onfocus

Only 15 minutes before President Trump decided not to strike Iranian power plants on March 23, a few traders sank billions of dollars into predicting that the S&P 500 would go up and oil prices would fall, making a hefty profit, Bloomberg reports. The traders reportedly used a two-minute window at 6:49 a.m. that day to make the massive deals in futures markets. 

I hope we can spend the next decade finding every last one of these garbage people and hold them accountable. We need to have some real accountability to make people think twice about this profiteering in the future.

“The President is only conceivably harmed by an injunction barring executive action if that court order is preventing him from doing something the law permits him to do,” she wrote. Given that nothing in the Constitution empowers him to prescribe the form of mail-in ballots in California or anywhere, Jackson concluded, the holding in Trump v. California is tantamount to asserting that “the President must be injured whenever he is prevented from doing something as he wishes.”

So grateful Justice Ketanji Brown is on the court and willing to call out her colleagues' corruption. It's not much comfort compared to real justice but at least there's a voice of reason in the record of this completely lawless court. By the way, court reform should be the top topic of discussion for Democrats.

Literally a couple months ago Marc Andreessen was on Joe Rogan talking about how these dumb young progressive kids support “socialism” even though “it never works.” Meanwhile, Andreessen was just appointed by Trump to some government policy board. As Trump literally nationalizes parts of the AI industry that Andreessen insisted the prior administration was going to destroy through its woke anti-capitalist policies.

I know it's tired to point out Republican hypocrisy because that's their happy place, but come on. The supposed party of small government is only concerned about the size when the benefits of government are going to people who aren't already wealthy.

Elon Musk's destruction of USAID is his single worst act, and I think it is beginning to dawn on him that he will be held responsible for his role in killing millions of children.

Jamelle Bouie has been on a tear lately. It's worth tuning into his YouTube channel.

Trans sports bans are built on the assumption that transgender students — particularly transgender girls — are misrepresenting their gender identity in order to compete “unfairly.” There is no evidence for this. But, it is worth sitting with how outlandish that assumption is.

This is a good explanation of just how ridiculous this supreme court decision is. Every campaigning Democrat should be talking about how they're going to support trans people and supreme court reform.

This was probably the most alarming Trump appearance to date. He was breathless and incoherent, ill-seeming and off-piste. He spent 32 minutes justifying his deal with Iran to the world before mentioning a single discussion that had taken place among the G7 countries at the summit, and the justifications spoke for themselves.

Painful to watch because it reminds how far the US has fallen.

Theodore Gillibrand, whose mother is Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), has drummed up $30 million in a fundraise led by the venture firm Lux Capital, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

He just graduated from Stanford. Seems legit.

Marion also said that the Township’s lawyers gave them a rough estimate of what losing the lawsuit would have cost and it was grim. “It was gonna be about $29,000 per household per resident, approximately, in additional taxes,” Marion said. The board said that the tax burden would have fallen on each township resident every year for the next decade if they had fought and lost.

Billionaires get what they want in America. Communities just have to deal with it.

Since Moore’s paper appeared, CAP has seen bills like Hawaii’s introduced in 14 states, while Montanans—who have a heroic history of forbidding corporate campaign spending for a full century until Citizens United negated their law—are working to place an initiative on their 2026 ballot to curtail corporate election spending along the lines that Moore’s proposal and now the new Hawaiian law lay out.

Nice work, Hawaii. This is some good news.

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

Yes, it’s called lying.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts said at a Wednesday judicial conference that the Supreme Court must be cautious about overruling precedents, warning that it can create problems if done for ideological reasons.

I would laugh at the hypocrisy of this ridiculous comment if it wasn’t so infuriating. In fact, I’m 100% sure this is victory lap trolling after gutting the VRA, not an earnest statement.

Congress has authority to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 that says that the appellate jurisdiction of the court shall be subject to “such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Rep. Sean Casten lists some ways congress could rein in this out-of-control Supreme Court.