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matthewbudman.bsky.social
Matthew Budman, book guy
@matthewbudman.bsky.social
1.5K followers 630 following 5.4K posts
News junkie, editor, faculty spouse, author of “Book Collecting Now.”
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Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
gregpak.net
I've finally put my "Find Your Organizing Home in NYC" zine online in readable form with clickable links - check it out and GET HOOKED UP and ORGANIZED, friends!

gregpak.net/2026/01/17/f...
FIND YOUR ORGANIZING HOME IN NYC Image features a photo of buttons reading "Fight Fascism," "¡Manos fuera NYC!" and "Working Families Party"
January 17, 2026 at 8:26 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
No, we got nothing in common
(We can’t dance together)
No, we can’t talk at all
Photo of the A19 gate—get it?—at DEN
January 17, 2026 at 7:30 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
RFK Jr. racking up the wins
phillewis.bsky.social Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 1d
The South Carolina measles outbreak is growing at an astounding speed

More than 500 people are in a 21-day quarantine and about 200 are "actively infected." The largest outbreak currently in the U.S. has spread to at least three other states
'Staring over the edge': South Carolina measles outbreak doubles in a week
More than 500 people are in a 21-day quarantine and about 200 are "actively infected." The largest outbreak currently in the U.S. has spread to at least three other states.
www.nbcnews.com
January 17, 2026 at 3:36 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
Americans have seen the Greatest President in the History of the World in action for a year and they are not impressed
headlines: "It's Trump's Economy, and Voters Are Unhappy With it, WSJ Poll Finds," etc.
January 17, 2026 at 1:21 AM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
From @status.news. Seems safe to assume that if there were *anything* newsworthy in parts 7, 8, or 9, @joshuajfriedman.com would have at least mentioned the highlights. Right?
Ryan Lizza published part nine of his series about Olivia Nuzzi. It was supposed to be the final entry, but he ended the article writing, “I’m sorry, but there will be a Part 10.” [Telos]
January 16, 2026 at 6:12 AM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
washingtonpost.com
During a hearing about the detentions of pro-Palestinian students, a federal judge said President Trump and top officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that would seek to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”
Trump cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution, judge says
“The cabinet secretaries and ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge William Young declared.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 16, 2026 at 1:30 AM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
"It’s arbitrary, it’s cruel, and I defy anyone to explain to me how masked men leaving a six-year-old wandering the streets of a suburban town in confusion and tears should be the way we handle any problem, let alone one as complex as America’s relationship with immigration."
chrisgethard.bsky.social Chris Gethard @chrisgethard.bsky.social · 3d
On Sunday I was eating ice cream sundaes with my son when he asked me and mom what ICE was. I stammered my way through an answer, not knowing that on the other side of town ICE was capturing people off the streets. Thanks to NJ.com for letting me write about it. www.nj.com/opinion/2026...
I told my blond 6-year-old he’d be OK. Down the street, ICE took away another 6-year-old’s ‘papi’
No one in New Jersey should spend any more time pretending ICE tearing families apart is far away.
www.nj.com
January 15, 2026 at 4:52 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
The Golden Age, cont.
Trump’s promised manufacturing boom is a bust so far
Manufacturing employment has declined every month since April, when the president said tariffs would bring factories “roaring back.”
www.washingtonpost.com
January 15, 2026 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
markharris.bsky.social
My husband was on the 2 train and a guy started braying about how Renee Good deserved to die and her "lesbian lover" did too. My husband got pissed and said, "You're absolutely disgusting." "Fuck you!" the guy said. "Fuck YOU!" my husband said. The guy left.

See? We just need to talk to each other.
January 14, 2026 at 11:46 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
@debkossmann.bsky.social: “I do not want my tax dollars or Haverford’s resources to be used to support a poorly trained, unprofessional, and cruel secret police force that is our current federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.”

[gift link!]
Haverford Township bars police from cooperating with ICE in noncriminal immigration enforcement
A township commissioner said it is "not our role" to act as a federal immigration authority.
share.inquirer.com
January 14, 2026 at 11:02 PM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
bgonthescene.bsky.social
Happening Now: Students have walked out of school and are protesting against ICE in Saint Paul, Minnesota
January 14, 2026 at 8:02 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
“The latent belief of the nativists vying to make America great again is that there is nothing especially interesting or consequential about the American project.” Vance, Miller & Trump claim “that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to”—that we're just animals.
ositanwanevu.com Osita Nwanevu @ositanwanevu.com · 4d
I wrote about Renee Good, Venezuela, Greenland, and what it means to be a human being. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives. Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil. It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago. It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”. It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing. The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States. Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all. As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.
January 14, 2026 at 6:25 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
"The Trump Administration is reversing its deep staffing cuts to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, reinstating hundreds of employees." Government efficiency!
January 14, 2026 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
kibblesmith.com
If there’s a better obituary for an evil cartoonist than an A.I. generated version of his character that fucks up the defining detail of its design, I can’t think of it. No notes. 👨🏻‍🍳 💋
January 13, 2026 at 6:47 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
Of all the @postopinions.bsky.social links I will not be clicking today, this is the one I will not be clicking the hardest
screenshot of WaPo home page: "Peter K. Navarro: Trump is planning to rescue a crucial part of the American Dream"
January 13, 2026 at 6:02 PM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
alissawilkinson.bsky.social
More screenings of MY UNDESIRABLE FRIENDS, in NYC and other cities!!!
cfahrenbach.bsky.social Christian Fahrenbach @cfahrenbach.bsky.social · 6d
...plus Sunday is a screening with Loktev at the Museum of the Moving Image, all five parts: movingimage.org/event/my-und...

And more screenings (Nashville, Burlington, Berkeley, e.g.) here: argotpictures.com/film/my-unde...
January 12, 2026 at 10:07 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
While we're discussing Republicans' murderous misogyny, Facebook reminds me that five years ago today, Hogan Gidley informed us that Donald J. Trump is "the most masculine person to ever hold the White House."
January 11, 2026 at 4:43 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
🔥🔥🔥
I never want to hear any moral grandstanding from these boys ever again. The next time Tim Cook says “privacy is a human right,” the only possible response is to laugh in his face. I mean, Apple and Google are fine distributing an app that has created an undressed image Grok made of Renee Nicole Good, the mother who was shot by ICE in Minneapolis. How do you plan to defend getting rid of the ICEBlock app while allowing X to generate degrading images of a woman ICE killed? Can Apple and Google even identify their values beyond their commitment to “shareholder value”? What’s your fucking endgame here, guys?
January 9, 2026 at 9:39 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
Not sure it's good how much I'm enjoying daily video clips of people yelling at ICE
noturtlesoup17.bsky.social amanda moore 🐢 @noturtlesoup17.bsky.social · 9d
This morning in Minneapolis, an ICE vehicle got stuck on an icy hill in a residential neighborhood. Agents had to push the vehicles out, some almost slipping in the ice themselves.
January 9, 2026 at 6:20 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
"Under both the first and second Trump administrations, the country has learned from watching Minneapolis that the federal government holds no regard for cities or the people who live in them."
Opinion | I’m the Mayor of Minneapolis. Trump Is Lying to You.
www.nytimes.com
January 9, 2026 at 1:42 AM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
smith.senate.gov
We cannot be more clear. Leave us the fuck alone.
January 8, 2026 at 1:19 AM
Reposted by Matthew Budman, book guy
atrupar.com
Jacob Frey: "To ICE -- get the fuck out of Minneapolis"
January 7, 2026 at 6:40 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
"It’s unclear what evidence the new guidelines are based on."
January 7, 2026 at 5:54 PM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
Well, I had to tell *someone*
#connections
CONNECTIONS completed screenshot: an "exceptionally tricky" puzzle with a 35% solve rate . . . and a highlighted MISTAKES: NONE (!!)
January 7, 2026 at 6:01 AM
matthewbudman.bsky.social
Whata Bod, Whata Bod, Whata Bod, whata mighty good Bod
washingtonpost.com The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 12d
Amid a big agency push to use AI models in weather prediction, the National Weather Service shared a forecast map riddled with spelling mistakes, non-existent locations and other geographical errors.
‘Whata Bod’: An AI-generated NWS map invented fake towns in Idaho
Amid a big agency push to use AI models in weather prediction, an AI-generated forecast graphic with errors was pulled from NWS sites.
www.washingtonpost.com
January 7, 2026 at 5:28 AM