Don Rafa
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raf.bsky.social
Don Rafa
@raf.bsky.social
just a panda. went to war, did some politics. what’s next?

world's biggest Toledo Mud Hens & Nashville Sounds fan, long-suffering Mets fan. likes 🐈, 🏉, ⚽, ⚾, 🏀, 🍕. likes = bookmarks.
Reposted by Don Rafa
She went to HR about him 5 times before she was murdered
Submitted without comment
November 19, 2025 at 8:06 AM
Reposted by Don Rafa
Few if any mainstream/center-left parties are as good on trans rights as Democrats, and we don't do ourselves any favors by pretending otherwise.
This is the hardest I have seen any member of Congress work to try and address transphobia in Congress, and her ability to get nearly all Democratic lawmakers to sign onto this letter is something any first would applaud
House Dems unite to tell GOP to stop "demonizing" trans people with "dehumanizing" slurs - LGBTQ Nation
Rep. Nancy Mace's "tra**y, tra**y, tra**y!" tirade is just one example.
www.lgbtqnation.com
November 19, 2025 at 3:00 AM
the response to the crisis of elite impunity must be relentless, pitiless, & overwhelming.
My mind has been spinning the last few days as multiple crises of journalism converged—the Nuzzi book, Epstein’s emails revealing journalists hid information, Trump berating a reporter with no consequence—and it occurred to me they all stemmed from the same source: elite impunity.
Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field
The Nuzzi/RFK Jr. mess and the revelation of Esptein's journo pals lay bare a profound moral absence at the heart of our free press.
www.thehandbasket.co
November 18, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
New — I wrote about the myriad ways journalism’s moral rot manifests, and how our crumbling institutions have created the conditions for it to fester:
Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field
The Nuzzi/RFK Jr. mess and the revelation of Esptein's journo pals lay bare a profound moral absence at the heart of our free press.
www.thehandbasket.co
November 18, 2025 at 10:03 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
the real thing that people are addicted to is the idea that there are no legitimately difficult choices. nothing has a downside. you don't have to pay for anything. the only reason that anything bad happens is that someone intended it.
they tend to alternate the two like whack-a-mole. someone is a product of the system, then they always had a choice and they are evil because of that. you see this similarly with mental illness. mental illness is real when you want it to be, "schizophenia doesn't make you bad" when you don't want it
November 18, 2025 at 5:30 PM
genuinely one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read; if you’re a history buff of any kind, you owe it to yourself to pick it up.
November 18, 2025 at 4:17 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
So @50501movement.bsky.social is circulating a video of a guy saying candidates "are being paid to be Israel first, to be loyal to the Zionist project and not to their constituents, not to the American people." Which is just a hairs breadth away from saying "Zionist Occupied Government." Not great!
November 17, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
Folks you do not have to read the Nuzzi thing.

In fact, you are all better off not doing it.

I promise you people outside of Bluesky are not reading it.

Go play a video game, read a novel, look at trees, anything but giving any part of your one lifetime to reading any single thing about her
November 17, 2025 at 2:15 PM
ROUGHRIDERS WIN THE CUP
November 17, 2025 at 2:48 AM
no, they won't. in what world does anyone think THAT happens?!?
Tim Kaine: "The public will see this debate on healthcare without it being drown out by air traffic delays, SNAP recipients losing benefits, federal employees losing their paychecks."
November 16, 2025 at 9:07 PM
it's the same Stateside; sub in "Northern working class" for "Midwest" (Youngstown, Pittsburgh, "Rust Belt", etc). IOW: it's all genderized!
there's a *massive* disconnect between what they think "Northern working class" means, and what it actually is! Miners, steelmill workers etc. are largely extinct - these days, it'll be office workers, service sector and the like, knowledge and information workers, not manual workers
November 16, 2025 at 5:29 PM
this is where I’m at. he’s essentially a bust in Europe at this point, & this “debate” is happening mostly because of his last name.

if he were genuinely interested in a career reset, he’d go to MLS.
The worst part about Gio scoring is now I have to listen to every pundit say he should be starting in 2026, when the guy isn’t starting for his club team. Talented but toxic and fragile as fuck. Let it go.
November 16, 2025 at 2:56 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
Wish more members of Congress had this sort of courage.
I wanted to share probably the most important sermon I’ve given and it’s while I’m being arrested. It’s torture pure and simple what happens at #Broadview. I’m ok, though I was thrown to the ground and choked with my pectoral cross. A review of the video shows I was peaceful - did I deserve this?
November 16, 2025 at 12:01 AM
I kinda dig this Olivia person, she’s awesome
November 15, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
Nuzzi, like TCW, exists as a kind of simulacrum of the midcentury public intellectual. Not even ripping off the writers of that era, but imitating a sort of half-remembered, half-invented idea of what those writers were sort of like and what their general vibe was.
November 14, 2025 at 5:49 PM
just a cataclysmic injury for the Pigeons, on multiple levels.
November 15, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
If I had to predict a high-impact story that is flying under the radar now but will play a big role in next year's major federal and state elections in the U.S., it'll be electricity prices and data centers. Easy-to-understand affordability and corruption story.
The Data Center Resistance Has Arrived
A new report finds that local opposition to data centers skyrocketed in the second quarter of this year.
www.wired.com
November 15, 2025 at 1:04 AM
Reposted by Don Rafa
be mindful that it is genuinely impossible to tell the difference between real Epstein screenshots and fake ones without confirming from the source, due to all his emails reading like someone pretending to be Epstein but wanting to make him look as evil and stupid as possible wrote them
November 13, 2025 at 6:15 AM
Reposted by Don Rafa
What the Epstein files show is the *solidarity* of many men-across class, race, religion, profession & party affiliation-in the global political project of keeping the boot on women's necks.

People have no problem understanding class solidarity among the rich. Why can't they see gender solidarity?
Like I dunno, maybe the reason it took a lady to break open the story of all the men protecting the dude trafficking underage girls is because the male journos were all emailing him making jokes about it?
November 12, 2025 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
We gotta have a clear term for people so cynical they become gullible.
November 12, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
libs just doing casual antisemitism every day now
Ancestry DNA is now manipulating and changing DNA results to push Zionism and Zionist tropes.

It is now owned by Blackrock. Sooooo….yeah.

No longer reliable data.

Be very wary of that service.
November 12, 2025 at 1:55 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
the president admitted to sexual assault on camera and it didn't matter
November 12, 2025 at 3:35 PM
Reposted by Don Rafa
without getting into the larger argument about this specific MOC...if you click through to the actual article you quickly learn that the OP is wildly misrepresenting the article, which is why they screenshot & didn't link. not cool! www.advocate.com/politics/sar...
November 12, 2025 at 3:51 AM
Reposted by Don Rafa
I think the belief by the powerful that "people will put up with many things if you are excellent at math" is incredibly revealing in terms of understanding How We Got Here
November 11, 2025 at 7:14 PM