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mikewhelanjr.bsky.social
I write and garden and love my wife while living in the middle of nowhere. It’s a pretty great gig. Used to lawyer, now I legaltech.
548 posts 420 followers 271 following
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Khaman Maluach is living an incredible, and heartbreaking story, as his home country faces visa revocations from the U.S. state department: www.usatoday.com/story/sports...

Today’s unsigned, unexplained #SCOTUS ruling clearing the way for removals of migrants to third countries without any additional process is a disaster—not just on the merits, but because of the government misbehavior that it not only refuses to punish, but effectively rewards. Me, via “One First”:

CATO: “New nonpublic data from ICE indicates the government is primarily detaining individuals with no criminal convictions of any kind… 93% had no violent convictions… 65% no criminal record at all…” @MarshaBlackburn www.cato.org/blog/65-peop...

“We have to wear masks because people are beating us up and you know people are beating us up because we have to wear masks.” Always the circle for these people.

Nippon Steel finalizes its deal to own 100% of US Steel. Which is exactly what both Trump and previously Biden claimed they opposed. One difference: Trump will now personally have veto power over various production/staffing decisions. www.cnn.com/2025/06/18/b...

The strong need to stand against the strong if the weak are to have any chance. We can’t stand by and watch immigrants dragged away by masked men. This is a risky ask, obviously, but I don’t know how we get to the other side of this without the resistance of the privileged.

Are we the baddies?

So in one 24 hour period these people made up a whole story with no basis in fact to make the guy on the right look like a guy on the left and then used AI people at a parade to make the president not look weak. The Information Age, indeed.

Uh, Chicago is in the Heartland, and we’re proud of it.

Fell behind on Andor, so am catching up. Watched Episode 9 this evening. You know. The wild one where they arrest a Senator after manufacturing a fake crisis that required the military to put down protestors. So unrealistic.

They’re being so “small government conservative”

Are we the baddies?

Is it weird that this makes me want to travel to DC to protest? I’m advised to go to the No Kings rally in Chicago, but this is tempting.

We had a full rainbow day yesterday. Not sure if I’ve ever seen that.

Los Angeles (in Stephen Miller’s mind)

This seems very bad

To state the obvious: you shouldn’t trust the Substack app to save the draft you’ve been working on for hours. Please, don’t ask me how I know.

The final peony blooms of the season. If I'd known it was this easy to make my wife happy, I might have planted her favorite flowers years ago.

This has to be AI, right?

They lied about “woke cancel culture” being a violation of the First Amendment so they could actually violate the First Amendment.

We all recognize that this man has never read the Constitution, right?

This is very true, and it’s especially poignant for people who (should) do thinking work like lawyers. Law school did a bad job explaining what “thinking like a lawyer” is, but I promise it’s a real thing, and we need it. Sometimes you just have to do the work.

This is some crazy

maybe if the tech nerds had ever had a humanities class they'd understand that the way people interact with technology in Star Trek (speaking with computers, hand motions in the air,) are largely because those are ways to tell a story to viewers and/or look neato, not because they're actually useful

Bluesky puts a lot of weird stuff in my timeline and is not very good at getting rid of that stuff when I tap “less like this,” but this one’s weird. Either it knows I speak Italian, which is freaky, or it doesn’t and gives me Italian language stuff anyway, which is awful user experience.

So, the budget bill that passed the House would likely cripple access to law school, medical school, and other unfunded graduate school opportunities by eliminating Grad Plus loans. Students would be forced to use high-interest private loans that lack public service repayment.

They think the Constitution says things it just doesn’t say but have no idea what it actually says. Honestly, do we think Donald Trump has ever read the Constitution??

My god. They’re just so unqualified.

And how do they incentivize Americans to buy more expensive American dolls unless the price of Chinese dolls go up for consumers??

Show us your writing process in a gif

It’s amazing how much better this country is than Stephen Miller and his ilk believe. Our capacity to serve is limited by few things more than our bigotry. We never lose when we do more.

www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of...

Philip K Dick would never write an apocalypse this unbelievable

Wait until the Mormon Trumpers realize what the Book of Mormon says about characters like him. It’s not subtle.

How my wife responds when I explain why I bought more tomato seedlings

Justice Jackson pushes back on Team Trump: English common law isn't relevant because the U.S. doesn't have a king.   "The fact that courts back in the English Chancery couldn't enjoin the king, I think is not analogous or indicative of our system. The executive is supposed to be bound by the law."

I thought Rogue One might have been the best Star Wars project, but after rewatching it after an Andor binge, I felt such a drop off. Maybe Rogue One was really good but Andor was genuinely great. Maybe movies just can’t keep up with the storytelling power of a TV series.

Rich people famously don’t care about money.

There's literally no difference between a public national monument approved by Congress and a $400 million jet the president keeps