Old Bushwick Bob

USMCA: Combined, the three countries now account for almost a third of global GDP, and intra-regional goods trade alone supports 9.5 million jobs across North America (Brookings USMCA Tracker) #cspan #cspanwj

They are, but culture continues to instruct us to be that way. You ever see a summer blockbuster about a guy who reasons his way to comity with another guy? Our pathetic lives are reflected back to us as zero sum action movies.

Watched Die Hard for the first time in 30 years yesterday. Noted that while it’s great fun, it’s not a Christmas movie. It’s a MAGA movie. Bruce Willis’ character is the proto MAGA man. Anti-feminist to his core, 2A nut; finds effeminate/euro men/ every authority figure both to blame and to kill.

The Constitution is very straightforward on birthright citizenship. There's no ambiguity in the language, no other plausible interpretation. The fact that this is a public discussion at all, and that the Supreme Court is taking it up, is on its own anti-constitutional bullshit. Read the text👇

NYC: “I’m born here! Kings County Hospital! Suck my d*ck!” Trump’s ICE goons grabbing brown and black people. Bounty hunters. Racial profiling is all they do.

Today the NYT story is framed with "Trump Calls Affordability a ‘Con Job." Followed by "President Trump is growing frustrated." There are facts about the economy. Who cares what trump says about affordability? That NYT thinks we should know that Trump is frustrated is lousy journalism.

Trump embraced Zohran Mamdani even after Mamdani called him a fascist. Why? Because Mamdani understands Trump only respects strength—and strength means taking away the voters who fuel his power. ICYMI @saletan.bsky.social breaks down the strategy: lnk.thebulwark.com/4iALUlB

I could see Trump being a bridging figure between russian mob and the cartel. That makes a lot of sense.

As you’re preparing for your Thanksgiving meal, remember the skilled work it took to get that food to your grocery store. Tell us your favorite Thanksgiving dish, and we can share some of what we know about the work behind the ingredients.

He was aware. Predator Trump #Patterns bsky.app/profile/chri...

“Abolish ICE” is a trickier thing, both politically and logistically. But a Congress sworn in on Jan 1, 2028 could have a Day One bill sitting on a Dem POTUS’s desk that dissolves DHS and moves everything around to departments w more civilian-like control.

Oh

One of the worst PEDOPHILES in recorded history thinks/knows Trump, another pedophile, is the worst person on the planet without a single redeeming quality. MAGAs love their pedophiles! bsky.app/profile/theo...

Exactly this. The best case is so bad it’s absolutely criminal.

Our leading news organizations turned a cache of ultimately-innocuous emails into a scandal-coded weeklong series of front page stories leading into the 2016 election. If they do not cover the "emails from notorious pedophile implication the President" emails with the same fervor, it's curious!

Also, DHS is nothing but a 20-yr old org chart. It’s not a “thing” that has to exist: it was just a post-9/11 reorg of agencies that had been elsewhere, brought under one over-militarized leadership. We could abolish DHS tomorrow and relocate all its pieces to less military agencies.

Sums him up pretty well.

well resourced paper Op/Ed sections should could be an amazing space to platform strange, wonderful, and intelligent ideas by artists, activists, scientists, and scholars you've never heard of instead the dull, conservative extraction class converted the whole segment into a contrarian troll farm

Trump’s economy suuuuucks.

We are SOOOOOO back!! 👊

Everyone: Ross Douthat’s opinion is less significant than he thinks.

The factional grifters will hate this, but the Mamdani-Spanberger-Sherrill axis actually suggests the outlines of a broad, emerging Dem coalition organized around both anti-Trump *and* affordability politics, not a party bitterly divided against itself.

This right here, this exact sentence, is THE problem in American political journalism. The IRA *was* cheap energy and good jobs! That was the whole bill! Democrats did precisely what political pundits are telling them to do and the pundits just ignore it.

DHS says our new piece is "dishonest, slanted, and fundamentally inaccurate" but won't say why. Here's the story where we show with evidence that DHS spliced together clips spanning years and multiple locations to create its own reality. Gift link wapo.st/4nuDGwf

I’m sorry, what? Question for immigration ppl: where does the law place the authority to make that determination? Does ICE have the legal authority to delegate to an app?

On a deadly serious note, the President cannot rely on external, private sources to fund spending as an end-run around Congress’ constitutional power of the purse. If he can, we no longer have a republic.

Quite a week!

Seeing how no regulations are being followed in the demolition of the White House, curious if they follow DCFD, NFPA or IBC Chapter 7 regulations for fire protection during construction. With all the tanning oil, hairspray, etc that will be in that ballroom, it may make a bit of a powderkeg.

As we suspected this work is unapproved, rushed, shoddy, unreviewed, harmful to its own workers, destructive of American history, and disrespectful to the nation. I worked for Trump as an architect before. This is his m.o., and always has been.

Some folks were worried that they'd sic thugs on the protestors or declare martial law. Instead they posted AI videos and complained. These people have no juice. Their supporters are cowards. They are are all bark and no bite. They collapse when we push back. Remember that.

Boston. Wow.

#NoKings Providence, RI Good turn out to get the Bum out.

These stories hit differently when the same shit is happening in Portland.

Chris Christie: “Thie is no longer, the Department of Justice, is no longer the premier prosecuting office in America. What it is now is a capo regime who goes out and executes hits when directed by the Don to do so. That’s what it is.”

Honestly, the police officers who are threatening to quit A: aren’t going to quit and B: are exactly the officers who shouldn’t be on the force.

NYT piece calls these MAGA types "provocateurs." It describes "dueling versions of reality." Both are common MSM tropes. But these are not provocateurs. They're propagandists. Only one side is employing deliberate deceptions on a vast scale for instrumental ends. 3/ newrepublic.com/article/2016...

Seeing that we’re now going to be hosting an Qatari airbase. Interesting. Worth looking back at some of the recent history of Oman and the Trump regime. Billions of $$ have been flowing into Trump family hands from Qatar and SA. www.justsecurity.org/69094/timeli...

The GOP is lying. They are distracting from their failures to address the health care crisis that they created.

"According to a July 2024 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022." itep.org/undocumented....