For months I've banged the drum that "not sure" has become the safe harbor answer for "Republicans who know Trump's probably wrong, but don't want to admit it." Today's Economist/YouGov Poll: Is Donald Trump racist? 41% of Republicans have No Opinion. d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/ec...

One of several great moments from the actual films that fandom at large has decided doesn't count because Vader is far too important to be Tarkin's lackey, even though he's explicitly referred to that way multiple times in the film.

This is the opposite of what is about as close as you get to an objective fact in economics.

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

BREAKING: An immigration judge has *terminated* the Trump-Vance administration's efforts to deport Columbia pro-Palestine student protestor Mohsen Mahdawi. Mohsen was first detained 10 months ago, when agents ambushed him at a citizenship interview.

It's hard to still be shocked after all this time, and yet I am shocked.

Unrelated to the stolen valor the president is attempting here, it's important to note that Don King has the 2nd most criminal convictions in this photo.

Horse, Senate. It would be inevitable by 2028, if he actually owned a horse.

Deleted the last post, which events had outpaced.

/2 It was fashionable to make fun of Jackson for liking alliteration but alliteration was just one of the more noticeable classical rhetorical touches he mastered. Classical oratory is an art, as stylized as a sonnet, and Jackson was an artist. At the time, in 1988, he was in the news at Stanford…

I saw Jesse Jackson speak at Stanford in 1988. He spoke in, with perfect irony, White Plaza. He was an extraordinary speaker, a master of classic oratory. Conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke famously gave him a backhanded compliment on it: /1

Hey, DC, is there anything distinctive about your Lanterns that is maybe easy to visually depict? No? OK then, if you say so.

My hot media take is that it's important to contact the subject of a story for a response but if they say something that's not relevant or true, and especially if they just denounce the story without offering an actual explanation of what they object to, you don't have to include their statement

You can tell it‘s not the first time either because his boss is low key like “goddammit, again?”

The Death Star board room scene is low key the funniest scene in cinematic history. It’s a work meeting with an evil samurai wizard everyone else finds mildly annoying and when his manager tells him to stop killing a coworker with his magicka, he has to listen.

The late great Steve Horwitz, less than a month into the first Trump presidency, already fully understanding the shape of things:

This is the interview Donald Trump didn’t want you to see. His FCC refused to air my interview with Stephen Colbert. Trump is worried we’re about to flip Texas.

Col. Dave Butler is renowned for being a straight shooter and a highly capable army officer. So naturally he has no place in Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War” (the title itself is a lie since it’s still the Dept of Defense under the law). www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Very happy to announce that The Chadha Presidency is now forthcoming in the @georgetownlj.bsky.social! ssrn.com/abstract=536...

New from RGCS faculty member @jacobtlevy.bsky.social Jacob Levy: "Conceptualizing Academic Freedom," forthcoming, Annual Review of Political Science

It's depressing how many people's response to the FCC blatantly weaponizing a policy with an extremely narrow focus is to say "Clearly, the FCC needs *more* authority and broader powers in the future!" (I'm not talking about Colbert, just the Usual Suspects here.)

My brain couldn't come up with the phrase "wash the dishes" so I just told my wife I needed to "do the sink laundry"

I believe this album also featured the immortal track “Boogie In Your Butt”

I think Sirius 80s on 8 dramatically overestimates the amount of nostalgia out there for this one. Hearing it once every year or two might be good for a chuckle, but any more than that is mnt really good for anything. m.youtube.com/watch?v=iWa-...

“.. a mega, anti-Trump trade alliance ..” #TheWorldIsMovingOn @politico.com @scottlincicome.bsky.social www.politico.eu/article/eu-a...

New hypothesis/ polisci inside joke: JJM has supported the Russian invasion of Ukraine in order to make Europe's medium powers finally do the thing he famously wrongly predicted they would, three decades and change ago.

This is why we need the Louvre of Bluesky back.

👀 Invoking Orwell, a federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore panels and historical acknowledgments of the history of slavery that the National Park Service removed in Philadelphia. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Now posted ahead of print: "Conceptualizing Academic Freedom," forthcoming, Annual Review of Political Science. (Uncorrected proofs, so a few minor edits different from the version that will be published in June.) doi.org/10.1146/annu...

Yesterday I complained a bit about Obama's "concerned" posture toward Trump, but it's of course vastly better and more responsible than George W Bush's passive-aggressive subtweeting posture. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/a...

same, girl, same

::taps the sign::

new political spectrum just dropped

Great piece from @dsquareddigest.bsky.social, which touches on one of the big theories for why English-speaking countries do especially badly at housebuilding: Adversarial and litigious common law systems (Anglo) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere. samf.substack.com/p/build-the-...

💯

Being shoved through the dimensional breach into the hellfire involved a lot less fetish gear than Chris Claremont led me to expect

Now posted ahead of print: "Conceptualizing Academic Freedom," forthcoming, Annual Review of Political Science. (Uncorrected proofs, so a few minor edits different from the version that will be published in June.) doi.org/10.1146/annu...

This is my memory of the Core Curriculum, which I both took as an undergrad and taught in grad school, so I may not be entirely blameless.

mom they’re roasting the US economy on mastodon again

During her 11 months as the de facto leader of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Kari Lake has wasted millions of dollars and done profound damage to America’s foreign broadcasters, and to America’s ability to communicate with the world www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Biden was the most economically progressive president since LBJ at least, he pursued a full-employment economy at huge political risk, it worked spectacularly. And what happened is that the entire progressive universe decided that he must not have done any of it, or else he would have been popular

An old friend trying to use jargon from The Yoots makes me think: I hope a bunch of Olds are harassing their grandchildren by having 6-7th birthday parties.

hey, Marco and Elon...

People mentally cannot accept or grapple with a world where progressive economic policies do not magically make everyone love you

One of my black pill moments was that Biden actually focused on lifting the lowest quartiles up at the expense of the rich and the online left screamed at him about student loan forgiveness.

wut?

What a psycho thing to say

But we didn't have economic stagnation for the working class. We had a period of unusually *high* wage growth for low income workers.