benstarr66.bsky.social

LeBron and Dean Wade do the Key & Peele Obama handshake sketch reenactment.

Elon Musk has spent more money on American elections in the last two years than George Soros has in his entire life.

Massachusetts has once again been ranked among the least competitive states for elections nationwide, a pervasive problem that supporters of a ballot question to transform primary elections have pushed in their campaign for electoral reform. buff.ly/nbyn3wd

New — I wrote about Vivek Ramaswamy’s weaponization of Amy Acton’s childhood sexual abuse and how it’s only the latest symptom of a Republican party flush with rape apologists, led by an adjudicated rapist:

🚨 EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump adviser Ric Grenell allegedly outlined a stunning pay-for-influence offer to a Turkish billionaire last year that included access to Trump, according to a text message reviewed by Axios that the White House counsel is investigating.

Can't believe this is where we are (repeat it every day).

1,000 years from now, teachers will struggle to explain to their students how at this time in history, we found literally the most despicable human being in America and made him the most powerful person in the world

#OPINION "I’ve spent my career fighting for a political system that actually listens to the people it’s supposed to serve," writes Tanisha Sullivan, president of the New England NAACP. If approved, ballot Question 3 would push lawmakers to do the same. buff.ly/SQhG6m5

Perfect. Drive through all the time and feel the same.

After this one Zolak screamed "this is not analytics! It's feel." Uh huh. @chadfinn.bsky.social

He tends to double down when someone suggests his words weren't what had been intended.

“.. defense companies backed by the president's sons, including Anduril, have now raked in more than $6 billion dollars in active or promised government contracts since those investments were made, according to the government's official contract reporting. abcnews.com/Politics/tru...

It’s confusing that @theatlantic.com described this man as a “a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Trump for the first time in 2024” who when these are some of his very easily findable FB posts:

This has been on my feed all day so I'm going to give it as fair as treatment as I can. Prof. Wolfers is well meaning & I get the intuition, but he's speaking outside his area of expertise and he's just wrong. Having lunch with someone you disagree with isn't going to "cure ideological bias." 🧵

YOU hate Nader for throwing the 2000 election. I hate Nader for ushering in the era of Consumer as a primary political identity, touting the tort system as an alternative to normal democratic deliberation, and making things generally work worse in the USA.

You tax things you want less of. It’s why they tax cigarettes. To make it too expensive to bother with that bad habit It is a disgrace this logical fallacy is applied to housing. If you believe in IZ you don’t actually want more housing, you just want certain housing, which prevents other housing

I believe most just employ "taxes" to save on letters.

Gotta love a New York mayor shitposting about English football and certain people just not being able to cope.

it is just fundamentally not the case that Zohran's governance has been characterized by either a) large new spending programs b) an insouciant approach to deficits he is instead plotting a new course for left politics which takes efficiency and budgeting deadly seriously

Commenting on the rise of xenophobia in 1855, Lincoln wrote, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.” One can only imagine his reaction to Bo French or Charles Haywood.

Karl Rove: Why I’m Voting for a Texas Democrat 🎁Gift article: www.wsj.com/opinion/why-...

A+ storytelling on the origination of the band Boston. www.bostonglobe.com/2026/09/16/m...

BC's unique position here seems worthy of follow-up from the Globe @chadfinn.bsky.social

The Freakout is an example of something @annielowrey.bsky.social has written about eloquently. Americans are increasingly unwilling to support rate-lowering, base broadening tax reforms or the idea of taxes as shared sacrifice. Everyone is out to get their own tax breaks, including majorities!

❗New Article❗ The Great American Property Tax Freakout! Since 2024, many states have radically reshaped their property tax systems.The changes are an example of a national trend of carving out influential groups from taxation, in this case a majority group: homeowners papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Sweet Caroline must be banned worldwide from all sporting events. it's such a bad song.

This “game” on the White House website, a version of Snake where you play as a white man in a suit and you run around picking up identifiably black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits, might be the most openly white supremacist thing I’ve ever seen the US government produce

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-harvard-...

Seems to allow suburbs off the hook and not carrying their weight.

Making everyone feel like there's a fixed pie of resources and their slice is shrinking and everyone is out to fuck everyone else creates fertile ground for conservatism & eventually authoritarianism. The absolute core conviction of online leftists to the contrary is endlessly baffling.

Convincing young people that America is poor & no one can afford anything & everyone is living paycheck to paycheck & their economic future is doomed ... IS NOT GOING TO LEAD TO MORE PROGRESSIVE POLICY. People who feel anxious & under threat do not respond with openness & generosity! Look it up!

People really want Trump to be an economic disaster and sorry, it's just not playing out that way. There's no doubt his policies have reduced growth relative to an alternative baseline, but the US economy is in great shape for the near to medium term, even more so given everything he's thrown at it.

Republicans' largest donor (by far) is hosting a robust debate on his platform about whether Jews are white. Corporate Media will ask precisely 0 Republicans about their largest donor's all-consuming misogyny, xenophobia, antisemitism, he will instead by referred to as a visionary industrialist.

working paper arguing that the 2019 NYC strengthening of rent control lead to substantially less property maintence and lower housing quality. beaubressler.github.io/papers/rent_...

And you wonder why Jews don't believe the folks who insist they're "just antizionist, really"

Most importantly, El-Sayed campaigned and appeared with Piker. He functionally promoted Piker as a Democratic Party surrogate. That's bad for the Democratic Party.

this is so incredible I can’t stop laughing because he forgot to include Reagan

"Her platform focuses on technocratic solutions like the theoretically best possible zoning policies rather than building power for the working-class by challenging capital." Good thing LA's zoning status quo is not devastating the city's working class or anything.

I am once again asking American government to stop using land use permitting processes as the site of public deliberation about broad social changes.

Good evidence for old school conservative perspective that govt is inherently flawed.

The weirdest thing is for all the press that insists on staying on X, how little coverage there is of the insane hate Elon Musk promotes there every day.

Playing in our faces

this is an established pattern from Track AIPAC, anybody who's elevating them at this point is extremely suspect (from my article in @liberalcurrents.com)

so when this 1st screenshot about natalie harp was making the rounds yesterday, it came up in a group chat i’m in — and our smartest member (guy who knows a lot about a lot) taught us some things i wish i didn’t know but now i know them so you have to know them too!

Boom! Shout it from the rooftops! www.pew.org/en/research-...

This is one of those arguments that sounds like slopulism but is actually, if anything, understated. 56% of Colorado river water goes to GROWING FEED FOR LIVESTOCK IN THE DESERT.

Great piece on the lackluster effects of California’s new housing laws. Legislators have finally challenged anti-density NIMBYism, but by loading on inclusionary zoning and wage requirements, they’ve made newly legal housing too costly to build www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026...