrastructure is that the interests of left policy go against the interests of people with the money to throw at a think tank
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I for one love to build a razor-thin governing majority, won on the backs of extraordinary turnout with cataclysmic calls to action, and then use the first 8 months in power to refuse to build power or remove obstacles, and ultimately hinge it on a car guy who loves debt ceilings
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"I was so busy doing a xenophobia that my subordinate did a coup while I was out of state" is a bit on the nose, and yet
I will be rescinding and reversing any actions taken by the Lt. Governor when I return.
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the Democratic party is extraordinarily fortunate to have AOC as one of its most visible figures and seems hell bent on squandering that through self-sabotage
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"defund the police" also means "don't let them accept surplus armored vehicles, even if the Pentagon offers them for free"
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oh come the fuck on
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I am begging anyone who covers this to please take like five seconds to look up what happens when wars end and how countries set the terms of those ends.
Biden says US in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, US asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country.
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@chitribopinions
Congrats on cementing your editorial line as expansive enough to include "sometimes it is okay to murder a child."
You could still take this down and issue an apology for it. That is always on option.
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currently my plan for retirement is either that we have a wholly different politics by the 2050s or I'll die from climate change related reasons before then
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@dmartosko
customary to remove the "ums" from a transcript but I guess your point is that you hate anyone who takes the time to talk to you?
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If there's anyone I trust on long-term security decisions, it's the former CIA director who set up a shared gmail account with his mistress
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NATO attempting a No Fly Zone over Ukraine would just be nuclear war with more steps and advance warning, please stop asking the admin to do it
@PentagonPresSec
When asked why the US/NATO has not set up a no-fly zone in Ukrainian airspace, Kirby says that "that's a policy decision at the nation-state level." He reiterates the administration's position to not deploy US forces to Ukraine while at the same time strengthening NATO allies.
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turns out it's super hard to get people on board with a politics that primarily protects homeowner investments when their whole experience of adulthood is insurmountable debts, repeat recessions, and the prospect that civilization as we know it might not exist in 50 years
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"There are two Americas, Cruz declares: “GQ America” and what he calls “Field & Stream America.”"
Fun fact: Field & Stream is owned by the same company and headquartered in the same Park Ave office in New York City as Popular Science. It's just three miles from the GQ offices.
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When I am middle-aged and wandering the drought-scorched fireplains where forests once grew, as I scavenge for intact containers that might work to hold water should I be so lucky as to find a spring, I'll think to myself "at least they kept the deficit low."
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Feel like "the rich are robbing us for all we've got and getting away with it" is more compelling than a button that says "I paid more in taxes than the sitting president" imo
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not sure there's anything more cyberpunk than putting together code that lets anyone stymie a theocratic bounty system
People are amazing. This guy made a bot to overwhelm that horrible tx site and when it banned his IP after 300ish entries, he made an iPhone work around that anyone can use
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New rule for 2019: no writing about college student ~mores~ until you've filed at least three stories on what Alaska's defunding of universities means for academic freedom
The new campus mores at American universities are meant to make students safe. What they really do is get in the way of the muscular exchange of honest views in the service of seeking truth, writes
@BretStephensNYT
.
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finally a viable path to DC statehood
Imagine if Jose Andres had 35,000 convict soldiers at his command
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congrats to Project Lincoln for failing to secure the one vote it actively cultivated
George W. Bush says he wrote in Condoleezza Rice for president in 2020 election
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@nycgov
did you extend the eviction moratorium or are we just shaming people for working to keep a roof over their heads
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Aaron Sorkin ruined how an entire generation understand and conducts politics.
Kind of amazed and appalled by the number of folks on Left who applauded the expulsion of
@PressSec
and her family from a restaurant.
This, in the end, is a triumph for
@realDonaldTrump
vision of America:
Now we’re divided by red plates & blue plates!
#sad
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