The newspaper that has a sad podcast called "Make It Make Sense" writes headlines about major presidential addresses that read like puzzles from the Riddler

Anschluss www.insidehighered.com/news/busines...

Trump's proposing a 20% surcharge on traffic through the strait of Hormuz. It's another calamity that Americans will play off but the rest of the world won't forget--and it's exactly what he proposed in 1989: open.substack.com/pub/musgrave...

Williams makes clear in a footnote that she lacks the power to prevent DOJ and Trump from entering into a private deal, but all that means is that DOJ could try to just do a brazen giveaway of 1.6B to insurrectionists and 100M amnesty to Trump in exchange for nothing. Just raw raid of public money.

This Supreme Court term may be remembered most as a time when the supermajority of very conservative, very pro-business justices bent the shape of American government. bit.ly/4fd58h0

BREAKING: Federal judge refers Trump's personal lawyer in the lawsuit against IRS for disciplinary proceedings including possible disbarment for bringing this lawsuit for an improper purpose--in other words a fraud upon the court. Judge also raised questions about Todd Blanche's ethics!

In a sane world the findings here would be enough for a unanimous impeachment and conviction: the President attempted to steal nearly 2B from the US

2 things. 1) The occupation is itself illegal, per the ICJ ruling in July 2024. All of the Israeli military presence therefore violates the law, and so does the settler enterprise. 2. Khanna is a member of the legislature of the country that funds this occupation to begin with. He can't go there?

The now fully-developed explanation is that Khanna purposefully went into a "restricted zone" in the illegally occupied West Bank and an "auxiliary force" from the "border police" (aka kitted-out settler gangs) "detained" him and "waited" until the army arrived, and then the real police.

A few words on the passing of South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, who spent the last ten years of his life eagerly helping Donald Trump in his quest to destroy American democracy. youtu.be/z4HMequIiiY

Unfortunately this seems to be the standard tactic whenever someone calls even for the most modest of proposals to hold Israel accountable. Never address the underlying issues, never comment on the substance, pivot, pivot, pivot, redirect, redirect, redirect.

That's not really all that's driving "polarised views", is it? Perhaps information ecosystems that reward engagement over accuracy might also be a fairly significant contributor to those dynamics? But I guess its easier to blame Russia than US tech oligarchs.

A lot of this stupidity going around…

Democratic Senators praising their friend across the aisle Lindsey Graham, pretending Mike Lee doesn’t already have draft tweets for every one of them, calling them all pedo traitors

Ro Khanna: “I saw the arrogance in the eyes of the Settlers. 21 & 22 year olds with guns, laughing that they’d detained us. The arrogance of those IDF soldiers... It is the arrogance of power. Of a power that has had no accountability. Total impunity. And it’s created a toxic culture of oppression.”

The fact that ‘settlers’ can detain foreign dignitaries would be the sign of a failed state except if the settlers are the state

The natsec press and commentators should be saying every day that the Sec of State is also doing the job of the acting National Security Advisor to the President (APNSA) in the White House and the National Archives Director, while also being Sec State and apparently running Venezuela? Legit insane.

exactly!!!

I have always appreciated Marc and his team but even more so since he broke down why the voter file is the holy grail of election manipulation for my Substack. Link to my discussion with him in nect skeet 1/

Sad but true. Voters rewarded House Republicans, for instance, for supporting Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

It's wild how 70% of the stories on the Microsoft game studio layoffs and carnage don't think it's worth noting that the company went on a studio acquisition spree three years ago that involved lying constantly about the vast benefits of mindless consolidation just not useful context, apparently

trying to figure out what the whole end game is with the republicans who claimed to have spoken to mitch mcconnell it seems unfathomable they would actually lie about something like that even taking in consideration they lie a lot about everything this just seems beyond bizarre

My actual favorite thing about Count Binface is that he has a fucking classics degree from Oxford. England is so class-brained that even the joke candidates are posh as hell.

Count Binface was on Andrew Marr's show today, and performed a lot better on that than the majority of politicians youtu.be/WRBh7uGwxmU?...

I'm been wondering if it would come to this and apparently it has. huge move from cloudflare, which hosts a fifth of all websites on earth.

I little bit about Teshuvah (repentance in Judaism) G-d forgives sins against G-d, but when you harm other people, you must: • Regret the sin • Stop doing the sin • Act and speak with humility • Act in a way opposite of the sin • Make reparations for the sin to those harmed 🧵

On this day in 1981, Richard Cobb got an honorary degree from the University of Essex. That may not seem significant to you, but it makes this afternoon the 45th anniversary of one of the finest graduation addresses ever delivered 🧵

“But the bigger problem is how much of the media of ‘the left’ is dominated by men who appear to have no understanding of sexual abuse or intimate partner violence, but do have a pretty hefty sexist streak that they either aren’t aware of or don’t care to remedy.” YES @juliedicaro.bsky.social

Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s Military www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

These jackals are careless people wrecking lives and global order for ego and pennies

But a lot of reviewer comments resort to "this choice should be explained/theorized/justified" when it would be more helpful to weigh in on whether it is a good choice

CAP has always been useless on the Middle East and Tanden has always been actively destructive. All the think tanks recycling the same old people and arguments have an existential problem that they don’t want to address.

"…as of July 2025, the CDC made tracking cyclospora optional, as part of scaling back its Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network. At the time, food safety experts worried that it could make it harder to identify and respond to outbreaks."

On the bargaining model of war:Peace may hold because no latent issue exists at all, or because a latent issue currently falls within the bargaining range. These are distinct causes of peace. But the bargaining model does not allow us to consider the distinction because it assumes away the question.

Unfortunately, a stunned Paris is how they all got into this whole mess to begin with

Incredibly entertaining (and affirming) convo on the need for younger leaders in the NYT's focus group with Black voters. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

When we say these people are just repeating the segregationist playbook, we mean it literally

These people were lifelong members of a fascist party.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s death wasn’t a tragedy. It never needed happen. And as with the others like him, I suspect we’ll at some point see the evidence that it was a crime. www.thebulwark.com/p/he-lived-h...

Cool cool cool, haven’t heard the sound of missile warnings in about 2 months

Also in each case the framing on her personal life is whacky, given that - again - she's a policy wonk and has two-going-on-three kids, which is not exactly an unusual number. It's not hard to find women with three children, they're much more common than Heritage policy hacks!

The cherry on the sundae is that she's a policy wonk for Heritage, so getting this sort of coverage is part of her job, but it also speaks to how the NYT's culture pieces are basically, 'journalist interviews their friend in the same elite circles.'

Vance again revealing that he is a terrible father because his default setting is to mistrust his own kids.

Hugh in late May: "I appreciate" Trump putting national security over the midterms by continuing Iran war. Hugh in late June: Trump is ending the war because GOP midterm success is "critical to the national security." Hugh last night: "Kudos" for new strikes. www.mediamatters.org/us-iran-rela...

Preaching that God has assigned black people to "a civilizational station of subordination and dependence" due to the Curse of Ham, Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge calls for a "return to European Christian colonization of African nations." www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwat...

Like many, many dynamics in US politics, this only goes one direction. Only one party is held to any moral standards. Only one party is asked to ritually reject its most ideological members. Only one party is held collectively responsible for anything any of its activists say.

What Say You,Military Recruiters...?

Playing badminton with Mitch McConnell. We talked about the midterms and Iran. I took the first game 15-0 because he is unresponsive and lying on the ground.