A pilgrimage worthy of the name

USCIS update on Operation PARRIS and other extreme vetting: hostile, paranoid, racist, dishonest. www.uscis.gov/newsroom/ale...

OMG cc @pkrugman.bsky.social *Motivated* math error, most likely -- and fraudulent fraud claim

Health program cuts eyed to help pay for Iran war www.axios.com/newsletters/...

They want to kill silver loading, stripping billions from premium subsidies. Above all others, this would hurt...Texans.

Don’t let this fly under the radar: the Trump administration wants to kick ~6 million more people off of food assistance programs, including nearly 2 million children. That would save just $1 billion a year, while Trump spends upwards of $1 billion per *day* on his new forever war. Priorities.

Families USA's Anthony Wright on the final enrollment report for the ACA marketplace in 2026. "The result is more uninsured, and a dramatic shift into worse coverage: enrollment in lower-level, higher deductible bronze plans jumped 10% — from 30% in 2025 to 40% in 2026."

To whoever did this at the #NoKings in Boston: Thank you.❤️ It made me tear up. And we must to be reminded of needless damage to humanity that results directly from the careless, bellicose bluster coming from the Pentagon and White House.

Analilia Mejia at SOMA Action's No Kings rally, Maplewood, NJ

Millions of low-income ACA enrollees moved from high-AV silver to bronze in 2026 xpostfactoid.substack.com/p/low-income...

Millions of low-income ACA enrollees moved from high-AV silver to bronze in 2026 xpostfactoid.substack.com/p/low-income...

OH MY HEART...the Oberlin Luddites Reject "The Year of AI Exploration"! 💚

Is Trump going to try "We hurt them so bad, we can afford to be generous"?

"More" of this:

Democracy dies in billionaire hands.

Hot off the presses! The Trump Administration continues to harm Social Security customer service, and the damage it's caused will have lasting effects on seniors, people with disabilities, and bereaved families. www.cbpp.org/research/soc...

Roughly the cost of extending the ACA enhanced subsidies, March through December.

Beinart: "I don’t think Heschel could have imagined a figure like Stephen Miller...it would have shaken him to the core to imagine America producing a Jew like Stephen Miller." It shakes me too that some of the most powerful Nazis rampaging today are Jews. open.substack.com/pub/peterbei...

New Jersey sues to stop DHS concentration camp buildout in Roxbury, alleging: "DHS and ICE have flouted bedrock federal statutory mandates with which Congress requires it to comply": the APA, NEPA, ICA and INA.

Graham Greene, The Quiet American, post civilian massacre:

Call for triage: Families USA's Stop the Bleed campaign open.substack.com/pub/xpostfac...

In case his resignation letter didn't convince you he is a Nazi

on the jim crow travesty that is the SAVE act (gift link)

Too kind. The real message in this excellent piece is that Kent is an antisemite.

Trump’s solution to his Iran fiasco: abolish the first amendment, give a big cash payday to Russia and invite China in to take control of the Persian Gulf. He’s demented but even more dangerous than he is crazy.

The way our nation turned its back on those who helped us at great risk to themselves and their families is an unforgivable national shame. We owed Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal. Instead, ICE arrested him in front of his children and he died in their custody. We failed him and his family.

Omfg

When a federal judge (finally) put ICE officers under oath, they admitted that they are given daily detention quotas and rely heavily on a Palantir-supplied AI tool to select targets, without warrants and without enough evidence to obtain one. They simply go into neighborhoods and round people up.

We're a week away from 2026 #Residency #Match. Taking bets on the over/under that >40% of #internalmedicine spots go unfilled because the 40% of IM docs who are #international #medical graduates ain't gonna step foot here

I just saw some grudging praise, and a dictum occurred to me: Grudging praise is the highest praise.

We are killing all the right people and cutting your taxes? Is that the U.S.'s epitaph?

"One former Pentagon official said the Feb. 28 strike that hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School ... came as a natural result of changes made by the Trump administration to reduce staff to mitigate civilian harm and Hegseth's emphasis on lethality over legality." apnews.com/article/iran...

Accept defeat and call it victory

RFK Jr is now targeting mifeprostone & is reportedly planning to target HPV vaccination next (he lies, very dangerously, when he says cervical cancer is more common in vaccinated women) Yup, RFK Jr & his physician allies, like Drs Bhattaharya & Makary, are pushing right wing misogynistic politics👇

Not to say the Twin Cities have moved on, but...

cc the Roxbury, NJ town council and their lawyer, NJ Senator Bucco, who have declared that federal supremacy can't be beat

"If we have a trillion-dollar military, but a week after you start to use it everyone screams that they’ve run out of everything and that more money is needed, then you don’t have a trillion-dollar military; you just have a contractor enrichment factory." prospect.org/2026/03/12/i...

HUGE.

Gee, I wonder who besides Netanyahu may have been whispering to Trump to start this war www.wsj.com/world/middle...

Cute that the Trumpies are considering un-sanctioning Russian oil,

This puts me at 10 people released. I filed my 1st habeas petition 29 days ago. I am an incredibly small-time, nobody lawyer who knew nothing about immigration law the day I submitted that case. I barely know any more today. I had never sued the federal government and now I've beaten them 10 times.

It can happen to any of us. wgntv.com/news/chicago...

“Tehran is burning. And smoke has filled the streets. It’s impossible to drive out of the city right now and even with the windows closed, heavy smoke is making its way inside." Read every word.

Sources: www.nytimes.com/interactive/... www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/u... news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-...

Department of ItIsn'tWar

Pema Levy sounds the alarm about Trump's Operation PARRIS, the promised roundup of vetted refugees, which started in Minnesota and is currently stayed by a court in MN only. motherjones.com/politics/202... via @MotherJones

The real story is that foreign govts try to "interfere" all the time. In 2020 and 2024 we had mechanisms to catch them, call them out, & mitigate damage. Now, those mechanims are gone & the Trump admin would prefer to exploit "foreign interference" to justify a federal take-over of elections.

I had a similar thought when NPR interviewed a missile victim in Tel Aviv -- can't do that in Tehran.

Wait, isn't Europe keeping Ukraine afloat while the U.S. (at best) stands by?

💥 No president in the modern era has ordered more military strikes against as many different countries as Donald Trump. He's attacked 7 nations, three of which had never been targeted by U.S. military strikes. He authorized more individual air strikes in 2025 than Biden did in four years.