Kate Sills

I did a deep dive into a supposedly "silently overruled" case to see if @questauthority.bsky.social was right that identifying such cases from the texts of later opinions themselves was "intractable." katelynsills.com/law/indicato...

Today's hearing in US v California is available for public viewing by using this Zoom link (provided by the Court) cacd-uscourts.zoomgov.com/j/1618147150... Telephone: 669-254-5252 Webinar ID: 161 814 7150 Passcode: 634618

IJ actually has footage of this. Stephen Lara was driving through Nevada to visit his family. He had his life savings taken from him when he was stopped in Sparks. Stephen obtained body cam footage that includes police taking his money to a Wells Fargo. I wish we could have put it in this video!

The use of drug dogs in civil forfeiture cases really gives the game away. What happens to the money once it's seized? It depends on the jurisdiction, but best practices are to put the funds into a bank account. This means the drug tainted funds are almost immediately put back into circulation.

This is legit wild. One of the Trumpiest GOP kooks we’ve had holding high office here in Texas makes an absolute spot-on, beautiful, non-partisan call for government transparency against the governor’s attempt to hide his emails with Elon Musk.

@people.com won’t be stopped, and my praise for them will be evergreen:

Here's Ryan Peterman interviewing Ryan Williams talking about the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis. Particularly timely given today's news about the ETH. x.com/ryanlpeterma...

You have to really, really, really fucking suck for your 8th grade teacher to come out and shame you like this. Damn.

A 2025 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Omar Yaghi is the son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Jordan. He just left the US to move to China after raising concerns about rising anti-immigrant sentiment, like the kind shown here. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/china-than...

BREAKING: Judge Reyes has issued a preliminary injunction over the golf course and begins with this: "Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President." ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show...

Two and a half years between these. (Tonight, OpenAI announced an unreleased model solved three long-standing problems in physics, math, and computer science, one of which was proving the Exponential Time Hypothesis was false)

And now back to my full time job, texting the word "stop" to every living Democrat.

Bumatay, meanwhile, shows he should not be taken seriously from the opening paragraph of his embarrassing 35-page dissent. Compare the first page of the federal appeals court judge's dissent with the first page of the actual complaint filed in federal court by DOJ. Truly.

The Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) is false. Holy shit. x.com/danintheory/...

I know it’s really distasteful and dispiriting and gross to think about, but you won’t understand Trumpist politics or the status of women if you don’t understand that a lot of people aren’t just in denial about the prevalence of rape; they are affirmatively pro-rape.

Bumatay's dissent got the day of the election wrong:

BREAKING: The 9th Circuit rules 2-1 to dismiss DOJ's effort to force California to remove 20,000 purported noncitizens from the voter rolls based on data CA officials view as faulty. Majority: Bennett (Trump) Sanchez (Biden) Minority: Bumatay (Trump) storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Breaking: The 9th Circuit rules 2-1 against the Trump administration's request to block California from counting mail ballots from people on ​a list of more than 20,000 registered voters the federal government alleges are likely noncitizens. www.reuters.com/world/trump-...

A serial rapist was elected twice as President, a fact we don't reckon with nearly enough. Now one of two major political parties has been molded in his image, run for and by violent sexual abusers who hate women.

The vile attacks on Amy Acton need to be seen in the context of a party that *needs* people to believe women fabricating sexual assaults is common as rainwater. Because it’s pretty much the only way to evade the conclusion that the president is a rapist.

I get they're inextricably intertwined but I kind of feel like leaning so much into how he was the longtime best buddy of the world's most notorious sex criminal has given it something of the feel of a political gotcha rather than the important part, which is that the president raped people.

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

32% of eligible US voters chose Trump in 2024, yet it was presented in the American media as an amazing landslide. Lula's reelection was significantly bigger, but it will be presented as eking out a win.

Beyond disgusted by even more rape allegations against the President of the United States. "In total, more than 25 different women...have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Report w/ new details: democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

The Ramaswamy ad has pushed the largest newspaper in Ohio, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, to reverse its position on endorsements. "A candidate who uses childhood sexual abuse as a weapon against the person who endured it has crossed a line that Ohioans should defend, whatever their party."

this might rank as one of the most important outcomes of the night if it happens. would give dems the ability to begin to make north carolina a democracy

This but for every goddamn post

We're proud to be partnering with @archive.org , @eff.org, @freedom.press and others on the Aaron Swartz Hackathon November 8. The event will support multiple projects that improve public access to knowledge. Learn more and register today. www.aaronswartzday.org

It is both very unlikely Trump will personally succeed at establishing a full-blown dictatorship before he's gone, and also the case that Trump's tenure in American politics has massively increased the chance this country will have a full-blown dictatorship at some point in the next 30 or 40 years.

True, but many successful authoritarians (as in established a consolidated regime) follow in the wake of a less competent, less successful predecessor destabilizing the system, setting the precedents, evading punishment and repudiation. The next guy learns and adapts, they don't start from zero.

After Minneapolis, everyone knew: they could be stopped. More than that, regular people could stop them. You didn’t have to wait for any kind of savior. You could walk out the door and do it yourself.

From that moment on their strength was BROKEN. They had plowed through the courts, the corporations, the institutions, the law firms, the universities, until they met a thin line of teachers and nurses and social workers in a frozen street in January. And against all odds, found it was unbreakable.

*ANTHROPIC FILES PUBLICLY FOR US IPO www.sec.gov/Archives/edg...

This is one good example of how appropriations hardball can work if you're willing to not blink first. Another: take your pick for demands and restrictions on funding Executive Office of the President. Yes, literally defund the White House. EOP is the central hub of the assault on the Constitution.

AK's had more notice but CA is more worrying. Equally insane and delusional as litigation, but CA tells us something: It doesn't have any close races so it's not about flipping a seat or two. There's only one reason to target CA: it has enough House seats to cover the margin of any Dem majority.

The Open Courts Act of 2026 would modernize PACER and tear down the paywall between the public and court records. And we need it now more than ever: PACER is set to increase per-page fees by 20%. free.law/2026/10/21/p...

Dragging this into the light...in light of Brazil.

He claims here that other states have a law saying "somebody with the same name can't run." That is false. In no state is that the law, and it would be unconstitutional. You can have rules about how the ballot is disambiguated, you can't say nobody else with a similar name is allowed to run at all.

Lula has been reelected president, Brazilian media has now called. An extraordinary comeback for the left-wing politician who trailed by 2 points in round 1 but managed to hold off Flávio Bolsonaro, the former president's son.

I really hope we get some new sci fi / cyberpunk stuff that incorporates the more interesting parts of how LLMs work. Not the sloppy chat bot stuff, but like the puppet master in ghost in the shell. Small AI hivemind stuff and stories about datacenter politics. Would be interesting.

Update: we're getting louder. @propublica.org ✅ @nytimes.com ✅ @inquirer.com ✅ @kansascity.com ✅ @nmasunivision.bsky.social ✅ @fwd.us ✅ @poynterinstitute.bsky.social ✅ @oklahomawatch.bsky.social ✅ @migrationpolicy.bsky.social ✅

Trump admin arrests Colorado priest. Incarcerates him for over a year. Judge orders him released without charges. They release him without the wheelchair he needs -- other prisoners have to bodily carry him out. He's now being tested for latent TB: www.newsfromthestates.com/article/colo...