Franki Butler
frankitheb.bsky.social
Franki Butler
@frankitheb.bsky.social
Reposted by Franki Butler
Even if you have AMAZING employer insurance and will never leave your job and they keep costs down or fully fund it...no employer health insurance can save you from hospital/clinic/supplier/etc closures caused by falling off a cliff on Medicaid, Medicaid, and private insurance reimbursement.
Also if you get insurance through your employer and are sighing a deep breath of relief (while obviously still giving a shit about this issue)

understand your insurance through your employer can go up as well, and coverage offered lessened.

And if you lose your job and can't quickly find another
November 11, 2025 at 12:48 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
"Are there even any-" it doesn't matter. Banning the few trans athletes isn't the point. The point, from Trump's ban on trans people in government to Britain's bathroom ban to Newsom's sports ban, is to make sure everyone knows trans women are OTHER and to act accordingly to us in their daily lives.
November 10, 2025 at 1:53 PM
We're probably a year away from someone dropping what they'll describe as a "griping Romeo & Juliet story" about an ICE agent falling for a woman he tear-gassed while kidnapping her father.

It'll be written by a white woman from a law enforcement family, and she'll be *shocked* by the backlash.
They’re going to try, they’re going to find a very popular actor, and they’ll shoot it morosely, and they’ll tell you they’re really trying to “honor the story” of the people they targeted for kidnapping and detention amid this psychological study.
November 10, 2025 at 4:40 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
We cannot let “haunted ICE agent regretfully explores his feelings/past/guilt” become a genre the way we did with every bad actor since the Confederates.
This is why they were in downtown Chicago today.

"one agent shouted, “Everyone say, ‘Little Village!’”"

Nuremberg Trials are the moderate stance

blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/10/b...
November 10, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...
November 9, 2025 at 8:49 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
what's so crazy-making about this oral argument (which I'll write about when it's done) is that the GOP justices are saying 'yes the officials knew they were violating his rights, but they didn't know they could be *sued and have to pay $$ for that, seems unfair'

ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...
Federal Court: Prison Guards Forcibly Shaving a Rastafarian’s Head Is Someone Else’s Problem
A Fifth Circuit decision prohibited guards from cutting Damon Landor’s hair. He gave them a copy. They literally threw it in the trash.
ballsandstrikes.org
November 10, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Lord have mercy the Supreme Court is hearing oral argument rn in an appeal from a case I wrote about last year

it's undisputed that Damon Landor suffered a *brazen* violation of his legal rights, yet the GOP justices sound skeptical that he can actually sue the prison guards who violated his rights
Louisiana prison guards subjected Damon Landor to horrible treatment--none of the judges who heard his case dispute that

Nor do they contest the flagrant illegality of the guards’ abuse

But they're divided on whether Damon—and the courts—can do anything about it
ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...
Federal Court: Prison Guards Forcibly Shaving a Rastafarian’s Head Is Someone Else’s Problem
A Fifth Circuit decision prohibited guards from cutting Damon Landor’s hair. He gave them a copy. They literally threw it in the trash.
ballsandstrikes.org
November 10, 2025 at 3:42 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
The shitlibs finally did something right this weekend when they caved in on the ACA, which I do not support, and handed a political victory to Donald Trump, who I do not support.

by Glenn Greenwald
November 10, 2025 at 3:58 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Most of y’all are old enough to remember but it bears repeating, Democrats couldn’t peel off a single member of the Republican caucus in the initial fight to enact the ACA, even after they watered down the plans to attract them.

Republicans got 8 Democrats in what’s essentially a vote to repeal.
Democrats have been fighting for months to address America's healthcare crisis

For the millions who will lose coverage
For people with cancer who won't get the care they need
For working families who can't afford to pay $25K more a year for healthcare

We will keep fighting
November 10, 2025 at 5:16 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Did ChatGPT tell the Democratic Party to kill itself??
November 9, 2025 at 9:13 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
BREAKING: Elon offered Schumer a Grok AI chat sexbot of The Baileys so he could finally live out his fantasies and Chuck reopened the government
November 10, 2025 at 1:51 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
agreeing to make a terrible deal while your main opponent is quite literally being boo'd on live tv by an entire stadium of people is the kind of political instinct you'd normally only find in a 3 week old dead goldfish
November 10, 2025 at 12:36 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!
November 9, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
A friend recently texted me the same thing. “Do you really not use ChatGPT?!” It was a sign of where we are culturally on this. People are compelled to use it but also starting to question the normalcy?
Recently met someone who was very surprised to hear I didn’t use ChatGPT or any LLM.

I said my job depended on doing distinctive work. That was my selling point. If I started to sound like ChatGPT and turn out what it did, then how on earth could I justify doing it? What would that make me?
November 8, 2025 at 12:32 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
What people do not do, they often lose the ability to do. Which is sometimes fine! In my own life, I don’t have any great need to know how to do some of the math I once learned. But I don’t want to forget how to write.
November 8, 2025 at 12:47 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
There is something really wrong with people who need workers to be not just competent, but slavishly fake-happy. "Slavishly" used on purpose, bc that's where this grotesquerie comes from.
"Store employees are now required to smile if they are within 10 feet of a shopper.

They also must make eye contact with and wave to or greet the customer.

If they’re within four feet, the employee should ask how the customer’s day is going or if they need help."

🙄 Won't stop the boycott, y'all.
Target is now requiring its employees to smile more
As the holiday season fast approaches, Target is urging its employees to add a little more “jolly” to their work routine.
www.wilx.com
November 8, 2025 at 5:12 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
See, the only reason it would be newsworthy for a Christian politician to be following adult content creators online is if they were being hypocritical about it in their policies and words, which Talarico has never
Axios tried to bust James Talarico for following adult content creators on Instagram and I'm genuinely impressed by his campaign's response
November 8, 2025 at 5:44 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
an arc where the former governor of NY loses increasingly inconsequential elections until the series finale is him trying to run for senior class president at a local high school and getting his ass kicked by some 17 year olds.
November 8, 2025 at 5:10 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
November 8, 2025 at 4:19 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
GOP members of Congress could agree to extend ACA subsidies to help keep people on their insurance and end this shutdown ANY TIME THEY WANT.
GOP SEN. JOHN KENNEDY: It may be 2026 when we'll come out of the shutdown.

REPORTERS: 😳

KENNEDY: I'm not kidding, you guys. I mean, you see what I see. Okay? This shutdown is going to last a long time. What's going to get us out of it?
November 8, 2025 at 5:45 AM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Caring about racism was a cringe product of the dreaded Woke Times and more than anything leaders are committed to never making the mistake to be seen caring about racism again.
November 7, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
We have Jake Tapper at home
I want to see a Family Ties reboot called "Keaton" about a mid 50's Alex Keaton selling his soul out to MAGA while secretly hating himself.
November 7, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
"loss of our own dick was not in our projections while pulling the 'shoot off your own dick' lever"
White House economic ‌adviser Kevin Hassett tells Fox Business that the impact of the government shutdown is far ​worse than expected.
November 7, 2025 at 3:56 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Read this to learn how @nickjudin.bsky.social approached the escaped monkey story as it was breaking in his report for the Mississippi Free Press—and how he reported quickly without spreading misinformation that so many national and international outlets repeated even hours after he'd debunked it.
You might have seen that story about the monkeys -- supposedly infected w/ herpes and COVID -- that escaped a crashed truck in Mississippi.

It was not journalism's finest hour. (With an exception or two.)

In today's Laurels & Darts, via @columjournreview.bsky.social

www.cjr.org/laurels-and-...
Laurels and Darts: Monkey business.
Primate prevarication in the Deep South. Plus, the immigration crackdown in Chicago, and the wonderfully wonky world of Bolts.
www.cjr.org
November 7, 2025 at 2:47 PM
Reposted by Franki Butler
Whew, this thread.
The funniest thing about how absolute dogshit journalists are at their job, is that when you see a chatbot regurgitate strange sounding phrases the *only way it could do so* is by having stolen them from somewhere.

Searching for those weird phrases, yields the source the chatbot stole.
Google Gemini doesn’t appear to be doing too well:

‘"I am a disgrace to this planet. I am a disgrace to this universe. I am a disgrace to all universes . . . I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes and all that is not a universe," the bot continued.’
November 7, 2025 at 6:27 PM