John Yoo op-ed: "As an official in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel ... I advised that the U.S. could wage war against al-Qaeda without blurring the distinction between crime and war. ... The drug cartels alone do NOT present a similar challenge that rises to the level of war." 1/

It’s really damaging when you have Democrats mimicking the power plays of Republicans. It allows Republicans to say “it’s all power, just depends on who you use it against.” We ought to be more principled and just not support government retaliation against companies for speech.

Are there any precedents for a President making major unsubstantiated medical claims that could affect public behavior like this? The only other case I know of (but less serious) is Trump’s claim about hydroxychloroquine for Covid.

A good post from the other site

Good post. The fact that it is being ratioed and people are so mad about it speaks ill of this website.

One irony of this post, in which Trump complains about being impeached over nothing, is that the post itself, demanding prosecution of his political enemies, is impeachable.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

Never in our history, not even during Watergate, has a single news cycle so comprehensibly established the deep corruption and politicization of the Department of Justice

Even Pam Bondi is unable to accommodate Trump’s lawlessness, it is so extreme.

Ezra Klein may be wrong about the politics of abortion but I think his broader point about not requiring political purity tests and running candidates who can win in places that are less friendly to Democrats is correct.

Really depressing that the rule of law doesn’t matter. Trump announces something he has no legal authority to do, like imposing a fee on H-1B visas and the reaction is not “It’s awful that the President pretends he can do something he can’t” But rather “This could happen”

Why is this horrible for Universities? Just about everyone who isn't a citizen or green card holder already who's hired for a tenure track faculty position is hired through an H1B and then, after 3-5 years, applies for a green card. This is literally "No more foreign professors can be hired"

We haven’t seen the text of this yet, but to be clear, the president has literally zero legal authority to impose a $100,000 fee on visas. None. Zip. Zilch. The only authority Congress has ever given the executive branch here is to charge fees to recover the cost of processing the application.

I think they’re overplaying their hand with this.

Significant comments from Republican Sen. Ted Cruz on FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threat to ABC over Jimmy Kimmel. “That’s right out of Goodfellas. That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going ‘Nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it.’” Cruz does the accent:

One theory is that Trump is a shrewd wannabe authoritarian taking calculated steps to consolidate power Another is that he’s always been thin-skinned and driven by personal grievances, but now has the powers of the presidency and he doesn’t care about the long-term damage to the country

What the Trump administration has been doing is terrible and unjustifiable. But I think that -left excesses caused both liberal criticism and a conservative backlash is a better model than -there were really no left excesses but misplaced liberal criticism of such excesses caused the backlash.

Yeah I doubt it. Do we have an accounting of where everyone who signed stands or is this just a fact free assertion? The grudge against the Harper’s letter is just tribalism and it’s really a bit much at this point.

So much for the independence of the justice department. Not only have they abandoned norms but they sprint in the opposite direction towards obviously immoral abuses of power and Republicans don’t bat an eyelash.

Had to double check if this was real. It is.

And from one of the scary textbook chapters.

The best thread I have seen on tonight’s events

The union representing the musicians from Jimmy Kimmel’s band releases a statement calling the FCC’s pressure on Disney “state censorship.”

Meanwhile the AAUP’s advice to academics

'Liberalism is always doomed to failure' is just a very odd thing to say after roughly 250 years of liberalism being on the march. In 1750 there were between 0 and 1 liberal countries on Earth, depending on the line you want to cut the line on the Dutch Republic. Today there are ~80 of them.

Everything old is new again

People can say any horrible thing they want about Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump or anyone else. And the government is forbidden from taking retaliatory action against them.

Far more dangerous than Trump, I think, is how quickly the last eight months have pulled back the curtain on America's elites and shown everyone how venal, how cowardly and how utterly mediocre the foundation of our society has been.

I don’t like the advice that the AAUP issued here. Maybe some of the advice is good. But a bunch of it is basically saying, “be quiet. Be afraid.”

I did not think that threats and bullying would work this well, I have to say. Mea culpa.

No law authorizes the president to designate something as a domestic terrorist org (only a foreign terrorist org), so it will be interesting to see what law he invokes here (if any). “Domestic terrorism” is more of a concept than anything with a legal underpinning.

ROVE: “.. Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous. It will further divide and embitter our country. No good thing will come of it.” @wsj.com www.wsj.com/opinion/they...

What America is going through is not unusual in historical terms. Plenty of examples like it today elsewhere in the world. What makes it unusual is the rapid collapse from a set of widely espoused norms and values that centered on liberty. It is the sacking of the shining city on hill that shocks.

Ilya Shapiro remains the least serious "libertarian" on Earth (and there is a ton of competition for that title).

The causal analysis in this article is so weak. As far as I can tell this is the paragraph that most clearly lays it out? Was it the way media portrayed the right that brought us Trump or something more fundamental? I think probably the latter. substack.com/home/post/p-...

I sometimes see people say that you should start with first principles and follow them wherever they lead. That’s too rigid and your principles could be wrong. What you really need is something more like reflective equilibrium, balancing principles against their consequences.

Among voters, there's effectively been an 11pt uniform swing against Trump, from his 2024 result to his approval rating

Donald Trump's approval rating has fallen to -17 in our tracker, the worst of his second term www.economist.com/interactive/...

And this is why, notwithstanding the formal protections provided by the First Amendment, the federal gov possesses extraordinary power to control public debate--power it is wielding aggressively right now.

It *is* a legitimately impeachable offense. No shortage of those, whether or not Congress acts on them.

You get into very dangerous territory when one party tries to criminalize the opposition. That is exactly what the Trump administration is loudly signaling it will do right now.

Getting more sinister by the minute www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

The Trump administration is flat out lying. They are making completely baseless claims about the involvement of left wing groups in violence against conservatives. It’s completely disgraceful and it’s dangerous.

What this really is is a Vice President trying to foment divisions and inflame tensions within our society for political gain. Horribly irresponsible and with ill intent.

"I'm sorry I offhandedly suggested we systematically murder mentally-ill homeless people" is a thing now, I guess. Hey, I suppose at least he didn't say "I'm sorry that you were offended by that."

The rhetoric in the second paragraph is authoritarian. We need to recognize it for what it is. This "plan to restore civil order" and "campaign to disrupt domestic terror networks in all fifty states" sounds like a call to turn the US into a police state.

Recommend the video Good statement by Bernie Sanders

Matt’s post is very good. The replies illustrate what’s wrong with this website.

This has nothing to do with the Harper’s letter, just people trying to settle old political scores.