the democratic party’s basic problem is it has almost no control over how its message reaches the ears of voters, especially outside of presidential election years. but rather than devote serious time, attention and cash to that problem its consultants and pundits want to fight factional battles

The Nintendo game was absolutely ICONIC and yet also had no business existing

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/o...

One thing that keeps me up these days: how is the next party in power supposed to govern? The GOP has signaled it will not always be bound by laws or international agreements it disagrees with. It’s not absolute — they blew up part of reconciliation, but not all; ignore some court orders, etc. (1/7)

The Supreme Court should preserve the status quo until legal questions are resolved and explain the disposition of cases for the public. They are abdicating basic principles of equity and failing to fulfill their institutional role. They aren’t pretending to try. There isn’t even the veneer of law.

The Supreme Court is out of control. To allow the president, without any explanation, to unilaterally dismantle agencies created by an Act of Congress is to endow the president with sovereignty. There is no justification, because they haven’t given one. Our country is in big trouble.

Shylock is among the most quintessential antisemitic stereotypes. This is not an accident. It follows years in which Trump has normalized antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories — and it’s deeply dangerous.

Saw this firsthand after '08—rich liberal donors instead of doubling down on progressive non-profits to bolster the left after Obama's win instead pulled back funding with an "well our work here is done" attitude. Exactly the opposite of what the right did after Reagan won in '80

A top economics reporter goes off script on national TV: “I am going to say this at risk of my job, but what President Trump is doing is insane.”

But will they count Never Say Never Again???

Given the stunning power vacuum, rats might actually now run this city

Robert Blake!

Robert Blake

This happens the same day they're laying off all those people working in cancer research.

This is horrifying. Genuinely horrifying. There are so many anti-humanity things happens, and an opportunity for new leaders to step forward and speak clearly and confidently about it.

Might be time for the Chiefs to put Carson Wentz in

It's very Pulp Fiction coded

Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.

Again, if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes. The thing, of course, is that Musk isn't elected. He is a private citizen. He was neither confirmed for a cabinet job nor formally appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He does not even have a presidential commission; he has been designated a "special government employee." Musk says that he is acting on the authority of the president of the United States. Even still, it is not as if the president nftha lInitad Ctatachne the authoritietn

Clear-eyed, direct NYT op-ed by @jamellebouie.net using the kind of non-euphemistic language the headlines should embrace:

It's not a rescission it's a concept of a rescission

Sam was general counsel to OMB under BIden.

So, basically, if this were My Cousin Vinny, today's the day when Sam is one of America's foremost experts on which cars have positraction and here's his testimony. 🧵

Normally when you have a government shutdown it's because there's a funding lapse. Tonight we have a government shutting down lots of itself by fiat. This is something new.

A smart journalist would park themselves there and basically make it the "suburban diner" story of 2025

Wild Bob Dylan outlived The Band

Mr. and Mrs. Smith is probably the best recent example. Perfectly executed episodic TV

Tokyo Narita Airport, where the Ippudo ramen opens an hour before Starbucks (clearly not complaining)

Inside of you are two wolves [watching British Bake-off before the Tyson fight]

This is one place where Biden's age matters. He's almost too old to be effective at the bully pulpit so that creates a abnormal information gap where he's unable to flood the zone with good news and his surrogates simply don't have the same stature to effectively carry the message

Old enough to remember when they played Phish as well...

I've been chasing a comparable potato chip crunch for decades

That's why it invented the grapefruit spoon, so serrated it can actually kill