curated citations to news sources
Daily Kos: A Juneteenth reminder of Trump’s love for the slavery-defending Confederacy
Paul Finkelman: Secession, the Confederate Flag, and Slavery
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But what was the cause of secession, and what led Confederates to start the war by attacking Fort Sumter? The answer is found in the speeches of Confederate politicians and in the statements of the four southern secession conventions that published a “Declaration” explaining their actions. These speeches and documents show that the South seceded to protect slavery and insure white supremacy in the South. Just listen to what southern leaders said between December 1860 and March 1861.
In March 1861, after secession but before the Civil War broke out, Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederate vice president and one of the most perceptive and brightest men in the Confederate government, forcefully set out the reasons for secession and the creation of the Confederacy in his famous “Cornerstone Speech.” Here, Stephens tied slavery to race, making clear that the cornerstone of the Confederacy was not merely chattel slavery, but also on the assumption of the racial and ethnic superiority of the ruling class and the utter inferiority and subordination of blacks.
Thus Stephens declared that, “Our new government is founded upon . . . its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.”
(Paul Finkelman more…)
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Marvin Olasky: What can we take away from National Immigration Heritage Month?
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Dean Blundell: “Deported for Dissent”: Trump Deported A Substack Writer as The Regime’s War On Truth/Media Ramps Up
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Foreign Affairs: How Iran Lost
Tehran’s Hard-Liners Squandered Decades of Strategic Capital and Undermined Deterrence
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A few years ago, the sudden, near-simultaneous killing of Bagheri, Salami, and a host of other senior leaders would have been unthinkable. Over three decades, the hard-liners who control Iran’s regime had built up what seemed like a formidable system of deterrence. They stockpiled ballistic missiles. They developed and advanced a nuclear enrichment program. Most important, they established a network of foreign proxies that could routinely harass Israeli and U.S. forces.But Iran’s hard-liners overplayed their hand. After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the regime’s leaders opted for a campaign of maximum aggression. Rather than letting Hamas and Israel fight it out, they unleashed their proxies at Israeli targets. Israel, in turn, was compelled to expand its offensive beyond Gaza. It succeeded in severely degrading Hezbollah, the most powerful of Tehran’s proxy groups, and eviscerating Iranian positions in Syria—indirectly contributing to the collapse of the Assad regime. Iran responded to this aggression by unleashing the two largest ballistic missile attacks ever launched against Israel. But Israel, backed by the U.S. military and other partners, repelled those attacks and incurred little damage. It then struck back.
(Foreign Affairs more…)
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Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 19, 2025
Just a week ago, the Trump administration was preparing for a sixth round of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, scheduled to be held in Oman on June 15.
In 2018, President Donald J. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiated in 2015 by President Barack Obama, under which the U.S., China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom lifted economic sanctions against Iran in exchange for limits to Iran’s nuclear program. With the U.S. withdrawal, the agreement fell apart.
Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” of stronger sanctions to pressure Iran to renegotiate the JCPOA, which lasted throughout his first term. Back in office, Trump relaunched that campaign in February 2025. Then, in March 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that the assessment of the Intelligence Community was that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
In the same month, Trump said on the Fox News Channel that he had written a letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging the Iranians to negotiate “because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said Iran would not “enter any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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NY Times: A U.S. Attack on Iran Would Show the Limits of China’s Power
China, which depends on Iran for oil and to counter American influence, has a lot to lose from a wider war. But there’s not much it can do about it.
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Steve Vladeck: The Supreme Court and the Long-Term Drift of the War Powers
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Commentators from across the political spectrum have understandably objected to even the possibility that the President might take the United States into an armed conflict without any authorization from Congress or even the patina of self-defense—a context in which the President would have at least a somewhat stronger claim to inherent constitutional authority. And a Congress that seems more focused on oversight of the Biden administration than on exerting any institutional authority over the White House’s current occupant is, yet again, doing nothing to assert even a modicum of its constitutional control over the war powers.There’s no question that presidents of both parties, for decades, have claimed ever-broader authorities to use military force either on their own authority or based upon increasingly dubious interpretations of statutes purporting to authorize it (or both). Indeed, for as much as John Hart Ely is known for his book Democracy and Distrust, I’ve always found his 1993 monograph on the drift of war-making authority during Vietnam—War and Responsibility—perhaps the single-best book that’s ever been written about the war powers.
But whereas Ely is unsparing in his criticism of Congress, his book is also a powerful reminder that it is, and always has been, a tad bit misleading to pitch this entire narrative in terms of the relationship between two of the branches of the federal government. The reality is that the Supreme Court bears some responsibility for this problem as well—not, it should be said, for starting it, but for a series of rulings that have made it that much harder for anyone, Congress included, to successfully contest unilateral assertions of presidential war power. If President Trump carries through on his bluster and actually does lead the United States into a shooting war with Iran, it will be more than a little difficult to use the law to stop him. That reality is not a structural failure baked into the Constitution, though; it’s a byproduct of highly debatable (and relatively modern) judicial interpretations thereof.
(Steve Vladeck more…)
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Atlantic: The Trojan Horse Will Come for Us Too
(Atlantic more…)Robert Reich: The Most Dangerous Corporation in America
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NY Times: Appeals Court Lets Trump Keep Control of California National Guard in L.A.
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TNR: ICE Claims Agents Need to Wear Masks Due to Assaults. Here’s the Truth
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security have claimed multiple times since May that there’s been a 413 percent increase in assaults against their agents to justify their officers wearing masks and refusing to identify themselves. The data states otherwise.
…Bump found that assaults on agents had decreased every month since 2024 and, despite repeated requests to ICE, wasn’t given any proof of ICE agents being doxxed, targeted, or assaulted outside the context of an immigration arrest.
(TNR more…)Justin Glawe: Los Angeles unrest signals difficult choices ahead for cops
An eyewitness account of a Trumpian powder keg.
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Los Angeles Times: How Trump could sabotage L.A.’s World Cup and Olympics
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There already are signs that Trump’s immigration crackdown is suppressing ticket sales for international soccer games in the U.S. That appears to be the case with an opening game of Club World Cup, scheduled for Saturday between Inter Miami, the Major League Soccer club featuring Lionel Messi as player-captain, and the Egyptian team Al Ahly at Hard Rock Stadium outside Miami.The cheapest seats for the contest, which are priced according to demand, have fallen from $349 in December to less than $80 last week, the Associated Press reported.
(Los Angeles Times more…)
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NY Times: ICE Imposes New Rules on Congressional Visits
The policy says that ICE field offices are not subject to a federal law that allows members of Congress to make unannounced oversight visits to immigration facilities that “detain or otherwise house aliens.”
(NY Times more…)
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Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Trump’s New Orders Allow VA Doctors to Discriminate Against Dems & Unmarried Vets & GOP Pols Claim Minnesota Assassin is Left-Wing Liberal (Huh?)
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Borowitz: RFK Jr’s Worm Now Living in Kristi Noem’s Brain
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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