During his confirmation hearings I wrote a (2000s alert!) blog post comparing him to the assassin played by Cillian Murphy in the thriller Red Eye: square face, blue eyes, seems charming at first & by the time you realize the danger you're trapped with him on a plane/with life tenure
In my view, John Roberts's most impressive PR accomplishment is persuading an entire generation of Supreme Court commentators that he is anything other than a Republican politician who uses legalese to implement policies that Republican voters want
You know the Supreme Court be playing fast and loose with the shadow docket but I'm telling you, qualified immunity cases? Some of the fastest and loosest
Let a lower court spell out why cops should stand trial, & the Supreme Court lifts it without explanation
ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/smith...
This seems possibly worse than the something-eating-the-sun disaster scenario in Project Hail Mary, and the probable fix would just require quitting fossil fuels, no need for Ryan Gosling to become an astronaut, but likely we won't b/c industry and world leaders don't wanna 😢
Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar
I also told him I thought his book would make a good TV show. This was on my mind b/c Shaun and I met working on So Long Dental Plan (@solongdentalplan.com), the upcoming book he edited about stories about unions in scripted TV. Keep an eye out for it, nerds of labor and TV! 3/3
We talked about the Trump administration's use of deportation to chill its perceived ideological enemies, and how that would sound familiar to Michael J. Obermeier, the union president who was arrested, convicted of lying about his Communist party membership, and deported during the Cold War. 2/3
It was great to interview @shaunrichman.org about We Always Had a Union, his page-turner history of the New York hotel workers' union! 1/3
Infowars/Onion combo logo in rainbow saying “I support the onion’s hostile media takeover.”
It’s finally happened. After 18 months. Finally, a media merger you can root for.
😡
These schools want to get public funding while also REJECTING 4-YEAR OLDS because their parents are gay or transgender, just to be clear
Washington Post headline: “Justin Fairfax grew obsessed with clearing his name. His family life was destroyed.”
Hey @washingtonpost.com, your headline gives the impression that the people who accused Justin Fairfax of sexual assault are to blame for “destroying his family life,” rather his decision to murder his ex wife
This is a delightful article, I laughed out loud enough to significantly embarras my 12 year old. It’s also touching and educational about free restaurant bread and human nature
It's fine to have Chef Boyardee Ravioli for lunch
Actually many presidents have had mental illnesses. There's no need to insult people with mental illness to point out what's wrong with Trump: immorality, not caring about human life, racism, xenophobia, misogyny, corruption, cruelty, incompetence. www.nami.org/blog/mental-...
Justice Sonia Sotomayor lets Brett Kavanaugh have it:
“I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour."
news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/...
I was a math major in college b/c I liked that there are correct answers, and I really miss that in my mostly non-mathy life
By my calculations, 15 pavers would make a circle about 26 inches in radius (measured to the inner part of the pavers). Don’t know if that’s the size circle you’re going for.
NEW: We have the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Now is the time to use it.
It's past time for Trump to be removed from office. This is a global crisis. It's time for J.D. Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.
Now, at Law Dork:
Whatever happens, this is a deeply shameful episode in American history that will leave a permanent stain on the country.
Repeatedly vowing to commit war crimes against millions of innocent civilians is beyond the pale.
"History will judge-" let me stop you right fucking there, history doesn't do fucking shit, I'm a historian, let's be clear here: elected officials need to do their fucking jobs, right now, before it happens, or future historians will judge THEM. Everyone knows and knew who Trump was.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum under the Trump administration has deleted its teaching materials about links between Nazi racism and the Jim Crow laws: www.politico.com/news/2026/04...
At first I assumed AI would get better—like they would build in a step where it checks its answers against trustworthy sources. But no! Not sure whether tech companies think truth doesn’t matter or that a world where nobody can determine what’s true is better for them. Not great either way!
Should the rich be able to send their kids to public school? use the library? parks? roads? Let’s make all public goods means-tested so they’re hard to access, the rich have no stake in them & starve them of $ and eventually eliminate them, that will show those fancy-burger eaters!
Should the rich be able to send their kids to public school? use the library? parks? roads? Let’s make all public goods means-tested so they’re hard to access, the rich have no stake in them & starve them of $ and eventually eliminate them, that will show those fancy-burger eaters!
There’s a good documentary about Louis CK that is illuminating about the effects of his behavior and covers the essential truths (as I see them) that (1) he was not cancelled and (2) he was not sorry. It’s a good watch. You can rent it on demand; here’s the trailer. youtu.be/YjWetrSafmc?...
Just amazing that the SG was like “I will not bother to come prepared with answers about how citizenship should work for babies left at hospitals and Native Americans, the groups that two of my target Justices are most interested in”
Yet anti-LGBTQ+ therapists now enjoy a First Amendment right that is denied to abortion providers. But as Jackson pointed out, the inconsistency runs deeper. After Chiles, parents who seek to “convert” their transgender children have a constitutional right to do so. But thanks to last year’s decision in Skrmetti, parents who seek to affirm their transgender children with medication have no such right. States can ban gender-affirming medication but evidently cannot ban anti-transgender talk therapy. And the majority does not explain why anti-LGBTQ+ speech receives heightened protections when other viewpoints do not. Surely, Jackson wrote, a state can direct doctors to discourage, and not encourage, smoking cigarettes. It can prohibit doctors “from telling an anorexic patient to eat less” while allowing them to recommend eating more. It can stop doctors from encouraging patients to end their lives. These laws, too, censor speech on the basis of the state’s preferred viewpoint—in Gorsuch’s words, they “enforce orthodoxy.” Why is it, then, that nobody seriously argues that they’d violate the First Amendment, too?
The Supreme Court's "conversion therapy" decision today is indefensible on its own terms. A ton of medical regulations restrict speech on the basis of "viewpoint." Nobody thinks they're unconstitutional. This court just subjects pro-LGBTQ protections to special hostility. slate.com/news-and-pol...
During a recent hearing, he shared how agents abused him while abducting his dad. “They told me I was ‘gay for crying,’ ‘an illegal idiot,’ a ‘border hopper,’ and other demeaning words."
"I’m sharing my story so that this doesn’t happen to other ppl,” he said. "This is not the America that I know.”
