“Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.” This all on the leader of the MAGA #scotus ↘️

How the Trump Administration Is Giving Even More Tax Breaks to the Wealthy www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/b...

I’ve read that the tech billionaires are saying they aren’t creating an oligarchy, but an aristocracy. They never miss a chance to flatter themselves. No. When such intellectual and moral mediocrities take over government by virtue only of their wealth, they are oligarchs, pure and simple.

Fascinating new word (at least to me) — “sado-populism.” Yes, this fills a gap in our political language, for “love this policy, it hurts people I want to hurt.”

From the report on Christian Nationalism by the Theology Committee of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops — “Christian nationalism is heresy for Christians, and dangerous rhetoric for all Americans.”

Lee Bright was just re-elected to the SC Senate by 6.3% of eligible voters. 93.7% of SC SD 12 voters are unaccounted for. Too busy? Don’t care? Don’t think it matters? What?

The cost of the tea that I’ve been drinking for ages just went up 35% because of tariffs to help pay for billionaire tax cuts. My money is being handed to Musk, the Trump family, and their friends who are very wealthy. This tells you whose voices, whose lives, matter to the current administration.

you fucked around and now the Episcopalians are doing memes. are you happy now. are you

Brett Kavanaugh is basically arguing tha there have been "sufficient remedies" for racism. This seems like a good time to bring up the @politico.com about how young Republicans have *remedied* racism. www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Justice Kavanaugh this morning in the Louisiana case asked if there should be a time limit on racial considerations in redistricting. If the answer is ever to be yes, it will have to be after young partisan allies of the Justice (yes, he is partisan) stop sending horrible racist misogynist texts.

We were actually getting somewhere, too. 😞 @sbmitche.bsky.social www.library.hbs.edu/working-know...

There is an intensive effort by members of the national administration to label everything in opposition to their positions, including No Kings rallies, as left wing extremism. It is not extreme to oppose morphing the presidency into a monarchy, unless all the founders of our nation were extremists.

South Carolinians: Did you see the announcement that Google is investing billions in SC? Well, your General Assembly refused to protect you from skyrocketing utility bills to subsidize this and other super wealthy corporations. This must change before residential & small business users are bankrupt.

I continue to see media comments that Chief Justice Roberts is afraid to buck the Trump administration. Instead, the evidence is that Roberts is on board with the whole plan for an authoritarian executive shored up by extreme right wing evangelical and Opus Dei-style fundamentalism.

Why is the Louisiana v. Callais case so important? Callais is essentially a showdown between two legal claims: racial vote dilution in violation of Section 2 of the VRA versus racial gerrymandering in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Read more: www.lwv.org/blog/louisia...

What percentage of the GDP of India is derived from spam calling to the United States? Surely it must be significant.

Ken Burns in an interview about his series on the Revolution — “the increase in executive power is perhaps the greatest existential threat to the United States right now.” This is not just what the executive branch but SCOTUS is explicitly committed to making happen, and Congress willingly helps.

I am curious. Why do some political figures answer every question with “trans!!!!!” Regardless of the question.

The League of Women Voters' case against South Carolina's gerrymandered congressional map is no longer active. The SC Supreme Court ruled this morning, finding it nonjusticiable. In short, they believe that they cannot act. Some thoughts on that: lteague.substack.com/p/gerrymande...

Corruption at an unprecedented scale. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/u...

This is what these data center companies are like — metastasizing without real concern for anything but their own bottom lines while we pay through environmental harm, escalating utility bills, or both.

“Risks deepening humanitarian crisis” is so inadequate for what is happening. www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09...

CD1 gerrymander is still an active case in the S.C. Supreme Court while Norman wants an even more lopsided gerrymander. Yes, it is is technically possible to map so that 40% of S.C. voters have no congressional representation. But they shouldn’t. www.postandcourier.com/politics/sc-...

My confidence in AI is not helped when a search for "Spoons Savannah, Colleton County" (an early family location) returns a suggestion that I'm confused about Lovin' Spoons, a no longer extant yoghurt shop in Savannah.

Just a personal take on this, but if you really believe in something a lot it is usually more helpful to dedicate your own life to working for it rather than taking someone else’s life. People who disagree on this point tend to be pretty confused.

S.323 would allow the government of South Carolina to control the lives of every person who is pregnant in the state. lteague.substack.com/p/small-gove...

The SC General Assembly had a chance in 2025 to protect our state's residential and small business users from being compelled to subsidize some of the largest corporations on earth -- Meta, Google, etc. They failed. They must not fail again in 2026. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

University of Arizona working on serious water issues, while a data center (usually a devastating hog of both water and energy) tries to locate in southern Arizona. Tucson apparently said no, but other nearby towns are considering it. www.kjzz.org/education/20...

I just got a notice from the company where I buy tea that Trump has put a 50% tariff on India. This is not to protect the non-existent US tea growers. It is yet another way of making us pay for billionaire tax cuts. The middle class will die by thousands of these cuts.

Krugman today — Trump’s trade war should be seen as part of a package of policies that amounts to class warfare — class warfare against middle and lower-income Americans in favor of the affluent, especially the top 10 percent of the income distribution.

Wilhoit's principle -- “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

PSE&G estimates 10-20% of queries from data centers will come to fruition. If utilities overbuild in anticipation of data center demand, who pays for building that capacity? Legislators must protect the rest of us -- residential and small business users -- from being the answer to that question.

SC needs to be ready to go it alone on many expensive issues, among them election cyber security. www.postandcourier.com/opinion/edit...

FREE LUNCH. The SC Policy Council has released its summer poll. They found that 73% of South Carolinians want to eliminate the income tax.They didn’t ask how folks would choose to compensate for the lost revenue. They might as well have asked how many South Carolinians would like a free lunch.

I recommend the worship Xipe Totec — guarantees interesting times. www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

AI data centers are using more power. Regular customers are footing the bill. scdailygazette.com/2025/07/16/r...

The Manhood Trap: From Epstein’s Island to Musk’s Baby Farm — How the Right Redefined Masculinity as Control open.substack.com/pub/thomhart...

So much of what some folks are nostalgic for — an era when women were subservient, LGBTQ+ closeted, oligarchs gilded and others desperate enough to be malleable — seems like nostalgie de la boue.

My husband oversaw archaeological work at Manzanar Internment Camp and production of the NPS report on that work. Will that publication be unacceptable because it acknowledges the pain inflicted by these WWII camps? open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

The South Carolina General Assembly must act to protect us. lteague.substack.com/p/data-centers

This misses the point. The folks calling the shots WANT to trigger a crisis through deficit spending, to justify totally demolishing any vestige of public good through government. Has everyone forgotten “shrinking government . . . Drowning it in the bathtub?” open.substack.com/pub/econjare...

I think Krugman is on to something here. The love of burning fossil fuels has some kind of “man-o-sphere” vibes for some of the right wing. We are on track to pay heavily to compensate for for the psycho-sexual inadequacies of these guys. Real Men Burn Stuff open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

The wretched bill has passed, doing serious harm to millions of Americans. The issue often raised — the oligarchs of infinite greed have so much already that their lives won’t change. So why the cruelty? For power. For control. For people so beaten down that we are no longer free. They will rule.

The person who figures out how to make pain blocks for joint replacement surgery last for a week instead of a day deserves to be the richest person on the planet, instead of the #%^*+ who now holds that title.

Does Murkowski think she gets brownie points for knowing the bill she voted for is cruel? Nope. On the contrary.

Everyone's Patriarch: Albert Perry was born into slavery in South Carolina in about 1820. Testing placed his great grandson in the y-DNA haplogroup A00, now traced to Cameroon. The man born with the defining mutations of this haplogroup became the y-DNA ancestor of almost everyone in the world.

Reading comments on an online ad for scones, I have to think that lactose intolerance is more common than at any time since the Chalcolithic and celiac disease is rampant.

The “radical agenda” that Planned Parenthood is conducting consists of ordinary contraception and basic cancer screening (pap smears, breast exams). I guess no conservative women have any of these radical medical treatments. scdailygazette.com/2025/06/26/u...

"“It cannot be that the only check on this sort of inversion of representative democracy is convincing lawmakers to give away their own power,” he [Allen Chaney] said." SC Supreme Court weighs constitutionality of GOP gerrymandering in SC’s 1st District scdailygazette.com/2025/06/24/s...