Exceptional call-a-spade-a-spade reporting by TPM's Kate Riga On Wednesday, the right-wing justices really preferred the safe world of legal abstraction, where they could pretend that Idaho’s abortion ban — which only has an exception to save the woman’s life — won’t inevitably leave women to gruesome suffering.  The Court’s conservative wing tried with increasing and atextual persistence to convince listeners that Idaho’s strict ban still allows emergency room doctors to provide abortions to women in varying states of medical distress, and not just when doctors are sure the patient ..read more

[For those who came in late, here's a checklist for (most) of our YIMBY/NIMBY thread.] One of the main points in our voice-in-the-wilderness housing thread was that, with many of the YIMBY movement's highly touted solutions, the sign was almost certainly right but the promised magnitude was very probably high.  With that in mind, check out this report from Erin Baldassari reporting for Marketplace. Since 2018, a number of U.S. cities and states have changed their laws to allow more housing in most single-family neighborhoods. Among them are Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; and Oregon and Wash ..read more

To Russia with Love... We start out with, I kid you not, a MAGA letter of apology to Moscow. I originally was 80% to 90% certain that Eagleman was a parody account like Three Year Letterman, but I checked and -- God help us -- this is real. Same shit, different day. pic.twitter.com/8aeHXG1PqZ — Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) April 21, 2024 Gaetz says that he thinks that at least 1-3 of his “corrupt Republican colleagues” will take a bribe and vote for Hakeem Jeffries once a motion to vacate is successful. pic.twitter.com/cT7XlW7rkj — Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) April 19, 2024 ..read more

In terms of brand disasters, if the Edsel and the DeLorean had a child, it would be the Cyber truck. In terms of impact on the company, it would bearing much stronger resemblance to the latter.  At the end of last week, Tesla was Trading under $150 a share, down over 40% for the year and almost two thirds from its two year high, and yet the company is still trading at an inflated price to earnings ratio far higher than any other major player in the industry (including BYD). This, despite a small and aging product line and a development pipeline that seems to have all but dried up. The lat ..read more

How news organizations filled with smart, dedicated, ridiculously overqualified people can be manipulated into making serious and seemingly stupid mistakes. Uri Berliner's controversial article about his now former employer, NPR, didn't have much to recommend it directly, but it was indirectly responsible for some excellent (and very much overdue) examination of the venerable institution. I don't listen to NPR. Not my thing. What I see is mainly over-compensating bothsides stuff. But I just happen to chance on Berliner's copy. But this Uri Berliner dude probably should have read the Mueller R ..read more

The more you read about what people thought about technological progress one hundred and twenty or thirty years ago, the more you come to question the standard line that technology always exceeds our expectations. Tuesday, April 17, 2018 People in the late 19th century fully expected to be commuting at a hundred miles an hour in the next ten or twenty years... Remember that. It's going to be important for future discussions. THE BOYNTON BICYCLE ELECTRIC RAILWAY.  Scientific American 1894/02/17 ..read more

This, my friends, is a soundbite. On the house floor today Laurel Libby (R-Auburn) stated "Let’s talk about the nazis…I would like to know what they did that was illegal." We won't stand for this MAGA extremism in Maine. Check out who we have running against her: https://t.co/d9J0zuPmKX #MAGACult #MEpolitics pic.twitter.com/omET9ldEPs — Maine House Democratic Campaign Committee (@MaineHDCC) April 3, 2024 More data points on the money question... The @DLCC just announced that they raised $2.3 million for state legislative Democrats in the first quarter of 2024, a 45% increase over their prev ..read more

Musk said "Let's get the bad news over with first" So the manager sends him a link ..read more

Friday, April 15, 2011 Weekend pop culture blogging -- comic strip edition The birth of a medium invariably consists overwhelmingly of crap (think Sturgeon's Law raised to the next level), but new media also has a way of producing the occasional work on stunning originality. An obvious example here is the work of Winsor McCay (arguably the first acknowledged genius of both comics and animation, though fans of Herriman and Feininger might dispute the comics part), but even McCay's astoundingly innovative work can't match the originality of the Upside-Downs by Gustave Verbeek. Verbeek's weekl ..read more

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