The post-Watergate reforms didn't rely on just norms. They relied on tenure protections (such as for inspectors general) and legislative veto mechanisms, among other things. The Supreme Court then sandbagged Congress and gutted all those on bogus unitary executive grounds, as Schiff alludes to.

These kinds of mundane referenda of approved plans for more homes being overturned play out in communities all over. It is perverse how we let current residents dictate who can be future residents and it has to stop www.marbleheadindependent.com/are-we-kind-...

The actual problem is 1) Democrats have popular policies but the country never hears about them due to right-wing propaganda; 2) Democrats constantly blame themselves and their base for this —a message right-wing media amplifies, making the problem even worse.

remember when the political media spent days treating bill clinton saying hi to loretta lynch on a tarmac as a major scandal of DOJ independence? will they do that here for a much, much, much worse abuse of power? if not, why not?

I live in a rural area. Local Democrats run on all sorts of great policy proposals. The Republicans run on a platform of "I'm going to cut taxes so hard your local school will die." Also, they wave guns around. They win by large margins. Wish outsiders understood the reality here. No easy solution.

I figured I'd write a short something wondering why Sam Alito said we couldn't force Texas to change its unconstitutionally gerrymandered maps in December because people there need "certainty" but he's happy to help Louisiana change its maps now, even as ballots have already sent...

“are we kind of being pricks?” is fantastic

We don't have to imagine an internet without intermediary liability protections like Section 230: in India, a YouTuber's review of a new Motorola phone has resulted in not only a takedown of the video but a civil defamation case against platforms hosting the review: restofworld.org/2026/motorol...

Good on YIMBY Action. This was clearly the right call. Steyer has shown a decades long commitment to climate action and has been a strong voice for housing growth. Steyer also the only serious candidate in the race given the pie in the sky nonsense Porter and Becerra have been pitching to voters

I am honored to share the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Best International Reporting with Dake Kang, Byron Tau, Aniruddha Ghosal and Garance Burke for our reporting revealing how Silicon Valley largely designed and built China's surveillance state and enabled human rights abuses.

I've always felt that a lot of rural politics is downstream from this. Wealth and status drives the culture among everyone lower in the hierarchy - sense of loyalty, place, proximity and access to wealth...the car dealership model writ large

Farmers vote Republican because they're people with money & property. So they vote like people with money & property. That's it. It's not rocket science.

Here's the thing though, farmers aren't cash poor. The median SMALL FAMILY FARM is clearing over $100K in annual income. AFTER farm debts & expenses. "But $100K isn't that mu-" They're farmers, Steve, they don't live in Manhattan

AVERAGE WHITE MLB PLAYER: has 18 latino teammates he doesn’t speak to, believes the 2020 election was stolen and is in a group text with morgan wallen AVERAGE WHITE NBA PLAYER: wokest dude you’ve ever met, has gotten into several fistfights over a teammate being called a slur, knows every nas lyric

ofc I say livelihood but as the story buries the lede, this was a larping hobby underwritten by fossil fuel extraction, renting land, and the usual pile of inherited cash the rural petit bourgeois has lying around

The actual finding here is that a huge percentage of the population believes things that are not true. Democrats objectively did not spend significant time on climate change or LGBTQ issues in the last election campaign.

On one hand you could say “Well bad car regs like the CAFE standards have biased the industry towards bigger cars” but the industry lobbied for both the bad standards AND supported the Trump admin which eliminated enforcement. They demanded the government to make the industry less mpg efficient!

Currently on Caltrain heading from the South Bay toward SF, and the train is packed. That would’ve been unthinkable a couple years ago pre-electrification, especially on a Saturday night when headways were once per hour or longer. Frequency matters!

graphcel poasters like me: there is no omnicause that combines us imperialist atrocities abroad with cost of living issues at home; in general american hegemony serves the material interests of the electorate, so . . . Trump: AT LONG LAST I HAVE INVENTED OMNICAUSE, THE WAR CRIME THAT MAKES YOU POOR

This is a very bad decision made by very bad people on behalf of other very bad people. The Trump administration has repeatedly shown itself to use illegitimate investigations to punish people it dislikes. Therefore a Trump administration investigation is not legitimate basis for this decision.

Might be this?

So is this directly downstream of Orban’s loss or are they reliant on someone else.

Taxing the ultra rich is not primarily a revenue raiser, because there are so few of them. The purpose of taxing them is to curb their anti-democratic power. Contributing to the maintenance of the public sphere that you share & enjoy with other people is good, actually.

The car lobby is so powerful that even the most progressive states, including California, are considering laws to kill electric bikes. Despite their environmental and climate benefits. Despite their affordability compared to cars.

BIA cannot articulate an actual housing-related reason they are spending heavily to oppose Steyer. - they oppose his commercial Prop 13 reform - which doesn’t apply to residential - they “pan” his modular housing plan (which is similar to Buffy Wicks’ plan) - gnostic policy they cannot describe

i genuinely wish the democratic national committee was as powerful, organized and ruthless as a lot of people seem to think it is

If "there is infinite demand for luxury housing" were true it'd be the One Simple Trick to solve all local government budget woes forever. Just allow unlimited luxury condo development, property tax them at normal rates, eliminate all other taxes, fund lavish infrastructure and social programs

Everyone has a day where they realize what Bobby Caldwell, singer of "What You Won't Do For Love", looks like

They'll get zero credit for it from dem voters or the political media, but this is legitimately an astounding political achievement for a US minority party to pull off

It’s honestly impossible to believe he exists at all. Let alone is President. At least a lot of awful men love their daughters in a non-sexual way. Not Trump!

Holy smokes

a significant amount of left-wing anti-YIMBY thought is just that people in the biggest cities cannot fathom a world in which property owners have to compete with each other for tenants i've got a friend in Salt Lake City and hearing about her apartment search radicalized the fuck out of me

Residents of an Atlanta suburb learned that Flock had been accessing cameras in the town—including in a children's gymnastics room—to demonstrate the company’s surveillance technology to police departments around the country. The city renewed the contract anyway. www.404media.co/city-learns-...

Some people say we don’t build beautiful things anymore and, like, lol. Motherfuckers, we built this:

took me 3 minutes to find the original profile and scroll through his engagement on LinkedIn (which is v much critical of people replacing teams with AI) and found the original post and it is clearly satire and he acknowledges it as such in the comments

Not being a little bitch: It works!!!

BREAKING: The Senate just unanimously banned Senators from trading on prediction markets, effective immediately.

I'm still not giving Schumer the benefit of the doubt but I am more willing to believe what he says. and Jeffries looks like someone who can be worked with.

Absolutely extraordinary. The Democrats conceded *nothing* and got everything they demanded. They said no ICE/CBP funding, and that's precisely what happened. In other words, they did not cave. At all. But the GOP did—completely.

BREAKING: Republicans caved to Democrats, finally passing a bill to end the DHS shutdown without additional funding for ICE. Democrats have been clear since the start: No blank check for ICE. This bill now heads to Trump's desk.

One non-trivial thing that law schools, law firms, famous people, etc. could do: Stop treating the Supreme Court conservatives with respect. Don't invite them to speak. If your organization invites them, don't go. If you run into them at a party, pretend not to know who they are, or turn your back.

it is literally impossible and i feel like anyone armed with the definition of "empirical distribution" would know this

the reason that Anthropic has Nick Carlini heading up their model security efforts is that the partner team he was the IC centerpiece of was ordered to stop model safety efforts in order to work exclusively on attempts to produce a model whose empirical distribution cannot be derived by sampling

5 out of the 6 Supreme Court Justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act were nominated by a president who came into office having lost the popular vote. 70% of Americans support the John Lewis VRA. The Supreme Court is historically unpopular. It is not a democratically legitimate institution.

I think this, when we retake power, justifies stripping Louisiana of representation in Congress and suspending all federal transfer payments under the Guarantee Clause.

it won’t be hard to discern to people in the future that the first black president led to a relentless and hyper-radical effort by conservative elites to destroy not only the voting rights act but reconstruction itself.

Incredibly funny that EA might legit be saved from a buyout because of the Iran war.

Can anyone explain to me in a way that makes sense, why our legislature’s number one transportation priority this session is e-bike regulation, when the daily reality in our communities is this? 👇👇👇 www.berkeleyscanner.com/2026/04/29/t...

I'll restate my oft-stated position that democratic self-government in the United States is not possible unless this Court and its manifest corruption are thoroughly reformed. civic democracy or this corrupt court. can only have one.