MrSquid

Bonus 193: The Pernicious Effects of Purcell The remarkable row between the majority and dissent in the three-judge district court's ruling in the Texas redistricting case can be traced directly to the Supreme Court's election-related case law.

"Before folks assume that one side of this fight clearly acted in bad faith and the other didn’t, it’s worth indulging the possibility that Purcell itself is the culprit—and that its standardless-ness creates perverse incentives for lower courts in election cases."

Me on the TX redistricting case:

Wyden Presses for Investigation Into JPMorgan Chase and Epstein

EPSTEIN BOMBSHELL: my staff is releasing a new report showing JPMorgan Chase executives – all the way to the top – enabled Epstein's sex trafficking operation. You're going to want to read this.

Updated US Lexicon:

Violently attacking Congress to stop election certification then getting convicted of seditious conspiracy by a jury with full due process = not sedition

Saying US troops made an oath to the Constitution and should ask a lawyer if they think an order may be illegal = sedition

Stewart Rhodes, convicted of seditious conspiracy and released by Trump, visits Capitol Hill Rhodes, the far-right Oath Keepers extremist group founder, was found guilty of orchestrating a weekslong plot that culminated in his followers attacking the U.S. Capitol in a desperate bid to keep Tr...

/3 Asserting the (legally correct) point that members of the military may refuse illegal orders is not conspiring to overthrow the government or hinder the laws by force.

You can tell because if it were seditious conspiracy Trump would be pardoning it.

www.pbs.org/newshour/pol...

If you're wondering why a large chunk of ostensibly left-of-center pundits are waging war on environmental protections in the form of an "abundance agenda," it's because Silicon Valley has quietly developed a culture of rampant pollution.

Trump ranting about sedition, hangings, and death because some members of Congress said that US military personnel have to follow US law is quite bad, yes.

But it's frustrated impotence more than actionable threat.

He can't get James Comey in jail, he's far from able to murder members of Congress.

trying to start a moral panic and the stories are all like “the ADHD meds really helped but didn’t solve everything”

the implicit standard of "criminality" is doing a lot of work here, mostly as a desperate appeal to avoid thinking (not grading any of your students' exams is not criminal behavior either but you can very quickly see how that might nevertheless put a professor's employment in jeopardy)

Tom Cotton is a graduate of Harvard Law School, and he's telling us it's proof that Trump's boat attack victims are drug traffickers if CNN doesn't interview their grieving relatives.

VERY funny that Labour are being pointlessly cruel and haemorrhaging support from their base and yet none of what they're offering is ever going to be enough for the people whose approval they're seeking, WHO could have predicted it

We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.

The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.

Don’t give up the ship.

once you go TERF, you never post normal again

By the way the American Farm Bureau Federation is a lobbying group and you're gonna love the name of the guy who founded it lol

The left has a problem with political violence. Anyway, here’s the President of the United States saying his political opponents should be executed.

YouTube video by Miniminuteman America's Atlantis: The "Lost" Colony of Roanoke

I adore miniminuteman and his efforts as a science/history communicator, fighting the tide of bullshit out there. But he left one important note out of his vid on the "mystery" out the Roanoke colony.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDl5...

CNN, NYT, AP, and other media orgs literally have interviewed families of people killed in Caribbean boat strikes, including some who say they were just fishermen.

Lies nested within lies, all in service of violating the laws of armed combat, for no evident national interest advancement at all.

Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget. In Minnesota, leaders of an Old Apostolic Lutheran Church community enabled a child abuser by telling his victims that once the sins were “washed away in the blood of reconciliation,” they could never...

This is one of the most disturbing stories I’ve read in a very long time: Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.
By @jlussenhop.bsky.social @propublica.org and Andy Mannix @startribune.com

Elon Musk can't get humans to love him so he made a robot to love him instead and now all the humans are making fun of the robot. This is the smartest man in the world, a once-in-a-generation genius and clear member of the natural aristocracy

The dynamics within the Democratic Party are just different from the GOP here, which Trump and Comer don’t seem to have figured out

*that signals Trump's desire to ban state AI laws

How the FBI Became the Face of Deprofessionalization What research tells us about national security under authoritarianism

New from me:
Kash Patel is engaged in purges, removal of real accountability, and impunity for loyalists at the FBI.
Researchers told me that these are the exact patterns that create abusive national security organizations under authoritarianism. 🧵
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

Worked on the January 6 investigations Investigated Trump for his connection to January 6th, or corrupt practices. Some agents working on corruption investigations were fired, rehired, and then fired again. Having a rainbow flag on their desk during the Biden administration. Taking a knee during a 2020 George Floyd protest Enforcement of FBI Covid policies Refusing to illegally fire other FBI employees Being in charge of the FBI jet after people figured out Patel was using it to see his girlfriend.

This are some of the reasons why people are being fired at the FBI right now. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-fb...

By my count there will only be one (1) trans character on all of the major networks and streaming services as of January 2026.

Ugh. So fucking awful.

My first job in journalism was as a copy editor, and I truly believe it taught me as much about journalism — on the copy desk in Warren, Ohio — as anything else I’ve learned since.

Uh, I accept those congratulations. Forcing a university to act to discipline a professor who evidently harassed colleague and possibly students - under the advice of a notorious sexual predator, even! - is Good, Actually.

RFK Jr had committed to Bill Cassidy, as a condition to win his vote, that he would keep website language.

Cassidy in February: “If confirmed… CDC will not remove statements on their website pointing out that vaccines do not cause autism.”

Note the language in second photo.

Travelin' Soldier by Cody Johnson, up to #8 on the Spotify charts

People are always doing too much when talking about the politics and optics of country music, but a Trump supporter getting a hit off a song made famous by the Chicks genuinely turns my fucking stomach

Polymarket tweets: "BREAKING: Zohran Mamdani to require all New York elementary school students to learn Arabic numerals." Laura Loomer replies: "You know things are bad when you can't tell if this is real or a joke. Dear God. It's real. Isn't it?"

when I was young, i used to wonder how people like this would fare in life, as they didn't seem suited for gainful employment. it turns out, the internet allowed them to accumulate a massive audience of similar idiots, enriching them and turning them into a presidential advisor

Seen a lot of Dems appear on Fox but Crow handled the hit better than any of them. Calmly conveying utter disgust, and not giving insurrectionist Eva Braun any quarter.

LULAC v. Abbott, No. 3:21-CV-259 (W.D. Tex., El Paso) * * * * * In the interest of time, this dissent is, admittedly, disjointed. Usually, in dissenting from an opinion of this length, I would spend more days refining and reorganizing the dissent for purposes of impact and readability. But that approach is not reasonably possible here because these two judges have not allowed it. The resulting dissent is far from a literary masterpiece. If, however, there were a Nobel Prize for Fiction, Judge Brown’s opinion would be a prime candidate.

If you are a right-wing freak judge, there is no funnier way to kick off your jumbled, screeching mess of a dissenting opinion in a voting rights case by immeidately announcing that your dissenting opinion is a jumbled, screeching mess electionlawblog.org/wp-content/u...