Linda

Blue since 1972. Share birthday with Bobby Kennedy and Joe Biden. 35 years working to prevent violence against women and homelessness🇺🇲🦅

[WTFGOP @doggintrump]

If you ever had a relative, who was on hospice & wanted to die with dignity in their own home, this disgusting administration just made it so much harder
Cruelty is the point with Republicans in Congress

[Suzie rizzio @Suzierizzo1]

If you vote for Ken Paxton then you’re saying that the plea deal given to Adam Dean Hoffman a former Waco attorney who was charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child age 12 was okay since he only received two misdemeanors for the whole time period of abuse & no sex registry.

[Nahuel Lanzón @nahuelzn]

🇸🇴 Nunca vi algo así. En Somalia hoy se llenó un estadio para recibir como héroe nacional a Omar Artan, el árbitro al que Estados Unidos le negó la entrada al Mundial. Increíble.

[DulceBiatch @BiatchDulce]

We have a Trump problem, not a voter fraud problem.
Don’t let them gaslight you with their lies.

[Viral Reel Addict @ViralReelAddict]

There is nothing normal about what’s happening around this World Cup.

Referees, journalists, photographers, team officials, and supporters are securing visas, boarding flights, and arriving in the United States—only to be detained, interrogated, delayed, or sent home. Some have reportedly been turned away despite holding official accreditation connected to the tournament itself.

This goes far beyond routine border checks. It sends a message to the world that certain nationalities, passports, and backgrounds are viewed with suspicion before they even step off the plane.

A World Cup is supposed to bring nations together. Instead, stories of detentions, invasive searches, and travel restrictions are dominating headlines. When invited guests are treated like potential criminals, the focus shifts away from sport and toward exclusion.

Defenders will point to security concerns or compare the situation to past tournaments elsewhere. But the issue isn't whether security exists—it's whether it is being applied in a way that undermines the spirit of a global event. The World Cup belongs to the world, not just the host nation.

If players, officials, media members, and fans cannot travel with confidence and dignity, then something has gone seriously wrong. A tournament that should symbolize international unity risks becoming a showcase for fear, suspicion, and division instead.

The United States often presents itself as a global leader and a champion of freedom. Yet the images emerging from this tournament tell a different story: one of barriers instead of welcome, scrutiny instead of hospitality, and exclusion instead of celebration.

A World Cup should make the world feel invited. Right now, too many people feel like they're being told they don't belong.

[Farm Girl Carrie 👩‍🌾 @FarmGirlCarrie]

On the day John Ratzenberger walked into an audition room in 1982, he had a plane to catch.

He had been living in London for nearly a decade — acting, writing, performing improv comedy across Europe with a two-man theatre group that had played to standing-room-only audiences for 634 consecutive shows.

He had appeared in small roles in some of the biggest films of the era: *Star Wars:
The Empire Strikes Back*, *Superman*, *Gandhi*, *A Bridge Too Far*

He was a working actor, but
nobody's idea of a household name. That day, he was in Los Angeles on a writing assignment, and his ticket back to London was already booked.
He had one audition before he left.
A new sitcom about a bar in Boston.

Both Ratzenberger and another actor, George Wendt, were reading for the same role — a minor patron named George who had a single line: "Beer!" It was barely a part at all.

But Ratzenberger wanted the work, so he went in, and the moment director Jimmy Burrows told him he was there to audition, not have a conversation, he felt the energy in the room go cold.

By his own account, all the blood rushed out of his body. He delivered a forgettable read. The casting director thanked him on the way out — the polite, final kind of thank you that everyone in show business learns to recognize.

He was almost through the door when something stopped him. Not calculation. Not strategy. Just the instinct of a man who had spent a decade doing improv and knew that the moment before you leave a room is sometimes the best moment you'll ever have.
He turned around.

"Do you have a bar know-it-all?"
The producers didn't know what he was talking about. So he told them. Every bar in New England, he explained, has one — some guy who acts like he has the knowledge of all mankind stored between his ears and is not even slightly shy about sharing it.

He had grown up around exactly this type: a man named Sarge at his father's regular bar, who could answer any question with absolute confidence whether he actually knew the answer or not. The room would ask Sarge the length of a whale's intestine and Sarge would shoot back: "Baleen or blue?" And somehow, everyone deferred to him anyway.

Ratzenberger launched into an improvisation right there — the Boston accent, the lean against an imaginary bar, the slightly too-long explanations of facts nobody had asked for. The producers watched. Then they laughed. Then they asked him to do more.

George Wendt got the role of the bar regular, renamed Norm Peterson. And the producers, convinced by five minutes of improv from a man on his way out the door, wrote an entirely new character into the show.

His name was Clifford Clavin. United States Postal Service.
Cheers debuted on NBC on September 30, 1982, to nearly catastrophic ratings — finishing 77th out of 100 shows that week.

The network came close to canceling it in the first season. But the show found its audience, and then it found a much bigger one, and then it became one of the most beloved television series ever made. It ran for 11 seasons.

Ratzenberger appeared in 273 of 275 episodes.
Cliff became the man at the end of the bar with the white socks and the questionable facts and the magnificent certainty — the guy everyone tolerated and secretly enjoyed, the kind of person every room has and everyone pretends to find annoying and would immediately miss if he disappeared.

Ratzenberger was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1985 and 1986. By the time the show ended in 1993, Cliff Clavin was embedded in American culture as one of the great comic characters in the history of the medium. Cheers! 🍻

[Roberto Shenanigans @Rob_Shenanigans]

Ohio legislators are trying to sneak through a bill today that would require absentee voters to provide a copy of their driver’s license or state ID in order to submit their absentee ballot. #VoterSuppression
https://t.co/kTuep2wncC

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Rep. Kamlager-Dove: "I rise today to sound the alarm about a grave national security threat: Donald Trump's sleeping habits ... we cannot trust the WH on matters concerning the president's health because they are denying what Americans are seeing with our own two eyes."

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

How many can say this:

New Yorker, February 2026:
$4.05 billion in family take from ventures that exist because he’s president.

Forbes:
his net worth went from $3.9 billion to $7.3 billion by September 2025. Nearly doubled in eight months.

Wall Street Journal:
$4 billion in proceeds and paper wealth from ventures launched since his re-election.

House Oversight Democrats’ wealth tracker:
$5.1 billion in new family money.

Bloomberg:
crypto alone added $1.4 billion in a single year. One-fifth of the family fortune now sits in digital assets that didn’t exist the first time he ran.

All that work is really paying off.

[Mike Netter @nettermike]

In May 1944, 23-year-old Phyllis Latour jumped out of a US bomber and parachuted into occupied Normandy, France. Her mission was to gather information about Nazi positions in preparation for D-Day. Once on the ground, she quickly buried her parachute and clothes, and began a secret mission that would last four months, pretending to be a poor teenage French girl.

Phyllis had been trained by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). She learned how to send secret messages in Morse code, how to fix wireless radios, and how to spy without being caught. She also went through tough physical training in the Scottish highlands. Phyllis wanted to get revenge on the Nazis who had killed her godfather.

Phyllis said, “The men who had been sent before me were caught and killed. I was chosen because I would be less suspicious.” She would ride a bicycle through the region, pretending to sell soap, and secretly pass messages to the British about German locations. She acted like a country girl chatting with German soldiers to avoid raising suspicion. She moved from place to place to stay hidden and often slept in forests finding her own food.

Phyllis also came up with a clever way to hide her secret codes. She wrote them on a piece of silk and pricked it with a pin each time she used a code. She kept it hidden inside a hair tie. Once when the Germans briefly detained her and searched her she took out the hair tie and let her hair fall, showing she had nothing to hide. In the summer of 1944, Phyllis sent 135 coded messages helping Allied bombers find German targets.

After the war, Phyllis married and moved to New Zealand. Her children didn’t know about her wartime service until 2000, when her oldest son found out online. This hero passed on October 7, 2023. May she rest In peace.

[Bteena @BertinaNichols2]

@Acyn @smc429 Let US see what you got LIAR; it's been 6 fuckin years.

[Linda @kakanicat]

@Acyn So release the damn files, trumpy. Or you gonna wait till a week or so before midterms cuz you think we're all dumb enough to fall for the act?

[Glen Carroll @MrGlenCarroll]

The Ultimate Irony Elon Musk Never Saw Coming

Remember when Elon Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter, rebranded it to X, fired everyone who knew how to run it, and turned it into a right-wing echo chamber so he could help Trump win?

Yeah. About that.

Because out of the shadows comes Dark Brandon Junior — and he's running laps around the entire MAGA ecosystem.

Hunter Biden (@HunterBiden) marked 7 years clean and sober on June 1. Instead of hiding, he posted a video thanking his recovery community. Then the trolls came for him. And instead of clapping back with anger, he disarmed them with something MAGA doesn't know how to fight: self-deprecating wit, radical honesty, and zero fs given.*

When someone accused him of leaving that White House coke behind, Hunter replied: "It most definitely was not. I would never have forgotten my drugs."

When someone photoshopped a pipe in his mouth, he corrected them: "A crack pipe doesn't have that little bowl at the end. This is why we can't trust AI."

When a user said they'd vote for him if he made a crack joke campaign ad, Hunter fired back: "How about 'Let's take another crack with a Biden.' Needs work but the possibilities are endless."

The result? Even his former MAGA tormentors are apologizing. One user called him "the MAGA whisperer." Hunter's reply summed up the whole damn problem: "Left, right, D or R, we all want the same things. We're being divided on purpose by the Epstein Elite Oligarch class because as long as we're at each other's throats, they get fat and rich off of our misery."

Meanwhile, I posted a side-by-side: Don Jr. looking like he just crawled out of a three-day bender vs. a clean, sober, sharp-witted Hunter Biden. Asked a simple question: Which first son's family would you trust with American democracy?

You know what's beautiful? Elon Musk spent billions to control the narrative. And now Hunter Biden — the man they spent years trying to destroy — is using X to unite Democrats who felt voiceless, shame trolls with humor, and remind everyone what actual redemption looks like.

So here's my message to every Democrat clutching their pearls about "messaging" and "optics":

Stop. Just stop.

Hunter Biden is out here doing more for Democratic morale than half the party's consultants. He's not running for anything. He's not farming for clicks. He's just speaking like the Americans his father and our parents raised — honest, unafraid, and unwilling to let bullies define him.

Meanwhile, the other side nominated a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist and didn't blink. They don't do purity tests. They do power.

So let's be clear: Laugh at the memes. Share the posts. Tag @HunterBiden every chance you get. Because every time you do, you remind people that redemption is real, that sobriety is worth celebrating, and that the party of "family values" spent years attacking a man for his addiction while their own golden boy Don Jr. can't even keep his eyes open in public photos.

Elon Musk, thank you. Without you, we wouldn't have Hunter Biden lighting up your own platform with truth, humor, and the kind of unscripted humanity MAGA can never fake.

#DarkBrandonJunior #MAGAWhisperer #HunterBiden #SobrietyWins #X #ElonMusk #DemocratsUnited #smokefléét

[Linda @kakanicat]

@MrGlenCarroll @DavidDuvall8 Very well said!!

[Linda @kakanicat]

@Tkpaddler @lippyent Ha!

[Linda @kakanicat]

@lippyent Of course

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

13 workers left Palantir and issued this statement.

"Palantir is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a 'revolution' led by oligarchs. We must resist this trend."

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Buried in a DOJ court filing on Friday is the part of this story that hasn't gotten enough attention.

The Department of Homeland Security is now exploring coordinating with the USPS to monitor mail-in ballot flows, identify anomalies, and generate "authorized investigative leads." The postal service - created by Congress as an independent entity - is being evaluated as a surveillance and investigation tool for federal law enforcement, applied specifically to Americans who vote by mail.

That is a separate track from the voter eligibility list story. Both are running simultaneously. The March 31 executive order requires states to submit lists of voters who have requested absentee ballots for federal eligibility approval before those ballots can be sent. On May 29, USPS began drafting compliance plans. Election officials in California and Wisconsin have already documented slower ballot delivery times since the policy changes began.

The NAACP sued Thursday, arguing the new rule violates a 2021 court-enforced settlement in which USPS agreed to protect mail-in voting and prioritize timely ballot delivery through 2028 - a binding legal commitment the agency is now moving to undermine. A federal judge in a separate case has expressed being "very concerned" about the harm the order could impose on voters.

The American Postal Workers Union's statement named what this actually is: "The Postal Service serves all Americans - regardless of party, religion, or race. It is not a tool for politicians to pick which Americans get which benefits." That sentence is a legal argument and a civic one. The postal workers who sort and deliver ballots in Elkhart and Fort Wayne and rural Hamilton County are being asked to participate in a process their own union has called unconstitutional. That matters.

[Untold War Stories @UntoldWarFacts]

In 1942 a Black mess attendant saved 15 shipmates by towing them through shark-infested water for eight hours.

The Navy gave him a letter, and the country forgot him.

He died at 37, worn down by a war that never let go of him.

Eighty years later, the Navy named a warship after him.

This is the story of Charles Jackson French..🧵1/6

[Linda @kakanicat]

@invertCucurella @Phuean57 Well said