Lawyers, Guns and Money

23/03/2025

The Department of Government Inefficiency

Not that this is news, but the point of DOGE is sabotage, not efficiency: A senior aide to President Donald Trump once said the administration hoped to traumatize civil servants, an objective it has handily accomplished through arbitrary layoffs and other indignities. But government workers are not....

22/03/2025

Music Notes

So it’s extremely unusual that I don’t pick the shows I am going to see. My wife is not a huge music person. She has her favorites and that’s why I spent a lot of money to get really good Jason Isbell solo tickets that I highlighted in the last Music Notes post. But mostly, […]

22/03/2025

Why is the historically unpopular president so popular?

Deputy NYT opinion editor Patrick Healy got the opinion section conservative columnists together to discuss why Donald Trump is so popular, based on cherry picking one source of data (right track/wrong track numbers) from an NBC poll and downplaying or ignoring others. The questions are like this: H...

22/03/2025

“Calipari is a pimp. He never could have outfought Pitino.”

We got ourselves a Family Feud in Providence today:  Because time measures history even as it moves on from it, and because college basketball remains perpetually dictated by larger-than-life coaches with enormous levels of power, money and personality, the latest chapter in a relationship that is ...

22/03/2025

Fascist Aesthetics

I enjoyed this discussion of AI and the aesthetics of fascism: Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager p...

22/03/2025

People Who Matter, People Who Don’t Matter

As Columbia University completely caves to allow Stephen Miller or whoever to make all the decisions for the university, it’s always worth remembering that you can say whatever you want about killing some people at Columbia and everywhere else in American life, by which we mean Muslims of course. ...

22/03/2025

The Little Bits of Destruction

Trump and Big Balls destroying the nation includes the big things we’ve been talking about it but it also includes destroying the little things that make life better for smaller numbers of people where a bit of money really matters, such as the library world. The IMLS is more than a grantmaking en...

22/03/2025

Week 9

The courts are standing strong this week. USIP did what it could to slow down the vandals. At least three courts are building the basis for contempt of court charges. I’m not clear on who would be charged with contempt or what the penalties would be, but there certainly are clown shows being prese...

22/03/2025

It did happen here

The collapse of the American liberal democratic order continues to accelerate: Paul Weiss and Columbia think that paying Dane-geld is going to solve their temporary little misunderstandings with the Trump administration, except as the poet noted, once you pay it, you never get rid of the Dane: Some....

22/03/2025

Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,842

This is the grave of Johnny Dodds. Born in 1892 in Waveland, Mississippi, Dodds grew up in a musical family. I don’t know a lot about his family’s background, but given their access to instruments outside of cheap guitars, it seems they were a bit better off than those stuck in the horrors of sh...

22/03/2025

The Man, the Legend

George Foreman has passed away. George Foreman, a heavyweight boxing champion who returned to the sport to regain his title at the improbable age of 45, and parlayed his fame and amiable personality into a multimillion-dollar grill business, died on Friday night at a hospital in Houston. He was 76.....

22/03/2025

This will hurt you more than it hurts me

One thing a member of Congress could do at a town hall with lots of constituents angry at you is to try to defend your party’s policy record. When what you’re doing is as unpopular as DOGE, it’s time for plan B: Yeah, I saw this, and laughed out loud—"how obsessed you are with the […]

21/03/2025

Shrug

Here’s what I’d say about this issue--if you are a parent and you don’t care if you kid dies from an easily preventable disease, well, OK then. I guess I don’t either. The Texas parents of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died from measles Feb. 26 told the anti-vaccine organization Childr...

21/03/2025

Hey all; something isn't right with Disqus (this has been an issue for a few weeks but appears to be peaking). Looking into the issue...

21/03/2025

A boom market for wallet inspectors

Jeremy Peters — the reporter who found Elon Musk’s politics an unfathomable mystery — discovers that Republican complaints about CANCEL CULTURE may not have been made entirely in good faith: As conservatives fought against cancel culture on college campuses, they developed a particular fondne...

21/03/2025

Howard Lutnick thinks that if you don’t get your Social Security check and complain you are probably a fraudster

Even in this degenerate age of ours, this is really wild: BTW he says “She’d just think something got messed up.” The rest of the quote in case you don’t want to get out of the boat: “And she’ll get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming and yelling and comp...

21/03/2025

Trumpism without Trump

JD Vance’s unprecedented unpopularity at this point of the administration is trumping even that of his official boss’s: Vance’s favorability is worse than Harris’s at the same two-month mark and perhaps worse than any new vice president in the history of polling. His Real Clear Politics f...

21/03/2025

A Note On Strategy

Toward the end of Ezra Klein’s interview with Gillian Tett, a more general strategic point comes up  [The previous Washington consensus] is that America was made stronger by being the dominant or strongest figure in these various global alliances and institutions. That meant not using the full ex...