@bmkowski.bsky.social
180 followers 120 following 45 posts
Union Teacher. Voracious reader. Movie lover. Distance walker. Mother. Also, is there a better Polis than Minneapolis?
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Reposted
atrupar.com
STEPHANOPOULOS: I didn't insinuate anything. I asked you whether Tom Homan accepted $50k as was heard on an audio tape recorded by the FBI in September 2024. You did not answer the question. Thank you for your time.

VANCE: No, George, I sai--

STEPHANOPOULOS: We'll be right back
bmkowski.bsky.social
Two white tahoes or suburbans with SD plates to be specific. A Reddit user saw the same vehicles, with masked agents, stop a motorist on Central and St Anthony Pkwy. Motorist was not apprehended
Reposted
phmelody.bsky.social
Safer Hennepin PAC mailer in my mailbox tonight. Looked it up and found funders up to end of year 2024. Significant/newsworthy to see a broadcast company on the list. www.transparencyusa.org
Mailer from Safer Hennepin that reads "The choice is clear. Mayor Jacob Fry is keeping Minneapolis safe. Vote early." QR code goes to the City of Minneapolis voter info webpage. A list of 2024 contributors to Safer Hennepin A list of 2024 contributors to Safer Hennepin. Any repeated names/donations here are repetitions from other screenshot, not a duplicate donation. As of end of 2024, Safer Hennepin had $11,933 on hand, $145,500 in total  contributions, and $125,370 in total expenditures
bmkowski.bsky.social
I just got this one, too. Thanks for following the money trail!
bmkowski.bsky.social
Just saw some ICE vehicles trolling around my neighborhood in NE Minneapolis. Stay safe, ya’ll.
bmkowski.bsky.social
Jacob Frey out here taking a page out of the Republican books…sent to residents of NE Minneapolis, an attempt to appeal to the white liberals over here. More fear mongering. Don’t fall for it. #dontrankfrey
Political postcard featuring side-by-side pictures of Jacob Frey and Omar Fateh. The headline reads “who will keep Minneapolis safe?” and says that Frey supports police while Fateh wants to defund them.
Reposted
gastropoda.bsky.social
This. This. This.
urocklive1.bsky.social
Just a reminder that Wikipedia is the only remaining reliable source of information that right wing billionaires can't control. (Although they'll never stop trying.)

Please donate to them whenever you can. Even a little bit helps.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Reposted
iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social
Live performance of "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield in 1967. The song was written in 1966 in response to the Sunset Strip curfew riots in Los Angeles. It became an anthem for generational conflict, civil unrest, and later anti-war movements.

"The lyrics are still so relevant."
Reposted
fritschner.bsky.social
A few minutes ago in the House:

- Speaker Mike Johnson officially cancels votes next week, extending the House recess through a fourth week

- House Republicans block Democrats from passing a bill to pay the troops during the shutdown, ensuring they will miss paychecks next week
House Press Gallery: During today's pro forma session, the Clerk read a message from the Speaker designating Tuesday, October 14 through Sunday, October 19 as a district work period. Punchbowl's Briana Reilly: House gaveled in and out of its pro forma just now w/o recognizing Rep Elfreth, who was seeking to UC a mil pay bill from Rep Sykes. 

Elfreth told reporters after that House Dems stand “ready and willing to take” up standalone legislation to pay troops.
Reposted
hcrichardson.bsky.social
20 paragraphs down in the NBC News story that broke the information that the administration is considering invoking the Insurrection Act is the report that Stephen Miller is driving the issue.
Reposted
dannykpolitics.bsky.social
WATCH: ‘Portland Frog’ pepper balled by ICE agents
Reposted
lolennui.bsky.social
So cool that whenever someone asks the president, “did you eat the Lindbergh baby” he’s like, “no but I’d be allowed to, I have the right to, I might do it later”
Reposted
elliottpayne.org
Tonight a resident posted a picture of racist and Islamaphobic language written on Johnson street that called for @omarfatehmn.com to be deported and wished death upon the Somali community. @doronclark.bsky.social and I showed up right away to get this racist garbage off of our streets
Elliott and doron cleaning up the shared use path on johnson
Reposted
geauxgabrielle.bsky.social
People still dont understand the effects of Trump’s new bill on education and how it impacts student loans.

Once 2028 gets here, there wont be anymore poor children who become doctors or lawyers. Poor kids wont be able to become epidemiologists like me.

That new cap ensures ONLY rich kids will.
Reposted
iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social
Five-alarm fire inside the DOJ - Lawyer Oyer
Reposted
dbrauer.net
Some of you know me as an OG media reporter, but Brian Lambert, who I don’t think is on here, taught me. He had some great thoughts about Kupchella’s landlord ad & “journalism.” Sorry for no alt-text; these excerpts are too long. If you need alt please message me & I’ll shoot you an email or text.
If you're in the news, tough facts and full transparency business, the question, "Who paid for this?"
should not come as tough or surprising. Like some of you last night, I watched the documentary, "A Precarious State", noting the presence of former KARE-TV reporter Rick Kupchella, its unusual commercial-free runtime on several ABC stations owned by the Hubbard family and its weighted cast of landlords, "business leaders" and
conservatives of varying pedigrees. Being a guy who doesn't get out much, I had no inkling of the production until yesterday morning, when I read an infomercial on the Star Tribune's op-ed page. It was a piece written by Kupchella touting his show. I could have thought, "Cool! The Strib is now running paid promos in its editorial
section. Kind of like Budweiser decals on Nascars." I hadn't stopped asking, "What the f*ck is this? before several texts arrived asking if I knew
anything about the show." Several of my woke, Marxist, anti-capitalist, eat-the-rich, let's all eat bugs-and-roots cronies were already smelling a new variation of a MAGA-marinated Liz Collin/Mrs. Bob Kroll attack on the faerie
lefty nymphs running Minneapolis... or in the case of Kupchella's piece, all of Minnesota. Not knowing anything about what was up, I told them that I only knew Kupchella from back in the
day and generally liked his work. As they say in the biz, "He's good TV." Not a raver. Not a ranter.
Adept at compiling statistics and delivering the goods with a genial, neighborly vibe. To a couple of my pals I did add, somewhat recklessly, that he was also "a relentless self- promoter", "relentless" probably being a bit much. But the point was the guy, even as a staff reporter for a corporate-owned TV station knew how to market his goods. As a media columnist at the time I always knew when a new Kupchella piece was about to drop. And as I say, they were
consistently "above average." Quality visuals. Lots of interviews... and stats.
Not that any of that guarantees a… If you missed the show last night, the capsule summary is that Minnesota, Minneapolis in particular, has descended to the levels of depressed, illiterate, crime-ridden hellholes like Louisiana and Mississippi. Everything around us is trending toward disaster. And the main reason is ... wait for it... oh, you already guessed ... radical democratic socialists... who in five short years
have emasculated both our prosperity-inducing developers, landlords and cops.
But mostly our cops. Now, being an old white guy living in Edina I don't pay as much attention as I should to the daily nitty of the Minneapolis City Council. But even as a delusional, woke, MAGA-resistant scold I can
accept that some of the stuff the council's majority yabbers about and proposes is kinda batty. As batshit as Tylenol causing autism? Defunding pediatric cancer research? Or flushing anyone who knows anything about science out of the CDC? No. Not quite that loony and destructive. But counter-productive. IMHO a lot of the current council lacks the realpolitik awareness that any city, especially big cities like Minneapolis, require buy-in from a wider range of influencers than the 40
people who showed up on caucus night and got you on the ballot. Kupchella's film, which plays like it got a script polish by John Hinderaker and Katherine Kersten at the Center for the American Experiment, (another operation from whom I'd love to see a donor list), does make some valid points about the easily-gamed caucus system. But its primary focus is ... crime. Lots of crime. Constant crime. Crime so pervasive "no one" wants to go anywhere
downtown. Put simply, the film argues, Minneapolis needs lots more cops. The deep irony there being that the appallingly inadequate vetting and training of cops was what (along with outside agitators) incited
the George Floyd riots. But (without new taxes of course) let's quickly put 600 more of those guys out there and hope for
the best this time (In the context of "too few cops on the street", I always like to remind readers that in the George Floyd episode, two MPD squad cars and a third, a Park Police squad, carrying a total of six peace officers, turned up to check out the possibility of a fake $20. And were soon bellowing f-bombs,
waving guns and murdering the suspect.) Kupchella's statistics team wove in a lot of gloomy numbers about our crime and student achievement. But, odd thing about Google ... five-seconds of tapping turns up other numbers that
paint a far ... far ... less grim picture. Like the stuff US News and World report culled from FBI stats showing that The City of Lakes and
Free Fire Hellholes was actually dead last in violent crime among the USA's 25 largest metros. Similarly, the state's academic achievement scores, while certainly in need of improvement (whose aren't?) still hold up well in comparison to say, Texas, which Kupchella and crew regard as a beacon of deregulated, low-tax, free enterprise supremacy... never mind the wretched state of its schools, which landlords, developers and can-do entrepreneurs invariably hate paying taxes to
support. (Those Democrat unions, y'know.) And on the topic of schools, at one point Kupchella interviews what I guess he regards as an average, representative suburban Minneapolis couple; parents of school age children. Nice looking
folks. Tidy house. But, I'm sorry when the dude with the crucifix necklace starts muttering about "indoctrination" in Minnesota's public schools and how "parents need more input" into curriculum,
one guesses, I'm out of there. Similarly, in the context of "good TV" we have "exclusive security cam footage of a wild shoot out last year down off Franklin and 19th. It's berserk. Sixty-some bullets fired. Some guy with an Uzi- style machine gun. Bad. No way to coat it. But for, um, dramatic purposes, Kupchella runs that clip ... three times ... and on the last roll intones, that this ... "is the new normal." Also, just asking… But that would have ruined the fun. I could go on ... and on ... but the point is that this, very much like, but with far more mainstream polish than your average Alpha News/Liz Collin rabble rouser, is a film with an agenda. And that's fine. For the next few hours at least it's still a free country. You got something you want to say and you've got somebody willing to write the check to buy an hour of airtime on a half dozen network
affiliates around the state, knock yourself out. But if the game here includes the pretense of journalistic integrity you owe it to your viewers to show your work. Like a list of who contributed how much to cover the two years of production and
tab for an hour of commercial-free network airtime. After the film aired Kupchella hosted an on-line discussion with several of the key sources/subjects
and took questions from viewers. Mine was, "Who provided money to produce this film? Did the Hubbard family donate? Why wasn't
Mayor Frey interviewed? Did he deny a request?"
Unless I missed it, time expired before they got to those
Reposted
jamestalarico.bsky.social
Jesus spent most of his time healing the sick.

Today, we have politicians in Congress with “Christ-follower” in their Twitter bios — but they’re trying to kick the sick off their healthcare.

And they’re willing to shut down the government to do it.
bmkowski.bsky.social
Fuck 👏🏻 YES 👏🏻
ocasio-cortez.house.gov
This moment is a test. Donald Trump wants us to blink first and hand him over power.

We have too much to save to give in. Protecting the American people is too important a task for us to give up before anything even starts.
Reposted
iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social
SIGNS OF FASCISM

Asbury Park Boardwalk
Reposted
Reposted
rbreich.bsky.social
The gap between teacher pay and other college graduates’ pay is the highest it’s been in over four decades.

Is there a “teacher shortage,” or a shortage of jobs that treat educators with the pay, dignity, and support they deserve?
Reposted
4taxfairness.bsky.social
They want you thinking about Tylenol so you don't realize that yet another right-wing billionaire is about to acquire yet another media platform.