Disjointed thoughts frozen in time.
624 followers 534 following 521 posts
view profile on Bluesky 
That Pritzker press conference was... surreal, and I think marks a significant moment of escalation in the constitutional omni-crisis. This was the governor of a state saying plainly the Union itself is being torn apart and his state is being militarily invaded by an authoritarian regime.
Pritzker: "When did we become a country where it's ok for the US president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything? Especially something we don't want. Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?"
The lifetime return to college remains enormous: four years of study adds more than a million dollars to expected earnings. And that yields a funny conclusion that I like to remind my students about: It may not feel like it, but these might be the highest earning years of your career.
A Texas County Cuts Over 100 Polling Sites as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting Nationally talkingpointsmemo.com/news/a-texas...
The National Guardners
One thing that's particularly maddening about what's happening today—beyond that it's happening—is that when people talk about how we are moving toward authoritarianism, toward fascism, by a collection of narcissistic sociopaths, many Americans' eyes glaze over.
Not sure whose fault it is primarily that most people don't seem to know that the president is basically a manager whose job is to carry out the will of Congress, and not The Country's Boss
This is worth sharing far and wide. Federal Employees and contractors oral history project. Im not involved in this. Just got the link, idea seems to be to create a record of the assault on the American Repuvlic after Jan 2025. www.fecohp.org
Yeah, man, totalitarianism is when people listen to experts. Good talk, always a pleasure to hear from you.
NEW: A week or so ago, one federal agent kept popping up in videos from Trump's violent DC crackdown—so @jsweetli.bsky.social and I investigated. Turns out he's a 26-year-old US Parks Police officer, a lesser known law enforcement unit currently championed by Interior Sec. Doug Burnum. Our report:
Pritzker: "No one in the administration -- the president or anybody under him -- has called anyone in my administration or me. It's clear that in secret they're are planning this invasion with US troops."
He’s providing them with valuable mulching experience though.
CARTOON OF THE DAY (From @mluckovichajc)
I’m pretty sure it’s widely recognized (just not reported) now.
Welch: Am American president talks to other American citizens like that, and propagandists come on TV and normalize this behavior. And nothing about this is normal. Nothing
shocking
Thank you, Trump voters.
What are the odds that the Supremely Corrupt Court of the US will give the Traitor-in-Chief a green light on tariffs on appeal?
No notes
They're now saying it out loud: The Administration's goal is to undo the political independence that Congress granted the Fed, so that the President can directly set rates.
🧵 As of July 1, the CDC gutted its FoodNet program, slashing surveillance from 8 major foodborne pathogens down to just 2: salmonella a& E. coli. No more federal tracking for campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio, or yersinia.
Meiselas on GOP now saying it's the states' job to lower costs: So everything that happened with the economy while Biden was trying to put out the fire created by the arsonist Trump during his first administration, was blamed on Biden. But Trump makes everything worse, now its a state issue?!
hasn't reached
You can't step anywhere in the public realm in America without risking being shot, either by accident or on purpose. Guns are everywhere except at Republican political rallies.
Well said. I've been trying to put this into words for some time.
Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve on the Minnesota shooting: "The sad thing is we can't sit here and tell them that help is on the way. Because we're not going to do a damn thing about it."
It’s hurting. It just reached the stock market yet so doesn’t count.
New in PN: Chairman Trump's Great Grift Forward "In his second term, Trump is at last unleashed to fully realize his vision, and on economics, that means a new kind of mobster state capitalism."
Undermining the Fed to get lower rates now is like ripping the batteries out of your smoke alarm because it’s beeping. It’s quiet for a bit. Then your house burns down. Credibility anchors expectations; expectations anchor inflation.
Brutal. A humiliation ritual.
National Guard soldiers called into service for President Trump's law enforcement surge in D.C. have been assigned to spread mulch at federal monuments. Normally the Park Service does that, but the administration laid off the workers. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
That is some good news for a change.
With Lisa Cook suing to challenge Trump's firing of her, experts in mortgage law tell me her lawyer can now use discovery to dig into the role Trump loyalist William Pulte played in singling out mortgages of her, Schiff and Letitia James for scrutiny: newrepublic.com/article/1996...
Let’s all take a moment to reflect on how this just absolute alpha male sprayed on his hair for TV
Why Trump built a staff of incompetent sycophants My latest for The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/25/trump-staff-incompetent-sycophants
Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.
Walz: "It boggles my damn mind that in the midst of a military takeover of our cities, the flaunting of the rule of law, that the press finds the need to talk about, 'Oh, there's a division in the Dem Party.' There's a division in my damn house & we're still married and things are good. That's life"
Trump sees himself as synonymous with the federal government and given our trajectory it would seem he is (even if only temporarily). So, the government having equity of a private company = Trump having equity in a private company.
If the US government had to pay for medical care of its citizens, it might care more about climate change impacts, air and water pollution, gun violence, traffic crashes, the food we eat, etc. It’s past time for single payer healthcare.
Warren: He said that with a single phone call he would end the war in Ukraine. He said he would end the war in Gaza. And I think I remember him saying he would release all of the Epstein files… He promised that on day one he would lower costs for American families. We are now on day 215.
it will take years to undo the damage from this lawless, criminal conduct. business as usual once Democrats reclaim executive power will unacceptable. no turning the page without repairing the damage
He always liked leverage.
I've settled at least 11 wars, and least 27 pre wars. And the number goes up everyday.
a guy in a parking lot saying "eat this in remembrance of me" doesn't make him christ, byron
Remarkable open letter from Bill Burns. "If intelligence analysts at the CIA saw our rivals engage in this kind of great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon. Instead, the sound we hear is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai." theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...
Here's a really galling example of what we're talking about. Note that @npr.org is only able to conceive of Trump's military occupations as a *political problem for Democrats.* This is some shockingly credulous and derelict framing.
Again: The same people screaming “SOciAliSm” about everything are the ones doing the actual socialism. Awkward. @MarshaBlackburn @RepTimBurchett @RepOgles care to comment?
The only poll anyone will ever need. Swing states voters were +11 on the economy they experienced locally and minus 27 (!!) on the national economy they only heard about.
You must protect your own.
Only MAGA allowed
Lemme roll and I'll connect the Michigan v. Michigan State score, the search for meaning, the role of truth, the human urge to record our reality, the cost of adding noise to statistics, and why we can't afford to appoint a partisan hack to head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.#GoBlue
New from me: Trump thinks Ukraine is to blame for the war and that Russia is right to think of the West as "the enemy." www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
The people who are *still* making a massive deal about having to go to the doctor and get a shot think historians made too big a deal out of **slavery**
when we talk about how the mainstream media is failing us, this is what we mean 👇
Actually, if you went to someone's house for an important meeting crucial to world peace and then they showed you this display, what would you think?
Howdy GA Neighbors! Look where our taxes are going...to the new American Auschwitz in Charlton County in the old Folkston Prison. As construction has come to a dead stop in GA and other States due to TARIFFS, this is the new focus Can we say wasteful spending?? capitalbnews.org/georgia-larg...
Highly skeptical of all "in running for Nobel Peace Prize" discussion. But if anything should, miraculously, come of today's emergency intervention, there's an eight-person slate that would be strong contention for the award. Here they are together.
truly unreal. he's the guy who buys a lap dance and thinks the stripper and he had a deep connection
New in PN: Gavin Newsom's moment "Newsom and other Dems joining this battle are right to fight. And by fighting, they are demonstrating just how weak Trump is. When you bend the knee, MAGA looks invincible. As soon as you stand up, though, the orange god starts to look like a fetid bag of wind."
Life comes at you fast
Crow: "Look at what happened. US military personnel in uniform literally were on hands & knees rolling out a red carpet for the most murderous dictator of the 21st century...we keep on acting like Putin deserves to be brought out in open like any of head of state. This is a historic embarrassment."
To those who countries willing to pay I'd imagine - kind of an equivalent of a $5M Trump Gold Visa, except for other countries. They want to run a giant nternational protection racket using the U.S. miltary, wth the financial benefits accruing to Trump and his family.
A man understandably refused to hand over his ID or get out of the car for a bunch of masked thugs who refused to identify themselves. And when he drove away, they opened fire on him. This isn’t how you do any sort of enforcement when your goal is to uphold the law. This is gangsterism.
NO RESEARCH: @GovBillLee was “unable to provide any environmental or community impact studies, community engagement or ‘other vetting’ of the tunnel project from before the announcement or lease signed.” Unreal. Already digging. The Speed of Corruption. www.timesfreepress.com/news/2025/au...
@gavinnewsom.bsky.social: "This guy is trying to get a Nobel Peace Prize? When he's bringing war to the American people? He sent the United States Marines into the United States of America."
While masked agents were violently attacking a delivery worker this morning, bystanders repeatedly asked to see their badge numbers but they refused. Bystander: You guys are ruining this country, you know that, right? Agent: Liberals already ruined it.
Very bad sign when masked, unidentified agents of the security state are not just grabbing people off the street but openly identifying with the regime's politics
@drneilstone.bsky.social Please sign and share our petition to remove RFK Jr. www.change.org/p/rfk-jr-mus...
Many people are irresponsibly defending throwing sub sandwiches, we decided to test one and discovered just how destructive they can be when we launched it at a group of unsuspecting people we saw standing around at the park.
“.. Let’s be clear: The so-called summit with Vladimir Putin did absolutely nothing to advance any American interests .. We got nothing. Appeasement doesn’t work, has never worked, never will work.” — Sean Hannity, after Biden’s 2021 summit @passantino.bsky.social www.status.news/p/trump-puti...
How does Governor Abbot feel about that?
“He’s been here 25 years cutting the state’s grass, paying his taxes — never even had a ticket… we got a felon in the White House but these are the people they got in there. Without immigrants this country is gonna go down.” 🇺🇸
Today’s Republican Party
my boss always speaks first at meetings too
👇👇
That he’s an old fat brain dead baboon? (No offense to the baboons out there on Bluesky today.)
They need to send him a fake medal just to get him to shut up. Everyone will know it’s fake but Donald will pretend it’s real.
International embarrassment.
open.substack.com/pub/spytalk/...
Once you realize that a pause is a symptom of not having an endgame, you understand why we just paused tariffs with China in response to the end of our earlier pause on tariffs with China, which we confirmed in earlier meetings after concern that our earlier pause with China might unpause.
Imagine if they’d had sandwiches. 🥪
"Until recently, a series of ameliorating factors have kept things looking artificially normal." Our economy is like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff and taking a few seconds to notice. @eggerdc.bsky.social and @cathyyoung63.bsky.social in today's Morning Shots: www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-tari...
There would be an immediate cease fire if Russia immediately ceases firing.
An interesting subtext here. We do indeed spend vast sums on our military. So the idea here appears to be that without "forever wars" we need to occupy our own cities.
That’s journalism. Period. We could use a lot more of it.
www.change.org/p/rfk-jr-mus... www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Everyone knows Real Macho Texans with "things between their knees" (?) put on their fancy suit and makeup, go on cable and whine that somebody was a real meanie to them.
If non-farm payrolls data were severely distorted, Wall Street wouldn't react to them. But in fact, markets respond to them more than any other indicator. So either EJ Antoni is smarter than all of Wall Street, or he's wrong. All data are imperfect. Wall St believes these are the least imperfect.
Great piece! I’ve often thought the same thing.
New in PN: Trump isn't the solution to the "crisis of manhood," he's the problem "The more obvious the alteration in a woman’s appearance — even to the point of grotesqueness — the more she's shown her commitment to serve him. No one needs to tell Noem to get back in her place. She’s already there"
Idiot. The Russians tried to establish an airhead outside Kyiv, and were defeated at the battle of Antonov Airport. Then they rolled tank columns down both sides of the Dnieper—using highways!—and were beaten back.
again, what is interesting to me about this stuff — beyond the obvious fact that what trump wants is propaganda — is that it is grounded in a political theory which holds trump to be the sovereign will of the nation, who can impose his demands on every aspect of the nation's society