IMHO, two things are happening here: 1) Systemic inflation feels higher than people think it should be. It is indeed higher than Nov '08–Aug '21. 2) Trump ran on lowering prices (not just the inflation rate but prices!), failed, and keeps lying that he has succeeded, which makes (1) hit harder.

Anything less than a 9-0 unambiguous affirmation of birthright citizenship as settled law that cannot be changed except by Amendment is properly understood as an assault by those Justices on the foundation of American values, law, and government. To even humor this shows the institution has failed.

I always thought Randy Barnett was full of shit and it's nice to see him doing what he can to prove me right by shifting his supposedly principled originalism to fit whatever is desired by Republican leaders at the moment.

SCOTUS hears arguments about Trump's EO on birthright citizenship today, a dispute no more valid than "can the President prohibit the free exercise of religion?" Anything other than 9-0 against Trump is a grave injury to the very idea of having a written Constitution, to the very idea of America.

No, there's neither a "messy and complicated debate" nor "profound ethical questions." The President has no more power to make the federal government give him $10 billion than any other federal employee. That's not a thing, it's illegal, federal employees go to jail if they try it.

More Iranian girls we killed to achieve the objective of giving the IRGC complete control of a vital global shipping lane.

The mere existence of this sentence in the chyron is evidence of a staggering level of incompetence, stupidity and failure. You talk to the people who control the army and state power ministries. They seem to be playing games going on something they heard from a guy who said who knows a guy.

I suspect the Trump admin's idea here is that this will force someone else (doubtful they even have a clear idea who) to clean up their mess. It will work as well as their idea that the IRGC would have to surrender after the initial bombing. Other people are not mere supporting cast in your TV show.

War crimes alert: today, the White House said opening the Strait isn't a core objective while Trump himself threatened to destroy "Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells ... and possibly all desalinization plants!" if it's not opened. The US isn't even pretending there's a military purpose to that.

According to March polling, only 32% of American Jews support the US's war on Iran, while 61% of white evangelicals support it. For reference, that's 27.3 million white evangelicals and 2.4 million American Jews

NYTimes has spent years breathlessly repeating claims that objecting to the treatment of Palestinians is antisemitic, but when right-wingers say they're “J-pilled,” NYTimes calls this "slang for skepticism of Israeli influence." Where's the "J" in "Israel"? Might that "J" mean something else?

The only acceptable answer from 2028 presidential candidates is "yes, I'll demolish it."

The NYT says today’s #NoKings protests had “no shortage of skeptics,” and then quoted exactly one of those skeptics: The chairman of the Ole Miss College Republicans (as of 2025.) But of course, the Times doesn’t ID him as such. He’s just a Concerned Youth.

None of this is true, but it's telling how RFK Jr is also so ignorant that his baloney story is also of no use. Is "troop strength" the reason Trump's war has utterly failed? Is that how Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, with soldiers stretched out across it holding hands?

If the estimates were right, there were about 9 million people at No Kings rallies today. That would mean this protest was THIRTY TIMES AS LARGE AS THE TEA PARTY PROTEST which we were told, over and over again, was a massively important sign that US politics had shifted dramatically to the right

Walking thru the “Ultra Normie” No Kings rally in my extremely rural, white town and there are Patagonia wearing moms carrying signs that say “DEAD PEDOPHILES DONT REOFFEND” and “ICE GETS THE WALL” and I hi fived an old guy with a sign that said MY DADDY FOUGHT NAZIS AND SO WILL I” this is wild

Zohran Mamdani continues to pose the crazy question “what if the government you paid all those taxes to was actually using that money to improve your life?”

A large rally in opposition to the government has value in and of itself. There's ample literature on this: signaling, agenda-setting, preference falsification. Historical examples abound; '63 march on DC and '68 protests in France were dismissed by many at the time as counterproductive farces. 1/2

We also don't have a replacement. The E-7 was supposed to be it. Here's how that's going: Feb 2023 - Biden admin starts process to get 26 of them June 2025 - Trump admin cancels program Nov 2025 - Congress funds anyway March 12, 2026 - Trump admin restarts program, orders 2 prototypes

In fairness it’s not like the consequences of having a mad king unilaterally take the country to war on a whim were so incredibly obvious that you could see it coming from the 18th and 19th centuries www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

It is the rest of the world's problem now, we did what we could.* *Made the situation worse in every way.

Worth noting Trump has already been doing some form of that "strategy" and the end result has been to strengthen the IRGC, to move hardliners up the ranks in the IRGC, to quash dissent within Iran, and to hand over to the IRGC complete control of a vital shipping lane. Great strategy!

It's just an objective fact that Republicans like it when mothers die. It's been a core policy plank of the GOP my entire life.

this is the guy that the mainstream media is working to paint as the serious guy in the trump administration who secretly opposes all the crazy stuff trump is doing. a fun contrast to how the media portrayed Harris when she was VP

1/8 NEW: @bellingcat.com has geolocated and verified two new videos showing the deadly strikes that hit an IRGC compound — and an adjacent elementary school — in Minab, Iran on Feb. 28. Here's what we found. 🧵 www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/03...

Look at persnickety Josh here, claiming that Trump's instruction to "use funds that have a reasonable and logical nexus to TSA operations" isn't good enough when clearly the Constitutional and statutory authority is <throws pocket sand and runs away>

This is just bizarre, like they don't understand how English works. The statement from the AMA's Chief Communications Officer said "surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood." That is not "endorses restrictions" (NYT headline) or "backed limitations" (NYT lede).

Doctors refer to this as "signs of conscienceness."

love how "get paid while doing your job" is a constant source of contention between employers and employees, as if there's any possible argument against it other than "i want to steal my employee's time"

Yeah. The Senate funding isn't some huge policy win for Democrats—but it's the best available move to position themselves going forward, and it's a symbolic & tactical victory (and those things do matter) how they held out while Republicans and Trump caved.

He fired a Black man who was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He fired a woman who was the CNO. I could go on. How much more evidence do we need.

Even before this, big AI was pivoting towards more aggressive monetization to manage their huge losses running it. And nobody has any clue how to achieve significant efficiencies of scale with LLMs, they run into expensive memory-bandwidth bottlenecks, Jevons Paradox, or both.

The 2020 campaign was the zenith of Dem party trans woke leftism and we won big, but that always gets swept under the rug by reactionary centrists who try to gaslight us that 2020 was the Liz Cheney tour while 2024 was the year of BLM, COVID masks, Kente cloth, and trans rights are human rights.

Exciting news—We've finally found a way to do a paid indie media bundle so you don't have to separately subscribe to so many newsletters. Now you can get a 30-day trial of @katelynburns.com @kattenbarge.bsky.social and my publications in your inbox for one [heavily discounted] price! Sign up now:

Lawyers have a saying for when a judge tells a lawyer to preserve their records: "Fuck fuck fuck I'm so fucked"

Today is Ivy Day, when the Ivies announce their admissions decisions. Reminder: don't go to Columbia.

Not great how this debacle revealed there isn't a single person in the Pentagon with a functioning brain, just sycophants who type "final blow" into an AI chatbot then pass it up the chain with a yessir. If even one person there told Trump/Hegseth the truth, we'd know because they'd be fired.

lowkey love her being like EYE have a passport bc I'm rich but what about the rest of y'all broke asses? I still know an unconstitutional poll tax when I see one!

Gosh, perhaps there are fewer campus protests because schools, as The Atlantic urged them to do, aggressively went after protestors. Columbia suspended, expelled, and retroactively revoked degrees in proceedings that were so arbitrary and capricious they were overturned by a NY state judge.

E15 is a little cheaper but also a little lower MPG. This will, however, raise corn prices, which consumers will pay for in various ways because everything is corn, but that's okay: anything to help corn farmers who hate our guts and overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the hopes he would destroy us.

Delightful to see USAO of SDNY throw ICE and ICE counsel under the bus, blaming them completely for it. (But it also doesn't excuse the USAO. "I didn't read the memo I relied on" is not a valid excuse for why the briefs they signed and the arguments they made in court were false.)

Trump has still never given a coherent objective of the war, but "Iran can toll the Strait" is objectively a failure of every objective he could've had. Those countries can't be blamed: they have no other option. Their refineries can't even use America's light sweet oil, they need heavy sour oil.

Possibility 3 is that both are happening because Trump himself hasn't decided which it is, and the battle among his advisors right now is to see who can be the last to talk to him before he decides. Great way to run a war!

Thank you, embedded Gmail AI, for recommending I change "screw us over" to "will act against our interests," and I appreciate your euphemism that this is to "make concise," but I'll stick with my original. 🙏

This is what happens when you combine centrist consultants with a candidate who doesn't know or care much about policy. Platner's own positions (oppose Medicaid cuts, support M4A, etc) provide better solutions, but neither he nor his team really believe in those positions, so they end up with this.

This is a bigger problem for state schools, which feel an obligation to educate residents (unless the trustees have made that impossible), than it is for "elite" schools, which have already cured this issue by using AI to auto-reject Black and Muslim applicants (via name + zip code as proxies).

Funny thing about American mass media is how woke content is broadly popular, routinely pays for itself, and sometimes goes blockbuster, whereas right-wing content is a narrow niche that rarely reaches breakeven, never goes blockbuster, and usually requires immense subsidies for it to exist at all.

You know, once a jury has made its decision you are extremely justified in dropping the "allegedly"

Brent & WTI are light sweet, the least affected by the closure. The real hit goes to heavy sour. They aren't substitutes. Feb 27 prices to today Brent $70→$95 (36%) OPEC basket $70→$145 (107%) Medium distillates like diesel are up >40% across the US. No prob except for stuff carried by trucks. Oh.

The $580 million short oil bet was the smaller of the two insider trades. The larger one, placed at the exact same time (6:49-6:50am), was between $1.4-$1.9 billion to go long S&P 500 e-Mini futures. Over $2 billion in Trump traitor trades, all wildly profitable 15 minutes later after Trump's post.