BREAKING: Federal judge in Pittsburgh blocks DOJ's invasive trans care subpoena. The latest loss for DOJ, regarding the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's patients, also brings news that DOJ has started scaling back its requests following its many losses. New, at Law Dork:

“Something like the plate tracker helps to encourage and promote legal transparency and legal accountability, especially when they're going around, switching plates, trying to hide, trying to be undetectable,” said Sherman Austin. Full story: lataco.com/ice-license-... By Aisha Wallace-Palomares

I think it’s important to insist on recalling, at all available opportunities, that this was specifically an attack on a trans instructor over an assignment about gender. Neither of those details are incidental; they are the center of the story

19 states sue HHS over youth gender-affirming care I'd prefer a better source, NPR words this story as if the threat to trans kids is a nebulous, maybe-unlikely possibility & that's frustrating. www.npr.org/2025/12/24/g...

See,the question here for the judge is 'is it okay for a teacher to put a child in danger of serious abuse from a parent or guardian. The judge answers this question with not only a 'Yes' but bars the schools from making rules to protect kids from abuse. And the judge is a fucking monster

The Trump administration has said it is immediately pausing all leases for offshore wind farms already under construction citing “national security risks”. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

and bigger and heavier vehicles wear bigger tires, and produce more pollution (see also, brake dust), whether that weight is some absurd bloated SUV / truck frame, or a battery pack, or both drive less, drive smaller, buy a vehicle sized for your vast majority use cases, not the outliers

Yeah, one thing I’ve noticed over the last decade is people refusing to put two and two together, because if they did, they’d have to deal with the conclusions. The only way to avoid fighting fascism is to willfully avoid seeing the fascism.

I need every cis person who is framing the OU situation as an academic controversy to read this for the context they are missing and so desperately need to be loudly fighting against.

Really American This is insane: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr announced that they will be hiring a "bias monitor" at CBS "who would report directly to the President." State run TV is officially here. Make sure everyone sees this.

Health costs soared so Howard Lutnick - US Commerce Secretary, no less - says that means everyone is going to earn 4.3% more money. It's like having a child fill in as spokesperson.

Judge: Schools can’t bar teachers from telling parents if children are trans Same judge that ruled Ca can't ban assault weapons or large magazines & teachers can post "One nation under God" and "God shed his grace on thee" banners in their classrooms. www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2025/12/23/s...

Hey @housedemocrats.bsky.social @senatedems25.bsky.social @democrats.org - here's yet another candidate that is *winning* by protecting trans people. Do you think maybe you should rethink your stated, "not a winning issue" stance yet?

It's sorta like when a Mob Don would call in the Capos. It's an opportunity for them to kiss the ring and do his bidding - or suffer the consequences. Now in this case there won't really be any lower cost to the insured. Costs may even go up. But he'll brag about it all the same.

Now that's what you call ironic.

I wonder what would happen if trans developers did something like this in a legally binding, enforceable way. Better still, a license that prohibits the user - especially corporate ones - from acting against trans people's equality. Wanna use this code? Gotta support trans rights.

It's a thread about the future of public health in America.

This is one of the ways corporations enable fascism and the erasure of minorities. It's a small way, minuscule in the bigger picture, but they add up.

It would be good for people to know that on this sort of redaction fail, they can do a folder-wide search for key text strings against the entire set of redacted docs all at once.

Granted this was all like a press release on a Friday night except it's Christmas/New Year timing-wise, but what do we do when the Dems give a quiet sigh of relief and conveniently forget about all this come early January because Trump does something distracting?

Worth noting that the student admits that she just threw the thing together in 30 minutes without reading the paper she was supposed to be responding to.

Nothing new prompted this except my spouse ruminating out loud. Do you think Pete Hegseth knows the difference between "the fog of war" and "the haze of booze"?

There’s gonna be a whole lot of Good Germans yelling about how they didn’t know DHS was murdering and torturing abductees and its not their fault

Republicans are actually okay with men in women's bathrooms so long as it's to kidnap women who aren't white. newrepublic.com/post/204732/...

if I were starting a media co-op (or a member of an existing one), I would affiliate with a media union for access to things like retirement pensions and union healthcare plans — much better dollar for dollar than marketplace plans and traditional 401ks

Don’t Force Hospitals to Choose Between Providing Care to Transgender Youth or People With Cancer - Cancer Health www.cancerhealth.com/article/forc... Thank you, Los Angeles LGBT Center and Joe Hollendoner!

Know what I don't miss? People saying "totes" instead of "totally". No real reason, it's just nice to think about completely inconsequential things once in a while. Like a palate cleanser before scrolling my bluesky feed.

"Cybertrucks have a fatality rate of 14.5 per 100,000 units; the Pinto had a fatality rate 17 times lower, at 0.85 fatalities per 100,000 units" www.planetizen.com/news/2025/02...

There’s a reason cultural appropriation got them so mad when it started becoming a thing we examined . As well as why they knew discourse around DEI mattered .. It’s also why the practice of yelling about republicans while allowing people we “agree with” to use them was bad

Case law & CPS guidance recognise: • Advocacy for fair treatment, legal rights, or humane conditions for prisoners is lawful • Concern for prisoners does not necessarily advance the organisation’s aims • Supporting prisoners is not the same as supporting the organisation’s activities or ideology

The redaction revelation is just so symbolic of the incompetence of Trump and the Republican party. Loyalty is everything; competence not so much.

This is what it is to be a trans professional. Any pretext will be used to eliminate us. Our institutions abandon us, refuse to fight for us - even when all we're guilty of is doing our jobs correctly. How are we meant to live in society? How are we supposed to win?

I found myself tonight downloading the CECOT prison 60 Minutes episode that CBS "postponed indefinitely" at the last minute because it's awkward for Republicans. The Fourth Estate has been moving in this direction for some time but I think perhaps it can generally now be called the Fifth Column.

U of Oklahoma fired the grad student TA for giving a Christian student a zero on her paper. Republicans have advanced their destruction of education in America because no one is stopping them. www.news9.com/ou-essay-rem...

The running theme between the Epstein story, banning trans healthcare for minors, religious homeschooling and the complaints about adult children estranging themselves is a fundamental American belief that children are property with no rights of their own

Yeah so when you read a summary of an overview of an area you don’t become a subject matter expert. You’re just a guy who read a Wikipedia article.

"In leaving the Fifth Circuit ruling in place, SCOTUS effectively granted state and local governments in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas the authority to determine what materials you can and cannot read." time.com/7341120/book...

What's so frustrating in this moment of explicit government censorship is how many times groups like the ACLU and others told us they _had_ to defend neo nazis because of the principle of free speech. Now that fascists are in power, none of those principles are protecting marginalized groups.

"His administration has cracked down on cities that ignore housing quotas when planning land use" Except, "Legislation to give Marin a partial exemption from state housing quotas...was extended by Newsom." Guess where Gavin lives? calmatters.org/commentary/2...

NTP at NIST Boulder has lost power It feels like that XKCD of the block tower resting on one block representing the Internet relying one the thankless task of one person. lists.nanog.org/archives/lis... Related old article. Note the table of 1 L water bottles: jila.colorado.edu/news-events/...

Happy Winter Solstice! Or as we say in our SAD afflicted family: There are two seasons, and only two. When the days are getting shorter, and when the days are getting longer. Winter is at its end, and Summer is about to begin. May this next half-trip around Sol be a good one for you.

the broad inability to leave a social media platform owned by a white supremacist and prolific manipulator of public perception really is one of the most discouraging data points right now

They're trying to sell art based on stolen art, have they no shame when it comes to stealing each other's text prompts?

Say, wasn't he Hillary Clinton's running mate?

Wow, for some reason I was not expecting @calmatters.org to carry water for Gavin Newsom's presidential aspirations like this. I give them credit though, for adopting NYT's tactic of taking advantage of most readers inability to separate hard news from op-ed. calmatters.org/commentary/2...

Just a small FYI.

And please also, AGAIN, never forget that they are inherently unethical to use because no one gave permission for their research or writing to be used in it. It is all stolen, and if you're using the plagiarism machine, please keep that in mind.