I don’t think any developed democracy tries to make it harder to vote. It helps that most (all?) also have national ID systems, so even the idea of having to register to vote is strange. (Of course that also intersects with immigration politics in the US.)
If the GOP wants to show it’s serious about all its complaints tonight, then tomorrow Mike Johnson should introduce a bill to implement a national gerrymandering ban & to double the size of the House. He could introduce similar bills in re: voter ID & a new VRA. That they won’t tells you everything.
We can't keep doing "maximum warfare" forever on congressional maps. At some point we need to restore the faith of the American people that their votes matter. The solution remains obvious: proportional representation
www.politico.com/newsletters/...
Articles about Jared Kushner's diplomatic role with Iran that mention Kushner has received billions from the Saudi government (2/28-4/19):
NYT: 5 of 58
WashPost: 1 of 43
WSJ: 0 of 40
AP: 0 of 26
CNN Wire: 0 of 18
NY Post: 0 of 17
Chicago Tribune: 0 of 4
LA Times: 0 of 4
Boston Globe: 0 of 2
Almost all Russian soldiers are volunteers signing up for money…
It was all in plain sight, how foolish we were!
It was all over when they disgorged their amphibious assault troops and had them place towels at key strategic choke points around the world. How could we have been so complacent??
a deep dive into many bad predictions, and a few good ones, and what they mean for thinking about future conflict
“The whole exercise felt ridiculous to Ben. He & his father—2 people who had never been to medical school— were now arguing about cancer research. Meanwhile, his father was ignoring the advice of an actual expert.
‘What am I doing?’ he thought. ‘This is why we have doctors, *human* doctors’.”🧪🛟
This is my assessment of why Trump’s war went so badly wrong. Underestimating an enemy and a belief in a quick victory are familiar sources of failure, compounded in this sense by incredible ultimatums and delusional claims. (£/free trial), open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...?
There it is: A full year of days spent playing golf in just over five years as president. www.pbump.net/outofoffice
Competence, how boring. They’d probably have experts and stuff, yawn. (/s)
Also a bit rich that the guy leading the most blatantly corrupt administration in a very long time (ever in US history?) is calling other people crooks.
The President’s Daily Intelligence Short?
What does one do with the oil afterwards?
Sean, obviously it’s just coincide that the people’s deputies elected the son of the founding ruler and then again his son. It’s just a really good family, jeez.
During the transition, Lewandowski told Zoley that he wanted to be paid in exchange for protecting and growing GEO Group's DHS contracts, according to a senior DHS official and three people familiar with their discussion. Zoley, concerned about the propriety of the ask, told Lewandowski he would have no part of it, the sources said, describing the confrontation as tense. Lewandowski took a role as an unpaid "special government employee" at DHS once the new administration was sworn in, where he advised and acted as a "de facto chief of staff" to Noem and, sources said, influenced contract awards. Zoley scrambled to find a way to assuage tensions from the meeting during the transition, two industry sources familiar with the matter said. He secured a follow-up with Lewandowski in late February or early March 2025. That second meeting did not go much better. Zoley offered to put Lewandowski on retainer - a recurring consulting fee - with GEO Group, according to two industry sources familiar with the matter. Lewandowski balked, saying he wanted to be compensated based on the company's new or renewed contracts with DHS, the two sources said. "He wanted payments — what some people would call a success fee," said a person with knowledge of the meeting. Zoley declined, the two sources said. In the months that followed, the length of two of GEO Group's federal contracts shrank, and currently several of its facilities that could house migrants sit idle,
One senior White House official raised the issue with Trump during an unrelated meeting in October, two current administration officials said, before the conversation was cut short by superseding business. And another senior White House official told NBC News they had received a "dozen" complaints from at least four companies about Lewandowski's involvement in the contracting process during the second Trump administration. Such complaints are rare in the defense contracting industry, in which relationships are often carefully built over years and across political parties. The reports of requests to pay Lewandowski, a government contracting expert told NBC News, raise "red flags." This account is based on seven months of reporting, including interviews with nearly two dozen people who expressed concern about Lewandowski's role in the contracting process - including current administration officials, current DHS officials, industry sources who have done business with DHS and lobbyists. These sources were interviewed on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media or because they wanted to protect their relationships with an agency critical to their business.
The NBC News story about Corey Lewandowski is very important.
The GEO Group-related claims are astounding, and later reporting in the story suggests that those allegations were not some one-time thing.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
Strategy is political and has to come from the top, but the top ain’t what it used to be.
Does anybody even know what the war goals are at this point?
It’s morbidly funny how Trump and Putin have both started wars they thought would be quick and decisive, resulting in regime change; didn’t have backup plans; and now find themselves in a quagmire with no clear way out. Though I think Putin didn’t intentionally antagonize his allies along the way.
Strategic goals are woke intellectualism
Makes sense that somebody whose whole shtick is “warfighter” performative machoism can’t conceive of war beyond tactical success.
Apropos bsky.app/profile/whst...
👀 Drones with mesh networks
Bravado-based strategy.
Relatedly, as an early 2000s college student, I love how Wikipedia is now considered a high quality source for LLM training.
I don't think Trump could do a ground invasion of Iran even if he wanted to, right? Where do you stash troops and equipment during the buildup, and how do you actually invade? Is Iraq gonna host US forces? Yeet across the Gulf in a Leeroy Jenkins amphibious assault? Gulf states ok with that?
The regime just killed 30,000 protesters, as horrible as the school bombing was, not sure how much it figures with that kind of context for the average person there.
This is different though. Iran is defending. Winning for them is regime survival. Doesn’t matter how much Israel and the US bomb them, as long as the regime survives.
Can’t really compare to Iraq ‘91 because Iraq had started the war by invading Kuwait.
The orange shit-gibbon has no comprehension of the Pandora’s box he just opened.
🇦🇪🇺🇸 Prominent UAE billionaire Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor just published an open letter to Trump. It's brutal.
1/7
