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

A $200 million ad campaign for an audience of one.

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

"A lot of powerful people don’t really grasp the full extent to which Musk is marinating in and sharing extraordinarily deranged material on the platform, sometimes hundreds of times a day." – @jwherrman.bsky.social (nymag.com/intelligence...)

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

"The crowd again started shouting 'tax Elon,' 'tax the wealthy,” “tax the rich' and 'tax the billionaires.'" The county went 68% for Trump www.lagrandeobserver.com/news/local/r...

submitted 1 day ago • 244 comments

Very basic question: DOGE is made up a few dozen people most of whom aren't drawing salaries. What could $40 million be going toward? Could it be data storage outside government servers? talkingpointsmemo.com/news/doge-co...

submitted 1 day ago • 70 comments

Median age of homebuyers just hit a new record high of 56 (Via Torsten Slok)

submitted 1 day ago • 91 comments

This kind of thing is so psychic damage-inducing but it really reinforces how many people don’t pay attention to anything and just let vibes guide their opinion. Message is to have superior vibes

submitted 1 day ago • 14 comments

Little Lord Incel-roy

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

We finally have an actual 1A question about social media and I’m wondering where the Twitter Files dupes are?

submitted 2 days ago • 20 comments

It very much feels like a trade off that is, “Hey, we’re gonna take away your Social Security forever, but we’re gonna give you $5k right now. You’re cool with that, right?”

submitted 2 days ago • 9 comments

I keep saying that he is NOT popular. I'll add that some of these polls show him underwater on the economy which even when he was at his lowest in the first term folks who were Apprentice pilled still gave him good marks on the economy.

submitted 2 days ago • 20 comments

Huh, turns out leaving the best hockey player in the world wide open in the slot ends poorly.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Vote-a-rama update: Chuck Schumer offered an amendment to the Republican budget resolution to prohibit tax cuts for the wealthy if even $1 is cut from Medicaid. It was rejected 49-51. Democrats unanimously voted YES, joined by Collins and Hawley. Other Republicans voted NO.

submitted 2 days ago • 25 comments

I'm trying to imagine how the ESPN production meeting for this game led to using Kurt Russell's speech from 'Miracle,' but only if the game went to overtime.

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

If this US-Canada game is your first sudden death overtime, allow @jonbois.bsky.social to explain what is coming:

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Laid-off IRS employee said he had voted for Trump: "I thought that someone with his business acumen would have come in with a fine-tooth comb and actually found it instead of coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people’s lives for no reason." www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/local/p...

submitted 2 days ago • 2595 comments

Sure, tens of thousands of journalists lost their jobs because Facebook hoovered up media ad revenues and made up fake metrics to push "pivoting to video." But at least Zuckerberg used the money wisely!

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Elon’s busy schedule today is claiming astronauts were left in the ISS for political reasons, getting corrected by an ISS astronaut, throwing a fit where he calls the astronaut a slur, then complaining that we should deorbit the ISS

submitted 2 days ago • 342 comments

A quick review of Hassett's prediction record: – 1999: The Dow should soon hit "36,000." – 2004: "I don't think a [housing] catastrophe is very likely." – 2020: Covid deaths will peak in mid-April, then drop off. And no, he never raised any concerns about trillions in covid aid under Trump.

submitted 2 days ago • 23 comments

NEW — I wrote about Leland Dudek, a Social Security Administration (SSA) staffer who went from being on admin leave for aiding DOGE to acting head of the agency overnight. I talked to multiple SSA employees about how this prolific LinkedIn poster became Musk's poster boy for government allegiance:

submitted 2 days ago • 56 comments

new from me: elon musk is supposedly the leader of DOGE — but the White House says otherwise in court. i looked into the EOs empowering DOGE and came to the same conclusion that even some of the staffers at the USDS did, which is there's no real clarity about who is in charge of this thing

submitted 2 days ago • 3 comments

mUsK dOeSnT nEeD yOuR MoNeY

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Star of Leopard News Asks That Friend’s Face be Spared

submitted 2 days ago • 432 comments

New Gallup poll: 37% of independents "approve of Trump’s job performance overall....Trump’s approval rating on the economy now, 42%, is lower than his 48% reading in February 2017." news.gallup.com/poll/656891/...

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Another poll showing majority support for DEI, even as very serious pundits insist Dems lost because of woke.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Are you a recently dismissed federal employee? MSNBC.com is looking for first-person pieces about what you were working on, why you joined the government, etc. We're interested in hearing from air traffic controllers, USAID employees, and everyone in between. Contact me at jdow.92 on Signal.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

An important reminder, since people are wrongly freaking out: Small private planes crash all the time. The Philly crash, the Alaska crash, this one — all count as such. There are 1,000 small plane crashes a year. This is normal. Them making headlines is what is scaring you.

submitted 3 days ago • 28 comments

Note how weird and vague the investigation of Schumer is: Martin says “I have reached out to Schumer to investigate the threats.” That’s . . . That’s not a thing. That’s not how investigates work. The U.S. Attorney doesn’t call the target. So….. /1

submitted 3 days ago • 55 comments

Disposable is out today! I owe everything to my sources and to my family, friends and colleagues, who have supported me and who believed in this project as much as I did. bookshop.org/p/books/disp...

submitted 4 days ago • 4 comments

Oops www.nbcnews.com/politics/dog...

submitted 4 days ago • 13 comments

This has happened with almost every new media of the last 40 years — talk radio, cable news, YouTube/podcasts. The only exception was the blog-heavy era of the mid- to late 2000s, and it's no coincidence that the right struggled to dominate the least expensive format.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

another Thing I Will Keep Saying: there is of course an important moral case for internationalism. but the practical case for it can start by simply noticing how internationalist the people robbing you are (however nationalist their rhetoric might be)

submitted 3 days ago • 7 comments

Lmao a Nobel Prize winner finds the solution to the global fertility collapse is for men to do the dishes and laundry more often -- more or less the precise opposite of the trad prescription Fabulous @byheatherlong.bsky.social essay www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

Fifty percent of these words are superfluous.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

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Wait until Palmer Luckey learns that Palmer Luckey has only 1 kid.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

hE DoEsN't NeEd yOuR MoNeY

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

What the mainstream media doesn't understand is that Americans voted to receive more mass texts from numbers they don't recognize.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Congratulations to Bill Guerin for doing the impossible and making this not fun anymore. www.thedailybeast.com/us-hockey-te...

submitted 4 days ago • 105 comments

Bernie Madoff would feign not knowing prospective clients' names, make them call him half a dozen times to schedule meetings, and express utter indifference as to whether they invested with him at all. All to show "no sign of wanting the businessman’s money." www.nytimes.com/2011/04/24/b...

submitted 4 days ago • 2 comments

Today I learned that "Dow 36,000" got memory-holed in conservative Washington. Which explains a lot.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Food safety chief at the FDA quits saying Trump's mass layoffs make his job "fruitless" www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

submitted 4 days ago • 65 comments

I've always said Javier Miliei is just the Argentine version of the "Hawk Tuah" woman (via @gilduran.com): www.thenerdreich.com/milei-crypto...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

As this article spells out, one tiny problem with "it's the wokeness!" is how Democrats crushed it when they were at their most woke. This was all in 2020 before the election. Then in 2024 they backed away from it and lost to a bunch of the same people they beat in 2020.

submitted 4 days ago • 46 comments

The script writers took it easy this holiday weekend: "Iditarod route changed due to lack of snow." www.adn.com/2025/02/17/i...

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

more and more these days, I find myself thinking that you can accept the discipline of your political goals or you can accept the discipline of your resentments.

submitted 5 days ago • 60 comments

What Trump has done for US farmers so far: -frozen their foreign aid program (and left their food to rot) -encouraged EU to ban their products -frozen legally-owed reimbursements for their energy efficiency upgrades etc. -threatened to deport half their workforce -suppressed research on bird flu

submitted 6 days ago • 190 comments

"IDRS access is extremely limited - taxpayers who have had their information wrongfully disclosed or even inspected are entitled by law to monetary damages." Well, well, well. I can think of a billionaire or two whose taxes could be raised to pay for those damages.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

USA-Canada starts with two fights. God I missed best-on-best hockey.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments