Meredith Shiner
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meredithshiner.com
Meredith Shiner
@meredithshiner.com
21K followers 1.4K following 9.3K posts
current twitter ex-pat. past congressional reporter. contributing editor @newrepublic.com. running a communications consulting business and raising a tiny baseball fan irl.

let’s work together! ⬇️

meredithshiner.com
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meredithshiner.com
2014 Meredith is not having you convincing me to care I only will get hurt.
Your author posing on Christmas morning in her new Jay Cutler “DOOONT CAAAARE” shirt
January 19, 2026 at 2:46 AM
meredithshiner.com
was just going through old photos at commercial and found this gem from March 2013
Your author making sassy face side-by-side with Jay Cutler making sassy face
January 19, 2026 at 1:35 AM
meredithshiner.com
It’s Beer Friday with Meredith Shiner™
A 32 oz. can of “The Weight” from Chicago’s Piece Pizzeria and Brewery, featuring an image of the restaurant and the text “Chicago’s most award-winning beer” being held by yours truly
January 17, 2026 at 12:54 AM
meredithshiner.com
Six years ago Mike Bloomberg paid a billion dollars to the Fuck Jerry guys to put this on the Internet in the hopes it would make him president and then the world ended. #tbt
Mike Bloomberg’s face photoshopped onto a meatball in a white bowl of four meatballs in sauce. Mike Bloomberg’s face photoshopped onto a meatball staring into our souls and the abyss of our fascist future
January 15, 2026 at 3:34 PM
meredithshiner.com
This all started yesterday because my podcast producer sent me this memory (from the bad site)
Screenshot of an old tweet Meredith Shiner @ @meredithshiner • Dec 8, 2022 oh you know just me and @joshkross going through the Brockmire pilot to find *the line* you know we needed
January 14, 2026 at 3:43 AM
meredithshiner.com
again I need people to know that this fall, North side Chicago yoga pants moms who for all I know voted for Paul Vallas in 2023 all came up to me at a Lil Kickers soccer practice for toddlers asking where they could buy my shirt. IN SEPTEMBER. BEFORE THEY SHOT A WHITE MOM LIKE THEM IN THE FACE.
January 13, 2026 at 4:04 PM
meredithshiner.com
Oh interesting maybe someone show this clip to @durbin.senate.gov
Screenshot of a bluesky post from October: Eric Michael Garcia @ericmgarcia.bsky.social Durbin on whether Democrats can use reining in ICE in Chicago as a precondition to [reopen] the government says "can't do that. It's gotta be health care all the way." 3:33 PM • Oct 8, 2025 © Everybody can reply 45 reposts 243 quotes 302 likes 302 likes 10 saves 1 288 O 302 企 ••
January 13, 2026 at 2:05 AM
meredithshiner.com
also for me this is in large part causation not correlation I would love for network execs to consider this
Do you watch pregame shows more or less than you used to? More: 11.1 percent Less: 61.3 percent No change: 27.6 percent
January 12, 2026 at 3:55 PM
meredithshiner.com
there are not more of them than us.
How do you feel about Pat McAfee on “College GameDay”? Like it: 31.6 percent Don’t like it: 49.5 percent No opinion: 18.9 percent
January 12, 2026 at 3:46 PM
meredithshiner.com
A photo from Gabby Giffords’ Tucson office sign covered in flowers, notes and loveys after her shooting that somehow ran in a news outlet despite the fact I took it on a BlackBerry circa 2011
January 8, 2026 at 3:27 PM
meredithshiner.com
the new york times homepage rn is certainly a ... choice
A screenshot of the NYTimes homepage that shows the Minnesota developments buried under eight stories about Venezuela/War/Oil
January 7, 2026 at 8:39 PM
meredithshiner.com
tbt to when @ericmgarcia.bsky.social asked Dick Durbin about my essay articulating how Democrats needed to connect the fall shutdown to ICE terror. How'd Durbin's "we can only talk about health care" tack go for Senate Dems? newrepublic.com/article/2014...
Screenshot of a Bluesky post: Eric Michael Garcia ‪@ericmgarcia.bsky.social‬ 🌐 Durbin on whether Democrats can use reining in ICE in Chicago as a precondition to rein in the government says “can’t do that. It’s gotta be health care all the way.” 3:33 PM · Oct 8, 2025 Everybody can reply
January 7, 2026 at 5:56 PM
meredithshiner.com
Again, there is no joy in predicting the extremely predictable (from January 2022). web.archive.org/web/20220108...
It's easy and convenient to isolate the images, violence and memories of Jan. 6, to remove them from their ongoing context and package them into produced speeches or television segments that look back. It's much more difficult to speak the truth about the modern Republican party, from school board meetings across the country to the halls of Congress, harnessing the power of white supremacy, propaganda and violence to fundamentally reshape America and destabilize the institutions that once buttressed the principles of democracy Biden declared on Thursday still endure. Twelve months after the attack, Biden saying anything was an improvement over silence. But there is a profound danger in "remembering" Jan. 6 once-per-year instead of acknowledging and confronting it daily. In the space between Trump's Big Lie about the election and the truth is a web of white lies that Biden and much of entrenched Washington establishment keep telling themselves and the country, enabled by a mainstream media still conditioned to be more fearful of criticism from bad-faith Republicans than of the fall of American democracy. In the space between Trump's Big Lie about the election and the truth is a web of white lies that Biden and much of entrenched Washington establishment keep telling themselves and the country, enabled by a mainstream media still conditioned to be more fearful of criticism from bad-faith Republicans than of the fall of American democracy. —The lie that there's a distinction between Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. —The lie that "unity" without accountability for an attempted coup of the government by Republicans is achievable. -The lie that Washington, D.C. can return to bygone days of handshakes and deal-making and cocktail parties, and the result will be a government that functions as designed. —The lie, largely by omission, that white nationalists who came to the Capitol bearing Confederate flags and donning "Camp Auschwitz" hoodies are isolated and contained threats to the public. —The lie that "this is not who we are" as a country. —And the lie that the ongoing assault on democracy is dane since our democracy These are not the sort of big lies that propagate on QAnon websites, the dangerous ones that have constructed an alternate reality for Trump's followers and torn our nation apart. But they are the kind of polite, insidious-in-the-guise-of-innocuous lies that have to be believed by Washington elite in order for elected officials, operatives, lobbyists and reporters to continue as "normal" in their glossy political lives. "Whatever my other disagreements are with Republicans who support the rule of law and not the rule of a single man, I will always seek to work together with them to find shared solutions where possible," Biden said Thursday, as if House Republican leaders, joined by the vast majority of their colleagues, had not voted to overturn his election, exactly one year earlier and yards from where he stood. "Because if we have a shared belief in democracy, then anything is possible," Biden said, as if that "if" could lift such an assertion from the heavy reality that 147 Congressional Republicans still voted to subvert democracy after insurrectionists tried to murder their colleagues and then-Vice President Mike Pence. Trump and Republicans are not severable, and Democrats and Republicans do not currently share a belief in democracy. Biden's apparent desire to be the president he imagined he could be in the late 1980s when he first ran for the office-the president who could host bipartisan meetings and pass appropriations bills with the backing of 90 senators-is in direct tension with the president he needed to be to navigate the nation through this tenuous moment, a president who in the wake of an attempted government coup could immediately and unequivocally call out the Republicans he worked with for decades as easily as they disputed his own election and legitimacy. It was safer within the "norms"-driven rules of DC engagement for Biden to wait 12 months and remember Jan. 6 as an anniversary memory, a flash bang, something Donald Trump once did as opposed to something his party is currently doing. When network news broadcasts dispatched their anchors to the Capitol for 24 hours on the anniversary of one of the darkest days of American history to "remember"-after spending a year continuing to give platforms to any number of those 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to reject Biden's fairly won electors— they isolated Jan. 6, the memory, from Jan. 6, the ongoing reality.
January 6, 2026 at 2:36 PM
meredithshiner.com
let’s keep pretending this all started with Trump tho
DeMint, working the crowd before the Florida GOP Senate hopeful Marco Rubio came on, said: "I've been criticized by some of my Republican colleagues for saying I'd rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who believe in the principles of freedom than 6o who don't believe in anything," DeMint said. "Let me make myself even clearer: I'd rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters."
January 3, 2026 at 5:50 PM
meredithshiner.com
oh hell no

take your circus somewhere else!
In a January 14 broadcast from Chicago, according to the call sheet, the main focus is planned to be on a "Bari Pitch" to bring on former President Barack Obama and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on to discuss "how the Dems lost touch and how to regain the working class trust." The other story ideas include Dokoupil riding the L Train with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and asking him about the racial life expectancy gap in Chicago; a piece on crime rates falling in the Second City "but do residents feel safer," and another "Bari Pitch" on the city's "abysmal schools."
January 3, 2026 at 2:12 AM
meredithshiner.com
congrats to the good brand, @homefield.bsky.social!!!
Screenshot of images of one sweatshirt and two t-shirts celebrating Indiana’s rose bowl victory: RAGS TO INDIANA C UNIVERSITY FOOTBALL NO Indiana GON •ROSESS XOSE BOWL CANE CAN?S 26 BOSE NOT GAMS Champions, INDIANA 20 26 CHAMPS RAGS TO ROSES® ROSE BOWL CHAMPS
January 2, 2026 at 12:29 AM
meredithshiner.com
Idk what this actually means for me but it very much could be worse so I’ll take it
Merriam-Webster Your 2026 Word picturesque
January 1, 2026 at 8:06 PM
meredithshiner.com
An icon of icons.

May he enjoy his cheese heroin in Turkey. Or some other countries.
Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social eric adams just went on tv and when he was asked what he's going to do tomorrow he said "travel to some countries" 10:21 PM • Dec 31, 2025 Everybody can reply 82 reposts 54 quotes 1K likes 4 saves 62 136 1K •.• Marisa Kabas he also shouted out Al 12 ≥ 9 @marisakabas.bsk... • 57m 330 企 ... Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsk... • 42m the interviewer asked adams who he wanted to wish a happy new year and he said his dead mother 22 42 345
January 1, 2026 at 5:28 AM
meredithshiner.com
>1 million Americans died in a traumatic viral pandemic, and America responded in the most American way, which was to make it more likely people would die of diseases we’d already contained by tearing up the social contract in the name of “freedom” while disregarding the actual concept of freedom.
The Post's findings show that at least 5.2 million kindergarten-age children in the U.S. are living in counties where vaccination rates for classrooms have fallen below the herd immunity threshold — up from about 3.5 million before the pandemic. While the vast majority of those who receive the measles vaccine are protected from severe illness and death, without herd immunity measles can still spread among those not immune, including those who cannot be vaccinated because of age or because they are immunocompromised. Out of the 44 states reporting county-level rates, 36 and the District of Columbia also reported them for individual schools or districts. At least 19,000 schools - nearly half of schools in the Post analysis - were more vulnerable to outbreaks. The share of U.S. counties where 95 percent or more of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles - the number doctors say is needed to achieve overall protection for the class, known as "herd immunity" — has dropped from 50 percent before the pandemic to 28 percent, according to The Post's examination of the public records from 44 states and the District of Columbia. The number of parents questioning vaccine safety in Anita Chandra-Puri's Chicago pediatric practice has doubled in the last few years, she said. Many of them are highly educated, but they keep coming across misleading information on social media, she said. Across schools in Chicago, the measles vaccination rate has dropped 6 percent on average since the pandemic. "They have access to every resource, and they think that they can become the expert at something because they've seen it multiple times" on social media, Chandra-Puri said. A map of the Chicagoland area showing kindergarten MMR vaccination rates largely trending downwards
December 31, 2025 at 3:12 PM
meredithshiner.com
I googled because I knew it would look exactly like this
The face of a professor who was very mad his lady students did not want to have affairs with him
December 31, 2025 at 2:12 AM
meredithshiner.com
This email came through yesterday and uh
ChatGPT To: meredith@meredithshiner.com › Yesterday Easy self-care you can start today ChatGPT Just tap a chat to start Try these ideas for fitting in more wellness. I don't belong to a gym. Make a no-equipment, 20-minute home workout I want to eat more protein. Plan 5 protein-rich, balanced dinners
December 28, 2025 at 6:45 PM
meredithshiner.com
happy florida new year
A photo of a pool overlooking the ocean with palm trees and the setting sun
December 27, 2025 at 9:56 PM
meredithshiner.com
Me, from April. [insert any job Rahm says he wants here]
Screenshot of a Rolling Stone article quoting me from April of this year. RollingStone Among the names that have already tossed around to fill Durbin's seat are former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel. "I think it would be catastrophic at every level if he were to become a United States senator," Shiner says. In every role he's held, she says, Emanuel "has consistently shown that he's been willing to compromise core values if he thinks that it's politically expedient. At the end of the day, our country and the people of Illinois are not well served by someone who thinks that political expedience is a priority - and who has also completely misread what is politically expedient. He was quoted in Politico saying that Democrats just could concede USAID as a little treat to Donald Trump, because maybe he'll be satisfied, and USAID might not be popular. We're going to put millions of lives across the world at risk. Why isn't that something worth fighting for?"
December 23, 2025 at 1:55 AM
meredithshiner.com
Absolutely incredible 1100/10 no notes
Screenshot of an espn push alert: Breaking News UNC working toward hiring former Arkansas HC Bobby Petrino as next offensive coordinator - On3 Sports
December 22, 2025 at 3:44 PM
meredithshiner.com
We bought the Hawks one but I made him do a photoshoot with every random 80s or 90s jacket he tried on — look at the REMARKABLE Larry Bird jacket behind him in this one.
Josh in a 1990s Team USA starter jacket posing in front of a rack of starter jackets and the most insane Larry Bird apparel ever made, I’m pretty sure.
December 20, 2025 at 4:46 AM