Fun story this morning. I spoke with Curtis Evans, the retired Marine in the viral photo below who took part in the anti-ICE protest at Broadview. He's a thoughtful guy, well read and with a dry sense of humor. Story @taskandpurpose.com taskandpurpose.com/news/marine-...

Trump Administration to link trade deficits and mail-in voting to autism.

Policy process: 1) Issue legal pronouncement without adequate legal or policy review. 2) Read legal pronouncement for the first time. 3) Consider policy implications for the first time. 4) Begin issuing clarifications. 5) Begin (maybe) an interagency legal and policy review of underlying issues.

Most Americans want billionaires to pay more in taxes. This proposal aims at one of their biggest tax breaks: unrealized capital gains. It would apply only to those with incomes over $100 million or assets worth over $1 billion. www.barrons.com/articles/dem...

Serious scholars have examined what happens when we change the number of H1-B visas issued. Cities that get more H1-B immigrants subsequently see the wages of natives *rise* substantially. Skilled immigrants bring new ideas, fill labor shortages and make us all more productive.

for all of the discourse on here about how “all democrats agree pro-housing policies, we don’t need ‘abundance’ because it’s already the consensus”… I went to a block party in my 90% D neighborhood of Manhattan and rich boomer NIMBYs set up a table to block new housing. We still have a ways to go

Reclaiming a toxic river. Beautiful! Joyous. We can have nice things. If we work at it. “There are now river otters behind the Lyric Opera,” said Margaret Frisbie, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River. “We’ve seen beavers, muskrats, turtles. There’s wildlife everywhere.”

Look, in general local tax breaks to draw in employers are a bad idea. In general, trusting Zuckerberg or Meta to do the right thing is a bad idea. But combining those two things increases the level of bad ideas exponentially.

News outlets: Here's the missing context for ALL of your articles on the economy. Put context in! “Democracy is just good for the economy. And autocracy is bad for the economy. Autocrats are just not good at managing economies. Policymaking tends to be erratic as democratic institutions decline.”

But it’s also an absolutely central moment in American labor history because it was the decisive moment when the nation officially rejected the system of slave labor that had built so much of the antebellum country.

Plus it gave a moral reason to fight the war, one with increasing importance as soldiers who might have been racist but had never personally witnessed slavery were outraged when they went to the South and saw the horrors of this labor system first hand.

While not a complete abolition of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation signaled slavery’s death knell and is one of the most important presidential acts in U.S. history.

How do I know the rapture won’t start tomorrow? Because there’s no way a good and caring God would do that on the first day of Fat Bear Week!

On the blog, @espinsegall.bsky.social, who is a faculty member of a public university in a blue city in a purple state run by a Republican statewide government, wonders what is and is no longer permissible for him to say. 👇

New: Sarah MacLachlan, Jewel, and more musicians scheduled to perform at tonight's premiere for Hulu's ABC News doc LILITH FAIR have all pulled out after Disney scrapped the red carpet. First notable talent consequence of the Jimmy Kimmel situation.

A quick per usal of Wikipedia tells me Mr. Shirley is a political consultant who has shown like five books about Reagan plus one about Newt Gingrich(!), which means “presidential historian” works, I guess, as long as you emphasize the singular of “presidential.”

I'm going to go ahead and say that a "historian" who doesn't remember who was President in the days after January 6, 2021, isn't much of a "historian." Let's stop insulting real historians by using the term to describe people like Craig Shirley.

I’m sure someone could provide a worse three paragraphs of “analysis” in this moment, but Peter Baker really sets the bar low here — with what he opined, who he decided to rely on as a source, and why he included those absurd claims without refutation.

All I really need to know Is, will it happen before or after 7 pm Central? Because if so, I guess I’m not going to bother preparing class for that night.

Grew up (and still am) Mormon, and we explicitly disclaim Jesus comparison when it comes to the murder of Joseph Smith.

finally people are speaking out about the issues we’ve been forbidden to discuss for far too long

“They should accept it because they looked a little Mexican. It’s the price of a free society.” Kavanaugh, J., concurring.

"Moreover, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States."

What we might refer to as a Kavanaugh Raid

Disney properties: including Marvel, Star Wars, and Alien/Predator won’t be covered on my channel for the forseeable future

But in many circumstances these agents are refusing to provide proof of their status as federal agents. Maybe USG could pass a law so USPS vans may go 100mph, but if the vans are unmarked then just pull them all over and make USPS prove they are who they say in the most laborious fashion.

After all, the supremacy clause didn't stop the good states from sometimes continuing to impede the slavecatchers as much as possible after Prigg, and they were right to do so. We forget that "states rights" can be (and sometimes was) an abolitionist argument too. And right now ICE tyranny is,

Hey, they’re Twittering TikTok!

The second-order effects are large on everyone else—their employers, their landlords, the IRS who were collecting their taxes, etc—but don't lose sight of how particularly cruel and evil it is on the holders themselves and their families

I beg of you, please, do not make me have to defend Bill Maher from government censorship

Ha! I don't get upset by crying babies on planes, to be clear. They're babies, they do what they do. Also, I have noise-cancelling headphones and about 100 hours of music downloaded into my phone. I'm fine.

Honestly, I don't mind my living room, but I'm entirely sure a $500,000 remodel could make it better.

Trump take away roof.

Two thoughts here: (1) Bill Maher deserves all the (non-governmental) hate he gets. I have no idea what his monologue was, but if it's like his past comedy, it was unfunny and pretend-edgy. (2) If the government is pressuring his network to fire him, that's even worse than Maher's sense of humor.

Sen. Murphy: "Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, literally accepted a bag of cash—$50,000—and the investigation was dropped when Trump became president. There are two standards of justice now in this country. If you are a friend of the president...you can get away with anything."

Linear time is *hard*.

who was President from 1 Jan 20 until 20 Jan 21 continues to be the defining political question of our time

FWIW, I can’t stand this type of framing. Have jail or prison not be a nightmare, alerting imprisoned people to do yoga and enjoy activities, is good actually. We should be working to expand this kind of thing. (And yes, Maxwell is a bad person and deserves to be imprisoned. 1/

“OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws” https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html

I read Robert Draper’s big profile in the NYT on the wife of the white supremacist who was murdered. It’s a little strange in that it doesn’t really describe the project that was his life’s work, and it leaves the impression of a couple whose lives were pretty alienated from one another.

Bibi was able to take the tactical defeat of 10/7, which, for a brief moment, engendered an almost unprecedented international support for Israel, and turn it into the most consequential strategic defeat (by his own standards) in Israel's history.

Like, I never went to PR school, but I’m pretty sure they don’t teach you that your first response to, “This is crazy creepy bruh,” should be “The crazy creepy thing is technically legal.” I mean, I can see how you might need to get there eventually. But it’s not a great starting gambit.

It’s here!

The one surefire way to get people to stop saying mean things about you is to send out a press release, insisting that they stop saying mean things about you. www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09...

Even if you take the most lenient possible interpretation -- that SCOTUS has made it increasingly hard to prosecute bribery and corruption -- you still have to ask what kind of crooked-ass administration hires a guy who just took $50k cash.

The only possible PR response to this odd, “Oh my gosh, that’s terrible! I can’t believe our algorithm did that; will fix it immediately!” So of course that’s not what Meta PR went with.

An amazing number of people didn’t bother to read this story and thus don’t realize the 37 year old man mentioned here was *horrified and reported it* - he is not the problem here! Mark Zuckerberg’s historically evil company is!

Also, I have a new helmet.

Time for the Popehat Signal — a call for pro bono help for a deserving person threatened with an utterly contemptibly bogus defamation case in federal court in New York. The defendant — a victim of vexatious bad-faith prosecution — is being sued for writing about the plaintiff’s prior bogus case./1

/2 The plaintiff is Gideon Rapaport, a recent law grad and FedSoc member, whose prior pro se complaint represented a tour de force in the genre of “why you should never hire, nor ideally talk to, Gideon Rapaport.” abovethelaw.com/2023/08/form...