These people are pure scum, and should all be in prison with their God-King: Despite the flub, some right-wing commentators and outlets praised Schmitt for the exchange. Pro-Trump influencer Benny Joh...

On the shadow docket, Trump wins, no matter how obviously the balance of equities favors the other side: The Trump administration can resume rapidly deporting immigrants to countries other than their ...

“Dumbest senator in the Republican conference” is an incredibly fierce competition. You have to stand with giants like Tuberville, Johnson and Blackburn to even be considered. It’s not a title just an...

This story has been making the rounds and it does not give you much hope for an educated electorate: “I don’t know a whole lot about Husted,” said Debbie Grenko, 67, a Republican, as she stroked her p...

The statistics in the article below come primarily from the Digest of Education Statistics, published annually by the National Center for Education Statistics, and CollegeBoard’s annual Trends in Coll...

Frank Bruni makes the obvious but important point that Trump’s constant past, present, and future lying about how elections are rigged against him is bad for the polity and the culture: Evidence (or t...

This ad, paid for by the American taxpayer, aired multiple times during NFL broadcasts today: absolutely demented. like a scene from a horror movie [image or embed] — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) Septem...

Time for another Quincy Institute blog about how Trump is occupying the peace lane: President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombi...

One of many such cases! I think something to consider here is that Collins voted to confirm Russ Vought as OMB Director despite the fact that he said a billion times that he thought Trump had a consti...

To follow up on Paul’s post about the latest Roberts Court atrocity, it’s worth noting again how badly the Court is abusing the shadow docket to advance their partisan interests. The Court continues t...

One thing I want the Democratic Congress to put near the top of their to-do list is to drag Roberts and the other five in front of various committees and grill them about all the very considerable dir...

Round my neck of the woods, we are usually quite committed to materialist explanations for all of human cognition, up to and including consciousness.  I share the commitment.  This is quite the opposi...

Is this just a distraction from the other distraction that was a distraction from the distraction from the Epstein Files? (We may need a flow chart). At first glance, it looks like a typical Republica...

Donald Trump is literally the only person whose death is something I’ve anticipated in a regular and conscious way. Indeed, I’ve done so on a daily and sometimes hourly basis for years now. I’ve even ...

Everything is less than zero: When the Department of Homeland Security sent Nevada a list of 185 names last month that it claimed identified noncitizens who had been improperly allowed to register to ...

Barring force majeure, we still have more than two years of this: Most reporting on Trump’s speech emphasized either his belligerence — his rejection of global cooperation — or the fact that almost ev...

Every now and then I’m struck by something shocking enough to remind me of just how completely this country has gone off the rails. This morning that something was Gibson Dunn & Crutcher’s complaint a...

And vice versa! Yet another game recognize game moment: Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian d...

While the Trump administration has decriminalized historic levels of political corruption — much of it their own — it does still use fraud as a pretext for some matters. Most notably, trying to strip ...

Here’s a surprisingly interesting and candid — interesting because it’s candid — interview in the NYT with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Very minor side point: it annoys me that Americans from Hispanic cu...

There was no usable audio of Trump’s latest tacky ribbon cutting because the political press finally showed some solidarity: WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump showed off his new White House helicopt...

Adam Serwer puts Trump’s exclusion of multiple non-regime-aligned media outlets from the White House in broader perspective [gift link]: On the first day of his second term in the White House, Preside...

Some excellent work on how Trump’s failure in Iran resulted from his destruction of US government capacity at home: Likewise, the administration launched the war with no consultation with its transatl...

Reflecting on the EU’s offer to make Canada an “associate member,” the Sultan of Shrill quotes what Machiavelli actually said as opposed to what is sometimes misleadingly described as “it is better to...

You would have to go back to the Wilson administration to find a presidency with this kind of commitment to the principles of free and open discourse: President Trump said on Friday he is banning CNN,...

The NYT has a story this morning of how bad things are looking for the GOP in the midterms, voting for which starts in many places in the next couple three weeks. The situation is dire enough that the...

A couple of commenters reminded me of something I’ve been inchoately puzzling over now and again: DamnYankeesLGM: The question that keeps coming up – obviously, what did people think they were voting ...

Despite attempts by RFK Jr. and his allies in rural Pennsylvania to deny it, the administration’s anti-vaxx campaign is having exactly the effect it intends (people getting sick and dying) [gift link]...

This morning the NYT reprinted a May 2016 Thomas Edsall column, in which Edsall explored the possibility that polls had a systemic flaw that understated Trump’s odds of winning the election, which was...

To follow up on my post yesterday, Mark Schmitt draws a useful distinction between midterms that are merely thermostatic and those that represent punctuated equilibria, like the presidential elections...

I see that my rock once again awaits me. (This is all because the Fed raised interest rates slightly, but did any of its members have an uncle who taught nuclear at MIT? ETA: Various commenters have p...

House Republicans can read polls, or at least those with literate staff members can heard them described, and are now reduced to bitter infighting over stupid gimmicks that are highly unlikely to work...

From one City Councilman to another. You’re a scum bag, a traitor to my country, and you should be deported. I don’t care what letter you put next to your name. America is for Americans. https://t.co/nlBCWUvoK6

Since we are seeing some people on the left of the party suggesting that people not vote for James Talerico, and some people on the center-right of the party suggesting that people not vote for Abdul ...

One of Trump’s more pathetic blackmail efforts: The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts board voted Tuesday to immediately close the venue’s main building, according to people familiar with the mat...

Robert Kraft was apparently outraged over Macklemore making some anodyne statements about Palestinian rights while opening for epitome of bland mediocrity Ed Sheeran. He demanded that Macklemore be dr...