Fun fact: they passed it because a DC video store leaked Robert Bork’s video rental history to a local paper during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history

Adding the 3rd layer of these prints today—a bit of sobering metadata Two texts separated by 175 years of American history, but they rhyme

nonzero chance the FBI is plugging LLMs into wiretap data under the legal theory AI alone can’t implicate 4th amendment concerns (semi-known 702 issue). or the NSA has now hard coded wiretaps across all newly built US data centers due to expanded ECSP scope. or probably both.

Thank you to @doctorow.pluralistic.net for the MORE EVERYTHING FOREVER shoutout in today's @newyorker.com newsletter! "Popular science with teeth...a book that does a great job of showing how deluded, stupid, or in bad faith many of these billionaires’ claims are." link.newyorker.com/view/5be9ea0...

faux liberalism (ezra klein) vs actual liberalism (mill)

ICE is arresting delivery drivers at a San Diego military base. According to an attorney interviewed by Kate Morrissey, military police at the gates call ICE on any driver who is not a citizen or green card holder, even if they have permission to be in the country. capitalandmain.com/ice-has-arre...

JUST IN: John Eastman, the conservative attorney who helped devise President Trump's last ditch strategy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has officially been disbarred, per the California Supreme Court:

“Beyond the basic fiscal math, it is counter-productive to liberal goals to indulge the anti-tax politics of the right. (. . .)If we believe that the government can and should improve the lives of its citizens and the world, it can only do so with the collective buy-in of taxation.”

holy shit he actually conceded folks, they tell you they’re invincible they tell you they’re inevitable they tell you that you should give up and stop fighting and absolutely none of that is true

Never gets old.

2026's #StarTrek #Hallmark ornaments include a modern reissue of the Shuttlecraft Galileo, the USS Cerritos from #LowerDecks, a metal Enterprise-G from #Picard, an homage to the classic AMT Spock vs. Serpent model kit, and Nurse Chapel from #StrangeNewWorlds

This is an outrage.

Taxes are good, in fact, & Democrats should stop granting Ronald Reagan's bad premise about government: bsky.app/profile/mcop...

But shall this crazed old man be tamely suffered to drag a whole ship’s company down to doom with him?

“I will NOT sacrifice the Oxford comma. We've made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They assimilate the em dash and we fall back. They capture ‘not just X but y’ and we fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

Adam means that she is the daughter of immigrants, but it is worth emphasizing that *every* U.S. citizen who has not been naturalized is a birthright citizen, either by the 14th Amendment or by statute.

Discworld QOTD, from Feet of Clay

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

from 1868 to 2025 there was little dispute about what the birthright clause meant and the idea that the past year has been some great scholarly debate is absurd. a handful of partisans and hacks have churned out junk so that the president can get what he wants. that’s it.

NEW: The government tells Americans to use VPNs to protect their privacy. The government also automatically presumes communications of unknown origin are foreign. Foreign communications don't require a warrant to wiretap. Lawmakers who've done the math want answers. My latest @wired.com:

Given the amount of blackmail and rent-seeking my cat perpetuates, this tracks

Honestly, fuck off.

Trump take Star Trek.

So, um... this is bad. Really bad. I looked at the letters that were translated by the AI, and the very first one I found was almost entirely hallucination. Thread:

Solidarity with Emily Tucker and her open letter to students. Tucker writes, "But the great thing is, you don’t have to go along with this, and I urge you not to. You can refuse to use the chatbot. You can tell your professors that you don’t want them to use it or to require you to use it."

I simply do not understand why California would hobble its most important rail line just to placate a bunch of wealthy, geriatric Republicans. "I don't care what you want" is a perfectly reasonable answer to their objections.

People arrested while protesting ICE say federal agents took samples of their DNA. It's legal, but experts say the practice raises questions about what the government is doing with that genetic data.

Well, this sounds like a terrible idea.

Under President Donald Trump, immigration agents have operated without typical public accountability. Many agents wear masks. Incident reports are largely hidden from the public. 1/4

Let me remind everyone not to feel sorry for this AUSA who got eviscerated by a federal judge for the administration's misdeeds. Lawyers can quit: ballsandstrikes.org/legal-cultur...

"I'm willing to take a not guilty. I'm willing to take a no true bill." What she means is she's willing to bring legally deficient cases that harass innocent defendants, waste her line prosecutors' time, and makes her office look like jerkoffs in front of judges and juries.

I wrote about the Democrats' attempt to merge tax cut populism with social democratic social policy and why it's a bad idea publiccomment.blog/p/adventures...

Is gender-affirming care for trans kids really a dangerous experiment? Who should be in charge of who gets it? Doctors and families? Or politicians? #protecttranskids 🏳️‍⚧️

Is he wandering around the White House talking to portraits like Nixon?

Chilling effects are hard to measure or document. They are what doesn't get said over here, because of some gvt action over there. But pieces like this are a small part of making visible what is obvious: right now, chilling effects are everywhere www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/u...

This month we're marching toward the June primary election. Come to our March 16 meeting to hear from Jason Sams, candidate for the OC Board of education get a campaign update from Laguna Niguel Councilmember Stephanie Oddo. Register here: www.mobilize.us/dpoc/event/9...

Congratulations to Melissa Waters, one of our members, who was honored tonight at the Women Making A Difference Awards for her environmental leadership. We are lucky to have an activist like Melissa working in Laguna Niguel!

yep youtu.be/MXZvHsem5OU?...

10 Mar 2026

The official NOAA stats out this week confirm that winter 2025-26 was the warmest on record across a huge portion of the western and central U.S., which has contributed to extremely low mountain snowpack & worsened the CO River crisis. Meanwhile, record March heat is in forecast.

A conservative organization with decades of influence in California has quietly turned attention, and millions of dollars, to a national initiative of right-leaning news operations, records show. bit.ly/4aYdk2K 📸 iStock

Even if it takes years, we have to bring EVERYONE who made this happen to justice. No moving on, no letting this go. Revenge is good enough motivation for me personally, but the nobler and important reason is to ensure that anyone who thinks of doing this again knows they’ll rot in prison for it.

Whatever was going on, there was nothing I could do about it now, and that just made me more furious. So I watched five minutes of episode 174 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Did that work? No, no, it didn’t.

JUST IN: Trump DOJ proposes surprise rule aiming to let Attorney General Pam Bondi suspend state bar investigations into alleged misconduct by DOJ lawyers. Very unclear if there'd be legal authority for the AG to intervene in this manner. news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...

Shaheen & Peters are retiring. But if any of these other Dems vote to give a single additional dollar to the Trump regime so it can keep illegally bombing in the Middle East, they should be primaried into oblivion. Call the Senate: (202) 224-3121. Not a single additional $ for Trump's illegal war.

A new California law says all operating systems, including Linux, need to have some form of ID verification (which they’re calling age verification) at account setup. This makes absolutely ZERO sense if you have even the most basic understanding of technology