Excellent piece. I'll admit I'll basically vote for any congressperson with a D next to their name due to their policy bundle and the limited damage they can do with their office. For executive positions if the Dem was monsterous I'd vote GOP or if very terrible then 3rd party.

Yes, I think the enormity of Elon Musk racking up Pol-Pot levels of mass killing is so hideous to contemplate that many people just….aren’t.

Trying to explain St Augustine to the pope, the former head of the Augustinian order, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Augustine, on his way back from celebrating mass at the Basilica of St Augustine in Annaba, Algeria, overlooking the site where Augustine lived is peak Adult Catholic Convert.

"To ensure that the person who earns investment gains pays the tax bill, taxes should be paid on gains whenever property is transferred—not just by sale, but by gift or at death as well. A rule like this has worked in Canada for decades. It will work here too." theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

This is a prime example of the very worst kind of symbiotic "insider account" journalism -- in which you can tell who the "sources" are, because they make themselves look good. It is therefore of extremely suspect accuracy. But.... 1/

The Onion is still undefeated 🧅

Old: Freedom of Navigation New: Joint Trump-Ayatollbooth

Millions of American voters wanted to be villains. They came to believe it’s the key to success, while goodness is weak, woke, loser stuff, done only to signal. Offered the option of unvarnished villainy, they enthusiastically took it. Seeing others suffer more made them feel big. And here we are.

I love these people.

One of my favorite “history fun facts” I often share in class is that Notre Dame is called “the fighting Irish” because in 1924, UND students beat the shit out of a local Klan that tried to harass them for being Catholic. stories.nd.edu/stories/a-cl...

reminder that the number one issue that the press covered in 2016, the one they told voters was THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in the election, was Hillary Clinton's compliance with Presidential Records Act record-keeping

Just so you understand, this is as if you prepared for argument in front of a panel that included Cookie Monster, and Cookie Monster asked you a question about cookies, and you had not thought about cookies in advance.

Amazingly the Hegseth-picked press isn’t asking him tough questions in an attempt to hold his feet to the fire, hold power accountable, and inform the public. They’re asking these basic questions because they assume Hegseth knows what he’s doing, is succeeding, and will therefore have good answers.

Big fan of David Roberts @volts.wtf and @pkrugman.bsky.social but their conversation on clean energy, environmentalism, EVs and so much more is next-level. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Heather Cox Richardson has a larger audience than almost any dudefluencer. More informed. Better values & policy preferences. And yet there are no profiles, no elevation or lionization, because there's *nothing* US media is less interested in than middle-aged lib women. No diner interviews for them.

Gotta love the Canadians... Right now there is a big push for them to forego buying the US-Made F-35 fighter jets in favor of buying Swedish-built jets instead. The proposed designation for this new jet would be the FU-47.

Maybe Baker should have spent less time complaining about black people winning journalism awards and spent more time accurately describing the man running the most powerful country in the world bsky.app/profile/carl...

💀

> @scottlincicome.bsky.social

"A team of British military planners has gone to the United States to help draw up plans to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, according to a British official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly." Good someone who hopefully knows what they're doing. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

Ryan Clark has a more serious discussion and understanding about the morality of war than nearly everyone in DC www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-9i...

Oh how I wish this wasn’t satire. 💙

Trump can't declare bankruptcy on the Iran war. He can't get his dad to bail him out. There's no one to sue. His usual lies and bluster aren't working. Iran isn't Venezuela. The global energy market isn't something he can bully. This has already spun out of control. I wrote about the war in @ms.now.

"Brian Stelter posted a December 9, 2017, quote from the New York Times: "Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals." Stelter wrote: “I think about this quote a lot.” "

Okay: Hear me out. How about hydrogen filled airships to avoid the strait?

“We have bombed the shit out of places and napalmed the jungles but the Viet Cong keep shooting at us from the bushes, we don’t get it, that’s not fair.”

“This is the greatest tragedy this state has ever felt" (said by venture capitalist Ron Conway) is such an unhinged statement for someone to make about the prospect of a wealth tax. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/b...

All of this incredibly obvious and infuriating welfare fraud happened under the first Trump administration and I don't recall them ever threatening to block funding to the state of Mississippi as a result.

Playing around with OpenDataPhilly's building footprints. Here's Philly, by population density, in 3D. sstirling.github.io/philly-3d/do...

@msoto.bsky.social sorry I didn't get back to you the other day. This is an example of an article i think was written in bad faith with a terrible headline. The Atlantic has been better lately just because their foreign policy is solid and that's what I've mostly been reading.

The is the federal government telling news stations to provide favorable coverage of the war or their licenses will be pulled. A truly extraordinary moment. We aren't on the verge of a totalitarian takeover. WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF IT. Act like it.

This is a good lesson for journalists: Use plain language to state true things clearly.

Man, @donmoyn.bsky.social's substack remains one of the best places to get concrete political science insights into our authoritarian consolidation. His guest authors today talk about secret police. I will definitely be getting their book open.substack.com/pub/donmoyni...

The Iran war is showing that renewable energy is a national security imperative, and that fighting renewables tooth and nail as the White House has been doing since day one deeply undermines national security, as @ryanlcooper.com writes. prospect.org/2026/03/13/i...

Excellent article. Government agency budgets are f***ed up and bullshit because Congress won't pass timely budgets. And we have to feed all those people in the military, y'know?

I think people who say things like this, especially prominent people with power, should be shamed and shunned and reviled — cancelled, if you will. “Free speech culture” disapproves of that sentiment — says that it’s worse than what Ogles said. Judge it thus.

We should be thinking about how to forgive the politically ignorant Trump voters in our lives as I suspect they'll come to realize they've been conned. Give them some room to come around, no they won't admit they've been conned. But I ain't Jesus, I can't forgive the true MAGA believers.

tapping the "people underestimate how many of our society's elites are motivated not by self-interest, but by sadism" sign

Renewable Energy and National Security The wind and the sun don’t need to transit the Strait of Hormuz open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

Wondering if they’re trying to cure leprosy.

MAGA Stole Obama’s Playbook How the right learned Obama’s game. And what Mamdani and Indivisible show about taking it back from the mucky mucks LIKE RAHM EMMANUEL who tossed it aside.

It's dumb politics that the Left/center left rarely make the national security arguments for renewable energy. Yes I fully understand climate change is much more important! Walk and chew gum!

Two people I really respect on here are @aubreygilleran.bsky.social and @besttrousers.bsky.social because they are in the trenches of the comments 30 replies deep arguing in good faith with people who honestly do not deserve that good faith. The mild temperament on display is remarkable.

Not mentioned in the article is the potential of cyber and other forms of sabotage that could disrupt these supply chains by Iran or other adversaries.

Starting in 2026, the National Endowment for the Humanities will only fund research on "Western civilization" Journalist: What do you think of Western civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.

It’s a problem that the president is a world-class imbecile with zero capacity to think strategically, understand the basic context of his decisions, and who makes those decisions in chaotic spasms. It’s a much bigger problem that our political system finds it impossible to say this out loud.

Rumsfeld:I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days or five weeks or five months, but it certainly isn't gonna last any longer than that Hegseth: It may or may not take four weeks, two weeks, six weeks. It could move up it could move back digbysblog.net/2026/03/02/h...

Breaking character: If you want to learn a bit about the risks of "regime change" in Iran, I recommend this article by James Fallows about the second Iraq War. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...

I think it's really worth unpacking this. I think in some ways, yes, publishing op-eds that represent the genuine opinions of people in power is a legitimate use of your newspaper even if those opinions are "wrong" or abhorent or whatever. Not what I'd do, but whatever. However,