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your friendly neighborhood heretic

@peaceofthespirit / peaceofthespirit.tumblr.com

callie [25, she/her] || queer, leftist, unorthodox christian || I follow from @gamora-borealis

Cory Booker has been talking in the senate for over 20 hours now

He’s not filibustering. He’s protesting the current administration.

For those of you from outside the US or those of you who didn’t pay attention in government class, in the US senate there’s really no limit to the amount of time a senator can speak. So sometimes if they don’t want a bill to pass they just. Don’t stop talking. To hopefully get past the deadline to vote on a bill. This is called filibustering.

Senator Cory Booker isn’t doing that. He’s disrupting “the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able”. Just in protest. This doesn’t usually happen.

He’s less than 20 minutes away from breaking the record of the longest speech given on the senate floor

Cory Booker has officially broken Strom Thurmond’s record for longest speech on the senate floor and he’s still going

For those of you wondering what he’s been talking about this whole time, his staff wrote down a bunch of stuff for him to read like stories from people across the political spectrum opposed to what the administration is doing. He’s also been telling personal anecdotes about meeting important civil rights leaders and other democratic senators have been pausing him for “questions” but the questions have been as long as a small speech and have both served the purpose of giving him a second to sit down and updating him on the news that he’s been missing while he’s been talking.

He has yielded the floor at 25 hrs and 4 mins. His eyes are so wide they look like they’re going to bug out of his skull so I don’t blame him for stopping. He said to go out and get in some good trouble.

Addition for those unaware: Cory Booker is black. Strom Thurmond set the previous record about 70 years ago in protest of civil rights. Booker spent much of the time I was watching talking about the importance of working together for the people and the idea that it's not "left versus right but right versus wrong."

The new record speech is on the right side of history.

“cory booker is not actually accomplishing anything” I need you to stop being a pessimistic hag every second of ur life. u can be disillusioned. u can wish there was more done already. but this is SOMETHING!! he has broken the longest senate speech record and has been standing up for americans (and against a fascist racist oligarchy) for over 25 hours straight. hundreds of millions have and are watching him. HE is the news cycle. he is reading democratic and republican testimonies alike. people are hearing him, whether they chose to or are forced to!!!!!!! will it solve all our problems? no. but it is a Spark that will hopefully catch flame

Fucking wild to be teaching about Rosa Parks at the same time as a trans woman in Florida does an act of civil disobedience to use a women's restroom in the state capitol

As far as I know, she is the first woman arrested bc of this law. The law requires that the trans person be warned to leave the bathroom by a state official, and then if they stay they are guilty of trespassing after a warning.

So like, me, my gf, others just piss and nobody asks or tells, but this young woman sent a statement about the law to over 100 FL lawmakers so they would know she was coming, the cops were ready for her, she brought a reporter and went in anyway and spent the night in a men's jail. She is out on bail, and is hoping this will inspire change of the law. But if found guilty, and the law is upheld as constitutional, then she could spend up to 60 days in a mens county jail.

Seriously, this is extremely Rosa Parks coded. Good looking, religious college girl. It's the whole playbook. She also added this selfie.

I support her and hope this goes as well as it can.

Shoutout to trans women for being the only ones to do something actually politically radical with the recent trend of girlcore catholicism

some of yall just cant stand to see men treated w any amount of kindness

i couldnt help but notice ur feminist theory is at least 2 decades out of date and u still believe men can never possibly suffer as a result of patriarchy, queen. here

They’re scared because they know that the public is with Luigi.

They’re violating his rights because they need to maintain capitalism.

Keep talking about Luigi.

“The dossier adds that the public ‘may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.’”

Whenever people ask me what do Jews believe about X I always start with how much time do you have? How many answers do you want? Would you like the four most common interpretations?

And then I get to watch their face as they try to wrap their head around the idea that a religion based on debate and questioning might have multiple disparate opinions on scripture.

every single discussion about the fucking signal groupchat makes me feel so insane. "what a display of incompetence! what a failure! let's all make accidental groupchat mistake jokes now" what the fuck are you talking about. it worked. the fact that THIS is the conversation now is literally the point. jeffrey goldberg literally did it again. selling the bombing of the middle east to the public is the entire purpose of his career as a "journalist"

former iof prison guard who spent the past year fully deepthroating the genocidal boot and famously sold the invasion of iraq as something that "will be remembered as an act of profound morality"? "journalist" who literally built his career on manufacturing consent for bombing arabs "accidentally" invited to a top secret group chat about bombing arabs oh no how could this happen? what are you TALKING about. fork found in kitchen! likely place for him to be! my god

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, has been at the center of a national story after he was “inadvertently” included in a group Signal chat with administration officials as they planned a deadly bombing in Yemen. Much of the coverage has focused on the mishandling of military secrets, rather than the impact of the bombings themselves, targeting the poorest country in the Middle East, which the United States has helped bomb and blockade for over a decade. Goldberg is not just an observer: He is contributing to this disregard for Yemeni lives, and his dismissiveness sheds light on why he was an administration media contact to begin with.
In an interview that aired on March 26, Deepa Fernandes, one of the hosts of NPR's “Here and Now,” interviewed Goldberg about the “group chat heard 'round the world” that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance. During one portion of the interview, Fernandes did something few other journalists are doing. She asked Goldberg about the Yemeni people who were killed in the bombing, which took place on March 15.
Deepa Fernandes: There's little talk of the fact that this attack killed 53 people, as we mentioned, including women and children. The civilian toll of these American strikes. Are we burying the lede here?
Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, those, unfortunately, those aren't confirmed numbers. Those are provided by the Houthis and the Houthi health ministry, I guess. So we don't know that for sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're, well, I don't know if we're burying the lede, because obviously huge breaches in national security and safety of information, that's a very, very important story, obviously. And one of the reasons, you know, it's a very important story is that the Republicans themselves consider that to be an important story, when it's Hillary Clinton doing the deed, right? So that's obviously hugely important.
But yeah, I think that covering what's going on in Yemen, the Arab and Iran backed terrorist organization, the Houthis, that are that are firing missiles at Israel and disrupting global shipping and occupy half of Yemen, and all kinds of other things in the US, you know, and the Trump administration criticizing the Biden's response and Europe wants Trump to do more. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a huge story in Yemen. But Yemen is, as you know, is one of the more inaccessible places for Western journalists. So maybe this becomes like a substitute for a discussion of Yemen. I don't know.
Goldberg not only seems unconcerned about the death toll and eager to cast doubt on its veracity, but he also appears unprepared for the question. It’s as though it didn’t occur to him that the substance of the Signal exchange itself—the bombing—might be a legitimate topic of conversation, and he seems eager to move on.
This is despite the fact that there is evidence in the exchange itself that the United States hit a civilian site in the bombing. Waltz wrote in the Signal chat that the US military had bombed a residential building. “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz wrote in the chat, to which JD Vance replied: “Excellent.”
Yet, as Nick Turse noted for The Intercept, “So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.”
The story of US belligerence in Yemen should be a huge one. Since 2015, the US-Saudi coalition has used American manufactured bombs to hit wedding parties, factories, a school bus, and a center for the blind. It’s difficult to know the exact death toll, but around three years ago, the death toll from direct and indirect consequence of war surpassed 377,000. Direct bombings by both the Biden and Trump administrations threaten a wider war, and have occurred in lockstep with US support for Israel as it has ruthlessly bombed and attacked Gaza since October 7.
Goldberg, of course, was included in that group chat because he was a contact of someone on the administration’s thread, and his history of laundering the US military’s mass atrocities is a good indicator of why. In the lead-up to the US-led war on Iraq, Goldberg was central to peddling the disproven conspiracy theory that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, a key lie of the George W. Bush administration, used to justify the invasion. One month before the US started the war, he went on NPR to discuss “Possible Links Between Iraq and al Qaeda and Evidence That the Iraqis May be Trying to Evade Weapons Inspectors.”
Goldberg has a long career of uplifting the media narratives of the United States and its allies, including a big piece in 2010 where he floated justifications for a possible Israeli war on Iran. Like many of the Iraq War pushers, Goldberg’s lies about Iraq did not harm his career, but marked its ascent. Under his tenure, the Atlantic has shut out Palestinian voices and stories, as the US has helped Israel wage genocide in Gaza.
Goldberg’s dismissal of Yemeni deaths is not a small detail of this blockbuster story, but a central component. One way to get on the speed dials of high-level officials is to have a proven career of doing their bidding.
As we see wall-to-wall coverage of the Signal leaks on supposed liberal networks like MSNBC, it’s important to remember that the primary scandal is the bombing of Yemen, a reality that the network has long obscured. As The Column’s Adam Johnson noted in July 2018, at that point it had been a year since MSNBC had mentioned the US backed destruction of Yemen. Yet during that same period, MSNBC had done 455 segments on the Trump-Stormy Daniels affair. As media reports and House Intelligence Committee hearings ignore the human toll of US military attacks, we continue to see the ascent of those who have built their careers on directing public attention away from the people the United States kills.
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