"I have spent the last few weeks addressing and preparing for a military invasion by the President of the United States. No, I’m not a soldier or a foreign adversary. I’m the Governor of Illinois"

The Murphy jawboning case was not-great behavior but overblown and rightly dismissed. But there's literally no evidence, nobody has ever come forward and said, Biden or anybody on his team ever said anything to the social media companies about booting Trump, either before or after Biden took office.

He only costs half an H1B visa! What a deal!

A bit underplayed that the Homan sting didn't reportedly come out of a public corruption investigation, it was a counter-intelligence one. Which means they somehow made the not-very-far leap to him from initially targeting a foreign and almost certainly state actor.

Zero chance Homan was alone and zero chance this was the only time he did it.

There's no shortage of acceptance and praise for defectors to the opposition coalition. But they're not enticed by patronizing "oh you couldn't have known, it was understandable to vote for him." You don't message to where people were, you message to where they are, which is they don't like the man.

Setting aside the perpetual confusion about who was president when, Trump wasn't banned by social media platforms because of political bias or to "censor" him. It was because he directly used their services to incite actual deadly violence. He committed literal violent crimes using their websites.

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law

Censorship is when private companies can take Big Brother off the telescreens just because he incited a lynch mob as part of a failed autogolpe.

He's just an EOP employee with a made-up title, but I see no reason Homan isn't impeachable. He's officer-ish enough.

Doing a takeout bag full of cash is like the amateur idiot cosplay version of how you do this kind of corruption. You might as well stamp "I Have No Plausible Deniability" on your forehead. Just paper over it with a "consulting" contract like every other hack influence peddler in DC.

It's important to remember when GOP Reps and Sens are yelling about the 'violent left' that they routinely tell reporters and colleagues how theyre afraid to do this or that because their own supporters routinely threaten violence agains them.

Quite a comedy act, the Canadian Senate of the mid-1980s

As we head into Rosh Hashanah, a very important point of order from Canadian Senate Hansard (1984) :p

Never in our history, not even during Watergate, has a single news cycle so comprehensibly established the deep corruption and politicization of the Department of Justice

just saw a tiktok from a disney adult reading from On Tyranny and asking their followers to cancel their d+ and disney trips omg

Laura Ingraham dated Dinesh D'Souza and they both deserved it.

Timely. Arrived earlier than expected, @tracinski.bsky.social a.co/d/6O3fjo9

At @theunpopulist.net @andycraig.bsky.social says, "We must understand that what is happening is a campaign to disarm and discredit the opposition and make it harder for it to mount an effective challenge to Trump’s growing authoritarianism." www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-cen...

So did he, just, like… keep the money?

I still post on X for work reasons and the major difference between the sites is that I have interesting conversations with my professional peers on here and I get called slurs on there.

“52% of all autocratization episodes become U-Turns, which increases to 73% when focusing on the last 30 years. The vast majority of U-Turns (90%) lead to restored or even improved levels of democracy” V-Dem data

"The attack on free speech and free elections are two sides of the same coin, and we can’t treat them as separable. We cannot get lost in each new offense, missing the forest for the trees." - my latest at @theunpopulist.net

"Trump's attack on free speech and free elections are two sides of the same coin, and we can’t treat them as separable." — @andycraig.bsky.social in @theunpopulist.net 🔥🔥🔥

genuinely believe that a large number of political, economic and media elites do not realize that nearly half the voting public did not vote for trump

We don't put powers in an elected legislature because they're necessarily all that prone to getting things right. There is value if nothing else in that a few hundred people can't be as erratic, can't produce such destructive uncertainty, as one illiterate geriatric and his maladjusted consigliere.

When he's not dabbling in race science, apparently the sensible redeemed centrist, who we're supposed to treat as serious and respectable now, also thinks a 35 year old having sex with a 15 y/o should be legal? Or at least, if the child is a boy, I guess? Is this just a totally porn-brained thing?

My letter saying I have no personal liability for committing a war crime is raising a lot of questions that are answered by the letter.

Elected lawmakers aren't just there to carry out bureaucratic technocratic procedures. They are your agents, to stand between you and the force of the state, empowered with the people's "she speaks for us." This is what representative democracy is for, at its best in the face of its worst failures.

There is no statute of limitations for murder. All of the people in this chain of command are in their 50s, 40s, 30s. That's a lot of future decades to gamble on how long there will be no political will to revisit this.

I think it's bad for the president to order the military to murder people so he can gleefully blast the snuff video out into everyone's feed.

More jarring than usual tone shift between the part he obviously didn't write and the part he obviously did.

The Texas etc. gerrymandering push is bad, but there's also a bit of perception bias because the *current* House has such a razor-thin majority. Dems are still likelier to take the House by a double-digit rather than by a single-digit number of seats.

"Keeping Bagram" was never part of the deal he made with the Taliban. The Doha Agreement was for a full withdrawal of all US forces.

I cannot emphasize enough how unhelpful it is to make the joke or comment — I’ve been guilty of making it at times myself — that this is conservative “cancel culture,” it’s not. It’s an authoritarian, cultish, censorship project run by the most powerful people in the federal government…

Jimmy Kimmel's bog standard centrist lib politics have definitely not changed more in the past decade or so than Vance's, the ex-Never Trumper whose shlocky book was once the toast of elites with bog standard centrist lib politics.

Kind of grimly amusing how he's not able to keep up the pretense that the censorship campaign is about Kirk, because everything has to be about him. So now he's just outright back to his longstanding tirades about how it should be illegal to be mean to him.

Logan here is acting befuddled at the basic Lockean framework articulated in the Declaration: the right of revolution is a last resort in extremis. There is always the obligation to exhaust all other options first. Hardly an obscure idea, it's literally one of the most famous documents in the world.

I don't think elected officials have any particular obligation to support their party's nominees in every other race, but the party chair certainly does.

The widely accepted narrative that Trump "chickened out" on Chicago is completely incorrect. ICE's incursions are getting worse here every day.

I saw, during my reporting in Hungary, how much putting friendly oligarchs in charge of the media matters in authoritarian consolidation. That's starting to happen in the United States. www.vox.com/politics/462...

The puzzle pieces are starting to fit together — Trump's individual authoritarian policies adding up to a concrete system that could render elections durably unfair www.vox.com/politics/462...

The past week has shown us something scary — the concrete and specific outlines of a durable authoritarian state in America. Here's what this state would look like, and the precise policy levers Trump is pulling to get there from here. www.vox.com/politics/462...

I hope some newspapers use a crop where you can easily read the sign.

The Biden-signed bipartisan law to force the sale of TikTok, based on speculative national security concerns, has led to this: the app (and its 170 million U.S. users) is probably going to get spun off into the hands of some of Trump's biggest allies www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Trump is firing his own nominee, because he will not go along with the President's conversion of the DOJ into a lawfare retribution machine. Imagine what happens when the DOJ is only made up of people willing to engage in such abuses of the law. abcnews.go.com/US/trump-poi...