It was @asharangappa.bsky.social who first put this idea in my head, but really starting to feel like they're gonna try to get Maduro to cop to some insane 2020 election conspiracy in exchange for leniency www.reuters.com/world/americ...

Would be comical if it weren't so sinister. What happens if they grab voting machines in 2026 before the results are official?

Journalist @ariberman.bsky.social says the FBI raid on election offices in Georgia is part of a "concerted effort" by the Trump administration to interfere in this year's midterms. https://www.democracynow.org/2026/2/2/fulton_county_georgia_election

NEW: Abigail Spanberger this afternoon ordered that all state agencies leave ICE's 287(g) program. This means that the state police (and some other agencies) will no longer be empowered to detain and arrest people for ICE. Big, big move by the governor within weeks of coming into office.

I think some people may have thought i was exaggerating the extremely gendered maga perceptions of liberal weakness. I offer this as a rebuttal. bsky.app/profile/radl...

Wyden was doing the same “hey, over here!” routine about the §215 bulk phone program long before anyone heard the name Edward Snowden.

You could cover the salaries of a hell of a lot of reporters for the sum Amazon paid to make a money-losing propaganda film about Trump’s mail-order bride.

"But a funny thing has happened with Miller's authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they're encountering opposition in...regions that backed Trump in 2024."

This is how Sen. Ron Wyden clues the public into activity that he finds extremely alarming. He does a press release about a letter he sent to the director of the CIA that basically says, 'I want to make sure you saw the classified letter I sent early today.' www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

Trump has weaponized every other part of the federal government, but we’ve heard surprisingly little about the Intelligence Community proper. It’s a shoe I’ve been anxiously waiting to drop for the past year.

I don’t like this

Denaturalization as criminal punishment is not a thing in American law, it's unconstitutional under any circumstances. It can only be done in the narrow case of somebody who fraudulently obtained the naturalization itself. Otherwise they are no different from natural-born citizens who commit crimes.

UPDATE: what you get for blurting the truth: www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/u...

Groundhog Day Meaning xkcd.com/3202/

The spirit of this is right, but “the press” as shorthand for “journalists” did not come into vogue until decades after the ratification of the Bill of Rights. The “freedom of the press” is the right of anyone to publish as well as speak, not a protection for a specific profession.

chat is it a good thing when the US Attorney representing the DOJ is also afraid of getting disappeared by the same organizations they're representing

Jacob Frey: "The continued presence of 2,000 federal agents in a city that only has 600 police officers is still not deescalation"

If you thought "This job sucks, please hold me in contempt" was wild, try reading the next 10 pages of the transcript. Just beggars belief.

Related: A lot of folks think having the maximally cynical read on everything makes them savvy, but a reflexive cynicism is just a kind of inverted naïveté

Too many people on Bluesky think that relentless expressions of despair are a sign of intellectual sophistication.

Believe all these guys when they act like they’re in a war against America. They think they are.

It’s just racism. There’s no immigration problem

in order to save this country we are probably going to have to do things that make rich men sad 😔

In Kash's mind, FBI agents are not law enforcement officers. They are soldiers in a political battle against Trump's domestic opponents, of whichever party.

Well, WaPo certainly picked the worst possible day to send me an e-mail reminder about my subscription renewing soon.

A judge orders ICE to release two men, only for ICE to immediately re-arrest them after the court hearing. Brazen lawlessness. www.startribune.com/mn-venezuela...

The most astonishing thing here is that they seem surprised that abandoning the paper's liberal leanings to seek a more conservative audience destroyed its revenue base. DC votes 95 percent Dem in every election. Stevie Wonder could have seen the result of this coming.

A thing that is funny about the moral grandstanding by Repubs re: Christopher Columbus is that nobody knew or cared about him 100 years ago. His "holiday" is barely 50 years old and was pushed through by Italian-American lobby groups in response to...anti-immigrant prejudice.

Incredible. They destroyed a great newspaper because they hated the people who actually paid for it and read it so much that they'd rather scrap the paper if they couldn't get Tucker Carlson's audience bsky.app/profile/maxt...

I think one thing people outside Minnesota don't understand is that after Good and Pretti were killed by feds while observing, the most normal people you could imagine have made peace with the fact that they could be next, and they are still out there because they say it's the right thing to do.

A publisher who lays off a reporter whose pen is freezing because she's covering a frigid war zone while dodging missiles is not an editor you want to work for, in a more perfect world

Timothy Snyder writes, "Should a major ICE operation go forward in Springfield, it would be the ethnic cleansing of an American city. To be sure, the appearance of racial difference drives ICE raids all over the country. But in this case we have a clear trail from public racism to practical policy."

Of course. DHS lied again. Right after they murdered Renee Good, they shot a young couple in Portland. Then lied about it. They were *not* gang members. And she wasn’t “involved” in a shooting, she was a victim of sexual assault. apple.news/AeMvL-19yS1S...

With Trump once again blaming Black cities for "voter fraud," it's worth revisiting our piece about why this is a playbook as old as the nation --- and how it makes these accusations more believable to Whites: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Jim Jordan starts another censorship-hoax hearing, where you're asked to believe that Europe regulating its market has been a 10 year plot to mass censor the global internet. That's right: you couldn't talk about COVID or US elections and you never knew 🙄https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLHJJ_wjADU

The headline should be, "DHS to keep 2,000 immigration officers in Minnesota." Instead, it seems the entirety of the traditional media went with, "DHS to withdraw 700 immigration officers from Minnesota." This presser worked like a charm.

But of course. @cnn.com www.cnn.com/2026/02/04/p...

With the closing of the Kennedy Center and the cuts at the Post, the Washington, DC metro area has lost its biggest arts institution and of its largest local journalism outlet.

Very sad to see yet another news outlet eradicate jobs for journalists. Reliable information about the world and what’s happening in it, from local to global scale, is harder to get with fewer and fewer skilled people whose mission is to provide it. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/b...

Homan is smarter than Bovino (no real feat, there). He understands that if he does stuff that signals that we’re in the denouement of the crisis, media will move on. But brutality with observers is escalating, ICE is still omnipresent. Little sign on the ground that it’s over

Johnson has chosen to elaborate on his disingenuous dim sum theology. You start with a construct you want to rationalize, then assemble a crazy quilt of justification by plucking passages from various books written centuries apart by different authors. Several of which are forgeries, by the by.

@kenwhite.bsky.social gets at an important point here: the peddlers of this stuff aren't just wrong and muddled about what free speech means. They are actively hostile to it. The whole game is insisting some people's speech is bad for speech so they should be compelled to shut up.

This, from @kenwhite.bsky.social in @theunpopulist.net, is a genuine must-read. If the current state of free speech discourse interests you—and especially if it infuriates you—this is a critical reframe steering us away from the idea that bad-faith actors are actually our free speech heroes.

Now look, that’s just madness. Think of all the pay-per-view revenue you lose by doing it simultaneously.

The George Will rule applies here: Every statement made by the administration by or about it DHS activities must be presumed a lie until proven otherwise. bsky.app/profile/atru...

The guy who owns Amazon shutting down the books section of the Washington Post is beyond parody

You can pick “biblical” passages that justify murdering and enslaving anyone outside your ethnostate, and others that that demand treating all persons with equal dignity regardless of nationality. Mike’s just decided which set he prefers.

I talked to a woman who quit an AUSA job recently. She was asked by main DOJ to dismiss a Medicare fraud prosecution because the defendant was the daughter of a girlfriend of a MAGA figure.

Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.

I also think "he was literally selling pardons, none of these are legitimate" is a great message.