onfocus

One student I met outside the Low Library after Johnson’s speech, who only identified himself by an initial, K, summed up the dissonance between Johnson’s description of the protesters and the reality of the encampment: “It’s as if there’s some kind of armed insurrection here—there isn’t,” K told me. “There’s maybe, like, 100 students sleeping in tents on a lawn.”

I think it’s good to keep in mind who really has power in these situations. Is it the administration and politicians who can direct militarized police or college kids? Showing up on campus to get some headlines while punching down is awful.

It’s a rogue court, a thoroughly corrupt one, one that is so far gone in its corruption that it feels free even from the practical obligation to clothe its corruption for the sake of appearances.

Hard not to be completely depressed about the state of things. This is the consequence of having a billionaire class and a large number of non-billionaires voting for their chosen sociopath. Please vote for people who care about other living people.

…in the meantime, you have tens of thousands of people who are pregnant or will become pregnant who will either need to drive or fly or get sick in order to receive care and their health will be very much at risk." 

As I always ask, please vote for people who care about other people and want them to be healthy. Please help living people here and now. Abstract ideas will continue to be ok but real living people might not be ok.

"Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes," according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's good to see fact checking like this happening in the media. It's very difficult to correct lies when the media is flooded with bs, but the attempt to correct the record is important.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

I know it’s true, but it feels rare to see it in print because media organizations typically don’t acknowledge this truth. They usually smooth over reality so they don't offend potential customers and make their owners happy.

“When Americans see a case like this – so clearly concocted and motivated by special interests, and with evident connections between those interests and the judges on the case, it does tremendous damage to the reputation of the courts, and to the public trust in their ability to give all litigants an even shake,” said Alex Aronson, the executive director of the nonpartisan group Court Accountability and a former chief counsel to the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

"It’s not technically illegal" is the first refuge of scoundrels.

In the wake of Louisiana's abortion ban, pregnant women have been given risky, unnecessary surgeries, denied swift treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, and forced to wait until their life is at risk before getting an abortion, according to a new report first made available to NPR.

We wouldn’t find this acceptable in another country but it’s happening in Louisiana and other states with abortion bans. Please register to vote and vote for people who don’t find medical malpractice acceptable.

Putting a 25% tax on 750 people to benefit the 330 million other members of the American public? Maybe you can see why it's not a radical idea when middle-class people are already paying higher rates themselves. To be clear, those affected by the rate increase would continue to be billionaires—it's just that their fortunes would grow past a billion at a slightly slower pace.

Escape velocity is a great way to think about when enough is enough for any one human to have. Society doesn't see much benefit from allocating so many resources to a small number of individuals. The standard argument is job creators! but that's a joke in a world where record profits lead to mass layoffs.

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently reported on a poll of 1,200 voters deemed gettable for Biden in three swing states, including Pennsylvania, and found the vast majority didn’t know about Trump’s “dictator for a day” comments, or that he’d echoed Adolf Hitler in calling enemies “vermin” and claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. The pollster said only 31% of persuadable voters had heard much about these statements.

This is the media functioning as its owners want: smoothing the way for autocracy in America so they can optimize profits.

At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent…You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend.

So strange that everyone at the NYT is working on this project to normalize Trump. Shouldn’t there be high profile resignations or some indication of unease from professional journalists?

Butler told CNN how he unknowingly helped Nauta deliver boxes of classified information from Mar-a-Lago to the former president’s plane in June 2022 – the same day that Trump and his attorney were meeting with the Justice Department at Mar-a-Lago about the classified documents.

Seems bad for national security.

Cuban needs no more convincing on who he’ll vote for come November. Speaking to Bloomberg this month, he shrugged off concerns about Biden’s advanced age: “If they were having his last wake, and it was him versus Trump, and he was being given last rites, I would still vote for Joe Biden.”

Pretty funny for a billionaire.