Was I asleep when the people of Chicago, Portland, DC, LA, etc voted for Trump or Stephen Miller to militarize their neighborhoods? While I was asleep, did I dream of the principle of federalism as a fundamental check against concentrated national power as a central tenet of American conservatism?

I'm less than optimistic on this.

"The Free Press is attractive to someone like Ellison for its choice of enemies... lustily punching down and left at the critics and adversaries of the ownership class. As a billionaire [seeking] to consolidate and expand power and influence, you could not find a more eager servant than Weiss."

Fascism occurs twice: first as the tragedy of a Second World War started by men who fought the First and knowingly chose slaughter, then as the farce of an ignorant draft dodger trying to provoke a war against his own people.

And that is true even by the Trump administration's own legal arguments.

This is an old formula used by authoritarian regimes. Stoke chaos and blame scapegoats to justify the use of force.

For a regime that hates "bureaucrats" and the modern administrative state, they sure have endowed one bureaucrat (who simultaneously occupies 2(!) positions created for said state) an unprecedented amount of arbitrary power to ignore two other constitutional branches.

In the American system of government, a legislature of the people’s elected representatives decide how to allocate the people’s money, then an unelected appointee in the executive branch called “OMB Director” decides if he feels like distributing the people’s money that way or if he’d rather not.

Russ Vought is a protege of Phil Gramm, which is a useful reminder that this aggressively destructive Republican administration did not fall out of a coconut tree. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

Abughazaleh: I think Kristi Noem should be tried at The Hague. And if the response from ICE to people exercising their first amendment right is to drive vehicles through them, they should not be an agency in the US.

"by the president’s own words, the U.S. military is engaged in armed conflict with undefined enemies he has unilaterally labeled 'unlawful combatants'... Yet he has refused to inform Congress or the public.”

Let's just govern on an old man's vibes. What could possibly go wrong?

Raskin: "It's not lost on anyone that shutting the government down allows them not swear in our new colleague, Ms Grijalva from Arizona, who would be the 218th signature to discharge the Epstein files and to put a vote on that on the House floor."

Today, I was interviewed by the BBC on the shutdown and its political and substantive implications. You can find the interview here:

youtu.be/igY-iRuAzxI?...

I was interviewed yesterday by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for their "Radio National Breakfast" about the shutdown. The permanent structural, legislative, and electoral implications of this are vast, particularly if Ds don't cave and force Rs to consider eliminating the filibuster.

I hope it's clear to everyone now that Trump really is going for it - he's trying to become a dictator. I don't know if he'll succeed, but he's working to install himself as an autocrat unaccountable to voters. And he's weaponizing the military against Americans who oppose him as part of that effort

My guess is this was coordinated across the entire executive branch, like a Hands Across the Hatch Act Violation event or something

Pete Hegseth must have the world’s absolutely smallest penis of all time

The flew the entire military leadership in so they could see for themselves that the Secretary of Defense is a mouthbreathing dipshit and the Commander in Chief is a senile, weak old man who might keel over at any moment.

I’m opening a movie theater in which I show recently released films that I ripped from the internet but the studios are welcome to opt out if they wish.

Pritzker: "In any other country, if federal agents fired upon journalists & protesters when unprovoked what would we call it? If officials marched down streets harassing civilians & demanding their papers, what would we say? I don't think we'd have trouble calling it what it is: authoritarianism"

100,000 federal civil servants will leave tomorrow. Then the shutdown will leave us with almost a complete loss of knowledge-based authority in our national government. Since all three branches have worked pretty hard over the years to demolish civic bureaucracy, we’ll see how they like its absence.

there are almost certainly more people — more blue collar laborers, specifically — involved in the cultivation and production of chardonnay grapes and wine than in coal

I was interviewed by CBC about the looming shutdown. This is not your typical political brinksmanship. This is a threat of fundamental reordering of the state and not in a good way.

www.cbc.ca/news/world/t...

Ossoff: "We have a president who's completely out of control, a crook engaged in unprecedented corruption, who's passing one of the most unpopular agendas in history. The public is turning against him. The opposition is motivated. We can win & we have to win, but we don't have the luxury of despair"