James Talarico Claps Back At Ted Cruz And Ken Paxton's Relentless Attacks On His Masculinity

Texas Democrat and U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico fired back at his opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Friday after the two Republicans echoed MAGA insults about his masculinity.

“I’ve said before, and I will keep saying that real men serve others; weak men serve themselves,” Talarico told MS NOW’s “The Briefing” host Jen Psaki. “And so I welcome this debate about what it means to be a man, and I don’t think Ken Paxton or Ted Cruz are in a position to tell anybody what a real man is.”
(snip)

“Here’s what real men don’t do,” Talarico said Friday in response to the attacks. “They don’t lie and cheat their way through life, they don’t sell their soul to the highest bidder, they don’t steal from other people in order to enrich themselves.”

The Democrat hailed his adoptive father, Mark Talarico, as a true masculine figure, recalling how he would not only mow their lawn but his elderly neighbor’s as well, without being asked and without even talking about it.

“He just did it because that’s what a man does,” Talarico said. “A man takes responsibility, a man upholds his commitments to his family and his neighbors. A man does what’s right, even when no one is watching.”

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/james-talarico-texas-ken-paxton-ted-cruz-masculinity-manhood-attack_n_6a2c168ee4b0942fb777ab89?origin=home-latest-news-unit

BAM! I like this guy better all the time.

Shut the Door on Your Way Out, Nancy Mace

It’s dim, it’s distant, and it’s not really going to happen until 2027—but I can see the light… by which I mean a future without Nancy Mace in any kind of political office. Y’all! The future is bright.

The so-called “Trump in high heels” suffered a humiliating defeat in South Carolina’s gubernatorial primary on Tuesday, placing fifth in the race, with just 12.1% of the vote. Come January, she’ll be leaving her House seat behind—as well as the prospect of a four-year term as governor. Even better, the state’s District 1 could also be taken by another Nancy—that is, if the state bucks its 2020 and 2024 trends of voting red. And, well, I’m feeling pretty positive, so let’s keep the good vibes up.

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) has been one of the more absurd characters to waltz through the lower chamber in recent years, launching herself into political moments and scandals that have ranged from bizarre to terrifying.

To recap the last 12 months alone: in July Mace said one of her “favorite things” to watch was people and their families being detained by ICE; in September she tried to punish Rep. Ilhan Omar (R-Minn.) for some nonexistent hate speech; shortly thereafter she suggested to pregnant women a drug with documented dangers for pregnant people; in October she reportedly screamed at TSA agents when they didn’t meet her with an immediate security detail at the airport; and last month, she proposed to update the Constitution and kick naturalized citizens out of Congress. During this 12-month period, at least two think pieces were published attempting to decipher her curious motivations (read: whatever the fuck was going on with her), revealing also that she would regularly get her staffers to upvote Reddit posts about her “attractiveness.”

And, no, this window doesn’t cover the times she’s spent bullying her trans colleague, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-Delaware), or how she distributed to her colleagues a nude image of herself to substantiate claims against her ex of rape (who’s since denied the claims); or how she called her constituents “ugly” and “evil” because she kept refusing them a town hall.

https://www.jezebel.com/shut-the-door-on-your-way-out-nancy-mace

And don't let it hit ya where the good lord split ya!

A Trump order asked national park visitors to flag 'negative' historical info. They had other ideas

The Trump administration last year issued a plea to visitors at U.S. national parks: Report any displays or exhibits saying “negative” things about Americans living in the past or present.

But most people who responded instead weighed in to criticize the effort itself, according to an Associated Press analysis of 35,000 public comments submitted in the second half 2025 and recently made public through a lawsuit.

One visitor to a park in North Carolina called the administration’s efforts “un-American.” Another derided the idea of “having Americans call in and snitch on each other.”

“Hey Donald Trump!” wrote a person in North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park, “Trying to erase history doesn’t mean it didn’t still happen!”

A large chunk — more than half, not even accounting for duplicative submissions — was a backlash to the effort itself, according to an Associated Press analysis.

https://apnews.com/article/national-park-service-doug-burgum-donald-trump-c58eb3278c9ce787afacf37f6845ff4c

'They are isolated ... they are alone': Zelenskyy on Russia, Putin's lies - and fighting back

itting down with the Guardian in London, Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems cheerful. More than four years after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion, he believes Europe’s biggest war since 1945 appears to be slowly turning in Ukraine’s favour. The military situation is the most promising it has been for Kyiv for two and a half years, Zelenskyy says. “We can’t say Russia is losing this war. But we can say they are losing the initiative each day, day by day,” he insists.

Over the past week the Kremlin has suffered a series of setbacks. Long-range Ukrainian drones have hit Putin’s home city of St Petersburg, setting fire to oil terminals and sending smoke billowing above the skyline. Similar attacks have crippled occupied Crimea. A key supply road is littered with burning lorries and tankers and the peninsula seized by Russia in 2014 is experiencing severe fuel shortages.

Meanwhile, on the eastern battlefield, Russia’s grinding advance has come to a near halt. According to Zelenskyy, who since 2022 has consistently said he believes that with sufficient support Ukraine can defend against its invader, the Kremlin is losing more than 30,000 soldiers a month, with 23,000-24,000 killed and the rest “heavily” wounded. The true figure, he suggests, could be even higher. “Totally, this is a very big number. It means that they are not winning the war,” he points out. Ukraine has lost service personnel too on a lesser scale.

Moscow’s war may look stuck, but its destruction continues and it has in recent months intensified its aerial attacks on Ukrainian towns and cities with the apparent goal to terrorise those not involved in fighting. One attack last Tuesday featured 73 missiles and 656 drones. Eighteen people were killed in Kyiv and Dnipro, including a three-year-old boy. He was entombed under the rubble of an apartment block. According to the city’s mayor, the Russians are deliberately using cluster munitions in built-up areas.

Last week, Zelenskyy wrote an open letter to Russia’s president, suggesting a face-to-face meeting to wind down this terrible conflict. Speaking on Friday at the St Petersburg economic forum, Putin rejected the offer. He characterised the letter as “rude” and said Russia’s territorial demands – the Donbas region and two southern Ukrainian provinces – were unchanged. He also insisted Russian forces were going forward across all parts of the frontline, telling them: “Keep working, brothers.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/jun/09/volodymyr-zelenskyy-interview-russia-putin-drone-warfare-ukraine

Russia keeps throwing people (many of whom are, prisoners, or citizens of other countries, some lured under false pretense), at the war, but it seems Ukraine has more drones and the ability to hit strategic targets

Last night, my husband described Texas politics

as a "rotting corpse nobody has the nerve to bury".: I'm Pretty sure he was speaking of the politics that currently control the state (RepubliKKKan) as the Dems seem to be all right. But this was after I had commented on Paxdumb's former lawyer endorsing Talarico.

Hunter Biden's social media second act is already raising red flags

“I’m Hunter Biden. You’ve never actually heard from me,” posted the son of former President Joe Biden to X and Substack on May 19.

It was an unexpected proclamation from a long-controversial figure in Democratic politics, whose personal scandals, nepo baby tendencies and criminal conduct have long been the stuff of political culture wars and tabloid coverage — and even a factor in electoral outcomes. But Hunter Biden’s note marked the opening salvo of a deliberate bid to reinvent himself using the miraculous powers of the social Internet.

And at the moment, it’s strangely kind of working.

Biden has been posting and replying to other people’s posts frequently, and getting a ton of engagement, thousands of reposts and vaguely positive media coverage for his commentary. He’s published posts on a variety of topics — sobriety (Biden has battled drug and alcohol addiction), his family, gratitude, his paintings, fundraisers for homeless people. Mostly it’s in writing, but sometimes he puts up videos with snippets of life philosophy in the style of Instagram influencers.

Part of the reason Biden is breaking through is he’s making blunt, self-deprecating humor a significant part of his online persona. For example, he once complained that a photoshopped image of him smoking a pipe featured what looked more like a meth pipe than a crack pipe, asking to be mocked more accurately. (Biden has openly discussed an addiction to crack cocaine.) He ended that post with the phrase, “Thank you for your attention to this matter” — a nod to Trump’s signature sign-off on many of his own social media posts. The joke seemed to be well-received by people across the political spectrum.

A lot of Biden’s posting is unobjectionable and sometimes even wholesome — at least by the standards of online attention-seeking behavior. But there’s an aspect of his new identity that I find more troubling: his attempts at cross-partisan political populism. Regardless of what his intentions are, he’s exhibiting a naivete about noxious right-wing ideas.

https://www.ms.now/opinion/hunter-biden-twitter-social-media-paintings-trump-politics

Apparently the reason he's raising "red flags" to this writer is that he's doing some of the same things Buttegieg does...except he's "just a Biden" and not a politician

MAHA has inspired a wave of medical professionals to run for office

President Donald Trump’s first term sent a wave of national security professionals into politics. His second term is doing the same for public health experts.

Across the country, doctors, scientists and public health officials are running for state and federal office, citing their frustrations with cuts to public health funding, diminished support for vaccination and disease prevention, and the sidelining of experts in public health.

Among the most prominent is Dr. Nirav Shah, who was head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention during the coronavirus pandemic. He is considered the front-runner in a competitive Democratic primary for Maine governor on Tuesday.

Other candidates include Dr. Amy Acton, a pediatric physician and researcher who is the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Ohio, and Jasmine Clark, who is poised to become the first Black woman Ph.D. scientist in Congress after securing the Democratic nomination for Georgia’s 13th District. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official, is currently ahead in the polls for the Democratic Senate primary in August.

They are part of a broader wave of scientists getting involved in politics. The 314 Action Fund, a political action committee dedicated to recruiting and electing Democratic STEM professionals, has committed more money than ever before to the 2026 primary cycle.

https://www.ms.now/news/news-analysis/doctor-candidates-maha-project-47

Good on them!

Santa Fe Raging Grannies Turn Ray Charles Song Into Passionate Anti-ICE Protest Song

Science Astronomers are capturing video of a black hole for the first time

Contrary to science fiction, black holes are not portals to other dimensions or cosmic vacuum cleaners that swallow up everything around them.

“The media always paints black holes as these pits of despair, and everything falls in, but they're much more fun than that,” astrophysicist Sera Markoff told Quirks and Quarks host Bob McDonald.

Markoff is part of a global team working to capture the first-ever video of a black hole, a scientific leap that could reveal how these mysterious cosmic objects behave.

“There's just an enormous amount of questions that we'd like to be able to answer about black holes,” she said.

In 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole — a supermassive one at the heart of Messier 87 (M87) galaxy, about 50 million light-years from Earth — using the Event Horizon Telescope, a network of eight radio telescopes that operates as a single virtual instrument, linking facilities from Antarctica to Spain and Chile.

Markoff, the Plumian professor of astronomy at the University of Cambridge, says the EHT is now being used to track the colossal black hole in M87 in motion — an advance that could reveal details that still images cannot. There are now 12 telescopes in total, but only eleven will take part, as the telescope in the South Pole cannot see M87.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/black-hole-video-astronomy-space-science-9.7117478

Stuff I only dreamed of in my youtn.

Marilyn Monroe Doc Shines Light on Her Hidden Health Battle

A new documentary is using Marilyn Monroe’s hidden health struggles to spotlight a disease that still leaves millions of women fighting for answers decades later.

End of the Cycle, a documentary about endometriosis, sheds new light on Marilyn Monroe’s private battle with the condition, which her biographer Anthony Summers said was so severe that it “destroyed her marriages, her wish for children, her career and ultimately her life.”

The documentary follows co-director Sammy Jaye, who also suffers from endometriosis, a disease estimated to affect more than 265 million women globally.

“The way she’s been portrayed all these years has not been accurate,” Jaye said during a screening of the documentary at New York City’s Whitby Hotel. “If anyone mentions Marilyn Monroe in a negative way, you can revert back to this and know what she was going through at a time when she couldn’t have said anything, and there wasn’t social media.”

Summers, who authored the 1985 biography Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, confirmed the actress’ diagnosis with the help of her physician while researching the book.

https://thelooker.thedailybeast.com/marilyn-monroe-doc-shines-light-on-her-hidden-endometriosis-battle/

I've had friends who suffered terribly with this condition, and I can only sympathize. I had fibroids, which are bad enough, but endometriosis is far worse. Poor Marilyn! I do plan to watch this doc.