David Maraniss
@davidmaraniss.bsky.social
13K followers 160 following 200 posts
Biographer, historian, journalist, professor, grandfather, Detroit born, DC and Madison based. Believer in Smokey Robinson, George Orwell, democracy, freedom of the press,Jim Thorpe, Roberto Clemente. and the Green Bay Packers.
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One pernicious step after another, Bezos encroached on the Post editorial policy. Today he seized it fully. The old Washington Post is gone. I'll never write for it again as long as he's the owner.
Reposted by David Maraniss
This is a huge scandal, one of the worst in modern law enforcement and something that is astoundingly unconstitutional and illegal.
Reposted by David Maraniss
What exactly is a “Democrat program”?

Medicare? Medicaid? Health insurance? 🤔
Trump: "We'll be making cuts that will be permanent. And we're only going to cut Democrat programs. I hate to tell you."
Agree. This happens time and time again.
You’d think a decade into all of this, the NYT would have figured out how to stop lauding the arsonist for helping to extinguish the fire.
there was a ceasefire when trump came in. he let israel blow that up, let famine spread, let his goons murder starving people, before using the power he'd had since he took office. grotesque to call this peacemaking. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/us/politics/trump-mideast-visit-israel-gaza.html
Good god, what was this interviewer thinking?
That got dark quickly.
David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)
Reposted by David Maraniss
Truly excellent new piece by Lincoln Caplan in @harvardmagazine.bsky.social on John Roberts, seen in full.

Careful, meticulous, devastating case on how "institutionalist" has enabled destruction of crucial institutions. Including his now discredited court.
www.harvardmagazine.com/legal/suprem...
Quote:
Their outcomes, along with the Court’s actions in the last few years, carry the seeds of American tragedy. Roberts, often described as an institutionalist, has enabled the most hostile anti-institutionalist ever elected president. The leader of the nation’s judicial system has empowered the president who is the most disdainful in history of the decrees of judges, the provisos of the Constitution, and the workings of American democracy. The chief justice, attempting to thread the needle between principle and practicality, has opened the door to the possibility of the ultimate constitutional crisis: a president’s outright defiance of the Supreme Court.
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You know what was weird last week? I didn’t see anyone fired for quoting words actually spoken by Jane Goodall.
Good for Dave.
What I'm referring to. It's a privilege to be invited onto networks to talk about my reporting but I have limits. Similarly stopped doing NewsNation after Nextar took its Kimmel stance.
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America enters a new, dark chapter: "Kavanaugh Raids" on entire buildings and neighborhoods, a chapter surely to be remembered as infamously as we now view the "Palmer Raids" of the first Red Scare. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/welcome-to...
Welcome to the Era of "Kavanaugh Raids"
ICE crosses another big, important line.
www.doomsdayscenario.co
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Aug. 26: Stephen Miller says "the Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization."

Sept. 25: Miller put in charge of coordinating a federal campaign to prosecute "domestic terrorist organizations."
The news side is still the Post
doing important work. The editorial side is not the Post any more but an odious embarrassment.
This is Washpost Opinion's takeaway from Trump's speech at the Charlie Kirk funeral.

No mention of him saying, "I hate my opponent." No mention of Trump's role in fomenting the January 6 riot.

Just unbelievable how bad that editorial board has become.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
President Donald Trump correctly pointed out during his eulogy for Kirk on Sunday in Phoenix that “no side in American politics has a monopoly on disturbed or misguided people.” He also criticized the absurd view that became fashionable among some liberal academics during the late 2010s that certain forms of speech can be considered violent because they cause stress. “If speech is violence, then some are bound to conclude that violence is justified to stop speech,” Trump said. “And we’re not going to let that be justified.”
Brown shirt in action. Sickening.
I was back at 26 Federal Plaza today, where an ICE agent violently threw this bereft woman to the ground in front of her kids. She had not touched him. She did not pose any threat. She had to be taken to the hospital. (🎥: Elias Eliahu)
So many outrages. So many lies. So pathetic that this monstrous piece of flesh is president.
JON KARL: What do you make of Pam Bondi saying she's gonna go after hate speech? A lot of your allies say hate speech is free speech

TRUMP: We'll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. You have a lot of hate in your hate. Maybe they'll have to go after you.
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Today in: ICE is a rogue agency.
korean reporting is nightmarish on the conditions Korean workers were contained in
Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink. The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours. Detained by US immigration authorities for eight days, the workers and their families expressed shock, describing human rights violations and absurdities they could not have imagined as ordinary Koreans living in 2025.
Gutless.
Fuck off, USTA. Who died and made you censor and protector of the king? To everyone at the Open: Protest so loud and long you cannot be ignored and silenced.
What the actual fuck.

US Tennis Association: “We ask all broadcasters to refrain from showcasing any disruptions or reactions in response to the President’s attendance in any capacity, including ENG [Electronic News Gathering] coverage.”
Does this fall under "personal liberties" or "free markets"? Once again embarrassed by the editorial side of my former newspaper.
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Applaud these women for protesting at Union Station in DC in the blazing heat! ✊🏼 #dc #notofascism
Madison eagerly awaits her appearance at CT Idea Fest next Monday!
I'm always blown away by how smoothly @kateshaw.bsky.social can synthesize and communicate her impossibly vast knowledge of the law and court cases with such insight and precision, but even by that standard this convo w @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social is top tier stuff.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/o...
Opinion | The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump’s Power Grab
www.nytimes.com
@stuartstevens using the old Jim Hightower dead armadillos line!
Love the picture on right! In the Reggie White and Charles Woodson tradition.
"If you have a chance to help others and fail to do so you are wasting your time on this earth."
Roberto Clemente, born on this date, lived by his motto and died by it, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Nicaragua after the December 1972 earthquake.
Ninety-one years ago today, The Great One was born in Carolina, Puerto Rico. Eighteen seasons with the @pirates.com proved without a doubt that Roberto Clemente was worthy of the name.
Black and white batting portrait of Roberto Clemente in a Pirates uniform demonstrating his right-handed swing. (Osvaldo Salas/National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)
Agree.
FIFA should pull all of the 2026 World Cup matches scheduled to be played on US soil & reassign them to venues in Canada.

That includes the World Cup final scheduled to be played at the Meadowlands.

This is not a country suited to host an international event now & won’t be until 2029.
I said months ago that the National Symphony Orchestra should bail from Trumpland and move to the Strathmore. Now...more than ever. Who with any decency could attend an event there while this anti-art monomanical despotic desecration is happening?
It is time for every decent person and institution to stand up and say no, no way in hell, we will not give an inch, we will not rewrite history, we will not genuflect to this putrid dictatorship.