Posts by Kim Browne
The Useful Idiots in the Media Abetting Trump’s D.C. Takeover
Less than a fortnight into President Trump’s federal takeover of D.C. by the National Guard and an alphabet soup of federal law enforcement agents, Washingtonians have rendered an unsurprising verdict on the president’s latest display of authoritarian corruption: They hate it, in large numbers. And they’re organizing against it: A “Free D.C.” movement has taken…
Read MoreTranscript: The Media Should Be Biased—Against Authoritarianism
Forde: My God we couldn’t in this country even get federal anti-lynching legislation passed. That was first passed not too many years ago. It’s extraordinary. But she played this really important role in helping us understand why lynching happened—that it was not for reasons that white people were saying it was happening. Lynching was happening…
Read MorePete Hegseth Just Fired a Top General Who Pissed Off Trump
Inconvenient truths don’t go unpunished in the Trump administration. It’s a lesson that Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse learned the hard way on Friday, as The Washington Post reported that he’s been fired from his position as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The DIA under Kruse was responsible for the…
Read MoreRussia Bombed a U.S. Factory in Ukraine. Here’s How Trump Responded.
If another country were to bomb an American-owned factory on foreign soil, one might expect—at the very least—harsh condemnation from the sitting U.S. president. The anticipated response from a president who enjoys a reputation as both a champion of American business and a tough guy on the world stage would be even fiercer. But President…
Read MoreTrump Seems to Want to Turn D.C. Into a Resort
President Donald Trump doesn’t just want federal control of Washington, D.C., he wants aesthetic control as well—and knowing the president’s garish style, it probably won’t be pretty. On Friday, Trump said the administration was “looking at doing something very exciting” to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a part of the White House campus that was…
Read MoreDOJ Releases Ghislaine Maxwell Transcript in Rush to Appease MAGA Base
The Justice Department released transcripts of its interviews with Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell on Friday, the Associated Press reported. The DOJ interviewed Maxwell as part of its scramble to regain the public’s trust after botching the rollout of the Epstein files. After Attorney General Pam Bondi promised the release of Epstein’s so-called “client…
Read MoreThe Media Should Be Biased—Against Authoritarianism
The news media has a powerful role in democracy, even if it often doesn’t acknowledge that, says Kathy Roberts Forde, a journalism historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As she explained in a recent episode of TNR’s Right Now With Perry Bacon, in the Jim Crow era, many white-owned newspapers in the…
Read MoreICE Used So Much Tear Gas, a Public School Fled Its Campus
As Rolling Stone reported, in June, the fence of the school’s play area displayed a laminated message. Its reported content, which matches a statement Cottonwood posted to Facebook, denounced the “harm being inflicted on our neighbors, ecosystem, students and school” and called on ICE to cease using weapons such as tear gas, “‘green’ gas, pepper…
Read MoreAlina Habba Melts Down After Losing Her Job (Again)
Alina Habba is whining that federal judges aren’t respecting the president after one ruled that she’d been unlawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey for over a month. “I am the pick of the president, I am the pick of Pam Bondi our attorney general, and I will serve this country like I…
Read MoreFed Chair Warns the Economy Is Even Worse Than We Realized
The ruling was in response to a lawsuit from Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe alleging that construction on the new facility was greenlit without providing time for public notice and comment, or conducting proper environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act,…
Read MoreTrump’s FBI Raid of John Bolton’s Home Looks Like a “Five Alarm Fire”
But Moss also notes that it’s not clear why the FBI didn’t arrange with Bolton’s lawyer to collect any documents in a far less dramatic way. Did Bolton refuse to turn over classified documents, as (you may recall) Trump did? Maybe. But if not, Moss says, then the dramatic raid could constitute a serious abuse…
Read MoreDid Trump Know About Bolton Raid or Not?
The ruling was in response to a lawsuit from Friends of the Everglades, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Miccosukee Tribe alleging that construction on the new facility was greenlit without providing time for public notice and comment, or conducting proper environmental reviews required by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act,…
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