yes, that is me, "spending ZERO time criticizing" the GOP
Senior News Editor, Mother Jones/CIR
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yes, that is me, "spending ZERO time criticizing" the GOP
If we all went back to Twitter, it would be happening over there. It's not like there was a healthy, respectful, cross-ideological exchange of high-minded ideas going on there in the before times.
I would define "Blueskyism" as the tendency to angrily reject any suggestion by a center-left person that there is merit to any conservative-coded critiques of what Democrats or media did between 2019 and 2024. But none of this is actually inherent to Bluesky; it's just where it happens right now.
Fifty-one of the 85 Federalist papers were written by a guy born in Nevis.
Update: Florida law enforcement keeps arresting people for using chalk to commemorate the 49 people murdered at the Pulse nightclub, according to @wesh2news.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6U...
Amid a wave of mass shootings, Florida cracks down on chalk www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Kid: Have you ever won a trophy? Wife: Yes, I won a trophy for debate. Kid: What's that? Wife: It's like arguing. Kid: Oh. Was anyone else complaining? Wife: No, it's like trying to make people agree with you. Kid: So... was anyone else complaining?
"Surfaces are very important to me..."
Yes, things are going just great in California, Illinois, and New York...
I agree that the Newsom tweets are hilarious. But I'd be annoyed if my tax dollars or campaign contributions were paying for them.
Every dollar, every minute, every staffer writing all-caps tweets has an opportunity cost
"Sure, my family can't afford a house in California," the swing voter who just moved to Nevada said. "But did you see Gavin Newsom's sick burn on the social media site formerly known as Twitter?"
Hot take: Dem governors should spend less time trolling Donald Trump and more time turning their states into models of successful liberal governance that voters across the country would be likely to choose over Trumpism...
If you don’t believe that Trump’s authoritarianism can be defeated, look at how scared MAGA is of chalk:
Seems like we’re setting the bar unnecessarily low here
Wait, have people seriously managed to convinced themselves Trump is dead, or is it a joke, or so of each?
Letting your 80-pound German shepherds attack your security detail and publicly berating and posting video of your landscapers are both absolutely sociopathic boss behavior
“The claim that trans people are disproportionately responsible for mass violence in America comes up every few months. It has never been true.” USA Today fact check from their extremism beat reporter www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
The president’s posting one-star contractor reviews on his proprietary Yelp site while DHS tweets about the true meaning of fire-fighting…
It would be extremely funny if the result of nuking universal injunctions ends up being that the tariffs exist only in red states whose AGs are too afraid of Trump to sue...
Chris Van Hollen is literally calling for a ceasefire and end to the war here, and he has been more pro-Palestine than all but maybe one or two other senators, but a lot of the replies here seem angry at him for deigning to talk to Israelis at all.
Is that just, like, non-ideological authoritarianism? Principled, consistent opposition to free speech?? It's weird!
Who are the 1/3 of Trump voters who think opponents of same sex marriage should be banned from speaking on campus??
So much fascinating stuff in this poll www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-ameri...
I think we can start to consider whether this is a trend of actual grand jury nullification. We will never really know given secrecy. The sandwich case was dreadfully overcharged. That said, given the rarity of no bills… these jurors are not rolling over for prosecutors in this moment.
"To blame the unnerving prevalence of mass shootings in America on the existence of trans people here isn’t just a dangerously stigmatizing, politically motivated take. It’s also bad math." - @abbyvesoulis.bsky.social
It's shocking how many people claiming to identify "patterns" are apparently unfamiliar with the concept of a "denominator"
I just think her death is a tragedy. She paid the ultimate price for her catastrophically bad decisions. Recognizing her prior service doesn't bother me in the same way that other J6 revisionism does. I don't object to people disagreeing with me about this, though.
Trump's attempts to whitewash and even valorize January 6 are generally outrageous and appalling. But I don't really object to this... thehill.com/policy/defen...
Here’s the clip of CM Padilla bragging about reducing the size of a 100% affordable housing project in her district and increasing the amount of parking while arguing against the transit oriented upzoning bill SB 79. (ED 1 is an affordable housing program in LA.)
It would be an outrageously absurd outcome if Trump, Biden, and Hillary Clinton all got away with this but John Bolton went to jail
The replies to this are completely deranged. Even if you are too short-sighted and amoral to care about the ethics of this, what's described in this story is quite obviously going to be just as politically effective as putting donor cash directly into a paper shredder
Bowser seems to be in favor of federal law enforcement working with MPD and against ICE raids and checkpoints and the National Guard occupation. If she were able to end the latter things by embracing the former thing, that would probably be pretty popular in DC. Big "if," though...
They are creating an unemployment crisis in DC (which can't possibly be good for preventing crime), but those jobs still need to be done, so they are involuntarily importing workers from elsewhere and creating labor shortages in those places
This is insane. DOGE fires NPS workers, ostensibly for "efficiency" and to save money. DOD then removes National Guard members from their full-time civilian jobs in Mississippi, pays to house and equip them in DC, and has them shovel mulch. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...
If there was a truly a silent majority in DC that was grateful to Trump for "liberating" the city, you'd think that would show up in grand jury indictments
These "tragic mishaps" keep happening. They are either not "mishaps" or not something the Israeli government actually believes is "tragic." apnews.com/article/isra...
My controversial opinion is that legally arresting and successfully prosecuting people illegally carrying guns makes DC safer, but that illegally arresting people for carrying guns and having to drop the charges makes DC less safe!
I don't dispute that if tariffs do end up causing massive inflation and/or the AI bubble bursts, that will matter at the polls. But amid the absolutely chaos and catastrophe of 2020, Trump lost by like ~40,000 votes.
Democrats have spent the last decade insisting that the latest Trump outrage will surely tank the market and crash the economy and then voters will learn their lesson and vote for Dems. That keeps not happening, so Dems are just gonna have to convince people that living in a police state is bad!
(I don't actually think that's a good idea, but as bad ideas go, it's both funny and relatively inexpensive.)
Have Democrats considered simply trying to get the SCOTUS conservatives to overturn Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission?
been offline for an hour or so to reflect on everything and decided that as long as the federal reserve remains independent and we keep getting commercial packages from japan that everything is going to be ok
wut
And @sulliview.bsky.social theorizes that the Times might have held off reporting the payoffs they witnessed (only to follow The City’s scoop) because they were “working on a bigger, more sweeping investigation” … and today’s NYT story supports that theory. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/n...
@sulliview.bsky.social is no longer at the Washpost and NYT, but she’s still asking tough questions about the choices their newsrooms are making. margaretsullivan.substack.com/p/cash-hando...
1) ABC/NBC should lose license or pay hefty fees because their reporting is mean to him. 2) MD should maybe lose bridge repair funds because Wes Moore was mean to him. 3) The feds should investigate Chris Christie for Bridgegate because he was mean to him.
This is increasingly outrageous. They've basically rendered him stateless. Canada should give the whole family asylum.
"When I was your age, son, we had to learn two contradictory definitions of 'liberalism' just to pass civics class..."
It's funny that, thanks to Donald Trump, the American definition of "liberalism" and the international/historical/polisci definition of "liberalism" have completely converged
Same reporters; bigger story www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/n...
Clara was right!
and *that's* why the Times had all those photographers and reporters at various Chinese-American political events in the city before the chips story www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/n...
A more productive line of research for these groups would be figuring out how to more effectively communicate that police states are indeed bad
This is a smart piece by @abbyvesoulis.bsky.social that applies to DC, but also more widely. Protest and resistance don't necessarily take the form of big marches, but that's what we (and media in particular) have conditioned ourselves to expect. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
It's very weird that powerful Democrats can look at what is going on right now and think it's a good time to give the Trump administration new tools to suppress political satire www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/o...
OK, but did this event successfully save the oceans?
Also not sure we want to hold up the post-WWI negotiations as a model for achieving peace...
He obviously right that this war is only going to end with some sort of negotiated settlement, but that's a pretty wild thing to say about WWII!
That how Republicans portrayed it, anyway. The money was also supposed to go toward making sure the Jefferson Memorial wasn't toppled by the woke waters of the Tidal Basin www.washingtonpost.com/archive/loca...
In 2009, Republicans had an absolute meltdown because Obama's stimulus bill included funding for re-sodding the National Mall...
Rep. John McGuire on the FBI raiding John Bolton's home: "I'm glad they're going after him."
Fox News panel expresses concern over FBI's Bolton raid: “There is a great concern about whether this is retaliation against a political opponent”
I was kidding! I do not actually think he used to take young Eric to DC on Amtrak to see the dinosaurs fossils
Mr. Escalona's case exemplifies how the problems in "Tren de Aragua" identification predated Trump — and how flimsy most evidence of "gang ties" really is. The U.S. government declared a man a gang member because he was wearing one of the most popular shoes in the world, and still stand by that.
The ONLY evidence that the U.S. government has ever offered to suggest this man is a gang member is that in 2023, he was on a bus in Guatemala and U.S. officials in the country doing migration checks saw that he was wearing Air Jordans. Seriously. That's it. Wearing Air Jordans. That was it.
What, you don't think he'd take his kids down on the train for the weekend to help them learn about dinosaurs?
It's extremely weird that these folks are claiming to be under the impression that the Smithsonian museums don't already "talk about hope and progress."
Once again, Congress, under both parties, created an imperial presidency from WWII onward that depended entirely on shared norms about democracy/the rule of law & not abusing that delegated executive authority that no longer exists. When we get through this, of these things need to go.
People do actually understand that the Vance couch meme is completely fake ... right?
People are so excited that we might be on the verge of civil war. I’m not. I’m a basic bitch who likes basic things like pumpkin spice lattes and not getting shot at in the grocery store.
such speech. very freedom. wow.
probably shoulda just stick with SpinCo
they've already got a great new logo for MS NOW
Delaware has one House seat...
Crowd cheers as cops leave.
ICE is gone but DC cops are still out at V and 14th, getting heckled by an angry crowd after one person was supposedly arrested by feds in a roadblock aimed at immigrants
'God save thee, pink polo shirt Guy! From the fascists, that plague thy head!— Why look'st that way?'—With my Subway I humiliated the FED.
Your weekly reminder that DC's sole congressional delegate, who might be counted on to protest Trump's latest assault on the city's autonomy, is 88 and too old to drive. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Tearing down hostage posters has to have been one of the most counter-productive forms of protest in human history. Freeing the hostages is the anti-war position in Israel, and it's insane that it is the opposite here. www.timesofisrael.com/families-of-...
"Trump is asking Texas Republicans to redraw the maps that they just drew in 2021 to get him five more seats to protect his majority in Congress, because he’s worried about losing it in the next election."
Yes, because of how Katsas decided the dispute, he would — as Pillard says in dissent — technically go "further" than Rao. But, look at Katsas's closing (left) v. Rao's closing (right), and tell me who is more extreme. (And, also, lol that Rao technically left proceedings open. Sure she did.)
![Whether to proceed with criminal contempt is a choice left to the district court, which “enjoys a discretion akin to the non- prosecution power in the executive.” Potter, 126 F.4th at 725. With the issuance of this writ of mandamus, I would not assume that such an extraordinary step is forthcoming. See D.V.D., 2025 WL 1832186, at *1 (assuming the district court will comply with the Supreme Court’s decision and “cease enforc[ement]” of the stayed injunction). In any event, today we correct the particular error before us. If the district court chooses the problematic and uncertain path of criminal contempt, the government may seek relief from this court to remedy any specific harms arising from the district court’s actions. * * * The district court used the threat of criminal contempt to coerce the Executive Branch to comply with an order it had no authority to enforce. And it directed that coercion toward the Executive’s exercise of its foreign affairs power. The significance of the district court’s error, coupled with the potential for abuse in future cases, justifies our intervention at this stage of the proceedings. Considering the “totality of the circumstances,” the writ is appropriate. In re Kellogg Brown & Root, 756 F.3d at 762. For the foregoing reasons, I concur in the decision to grant the government’s petition for a writ of mandamus and to vacate the district court’s order.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:36eqtmzysqf7wsslczw4uxcd/bafkreiaveyxvtf2i2fvqznqdzsjmjtu62uqb4w7y7z7rplh7bbfe6e63gy@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Rao, unsurprisingly, is more extreme here, calling Boasberg's actions — not the Trump administration's moves — "egregious."
![Punishment through criminal contempt might still be available in these circumstances, but the district court cannot use the threat of such punishment as a backdoor to obtain compliance with a vacated and therefore unenforceable TRO. The district court’s abuse of the contempt power is especially egregious because contempt proceedings against senior Executive Branch officials carry profound “separation of power[s] overtones” that demand the most “sensitive judicial scrutiny.” In re Att’y Gen. of U.S., 596 F.2d 58, 64 (2d Cir. 1979). Lacking the authority to compel obedience, the district court nonetheless pressured the government to take custody of alleged alien enemies held in El Salvador. This intrusion on the President’s foreign affairs authority “constitute[s] an unwarranted impairment of another branch in the performance of its constitutional duties.” Cheney, 542 U.S. at 390. Because the order exceeds the court’s authority and amounts to a clear abuse of discretion, mandamus is appropriate.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:36eqtmzysqf7wsslczw4uxcd/bafkreifo6mys7o6mjglhqkcqsqocyhbp2n2la7slwjrqfrsjq4quskx4gq@jpeg "Click to view full size")
This, in sum, is the grounds on which Katsas decided the matter:
“Motte and bbailey” is the perfect term for this phenomenon thank you
Bluebberrygeddon is delightful
I think the Harper's letter was fine. I declined to sign it, but I did not disagree with any of it then, don't disagree with it today, and take no issue with anyone else having signed it. Here's the link. It's fine. harpers.org/a-letter-on-...
theonion.com/dnc-aiming-t...
yes... maybe? the right-wing discourse around them seems interrelated to me in a way I think is fascinating but can't quite articulate
I have some suede shoes that I wear in the rain, and I'm comfortable with that life decision
Kinda seems like Democrats are a bit *too trustful* of "medical researchers"
JFC -- remember the outrageous when Bill Clinton talked to Loretta Lynch on the tarmac?
Like ... come on www.cnn.com/2025/08/05/p...
I still think there is essentially zero credible evidence that Trump committed any Epstein-related crimes. But this is ridiculous... abcnews.go.com/US/trump-adm...
There are many reasons why Trump should not, and legally cannot, "federalize" DC -- but "LOL it's funny and good that Big Balls got car-jacked [insert misinformation here]" is definitely not one of them
No specific deadline — just a topic I’m interested in getting pitches for that we’d consider assigning
