one thing that still baffles me is that orchestrated spate of right wing talking points about how the alleged shooting at the WHCD should end any debate over the ballroom it made absolutely zero fuckin sense lol it still makes zero fuckin sense lol

Slightly diminish a book Absalom, Absalom.

By gutting the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court is killing the Second Reconstruction. The first Reconstruction shows how Congress should respond. Me and Daphna Renan in the NYT on the tools we have to save democracy from a hostile Court.

there really is like a society wide, party neutral affliction of people not caring whether something is true or not and I can't say I care for it!!!!!!!!!

John Lewis had John Roberts' number from the jump: takebackthecourt.substack.com/p/john-lewis...

This move by SCOTUS is deeply insulting. The district court gathered a massive amount of evidence in record time, and District Judge Jeffrey Brown wrote a careful 160-page opinion. Now a majority of justices have dispensed with it without even providing a full written opinion.

There is a competitive primary in NY-12 for Congress. I have long been 100% all in on @alexbores.nyc for a long time. The Ezra Klein Show just dropped a 90-minute interview with him called "Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?" and it is the single best case for why this race matters.

For those interested, here’s a link to News Center Maine’s (Phil Hirschkorn’s) profile of my candidacy for the US Senate. Brief overview at the top and more in-depth questions and answers video at the bottom following the text... www.newscentermaine.com/article/news...

All federal wind power R&D at the Department of Energy is $0.137 billion. So the government is paying 7x the amount it spends on all wind power R&D just for a fee to kill one wind project. Seems bad.

If you watch and share one thing today make at this. Why is every democrat in the country not talking like this?

Reminder: The Trump regime cancelled nearly $500 million in federal contracts for mRNA vaccine development last year.

All right, this piece has triggered me so I have to yell a bit (though this is bluesky, so I realize I'm just preaching at the choir):

There’s so much to say about the remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak—and I’ll say a lot of it in Monday’s newsletter. But the most striking thing about all of it is the role & behavior of Chief Justice Roberts. “Calling balls and strikes” this ain’t: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

Why do markets keep being surprised by this cycle where Trump makes an unsupported positive announcement on Friday near market close, insiders make trades based on the expected announcement shortly beforehand, the market moves based on the announcement, and then it’s revealed later to all be bs.

Center-left parties are nothing like far right authoritarian parties

this is a boring take but if we want this from a Dem President in 2029 we need to deliver the type of huge legislative majority Magyar just achieved and not the razor-thin one that Biden was forced to work with.

more seriously congrats to the hungarian people for kicking that asshole out

HELL YEAH

Trying to imagine what Republicans would have said if Kamala Harris met a bunch of Iranian regime figures in Pakistan to negotiate with them over whether to release Iran’s frozen assets and let them charge a toll to pass through the strait of Hormuz

This is exactly what you’d say if you never laid any mines but wanted people to think you did and could again

This is so well done. 👌

"This is what you get when you elect Republicans." Every Dem within 100 feet of a camera needs to be saying this repeatedly. Every time we elect Republicans, we get dumbass wars, tax cuts for rich people, and financial crises. Every time. Fucking say it!

It's moments like the one we are in when I have to say: liberals were right. We were always right. Yet we will never get credit for being right, because being right is not valued in America. HRC was right. They called her a bitch.

You don't actually have to let a madman do whatever he wants. You don't have to do that! The Founders put impeachment in the Constitution for a reason. You can use it!

I hate the too-cool-for-school attitude of dismissing this with a "but they won't." That is surrendering in advance. The pressure should be put on them, the message should be unrelenting that this is what must be done and they're the ones refusing to do it. Don't act like they don't have agency.

I don't think Kamala Harris would've threatened to commit genocide in Iran on a random Tuesday morning a month after starting an unwinnable war with them for no reason

A U.S. Army staff sergeant and his wife arrived at his base in Louisiana last week, ready to start their new life together. Instead, ICE detained her. She was brought to the U.S. as a toddler. People like her should be citizens, not treated like criminals.

The bird

Pour one out for this piece. Thanks for nothing, Pam!

Spreading the good news! There will soon be Indian food at Taco Bell

Joyce Carol Oats is an excellent validation of any take of the form “X renowned writer/philosopher would’ve loved poasting” because she’s a renowned author who is also a generational poster

Oh, well, in that case

This. The court may even pair the release of the ruling in favor of birthright citizenship with the one gutting the Voting Rights Act, and the usual suspects will proclaim it’s a sign of moderation

Pentecost, by Friar Juan Bautista Maíno, 1615-20, 📸 via @MarchMadnessMBB

Honestly cannot think of a time I knew less what was going to happen at court than I feel ahead of oral arguments on birthright citizenship tomorrow. The fact that this is getting a full hearing instead of a 9-0, per curiam, benchslap is already beyond disturbing.

Response to that weird Moyn thing criticizing me, @evanbernick.bsky.social @anthonymkreis.bsky.social @jedshug.bsky.social et al for being able to think that the attack on birthright citizenship is a political hack job AND that its legal arguments can be refuted balkin.blogspot.com/2026/03/poli...

And what happened next?

>10,000 STEM PhDs have left federal service over the past year (including 30% of the federal colleagues with whom I’ve worked closely). Those still left are holding federal science together with duct tape. What an extraordinary act of sabotage against the American people.

the failure of the Mueller Report, ultimately, was the successful result of the conservative project to make sure that what happened to Richard Nixon would never again happen to a Republican president

Pretty good case for a steep estate tax right here!

This is insane.

More Americans have died in the illegal undeclared Iran War than died during the Afghanistan withdrawal that was portrayed to the American public as a presidency-annulling catastrophe for Joe Biden.

Inside the Department of War are two wolves: "We've shut down the Colleges of War because book learnings are woke, gay, and irrelevant to war fighting." "How come no one told us the Strait is important, there are different kinds of Kurds, Iran is big, and air power historically doesn't win wars?"

I love the idea that *this* US government, which has been nabbing landscapers and five year olds knows where Iranian sleeper cells are but just hasn’t gotten around to doing anything about it yet.

A breakdown from @eliasisquith.blog explaining how "the media is structurally pro-Trump." His newsletter is fantastic. www.thenecessaryfictions.com/p/the-media-...

If you’re roughly my age, it’s wild to reflect on the optimism for the future Americans felt when Obama was elected — young Americans spontaneously took to the streets to celebrate! — and contrast with what we face today. The falloff over the past 18 years is hard to process.

As an IR professor, it's depressing that this is outperforming all others as the best theory of US foreign policy

Iran's government is more hardline, its people are poorer and more isolated, the region's on fire, and the global economy feels like its about to go into shock If you want to know why people wanted to avoid war with Iran for so long, you're finding out in real time

USUALLY presidents getting blame or taking credit for gas prices (or local crime rates, or etc etc) is dumb, because it’s a commodity whose price is set on a global market, USUALLY for reasons having little to do with the White House’s occupant. But this is 100% directly Trump’s fault.