NYC politics
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1 hour agoMamdani Loses a Fight He Shouldn't Have Joined
Mayor Zohran Mamdani secured a budget extension but faced a political defeat in a City Council special election.
Anthropic's political activities have ramped up as the company continues to be enmeshed in a nasty legal battle with the Defense Department. The dispute erupted earlier this year over the government's use of Anthropic's AI models and what guidelines (if any) should exist for that usage.
Yes, killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil. It's not how evil is this one versus that one: Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.
The Article I Section 4 was drafted by the Framers specifically to grant primary authority to regulate elections to the states, to the state legislatures. It also gave the authority to Congress to act directly, but one entity it didn't give any authority whatsoever to was the President of the United States.
The right to vote is often described as the cornerstone of American democracy. Yet the ability to exercise that right depends on something more basic: whether citizens possess the practical means to participate in the systems that govern their lives.
The president was very enthusiastic about this idea, very enthusiastic. The plan would be one of the biggest federal investments in housing in 50 years if it comes to fruition. Mamdani's team presented Trump with a custom fake front page of the New York Daily News reading Trump to City: Let's Build and Backs New Era of Housing, referencing the famous 1975 front page where President Ford rejected New York's bailout request.
In an eyewitness video analyzed frame by frame by The New York Times, Alex Pretti raises one hand and holds a phone in the other. Federal agents tackle him, and one appears to find and remove a gun holstered on his hip. Then, an agent shoots - and a second follows. They appear to fire nine more shots as Pretti lies on the ground.
Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions. Trump has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court's decision to grant him a kingly immunity).
Last week- after the Wall Street Journal broke more news about the Trump family's dodgy crypto-business dealings and before the President shared a racist video of the Obamas depicted as dancing apes-the Amazon entrepreneur Jeff Bezos decided that one of his smaller properties, the Washington Post, has proved such a drag on his two-hundred-and-thirty-billion-dollar fortune that prudence required that he obliterate much of its newsroom.
In the United States, we haven't yet seen rifles aimed at large crowds, but we do observe masked federal agents detaining protesters in unmarked vehicles, flashy ICE raids staged like military operations and pardons for political violence all clear warning signs. Ignoring this is the first step toward complacency, which can kill liberty. Fascism is often misunderstood. It is not just political oppression; it is a set of traits, as scholars and observers point out,
Luke Ganger said he and his brother were there to ask for you help and suggested the sense of loss his family felt had been deepened by subsequent events in Minneapolis, where a protester, Alex Pretti, also aged 37, was shot dead by two border patrol agents on 24 January. The deep distress our family feels at Renee's loss in such a violent and unnecessary way is complicated by feelings of disbelief, distress and desperation, he said.
In this new season, I'm asking how the Trump White House is rewriting the rules of U.S. politics, and talking to Americans whose lives have been changed as a result. Today's episode examines the destruction of the civil service: the removal of professionals, and their replacement with loyalists. I've seen this kind of transformation before, in other failing democracies. Everyone suffers from the degradation of public services.