Sammygski

I Love Bonnies, Buffalo Sports, Music, Collecting Cards, Rugby, Humor, Food, Outdoors, Learning, Life. Rather Not Wear Shoes.

[Sammygski @SammyGski]

Next year is looking good. Just need one more coaching change.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Some thoughts on the new Epstein Files revelations:

I’ve now read everything that’s come out from the new Haberman and Swan book, and the thing I keep coming back to is the Situation Room. They held multiple meetings in the Situation Room about the Epstein files. That room is for war. It’s for national security emergencies. It is not for figuring out how to spin a scandal you’re telling the country is a hoax.

While the President was deflecting or calling this old news, his own Vice President and Chief of Staff were huddled in the most leak-proof room in America because they knew how bad it really was.

You don’t take a nothingburger to the Situation Room.

And I have to be honest, reading all this brings back a lot of frustration about what happened in the House of Representatives. I sat there and watched Mike Johnson send the House home early to dodge a vote on releasing these files. I watched him refuse to swear in a duly elected colleague for months just to stall the discharge petition. Month after month of excuses, arm twisting, and procedural games, all to keep this information from the public. We only got the files because survivors, families, and a handful of members in both parties simply refused to let it go.

So when people ask me why I talk so much about transparency and accountability, this is why. The truth eventually comes out. It always does.

The only question is whether your leaders helped reveal it or helped bury it.

Everyone who voted to keep these files hidden should have to answer for that.

Finally, notice what’s missing from all of this is any sign that Trump’s DOJ will actually investigate the powerful men named in these files.

Draw your own conclusions about why a Justice Department run by the President’s former defense lawyers might not be eager to pull that thread.

[Sammygski @SammyGski]

@SenBillCassidy You waited too long to do the right thing, Bill. You should've stood up for citizens of your state and country when it would have made a difference over the last two years.

[doomer @uncledoomer]

saving 20% of my income so that in 30 years i can afford 11 months of assisted living. the math is airtight

[Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine]

I’m humbled and proud to officially be your Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate to take on Susan Collins and the billionaire class she represents. Together, we will win this seat back for working Mainers.

Thank you, Maine.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Scientists at Trump’s EPA say they are being told to make chemical risks “disappear on paper.” Not to study or manage them, but to make them vanish.

When a safety test on a household chemical shows danger, supervisors reportedly ask to keep shrinking the scenario until the poison looks safe.

They have reassigned senior scientists to paperwork and handed life-and-death risk assessments to staff with less experience. They have installed former chemical industry lobbyists to run the very offices that are supposed to regulate the chemical industry.

A gift to industry, paid for with your family’s health.

They are even throwing out research on how certain chemicals hit certain communities harder, calling decades of established science “DEI.”

You can make risk disappear on paper.

The cancer does not disappear.

The birth defects do not disappear.

The infertility does not disappear.

The kids drinking the water and getting sick do not disappear.

The EPA exists to protect people, not to protect the profit margins of the people poisoning them.

Every American deserves to know what is happening. #TrumpMakesUsSick

https://t.co/5DwXgxBybt

[AthletesInSpace @AthletesInSpace]

Never forget - inflation was TRENDING DOWNWARDS, trending towards the Fed’s target rate of 2%, and THE US ECONOMY WAS TRENDING TOWARDS NORMALIZATION FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2019

And the dumbest fucking people in the world voted for a guy who has completely single-handedly reversed those trends thru his own domestic and foreign policy decisions

[Tom Morello @tmorello]

No notes

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Bari Weiss built her entire public identity on the proposition that cancel culture was destroying American discourse. She wrote about it. She founded a publication around it. She championed the Intellectual Dark Web as brave thinkers being silenced for saying forbidden things.

Scott Pelley said factually true things, without yelling, without cursing, without threatening anyone, in a staff meeting. He said Bilton had slender qualifications. He said Weiss was murdering 60 Minutes. He said these things because they are true and because saying true things in rooms where powerful people prefer comfortable silence is - per Weiss's own stated philosophy - exactly what journalists are supposed to do.

She fired him.

JVL names what this exposes precisely. They never wanted to end cancel culture. They wanted to control it. Some forbidden ideas - the ones MAGA likes - must be protected and platformed. Other ideas - the ones Bari Weiss dislikes - are genuinely verboten. Say them out loud and you lose your job.

The Pentagon press office is now classified. Tim Miller was threatened with FARA for sharing a public news report. Comey is being prosecuted for seashells on a beach. The federal workforce faces proposed NDAs. Pelley was fired for refusing instructions to broadcast unverified assertions and then saying so in a meeting.

The through line is not chaos. It is a consistent, documented project to determine who gets to speak, about what, to whom, and under whose authority. Cancel culture was never the target. It was always the tactic. Weiss just proved it by doing the thing she built her career opposing, the moment she had the power to do it.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Twenty-six Supreme Court opinions still pending. Marc Elias has personally litigated two of them. He won the first four cases he argued before the Court. He expects to lose the fifth.

NRSC v. FEC involves a 50-year-old limit on how much money a political party can spend in full coordination with its own candidates. The Republican Party has been trying to strike it down for Elias's entire 30-year career. The Trump DOJ switched sides after inauguration and argued against its own law, leaving the Democratic Party to intervene and defend a federal statute the administration abandoned. If the Court strikes it down, the already broken campaign finance system loses one of its last structural constraints.

Watson v. RNC involves whether mail ballots postmarked on or before Election Day but received a few days after must be counted. The RNC says no. If the Court agrees, tens of thousands of voters who mailed their ballots on time will be disenfranchised. The conservative Court denied Elias's request to argue the case - leaving only Mississippi's lawyer to defend a law with national implications.

Then there is birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment says it plainly. Even Elias finds it hard to imagine this Court siding with Trump. But this Court invented presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. It limited Congress's ability to enforce the Voting Rights Act. It overturned 50 years of abortion precedent. Hard to imagine has become the wrong standard.

Three cases. Campaign money without limits, mail votes that don't count, citizenship that can be revoked. June has 27 days left. Each one of them matters.

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

Here’s Thom Tillis saying he’s voting to codify that Trump can’t have a $1.8 billion fund to reward 1/6 domestic terrorists.

Later, Tillis voted NOT to codify a ban on the fund and the ban failed by 1 vote.

It’s like Tillis saying he’d keep Pete Hegseth from becoming SECDEF and then voting to confirm him . . . which passed by 1 vote.

Another profile in cowardice and capitulation.

[Paolo Mossetti @paolomossetti]

Leen Hijaz, valedictorian at her high school in North Carolina, said the following in her graduation speech:

"Before I leave the stage, I have one last thing to say. Every single person here has a voice; we have the privilege to use it when millions around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard. Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or families being torn apart by ICE. These are not just an issue here; they are happening there, they’re happening right here as I speak. My point is, we’re not given a voice to stay silent."

Corey Robin, a political theorist at Brooklyn College, writes: "The mere mention of Palestine—maybe ICE, too—sent the high school principal, Melissa Moore, hurtling across the stage to seize the microphone from Hijaz, and stop her from saying these unapproved words.

Just look at this photograph: A young Muslim woman, speaking out, and a desperate, terrified principal trying to shut her down, lest the student say something unauthorized, disapproved, discordant with the views of an increasingly small clique of government officials and voters.

It's so pathetic. It reads like a comic play by Václav Havel. It looks like the desperate last days of the Soviet Union. I can only hope Hijaz speaks for a generation that will, one day, sweep all this garbage into the dustbin of history".

[Marcus d’Osint 🎒🕊️ @WarFrontIntel]

The onion never misses. 😂

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

“If we stop measuring climate change, there is no climate crisis”

“If we erase January 6th, it didn’t happen”

“If we don’t release certain inflation data, there’s no inflation”

“If we don’t measure food insecurity, no one’s hungry”

“If we delete research on right-wing violence, there’s no right-wing violence”

“If we stop Covid testing, we’ll have fewer cases”

The Trump administration is hiding data so you can’t truly see how corrupt and incompetent they are.

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

Why is Donald Trump protecting people who commit fraud?

DISGUSTING!

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Breaking NYT:

In a move that disproportionately targets women and minority officers, Pete Hegseth recently blocked the promotions of at least seven Navy officers who had been selected by a board of senior Navy admirals.

The decision appears driven by his anti-diversity stance rather than based on merit. https://t.co/9eesu4F4Jo

[X-Paulie M @pauliemurr]

@JeremyWGR I like the way he celebrates 😂

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

The world's richest centi-billionaire oligarch used his power to change the rules, so he could dump his garbage company (which is cartoonishly overvalued, unprofitable, and incinerating cash) on retail investors, using trillions of dollars in retirement funds as exit liquidity, all in order to become the first trillionaire.

This is the perfect metaphor for the US economy as a whole, which is entirely based on bubbles and scams.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Graham Platner: “They need us feeling hopeless and blaming our neighbors, or blaming immigrants, or blaming trans kids, blaming some marginalized community for the fact that life got harder for working people. But it wasn’t immigrants, it wasn’t trans kids. It was billionaires.”

[Sabres Fun Stats @SabresFunStats]

Sabres Iconic Photos Bracket

Round #1 Northeast Division #LetsGoBuffalo