Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Susan Barnes @susrbarnes.bsky.social · 17h

As a Penn Stater who cheers for my teams, it’s crazy we owe Franklin $50 million but we’ve been sustaining deep academic budget cuts for a while. So pathetic.

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Rob Tornoe @robtornoe.bsky.social · 18h

Penn State, a land-grant institution, will pay James Franklin about $50 million to NOT coach for the next six seasons.

Meanwhile, the school declined to spend about $17 million to keep WPSU on the air, choosing instead to shutter its public media company.

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Andy Craig @andycraig.bsky.social · 16h

A distinct principle from not engaging in public discourse about cases, but they also shouldn't be earning any outside income, such as from a publisher. Live on the salary or retire.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 19h

Hi Sally. When Weiss published a supposed expose on the death of George Floyd, a veteran criminal justice reporter showed in deep detail that the piece was not just wrong but filled with falsehoods and misrepresentations. Weiss did not retract the piece. What do you think of that?

Sally Jenkins @sallyjenx.bsky.social · 21h

This is really smart. Amazed at the hysteria over the ascendance of a woman entrepreneur who clearly knows how to cover and sell news and who's not afraid to take on a mob. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Don’t Bet Against Bari Weiss

The new editor in chief of CBS News triumphs over her critics.

www.theatlantic.com

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nanoprof.bsky.social @nanoprof.bsky.social · 15h

BBQ time

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Justin Elliott @justinelliott.bsky.social · 20h

Here is our full story that Vance is dismissing, with primary source documents showing Trump cabinet members with multiple primary-residence mortgages

www.propublica.org/article/trum...

www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 2d

UNTIL IT’S DONE, Ep. 4: Sylvia Rivera

In the 1970s, queer New Yorkers had been pushed to the margins of NYC. Our trans neighbors faced immense cruelty. But in Sylvia Rivera, they found a champion.

As we combat Trump’s politics of darkness, her legacy can light the path forward.

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Julie DiCaro @juliedicaro.bsky.social · 17h

So Kilmer Abrego-Garcia will not challenge a deportation to Costa Rica, who has agreed to for him residency, but DHS won’t agree to send him there because it’s not cruel enough.

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/u...

For weeks, Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who is married to a U.S. citizen, has made clear that he would not challenge his deportation if he were sent to Costa Rica, which has promised him legal residency and guaranteed that he would not be sent back to El Salvador.

But the Trump administration has refused to deport him to Costa Rica, and in an earlier hearing this week, Judge Xinis pressed the administration to consider the option or clarify why it was unacceptable.

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Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 20h

Listen to the response to this and look how easy it is to say it.

Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine.bsky.social · 20h

We have armed secret police kidnapping people off the street based on the color of their skin.

When we win: we will haul them before a Senate committee. The masks will come off. There will be consequences.

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Michael Anderson @michaelander45.bsky.social · 20h

Maybe you shouldn’t be doing controversial changes to precedent or reversals of reasoned lower court opinions using it then?

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 21h

Amy Coney Barrett defends heavy use of the shadow docket: "If we wrote a long opinion, it might give the impression that we have finally resolved the issue, and in none of these cases have we finally resolved the issue."

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Micah @rincewind.run · 20h

if we'd treated their obvious baldfaced lies and deflections more like this over the past eight years maybe we wouldn't be in this situation

shocking how easy it is when you actually see it done

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 21h

STEPHANOPOULOS: I didn't insinuate anything. I asked you whether Tom Homan accepted $50k as was heard on an audio tape recorded by the FBI in September 2024. You did not answer the question. Thank you for your time.

VANCE: No, George, I sai--

STEPHANOPOULOS: We'll be right back

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The Fig Economy @figgityfigs.bsky.social · 21h

This is getting directly to the trust issue, and is a demonstration that they understand a bill with their ask isn’t enough for them to believe their ask will be respected.

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 22h

Sens. Schumer, Merkley, Murray, and Peters are calling for the resignation of OMB Director Russell Vought.

"By impounding billions of dollars … and aggressively pursuing the illegal use of pocket rescissions, Vought has done everything in his power to gut the federal government piece by piece."

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Bolts @boltsmag.org · 21h

A Democratic candidate for prosecutor in Virginia wants lawmakers to ban ICE agents from operating while masked or while concealing their identities; she says she’d then prosecute those who don’t comply.

Your Guide to the 2025 Prosecutor Elections

Key races will shape the politics of criminal justice from Philly to Seattle—plus a wild card in New Jersey. But most of November’s 66 prosecutor races feature just one candidate, as usual.

boltsmag.org

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Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1.bsky.social · 22h

Sens. Schumer, Merkley, Murray, and Peters are calling for the resignation of OMB Director Russell Vought.

"By impounding billions of dollars … and aggressively pursuing the illegal use of pocket rescissions, Vought has done everything in his power to gut the federal government piece by piece."

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Victor Ambros @vambros.bsky.social · 21h

An excellent piece by Joachim Frank, 2017 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, about how we must resist the Trump Administration's crackdown on universities.

www.usnews.com/opinion/arti...

www.usnews.com

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 21h

Not sure why it has taken until late 2025 to see this, but this is how you do it. Every time. For every one of these guests.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 21h

STEPHANOPOULOS: I didn't insinuate anything. I asked you whether Tom Homan accepted $50k as was heard on an audio tape recorded by the FBI in September 2024. You did not answer the question. Thank you for your time.

VANCE: No, George, I sai--

STEPHANOPOULOS: We'll be right back

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Kai Kupferschmidt @kakape.bsky.social · 22h

Our future is being shaped to a terrifying degree by people who have just … completely lost their marbles…

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist

The political svengali and investor has been giving lectures on ‘an evil king or tyrant … who appears in the end times’

www.theguardian.com

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Joe Patrice @joepatrice.bsky.social · 22h

Amazing

Tweet: @vexwerewolf
Right-wingers literally straight-up admitting "it's harder to discredit the left because the left is almost always telling the truth"
Scott Jennings @Lum 21h um, yes, that's really a problem
Show this thread
9 paints • 12 hrs
The problem with left-leaning media is they're intrinsically more strict with their propaganda to only using verifiable sources so it's really hard to poke holes in their ideology and arguments in comparison to a lot of low quality rightwing content.
That makes attacking their points with fact checkers not very effective unless the fact checkers use misinformation tactics as well.
In essence people on the right have to work harder and more creatively to push their agendas as statistics and studies frustratingly arent usually on our side.

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elias isquith @eliasisquith.blog · 22h

i think it’s noteworthy that a lot of centrist pundits have decided to just take it as a given that jd vance lies constantly and to treat this as almost part of his intellectual program so that only gauche rubes would bother to mention or care about it.

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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 22h

Correction - the transfer of the money between DOD functions is unusual but may not be illegal because a provision was written into the CR. The main point about disconnection between troop payments and other federal employees stands. (h/t @brendannyhan.bsky.social) bsky.app/profile/egoj...

eric gonzalez juenke @egojunk.bsky.social · 1d

The DoD is allowed to transfer this money per statute apparently (though this is outside of my area). The CR in March upped it to 8 billion.

Of course it has. It always does. Sec 8005 of DOD Appropriations, for starters…

That one provision now allows for $8b in transfers, per March’s full year CR:

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ceej @ceej.online · 22h

the disastrous refusal of the self-styled silicon valley technokings to keep anyone in their lives capable of questioning their increasingly incomprehensible politics has lead to a crisis of thinking so severe that a fifty-eight year old man believes something is important because he knows about it

Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social · 1d

thiel, man, what the fuck are you talking about

He describes the plot of Watchmen, a 1986 graphic novel involving superheroes grappling with moral questions about humanity against the backdrop of impending nuclear war:

The antihero Ozymandias, the antichrist-type figure, is sort of an early-modern person. He believes this will be a timeless and eternal solution – eternal world peace. Moore is sort of a late-modern. In early modernity, you have ideal solutions, ‘perfect’ solutions to calculus. In late modernity, things are sort of probabilistic. And at some point, he asks Dr Manhattan whether the world government is going to last. And he says that ‘nothing lasts forever.’ So you embrace the antichrist and it still doesn’t work.

Thiel later finds biblical meaning in the manga One Piece, discussing how he believes it represents a future where an antichrist-like one-world government has repressed science. He believes that the hero, Monkey D Luffy, represents a Christlike figure.

In One Piece, you are set in a fantasy world, again sort of an alternate earth, but it’s 800 years into the reign of this one-world state. Which, as the story unfolds, gradually gets darker and darker. You sort of realize, in my interpretation, who runs the world and it’s something like the antichrist. There’s Luffy, a pirate who wears a red straw hat, sort of like Christ’s crown of thorns. And then towards the end of the story, transforms into a figure who resembles Christ in Revelation.

Thiel, along with a researcher and writer at Thiel Capital, explored these ideas at greater length in an essay for the religious journal First Things earlier this month.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23h

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 23h

What he’s railing against is a profound shift in culture, status… He’s obsessed with the idea that America is controlled by a leftist “ruling elite” - but “elite” isn’t defined socio-economically or by political power, it means something like: Getting to define “real America” and who gets to belong.

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Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 1d

Sunday reading:

I wrote about the aggrieved extremist who is currently firing thousands of federal workers and ravaging state capacity based on conspiratorial nonsense - and about mainstream media’s infuriating tendency to sanitize Russell Vought and the regime he serves.

This week’s piece:

We need to talk about Russell Vought – But Properly

Why certain mainstream outlets insist on sanitizing Vought as a devout “small government” conservative – and what actually animates his war against pluralistic democracy

steady.page

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Thomas Zimmer @thomaszimmer.bsky.social · 23h

Vought is at war with large swaths of the population, with the very idea of a society defined by democratic pluralism. If you have correctly identified that this guy is now in a really powerful position, that people like him are in control of the government, how is that not the main story?

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James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 1d

Re-upping:

Excellent assessment of John "Roger Taney" Roberts.

In @harvardmagazine.bsky.social , by Lincoln Caplan.

As careful, legally informed, judicious-minded writer as you're going to find. With an unsparing judgment.

www.harvardmagazine.com/legal/suprem...

What Trump Means for John Roberts's Legacy | Harvard Magazine

Executive power is on the docket at the Supreme Court.

www.harvardmagazine.com

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