In December 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked SCOTUS to grant cert before judgement to hear Trump’s immunity appeal. The court rejected that request and didn’t issue its immunity decision until July 2024. Trump’s federal cases never made it to trial before the November 2024 election.

This is horrific and feels like it should be a bigger deal. Business Insider reports that people who have worked at xAI have seen Grok create images and written material with child sex abuse material. www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-gr...

Since Trump’s MAGA majority has controlled the Supreme Court, SCOTUS has overturned 42 years of precedent deferring to agencies 50 years backing a women’s reproductive rights 60 years of affirmative action And-likely-a 90 year old case shielding the FTC It’s the most radical Court in US history

It's wonderful when two sociopaths with the mindset of serial killers find each other.

👇

I tried to capture everything that's strange about the TikTok deal. A giveaway to Trump's allies and another step toward US media being controlled by his allies www.platformer.news/tiktok-deal-...

7-Day Bird Migration Forecast We’re entering the peak of fall migration across most of the U.S. Hundreds of millions of birds are on the move, with Thursday and Friday forecast to be the biggest nights of the season so far — over 400 million birds predicted to be taking flight.

Whimbrel on the wing… 📍Oyster Bay, Masaki, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. #NaturePhotography #Birds 🪶

"kristi noem and corey lewandowski, who we can confirm are not only dating but running DHS together" absolutely cursed sentence

The conservative justices are running out of ways to make clear they don't give a shit about anything other than what Trump wants

Tangier Island in Virginia — one of the last inhabited islands in the Chesapeake Bay — is under threat from rising sea levels and climate change. n.pr/48uCGnV

🧵 The JWST, using its NIRCam instrument, captured an immense stellar jet, 8 light-years long, that is almost twice the distance to Alpha Centauri. It lies at the heart of the galactic frontier, 15,000 light-years from the Sun, and originates from... ➡️ science.nasa.gov/missions/web... 🔭 🧪 #science

The President sounds like this all the time these days and is clearly non compos mentis but it just gets a pass from Congress, from the courts, from the media, from Wall Street, from every institution, because it's Trump.

It's really something that the conservative justices can, with a straight face, chastise lower courts for "defying" shadow docket rulings & at the same time let the Administration literally defy centuries old unanimous Supreme Court precedent, all before bothering to overrule it.

Ah, I see, shadow docket *plus* rocket docket for whatever Trump needs. Reminder that the emoluments clause case filed by Maryland & DC started June 12, 2017 and then was stalled for so long that SCOTUS dismissed it in January 2021 without a decision because Trump losing made it moot.

#BREAKING: Over dissents from Justices Sotomayor, Kagan & Jackson, #SCOTUS grants a stay in the Slaughter case (allowing President Trump to remove the last Dem member of the FTC), *and* grants certiorari "before judgment" to decide whether to formally overrule its 1935 ruling in Humphrey's Executor.

J. Kagan dissent: "Our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars.Still more, it should not be used,as it also has been,to transfer government authority from Congress to the President, and thus to reshape the Nation’s separation of powers."

A piece from a few years ago that remains just as relevant boltsmag.org/when-state-s...

The Court is overruling federal laws, its own precedent, and lower court decisions, on the emergency docket which, quite simply, real courts do not do.

For our October issue I wrote about the Roberts Court for its 20th anniversary, how it helped lead us to the current crisis, and what should be done about it:

Just went you think you've seen all the *really out there* Second Amendment ideas out there, you run across one in quite another realm: "Heavy Touch Reporting Requirements Infringe On The Corporate Right To Bear Digital Arms" www.compliancelawjournal.com/compliancela...

New: We have just sued ICE to demand it turns over a secretive spyware contract that it refuses to release: www.404media.co/were-suing-i...

The numbers in this story stun me. And i have seen a lot of theater is dying moments. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/t...

WASHPOST: Surveillance in DC from the air: Nearly 80 helicopters were identified flying over D.C. as Trump crackdown continues, with the flights most intensely focused on majority Black neighborhoods. www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Kristi Noem does not want to move out of home usually reserved for the Coast Guard commandant.

The US economy has a new problem: Democracy is under siege www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/b...

NEW: White House officials are "ecstatic" at their long winning run at the Supreme Court. Details on their aggressive legal strategy here: www.nbcnews.com/politics/sup...

ARRESTED FOR SITTING www.blackenterprise.com/alex-okeefe-...

My latest installment in a series I should start calling "Thanks John Roberts" www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

NEW: I talked to six immigrant workers on H-1B visas who had to cancel their travel plans last minute to avoid paying the $100,000 fee Trump suddenly announced on Friday, just to learn about its reversal on Saturday. It cost them thousands of $ to rush back and also made them question the system.

"Can a Family Resurrect the American Chestnut Tree in Appalachia?" My story for @barnraiser.bsky.social about one family carrying the torch. This is a story against the grain. A story of hope in a dark time. A story of long time horizons. 1/n barnraisingmedia.com/can-a-family...

At the Nuremberg trials, Karl Dönitz was convicted of war crimes for the sinking of civilian vessels. This is not a complicated question, it's been illegal for centuries.

This anecdote from Miles Taylor about Stephen Miller allegedly suggesting drone strikes on boats of migrants during Trump 1.0 seems relevant given the recent US lethal strike on a vessel in the Caribbean. www.treason.io/p/read-one-s...

Holy shit

Fun story this morning. I spoke with Curtis Evans, the retired Marine in the viral photo below who took part in the anti-ICE protest at Broadview. He's a thoughtful guy, well read and with a dry sense of humor. Story @taskandpurpose.com taskandpurpose.com/news/marine-...

“I had looked forward to the opportunity of traveling with my parents for a long time, but the reality is, I can’t leave behind my husband, my cat, my house, my friends, and my job in the US." $3,800 flights and aborted takeoffs: How Trump’s H-1B Visa announcement panicked tech workers.

We're only 9 days out from a potential government shutdown, and OMB *still* doesn't have its agency contingency plans up (this is the central hub for how every agency plans to operate under a shutdown).

1/ I think a lot about this passage from Seila Law: "[T]he Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government. Only the President (along with the Vice President) is elected by the entire Nation."

5/ But unitary executive theory draws some of its rhetorical impetus from presenting the president as a tribune of the people, so Roberts just takes the modern procedures for choosing a president, lops off the ways that the electoral college + winner takes all means that many states don't matter ...

IF the Biden DOJ thought Homan had to perform an official act to charge him because of recent jurisprudence, then their $50,000 payment to him looks like a massive parlay bet that: (a) Biden/Harris would lose, (b) Trump would reappoint Homan, (c) Homan would do it, and (d) TRUMP’s DOJ WOULD INDICT.

to the art director at Wired who made this unholy image.... you will not see heaven www.wired.com/politics-iss...

Remember those data centers raising electricity prices? In many cases, they are also getting taxpayer subsidies. “At least 10 states already lose more than $100 million per year in tax revenue to data centers” goodjobsfirst.org/cloudy-with-...

As part of WIRED's Politics Issue, read @stevenlevy.bsky.social on how the vibrant, outsider Silicon Valley he discovered as a young reporter decades ago, has changed utterly, to become a place bowing before Trump With incredible art from @coldwarsteve.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/silico...

Reminder that in the Trump immunity ruling, the Supreme Court ruled specifically that the president has total immunity when it comes to his communications with Justice Department officials:

When @wired asked me to look at Silicon Valley in the age of Trump, I saw the crash of the idealism that originally drew founders--and me--to the tech revolution. Selling out the dream will not serve those moguls (or us) well. www.wired.com/story/silico...

Pleased to speak with @gregsargent.bsky.social about the legal issues raised by the lethal US strikes in the Caribbean and a draft use of force authorization that would be a blank check for war on "narco-terrorists" globally.

Awful: White House is circulating draft bill to vastly expand Trump's authority to bomb "drug cartels" w/o Congress. It's a "blank check to use force anywhere in the world against anyone he designates a narco-terrorist," says @bcfinucane.bsky.social. All on the pod: newrepublic.com/article/2007...

This piece by Robert Post is excellent. I especially like that he traces the Trump Administration's authoritarian trampling on the First Amendment to, in part, the Roberts Court's extreme unitary executive theory. verfassungsblog.de/turn-against...

Cool! The moon photobombed the Sun as seen by GOES’ SUVI instrument. This means nothing other than it being a neat-looking image.

Somehow missed this: A presentation to advisers for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cited study in animals suggested that use of the vaccine preservative thimerosal can have “long-term consequences in the brain.” But it looks like that study does not exist. www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/h...