Valuesauce

[Patrick Webb @Patrickwebb]

BREAKING: FBI records confirm that a Butler County Sheriff’s deputy exchanged two emails with Thomas Matthew Crooks prior to the July 13, 2024, assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, PA, per FOIA request.

[Clarence Thomas the Tank Engine @TheRealJChubby]

Are you saying the fakest "assassination attempt" in American history might have been staged???

[MonitorX @MonitorX99800]

🇺🇸🇮🇱⚡️BREAKING: American soldiers deployed to defend Israel had their phones bugged and wiretapped by Mossad – New York Times

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@tedcruz Shut the fuck up.

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@NateSilver538 Nate, tell me you don’t understand anything about any of the vibes out here without telling me that directly. It’s like you’re living 8 years behind the rest of us. It’s incredible.

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@DropSiteNews @TrackAIPAC Israel is a terrorist state. It needs to be completely dismantled. Its agents of subversion imprisoned or hanged. One state solution, called Palestine, with full democracy. Fuck Israel. Never forget, fuck Israel.

[pannekook 🫶 @pannekook]

it’s been crazy to see twitter spaces about this going on for weeks and see absolutely nothing about it on the timeline. news is being censored

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Prem Thakker @prem_thakker]

Here are the 117 Democrats who voted with Republicans against Rashida Tlaib's Lebanon war powers resolution.

Thomas Massie was the one Republican to join 91 Democrats — who all bucked party leadership — in voting for it.

[Prem Thakker @prem_thakker]

A US group founded to “enhance Israel’s image” & staffed by ex-Israeli officials (including Netanyahu’s negotiator who got US to send $3.8B per year to Israel) is revealed to have helped blueprint the new Republican push to fuse the Israeli & US militaries.https://t.co/t0lJM3FeaW

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@TalkinBaseball_ @MartyCaswell I think the problem is manny sucks this year so he’s upset about sucking

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@TheRabbitHole Ok but that would be like that guy in 95 saying they are a “normal person” from 65. How did a 1965 person feel about race? How about woman working? Yeah. Fucking idiot.

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@JasonBassler1 They should destroy them, not just cover them.

[susan abulhawa | سوزان ابو الهوى @susanabulhawa]

ZIOS: it's antisemitic to say Jews control the media

ALSO ZIOS: controlling all the media is a lot of work. "Instead of trying to control the whole world," [yes, that's a direct quote], all we have to do is control AI, because people trust AI and that's where everyone is getting their information.

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Rather shocking remarks at the Park East Synagogue on Sunday from former Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan: “Message to Mayor Mamdani: We survived Amalek, we survived Hamas, we defeated Iran, we overcame Pharaoh — we will overcome Zohran Mamdani as well.”

[iza @izamamaa]

Wasn’t her husband assassinated in broad daylight here in the U.S. while Trump was president?

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@NateSilver538 Nate isn’t this like your job, how are you so absolutely absurdly bad at it

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

It's kind of wild to find out that the Republican in the NYT story that says she had a toxic relationship with Graham Platner is Lyndsey Fifield. Having been in DC for too long, I know a decent number of people who know her quite well. For a long time she was the co-host of a podcast with her best friend Bethany Mandel, called Ladybrains, though she has also worked for multiple super PACs, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Heritage Foundation.

Some background, presented without judgment: In 2014, Fifield began work as digital director for American Action Network, a Republican Super PAC that oversees House races. The next year she became social media manager for the Heritage Foundation, where she stayed for the next seven years.

In 2022, she joined the Super PAC backing Nikki Haley for president, switching to the official campaign side the next year, and staying until the campaign flamed out. She now lists herself as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, a prominent dark money group that is best known for helping usher Brett Kavanaugh on to the Supreme Court and giving Susan Collins the talking points she needed to make her decisive speech in his favor.

The NYT breezed past all this, saying she was "a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns."

In an interview for a news outlet called Red Alert Politics that named her to a “30 under 30” list back in 2016, she said that she wanted to “emulate the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s approach to online activism.” Breitbart, known for pushing the boundaries when it came to political combat, is perhaps best remembered for having exposed Anthony Weiner’s penchant for sending nudes to young girls, and for his work elevating James O’Keefe.

That she worked for Independent Women's Forum recently is even wilder since IWF played a critical role in Kavanaugh's confirmation and in persuading Collins to support it.

Heather Higgins, chair of IWF, laid out the group’s role in a talk several years ago. “We wrote a memo. It was used by a lot of members of the Senate and the House, Fox News, and elsewhere. Most important, Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she would not see how to support him,” Higgins said. “And if you look at the speech she gave on the Senate floor, it’s entirely the playing out and architecture of how we said to structure the argument — what to say and how to say it, which is just so gratifying. We’re watching TV and we’re like, ‘That’s ours! That’s ours!’”

Meanwhile, the timeline Fifield gives of their relationship is confusing, because during at least some of that time she was actually dating a different person, her longterm boyfriend who became her fiancee before she called off the wedding in 2018. We all know this because she and Mandel did a podcast episode on it that went mega-viral in Republican circles back then. Apparently this is the kind of thing the NYT thinks is important now, so I guess it requires more reporting. I'll report back.

Here is Heather Higgins celebrating IWF's role in getting Susan Collins to confirm Kavanaugh:

[Nathan Bernard @nathanTbernard]

This is the GOP operative who NYT used as their primary Platner source without being able to corroborate her claims.

[Valuesauce @valuesauce]

@lyndseyfifield Shut the fuck up you lying hack