Author: nick

Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi discuss the brewing Texas showdown between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Then, they break down Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R–S.C.) proposal to give boomers a property tax break and Pope Leo XIV’s latest encyclical on artificial intelligence. Finally, they wrap up with some lighter debates over The Legend of Zelda, Nicolas Cage movies, retro-futurism, Jill Biden’s latest remarks, and whether President Donald Trump’s political influence will ever fade. 0:00—Heretics and hypocrites in Texas 14:30—Talarico takes back his former wokeness 19:10—If you can’t take it, don’t dish it 32:25—Coal mines are…

Today is first day of the World Health Organization’s 79th annual World Health Assembly, where delegates come together to set policies and priorities for global health. Essentially, it’s a week-long exercise in saying, as loud and long possible, “We’re really important.” And thank goodness it came along when it did, because…wow. The hantavirus outbreak is tearing through the world at the unstoppably terrifying rate of five whole deaths every two months. That’s about 30 deaths in a year or about  0.25% of the number of people who’ll died from falling down stairs. In Africa, the Ebola virus went from zero to…

From H.C. v. Contreras, decided yesterday by California Court of Appeal Justice Mark Snauffer, joined by Justices Bert Levy and Donald Franson:Bethany G. sought a protective order protecting H. C., her minor son, from H. C.’s father, Rudy C. Numerous witnesses testified at a hotly contested hearing after which the parties filed closing briefs. Rudy’s brief, submitted by counsel, contained fictitious caselaw and misstated the law. Counsel for Bethany directly and swiftly pointed the errors out to the trial court. The trial court declined to issue the requested order, but its ruling erroneously relied on a nonexistent case and a…

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair On May 25, US president Donald Trump went back to war with Iran, launching strikes in the southern part of that country on a laughable claim of “self-defense.” The previous phase of the war was stupid, evil, and illegal, as is this phase. It was and is stupid because even given Trump’s constantly shifting (and mostly themselves stupid) objectives, there was no way to “win” it other than nuking all of Iran’s major cities and sending in a massive occupation force for the foreseeable future. It was and is evil because war is always evil.…

The “subject judge” in the Eleventh Circuit attended a partisan event for a District Attorney. That would create a conflict of interest for any matters affecting that District Attorney. The Memorandum focused at some length about a potential conflict with the boyfriend’s police department, but there was little focus on a conflict with the District Attorney. The Eleventh Circuit’s decision to make the reprimand private is confounding on so many levels. Perhaps the most problematic aspect is that the memorandum identified a clear conflict of interest, but deprived the public from knowing which judge had that conflict of interest. How…

Bitcoin Depot, the largest bitcoin ATM operator in North America and publicly listed on Nasdaq, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. What to know: Bitcoin Depot, once the largest bitcoin ATM operator in North America and publicly listed on Nasdaq, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Atlanta-based company has blamed increasingly stringent state regulations and enforcement for making its business model unsustainable. Bitcoin Depot faces a high-profile lawsuit from the attorneys general of Massachusetts and Iowa over alleged facilitation of crypto scams. Nasdaq-listed Bitcoin Depot, which once operated the largest network of bitcoin ATMs in North America, has filed for Chapter…

I invited Professor Arthur Hellman, an emeritus professor at the University of Pittsburgh, to write a guest post on what should come next for Judge Ross. Professor Hellman is a leading expert on judicial ethics, and has testified before Congress on this important topic before.District Judge Eleanor Ross of the Northern District of Georgia has now been “outed” as the “Subject Judge” of the judicial misconduct order issued by the Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability of the Judicial Conference of the United States (JC&D Committee) on May 22. The Committee agreed with the Judicial Council of the Eleventh Circuit…

Image by Ye Jinghan. I’ll be honest with you. Today I spent money I didn’t have to spend, and I don’t regret a single penny of it. I went to Apple TV and bought The Alabama Solution (2025) even though I already have an HBO Max subscription where it streams for free. This film was Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary Feature, and it lost. It lost. I wrote about that on my Substack, When The Oscars Looked Away, because that loss meant something. It meant that a film made by people who smuggled phones past guards who would’ve killed them for it, a…

In a normal, pre-Donald-Trump political world—you know, when pastors didn’t pray around golden statues of political leaders and presidents didn’t plaster their names and faces on public buildings, passports, and currency like in a tin-pot dictatorship—lawmakers could agree on some basic parameters of decent behavior. Democrats and Republicans may fight about everything, but they could unite in their opposition to self-dealing outrages. That’s no longer true. There is seemingly nothing Donald Trump or his family could do that would spark denunciations from the GOP. That’s especially obvious after Trump exacted vengeance in Tuesday’s primaries on the handful of Republicans who would sometimes…

In January of 2025, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) promised to slash $2 trillion from the federal budget. After 10 months, the initiative, inspired by the dog meme, became a villain in Washington and only saved $215 billion (by its own estimation).  Now, the spirit of DOGE lives on, this time in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York City…kind of. On Thursday, Mamdani launched a Commission on Government Efficiency (COGE) initiative to make the city government “work smarter, faster, and more effectively for working people.”
He wrote on X, “New Yorkers deserve a city government as careful with their money…