The legal justification the WH gave us for attacking Venezuelan boats in int’l waters without Congressional approval was weak, and exposes the WH and military staff to domestic and international criminal prosecution. They have not even sought to justify strikes within Venezuela.
1. Their justification - dutifully repeated by every sycophantic member of the @HouseGOP was that some drugs kill Americans so any international actor who sells or traffics drugs is engaged in war against America. You can drive a bus through that logic, as I noted last month
@HouseGOP 2. Before we left Washington last month we were given a classified briefing by Hegseth and Rubio about Venezuela that contained no classified information other than details on the location of certain military assets that were irrelevant to the question at hand.
This Yglesias piece in the NYT is really bad. Almost every "fact" it cites is provably false. At best it is cocktail party banter from a pundit who knows nothing of energy. At worst, it was cut/paste from oil industry talking points. So, a rebuttal: nytimes.com/2025/12/18/opi…
1. First: the elephant in the room that he doesn't mention explicitly but haunts the whole piece: climate change is real, we've already overshot and the only way to turn the corner is to leave fossil fuel in the ground. To ignore that is to talk about rocketry and ignore gravity.
2. What he says about climate is patently false (more on that later) but to the extent he's saying "politicians shouldn't do the right thing unless it's popular", I'd note only that that is a toddlers view of leadership. If the popular kids are mean, should you be mean?
There are complicated, structural reasons for the recent surge in electric prices (maybe a future thread on that) and beware of simple narratives. But prioritizing the most expensive generation is, quite literally, the dumbest possible solution.
One of many tragedies here is that the states that are seeing the fastest rate increases are in the central part of the country where historic reliance on coal and a political fear of change have the potential to conspire and make this much worse.
Time for a nerd thread on monetary policy in light of the Feds rate cut yesterday. TL;DR: we are in unchartered waters here on account of Trump's tariff policies and general weakening of the US economy that @GOP policies will make worse. nytimes.com/live/2025/10/2…
1. First - if you're a macroeconomist, you can skip ahead as I want to start with some pretty basic stuff. Because statistically speaking, most people aren't macroeconomists.
2. In 1977, The Federal Reserve Act created the "dual mandate" that says that the Fed's obligation is to keep unemployment and inflation low. richmondfed.org/publications/r…
It's been a while since I've done a non-political nerd thread. And I wish I could do them more often! So let's do a palette cleanse to talk about this article from WaPo that is technically true, but deeply misinformative about US electric markets. washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro…
1. Read the whole article, but the big problem is this paragraph. It's true that electricity isn't like other markets, but not because it has high fixed costs. It's because it is a regulated market that isn't subject to those forces you learn in Economics 101.
2. Econ 101 doesn't say that falling demand forces lower costs. It says that happens IF you have competitive markets. When demand falls, you cut costs to try and hold onto market share - not because your changing cost structure compels you to pass savings onto your customers.
Mike Johnson refuses to open the House. Refuses to do oversight. Refuses to defend the Constitutional rights that only protect so long as they are enforced. Refuses to stand up to child predators. So we organized our own hearing in Chicago yesterday.
And if you’re objecting to this on the grounds that I accused Trump of being a child predator… well, you can choose to follow Mike Johnsons example and protect child predators too. Or you could insist on the release of the Epstein files that might clear his name.