Pamela G. Mullins
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pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Pamela G. Mullins
@pamelagmullins.bsky.social
450 followers 140 following 910 posts
Writer | Reader | Artist | Photographer | Meanderer
Certified member of the Lippy Bitch Squad
Searching for the next questions to ask
pamelamullins.com (Buy art here)
meanderings.me (Writing lives here)
linktr.ee/pamelagmullins
Mooresville, NC, US
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pamelagmullins.bsky.social
😶
December 10, 2025 at 1:43 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
🙄
Hillary Clinton thinks people are being brainwashed into being pro-Palestine Speaking at the Israel Hayom Summit on Tuesday in New York, Clinton bemoaned the fact that people, including “young Jewish Americans”, are getting their information about Gaza on TikTok. I don’t know, Hillary, maybe the problem isn’t TikTok. Maybe the problem is that there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza and an enormous surge in settler attacks in the West Bank. Maybe the problem is the mainstream media isn’t covering a lot of these issues: indeed settlers attacked and robbed Italian and Canadian volunteers in the West Bank this week and it barely made the US news. Maybe the problem is that people don’t like seeing kids starving to death and aid seekers apparently getting their bodies bulldozed.
December 8, 2025 at 2:13 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
THIS !! is definitely what I was referring to in this & subsequent threads about a rebellious culture.
Yet Gen X isn’t just a time period; it’s also, as Rushkoff writes in “The GenX Reader,” “a culture, a demographic, an outlook, a style, an economy, a scene, a political ideology, an aesthetic, an age, a decade and a literature.” It’s a moment, a mood, an ethos and an enduring way of being, the hallmark characteristics of which — anticorporatism, anti-authoritarianism, ironic detachment, artistic independence, an existential horror of selling out and a live-and-let-live philosophy of life — feel like the antidote to a lot of what’s currently wrong in our culture. Lately, I’ve noticed that whenever I recount stories of my youth, the response is one of intense yearning, especially from young people, who never knew that mythical time before social media turned everyone into mirror stars and ruined social life.
December 3, 2025 at 4:44 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
The federal watchdog system at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that oversees complaints about civil rights violations, including in immigration detention, has been gutted so thoroughly that it could be laying the groundwork for the Trump administration to “abuse people with impunity”, experts warn. Former federal oversight officials have sounded the alarm at the rapid dismantling of guardrails against human rights failures – at the same time as the government pushes aggressive immigration enforcement operations. A group of fired watchdogs has filed a whistleblower complaint to Congress through the Government Accountability Project (GAP), and a coalition of human rights organizations sued the administration, demanding the employees be reinstated. There is deepening concern that a system of oversight that was already weak is now hanging by a thread, even as criticism surges over treatment of detainees in the ballooning immigration jail network. “They want to be able to abuse people with impunity,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice-president of US advocacy and litigation at the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights advocacy group based in Washington, which is representing the group suing the government. He added: “They want to be able to operate a system that doesn’t have any rules and that can be used to maximize brutality against people, in order to accomplish a mass deportation agenda.” The DHS has repeatedly, through assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin, insisted when asked about reports and complaints of abuses that there are “no sub-prime” conditions in immigration custody in the US. But Dana Gold, a senior director of the GAP, which is working with those behind the whistleblower complaint, echoed Enriquez’s warning.
November 30, 2025 at 3:43 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
You have to wonder if there was a purpose to all these accounts repeatedly using the FF accusations now that we know a majority of them are fraudulent overseas accounts? Paving the way to automatic dismissals & conspiracy theory nonsense.
“Everything you are watching on TV is a false flag, especially the nonsense about Elon Musk & Trump spat,” another X user wrote last week, referencing the fallout between the president and the richest man in the world. Data from ISD shows that over the past five years, false-flag claims have increased by more than 1,100 percent on X, and the situation is getting increasingly worse. There were 1 million mentions of “false flag” on X between April 26 and June 26, 2025, a nearly 350 percent increase compared to the prior two months. “It's unprecedented in terms of the volume, the speed at which it spread, and the level of engagement that we saw. Some of these accounts were not that big, and yet they were garnering millions of views in a matter of hours,” Valeria de la Fuente Suárez, a digital research analyst with ISD and author of the research, tells WIRED. “It's just becoming this common response to these high-profile crises when there's chaos and confusion and uncertainty and, in many cases, it doesn't align with their agenda.” De la Fuente Suárez says the institute’s research focused on X but adds that she was also able to find many examples of “false flag” conspiracizing on other platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
November 28, 2025 at 3:10 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Morning.
November 24, 2025 at 1:07 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
re: Plaskett texting Epstein—I thought that was procedure when getting information from criminals and/or informants? I'm not sure I see the issue with those texts? I must be missing something. But the info on Cory Mills is new to me...wow CORRUPTION CORRUPTION CORRUPTION.
Over the course of the last few months, Democrats had made it their mission to release all Epstein-related documents and pushed for transparency around the financier’s connections to powerful figures. But when newly released materials exposed Plaskett, a Democrat from the US Virgin Islands, for exchanging real-time messages with Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing, all Democrats voted against her censure. Then, immediately after the vote, Democrats withdrew a planned censure resolution against Cory Mills, a Florida Republican representative facing allegations of stolen valor, financial misconduct and domestic abuse. Mills has denied the accusations. The sequence prompted Lauren Boebert, a representative of Colorado, to shout at fellow Republicans on the House floor, wagging her finger and at one point directly confronting Mills. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican representative from Florida, attempted to raise a parliamentary inquiry asking Mike Johnson, the House speaker, to “explain why leadership on both sides, both Democrat and Republican, are cutting back-end deals to cover up public corruption in the House of Representatives”. “Get it, girl,” Boebert shouted in response. The documents at the center of the controversy show Epstein text-coaching Plaskett during a House oversight committee hearing with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former attorney. The messages suggested Epstein was watching the proceedings and providing information that appeared to inform Plaskett’s questioning. In one exchange, first reported by the Washington Post, Epstein alerted Plaskett that Cohen had mentioned Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime executive assistant. “RONA?? Quick I’m up next is that an acronym,” Plaskett replied. Epstein responded: “Thats his assistant.” The documents also show Epstein complimenting Plaskett’s appearance during the hearing, writing “Great outfit” and “You look great.” Plaskett responded “Thanks!” In a statement, Plaskett’s office said she received …
November 20, 2025 at 1:54 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Sounds familiar.
November 20, 2025 at 2:24 AM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
November 19, 2025 at 2:45 AM
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In fact, federal data shows that many immigrants being arrested do not have criminal records in the United States. Fewer than 40 percent of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement — the D.H.S. law enforcement agency leading the administration’s crackdown — have a criminal conviction, according to a Times analysis. Roughly 8 percent of those arrested had been convicted of a violent crime, while about 9 percent had a traffic conviction, the analysis found.
November 17, 2025 at 4:44 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
For example, I looked for a middle finger gif & there wasn't any. No worries though, I have an entire Pinterest board named attitude. Am I supposed to label this now or I'll get booted?
November 16, 2025 at 3:52 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
"...sue the person their spouse had an affair with..." ?!?

LOL When...what is happening?!? OMG this country has turned into a small town Baptist church. Reality show meets MAGA. What a hideous culture. I hate this timeline. I wanna go live in Paris.
Judge rules in trial accusing NC TikTok star of ruining marriage. North Carolina is one of a handful of states where someone can sue the person their spouse had an affair with.
November 16, 2025 at 1:46 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
"thank them" & "very concerned" ?!?

I'm really starting to detest politicians, especially weak ass Democrats. I wondered why my feelings towards this dude were meh. Now I know. Feckless. The lot of them.
“We don’t know what their plans are for Charlotte,” the governor said. “If they come in and they are targeted in what they do, we will thank them. If they come in and wreak havoc and cause chaos and fear, we will be very concerned.”
November 16, 2025 at 1:39 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
...
November 12, 2025 at 2:07 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
The ambassadors of the centrist manosphere praise women’s advancement and the feminist cause while insisting that men’s economic and vocational anxieties are more naturally potent. This ambivalence reveals the weakness of their side. The right-wing manosphere knows that masculinity is a series of dominance signals beamed from behind iridescent Oakleys and the wheel of the most enormous pickup truck you’ve ever seen; it is a smirking multimillionaire who “DESTROYS” a young woman at a college-hosted debate; it is—must it be said?—an AR-15, openly carried. Manliness in the Trump era, Susan Faludi has written, “is defined by display value,” which exhibits itself in a “pantomime of aggrieved aggression.” Upon this stage, men’s biggest problem is feminism, and the solutions are straightforward: restrict reproductive rights, propagandize about traditional gender roles, etc. The squishier centrist side has no such certainties. Galloway, in both his podcasts and “Notes on Being a Man,” presents masculinity not as one side of a fixed binary but as a state of mind and a life style, one equally available to men and women, and therefore impossible to define. (It’s a feeling, and we know how Trump supporters feel about those.) Within this amorphous framework, men’s biggest problem is, likewise, a feeling—an unreachable itch, or a marrow-deep belief—that men should still rank above women in the social hierarchy, just not as much as before. This belief may be misguided or unconscious, but it is nonetheless insuperable, and it must be accommodated, for the good of us all. What these pundits are nudging us to do, ever so politely, is accept that women, in the main, are accustomed to being a little degraded, a little underpaid and ignored and dampened in their ambitions, in ways that men are not and never will be. The “female-coded” person, to borrow Krugman’s terminology, may feel overwhelmed by child-care costs, ashamed that she can’t acquire a mortgage, or hollowed out by long hour…
November 11, 2025 at 12:14 AM
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The mood here isn’t wonky appreciation of practical solutions to the city’s rolling cost-of-living disaster. The middle class does face crushing rents, but New York also operates what is vastly the largest welfare state of any city in the country. The mood is, rather, a celebration of the triumph of populism. Mamdani, who began his campaign doing man-on-the-street interviews with Trump voters, ran against bankrupt elites and a dynastic political family. (It’s no contradiction that Mamdani shares the president’s personal ease in Manhattan elite circles; they both grew up in that milieu.) The single-minded obsession with Mamdani’s talk of affordability, while convenient for the mayor-elect and a vital part of his appeal, also misses an obvious point. The issue most associated with the establishment of both parties right now — for reasons future historians can decipher — is support for Israel. And while Mamdani focused on affordability, New Yorkers heard endlessly from his enemies about hostility to Israel as well. He never ran away from his years as a pro-Palestinian activist. It’s hard not to think that the perception — and reality — that a billionaire political class was funding anti-Muslim attack ads on Mamdani over Israel helped confirm his status as an anti-establishment hero. That’s a dynamic Republicans are wrestling with in public right now, as the GOP’s efforts to purge both critics of Israel and open antisemites from the party risk instead driving its populist wing closer to those positions.
November 10, 2025 at 3:05 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Willfully obtuse.
November 10, 2025 at 1:39 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
AI Overview Viktor Orbán is frequently described as an autocrat or authoritarian leader due to his actions as Hungary's Prime Minister, which critics argue have weakened democratic institutions. His government has been accused of consolidating power by controlling the media, altering election rules to favor his party, influencing the judiciary, and suppressing civil society and academic freedoms. These actions have led to Hungary being labeled an "electoral autocracy" by some critics. Actions described as autocratic Media control: Orbán's government has been accused of putting independent media outlets out of business or turning state media into a propaganda tool. Judicial influence: Critics say Orbán has altered rules for judicial appointments to fill courts with political loyalists. Election manipulation: His government has been accused of gerrymandering and changing election rules to ensure Fidesz wins elections, even with less than 50% of the vote. Weakening checks and balances: Orbán is accused of dismantling checks and balances and weakening independent institutions, including universities and NGOs. Suppression of rights: Critics point to crackdowns on public assemblies and laws that threaten NGOs that receive foreign funding. Impact and criticism Electoral autocracy: The European Union has used the term "electoral autocracy" to describe Hungary under Orbán's leadership. International attention: Experts have noted that Orbán's strategy is being watched by other political groups, with some suggesting it provides a blueprint for dismantling democracy. Fidesz dominance: This systematic approach has helped his Fidesz party maintain a two-thirds majority in parliament.
November 7, 2025 at 7:55 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Over the past six months, CFPB complaints about PayPal have risen to their highest levels in years, reaching 711 complaints in September alone, with common grievances citing unauthorized transactions, trouble accessing people’s money and suspicions of fraud. A PayPal spokesperson declined to comment. According to the CFPB database, the company provided a timely response to consumers for all but two of those complaints and gave them monetary relief for 87 of them. On top of the many risks to consumers, the near destruction of the CFPB could slow long-term innovation. Companies often want guidance from agencies like the CFPB to interpret complex financial laws, and halting virtually all of the bureau’s work creates massive uncertainty. “Financial services laws are real and are needed for the development of the industry,” says one regulatory consultant. “No one seems to be owning that problem.”
November 6, 2025 at 11:35 AM
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In January 2025, the CFPB fined Equifax $15 million for not doing enough to investigate and resolve errors on credit reports. An Equifax spokesperson says it worked collaboratively with the CFPB to address the bureau’s concerns through “holistic changes to our technology and processes.” Today, it remains hard to get a clear read on credit reports’ accuracy–some studies have indicated high error rates, while the bureaus adamantly reject such assertions.
November 6, 2025 at 11:34 AM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Which financial products are most likely to attract predatory practices? Auto loans, payday loans, mortgages, credit repair services and a host of fintech products are prime candidates. Tens of thousands of so-called non-banks offer these products, ranging from payday lender Speedy Cash to Rocket Mortgage, PayPal and Klarna. Institutions like these offer services similar to banks but are not regulated or monitored by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Reserve or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Before the CFPB was created, no federal regulator was charged with supervising non-banks. Auto lenders and servicers are an especially big concern, partially because they have a history of questionable practices. Over the past five years, studies have shown that auto lenders have discriminated against Black and Hispanic borrowers. Two years ago, the CFPB sued auto loan servicer USASF for allegedly disabling and repossessing cars illegally. USASF used remote “kill switches” to disable consumers’ vehicles and incorrectly disabled them 7,500 times, leaving borrowers stranded when they weren’t in default or were communicating with USASF about coming payments, according to the CFPB’s lawsuit. The company, which declared bankruptcy a few weeks after the CFPB filed its lawsuit, also double-charged 34,000 customers for insurance, costing them millions of dollars. Low-income Americans with auto loans are struggling to pay them back. In January 2025, a staggering 11% of consumers with credit scores below 660 were at least 30 days late on their payments, a historical high going back to at least 2005, the earliest year for which Equifax and Moody’s data is available. As of September, defaults among that subprime group were hovering at 10.3%, right around the Financial Crisis-era peak of
November 6, 2025 at 11:30 AM
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It is not only pragmatism, but cynicism, and no small degree of fear, that has led to the widespread adaptation of this approach: the rapidly proliferating number of centrist and center-right thinktanks and consultancies looking to shape Democratic party strategy exist, in part, to channel the preferences of their own ultra-wealthy funders, and to signal what the billionaire class will accept. The result is a Democratic party that appears listless and unprincipled, unwilling to fight because they do not believe in anything.
November 5, 2025 at 2:06 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
This is a paragraph! Woo. 'his scheming viziers.' HA
This current Congress, led by John Thune in the Senate and the aforementioned Johnson in the House, has tossed away its ball and left the field of play. It treats its power as a burden: something to avoid for fear of challenging the chief magistrate and risking his wrath in the form of an angry social media post or, more concretely, a primary challenge. Individual members cannot even be bothered to actually represent their constituents, abandoning any effort to push for the material interests of their voters in favor of a commitment to the psychological and symbolic demands of a distinct partisan minority. And to the extent that Republicans have engaged with the public as members of Congress, it is to justify their inaction and explain their decision to hand their authority away to the president and his scheming viziers.
October 29, 2025 at 3:52 PM
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17. While both the Russia-Ukraine conflict and Israeli-Palestinian conflict are important humanitarian issues, our issue salience polling suggests that the Democratic Party's positioning on these issues is unlikely to be a major cause of our party's electoral struggles (hence why Deciding to Win focuses on domestic political issues, which tend to be voters' top priorities).
October 27, 2025 at 8:12 PM
pamelagmullins.bsky.social
Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out this binary in stark terms, describing “white freedom” as freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
October 23, 2025 at 10:07 PM