Recent posts by Online Political Thinkers on Bluesky

Two posts to keep in mind as we hear news of a “ceasefire”. The first:

This is @titmou.se always

How much insider trading was there on this latest bullshit?

Iran is totally getting a nuke soon aren't they?

Ok, let’s see if this holds water.

Shared in one of my group chats re: two weeks

the funniest outcome here is that Iran insists on tolls and we have to figure out a way to backchannel payment to them to let ships through for the next two weeks to pretend they agreed to the ceasefire

"This is just how Altman operates. He floods the zone with preposterous projections, sometimes as a sales pitch, other times as a distraction to buy himself more time." Guess the former Elon Musk protege learned at the feet of the master. www.hardresetmedia.com/p/sam-altman...

My guess is that Trump is going to declare victory and leave the mess for others to clean up.

Assuming the Iranians actually agreed to Trump’s “terms” for the declared ceasefire in the first place. It’s unclear that they did.

I’m going to see a play tonight and so am glad I wouldn’t turn on my phone at intermission to find out we’d decimated Iran’s infrastructure.

Starting to think the GOP is just people participating in a massive humiliation fetish

Peace in our time!!! /s

Please inform your goldfish, or any other household creatures who possess 3-second memory spans, that the Strait of Hormuz was open *before* Trump started bombing Iran.

Trump’s evangelical “leaders” — laughably obsequious as usual afn.net/politics-gov...

funny that Dhillon’s name hasn’t come up for AG or a judgeship

I’m still in awe over all the dumb fuck law firms, tv networks, and universities that caved to Trump. More or less everyone who has stood up to Trump has won and everyone who didn’t has suffered an endless series of humiliations.

Completely understand people's desire to use favored acronym for Trump's predictable threat-withdraw pattern but hard to imagine a situation in which its less apt. Threatening war crimes whether immediate or on time delay is a war crime.

Old enough to remember when the podcast bros assured us that Kamala was the one who would start WW3 and Trump would bring the wars to an end. Glad that worked out so well. Definitely not having a hard time finishing my work because I'm worried about what this maniac will do. Ah well, nevertheless...

The two week theory remains undefeated

If you read this carefully, it doesn’t sound like an agreement, it sounds like a U.S. offer. “Subject to”. Did they agree? He just presumes they will.

Iran would be insane to negotiate with Trump. They’ve already gained a toll on a sea route by NOT doing that

A two-week ceasefire from a man who cannot plan two hours into the future

Thank god Trump is a bitch

🚨 TRUMP: “I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.”

Rick Perlstein returning to blogging is good news.

So, basically this is the exact thing Trump accused Barack Obama of doing with his "red line" on Syria, but tenfold.

The threat itself — entirely on its own — warrants his removal, by whatever means that may come to pass.

keep getting doomsdaymogged by nuclear arsenals while alivemaxxing and it's spiking my cortisol levels

LAX via public transit vs. LAX via private car dropoff is one of the starkest difference imaginable in pleasantness of experience. Being dropped off or picked up via car is probably one of the worst airport experiences on the continent. Public transit is other than time pleasant and relaxing.

What a fucking horrific and stupid day. Glad it ended on just stupid for most of us. Now to continue to seek vengeance for the horrors.

invoke the 25th and start impeachment anyway

Trump backtracks on striking on Iran. But the caveat: "We received a 10 point proposal from Iran, and believe it is a workable basis on which to negotiate." This is basically a capitulation.

JFC. Will Republicans get off the hook for impeaching a genocidal madman? Just because (future) war crimes and genocide is on pause?

“Two weeks” is Trump speak for never

We’ll see what Iran says they agreed to.

is it over

🚨 TRUMP: “I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.”

The 25th is simply not meant for removing a president over his or her objections. It just isn't. For the gory details, I wrote about this a couple of months ago goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/no-dont-in...

Trump: “…I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double sided CEASEFIRE!”

Once again they killed someone trying to escape. They are killing people because they don’t want to allow an escape. That’s not self defense.

Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946. Swap ‘antisemite’ for ‘fascist’ — the superset that many antisemites belong to — and you’ll draw a sharp bead on the state of U.S. politics eight decades later.

[Bob Dylan voice] Yes and how many worms must this white dove eat, Before she poops in his hand?

HOLD UP. One of Washington DC's most "wired in" reporters (for Republicans) really just typed out that our nation is "on the brink of war." 🙃 What has been happening since 2/28? Just a little "military adventure"? PS: Ofc, I appreciate that he gets that Dems need to get to DC.

CNN claiming that good news about a ceasefire coming soon

The ’Donroe Doctrine’ was just a half-hearted codpiece for what amounts to Wilhoit’s observation, applied across borders: there must be in-groups that the world order protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups that the world order binds, but does not protect.

Patrick Stewart was the right choice but I'm glad Yaphet Kotto basically got to play the same guy later on in HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET

This --> Some people would rather blame Democrats for this Iran disaster than the party that has actually enabled it. www.dailykos.com/stories/2026...

Good evening from Baycare Ballpark, home of the Clearwater Threshers (single-A affiliate of the Phillies). It's cloudy and cool, with wind gusts up to 30 mph, but at least it's not raining. It's the home opener tonight, and a nice respite from all the other things.

I appreciate an author who creates characters you fall in love with and then doesn't kill them.

WSJ edit board on Vance's trip to boost Viktor Orbán's re-election campaign: "What a spectacle: America’s second-in-command campaigning on behalf of a Prime Minister who may lose, in a small central European country, while America is prosecuting a war in Iran." www.wsj.com/opinion/jd-v...

WSJ edit board on Vance's trip to boost Viktor Orbán's re-election campaign: "What a spectacle: America’s second-in-command campaigning on behalf of a Prime Minister who may lose, in a small central European country, while America is prosecuting a war in Iran." www.wsj.com/opinion/jd-v...

It would be quite a wild twist on US History if we elected the Chicago Pope to be the President of the US.

i think about this a lot (as David points out down thread, it was actually Obama's AG. Clinton had been out of office for over a decade)

Uh, Bret, I was KIDDING. You absolute dolt. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/07/o...

I’m for all demands to impeach Trump as well as all demands to remove him via the 25th Amendment. It’s important that the urgent need to remove him becomes as widespread as possible. Neither demand should preclude the other. I consider it my responsibility to call my reps to demand they act.

The dominant form of masculinity on display in this administration is just a non-ironic, dry drunk version of what we see in this 1995 commercial. youtu.be/t9VxYfHfz-Q?...

I’ll take it. The one benefit of having a POTUS completely unmoored from reality is that he can always back down.

This dominant form of masculinity that marks this administration is just the non-ironic, dry drunk version depicted of this 1995 commercial. youtu.be/t9VxYfHfz-Q?...

If you're a surgeon and you leave a sponge in someone's abdomen, you can lose your license to practice medicine. If you're an attorney and you completely bungle a client's case, you can lose your license to practice law. Otoh, if you're a prominent op-ed columnist...

My inner crossfitter coming out

Is it a good sign when the website for visualizing the destructive power of nuclear weapons is getting overloaded?

The whole world gets to experience infrastructure week but instead it's possible nuclear holocaust every few weeks until he croaks.

Another ICE shooting! As always, we don't have all the facts in. We do have a dashcam, though. DHS claims, as it has during multiple prior shootings (claims at times proven false), that the person who was shot tried to "weaponize" his vehicle. See for yourself (there are no visuals of the victim).

I’ve spent this entire term, and especially these last few days, feeling lost as a writer and analyst. I spent the last ten-plus years warning over and over again that all of this was likely to happen if we didn’t stop this man. I grounded it in international experience and history, cited theorists…

Another ICE shooting! As always, we don't have the facts in. DHS claims, as it has during many multiple prior shootings, that the person who was shot tried to "weaponize" his vehicle. In many of those cases, DHS's initial story turned out to be either completely false or heavily distorted.

This doesn’t sound like someone planning to drop a nuke tonight at least

We need a list of who ends up going so we can make sure to never consume their journalism ever again.

We need a list of who ends up going so we can make sure to never consume their journalism ever again.

Amen. Let the church say “amen.”

In town for only a little more than 24 hrs but still had to time to pay my respects 🫡

As others have said: However mad you are at John Roberts, you're probably not mad enough.

You’ve got less than three hours. Go.

thehill.com/homenews/hou...

Ambition will not counteract ambition www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/ambi...

i want you to know that the mtsw Board of Directors took a vote this afternoon and directed our executives NOT to post about the brimless Dodgers cap out of Respect for imminent nuclear war.

This isn't a conflict that would invite nuclear retaliation to the United States; Iran lacks missiles that can reach the territory and thanks to the JCPOA and the late Khamenei's personal opposition to them lacks nuclear warheads. The immediate harm will fall on civilians in a nation of 90 million.

A lawless administration

The culmination of the Trump hostage-taking playbook: -Assert maximum leverage, ignoring costs/consequences -Demand concessions other side won't/can't make -Threaten negative-sum outcomes unless demands met After all the knee-bending here, he's now doing it to the world - potentially again & again.

This isn't bad because it's like Russia it's bad because the President of the United States is threatening a means-agnostic destruction of a civilization as he upends trade & kills civilians. It requires an answer in the US, one unlikely but institutionally possible. Putin comparisons offer nothing.

Of course AOC is the only one with the nuts to warn people in the chain of command that acting on Trump's illegal orders is a crime they can be tried for. Literally, she is the only person who has a moral claim to the Democratic nomination. I just hope voters see it. thehill.com/homenews/hou...

This is true! But it's also a choice that they're constantly making, even if they don't realize it. And one they really could make differently.

Hey looks like the message I left worked

<to the tune of Simply The Best>

We gotta bring back the productive kind of national shame. Not the throwing up your hands and going “what can you do, we suck” kind but the “I’ll be GODDAMNED if I let the fucking FRENCH have better TRAINS” kind

I'm still gonna make my silly baseball posts because I decided to go to the game instead of curling up in the fetal position in my hotel room. Mute me if that's not your cup of tea right now; I'd understand

Apropos of my last re-post, I honestly think some of these Trumpy reps wouldn’t even know what to do in Congress if they weren’t genuflecting to Trump. So questions about whether they realize they are in electoral trouble are beside the point. They don’t want to be real reps.

Did I mention that tomorrow’s my birthday?

That eligibility is still written in our Constitution and Trump is clearly ineligible despite SCOTUS engineering a non-existent carve out for him

President Donnie Darko is going to start posting how many hours and minutes we’ve got left.

I’m terrified for them. I don’t think this would even give Hegseth pause

I remember in the 1990s when a common debate was whether a personally immoral man could still be a good president. And now it's more like, huh the racist rapist pedophile is also a genocidal maniac, weird

why do these guys so often have the little mustache and the hat.

we can be pretty confident that the US government doesn't have secret UFO programs or similar because there's no way Trump wouldn't have talked about them

Do the Artemis astronauts have any more shielding from cosmic radiation than the Apollo astronauts did? Is that even solvable?

I guarantee you that whatever more constrained military options Trump may be considering would also be war crimes.

‘Promises,’ Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders + London Symphony Orchestra (2021) ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You,’ Big Thief (2022) ‘Call Me If You Get Lost,’ Tyler, the Creator (2021) ‘Renaissance,’ Beyoncé (2022) ‘Mahashmashana,’ Father John Misty (2024) ‘Gold,’ Alabaster DePlume (2022)