Oh my God.
National security lawyer (all views strictly my own), TTRPG enthusiast, Tolkien lover, occasional songwriter, and a partridge in a pear tree. He/him. Cover photo: concept art for Númenor in The Rings of Power.
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Oh my God.
fortunately our corporations are rising to the moment
What kind of leader sees a threat to democracy and then calls for *someone else* to do something about it? No one's stopping you from promising future action, so why aren't you?
bsky.app/profile/stub...
You never know which Constitution Day will be the last.
I thought it would at least take longer, you know? We're not even 9 months in yet.
That's also true of regulating trade, providing national defense, minting currency, etc., though.
I mean right now allowing the government to do anything is a bad idea. Not sure this extremely general problem proves the specific case very well.
If your ideas succeed in the marketplace of ideas and mine fail, you should let my ideas win anyway.
They'll just vacate the preliminary injunction and let the trial play out, putting all the defendants on the hook for massive court fees, and then only stop it on the final appeal of any convictions years down the line, after the chilling effect has already done its work many times over.
No crisis, no war, no plague (we mostly solved that one?). We just elected the wrong guy twice. Oops.
Just thinking about how the right made up an entirely fictional left wing character that resulted in so many bomb threats and the like and nobody will face consequences. But people on the left who accurately clocked the victim’s life work lost jobs.
So basically, the same people who are honoring & praising a guy for his proclaimed devotion to free speech are now actively searching for people who are freely speaking with the goal of ruining their lives, getting them fired & putting them in danger? Do I have that right?
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
/ When the state security apparatus pursues ideological mandates, not the evidence, we have arrived at the anti-republic: we will find ourselves with neither liberty nor security.
/may never know the truth in this administration that has no commitment whatsoever to objective facts, and pursues only partisan goals. If we don't know the truth, any actions in response won't address the causes. If state power isn't addressing the causes of violence, violence will continue./
This is catastrophically bad crisis management. So many officials jumping to conclusions and actions without evidence of the killer's identity or motive creates pressure on investigators to "find" things that confirm their leadership's premature commitments and "overlook" things that don't. We/
Dems: if you're looking for a message to go on the offense about, this is a good one.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDBi...
Everything Is Awesome?
The founders obviously intended for the President to assassinate any bad guy he wanted anywhere in the world with the military, that's what the one clause about being C-in-C clearly means.
Because it's more shocking and gets more attention?
The authority? Absolutely. The OPSEC? Clean. The Department? War.
Nine grafs deep into the article and we find out: "Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters."
1/ I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for lethal strike of suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be "murder" or war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable. Read expert analysis by @bcfinucane.bsky.social⤵️
That is precious!
Trump has halted or dropped enforcement actions against 160+ corporations, including: -42 consumer protection cases at CFPB -20 foreign bribery cases at DOJ -6 employment discrimination cases at EEOC -7 crypto cases at SEC It's a new golden age for corporate criminals.
My Chemical Situationship
The Second Base Pistols
You could just admit you don't really know what caucus means and walk away. But I don't think you will.
Hopefully it creates a LOT more political pressure for DC statehood.
The fact that your feelings determine whether your workers get a living wage is an unforgivable policy failure in the richest economy in human history.
It's amazing to me that there are millions of people ready to go to the front line of a battle, but no effort to start any kind of battle from anything bigger than an online advocacy group. Folks are ready for the fight, but leaders refuse to pick one.
/This removes the problem of redistricting entirely while also giving third parties more of a chance to exist, at least in the House.
If we ever have a Second Reconstruction, we should require multi-member proportional elections for the House. You vote for a party, then each state assigns House seats to the parties based on their share of the vote, and the parties go down a ranked list of candidates for that state to fill them./
We’ve flipped the Constitution: We now have direct election of Senators while state legislatures pick the House of Representatives.
Every ancient civilization from the Nile to the Euphrates to the Indus to the Yellow River had this figured out before Moses ever put it on a tablet. I think we'll manage without the reminder that follows "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
Yeah, but if SCOTUS gets it on the shadow docket, the rules don't usually apply...
It is a fundraising organization with three minor political parties haphazardly duck-taped to it.
Imagine being disappeared in one dictatorship, making it to America, and then being disappeared again
I think this is required by privacy laws, though.
HBO should fire Bill Maher and give his time slot to Stephen Colbert.
Just to get back to where we were as of January 2025, we will need Manhattan Projects across multiple agencies. This particular loss will produce exponentially increasing human injury and economic damage to the U.S. as the ability to investigate and to regulate falls apart.
Maurene Comey's goodbye note to SDNY colleagues:
These people are allergic to winning.
They only meant it as performative. It was their language for solidarity against the opposing political tribe, not a commitment to apolitical ideals untethered to party identity.
#booksky
*apocalypse See, it's working!
According to this Supreme Court, President Biden's Department of Education was exceeding its power by trying to forgive peoples' student loans. President Trump, on the other hand, has the power to just completely dismantle the entire Education Department.
I think you just delayed the AI applications by like two weeks, though, so good job.
The same Supreme Court that tripped over itself in a rush to stop Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan in 2023 signs off on Trump’s plan to illegally dismantle the Dept. of Education two years later: www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24p...
"Dying is easy, son. Living is harder." It's what you do while in life that makes men free. Dying for a cause is romantic, but doesn't get the job done. We must live for a cause to achieve it.
The first Minister of Predatory Multinational Corporations. NZers have to stop letting unscrupulous pols loot the country just because they promise to end wokeness. It's a con and the opposition needs to show that to people every chance it can.
Sold his country and even his party to a demagogue with only 8.6% support. Astonishing.
But congestion pricing polled terribly. The “popularists” who run Democratic party strategy said we shouldn’t do it. Because the polls were bad. But public opinion can change, and politicians can and should lead it. Vote for politicians who will lead public opinion, not follow it.
Happy Fourth of July.
ALL CAPS FUNDRAISING TEXTS
When your neighbor on the left is being dragged away by masked men and your neighbor on the right can't get an X-ray for their child, be sure to quickly explain that "both parties are the same" and whatnot.
🧵 The US is embracing this dual-state reality, courtesy of two branches subordinating themselves to the will of the head of the third because they endorse his political project while retaining all their formal power.
Canadians are getting smart about the economics of basic income.
A lot of the people who say they believe in hell really don't seem to
/If he wants to give him comms advice, by all means reach out privately. But to go on TV and say this is basic political malpractice and disqualifying for a leadership position in a political party that aspires to be anything more than merely a sclerotic fundraising network.
I think making someone who didn't say a thing publicly answer for people who did just because they share a religion is wildly inappropriate. But for a professional politician who is a leader of the same party to do it is an order of magnitude worse. Jeffries should be publicly fighting for Mamdani./
"They took hospitals and health care away from you so they could build concentration camps for immigrants."
The famous Democratic message discipline on display.
If you're so confident, let's try stripping billions for a decade or so and see if, I dunno, Amazon totally collapses because one guy is only worth hundreds of millions instead of billions. Amazon existed before the $1B mark, I think it'll exist there again.
“ICE gets a bigger budget than the Marine Corps” is a simple fact that should be communicated very widely because it clearly expresses how crazy and radical this is
Which is clearly intentional: it allows the majority's favored political project to continue to enjoy the benefits of universal relief, while the disfavored political project gets theirs denied on technical grounds.
That is an extremely pointed "but see" citation.
"Just because the iron gate between the hungry lions and the slaves in the Coliseum has been raised, that does not mean the slaves have been eaten. There are many ways some slaves could still survive, and it's cruel and wrong to keep lions in cages."
It’s every parent’s nightmare, isn’t it? you check your child’s bulletproof backpack and find a picture book about gay penguins
So am I reading this court decision correctly? We now have 50 micronations with their own laws interpreting the U.S. Constitution wholly separate from one another? But there's one guy with private law enforcement who is immune from all punishment who can do whatever he wants in those 50 states?
Maybe a Secretary of Defense (War!)?
he's right and he's right to say it
all i want is to one day own a modest sized home in a walkable neighborhood and raise money for shelter animals. wear an outfit i like, walk to the grocery store, buy some nectarines, feed cats, and live in peace. just don't understand why achieving this is so hard
Also, 43% is still a minority. The headline should say "Most white men don't report..."
The DNC sincerely believes it cannot have a leader or a unifying agenda until there's been a presidential primary of some kind. They prefer the flexibility to run different candidates with different policy positions in midterms and see what wins, then jump on that. It doesn't work, of course.
Reagan was sued for not complying with the WPA and the court said it was "nonjusticiable," at least while the deployment was still in its early/low-level stage. That's made it very hard for anyone to bring a challenge the courts will hear.
Yes, transparency, accountability, democracy, and law often obstruct a would-be despot's ability to achieve their aims, that's why we have them.
I can't handle Embrace Durge, it's more creepy serial killer than angry butcher. And you lose out on a lot of content overall by alternating, like, everyone. Resist Durge, I've found, is still very close to a good Tav playthrough, but I think that's ultimately what the game best supports.
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying "If we keep saying it's illegal, it will have an effect on the regime now." I'm saying, "If we keep saying it's illegal, then we better know 1) when the regime has crossed it (again), and 2) where to redraw the lines after the end of the regime."
Completely failing to actually build nations in place of defeated governments and ceding all those gains to reactionary terrorists embedded in the local population that we leave to their barbarism turns out to be a longstanding American tradition.
Unless you practice military law...
I don't think that's true of the team that negotiated the JCPOA.
It's kind of amazing how quickly the Unitary Executive turned into exactly the kind of monstrous 'elective monarchy' (ie what we now call a 'caudillo') the Founders worried the Presidency might become if unchecked. The greatest empirically falsified fuckup in US jurisprudence since Dred Scott.
It's a fan's Inkarnate map of the canon map of the universe of a genuinely bestselling book series.
They are magical faerie realms eternally experiencing their corresponding season/period.
If you stop saying "this is illegal," it becomes a lot harder to ever get back out of the hole.
No, they'll leave that up to Israel.
It's like the polling from the 2018 Syria bombing compared to Obama's previous non-bombing. Dems were against it for Obama and like 10% more against it for Trump. Republicans were 25% for it for Obama and 85% for it for Trump.
Presumably a concurrent resolution under 50 USC 1544(c) to order the President to remove the armed forces from Iran.
I am calling for a total and complete ban on the use of the passive voice in headlines until newspaper editors figure out how the hell cause and effect work.
South Korea would prefer North Korea on its border than China.
The law is only as strong as we make it.
Folks really think that a week after Watergate, the Congress preparing to impeach Nixon first overrode his own veto to give him carte-blanche to wage war for 60 days and thereby recreated the exact same "deploy first; ask Congress to approve it later" Vietnam problem the WPA was trying to prevent?