blakerj.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

U.S. Attorneys are not the President’s lawyers. They are the United States’ lawyers. You didn’t pledge an oath to a President, you pledged it to the constitution. This statement alone is reason enough to resign.

submitted 30 minutes ago • 98 comments

Hail to the thief. We're entering a golden age for scammers and financial predators, with two of the biggest in the world running things now.

submitted 4 hours ago • 6 comments

alright, we're gonna kick this series off with a fucking bang. my first story in the DOGE IS FOUR LETTERS series comes from nate brought, director of the executive secretariat at the national institutes of health, and you're going to want to hear what he has to say.

submitted 5 hours ago • 32 comments

Sun Ra’s “Holiday for Soul Dance” on the table with maybe the chillest and most straight-forward Arkestra outing in existence. All standards plus one Phil Cochran original, this is a great lazy afternoon spin from a small Arkestra session in 1960.

submitted 19 hours ago • 0 comments

Keith Hudson, the dub/reggae icon and Bob Marley contemporary’s iconic debut LP Flesh of My Skin, Blood of My Blood is a go-to feel-good album of aspiration and centering observations. This 2021 press on VP Records is a great mix that’s very attainable..

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

It's pretty cool that Eater put together resources for restaurants about how to handle ICE raids

submitted 3 days ago • 39 comments

Lazy Bones!! was my introduction to the Zamrock sound, likely because it’s the standout album from a band that helped put Zambian music on a global stage. Fuzzed out hard rock dipped in Zambian folk and dosed with a drop of psychedelia, WITCH conjures only the most delectable demons for your ears.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

another thing every other president in history would be impeached for just happened

submitted 3 days ago • 89 comments

This is quite significant in many ways: the overt thuggery, Trump’s barely suppressed fury at being contradicted by a woman, the governor’s standing up, the total abandonment of the pretense of federalism, the continuing use of trans Americans the way Hitler used Jews.

submitted 3 days ago • 294 comments

Republicans could easily stop Trump and Musk’s liquidation of government functions their constituents rely on. Just a small handful—literally single digits—could work with Democrats and end it. Instead they meekly go along while privately begging for dispensation. www.politico.com/news/2025/02...

submitted 3 days ago • 25 comments

Lesser known (to me at least) project involving Khan Jamal, Sounds of Liberation were a Philly staple on the equally Philly Dogtown label, and their lone proper album is a scorcher. SOL includes Byard Lancaster on sax and frequent Jamal drummer Dwight James setting the pace. 2019 Dogtown reissue.

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Tough situation. Maybe at some point we can amend the Constitution to provide a specific power Congress can use against an executive who’s unlawfully usurping its authority.

submitted 3 days ago • 58 comments

Wow. DOGE is far more expensive than the USDS that it pretends to be. www.propublica.org/article/doge...

submitted 3 days ago • 60 comments

i think it is cool that de facto first consul of the united states is a drug-addled maniac and deadbeat dad with a breeding fetish

submitted 3 days ago • 545 comments

We are living through a real life version of the right wing conspiracy theory about Soros controlling everything, but Musk is a right wing billionaire so Republicans are fine with it bsky.app/profile/samd...

submitted 4 days ago • 24 comments

Minnesota’s deputy director for the Small Business Administration was fired Feb. 7, rehired days later when the government said it made a mistake, and then fired again last week. Another federal employee who was abruptly fired has newborn twins in the NICU. More stories of chaos + cruelty:

submitted 4 days ago • 12 comments

Mass layoffs of IRS agents who catch tax evaders. Once more, Elon Musk's very sincere crusade to cut "waste and fraud" out of the federal government just so happens to weaken government power over billionaires like him. What an incredible string of coincidences we've had here.

submitted 4 days ago • 44 comments

Epic 2006 Soul Jazz reissue from ESG on the table tonight, originally on the historic 99 Records label back in 1983. Blending dance-funk with a punk aesthetic and filtering it through a NY sound, something like no wave but caked in street-grit. An album full of standout boogie-downs no doubt.

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

You know? I still find it remarkably easy to remain patriotic throughout this administration. Trump and the MAGA crowd are a repudiation of every single civic ideal that the United States is meant to represent—and I see no reason to stop believing in those ideals because of them.

submitted 4 days ago • 131 comments

REVEALED: we identified the operator of an overtly racist X account, "GlomarResponder," as ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden, based on an overwhelming number of biographical details matched through publicly available documents, other social media activity, and courtroom observation.

submitted 4 days ago • 1007 comments

Going to be quite frank, I do not find anything about this “king” stuff to be funny in any form, don’t think there’s a place for us to just crack wise about it and pretend it’s normal, yes we are all irony-poisoned but if we don’t draw a line here then we have no line

submitted 5 days ago • 134 comments

The root that tears apart your foundation begins as a seed of distrust, hate, and blame. The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

submitted 5 days ago • 844 comments

I enjoyed that little flurry of fake news reports that Trump and Putin weren't really talking, or that Putin was mad at Trump the "russia hoax" was always real, and this is an extremely well funded global authoritarian assault on law, informed consensus, empathy, and democratic order by sociopaths

submitted 5 days ago • 21 comments

Sweet psych/funk/soul stuff from The Black Hippies, a Nigerian group who played it up to western expats capitalizing on the 70s West African oil boom. They got some attention, and ultimately this release on the sizable EMI label in ‘76, but never quite found an audience. Academy has this reissue.

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

1. Meta removed a Facebook ads criticizing Elon Musk's efforts to seize Americans' private information through DOGE. A notice from Meta said the ads violated its rules on "Unacceptable Business Practices."

submitted 6 days ago • 229 comments

a good example of how the world is getting dumber. the new politico playbook writer didn't know who FDR was until a reader told him about that whole "new deal" thing. this newsletter is read by every important person in DC.

submitted 6 days ago • 839 comments

you don't talk about stuff like eggs or long lines at national parks because those are more important than the coup against the rule of law. you talk about that stuff because getting low information americans mad at Trump about that stuff is a precondition to getting them to care about the big stuff

submitted 6 days ago • 24 comments

What happens when the government of the United States is no longer clearly on the side of freedom, at home or abroad? What happens when we can no longer be proud of the behavior of our own government? Today's Morning Shots from @billkristolbulwark.bsky.social and @eggerdc.bsky.social:

submitted 6 days ago • 23 comments

Just to be clear, because I don’t think the Post story highlights it enough: This was Trump’s day-one pick to lead the Social Security Admin until his nominee got confirmed who RESIGNED a career job rather than do what Musk’s DOGE team wants. This is Treasury (DOGE) and DOJ (Adams) all over again.

submitted 6 days ago • 90 comments

The enigmatic Willis Earl Beal, an artist who had a spark of notoriety at the end of the aughts after being “found” by Found mag, is a sometimes confounding force. Acousmatic Sorcery, his leap into the spotlight, is a champion of the counter-culture grindset. Raw, emotional, untamed & unclassifiable

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

How was this contract awarded??!

submitted 7 days ago • 759 comments

If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general. If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them.

submitted 7 days ago • 2289 comments

i feel like this is evidence for my view that people experience trump through a strong form of ironic detachment. they literally do not perceive him as real.

submitted 7 days ago • 427 comments

Trafficking is a central theme of the QAnon worldview, with the idea that Trump would act to stop it when in office. Instead...

submitted 7 days ago • 163 comments

I feel like I'm going insane every time I see a media story about DOGE that doesn't also mention the fact that the Government Accountability Office exists and performs the exact function that DOGE pretends to, only in a credibly constitutional, non-partisan, and conflict-of-interest-free manner

submitted 8 days ago • 186 comments

Elon Musk and Donald Trump are mass firing veterans. apnews.com/live/trump-p...

submitted 8 days ago • 650 comments

Companion piece to last Sunday’s “Hours After,” “Reflections In Blue” was the 1st album from that '86 Italy session. Classic big band swingin' channeled through an 80s filter; a rather unconventional straightforward and not-at-all cosmic affair with a fun-loving & care-free approach.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Congrats to everyone who insisted they were better off four years ago -- you made it right back to the safety and security of "early COVID pandemic"

submitted 8 days ago • 61 comments

New, from me: DOGE's mass firings of probationary employees are a masterclass in how not to manage public organizations. They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/doge-misma...

submitted 8 days ago • 95 comments

A non-trivial part of the issue here are the strong incentives within the academic legal culture to produce knowingly & facially absurd arguments as sorts of feats of cranial strength and very little acculturation pushing in the opposite direction.

submitted 8 days ago • 10 comments

Songs for lazy afternoon with Leo Nocentelli’s “Another Side,” a nearly forgotten would-be classic of southern fried acoustic rock from the famous Meters guitarist recorded in 1971 and buried until 2021, thankfully given to the world by Light In The Attic. The 70s would've loved this one.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment