Ok the fact they’re alleging corrupt undue influence from Qatar is honestly hilarious www.nytimes.com/2025/11/06/u...

Here’s an essay from 2009 criticizing Ross Douthat’s hiring by NYT, which—16 years ago—says “even for a blogo-pundit, Douthat that seems unusually averse to engaging with women intellectually“ www.thenation.com/article/arch...

If this is true (*if), then the worst thing Merrick Garland did as U.S. attorney general is fail to charge Donald Trump with offenses to get this evidence into the public record before 2024 www.alternet.org/doj-republic...

How many times has a federal prosecutor brought a *misdemeanor* charge all the way to a jury trial and an acquittal? Has to be vanishingly rare, right? In the 2023–24 fiscal year the US District Court for the district of DC had 59 jury trials total, and 94 class A misdemeanor charges total

He’s saying this in response to a question about merger / antitrust regulatory approval btw

incredible photo that's definitely worth at least 1,000 words from Andrew Harnik of Getty

O’Connor now accepts the Trump Administration‘s revised non-prosecution agreement, which does not include any independent monitor So O’Connor is ok with no monitor, but was not ok was an independent monitor whose hiring had a diversity policy involved storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

The 737 Max criminal case has been going on long enough that the indictment was handed down during the first Trump Administration The criminal charges had contended Boeing intentionally & willfully deceived the FAA about known defects, namely 👇

conservatives for 20+ years: waaah 😫 federal courts should not defer to executive-branch interpretations of the law. that is the role of the judiciary 😭 SCOTUS in Loper Bright: ok. It is the role of the courts alone “to say what the law is” conservatives now: 👑 gotta defer to us tho 👑 😉

Remember, this is coming out in discovery in “impeding a federal officer” criminal proceedings against the *shooting victim*

Ross Douthat’s mother Patricia Snow went to Yale and has been an essayist & author (and anti-feminist) for like 40 years

Cool. What would you call the other wing then? www.nytimes.com/2025/11/03/u...

The original 1999 Sports Illustrated cover article that got John Rocker suspended is a wild ride, and also now stands as a model profile of a median Gen X Trump supporter or the president of the Heritage Foundation web.archive.org/web/20000817...

It’s f cking bonkers that the Supreme Court is debating whether a tariff is a tax At the founding and well into the 19th century, import duties were *the* main source of federal revenue Everything about taxation in the Federalist Papers is about tariffs

Only 7 or 8 senate Dems caving would be enough Schumer needs to slam the door on this, and if any of Senators Peters, Shaheen, Hassan, Fetterman, Cortez-Masto, King, Ossoff, Kelly, Welch, Baldwin, Rosen, or Slotkin are your Senator, call and say ‘no’ to selling out thehill.com/homenews/sen...

The guy Fox News interviewed for the “$100+ million” quote is a luxury developer in Miami whose portfolio generally starts at $500k homes at the low end So conservatively, this guy’s anecdote relates to 200 buyers total www.foxbusiness.com/media/nyc-el...

So long to Glenn Youngkin you may not have contended for president, and you may not have gotten that NHL/NBA arena, but at least you managed to [checks notes] veto unpaid bereavement leave for businesses having 50 or more employees legacylis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp...

The first thing Jason Miyares did with his power as Virginia attorney general was halt all actual-innocence claims and fire the office in charge of litigating them That’s a hell or a lot worse than some vulgar text messages

Aside, Lindsey Halligan‘s signature block on this filing identifies her as “United States Attorney” even after yesterday Attorney General Bondi purported to retroactively make Halligan into “the additional position” of special attorney

Judges ordering the Trump Administration to do something as basic as produce a hearing transcript:

Imagine trying to explain « iodine-131 » and « buried escarpments » to a man who does not realize he has been taking dementia tests and cannot comprehend the difference between “asylum” and “an asylum”

I’m borrowing my 77-y/o in-laws’ car for an errand this morning, and the radio is set to a homemade burned CD, sharpie-labeled “mp3 Emmanuel God with Us”

just a personal fav mostly because of the photo

What’s going on here is DoJ realized they would lose a challenge to Halligan’s appointment under the Vacancy Reform Act (Halligan isn’t an eligible person to become acting U.S. Attorney) and they’re scrambling to provide a legal cover for Halligan’s activities to-date

On top of everything it’s completely forgotten that Matt Gaetz moved to vacate Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, making way for Toady Johnson, in retaliation for McCarthy backing an Ethics Committee investigation of Gaetz committing statutory rape (among other serious offenses)

BBC describing Arlington County, Virginia as “Southern US county” 🤭 www.bbc.com/travel/artic...

“Trump Officials are cognizant that Donald Trump’s ravings about nuclear weapons are dangerous & unhinged, and they are scrambling to obfuscate what Trump said and quietly steer his policy towards something marginally less insane” is an accurate appraisal of what happened

This can only be reasonably interpreted as Donald Trump actively wanting full resumption of nuclear weapons tests, and the Energy Sec’y scrambling to dissemble & concoct a sanewashed explanation, such the flagship media can wipe their brows in relief that they can continue pretending Trump is sane

"Person who just bought toilet paper, only to find that there was none left in the supermarket restroom (based on a true story)" x.com/dailyportalz...

Can’t prove a counterfactual, but I agree „the Immunity Decision proves the Trump prosecutions were fated to fail no matter what“ needs to contend with the way SCOTUS’ decisions are contingent, and the pressure would be very different if the legal question had come up before Trump was the nominee

time to log on to post my fresh joke about LA Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto having the same family name as imperial navy Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto,,,

Kiké Hernandez has a load-bearing diacritic in his name there…

So apparently there is some wide disagreement between right-wing Christian interest groups and NGOs and, well, the Nigerian government and other observers (see, eg, 👇) about whether there is “persecution“ of Christians in Nigeria, and I’d be interested in reading some reliable deep dives

Trump meddling in American public spaces has me thinking again about my completely unsupported pet theory (ie, the German parliament meeting inside a war memorial has a substantive impact on German politics)

”We are offering rich-people clothing so you can dress up and feel just like the characters in the upcoming movie Don’t Be Like The Rich People” www.businessinsider.com/brooks-broth...

This event planning blog post from 2016 is a bit of a tell, including the author complaining that she reread the book for event planning ideas and was annoyed to find “to my horror I realised that there wasn’t a lot of data in there that would serve us“ blog.printsome.com/great-gatsby...

I brought back the elaborate prize wheel after some kids complained last year about the year-over-year downgrade I set the bar too high This year I have a prize wheel carnival thing with music 👍

Marge Taylor Greene is perhaps the most textbook Q Anon radical House GOP member, but Nancy Mace may be the most unhinged Mace comes off like someone who might microwave a cat

(The current Lincoln Bedroom, named for its Lincoln-era furnishings, was the president’s office c.1825–65, and the small room adjoining it on the southeast was a telegraph suite from post civil war through 1902, and this room wasn’t split up to include a bathroom until 1948–52 renovation)

Republicans waltzing into destroying insurance markets and unleashing food scarcity are doing more to advance left-wing systemic reform than Democrats ever would have

For context, 18 USC §111 (and aiding & abetting of §111) is one of the charges against Kat Abughazaleh, and is a charge that grand juries have recently no-billed several times Here, the judge *dismissed the charge* bc even if proven, the alleged facts are insufficient 👇

Just two weeks ago Vance told Greta Van Susteren “I think there are things you can do to make [healthcare] better, but to pretend we can fix such a complicated system, that logic is probably what led to the original Obamacare disaster“

cc: Venezuela

Meat Loaf, if your spirit is listening, now is your chance www.bbc.com/news/article...

Vance’s Newsmax interview re healthcare:

Of course, Vance, Hawley, other “right-wing populists” who attended Stanford & Yale, they do not want to do anything to promote labor organizing or labor’s leverage vs. management They want Mussolini’s “Corporativismo,” where workers are in guilds managed by the state and rewarded for their loyalty

One might think Donald Trump making dangerous nuclear weapons policy decisions on Truth Social would serve as a gut check for reporters, producers, and editors who continue to apologize for & cover-up Trump’s manifest radicalism & incoherence One might think… 🥲

ICYMI, the US Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California (same US Att’y Essayli who was recently disqualified as unlawfully appointed) decided they’d rather dismiss a criminal case than explain why they failed to disclose the ICE agent’s criminal record to the defendant

Vance’s whole hypo here—“a (presumably white) family of 4 or 5 is evicted due to demand-side rent increases, and are then replaced in that unit by 3 to 5 foreign families comprising 20+ people”—is just his racist imaginings