curated citations to news sources
Rebecca Solnit: On Not Surrendering in Advance, or During, or At Any Point Thereafter
A friend of mine reminded me that the word encourage literally means to instill courage; we can do that or its opposite with how we speak, with what we say, with how we show up. It’s not the only work we can do during this emergency, but it’s an important part of it. It’s a big part of how we express a spirit of defiance, of resoluteness, how we act with the knowledge that emotions and attitudes are contagious, be they fear or courage, strength or weakness, kindness or cruelty.
Which is why it makes my head explode – picture this head as a volcano and these words as lava – when people surrender in advance verbally, which they do all the time about politics. There’s a lot of “I believe that we will lose” on social media and in the news. One way it shows up is when journalists report on some of the rubbish spewing from the mouth of the geriatric clown/felon we have to call president as though his every utterance had the weight of law, as though words will become actions, as though the actions will succeed, as though they will not be met with opposition, as though they believe he will win.
The current case in point is: a few days ago, after the latest installment of his periodic ritual submission to Vladimir Putin, Trump said Putin told him to go after mail-in ballots. Now first of all, if one of the world’s most dictatorial dictators gave a president of the United States advice on attacking democracy, that should have generated a lot of heated headlines and screaming politicians urging outrage in ways that have the power to put him on the spot and maybe make him walk it back.
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
Lisa Needham: Russia, Trump is listening
His attack on mail voting is inspired by Putin.
Steve Vladeck: The Election of 1864
At the lowest moment of his presidency (if not the Civil War), Abraham Lincoln was committed to protecting the people’s right to vote him out in favor of a negotiated end to the war—and the Union.
-
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – August 20, 2025
President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.
…In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.
Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. …
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)Dispatch: The Data Driving the Looming Redistricting War
…
Currently, Republicans have both a 219-212 majority (220-215 with no vacancies) in the House and a six-seat advantage in the partisan makeup of districts. While it is tempting to look at those two datapoints and ascribe the GOP’s slim majority to gerrymandering, whether redistricting efforts swayed the election is far from clear. “It’s hard to say for sure because, when districting is done fairly, it’s done based on a lot of factors: keeping cities whole, counties whole,” Wang said.Nor does the present Republican advantage make it impossible for Democrats to take the House. The party won in 2008 and 2020, when the GOP held a 13-seat and 11-seat edge, respectively, according to the New York Times’ Nate Cohn.
(Dispatch more…)ProPublica: A Texas County Cuts Over 100 Polling Sites as Trump Attacks Mail-In Voting Nationally
NY Times: One Sentence in the Constitution Is Causing America Huge Problems
…
The problems with the presidency, according to Cato, began in the first words of Article II. “The construction of the first paragraph of the first section of the second article,” he said, “is vague and inexplicit.”He is exactly right. It’s so vague and inexplicit, in fact, that it’s hard to discern what it actually means. Ambitious leaders are eager to fill the vacuum created by ambiguity.
Here is the key sentence: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” That sentence immediately raises two questions: What is executive power? And, crucially, what are its limits?
(NY Times more…)Guardian: The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America
-
Emily Atkin: A call to merge the climate and immigration movements
On Hurricane Katrina’s 20th anniversary, a Louisiana native makes the case for solidarity.
(Emily Atkin more…)MIT Technology Review: Why recycling isn’t enough to address the plastic problem
Plastic production is a massive source of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Wired: Phone Searches at the US Border Hit a Record High
Intercept: ICE Held an NYC Child Incommunicado at Secret Hotels, Then Deported Him
-
Steward Beckham: Theater of Peace
Washington declares calm, M23 digs graves. A ceasefire without rebels is not peace. It’s propaganda.
A new Human Rights Watch report asserts that at least 140 civilians were executed in July by the Rwandan-backed rebel group M23 near Virunga National Park. …
(Steward Beckham more…)
-
Ken Klippenstein: Military Preparing Attacks on Mexican Cartels
The Trump administration has directed the military to prepare for lethal strikes against cartel targets inside Mexico, three military sources tell us. The Top Secret planning order, issued in late Spring, directs Northern Command (NORTHCOM) to manage the attacks, which are to be ready by mid-September.
-
Sarah Jones: Trump’s America: Multiple Masked Agents Tackle Man to Ground as He Pleads ‘I’m Not a Criminal’
…
It’s unclear at this point why masked men were trying to arrest this man, but one consistent factor we’ve seen in too many of these “arrests” is they are happening without a judicial warrant, and often with an abuse of due process rights.
People in the comment sections are blaming the man, saying he shouldn’t have run away. But they haven’t been suddenly surrounded by masked thugs who do not identify themselves or present any kind of official paperwork.And even if they had, sudden violence triggers irrational behavior, which is why real law enforcement in a democracy does not act this way out of the gate and is trained on de-escalation. Even then, way too much police violence occurs, but at least there is some effort to make the policing more transparent than Trump’s thugs.
And from the policing standpoint, police violence often occurs because someone who is not trained enough gets scared and escalates violence. Whenever violence is being escalated, everyone is unsafe, including the police.
Trump’s policing is not making anyone safer. It’s certainly not about making DC safer.
(Sarah Jones more…)
-
Lucian K. Truscott IV: Shoving religion down the throats of children and everybody else
A federal district court in Texas ruled today that the law requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every school room in the state is unconstitutional and suspended the requirement in the 11 school districts involved in the lawsuit.
-
Charlotte Clymer: Male Cheerleaders Are the Right’s Latest Absurd Distraction
(Charlotte Clymer more…)Slate: Trump Has Found a Cruel New Way to Attack Trans Veterans
LAWdork: Judge orders DOJ to give more info on subpoenas targeting trans minors’ medical care
Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia staff warned of “traumatic” effects if forced to provide patient information to the Trump admin.
-
Atlantic: AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.
How lucky we are to be alive right now! Yes, things are weird. But what do you expect? You are swimming in the primordial soup of machine cognition. There are bound to be growing pains and collateral damage. To live in such interesting times means contending with MechaHitler Grok and drinking from a fire hose of fascist-propaganda slop. It means Grandpa leaving confused Facebook comments under rendered images of Shrimp Jesus or, worse, falling for a flirty AI chatbot. This future likely requires a new social contract. But also: AI revenge porn and “nudify” apps that use AI to undress women and children, and large language models that have devoured the total creative output of humankind. From this morass, we are told, an “artificial general intelligence” will eventually emerge, turbo-charging the human race or, well, maybe destroying it. But look: Every boob with a T-Mobile plan will soon have more raw intelligence in their pocket than has ever existed in the world. Keep the faith.
(Atlantic more…)
-
404 Media: Inside the Underground Trade of ‘Flipper Zero’ Tech to Break into Cars
(404 Media more…)
-
Decoding Fox News: Some Heroes Don’t Wear Capes – They Throw Sandwiches
A condensed overview of 18 hours of Fox News for the week ending 8/17/25
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
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