in every city in every nation from lake geneva to the finland station. he/him
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Gutting such programs for crime control, said @johnpfaff.bsky.social means "your focus is clearly not about reducing crime, it’s about intimidation and social control. And this is made all the more clear by where federal troops deployed — not where the crime is, but where the cameras will be." 5/5
A federal court is allowing the EPA administrator to cancel a $20 billion program, created in law via the IRA, to distribute climate change grants. The court says these are contracts not grants, and so only the Court of Federal Claims can review. Unconstitutional violations via technicality!
Fascinating when a Katie Rogers story lists a president's extreme age as part of a litany of 'hyper-online' complaints, and when it is key corroborating evidence for a thesis that belongs in the headline
Hate when 'The Internet' stokes baseless conspiracy theories about a president's health
An implicit assumption of Abundance is that out-migration from places with too few jobs relative to people will help those left behind. But while this helps the out-migrants, this out-migration will not improve economic or social conditions in distressed places.
Your occasional reminder that the positive effects of UBI have been tested and validated hundreds of times more often than the murderous Musk robotaxis or LLM’s we’re rushing to put into our schools and streets.
its cool how “no purity tests” can simultaneously express the cheap realism of “you must accept monsters with power no matter what they do” and impose the absurd idealism that “you the relatively powerless must never, ever complain or even have standards”
It’s insane that “Free Palestine” gets treated as antisemitism, but “America is not a universal nation” is not. I’ll tell you what: as an American Jew, I feel much more threatened by White Christian nationalism than I do by Palestinian liberation.
Kraft's campaign spent $1.9 million in July alone, nearly nine times as much as Wu. Almost $3M in dark money coming to support Kraft's candidacy from Jim Davis and friends.... Yesterday was a beautiful show of support for democracy and Mayor Wu. Even Governor Healey and Senator Warren showed out.
LMAO someone corrected Hochmann in between posting the speech at Daily Signal and him promoting it online.
This made me laugh. The United States is almost a century older than Italy!
Not going to stop thinking about the comment that Trump is sending Confederate armies to occupy Northern cities. How much more is there to say? That’s not a “distraction.” It’s what the white supremacists who tried to secede have wanted for over a century. It’s not a distraction to them at all.
This is literally what scholars mean when they speak of the fascist ethos of “blood and soil.” It’s adapted from a European context, but it’s the real deal. We’re in it.
“Authoritarians thrive on your silence. Be loud for America.” Pritzker really is forcing me to reframe it as “every billionaire is a policy failure … except one.”
I wrote about journalists who look away. From Maxim Gorky's shameful behavior in 1929 at Solovki and the death of George Polk in Greece in 1948, I move on to our current national crisis, which grows a little more urgent every day, despite those who continue to act as if nothing is happening.
COMMENTARY: If this was happening in another nation, we'd call it by name. It's authoritarianism.
Apparently Guillermo Del Toro has ruined Frankenstein by… being relatively faithful to the source material. Oh my.
It’s not just that the President of the United States posted a video of eleven people being murdered in international waters it’s that the President of the United States ordered the murder of eleven people in international waters so he could post a video of it.
*pointing upward and nodding sagely on Tiktok*
40% of Republicans think the COVID vaccine killed more people than the COVID virus. One in four believe that QAnon is real. No matter how far they radicalize, we are told over and over again that the people being rude to them are the problem.
They wanted to kill some Drug Guys for Fox News and they did. Simple as.
I feel like in the 1980’s/90’s this would be a major plot point in a Tom Clancy novel, and the operation would be carried out as an off-book, illegal black op, with various characters trying to cover it up lest they face congressional hearings. Now the President just announces it.
Here's the video Trump just posted to Truth Social, with the claim that 11 people aboard the boat were killed. There is zero evidence of self-defense here. Looks like a massacre of civilians at sea. Even if they had drugs aboard, that's not a capital offense.
It is staggering. The AP today just reprinted Trump’s literal nonsense about “turning DC around” without a word that the thing most turned around - other than any remnant home rule - is the city’s economy. Turns out the Mississippi National Guard and ICE checkpoints are a turn-off on date night.
BREAKING: On a 2-1 vote, D.C. Circuit denies the Trump administration's request to let Trump fire a Federal Trade commissioner during appeals. Citing Humphrey's Executor, about the FTC: "To grant a stay would be to defy the Supreme Court's decisions that bind our judgments. That we will not do."
Emanuel is unusually blunt, but he is joined by many other Biden alums blaming progressives for their own 20+ years of failure. Their proposal is to reinforce inequalities at home and abroad, dealing with discontent through compulsory patriotism behind great power conflict. 9/
Studies repeatedly show that most people age out of "hardcore" crime by their late 30s and 40s. And nobody is "born to be" a criminal. Even Trump, who is a hardcore criminal who has not aged out of his illicit behavoir, was not born like this. I blame his parents.
The show should stay dead; it only had one watchable episode.
Notice that Gov. Pritzker is calling out what @radleybalko.bsky.social has emphasized: Trump is *barely even bothering* to manufacture fake crises to use as pretexts to send troops into cities. It's just repression for the hell of it
I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable
Glad to see Pritzker standing up forcefully against the current tyrant in chief. Needless to say, none of this is normal, and every day it’s pushing us closer and closer to an outright shooting war. If you’re a member of the military, remember you swore an oath to the Constitution above all else.
Can you imagine if Biden had sent, say, the California NG to Idaho to quell some Cliven Bundy-like situation?
The president is sending the military to control American cities and if you're a reporter who's framing that illegal power grab as "pushing the boundaries of constitutionality" or "acting boldly to fight crime" or whatever, please go find another line of work where you won't get us all killed.
One of which being the minor detail that deploying them off federal property in the territory of one state under another state's authority without the permission of the government of the first state is quite literally an invasion
These problems are even bigger. As a constitutional matter, the deployment of unfederalized Guard personnel into a nonconsenting state can never happen. Never.
Pritzker should mobilize the Illinois National Guard to oppose them. Extreme? Maybe. But I don’t see why he should just let another state effectively invade his.
Is sending up fighter jets to respond to a press conference by your dead best friend's sex trafficking victims considered weird or not weird these days. I've lost track.
The best quote I’ve ever seen about this is that every Democratic leader of the 21st century is ideally suited by temperament and mindset to be in congress in 1995 debating the v-chip.
"I spoke with a Midlands-based Reform UK candidate. Instead of trying to convince me to support the party by discussing its manifesto policies and ability to govern, he took another approach: he told me that the UN were sneaking ‘military-aged’ migrants into asylum hotels"
Hello bay area
🤡
Pritzker: Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next
Got some real struggles with causation going on here.
What makes it beautiful is that both premises are true. At their respective best only they can really make each other uncomfortable
A group of 85 leading US climate scientists have compiled a withering review of a controversial Trump administration report written by fringe researchers that downplays the risks of the climate crisis, finding that the document is biased, riddled with errors and fails basic scientific credibility.
Trump’s tariff taxes are driving American farmers out of business. Believe me, no one knows bankruptcy better than Donald! fortune.com/2025/08/30/r...
EJ Antoni, Trump’s pick to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shared a Darwinism-inspired theory about inherent differences between men and women's IQs during a talk to Heritage Foundation interns last year. from @jacobbogage.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
Why didn’t we just track and interdict the vessel in US waters, arrest the crew and seize the drugs, as the US Coast Guard routinely does?
“JD Vance isn’t anti-democratic. He just happens to idolize a man who wants to reinstate slavery.”
Vance follows a coterie of online Nazis on X, has described Curtis Yarvin as a major intellectual influence, and openly attacks immigrants in blood and soil terms. The response of most of the political press? "Doesn't look like anything to me."
KASIE HUNT: Over the summer you said, “There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective”. Do you still believe that? RFK JR: “I never said that.” KASIE HUNT: “Play the clip.” RFK JR (clip): “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.” (March 2024) ht: @cwebbonline.com
If I were an editor, my questions for this Contributing Opinion Writer Who Is a Senior Fellow At a Right Wing Think Tank would have included: 1. What party is Zohran Mamdani a member of 2. What party just nominated him to be its candidate for mayor of New York 3. What are you talking about
Wrote something you can send to your friends still addicted to Twitter to help convince them to leave before they become a 'you gotta hand it to JD Vance' guy. www.splinter.com/twitter-is-f...
It's never too late to stop taking the right at face value, believing that the things it claims to value are in fact the things it values. If decades of idol-worshipping The Founders and The Constitution culminating in this administration hasn't snapped you out of it, what will?
Here are Kristi Noem's quotes about Abrego Garcia that she claims were deceptively edited out. They're almost entirely lies and unsubstantiated charges. CBS was absolutely right to refrain from airing them. I did a quick fact check of the unaired comments: newrepublic.com/article/1998...
America heartbroken to discover president somehow still alive
"we need to be sure your parents don't want you to die"
Greg Sargent: "So perhaps it’s time for news organizations to state unabashedly and affirmatively that they are not in the business of amplifying Trump officials’ lies and smears, and any official who feels entitled to such amplification can go stuff it." newrepublic.com/article/1998...
Congress returns today from its August recess, but Democrats cannot return to politics as usual. Neither collaboration nor silence will slow Trump’s march toward authoritarianism. From @ddayen.bsky.social: trib.al/dWJkzqz
Absolutely blistering takedown of the US government's mad climate report that rehashes the worst denier tropes of the past decade. US gov't took on a handful of self-serious denier micro-celebs, and in doing so, basically just hugely owned themselves in public sites.google.com/tamu.edu/doe...
Just an astonishing, powerful op-ed that drives home what we are losing and what's already been lost. We are so incredibly fortunate to live with the advances modern medicine and health science. Destroying and stymieing it is just unforgivable. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Every screenshot in my feed today is like: I'm a pundit who makes $650,000 a year because I was right one time 13 years ago. I spend my days obsessing over a website I claim not to use. I just retweeted a thread on the feminization of toaster strudels.
Keir Starmer looking at this and frantically trying to turn the racism dial even more rightward
I once sat next to Jim Vandehei in a poker game. He spent the whole night holding his cards up at an angle where half the table could see them, even after multiple reminders to protect his hand. Seemed like being-a-total-sucker was his whole personality. Some things never change.
i cannot wait to return to this specific bit of this story
"mandate the moral high ground once you win" is unfortunately a necessary strategy rn, anyone advocating otherwise is either incapable of recognizing the current moment or in favor of authoritarianism
putting the question of mid-cycle redistricting to a plebiscite is antidemocratic, whereas allowing an authoritarian antidemocratic movement to entrench its power without response is actually democratic. the wise strategy is to lose elections until democracy is wholly dismantled, then... win
We know Kennedy is going to use bogus data to declare that vaccines cause autism. He hired a notorious antivax quack to conduct the analysis, who wrote 2/3rds of all the papers that purport to show a link between vaccines and autism. And he announced we'd have an answer by September. The fix was in.
Also, don't trust people who say being against fascism is bad for business. Unless you're doing some weird crypto ponzi scheme, or trying to get a government contract to blow up a border tent, dissent great for business! The Onion is living proof. People flock to you! www.wired.com/story/uncann...
So you need two people and the AI to do what used to be the job of one writer or one graphic designer. Sounds efficient.
1/ No government officials can memory-hole their own speech in an attempt to hide their past statements from the public. Doing it through improper copyright complaints is no less censorship than a direct government order.
It's quite funny how "The Argument" was presented as a left/liberal publication and they were incapable of holding that pretense for a nanosecond, the whole thing has been "you should post on X," "you should be nice to your MAGA family members," and "JD Vance isn't so bad."
Not crazy about this framing. Yes, point out that Trump's justification for NG troops is bullshit, that red states have higher crime rates, and that it's all dangerous posturing. But deploying the military to Memphis would also be destructive and anti-democratic. And crime is dropping everywhere.
Yeah, this part is especially bad. And this is a straight news reporter, not an opinion writer.
Exciting news: Jonathan Haidt, the guy that’s into measuring heads with callipers, has joined a blog run by the ex-NYT columnist that started a bible college operating out of an office building owned by Harlan Crow. The blog’s evaluation will go up by a few more billion dollars, for reasons
Yes Bluesky is famously welcoming to DNC influencers
"I wish people reckoned more heavily with the consequences..." there were dozens of think tank reports and public health debates about this at the time! We absolutely reckoned with it, we just decided preventing death was worth some learning loss.
I agree with all of this, and I'd only add that people get piled on here from the center as well—it's just that it's largely invisible to you if you're the kind of person who only gets piled on from the left.
in case you missed it here's a member of Congress admitting I was right to mock them for normalizing DOGE and trying to bridge with fascists
Next time @cato.org appears to make a good point about authoritarianism, remember that they wrote this report.
At some point, you have to defend democracy, not just pivot to talking points, or there won't be fair future elections to win www.cnn.com/2025/08/31/p... What I told @ronbrownstein.bsky.social (joking/not joking):
Perfect encapsulation of the Trump administration: The guy suing Harvard for alleged antisemitism is a straight-up Hitler-admiring Nazi. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/02/m...
Holy crap, NYT let Charles Munger Jr. write an op-ed opposing the California redistricting without disclosing that he's FUNDING the opposition to the California redistricting. I have 4 mailers he paid for in my house right now and that's just the beginning. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/o...
“Prasad’s comments still appeared on anti-vaccine social media accounts, suggesting Prasad was directing his removal demand only at a critic and not anti-vaccine influencers. In the past, Prasad has complained about censorship by social media companies.” Yeah, cause he is an antivaxxer and a fraud.
Got 34 videos of #QuackPrasad loaded into the Internet Archive including those by his goon "The Chief Nerd" tweeted for him. archive.org/details/@adr...
Hi did you move your newsletter away from substack? drop it in the replies so people can find you and subscribe! I am big on rewarding good choices
Look I am clearly a heavy social media user but I also don’t need to validate my social media use by imagining that a politician having someone on their team who is good at making memes means that they would be a great president and have good policy ideas Like please be serious
On this Labor Day, let us remember that it wasn’t the CEOs and billionaires who saved us during COVID-19. It was the janitors, nurses, cleaning crews, grocery and food workers with their hard, often invisible labor.
i would point to this interview if i was trying to explain how sometimes people who don’t think of themselves as journalists or reject the notion altogether can be the most effective interviewers newrepublic.com/post/199737/...
Crime is literally lower than it has been in the entire life of every single non-senior-citizen American. If you are under age 65 you have never lived at a time with lower property crime rates, lower violent crime rates or lower homicide rates. Never.
I remember an article about safin that said his biggest problem was a rich and intelligent imagination that let him understand both the likelihood & repercussions of failure (& simultaneously the arguable silliness of placing so much weight on the outcomes of a game). It can be better not to think
I have never seen a single news article about whether or not Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer or Kristen Gillibrand need to assure Muslim New Yorkers that they're against Islamophobia and anti-Arab / anti-Asian bigotry
No one is "disregarding" this, it has been the subject of relentless coverage from media and politicians since 2020. Everyone knew school closures were going to be very hard on kids. The trade-off was that not closing them was going to result in mass death. No win-win scenario was on the table.
Compare the murky, indeterminate data on school closures to the stark, decisive findings on vaccine hesitancy. Republican policies and rhetoric killed hundreds of thousands of people! We don’t need to bolster this fake narrative. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
California and Florida are on opposite ends of the school-closure spectrum and the differences in test scores are a wash. Some individual schools and districts definitely stayed closed too long but it just isn’t the case that this is some huge, obvious, foreseeable blunder.
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
School closures only seem to matter when Dems can be blamed for them.
My kid lost half a year when she was learning to read and write but she's doing amazing now and my godson was a freshman who lost half a year of HS and now he's loving life in college. Kids are risilient. Their whiny parents aren't.