Paul Krugman writing the kind of stuff that would be way too shrill, aka true, for his former editors:

Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in New York’s Democratic primary has created panic in MAGAland. Stephen Miller, the architect of Donald Trump’s deportation policies, waxed apocalyptic:

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.”

And Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama basically declared New York’s voters subhuman, saying:

These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.

These reactions are vile, and they’re also dishonest. Whatever these men may claim, it’s all about bigotry.

Miller isn’t concerned about the state of New York “society.” What bothers him is the idea of nonwhite people having political power.

Trumpism is an ethno-nationalist movement, based on white supremacy, patriarchy, and massive economic inequality packaged as equal parts traditional patriotism and anti-intellectual “common sense.”

It’s all Great Replacement paranoia, that has been around forever, with the replacements (great name for a band) being in turn and all at once the Catholics, the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, the Jews, the Mexicans, and always always The Blacks and the Women Who Don’t Know Their Place.

And while Tuberville stands out even within his caucus as an ignorant fool, his willingness to use dehumanizing language about millions of people shows that raw racism is rapidly becoming mainstream in American politics.

Remember, during the campaign both Trump and JD Vance amplified the slanders about Haitians eating pets.

And now that they’re in office, you can see the resurgence of raw racism all across Trump administration policies, large and small. You can see it, for example, in the cuts at the National Institutes of Health, which are so tilted against racial minorities that a federal judge — one appointed by Ronald Reagan! — declared

I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this.

You can see it in the renaming of military bases after Confederate generals — that is, traitors who fought for slavery.

You can even see it in a change in the military’s shaving policy that is clearly custom-designed to drive Black men — who account for around a quarter of the Army’s new recruits — out of the service.

So racism and bigotry are back, big time. Who’s safe? Nobody.

Trump has been riding the crest of a massive reactionary wave for a decade now, and while that wave has many sources, THE key winds blowing the storm are racism and patriarchy. The 15th and 19th amendments, giving black people and women actual political rights, represent the biggest constitutional revolutions since the founding, since they fundamentally altered who “the people” of We the People were going to be, going forward.

Jack Balkin recently directed my attention to a 1922 SCOTUS case I hadn’t heard of, in which Louis Brandeis spent exactly one short paragraph shooting down a claim that the 19th amendment was illegitimate because it robbed the sovereign states of their sovereignty, by forcing them to admit into their polities foreigners, politically speaking, who were not part of the People, properly speaking. Brandeis’s argument consists of nothing more than noting that the 19th amendment is structurally identical to the 15th, and that the constitutionality of the 15th couldn’t be questioned.

The first contention is that the power of amendment conferred by the federal Constitution and sought to be exercise does not extend to this amendment because of its character. The argument is that so great an addition to the electorate, if made without the state’s consent, destroys its autonomy as a political body. This amendment is in character and phraseology precisely similar to the Fifteenth. For each, the same method of adoption was pursued. One cannot be valid and the other invalid. That the Fifteenth is valid, although rejected by six states, including Maryland, has been recognized and acted on for half a century. See United States v. Reese, 92 U. S. 214; Neale v. Delaware, 103 U. S. 370; Guinn v. United States, 238 U. S. 347; Myers v. Anderson, 238 U. S. 368. The suggestion that the Fifteenth was incorporated in the Constitution not in accordance with law, but practically as a war measure which has been validated by acquiescence, cannot be entertained.

I went down a rabbit hole and discovered that the lawyer behind the anti-suffrage suit had published an article in the Harvard Law Review twelve years earlier, arguing precisely that the 15th amendment wasn’t really part of the Constitution, because it forcibly disenfranchised “the People” — meaning the white men of property — who had entered into the constitutional compact originally, without their consent or that of their posterity. (Note that this is a separate argument against the Reconstruction amendments than the “forced adoption at gunpoint” argument much favored by white supremacists over the years, which Brandeis rejects in the last sentence of the quoted paragraph, and which the author of the HLR article also doesn’t rely on).

The past is never dead. It isn’t even past, apparently.

The post That train’s never late appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

This is, as a Delaware poet once said, a big fuckin’ deal:

California lawmakers on Monday sent Gov. Gavin Newsom two bills to roll back a landmark law that was a national symbol of environmental protection before it came to be vilified as a primary reason for the state’s severe housing shortage and homelessness crisis.

For more than half a century, the law, the California Environmental Quality Act, has allowed environmentalists to slow suburban growth as well as given neighbors and disaffected parties a powerful tool to stop projects they disliked.

The changes, which were written by Democrats but had rare bipartisan support in California’s divided State Capitol, would allow many development projects to avoid rigorous environmental review and, potentially, the delaying and cost-inflating lawsuits that have discouraged construction in the state.

Democrats have long been reluctant to weaken the law, known as CEQA, which they considered an environmental bedrock in a state that has prided itself on reducing pollution and protecting waterways. And environmentalists took them to task for the vote.

But the majority party also recognized that California’s bureaucratic hurdles had made it almost impossible to build enough housing for nearly 40 million residents, resulting in soaring costs and persistent homelessness. In a collision between environmental values and everyday concerns, Democrats chose the latter on Monday.

“We’ve got to get out of our own damn way,” Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, said last week.

Discussions about changing the environmental law have repeatedly surfaced at the State Capitol over the past decade, only to be thwarted by opposition from environmentalists and local governments. This year was different.

Mr. Newsom threatened to reject the state budget unless lawmakers rolled back CEQA, which is pronounced SEE-kwa. Democrats were also aware that voters nationwide had blamed the party last year for rising prices.

To call CEQA “environmental legislation,” as the headline does, is at best incomplete. It was frequently used as a barrier against building infill housing that is clearly a net positive for the environment, for reasons that had nothing to do with environmentalism. And even to the extent that it has genuine environmentalist purposes, it was a 70s-style aesthetic/pastoral environmentalism that did not put nearly enough emphasis on climate change. It also came to represent one of the worst traits of late-20th-century liberalism — the idea that lawsuits and courts are better forums for policy than democratically accountable legislatures.

This is a major win and hopefully a harbinger of a west coast liberalism more dedicated to increasing state capacity than creating arbitrary veto points for wealthy property owners and work for lawyers.

The post California Dems finally beat back the NIMBYS appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I am officially retiring today from the Voice of America and the United States Foreign Service. Thank you for coming along on our journey via the airwaves and on social media, while we reported from dozens of countries and at the White House and aboard Air Force One, during these past decades.

My time as an active correspondent abruptly ended four months ago when VOA’s top managers suspended me as part of its anticipatory obedience to the incoming USAGM politically-installed leadership. Two weeks later, nearly everyone at VOA was also put on administrative leave and VOA broadcasts, on air continually since 1942, were silenced by the U.S. government.

Thank you to AFSA and other labor unions and journalists’ groups, the Government Accountability Project and especially my successor as VOA’s White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, as well as the other named and ‘John Doe’ plaintiffs, for leading the legal fight against executive overreach and First Amendment violations. Many more are involved behind the scenes as part of the volunteer grassroots #SaveVOA campaign.

If you are also outraged about the wanton destruction of U.S. international broadcasting, please consider helping the most vulnerable of our colleagues, including hundreds of already-terminated contractors, by contributing to the USAGM Employee Association fund (a non-federal 501(c)3).

Non sibi sed patriae.

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Keep your ass in the shade.

Pizza places near the Pentagon got a spike in business over this past week of international warfare – and one social media account may have actually predicted the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites. 

On Saturday, June 21, at 7:13 p.m. EST – shortly before President Donald Trump announced via Truth Social of the U.S. bunker-buster attack, Pentagon Pizza Report tracked a “HIGH activity [of sales] at the closest Papa Johns to the Pentagon.” 

@PenPizzaReport’s account is dedicated to “open-source tracking of pizza spot activity around the Pentagon (and other places).” The X handle went live last August — months before the 2024 election — and it already has over 203,000 followers. 

One local pizza operation also showed a big boost in traffic during the wee hours of Monday night, just as ceasefire talks between Iran and Israel were coming to light. Pizzato Pizza, the year-old Lyon Park pie shop located a four-minute drive from the Pentagon, stays open until 3 a.m. (Nearby Domino’s and Papa Johns, meanwhile, close at midnight.) Pizzato counts spicy vodka pepperoni and chicken barbecue pizza as some of its most popular orders. Partner Ali Hatim runs Mumbai Darbar Indian Cuisine in Alexandria, so there’s also butter chicken and chicken tikka pizzas (2626 N. Pershing Drive). We, The Pizza, the chain from Top Chef star Spike Mendelsohn, as well as Extreme Pizza and area Domino’s outposts also continued to experience a sales boom on Tuesday afternoon.

Pizza appears to be the pre-strike meal of choice for top U.S. military officials who are hunkered down in the Pentagon, per the Guardian. Deliveries to the high-profile Arlington address reportedly doubled right before the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and jumped again before Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Of course, there wasn’t any social media around back then to track such surges.

The five-sided structure is home to one pie option, Mosaic Pizza Company, but hours are only 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The Pentagon’s lengthy concessions roster shows a Five Guys is coming soon to its food court.

It’s been about two months since Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Commanders announced their proposal to build a new, publicly funded football stadium at RFK. Since then, they’ve been insisting in all possible forums that doing so will generate billions in revenue for the District.

Meanwhile, the DC Council, and members of the public, have asked for data that back up the grandiose claims. The team has stonewalled. Bowser, for her part, released an “economic impact report,” on June 5, 2025—now seemingly removed from District websites—that does nothing more than tout the same misleading numbers, just with a fancier page layout.

“Economic impact reports” are a standard feature of teams’ and boosters’ stadium-subsidy-selling playbooks. We covered the tricks their progenitors use to generate implausibly optimistic numbers in a prior post.

Now that we have an RFK-specific “report” in hand to dissect, here’s what’s wrong with it.

They’re owned by whom?

To produce the “report,” the executive hired a firm called Convention, Sports, and Leisure. CSL is owned by Legends Hospitality, which acquired it in 2011. Legends Hospitality was founded by the owners of the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees, and they retain an ownership stake in the company.

The value of the Cowboys and the Yankees, as with any sports team, is based in part on the comparative value of other teams. And, each new stadium subsidy deal functionally sets a new floor for how much taxpayers will be ripped off for the next one. So, it’s obvious that Legends has an absolutely wild incentive to ensure that the firm it owns delivers whatever numbers will secure the bag for fellow owners.

Legends also handles concessions, ticket sales, and merchandising at sports venues, another conflict of interest for CSL: The construction of larger, fancier facilities will likely boost its related lines of business. In one instance, CSL produced an “economic impact report” for the Los Angeles Angels’ stadium at the same time that Legends, its corporate parent, was bidding on the team’s concessions contract.

Check the receipts

CSL’s published body of work is a panoply of false promises and rudimentary math errors. Here are just a few of its greatest misses:

• 2003: CSL projected that an expanded convention center in Philadelphia and new one in the District would boost annual hotel stays by 56% and 103%, respectively. Hotel stays instead declined 26% and 23%.
• 2012: CSL projected expanded attendance and spending as a result of a new football stadium at Colorado State University based on unreliable survey data and “an incomplete, and rather unconventional, method of projecting future attendance.” It further posited that revenue growth at a rarely-sold-out college venue would outstrip revenue growth at the average new NFL stadium.
• 2019: CSL boosted Montreal as a prime candidate for Major League Baseball expansion via numbers that didn’t account for the US-Canada exchange rate.
• 2023: CSL projected a new hockey arena in Tempe, Ariz., would lead to $796.5 million in new hotel spending. A local economist there found CSL overstated its estimate by a magnitude of at least 50.
• 2024: CSL claimed that a new arena in Philadelphia—a few miles away from an existing arena—would draw more events to the city. Its justification for this claim was a comparison to another pair of arenas, one on Long Island and one in New Jersey, that are 50 miles apart.

CSL was also commissioned by the District in 2014 to provide a “report” when the city was considering what taxpayer dollars to turn over to DC United for that team’s new stadium. CSL initially said the District would reap $109 million in benefits, but had to issue a public retraction admitting it miscounted $70 million of that. We would be long ousted from our career fields for something like this, but cities apparently continue to find much to like in CSL’s miscountings.

Show us the money

The biggest problem with the “report” itself, beyond its providence, is that it’s not a report. Since it doesn’t articulate the basis of its assumptions, it’s more accurate to describe it as an underpants-gnomes slideshow of slick tables and bold-type numbers that distract from how unfounded its claims of profit are.

For instance, CSL asserts that there will be 1.4 million attendees at stadium events per year, that 40% of them will be from out of town, and that those out-of-towners will spend between $65.00 and $324.50 outside of the stadium. There’s no indication of what those numbers are based on.

In the last piece we wrote together, we showed how “economic impact reports” count revenue that would be generated anyway. A family going to a Commanders game is probably going instead of, not in addition to, a Capitals game. That’s not net new spending. CSL claims to have subtracted such figures from its suggested total impact, but doesn’t show how much was subtracted. You will simply need to trust that CSL’s judgment is sound.

House of cards

Even if you take CSL’s mystery numbers at face value, the premises of its assessment of the Bowser-Commanders deal are untrue. Primarily, CSL presents the alternative to a Commanders stadium at RFK as “no stadium.” It is, rather, “stadium six miles away in Maryland.”

All the direct, indirect, and induced spending of a Commanders stadium will be the same for the region’s economy regardless of whether it’s in the District, or subsidized with District residents’ dollars, because there will be a Commanders stadium in the region. So, we think it’s fair to cross out the entire stadium-output portion of CSL’s analysis, which is $24.5 billion of the total $33.5 billion in revenue boasted of in the firm’s slide deck.

Similarly, CSL’s analysis also counts the full benefit of the mixed-use “distrcit” [sic], as if the alternative to that is no development at RFK whatsoever. But that’s not even what Bowser is saying—she’s pushing the stadium as necessary to accelerate development that would happen regardless. But in CSL-world, construction on mixed-use development at RFK won’t start until 2029 and won’t be completed until 2036 anyway.

Nick has previously explained why Bowser’s claim of stadium-induced development warp-speed is a dubious one. If the mayor wants people to believe her, it’s in her interest for her consultants to at least gesture at demonstrating how many years a stadium would lop off the emergence of a neighborhood. That would, however, result in much smaller numbers than those on CSL’s slide deck. If the stadium sped up additional development by a decade (again, this strains credulity), the revenue generated as a result would still be just one-third of what’s shown in CSL’s deck—because CSL is taking credit for the presumed 30-year value of mixed-use development overall, when it should only be doing so for the acceleration of that development.

The estimated fiscal impact of the stadium itself—i.e., the tax revenue the District is proposing to steal from Maryland—is the messiest and sneakiest feature of CSL’s deck. The report counts $2.4 billion in this category and includes a chart breaking that total into its component parts, per year, shown below.

But the math isn’t mathing: $63.7 million times 30 years, plus $29.2 million in construction taxes, is only $1.94 billion, which is $459 million short of $2.4 billion. CSL appears to have inflated the revenue that might be generated over the 30-year life of the stadium, but doesn’t say how, or by how much, it did so, leaving a half-billion dollars completely unexplained.

More troubling is that the report fails to account for the fact that Bowser’s term sheet promises back to the Commanders the projected $958.1 million in ticket revenue to, first, pay off their bonds and, then, fund ongoing capital improvements to the stadium. Ticket revenue is the single biggest component of CSL’s total taxes number, but, per the term sheet, it won’t be available to the District in any way. It should be subtracted from the total.

So, the best-case revenue-generating scenario for the District that we can discern, after weeding out the most glaring of CSL’s baseless assumptions, is $1 billion in stadium taxes ($1.45 if CSL can explain the mystery $459 million), plus maybe another $1 billion-ish in taxes generated by a mixed-use development that has come online possibly faster than it might have otherwise, over 30 years.

Even that’s an unlikely estimate: When Bowser announced the Wharf’s redevelopment in 2017, she claimed it would generate $100 million in tax revenue annually. Seven years later, all built out, the total collected was exactly half that.

Local journalists have picked up on the shoddiness of CSL’s “report.” But when NBC News4’s investigative reporting team approached the mayor’s office for the missing information, they were given the runaround. Bowser will have to come forward with a lot more information if she wants the District’s taxpayers to grant CSL’s numbers any credibility. For now, let’s not.

Top image: The “economic impact report” on a subsidized Commanders stadium at RFK touted by Mayor Muriel Bowser is by the book, and it’s not a good book. The consultant, CSL, miscounted by $70 million in an earlier projection for the District, on what became Audi Field. Image by emma-k-alexandra licensed under Creative Commons.

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