I wonder if they're going to try to do an end around the agency heads again. Because most of the agencies have been trying to bring back at least a fair portion of people cut by DOGE/Vought. My best bet is this just leads to another attempt to kill CFPB

feels a bit weird that we keep having these stories about individual cyber attacks but without anyone really joining the dots and going "okay, shall we maybe talk about this as a major global story"

I think about this chart 24/7

An under-the-radar but huge story: in less than 2 weeks, Microsoft plans to end support for the Windows 10 operating system, which is currently used on 42% (!) of all PCs globally. Over 400 million computers will be vulnerable to hacks or destined for the dump if users don't pay up.

New Washington Post poll on who voters blame for the government shutdown:

This is a perfect example of how Donald Trump views the entire federal government, and really the whole country, as a thing that belongs to him personally. L'État, c'est moi.

The White House is threatening "imminent" mass firings. Down at the ground level though the things you'd expect to see in advance of that simply aren't happening. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/shutd...

in particular, "hahaha we are using the shutdown to enact project 2025 by firing ideologically unwelcome federal employees" and "the dastardly Democrats shut down the government" are not coherent messages

This ransom memo should be as big a deal as the Kimmel suspension. It probably won't be but the stakes are higher for higher ed.

one reason to insist on historically informed political analysis is to avoid the kind of punditry that takes Atlantic articles to be the only relevant context (or an audience that will fall for that)

there are simply no words to describe the grief of this happening on yom kippur.

Surreal moment for America. Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks — they would be sued into oblivion. Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.

Cracks in the dam, ppl. Cracks in the dam.

Some schools will be starved of resources. Other schools will be offered bribes. The end goal is the same. To make the universities an extension of the Trump administration. Shame on any of these institutions willing to take the bribes.

DHS includes a bunch of false and defamatory statements in their tweet about Kilmar Abrego Garcia as they prepare to send him to Uganda.

Don’t get mad at the muppets for playing the Riyadh Comedy Festival, it’s the only way they can save the theater

No joke: one of the most racist, idiotic, dangerous things I’ve ever read. A stunning inversion of reality, turning segregationists into terrified refugees, while actual victims of segregation are transformed into a kind of invading horde who seized inner cities by force - and should be now removed.

Consumers do in fact say “fuck this I don’t want it” all the time. today might be a real good day to ask somebody at Xbox or Disney about that for example.

"Lutnick, in a notable break with the DOJ, claimed late pedophile Epstein was 'the greatest blackmailer ever' — and may have traded the feds video of his rich and well-connected associates getting massages from young women in exchange for a controversial 2008 plea deal."

This short passage from a Politico afternoon newsletter captures a huge amount of the advantage gained by lying at scale and the why the DC press corps remains wired for the GOP.

Let's be clear a what's happening here: the "censorship" and "bias" narrative is being extended to Wikipedia bc the far right knows that getting bullshit into LLMs is how to shape reality as "answer engines" replace search engines. Wikipedia is core to that fight so the grievance blitz is here.

They are stealing taxpayer dollars from blue states because Democrats in Congress refuse to give Trump a blank check for his authoritarianism. Corruption. Coercion. Blackmail. Lawlessness.  I won’t bend the knee to a wannabe dictator and his cronies. We will prevail.

Posting this three hours before the start of Yom Kippur is quite a choice

Twenty 50-5 messages for the effort of a single quality meme, then let the discourse do the optimization for you. The logic of botfarms slowly consuming media

Ezra Pound brain.

The White House abruptly terminated a large share of the council members advising the National Endowment for the Humanities, an advisory board to the head of the government’s grantmaking agency, retaining only four Trump appointees.

Vought easily the most underrated villain in the administration (Miller and RFK Jr are properly rated).

an extraordinary person with an extraordinary legacy who nevertheless didn’t take herself too seriously when Gary Larson published this cartoon, she was in Africa and her institute was horribly offended and drafted a complaint the whole thing was defused when she returned - she found it funny

JUST IN: Federal judiciary discloses it can use alternative funding, including filing fees, to continue operating through Oct. 17. Earlier statement suggested it might curtail operations after Oct. 3. Stmt: www.uscourts.gov/data-news/ju...

well now!!

Zero chance they are doing these according to law and regulation.

NEW: At least 10 watchdog websites are dark after OMB withheld funds from a watchdog council, removing access to thousands of watchdog reports and required whistleblower links. OMB's move to withhold funds - which has received Republican pushback - is separate from the shutdown.

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

“For years, the right has vilified federal workers as nameless, faceless bureaucrats. But the truth is … they’re the people who live and work in our communities and they are being hurt.” Sara Nelson, President of @afacwa.org in 2019 when Trump et al shut down the government. Workers have power.

Yeah, I spaced the tariffs for a second. SCOTUS won't let him fuck with the money, won't let him completely rewrite the constitution, but will dramatically expand executive power in a way that lets them do takes-backsies when a dem is in office.

so that’s a little different

this is smart I think but we already see some of this in the Trump Style

BREAKING: The Supreme Court allows Lisa Cook to remain as a Federal Reserve Board Governor for now. The court schedules oral arguments for January on DOJ's request to allow Trump's purported firing of Cook to take effect during litigation.

We did not have shutdowns until Jimmy Carter’s Attorney General issued an opinion saying that he thought they were necessary in case of a budget impasse.

Literally removing the stakes to push the odds.

Trump's FCC yesterday voted to kill a program that provided free Wi-Fi to rural school kids at no cost to taxpayers, falsely claiming the program was "illegal" and was being used to "censor Conservative ideology."

i think this is poor tactically by Johnson et al; they will 100% take the blame for a shutdown, all of it, if they’re talking about it as an opportunity to do things they want to do