Michael

just checking things out

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

The test is called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.

It’s a tool used to screen patients for dementia.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Trump: I said it the other day. Let them hit a missile into San Diego or Los Angeles.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

amazing -- Karl Rove lists Ken Paxton's scandals: "You've got a guy who has multiple girlfriends and $200,000 worth of home improvements from a corrupt business guy for whom he does favors. My personal favorite is the Uber account in the name of David P. Since he drives around in a car that has [state] license plates, it made it a little difficult to have assignations with one of his mistresses, so the corrupt business guy gives him a fake Uber account and the records of that are now in his impeachment proceedings, so we know how often he went to have sex with Laura Olsen. I mean, can you make this shit up?"

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

Republicans are having an absolute meltdown today because they just discovered that some food is labeled “Certified Halal.”

Now they’re calling for boycotts of companies like Tillamook because apparently reading a dietary certification label has become too advanced for the culture-war brain.

As a Jewish person who grew up in a family that kept kosher, this is hysterical.

This would be like seeing a kosher symbol on a box of crackers and screaming, “THE JEWS HAVE INFILTRATED NABISCO!”

Halal is a dietary standard. That’s it.

It doesn’t mean the cheese is Muslim.
It doesn’t mean buying it funds a mosque.
It doesn’t mean your yogurt is about to face Mecca.

Halal and kosher rules are actually quite similar in many respects: restrictions on certain animals, rules surrounding meat preparation, and prohibitions on particular ingredients.

The funniest part is that these people have probably been eating halal-certified products for years without realizing it and somehow survived.

Imagine being so desperate for a new outrage that you end up declaring war on food because Muslims are also allowed to eat it.

The culture war has officially reached the dairy aisle.

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true.

I took the UN's definition of corruption, turned it into eight criteria and 100 points, and scored the leaders history remembers for looting their countries: Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin.

Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions.

Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25.

Trump's second term scored a 91, which ties him with Suharto and Mobutu and puts him above Marcos and Abacha.

So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years.

PSA: don't come in my comments arguing about the results if you haven't read the full article, because ignorance is a choice.

Full article is up now on my Substack (link in bio) and it's free.

[John Cleese @JohnCleese]

Can someone excplain to this ignoramus what 'unconditional surrender' means, and that it is the opposite of negotiation

[Sam Stein @samstein]

This is actually insane. We're taking over more venezuelan assets than their oil but we can't identify where the money is going and who it is going to? seems like something we should look into

[Acyn @Acyn]

Garcia: So, to be clear, we have a president that is $2 billion richer just from this last year. We have a son whose wedding is being paid for by rich Russians and oligarchs that have connections to Putin. We have Jared Kushner, who got $2 billion for his investment firm from the Saudis while also doing diplomacy in the Middle East.

We have the Kushners who are trying to buy private islands and selling all sorts of merchandise that’s being promoted, oftentimes through government resources. We also have, of course, this insane amount of stock trading that the president himself is doing to enrich himself and his family.

And, of course, the sons sitting on boards of private companies that are then getting contracts from the federal government. The amount of corruption is unprecedented. And not only are they lining their pockets, they’re stealing the wealth of hardworking Americans, they’re stealing the hard-earned labor and wealth of working-class people, and then funneling that money to themselves and to the rich donors and large corporations and CEOs across this country.

As they get richer, costs go up for the American people. And we know that Republicans in the House and in the Senate are complicit by not calling out this corruption.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

This is what Trump was doing on 9/11.

[Kayla @KaylaDavis2000]

9/11 while the Twin Towers were still burning, thousands were dead or trapped under rubble, a nation stood frozen in horror; Donald Trump got on TV & bragged about his building now the tallest in Manhattan...

That's who he is. That's who he's always been

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

25 Years Later, Trump Is Still Lying About a 9/11 Rescue He Never Took Part In

Donald Trump does not merely lie. He treats lying as a public service he performs for himself. The latest version of his 9/11 story is not a slip, a haze of memory, or a colorful exaggeration. It is the same old con: insert himself into a national wound, inflate a walk-on into a starring role, and dare anyone to notice that the paperwork never existed.

He told Trey Gowdy he rushed downtown, sent his construction crews, and "worked long and hard." That last phrase is the tell. It is not testimony. It is branding. "Long and hard" is the language of a man who needs the camera to believe he was indispensable. David Pakman called it what it is: a lie he cannot drop because Trump's ego, insecurity, and malignant narcissism requires a hero's origin story he never earned.

The documented record is unkind to him. He visited the area around Ground Zero in the days after the attack. That is it. On September 13, 2001, he claimed he already had more than a hundred workers on site and a hundred more coming. FDNY Chief Richard Alles said the obvious: there would have been documentation. Crews operated under police and fire supervision. There is no record of a Trump deployment. Newsrooms that tried to verify it found nothing. No names. No hours. No crew. Nothing.

What does exist is the phone call. While the city was still counting the dead, Trump rang a TV show to claim that 40 Wall Street had become "the tallest building" downtown. Even that boast was sloppy. 70 Pine Street was taller. The instinct was perfect, though: measure a massacre in square footage and personal ranking.

This is the pattern. He did not build the recovery. He built a story about the recovery, then demanded applause for the story. When the evidence fails to appear, he repeats the line louder, as if volume were a substitute for a roster, a work order, or a single contemporaneous account that doesn't come from his own mouth.

A pathological liar is not someone who gets a date wrong. A pathological liar is someone who keeps returning to a catastrophe he did not manage, claiming labor he cannot document, and treating other people's grief as a stage. Twenty-five years later he is still doing it, still hungry for a medal, still unembarrassed.

Trump is not a leader. He is a man so hollow he cannot let a mass grave exist without crawling into it for credit. He did not send the hundred workers. He did not work "long and hard." He worked the PR angle. Twenty-five years on, he is still auditioning as the hero in a story where the only documentation is his own voice bragging about a building. When New York City needed him most, Trump was a no-show.

[Michael @tmpape]

This is getting ridiculous. Half of the packages seem to arrive damaged anymore. Amazon can do better if they really wanted. They charge enough for their service.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Jessica: But there was a lot more to that Fox poll, and it was absolutely brutal for Republicans, and that is going to be the choice in November. Democrats up 53-46. In counties where the presidential vote was close, so decided within ten points, Democrats have 59-41. Up on inflation and prices and the economy. Young people. Old people. Women. Independents.

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

PBS fact-checked Trump’s speech:

1. CLAIM: China accessed voter files.
*The files were public voter rolls from 6 states in 2022, not the 2020 election. No evidence votes were changed.

2. CLAIM: Voting machines are vulnerable.
*No evidence any machines were hacked in 2020. Paper ballots and audit trails protected election results.

3. CLAIM: 278,000 non-citizens were registered.
*Registration isn’t proof of voting, and the WH provided no evidence for the claim.

[Jessica Tarlov @JessicaTarlov]

Mocking the Democratic candidates in Maine may feel good now, but reality it’s a very blue environment and Susan Collins is six years older than when she beat Gideon and has been voting with Trump 95% of the time.

She gave the go ahead on an extra 70 billion for ICE with no guardrails. Listen to the ex wife of the agent who shot Joan Guerrero - he shouldn’t have been in that job. Maine is confronting the consequences of an agency staffed with untrained, unaccountable officers operating without body cameras. Collins can issue all the carefully worded statements she wants, but her record is clear. In 2026, make her answer for every vote.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

A Fox host joking about US soldiers raping women.

Well done Rupert Murdoch, well done.

[Jessica Tarlov @JessicaTarlov]

This has to stop. They’re just laughing and counting money and we’re letting them get away with it.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

MAJOR BREAKING: Trump just stated that The Trump admin allowed China to obtain 220 million American Voter files and his intel agency downplayed it all!

IMPEACH!