2025 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News. — Why every American should care about CBS settling 'dangerous' Trump lawsuit, even MAGA. — Elon Musk demands firing of 'disgusting and cruel' WSJ reporter who uncovered DOGE employee's racist tweets. — Trump tries to intimidate The Washington Post and columnist Eugene Robinson. — Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls out the Court's rightwingers on presidential immunity. — GOP bill bans prosecutors from going after officials who refuse to certify elections..say what?! — Trump administration orders states to halt EV charging programs.

He's firing the FBI, silencing the press, and dismantling Democracy: The window to fight back Is closing quickly... Trump wants FBI agents who investigated his coup attempt, his facilitating espionage, or his other financial and criminal activities fired. Let's be very clear: this is how dictatorships start. A guy who wants to be a dictator always begins by changing how the government works. Even though the majority of the nation had agreed previously that the government should do certain things in certain ways, he reassures everybody he's got a better way and it'll all work out. In the process, he breaks a bunch of laws, but people mostly shrug because they don't directly affect them. Pastor Niemöller wrote about this in 1930s Germany: "First they came for the government workers…"

America was built to reject kings, theocrats, and the morbidly rich — It's the same playbook, different century… The author of the Declaration of Independence went to great lengths, on numerous occasions (as I detail in What Would Jefferson Do?), to point out that when he and his colleagues started the United States of America they were explicitly rejecting — in favor of democracy — the men (they were all men back then) who drove the "three historic tyrannies": kings/autocrats, theocrats/popes, and morbidly rich oligarchs. For two thousand years before Jefferson, Washington, Hamilton, Paine, Adams, Revere, and their colleagues created our checks-and-balances system of republican democracy, every country in the world was ruled by one of those three. Today, of the 167 countries on Earth, only 74 are democracies, and only 24 of those are "fully democratic." And now, because of the GOP, America stands on the verge of losing that status.

In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, the Economist ran an article that clearly laid out how the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and how states took that to mean that it was open season to purge state voter rolls. The article quotes research from the Brennan Center for Justice that found that “nearly 16 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. That is almost 4 million more than were purged between 2006 and 2008. The increased purging far exceeds population growth or the growing number of registered voters.” This is a system failure that automatic voter registration would not necessarily fix.