Mme de Staël, influential French-Swiss woman of letters, author of Corinne, born #OTD 1766; champion of Romanticism, pre-cursor of feminism, known for her observations on Revolutionary France & the rise of Napoleon.
Portrait after François Gérard, Château de Versailles
Constitutional antihardball. @fishkin.bsky.social David Pozen columbialawreview.org/content/asym...
These are the people who literally strip power from elected Democrats before they take office.
I'm partial to Fauquier County myself (another British governor).
Slotkin with the "if only he would suddenly become a completely different person and turn into a normal president" thing.
Samuel Beckett waited outside Lidl to do the same but his supplier never turned up
Maryland has, for now, stopped ICE from converting a warehouse designed to hold commercial products into a warehouse used to hold people.
Similar lawsuits have been filed against ICE's warehouse detention camp plans in New Jersey and Michigan.
Patel’s lawsuit has initially been assigned to Judge Emmet Sullivan, a senior status Clinton appointee.
The current trend of Democrats promising tax cuts is incredibly irresponsible. It's like promising kids ice cream for breakfast.
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Now on SSRN:
#history #lawsky #skystorians
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT No. 26-1327 Rigoberto Soto Jimenez Appellee Todd Blanche, Acting Attorney General, et al. ----. ------ Matthew Isihara Appellant Appeal from U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota (0:26-cv-00957-LMP) ORDER The court hereby denies the motion to dismiss, but grants the alternative motion to appoint an amicus curiae to argue in support of the district court's contempt order. Jeffrey P. Justman is hereby appointed as amicus curiae. The brief of amicus curiae shall be due on May 20, 2026. April 20, 2026
NEW: Eighth Circuit does NOT dismiss DOJ's appeal of the civil contempt order against a DOJ lawyer in one of the Minnesota cases (as requested by the habeas petitioner, represented here by @smmarotta.bsky.social), but does appoint a lawyer (Jeffrey Justman) to argue in defense of the contempt order.
This piece begins with Amity Shlaes' most common and most deceitful trick -- citing the unemployment numbers in 1938, when the country fell into a recession because FDR had been persuaded to *ease off* the New Deal, as proof that the New Deal didn't work.
Pure hackery.
Here’s FBI Director Kash Patel’s complaint against the Atlantic regarding the magazine’s reporting about his drinking habits: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
When I saw "cattle slaughter," I thought of the Larionov scandal of 1960, when the Ryazan party boss inflated his meat production statistics by buying cattle from neighboring oblasts and counting them as his own and just plain falsifying statistics. Larionov killed himself before the scandal broke.
‼️ Russia: “Novosibirsk Region Governor Andrei Travnikov has dismissed his deputy, Minister of Agriculture Andrei Shindelov” following a “cattle slaughter scandal.”
👀
www.kommersant.ru/doc/8604894
Searing opinion from a federal judge on Long Island, who describes "police state"-like tactics by ICE to arrest peopleand draw up after-the-fact warrants.
He says DOJ is damaging its credibility with the courts by trying to shield ICE from scrutiny. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
How was Medicare a failure? I know it still exists, because i just started getting it.
"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...
A black and white photo of Einstein’s desk, blackboard, and bookshelves after he passed away. Journals, magazine, and papers are strewn over the desk and shelves. A few of the shelves are organized, but mostly they contain haphazard, listing stacks that seem like they could fall over at any moment. The desk is a beautiful disaster, with papers and journals covering every inch. A pot for tobacco, a small glass jar, and Einstein’s pipe sit near the middle. The dark leather chair is pushed back slightly from the desk. The blackboard is sectioned off into several different regions, each of which contains one or more boxed formulas from whatever Einstein was working on when he fell ill.
Albert Einstein passed away #OTD in 1955 due to complications from a ruptured abdominal aneurysm.
Doctors recommended surgical intervention but Einstein declined, saying “I have done my share; it is time to go. I will do it elegantly."
Here is his office as he left it. 🧪 ⚛️
Image: R. Morse/LIFE
A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Some of it was by Soviet economists like Zaslavskaya.
Many Democrats do want to undo it, but many don't. I think Biden came the closest to undoing some of it and challenging the framing of "government is bad" and "taxes are bad," but then you have the Democrats who are promising tax cuts, which is exactly what we don't need right now.
Henri Rol-Tanguy was the French Resistance leader who led the uprising which helped in the liberation of Paris in 1944. His command post was near the Denfert-Rochereau metro station.
JUST IN: Judge McElroy, a Trump appointee, continues DOJ’s unbroken losing streak in efforts to obtain state voter rolls. She calls it a “fishing expedition.” storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
![A message from the Bluesky status page, noting that 'we are investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic]'](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4tvxd4eblq5sgvwr7t6iohtt/bafkreih7cbkewqbzyggi2o4nn6kim6sagehkxlz2zu453xf7qcd3luikdu)
A message from the Bluesky status page, noting that 'we are investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic]'
I see the Bluesky team is finally taking an interest in late Carolingian historiography.
I'll see myself out.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
I've been getting a lot of "Forbiddens".
