Posts on Thursday, April 30, 2026

We’re in the eighth week of the Iran waropens in a new tab, and things are starting to heat up even though there’s not kinetic action. What do I mean by heating up? The Iranian government has ceased to exist. We don’t know, and the Iranians don’t know who holds power. There is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. There is the theocracy, there is the elected people in Parliament, and there is a regular military. And those four groups operate in schizophrenic fashion. By the same token, sometimes they give off signals that they would like to negotiate because that is predicated on popular resistance.

The issue was simple for New Jersey: We can't protect consumers from deception about abortion services without requiring pro-life pregnancy centers to identify donors. The response from the Supreme Court on Wednesday was just as simple: Have you read our precedents? Chief Justice John Roberts further cemented his reputation as "Mr. First Amendment" by wrangling the high court's perceived conservative ideologues and institutionalists as well as the liberals into a unanimous ruling for both donor privacy and access to federal courts, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing the opinion and no one muddling the message with a concurrence.

In the wake of the Charlottesville rally in August 2017, the media relied on Southern Poverty Law Center experts to explain an apparent rise in white supremacy in America after Donald Trump’s election. But, while SPLC’s experts helped the media understand America’s racism problem after the rally, it was allegedly funding an organizer of the event, a member of a racist group prone to extremism. At the same time it was double-dipping, the Charlottesville rally launched SPLC’s credibility to new heights and boosted its fundraising hauls. Throughout the last decade, SPLC also covertly funded members of racist groups prone to extremism, including the Aryan Nations,