I think the first Trump admin's bumbling nature gave Trump more of a floor, as many of his less popular ideas were never enacted. Not so much this time around.

The NYT can do better than this headline

📣 Call for Nominations: Jack Walker Outstanding Article Award ⏳ Deadline: February 27 📧 Email nominations to: @jmcrosson.bsky.social @rdassonneville.bsky.social @garlicksauce.bsky.social @shamiragelbman.bsky.social @luciamotoliniac.bsky.social

Not invincible.

Who could've seen this response coming? Oh yeah, anyone that's read my book.

For 0 dollars most academics will use their trademark depth of policy knowledge and actual experience doing academic research to tell you things that are more true than false

Yes. Could be changed by simple legislation.

Uncommon Mike Johnson W

honestly, we gotta get him to keep talking like this

YIMBY is a generational cause.

See, only wussy Democrats call it a quarantine to avoid an act of war (while successfully averting nuclear catastrophe, but I digress). So they will definitely call it a blockade.

TikTok coverage seems to have become somewhat numb to this, but worth remembering that the President simply refusing to enforce a *crystal-clear* law of Congress for over a year to instead broker a deal on his own terms, & Congress just shrugging, is very much not how this was supposed to work

Biden trying to ban tiktok in an election year wasn’t the only reason Democrats blew the 2024 election, but if put it in the top 10.

This has got to be the OpenStax version, no? I wonder if the original copyright holders have grounds to sue if the work was not being used properly.

The thought of that tiny child being snatched by big strange armed masked men and thrown in a car or a plane or whatever all alone with no idea what’s happening to him and no one to take care of him. Heartbreaking isn’t a strong enough word. There is no word that’s strong enough.

Now the actual military has to dress like it’s not the military cuz federal law enforcement agencies dress too much like the military

while it would be nice to assume the GOP will simply run itself into the ground forever, the people who will make the best tactical decisions over the next few years will be the ones who understand Republicans do in fact need to win elections in the future and will rework the brand accordingly

meta-discursive comment: the incentives of social media where making an incorrect naive prediction is seen as much more embarrassing than making an incorrect cynical one are very bad.

If you want to submit nominations for the career achievement award or emerging scholar award for APSA’s state politics and policy section get them to me, Caroline Tolbert and Justin Phillips. 2/16 deadline.

Roast pork with provolone and long hots.

Forget TACO, we need an acronym for whatever it is Josh Hawley is doing this Congress.

Thank you for the birthday wishes. In lieu of gifts, if you give money to a candidate in 2026, please give it to one who can plausibly change the veto point of a legislative chamber.

We don't need a Google Scholar AI. We need Google Scholar to (1) fix the cite option, so that it always has the correct BibTex cite. (2) put the cite option on every mention of the paper (in author bios, standalone pages, etc.).

I like how every major institution has one IT guy, who probably doesn't even work there anymore, who decided one day: "we're going with (first inital-last name, last name plus first and middle initials, etc.) for email addresses and everyone has to live with that for the rest of their digital lives.

The cost of 3 years of ACA subsidy expansions is just about what Trump and congressional Republicans increased the ICE budget by in the OBBBA.

I've often joked that as faculty I program in a high-level language called "graduate student". Having tried out Claude Code this morning, I (i) feel extremely at home, (ii) am realizing that research-by-graduate-student is perhaps the original vibe-coding. 1/2

I don't know if esoteric separation of powers issues is the right political frame to litigate in the future, but this is impeachable behavior for Trump and any cabinet officials involved.

I know (almost) nothing matters, but after watching the murder video, this speech by Noem should be an impeachable offense.

When the boomers leave the workforce, do you think we can finally replace the garbage silver Diet Cokes with the superior Coke Zero in all the vending machines?

It’s his favorite day of the year to violate the Constitution.

Trump's first term approval had a floor of like 36, but he was always sure not to cross his MAGA base. Epstein stuff and nation building in Venezuela run the risk of crossing the base in such a way that the floor could fall out.

how many of y'all knew that only ~15% of organizations active in DC both lobby and contribute via PACs?

It's time to talk about the anti-vaxxers as an interest group having a remarkable and awful policy impact in a short period of time.

Among the many reasons you don’t kidnap a foreign head of state at gunpoint even if you have the capability, is that it sparks consequences you can neither control nor anticipate.

I’ve long maintained that it was a mistake for Congress to have abolished itself.

Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change. I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress.

Congress, not the president, had the power to declare war. And even if you believed bombing alleged drug dealers wasn’t war, kidnapping a country’s leader most assuredly is.

There’s only one Middlebury

I think about slop in terms of F1 scores that measure the precision of machine learning (or call it AI) tools. It's remarkable how quick they get to levels that lightly trained humans do (~0.8 or 0.9). But that last 0.2 is where pros, creatives and human experts differentiate their work from slop.

We're all gonna get got by the AI from time to time, but this is the right way to handle it. Recognize the error, do what you can to reverse your role in spreading it, be vigilant going forward, and don't be one of the people who says "it's compelling even if it's not real, so what's the harm?"

While all eyes were on health care, Dems very nearly pulled off another big surprise on the House floor. A war powers resolution vote forced by @meeks.house.gov to block Trump and Hegseth's boat strikes in the Caribbean nearly passed; 7 Republicans flipped their votes from yes to no late in the vote

I'm enjoying the Ken Burns "American Revolution" documentary, but are we sure this couldn't have just been a podcast?

The slogan "Drill, baby, drill!" originated with former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele at the 2008 Republican National Convention, intended to promote U.S. energy independence, but it was famously amplified by Sarah Palin at the same event.

Does palin sue?

In Leavitt's defense, she was 11 years old when Sarah Palin was nominated for VP at the 2008 RNC.

Best book covers of 2025 medium.com/3streams/bes...

Grading and googling hallucinated citations, as one does nowadays, and now that LLMs have been around for a while, I've discovered new horrors: hallucinated journals are now appearing in Google Scholar with dozens of citations bc so many people are citing these fake things

I want Spotify Wrapped for Professors: "This year you read 2,404 pages of student papers/exams. You said `This argument needs to be more specific' 477 times. You gave compliment sandwiches 23% of the time. You used 78 unnecessary em dashes. Your most depressed months are MARCH & NOVEMBER."

One of the most gripping moments I've ever seen in a congressional hearing.

This is an absurd threat to have made, and now do they carry it out and punish a core state? Or back down and make their other threats hollow? Kind of a no-win.