Democrats in both Iowa and Mississippi last year flipped two seats in the states’ upper chambers, breaking GOP supermajorities. In Mississippi, that means Republicans no longer have the power to advance constitutional amendments on a party-line vote.

Does it get any cozier than this? Literally living in Big Pharma lobbyists DC home and paying them rent with taxpayer money?

You know I knew that Door Dash woman looked familiar

When you add it all up, the collapse in immigration looks like this: a decline of roughly 50K for illegal (even including the people arrested and not released) and a decline of about 132K for legal. Over 70% of the cut in immigration has come from LEGAL immigration.

Trump or God. Pick a side. It’s finally happening

J.D. Vance: The Pope should stick to matters of morality instead of talking about how many women and children the US is killing in an arbitrary war of choice and how we're kidnapping mothers from their children and sending them to gulags.

About 3.5 million people are getting ~$1,400 back from the tax deduction for tipped income. Twice as many are losing their entire health insurance coverage through the same bill.

Here is Los Angeles' budget proposal from last year.

New: Maryland ordered Washington County to freeze all sewer expansion today, finding the county's infrastructure cannot handle waste from the proposed ICE detention facility — and that its sewerage plan, last updated in 2009, is too outdated to evaluate whether it ever could.

With the U.S. blockage of Iranian ships, this means that the Strait will be mostly closed or entirely closed for a minimum of two months.

Trump's followers on Truth Social are calling him the Antichrist after his post of an image depicting himself as Jesus

80% of Trump’s budget goes to war and policing. www.stephensemler.com/p/trumps-bud...

JD Vance: "They're saying Boo-urns." www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6TF...

Trump picked a fight with literally the last person in the world he should have. The Pope is by far the most popular international figure in the US, beating Trump by a mile. Every Republican must be asked today whether they stand with Trump or the Pope. news.gallup.com/poll/693155/...

What he created was not a mass-membership party but a combination of a professional campaign organization and a genuine movement, built up of thousands of self-organized "islands". This proved remarkably flexible and also allowed him to keep out fraudsters, adventurers and crazies.

That took him from zero to 30% in less than three months in early 2024, literally single-handedly, going around with a borrowed pickup truck and holding forth from its plateau as his stage through villages and small towns. The biggest question mark for me at the time was whether he can turn the ...

From the get-go, he has shown an almost superhuman, obsessive energy, visiting small towns and villages (altogether more than 700, many of them multiple times) that have never seen a national political figure for decades. After rallies, he stayed for hours, shaking hands, doing selfies...

For starters, he barnstormed the whole country six times in the two years that he entered the political stage in the spring of 2024. Here is a visualization by the invaluable Vox populi blog of his last campaign tour, broken down by the 106 electoral districts:

BRUSUELAS: “.. Six weeks into the attacks on energy facilities in the Middle East, and on top of the obvious increases in the cost of food and gasoline, consumers now expect inflation to increase from 3.3% to 4.8% over the next 12 months.” @joebrusuelas.bsky.social #UMich

pro tip: this isn't a feud, rift, showdown or dispute. It's an unprecedented attack on the world's most prominent religious leader by a US President over a reckless war. Say that.

It’s a great moment to remember that in the leadup to this popular uprising, the first major gut-punch was delivered by Budapest Pride. Poetic justice. 🇭🇺🏳️‍🌈

Bishop Robert Barron, who serves on Trump’s own religious liberty commission and has appeared with the president on multiple occasions recently, has released a statement that asks Trump to apologize to Pope Leo. This is notable from Barron, who has often aligned publicly w/Trump and/or his allies.

…The Trump admin has denied clergy — including Catholic priests — from providing pastoral care and religious rites to people being held at some centers run by DHS. Pope Leo himself has spoken out about it. It is now the subject of not one, but two ongoing lawsuits. religionnews.com/2026/04/03/a...

This might be relevant in another country where rural voters have disproportionate political power ...

Comment by Catholic Jesuit priest:

There are approximately 53 million Catholics in the US. About 55% voted for Trump in 2024. Epstein sent Bannon an article, "Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose” to which Bannon replied “easy choice.” What will Catholics choose? Trump, Epstein, Bannon, Thiel and Vance? Or the Pope?

"Jews promote race-mixing among everyone else, to undermine the white race, while protecting their own racial purity" is a quite longtime fascist view about the Jews. It's literally part of Nazi ideology.

plenty we can do to reduce prices like universal health care and of course not starting a war... but @arindube.bsky.social is right: the affordability crisis is really a pay crisis. suppressed wages funded soaring inequality and took tens of thousands of $ in annual income away from the middle class

A rural strategy was the path to victory. Feels like this lesson could be applied to other systems where rural voters hold disproportionate political power ...

Perhaps Magyar's most important promise, and the one that certainly resonates with voters: "never again a country without consequences!" The crowd chants: "To prison! To prison!" [with the corrupt officials of the outgoing government]

We should all be heartened that you can, in fact, vote out fascism, and that as Americans the fascists we’re going to be voting out are deeply unpopular everywhere

As I see, several things are true: 1) Over the past 45 years, wage growth for middle has been halting at best 2) Last 10 years has produced better wage growth than the previous 35, largely because we've had tighter labor markets 3) We're at risk of losing this: last month, price growth>wage growth.

Viktor Orban accomplished so much of what the Trump movement wants to accomplish here he ruled for 16 years and rewrote the rules in his favor and still, they threw him out and you know what? they did it by voting don’t let anyone tell you voting doesn’t matter

one immediate dramatic consequence of the Hungarian result: Magyar has promised to repair relations with the EU and unblock a €90bn EU loan for Ukraine

It's not just that Orbán losing inspires hope in other competitive-autocratic countries ruled by right-wing nationalist authoritarians. It's that his loss materially changes things in those other countries, because he's been operating as a headquarters and funding source...

Polling this week showed the JD Vance is the least liked US VP in modern history. Turn the blue dot and Vance stumps for Orban in Hungary, a few days before his historic defeat. Turn the blue dot a little more and Vance blows negotiations with Iran. The scale of Vance's bad vibes is planetary.

Reuters says Tisza has at least 135 seats: 133 is the constitutional supermajority! Live by highly disproportional electoral systems (which Orbán made even more disproportional with the extra compensation votes awarded to winners), die by highly disproportional electoral systems.

💥🇭🇺🗳️ BREAKING: Péter Magyar says Viktor Orbán called to concede and congratulate him. Magyar will be Hungary’s next prime minister and, as it stands, is set to secure a 2/3 supermajority – enough to fully dismantle Orbán’s system. A 16-year chapter is over.

As we await Hungary's election both for the liberation of its people and as portent for our own, let us recall the role that ridicule, resistance and refusal has played. Yes, elections can be turning points but only if movements make them so.

Out of 23,000 undergrads, only 19 students signed up for the lavishly funded conservative academic center forced onto University of Iowa by Republican politicians. Turning Points has an $85 million budget and there is no equivalent on the center-left/left. And yet, students still aren't buying it.

Local zoning is the way! A lot of these are being stopped or stalled by neighborhood organizing. These warehouses often need to be purchased, permitted, approved for occupancy and specs. Each one of those steps can be interrupted. Ppl are pressuring corps not to sell, counties to deny permits, etc

i think people have forgotten that vance is quite possibly the least experienced person to *ever* serve as vice president of the united states

Absolutely remarkable statement from Pope Leo today. One for the history books www.theguardian.com/world/2026/a...

Pete Hegseth's Defense Dept appears to be caught in a lie. It involves deaths of 21 people (including at least 5 children), injuring 110 in Lamerd, Iran with sports hall and school. By a U.S. missile (PrSM) never before used in combat. NYT sources include: 3 US officials! 1/

I've studied so many concentration camps through history that held vulnerable people in just this kind of crowded squalor. You demonize people, you demand more arrests, this is what you get. It already has its own budget and its own momentum, and is on track to go much further, unless we stop it.

US AUTHORIZED THE RELEASE OF USD6 BLN IN FROZEN IRANIAN FUNDS, WITH QATARI AND SOUTH KOREAN REPRESENTATIVES SAID TO BE ARRANGING THE TRANSFER WITHIN DAYS - X

What better example of costs and corruption than a demented president singlehandedly deciding to launch a war of choice that explodes gas prices, jacks up inflation to the highest level in years, and opens the door to administration officials gambling in online betting markets?

Real wage growth in 2025 was already negative for lowest-wage workers, and was below 1.5% for just about everybody. A price shock of 1.5% (what's likely baked in based on oil price per barrel increases so far) means 2026 is looking like a year of negative real wage growth for most workers. 2

An eye-popping 0.9% *monthly* rise in the CPI was driven mainly by rising energy prices. Core inflation rose a more sedate 0.2% in March.