MOUNTAINAIR, N.M. — Three people are dead, three remain hospitalized and a total of 25 people have been exposed to an unknown substance at home Wednesday in Mountainair.

Paramedics and sheriff’s deputies responded to a home on Hanlon Avenue and Pinon Street, regarding a call made around 8 a.m. about a possible overdose on an unknown substance.

First responders found one person dead outside of the home, one dead inside and two other people who needed resuscitation. One of those two people later died at the ER.

I really wanted to like David French. In fact, I did like David French. I enjoyed listening to him on the Dispatch podcasts — I listen to a lot of podcasts — and now, I have to tell you, I am not quite sure if I continue to like David French. Because what he has done here with Graham Platner makes me question his intellectual honesty.

The column ran in the New York Times this morning, under the title that names the move it is making. French walks the reader through Platner’s deleted Reddit posts, the Marines-era tattoo Platner has covered up, the I am a communist statement, the trolling. He concedes, in passing, that Platner has acknowledged the posts were wrong and deleted them, that the tattoo is covered, that the explanation Platner offered (a difficult period following repeated combat deployments) is the kind of explanation any honest reader would have to take seriously. He concedes, in passing, that Platner has the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. He grants the substantive moral framework that would normally apply to a candidate with this kind of biographical record — that people can change, that redemption is real, that we should not define people by their worst moments.

And then he refuses to apply the framework he has just granted. The column’s central argument is that Democrats supporting Platner are doing what Republicans did with Trump — telling themselves the stakes are too high for normal standards, accepting a lesser evil because the greater evil is too terrifying to face honestly, beginning the slide that ends in cult-of-personality politics. The framing requires the reader to accept that Platner’s biographical record places him in the same moral-political category as Trump. The framing requires the reader to forget that French has just spent half the column granting that the biographical record admits of redemption-eligible explanations that the framing depends on disregarding. The framing requires the reader to accept that the lesser of two evils is the right description of what Maine voters are doing when they consider Platner against Susan Collins, on grounds that French presents as if they were obvious rather than as if they were the donor network’s preferred grounds being smuggled into the Times opinion page under the cover of moral-philosophical seriousness.

Bryan Bennett of Loft Beck Strategies released a national survey on April 27 that asked Democrats and independents which mattered more in evaluating a candidate, fight or policy agreement. Sixty-nine percent picked fight. He asked whether fight or authenticity mattered more. Sixty-eight percent picked fight. Liberal Democrats picked fight over policy by twenty-eight points. Double haters, voters who hold an unfavorable view of both parties, picked fight over policy by twenty-six. Across every category Bennett tested, voters did not care about platform. They cared about willingness to fight. Which is Idiocracy-level reasoning, but we are here to win, and when we bring this sort of data into our calculations we win more elections. When we don’t, we don’t.

Other recent polling found the same thing in different words. The Harvard Youth Poll asked young voters for one word to describe Democrats. Fifty-eight percent chose a negative one. The most common, generated without prompting, was weak. The Strength in Numbers/Verasight survey asked Democratic voters in their own words what their party did recently that upset them. The largest category of response, thirty percent, said the party was too weak, too cautious, or not fighting hard enough.

SNIP

Voters read strength when a politician names the opponent out loud, takes an aggressive posture rather than a conciliatory one, uses language that signals willingness to use power to its fullest extent. Voters read strength when a politician refuses to back down publicly when backing down would be easier, violates norms of decorum when the situation calls for it, doesn’t mince words, doesn’t ask the public to wait for the next election, and demonstrates capacity for aggression on behalf of voters against the people harming them.

Voters read weakness when a politician retreats into process language, appeals to norms and institutions as the response to norm violations, hedges visibly, announces fights and then does not fight them, treats the opposition as good-faith partners while voters perceive them as adversaries, and prioritizes decorum over outcome.

Secret memos obtained by The New York Times illuminate the origins of the court’s now-routine “shadow docket” rulings on presidential power.

Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions.

For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a stately pace that encouraged care and deliberation, relying on written briefs, oral arguments and in-person discussions. The justices composed detailed opinions that explained their thinking to the public and rendered judgment only after other courts had weighed in.

But this time, the justices were sprinting to block a major presidential initiative. By a 5-to-4 vote along partisan lines, the order halted President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, his signature environmental policy. They acted before any other court had addressed the plan’s lawfulness. The decision consisted of only legal boilerplate, without a word of reasoning.

SNIP

Last night, after a 16-year reign, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán — Europe’s would-be authoritarian — was defeated in a massive landslide by Péter Magyar and his opposition Tisza party. A democratic country that across the 21st century has slid steadily toward autocracy rose up, resisted, and — for now, apparently — chose a different path. It is as titanic an achievement for democracy as we have seen in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, one to stand alongside Ukraine’s Orange Revolution or its Maidan protests in 2014 that led to the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych.

The election mandate was so huge that Tisza secured the supermajority that will allow it — if it follows through with its campaign promises — to amend the national constitution and prohibit the rise of any future Orbáns (or even the return of Orbán himself). Perhaps most importantly of all, Magyar in his victory speech said he and his party were coming for all the “Orbánists” who enabled the corrupt regime, demanded the immediate resignations of cronies installed across government, and promised “never again a country without consequences!” In return, the victory night crowd chanted a warning to all the corrupt lackeys and self-dealing cronies who made Orbán possible: “To prison! To prison!”

SNIP

How to follow the model of the Hungarian opposition, though, is itself an important case study for Democrats and the pro-democracy opposition here in the United States; the Financial Times’ Ed Luce made an important observation: “People will be closely studying how Hungary’s opposition pulled off their win in such a pro-incumbent system. Important to note that the theme was corruption. Democrats need to get much better at calling out Trump’s corruption.”

To me, “Never again a country without consequences!” is as good an organizing principle as we can have for this moment.

The Trump administration will pay the French energy giant TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to abandon its plans to build wind farms off the East Coast, the Interior Department said on Monday at an energy conference in Houston.

Under the unusual deal, TotalEnergies would forfeit its leases in federal waters for two wind farms, which would have been built off New York and North Carolina. The Justice Department would then reimburse TotalEnergies $928 million, the amount it paid for the leases during the Biden administration.

In exchange, TotalEnergies would invest that money in oil and gas projects in the United States, including a facility in Texas that would export liquefied natural gas to global markets. The company would also commit to producing more oil in the Gulf of Mexico and said it was developing some additional gas-burning power plants to meet rising electricity demand from data centers.

The deal is an extraordinary transfer of taxpayer dollars to a foreign company for the purposes of boosting the production of fossil fuels, a main driver of climate change, while throttling offshore wind power. It comes as the war in the Middle East has shocked global oil markets, prompting concerns about energy supplies.

It’s a long-standing allegation that Washington is a gerontocracy — a place where disproportionate power is wielded by people who, because of their age, struggle to understand the lives and views of young Americans. Maybe our latest NOTUS Perspectives forum can help bridge that divide: We asked 22 college students and recent graduates from across the country to write short pieces identifying one political or social trend among young people that Washington badly misunderstands. Their compelling and, in many cases, surprising answers are here …

I'm a writer, so of course I care about words! But I'm a writer, so I also think that words are improved by their malleability, duality and nuance.

This is one of the things I love about being a native English speaker – this glorious mongrel language of ours is full of extremely weird words, like "cleave," which means its own opposite ("to join together" and "to cut apart" ). English is full of these words that mean their own opposite, from "dust" to "oversight" to "weather":

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This is what you get when you let a language run wild, with meaning determined (and contested) by speakers. Not for nothing, my second language is Yiddish, another glorious higgeldy-piggeldy of a tongue with no authoritative oversight and innumerable dialects.

Semantic drift is a feature, not a bug. It's how we get new words, and new meanings for old words. I love semantic drift! I mean, I'd better, since, having coined "enshittification," I'm now destined to have a poop emoji on my headstone. Having coined a word – and having proposed a precise technical meaning for it – I am baffled by people who make it their business to scold others for using enshittification "incorrectly." "Enshittification" is less than five years old, and we know when and how it was invented. If you like it when I make up a word, you can't categorically object to other people making up new meanings for this word. I didn't need a word-coining license to come up with enshittification, and you don't need a semantic drift license to use it to mean something else.