NOW: Protest in DC tonight at 14 and U streets, shutting down traffic in both directions.

Rally against ICE terrorism in Boston Common

Protests mounting against ICE in various parts of D.C. tonight. In the middle of the U Street corridor, occupying the intersection with 14th Street: “Remember Renee Good,” one of the many signs here reads.

President Trump withdrew the U.S. on Wednesday from dozens of international organizations intended to foster multinational cooperation, cutting ties with a wide range of prominent forums addressing international security, law, trade, economics and human rights.

Here's a vicious attempt to destroy the rules-based international order since US funding is crucial to many of these institutions. The US wants to go it alone not realizing how much these international organizations do for us. Insanity amplified by arrogance. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Where Americans see common political purpose by gender, race or generation. www.pbump.net/o/americans-...

🚨 the best state policy & public opinion database is now online. ~200 (!!!) state policies and 80 public opinion series on abortion, labor, taxes, environment, guns, education… dynamicdemocracy.shinyapps.io Massive public goods provision from @devincaughey.bsky.social & @chriswarshaw.bsky.social

A reminder - before Trump, MAGA, Musk and Fox rewrote history - that this is what the entire country agreed had happened five years ago today:

1/Leaders are abducted/allies are threatened but pundits and governments are scratching their heads on what the US is doing. Danish PM on Greenland "It makes absolutely no sense". Why? Because actors using old IR models when we need a new lens. Enter neo-royalism. abcnews.go.com/Internationa...

The failure of our elites to hold Trump accountable for January 6th is as disgraceful as what happened on that awful day. Since 2010, 35 democratic leaders around the world have been criminally convicted. Only Trump went unpunished and unconstrained. Now he threatens democracy at home and abroad.

Five years ago tomorrow, thousands of the president's supporters stormed the Capitol. Trump has since dubbed Jan. 6 a "day of love." Scroll through @propublica.org's massive trove of parler videos -- organized by time and location -- from that day and judge for yourself:

And third: stepping back from political analysis to try to understand how people think about their own political identity -- and why that's so far from a simple question

What a bizarre performative takeover in Venezuela where the actual government denies it has been overthrown and continues in power. There is a huge gap b/w Trump’s statements and the facts on the ground. A lot of anti-Maduro Venezuelans are going to be pretty upset when things stay exactly the same.

📜 From Old Books, 16th Century “The speech of the learned is a blessing; the speech of the ignorant is a disaster. The silence of the learned is a disaster; the silence of the ignorant is a blessing.”

So this means all those US warships stationed off the coast of Venezuela will go home now, right?

“My biggest regret is being too reassuring, wanting to believe that American politics had returned to normal.” - Amanda Sloat, Senior Director for Europe in the National Security Council under President Biden. time.com/7340472/trum...

"The Constitution vests the power of declaring War with Congress, therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorised such a measure." George Washington

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

Here's a dangerous effort to carve out a loophole in presidential war powers big enough to drive a tank through. If such an authority existed, the president could invade anywhere, anytime, without involving Congress—just by claiming, without proof, that an attack is "imminent."

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

Humans have emitted 2750 gigatons of CO2 since the industrial revolution from burning fossil fuels and land use change. To put this in perspective, this is more than the (dry) mass of all living things on earth and everything humans have ever built combined:

New research in International Migration Review: US visitor visa rejection rates are more than double for applicants from Africa compared to Europe. And this disparity isn't explained by economics, demographics, or even visa overstay rates. 🧵

This is the "testing the waters" phase of the playbook. The GOP ecosystem targets groups like Somalis, Haitians, and trans people specifically because they've calculated that the average person's passive disapproval won't ever turn into active defense. They're exploiting public apathy.

Health care costs have officially spiked for millions as Affordable Care Act subsidies lapsed at midnight thanks to GOP inaction

Breathtaking series of constitutional violations and high crimes or misdemeanors. At the heart of the framers’ reasons for creating the Constitution. Trump’s Tangled Web of Deal-Making, Policy and Riches www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Mamdani: For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty

I hope Mamdani's speech will be cited in future history books as the moment America as a whole began executing a U-turn on Reagan's toxic "government is the problem" legacy. www.youtube.com/shorts/iF8h9...

An official account of the United States government is dreamposting about deporting 80+ million citizens

There are only 45 million foreign-born people living in the United States right now, about half of whom are naturalized citizens. So this ridiculous edge-lord post by taxpayer-funded trolls is suggesting deporting 55 million native-born citizens.

House Judiciary Committee releases on New Years Eve (in an obvious attempt to bury this info) the Jack Smith deposition transcript. I recommend doing a word search for "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." And explanation of disenfranchisement of urban areas. judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

Sometimes I think about how even when Trump and his crew are overthrown, the rest of the world will never trust American voters and politicians again and soft power was its most successful foreign policy, and while the ideologues in charge don’t understand that, Putin does

My latest list of China books of the year up at @fivebooks.com —along with an interview (key to read for a sense of the books AND at the end has a note explaining some of the rules I set myself embarking on an impossible task given how many good works keep coming out) fivebooks.com/best-books/t...

Canvas used to be helpful but that time has passed. Last semester I gravitated some of my course materials off Canvas. This coming semester I will pull off even more.

All of the top-10 books borrowed through the public library app Libby were written by women. And Kristin Hannah's The Women was the top check-out in many library system around the country. n.pr/49tGkyq

The utter perversion of the #BrokenTimes' both-sidesing compulsion: Here it equates the right-wing ruin of New College with (checks notes) liberal (in any sense of the word) education, which it dismisses as just another "ideological bubble." Just fuck off.

Barely a blip in the news. 🦗from the New York Times editorial and opinion pages. Compare with days of Hunter Biden Hysteria about unprecedented abuse of the pardon power.

unironically a good idea

i live in a major historic black city represented by a white republican solely because of a gerrymander where's my article

The U.S. military is being used inside the United States. There's a lot we don't know about how, why, and under what authorities. Lawfare's Domestic Deployments tracker and map, updated by Loren Voss, shows we know—and don’t know—about certain domestic military deployments.

As you celebrate the holidays, here are 10 things to know about the dramatic changes to how NSF does business. This story looks at merit review. The second part will explain the significance of NSF's new structure. www.science.org/content/arti...

“.. We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said .. as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.” @washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

I count 10 cities in 2025 that are on track to have the fewest murders since at least 1970. Newark is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1956 (though only have data through Oct this year) and San Francisco is on pace to have the fewest murders since 1942.

the most notable thing JD Vance has done in the last five years is tell vicious racist lies about immigrants. If you think he hasn't taken a side on bigotry, you are an idiot. He's for it. He's very strongly for it.

The “free speech” and “cancel culture” panics have led to overt state censorship because that was always their purpose. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

!! Here’s a link to full video of the 60 Minutes segment that Bari Weiss killed last minute, via @jasonparis.bsky.social: is.gd/paU8Ko (It was uploaded to the Global TV app in Canada, seemingly by accident, and has now been taken down)

NEW AT DEMOGRAPHY: We use difference-in-difference approach using applicant vs. implemented counties w/ 287(g) ICE agreements 2000-2020 to identify a plausibly causal effect immigration enforcement leading to sizeable increase in Latino-White segregation. OPEN ACCESS PDF doi.org/10.1215/0070...

Exactly what we expected

The New York Times investigated 346 people who donated at least $250,000 to Trump and found that more than half of them (197) have received pardons, jobs, government contracts, special treatment, or favors.

The story is insane. The acting head of cyber security, a Noem crony, repeatedly demanded to see highly classified information he didn’t need access to, and when staff set up a lie detector test as a condition to grant him access, he failed it. So DHS suspended the staffers.

This and the discussion about how academics can now just read AI summaries of things really drives home how much these guys always confuse the product for the goal. You don't do a coloring sheet because you want to have a colored sheet at the end!!! The coloring is the point!!!