Not another one, aw, no

"Girl With Mug" is a painting by Iranzy Art.

Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called "terrorists" for defending their own country against invaders.

"Last Week was National Police Week. The House of Representatives Celebrated by Passing These Bad Bills.: Last week was National Police Week, and the US House of Representatives celebrated with one of its favorite pastimes: passing pro-cop legislation. I wrote earlier about the vote to exacerbate the criminalization of poverty and push debunked myths about a 'retail theft epidemic.' The House also voted 243 to 173 (to 3 present) for a right-wing messaging resolution blaming the left for crime and praising our corrupt rapist of a president for reducing crime. The easiest way for Trump to reduce crime would be to stop committing it. 29 Democrats joined the GOP in voting for it: [list] The House voted 243 to 179 to criminalize bail funds by accusing them of insurance fraud. 32 Democrats joined the GOP in voting for it: [list] The House voted 219 to 204 to undermine federal monitorships, which are an important tool for federal judges to ensure compliance with court orders, settlement agreements, or consent decrees and remedy entrenched violations of federal law, especially in matters of civil rights, policing, detention, disability rights, the environment, education, and antitrust. [...] Finally, the House also voted 308 to 116 for a bill to create duplicative requirements about posting information about states and cities that have cashless bail in order to fear-monger about crime and accuse cashless bail policies of increasing violent crime."

"'By This Logic, Any Protest Could Be a Conspiracy': Conviction of Spokane ICE Protesters Raises Free Speech Concerns: With the conviction of three anti-ICE protesters in Spokane, Washington on federal 'conspiracy' charges Thursday, civil rights advocates and legal experts fear that the Trump administration may have just been handed a powerful tool to criminalize dissent. Jac Archer, Justice Forral, and Bajun Mavalwalla II, nicknamed the 'Spokane 3,' were indicted last year for their actions at a protest in June 2025, where they attempted to physically obstruct ICE agents from transporting two Venezuelan immigrants to an ICE processing facility in Tacoma."

You'd think the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is aiming funding at Steyer's strongest opposition (Becerra) would be reason enough for Californians to want to vote for Tom Steyer, but Harold Meyerson says "Tom Steyer's Problem" is that no one seems to realize he isn't just a billionaire, and he needs some help to get across to people that he's showing all the signs of being a class traitor, and what he really needs is endorsements from Bernie and AOC to wake them up. That didn't happen, which is why a Republican beat Steyer for second place in California's jungle primary and the Republican will face off against Democrat Xavier Becarra in the gubernatorial election in November. Beccara is not what I would have hoped for.

Oppo research on Graham Platner has been drip-drip-dripping away with successive "bombshells" that amount to a guy who was once in the military and talked crap who got a "badass" tattoo and had PTSD when he returned to civilian life and drank too much, sometimes worrying his girlfriends, most of whom seem to think he was a great guy. It doesn't seem to have convinced Maine Democrats that they want to vote for Susan Collins or anyone else. Maybe this video explains why the ratfucking campaign isn't working. He won the primary decisively but the internet is still full of concern trolls talking about how he's bound to be the next Fetterman, even though the only thing they have in common is that they're white guys who don't always dress like lawyers. The more careful they are not to mention his position on Israel, the more I'm sure this is really about his position on Israel.

Meanwhile, Robert Kuttner's "Memo to Ezra Klein: Check Out Wichita and Boise" tells us that, "You don't need to scrap planning and zoning to get abundant and affordable housing. In fact, planning and zoning can help get housing built." Klein's wanting to point to the Houston model, where cutting regulations has meant shoddy housing that's great for developers but a nightmare for homeowners, is the only way to go, but it sure looks like this is a much better model if you want to get decent housing built at reasonable prices. But it's a model that's still going to be tough to work in NYC and San Francisco.

All this time people assumed the Democratic Party didn't want to release its autopsy because the truth would demonstrate how their excuses were rubbish and they ran a terrible campaign, but it turns out Ken Martin looked at the report and realized it was a terrible piece of work that skirted the real reasons altogether. Mind, they could just endorse better reports that have been done by outside groups, such as RootsAction's "Autopsy: How Democrats Lost the White House", or even the polls from Lake ResearTch Partners discussed here in USA Today.

Josh Marshall has been musing about the pipeline to success in the legal profession and how it's tilted toward corruption, and he got some very precise agreement from a reader who wrote More on the Fancy Lawyers (and the Legal Academy).

"Clarence Thomas Can't Get American History Right: In his recent broadside against the twentieth century, the justice is as ill informed as he is mean-spirited." And he thinks he alone understands The Declaration of Independence.

A funny thing happened when Nicholas Kristoff wrote about Israeli prison guards torturing Palestinian prisoners: He got slammed by a hasbara campaign. Rick Pearlstein points out that the supposed "blood libel" that isn't possible has been accepted for decades since these are the same charges Jewish women made against Nazi guards.

From Haaretz, "I'm Queer and Palestinian. Jerusalem Pride Is Not My Celebration: Every time I see a campaign that presents Israel as an "LGBTQ paradise," I ask myself if we even live in the same country. Because I am not only queer, I am also a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel, and the moment that detail is added, the entire enlightened narrative that Israel so loves to sell the world begins to crumble."

RIP: "Anthony Head, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Ted Lasso actor, dies aged 72." We first saw him as the coffee heartthrob in those Gold Blend/Taster's Choice commercials and by that alone he became an interesting star. He was Jonathan's annoying and self-aggrandizing stage-magician boss on the first episode of Jonathan Creek but quickly disappeared to suddenly reappear as Rupert Giles, Buffy's ultimate Daddy character. He was the brilliantly evil version when he appeared as a schoolmaster on Doctor Who. And then he was another Rupert as the oily former team-owner in Ted Lasso. He was wonderful every time, and I'm now learning from all the obits and tributes that absolutely everyone said he was a great guy. I had to get to the bottom of this obit to learn something that should have occurred to me earlier but never did — that he was Murray Head's brother.

"Why is the Whole Economy Just Coffee Shops?" is a crash course from Unlearning Economics that enlightens you in less than an hour about what really happened in Greece, how George Osborn started doing the same thing to his own country in the UK, why so much of the world's economy is looking more and more like Brazil, and how Spain shows there are better choices. And also, we like human society and coffee.

"They Were Always Planning This. The blueprint ran through Dallas. [...] These men ran Congress for decades. They wrote the rules. They controlled committees. They filibustered, stalled, and killed legislation. They made sure that what the Civil War started, and Reconstruction briefly interrupted, the subjugation of Black Americans as the organizing principle of Southern political life kept going. And they were far from the only ones. The history of nearly every white Southern Congressman and Senator until the 1950s was nearly the same. And when they finally started to lose, when Lyndon Johnson, one of their own, betrayed them and signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965, they didn't give up. They reorganized. [...] Originalism means interpreting the Constitution according to its 'original meaning.' The original meaning of the Constitution, before the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, protected slavery. Before the 19th Amendment, women were excluded from the franchise. Before the 24th Amendment, poll taxes were allowed. The 'original' Constitution was written by and for wealthy, property-owning white men." (Except for the original meaning of the Second Amendment, which was never interpreted to forbid gun control until these creative liars came up with their new reading of it. From the very beginning, new towns routinely enacted gun restrictions as soon as they incorporated, and that was uncontroversial.)

Can't remember now how I found Peter Shamshiri, but it seems like something Atrios might have pointed to because of his "Rich Guy Quote Journalism" article about how there's a whole genre of interviews in which the unremarkable and not very useful opinions of rich guys are treated as news stories just because these guys are rich. Which is a nice little piece, but I also liked "Purity Politics Is A One-Way Ratchet," about how our "centrist" Dems always object to "the left" having "purity politics" (by which they really mean standards) but have their own purity politics which is mainly about expunging "the left", by which I mean The Base.

"Democrats keep playing defense on race. Repeal the 1929 freeze and expand the House." George Washington said a Congressional seat should represent no more than 30,000 people. He was right. And today, some seats represent about a million people. That isn't even representation.

"You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Gotta Hand it to Marjorie Taylor Greene: Some may find this hard to believe, but the Jewish space lasers lady may not be totally sincere about Israel."