Eric Johnson

As a #WHSR Senior Duty Officer from another era (1990-92), I thought they did a nice job in capturing the dynamics of the Sit Room team during a fast-moving crisis, including the roles played by Rebecca Ferguson & Jason Clarke. (More screens now, though!)

Well done, @larrypfeifferdc.bsky.social !

As a #WHSR Senior Duty Officer from another era (1990-92), I thought they did a nice job in capturing the dynamics of the Sit Room team during a fast-moving crisis, including the roles played by Rebecca Ferguson & Jason Clarke. (More screens now, though!)

Well done, @larrypfeifferdc.bsky.social !

YouTube video by Animagraffs How the Golden Gate Bridge Works

the promise of the internet was high-quality information, always available. this video is what people were imagining; it's really terrific. I had no idea how complex the Golden Gate Bridge was.
youtu.be/RjbJwnUd3Pw?...

As we alarmingly wrote "We are hurtling toward climate chaos" in our new State of the Climate Report which just came out. It is well covered by the LA times. Thanks to my set of distinguished coauthors including @michaelemann.bsky.social @petergleick.bsky.social and others.

22 of Earth's 34 'vital signs' are flashing red, new climate report reveals — but there's still time to act Earth's systems are nearing tipping points that could plunge the planet into a "hothouse" regime — but there's still time to prevent that from happening, scientists say.

"22 of Earth's 34 'vital signs' are flashing red, new climate report reveals — but there's still time to act" | Nice article on our new #Bioscience article by @saschapare.bsky.social for @livescience.com: www.livescience.com/planet-earth...

Donald Trump is clearly willing to do whatever it takes to stay in power, regardless of what the Constitution says. He “has always told us exactly who he is,” J. Michael Luttig argues. “We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.” https://theatln.tc/lcyBbEUr

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people

www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Voters Did Not Understand the Stakes in 2024 - The American Prospect A large majority of American voters are greatly dissatisfied with the state of things, most especially the economy. It turns out that median voters were catastrophically misled about the stakes of the...

Coda: it’s the information environment. prospect.org/2025/10/29/v...

Yes, could be helpful, too, in flagging failures of media & broader education system/society in general to ensure citizens know basic facts. Start w/ simple facts. Are inflation, employment, crime at record low levels? Or record high levels? What % of taxes goes to foreign aid, vs. other spending?

Feels like so many of our convos are revolving about how voters respond to what politicians are doing, or what parties’ positions on issues are, without much actual empirical sense of what they actually know about those topics.

Yes, could be helpful, too, in flagging failures of media & broader education system/society in general to ensure citizens know basic facts. Start w/ simple facts. Are inflation, employment, crime at record low levels? Or record high levels? What % of taxes goes to foreign aid, vs. other spending?

I’ve been thinking a lot about a new kind of polling I’d like to see. We have polling that measures public opinion, which is obviously important, but I’d love to see a little more empirical work on public knowledge: what do voters know about politics and policy?

You always get a few strays on this who say something like "look if you committed a crime I don't feel bad for you."
When we sentence people to jail or fines we don't also sentence them to be scammed and exploited for their entire incarceration by mid-market private equity firms

How dangerous is it really to work for ICE? According to ICE’s own data, none of its officers have been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s history.

DHS has said over and over that immigration enforcement is so dangerous that ICE agents needs masks and the military to protect them.

ICE's own records show that no ICE agent has ever been killed by an immigrant. Covid-19 is by far the leading cause of death.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

How dangerous is it really to work for ICE? According to ICE’s own data, none of its officers have been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s history.

According to ICE’s own data, none of its officers have been killed by an immigrant in the agency’s history.

The Taxpayers’ Tab for Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful New Ballroom Trump’s $350 million ballroom funded by corporate donors raises concerns over taxpayer costs and political influence.

Trump's big ballroom is going to cost taxpayers over $100 million-- his friends and business partners' contributions are tax deductible cepr.net/publications...

J. B. Pritzker Wishes for Precedented Times Twenty-seven minutes with the latest governor Donald Trump wants arrested

Authoritarianism comes fast, Governor J. B. Pritzker told @markleibovich.bsky.social. “And if you’re not willing to stand up and push back while it’s happening in the early days,” Pritzker added, “it gets a lot harder later.”

Public Trust Demands Open-Source Voting Systems | VotingWorks Yesterday, news broke that Dominion Voting Systems was sold to a new company, Liberty Vote. Dominion, the second-largest voting systems vendor in the US that currently tabulates 1 in 5 American…

"Trust us, we're the government" is fine, iff, as Reagan put it, we "trust, but verify." The only credible way to verify critical code is if that code is open-sourced.

There is one extremely prominent open-source vendor in America. There need to be many more.

buff.ly/XjJblPk

A former GOP official has privately financed the purchase of the second-largest voting technology vendor in America? What could possibly go wrong...

Here's what could go right: We urgently need a demand by election officials for open-source voting technology.

There Is No Democratic Future Without Supreme Court Reform I’ve made versions of this argument here in the Editors’ Blog and...

Josh Marshall: No plan to recover from or even seriously battle with Trumpism can be in any way capable of succeeding unless reforming the Supreme Court is the first order of business.
talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/there...

Will Trump’s Russia Oil Sanctions Finally Sway Putin? The threat to Moscow’s oil earnings is huge. But will it be enough?

"Putin has repeatedly told Trump that any agreement over 🇺🇦 must address the “root causes” of the conflict, which are not, apparently, an unprovoked armored onslaught on a neighbor, but 🇺🇦’s very existence."

Good article by @kfj-fp.bsky.social. The answer to the headline question is "no."

Beyond the solar panel Finding all the clever paths forward!

What if you powered data centers by installing heat pumps in homes? And a thousand other good ideas
billmckibben.substack.com/p/beyond-the...

The White House is "the people's house."

But now, corporate interests are paying millions to fund the construction of a gilded ballroom to curry favor with President Trump.

This is a physical representation of the rampant corruption that has escalated over Trump's two terms.

Canadian ad tells the truth PLUS: Join Corbin Trent, former Bernie Sanders advisor and AOC communications director, and me TODAY at 12 pm ET on Substack Live

“Ronald Reagan, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Harry Truman and FDR would have all been in absolute agreement about who and what Donald Trump is. They would have recognized that he is the demagogue that the founders feared.”

steveschmidt.substack.com/p/canadian-a...

Unfathomable corruption. Democratic leaders should be shouting this from every podium and camera—calling it out for what it is—and condemning their GOP colleagues who stay silent and thus complicit. Silence is collaboration. ⚡ wearabetterworld.com

On September 11,2025,it became known that the USА lifted sanctions on Belavia,the Belarusian state-owned airline

This opens the way for Russian aviation to rather easily obtain the spare parts needed to service its airfleet -both civilian and military -since many of those parts are dual-use

Lynsey Addario and Anne Applebaum go inside Sudan - the ‘most nihilistic conflict on earth’ “I think the most important thing you need to know about Sudan is that it's a place where a group of countries that are sometimes called the middle powers – not superpowers, they’re not all big countries – are fueling the war for their own purposes,” says Atlantic staff writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Anne Applebaum, after spending weeks in the country during its ongoing civil war, alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning Photojournalist Lynsey Addario. At the same time, the forces of peacemaking are no longer around – entities like the United Nations, the United States and the like. As a result, “The UNHCR was operating at a fraction of its budget because the donors just have not come through in recent years,” says Addario. “UNHCR didn't even have a budget to provide them with any shelter. They couldn't provide any hot meals. They couldn't provide anything, really, because they had no budget.”

With more people displaced than in Gaza and Ukraine combined & fading attention and money from the usual "peacekeeping" powers, @lynseyaddario.bsky.social & @anneapplebaum.bsky.social take us inside Sudan's "nihilistic" conflict and the "devastating" senseless violence being endured by civilians.

How Scientific Empires End And what it means for America

The rapid decline of American science has few precedents in history, argues @rossandersen.bsky.social. We are witnessing an unparalleled act of self-sabotage:

Remember when Stalin removed people from photos and rewrote history, well ..... history apparently repeats itself. Except now it's here. In America. A democracy.

#Shameful.

We have no Constitional enforcement entity like we have law enforcement agencies. Congress was supposed to be the check on the Executive branch and they are not only failing they are abetting.