Having worked for DOGE in any capacity needs to be a mark of absolute shame. When they destroyed USAID they caused the deaths of countless people in foreign countries. Here in the US, they enabled the theft of 300 million citizens’ private info from government databases. They are monsters.

As it's the weekend, let's take a moment to enjoy and celebrate what for the entire country is an unalloyed good-news story!

This is a valid point: whenever you see this sort of high-pressure sales tactic turned on a technology, you can be CERTAIN that it's a fake—actually useful new tech sells itself! And don't underestimate the effectiveness of FOMO as a tool in the hands of a con artist.

The head of the FBI isn't supposed to be getting blackout drunk. He's supposed to be cross-dressing

Barely more than a decade ago, Florida proudly and with a bipartisan vote passed in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants who had been brought here as children and grew up in Florida. DeSantis’ Lieutenant Governor was actually a champion of the bill. Things changed fast.

exactly three democrats voted for gorsuch (the final vote was 54-45, heitkamp, donnelly and manchin), 1 voted for kavanaugh (manchin) and none voted for barrett. bsky.app/profile/alb8...

'The resolution says, "the nuclear family is under attack in our beloved State and nation."' GTFOH

If this actually happens, it may rank as the single most corrupt act in the history of American politics. I cannot believe this is even under discussion.

NEW: Meta co-sponsored a celebration with the Daily Wire for podcaster Isabel Brown, who often foments about Islam and wants to "save the West," which is an interesting, cocktail-party-level look at the company's rightward pivot www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

U.S. voters, media, and industry struggling to understand the concept of policy not being determined by social media

FOUND IT

Yup. This site shows all the anti-trans legislation bills & links to details. I have not reviewed all of them, but every single one of them that I have were sponsored by republicans, and almost all of them had a party line vote R for it, and D against. Fight the real enemy translegislation.com

"They said they wouldn't pay me and would use AI instead if I didn't give them a lower price" They're bluffing. They already tried AI and it didn't work so they're contacting you. No one goes "I'll pay you or do the free one" they just do the free one, see that it's crap, and do the paid one.

this was predictable, but i don't feel all that good about it. among other things, if she can't fly out of the country she's just gonna wind up driving more.

just heard someone refer to a regular bicycle as an “acoustic bike”

Big win for Big Oil at the Supreme Court. Key case holding oil and gas companies accountable for their role for coastal erosion and Louisiana's disappearing coast line related to their operations (not climate change) will be heard in federal (rather than state) court. apnews.com/article/supr...

Holy shit, I have NEVER been more excited for a movie.

The application has remained stable since approximately 9 PM PDT, April 16 despite ongoing Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. We have not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private user data. We will provide a further update by end of day.

Famously vengeful Knicks owner Jim Dolan has long spied on people at his iconic arenas. WIRED goes deep inside the operation that allegedly tracked a trans woman, lawyers, protesters, and more. www.wired.com/story/madiso...

The only president or major party candidate in half a century not to disclose his tax returns—who fought for years, at taxpayer expense, to keep them private, and lost—now wants the IRS to MORE THAN DOUBLE HIS NET WORTH at taxpayer expense as a part of the systematic pillaging he calls a presidency.

NEW from me at @theguardian.com + @documented.net An official at Trump-aligned AFPI said the quiet part out loud: They want to end medical transition for everyone, adults included. Children are the “low-hanging fruit” in their quest to do so. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Now in addition to Utah, Tennessee has become the second state to prohibit lawsuits against oil and gas companies for climate damages. TN's law just passed yesterday

CASAR: You've met with CEOs, you've met with billionaires. How many have you met with that have lost their health insurance? RFK Jr: I've met with the advocacy community on virtually everything C: Have you met with any of the 1.4m who lost their coverage? K: They're almost all illegal immigrants

Pete Hegseth has issued a memo directing the Pentagon to terminate the union contracts of 300,000 workers in the Department of Defense. This illegal move will undoubtedly be challenged in court.

Congrats on “opening” a strait that was open six weeks ago, and all it cost was at least 13 dead service members, thousands of dead Iranian civilians, tens of billions in taxpayer dollars, our loss in global standing, and the Iranian regime’s increase in power. Phenomenal work.

more remarkable that he does this given the above-average number of death threats he must regularly receive

I'd say that this applies to anyone traveling in a car in any city. Being in a car versus walking, riding, or taking transit fundamentally changes how you view a place and your relationship to it. I wish more leaders set this kind of example. www.npr.org/2026/04/16/n...

A dark money group funded in the past by Peter Thiel has given nearly $9 million to a GOP-led PAC that is blanketing Virginia with mailers comparing the upcoming redistricting referendum to Jim Crow www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Orban made grand appeals to “Christianity” and “Western Civilization,” but his “illiberal democracy” was just a scam, a way to make him and his buddies rich while subjecting Hungarians to stagnation and robbing them of their freedom. Sound familiar? (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

trying to finish my James Baldwin reading list and he drops the line “The poor are always crossing the Sahara” within the first five pages like I’m not already depressed enough

The New York Times is now blocking The Wayback Machine from accessing its articles. That means you'll no longer be able to view archived versions of NYT stories published in 2026 and beyond on archive.org. (All those posts you see tracking changes to NYT headlines and ledes? They relied on WBM).

I’ve been trying to make sense of that Justin Fairfax news story and I can’t think of anything new because “man gets served divorce papers by his wife, so he shoots her and then himself” is a banal, unremarkable story in the U.S.. This one’s only notable because he’s a former lieutenant governor

Trump is weird rich coastal elite who is at least as out of touch with real people as Mitt Romney was but gets covered like a man of the people because he’s racist and stupid.

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls And tenement halls And whispered in the sound of silence"

I also don’t like or trust genAI but I don’t think vibe coding was responsible for yesterday’s downtime

i made this exact some post on tumblr and it’s doing numbers there

Antisemitism is structurally necessary for Elon Musk's politics, because he wants to brand himself as the insurgent populist fighting the elite, but as the world's wealthiest person, he needs a definition of "elite" that is not strictly rooted in wealth or corporate ownership.

BREAKING: Louisiana has advanced one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country. It would force homeless people to choose between jail and involuntary treatment, make them pay for it, and if they can't pay, force them to perform unpaid labor. buff.ly/d6rXj5h

Americans elected the only new yorker alive who has never set foot in a bodega bsky.app/profile/atru...

it's a tax on second homes. they already moved.

Remember that the Russians banned Bluesky just the other day

Our team received a report of intermittent app outages at about 11:40pm PDT on April 15, 2026. They worked through the night to mitigate a sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which intensified throughout the day.

From a cartoonist's perspective: drawing the same character's face for 40+ years without going completely insane is an underrated skill. Our artists are basically monks.

1990 TMNT movie farmhouse convalescence Splinter seance scene:

they've been fighting a DoS attack all day. techcrunch.com/2026/04/16/i...

From rose.bsky.team "We had a DoS attack" It’s not just you — Bluesky is (sorta) down Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Thursday after experiencing service interruptions that COO Rose Wang attributed to a denial-of-service attack. The issues began 2:42 a.m. ET time on Thursday.

Thanks, voters

Update: On Thursday, the Senate voted 50-49 to send a measure revoking mining prohibitions on U.S. forest land near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to President Donald Trump for a signature.

Independent approval of Trump's handling of Iran has tanked since March

Here's your friendly Tax Day reminder that not only did Republicans give massive tax breaks to the rich last year, but Trump’s billionaire Cabinet also axed the IRS’s new free filing tool, so now Americans have to pay more to get their taxes done. itep.org/trump-admini...