When it’s impossible to distinguish between your blog posts and the claims that Stephen Miller is making, it might be time to just stop writing:
reason.com/volokh/2025/…
It’s obvious that “why do you care so much about THIS” is a concession that you’ve got nothing on the merits. But “if the a candidate tells racist lies about immigrants and goes on to win a plurality of the vote the Fifth Amendment is therefore suspended for the entirety of his term” sure takes that move in a sub-Schmittian direction.
I have also learned some disturbing information:
Josh Blackman is a gang member.
I say this with absolutely no evidence, only so that from here on out everyone else can feel absolutely comfortable describing Josh as an "alleged gang member" in any circumstance they deem fit.
I guess he should be grateful that the Constitution was already rendered inapplicable by the most recent election so his loss of due process rights will come as less of a blow.
Собрание русофобских цитат, в основном из славянофилов и около. Ничего доброго, ничего достойного уважения или подражания не было в России. Везде и всегда были безграмотность, неправосудие, разбой, крамолы, личности угнетение, бедность, неустройство, непросвещение и разврат. Взгляд не останавливается ни на одной светлой минуте в жизни народной, ни на одной эпохе утешительной. - А. Хомяков
Россия не содержит в себе никакого здорового и ценного зерна. России собственно - нет, она - только кажется. Это - ужасный фантом, ужасный кошмар, который давит душу всех просвещенных людей. От этого кошмара мы бежим за границу, эмигрируем; и если соглашаемся оставить себя в России, то ради того единственно, что находимся в полной уверенности, что скоро этого фантома не будет; и его рассеем мы, и для этого рассеяния остаемся на этом проклятом месте Восточной Европы. Народ наш есть только "среда", "материал", "вещество" для принятия в себя единой и универсальной и окончательной истины, каковая обобщенно именуется "Европейскою цивилизациею". Никакой "русской цивилизации", никакой "русской культуры". - В.В. Розанов.
И знать не хочу звереподобную пародию на людей, и считаю для себя большим несчастьем, что родился в России. Ведь вся Европа смотрит на Россию, почти как на людоеда. Я не раз испытывал стыд, что принадлежу к дикой нации." - В. М. Боткин во время спора с Некрасовым. Авдотья Панаева. ``Воспоминания''
Выдающийся композитор М. Глинка, окончательно покидая 27 апреля 1856 года Россию, на границе вылез из рыдвана, плюнул на землю и сказал: "Дай Бог мне никогда больше не видеть этой мерзкой страны и ее людей!"
``Мы, московиты, споили киргизов, чемерис, бурят и других. Ограбили Армению и Грузию, запретили даже Богослужение на грузинском языке, обокрали богатейшую Украину. Европе мы дали анархистов П. Кропоткина, М.Бунина, апостолов руины и палачества Шигалёва, Нечаева, Ленина и т.п. Моральная грязь, Московия - это чудовище, которым даже ад побрезговал бы и изрыгнул бы на землю''. - В. Розанов, российский философ (1856-1919)
Не поленился, и нашел текст Розанова, из которого цитата. http://az.lib.ru/r/rozanow_w_w/text_1915_voyna_1914_goda_oldorfo.shtml Такъ вотъ въ чемъ дѣло и вотъ гдѣ корень расхожденiя московскихъ друзей 40-хъ годовъ, которое опредѣлило собою на семьдесятъ лѣтъ ходъ русской общественности и литературы. Дѣло было вовсе не въ "славянофильствѣ" и "западничествѣ". Это -- цензурные и удобные термины, прикрывавшiе собою далеко не столь невинное явленiе. Шло дѣло о нашемъ отечествѣ, которое цѣлымъ рядомъ знаменитыхъ писателей указывалось понимать, какъ злѣйшаго врага нѣкотораго просвѣщенiя и культуры, и шло дѣло о христiанствѣ и церкви, которыя указывалось понимать, какъ заслонъ мрака, темноты и невѣжества; заслонъ и -- въ существѣ своемъ -- ошибку исторiи, суевѣрiе, пережитокъ, "то, чего нѣтъ".
-- Религiи нѣтъ, а есть одна осязательность, реальность, одинъ матерiальный мiръ; предметъ физики, химiи и бiологiи.
-- Души нѣтъ. Загробнаго мiра нѣтъ. Наградъ и наказанiй за эту земную жизнь нѣтъ. Бога нѣтъ.
-- Исторiя -- путь ошибокъ и суевѣрiй. Нужно все начинать сначала. Исторiя реальная началась съ французской революцiи, и ее продолжаемъ, -- т. е. поддерживаемъ принципы французской революцiи,-- мы, Стасюлевичъ, Некрасовъ, Щедринъ, Краевскiй и передовые профессора университетовъ.
-- Россiя не содержитъ въ себѣ никакого здороваго и цѣннаго зерна. Россiи собственно -- нѣтъ, она -- только кажется. Это -- ужасный фантомъ, ужасный кошмаръ, который давитъ душу всѣхъ просвѣщенныхъ людей. Отъ этого кошмара мы бѣжимъ за границу, эмигрируемъ; и если соглашаемся оставить себя въ Россiи, то ради того, единственно, что находимся въ полной увѣренности, что скоро этого фантома не будетъ; и его разсѣемъ мы, и для этого разсѣянiя остаемся на этомъ проклятомъ мѣстѣ Восточной Европы. Народъ нашъ есть только "среда", "матерiалъ", "вещество" для принятiя въ себя единой и универсальной и окончательной истины, каковая обобщено именуется "Европейскою цивилизацiею". Никакой "русской цивилизацiи", никакой "русской культуры"...
Но тутъ уже даже не договаривалось, а начиналась истерика ругательствъ. Мысль о "русской цивилизацiи", "русской культурѣ" -- сводила съ ума, парализовала душу... Это было то черное, что если не заставляло болѣть и умирать Стасюлевичей и Краевскихъ, Пыпиныхъ и другихъ профессоровъ, то лишь единственно потому, что они были въ обладанiи всѣми средствами, чтобы заставить умереть и захворать своихъ противниковъ. Въ "обладанiи всѣми средства-j мы": ну, понятно, какiя это "средства" въ духовномъ мiрѣ, въ идейномъ мiрѣ. Это лишенiе права слова; моральное его лишенiе, литературное его лишенiе. Бѣлинскiй далъ понять "своимъ", т.-е. далъ понять всей читающей Россiи, что славянофильство есть нѣкоторое "неприличное мѣсто" въ духовной жизни нашего общества. Писаревъ, которому вся Россiя также кинулась на встрѣчу,-- называлъ славянофильскихъ писателей и ученыхъ "Ванькиной литературой".
* * *
Между прочим, почти всю мою жизнь я в этом конфликте активно сочувствовал славянофилам и Розанову, потому что "западники" казались и мельче, и глупее. Путлер одной левой решил сей конфликт в пользу западников, полностью и окончательно. Ну типа, основной лозунг эпохи это "есть Путин, есть Россия, нет Путина, нет России". А коль скоро путлер глуп и мелок, то и вся Россия глупа и мелка. И раз путлер все равно сдохнет, то и вся Россия вместе с ним. Раньше меня бы сие огорчило, а теперь примерно так же радует, ибо терпеть это говно совершенно невозможно. Западники, которых Розанов пародирует, по факту не преувеличивали, а преуменьшали всю мерзость и идиотство этой тошнотворной страны и культуры, где в качестве символа веры используется гебешный шнырь с кругозором питерского гопника и интеллектом крысы. Эта страна говно, воистину так.
Let this serve as an open thread for the first three episodes of Andor. Please confine your comments to at least the penumbra of this subject. Enter at your own risk; there will be no allowance made for spoiler alerts.
Tesla’s net income slid 71% in the first quarter, as the company struggled to overcome competitive pressure overseas and a reputational hit from Chief Executive Elon Musk’s polarizing role in the Trump administration.
The company also reported adjusted earnings-per-share of 27 cents, which missed analysts’ expectations of 41 cents.
Tesla revenue fell in the first quarter after a steep decline in automotive sales, including double-digit percentage drops in crucial markets including the U.S., China and Germany.
The electric-vehicle maker reported $19.3 billion in revenue for the quarter, down 9% compared with the same period last year. Revenue from the company’s automotive business fell 20%. The energy business grew 67%.
They are, however, still being propped up by revenue streams that shouldn’t exist:
Tesla also reported $595 million in revenue from other automakers who pay Tesla for carbon credits to offset their sale of conventional vehicles, up sharply from a year earlier.
Leaving aside the fact that that this carbon credit system is helping someone dismantling the American state, it should be eliminated because it’s a terrible system that doesn’t actually protect the environment. If the EU wants to be serious about stepping up for liberal democracy eliminating these credits should be an obvious move. If companies want credits they should only be able to get them by actually building electric cars.
But Medicaid is a joint federal-state program, with Washington putting up the majority of money and leaving administration to states, as long as they keep within certain guidelines. And for most of the program’s history, the majority of states stuck to the minimum requirements, or relatively close, meaning they limited coverage to certain categories of people, including children, young single mothers, and the elderly.
The Affordable Care Act’s designers sought to turn Medicaid into something much more ambitious: a program for all low-income Americans, so that it was open to any citizen with an income below or just above the poverty line, even if they were working-age men or fell into another demographic category the program had excluded previously.
To put it another way, they were out to transform Medicaid from a narrowly targeted welfare program into part of a universal coverage scheme.
But the interest in ending expansion funding is still there—in no small part because the money is still there—and in recent years especially Republicans have spun their efforts more as an attempt to preserve Medicaid for what they say are the truly vulnerable groups that need it.
One source for this argument is the Paragon Health Institute, one of several think tanks launched by alumni of the first Trump administration, whose researchers have argued that adding all of these working-age, childless adults to Medicaid has put extra financial strains on the program, while overwhelming the doctors and other providers who see Medicaid patients. As a result, these researchers say, the children, pregnant women, seniors, and people with disabilities who had previously depended on the program now have a harder time getting care.
In addition, Paragon’s researchers argue, the extra funding for Medicaid expansion effectively “discriminates” against the vulnerable, because it means the federal government is subsidizing working-age, childless adults at a higher rate than it is for children, pregnant women, and the elderly.
“For more than a decade, the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) Medicaid expansion has shifted resources away from the most vulnerable Americans—single moms, infants, and the disabled—in favor of able-bodied adults without dependents,” Liam Sigaud, a Paragon adjunct scholar, wrote in February. “Congress has the capability to reverse this and ensure our safety-net programs focus on the most vulnerable.”
[…]
ARE THE CRITICS RIGHT about what Medicaid expansion has meant for the program’s traditional beneficiaries?
Lots of analysts disagree, for a variety of reasons—among them, the large and growingbody of research showing the overall effects of the expansion include a financial boost for safety net providers, not to mention clear improvements in financial well-being, access to care, and (less conclusively) overall health among low-income people living in expansion states. (I find that evidence considerably more persuasive than Paragon’s, but you can decide for yourself by following all of those links.)
In the meantime, what’s not disputable is that taking away the extra matching funds will mean that the only way to preserve expanded Medicaid coverage would be for states to make up the difference—something most either couldn’t or wouldn’t do, given the expense and their resources.
So what then? Many and probably most of the people Johnson says “should never be on” Medicaid would have no other way to get insurance. Georgetown research professor Joan Alker—who not only studies Medicaid but spends a lot of time speaking with people who work on it—emphasized this in a recent telephone interview.
“The reality is that many of these folks are working in low-wage jobs and they don’t have access to affordable health insurance,” Alker said. “They’re working in a gig economy. They’re working in the service sector or agriculture, in places where they’re not getting health insurance.”
And it’s not like Johnson or his supporters are proposing an alternative way of covering all these people. Some would find their way to other forms of coverage, but the rest would end up uninsured. And while it’s tough to predict these sorts of things accurately, the number of newly uninsured would likely reach well into the millions and could easily exceed 10 million.
The idea that killing the Medicaid expansion is about “protecting the most vulnerable” is an incredibly cynical lie. Coverage for the groups still eligible for Medicaid would not improve, and their access to healthcare would decrease as a huge cut in federal funds causes hospitals (especially in rural areas) to close. The idea here is to make as many states as possible like Texas, where only a relatively small number of poor people qualify for Medicaid and everybody also is out of luck.
So, in other words, millions of people will be denied access to medical care to partially pay for another massive upper-class tax cut. I believe this is the new Republican Economic Populism (TM.)
Bonner County Sheriff candidate Shaun Patrick Winkler stands at home with his daughter Hannah, south of Priest River, Idaho in the Spring of 2012. He proclaims himself the grand wizard of his local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. Winkler was once head of security for the Aryan Nations during the Richard Butler era in nearby Hayden, Idaho during the late 90’s.
Traditionally, one of the few things actually good about this horrible, racist, violent, misogynist, and cruel nation was public education. Establishing the right and expectation of a universal public education was an actual good policy that came early in our history and lasted a long time. Naturally, it is under target by the Republican Party. And as usual, Idaho leads the way in destroying it.
Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has shut down a program that helped tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other educational expenses.
The Republican leading the push to defund Idaho’s Empowering Parents grants said it had nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative group, a strong supporter of the private school tax credit, drew the connection directly.
The Idaho Freedom Foundation, on its website, proposed adding the $30 million that fueled Empowering Parents to the newly created tax credit, paying for an additional 6,000 private and homeschool students to join the 10,000 already expected to benefit from the program.
The new voucher-style tax credits have major differences from the grants lawmakers killed.
The tax credits are off-limits to public school students, while the grants went predominantly to this group. And there’s limited state oversight on how the private education tax credits will be used, while the grants to public school families were only allowed to be spent with state-approved educational vendors.
Rep. Soñia Galaviz, a Democrat who works in a low-income public elementary school in Boise, condemned the plan to kill the grants in a speech to legislative colleagues.
“I have to go back to the families that I serve, the parents that I love, the kids that I teach, and say, ‘You no longer can get that additional math tutoring that you need,’” she said, “that ‘the state is willing to support other programs for other groups of kids, but not you.’”
When states steer public funds to private schools, well-off families benefit more than those in lower income brackets, as ProPublica has reported in Arizona. The programs are pitched as enabling “school choice,” but in reality, research has found the money tends to benefit families that have already chosen private schools.
Idaho lawmakers passed such a program this year with the new tax credit, which some describe as a version of school “vouchers” that parents in other states spend on schools of their choosing.
The credit allows private and homeschool families to reduce their tax bills by $5,000 per child — $7,500 per student with disabilities — or get that much money from the state if they owe no taxes. Lower-income families have priority, and there’s no cap on how many credits each family can claim. The law says funds must go to traditional academic expenses like private school tuition or homeschool curricula and textbooks, plus a few other costs like transportation. But families don’t have to provide proof of how they spent the money unless they’re audited.
As I’ve said again and again, the policy positions of the Trump administration are to return the U.S. to the Gilded Age, repealing the 20th century. Maybe it would help if Americans stopped watching the Nazi documentaries and remember that their own country is at fault for many of the problems in the world and that to understand what is happening in the U.S. today, focusing on our own history makes a lot more sense. For example, milk:
Staffing issues at the Food and Drug Administration have led to the suspension of a program that ensures the quality of milk and other dairy products. According to Reuters, the agency announced the suspension in an internal email sent to employees Monday and viewed by the news agency.
Starting Monday, the FDA suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade “A” raw milk and finished products. Grade “A” is given to products that meet the highest sanitary standards.
The decision to suspend the program came after the FDA’s Moffett Center Proficiency Testing Laboratory said it “is no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis.” That center is part of the FDA division that oversees food safety, according to Reuters.
By destroying the government capacity to keep the milk supply safe, what kind of nation are we returning to? This one:
At the turn of the 20th century, Indiana was widely hailed as a national leader in public health issues. This was almost entirely due to the work of two unusually outspoken scientists.
One was Harvey Washington Wiley, a one-time chemistry professor at Purdue University who had become chief chemist at the federal Department of Agriculture and the country’s leading crusader for food safety. The other was John Newell Hurty, Indiana’s chief public health officer, a sharp-tongued, hygiene-focused — cleanliness “is godliness” — official who was relentlessly determined to reduce disease rates in his home state.
Hurty began his career as a pharmacist, and was hired in 1873 by Col. Eli Lilly as chief chemist for a new drug manufacturing company the colonel was establishing in Indianapolis. In 1884, he became a professor of pharmacy at Purdue, where he developed an interest in public health that led him, in 1896, to become Indiana’s chief health officer. He recognized that many of the plagues of the time — from typhoid to dysentery — were spread by lack of sanitation, and he made it a point to rail against “flies, filth, and dirty fingers.”
By the end of the 19th century, that trio of risks had led Hurty to make the household staple of milk one of his top targets. The notoriously careless habits of the American dairy industry had come to infuriate him, so much so that he’d taken to printing up posters for statewide distribution that featured the tombstones of children killed by “dirty milk.”
But although Hurty’s advocacy persuaded Indiana to pass a food safety law in 1899, years before the federal government took action, he and many of his colleagues found that milk — messily adulterated, either teeming with bacteria or preserved with toxic compounds — posed a particularly daunting challenge.
Hurty was far from the first to rant about the sorry quality of milk. In the 1850s, milk sold in New York City was so poor, and the contents of bottles so risky, that one local journalist demanded to know why the police weren’t called on dairymen. In the 1880s, an analysis of milk in New Jersey found the “liquifying colonies [of bacteria]” to be so numerous that the researchers simply abandoned the count.
But there were other factors besides risky strains of bacteria that made 19th century milk untrustworthy. The worst of these were the many tricks that dairymen used to increase their profits. Far too often, not only in Indiana but nationwide, dairy producers thinned milk with water (sometimes containing a little gelatin), and recolored the resulting bluish-gray liquid with dyes, chalk, or plaster dust.
They also faked the look of rich cream by using a yellowish layer of pureed calf brains. As a historian of the Indiana health department wrote: “People could not be induced to eat brain sandwiches in [a] sufficient amount to use all the brains, and so a new market was devised.”
“Surprisingly enough,’’ he added, “it really did look like cream but it coagulated when poured into hot coffee.”
Finally, if the milk was threatening to sour, dairymen added formaldehyde, an embalming compound long used by funeral parlors, to stop the decomposition, also relying on its slightly sweet taste to improve the flavor. In the late 1890s, formaldehyde was so widely used by the dairy and meat-packing industries that outbreaks of illnesses related to the preservative were routinely described by newspapers as “embalmed meat” or “embalmed milk” scandals.
Indianapolis at the time offered a near-perfect case study in all the dangers of milk in America, one that was unfortunately linked to hundreds of deaths and highlighted not only Hurty’s point about sanitation but the often lethal risks of food and drink before federal safety regulations came into place in 1906.
Returning to America to this is the goal. Maybe we should know about it.
As for the pushback about this fascist-Gilded Age thing I get from commenters, much of it revolves around “Americans don’t know about the Gilded Age so we are using the comparisons that matter.” I have two responses to that. First, we’ve called Trump a Nazi for a decade and all its down is convinced so few Americans that he’s been elected president twice. Second, I’m not communicating these issues to the American people. I’m communicating them to the readers of LGM, who are smart and educated and should know better. There is value in the fascist comparisons–Vance and Miller are outright fascists after all. But if we aren’t talking about the Gilded Age as much as we are talking about the Nazis, we are really blind to what is happening here.
Militants opened fire on a group of tourists in the Indian-controlled region of Kashmir on Tuesday, killing at least two dozen and injuring many more, according to local media reports.
The attack, in a picturesque district of pine-covered hills and valleys that is popular with Indian travelers, was the worst assault against civilians in the restive region in years, said Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, as the region is officially known.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi condemned what he called a “terror attack” and said that “those behind this heinous act will be brought to justice.”
If the attack is attributed to or claimed by any Pakistan-based group, decent odds India will resort to the use of military force—including across the Line of Control and international boundary.
In the Choose-Your-Own-Autocracy adventure that is contemporary subcontinent policy, the Trump administration is leaning rather heavily towards Modi (as did Biden, to be fair). Don’t count on the US to restrain India if this comes to fisticuffs.
Photo Credit: By KennyOMG – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15411330
At 1 o’clock on the morning of Saturday, April 19, the Supreme Court issued a terse, one-paragraph order that amounted to John Roberts telling Donald Trump to stop playing in his face. The court, by a presumed vote of 7-2, ordered Trump to halt a number of planned deportations to El Salvador of immigrants being held in Texas. I believe this is the first time that a majority of Supreme Court justices have gotten pissed at the Trump administration’s lawless refusal to follow basic court orders. If the court is ever going to fight for constitutional principles in the face of fascist overreach, it might be here and now.
…
The court’s decision to issue this ruling when it could have opted to hide behind technicalities and courtesies tells me that the justices who ruled in the majority were fed up with Trump’s games. Trump was attempting to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s authority, and not only did the court tell him “no,” it told him “no” in the middle of the night, without even letting his lawyers or his Manchurian justices (Thomas and Alito) spit out their objections. On Holy Saturday, the court kept its eyes on the good news, instead of getting distracted by all of Trump’s rotten easter eggs. The majority told Trump to stop playing in their face.
The ruling is really the first time I can think of when the court didn’t let Trump get away with legal time arbitrage—by which I mean it didn’t let him take advantage of the fact that the executive branch can move faster than the judicial branch and make its policies a reality before the court can weigh in on its legality. And Trump, clear as I can tell, actually complied. The buses were turned around. The victims in A.A.R.P. are still in the United States, for now. They likely wouldn’t be if the court had waited until Monday morning to issue the same ruling. They likely wouldn’t be even if the court had merely let Alito dawdle on his keyboard through the weekend to write his dissent.
Of course, nobody should be claiming victory just yet. First of all, the court has merely issued a procedural restraint. It still hasn’t gotten close to ruling on the merits of whether Trump can use the Alien Enemies Act as the excuse to carry out mass deportations, and the betting money says the hyper-conservative court will still eventually allow Trump to banish whoever he wants. And while Trump seemed to follow this late night Supreme Court order, there’s no guarantee he’ll follow the next one. It’s likely that the Trump administration simply didn’t expect the court to pull a 1 am order out of its hat: next time, the attorneys will be ready for it and have some obviously specious argument ready for why its victims can still be deported. The Trump administration has already gotten around lower court orders by claiming, without evidence, that the abductees were deported before the court was able to file papers ordering the government to stop. I imagine that’s a trick it will use to try to evade compliance with the Supreme Court, before long.
Still, to put this all in a broader context, the only other time the legal world waits for late-night or early-morning Supreme Court orders telling the government what it can or cannot do is in the context of death penalty cases. Death row inmates are consistently in the position of waiting for a ruling on their final appeal while their executioners sadistically hit “refresh” on their computers, hoping for the go-ahead to murder them. Supreme Court justices (even the ones I hate) are known to take their roles as the final arbiters of life or death seriously, and regularly work late into the night dealing with emergency appeals from the condemned.
Issuing an order at 1 am on Saturday is a pretty clear indication that the justices understood that their ruling was, in fact, a matter of life or death. It’s an indication that they knew that the people being herded onto buses in North Texas were being sent to their doom.
Pete Hegseth is somehow hanging on, because total idiocy, incompetence, and corruption mark every aspect of the Trump administration:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January with almost no government experience and huge ambitions to remake the way the military was being run.
In just three months in office, Mr. Hegseth, a former Fox News host, has instead produced a run of chaos that is unmatched in the recent history of the Defense Department.
Mr. Hegseth’s inner circle of close advisers — military veterans who, like him, had little experience running large, complex organizations — is in shambles. Three members of the team he brought with him into the Pentagon were accused last week of leaking unauthorized information and escorted from the building.
A fourth recently departed member of Mr. Hegseth’s team, John Ullyot, who had been his top spokesman, accused Mr. Hegseth of disloyalty and incompetence in an opinion essay in Politico on Sunday. “The building is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership,” Mr. Ullyot wrote.
The discord, according to current and former defense officials, includes: screaming matches in his inner office among aides; a growing distrust of the thousands of military and civilian personnel who staff the building; and bureaucratic logjams that have slowed down progress on some of President Trump’s key priorities, such as an “Iron Dome for America” missile-defense shield. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business.
Adding to the dysfunction, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has set a loose target of slashing as many as 200,000 jobs from the Pentagon’s civilian work force of 750,000, a level of cuts Mr. Hegseth has warned would cripple some critical functions within the department, three current and former defense officials said.
As to how long “we” can keep going on like this, LGM will continue to ask that question in, as a prominent German rocket scientist once put it, “a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters during the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn of the White House on April 21, 2025. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as reports of mismanagement and dysfunction in his office suggest he’s unfit for one of the administration’s most important jobs.
What’s going on with Hegseth? He has been under scrutiny since before his confirmation, when Senators and others raised concerns about his treatment of women and issues with alcohol. Last month, Hegseth shared sensitive information about an upcoming military strike on a non-secure group chat. (The world found out about it because a staffer accidentally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the chat.)
Things haven’t gotten any better over the past week, in which:
Multiple outlets reported that Hegseth had shared sensitive information about the strike in a second chat, one that included his brother and lawyer (who both have Pentagon jobs) and his wife (who does not).
Three top officials Hegseth brought to the Defense Department have been suspended in connection with a Pentagon investigation into leaks.
A fourth member of his team quit and wrote an op-ed for Politico accusing Hegseth of presiding over dysfunction, calling on Donald Trump to fire him.
The New York Times this morning reported that Hegseth “had been unable to establish a process to ensure that basic, but essential, matters move swiftly” through his office.
Why does this matter outside the Pentagon? The defense secretary is the civilian official tasked with overseeing the world’s most powerful military and with reacting quickly to major geopolitical crises. If Hegseth isn’t up to the task of managing his own office — and if he’s continually sloppy with sensitive information — his presence in the role poses a risk to national security.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
It’s Earth Day, and I have more good news today from Vox’s Escape Velocity project, a package of stories demonstrating how progress on climate change can and will continue under the current administration. One of today’s pieces is about developments in home battery technology, and how it can help avoid blackouts and diminish demand for dirty energy. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a closed-door investor summit on Tuesday that he expects the tariff showdown with China will de-escalate as the situation is unsustainable, according to a media report.
He noted that a deal is possible, even though talks haven't started yet, Bloomberg News reported, citing people who attended an event hosted by JPMorgan Chase in Washington. The conference wasn't open to the media or the public.
Totally good and normal for the Treasury Secretary to say market moving shit to a select group in private!
Also you can't unshit this bed. Things could settle down, but then Gramps will tweet some crazy shit again and all deals will be off.
Anti-abortion protesters march in front of the Supreme Court during the 2025 March for Life, on January 24. | Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
These questions have come before lower courts, but the Supreme Court decided to hear a case — Mahmoud v. Taylor, brought by conservative Muslim and Christian parents who find these books objectionable — before these lower courts had a chance to sort out whether anyone’s constitutional rights have actually been violated.
Despite all this uncertainty, all six of the Supreme Court’s Republicans appeared absolutely convinced, during an oral argument on Tuesday, that the Montgomery County school district violated the Constitution, and that it must do more to protect parents who object to these books on religious grounds.
Based on Tuesday’s argument in Mahmoud, it seems all but certain the Court will rule that parents who object to these books must be allowed to remove their children from any classes where the books are featured. What is less clear is whether the Court will do so in a way that could endanger every public school in the country’s ability to function.
Eric Baxter, the lawyer representing the parents who oppose these books, seemed quite emboldened during Tuesday’s argument, and advocated for a result that would be extraordinarily disruptive. In his brief, Baxter suggested that parents who object to any form of classroom instruction on religious grounds must be notified in advance about that instruction and be permitted to opt their child out of the class.
Under Baxter’s proposed rule, to avoid these lawsuits, school districts would have an obligation to notify parents in advance if they will teach any book where magic exists, any book where divorce exists, any book where women have accomplishments, or any book about famous pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. — among many other things. It is hard to imagine how any public school could comply with such an obligation.
That said, while all six of the Republican justices appeared highly likely to rule against the school district in Mahmoud, some of them did appear to be looking for a way to decide this case more narrowly than Baxter suggested.
Justice Samuel Alito, for example, suggested at one point that Baxter’s rule might only apply to very young students, or to lessons that touch upon sexuality. Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed to an alleged statement by a school board member, which Gorsuch claims showed animus against certain religious beliefs. Following Gorsuch’s line of thinking to its conclusion would allow the Court to rule that Montgomery County’s policies must be changed because they are rooted in animus, but that another school district might be allowed to enact similar policies so long as they did not display similar hostility toward religion.
So, while there seems to be little doubt that the school district will lose the Mahmoud case, it is possible that it will lose in a way that doesn’t endanger public school instruction throughout the United States.
The Court appeared to divide into four camps
Broadly speaking, the justices floated four different approaches to this case.
All three of the Court’s Democrats — Sotomayor, and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — focused on the “line-drawing” problems presented by this case. Kagan said she understood how even non-religious parents might object to “young kids” being taught “on matters concerning sexuality,” but she added that there wasn’t anything in Baxter’s argument that would allow the Court to limit claims by parents who want to micromanage a school’s lessons.
Similarly, Jackson was troubled that Baxter’s arguments seemed so broad that they could prevent a gay teacher from displaying a picture of their own wedding, or even prevent a teacher from referring to a transgender child by that child’s preferred pronouns in the presence of another student whose parents object to trans people on religious grounds.
But these concerns were largely limited to the Court’s Democratic minority. The other six justices appeared to be hunting for a way to rule against the school district.
The most extreme of these six Republicans was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who at one point said that he is “mystified, as a longtime resident” of Montgomery County, that this case exists. As the Supreme Court said in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery (1988), the First Amendment only prohibits government action that tends “to coerce individuals into acting contrary to their religious beliefs.” But Kavanaugh at one point seemed to propose overruling Lyng and holding that a parent with religious objections to a lesson must only show a “burden” on their faith — however Kavanaugh would define that term.
Both Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, appeared to think that there is something particularly noxious about exposing young people to books with gay characters. Alito, for example, argued that older students will understand that their teacher isn’t always correct — so it’s okay if those students are exposed to lessons that are in tension with their parents’ religious beliefs. But a different rule should apply to younger students.
Similarly, Roberts argued that it would be “dangerous” to expose kindergarten-age children to lessons their parents might object to, because that might cause those children to question whether they should obey their teacher.
Gorsuch, meanwhile, latched onto several lines in Baxter’s brief, which claim that a school board member compared parents who object to LGBTQ-inclusive literature to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.” This matters because, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Court ruled in favor of a baker who refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples because a state civil rights commissioner made similarly disparaging comments about the baker.
Under Gorsuch’s approach, in other words, the Court could decide the Mahmoud case very narrowly, ruling in favor of the parents because of this school board member’s alleged comments, without handing down a broader rule that would impose unworkable disclosure rules on every public school in the country.
So it is possible that the Court will hand down a good-for-this-ride-only decision that gives these specific Montgomery County parents the result they want, without harming public education elsewhere. It is also possible that the Court will impose a kind of “Don’t Say Gay” rule on elementary school teachers, while allowing high school teachers to reveal that some people form romantic attachments to people of the same sex.
The Court used to be more cautious about rules that prevent public schools from functioning
One surprising omission in Tuesday’s argument is that no one mentioned the Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), a free speech case brought by students who wore black armbands to class in order to protest the Vietnam War.
In Tinker, the Court held that these students had a right to wear the black armbands, but it did so because the students merely engaged in a “silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners.” Tinker held that public school students retain free speech rights, but not when their speech “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”
The Court, in other words, recognized that public schools could not function if students could engage in speech that disrupts lessons, and it crafted a careful rule which respects those students’ First Amendment rights without undercutting the school’s ability to educate them and their classmates.
The Court could take a similar approach in Mahmoud. Because the full facts of this case are not yet known, it may, in fact, turn out that a teacher tried to coerce a student into rejecting their religious beliefs, or otherwise behaved in a manner that violates the Constitution’s protections for religious people. If that turns out to be true, then the courts absolutely should provide appropriate relief to that student and their parents.
But, instead of waiting until they know all the facts of the Mahmoud case and crafting an appropriately tailored rule like the one announced in Tinker, many of the justices seemed inclined to a more ham-handed approach. Based on Tuesday’s argument, it is difficult to guess whether Kavanaugh’s, Alito’s, Gorsuch’s, or some other approach will prevail. But, if the justices choose to accept Baxter’s arguments in full, they could easily impose unworkable obligations on public schools that will prevent them from functioning.
WASHINGTON, April 21 (Reuters) - The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division, according to an internal email seen by Reuters.
Gotta increase that birthrate even more if you're trying to increase the childhood mortality rate, too.
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