Burton M

"If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you'd be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled - have you no shame in that?" -Epictetus

Say whatever else you will about him, men like Robert Byrd cared deeply about the power of the legislative branch and, in his case, the Senate in particular. The willingness of the men and women in those institutions to hand their powers over to the executive rather than fiercely guard them can’t be understated as the source of the current environment.

Take our requirement that spending bills originate in the House. Seems pretty clear. Unless you want to forgive student debt. Then you just have staff comb statutes to find a phrase that you can point to in bad faith. Or if you like tariffs. Then everything is an emergency. /2

There are two reasons that I am against a gerrymandering ban and would leave it to the political process, even when it is abused. First, you cannot institutional design your way out of bad character. If people want to abuse a system, the can find the slightest pretense. 1/

@NBCNews And? Is there an actual story here or do you not understand this is how it works when people in any profession lose their jobs?

Thirteen federal workers who were laid off during the DOGE cuts tell NBC News they struggled to find work, had to move or took major pay cuts after their agencies were gutted. nbcnews.com/politics/doge/…

@PGATUOR The unique combination of raw power and a complete lack of hand/eye coordination is truly impressive.

We’re not sure if this is embarrassing or impressive

@thechosenberg Ha! Ha ha! HO ha ha! Theater kid got what’s coming for making crappy choices. Now she’ll have to grow up and figure a way out of it and will be better for it.

Boomers will not see heaven

@reBurningBright @TFL1728 Donald Trump is a child with a magnifying glass and Iran is his ant. It’s no more sophisticated than that.

Donald Trump is playing a game of chicken. It's just not against the Iranian Regime. The same chorus that once dismissed Sovereign Disentanglement as fantasy is now tripping over its own contradictions trying to explain Donald Trump’s latest pause in the Iranian theater. Every ceasefire extension, every delayed flight to Islamabad, every saber-rattle followed by another reprieve. The faux intellectuals and even earnest observers read it as hesitation, weakness or proof that the kinetic objectives they projected onto Trump were never real. They are wrong. What they are witnessing is not the unraveling of a plan, but the patient execution of one: the surgical untangling of the Iranian Knot as the latest, most visible front in the Sovereign Disentanglement operation that has defined Trump's second term from its first deployments and declarations. Trump's objectives were never regime change in the neoconservative sense, but Sovereign Disentanglement followed by Multipolar Realignment. And the first bicameral and paradoxical tell is hiding in plain sight. The Media Industrial Complex has accurately framed Trump’s Iranian Gambit as a high-stakes game of international chicken, while detailing the power struggle within the Iranian leadership. They are not wrong about the game. They are willfully blind—or actively obscuring—who the game is actually being played against. And from where I'm sitting, this is not a game of chicken against Tehran, but against the very dependencies that have kept the Globalist Western Hegemon breathing: the energy chokeholds, proxy architectures, fiat-petrodollar scaffolding and the so-called allies who long ago traded sovereignty for borrowed security. Security provided by us. Fail to view every single geopolitical event, every narrative flare-up, every economic tremor through the lens of the Sovereign Alliance and the emergent Multipolar Order versus the New—but now Old—World Order of the collapsing Western Globalist Hegemon, and you will remain permanently lost on a map that is being redrawn in real time. That is the single greatest blind spot afflicting the commentariat right now. Because while the surface narrative screams chaos, the actuals tell a different story. The United States is the last to feel the economic, financial and energy squeeze from the Hormuz Crisis. The Defense Production Act has been invoked at scale precisely just as this engineered pressure is peaking. American energy exports are not collapsing. They are surging. The very chokepoint once weaponized against others is being turned, deliberately against the architects of engineered scarcity, who have no such levers to pull. At the same time, and as I have been commenting on the whole time, calibrated moves BY the US have shielded Russia from that same vise, and in turn, Russia has helped to extend that shield to India and China. Meanwhile, the European Continent and many of our 'So-Called Allies' in Asia are devolving exactly as designed, with deindustrialization accelerating, energy shortages biting, political fractures widening and populist revolts simmering. If the primary target were truly the Iranian regime, why are the dependent nodes of the old order fracturing first? If you think Donald Trump is the idiot strongman both the traditional MSM and the faux intellectual class who've been masquerading as MAGA for much of the past decade agree he is, then you have your answer. If you think something else is going on when it comes to the story of Donald Trump, and the larger story he inhabits, then the question answers itself. To wit, the Media Protectorate gives the game away every time it references 'competing factions' inside Iran—the IRGC versus the civilian negotiators, the unresponsive Supreme Leader, on-again, off-again peace talks and Strait re-openings and rug pulls. On the surface, it tracks. But look deeper, and the Afghanistan Model snaps into focus—the one very small segments of the Truth Community mapped years ago, and that the Collective Mind has largely forgotten. The Kabul Withdrawal did not represent Biden-era incompetence. It represented the deliberate codification, under the necessary Narrative Shielding provided by Our Boy Blue of the Doha Agreement Trump had already negotiated with the very Taliban who lead that renormalizing nation now. The Hegemon-installed Afghan Army and Leadership dissolved exactly as required so the resurgent Taliban could assume its rightful place as a sovereign node ... and yes, also so that they might use the very US munitions left behind during said withdrawal to hunt down the remnants of ISIS in the region ... the very network Donald Trump himself has long claimed was 'founded' and 'funded' by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Taken in this context, Donald Trump will not—and cannot—emerge as the unambiguous winner in every theater to every audience. Not if a genuine multipolar world is to emerge with multiple nodes of perceived and actual strength, each sovereign in its own sphere of responsibility. This is why he continues to reference Iranian 'face-saving,' and why I personally argue that the ghost of Joe Biden represented Trump's own masterful attempt to do so while the most difficult disentanglements were in the offing, from Kabul to Kiev to the US itself on both financial and energy grounds. So when the media fixates on surface level factions in Iran, the deeper question becomes: are we dealing with the regime as currently constituted, or with the puppet masters who first installed those structures decades ago—the same Invisible Enemy who ran color revolutions from Kabul to Caracas, and yes, to the theater that brought me to the dance in the first place, Kiev? And have those puppet masters already been dealt with? The Iranian Government devolved and 'fractured' strategically in 2025 in anticipation not of Trump's assault on them, but as preparation for the Narrative Translation layer that would allow the Knot to be untangled without handing the Globalists the forever-war footage they so desperately needed. Trump—and yes, the sovereign elements operating inside Iran—are squeezing Globalist-dependent nations without mercy, with Europe first, its vassal states next and the entire rules-based architecture groaning under contradictions it can no longer paper over. Meanwhile, those same energy shocks are being weathered in sovereign fashion elsewhere, with American abundance being redirected inward, Russian revenues protected, Chinese supply chains rerouted and Iranian continuity preserved. All while the global mandate is cultivated at speed for every nation to follow suit: withdraw inward to reclaim agency, then project outward from a foundation of true sovereignty rather than borrowed hegemony. This is the Sovereign Radiation concept I first named in 2023. And the biggest tell—the ultimate proof—that I'm not crazy will only arrive with the full benefit of hindsight. And yet, even now, the Venezuela Model avails us well, as the same State Department that once greenlit the aforementioned destabilization ops across Latin America and the world writ large has already announced its intention to embark on “Political Reconciliation” with the very nations it helped fracture during the unchecked era of Deep State engineering. So when Donald Trump not only publicly makes peace with the Iranians, but embarks on the same narrative rehabilitation tour he has already extended to the Taliban, to the Syrians, to the Venezuelans—and yes, to the Cubans once that particular knot is untangled—remember this: The choice to recognize that they were never our true enemy has been yours all along. And Trump continues to present it to you.

@KenBruc91173604 @mattyglesias It is just as bad when you zoom in on the maps around Chicago and the suburbs.

@RealBurtonM @mattyglesias Having lived in Champaign for 30 years, I can safely say that there are three states more crooked than Illinois. Seriously, look at the fucking map where Champaign is and how we extend 10 miles wide and 175 miles to the southwest across the river from St. Louis… Crooked AF.

It is EXTREMELY bad that Republicans repeatedly blocked a national ban on gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is bad, and Republicans are profoundly blameworthy for its continued existence.

@DanVickHimself2 @mattyglesias Source?

@RealBurtonM @mattyglesias TX and NC have larger efficiency gaps

@temporaryfap @SplexyWho I’m gonna rub it in because you deserve it.

I’m not even joking this is worse than 9/11

@temporaryfap @SplexyWho

Dr. Oz Says Anti-Fraud Effort Coming To 'All 50 States' zerohedge.com/political/dr-o…

@jbarro Whatever

The whining from Republicans here is just preposterous. Democrats remain willing to prohibit gerrymandering nationally. Republicans thought they were better off fighting this battle state-by-state and are sore that that wasn't true.

Which stage of grief is this?

@notcapnamerica @simpatico771

BITCH WE DONT EITHER

A man with his wife and 13 children in Louisiana, 1938 during the Great Depression. But its too expensive to have kids today

@jtLOL A lack of gills didn’t help.

Sure didn't help Natalie Wood

@GovPritzker Get control over CTU and we’ll all believe you are actually against political corruption.

The Trump administration continues to be riddled with stories of appointees seeking to profit from prediction markets. Illinois is stepping up to ensure those here who are serving the public do just that, not their own personal financial gain. chicago.suntimes.com/politics/2026/…

@persianjewess @zerohedge They were made for each other.

Over 70% of the East Village voted for Mamdani. Now they’re suing Mamdani because he’s planning to relocate Bellevue homeless shelter to the East Village.

@untoldchicago @sportsmockery Unless this involves giving the rat a jersey and hat, I don’t wanna hear it.

@CBSNews I’m not sure what’s worse, the fact that someone wanted to study this or the fact that CBS felt it was newsworthy. Great job @bariweiss

Salmon exposed to cocaine in the water swim longer distances than those that go without, according to a study released this week. cbsn.ws/48ADVBt

Even the NYT acknowledges they are more than “just an idea”.