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mjbalch69.bsky.social
@mjbalch69.bsky.social
Reposted
This is the way. The best path to changing American policy is to put pressure on the big companies, not on the government or the citizenry. That's a sad state of affairs, but it is the state of affairs.
Just wow. @pluralistic.net.web.brid.gy came out swinging in this article. He's right though and that's the coolest part.
December 26, 2025 at 2:41 PM
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“In that same court document, it is revealed that Epstein took the then 14-year-old to Mar-a-Lago in 1994, where she was introduced to Donald Trump. According to the files, Epstein elbowed Trump playfully asking him, "This is a good one, right?" with Trump smiling and nodding in agreement.”
Met in Michigan: New Epstein files reveal where he met his first victim
The first known victim of Jeffrey Epstein was a 13-year-old girl in Michigan in the 1990s, according to files recently released by the Department of Justice.
www.fox2detroit.com
December 22, 2025 at 4:08 AM
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Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:
December 22, 2025 at 3:37 AM
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“AI used as much water as the water industry this year” is fucking wild
December 20, 2025 at 6:10 PM
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December 20, 2025 at 1:34 PM
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Kaufman on the First Criminal Procedure Revolution
Emma Kaufman, New York University School of Law, has published The First Criminal Procedure Revolution in the Harvard Law Review:Today, it seems obvious that criminal defendants can waive constitutional rights. Plea bargains make up the vast majority of criminal convictions, and defendants routinely trade their rights — to indictment, to remain silent, to an attorney, to a jury — in exchange for a faster trial or a lesser charge. The modern criminal legal system is a regime of negotiated justice. Rights used to have more force. In the nineteenth century, the rules we now call criminal procedure rights were hard limits on judicial power. Defendants could not forfeit rights, and constitutional violations deprived courts of jurisdiction. But then, in an underappreciated and radical shift, courts changed their mind. One by one, rights became individual options, alienable upon consent. The rest is history: Grand juries declined, plea bargains soared, prosecutors became power brokers, and the system of mass processing was born. This Article recovers a lost chapter of American criminal procedure. It mines a trove of overlooked sources and traverses multiple disciplines to advance a simple claim: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal, courts transformed the rights of the accused. Long before the Warren Court revolutionized criminal procedure, there was a first revolution in constitutional criminal law. The story of that revolution reorients the field’s core assumptions, embarrasses modern doctrines, and expands the canon. It also advances our collective understanding of what it could mean to protect criminal procedure rights. --Dan Ernst 
dlvr.it
December 19, 2025 at 6:14 AM
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Notice that the parts of Trump's economic program that help working and middle class Americans — DOGE checks, tariff rebates, and warrior dividends — are popular, progressive, and non-existent. Tax cuts for the rich are unpopular, regressive and very very real.
December 18, 2025 at 3:39 AM
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Love this thread so much.
venezuela's major metropolitan areas are all somewhat inland because the spanish were worried about this exact situation: pirates conquering their towns.

i'm 100% serious about the pirates part

1/?
minor point but "COMPLETELY SURROUNDED BY" BOATS
December 17, 2025 at 4:23 AM
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I don't know, Aaron. I think we need to take this seriously. In fact, after surveying hundreds of years of history in the past few days, I've written an article assessing the originalist case here:
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
December 16, 2025 at 3:58 AM
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what would be the funniest way to find out It happened

like via Jeff Passan or something
December 15, 2025 at 3:54 PM
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Virginia Heffernan wrote this shortly after the 2016 election and it still holds true
December 16, 2025 at 4:21 AM
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“The Goal of the Game,” my middle-grade readers novel , publishing this week, is a “required reading” choice in this week’s NY Post Postsctipt column. nypost.com/article/best...
The best new books to read: Top releases, updated weekly
Each week, The Post compiles the buzziest new books. Have a look at our favorite titles in recent weeks. This week’s best new books The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, …
nypost.com
December 14, 2025 at 3:42 PM
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i’m at the brooklyn training. amazing energy.
@handsoffnyc.bsky.social is training thousands of New Yorkers on how to protect their neighbors from ICE. Today, they are currently running two trainings in Brooklyn and the Bronx, both of which hit capacity because interest was so high.

This is the way, y’all—we protect each other, and we know it.
December 6, 2025 at 7:24 PM
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"In less than 10 years, Trump showed the nation its central conceit of a nation governed by a piece of parchment rather than a monarch was nothing more than a convenient fiction." michaelianblack.substack.com/p/every-cris...
Every Crisis an Opportunity, Every Opportunity a Crisis
A few words on hope and fear.
michaelianblack.substack.com
December 4, 2025 at 4:20 PM
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authors you have the chance to do the funniest thing right now
AI advocates have warned that if every author in the class action filed a claim, it would "financially ruin" the entire industry.
Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action
Advocates fear such settlements will “financially ruin” the AI industry.
arstechnica.com
November 18, 2025 at 4:35 AM
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There is absolutely nothing old or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic democracy* in America. It only started 60 years ago.

And the conflict over whether or not it should be allowed to endure and prosper has been the central fault line in U.S. politics ever since.
From 2022:
November 15, 2025 at 3:59 PM
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At stake in today's tariff cases at SCOTUS is how to parse the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, but more fundamentally and in all cases, questions about "about politics, power, and country, not unhelpful and misleading legal formalisms." @espinsegall.bsky.social has details on the blog 👇
The Constitution in Crisis: The Supreme Need for Justice Robert Jackson's Legal Realism
Donald Trump is asserting more executive power than any President since the Civil War. He would likely not only agree with that assessment b...
www.dorfonlaw.org
November 5, 2025 at 12:28 PM
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Like this is hard? — Mom, Donny.
@zohrankmamdani.bsky.social
October 24, 2025 at 11:29 PM
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Best I've seen.
👀 someone calling out big law firm complicity and cowardice
October 18, 2025 at 11:15 PM
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With this + Santos/J6 pardons + Trumped up prosecutions...Corruption is lowest-hanging electoral fruit imaginable

Not saying health care isn't a good issue - it is and should be a focus.

But walk and chew gum -- should be so easy to cement the public view that this is govt is corruption 24/7/365
“The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two Gulfstream private jets for Kristi Noem, the secretary, and other top department officials at a cost of $172 million, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.” — www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/u...
Coast Guard Buys Two Private Jets for Noem, Costing $172 Million
www.nytimes.com
October 18, 2025 at 6:03 PM
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Wow
With this + Santos/J6 pardons + Trumped up prosecutions...Corruption is lowest-hanging electoral fruit imaginable

Not saying health care isn't a good issue - it is and should be a focus.

But walk and chew gum -- should be so easy to cement the public view that this is govt is corruption 24/7/365
“The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two Gulfstream private jets for Kristi Noem, the secretary, and other top department officials at a cost of $172 million, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.” — www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/u...
October 18, 2025 at 6:14 PM
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If you were “prematurely anti fascist” about this you were a hysterical lib, if you were wrong about it you’re a respectable intellectual with lots of billionaire connections bsky.app/profile/gtco...
October 16, 2025 at 12:55 PM
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Once American democracy made it possible for a Black man to be elected president, American conservatives decided that it had to be destroyed
While Vought traces the “leftwing revolution” back a hundred years, to the progressive era, there is no question that the election of Barack Obama was a radicalizing moment for him and many key thinkers on the radical Right - as were the multiracial protests in the summer of 2020.
October 12, 2025 at 4:31 PM
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Watching Democrats simplify this to just healthcare has been frustrating and disheartening. Like they don’t fully get what’s going on. Especially considering funds aren’t being appropriated accordingly anyways.
October 16, 2025 at 2:12 AM