Tonight.

NEW: Judge William Young's ruling against Rubio and Noem is a lesson for all in the Trump era. Young lays bare the unconstitutionality of the Trump administration's student deportation efforts — and issues a challenge to America. Today, at Law Dork:

The moment where Hegseth ends his speech and not a single officer claps is the most hopeful thing I have seen in a long time.

Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva hasn't been sworn in, so she has to roam Congress with an escort I saw her this morning going through security along visitors — something lawmakers don't need to do when walking into the Capitol More on her limbo status here: www.notus.org/congress/ade...

Mike Johnson continues to refuse to swear in a Democrat who won in a landslide.

Most of the power authoritarians have is freely given. We should not comply with them in advance. Trump is far weaker than he looks. So is the GOP. We should draw them out, drain them at every opportunity, and fight for people’s wellbeing at every turn. We have been sent here to fight for people.

We sunk the Bismark! www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

About Overthinking the Shutdown talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/about...

Every single one of these clips was taken today in downtown Portland. Portland doesn’t want or need a federal takeover. If Trump insists on sending federal “resources” he can start with funding health care, bridges, affordable housing, and wildfire protection to name a few.

# of paragraphs for news orgs to mention there's no discernable need to deploy troops to Portland, Oregon The Guardian: 1st paragraph BBC: 4th paragraph AP: 5th paragraph Time: 6th paragraph Politico: 8th paragraph NPR: 9th paragraph CNN: 10th paragraph NBC: 12th paragraph Fox News: never mentions

CARTOON OF THE DAY

"Dallas Morning News shareholders vote to deny the hedge fund Alden Global Capital." The hedge fund offered more money. Did you hear what I said? "Alden Global Capital is well known as the worst possible newspaper owner for anyone who cares about journalism." www.niemanlab.org/2025/09/dall...

rewatching NETWORK for a project 👀 and it is absolutely shocking how prescient this film is. it’s like paddy chayefsky was granted a vision of america in 2025 and he furiously tried to turn what he saw into something intelligible to viewers in the 1970s

More grift.

Starring: Emil Bove, then at the DOJ and now a lifelong federal judge, who the article says pushed DOJ to be skeptical of the investigation

"journalists must sign a pledge not to gather any information, including unclassified reports, that hasn't been authorized for release" or lose their press credentials - openly authoritarian www.npr.org/2025/09/20/g...

The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.

Just read this old Al Franken piece on the Republicans being outraged by political funerals having political rhetoric for no reason in particular.

Some conservatives are saying that Kilmeade’s “Just kill them” comment is less horrifying when you see it in context. So here’s a longer clip, where you hear almost 4 minutes of Fox couch banter before he says it. And, uh, it’s not much better. At all. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSPa...

Looked at my data collections for state-backed activity. If the report were a picture:

You may think, "Eh, it doesn't matter if I watch, like, and subscribe." But it really does. Those who did made sure that folks seeking reliable information actually got it. Without that, they mostly would have gotten hagiography or right wing slop. youtu.be/6wN6aBFCrjc?...

💯. The longer clips from the program demonstrate the discussion had fully pivoted from the individual perpetrator of the North Carolina murder to the general question of what to do with the homeless. In saying we should "just kill 'em," the host was proposing mass murder.

Trump tortures. Use the word.

It’s important to understand the extent of the digital bloodlust on X. They’re scraping data from social media sites—including Bsky—to create a searchable database targeting people for perceived thoughtcrimes related to CK. It has 40k names so far, and they’re sharing it with the federal government.

This is Kevin effing Williamson thedispatch.com/article/char...

Russia has faced little to no consequences following its brazen Sept. 10 attack on Poland, yet Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski is upbeat about NATO's response and how things have played out since.

I find myself thinking about historian Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition of fascism far too often than I’d like these days. Note that these sentences were written back when Donald Trump was a NYC playboy libertine who donated to Democrats.

This is one of the weaknesses of civility politics, it falls for the form. That humiliating content farming is debate-shaped, we have to treat it as legitimate! Fox News is news-shaped, we have to treat it as legitimate! The Free Press is newspaper-shaped. etc etc.

"Now an extraordinarily successful scientific research system — one that took decades to build, has saved millions of lives and generated billions of dollars in profits for American companies and investors — is being dismantled before our eyes."

“Mr. Van Hollen saw a different lesson [from his role in the Abrego Garcia case]. ‘This finger in the wind stuff has got to end. We also need to stop deluding ourselves that the problem is all about messaging, or about volume, or style. We don’t just need to fight. We need to fight for something.’”

Murder is wrong. Pogroms are wrong. Using a murder to incite a pogrom against a small and vulnerable group in society is wrong. (If I’m not mistaken, an assassination was the excuse for the wave of mob but state-sanctioned violence in Russia in 1881 that gave us the term “pogrom.”)

Driscoll should get an “insufficiently based” tattoo.

It is weird that the assassination of essentially a celebrity influencer is a bigger deal than the shooting of two top state legislators + their spouses

New Demand Progess Action poll in NYC - Brad Lander would lead Rep. Dan Goldman by 18 points if he challenged him in the Dem primary. AIPAC toxic in the district, AOC/Mamdani far more popular than Jeffries/Schumer www.semafor.com/article/09/1...

This… is a politicized assassination! Oops. Did I say that out loud??

There's a strong analog here to what we would now call civil disobedience, non-compliance, jury nullification in response to the fugitive slave law in the late 1850s

ABC News agrees to blur out the faces of federal agents, presumably as a condition for getting to "ride along" on ICE raids in Chicago. Shameful obedience. abcnews.go.com/world-news-t...

UPDATE: In the lawsuit, three senior FBI officials fired by Kash Patel say Patel informed them that he was instructed to "fire anyone" who worked on any investigation related to Trump. And said his own job depended on carrying out the firings. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

If I have any credibility with you from 20 years of reporting on rightwing & fascist movements, please listen when I beg you not to celebrate Charlie Kirk getting shot. Leave aside morality: this isn’t a match in dry grass, it’s a torch. We do not want what this could ignite & we would not win.

It’s not simply important to denounce political violence because it looks bad not to. It’s the right thing to do on the merits. Even more specifically to this moment it’s important because the forces of fascism are inherently better at political violence than the forces of civic democracy.

Endorsing this: washingtonmonthly.com/2025/09/09/e...

Pope Leo XIV met with one of the most prominent advocates for greater LGBTQ+ inclusion in the Catholic Church. The Rev. James Martin said Leo told him that he intended to continue Pope Francis’ policy of LGBTQ+ acceptance in the church and encouraged him to keep up his advocacy.

This is literally the largest act of union busting in American history. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...

Wow! Prior surveys I and others have done show majority support for work requirements, with informational treatments making little difference. But months of a public discussion of this topic might have broken through. Would love to see more survey data about this.

Art depicting “Sandwich Guy” now at the scene of the alleged misdemeanor.

Define “fairer”, Governor. 🤔 This video is as good an ad for California’s #YesOnProp50 campaign as you’ll see.

"If you are an authoritarian, or a wannabe authoritarian, you are inherently driven to follow a specific checklist that allows you to a) consolidate power and b) neutralize sources of dissent...Trump has made extraordinary progress in a short period of time." open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

“We have to build up an apparatus to shield us from the recklessness of Robert F. Kennedy,” a senior Illinois health official in Gov Pritzker's administration tells me in this piece.