leftcoast1213.bsky.social

What is a Farmer and How Does the Government Count Them? The High Politics of a Seemingly Mundane Statistical Task Silvia Secchi is a natural resources economist and a Full Professor in the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences at the University of Iowa. Editor's Note: Dear readers, Nathan here. ...

NEW @crisesnotes.bsky.social piece by @profsecchi.bsky.social! Late to posting it here but this piece is really a must read on how the USDA counts- or miscounts- farmers, how this came about and why it matters.

www.crisesnotes.com/what-is-a-fa...

If you make a billion dollars — or $500 million or even $100 million dollars — and you keep trying to make more, then there is something seriously wrong with you. It's a mental illness akin to hoarding or drug addiction.

Warned that this was going to happen. And if Trump’s DOJ doesn’t fight it, I’m not sure there’s much that can be done to stop it.

radleybalko.substack.com/p/magas-300-...

immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes

Opinion | At the Supreme Court, Scenes From a Judicial Backlash

1/ A few thoughts about @williambaude.bsky.social’s comment in yesterday’s NYT chat that, “It’s amazing how many of our problems today could be solved by a Congress that was willing and able to legislate in response to national problems.” www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/o...

quite something that almost every court in the land except like one in Amarillo and the highest in the land routinely tell Trump to go pound sand

This 🧵is spot on

But if you spent 2021 and 2022 whining about the prices of burrito taxis instead of celebrating the best ever job market for workers in the 21st century you should know that you were helping the bosses' little scheme. Scheme worked! Trump's back and people are now desperately holding onto their jobs

The Supreme Court Is Poised to Revive a Key Feature of Nixon-Era Corruption The justices will hear arguments on Tuesday in NRSC v. FEC, a case cooked up by the GOP itself.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments right now in a case engineered by the GOP to strike down a longstanding campaign finance law that prevents megadonors from bribing politicians for favors by laundering the money through political parties.

Guess how it'll go. slate.com/news-and-pol...

This is all John Roberts’ fault Trump owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man.

As SCOTUS hears another case today that could further destroy campaign finance regulation, consider this astonishing fact: political spending by billionaires has increased 160-fold since Citizens United decision www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

It's just like the immunity case, when they said "My God, imagine if an ex-president could be prosecuted! It would be madness!" As if it hadn't been that way for 250 years, and it was perfectly fine.

Same headline.

Seven years apart. 🤡

@politico.com
www.politico.com/news/2025/12...

We don't need massive SCOTUS reform in the abstract. Fixed terms, some small things. But the problem isn't the Court. It's the justices. These six people are so bad, such enemies of the Constitution, they must be removed or otherwise disempowered even if it means things I'd generally rather not do.

Why are our ungrateful readers so dense that they can’t see that the transphobia and fascist sanewashing and whitewashing genocide is for their own good?

Yes. What this thread says is so obvious to me and I kind of feel like the only way it's not obvious to you is if you were extremely keen to take part in the whole moral panic, and realizing the true nature of it made it less fun to indulge.

The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.

"Individual liberty" is when conservatives decide everything. Their concept of liberty is just domination, not freedom to do what they want, but freedom to force everyone else to do what they want. bsky.app/profile/donm...

Said it before and I'll say it again: A real problem with the legal profession's cultural norm of venerating the Supreme Court is that the legal profession never contemplated that there might someday be a justice as dumb as Brett Kavanaugh on it

Not just Jared but almost all the gulf monarchies plus a pass through entity for the ccp.

For reasons completely unrelated to any opinions about regulatory policy, a Day 1 executive order here in the US should be ending every government agency account on X. Just delete them all, plain as that. For the same reason the US government need not have accounts on Stormfront or 4chan.

Tolerating these bad faith parlor games, devoid of an attachment to actual history or the plain meaning of words, as paths to elite success in legal academia & the federal judiciary was a grave mistake. We need to stop doing that & never do it again.

this gets to the fundamental lawlessness. the difference between law as a game and law as a tool of government.

birthright citizenship is the law. nothing has changed. the documents are the same. if that can change based on *nothing*, you don't have a real constitution in the first place.

There are a variety of ways to describe the healthy economy Trump inherited from Biden. For those who care about reality, “trainwreck” isn’t one of them: tinyurl.com/2dau4rpu

You know who inherited a monumental trainwreck? Biden.

Everything is twisted projection with these people.

don't worry, john roberts says this is a legitimate exercise of presidential power and if we did anything to curb it, we would be robbing the executive of the energy he needs to do his job

First in the Nation: A Courageous Editorial Board Calls for Trump’s Impeachment American Democracy is under siege. The President of the United States is subverting the Constitution. One patriotic Editorial Board rises to the moment.

A 🧵
How many newspaper Editorial Boards have called for Pres. Trump's impeachment (or resignation)?

As far as we know, only one: @sentinelcolorado.com

Our 2 part series: journalism, trust, press freedom & how a local newspaper serves its community-and democracy.
open.substack.com/pub/mediaand...

What strikes me is that this is one of the best statements on the issue of GenAI that I've ever read.

when your 20 year old space company is valued at 800 billion dollars and you're still blowing out shares to keep the lights on (and pay employees), you don't have a real company. hth

this bubble popping will be spectacular

A court with a normal-ish conservative majority would have been tolerable. I'm not eager for court packing, impeaching justices, and other such options. But this court sticking around post-Trump is untenable. They've already torched their own legitimacy, the only question is what do we do about it.