I agree the blog is really good

Yeah this is RAPIDLY gaining on “How much does Bloomberg pay Noah Feldman for his dumbass columns” as my journalism white whale

Brett Kavanaugh’s Colleagues Are Getting Awfully Tired of Brett Kavanaugh Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s comments about the Supreme Court’s recent racial profiling case are just more evidence that Kavanaugh’s colleagues kind of hate his guts.

If a Supreme Court justice is willing to publicly call out Brett Kavanaugh as a silver-spoon doofus who has no idea what life is like for people who aren't rich white guys, I promise you that the justices are saying some WILD stuff about him in private

Brett Kavanaugh’s Colleagues Are Getting Awfully Tired of Brett Kavanaugh Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s comments about the Supreme Court’s recent racial profiling case are just more evidence that Kavanaugh’s colleagues kind of hate his guts.

Verily I have blogged it

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it. Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal. On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

Wrote about how Hegseth’s effort to resegregate the upper ranks of the US military ties into the larger MAGA project to restore hierarchies of race and gender: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

the pastor walking way and spraying a big section of planted flowers

This is what the bodycam footage shows at the moment the cop says, "There's a suspicious person in the yard" lmao

Cops Arrested a Black Pastor Watering His Neighbor’s Flowers. The Alabama Supreme Court Is Fine With That The opinion in Jennings v. Smith transforms the state’s stop-and-identify law into a show-me-your-papers regime.

Somehow, the bodycam footage of Alabama police arresting a Black pastor watering his vacationing neighbor's flowers makes the story even more surreal than the headline suggests. They keep threatening to cuff a man who is *actively spraying planter boxes the entire time*.

My truest ally, making sure my Very Much Looks Like An ICEMobile rental car would not get me in trouble

Issuing a correction on my previous tweet, it is actually St. Peter jamming Belichick in this scenario, that’s on me I’ll work on myself

True story: When I met up with Jay on Monday, I checked the plates on his rental car so he could have peace of mind. Thankfully they came back 🚫.

The extended riff on a dying Bill Belichick preparing to enter heaven by jamming St. Peter at the line of scrimmage made me laugh as hard as I’ve laughed at a podcast in a long time

It's really striking, even for those of us who live here. The signs truly are all over *every single block*

One other thing: I didn’t understand before I got here how geographically proximate the murders of George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti were. From my mom’s old house, it wasn’t more than 5 minutes between the memorials. Did some crying in public today.

After three days, the most striking takeaway from talking with people here is how *angry* everyone is. Heartbroken, weary, yes, those things too. But above all else, they are furious, and not shy about it. When Minnesotans are volunteering their feelings to a stranger, you know it’s bad.

This morning, I got to walk around the South Minneapolis neighborhood where my mom grew up. Seeing *entire blocks*, both sides of the street, with handwritten NO ICE and ICE OUT MSP signs taped to the front windows was one of the most moving things I’ve experienced in some time.

Sotomayor Faults Kavanaugh Over Immigration Stops Concurrence Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized a fellow member of the US Supreme Court for failing to grasp the real-world effects of an unsigned order last year that allowed immigration enforcement sweeps in Los...

Supreme Court justices rarely criticize their colleagues in public, when they do, they never single out any one justice. If Sotomayor's willing to just come out and say it like this, they really, really, really, hate his guts.

Elie

JASON ALDEAN Aldean Army members get first access to tickets starting Tuesday, March 3 at 10:00 AM local venue time through Thursday, March 5th at 10:00 PM local venue time. The public onsale begins Friday, March 6th at 10:00 AM local venue time.

🎶 I may never fly o’er the enemy
But I’m in Aldean Army (Yes sir!) 🎶

Ben Wikler had a long-term, successful plan to flip the court, but what really set the fire under WI Dem activists was the court nearly throwing out enough ballots to steal the state from Biden. One GOP swing vote prevented that.

I am relaying this cursed sequence of words from a hotel lobby showing Fox & Friends this morning: “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider, now powering Jason Aldean’s Songs About Us tour 2026”

So I’ve been offline today but I am getting the sense that Things Were Not Great

[frantically pasting to my google doc titled “IDEAS???”] absolutely

I’ve been thinking for a while about a post about how unhinged the ads on the president’s bloodthirsty rants machine are, but I still can’t figure out how to not make the pitch sound just as unhinged

I will reiterate the Jay Willis Promise: If you’re cool and we have occasion to meet up IRL and you remind me before I pack, I will probably bring you a bobblehead of John Roberts in an umpire costume, crossing his fingers, stomping on the Voting Rights Act

Close—more specifically, he is standing on Title 52 of the U.S. Code, which contains the Voting Rights Act

Umpire John Roberts Bobblehead Doll

Drank a Hamm’s earlier with @jaywillis.net who passed through town long enough to gift me a John Roberts bobblehead doll.

“Not even a dang cell connection” is rage bait and I won’t be taking it

It's for me. I will buy this truck.

I asked the 5-year-old if she’d miss me when I’m out of town this week and she said no, and when I asked why she said “it’s complicated”

Incredible how quickly the conservative obsession with “all college admissions decisions should be made SOLELY on academic merit” melts away as soon as that model yields outcomes they do not like