You can sum up quite a lot of the last sixty years of right-wing politics in America as conservatives going from wishing violence on MLK, to offering tepid praise of him once a year, to reverting back to wishing violence on those trying to continue his legacy.

Walter Cronkite wept. The fall of CBS isn't exactly surprising, but the groveling diet of abject humiliation on its' way down at the hands of the Trump administration tarnishes whatever little legacy it had left.

Oh, so you reduced tariffs and allowed Americans to buy $10k luxury evs from China? Is that what you did? If not, then be quiet and go have a seat at the kids' table.

Fraud is a serious crime that merits laying siege to an entire city and collectively punishing every immigrant from Somalia. It's also a crime for which you can be pardoned and relieved of compensating your victims, so long as some of the money you stole finds its way to the president.

Woman Seen Pulled from Car Speaks Out: 'Lucky to be alive' Aliya Rahman "said she was driving to an appointment at the Traumatic Brain Injury Center when the incident occurred." She asked for a doctor and was taken to a detention center where she lost consciousness. abcnews.go.com/US/live-upda...

Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system against your opponents is an authoritarian tactic. The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.

But "internal bleeding" sounds way more significant (while still being technically correct) as admitting he had some light bruising.

terrific conversation with @whstancil.bsky.social about what's going on in his home minneapolis right now. at the end he puts it very bluntly: ICE is not an immigration agency that just needs some technocratic reforms. ICE is a terror agency operating under the fig leaf of immigration.

Guards may have choked a man to death inside an ICE tent encampment on the Mexican border. Had three children, been in the U.S. for 30 years. www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/... @douglasmac.bsky.social

Jesus. www.startribune.com/ice-raids-mi...

Stunning photos from Minneapolis, including this one by John Locher for the Associated Press. www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

Worth noting that *bruises* are internal bleeding.

This is appalling: Top DOJ officials are actively pushing for a criminal investigation into the widow of Renee Good, leading prosecutors to quit en masse, NYT is reporting. Who in the White House ordered DOJ to do this? That's the next thing to establish.

The ICE roadshow -- a traveling, thuggish circus going to blue cities to provoke a response so they can farm clips for right-wing media -- erodes away the civic vitality of our democratic republic and greases the rise of a future, right-wing authoritarian regime in two ways:

But Powell made Trump look silly during that tour of the building, so Trump will extract his petty revenge even if it comes at the potential expense of the policy goal.

Authoritarianism is affirmative action for mediocre men.

No, he shouldn't apologize. He was righteously raising the temperature on the hoodlums and thugs who murdered one of his constituents. It would've been more inappropriate if he *hadn't* sworn!

I just heard that Daniel Walker Howe, author of the magisterial "What Hath God Wrought," passed away. He once made a durable impact on a young grad student when Howe waited to come up after an ASCH panel to express enthusiasm for this junior scholar's work. It meant the world at a tough time.

A woman recording an ICE agent tells him "Shame on you." The agent responds, "Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" "Learned what?" she asks Then he knocks her phone out of her hand

If I was the commander in chief of the Imperial hegemon I would simply not dismantle the network of military and diplomatic alliances, favourable trade deals, and broad cultural paramountcy that had made my nation the most wealthy and powerful the world has ever seen.

"It creates a vast surplus of policing power that can be & increasingly is directed toward illegitimate ends. It’s the engine through which Donald Trump has sought to treat blue states & blue cities as conquered territory to be casually brutalized as one part public theater & one part intimidation."

Red state officials blinded by crass partisanship into giving up the constitutional authority granted to states. Think of the counterfactual, if the Biden admin had demanded voter rolls in order to ensure voter access for (Dem-leaning) communities. Would they have so willingly complied??

It is the position of the Trump Administration that its agents can come into any state and city in America (let alone other countries) and kill people and that state and city have no jurisdiction to inquire about it. Treat any Trump official accordingly.

This is the ninth shooting by ICE since September (I did not know that). All of them were into vehicles.

Driver: “Criminals doing Uber? Maybe criminals are doing ICE, how about that, you know what I’m saying? Y’all shoot enough people… You shot her in the head! For what?!” Agent, heckling: “I don’t know why they do the head, man” [Bovino and other agents laugh].

Five years ago.

If the DEA had killed 80 innocent Americans in the course of apprehending one drug dealer, there would be riots. But we are so ghoulishly indifferent to the lives and humanity of people abroad that it's barely even part of the conversation.

kind of darkly funny that "gender studies" is the stereotypical "useless degree" because gender studies will help you understand a large and important chunk of the current psychosis in american life

Marco Rubio's arc from prez candidate to Trump's Sec of State meant squandering whatever small dignity, principle, and self-respect he once possessed. He did it all for this moment: to start an unconstitutional war, repeating the same mistakes as Iraq, and potentially destabilizing South America.

"Over the past year, a number of high-profile prosecutions—many of them politically tinged, some of them frankly absurd—ran into an obstacle that modern prosecutors rarely encounter: citizen-jurors who refused to go along." Colonists fighting the Crown would have understood [Clark Neily, @cato.org]

"The children who died naked are waiting for you on the other side."

ICE's recruitment strategy basically optimizing for young gun nut white supremacists.

A pet peeve of mine is pundits prefacing the scramble to replace Trump as if he's some kind of unique, political savant. He's not. In both '16 & '24 Trump was the unremarkable beneficiary of 1) a breakdown of the GOP as a modern party & 2) a landscape that favored whomever the GOP nominated.

Still unreported, should be investigated: ICE shot Richard outside a mall. I visited mall security office. Guard said ICE and LAPD came in, used thumb drive to copy mall’s video footage, and THEN DELETED THE EVIDENCE from mall’s local drives. He showed me the missing timeline part saying “no data.”

My latest for @thedispatchmedia.bsky.social: how the abuses of the FCC under the Trump administration demonstrate the need to end broadcast licensing. Also, comparing the political utility and free speech protections for commentary on the supposed sex lives of Melania Trump and Marie Antoinette.

Increasingly clear that the anti-"censorship-industrial complex" complex was a fraud.

ICE detain father shopping on Christmas Eve—then steal his family's groceries. Then 3 agents divvy up his paid for food—taking what they want for themselves. "Can I just get the wife's number to call and let her know?" woman asks. "No, guess he should've complied," agent says. Yakima, Washington

"Hey, Obama extrajudicially killed a bunch of civilians with drones so it's fine if Trump does too" isn't the profound argument you think it is.

It's not rocket science. The American public thinks immigration is a good but also want an orderly process and a secure border. They don't like it when Stephen Miller's goons kidnap people. And they didn't like it when Obama / Biden half-assed immigration liberalization via cheap executive orders.

The richest man in the world nodding along to @cumlasagna1

Beyond stupid. Here's something I wrote about how stupid it is to give the fascists this gift: www.techdirt.com/2021/01/11/d...

People love to hate the internet, in general, & Amazon, in particular, but this Christmas I'm just a boy standing in front of you saying, "20 years ago I had to make a weekly run to Walmart or Target to pick up odds and ends but now I don't. I get little brown boxes on my porch instead, like magic."

Completely predictable that Aussie teens would immediately and easily circumvent Australia's idiotic and paternalistic social media ban for minors.

The DRAMA around Taylor ham (pork roll) is off the charts. A mysterious Moldovan who married not one but two brothers, who both promptly died leaving her to inherit a pork roll empire that had been in the family for five generations. Can't make this stuff up!

A useful exploration of how the TikTok algorithm works illustrated via spatial mapping.

I'm old enough to remember when conservative Christians realized defending religious freedom for one group defended religious freedom for all. I miss those days.

Rand Paul tells me that he wants the full video of the Venezuelan boat strike released. “And I think if the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.”

I just find it hilarious that his whole cabinet is sloberring praise all over him with ridiculous hyperbole and he is falling asleep while they're doing it. You couldn't write comedy better than this. It's better than VEEP.

And Marco Rubio's grandad fled communist persecution in Cuba, while his grandson is part of a fascistic regime trying to prevent Venezuelans from doing the same. And their's Trump's grandad, Trump's wife, JD Vance's wife, etc. The hypocrisy on immigration is *thick* with this administration.

great rundown on the hidden role that fire departments play in anti-density pro-car design. i think it speaks also to my own bugbear about "defer to the professionals." professions are often both insular and narrow-minded, unwilling to weigh costs and concerns beyond their internal cultural foci