the most notable thing JD Vance has done in the last five years is tell vicious racist lies about immigrants. If you think he hasn't taken a side on bigotry, you are an idiot. He's for it. He's very strongly for it.

one of the critical things here is that 90 percent of journalism has been destroyed, and the remaining 10 percent is what was once the top 10 percent, highly status-driven, highly opinion-driven, and intensely New York/DC centered. there's no ladder to come up as a journeyman left.

I used to think these people don't understand art/movies/etc but it's broader than that. They don't understand culture, not even their own. Perhaps that's why they end up with politics with little consistent ideology, just reactionary grievance and whatever this is. Santa's not even an American!

There's a fox outside my house repeatedly shrieking in a way that sounds just like the opening of "Sympathy for the Devil" (yoaw! ow!) and I don't know what to do with this information. Start playing the bongo part?

The full Weiss memo is dogshit -who cares if administration figures “regret” sending people to CECOT -who cares about the criminal histories of the people we sent to CECOT, we sent them to a torture prison —who cares about the “debate” over the legality of sending people to a torture prison

The Olivia Nuzzi story and the Bari Weiss at CBS story are the same story, which is that the upper echelons of legacy media are absolutely rife with people who worship power and don't feel burdened by any sense of responsibility to their profession or the public.

Pure fanaticism, just objectively bad policy especially while building all these new data centers. But also an opportunity for Democrats to say loudly, over and over again, that Trump and Republicans are making everything more expensive. Higher electricity costs impact everything.

To save you all the time of googling: yes, of course this guy is hopelessly unqualified, he's some Kristi Noem flunky with no experience particular to cybersecurity. He's a business IT guy whose first job at all relevant was appointment by Noem to be South Dakota's chief tech officer in August 2024.

If you needed more evidence that Bari Weiss isn't the sharpest crayon in the box, the fact that she (a) personally spiked the story (b) in a way that left her fingerprints all over the decision (c) at the last possible minute, thus guaranteeing maximal exposure and blowback.

Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

This credulous NYTimes article makes exactly one reference, near the end, to what everybody with a brain knows Republicans mean when they say "theater kid." It means gay, effeminate, unmanly. Toxic masculinity isn't subtle or novel (or interesting), it's always the same crap again and again.

in AI speak this is what we call an out of distribution event

This is extraordinary, heartbreaking, and a red alert warning sign for our democracy. These people are about to be federal judges, and they refuse to answer whether the U.S. Capitol was attacked on January 6. They say they can't comment because it's "a political controversy".

Among other anti-renewables policies, the residential solar tax credit expires at the end of the month, part of the GOP's Ruin Everything budget. It's pure fanaticism, including from the tech barons who are so deranged they can't understand how their AI dreams require massive solar/wind expansion.

I'm not sure how far we are down the path, but I agree that is the trajectory. Notably, the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break things" served Musk poorly in the X takeover. It was too obvious what he was doing, and it swiftly made the site much worse.

Don't mean to slag Dartmouth specifically, I'm sure many others have thought this, but... ...that's what consulting websites say, so it's what LLMs tell people to do, and the AI will do it for them. Honest high school seniors know it's insincere and won't do it. home.dartmouth.edu/news/2025/12...

Domestic oil & gas production both skyrocketed under Obama and stayed high. Did we win everything? Of course not. But this is another pointless messaging-only claim that, if everyone to Yglesias's just left shut up, then Dems would win everything. That's not how it works.

I've been busy and didn't know Trump was giving a primetime address, and it seems Trump didn't know either because what even is this stuff? Standard lies and the absence of real policy to help anyone, same stuff he says by the chopper before going golfing.

I assure you, it is quite easy to find conservative-leaning lawyers who aren't absolute freaks with deeply-held views so creepy most people don't even know such views exist. But this is who they nominate instead.

Some Dems have told themselves only ~1% of the population is trans so they can dip their toe in the anti-trans filth and come out clean. I don't have any trans family members—but it still makes me irate. I see it as a huge red flag, a sign you are unprincipled and untrustworthy. And I'm not alone.

Indeed. Unlike Charlie Kirk, you can describe and quote the Reiners' work in a glowing memorial piece. You can't do that with Kirk—his life's work was advocating for hatred and bigotry—and the NYTimes didn't. Honestly portraying him would have been, as they say, inconceivable.

Since 9/11, the FBI has spent a ton of resources effectively entrapping angry poor people into pretending they were engaging in a terrorist plot and then "stopping" the plot that never had any chance of being carried out. This is almost certainly another such case. www.techdirt.com/tag/own-plot/

I’ve missed the Twitter experience. Over here, when I say hello, nobody responds with “what about black on black crime in Chicago?”

what a confusing time to be a piece of shit

Wake up sweetie, new defense of creedal nationalism just dropped (seriously, what a fucking hero)

If you're feeling down because you were wrong about something, just remember that, no matter how embarrassing it was, at least you didn't sign the Harper's "Letter on Justice and Open Debate" declaring that the greatest threat to free speech was "censoriousness" among liberal academics. 🫶

A whole lot of data-driven popularism pundits lost interest in the data when polls consistently showed a majority thought Trump's immigration and economic policies sucked, so now they're stuck with "data-driven popularism is when politicians say stuff I agree with."

The courtroom scene in "A Few Good Men" is bullshit but the fact that everybody knows that scene from a movie released 33 years ago is evidence enough that it doesn't matter, it's just a damn fine scene.

Love the idea underneath "we have to earn their trust" that X is just some regular ol' company with a banal history. Journalists know who owns it! They know how it was bought to make it a propaganda vehicle! All of that is still true, nobody with a good brain will "trust" your shithole Nazi forum.

"ICE and CBP must be abolished" is the only reasonable position. We can debate the specifics of new agencies for immigration functions, but these agencies are simply too infected with a culture of impunity, racism, and fascism to continue. They're gangs with badges.

I'm still struck by how Smart Movie Executives looked at Ryan Coogler's vampire delta blues film starring Michael B. Jordan and thought "meh, niche Black film" when basically anybody who actually watches movies would think "that's going to be awesome and it'll print money."

It's a defining feature of the Trump Era: unqualified people in big important jobs who don't want to do them and can't anyway so they spend a lot of time pretending to do it on TV and social media.

Really is a problem that for every Mark Cuban ("omg I can buy sports teams yay") there are, like, 25 billionaires who believe God has chosen them to cleanse the Earth with fire and to seed the future of humanity. It's just too much damn money, brains can't handle it.

Australian news reporting that the hero bystander here is named Ahmed al Ahmed. Muslim, father of two.

Nate Silver never had his finger on the pulse of anything but it's wild how cooked the dude's brain is. Yeah, sure, Heather Cox Richardson is just as bonkers as the most extremist GOP members of Congress. Totally reasonable point of view there, Nate.

Michael C. Rockefeller got shipwrecked in 1963, washed up on an island, and was promptly eaten by cannibals.

repeating “the lady who handcuffed herself to the twitter building has veto power over national security personnel” to myself over and over and slowly going insane

Bush v. Gore was an unambitious declaration of war by Republicans against democracy and the rule of law. Republicans made clear they didn't view those principles merely as malleable concepts they could cynically bend; no, they see those principles as fundamentally incompatible with conservatism.

Add to this that HSI just filed a declaration in our case challenging these policies saying they can’t trust REAL IDs as proof of status. So showing your papers isn’t even enough to end the stop.

Trump 22 points underwater on immigration in new AP-NORC poll. No wonder Kristi Noem fled her hearing today.

WOW. @haleaziz.bsky.social with a new scoop: ICE now gets a running list of every person who is going to be taking a domestic flight inside the United States from the TSA and runs it through their database looking for targets. This explains the Babson College student's arrest.

Trump's AI executive order is out, purporting to preempt state law. Legally, only Congress can do that, or at least that's the law until Calvinball federal judges and justices say Trump is the Most Special Boy who can. 🤷‍♂️ www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

This. This was the formative event of my generation & our entire politics in 🇺🇸. The structural break after which we were no longer a full democracy, when 5 Wizards In Robes decided they were a super-legislature & counting all the actual votes didn’t matter. The rest has been 25 years of commentary.

Remember: The average American cannot afford an unexpected $1,000 medical expense. In a country with notably expensive health care, fronting medical expenses because of bad insurance policies and then waiting to do a big tax deduction is not going to be an option for the vast majority of people.

everyone who suspected the admin was trying to hide something by spiriting him far away to a deep dark hole was right

Reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut describing his conversation with Joseph Heller about a billionaire. www.themarginalian.org/2014/01/16/k...

NEW: Clean energy startups that had gov funding cut by the Trump admin are laying off staff and freezing hiring. DOE offices that gave grants to renewables startups are ghost towns that ‘effectively don’t do anything,’ an official says. With @chloeaiello.bsky.social www.inc.com/chloe-aiello...