this week on crossfire: should we keep flat out murdering people on boats?

tfw “our legislation is intended to restrict those political processes which can ordinarily be expected to bring about repeal of undesirable legislation, not to discriminate against a discrete and insular minority” is a winning argument.

Very confusing to sort out when we’re going to murder and when we’re going to pardon people involved with cartels, random fishermen, and whole countries. Remember when…

Moor Mother + Wooden Elephant, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes. It’s great. open.spotify.com/album/3KsL6E... youtube.com/playlist?lis...

overcast.fm/+AAHAsqkDczQ one of the greatest musicians talking music. (One battle after another, film and music both, is on another level)

The only relevant questions at the moment concern what a handful of Republican senators and reps will do in the face of increasingly outrageous violations of domestic and international law. No other takes matter.

Open the page. Scroll down to the timeline. Go through the timeline. It’s… shocking

can you be considered a serious presidential candidate if you don‘t promise to demolish the ballroom on day 1?

I guess they call it the emergency docket because they use it to create emergencies.

Further premeditated killing by the Trump administration. Labelling the victims of these strikes as "narco-terrorists" does not magically make these attacks legal.

It appears that Sec. Hegseth has admitted to murder and implicated others. It looks bad, but he and any co-conspirators deserve a fair trial with all the protections and process due under our law.

Ok so this is bad but for complicated reasons. Substantively, much of it is terrible explicitly: the anti-trans stuff, the requirement to use force on student protesters, cap on foreign students, content-based "screening" of foreign students, surveillance of foreign students. But some of (cont🧵)

Whether a president has effectively unreviewable authority to direct the military to murder someone, in boats in the tropics or on the streets of Portland, if he says they’re a threat to the United States is becoming just another issue about which “reasonable” people can disagree.

I take it as a bad sign that “what a murderer thinks” is increasingly a topic as to which people have hopes.

There is so much that is terrible in what has been reported. But among them is the student’s reference to “our president’s laws.”

Not the biggest problem here by a longshot -- but this is an exercise in wasting everyone's time, imposed to bolster the proposition that this is about e̶t̶h̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶j̶o̶u̶r̶n̶a̶l̶i̶s̶m̶ course-description integrity www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston...

chng.it/v648fZ9tKW Solidarity with colleagues at Texas A&M.

I have no idea whether this cable-news-pol is sincere. But it’s a big problem that we have so many fellow citizens that are afraid of everyone and everything all the time. Had a contractor absolutely and honestly astounded that we drove across country and backpacked without guns.

If these masked federal agents fanning out across American cities under the control of the mad king even think about delivering broccoli or asking about health insurance, then — and only then — elite libertarians will rise in opposition. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

It’s true that there is an unprecedented wave of crimes now being committed in DC.

The point of putting the military on the streets in cities isn’t to “clean up” those cities, it’s to heighten tension in the hopes that somebody takes a shot at them and gives an excuse for invocation of the insurrection act.

“It is illegal to assist people who are not rich, because that inevitably helps racial minorities who are ‘inseparable’ from their relative poverty.” Heckuva job American legal culture for landing in a place where arguments like this have become acceptable (again). It doesn’t have to be this way.

Whether potus and his enablers can one day be prosecuted for war crimes is a hard question of law (content of CIL, not directly subject to ICC, content of and personal liability under other agreements, etc.), politics (sec. council veto, etc.), and fact (more justification than we know?). But...

I get that there are issues on which I’ll disagree with others. What I don’t get is how they keep coming up with insane positions on things I would never have thought were issues. It must be someone’s full-time job to brainstorm awful, destructive proposals concerning things no one is talking about.

The new Grok will be taught without contradiction that the hurricane was in fact heading to Alabama.

And meant to add: every non-white litigant should demand he recuse in every case. How can you trust a judge who AWARDED A PRIZE to someone who said you are not an equal citizen? Make him address this issue, over and over and over again. (And it’s fair: how CAN you trust him? You SHOULDN’T.)

Is there any doubt how this court would have decided Brown v. Board? So much modern legal theory is aimed at making us the good guys of yesteryear, without constraining us in the present.

An arrest is, obviously, a deprivation of liberty. An arrest that is indistinguishable from a criminal kidnapping being committed by masked private citizens likely is not the process due under the circumstances. Weigh govt interest (usually low), arrestee harm (super high), risk of error (low?).

How much longer can debased news agencies like the Times avoid the fact that Trump is a raving idiot without a plan, who doesn’t know how things work, and doesn’t even know the basic meaning of words like “unconditional surrender”? He’s a fool making proclamations using half-remembered phrases

These people are playacting the roles they’ve seen on TV. It’d be hilarious if the stakes weren’t so high. But canceling a contract for an effective bird flu vaccine and laying the groundwork for 19th century healthcare by yolo’ing chatgpt suck.

In case you needed further proof that Twitter is, in fact, real life now.

The “freedom of speech” is the freedom of the president to decide which viewpoints qualify and which do not qualify for federal grants, taxation, and prosecution.

HASSAN: What is habeas corpus? NOEM: Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country HASSAN: That's incorrect

TIL: People are going to community colleges like Arizona State to learn how to work for the rest of their lives in plants taking care of and air-conditioning robotic arms. Also, too, their children and grandchildren will do the same.

This was eye-opening for me. www.semafor.com/article/04/2...

Prediction: a steadily increasing amount of scholarship devoted to the design of truth and reconciliation commissions and the like.

Observe that the one that complied and the one that didn't comply are treated exactly the same way.

Not at the moment the most important issue, but the former Covid practical info hub - Covid.gov - redirects to a webpage on a lab leak theory. (All too typically, a weird, blundering conspiracy theory version on bioengineering — but however weird, it *replaces* a site with useful information.)

A losing coalition did indeed vote for this. The winning coalition voted for cheaper eggs. Always important to distinguish two questions: 1. “How could *anyone* support this?” (Hard question) 2. “Why did the vote come out the way it did?” (a straightforward analysis of marginal coalition members).

Really really troubling sign that we’re at the open, outright & gleeful defiance stage. It hasn’t even been 3 months since Trump swore his oath to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Gobry is correct in assuming that there must be a process for correcting the government's mistakes. He cannot even imagine a world in which you're given no opportunity to do so.

It's now been over a month since Trump sent innocent man Andry Hernández to one of the world's worst prisons because of "Mom" and "Dad" tattoos. Like the others, he is being imprisoned with no contact with the outside world. Don't let him be forgotten.

I propose a different “useful test”: If ICE arrests your mother, says she’s MS-13 or whatever, and tries to send her to a prison in El Salvador, should she be able to argue in a federal court that she’s a citizen or (if she’s not) that the government is otherwise wrong about her or acting illegally?

you want to "prove" that birthright citizenship isn't what it has obviously meant for 157 years? go ahead. but don't pretend you aren't interested in this because daddy trump needs someone to give his prejudices a thin veneer of academic plausibility

The fact that this is showing on NEWSMAX is an encouraging sign about the president's ability to bury this scandal in disinformation.

Sigh.

I know it’s wrong, but in my weaker moments I do find myself thinking that there is *one* American I think ought to be in a notoriously inhumane foreign prison.

Trump is being completely open about his desire to send Americans to a foreign prison that no one is released from.