Potsy

[David Doney @David_Charts2]

Since 1965, there have been 6 fiscal years when federal spending fell relative to the preceding year:

🔵1965 - LBJ
🔵2010 - Obama
🔵2012 - Obama
🔵2013 - Obama
🔵2022 - Biden
🔵2023 - Biden

No Republican president in the last 60 years has cut spending vs. prior year.

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@TomMarshall111 96 night of course!

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@AdamSchefter No.

[The New York Times @nytimes]

Breaking News: Federal officials acknowledged in court documents that they canceled grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump in 2024. https://t.co/FeH69OK3fq

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@TomMarshall111 96 night of course!

[🔻agitprop + absurdity🔻 @agtprpnabsrdty]

A months-long Sky News investigation into the US double-tap strike on a Minab girls' school found the Pentagon had tracked the site by satellite since 1987 and could still count children's shadows in the courtyard before firing anyway.

What the evidence shows:

Three Tomahawk missiles fired from the USS Spruance, 716 kilometers away in the Arabian Sea, hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab on Feb 28, the opening day of the US-Israeli war on Iran. Witnesses described a second strike hitting the exact spot where a teacher had moved surviving students for shelter, killing nearly everyone who had taken cover there. A third strike followed on the same site. Death tolls range from 156 to over 170, most of them girls aged seven to twelve. The school had been walled off from the adjacent IRGC naval base since at least 2015, had its own website, and was geolocatable through open-source materials any analyst could have pulled in minutes.

Built to fail:

The Pentagon's own machinery for preventing exactly this outcome had already been dismantled. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth slashed the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence workforce by roughly 90 percent and cut CENTCOM's civilian casualty assessment team from ten people to one, months before the war started. A May Pentagon Inspector General report found the office had become a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate, no real mission. A functioning warning system was defunded on purpose, then blamed for not warning anyone.

Accountability buried:

Four months on, CENTCOM's commander told reporters the investigation was near complete, yet nothing has been released. Asked in June whether anyone would face consequences, Trump called it a strange question, adding that mistakes are made and war is nasty. The mistake was choosing not to fund the office that exists to catch mistakes like this one.

My take: A military that surveilled a schoolyard for four decades didn't fail to see the children, it decided in advance that seeing them wouldn't change the targeting. Nobody in this chain lacked information.

[Judd Legum @JuddLegum]

1. ICE is lying about body cams and I have the documents that prove it.

On July 14, Tom Homan, who oversees ICE's immigration crackdown at the White House, said that ICE purchased body cams as soon as Democrats approved funding for DHS in April.

That is a lie.

[Tommy Vietor @TVietor08]

Trump released documents that confirm Russia tried to interfere in the 2020 election to hurt Biden. It says Russia tried to "orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal" and push narratives about "voter fraud resulting from mail-in balloting"

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@BengalsCaptain Ground Round

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@shapsio My first show

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Step 1: Remove filters in Reflecting Pool because Obama put them in.
Step 2: Give your criminal neighbor who runs "Greenwater Services" a $20 million no-bid contract to paint the pool.
Step 3: Fill the pool with water from the Potomac River, the phosphates from which cause algae blooms.
Step 4: Freshly sealed pool and extreme heat result in a super scum event
Step 5: Direct National Park Service to dump hydrogen peroxide into the pool which causes the paint to peel.
Step 5: Deploy US National Guard to stop people from taking photos of the swamp as a perfect metaphor for the administration.
Step 6: Blame someone else.

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@poddtadre Just say Minor Threat

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Dear Joe,
I wish I could sit down with you face to face and explain why so many of us were offended by the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House.
For me, it had nothing to do with the UFC or who showed up for the fights. The brand you and Dana have built is a bona fide American success story. More power to you. As for the fighters, in my book, anyone brave enough to put it all on the line in the arena is remarkable to witness. Their dedication and discipline inspire me. I don’t understand anyone who can’t admire that.
And as for the people who attended, I, for one, love Shane Gillis. I think he’s hilarious and brilliant. It was a show. A once-in-a-lifetime spectacle. I can’t blame anyone for wanting to witness it firsthand.
My problem is that I believe some of our public spaces are sacred. And unlike many of the great powers that came before us, these American monuments belong to all of us. Not to whoever happens to hold power at the moment.
The White House does not belong to Donald Trump. It does not belong to any President. It belongs to the people. To treat it as Caesar treated the Colosseum is antithetical to everything our founding fathers fought for.
This is not Rome. Presidents are not emperors doling out bread and circuses for the peasants. The White House is the People’s House. This “celebration” could have happened in any stadium within a stone’s throw of the South Lawn. No one would have had an issue with it.
But that was obviously Donald Trump’s whole point. By holding the event on the South Lawn, what he was saying to the rest of us is:
“This is my house. I own it. I will do with it what I please. I’ll build a colosseum and have the gladiators fight under my gaze. I’ll tear down the East Wing. I’ll pave over the Rose Garden. I’ll cover everything in gold and marble. I’ll erase the names of all the men who came before me.”
The fights were an exhibition of imperial domination, not a celebration of our 250th anniversary as a democracy.
The White House is not Buckingham Palace. It is not the Palace of Versailles. It is not the Forbidden City of Beijing. It does not belong to an emperor, or a king, or a commissar.
The White House belongs to us. All of us. The person who sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office is nothing more than an honored guest. A temporary caretaker.
The President is our servant. Not our Caesar.
Respectfully, Hunter

P.S. Cage match between me and Don Jr.? Your call on the venue. Anywhere but the South Lawn.

[Potsy @brian_pottenger]

@PardonMyMeme Why doesn't Katy perry have a soul patch?

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

Reporter: The DOJ has this new fund — $1.7 billion. Why should taxpayers pay for the January 6ers?

Trump: Because in my world, loyalty outranks law. They broke the rules for me, so you pay the bill for them. That’s the transaction.

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

President Trump's $1.776 billion settlement with the IRS is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history.

They moved fast to avoid the scrutiny of the judicial process, and very likely violated the Constitution. This is an outrage.

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Trump personally bought and sold millions of dollars worth of stock in technology companies and government contractors early this year, according to new government records.

In total, he made at least $220 million in financial transactions.

The Trump admin directly regulates some of these companies — and many of these trades coincided with favorable regulatory decisions. https://t.co/t6asd6pAq4

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In 1992, a company called Nabisco released a green box of cookies that explained the entire era better than any government document could.

They were called SnackWell's. They were fat-free. The fat had been removed, and to make a fat-free cookie taste like anything at all, it had been replaced with sugar and refined flour, in quantities that made the cookie nutritionally worse than the cookie it was pretending to improve on.

The marketing did not mention the sugar. The marketing said: fat-free. And a public that had been trained for fifteen years to read "fat" as the single enemy understood "fat-free" to mean "free." Free of consequence. Eat as many as you like.

They did. SnackWell's outsold Oreos. The boxes held twelve cookies, framed as a sensible single serving, and were emptied in a sitting by people who genuinely believed they were being good. By 1995 the brand was selling nearly half a billion dollars a year.

It produced a phenomenon real enough to be given a name in the psychology literature. The SnackWell Effect. The tendency to overconsume a food precisely because its label has told you it is virtuous.

A nation ate itself heavier on cookies it had been told were a diet aid, and could not work out why.

The green box was not an outlier. The green box was the whole decade, condensed, on a supermarket shelf.

[Jake Thornton 🇬🇧🇺🇸 @jakethornton]

“Tell him to enter the password he knows is correct. Inform him it is incorrect. Invite him to reset it. Watch as he enters the password he believed it to be all along. Then tell him he cannot use it… because it is his current password.”

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

Trump April 23: I contacted people "that have worked for me in the past, doing swimming pools," and one gave me a great price on the Reflecting Pool project

Trump May 4: "I have some very good contractors," asked three of them to "do me a favor fellas" and go look at the Reflecting Pool, and the best one gave me a great price

Trump today: The Reflecting Pool contract "went to a contractor I did not know, and have never used before"