Or as corporate media would ask: "Why won't Democrats open the government up?"

Has Trump’s second term posed a greater or lesser threat to the rule of law than you expected? @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/m...

Trump oversaw the Afghanistan war for four years. I guess it was so unimportant to him that he forgot this.

"For me as a veteran, this is more than just a personal injustice—it’s a constitutional affront." #KavanaughStop

They’re using American tax dollars to fund infrastructure in Argentina because that’s where they’re all going to flee when we kick them out of office

A must-read for those who are concerned about the future of universities under Trump. Trump is replacing the rule of law with rule by deal, and guaranteeing nothing for universities except that they give up their constitutional freedoms to avoid political punishments.

I thought I'd put the administration's proposed "compact" with universities in context, so I wrote the blog post below. It's especially for journalists covering this story! Many details about how the compact itself works and why the administration has retreated to this strategy.

I hear the same from many British, American and Canadian Jews

The regime keeps losing in court because what they’re doing is illegal

In case you missed it: 🎁link to Erwin Chemerinsky's outstanding article on the Trump Administration's pernicious proposed "compact" with universities. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

If you like yelling about misuse of the passive voice, THIS IS IT.

Both could be true.

“'The fact that we don't have money to pay journalists, but we have money to pay Bari Weiss between $100 and 200 million is indicative of what the Ellisons' true goal here is,' a network correspondent said. 'And it's not journalism.'"

There will come a time in America when many ICE agents delete it from their resumes.

The central point is that when fascism came to America it wouldn't call itself that, nor would it be wearing a swastika. It would call itself "patriotic" and "100% American."

"It is not hyperbole to say that the future of higher education in America requires that every university reject it. If any schools capitulate, the pressure will be enormous on all to fold. The only solution is solidarity & collective action against this effort at federal control over higher ed"

Ideology over experience.

Important to remember that Chris Rufo spearheaded this overhaul and serves on the colleges’s board of trustees. Yet he is worshipped in various quarters as an educational innovator

Senior officers, entrusted to manage complex military operations, were summoned from around the world. They got a lecture on fitness and grooming standards. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/30/u...

Trump’s tariffs and pointless military displays are the opposite of foreign-policy restraint, argues columnist @stephenwalt.bsky.social.

Does Hegseth seriously believe all senior military officers should have resigned if they disagreed with any of Trump’s predecessors? Can’t think of a better way to have a crappy military.

It's easy to see this speech as just weirdly performative, but there's a lot more—and a lot worse—going on here. The meeting & speeches are part of a larger project aimed at promoting the military leadership’s partisan alignment with the administration. How? 1/

"I am proud to shut down the government .... I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down." —Donald Trump, Dec. 11, 2018

I keep thinking about something John Kenneth Galbraith once said about the flaws of Reaganomics: “It assumes the rich aren’t working hard enough because they don’t have enough money, and the poor aren’t working hard enough because they have too much.”

Not a single one of our institutions has any intention of protecting its faculty or defending the integrity of intellectual inquiry at this moment. This is of the most disturbing versions of that story I’ve read: it keeps getting worse and worse as you go

He also gutted the VA of at least 150 psychologists and 500 social workers. I'm sure they weren't doing anything important.

Trump is building a personalist regime where every university must bend the knee or lose funding and every business must bend the knee or face tariffs, H-1B fees, and regulatory blackmail. You can't cover each domain in isolation; they are all the same story.

The greatest failure of the past year hasn't been the parade of illegal and unconstitutional acts taken by the president: A functioning democracy could have blunted them. The greatest failure has been the abject surrender of nearly every person & institution with the power to resist. For example:

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.

Przeworski says it cleanly, clearly, and convincingly. What then must we do? www.dissentmagazine.org/article/how-...

Let’s call a lie a lie, shall we?

If/when Dems regain control of Congress, the path is clear. No clerks. No building. No shadow docket. Nothing, until the Wizards In Robes stop ignoring the law, data, history, precedent, & the plain meaning of words in the Constitution. And there will be 25, with 9 chosen by lottery for any case.

Has anyone collected the vile statements congressional Republicans have made calling for the murder, assault, deportation and/or imprisonment of their colleagues? Seems like there’s a lot of this coming straight from the GOP but the nation is more focused on ordinary liberals on social media.

# 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

Another reason to demand RFK Jr's impeachment is that it helps to normalize a removal politics that's sorely missing in the US. Our politics needs a widespread sense that contempt for proper service to the public can get you kicked out of office

Trump promised Americans last year he wouldn't go after abortion. Trump lied.

Trump’s newest immigration clampdown, which targets foreigners seeking a special type of visa known as the H-1B, will inflict a range of harms on the country’s prosperity and standing in the world, writes columnist @hofrench.bsky.social.

"The people, it turns out, are far more courageous than their leaders."

The merchants of hindsight www.politico.com/news/magazin...

So much of our news is devoted to questions like "are vaccines good" and "is climate change real?" that there's no oxygen left to talk about how well the government is (not) doing at, you know, governing. www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025...

The 2025 Faculty in the South Survey asked if faculty had syllabi or curriculum choices questioned by their school. Almost 20% in Georgia said yes. That is hardly a ringing endorsement of the university system's proclaimed commitment to academic freedom. www.ajc.com/education/20...

"The United States, created in opposition to monarchy, should never become a country where the president can order the indefinite imprisonment or the unilateral killing of people merely because he has deemed them to be criminals."

Here are two minutes of lowlights from Trump’s rambling, hour-long address to the UN General Assembly that Twitter is calling one of the most embarrassing moments in recent US history. Subscribe to zeteo.com for more.

Just read a transcript of Trump’s UN speech, a semi-coherent pack of self-promoting xenophobic propaganda. US adversaries are no doubt pleased we are led by such a buffoon, and any foreigners who still like this country must be asking why Americans did this to themselves (and the rest of the world).

Keep in mind that the latest YouGov poll has American public approval of Trump at 39%, while favorable American public views of the U.N. are at 57%, up from 52% last year, according to Pew poll.

That is not a denial.

“They studied 51 populist presidents and prime ministers who were in power between 1900 and 2020 and found that after 15 years, GDP per capita was 10% lower when compared with a plausible nonpopulist counterfactual.”

“Behind closed doors” being the most important words. fortune.com/2025/09/21/b...

Nine months into 2025, it shouldn't be too much to ask of journalists that they pause, reflect, and expressly raise questions in their stories—prominently, at the top!—about whether an executive pronouncement like this is lawful or simply yet another attempt to engage in a lawless power grab. 🙄