The history books quietly bypassed is that Barack Obama, during the most pressure-saturated nights of his presidency, would retreat alone to the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence — not to strategize, not to take calls, but to handwrite personal letters to ten ordinary American citizens every single night, a practice he maintained with almost monastic devotion across all eight years, selecting the letters himself from the 40,000 that arrived daily at the White House, and his longtime correspondence director Fiona Reese confirmed that Obama would often weep privately while reading certain letters, folding them carefully before writing responses so personally detailed and emotionally present that recipients frequently described the experience of receiving them as the most significant moment of their lives, with one Ohio steelworker writing back to say that Obama's letter had physically stopped him from making a decision that would have permanently altered his family's future. What makes this practice almost unbearably moving is the detail that surfaced later — Obama never used a computer for these letters, always a black felt-tip pen, always legal yellow paper first as a draft, always rewritten onto White House stationery by hand a second time, because he believed, as he told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in a rare private conversation later recounted in her 2018 work, that the physical act of pressing pen to paper forced a quality of attention that typing simply could not replicate, a philosophy rooted in his years as a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004 where he developed the conviction that democracy only functions when its leaders remain genuinely, uncomfortably close to the specific gravity of individual human suffering rather than processing it from behind the insulating distance of institutions and screens."
Good morning. The President of the United States was in the middle of the most serious child sex trafficking ring of the last quarter century.
He is referenced not a dozen times in the case files. Not 100 times. Not 1,000 times. He’s referenced 38,000 times.
If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don't tell me he needed to fire one-third of the Washington Post staff.
Democracy dies in oligarchy.
🚨 Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine just showed up in Minneapolis.
“I don’t live here. I’m an outside agitator. I’m here to stir up trouble, because we care about democracy, freedom, and opposing tyranny, racism, and state terror.”
A breakdown of mass shooters:
Straight males: 98%
Straight white male: 57%
Trans: .13%
If you’re focusing on the shooter being trans, just admit that you DO NOT care about mass shootings. Stop pretending you care about children being murdered, because you clearly do not.
A top staffer to Sen. Tina Smith emailed Sen. Mike Lee’s top staffers on Monday about “how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend”
Full email below
Ukrainian soldiers recite the poem Invictus by British poet William Ernest Henley as a gesture of gratitude to the United Kingdom for its unwavering support🇺🇦🇬🇧.
This powerful poem stands as a timeless symbol of resilience, dignity, and inner strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.