https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C8-3/ALDE_00013206/

Sure the American public is going through a bad phase right now, but that’s pretty normal. The fact that having a demagogue capture maybe 15 percent of the public’s support (I’m only counting real MAGA) has caused the entire government to radically change is an indictment of the political systems, more than the public. Specifically gerrymandering, plurality voting, the electoral college, bicameral legislature with filibuster, lifetime court appointments, and an independently elected president. Probably more that I’m forgetting about. Human nature isn’t going to change, but we can change how a nation makes policy.

https://cpb.org/pressroom/Corporation-Public-Broadcasting-Statement-Regarding-Executive-Order-Public-Media

Read CPB’s statement.

Nah this is 60 minutes putting pressure on their new handlers to not squash the segment. Now everyone knows it’s coming, and if it doesn’t air people will notice. I think it’s a wise move.

Honestly what are you talking about?

More than Abrego Garcia? Probably because he had a court order not to be deported.

Maybe the staff don’t want to come back after being doxxed.

There is no way that these two didn’t talk about how to answer that question before the press event. This isn’t the president of El Salvador saying he doesn’t want to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, it’s him saying that he is on Trump’s side.

If people think the big risk of AI is fake nudes… man, I wish that was the worst that could happen.

Criticism is not censorship. You’ll just have to learn to live with the fact that people can tell you when they think you’re being an ass. Free speech, you know.

Most Americans are not MAGA. If this guy gets back to a US court, and he can deliver testimony about what Trump’s DHS is doing, and what things are really like in this Salvadoran gulag, that’s the kind of primetime drama that gets people’s attention.

I for one agree that kind of sexualized criticism is inappropriate. I think a reasonable person would read it as trying to demean Schumer by associating him with other-than-straight behavior.

I dunno pretty sure they consume groceries

Yeah but how do you get the information from the IRS into the systems that manage this hypothetical program? How do you get your parents’ and grandparents’ IRS data correlated with your own? What about people who don’t file taxes? The risk is that all that work falls on the applicant. Or if the program administrators do all that work, that’s where the overhead costs come in.

This is something which happens with existing public assistance programs, where so many requirements have been put on the aid application that people give up trying to to prove they made less than X dollars in the last 12 months, or lived in the state for at least 5 years, or have passed a drug screening, and so on. Too often that’s done intentionally to stymie a program, but the phenomenon exists regardless of motivation. The more complicated the program requirement are, the more people will fail to get aid they should, and the more it costs to administer.

Has it worked well for France? I’ve been arguing that such an approach would work much better for the US.

Using self-identified racial identities for aid programs is too easy to argue is itself racially biased. Even if you can make good contextual arguments that race-based aid is a compensation for race-based oppression, either current or historical, that’s not a winning political position.

Using metrics like generational wealth, income, education is a much easier argument to make, even if in effect it would disproportionately benefit these identity groups.

The primary downside seems to be that administering such a program is more complicated, which means more of the expense goes to overhead, and more people will not get the benefits they could because of the difficulty of navigating a more complex process.

I didn’t see anything about a violation of election law. All it said was she was known for pro-Kremlin, and anti-Semitic positions. I hope there’s more to this story or Romania is going to damage the credibility of their elections.

This is exactly what needs to happen. Every government fundamentally runs on the voluntary cooperation of the people involved. Every government is susceptible to a breakdown of that cooperation. “Or what?” is not the biting political analysis you think it is.

But I’ll spell it out. The administration will comply with the order or they’ll be found in contempt. If they’re found to be in contempt, they’ll either comply with the remedies, or we’ll have ourselves a proper constitutional breakdown.

The point is that it’s all on the record, black and white, in public. If things really go wrong it is critically important that every media outlet, and every civic institution can point to these public facts so that it is abundantly clear that the administration has become lawless.

It would be much worse if the courts were already so submissive to the will of the executive that they won’t even rule against them. Then maga would get to continue doing what they’re doing with a pretense of legitimacy, and it would be many times harder to muster public resistance.

People have been saying that the world is getting ruder for thousands of years. I didn’t see anywhere in the article where they compared this finding to that baseline.

This is not true. The United States v Trump ruling was that a president can not be held criminally liable for their exercise of the powers of the presidency. It does not mean that anything the president does is legal. It does not even mean that every presidential action is legal. Courts can still rule that a president’s actions are illegal and order injunctions, or even find contempt if court orders are not followed. This has already happened several times in the last month.

It’s a bad ruling but making it more catastrophic than it actually is does nobody any good.

Sure there’s the maga cultists, but that is not the majority of people who voted for Trump. I honestly think a self-inflicted recession may turn out to be a good thing.

Right now Trump is behaving like, and being treated by the opposition like he’s invincible. But I do not think we are at the point where maga has such a hold on power that they can withstand being broadly unpopular. There is still a lot of the government and civil society that remains intact, and could be a platform for stopping the authoritarian takeover, but they are going to need a huge amount of public support. Causing a recession when your mandate was to improve the economy may be enough for this.

The longer this festers, the more maga will be able to destroy or compromise the state and civil society. I think we need to force the crisis sooner rather than later.