iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I’m not entirely convinced that opinion was correct. It is borderline and I would prefer to err on the side of strictness, if we ever live in a world where the foreign emoluments clause isn’t a dead letter.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 12h

Aside from the obvious about how he’s psychotic, the only reason it’s constitutional for any POTUS to accept the peace prize is because the Nobel foundation is not part of the government of Norway as such. Otherwise it’d be a forbidden foreign emolument. Obama asked for an OLC opinion on this point.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 12h

Those who voted for her in the primary got what they voted for. She’s duly on the ballot as the Democratic candidate.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 12h

It’s pretty obvious who between the two of them could have had a more serious shot, but it’s fundamentally wrong for any candidate to claim some entitlement to anyone’s support, endorsement, or votes. That’s not how it works. It’s on you as the candidate to earn it, always.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 12h

There have been races w/ a Dem on the ballot but much more support goes to an independent. Two are already in the Senate. Bodnar hasn’t pulled that off to the same degree as Sanders or King; that’s on him just like Bankhead’s failure to earn more support is hers. Neither are automatically owed it.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 12h

It would be preferable if a party had the legal ability to directly make the decision to strategically sit out a race. That’s not an illegitimate tactic. But if the only way to do it is to have somebody win the primary who is then willing to drop out, then actually pulling that off is necessary.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 12h

It was a poor decision to not put in sufficient effort to ensure someone else won the primary.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 13h

Winning a primary entitles you to that placement on the general election ballot and absolutely nothing else. She has that and nobody’s taken it from her. But nobody is obligated to support you. The state does not command other politicians and party leaders, who are free to make their own decisions.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 13h

Or perhaps denationalize. Musk is for all intents and purposes part of the state now, an integral part of the regime, his fiefdom more a corrupt and lawless government agency than it is private enterprise. To break up and remove assets from his control could reasonably be construed as privatization.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 17h

It’s not even a tradeoff on the principle of not using a literal nazi’s website versus the value of your audience reach. You’re not getting either!

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 17h

They do this even though it is obvious beyond a shadow of a doubt that Musk rigs the algorithm however he pleases.

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Micah @rincewind.run · 19h

Ossoff is one of the very few people adequately channeling Evelyn Normielib these days the base doesn't want to hear entreaties to our better natures, they don't want to go high while the other side goes low, they want someone to come on the TV and go "these people are garbage" he's good at it

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Nicole Foy @nicolefoy.bsky.social · 21h

What a strange story. California woman finds a man, allegedly drunk, sleeping on her lawn early in the morning & sends her dad out to move him. The man wakes up & allegedly assaults the (elderly) dad, who shoots him Turns out the man is off-duty ICE agent David Gonzalez abc7.com/story/off-du...

abc7.com

Off-duty ICE agent shot after assaulting 72-year-old man and his daughter at Fresno home, police say

Authorities say a woman found the ICE agent sleeping on her front lawn.

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The UnPopulist @theunpopulist.net · 09/10/2026

His father swam for days to escape Mao's China. Decades later, Nathan Law fled the city that took his father in. His LibCon2026 dinner address on exile, courage, and why liberal democracy has to keep making its case.

theunpopulist.net

Liberal Democracy Is Not Self-Sustaining

It endures only as long as its advocates can make a compelling case for it, as exiled Hong Kong dissident Nathan Law argued at LibCon2026

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 23h

It’s straight up bad faith posturing. There is no version of how they could have written this up that would have been satisfactory, and no disputing the obvious absurdity of the complaint that wouldn’t be denounced with how dare you disagree with me.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I’ve been a bit pleasantly surprised at how much media has stuck to defense department / secretary as their house style, though you see some exceptions.

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Josh Chafetz @joshchafetz.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It would really be great if folks not affiliated with the Trump Administration could stop using "Department of War." The Department of Defense is a statutory creation, and the name is statutorily given--the administration cannot unilaterally change it.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I said nothing of the sort. I've said this two-paragraph write-up is also saying nothing of the sort, because it objectively isn't.

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The UnPopulist @theunpopulist.net · 09/10/2026

Benjamin Franklin's aunt helped send three people to the gallows in the Salem witch trials. Decades later, he'd help strike the word "sacred" from the Declaration in favor of "self-evident." A meditation on how far progress has actually come. @andycraig.bsky.social

theunpopulist.net

From Spectral Evidence to Self-Evident Truths

One man’s remarkable life and the invention of progress

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Nothing in that screenshot is doing that.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It’s not arbitrary for why Rainey Bethea is cited as the last example of this particular thing happening, when the state by law openly conducted an official public execution. To insist it’s somehow minimizing or denying later lynchings is absurd.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

No, the example it’s referring to is 1936 which is generally acknowledged to be the last judicial public execution done as official policy. It’s not denying that lynchings happened later than that.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It did. Nothing in the screenshot is denying that. It’s factually correct about the last time it happened with even that veneer of a sham judicial process and legal sanction.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Maybe, but he’s barely a blip in the polls. To be fair Hegseth is similarly unserious, it’s basically Vance and Rubio and I’d say even Rubio is delusional. It will be Vance if it’s not Trump himself.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Outside of VP, when was the last time a sitting (not ex-) Cabinet secretary was running a pre-campaign for president? Hoover? I can’t think of any recent ones. Clinton left at the end of Obama’s first term.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It’s telling there aren’t any governors or senators even discussed as serious potentials. Being in Trump’s Cabinet is table stakes, which is novel.

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darth™️ @darthbluesky.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

impeach hegseth should be on the list day one it is not even debatable tbh

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

PMRC was a very bipartisan moral panic. That it was the Gores is memorable precisely b/c it feels incongruous in retrospect, and her name stuck to the “sticker,” but James Baker’s wife was right there with her. It’s so predictable it’s not even noteworthy that of course conservatives were in on it.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

They did, but conservatives can hardly claim the mantle of leading the opposition to them on that.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

If you want to talk generational perspectives, it’s worth considering that “we were the party of small government and personal freedom” rings pretty hollow to someone who came of age while Bush made banning same-sex marriage a centerpiece of his reelection campaign, to name just one obvious example.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The libertarians can make that case for where they stood, if you want to talk about somebody like Friedman perhaps, but you know well enough they were a marginalized minority on the right generally, and especially did not have their way on social issues within the conservative coalition.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

That progressive left-liberals were always the side of unconstrained government power because they don’t believe in any limits on the state, and conservatives were principled classical liberal small government minimalists until Trump came along, is not the reality of what either side believed.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It was not generally people on the left who spent those decades championing the use of state power to police personal choices in the name of a virtuous society on a wide array of issues. Those were pre-Trump GOP standard conservative positions. It was one of the stool’s three legs, as Reagan put it.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I recognize this spiel well enough, and it’s a strawman caricature that tries to conflate pre-Trump conservativism with classical liberalism more than it ever actually was, and pretends people on the left were never interested in limits on state power, when on many issues it was often vice versa.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Few if any progressives would use that definition. They believe in a more expansive state for material concerns, and the efficacy and desirability of that is plenty debatable, but the state as inculcator of moral virtue is not a central premise and if anything it’s a hallmark of social conservatism.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It is remarkable how many Dems in competitive races are not doing the squishy bipartisanship tapioca routine and are instead just letting rip with these guys are a bunch of evil goddamned nazis who want to take all your rights and are also corrupt as fuck. It’s reading the room, I suppose.

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 09/10/2026

Ossoff: "Tonight, a united Georgia will hear the trial the Mike Collins. Mike Collins has brought dishonor to our state through his personal bigotry and his widely documented ties to white nationalists. And he's sold out Georgia in his pathetic child-like devotion to Donald Trump."

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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 09/10/2026

Troy Jackson: "The gentleman's name was Johan Sebastian Guerrero. He had a 3 year old daughter. The only mistake he made that morning was going to work. Because Sen. Collins is not willing to stand up to Donald Trump, he was murdered in the streets of Biddeford for doing nothing wrong."

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VoteHub @votehub.com · 09/10/2026

On Supreme Court term limits: Sen. Susan Collins: “Absolutely not. I’m sure that Troy wants to pack the court.” Troy Jackson: “I wouldn’t have to pack it if you didn’t put in Kavanaugh."

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Hegseth got the job not because of his clown antics on Fox News but because during the first term he made it his personal crusade to get Trump to pardon war criminals who had murdered civilians and desecrated corpses. That’s who he is and it’s what Trump hired him to be.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Speaking in the abstract, tyrannicide is different in kind, not so much as exception to views on capital punishment but outside the category of judicial punishments altogether. It’s law of nature, a political act of national self-defense, even if dressed up in a superficially judicial process.

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Jason Kuznicki @jkuznicki.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The president is trying to incite pogroms. He promises to protect those who participate.

On Truth Social, @realDonaldTrump writes:
“The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants. There is Violence, Murder, and Mayhem all over the State. The people of Minnesota must fight back.
You have been robbed, and abandoned by your State Government. Your Governor is an incompetent thief who doesn't want to get involved. He just wants to get out of town with as much as he can steal, and then, lead a quiet life. The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.
Governor Tim Walz, and Mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, must immediately ask for Federal help - and leave the rest to us! President
DONALD J. TRUMP”

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Roger Sollenberger @sollenbergerrc.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is objectively psychotic and every member of Congress and Senate should be ashamed if they don’t try to remove him from office before this happens

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

This is depraved and so is a country that lets them do it.

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gwen howerton @kissphoria.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

whoever decided to split this clip into four separate sound bites that they could drip out to the media knew exactly what they were doing.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

They *want* people to think their goons will be out in force intimidating voters and interfering with poll workers on a massive scale. The point is talking it up as if that's true, when it isn't, is playing into their hands.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

And that's still not enough and we shouldn't lose sight of that reality. Of course they'll target where they think they can maximize the effect (if this has any successful effect at all even where they do show up, which is not a given). It's still way more places than they can actually cover.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Fine but that's not what I said.

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