Ann Odell

As an elected official in N.Y. I have been around Chuck Schumer, attended events with him, chatted with him, met with him when I was running for Mayor etc. He has a brilliant mind and is a prodigious fund raiser. However, he was on the wrong side of the disastrous Iraq war (along with Hillary Clinton), helped to cause the great 2008 recession bc of the donations of the financiers who pushed for deregulation of that industry & the subsequent meltdown. He was on the wrong side of this debacle in Iran and sadly continued funding Israel as Palestinians were and are being ethnically cleansed in Gaza & now the West Bank. These are all very significant and terrible events in the life of our country & he was on the wrong side.

When Democrats run against billionaires, they win! Thank you to @BernieSanders and @ZohranKMamdani for showing the way.

There was no such thing as white people in the 1600s. Europeans didn’t call themselves white. They called themselves English, Irish, German, Italian. And they hated each other. The English despised the Irish. Northern Italians didn’t even recognize southern Italians as equals. Germans fought everybody. There was no “white team.” No shared identity. Just Europeans killing Europeans over land, religion, and power. That’s the actual history of Europe. Then suddenly, mid-1600s in the American colonies, something changed. “White” was invented. Why? Because the colonial elite the rich landowners could count. They looked around and realized they were outnumbered. Badly. African slaves, European indentured servants, poor peasants who had no land and no future. Together, they were a threat. So the rich did what they’ve always done: they divided them. They created “whiteness” as a concept and gave poor Europeans just enough legal protections, small privileges, the promise that they’d never be at the bottom to make sure they’d never unite with enslaved Africans. It worked. Poor whites started policing Black people instead of fighting the system exploiting them both. And that’s the con. The whole history of America is rich white men convincing poor white people that their enemies are Black and Brown not the system keeping them all broke.

Let me keep it 💯: it’s the church.

“Democrats should act as though they own Congress today. The future doesn’t start in 2027. Voters gave Democrats the biggest mandate any party has had in 50 years. Start driving legislation and dare Republican dead-enders to get in the way.” thebulwark.com/p/defund-war-…

This is the single best thing I’ve seen all week. Republican Thomas Massie on his Pete Hegseth impeachment articles: “I hope Hegseth addresses the 8 articles of impeachment, and doesn‘t get up and misquote the Bible in Quentin Tarantino fashion and do some pull-ups and call everybody fat and gay.“