Curious citizen🤔Radio guy & podcast dude for NPR's Here & Now: https://xitter.gq/t.co/B7FNh0LTz6 Making noise w/CDPROM, La Croix Mystique & more
Chicago, IL ✶✶✶✶
Joined June 2009
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I went to Alaska and talked to people about the anxiety of living with the growing threat of deadly landslides. Listen to their stories:
wbur.org/hereandnow/2026/09/…
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Chris Bentley retweeted
Jeffries opponents on the left are making a meal of this - members who just ducked out for a pointless post-election reception are getting their AIPAC tracker number shot back at them, accused of secretly supporting the Iran War, etc.
Skip the reception, go to work! Simple as.
Chris Bentley retweeted
Most of the Dems who missed the vote were here, Republicans just gavelled before they got in there (which is their prerogative when time has expired). But their arrival would not have changed the outcome of the vote since all Republicans except Massie voted in lockstep.
Chris Bentley retweeted
Insane that 11 Democrats couldn't even bother to show up for an impeachment vote after the actual voters rejected the Iran War. What is going on?
Chris Bentley retweeted
One thing that does look easier for AOC now, in the 2028 conversation, is getting past “woke 1” positions.
Lots of candidates got past their regrettable 2020 takes. Will Lawrence deleted his tweets and said he didn’t think that stuff anymore. The RNC had a Dick’s Picks-sized archive of Abdul El-Sayed podcast cringe, and he just recanted the toxic stuff. Rs pinned the violence in Atlanta on Keisha Lance Bottoms and voters had moved on.
Stretching this a bit — nobody cared about COVID. Vivek put a lot of chips on “my opponent locked you down and killed your job. And she’ll do it again!” Nobody believed that and people had warm feelings about Acton’s COVID role. (Vivek also an imperfect messenger because he did a 180 on COVID precautions.)
If you want libs to keep paying a price for Peak Woke and Peak COVID, this is frustrating. If you really hoped that the 2020 uprising would bring about the Age of Antiracism, also frustrating.
But the radioactive material of 2020 feels like it went inert this year. By the final week some candidates were living off the land and saying “the chaos in Paris could come here!” because playing the footage of May 2020 didn’t hit anymore.
Ah yes
Susie Wiles, whom President Trump calls the most powerful woman in the world, says she has a plan to save the midterms for the Republican Party.
She says Trump will campaign like it’s 2024 all over again, and admits she hasn’t even told him this yet.
Her strategy is to make the election national instead of local and center everything around Trump.
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Chris Bentley retweeted
I spent a decade of my life campaigning against fossil fuels, risked very serious criminal charges protesting those things. The trade-offs in the bill are tough but I support it *because* I have committed my adult life to climate action. This kind of argument is utter trash.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Chris Bentley retweeted
New — In an internal call, Stephen Miller cut off an official describing fraud in Florida. He was told about a criminal probe in Va. "That's a long way off from Minneapolis,” he said
Incredible reporting @AlmsNatalie on Miller’s crackdown on MN Somalis
washingtonsun.com/whitehouse…
Chris Bentley retweeted
Former Wisconsin Republican congressman on Tuesday’s election results:
There was an almost extinction level wipeout of republicans across the country. Traditional red states like TX, IA, KS, SC moved left. There is weeping and gnashing of teeth on the right. To me, I wonder how anyone could have not seen this coming. Maybe not the sheer size of it, but the fact that it was going to happen.
There is not a single reason. It would be neat and clean if there was. The closest thing to it, is a national rejection of Trump. But even that is to simplistic.
It was many things. And different voters voted for different reasons. It was tariffs that raised prices and lost manufacturing jobs. It was the war in Iran and the subsequent increase in gasoline and diesel fuel. It was how immigration policy was mishandled doing deportations in the most cruel manner. It was the loss of decency. It was middle America saying we are struggling. It was ignoring a struggling electorate while simultaneously building a gold ballroom for the elites that no regular voter will ever see. It was broken promises. It was a sycophantic Congress unwilling to rein in the administration’s worst impulses.
It was all of this.
Chris Bentley retweeted
With Dems all but certain to prevail in Mississippi and Alaska, we're most likely looking at a 56D-44R Senate and a ~260D-175R House, which would be Dems' largest House majority since 1992.
Chris Bentley retweeted
“A missed opportunity that quite frankly sets Montana back decades.”
That’s what former Sen. Jon Tester said to me about Montana’s failure to join the wave of new Democrats in the Senate.
washingtonsun.com/campaigns/…
Chris Bentley retweeted
Why I’d urge caution on declaring the Trump era over. The second term project hasn’t just been about retribution, but also unchecked presidential power — with Miller and Project 2025 its architects.
They didn’t really try and sell their agenda to the public. They tried to gerrymander a win before voting started. And they worked hard to empower the executive, and to minimize the role of Congress/Courts altogether.
So in a weird, undemocratic way, the WH has been building to this moment for two years.
Chris Bentley retweeted
I've been in politics for a quarter century. It's hard to express how staggering it is to see a conversation like this on corporate US media. The Morning Joe panel gobsmacked by the directness of @AbdulElSayed's points.
(clip via @DropSiteNews)
Chris Bentley retweeted
The governor-elect of Texas, Gina Hinojosa, has explicitly said that all currently permitted datacenters in Texas will be allowed to finish construction. This essentially covers all of the 2027 and likely well into 2028.
She is going to pass laws that ensure that all *newly* permitted datacenters going forward for delivery in 2028/2029 will pay taxes, commit to no increase in power prices for consumers, don’t impact water availability for people, be constructed with union labor and give “Texans a seat at the table.”
Sounds reasonable. She doesn’t want to lose a lot of good blue collar jobs and property taxes for small towns in rural Texas.
Datacenter commentary starts at 6:30 in this interview.
Also attaching her official campaign position from her website in the next post.
Sidenote: After watching a bunch of her speeches and interviews, I do think she is a political talent and probably has a future in national politics.
youtu.be/D-T6H3b8ZeE?is=mEWu…
Chris Bentley retweeted
New post: I think folks are failing to grasp what a watershed election this was for the politics of monopoly utility companies.
Governors are the most important people to utility regulation in most states. The new ones ran on aggressive utility accountability platforms. 1/9
Chris Bentley retweeted
Lindsay is right. Yes people care about the vulgar bribes, yes they’re angry at the weird golden ballroom when they can’t make rent. But for most of the people I talk to, the way they *feel* corruption on a daily basis is the $500 electric bill that no one in Washington seems to care about, and then when you lift up the rock, find out that those same officials got donations from that utility company. Same thing with healthcare, housing, you name it.
Chris Bentley retweeted
Call me crazy but the thing that really matters in politics is policy. It's striking how the issues that defined this election—affordability, corruption, an unpopular war in the Middle East, immigration enforcement, corporate AI power—all would be classed as "left" or "liberal" concerns pre-2016.