RIFs can’t be done without agency leadership so this is RFK Jr extending his purge of CDC scientists to help Vought’s shutdown agenda. Genuine public health risks created by aggrieved men.

that johnson is more terrified of seating a duly elected democrat who could force an epstein vote than having the entire government shut down really makes me wonder about that epstein vote tbh

It's very striking how clearly they seem to see what's right in front of their faces in way that so many others -- law firm partners, university presidents, members of congress, and on and on -- refuse to.

This man is being Gorilla Channel'd with a rotating selection of AI slop riot porn by several known white supremacists who are secretly running the government.

Exodus 8:2 "If you refuse to let them go, I will send a plague of frogs on your whole country."

Every pundit who criticizes the concept of toxic masculinity seems to begin from the straw man "Masculinity isn't toxic…" So nuance is rarely on the agenda.

The folks claiming this stuff are the same ones who decided “believe women” or “Black lives matter” = calls to upend due process and the rights of white men. It’s a nesting doll of obfuscation and hysterics that allows them to be victims and thus justified to openly pursue a politics of denomination

Ever wonder why Republicans don’t hold town halls? 🤔 Probably because they don’t want their constituents to know what will happen when they LET ACA tax credits expire. So we’ll do it for them:

Scuse me, I have an alternate reality to go join. Do my neighbors (biblical sense) get full civil rights too?

Honestly there isn't a 'left' in America, you only have two parties. If a Democrat was to run in Canada, they would run as a fiscal Conservative. You will never have universal healthcare and a strong social safety net, Americans would never allow that.

I have not accepted a single review this year and I generally do not give a reason but if I did it would be: Currently lacking bandwidth for external labor due to being traumatized by my federal employer.

I'll say this again for the millionth time. He never took a cognitive exam. He took a dementia screener that is administered to all senior citizens admitted to a hospital to determine if they are able to make their own medical decisions. My mother has aced it 25 times. I wouldn't voter for her.

1) Grandma sounds awesome. I wish my elders were like this. 2) One of the many things we lose when the fascists make headway is that good people become more exhausted.

Aw, our cat does this too! Except she thinks we really want our noses to be inside of her mouth during this process, sort of jammed around her gums while she purrs. Her prescription wet food is super stinky and it smells awful in there.

I'm glad MTG draws a line at child rape. But let's not forget that she used to seek out other children that survived school shootings and harass them in public yelling that they were crisis actors. I'm sure she loved her own children that she left home while she travelled to other states to do this.

Needing multiple streams of income to stay afloat is a societal failure not a personal one. You should be able to afford a comfortable lifestyle with one job. You are not lazy.

If the law doesn’t mean anything and every 4 years a new president takes a wrecking ball to big pieces of the government while nothing gets built, it’s just a recipe for anarchy and disintegration.

When the Supreme Court struck down Biden's policies, it was tempting to think: "At least these limits on executive authority will bind Trump if he comes back into office." But no—the court's skepticism of executive power vanished on Jan. 20, 2025. This dynamic is obvious to anyone paying attention!

With SCOTUS set to legalize conversion therapy, I think it's important for states to get around this decision by implementing new legislation applying private rights of action to practitioners of conversion therapy by their victims with large damages and long statutes of limitations.

Someone should start asking why we’re hearing and seeing Stephen Miller so much all of a sudden.

Posobiec isn't a nazi in some generic rhetorical sense of having fascistic impulses or simply being far-right. He is a full-blown Hitler-loving Jew-hating mask-off literal capital-N Nazi, with a longstanding public record to match.

*youth pastor voice*: You know who else was labeled an insurrectionist even though he was innocent

The antifascist members of the Lincoln Battalion, who volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War, were labeled as subversives by the FBI in 1939. They were blacklisted by the US military during WWII; denied promotions & commendations, and were not allowed to serve as officers.

Unfortunately, I 100% know people who: -think the US antifa is a centralized group that operates like a terrorist cell -will now believe that they are the same organization that was active during the Weimar Republic -will not realize why an antifascist group would have been active during that time

I know I know but good god imagine what the GOP would do with a Biden or Obama "we took the freedom of speech away" sound bite

Trump: "We took the freedom of speech away because that's been through the courts and the courts said you have freedom of speech, but what has happened is when they burn a flag it agitates and irritates crowds."

Plaintitff attys concede this language will cause hesitancy in the govt and among federal agents, but say this is a good thing. "We would like them to hesitate before shooting priests and journalists," plaintiff atty says.

Govt. attorney wants language added to the TRO giving feds the ability to disperse an entire crowd, incl. journalists. He cites people possibly "impersonating" journalists to cause chaos. Plaintiff attys claim this could threaten journalistic purpose, i.e., to act as "the eyes" of a community.

Def. atty continues his argument, says "violent terrorist organizations" are trying to doxx agents. This prompts open laughter in the courtroom. "Well, I think we have a different idea of what's going on in Chicago," Ellis tells the def. atty, who is appearing remotely.

Ellia further breaches that feds have turned chemical weapons on unarmed press and protestors, says "we have to live in reality." "They're responding to being attacked," defense attorney says of the federal agents in response. Sighs in the courtroom.

a fortunate quirk is that doing food and medical support for impoverished children, foreign and domestic, *also* is about the biggest bang it is possible to get for our buck. so you can analyze aid on a moral basis or a realpolitik basis and you get the same answer: we should do it

In a very real and practical sense, the elimination of USAID occurred because a) civil servants who followed the law were pushed out, b) unaccountable amoral people were given power, and c) SCOTUS let it all happen. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...

A reminder on the 8th day of this Republican shutdown: Speaker Johnson could call Members back to negotiate to re-open the government any time he wants. He's choosing not to. Republicans would rather raise costs and kick millions of Americans off their health care.

The cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities go far deeper than any of these agencies - almost 70% of 179 people were terminated, despite no change to the agency's budget. There were no savings here - only idealogical destruction. #NEH

The only thing you really need to remember about Chiles v. Salazar is that ADF couldn't find any children harmed by not being able to find counselors who will practice conversion therapy— so they rely on anonymous complaints on Reddit. It's a fucking joke.

Ruben Gallego on whether Trump is talking to Democrats: “Look, the President clearly has some kind of dementia, so I think there's a he's probably talking to himself, or think he's talking to a Democrat, but I sincerely doubt that that's actually he's actually physically talking to a Democrat.“

So if conversion therapy should be legal is it okay for me to waterboard or eletroshock a child until they renounce Jesus? Or is that only for queer and trans kids? Just wondering. Because that sounds like viewpoint discrimination to me if I can't, Justice Alito.

For decades I said to people complaining about the mail that they should shut up, it works well, they should try mailing things in another country if they wanted to see bad mail. Now we are another country.

Since the billionaires, the President, and Congress are avoiding the files, is there a way to follow up on Lutnick's theory that the videos incriminate billionaires by finding the videos to see if this is true? If his theory is correct, somebody has those videos and may still be blackmailing people.

These two things are of a piece, even if the motivations and details differ. Trump’s justification for his authoritarian crackdown is an America that doesn’t exist. @lizzieohreally.bsky.social

This is rampant lawlessness The law says what it says, and Russ Vought doesn't get to unilaterally change that www.govexec.com/pay-benefits...

31 USC 1341 is clear. Each employee of the United States Government... furloughed as a result of a covered lapse in appropriations shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations. "covered lapse in appropriations” means any lapse in appropriations that begins on or after Dec. 22, 2018.

I suspect a number of the “you shouldn’t be mean to LLMs because they may be in some way sentient” people are also “there is NO connection between playing violent video games and doing violent acts” people and uh, they’re gonna have to figure out how to reconcile those two concepts eventually

It’s disturbing to me, when I say to otherwise kind, intelligent, aware people, “wow, bad shit is happening”, and they reply to me, “Oh you have to not watch the news. Don’t read the papers! Just don’t think about it.” And NO that is a TERRIBLE answer. That’s exactly how we got here to begin with.

Furthermore, the current law of the land - the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act - says that ERs cannot turn anyone away based on their ability to pay (or legal status), and nothing that is currently being debated in Congress relating to coverage/benefits would change that federal law

ER doc here! This is a lie. Wait times are up because the American healthcare system is an unsustainable business model and a for-profit national healthcare system just doesn’t work. These problems will continue to get worse until we change that system. It literally has nothing to do with immigrants

We no longer live in a world where the US government funds folks like me to ask how fungi can help farmers. We no longer live in a world where folks like me aspire to do research in the US government.

While this experience feels like a disruption to me in many ways, it was also eye opening. I want to name that my lab did *not* close because we weren’t doing well, it was a casualty of a siege on science by the federal government.

Maybe he really believes that hazing recruits harder in basic will produce good results, but what he's going to get is worse leaders, poor morale and discipline, and lower readiness - and the flag officers whose time he wasted today have already thought about this a lot

WE WON: "This case -– perhaps the most important ever to fall w/in..this district court squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in US..have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally “yes, they do.”"