on the one hand we should want people to change their mind so we can stop what's happening now. On the other hand there need to be costs for the ghoulish behavior that got us here, as these people absolutely will do this again given half a chance

Rep. Rashida Tlaib leads a new letter to the Trump admin demanding safe passage for the Gaza Freedom Flotilla to deliver aid & food to Gaza.

Signed by Summer Lee, Chuy Garcia, Pramila Jayapal, AOC, Mark Pocan, Greg Casar, Delia Ramirez, Al Green, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar.

One thought I keep coming back to is how much clearer our housing debates could be without the YIMBY/NIMBY terms. “Do you support public housing?” is a much easier debate for me to follow (even with all its intricacies) than “are you a left-YIMBY, center-YIMBY, right-YIMBY or anti-YIMBY?”

We need a name for this person. The vice provost for authoritarian compliance?

This is the equivalent of saying don’t get mad the firefighters aren’t turning on the hoses because the arsonists are the problem.

I follow French politics a lot, as many of you know. Any effort for mass layoffs of public sector employees there would create such huge strikes and marches, the level of disruption and paralysis would be biblical.

American political observers now seem to be realizing something that was true all along: the “institutional” constraints on the executive were a series of doors pretending to be walls. When all else fails, constraint will hinge on social and economic disruption.

You'd never know it reading basically any political commentary being offered now, but a year ago, a Marist poll found that 66% of Americans — including nearly half of non-college white men — supported mandatory DEI training. It's reliably polled well. thehill.com/blogs/blog-b...

DOGE is tearing its way through the US government, and NASA will not be spared.

Elon Musk says he wants the agency to focus on Mars, but more than anything he wants to sideline traditional aerospace contractors so SpaceX gets even more money and power over the US space program.

I mean, did anything else happen in 2020-2021 that might have caused a paradigm shift in how people evaluate their satisfaction with current economic conditions?

It reminds me of moms I interviewed who stopped following the news once they sent their kids back to in-person school after Covid closures. They told me "I'm putting my head in the sand." They didn't want to know what was happening because knowing meant having to do something with that knowledge.

My piece on the squandering of the opportunity to re-set the Democratic Party’s economic policy ideology is out at Boston Review. It’s obvious now that the only chance of defeating Trumpism would have been a full-throated confrontation with plutocracy.
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There's another piece here for someone who had more closely followed the Gaza protests—how the combined city/feds/university repression and punishment of those protests, all that police did with most Democrats' blessing last spring and summer, has shaped what protest looks like now in the US.

A quick hit from me after the protests over the last week, despite all the claims that people were too exhausted to protest and were sitting Trump II out. It's true, much of the Trump "resistance" appeared to have gone home when Biden was elected. But plenty of people never left the fight:

I wince at people calling every single thing a distraction. Even if it is a distraction it’s still

1) a thing that is actually happening

2) a thing that is hurting people

3) a thing that also needs to be fought and illuminated

“It’s just a distraction”feels so dismissive.

My phone has been blowing up since yesterday. Workers at the DOL, OSHA, and so many other agencies are scared, disgusted, and absolutely *furious* at the orders they’re being given (in the DOL’s case, by Acting Secretary of Labor Vince Micone) to comply with Elon Musk’s fascist takeover.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once,” said David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School.