Why are ICE agents wearing camoflauge? Are they planning to hide in the woods to jump out and surprise immigrants? Do they expect jungle warfare in Minneapolis? NO: it has one purpose -- too look tough and intimidate. Horrific.

My latest on the protests in Iran, with Karim Sadjadpour: www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

"Strong laws ought to be developed against A.I." says the President who has blocked any state from passing strong laws against AI (!?).

America has a president who was best friends for decades with a sex trafficking pedophile and himself was convicted of felony business fraud. And yet he thinks America is now respected again. Sorry, the world laughs and pities us.

Among the newly-released Epstein files. This Justice Dept email from Jan 2020 'I wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein's private jet many more times than previously has been reported"

It's good to catch admin officials in lies. But these hearings are harsh. I miss the ol' Southern legislators who would say "I'm just a country lawyer, but I know when when a dog is right and when it's gone wrong, and when I hear what you're telling me I have to say that your dog just won't hunt."

Very bizarre to see SecHS Noem smiling through today's hearing as if her plumped up lips and wavy hair will shield her from harsh and clear statements of her lies and false ICE arrests of American citizens.

1/Trump thinks he "won" the Gaza Peace Plan because Qatar forced Hamas to "accept" the terms. But a key point was that Hamas disarm, and Gaza be managed by international forces. These are looking like pipe dreams. So the "cease fire" allows Hamas to regroup and retake control of much of Gaza.

This is rather worrisome: Trump just granted blanket, preemptive pardons to anyone who in any way helped him try to overturn the 2020 election, saying they were simply exercising their democratic right to challenge election results. Now anyone can help him overturn results in 2026/28 without fear.

Trump doesn't just want to be a dictator, he wants to be a Caesar, with a triumph arch in his capital and his image on coins. For the Founding Fathers, who admired the Roman Republic and feared tyrants above all, Trump would be a nightmare. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/u...

What if instead of making AI companions to REPLACE real interactions, making them as ingratiating and fawning as possible, AI was used to create relationship TRAINING, rewarding users for being unselfish, cooperative and empathetic? Goal should be to help people improve, not just capture attention.

Trump made his career & attracted new voters by being dfferent from other politicians--lying about opponents, saying the nation was in carnage, etc. Now he is sounding JUST LIKE other policitians, lying to people about prices not going up, the economy being great for them, etc. This may cripple him.

1/ Dems had a great victory last night. But it's important not to rest on these laurels. They should be an inducement to get working at the grass roots level to duplicate the youth turnout of Mamdani and the middle-of-the-road appeal to independents of Sherril and Spanberger. Elsewhere, Dems will

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Pure political pressure to cancel speech about LGBTQ existence. While Texas banned teaching gender ideology in K-12 schools, there is no law against it in universities. Yet multiple firings after instructor said gender identity is not the same as biological sex. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/u...

The lower courts are continuing to try to set limits to what POTUS can do: Troops in LA and arbitrary changes to Congressional appropriations have been deemed unlawful. Now we have to wait and see whether SCOTUS agrees or overturns on the basis that the President can do whatever he wants to do.

Have you seen the 100x larger than life banners of Trump on DoL and Ag buildings? Reminds me of nothing so much as Mao's portrait in Tiananmen Sq. Also today: "I have the right to do anything I want to do--I am the President of the United States." Murderers in DC will be executed. Good night USA.

Putin lies to Trump: "You won big in 2020." "If you were President in 2022 there wouldn't have been a war in Ukraine." And Trump laps it up. Well, maybe the last is true. Putin would still have invaded but made sure Trump wouldn't arm Ukraine, so it all would have been over quickly.

Alaska=Helsinki 2.0. Trump LOVES humilating people, and HATES being humiliated, but with Putin he's ok with it. It's so bizarre that the President of the US has a mancrush on Putin.

Contrary to what Putin told Trump to flatter his vanity, MANY countries have mail-in voting, including such model democracies as Canada, Germany and South Korea. It's a common way to vote where there are many people who are in school or temporarily working outside of their state of residence.

1/ Nothing new has emerged from the AK summit. No cease-fire, plan or agreement to end the war. This looks like a wretched failure: after touting a meeting for peace, or at least a cease-fire, and rolling out the red carpet for Putin in the United States, Trump comes away empty-handed.

I really don't understand why more people don't see how meeting Putin in Alaska plays into his hands: he can say "Alaska used to part of Russia; now parts of Ukraine will be part of Russia; it's the natural order of things for land to change hands."

PBS and NPR defunded; VoA shrunk and run by MAGA; Trump take-over of Kennedy Center; now Colbert cancelled. (Trump gloated: "Kimmel is next.") We are rapidly moving toward a media environment that is simply MAGA, like communist China and Putin's Russia's one-dimensional media space: pro-goverment.

SCOTUS first said that POTUS is personally immune from prosecution for violating the law. Now it ruled that the rest of us cannot obtain injunction relief if we are impacted by an illegal, unconstitutional action by POTUS. The rule of law is dissolving before our eyes; US is becoming an autocracy.

1/Trump's ridiculous lies on immigration need to be called out. At the G7 he said Biden allowed "21 million" immigrants into the US and most of them are "criminals" because other countries "emptied their jails." About 4 million immigrants entered during Biden's term, and that is high--about ...

1/ Trump wants to offer $1,000 and a plane ticket to undocumented immigrants to self-deport. I understand why you'd want to deport people picked up crossing the border without authorization; or illegal aliens convicted of crimes. But why the rush to deport undocumented folks who have been ...

1/ One out of 30 U.S. residents is an undocumented immigrant. 99.9% of them have never committed a crime and pose no threat. Removing tens of thousands of them will turn America into a police state. It is already happening. People are being disappeared into detention or foreign countries or jails.

If having tatoos meant you are a gang member and need to be deported, we'd have to stop the NBA playoffs and ship all the players to El Salvador. Our government is sometimes just ridiculous.

After years of living online more than in the real world, we now are living in a country being governed by fantasies. We have a health dept that believes vaccines cause more harm than good; an education department defunding libraries and school testing; an economics team seeking to end world trade.

If this had been an immigrant, it would have been 24 hour front page news and trumpeted by GOP nationwide. Maybe name a law after the victim. But since this person- who assaulted a 3 yr old girl after prior arrests - was released by Trump, it's fine, right? www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/n...

1/ The real risk is that the stupidity of the tariff policies, with calculations based on transparent falsehoods, undermines international trust in US economic policy-making. Combined with the crazy Senate rule to treat new tax cuts as cost free, driving up the deficit by trillions of dollars ...

We will find out on April 2 what tarrifs Trump will impose. He seems to believe that the US economy is so strong and independent that any interruptions or costs to trade will hurt other countries a lot, and the US very little. I hope he is right, but this seems like a FAFO moment.

Constitution (Art 2 Sec 3) says POTUS "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." FAITHFULLY. There are no invisible words that say: "unless he dislikes or disagrees with them; he may then disregard them and govern as he sees fit." That's what Trump claims Art 2 says. Will SCOTUS agree?

Trump continues to claim that (1) US gave $350 billion to Ukraine, and (2) US gave much more than Europe; and that the latter are secured loans. Both of these claims are completely false--no matter how often that is pointed out Trump seems unable to accept that.

Trump is going ahead with 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada--our allies. Let us see how wise those moves are for our economy.

Also funny, if not tragic, is the parade of GOP congressmen claiming that Federal mass firings, which at most will save 100s of millions of dollars, are absolutely essential to save us from impossible debts, while planning to vote in tax cuts for the wealthy that will raise US debt by trillions.

Trump is obviously angry that Zelenskyy is interfering with Trump's promise to Putin to deliver a Ukrainian surrender. www.ft.com/content/33de...

Would be hilarious if not so tragic: while the First Lady is testifying about the horrors of on-line invasion of privacy, her husband's alter ego is using DOGE to get the private information of hundreds of millions of Americans' health, tax and financial records.

White House Correspondents should refuse to report on Trump AT ALL unless this is reversed; this is creating a state-controlled media at odds with the 1st Amendment in every respect. Trump wants coverage above all, but it cannot be only on his terms. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/b...

Either Trump accepts the Dem's view that defense spending is wasteful, OR Trump believes that Russia's no longer a threat & he can cut a deal with China. If the military is only for the Western Hemisphere, it can be smaller. End of US as a global power, though. www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

Trump is seeking to reshape the Federal Election Commission to be a partisan, pro-Trump body. If that happens, we no longer can be confident that the US has free and fair elections.

Someone deserves an award for acronyms: Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., announced the Eliminating Looting of Our Nation by Mitigating Unethical State Kleptocracy Act, with the acronym the ELON MUSK Act. It will direct federal agencies to terminate contracts with special government employees, such as Musk.

Repubs say Trump was elected to cut govt. spending. So too was Republican led Congress, with GOP House and Senate. So go ahead and cut spending. But do it by the rules of our Constitution and Congressional procedures that both Dems and GOP have written into law and abided by.

1/ Much of the blame for Elon Musk gaining control of the levers of government goes back to the SCOTUS decision in Citizens United, which opened the way for wealthy individuals and groups to spend billions on supporting candidates as an expression of "free speech." That's nonsense: if "free speech"

Be prepared. We now know what to expect for the next four years. ANYTHING bad that happens: Plane crash, war, environmental catastrophe, economic setbacks, renewed inflation, will be blamed on Obama & Biden, while Trump pretends that HE could have saved everyone. So sad. www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/p...

This is insanely dangerous. Trump's OMB is saying "the election of Trump means the American people want to overturn all the legislation by Congress of the last 30 years, so Trump has the right to do so by fiat, regardless of the law or Constitution." What now? www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

January 6 is well on the way to becoming America's June 4, 1989 (day of Tiananmen SQ massacre). That is, a day whose events will be suppressed and retold as "nothing significant happened, and don't dare say othewise." www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/u...

On Trump's immigration policy: 1) Biden had already reduced unauthorized border crossings by 80% from crisis peak, to levels lower than under Trump in 2019. 2) He did so by forcing people to make appointments or apply to a legal entry (only with sponsors & vetting) program for certain countries. ..

Tried using AI (Claude Haiku, Chat GPT) to save myself a bit of time on simple data questions today. Results: Hopeless to awful. Claude gave me a graph of countries with median age 35+ over time (e.g. 34 in 2000); but when I asked it to list the specific countries in 2000, it didn't match the graph!

1/ Thread on Trump's executive order on US Citizenship: People need to be deeply alarmed by this. It may appear to just be a way to stop immigrants from "taking over" by having children on US soil who claim citizenship. But it's actually a claim that the President can redefine the U.S. constitution.