For bedtime, @irisgrim and I’ve been reading this CSPAN history of the presidents and it’s remarkable what bad luck the left — broadly and imperfectly defined — has had when it comes to mortality.
The first president to die in office, the Whig William Henry Harrison, was the first to run a modern campaign, even drawing 100k people to a rally, like 1/2 the damn population at the time. Women for the first time were a major part of his campaign and he ousted Jackson’s protege
Martin Van Buren. He died in a month and was replaced by the slavery-loving Democrat John Tyler, who was later elected to serve in the Confederate Congress
Then 8 years later the Whigs manage to elect Zachary Taylor, who surprising everybody by being a strong opponent of the Slave Power, threatens war with Texas and threatens to hang Jefferson Davis for treason
He does too, replaced by the wretched Millard Fillmore. Whigs had not learned their lesson.
Then 1865 wasn’t bad luck: a Confederate conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln was successful. But the Whigs-turned-GOP still hadn’t learned their lesson, and Andrew Johnson takes over
At Lincoln’s memorials, lots of prominent politicians referred to his assassination as the third — certain the Slave Power had also killed Harrison and Taylor, though the evidence doesn’t back that up.
Then Garfield is elected in 1880, after running post-Reconstruction as an explicit supporter of black civil rights. He dies his first year, replaced by Chester Arthur, who did not feel similarly.
You could argue the first one to go the other way came when an anarchist
shot McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt took over, launching the Progressive Era.
I don’t really have a point, just an interesting thing to add to all the structural right wing tilt already built in.
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I could not possibly be filled with more rage after seeing Texas Republicans blame the National Weather Service forecast for the unspeakable tragedy that hit the girls camp.
You were warned this would happen if you fired everyone!
You actively chose to fire as many scientists working for the federal government as possible and have even taken weather balloons out of the sky. These were people who dedicated their lives to this stuff and you fired them so you could do tax cuts.
You do not now get to complain that weather forecasts are off.
Please go find these girls and rehire these scientists.
It can’t be known at this time what the specific effect of the cuts was. What can be known is that nobody who supported all the firings gets to complain about the performance of an agency they torched. And stop letting people build in known danger zones.
This doesn’t seem to be getting enough attention. The Silicon Valley social contract forced on the public by Obama and then Trump and then Biden (minus Lina Khan) and now Trump was straight forward: We will let these bros become the richest people in human history and in exchange they will develop a tech industry that makes the U.S. dominant for a century.
They did the first part, then built monopolies to try to keep out competition rather than continue to innovate at a top level, and then got out-competed by Chinese companies in both AI and social media. They are the losers we always thought they were — and now so are we.
Now they’re gonna spend $500B gobbling up energy in Texas to build a product China is making for $5B and giving away basically free. Lemme know how that goes.
Meanwhile the Texas grid breaks when it gets cold.
U.S. tech oligarchs and the actual president of the United States spending time and energy doing crypto nonsense while China releases an AI that kicks our ass is such a perfect metaphor while also being literally what’s happening
IDF is now openly acknowledging the 5 journalists they incinerated were indeed operating as journalists, but the IDF believed their work was “combat propaganda.”
The IDF is entitled to its opinion and is free to engage in media criticism, but deliberately killed 5 journalists because you don’t like their work is terrorism, barbarism, a crime against humanity, and should be prosecuted immediately
So the @nytimes can drop the he said/she said pretense here since both sides acknowledge they were indeed working as journalists
@nytimes For the prosecutors, here’s the confession
🚨Major investigation just dropped at @DropSiteNews in partnership with a consortium of independent European news outlets. A major player in global journalism is primarily bankrolled by the U.S. State Department, we can reveal. Story to follow in next post:
🚨 Today at @DropSiteNews--in collaboration w/TI Brasil--we're publishing text messages sent by the US-backed attorney general, a rise star celebrated in Time magazine by Samantha Power, that show her using the powers of her office to undermine the party of Rafael Correa /1
For instance, in one message sent to Ronny Aleaga, who says he had an "intimate relationship" with Salazar despite being political adversaries, she says she is delaying the prosecution of a right-wing official so as not to help the left in the elections dropsitenews.com/p/ecuador-left…