Doug Pennington
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morfaleji.bsky.social
Doug Pennington
@morfaleji.bsky.social
770 followers 680 following 150 posts
Husband. Flack. Principal Consultant, Morphology Media Relations LLC. Pirkei Avot 2:21. #unionmember. DC via Cincinnati. @morfaleji most places. Skeets gone after about a month (or less)
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morfaleji.bsky.social
Sadly on point nearly 20 years on
tom toles editorial cartoon, 4/22/2007 that reads, “we decided to let the good citizens shoot it out with the bad ones,” as a mom pushing a stroller and a dad holding their toddler’s hand all walk through a hail of gunfire.
December 22, 2025 at 9:20 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Called it bsky.app/profile/morf...
Doug Pennington @morfaleji.bsky.social Expect others have asked already, but wondering the chances we'll hear a "those convos were off the record!" à la Halligan any minute • James BallO @jamesrball.com • 8h This is the wildest shit a White House chief of staff has said about *their own colleagues* and *their boss* ON THE RECORD, WHILE STILL IN THE JOB. Holy hell. 11:38 AM • Dec 16, 2025 & Everybody can reply
December 16, 2025 at 10:18 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
All of this.
citizenship of children who are born here. And he was explicit later in the week about the people he wants to come. Why can't we get people from Norway? Why can't we get people from Sweden? Can the Danish send us a few people? We want white people. That's what he's saying. He has an immigration policy that favors white South Africans. So he ir canceling black people or attempting to in real time. And that's not the language of the conversation that we're having. So we went crazy over this idea of the First Amendment. Don't get me started on the Second Amendment. But we get to the 14th Amendment, and there's just kind of, you know, that's black people talking, or that's some, you know, a civil rights leader said this or that, as opposed to a frontal assault on our Constitution. And this idea of Somehow reading the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution, treating it as though it's some illegitimate add on, is outrageous. As Eric Foner says, it is the most consequential addition to the Constitution since the Bill of Rights.I
December 14, 2025 at 5:14 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
The worse part for me that still warps my brain is that he calls his shot on social — ‘I’m going to manipulate institutional media for nefarious purposes’ — and then institutional media obliges, without making him persona non grata forever www.mediamatters.org/education/ri...
[Media Matters, 12/15/23] Manhattan Institute fellow and anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo has bragged about infiltrating the mainstream media's education coverage to push right-wing talking points to the forefront. The New York Times has published an op-ed by Rufo as well as a soft-lens profile which amplified his right-wing attacks on public education. [Media Matters, 7/27|23] Rufo has been clear about his intention to mainstream bad faith right-wing attacks on academia in order to oust progressives from positions of authority. On X (formerly Twitter), Rufo wrote: "We launched the Claudine Gay plagiarism story from the Right. The next step is to smuggle it into the media apparatus of the Left, legitimizing the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple her. Then squeeze." Rufo later told Politico that Gay's resignation demonstrates "a successful strategy for the political right."[Twitter/X, 12/9/23; Politico, 1/3/24]
December 14, 2025 at 3:08 AM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Peter Griffin color chart meme with light colors labeled “Move Along” and darker colors labeled “Papers Please”
December 13, 2025 at 3:36 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Hypothesis: If Council did its job to broad satisfaction, initiative proposals would wane. Meanwhile, it’s hard to escape this conclusion:
"They are trying to silence voters from bringing up important issues that are not getting attention from them (City Council) because their financial backers don't want attention on wages and on housing," says Eidinger, who has developed a particular expertise (and funding stream) for ballot initiatives in D.C. "They are acting like agents of the corporate aristocracy that doesn't like democracy."
December 13, 2025 at 1:46 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Vocational schools are a pretty old idea, hardly “audacious.” Depending on a lot of things, changing the school into a job placement service (if it actually does that) could be useful. Pretending learning how to think—how I read “learning for learning’s sake”—is only for the rich? That’s crap imo
… online undergraduate and master's classes in fields like accounting and education, she grabs a printout of a spreadsheet and starts writing in faculty assignments herself. She's not worried about which professors are passionate about the subject of a given class, but rather who has the basic knowledge required. For the same reason, she's unconcerned about instructors having doctoral degrees, at least outside of the purely academi subjects like English and history that remain. Uber-wealthy schools like Penn and Penn State can focus on learning for the sake of learning, in her view. Her mission isn't to create cutting-edge researchers, but to get her students jobs. It's tough to argue with her logic. The turn away from the liberal arts at schools like Albright might be sad, might reveal something tragic about where we are as a society, might mean that some day in the near future only students at the nation's most elite colleges will read Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Nietzsche. But the truth is…
December 9, 2025 at 5:56 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Don’t know how to describe it exactly. Like a mashup of Larry David as Omar Sharif from Lawrence of Arabia, where instead of reluctantly following a “no prisoners” battle cry, we were repeatedly drafted into pretending to take seriously bad faith GOP legal arguments that were really just power grabs
December 8, 2025 at 12:34 AM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Sadly, true as the day it published
Tom Toles single panel cartoon from 9/12/2007 showing a man and woman pushing a stroller with their small son walking beside, as a hail of bullets whiz all around them. The father says, “We decided the solution was to let the good citizens shoot it out with the bad ones.”
December 7, 2025 at 11:48 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
By now a well-known channel of corruption of science and policy, still a catastrophe all the way down. JFC apple.news/AVKI3gnodQFm...
The Washington post ... Last Friday the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology retracted a 2000 study that concluded "under present and expected conditions of new use, there is no potential for Roundup herbicide to pose a health risk to humans." The retraction from the co-editor in chief said evidence suggests that Monsanto employees "may have contributed to the writing of the article without proper acknowledgment as co authors," the study's authors may have been paid by Monsanto without disclosing it and that the findings about its cancer risk "are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto." Noting that the paper "had a significant impact on regulatory decision-making regarding glyphosate and Roundup for decades," the journal concluded that it has "lost confidence in the results and conclusions of this article, and believes that the retraction of this article is necessary to maintain the integrity of the journal." The Environmental Protection Agency, which is slated to announce an updated human health risk assessment for glyphosate next year, cited the paper in its 2016 review of glyphosate. It later determined that the pesticide ingredient was "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans." The Washington post A retracted study on Roundup reignites debate over its potential cancer risk The 2000 study in the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology had concluded that the active ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, did not pose a cancer risk to humans. December 5 at 5:00 AM 2025 Roundup is one of the world's most widely used herbicides. By Amudalat Ajasa
December 5, 2025 at 11:50 AM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Humorous scene, to Cotton, of people frantically grabbing anything to stay afloat, stay alive, but be murdered instead

Recalls that time when Tom Cotten said, “faith is what we live every single day.” He says he worships on Sundays, but not clear to what g*d. www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-po...
"It's just another example of how Obamacare infringes on the liberties of all Arkansans," Cotton told KNWA. "Barack Obama and Mark Pryor think that faith is something that only happens at 11 o'clock o Sunday mornings. That's when we worship. But faith is what we live every single day And the government shouldn't infringe on the rights of religious liberty."
December 4, 2025 at 9:24 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
The number of times a week after seeing news I say this aloud to an empty room
December 3, 2025 at 4:07 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Basically, to the publisher:
Judge Judy saying, “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining”
November 28, 2025 at 6:20 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Opposite of an expert, but going out on a limb here to say the publisher is either

(a) lying bald-faced, or

(b) going to let this sh!t roll downhill to the 2 unnamed reviewers, who

(b2) might have some information of their own to share?

Because no human editor both saw this image AND signed off
But that last part of Marszalek's comment is interesting! Two independent peer reviewers, across two rounds of review, appear to have missed the figure that was Al-generated and did not flag any issues?... This paper's quick retraction - a sign it should not have been published in the first place - leaves some questions around its handling. I asked further questions of Springer Nature about whether they would add a note to the article to suggest a decision has been made on its retraction, but haven't heard back just yet — it's currently early early morning UK time as a I write this.
November 28, 2025 at 6:18 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
November 24, 2025 at 5:24 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
I think about and laugh anew at this one every couple years
Far side cartoon of American Indians gathered together watching egg beaters fall from the sky with the Chief saying “Oh! Four steps to the left _and then_ three to the right…. What kind of dance was _I_ doing?”
November 22, 2025 at 8:14 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Republican pols may not mind f*cking around now, but in about a year I expect they’re going to find out. www.cincinnati.com/story/news/p...
Cincinnati.com Local Politics Fri Nov 21 2025 'I'm outraged.' In Ohio's Trump country, suburban grandmas take on ICE [photo of three gray-haired white women in their 60s] A grassroots group protesting its county's cooperation with ICE ranges in age from 60 to 85.
November 21, 2025 at 11:35 AM
morfaleji.bsky.social
The future is now
November 19, 2025 at 3:28 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Probation, huh. Okey dokey. Surely he won’t offend yet again 🤷‍♂️
Ex-Lobbyist Jack Abramoff Gets Probation, Must Repay $2.2M for Crypto Fraud Scheme 7:01AM Nov 19, 2025 The National Law Journal Morning Update
November 19, 2025 at 12:07 PM
morfaleji.bsky.social
Me every time an ad interrupts whatever youtube vid I’m watching
November 10, 2025 at 11:43 PM