Once they were in the shutdown though they could have made it about anything. Put clips of ICE abducting children on endless loop and say “do we keep funding a govt that does *that*?” Then you might get federal workers clamoring not for concessions but a strike. Again, requires believing in things.

I just called my senators, leaving messages asking them not to vote for any deal to end the shutdown without a deal to extend ACA subsidies. It is shocking to me that they are about to cave without this.

Anyway a great way to radicalize people is for them to realize that you just abandoned their chance at being able to access and afford health care because you didn’t like waiting in line at the airport.

i think this is key. taking the deal would amount to taking the blame. it would turn a clear political victory into an unambiguous defeat.

agreeing to make a terrible deal while your main opponent is quite literally being boo'd on live tv by an entire stadium of people is the kind of political instinct you'd normally only find in a 3 week old dead goldfish

Dems backed Trump into a corner where he’s advocating for starving Americans and hemorrhaging support. If they vote to let him off the hook in exchange for nothing it’s a cataclysmic failure. I know people are in pain but insulating Republicans from political consequences is not the answer.

Must be the communism that's cancelling your flights and starving poor kids dang

Hey look, it's me

One thing from our piece on Saturday: Sen. Shaheen is leading the Senate cave caucus. She's on the appropriations committee and wants whatever little goodies she got in her appropriations bill passed into law. As we wrote: prospect.org/2025/11/08/w...

Wait did the Muppets in fact take Manhattan before Leonard Cohen?

Any food which has gotten to poor families the states must send agents to reclaim the food before it is eaten or face new federal penalties

This led, indirectly, to the existence of groups of Ashkenazim in Eretz Yisrael (including ~¼ of my ancestors) who wear Palestinian dress - as in, traditional Palestinian men's robes made from traditional fabrics. Avoiding loan sharks with a dash of mysticism.

Look what he has on the Resolute desk 😱 He has print outs of his *own* tweets The Resolute desk has never felt that dumb.

This is what it means to be a king and it is the result Trmp wants: to make it so that he personally has the power of life and death and everyone else has to beg him for favor. All "rights" such as they now exist (to privacy, due process, liberty) are being siphoned off to the king.

If you know anyone who works on medieval Judaism, please send them this! Binghamton is hiring a Talmud/Rabbinics assistant prof: half in Judaic Studies, half in the Med/Ren center. A killer R1 job for the right person, and not a ton of applicants so far....

A lawless regime is oppressing innocent Christians! Call Marco Rubio! They may have to re-invade Chicago and root out the anticlerical thugs who are preventing prayer.

“The debate about crime… has become a lightning rod that, like the immigration debate, captures a wider set of anxieties about a wider set of failures of policymaking and statecraft.” My ‪@theobserveruk.bsky.social column: observer.co.uk/news/columni...

ben Zohran omer:

✨YIDDISH GOTHIC✨ starts Tuesday afternoon. This was one of my favorite classes and I'm excited to offer it again. I'd love to see you there - email me to sign up or lemme know if you have any questions cjcrokhl @ gmail com

Money quote from Gov-Elect Spanberger (now please just do it).

continues to be hard to say why the White House is taking such a beating for the shutdown when they keep announcing new voluntary actions they say explicitly are meant to increase pain to pressure Dems and then lots of bad things happen and people get sad.

Girl Scouts in a Chicago Suburb hosted a food drive. But the girls encountered masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with weapons. "ICE turned it into a scary and what felt like an unsafe environment for us to be out with these kids" chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

At least a few of the people responsible for this wickedness sat in synagogue this shabbat and read the parsha of the week, in which a. The sacred nature of feeding the poor and hungry who come to you is underlined and b. The sin of Sodom was meeting the vulnerable and the foreigner with violence

Y'all need Jesus, happy Sunday

Sounds like the squishes in the senate caucus are ready to pull the plug with no ACA changes. This is real. If you want to register your opinion you shld call yr senator in the next hour. They not only want to reopen w/nothing. They want cover from their colleagues who still want to hold out.

These guys are constantly saying that Dems need to abandon identity politics and run on kitchen-table issues. They get the most kitchen table-ass candidate imaginable, spend months saying he's secretly radical, then as soon as he wins they say he's secretly moderate.

Damn, I hate it when things that happen mean nothing :-(

When there is no ballistic evidence, no damage from gunfire, no injuries, & DHS isn’t providing video evidence of the claim from their agents that someone fired shots, then I am going to call bullshit based on the 2 months of fabricated stories by federal officials that have been debunked by videos.

Yesterday was Bram Stoker’s 178th birthday! 🎂 Author of THE LADY OF THE SHROUD, THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM, and, of course, the iconic DRACULA. 🧛 Read the 1899 public-domain edition here ⤵️ archive.org/details/drac...

Bram Stoker - BOTD 💙📚 #LiteratureSky

If the political opposition doesn’t put these ICE & CBP institutional criminals in prison, annihilate their budgets, purge the datasets and repeal their authorities, this will keep happening. And that opposition will reveal itself as a false, controlled opposition that is no less predatory on people

They’re wearing masks so they can’t be prosecuted later. As long as they think they can’t be prosecuted, their crimes will intensify. They will torture, starve and kill, as they have already, on greater and greater scale. Signed, someone who’s covered the unaccountable War on Terror for 23 years.

For Marie Dressler's birthday today, and in honor of A Chorus Year, here's a feature about her crucial role in founding Chorus Equity Association and winning Actors' Equity Association's first strike in 1919, written by Gabriela Geselowitz: www.actorsequity.org/news/equityn...

The modern conservative movement is more opposed to America’s WW2 actions than they are to literal Hitler

Every sector of the 🇺🇸 economy & polity is exactly like this. Ronald Reagan & his lazy, selfish, juvenile talking point & his acolytes’ worn copies of Atlas Shrugged have done untold damage to our politics & society.

A reminder to other lochs to abandon the pressure to be perfect maps.nls.uk/view/218516888

Just remembering that Dick Cheney secretly intervened in a dispute over the Klamath River in 2001--and caused the biggest fish die-off in US history, with ~77,000 fully grown adult salmon piled on the banks of the river.

Mamdani embodies a pro-Palestinian politics that truly distinguishes between the state of Israel and the Jewish people, and truly takes antisemitism seriously as its own problem. That makes him a threat to those who want to absolutely conflate antisemitism and anti-Zionism, whether the ADL or WoL.

I got to play with a simulation of a Korean divination technique that is based on the first animal sound you hear (in the new year, technically). The dog bark got me “Many thieves for the year,” so I’d like to remind everyone that the temple robbers are happy to go on tour for a book talk.

yes. by design.

There are racial & geographic disparities in who lives long enough to access Medicare. This makes sense for multiple reasons, but one is that demographic variables are often proxies for healthcare access. If you didn't have good access before, you might not... www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/...

The Heritage Foundation, which is staffing the US presidential administration, has spent the past two weeks mainstreaming actual neo-Nazis into American public life, and much of the American Jewish establishment is panicking about a Muslim mayor of New York City.

"All right, class, who knows what Watson and Crick discovered?" "Rosalind Franklin's notes." "That's correct."

Hey folks, as news of Watson's demise spreads, please don't set aside his weighty legacy of misogyny and racism. He was truly among the worst of us. www.vox.com/2019/1/15/18...

Sometimes we can have nice things ☺️

40 years ago we’d have congressional hearings falsely accusing metal bands of putting backwards messages in their songs that told kids to kill themselves & now we have a planet-killing chatbot that’s all like “bet you won’t commit suicide chickenshit bitch” & the government is like here’s $5 billion