Robert D. Peters

Proud husband, parent and grandparent! Thrilled to have been #DNC2016 Delegate pledged to @HillaryClinton. #StillwithHer
#BidenHarris2024
#FinishtheJob!

[Robert D. Peters @RobertDPeters]

https://t.co/hngDk7S9Ga

[Robert D. Peters @RobertDPeters]

The Boss Bruce Springsteen!
https://t.co/PFyeHR0AMb

[Robert D. Peters @RobertDPeters]

Barney Frank was a great American leader on so many issues that resonate today. #RIP #BarneyFrank

https://t.co/wuLmerMjsp

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Hungarian PM Péter Magyar:

“Ukraine is the victim and has every right to defend its territorial sovereignty and integrity with every means available to it”

What a refreshing change from Viktor Orbán.

[Senate Judiciary Democrats 🇺🇸 @JudiciaryDems]

Sen. DURBIN: We ask all these nominees what happened on January 6th, and they say 'it was sunny and the wind was blowing.' No. There was a mob that attacked the Capitol. If you can’t acknowledge that, then what the hell good are you?

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Greenland has been on the map since roughly the year 982, when a Norwegian called Erik the Red sailed there and named it. The Vikings. Not Donald Trump. Vikings with axes and no central heating.

It is the largest island on Earth. It appears on every atlas ever printed, every globe ever made, every satellite image ever taken. NASA photographs it from space on a daily basis. It has its own government, its own flag, its own capital city and its own deeply held opinion about not being owned by anyone in a red baseball cap.

The United States Air Force has had a base at Thule since 1951. Which means American military personnel have been eating terrible food and freezing their bits off on Greenland for 74 years, apparently without telling Governor Landry.

And yet here stands Jeff Landry, Governor of Louisiana, a man elected by actual human beings to run an actual American state, explaining to a Danish television crew that Greenland did not exist until 2025.

This is the intellectual foundation of the most aggressive territorial land grab attempted by a Western democracy since the Second World War. Not strategic doctrine. Not legal argument. Not geopolitical necessity. A governor who apparently believes the world’s largest island was invented by a property developer from Queens.

They want to take Greenland. They cannot find Greenland.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Terry Moran 🇺🇸 @TerryMoran]

Every word.

Chris Van Hollen tells the plain, honest truth about the Department of Justice under Trump.

The symbol of this era: That stupid, huge banner of Trump on the DOJ building.

It’s a Declaration of Corruption.

DOJ is now a national disgrace.

[Sen. Elissa Slotkin @SenatorSlotkin]

While we are still learning the full results of President Trump's summit with President Xi, this is a clear step backward and a full 180 from his first term. American farmland should be for American farmers -- not for the Chinese Communist Party. @RepKMR and I have a bipartisan bill to prevent CCP purchases of Michigan's farmland, which has passed the House in the Farm Bill.

President Trump's apparent capitulation to the Chinese government on this issue makes it even more urgent that the Senate passes our bill immediately. We need to protect America's land and our national security.
https://t.co/guKq8DDnM6

[Christiane Amanpour @amanpour]

⁠Ahmadinejad, SERIOUSLY? The Holocaust denier? The wipe Israel off the map guy? The Green Revolution death and torture guy who stole the 2009 elections? The nuclear program accelerator guy? The Islamic fundamentalist end-days guy?

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Poland Paid $50 Billion for America’s Friendship. Turns Out That Wasn’t the Deal.

Poland has spent fifty billion dollars on American weapons. F-35s, Abrams tanks, Patriots, HIMARS. The full catalogue, ordered with the desperate enthusiasm of a country that shares a border with Belarus.

Last week the Pentagon scrapped plans to deploy 4,200 troops to Poland. The brigade had already held a send-off ceremony, shipped its tanks, and sent advance personnel into Europe. Then came the call. Don’t bother.

Poland was blindsided. Their officials found out by ringing American congressmen. JD Vance turned up at the White House briefing today and told a Polish reporter he was overreacting. It was just a delay, he said. Europe needs to stand on its own two feet.

Poland spends nearly four percent of GDP on defence. It hosted American troops and paid fifteen thousand dollars per soldier per year for the privilege. It sent men to Iraq when Washington asked, even when France and Germany quietly suggested that everyone involved might regret it.

Rumsfeld once called Poland the most pro-American country on earth, including America itself. 

The reward for twenty years of that devotion is being told, by a man who has never heard a gunshot in anger, to look in the mirror.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

After this Thursday’s show, the Ed Sullivan Theater will go dark, and we’ll lose one of the nation’s funniest and most courageous, truthful, and gentlemanly critics of Trump and his regime.

Farewell, and thank you, Stephen. https://t.co/0syXYZoCnD

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

On May 4, The Washington Post won two Pulitzers. To stream the announcement live, the paper had to bring back two of the video operators it had laid off in February. Nobody left in the building could run the equipment. They walked past the new opinion studio on their way in.

The new opinion studio was built with $80,000 in video gear. Its flagship podcast has 515 YouTube subscribers after 186 videos and more than 20 episodes. Apple Podcasts users have given it 2.3 stars. The most positive review on record: "This is bad and the people making it should feel bad."

Dave Jorgenson, the journalist who built WaPo's TikTok presence, left last year. His personal YouTube channel now has 358,000 subscribers. The opinion podcast has 515. A former WaPo journalist working with a small team has built more than 600 times the audience of the flagship new show.

Bezos was warned by his own opinion editor that the rightward pivot would cost subscribers. His documented response, per the New York Times: "I don't care."

The piece's own summary is the only sentence needed: "Bezos laid off the people who win the Pulitzers. He's funding the people who lose the subscribers."

[Steve Schmidt @SteveSchmidtSES]

“Thomas Massie’s offense wasn’t ideological betrayal. It was independence. In today’s Republican Party, independent thought itself is the crime.”

https://t.co/E0Vu4vSXyE

[Scott Dworkin @funder]

When Eric Trump tried to lie and claim his family doesn't trade individual stocks, Rep. Don Beyer wasn't having it.

He publicly posted the actual 113-page financial disclosure, exposing 15 separate transactions worth millions of dollars—complete with Donald Trump's own signature. We have the receipts. Dive in: https://t.co/YZbOhYf4RB

[Michael McFaul @McFaul]

Ukraine isn't subjugated.

Its government still stands.

Its military is stronger than before.

NATO expanded with Finland & Sweden joining.

And Russia has paid an enormous price in casualties & economic strain.

After four years, Putin is further from his goals—not closer.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The Wrong Side of History Has a Very Specific Smell

By Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Ben Hodges is not a man who wastes words. The former commanding general of US Army Europe has spent the better part of three years telling anyone who would listen that Ukraine was going to win, that Russia was going to lose, and that the only real question was how much unnecessary dying would happen in between. He has now added a postscript, and it is not a comfortable one: America, he says, is going to deeply regret what it failed to do.

He is, of course, absolutely right.

Ukraine is not merely surviving this war. It is industrialising it. The country that Russia expected to fold in 72 hours has spent three years building one of the most sophisticated drone warfare ecosystems on the planet, developing long-range strike capabilities that have genuinely rattled the Kremlin, and producing battle-hardened soldiers who have forgotten more about modern combined-arms warfare than most NATO generals have ever learned. When this war ends, Ukraine will not be a grateful, shell-shocked recipient of Western charity. It will be the single most capable and battle-tested defence industry in the World. Full stop.

And the United States, which spent the last stretch of this conflict flirting with the aggressor, slow-walking ammunition, blocking long-range strikes, and sending its president to Mar-a-Lago to take phone calls from Putin like a middle manager hoping to avoid a performance review, will have precisely zero claim on any of that.

Now imagine the day it ends.

Imagine a billion people in the streets. Kyiv, Warsaw, Tallinn, Berlin, London, Tokyo, Seoul, every city that understands what it means when a free country refuses to die. The flags, the tears, the noise of it. The sheer, thunderous relief of a world that held its breath for years and can finally exhale. It will be one of those moments that gets burned into the collective memory of a generation, the kind that people will tell their grandchildren about with the particular pride of having been on the right side.

And America will watch it on television.

Not as a liberator. Not as the arsenal of democracy, the role it once played and once deserved. It will watch as the country that looked at the greatest struggle for freedom in a generation and decided, at the critical moment, to see which way the wind was blowing before quietly backing the wrong horse. The Stars and Stripes will not be waving in Maidan that day. Ukrainian children will not be naming their sons after American presidents. The defence contracts, the partnerships, the strategic relationships, the soft power that the United States spent eighty years accumulating as the world’s indispensable nation: all of it auctioned off for nothing.

There is a particular kind of shame that comes not from doing something terrible, but from failing to do something obvious.

The historical record does not grade on a curve, and it has no sympathy for anyone who says they were confused about which side was which.

Russia invaded. Ukraine bled. The rest of the world chose.

America, under its current management, is choosing badly. And when that billion people starts dancing, the silence from Washington will be the loudest sound in the room.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

HODGES: We are going to regret that we, United States, didn’t do more to help Ukraine, because Ukraine going to win this war. Ukraine’s defeat of Russia is in best interests of all of us. Ukraine will become dominant defense industry power in Europe. America will be left behind.

[Orla Joelsen @OJoelsen]

When Donald Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, Jeff Landry, arrived in Nuuk on Sunday, he was accompanied by physician Joseph Griffin, who told Danish broadcaster TV2 News that he had traveled to gain insight into Greenland’s healthcare system.

However, Greenland’s Department of Health told Sermitsiaq that it had not been contacted regarding any planned meetings.

“The Department of Health and Persons with Disabilities is not aware of any plans for a meeting,” the department stated.

Greenlandic health minister: “Deeply problematic”

According to Griffin, he is in Nuuk as a volunteer and has no affiliation with the U.S. government.

On Sunday, Greenlandic Health Minister Anna Wangenheim wrote on LinkedIn that she viewed the Americans’ approach as deeply problematic:

“It is deeply problematic when individuals with a political mission to make Greenland part of the United States send a so-called ‘volunteer doctor’ to Nuuk to ‘assess our needs.’”

“Greenlanders are not test subjects in a geopolitical project,” the minister wrote.

— Sermitsiaq

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

There is no way the republicans would be anything less that outraged if Obama had taken almost $2 billion of taxpayer dollars and given it to people he pardoned for trying to steal an election. Every republican in congress who doesn’t speak up and prevent this is complicit

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨“The longer you make this last, the worse it is…”

Is what an ICE agent said to U.S. citizens during an unlawful stop in Tennessee.

In the video, ICE agents and police illegally boxed in a vehicle, trapped the car from leaving, shoved a phone through the passenger window… to scan the passenger’s face… and then threatened the driver for stating his constitutional rights.

The driver repeatedly asked the most basic constitutional question:

“Am I being detained or am I free to go?”

And notice how they never gave a clear lawful reason for the stop, or any questions…

The driver told them to get their hands out of his car. He told them they needed to move their vehicle because they were blocking him in. He repeatedly asked what crime had been committed…

And the agent’s response?

“The longer you make this last, the worse it is.”

That is not how constitutional policing works in America.

You do not lose your Fourth Amendment rights because an ICE agent gets irritated that you won’t instantly comply with unlawful demands.

You do not have to surrender your rights to avoid retaliation.

And after they were done violating these two U.S. citizens rights, you can hear an officer say, “be more cooperative next time…”

That is an especially disturbing thing to say after illegally detaining people who kept asking…

“What did we even do?”

Nothing in this video suggests reasonable suspicion of a crime, before they illegally boxed the vehicle in, and started demanding compliance.

That is exactly why constitutional protections exist in the first place… and why every American is losing their constitutional rights the longer this happens without accountability.