
https://xitter.cf/t.co/FQzWpV5kvv Audio Consultant/Sound Designer/Broadcaster formerly @thetakeaway @freakonomics music: https://xitter.cf/t.co/LIiWcmcSh1 (he/him).
Joined June 2011
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got lots of music for sale at the ole @Bandcamp site if you please:
jcowit.bandcamp.com/
Plus all this month, 20% off ANYTHING in the store, if you use the code word: "September."
Buy it all! I'm moving and could use the change:)
The field is opening up so much that Democrats are spending in Mississippi and the NRCC Chair is fighting for his life in North Carolina and the head of CAP is still litigating the Michigan primary. With 12 days until the general election, this is a generational run of obsession.
Replying to @Jacket_Spangler
Literally Rogers would have nothing to campaign against her on. He's going to attack her for being too close to Israel? I don't think so. We have to lock in to defeat Rogers here but I don't think the DSCC would have to have spent a dime in Michigan if Haley was the nominee.
jay cowit retweeted
crisis of literacy moment: overwhelming majority of clips on this website show something entirely different than the description & ppl can’t even get themselves to watch the often out of context clip & just rt and start theorizing over the false claims in the description
jay cowit retweeted
This clip of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar is getting a lot of attention tonight, but many of the people sharing it are misstating what she was asked.
When she said, "Not to my knowledge," she was not answering whether she had married her brother.
Chris Hayes had already asked about the brother claim, and she called it “insane” and a right-wing conspiracy theory initially started by a Somali blog.
"Not to my knowledge" was her answer to his follow-up, whether she was related to the man in any way.
People are welcome to criticize her for that — but they should at least get the question she was asked right.
jay cowit retweeted
Me: "Do you know how many times you've tweeted about Piker since you wrote that tweet [about not tweeting about him] on August 30th?"
@mattyglesias: "Probably more than I intended to."
Me: "8 times.... you tweeted about Mike Rogers 6 times. So you're tweeting about the streamer you didn't want to talk about more than the Republican candidate you say you want to defeat."
Yglesias: "Yeah, that's fair."
Me: "Why?"
Yglesias: "What do you want me to say? You got me."
From my new Zeteo interview with the top centrist pundit - on the left, Michigan, Gaza, immigration, polls, electability, and more:
zeteo.com/p/matt-yglesias-me…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Yglesias's posts since Aug 30 include ~5 mentioning Piker and at least 9 mentioning Rogers/Rodgers, not 8 and 6. Hasan posted about Piker ~35 times in the period.
x.com/mehdirhasan/st…
x.com/ThomasVLinge/s…
zeteo.com/p/matt-yglesia…
x.com/mattyglesias/s…
x.com/mattyglesias/s…
x.com/mattyglesias/s…
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x.com/mattyglesias/s…
x.com/augustcohen4/s…
jay cowit retweeted
Beyond targeting Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Trump administration has killed, arrested, deported, and demonized Somalis at home and abroad. theintercept.com/2026/10/21/…
Losing this game, and this series, *after* this moment is the emotional equivalent to: if ending of The Never Ending Story was Bastian riding Falcor, pumping his fist, and then gets knocked off by a plane.
jay cowit retweeted
So, unlike how Dana makes it appear, El-Sayed didn't just say "sure, yeah."
He unequivocally said "yeah, absolutely." And it has now been revealed that the guy asking El-Sayed the question is a GOP operative and far-right Christian nationalist.
jay cowit retweeted
Jan, your boss Bari Weiss’s wife, Nellie Bowles, is in the Epstein files coordinating a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein well after his conviction. Do you disavow Jeffrey Epstein? Because your silence right now is deafening.
jay cowit retweeted
"Grassley arrived for an interview and began speaking to his own staffer as if she were the correspondent. Following an uncomfortable pause, the staffer corrected Grassley and pointed him to the journalist."
lnk.thebulwark.com/4ylDOne
jay cowit retweeted
Literally the definition of racism, per the federal government.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) classifies the phrase "go back to where you came from" as a form of potentially unlawful national origin or race-based harassment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
jay cowit retweeted
When Trump raided John Bolton last year it was met w/ immediate outrage in the opinion pages of NYT, WSJ, WaPo, Atlantic & New Yorker. Since Rep Omar was raided Mon––and subsquently threatened w/ deportation––these same outlets have been silent. I wrote about this double standard
Unlike the raid on John Bolton, the targeting of Omar has elicited zero condemnation from NYT, WSJ, and Washington Post. theintercept.com/2026/10/15/…
jay cowit retweeted
Unlike the raid on John Bolton, the targeting of Omar has elicited zero condemnation from NYT, WSJ, and Washington Post. theintercept.com/2026/10/15/…
jay cowit retweeted
One of the most influential officials in the Reagan WH -- a leading conservative voice for decades and former GOP Congressman from Michigan -- denounces the raid on Ilhan Omar's home and explains at length why it's indistinguishable from prior acts of politicized lawfare:
No, we have no sympathy in any way, shape or form for the socialist left-wing nonsense that Rep. Ilhan Omar peddles day-in-and-day-out on Capitol Hill. But the predawn raid on her home early this AM represents Trumpian political grandstanding and weaponization of the machinery of justice every bit as despicable as what happened under "Joe Biden". This raid on the home of a sitting member of Congress, in fact, is no more justified than was the pre-dawn assault on Mar-a-Lago against a former president.
First and foremost, this is not a case that even remotely involves criminal conduct by Rep. Ilhan Omar. By the accounts given to Fox News and confirmed at the high level by the Department of Justice, it is an investigation into immigration paperwork completed by her father 25-30 years ago when she was a child. But her father, Nur Omar Mohamed, has been dead since June 2020 and can no longer be held accountable, anyway.
Still, the apparent reason for the raid turns on events from 1995 ( her family's refugee resettlement) and roughly 2000 (her father's naturalization), and on factual claims about her birth year, her mother’s death, and the loss of 45-years ago Somali records.
So what we have is a “sins of the dead father” inquiry that turns on the following hideous level of historical trivia:
*Statements or omissions on the family’s 1995 refugee resettlement paperwork under the Somalia program.
*Statements on the father’s own naturalization application around 2000.
*Whether Omar was in fact born on October 4, 1982 (the date used in congressional and Minnesota Legislative Reference Library records), which would have made her 17 and eligible for derivative citizenship.
*Whether her mother actually died when Omar was about two years old (circa 1984), a fact relevant under older rules that generally required both parents to naturalize unless one was deceased.
*Whether original birth and family records were lost during the families flight from Somalia in 1991 and the subsequent four years in a chaotic Kenyan refugee camp.
Omar has long said she derived citizenship in 2000 as a minor when her father naturalized. Under the law applicable to children born before 1983, derivative citizenship for a minor is tethered to the validity of the parent’s naturalization. If a parent obtained citizenship through material, willful misrepresentation, that can in theory be used to challenge the child’s derived status.
It is also a mechanism with high practical and legal barriers. The government must prove material, willful concealment or misrepresentation—not mere inconsistency, incomplete recollection from a war zone, or the absence of a birth certificate that was never issued or was destroyed.
But a minor child who did not prepare or sign the forms, and Rep. Omar clearly didn't, and who has no demonstrated knowledge of any false statement, is not guilty of anything. Courts have historically required clear, unequivocal, and convincing evidence of personal, not derivative, fraud before stripping citizenship.
Moreover, the whole matter is moot, anyway. Had Omar been 19 years old with a living mother in 2000, she would simply have naturalized on her own after the ordinary five-year permanent-residence period that applies to most refugees. That is how large numbers of adult Somali refugees who arrived in the mid-1990s obtained citizenship.
Derivative status for minors was a convenience and a legal pathway that existed precisely because many families arrived with young children. Treating the use of that pathway as inherently suspicious, three decades later, inverts the system that was applied to the entire community at the time.
The truth is, there is no serious public-interest justification for a judicially authorized search of a sitting House member’s home in October of an election year in order to test whether her mother died in the mid-1980s or whether a birth year listed in official records is accurate. Yet that's the sum and substance behind this egregious miscarriage of justice.
Even then,the purported fraud would have been committed by her father, who has been dead for six years and cannot be questioned. Original Somali civil records from a collapsed state are routinely unavailable. The entire exercise rests on the possibility that documents prepared by a now-deceased parent contained a material falsehood that a child then carried forward.
This is the weaponization of federal investigative machinery taken to a new level of barking absurdity. Democrats spent years using selective investigations, leaks, and process as political tools against opponents. Doing the same thing now by a gang of DHS thugs wearing what amounts to red jerseys to raid the home of a sitting congresswoman on the basis of 25- to 30-year-old refugee paperwork and the death certificate of a woman who died when the congresswoman was a toddler is exactly the same thing the Dems did under the last administration.
That is not accountability. It is pre-election grandstanding dressed up as law enforcement.
If there is concrete, recent, personal evidence of fraud by Omar herself, then the Trumpians need to produce it. Fast.
Until then, a search warrant aimed at the alleged paperwork of a man dead since 2020, for the purpose of litigating events from 1982–2000, does not serve the interest of justice. It serves a political narrative peddled by malefactors hiding behind the color of law.
And, no, Omar didn't marry her brother, either. That canard has been debunked so thoroughly that only the densest MAGA Hats credit it.
jay cowit retweeted
Any minimally honest person would acknowledge that this raid is a flagrant abuse of state power and the domestic authorities of DHS against one of Trump's most outspoken critics, right near an election.
The scurrilous claims about @IlhanMN have never had any basis in fact or evidence. Omar has lived in the US for more than 30 years: longer than Melania Trump, or Sebastian Gorka, or Steve Hilton, or countless GOP luminaries. She's lived in the US since she was 13. She's been a US citizen for more than 25 years.
This has as much to do with immigration enforcement as the Trump/Rubio policy of deporting people for the crime of criticizing Israel: which is to say, none at all. It's all about feeding the MAGA base something to excite them and, especially, persecuting one of the most vocal critics of Trump and Israel.
jay cowit retweeted
There was buyers remorse at NYPR on Tanner almost from day one. @semafor reported in May that immediately after joining, she forced several top figures out of the org, surprising staff and leadership. There were also concerns about her management style.
semafor.com/article/05/31/20…
NEW: Christy Tanner stepping down as CEO of New York Public Radio gothamist.com/news/new-york-…
(I work there)
jay cowit retweeted
Between this and his “midterm surprise,” the time to prepare for him to try to steal an election is now.
jay cowit retweeted
Illuminated Jetty. Video projection photograph. 2022-2025.
Prints: justinwood.art/collect/illum…
jay cowit retweeted
laura loomer is a virulent racist but she's pro israel so the randy fine standard of minimal scrutiny will be applied here.
NEW: Laura Loomer is expected to travel with President Trump on Air Force One to Alabama this afternoon, per a source familiar.
Loomer’s previous meetings with Trump have been consequential. Last year Trump fired six national security staffers following a meeting with Loomer in the Oval Office where she presented opposition research against the individuals.


























