To aid offshore oil drilling, federal govt strips protections for one of the world’s rarest whales, threatening the survival of a species that calls the waters off the #Florida Gulf Coast home. www.tampabay.com/news/environ... via @maxchesnes.bsky.social

Today’s Daily Cartoon, by Joe Dator and Kevin Maher.

NEW FISH! NEW FISH!

The group vying for Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund is a who's who of "Oh yeah, that f**king weirdo"

Can someone in gov data world take a look at this? There's a ton of older CFPB data still on the site—which obviously doesn't mean there wasn't a mass deletion of something ("posts"?), I'm happy to believe that there was, but I would really like to know what got taken down.

Bhattacharya’s legacy The US had a “world-class Ebola lab in Frederick, Maryland, with the NIH,” designed to develop vaccines & treatments. The lab would normally be swinging into action. “But that lab was shuttered last year, with staff laid off abruptly”😢 www.theguardian.com/world/2026/m...

The president of Cornell hit two students with his car, lied about what happened, and got away with it. The story illustrates an under-reported crisis in higher education: administrators and the trustees they answer to are increasingly hostile to the idea of college itself. I wrote about it here:

Because this country likes to forget what it’s capable of, I take it as a duty to remind us. We sit at the brink of the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction — a Second Redemption. And the end of Black political power means the end of democracy itself.

Trump's “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any" quote about COVID is how his administration approaches every problem they don't want to feel responsible for seeing or solving

Wow. Just wow. Just when I thought their corruption couldn’t sink any lower it has. Thank you @lizoyer.bsky.social for keeping us informed! Call your Senators. This is bribery for Republicans in exchange for pushing the slush fund through. It’s sickening.

To keep people up to date: six people who exercised their first amendment rights had their lives overturned and were forced to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys fees because of clear prosecutorial misconduct.

HOLY SHIT prosecutors kicked off grand jurors and then re-presented the case against the Broadview 6, then altered the grand jury transcripts to hide it from the judge. www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news...

if you're cis and you are asked by your management to police bathrooms, "can you confirm in writing that you are ordering me to approach customers to discuss their sex?" is an email no manager wants to reply to

He played golf last Saturday and Sunday.

Ebola responders say aid cuts by Western nations left them ill-equipped for outbreak www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/0...

"They leaked his tax returns, they tried to destroy him." If revealing your official tax returns -- something every single president and VP for forty years before Trump did voluntarily -- could possibly "destroy" you, that is the scandal.

God, I love archivists. That is all.

IT'S JURASSIC PORK

COVID-19 death toll far higher than official numbers, says WHO "The World Health Organisation estimates that the COVID-19 pandemic caused 22.1 million excess deaths globally between 2020 and 2023. The figure is more than 3 times higher than the officially reported 7 million COVID deaths worldwide"

"There was a warrant issued for his arrest, so we expect that he will show up here by his own will or by another way" Blanche said to applause in a packed auditorium of officials & Cuban Americans. Considering the US has no extradition treaty with Cuba, makes you wonder what the "other way" is

Call me naive, but I was really hoping for a serious NYT news analysis about how these corrupt acts set Trump above the law, make a mockery of separation of powers, violate the 14th amendment, and cannot stand. Instead: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/20/us/politics/trump-fund-legal-questions.html

is that good bsky.app/profile/chri...

The parking attendant paused by the double-length bay. Intended for mobile homes and cars with trailers, it was currently occupied by a sleeping dragon. No parts of it extended beyond the lines, and the paper ticket was clearly displayed, impaled on a horn. The parking attendant moved on.

Is anyone else getting tired of witnessing the most astoundingly blatant corruption in American history happening in plain sight and almost half the country cheering it on, overwhelmingly to their own detriment?

BREAKING: Harry Dunn and Daniel Hodges, two law enforcement officers who clashed with Jan. 6 insurrectionists, have sued to block the Trump 'slush fund'. They're asking a federal judge to find the creation of the fund illegal and reverse any transfers that Treasury has made to DOJ to implement it.

The longer you look at this, the worse it gets

This is absolutely true. The presidents we would have previously held up as examples of corruption have been repeatedly lapped by Donald Trump.

Become Radicalized.

Have you been injured? #slushfund

BREAKING: Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and billionaire Rick Jackson are advancing to a GOP runoff for Georgia governor — pitting two election deniers against each other for the Republican nomination.

Rep. Thomas Massie has conceded. Republican voters have rejected the member of their own party most responsible for forcing the vote to release the Epstein files. All because Trump, a man named in the Epstein files thousands of times, didn't want them released. That says a lot. None of it good.

The New York Times calla this a “deal” even though it’s a deal between Trump and himself, which means it’s a scam, not a deal.

The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal: “[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

man wonder what kind of stuff inspired the attack on the san diego islamic center

recorded this just before news broke that the settlement shields the trump family from IRS audits which is OUTRAGEOUS youtu.be/hraZ4tIuDWA?...

The whole AI-to-make-graduation- efficient is bizarre. The most efficient way to award diplomas is by mail; there’s no logical need for ceremonies. The whole reason they exist is for the human touch & so people can celebrate each other. AI for “efficiency” here is nonsensical (& doesn’t even work🫠)

One imagines that if was a a synagogue that synagogue in San Diego was was shot up by two terrorists with record of what the police chief called "hate speech," killing five, that the New York Times would find space for it as one of their lead stories. Mosque, who cares?...

😕

Here is Elon Musk bragging about how he "accidentally" canceled all Ebola prevention efforts (DOGE never fully restored the canceled contracts)

On the eve of their primary, Republicans have grown nervous about their prospects in November against Mr. Ossoff. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/18/u...

1. What I found in Trump's new 113-page financial disclosure report. It doesn't look good.

“The Yale findings show that the Trump administration is literally treating the presence of Black students as evidence of illegal racial discrimination.”

The "resolution" here is a $1.7 billion slush fund that would be used to pay off Trump allies who were prosecuted for their role in a coup against the United States government, which is almost as outrageous as the president arranging a payoff to himself.

Six Ebola Experts Walk Into a Virtual Bar The Bundibugyo ebolavirus outbreak is a disaster unfolding before our eyes, so our expert panel had to discuss over drinks rasmussenretorts.substack.com/p/six-ebola-... I trust Dr. Rasmussen's take on this Ebola outbreak. @angierasmussen.bsky.social

Good morning THIS is my worry. The Andes hantavirus outbreak itself has very low epidemic or pandemic potential—but the anemic, chaotic, slow US response is indicative of a HUGE problem: the MAGA/MAHA folks have decimated pandemic preparedness/response & we’re screwed in the next actual pandemic

I can’t believe the guy who invented “groceries” would be so unconcerned about prices

Pete Buttigieg to CNN just now.. about Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's controversial road trip reality show "I love road trips. I love America. I actually took a taxpayer-funded road trip lasting about seven months. It was in Afghanistan. This is something very different"

This is like a setup to a horror movie where you actually root for the ancestral spirit of vengeance to kill everyone.

ABC killed fivethirtyeight.com, pulling down thousands of stories and dashboards. I can bring them back, but I can offer you https://fivethirtyeightindex.com, my new index of everything captured by archive.org.