onfocus

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.

...to paraphrase former justice Potter Stewart, you know the corruption when you see it. And we see the out-of-control corruption in the increasing willingness and brazenness with which the Court reaches down into judicial process to find notional bases upon which to make policy for the country which it simply desires to make, frequently ignoring the appellate process, the fact-finding of trials, basic issues of standing. The corruption runs so deep there is simply little effort any more to hide it.

This is a good summary of the corruption.

There are many theories swirling around for why they have increasingly chosen to abandon their basic duty to legal transparency. And the likeliest one is also the simplest: They’re cowards.

I believe the Roberts Court will be known as the court that brought down the institution in this form. Only significant restructuring will restore faith in this thoroughly captured enabler of authoritarianism.

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark civil rights law that restricted racial gerrymandering and racial discrimination in voting for sixty years.

This isn’t justice based on careful deliberation. This is corruption in the service of white supremacy.

“I think this is a creative and ambitious bill,” he said. “It tries to get around Citizens United by arguing that corporations only have the powers the state chooses to grant them, and that Hawaiʻi can decline to grant the power to spend money on elections. That’s a genuinely innovative idea.”

Nice to see a state even contemplate asserting its power to regulate. Fingers crossed.

The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term. Only a few weeks ago, in his role as Mr. Trump’s “peace envoy,” Mr. Kushner met in Geneva with Iran’s foreign minister. The U.S. and Israeli bombing campaign in Iran began shortly after those meetings concluded without a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Seems like "blurring the lines" is a bit of an understatement. Also, what is Kushner’s role in the administration? Does he have security clearance? None of this should be legal.