Jennifer Bremer

Gerrymandering foe, policy analyst, NC activist. After decades working to fight governance failures abroad, now working to keep our own democratic ship afloat

[Warren Gunnels @GunnelsWarren]

Can’t stop thinking about how Wall Street is celebrating Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire, while he single handedly eliminated humanitarian aid that will lead to the needless deaths of 4.5 million of the poorest children in the world in the next 4 years.

[Jennifer Bremer @JBremerDevt]

@ForwardCarolina @ryanthestephens This is a truly awful bill!

[Jennifer Bremer @JBremerDevt]

@hissgoescobra @jmontforttx Put it back!! He's a genuine hero and deserves to be honored.

[Jennifer Bremer @JBremerDevt]

@CliffW08950229 @MarkeaMary Yes. It's unAmerican!

[Jennifer Bremer @JBremerDevt]

@native_am_pride @cpujudy Should be permitted for native Americans, as long as it is modest and respectful

[Jennifer Bremer @JBremerDevt]

@mjfree @HomerCaban Not living in the White House (mostly)

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

We need to flood Twitter with this birthday card on June 14th.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

BREAKING: Scott Pelley Just Made A Pretty Stunning Allegation.

According to Pelley, CBS leadership wanted a story about the killing of ICE protester Renée Good changed to better match Trump's version of events.

Pelley says he was told management wanted protesters portrayed as more violent and wanted Good described as driving toward the officer who shot her. He says the video evidence showed otherwise.

Then came the admission.

"There was a thumb on the scale for the president's version of events."

A veteran journalist with 37 years at CBS is alleging political pressure was applied to change the facts of a story.

That's a remarkable accusation.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

OMFG!

Trump literally just celebrated a massive increase in our trade deficit.

He doesn’t even know what a “widening of our trade deficit” means. He thinks it means that we are exporting more than we’re importing, which would be good, but it means the exact opposite.

[Jeremy Corbyn @jeremycorbyn]

What an absolute disgrace. A FIFA-certified referee being denied entry to the United States purely because he is Somali.

The World Cup is meant to bring people together. This is racism, plain and simple. Shameful.

https://t.co/rpSgTmmPU4

[Scott Dworkin @funder]

🚨 The articles of impeachment are filed, but they won't move unless Congress hears from us. Take 10 seconds to send your demand to your representatives right here:
👇
https://t.co/yrqb1AFXim

[Marlene Robertson🇨🇦 @marlene4719]

WTAF
Does the demented clown realize he’s admitting the trade deficit has exploded under his watch???

Expect this post to be deleted.

[James E. Clyburn @RepJamesClyburn]

According to a new report, the Social Security trust fund—which helps pay Social Security benefits—will now run out of money in 2032, a year earlier than expected.

Why? Because Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is depleting the fund faster. Recipients will see their benefits slashed by 22% if Congress doesn’t act.

Sounds like a cut to Social Security to me.
https://t.co/dmoRB2mjP8

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

Carolina Forward's generic ballot tracker is somewhat more conservative. Our average still stands at D+4.3 today - but that could aways change.

In our model of district elasticity, a D+6 environment could flip the NC House, but would leave the Senate with a 4-seat Republican majority.
https://t.co/l2LspAPGYz

[LongTime🤓FirstTime👨‍💻 @LongTimeHistory]

Airport security force wheelchair bound disabled Black man to stand—unaided on feet for many minutes.

He's now suffered over 30 silent seizures—in just the past 2 weeks.

"I was afraid they would just see an angry Black dude with dreadlocks... and not a brain injury," said mom.

"He was very upset, so if you see another video of me in his face it was just me trying to calm him down."

Airport security offered no explanation for the search not being allowed in his wheelchair—and even called over a supervisor.

Vince "Fresh The Dj" Colston suffered a traumatic brain injury with paralysis on one side of his body—after being hit by a car while riding his motorcycle.

This caused severe mobility impairments that make him wheelchair dependent.

The incident occurred at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas, Nevada.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: YES! New polling reveals that Democrat James Talarico has pulled ahead of MAGA freak Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race.

Republicans are officially in full-blown panic mode...

According to a survey conducted by the Texas Pulse, 47% of respondents said that they would vote for Talarico while 44% said they'd vote for Paxton. 2% said they'd support a different candidate. Given the fact that Texas is touted as a bastion of conservative sentiment, this is a remarkable lead for Talarico.

And Paxton is a remarkably bad candidate, even by the subterranean standards of the Trump era. He was impeached by his own party for taking bribes as state attorney general. In addition to being a literal crook, he's an immoral philanderer and his wife divorced him for adultery. He previously said that the horrific Uvalde school shooting — during which 21 people died and 18 others were injured — was just "part of God's plan."

“Call me old-fashioned, but a man takes responsibility,” Talarico, taking aim at his opponent. “He upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors, and he does what’s right even when no one is watching.”

Meanwhile, Talarico himself is a devout Christian with a sterling record of standing up for working class people as a member of the Texas House of Representatives. He represents the sane, upstanding choice compared to Paxton's blatant criminality.

It's clear that Republicans are floundering here. Lacking any legitimate avenue of attack against Talarico, they've resorted to falsely claiming that he's "transgender," insulting his masculinity, and spreading AI videos depicting him saying things that he's never said. They have nothing to run on and Texans will see right through their pathetic smear campaign.

Please ❤️ and share if you're rooting for James Talarico!

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

When the President of France visited the United States in April 1960, he asked the FBI to help him find a man.
The man he was looking for was an American citizen. He was sixty-four years old. He had been awarded fifteen French military decorations and — six months earlier, in a ceremony in Paris — had been made a Knight of the Légion d'honneur, the highest civilian honor France can give. The medal had been pinned to his chest by the President himself, who had publicly called him un véritable héros français. A true French hero.
The FBI located the man within a few days.
He was operating an elevator at Rockefeller Center in New York City.
The elevator operator's name was Eugene Bullard. He had been born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1895, the son of a man whose own father had been a slave.

He had run away from Columbus at the age of eleven, after watching a white mob nearly lynch his father.
He spent the next several years drifting through the American South. At sixteen, he stowed away on a German freighter at Norfolk, Virginia. He landed in Aberdeen, Scotland. From there he made his way to London, where he learned to box. By 1913, at eighteen, he was prizefighting in Paris.
When Germany invaded France in August 1914, Bullard was nineteen years old. He had no legal obligation to fight. He had no French citizenship.
He went to the recruiting office on October 19, 1914, and signed up for the French Foreign Legion.
He spent the next eighteen months as an infantryman in some of the worst fighting of the war — at the Somme, at Champagne, at Verdun. He was wounded three times. The third wound, on March 5, 1916, tore open his thigh and left him with permanent damage to his leg.
He was twenty years old. The doctors told him he would not return to the infantry.
He decided he wanted to fly.

In a Paris café in the spring of 1916, while he was recovering, Bullard mentioned to three white American friends that he was thinking of joining the French air service. A Mississippian named Jeff Dickson laughed.
Gene, Dickson said, you know damn well there aren't any Negroes in aviation.
Bullard answered: Sure do. That's why I want to get into it. There has to be a first to everything, and I'm going to be the first.
Dickson bet him two thousand dollars he would not make it.
Bullard took the bet. He earned his pilot's license on May 5, 1917. He won the bet.
He reported to the front in August 1917 and flew approximately twenty combat missions over the next three months in a SPAD VII. The fuselage was painted with a bleeding heart pierced by a knife and the French phrase Tout le Sang qui Coule est Rouge — All Blood that Flows is Red.
He carried, on every combat flight, a small capuchin monkey named Jimmy in the front of his flight jacket.
The French press began calling him L'Hirondelle Noire — the Black Swallow.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, Bullard immediately applied to transfer to the U.S. Army Air Service.
His application was rejected.
The U.S. Army Air Service had a policy, in 1917, of not accepting Black pilots. The other American pilots flying for France in his unit, all of them white, were transferred to the U.S. Air Service.
He was the only one who was not.

For the next twenty years, he was one of the most familiar faces in the Montmartre nightlife of Paris between the wars. He owned a nightclub called L'Escadrille. He spoke fluent French, English, and German. Hemingway drank there. Fitzgerald drank there. Langston Hughes drank there. Josephine Baker performed there. Louis Armstrong was a personal friend.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Bullard was forty-four. His fluent German and his ownership of a nightclub frequented by German officers made him useful to the French Resistance. He became an intelligence agent — eavesdropping in his own bar on conversations between German officers who did not know he understood every word.
When France fell in June 1940, friends in the Resistance smuggled him across the Spanish border before the Gestapo could arrest him.
He came back to the United States for the first time in twenty-eight years.
He arrived in New York with thirty dollars in his pocket and a permanent limp.

He did not return to a hero's welcome. He returned to a country that had no idea who he was.
He worked at a perfume counter. He worked as a security guard. He worked at the Staten Island shipyards. By the late 1940s, he had taken the job that he would hold for most of the rest of his life.
He operated the elevator at Rockefeller Center.
He was wearing the elevator uniform on the day a producer from NBC came down from the studios upstairs to ask if he was the man Charles de Gaulle had been looking for.
A few weeks later, NBC sent a film crew to interview him in the lobby. The studios where NBC produced The Today Show were on the floors above. He had operated the elevator that took the network executives up to those studios every morning for nearly ten years. He had not been recognized as he did it.
He went back to operating the elevator the following Monday.

He died of stomach cancer on October 12, 1961, three days after his sixty-sixth birthday.
He was buried in the French War Veterans' section of Flushing Cemetery, in Queens, in the uniform of the French Foreign Legion. The casket was draped with the French flag.
In 1994 — thirty-three years after his death — the United States Air Force formally commissioned Eugene Jacques Bullard as a Second Lieutenant, posthumously.
It was the first commission the U.S. military had ever offered him.
He had been the first Black combat pilot in American history.
The French had been calling him a hero since 1917.
The Americans got around to it in 1994.