Four-byline alert: 🚨 “.. A broker for Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter.” www.ft.com/content/744e...

The problem with this piece from The Hill, like so many others, is it misses core reality: Most fraud is by companies and bureaucrats turned crook, for decades and recent, not by individual recipients. "Welfare queen" myth vs. giant companies that commit fraud to tune of tens of millions

I understand why reporters monitor twitter/x — I would too if I were covering news now — just as with any major platform or outlet where people post or talk publicly. But there's no gain (journalistic or audience) in associating their professional identity, by posting or engaging there —

Okay fine, in this one instance you do have to hand it to Fox News

Hi! Your friendly neighborhood 82nd Airborne vet here to tell you 1,000 paratroopers is a command group+advance party and it makes no sense to send this element unless the plan is to send a fuck ton more ground troops relatively soon!

Always fascinating to watch journalism invent new boilerplate — where'd this "offramp" term originate, and isn't it trivialzing the complexity of the situation the Iran war has created?

This makes perfect sense at a time when electricity prices are about to remain stable due to no geopolitical conflict.

Alternate and beter news angles today would use these programs to address questions for all Americans: What ICE officers at the airports will involve, what the president is actually doing today amid Iran crisis, many other lines of reporting better than spin

Made a quick interactive about federal spending and the federal debt. www.pbump.net/o/trump-like...

Congratulations and good luck to @danamilbank.bsky.social and the new Washington news org but please don't try to be the Post of old or Politico — put your journalism on the side of people and fight to keep them informed. Be a newsroom that looks out for how people are affected by power.

Let's retire this: "saying the quiet part out loud." Say what you mean. Expressed racist ideas. Proposed taking legal rights away from women. Etc.

Doesn’t really work to demand intensely data-driven decision-making from the news side while maintaining the opinion side as a vanity project that alienates your audience.

UPDATE: We just added more info to the Trump Team Financials app! Now including President Trump's most recent financial transactions, which were filed late + released the same day we published our app. You can now see his transactions up until late Jan 2026. projects.propublica.org/trump-team-f...

Sickening racism from a sitting senator. The Ogles hate is contagious. You’re either calling this out or normalizing it. There’s no third option.

✋ Former USG war crimes lawyer here. Apropos of SecDef's remarks this morning: Denial of quarter—even the declaration of no quarter—is a war crime. And recognized as such by the US Government. From DoD's Manual for Military Commissions.

"A dangerous precedent is being set in Trump’s new Middle East war: targeting critical and highly vulnerable desalination plants that provide vital freshwater resources for the region" by @petergleick.bsky.social thebulletin-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/thebulle...

Bulk voter registration forms may soon be unavailable. On Feb. 27, the NCSBE directed county boards to stop providing forms in bulk once their current supply runs out. Learn more in this op-ed by YCV Founder & Executive Director Kate Fellman at youcanvote.org/latest-news. #ncpol #ncpolitics

Just out @propublica.org: How did the Pentagon make the horrible mistake that left more than 150 school children dead? Perhaps because it cancelled an effort to limit such harm in favor of Hegseth’s lust for “lethality.” www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Side note: Media outlets that refused to cave to Pentagon press rules have been coming up with scoop after scoop from military sources. So much for Hegseth’s attempt to strangle journalism

Recent polling confirms that the vast majority of college students including self-defined republicans & conservatives do not feel censored, punished, or indoctrinated by faculty, further undermining the case for all these taxpayer funded right-wing civics centers hechingerreport.org/politicians-...

The worst part of any news week: Sunday morning, when the political class goes on talk shows and news outlets act like what they say is worth headlines, when it's all spin. Cover what they do, not what they say.

This morning @status.news produces a long list of his attacks on press freedom before asking: "Should the WHCA treat Trump as just another president participating in a century-old Washington tradition—or as someone who blatantly attacks First Amendment freedoms at every turn?" Read to remember...

This is a great article and got too little attention when it first came out. @propublica.org is doing amazing work.

For those who don't know, Tillis LOVES Dogs. He holds a "Bipawtisan" parade every year for dogs during Halloween and even dressed up his dog as Kyrsten Sinema one year for Halloween. He hosted a Mardi Gras dog parade last month. #NCPol #NCSen

Got bumped from a hotel reservation in DC because the National Guard extended its stay -- afterward, saw a couple of clusters of Guard members hanging out in streets, doing nothing at all. News coverage moved on, but what is the Guard still doing here (and how much is it costing us?)

In a nutshell, this situation captures journalism's failure to recognize a paradigm shift. Culture, politics, power, technology, all are dramatically different, and journalism needs to operate as such. The dinner, which has long been awkward and full of compromises, no longer works for the times.

Bookmark many of these "hot takes," for they will turn out to be wrong. One of the worst results of the digital age is lightly informed instant commentary: those few who are deeply knowledgeable on Mideast policy, economics, history and war, and those who are well sourced, are the exceptions.

Judd Legum's @popular.info always follows the money — this time, to Saudi Arabia's influence (and giant financial invesments) in Trump's businesses and family, and how that shows in the US Iran war popular.info?utm_campaign...

Yes. We don't need reposts from X. Be part of a different dialogue.

North Carolina elections officials used to avoid participating in partisan campaigns. No more: Republicans who run the elections process are out stumping for party peers, including state auditor David Boliek, who now appoints elections board members. ncnewsline.com/2026/02/25/n...

Planning on listening to this again tonight, seeking the kindness and humanity of Seamus Heaney — "the squeeze of the hand" www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7Kz...

This is exactly right. The Onion quietly left Twitter a month ago and... our weekly subscribers went up. It's because we're doing well here, on Instagram and on YouTube. As a business, being on Twitter is somewhere between useless or detrimental, unless you're selling boner pills.

I can’t help thinking there’s so much money changing hands wrt ICE detention that there aren’t even enough investigative reporters to track www.michiganpublic.org/criminal-jus...

Stephen Colbert has brilliantly played the political censorship by both the FCC and effectively his own employer - CBS . Told he couldn’t air an interview with Democrat James Talarico on broadcast - he went ahead and did it anyway on YouTube

A thing that annoys me about the Axios newsletter is that the tone is consistently “I am one of the top experts on this thing I learned about five minutes ago.” Also that they have 280 sources in the White House but their only source on the left is Rep. Capitulate Middle (D).

This is a great book: "Paper Girl," by Beth Macy @bethmacy.bsky.social Also read Sarah Smarsh. We need a press that understands the reality of Americans

“This is something that governments in Iran and Syria and East Germany and maybe military regimes back in the day in Argentina and Brazil would do, but in the United States? That’s just crazy,” he said.

Civilians have had apparent seizures. One had his eyes roll back. Another had ribs broken. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die,” said a 16-year-old citizen put in a chokehold. The government won’t say if any agents have been punished.

Imagination is a beautiful thing

Such an important story: ProPublica went inside the immigrant detention center for families in Dilley, Texas. Children held there told us about the anguish of being ripped from their lives in the U.S. and the fear of what comes next. @micarosenberg.bsky.social

Greed is killing this country.

This will not right the ship financially — it never has, and Bezos likely knows that. And by not speaking publicly or literally standing behind the position he holds as owner, he supports the many theories that he has bad/ selfish /political intent.

Jeff Bezos ignored letters from top Post journalists, but on Monday “he was there in person to warmly greet Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, on a tour of another one of the companies he owns, his Blue Origin spaceflight startup.” www.theguardian.com/media/2026/f...

Federal officials, in the highest offices, lie so easily, so publicly and so often these days that news reporting must no longer simply quote them without factchecking — (not referring here to @atrupar.com, who does the work of monitoring many things and alerting us to what's said)

Maybe the most important read of the day, from @tressiemcphd.bsky.social Information used as a weapon, by the federal government, threatens every element of the freedoms we claim

1/ BREAKING: Government documents reviewed by ProPublica identify Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez, 35, as the two who fired their weapons during the deadly encounter with Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

Banger of a story from @wsj.com (gift link) So much about this admin throws out rules and ethics about using office to profit the POTUS and family, great example and context here www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Recall that Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered not long ago by a fake cop who showed up at their door looking like this guy