curated news excerpts & citations
Andy Borowitz: Trump’s Racism Isn’t News
Donald Trump’s racist meme featuring Barack and Michelle Obama is shocking but utterly unsurprising. Trump has been a racist for decades—following in his father’s footsteps.
In 1971, Trump joined the real estate company founded by daddy Fred, and, in a move that every nepo baby would applaud, assumed the entry-level position of president.
His career as his father’s junior partner got off to an inauspicious but telling start.
In 1973, the U.S. Department of Justice sued Trump Management for discriminating against prospective Black tenants, naming both Trumps as codefendants. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline heralding Donald J. Trump’s first appearance on page one of the New York Times.
Countersuing, the Trumps unleashed their lawyer, Roy Cohn, the disgraced (and, eventually, disbarred) former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn advanced the Trumps’ claim that they were discriminating not against Blacks but against undesirable “welfare recipients.” A judge dismissed the Trumps’ countersuit. (The tradition of judges tossing baseless Trump lawsuits continues to this day.)
(Andy Borowitz more…)
Jennifer Rubin: They’ve Always Known He is A Racist…
They just never cared
Steven Beschloss: Deleting Donald Trump, Letter By Letter
The name of this blight on America should only survive on buildings as a warning
Michael Garrett – NC Senate: Facebook Post
I watched Bad Bunny deliver the most American halftime show I have ever seen. Then I came home and watched it again. And I am not okay. In the best possible way.
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The only thing more powerful than hate is love.
Over 100 million people saw that tonight.
And no Truth Social post can take it away.
(Michael Garrett more…)
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – February 9, 2026
Last night’s thirteen-minute Super Bowl half-time show featuring Bad Bunny had more watchers than any other halftime show in history: an estimated 135 million watched live, while millions more have streamed it since. …
Right-wing critics complained about the NFL’s invitation for Bad Bunny to do the halftime show, saying he was “not an American artist.”
In fact, people born in Puerto Rico are American citizens. But Puerto Rico has an odd relationship with the United States government, a relationship born of the combination of late-nineteenth-century economics and U.S. racism.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Judd Legum: How Trump is rigging immigration courts against Somali migrants
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Matthew Hoppock is an immigration lawyer based in Kansas City. He currently represents eight Somali migrants in immigration court. On February 4, Hoppock said that all his cases had been reassigned to a new immigration judge. While the cases will still be heard in Kansas City, this new judge will preside via video conference from Louisiana. According to Hoppock, other immigration lawyers representing Somalis have had their cases reassigned to the same judge on the same day.The judge who will now be hearing these cases involving Somali migrants is Sherron Ashworth, Popular Information has learned. Ashworth is a former ICE prosecutor with a track record of quickly rejecting most asylum claims and accepting the Trump administration’s most specious legal arguments.
(Judd Legum more…)
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USA Today: Toddler returned to ICE custody and denied medication, lawsuit says
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Daily Beast: Secret ICE Arrest Data Blows Up Trump’s ‘Worst of the Worst’ Claim
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Karen Attiah: The “Return” of the Golden Sword
My grandfather guarded it. The British stole it. I’m named after it—and I’m going to fight for it.
(Note: This is the first part in an essay series about my personal journey with a looted golden sword in Ghana and the politics of cultural repatriation. This was originally supposed to appear in the Washington Post, but I was illegally fired before we could publish this. I am excited to share this with my Substack readers. Enjoy!)
(Karen Attiah more…)
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Liz Dye: Starbucks Grinds Lawsuit Over Lack Of White Baristas
Pour one out for Missouri prosecutors!
A year ago, the state sued Starbucks for failing to hire enough white, male baristas, forcing consumers “to pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services that could be provided for less had Starbucks employed the most qualified workers.” Implicit in this is the assumption that you need a flat white dude to make a flat white. Or, more specifically, that medium-roast managers are less qualified than their blonde peers — something for which no evidence was presented.
But the effort to grind Starbucks over the company’s DEI policies fell flat last week when a federal judge tossed the legally undrinkable swill. Looks like the state’s top prosecutor ought to worry more about the quality of her lawyering than the race of the brew master.
(Liz Dye more…)
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Peter Birkenhead: Serious Men and the Water They Swim In
I’ll never forget the feeling I got about an hour into reading Hillary Clinton’s emails after they were released in 2016. It was the kind of feeling only a 12 syllable German word could do justice, composed of equal parts relief, admiration, boredom, and an acute, mushrooming anger.
Anger at the (male) pundits, (male) politicians, and (male owned) media companies that had sold me a Hillary-hating bill of goods for years, and at my damn (male) self for buying way more of it than I had realized.
I was With Her, of course. It was about a month before the election and I wasn’t the least bit hesitant about supporting Clinton against her odious opponent. But as I read through her emails I began to understand the extent to which I had bought into the caricature of Hillary the Shrew that the media had been pitching to Americans like me for so long.
(Peter Birkenhead more…)
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Jay Kuo: What’s Tulsi Hiding And Who Is She Protecting?
She delayed, then heavily redacted, a whistleblower complaint that alleged she had blocked normal distribution of an explosive intelligence report.
…The Wall Street Journal has been breaking many stories about how the Trump White House has tried to bury investigations and reports, including famously on the Epstein files. Here’s what it had to say about a whistleblower complaint within the intelligence services:
A U.S. intelligence official has alleged wrongdoing by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard in a whistleblower complaint that is so highly classified it has sparked months of wrangling over how to share it with Congress, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter.
The filing of the complaint has prompted a continuing, behind-the-scenes struggle about how to assess and handle it, with the whistleblower’s lawyer accusing Gabbard of stonewalling the complaint. Gabbard’s office rejects that characterization, contending it is navigating a unique set of circumstances and working to resolve the issue.
A couple points here.
That there is a whistleblower complaint at all within the intelligence community should raise alarm bells. The amount of personal risk an official within intelligence agencies would need to take, all to raise a warning about the Director herself, should not be discounted.
Further, as the Journal noted, this has been sitting on Gabbard’s desk since last June, moving exactly nowhere until the Journal’s reporting came out.
(Jay Kuo more…)Allison Gill: Tulsi Gabbard is Covering Up a Call About someone Close to the White House
This is an impeachable offense. I sat down with the whistleblower’s attorney for an in-depth, 45-minute interview. You don’t want to miss it.
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Thom Hartmann: The NFL Is “Socialist” on Purpose, and It Exposes Republican Economic Stupidity
The NFL proves that rules, referees, and “redistribution” are the only way any game, including the American economy, actually works…
Last night’s NFL Super Bowl game was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing red, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry.
But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, “socialism,” and the differences between Republican “free market” nuts and FDR’s re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation’s citizens.
Most Americans would be highly offended, for example, if the NFL took big bucks from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like these monopolists to change the rules so whichever team gave the League the most money could have an extra three players on the field at all times.
But that’s pretty much exactly what Reagaonics and deregulation have brought us in our marketplaces; it’s the staggering difficulty that every small business in America faces today in the form of massive corporations like Walmart, Facebook, X, Google, and Amazon.
For capitalism to work in a way that doesn’t produce oligarchs and monopolies, it must be regulated. Capitalism, after all, is just a game that people play using money and mutually agreed-upon rules. Just like football.
(Thom Hartmann more…)
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HuffPost: Trump Using A ‘Softer Touch’ With ICE In Minnesota? Residents Say Don’t Be Fooled.
Two weeks after Alex Pretti’s killing, federal agents have shown no signs of backing down. The resistance definitely hasn’t.
(HuffPost more…)Jonathan Larsen: Only Four Days Left To Fund Concentration Camps!
Without a deal, funding for ICE concentration camps could run out on Friday and then maybe we’d have to, like, not have them
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NY Times: These Monks Walked for Four Months. Here’s What People Learned From Them.
A diverse swath of Americans searching for calm said they found some as a group of Buddhist monks finished a 2,300-mile trek from Texas to Washington.
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404 Media: Watch 404 Media’s Super Bowl Ad
(404 Media more…)
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Nate Silver: Kamala Harris has Liz Cheney Syndrome
Centrists think Harris is a leftist, and leftists think she’s a centrist. But she’s not the only candidate with this sort of problem.
(Nate Silver more…)
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Boing Boing: Measles outbreak tears through a Florida university
Eric Lullove, DPM: Measles Is Back—and That’s Not an Accident
How Political Theater Turned Public Health Into a National Liability
I am a podiatrist. My professional life is spent in the weeds of wound care and limb salvage—preventing the “slow-motion” tragedies of chronic disease. I don’t run a vaccine clinic, and I’m not a career immunologist. But I am a physician who understands how a system breaks.
(Eric Lullove, DPM more…)Shanley Hurt: Dr. Oz Discovers Measles
On Sunday morning TV, Dr. Mehmet Oz did something that, by the standards of our current national health discourse, counts as a small civic miracle: he advised Americans to get vaccinated against measles. “Take the vaccine, please,” he said, as if he were pleading with a toddler to eat one bite of broccoli before the screen time kicks in. Which, in a way, he was.
ICE deaths 2026 – They deserve remembrance and justice.- January 24: Alex Pretti
- January 14: Heber Sanchaz Dominguez
- January 14: Victor Manuel Diaz
- January 9: Parady La
- January 7: Renée Good
- January 6: Luis Beltran Yanez-Cruz
- January 5: Luis Gustavo Nunez Caceres
- January 3: Geraldo Lunas Campos
- December 31, 2025: Keith Porter
Walk for Peace – Dhammacetiya – The Ancient Sacred Buddhist Scripture Stupas
Margaret Chase Smith: Declaration of Conscience
NPR: January 6, 2021: A visual archive
Accountability Initiative ICE List
GriftMatrix
Trump Action Tracker
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
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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