Top recent posts by Online Political Thinkers on Bluesky

they know there's going to be an apocalypse for trucking jobs due to tariffs so they're trying to stem the political damage by making it so the layoffs disproportionately affect non-english speaking truckers

Despite knowing the people on the search warrant weren't there, the ICE arrest team STILL took this family's phones, laptops, and life savings — and refused to leave a BUSINESS CARD so they could ask to get it back! This stuff is sadly not unique to ICE; it happens with regular police raids too.

She’s in jail for writing an op-ed.

If you're a Democratic elected and don't have Stephen Miller or Pam Bondi or Ed Martin talking about throwing you in prison for your seditious libels of Dear Leader, you aren't going hard enough.

on Jan 20, 2025 the Conservatives were *23 points* ahead in the polls

BREAKING: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Liberal Party wins election, CBC projects

@shrithanedar.bsky.social has filed impeachment: Obstruction of Justice and Abuse of Executive Power Usurpation of Appropriations Power Abuse of Trade Powers and International Aggression Violation of First Amendment Rights Creation of an Unlawful Office Bribery and Corruption Tyrannical Overreach

pretty fucking wild to read a story that confirms there *is* an elite cabal of some of the country's wealthiest and most influential people and they *are* coordinating strategy and tactics to try to control global opinion, it's just not any of the the cabals tinfoil hatters have always assumed

once again reminding people that "swing voters" are mostly not centrists they are "get mad at the president because i disapprove of the supermarket rearranging the aisles again" voters

Conservative superlawyer Paul Clement joins yet another case challenging the Trump administration. This time he's representing Judge Hannah Dugan, who was was arrested after the FBI said she tried to shield an illegal immigrant from arrest. www.jsonline.com/story/news/l...

It is a hostile and political act to tell costumers how much things cost

Trump's EO calls for military and national security "assets" to be deployed on American streets to assist with law enforcement, and for the prosecution of local officials who talk about "DEI stuff" like the history of racist police violence. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

we need to think of 'abolishing ICE' as like 'abolishing the Wehrmacht.' Germany still needed an army. Americans will still want some kind of immigration and border authorities. But abolishing the culture, structures, and power-holders of a utterly corrupted and brutal system is important.

I can’t stop laughing at this image

Wow, finally we get some answer as to what happened! They really did just run all names through law enforcement databases and terminate SEVIS status for anyone with a match, no matter the circumstances or magnitude of the "offense" (including things like speeding tickets and even dropped charges).

This is a proper impeachment resolution for offenses against the Constitutional order, rather than pretending that impeachment has to be limited to more-minor offenses against the criminal code.

There are a number of reasons Dems shouldn't shy away from impeachment, including simply the principle of the matter, but even on political calculus "he's completely lawless and we're in a constitutional crisis and also he should stay in office for the next four years" is not a message that works.

🧵NEW: The House GOP's reconciliation package would DRAMATICALLY reshape immigration via fees, and as noted below, undermine judges' contempt powers. First, one big change would be an $1,000 fee to apply for asylum, plus $550 every 6 months for work permits and $100 for every year the case drags on.

Given that there is no civil disorder, insurrection or armed rebellion at present, senior military leaders need to consult with their JAG officers *now* about the potential need to disobey unlawful orders. They should also consult with Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana with another one of those normal and understated tweets he’s become known for

Clay Jackson's story is picking up momentum. Jackson is the Texas attorney who was visited by two law enforcement officers at his home after giving some legal advices to an undocumented family. He was fired from his job with FNF after talking to me about the incident. Here's Judd Legum:

cringe, yes, but it's also fucking obscene. tens of thousands of fed jobs cut, hundreds of millions in research funding vaporized, US AID cuts that will be measured in millions of global preventable deaths, all at this motherfucker's feet, and he's making 69420 jokes about it

Every time I see an interview with the Secretary of Transportation he’s talking about how terrified he is of the subway

I just do not understand why Ds keep doing this. Trump is setting the constitution on fire every single day. Just vote against his fucking nominees. how hard is that? what on earth is the perceived downside?

god if you give me this i will die laughing

Breaking: Jalen Hurts missed White House visit due to elective colonoscopy. "Sounded like more fun," the star QB said.

i'll say this, though, this story explains a hell of a lot of how and why someone like chris rufo — who is not a scholar, not an intellectual, not an interesting thinker or writer, not even an interesting person — got to be so influential.

These Dems just joined the GOP to vote to advance David Perdue as ambassador to China: Booker Coons Duckworth Gallego Hassan Kim King Klobuchar Peters Reed Rosen Shaheen Slotkin Warner

why on god’s green earth would you ever want to be a part of a 300 person signal chat, what in the fuck is wrong with these people

I looked into this earlier, and in fact, knowing English has been a requirement to get a CDL since 1936!

Among the other awful ideas I. Today’s EO, Trump’s going to use part of the $1 billion he has extracted from Big Law to defend cops who beat and kill people. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Turns out that offering the president's wife $28 million for a documentary gig still doesn't spare you from his retributive wrath.

People are baffled by this, and I've joked about it before but it's the real reason: they think gaming DW-NOMINATE and similar scores w/ inconsequential confirmation votes gets them "bipartisan" cred in a way anybody cares about, and not tagged as "the most liberal senator." That's seriously it.

"Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern and Adam Ramada, a Miami-based venture capitalist, have had accounts on the computer systems for at least two weeks...neither Farritor nor Ramada appear to have had experience with either nuclear weapons or handling classified information."

This looks like an SNL skit.

not to spoil anything now, but a thing thats gonna happen is the DOGE guys and other Trump goons are gonna bury themselves inside the federal gov't, especially at GSA, treasury payments system and other internal machinery, and courts will slow-walk attempts to remove them, probably for years

also worth emphasizing that U.S. policing is *unusually bad and incompetent.*. British police have fucked up plenty of stuff - see the Spy Cops scandal - but not on the routine and enormous scale that U.S. cops do.

this is true and it's actually a major point of potential vulnerability

true, the president has betrayed everyone he works with and destroyed everything he touches, but you fail to understand that I'm built different

There have been many presidential impeachment resolutions filed over the years, but none quite like this: "He has, by his actions and statements, sought to establish himself as tyrant, dictator, and autocrat over the People of the United States"

20 million Americans might lose their health coverage, just so Republicans can give billionaires a tax cut.

“What makes you so much worthier of your peace… of protecting your children… of your citizenship… of safety?” This is it. This is precisely it.

people say that Donald Trump is dooming populist right-wing parties in other countries but I just checked the Australian polling and since he took office he's really been owning the Libs there.

You'd think so, but assuming a Democrat can take over in 2029 how do they rebuild the federal agencies that have been decimated? How do they undo and punish the graft and corruption taking its place? Seriously important questions, presidential candidates should try to answer them.

Bad news: Stronger penalties for wearing a mask when committing a crime will be included in a pending New York state budget agreement. This policy will further stigmatize masks, a critical public health tool.

“86% oppose the United States trying to take control of Canada. Eighty percent oppose Trump serving a third term, 76% oppose trying to take control of Greenland and 66% oppose sending U.S. citizens to foreign prisons.” abcnews.go.com/Politics/ame...

a bit of a stretch, but i think one of the ways in which ZIRP broke the world is that it allowed a lot of men to get very rich building companies that never had to truly perform or compete, and it created this abnormal ~13 year period where they convinced themselves that none of this mattered

NEW: Republicans consider unraveling a key part of Obamacare in Trump agenda bill House chairman overseeing health policy says they're looking at unwinding the federal promise to cover 90% of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion (ie FMAP). BFD, if it happens 👇 www.nbcnews.com/politics/con...

the Canadian electorate:

the other sense that you get from that story is that andreessen seems like a deeply lonely person who doesn't know how to value anything other than his own ego. musk is like this, too; guys who played the entire game with cheat codes and don't know what to do with themselves once the credits roll.

i've always been, basically, a pragmatic center-left person, but seeing what stratospheric wealth accumulation has done both to the people who accumulated it and the society they seek to control with it has genuinely radicalized me hard into significantly more punitive tax policies for the wealthy

The SEVIS stuff, where ICE went after thousands of foreign students, tied up likely hundreds of lawyers nationwide and dozens of judges, and likely generated thousands of hours of wasted effort, all for the backlash to lead ICE to rescind their actions in the first place. Just an ENORMOUS waste.

A very frustrating thing with the executive orders is they are deliberately vague and filled with euphemisms, a big pile of mushy "you know what I mean" with few concrete specifics. But we know they do in fact know what he means, and then go act on it regardless of what the order strictly says.

Here is a link for the full text of the Rep. Thanedar's impeachment resolution, it takes a while before it shows up in the online system. drive.google.com/file/d/1mArb...

Fun fact: federal courts have the power to deputize others, such as state or local law enforcement or even in theory private citizens, if the marshals are unable or unwilling to enforce an order.

What could go wrong? "a 23-year-old former SpaceX intern...and...a Miami-based venture capitalist...have had accounts on the computer systems for at least two weeks... neither Farritor nor Ramada appear to have had experience with either nuclear weapons or handling classified information"

hahahah you're getting the summer of scarcity for fucking real

Surrounding yourself with people who are terrified to give you bad news really fucks with your perception of reality. www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

This shows how lawless Trump's actions are. Congress explicitly made clear that the CPB is NOT a government agency and that no government agent can impact its business, and yet Trump comes in and claims he can fire board members whenever he feels like, for no reason at all.

the staggered nature of 2020 meant the most recent cathartic election night W for Dems was 2008. I do kind of wonder if some of the trouble with the Youth is that they've never felt that

Combined, Congress is about to give the Trump administration over $90 BILLION to spend on JUST border walls and ICE detention centers.

Well, that was fast www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Rest in piss Poilveri

The plan for tariffs was threaten them and other countries would go "oh sir, we're so scared, we'll do anything" and the news would be filled with deals and the rest would flood US coffers. Wasn't supposed to raise prices, disrupt supply chains, and crash the economy. That's what the experts warned.

This is because they're used to the ethics of televangelists.

this would be the funniest possible Canadian coalition

Sorry canda, you ain't getting our beautiful health care system

I’m sorry what does a “criminal bench” even mean in this context. It’s just word salad meant to impugn.

I remember when conservatives were howling about Obama’s plan to “federalize law enforcement.”

This whole enterprise of not trying to defend the actual proposition but instead that it merely has "room for legit debate" is deeply anti-intellectual. You can debate whatever you want, even if you're egregiously wrong. It's 'just asking questions' sophistry dressed up in a scholarly pretense.

Sean O'Brien is sitting in union buster Dana White's luxury box at the UFC fights and getting red carpet treatment at Fox News. Sean O'Brien's members are getting pink slips. Great work, Sean.

steal the sheet, lose your seat.

The first sentence—the very first sentence—is completely and utterly wrong. I’m confident it is going to go downhill from here.

Broccoli haired zoomers do it again

this is good. it's also the result almost certainly of the fact that he's facing a real primary challenge. which suggests we need more primary challenges.

congratulations to the new skadden associates who will be representing a neo-nazi ICE guy who beat a child to death for sassing him

We have a CBC call -- Poilievre loses his seat. Beautiful

if you set your movie in the 1300s, i *will* watch it. That's the mtsw promise. Bad century to live during, underrated century to set your movie during.

Congratulations again to Matt Stoller

What was supposed to be the Hunter scandal again?

THE TORIES ARE DEAD AND THE CBC IS ALIVE

Folks: do not do this. Just. Period. Don't.

Interesting: the Department of Justice just filed a sealed motion in the Abrego Garcia case. This comes after both sides agreed to a 7-day pause in discovery after a previous round of sealed motions. No clue what's going on. We'll have to wait and see.

NEW: ICE clarifies that the 151,000 arrest figure put out by the White House yesterday is NOT internal arrests, as Leavitt and DHS have implied. That figure likely includes all CBP “encounters,” including people with visa issues at airports. ICE’s arrest number is 66,500; high, but not historic.

Wowwwww. Paul Clement to defend the Wisconsin judge.

we ask our police to do different things than other people ask their police to do. you know what don't do dick for investigations? surplus Army vehicles

They really do believe, deep down, that telling the truth is hostile, political, and deeply unfair to them.

There's a new conservative study purporting to prove that abortion medication is dangerous. Let's talk about why it's horseshit. To start, it's published by a conservative think tank, not peer-reviewed, and contradicts decades of credible research showing mifepristone is safe

One reason for skepticism towards AI hype is many of the same people insisted the Metaverse was definitely the future and you're dumb if you didn't get that, and before that insisted NFTs were definitely the future and you're dumb if you didn't get that. LLMS seem to have more use cases, but still.

revenge of the sith is very bad and *is also the best of the prequel films*

All of these panels of low info voters just confirm that Trump won on an avalanche of uncountered bullshit, which we already knew. Or at least should know if not for a variety of pet theories.

literally only Teslas meet this standard www.kbb.com/car-news/stu...

Attn: US Armed Forces Some of you are cops. Your job is no longer national security, it's now domestic repression. "Crime" is hereby flexibly defined. The Attorney General's in the chain of command. Sort of, maybe, not really, but also yes. That's why you got into this, right? To shoot Americans?

this is genuinely remarkable - www.scotland.police.uk/what-s-happe...

this is not going to end well