MOAR BAFROOMZ

Cardiac MRIs, definitely a thing you order when the patient is perfectly healthy and you are absolutely /not/ worried about, say, diagnosing the source of a cardioembolic stroke.

The news has entirely failed to grasp the unprecedented scope of the ICE and DHS budgets. Nothing like it in modern history. A galaxy of public/private surveillance and caging institutions for $100,000,000,000s unleashed on a public that will be forever changed. www.brennancenter.org/our-work/res...

What you want is an Ed Asner or Michael Madsen, an omnipresent B-lister. 2/3 of the pieces will be schlock, but it’s a desert island, go for quantity.

Law prof Josh Braver notes the problem of 'manifestly unlawful' when the civilian legal authorities *say* it's lawful -- and thinks least bad outcome is the military maintains civilian supremacy even if acting illegally. Many (most?) civ-mil relatios scholars agree. www.wsj.com/opinion/diso...

A direct example of illegal chain refoulement.

So Rubio’s “stay out of jail for murder” plan is to execute a 2003-style “the road to Havana goes through Caracas” regional reordering through blunt-force invasions, and assume that success makes him untouchable.

We found the actual Abundance Democrat!

Not exactly on point here, but I find it notable that the NYT’s only Midwestern beats are “drug abuse” and “hit jobs on Democratic politicians.”

Fitting that none of these words are in the Bible except for the book of Revelation.

Just ten years ago, “the President is mentally incapacitated and being impersonated by an artificial intelligence” would have been the major plot beat in a technothriller, now the markets are just pricing it in.

To be fair, while Trump hates fentanyl, but he’s never wavered in his genuine, heartfelt love for cocaine.

trump: “no see we HAVE to blow up those boats in the caribbean, they could be carrying drugs!” also trump:

I’ve been lukewarm on going after the uniformed military on this, as opposed to hauling up civilian leadership on murder charges, but this is an order to carry out a clear-cut war crime, the worst since Vietnam.

Life did not need to become an ‘80s black comedy dystopia, this is something we chose to happen.

“This book describes the four strains of extreme far-right counterliberalism that the GOP has embraced in a project to remake America as an authoritarian state. I wish it had blamed Kamala Harris more.”

OK - pie discourse - best pie story: In 2016, we were living in Andover, in the UK. My wife was assigned as an exchange officer at the Army Air Corps base at Middle Wallop (yes, really).* The US Army has a tradition: senior leaders, in dress uniform, serve junior troops Thanksgiving dinner. /1

We’ve blown right past “what you’re doing now is what you would have done in 1930s Germany” to just “1930s Germany.”

Being among the first interrogated and ultimately fired by DOGE, I certainly felt we were facing the business end of a right-wing conspiracy theory 🧵

"Now, me to you, I know what it’s going to take to get a peace deal done: Donetsk and maybe a land swap somewhere." -- Steve Witkoff, in his call to Putin aide Yuri Ushakov Read the whole transcript of the Oct 14 call. It's amazing. Gift link (for 7 days) ⤵️ www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

The regime-linked oligarch’s media company is pleasing the leader by paying off a disgraced director who filmed a hagiography of the leader’s wife. Real post-Soviet republic bullshit.

Hegseth literally attacking the BSA for no longer excluding girls, something they only did due to a collapse in participation because their “boy-friendly spaces” were mostly child-predator friendly.

The important thing is that she’s openly declaring CBS will be a right-wing propaganda outfit with a specific political agenda, not a newsroom, but also, “40 yards” of /what/? Where does this metaphor even come from?

“Don’t judge MbS by the days he personally ordered a man to be bloodily dismembered for criticizing him, judge him by the days he /doesn’t/ do so” is quite a thing to willingly send to press.

There isn’t a lie to be found in this article, but note the total omission of 2.5mm Black and Latino folk, as well as the fast-growing Asian, Middle Eastern, and South Asian populations to the north, all of which cut against total white homogeneity. In conclusion, Dallas is a land of contrasts.

Hegseth will eventually prompt the interesting question of “can you recall a former officer for UCMJ prosecution of war crimes committed as SecDef?”

On the patently unlawful boat strikes It's hard for USGs to claim ‘mistake of law’ or ‘advice of counsel’ – when they’re firing lawyers who wouldn't sign off on the strikes. WaPo's new revelations on firings or removals: 1) CIA General Counsel 2) NSC Legal Adviser 3) CIA Mission Center’s lawyer 🧵

ICE threatening to smash in a judge’s car windows to kidnap someone they had no legal right to lay hands on.

Fucking *chiropractic* and *theology* made the cut, nursing didn't. Seriously.

Judge Ellis derides Greg Bovino as a serial fabulist who brazenly lied on the stand and seemingly considered it funny to perjure himself. cst.brightspotcdn.com/49/34/daecfb...

I haven’t seen this get covered in English yet so let me translate. Grok is saying that the crematories at Auschwitz’s were conceived as disinfectant chambers, not mass execution and that the law has made it taboo to acknowledge that this is what they were X is a Nazi site. Get off the Nazi site.

Needless to say, if you’re asserting privilege in response to a direct question from a judge, your day is already a career low and it’s only going to get worse.

Billionaire bubble mind means not recognizing that it’s less humiliating to get roasted by your own AI than to program it to say shit like this.

When you get tired of digging and just decide to dynamite the ground beneath your feet.

The Senate refusing to bend is a key moment. Trump will of course prevaricate, obfuscate, and finally simply demur to release anything that makes him look bad, but that simply keeps the issue alive politically and legally, while he continues to bleed support, both political and institutional.

Hours after Speaker Mike Johnson confidently declared that Senate Republicans would "fix" Thomas Massie's bill requiring release of the Epstein files, the Senate just passed the bill as is by unanimous consent without any changes. A massive, embarrassing debacle for Johnson. It now goes to Trump...

NEW: For months, the Social Security Administration was quietly sharing sensitive data about immigrants with DHS. Now it’s official. read @telliotter.bsky.social:

NEW: The White House intervened in a DHS investigation. The target? Sex offender Andrew Tate. The WH person? Paul “Nazi Streak” Ingrassia. Who was previously also Tate’s lawyer. A banger from @robert-faturechi.bsky.social & Avi Asher-Shapiro www.propublica.org/article/andr...

The man is actually going to order paramilitary forces to raid churches on Christmas Eve so he can drag worshippers away from the altar but sure, Republicans, tell me he isn't literally the Antichrist.

When someone blows the whistle on BOP mistreatment of inmates, allegedly reassigning them to the one place where they can gather direct evidence of BOP offering favorable treatment to politically-connected inmates is not the smartest move, especially when they know to only talk to Congress about it.

oh my god you have to read this until the end www.telos.news/p/part-1-how...

I know nothing about Charlotte, but can’t imagine that armed raids on country clubs are going to generate a lot of goodwill amongst the local gentry.

Can you indict someone for crimes against the humanities?

This whole NYT account about the weaponization of DOJ is beyond disturbing. Kinda feels like the US government fell in January. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

He’s very explicitly stating right here that he’s going to hide documents from Congress. Having said that, I don’t think litigation — or having admin officials or federal agents questioned under oath by Congress about the contents of those files — is going to go well for him, legally or politically.

a big runoff last night, in New Orleans: Calvin Duncan was exonerated after spending *28 years* in prison; he tried to get his own case records from the New Orleans city clerk—but the office dragged its feet. So Duncan ran to become city clerk himself, and yesterday ousted the incumbent.

Trump's illegal murders in the Caribbean just got worse. An internal DOJ memo on the bombings says the victims are waging war on the US, but per NYT, it extensively cites the WH's *own claims* to this effect as evidence! It gets even darker than that. 1/ (new piece) newrepublic.com/article/2032...

Trump now profits from 22 foreign developments, several tied to gov land or state-linked partners. That gives foreign officials leverage over him. Our assessment warns when executive decisions overlap with private revenue streams, democratic checks weaken. www.citizensforethics.org/reports-inve...

To be fair, she /was/ convicted of something she didn’t do (run a company without committing massive and systemic financial and clinical fraud).

Things are gonna be great if you’re the kind of person whose problem with the Iraq occupation is that it wasn’t close enough to the continental United States.