This is an absolutely extraordinary, revelatory quote. Why is the NBC affiliate in Portland the only place reporting it? www.kgw.com/article/news...

Interesting to note that the coal industry in the U.S. employs just a tad over 40,000 people, according to the BLS. The same source tells us that 64,000 people work at wineries.

“I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that flowers would also be tariffed”

I feel naive just writing this, but a president threatening to withhold funding to a city unless it elects his preferred candidate for mayor seems like the sort of thing that shouldn't be legal.

No bread. Just circuses.

The Kavanaugh rule

Has anyone collected the vile statements congressional Republicans have made calling for the murder, assault, deportation and/or imprisonment of their colleagues? Seems like there’s a lot of this coming straight from the GOP but the nation is more focused on ordinary liberals on social media.

Now free to read: www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Norway puts our backtracking to shame: Norway’s uptake of EVs is nearly 100%. August set a new record of 98.4% of all new sales (with plug-in hybrids a mere 1.5%). The government has a goal of ending the sale of fossil-fuelled cars by the end of this year. cleantechnica.com/2025/09/09/e...

But, in the name of one-sided Calvinball-civility, we mustn’t call them Nazis.

As a US Atty, I prosecuted and oversaw police excessive force cases. We took them seriously because they were serious abuses of power. What we're seeing now is the outbreak of an epidemic & instead of being condemned by fed'l law enforcement leaders, it seems to be tolerated if not encouraged.

Maybe paradoxically, I think this is also better strategy. Voters cast a ballot for a person, not an abstract slate of policy stances, and they can smell focus-grouped inauthenticity.

We have to stop dehumanizing ICE agents while they are doing their important job of dehumanizing us

Remember when people took constitutional principles seriously? Like this one: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time”?

Trump is building a personalist regime where every university must bend the knee or lose funding and every business must bend the knee or face tariffs, H-1B fees, and regulatory blackmail. You can't cover each domain in isolation; they are all the same story.

‘For as long as I’ve been alive, 🇺🇸 presidents have defined tyrants by their willingness to use military force against their own people in reprisal for political opposition.… Ronald Reagan declared in 1981 that “it is dictatorships, not democracies, that need militarism to control their own people…’

This is such a good article on how the undermining of universities is part of an anti-democratic movement: “Anti-university rhetoric is the language of an international pro-authoritarian movement opposed to centers of learning that model liberal-democratic values”

So many echoes from this article for US politics....

‘…I used to think that the 🇻🇪 opposition’s obsession with obtaining confir’n that a certain label applied to our country was a little silly, a little beside the point. But in 🇺🇸, I find myself participating in similar discussions: Is 🇺🇸 “fascist”? Can we say that a “constitutional crisis” has arrived?‘

Some of the Justices need to be impeached. If Abe Fortas could be impeached, for much much less, why not this 6-pack of scoundrels?

And if that doesn't get everyone to stop talking about the Epstein files, inflation, and bad job numbers, there's always the option of starting a war with Venezuela

I’m not convinced Trump suffering some losses in the courts shows the system is working. Small losses are helpful to Trump: “Look, there’s rule of law.” (International audience) “The reason I haven‘t done what I promised is the woke courts keep blocking me“ (domestic) 1/2

I’m surprised that they don’t just buy Embraers instead.

Once again, along with the violations of domestic law, it should be a presidency-ending scandal that Trump totally disregards all of our int’l treaty obligations, from NATO to the WTO to the UN. In fact, these are also part of domestic law, having been ratified by Congress. One. Special. Boy 🤷‍♂️🤦‍♂️

A historically recurrent American Dream (e.g., Puritans, Mormons, etc.) has been to Make This Place the Middle East Again. Too bad it also always seems to work out *in this way*.

Does that “expertise” include not providing air cover?

My comments to The Washington Post on why the charges against Comey are so dangerous wapo.st/4nrPAYw

In a personalist regime, your business (tariffs) or your life (Comey, ICE) can be upended at a moment's notice at the whim of the authoritarian leader

one theory

A rather brilliant idea from Massachusetts. 🔌💡

Meanwhile, my “CoPilot-enabled” #Microsoft “365” (it’ll be always be Office to me) apps have all become virtually unusable since the last “update”. Between going totally fash as well as AI-raptured, a total nutshell of the #enshittification of the US tech industry.

Today in life under competitive authoritarianism More textbook stuff. Every day. All easily anticipated because they said they were going to do all of this stuff, & we should have believed them.

Clowns and charlatans

"a disturbing account of what it describes as efforts by Mr. Trump’s top aides to strip the bureau of its century-long history of independence" - "issuing political loyalty tests and directly ordering the firings of agents targeted by President Trump and his allies"

Senate Judiciary Committee launches an inquiry into wha Tom Homan did with the $50,000 FBI agents gave him n a CAVA bag.

One of the factors I included when we bought our house 18 years ago, was potential climate impacts.

We are at a very strange inflection point. They showed their hand with the Kirk canonization attempt, and they just don't have that many cards left.

It’s an old Russian tradition that westerners wouldn’t understand

NBC News projects: Democrat Adelita Grijalva wins the special election for Arizona House District 7. Grijalva will bring the important 218th signature to the chamber's Epstein files discharge petition — forcing Mike Johnson to handle a fight that has divided his conference.

The orange tyrant continues to make the United States uninvestable. He is turning off new investment by American companies as well foriegn direct investment. What board could reasonably take a chance on Trump’s wildly vacillating moods and notions?

this is very funny tbh

Depolarization is not "a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict.... achieving lasting depolarization will likely require....moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict" www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

A great example of why framing (and survey question wording) matters...

One reason, sure, but maybe more immediately important is that, to Trump and many Trump supporters, "cities" and "urban" are code words for "black". Sending troops to the cities is a way of showing his whites he's dominating blacks, a way to demonstrate his commitment to white supremacy.

Maybe not "the greatest" city, but definitely great - and made greater by having a mayor who understands how to respond to hatemongering lies.

Amazing life. Had the privilege to hear him speak a number of times. Sad to think of how this kind of humane, intellectually curious, cosmopolitanism seems to be in the process of being extinguished in so much of this currently populist/nationalist world.

If there was a functioning media environment, people would become aware of this national embarrassment.

Stochastic authoritarianism.

The 🇺🇳 can still be a space of pushback vs Trumpist bullying: ‘…The U.N. is “not anywhere close to what anyone would want it be,” Shapiro said. “But if you didn’t have the U.N., you would want to invent it.”’ 🗺️