🔥“The key is that we are enforcing the laws that already exist and are being broken. We are not pursuing mere partisan power or grinding ideological axes, as MAGA has done. […] It is not our fault that Trump and his lackeys decided to commit so many crimes.”

OMG. To claim that russians are uniquely/deeply fearful of invasion due to their history is to whitewash russian aggression. When will people realize this? Every old European city has been torched/invaded multiple times. Europe managed to build peace. Ru is attacking its neighbour AS WE SPEAK!

From www.economist.com/graphic-deta...

Latest post looks at why Putin persist with a failed strategy against Ukraine, and why he needs Russia’s current, struggling offensive to succeed this year (£/free trial), open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/p...?

A must-read. It lays out a realist theory of Ukr victory, focused entirely on material power. That the well-known realists aren't jumping on this math but twisting themselves into pretzels arguing that nothing Ukraine or its allies do would help and Ru is destined to win exposes their pro-Ru bias...

THIS IS WHAT RIGHT WING EVANGELICALS ACTUALLY BELIEVE — "personal relationship with Jesus" translates to an unlimited and unqualified indulgence for wickedness, at least if you're a powerful white man who serves their cult.

I want everyone who had any hand in all this corruption imprisoned. We have lost our republic and Trump is raiding the Treasury for himself and his cronies

“Virginia’s Democratic majority, and pro-democracy Americans more broadly, should fight rather than acquiesce, using any nonviolent means they can come up with, and see what happens.” open.substack.com/pub/arcdigi/...

President Trump has once again appeared to doze off on camera in the middle of a White House event, this time, just seconds after he spoke. trib.al/XseCB0A

Hungary’s parliament sings “Ode to Joy” — the anthem of Europe — after Péter Magyar is sworn in as prime minister. Hungary is once again a proud member of the European Union.

Is it scary & dangerous? Yes. But the old status quo is dead. It’s not coming back. We have to recognize we’re in a dramatically different political context now than even two or 6 years ago.

Seeing a few “this is very bad, but rule of law/norms against political hardball are sacrosanct,” which misunderstands that Reps have bulldozed the rule of law & all forbearance norms. The choice is 1) hardball for a chance to have a democracy, or 2) 1-sided rule- & norm-following into autocracy.

Grotesque.

"I think that the thing we should all be considering aren’t modest reforms, but a wholesale transformation of our electoral system" - @jamellebouie.net Amen! www.nytimes.com/video/opinio...

There were more Russian vehicles in Kiev than at Moscow #VictoryDay parade. This means we are winning.

Can reporters stop using the word deal? It’s an agreement, a settlement, a treaty, an understanding, an MOU etc. Using the word deal is accepting his simple-minded TV game-show framing and contributes to the bogus drama he is trying to create.

I'm inclined to a harsher view, but not so much for parsing blame in hindsight. It's about what lessons have we learned and how are we going to do better next time, which isn't that far off. Which mostly amounts to: we must go much harder on accountability and much bigger on reconstruction reforms.

"The main problem is the usage of single-seat districts as the basis of representing the population in the House. There is no such thing as a set of maps that is fair, competitive, and representative. Gerrymandering is just tweaking a bad system at the margins."

I’ve been saying for 30+ years that if you value minority representation you shouldn’t rely on paternalistic gerrymanders to achieve it. You need to fight for proportional representation electoral systems at all levels. Could that message finally sink in?

As we think about 8 May 1945, 2026… www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

“[The AI industry has] constructed a sort of financial flywheel, where they subsidize computation-heavy behavior from users, then report back to investors about the soaring product demand and use it to justify the next investment round” davekarpf.beehiiv.com/p/what-sort-...

Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled in his second term, reaching $6.5 billion. His administration is the most brazenly self-enriching in American history. My @morningjoe-msnow.bsky.social Chart.

I don’t know anything about judicial politics, but this proposal on the surface seems great to me: Dramatically expand the lower courts, break up the Supreme Court, and instead randomly draw judges to form a SC for each case as needed.

“I wish we lived in the Tom Clancy world where analyst assessments form a decisive input into policy, but often decision makers already have strong assumptions about the situation, and know what they want to do – or don’t want to do.” — Michael Kofman responds to my critique of Ukr. war predictions.

From the Japanese Empire to Trump’s America, “It is possible to achieve the objectives of your campaign and still lose the war—and you’re more likely to do so if you’re not thinking rigorously about why you’re fighting the war and what you want to gain from it.”

This seems like exaggeration at first, but nope, clearly dozing off.

Is social media dying? How much did Twitter change as it became X? Which party now dominates the conversation? Using nationally representative ANES data from 2020 & 2024, I map how the U.S. social media landscape has changed Here are the key take-aways 🧵 Full paper out now in in JQD:DM!

If the GOP wants to show it’s serious about all its complaints tonight, then tomorrow Mike Johnson should introduce a bill to implement a national gerrymandering ban & to double the size of the House. He could introduce similar bills in re: voter ID & a new VRA. That they won’t tells you everything.

We can't keep doing "maximum warfare" forever on congressional maps. At some point we need to restore the faith of the American people that their votes matter. The solution remains obvious: proportional representation www.politico.com/newsletters/...

Articles about Jared Kushner's diplomatic role with Iran that mention Kushner has received billions from the Saudi government (2/28-4/19): NYT: 5 of 58 WashPost: 1 of 43 WSJ: 0 of 40 AP: 0 of 26 CNN Wire: 0 of 18 NY Post: 0 of 17 Chicago Tribune: 0 of 4 LA Times: 0 of 4 Boston Globe: 0 of 2

a deep dive into many bad predictions, and a few good ones, and what they mean for thinking about future conflict

Wow, this story: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/w...

“The whole exercise felt ridiculous to Ben. He & his father—2 people who had never been to medical school— were now arguing about cancer research. Meanwhile, his father was ignoring the advice of an actual expert. ‘What am I doing?’ he thought. ‘This is why we have doctors, *human* doctors’.”🧪🛟

This is my assessment of why Trump’s war went so badly wrong. Underestimating an enemy and a belief in a quick victory are familiar sources of failure, compounded in this sense by incredible ultimatums and delusional claims. (£/free trial), open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...?

There it is: A full year of days spent playing golf in just over five years as president. www.pbump.net/outofoffice

The NBC News story about Corey Lewandowski is very important. The GEO Group-related claims are astounding, and later reporting in the story suggests that those allegations were not some one-time thing. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

It’s morbidly funny how Trump and Putin have both started wars they thought would be quick and decisive, resulting in regime change; didn’t have backup plans; and now find themselves in a quagmire with no clear way out. Though I think Putin didn’t intentionally antagonize his allies along the way.

👀 Drones with mesh networks

I don't think Trump could do a ground invasion of Iran even if he wanted to, right? Where do you stash troops and equipment during the buildup, and how do you actually invade? Is Iraq gonna host US forces? Yeet across the Gulf in a Leeroy Jenkins amphibious assault? Gulf states ok with that?

The orange shit-gibbon has no comprehension of the Pandora’s box he just opened. 🇦🇪🇺🇸 Prominent UAE billionaire Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor just published an open letter to Trump. It's brutal. 1/7

“Russian TV routinely features jokes about how Trump can be manipulated into doing things that clearly damage U.S. interests.”

New post at CAMPAIGN TRAILS, taking stock of a very racist administration.

Is anybody ever gonna take a step back and realize the "Russia Russia Russia" people — derided as lunatic wine moms — were actually underplaying the foreign influence stuff, and the loud people who kept insisting it was all fake are now saying Jeffrey Epstein was kind of a cool guy?

The Atlantic Magazine just dropped a tremendous story on the Minnesota Resistance. The author is a war correspondent & sees the echoes of leaderless community empowerment around the globe: www.theatlantic.com/politics/202... (supposed to be a gift link, might not work, it’s in Apple News, too.)

Other folks have already noted much of this, but I think the MAGA 'theory of victory' here is: 1) DHS provocations trigger a riot or attack on agents which 2) Leads to widespread civil unrest in many 'blue' cities so that 3) Trump can invoke the insurrection act and send in the troops...

🚨HOLY CRAP. An ICE whistleblower just revealed a secret memo authorizing ICE officers to break into homes without a judicial warrant, which DHS's own legal training materials say is unconstitutional! ICE then hid the memo from the public, passing it along by word of mouth and private conversation.

ICE detained a 5-year-old Minnesota boy coming home from school + took him and his dad to Texas, school officials say. The family has an active asylum case + entered the US at a port of entry. "They’re taking children. They're not violent criminals. They're little kids," the superintendent told me.

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

No longer world's most insane Prez.