Kevin Hawley

[Jordan Wood @JordanWood]

This is the ad that will end Susan Collins’ career:

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

Neil Bush: “I see in [James Talarico] the qualities I admire most in public servants: integrity, civility, humility, and a willingness to listen to those with whom he disagrees. My impression is that he is a principled, pragmatic leader who understands that public office is a responsibility to serve, not an entitlement to power.”

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: James Talarico just released an incredible video reminding every American what hope feels like. This is the best political ad we've seen in a long time.

[Bulwark Clips @BulwarkClips]

Talarico: "We just found out that [Elon Musk] is almost single-handedly bankrolling this effort to install Ken Paxton in the U.S. Senate and defeat this movement...Elon Musk wants our land. He wants our water. He wants his very own personal United States senator. He is trying to buy Texas."

[The Library Lady @kappler_donna]

@CrimeanVoyager

[The Green Dragon Tavern @greendragonhq]

In a few weeks when you go to vote, remember this post.

Two states, different leaderships. One state has a Democratic trifecta, the other has a Republican trifecta.

Where would you rather live?

Education ranking
🔵Massachusetts: 1st
🔴Oklahoma: 48th
(U.S. News 2025)

Healthcare ranking
🔵Massachusetts: 1st
🔴Oklahoma: Near bottom (3rd–5th worst (U.S. News Best States 2025 & America’s Health Rankings)

Poverty ranking
🔵Massachusetts: Among the lowest (~9.7–9.8%)
🔴Oklahoma: 8th highest (~14.9% in 2024 ACS)
(U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024)

Life expectancy
🔵Massachusetts: 80.82 years
🔴Oklahoma: 75.16 years
(CDC/NCHS life tables)

GDP per capita
🔵Massachusetts: ~$93,600–$110,500
🔴Oklahoma: ~$62,700–$64,700
(U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (state GDP data)

Murder rate
🔵Massachusetts: 1.78 per 100,000 (2024)
🔴Oklahoma: 6.25 per 100,000 (2024)
(FBI Uniform Crime Reporting)

Violent crime rate
🔵Massachusetts: 314.7 per 100,000 (2024)
🔴Oklahoma: 422.8 per 100,000 (2024)
(FBI Uniform Crime Reporting)

Federal reliance per $1 paid
🔵Massachusetts: Receives ~$0.60 per $1 in federal taxes paid (net donor state)
🔴Oklahoma: Receives ~$1.30 per $1 in federal taxes paid (net recipient)
(Rockefeller Institute of Government balance-of-payments analysis)

High school graduation rate
🔵Massachusetts: ~89.3% (recent four-year adjusted cohort)
🔴Oklahoma: ~82.2% (recent four-year adjusted cohort)
(State education department)

College degree rate
🔵Massachusetts: 47.3% of adults 25+ hold a bachelor’s or higher (2024 ACS)
🔴Oklahoma: 28.3% of adults 25+ hold a bachelor’s or higher (2024 ACS)
(U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024)

Air quality ranking
🔵Massachusetts: Stronger (roughly 11th in US News-style rankings; lower average AQI/PM2.5)
🔴Oklahoma: Weaker (roughly 44th; higher average AQI)
(US News Best States air quality metrics)

Teen pregnancy rate
🔵Massachusetts: 5.4 births per 1,000 females ages 15–19 (2024)
🔴Oklahoma: 19.6 births per 1,000 females ages 15–19 (2024)
(CDC National Vital Statistics System)

Incarceration rate
🔵Massachusetts: ~96 per 100,000
🔴Oklahoma: ~545 per 100,000
(Bureau of Justice Statistics)

Infant mortality rate
🔵Massachusetts: 3.28 per 1,000 live births
🔴Oklahoma: 7.12 per 1,000 live births
(CDC National Vital Statistics System)

Fetal mortality rate
🔵Massachusetts: 3.88 per 1,000
🔴Oklahoma: 5.71 per 1,000
(CDC National Vital Statistics Reports)

Median household income
🔵Massachusetts: $104,828 (highest among U.S. states in 2024)
🔴Oklahoma: $66,148
(U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024)

Uninsured rate
🔵Massachusetts: 2.8%
🔴Oklahoma: 11.5%
(U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 2024)

Adult obesity rate
🔵Massachusetts: 27.0%
🔴Oklahoma: 36.8%
(CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System BRFSS)

Maternal mortality rate
🔵Massachusetts: 16.4 deaths per 100,000
🔴Oklahoma: 29.6 deaths per 100,000 live births
(CDC National Center for Health Statistics, National Vital Statistics System (2018–2022)

[Mark J. Perry @Mark_J_Perry]

"Chart of the Century" updated through December 2025.

[Sam Waldo @wlodawskicodes]

You know the thing that gets me is the endless grace that we’re expected to give Republicans I remember in 2009 when President Obama took Office after one of the worst financial crisis since the great depression literally within weeks you had Republican Talking Heads and politicians bitching that Obama was not moving fast enough to fix things. I remember in 2021 when President Biden took Office we were in the depths of Covid you had thousands of people dying every week you had a supply chain issues you had so many problems that Trump caused and once again within days you had Republicans bitching about how Biden was not doing enough quickly yet for some reason, it can be two or three years into a Republican administration and we’re still supposed to act like this is some honeymoon.. All it is is Republicans not wanting to accept responsibility for the shit they are doing and they have the fucking nerve to talk about being the party of personal responsibility. They never accept responsibility for shit it’s always someone else’s fault.

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

Trump says he brought in “$21 trillion” of investment vs. “less than $1 trillion” under Biden.

Actual business investment: $14.5 trillion under Biden, $6.7 trillion so far under Trump.

My @Morning_Joe Chart

[Joe Barnes @Barnes_Joe]

EXCLUSIVE: Elon Musk came to Donald Trump with the plan to throttle Ukraine’s use of SpaceX’s Starshield satellite internet network, sources have told the Telegraph.

The tech billionaire made the proposal during the US President’s row with Volodymyr Zelensky over strikes on Russian oil refineries.

‘The reality is that they were both in it,’ a senior source said of Musk’s and Trump’s involvement.

But after a night of carnage in Kyiv caused by the slowdown, Musk was alarmed about the possibility of adverse consumer reaction in Europe.

The SpaceX boss then proceeded to tweet, blaming the US administration, and ultimately, President Trump for authorising the slowdown.

‘He tweeted out that he was innocent and that it was the US administration that did it,’ the source said.

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

Trump says we’re building “more factories and plants right now than at any time in our history.”

Factory construction hit a historic record under Biden and has fallen 31% since Trump took office.

My @Morning_Joe Chart

[AffirmedAlydar 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 🇨🇦 🇩🇰 @WollastonWntr63]

Sir Richard Branson's statement hours ago on the current reality.

He asks, "how will America's allies ever be able to trust this administration again?"

My concern is that regardless of administration, the United States of America will never be trusted again because our agreements can be unilaterally walked away from with a change in administration every four years and also because trust in the American electorate for having made such a grievous mistake in reelecting someone who was rightfully on his way to prison, one who it was obvious he would align with dictators and turn his back on historical allies, was enthusiastically supported by enough of a voting citizenry heavily susceptible to propaganda and the pernicious polarization of tribal politics in a two party system.
The world really did find out how detached from reality and common sense much of mainstream America actually is on November 5, 2024, and the ignorance of the average American voter isn't only a danger for the nation but for the entire world.

[Former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 @FmrRepMTG]

Me and Ilhan Omar are far apart policy wise. I’m pro life, she’s pro abortion. I’m pro 2A, she’s pro gun control. And on and on.

But can someone tell me how pretending to get ready to deport Ilhan Omar is going to bring gas down under $2, make health insurance freaking affordable, make a family’s weekly grocery bill make sense, and stop sending our beloved military off to fight for another fucking foreign war???

People are so sick and tired of the bullshit.

When you dumb mf’ers at the WH actually release the Epstein files and lock up the pedophiles and rapists you all hang out with, then we will start paying attention.

Until then 🖕.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

With the midterm elections just three weeks away, a new inflation report shows prices rising faster than expected, putting more pressure on Americans struggling with the cost of everyday essentials.

@RealAmnaNawaz speaks to @byHeatherLong for more.

[Project True North @proj_true_north]

-Lisa Demuth said she “didn’t have anything” on which she disagreed with Trump.
-She said she “fights for the MAGA Agenda.”
-She refused to admit Trump lost Minnesota three times.

Minnesota doesn’t need a Trump rubber stamp in the Governor’s Office.

[Tamie @RealTamie]

There you have it.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 @RachelBitecofer]

Trump will “fix it”

ABC: We did just hit a new record for gas prices. The national average above $4 a gallon for the most days ever in one year. Moody's Analytics says the typical household has now paid an extra $1,043 in fuel expenses since the start of the Iran War.

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

Gas prices are up 34.2% over the last year.

[Ramesh Ponnuru @RameshPonnuru]

Sometimes supporters of tariffs say you can avoid paying more by buying American. Nope. https://t.co/JLWmLBDNlS