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Political Animation
Pulitzer Prize-winning animated satire…
Social impact messaging
Distilling the complex into stories & visuals that make a difference…
The JSK journalism fellowship at Stanford!
Free speech is under attack on college campuses across the United States.
While protests are messy and disruptive, they aren’t nearly as dangerous as the impulse to shut down free expression by sending in riot cops.
In one of the more ominous signs of the chilling effect right-wing House Republicans are having on speech, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser was granted a reprieve from appearing before a House panel after police broke up an encampment at George Washington University.
Gaza war protests have spread to college campuses all across the United States and anti-war protesters have conducted civil disobedience at Google’s headquarters and on city streets.
Hundreds of people have been arrested and scores of workers have been fired as a result of their actions. The protests have disrupted universities, workplaces and commutes . . . and that’s the idea.
I know, it’s an insult to mobsters eveywhere to compare Donald Trump to a mob boss, but the similarities are just too numerous and recurring to ignore.
A real mob boss would at least be smart enough to not publicly attack the judge and his family.
The Biden administration line about “Israel’s right to defend itself” is becoming more untenable with each passing day.
Besides the fact that we’re weren’t questioning Israel’s right to defend itself in the first place, now it’s getting much harder to look at killing over 30,000 Palestinians as a real strategy of self-defense.
Killing tens of thousands of women, children and innocent civilians doesn’t count as defending yourself, that’s offense.
If you listened closely — amid ongoing reports of Donald Trump’s legal victories, setbacks and increasing wealth — you may have heard that a cease-fire resolution passed a United Nations Security Council vote earlier this week.
It’s a good thing whenever meaningful steps are taken to keep civilians from getting killed.
Donald Trump and his lawyers say he’s having a hard time scraping together the $454 million dollars he was ordered to pay after he lost the civil fraud case in New York. (Or $464 or $600-ish million dollars, depending on how you count it.)
Never mind that in a deposition last year, Trump said he had way more than $400 million cash on hand.
For some odd reason, no one wants to lend a guy with a history of lying about property values (and everything else) a half-a-billion dollars.
The horror in Gaza is entering a new phase.
Reports are emerging of children starving, people eating weeds and animal feed to survive — which of course increases panic and chaos.
Even though Israel is still bombing, other nations and aid groups are trying to get humanitarian supplies to the Palestinians.
At this point it’s pretty much a given that Donald Trump has some good pals on the U.S. Supreme Court. Sure, some might be ethically challenged, but that is of course very on-brand.
The Supreme Court rejected a Colorado ruling that the 14th Amendment disqualifies the Insurrectionist-in-Chief from the ballot — which wasn’t much of a surprise.
Remember back when doing Russia’s bidding meant extorting Ukraine over the phone?
That seems almost quaint now.
Now the leader of the Republican party says he would welcome a Russian invasion of NATO countries, Trump sycophants in the U.S. Congress want to cut Ukraine loose and top Republicans knowingly spread Russian disinformation in an attempt to smear (and impeach) Joe Biden.
Amid all the trials, hearings and court rulings, the Trump grift machine keeps chugging along.
The latest addition to the long line of products, scams and schemes is a $399 pair of Trump-branded sneakers, complete with golden shoelaces.
It’s not looking good for the news biz, which means it’s not looking good for truth, elections and democracy.
In the latest sign (or screaming bullhorn) that Big Tech is distancing itself from news, politics and social commentary, Meta announced it was no longer going to recommend political content and social commentary on Instagram and Threads.
It still feels strange to spend any time or energy investigating crazy right-wing conspiracies.
Unfortunately, when these conspiracies are spread on the nation’s top-rated cable network (Fox News) and among right-wing influencers who hold sway within the Republican Party and Trump cultists, we’ve got to pay attention.
As thousands of migrants fleeing misery and violence continue to head for the US-Mexico border seeking asylum and a better life, Republicans are looking to score political points.
(To be fair, some Democrats are also trying to do their own share of point-scoring.)
President Biden desperately wants the Party of Trump to lose its ability to use the border as a cudgel in the presidential campaign.
It sure is looking like the Republican Party is going to make it official: Donald Trump is the leader of their party and is their choice for president (again).
Yes, things could change — like people turning away from Trump in droves if he gets convicted in one of his multiple criminal trials.
It was a little embarrassing to hear Ron DeSantis (and Nikki Haley for that matter) spin a 30-point loss to Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses as some sort of victory.
Right now it seems clear that the Defendant-in-Chief will almost certainly be the Republican nominee for president. (Note that I used the journalism wiggle-room term “almost certainly” — because after all, we have to account for the possibility of Trump incarceration and/or fleeing to Belarus.)
As the war in Gaza continues, Israel’s military campaign is looking more and more disproportionate every day.
Let me clarify: I’m using the word “disproportionate” the way it is used among regular humans, where one thing is not equal to another.
In the world of military strategists and experts in the laws of war, “proportionality” doesn’t really take into account the sheer numbers of deaths on either side of a conflict. (It’s pretty chilling, horrible stuff that sounds like it’s taken right out of Dr. Strangelove.)
As we head into a presidential election that may once again put our democracy through a very severe stress test, the leading Republican candidate for president is busy fundraising.
The cult is getting cultier.
Speculation is growing about who Donald Trump will pick as his running mate, so possible contenders are making the trek to his criminal trial in Manhattan in the hopes that the Defendant-in-Chief will look favorably upon them.