“Ah, just one more thing, sir. You’re blowing up those boats, saying they’re filled with drugs headed for the US. But then you go and pardon the guy who brought in 400 tons of cocaine. That’s billions of doses. Help me understand that.”

Useful 🧵 on how Europe can and must stand up to Russia by itself now that the U.S. has effectively abandoned western security in favor of profits for a few.

Did Timothy McVeigh assimilate? Did the thousands of Trump supporters who engaged in an unprecedented violent assault on the heart of our government assimilate? They seem stuck on valued wholly alien to this country's. The Founders would be embarrassed.

How did the turkeys meet the "tried to overturn Democratic election results" criteria for receiving a presidential pardon? At pardoning ceremony, Trump informs turkey of all he’s accomplished www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/...

I'm horrified and praying for the two National Guard members shot in Washington, DC, and their loved ones. No family should endure the trauma of gun violence, especially so close to Thanksgiving.

Extremely valuable 🧵 setting the record straight on numerous persistent falsehoods about Ukraine. Particularly galling that we have $20 billion to cover corrupt far-right Milei's economic mismanagement in Argentina but not one dime to help democratic Ukraine save the West.

Seems to me the Truth keeps showing up with a tow tag in our fair town.

Only Ukraine's victory will end the war. Western democracies should be united to defeat russian fascist aggression. The war wish-list (falsely presented as a "U.S. peace plan") is the agenda of the rashists in Moscow. If adopted in any form it guarantees global war will ensue.

The US does virtually nothing for Ukraine - some intelligence & some arms Europe pays for. Trump is a full-fledged supporter of Putin & not entitled to any voice on Ukraine. Ukraine & Europe should just ignore the Kremlin proposal that Trump embraces as his.

Just an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

Senior Russian officials are very clear that the purported "peace plan" that Putin dictated to Trump is only a means of destroying the Ukrainian armed forces to pave the way for the final conquest of Ukraine. And nothing in the plan provides any meaningful outside guarantees. Shameful.

Crucial summary from someone who bravely served our country. We don't need the shame of our own Munich.

But we are supposed to believe that the administration’s attack on higher education is about fighting anti-semitism. OK wapo.st/3Mbd9a6

they were buying politicians long before Citizens United. The rich won't be as stupid as we want them to be. They did not need CU, it was just a convenience

Breathtaking substitution here: giving people money does not make them "informed consumers": it makes them consumers who are much more vulnerable to exploitation precisely because of their lack of information. Simply assuming information on something this complex and critical is jaw-dropping.

The equivalent of going skydiving with your little brother's bookbag instead of a parachute. Olympic level incompetence.

Any “peace plan” that calls for Ukraine to disarm is an obvious attempt to prepare the ground for the next stage of Russia’s invasion. There is no other conceivable reason to weaken Ukraine’s defenses. Nobody can seriously suggest Moscow views Ukraine as a military threat

The truth hurts.

If you compare their "work" when they were on their extended Epsteincation with the work they did this spring and summer passing Trump's megabill, I cannot disagree that they do better "work" when they are not here.

It's remarkable that the number of news analyses/pundit takes that the Democrats are too extreme--out of touch, too focused on divisive cultural issues, too beholden to progressive orthodoxy--far exceeds the articles on the Trump/GOP's connections to the far right. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/u...

The fact that @harvard.edu's Larry Summers is teaching three courses this semester while Texas A&M Professor Melissa McCoul was fired tells you all you need to know about what "gender ideology" is allowed and which is not. @aaup.org

For thirty years I worked in the post-Soviet successor states in Central Asia and observed over and over again precisely the cycle that Bill Kristol describes. Corruption leads to authoritarianism, directly. The path is utterly predictable.

NEW: Epstein survivors release the most powerful PSA I have ever seen. Make this go viral so every member of the House of Representatives sees it.

We should not rule out people with sincere beliefs with which we disagree. But we absolutely should rule out people whose direction swings wildly like a weathervane. A few conversions are plausible, but repeated opportunism makes a candidate both untrustworthy and often unelectable.

They do that all the time. Capital gains tax cuts are always said to gain money due to realizations; they never admit to any revenue losses. Plus dynamic effects (which only go one way, of course). And anti-immigrant policies are said to create jobs despite making some businesses unviable.

The Founders were so concerned about bribery that the Constitution forbids it three separate times. Two emoluments clauses ban officials—unambiguously including the president—from accepting things of value, plus bribery is the only named impeachable offense besides treason. Unprecedentedly corrupt.

THIS. Teenage victims have a completely different set of prejudices to deal with. Trust me, I know. Grooming is probably the least understood aspect of child abuse.

As NATO is so aggressive, we have moved our border guards from where NATO *is* on our Estonian border, and sent them to die in Ukraine, where NATO *is not*

Seeing this picture, I can't help wondering if President Trump does not know how things turned out for the mythological King Midas. The golden touch actually was not a good thing. The story seeks to cut through our superficiality, but that's a tall order when it comes to him.

Sometimes you have an experience like this and years later see the man thanked for his mentorship by another man in the preface to the latter’s book, and it really burns

The fact that Summers remained so popular after questioning the intellectual abilities of women is really a pretty harsh indictment of US society as a whole and particularly the elite circles Summers travels in, and Democrats should have kicked him to the curb for that shit.

A lot of the (often quite powerful!) guys emailing Epstein were asking him for dating advice, which seems to suggest that they saw his own sex life as aspirational.

If women are underrepresented in STEM, it's at least partly because men like this offer mentoring, then embarrass themselves by assuming their mentees must be into them, then decide the best solution is to cut ties, which sends the signal to other faculty that the mentee must not be good enough.

This proposed action is completely illegal. As with their demands for confidential information on SNAP households and their cutoff of all SNAP during the shutdown, the Administration is again purporting to wield powers Congress clearly did not give it. So determined to harm they disregard the law.

Useful 🧵 on how to respond to grotesque sexism in academia. I would add that, for someone of the power of Summers, one must scholarly impact by netting what we learned from his works against what we could have learned had he not suppressed the careers of numerous bright, promising scholars.

As much as I prefer debating issues, this is correct, both for the reasons stated and because MAGA's hold on many voters' support on many issues springs from their having more credibility than Dems. Epstein shows how dishonest they are, opening the door to doubts on their other statements.

🎯

I am begging America to not be stupid enough to embrace a racist and an antisemite because Donald Trump thinks she's a meanie. Just grab some popcorn and watch the Nazis fight.

My latest on how easy it is to confuse who is really doing what in Congress. Issuing praise or retribution without knowing what is going on just makes matters worse. Balkinization: The Perils of Superficial Political Analysis share.google/YzYODgos1Uhz...

My latest on the lessons from the Administration's horrific freeze of SNAP food assistance. Balkinization: What the Administration’s SNAP Freeze Teaches Us share.google/PSeuJtcugMGO...

In the Trump Administration's latest Supreme Court filing, it condemns the lower courts for interfering with "how the Executive exercises its discretionary authority over appropriating limited funds among competing priorities." Actually, the Appropriations Clause gives that power to Congress.

Sounds like a violation of the 27th Amendment.

I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

More chaos and cruelty in SNAP. A short 🧵. On Thursday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered USDA to issue full SNAP benefits for November by Friday, using unneeded extra funds in the child nutrition account. Several states responded by starting work on issuing full benefits. 1/

USDA issued guidance Friday saying it was working toward full issuance of SNAP benefits for November. It did not say "this policy will change if we get a stay". They left it in force for roughly a day after they got a stay. Many states issued full SNAP benefits. Now USDA is angry at those states.

The growing consensus on Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's order tonight: a horrible situation, handled strategically (from @stevevladeck.bsky.social) www.stevevladeck.com/p/190-snap-wtf

Key point: Justice Jackson did not think the Supreme Court should decide this case without a full opinion from the First Circuit, especially because the urgency of the crisis prevented the district court from writing much. We should expect a meaningful opinion from the First Circuit in a day or two.

Pam Bondi tweeted that she is outraged that the Court intervened rather than allow the Administration to seek a political resolution. That sounds a lot like an admission that they are trying to deprive 42 million people of food for political leverage. They don't deny they have the power to fix it.

USDA has left states to guess what crazy policy it will adopt next. Some are quite reasonably issuing benefits in compliance with the unstayed court order. It could end up that most of the benefits the Administration will be asking the Supreme Court to stop are in red states.