«…trying to finagle exceptions to President Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders or cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service that freeze hundreds of billions of dollars, including money for farmers and infrastructure projects.»
https://wapo.st/4k2j5yO (gift)
Here we go. Exceptions for me, none for thee.
Trump is going to act like the arch villain that was bullied as a child. “How do you like me now?”
«Sadly the player in question, who in a bout of nominative determinism goes by the handle Morgan ‘RepulseGod’ Bamford, didn’t have the stones to deliver their apology in-person…»
I’m not a gamer, but this headline is just too good. Are you paying attention, *New York Times*?
(Do women have stones? Women have stones, right?)
«Plus, USAID’s inspector general was recently fired (illegally, as you’d expect) for releasing a report estimating that nearly half a billion dollars worth of food aid was going to waste — stuck in ports, or in transit with no plans to distribute it, or just plain rotting in warehouses.»
https://www.wonkette.com/p/trumps-evil-usaid-cuts-hurting-farmers
Hey, I found some waste, fraud, *AND* abuse.
https://www.tiktok.com/@westmoreland_pops/video/7469227380796558635
I keep coming back to this in my head.
It’s a bit long for a tiktok (I guess? I don’t watch a lot of tiktok), and he takes a while to come to his point (kind of gently), but it’s a good point.
It’s not that MAGAs are wrong, that’s not the point.
The point is “you were lied to.”
Occurs to me. I’ve been seeing a lot of “weeknight sheet-pan” recipes in the Times (I get the Cooking emails).
And, it occurs to me: some of these things might make good dipping sauces for pita bread. The meat (bone-in chicken thighs, whatever) and the oily stuff, with the veggies, chickpeas, whatever.
Or, I could just throw some kind of dough thingie under all that, maybe pre-bake/broil to crisp it up so it doesn’t get too soggy.
And that would be…
Pizza.
And, suddenly, I’m flashing on Italian families in the 1900s in New York City. She comes home from working at the Triangle Shirt factory or whatever. He comes home from digging the New York subway system. And they need to get supper on the table.
Now, it’s the Times’s hifalutin’ “sheet-pan” recipes.
https://act.commoncause.org/forms/tell-the-nc-supreme-court-we-matter/
Hey, NC peeps! The NC supreme Court race is STILL undecided, while Republicans look for a way to steal it.
Randy Barnett & Ilan Wurman had a guest essay in the N.Y. Times on Feb. 15th: “Trump Might Have a Case on Birthright Citizenship.” The bottom line is that their essay backfires, because their main source for their supposed “allegiance-for-protection theory” is a single sentence from Lincoln’s Attorney General Edward Bates in 1862), but just […]
Birthright Citizenship: Barnett & Wurman’s NY Times Essay and their Bates/Blackstone Double Backfire
SOOOO… Once again, it appears the New York Times has published a garbage essay. Not just something I didn’t read very much of (yay, time not wasted), but actual garbage.
Here is an apparent “originalist” deep dive that also comes to conclusion that it was garbage. Trump does *not* have a case, in any sense of the phrase.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/house-dems-want-to-end-citizens-united
Alma Adams! w00t! \o/
I will claim her for my hometown, even though she’s representing Charlotte now. NC-12 has morphed over the years, thanks to the state Republicans, from an ink-spill of a district along the interstate from Greensboro to Charlotte to just Charlotte, but, in my heart, she will always be the politician representing my hometown.
https://www.ft.com/content/a7c9376b-4cb2-4cf2-a665-66f75b72f4c2
I just subscribed to FT Edit for $49/year, and I don’t have enough “sharing credits” yet, so sorry, paywalled.
But, basically: the statement that business is behind Trump and will be for the foreseeable future is incorrect. He’s too much of a clown.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/15/opinion/trump-birthright-citizenship.html
New York Times, blah blah blah.
But: the first precedent they mention is from 1898 (I stopped reading after that).
Well, if we’re going back to 1898, then, yes, the Court has absolutely ruled in favor of whiteness, multiple times. And this same institution is responsible for the Dredd Scott decision, and it seems like we might be regressing just that far now. There are no automatic backstops here, only the respect and trust people have for how things work. Or don’t have.
So, yeah, there are no guarantees, and we already know this, thank you, New York Times.
But they got one thing badly wrong in the headline, as per usual: Trump will never “have a case” in the sense that he might be right.
Immigration is the only thing keeping us from facing the same population decline that is facing Europe and China. It’s one of the things that keep us economically strong. And culturally vibrant, frankly. And I welcome it (taco truck on every corner!), and Trump and the Right are wrong about it.
We can certainly tune some things. Stop distinguishing by country of origin, for example. Separate quotas for Samoans and Haitians is ridiculous. (Basically, each separate region of the world where we’ve had an imperialist adventure around the turn of the 20th century gets a quota. Remember the Philippines? Quota. Nicaragua? Quota. Guatemala? Quota. Etc.)
And we can fix the H-1B visas to allow recipients more freedom to switch employers and not make employer sponsorship so onerous. That would raise H-1B salaries, benefitting domestic labour and treating everybody more humanely.
And lots more fixes smarter people than I have thought of and I just haven’t heard of yet.
Here, Read This 