Kyle Stowell

sports enthusiast, poker player, dog lover

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

My July 5th Diatribe after Returning from Europe again:

The weirdest thing about leaving America is realizing how much of America is just a sales pitch.

You spend your whole life hearing “greatest country on Earth,” then you go overseas and see clean trains, safer streets, affordable medicine, cities where people can walk without playing Frogger with an SUV, and workers who take vacations without acting like they committed treason.

And then you come home.

You come home to potholes, medical debt, school shooting drills, $17 airport sandwiches, people living in tents under highways, politicians wearing flag pins (or worse, gun pins) while doing absolutely nothing for the people standing in food bank lines, and billionaires being treated like they’re the fragile ones.

And somehow we’re all supposed to stand there, hand over heart, and pretend this is normal.

I don’t hate America. I hate what America has been taught to tolerate.

I hate that we call basic things “radical.” Healthcare? Radical. Paid leave? Radical. Clean air? Radical. Kids not getting shot in math class? Somehow political.

Meanwhile, the loudest “patriots” are usually the same people telling struggling Americans to shut up, stop complaining, and be grateful.

Grateful for what? A flag doesn’t pay rent. A bald eagle doesn’t cover insulin. Fireworks don’t fix bridges. And chanting “USA” doesn’t make a broken system less broken.

America has incredible people. That’s the tragedy. The people are better than the system they’ve been forced to defend.

So no, I’m not going to call America the greatest country on Earth just because it has the best marketing department.

Real patriotism isn’t pretending the country is perfect.

Real patriotism is being angry that it isn’t, and blaming minorities and immigrants for your own piece of shit life that you created.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Jack Smith spent two years building the most serious federal cases against a president in American history. He indicted on classified documents and January 6. Both were dismissed when Trump took office. A federal judge has since permanently blocked the release of his classified documents report.

He said Thursday that the United States is facing an attack on the rule of law different in kind and scope from anything he has seen in his lifetime. He said judges can no longer trust the Justice Department as currently constituted. He said prosecutors in Minnesota refused retribution orders against families of people ICE shot earlier this year. And he said the pardons for January 6 participants send one message to those pardoned and a second, equally troubling message to every federal law enforcement officer watching.

Smith doesn't have political ambitions. He has no book to sell. He resigned, saw his work buried, and is doing press on the eve of the 250th to say what he believes the record requires.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

To my Republican colleagues:

The President of the United States made $2.2 billion in one year while sitting in the Oval Office, most of it from industries he regulates. Experts now compare his self-enrichment to Putin and other authoritarians, not to any leader of a democracy.

You know this is blatant corruption.

You say it privately.

So when will you say it publicly?

Is holding your seat really worth your silence?

I’ve heard the argument. If you speak out, you lose your primary, and someone worse takes your place. But look around. What has your silence actually prevented? The corruption grows bolder every day you stay quiet. The country needs your courage more than it needs your incumbency.

One day your kids and grandkids will ask what you did when the President of the United States sold the office for billions. They will read the record. They will know whether you stood up or stayed quiet to protect a title.

Ask yourself how you want to be remembered, because history will remember either way.
https://t.co/2gYfVphsXz

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨HOLY SHIT: Thomas Massie is spitting some FACTS right now that should SHUT MAGA UP:

“I think it's ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the White House, and we're yelling 'election fraud'? I mean, we won all the damn elections.”

[Tom Santos @tommysantos14]

I'm going to give you the MAGA Fascist Propaganda Playbook in a few steps:

Step 1: Pick one or more issues.
For example, illegal immigration and election integrity.

Step 2: Combine them and make ridiculous, false claims to scare people. Tap into patriotic sentiment.
Your America is being stolen from you because illegals are INVADING our country and illegally voting in our elections!

Step 3: Repeat, over and over, for months.
This step is called the Illusory Effect. It's the most important step, and it's the key Trump strategy. Don't stop repeating, even after the bullshit is debunked. Even if there's video proving it's all a lie. Even if folks are on tape admitting it's all fake! Keep repeating. Over and over. Don't stop.

Step 4: Use anecdotal, tangential events as proof of the larger claims.
Keep watch for one-off, random events, videos, or situations you can hijack and claim they prove your false claims. It doesn't matter how small or insignificant. Their brains will conflate, exaggerate, and draw a connection. Stupid people don't need this step to follow you. But if you can do this successfully, it will cement the propaganda in their minds as real - they are too lazy to actually dig in and scrutinize. One-liners and simple images are easier to process and accept as true.

Step 5: Enact laws, take over processes, or suspend rights. Use your false claims as justification
You never have to actually prove your claims. If you've successfully done steps 1-4, now you can take action using them as the evidence and the rationale.

And people, years later, will still be in your comments typing the exact same debunked talking points from years ago.

They can't remember to pay their gas bill, but they remember they were told years ago that Antifa actually attacked the Capitol and not them.

There you have it. MAGA fascism in 5 steps.

[Acyn @Acyn]

AOC: Mike Johnson paints this as though it’s some partisan witch hunt. But if you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.

And he’s talking about running a protection racket. And we are already seeing that this Trump administration has run what some have called one of the largest pedophile protection programs in American history.

And so when Mike Johnson tells a group of wealthy donors, I'm the only thing standing between you, and a consequence that should rattle at the conscience of every American.

What he wants to do is create—or rather, not even create, because it’s already been created—but protect a class of impunity in America that says, “You can commit whatever crime, and so long as you pay a check to us, we will protect you.”

And that is a model of extortion in American politics. And you know what? That’s their pitch.

[Stew Peters @realstewpeters]

MIKE JOHNSON: “If we lose the midterms, the Dems will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body. They will go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors, and friends.”

This is actually the best case I’ve heard for voting Democrat.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

WWII Veteran and Purple Heart recipient Robert Hilliard:

"Next week I'll be 101 years old. In February 1944 when I was 18 years old I was inducted into the army and what they taught me to do there was to kill people who set up detention camps. Can you imagine how I felt earlier this year when they announced that one of the future detention camps would be at that same camp landing in Florida? We have a fascist, a fascist government, that allows innocent people to be put in detention camps and incarcerated."

Source: @tomaskenn

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Elias's comparison is the one worth sitting with. When Bill Clinton briefly boarded Loretta Lynch's plane on a Phoenix tarmac in 2016 and they talked about grandchildren and golf - no documented request, no documented outcome, a conversation - the media treated it as a scandal that required weeks of coverage. Trump stood at a podium in Pennsylvania, described personally calling a federal prosecutor to investigate an election while his preferred candidate was losing, and the Pennsylvania federal prosecutor was sitting in the audience being publicly thanked. Elias: none of the reporters present found this worthy of a question.

The normalization that allows that to happen is not benign. When the president describes using the federal prosecution apparatus to intervene in a state election and it registers as a moment of rally color rather than a constitutional question, the mechanism that would otherwise produce accountability has been eroded. That erosion is itself the story underneath the story.

[Susan Rice @AmbassadorRice]

This is a jaw-dropping, horrific surrender document complete with hundreds of billions in reparations. It is the predictable result of incompetent negotiation and the foolhardy strategic catastrophe of starting and pursuing this disastrous war. The U.S. will not soon recover from this, the biggest national security blunder in decades.

[Kyle Stowell @StowellKyle]

@AugustinaJJD @FaytuksNetwork Are you blind?

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

CNN montage of all the times Trump announced deals with Iran.

Anderson Cooper: Today marks 39 times that he has said something like that.

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

OBAMA: $1.7 billion to reduce Iranian uranium stockpile for 98% and cap enrichment at 3.67%

TRUMP: $23 billion for just a commitment to TALKS about uranium and nuclear program.

This isn’t a deal.
Trump surrendered.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

New York Times investigative journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman are this generation's Woodward and Bernstein.

This story is Trump's Watergate and it's about to EXPLODE:

Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, White House Counsel David Warrington, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and former Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich converted the hallowed Situation Room — America's nerve center for real threats and decisive action — into a pedophile protection racket, where top officials huddled to cover-up the Epstein files scandal and protect a president who used to rape children for fun.

[Sandi Bachom 📹 @sandibachom]

ALL of these people have seen the tapes Epstein made of children being r*ped and tortured. He had cameras in every room. That’s how he rose to power.

How damage do you have to be as a human to see that to witness that and continue to protect the perpetrator?

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🚨 The White House May Have Just Confirmed The Most Important Part Of The Epstein Story Without Meaning To.

New reporting comes out.

The response isn't:

"None of this happened."

The response is:

"Find the leaker."

Think about the logic.

If officials are launching a leak probe, they're looking for people inside the administration who spoke to reporters.

That means they're treating the conversations as real.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

I'm shocked they haven't deleted this tweet confirming that DOGE cut the funding for the screwworm eradication program.

Have the plague you voted for!

[Congresswoman Chellie Pingree @chelliepingree]

Hi, Donald. Midcoast Mainer here.

You did not, in fact, “have to go to Japan” to get a Maine lobster before you. We sold millions. Our lobster fishery is one of the most valuable in the U.S.

It’s a big reason why people come here, in case you didn’t know!

If anything is hurting our lobstermen, it’s inflation (which you apparently “love”).

Also, exactly *zero* Maine fishermen run their boats at three knots. More like 30 knots—and some go even faster. You should check out a lobster boat race sometime!

I think it might be time for one of your famous Oval Office naps, because you have ZERO idea what you’re talking about.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

A sitting president sued his own government for $10 billion. Then settled with himself. The payout: $1.776 billion in taxpayer money, drawn from the federal Judgment Fund - the same Treasury account used to pay court-ordered settlements against the United States.

The commission overseeing the fund is appointed by his attorney general, with Trump retaining the power to remove any member. Claims stop processing in December 2028 - roughly one month before his term ends.

Pardoned January 6 defendants can now apply for taxpayer payouts through this fund. Capitol Police officers who were beaten that day are suing to block it.

Senator Kelly served in the Navy for 25 years. He knows what it looks like when an institution gets stripped to fund a political reward structure. The VA budget is not a hypothetical to him.

There is no legal precedent for a president suing his own government, engineering a settlement with himself, and directing the proceeds to his political allies. The federal judge assigned to the case raised constitutional standing concerns before the DOJ filing sidestepped her entirely.

The number $1,776,000,000 was chosen deliberately. The branding is the tell.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Trump is now reportedly responsible for roughly 27.7% of the entire U.S. national debt accumulated under all presidents combined.

That is an astonishing figure historically.

The national debt just crossed $39 trillion.

President Trump has added roughly $12–13 trillion to the debt across his two terms in office.

That’s approximately 30% of ALL U.S. national debt accumulated since 1789.

In 2016, Trump said he would pay down the national debt “over a period of eight years.”

Instead:

- First term: +$7.8 trillion
- Second term: roughly +$4–5 trillion already

And yes, COVID affected first-term spending.

It does not explain adding another trillion dollars every five months without a pandemic.

A political movement built on:
“fiscal conservatism”
“small government”
“balanced budgets”

has now overseen the largest debt expansion tied to any single presidency in American history.