the idea that invading venezuela would somehow be a distraction from the epstein files sort of falls apart when you realize invading venezuela may in fact be less popular than trump's handling of the epstein files.

So here's Trump year in Economist/YouGov polling - a brutal, ongoing rejection by the American people of all shapes and sizes.

74% of voters want Trump to get Congressional approval to invade Venezuela. Only 11% OK with him going alone. 11%!!!!!!!!

Invading Venezuela is a close second: 19% approve, 60% disapprove.

So we may have found the single most unpopular thing Trump has done in 2025 - the vainglorious renaming of the Kennedy Center after himself (via Economist/YouGov): 18% approve, 66% disapprove

you can always tell the straight shooters because they defend their friends when their friends become fascist regime apparatchiks.

The linked article below is a great read. Again I find myself almost having to thank Bari Weiss, for highlighting these connections between authoritarian politics and incompetence.

Yea. Anyone who has even take a cursory look at the literature on fascism and tyranny can see the vast majority of these people were incompetent. Fascists generally lack a theory of other minds, so it confounds them when their plans fail, or people don’t comply with them.

yeah...this is a really common confusion, but fascists (and evil people generally) are often extremely incompetent. bigotry is a massive moral error which leads to cognitive errors. www.everythingishorrible.net/p/white-supr...

So... the next questions for 2026 will be: A: Does Trump just ignore this and send the National Guard anyway, and what, if anything, will SCOTUS do about it when they are ignored? B: Will Trump send the Army and violate Posse Comitatus? C: Will the Court cave on what Posse Comitatus means?

The rest of the debate is: Kavanaugh: We should make it easier for him to send the Army Alito/Thomas: Trump can do whatever he wants because he said so. Gorsuch: I don't like using the Shadow Docket when I lose, I only like using it when I win.

My summary of Trump's loss in the National Guard case: If Trump wants to attack chicago, he's gotta send the Army *first* then say that the Army can't get it done... but first he has to prove that the Army is allowed to go in, without violating Posse Comitatus. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25p...

In case people tell you that public criticism of the court doesn’t matter, here’s Brett Kavanaugh trying to walk back what he said in the ICE roving patrol case - when he blessed racial profiling & called the stops prompt. He was lambasted; @akalhan.bsky.social coined the term “Kavanaugh stops”

Kavanaugh tries to put the "Kavanaugh Stops" genie back in the bottle

kavanaugh not beating the allegations that he’s a dumbass

Michael Crawford?!

argh; yearly freelance collapse has begun. 1 of my steady clients says they won't be using me anymore. another has cut back. if you think my writing is valuable , subscribing to my newsletter is a big help. it's $50/y, $5/mo www.everythingishorrible.net/subscribe

You wanna sue people? Fine, you can wait till you’re out of office and can sue them in your private capacity

It is crazy that the president can sue anyone while he is president by the way. There is always incentive to settle if he is office and it always effectively a bribe. Congress needs to eliminate that possibility

Because Vance is a public figure he is apparently more immune than I am from making insane, factually incorrect initially harmful statements. The president can sue you but according to the Supreme Court you cannot sue him

In a just a world I should be able to sue Vance for stating publicly that I was part of a conspiracy by open society to smear Charlie Kirk because it resulted in harm to me including death and rape threats and so on but that is not how our law works.

Of course they have. But when they can do it publicly it adds a new level of danger for the critic and they know that. People who have already been radicalized can be motivated to go after those people using mass comms that didn’t exist during the Nixon or McCarthy eras

JD Vance said publicly that I was a soulless hack paid by George Soros’s org to bash Charlie Kirk and I got death threads and stalking nonsense as a result. And it’s not that government officials in the executive branch haven’t targeted individual journalists before …

And powerful people don’t have to drag you into court to make your life hell either. If they’re Elon Musk they can complain on the platform they own. And it’s no longer verboten for the President or cabinet members to attack critics personally or lie about them

Btw this is one of the biggest reasons why it’s not as easy as people think to start up independent newsrooms or just be an indie journalist on substack. If you are actually holding powerful and rich people to account, you WILL need legal representation. Not a matter of whether but when

the problem with reading good poetry is that it reminds you that your poems aren't shit.

Gee, weren't there some ivory tower midwits out here claiming that not only was the zero unwarranted, but the paper deserved a passing grade?

the best way to protect Jewish people from fascism in the US is to fight fascism in the US. It is not to protect a violent fascist government in Israel.

This means the VA won't cover abortions EVEN in the case of rape, incest, or serious threat to the health of the patient. The DOJ memo was authored by Josh Craddock, one of the chief legal advocates for fetal personhood, i.e. imposing a nationwide abortion ban through the courts.

But it does tell me that they have limited experience working on stories where powerful people don’t want the truth to get out or are determined to throw their weight around to censor coverage

As a 49 year old I am shocked by how many people like Jenkins make it this far without understanding that stonewalling and / or denials are not de facto story killers. And if they were we wouldn’t know a 10th of what we know about abuses of power

Weiss knows this, if Jenkins does not, maybe she shouldn’t be commenting on stories where the subjects are unlikely to comment and will go to great lengths not to, and write arounds and the like are necessary and common

There’s also the matter of getting people on the record, it is ideal but not necessary. Watergate was a story that hinged on a single anonymous but well vetted source. In sexual assault stories, the accused pretty much never goes on the record. The WH has little incentive to here

In which case, comment has been obtained in every effective sense but cannot be used, d) Weiss probably already knows this because she was an editor at the NYT and even if she sucked at it she would be held to their standards re asking for comment

Having had to ask the White House, the CIA, multiple billionaires, and creepy malicious people like the Church of Scientology for comment: a) refusal to comment is a comment, b) 24 hrs is a reasonable time frame and they had much longer than that, c) spokespeople often comment, deny off the record

It's funny how us parochial Americans generally seem to perceive that the EV revolution is stalling or reversing when in fact it's accelerating rapidly worldwide. 25% of cars sold globally in 2025 were EVs! It's mostly just the US that's being left behind

Gosh. I'm wondering what ruling by which Supreme Court Justice might have previously given CBP and ICE the idea that they could just detain people and throw them behind bars for an extended period of time based on the color of their skin and nothing else?

The reason @martylederman.bsky.social’s brief was so effective is because it gave Roberts and Barrett (and Kav) a way to vote against Trump without calling him a fucking liar, which is what the lower courts based their decisions on

Worth remembering that Bari Weiss signed that oh-so-remarkable Harper’s Letter about the vital importance of free speech and the need to resist attacks on it. I know that letter is five years old now, but utterly annoys me as much today as it did when it came out. So transparently bad.

BREAKING The US Supreme Court has blocked President Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago. 6-3 vote with Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissenting.

look at how little effort it takes for someone on the conservative grievance circuit to destroy a life millions of college kids have half assed an assignment at the last minute, you eat the F and move on but the effort to push trans people out of public life will use whatever it can get

oh, missed this! my story about an intrepid kangaroo who defies a world of ice to invent cats has been published in this fun collection. nat1publishing.com/children/fro...

this seems bad.

Do we really think Stephen Miller or Tom Homan would have said anything to 60 Minutes that would surprise us? Do they ever?

This is totally underreported. Trump is not just going after "illegals." He's going after people who were here legally, by changing their status. These are people who entered the US the right way, and never broke a law. Now they are subject to Trump's whim, his ICE goons, and inhuman detention.

this is one of the odder things I wrote this year. still quite like it on reread.

I am pretty sick of the mcu films and would like them to stop at this point. but nobody asked me, obviously...

just amazing how cruel this is in the middle of what sure looks like a brutal recession.

I was always underwhelmed by chris evans' performance in the mcu, but he's done a bunch of really fun things since then? haven't seen anything but really enjoyed him in knives out and materialists. and he was the only good thing about the gray man.

Chris Evans watching through his kitchen window as the truck Disney sent slowly backs up to fill his swimming pool with Scrooge McDuck’s gold.