Three years after my husband died, I’m still trying to prove our life together was worth losing his family. What I live with isn’t forgetting — it’s the blurring of memory. On the third anniversary, I wrote about grief, memory, and continuing without answers. www.dataandpolitics.net/the-blurring/

this has been one of my central arguments the past ten years. the theory underpinning the anti-democratic elements of the american constitutional order is wrong!

It's not even strictly partisan, Democrats who suck up to him can get in on it too (Blagojevich did, good chance Menendez will). No need for any pretense a prosecution was flawed in some way. It's official policy that Trump just straight-up hates the idea corruption should be illegal and punished.

Dr Oz talking about obesity, diabetes and dementia while Trump is slumped over like a man minutes from death is supremely funny content

The more democratic elements of the American constitutional and economic order are actually throwing up road blocks to Trumpism. Protests and boycotts and low level courts and juries and cetera. Elite actors on the other hand are all too frequently caving. Fascinating study in who actually cares!

Your cat when you're choking to death in your apartment

I have a real job and I have had infinitely more problems from mediocre men dismissing or ignoring talented women than from men being scared of woke or whatever asinine bullshit

justice has been done

His whole mien is “you guys ruined my shot.”

Please don't tell daddy I said anything bad

WASHINGTON (AP) — Nancy Pelosi won't seek reelection, ending her storied career in the US House.

Anyone who knows anything about the Orban regime’s history understands that MAGA is trying to clumsily speedrun the same combo of xenophobic fascist machismo as a smokescreen distracting from a complete oligarchic heist, and the capture and plunder of state institutions

Some beautiful pictures in this article smarthistory.org/the-gwozdzie...

south shore IV [10.16.25] Canon EOS 1500 manual, 800 iso

cry more, assholes [and to clarify the sentiment I am expressing here comes from a place of anti-sectarianism rather than the opposing form of sectarianism from that on display in the linked article]

it turns out, as it were, that society has stigmatized Nazism, fascism, integralism, being a ‘big fan of Stalin,’ etc for decades for good reasons and not just to ruin everyone’s fun

as my bio indicates, I am a “boring social democrat,” and one of the biggest delusions out there about how social democracy works is that you can get the wealthy (who should nevertheless pay way more tax than they currently do) to pay for it on their own

The media is rushing 300 “New York Jews worried about Mamdani antisemitism” fetch essays based on nothing but Mamdani being a Muslim meanwhile the Republican Party from top to toe has the confidence to wear nazi makeup every day knowing the press looks at it like the westworld bots seeing a polaroid

one way to understand the dysfunction on display here: these people push the argument that woke, multiculturalism, any and all norms against exclusionary behavior, etc impedes authentic social cohesion & organizational effectiveness, but their experience shows what bullshit this is in practice (1/n)

The members of Black Flag and their personal style between 1976 and 1986 😍 #Punk #Punks #Punkrock #HardcorePunk #BlackFlag #History #PunkrockHistory

Prediction: Social psychologists will still insist that the book's thesis is valid, thereby ironically validating its thesis

NEW: The US Army website for its bases in Bavaria, Germany told its soldiers and employees that it might need to obtain free food from the German government during the US government shutdown. The Army later altered publication to remove a list of food banks, but we have the original text here:

"Trump canceled your flight" is about as easy as messaging gets.

NEW: Judge Gettleman just ordered ICE to improve "serious conditions" inside its Broadview facility in Chicago. Yesterday, people testified in court that they were crammed into overcrowded and filthy cells for days, with little access to lawyers, and pressured into deportation.

this looks like a trick daffy duck would put up to get bugs bunny into "the oval office"

this is what they took from us

“Kids, Syd Barrett LOVED this and you will too!”

ICE isn’t going after the worst of the worst. This morning, they took a preschool teacher without a warrant IN FRONT OF CHILDREN in my district. #ice #chicago

It is tiresome to deal with people who do not acknowledge that words have meanings. It is even more tiresome to deal with a society where a significant proportion of those who qualify as opinion elites do not acknowledge that words have meanings.

It’s hard to believe but there was a cartoon about an immigrant mouse and it was seen as totally fine and not controversial and not woke because it was an aspirational and nice thing about America that people could come here and find a better life

your basic idea is that an Indian Muslim whose father was expelled from Uganda for being Indian and whose maternal grandparents lived through the violence of the Partition, on the wrong side of the border, is predisposed to believe that countries have a right to maintain an ethnoreligious majority

lol

I continue to believe that the Trump *campaign* successfully convinced quite a lot of people that mass deportations did not mean mass deportations; that it meant targeted enforcement against “the bad guys.” The problem for the Trump *administration* is that no one believes that anymore.

"...if you compare the average net approval in the first 7 days of Trump’s presidency to the last 7 days, he’s fallen about 15 points with white Americans, but 57 points with Black Americans and 26 points with Hispanic or Latino Americans."

The polls had a sizable pro-Republican bias. Some of that was a flood of junk Republican polls, but even the media and academic polls missed

that's right

First take out of court: We could get as much as a 9-0 judgment against Trump; the only real question in my mind is whether the rationale is purely based on the statute or if it relies upon some major questions doctrine/nondelegation reasoning.

"Ah but not so fast--this is nothing compared to what Glenn Youngkin did four years ago." Never change, Nate Cohn, never change www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/u...

Agreed. The 'wokeness panic' -- and a lot of the nation's obsessive cultural politics more generally -- reflects localized intra-elite status competition that said elites project onto the mass public.

The question lurking behind all of this, of course, is what happens when the personalistic cult leader is no longer around.

Trump has a personalistic cult he is able to activate when he is on the presidential ballot. A large portion of this cult are simple MAGA bigots from the GOP base. But it's rounded out by low-engagement / low trust voters who show up only for him. (1/n)

It took casual analysts a long time to realize that identity concerns -- as opposed to 'economic anxiety' -- drove the MAGA base. Similarly, it is taking a long time for causal analysts to realize that the MAGA base alone did not secure Trump's victories. (1/n)

I do think yesterday’s results reinforced the dynamic that while much of the American leadership class is chickenshit, most of the electorate is not

"An early forecast for the 2026 midterms — based on the historical predictive power of Virginia’s governor elections — suggests a national environment that looks something like D+8 to D+9, compared to the D+3 to D+4 in polls today." (1/n)

UPDATE: Dems lead every city council race in Aurora, Colorado - and could flip a 7-3 GOP majority into a 6-4 Dem edge - including what would be a shocking upset of MAGA media star Danielle Jurinsky, whose claims of a "complete gang takeover" led Trump to call Aurora "conquered." #copolitics

good