Politics

Spoiler: Maybe Musk did us a favor by disrupting Twitter and forcing us to consider better social media alternatives. Warning: This may get gossipy with some of my personal social media anecdotes. I: Social Media Encourages Demagoguery Democracy Needs a Functioning Public Sphere Definition: The public sphere is composed of voluntary associations that promote social cohesion […]

This page has been updated, and all the material moved to a new page here.   

First, some business.  Sometimes I think, “Elon Musk would not drive Twitter into a brick wall.” Other times I think, “OMG Elon Musk is driving Twitter into a brick wall.” I have therefore opened accounts at Mastodon and Counter Social: Counter Social = @Teri_Kanefield Mastodon= @Teri_Kanefield@mstdn.social If you’re trying to decide which to join, it seems

On Wednesday, I appeared on the Lincoln Project show We’re Speaking. Shortly after the interview, I thought of ways I could have given much crisper answers, which annoys me to no end. Anyway, most of the answers I gave came from recent blog posts and my FAQ page, with one exception: The first question Lisa and Maya asked

Contents Part I: The Republican Travelogue to Hell Part II: Trump’s Special Master Lawsuit Backfires Part I: The Republican Travelogue to Hell Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell opens with a splash. America never would have gotten into this mess if it weren’t for me and my friends.

I. The Lawsuit (This section was written Saturday, September 17. For the stuff that happened since yesterday, skip to Section II: The Backfire) To recap, two weeks after the FBI executed a search on Mar-a-Lago, Trump filed a lawsuit demanding a special master to review the seized documents. He put forward the outlandish claim that

Last week I wrote about Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to screen the Mar-a-Lago documents. To recap, his lawsuit was based on the outlandish claim that he had the right to possess the documents, a mindboggling claim given that most of the documents seized by the FBI were government documents, which, by law, must

TV and Internet lawyers often qualify the word “consequences” with words like “actual” or “real” or “meaningful,” like this: “Trump has never suffered any actual consequences” or the common corollary, “Trump keeps breaking laws because the legal system is corrupt or failing” are what I call a “rage-inducing simplification.” Rage-inducing simplifications take a complex situation

Trump’s stealing, mishandling, and concealing of United States defense secrets is on the Republican Party for refusing to remove Donald Trump from office when it was clear he was not fit to be president. They had the chance to remove him (twice) but instead shielded him. This is on them. New Information about the Search

Timeline [My commentary in red] Overview: The government is conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces, as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records. We know from the Search Warrant that the following crimes are being investigated: 18 USC 2071 — Concealment, removal

Last weekend I had an entirely different topic planned for this week. Then, we had perhaps the weirdest week in American presidential history. Let’s start with a chronology. Trump, through a series of bizarre actions, makes public that he is under investigation for violating the Espionage Act August 8, Monday: The FBI, pursuant to a warrant,