One other really interesting point from A B Stoddard on today's pod: Trump's threat to gut the 'deep state' and stock the bureaucracy with loyalists will weaken hopes for any real professional dissent against plans to abandon NATO. These are two sides of the same coin.

Now that Trump's lawyers are making his demand for absolute immunity look every bit as unhinged as expected, reupping this. I talked to legal experts about what a second Trump term could look like if he were totally unshackled. Awful stuff:

newrepublic.com/article/177940…

Jack Smith has amassed an 'extraordinarily detailed description' of Trump's conduct during the insurrection, information that the 1/6 committee could not get. A SCOTUS delay may mean that voters don't get to hear this info before the election.

it would be a shame if Trump was inconvenienced or had high legal fees, unlike every other criminal defendent in the justice system that Alito is a part of.

On many fronts “Trump’s allies—overt & tacit alike—seek to run interference for his corruption & likely criminality in ways that allow them to maintain a veneer of respect for the rule of law. But Trump keeps demanding that they openly pervert the rule of law”
V-good@GregTSargent

russia kills humanitarian aid workers constantly, they killed two french ones just a couple months ago. what is this compulsion to make russia the favorable comparison, it always fails

Things just got very real in the classified documents prosecution.

DOJ calls out Judge Cannon's outlandish jury instructions as destructive to a genuine trial.

Asks court to rule now to give government opportunity to appeal and seek mandamus.

With strong precedents in hand.⬇️

Discipline and Publish

I hate this framing because the “freedom” vs “order” tradeoff is not real. Russia has a higher homicide rate than the US. life there is shorter and more violent. if you’re choosing between freedom and order autocracy will get you neither

Russian is such a colonial identity that it has two words for 'russian', one to describe the ethnicity and another to describe the imperial entity hope this helps

When I posted this I’d forgotten that Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty actually uses the phrase “denounce”!

The JS incarnation of the Daily Show was, at heart, a critique of the news media and its bullshit. Its failures were usually when it *echoed* the news media; which is why this start is... rather inauspicious.

I'm not sure how dismissing Ukraine and NATO is going to reassure Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. If anything, it will have the opposite effect. Trump's GOP is encouraging allied strategic autonomy, including nuclear proliferation and adversary partnerships...

TIL that academics can quote from Plato's Republic without citing it, because it's in the public domain.

I guess things have changed a lot in 30 years since my first reaction was “who the hell studies in Widener?”