@samrosenfeld.bsky.social likes to call this “goo-goo hardball.”

If we lose Section 2, Democrats will need a lot more of this energy from Black elected officials. Maybe that’s easier after tonight.

Food mill the most underrated kitchen gadget ever.

With ‘The Big Dig,’ Ian Coss puts Massachusetts at the center of podcasting - The Boston Globe “Boston has an outsize mythology and presence in the national story,” Coss says.

Political scientists, if you haven’t listened to @iancoss.bsky.social podcasts, you’re missing out.

www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/17/a...

Looking for an example of falsely expecting political benefits from policy? Bad political thinking and pernicious logic from @patrioticmillionaires.org. Opposite from @vanessawilliamson.bsky.social. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/b...

Taking a survey from the College Board, which turns out to be market research about AI-enhanced multiple choice tests. Grim, grim, grim.

Looking to browse through some books on a nice afternoon, maybe take my mind off the headlines.

The useful-to-the-center myth that will not die.

We're not going to come to agreement about what effect sizes like that do or don't say about big approaches to political change.

I suspect credit-claiming works differently in state/local politics, especially where the traceability is clear, than at the national level.

PS: Nolan, separate from all this, I am also a big trolley jolly (been on metro/tram systems in 93 cities) and love your work on trains.

Congress, Policy Sustainability, and the Affordable Care Act: Democratic Policy Makers Overlooked Implementation, Post-Enactment Politics, and Policy Feedback Effects When crafting and passing health care reform, did policy makers appreciate and attempt to address potential implementation and sustainability challenges, or were they largely oblivious to the reali...

What Rob said. The very particular way that the policy feedback literature jumped the shark, in ways that then made it easier to avoid other sets of problems. I was interested to learn just how little the framers of the ACA thought in those terms: www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

@samrosenfeld.bsky.social and I wrote about the limits of Democrats expecting policy solutions to political problems. To respond to some chatter, our point is that all factions should be thinking organizationally--not that it's a cudgel for factional disagreement. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/o...

The 25th Amendment stuff is cope, but it's the first moment in the Trump-Biden-Trump years that members of Congress have stared into the maw of the imperial presidency en masse, and begun to grope toward some Linzian conclusions.

I'm not quite sure I agree with all the answers here--I'd lean harder on the failures to understand that policy does not create its own political supports, and the failure to think much about the welfare state and the taxes that underlie it--but this is asking exactly the right question.

I was at this (Hewlett-funded) convening and basically endorse the report, but want to add: because the crowd, as is common in "pro-democracy" spaces, ran the gamut from left-liberal to Never Trump/GOP-in-exile, we gingerly avoided the question of what healthy parties mean when one of them is fash.

Crazy, if ultimately unsurprising, how closely Common Cause membership by state in 1983 tracks the electoral coalitions of the 2020s.

It is extremely wrong how Dems talking point on this is that paying TSA by EO is totally legal and he should have done it sooner. It is not legal, that $10B is only for border security and TSA is not border security. He's stealing the power of the purse, stop saying he should have done it sooner!

The peroration to this piece on the war from Daniel Luban captures something essential about how leftists looking for horseshoe politics are mostly engaged in magical thinking: dissentmagazine.org/online_artic...

Adventures in Slopulism You can't build a Nordic social insurance system on a Norquist-style tax base

I wrote about the Democrats' attempt to merge tax cut populism with social democratic social policy and why it's a bad idea publiccomment.blog/p/adventures...

In the early 2010s, the wonk-progressive mantra was “give people cash,” as a way to get around the perils of in-kind benefits. The Porter-Booker-Van Hollen stuff is a real monkey’s paw version of that.

Unlikely to get a nomination but the obvious play for 2028er looking for an angle is an actual tax-and-spender with serious revenue and big universal programs.

Tired: constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.
Wired: constitutional amendment to overturn Chadha.

This is an unjust, illegal war. It violates our treaties and our laws. Presidential impunity must end.

William E. Connolly Obituary February 25, 2026 - Eclipse Funeral Care View William E. Connolly's obituary, send flowers, find service dates, and sign the guestbook.

Bill Connolly died yesterday and he was one of the good ones. It kills me that he was taken while our politics are like this. He deserved to outlive the bastards. I guess we’ll have to take it from here. But let me say: for depth of understanding, empathy & moral clarity, this man had few rivals /1

Yes! A button that says the System of 1896 was a real thing.

In today’s mail, a button from Harry Daugherty of Teapot Done infamy.

A few Jesse Jackson buttons from my collection. A sometimes maddening but genuinely transformational figure who understood better than his adversaries what it would mean to transcend what he called "the long dark night of reaction."

Three not-a-comparativist-either hypotheses:
1a. PARTY: The Liberal Party feels free to move in ways that the post-Corbyn Labour Party is constrained.
2. BIO: Central banker is better preparation than public prosecutor for this.
3. SEQUENCE: Take power after Trump II and the task is crystal-clear.

You don't think a book review can be must-read for people just trying to make political change? This one is. @daschloz.bsky.social spells out the vexed underlying dilemma of democratic (& Democratic) politics in a world where increasingly "the choirs & brass bands reach only into the educated base."