The only fun Stalin fact.
The only fun Stalin fact.
Shame on the courts for going along with the pernicious fiction that American national security required stripping employees of union protections
9 CDC Directors going back to 1977 speak out. What RFK Jr has done to our nation’s public health system "should alarm every American." It "is unlike anything we have ever seen at the agency, and unlike anything our country has ever experienced." www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
We’re only a few years removed from creatjng a vaccine to protect against a deadly airborne virus in a matter of months. Now, we have a scion fail son running the CDC into the ground not because it failed, but because its success conflicts with RFK Jr’s eugenicist ideology.
jaoswald.bsky.social (@jaoswald.bsky.social) reply parent
Wild guess: they are trying to solidify the marketing around their bacon hamburgers: if they sell bacon in the grocery store, they must really know bacon, have good bacon, they specially choose the bacon that goes on their burgers, etc., and the next time you think of Wendy's, you think of bacon.
During Jim Crow, many states mandated that anyone seeking to register to vote or apply to a state university had to have multiple voters/alumni “vouch” for their character. It was an easy if unsubtle way to maintain all-white (or mostly-white) institutions
We've got more for you on Labor Day. More than 82 percent of civilian federal workers have had their right to collectively bargain stripped in the largest act of union busting in US history. Unions are a voice from below, and their autonomy poses a threat to autocrats, Harold Meyerson writes:
jaoswald.bsky.social (@jaoswald.bsky.social) reply parent
I am not at all confident that economic pain in red-voting districts will hurt GOP turnout or voting: any and all failures of the system can be successfully blamed on "those people" in the blue areas not following MAGA principles. It's reactionary politics, not economic statistics.
Going after the judges again:
Just an astonishing, powerful op-ed that drives home what we are losing and what's already been lost. We are so incredibly fortunate to live with the advances modern medicine and health science. Destroying and stymieing it is just unforgivable. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
A plane carrying Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the EU's executive arm, suffered from jamming of GPS navigation while flying over Bulgaria. The authorities believe that Russia was behind the operation, European officials said on Monday.
Pure distillation of Trump's view that positive-sum trade is literally impossible—buying = losing & selling = winning, automatically But also a good view into the inconsistencies of his trade "demands". He's mad at India for its tariffs, but even zeroing them wouldn't be enough?
like i was saying, i think maha is a very, very vulnerable coalition right now
Trump on RFK Jr., the CDC, and vaccines (a translation). He seems to be saying that he was shown data about COVID19 vaccines being safe and effective, but that the pharma companies didn’t show those amazing data to anyone else, like RFK Jr. He thinks this is why there is a “mess” at CDC.
Keir Starmer just appointed Tim Allan, a board member of the anti trans hate group, Sex Matters, to be his new communications director.
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
Prima facie, Elon Musk appears to be manipulating X platform for specific political voices he supports (as well as using his own account to amplify the far right & furthest right). In particular the platform dynamic has shifted & is helping Tommy Robinson to be amplified more than Nigel Farage.
It is insane to me that the richest man in the world is using his global megaphone to call for millions of British people to be rounded up and deported (including my family) and somehow this isn’t even news.
Oh boy whatever happened in New Hampshire the other night must be horrible
The Trump administration will consider reopening "insane asylums" to house homeless people.
Remembering when the NYT went on a weeks-long bender covering a decades-old real estate deal the Clintons were involved in, in which they *lost money*.
Section 1013 of the ICA is crystal clear that, if you want to defer budget authority, you need to go through the procedure laid out in Section 1013. So what's OMB's approach? Just (incorrectly) assert that all sorts of deferrals aren't actually deferrals.
![PROPOSED DEFERRALS OF BUDGET AUTHORITY SEC. 1013. [2 U.S.C. 684] (a) TRANSMITTAL OF SPECIAL MESSAGE.—Whenever the President, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the head of any department or agency of the United States, or any officer or employee of the United States proposes to defer any budget authority provided for a specific purpose or project, the President shall transmit to the House of Representatives and the Senate a special message specifying— (1) the amount of the budget authority proposed to be deferred; (2) any account, department, or establishment of the Government to which such budget authority is available for obligation, and the specific project or governmental functions involved; (3) the period of time during which the budget authority is proposed to be deferred; (4) the reasons for the proposed deferral, including any legal authority invoked to justify the proposed deferral; (5) to the maximum extent practicable, the estimated fiscal, economic, and budgetary effect of the proposed deferral; and (6) all facts, circumstances, and considerations relating to or bearing upon the proposed deferral and the decision to effect the proposed deferral, including an analysis of such facts, circumstances, and considerations in terms of their application to any legal authority, including specific elements of legal authority, invoked to justify such proposed deferral, and to the maximum extent practicable, the estimated effect of the proposed deferral upon the objects, purposes, and programs for which the budget authority is provided.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:drfb2pdjlnsqkfgsoellcahm/bafkreiccasi3vsp4k2c7ao5egwffel2c5mkbjv3eumiwuqnbopzcusphsq@jpeg "Click to view full size")
But no matter what they say, pocket rescissions are illegal - and the exact part of the law that they claim *grants* the power actually directly prohibits it instead. However, even if the law did grant them the power, it would be unconstitutional under the LIVA decision. bsky.app/profile/bbko...
Next, they have changed 112.2 to claim the power to do pocket rescissions. On the left is the old section 112.2. On the right is the relevant part of the updated section 112.2.
Enormous impoundment-related changes in Trump/Vought's Circular A-11 update from Friday, which is OMB's guidance to agencies They: -removed the definition of impoundment -said GAO's impoundment determinations don't matter -claimed pocket rescission authority -claimed profound deferral authority 🧵
This is VERY. BAD. Russell Vought at OMB wants to rip away Congress' most important power, the power to set the budget, and put it in the hands of a president-king. This illegal impoundment stuff runs contrary to the most important principle of Anglo-American gov't—
After banning visas for Palestinian children seeking medical care, the Trump administration is now banning any Palestinian passport holders from entering the United States. Extraordinary bigotry being converted into US policy. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/w...
jaoswald.bsky.social (@jaoswald.bsky.social) reply parent
You can employ part-time nannies who cover this period between school letting out and the parents getting home.
Crime is literally lower than it has been in the entire life of every single non-senior-citizen American. If you are under age 65 you have never lived at a time with lower property crime rates, lower violent crime rates or lower homicide rates. Never.
Wait, there's a new Tesla Master Plan? The first one was literally the result of Musk's temper tantrum over Martin Eberhard getting all the credit when Tesla came out of stealth in 2006, because he was the actual founder and CEO. None of it has held up as a reflection of Tesla's actual strategy.
jaoswald.bsky.social (@jaoswald.bsky.social) reply parent
Also, that it is difficult to operate in-person schools when teachers get seriously ill in large numbers.
But it's always like this. Democrats try to do the right thing. They fall short, like humans do. Everyone teams up to shit on them. Republicans don't even bother pretending. They lie, they smear, they destroy lives, they get people killed, & they face NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT.
At every single second, they worked their hardest to destroy trust, to foment doubt & anger & resentment, to *prevent* solidarity. And those lies mattered. The vaccine skepticism deliberately spread by the right led to 100s of 1000s of preventable deaths. Again: *they caused mass death*.
This is the provision Ensign cited as the basis for the government's authority to summarily remove unaccompanied migrant children. I’d love to hear from immigration lawyers, but having briefly looked at it… it’s so frivolous it’d be laughable if it weren’t so cruel. (Am I wrong??)
Remember Nate Silver refuses to use Bluesky and says you'd have to pay him over a million dollars to use it, so I'm going to suggest he not only doesn't know what "normal" people like, he doesn't even know what Bluesky is.... Signal and the noise guy is full of noise once again.
What’s funny about this is that when the Dems nominated a non silent Gen nominee without a hint of heath issues the media outwardly decided it was untoward for Mr.Trump to debate her again when he was having a mental breakdown
The biggest problem: the police unions, which are usually tightly connected to the local Republican Party apparatus & thus very powerful. Camden got around this in 2013 by axing its police department & transferring its functions to the county sheriff's office: www.camdencounty.com/ccpd-buildin...
9. DeSantis this weekend attempted to deflect responsibility, blaming the legislature: “There’s laws that are on the books that I enforce that I may not fully agree with, but I took an oath to do it and so that’s the way the cookie crumbles, and so but there was a change in law."
6. A judge ruled that officers had “no probable cause” to arrest the man after Suarez’s attorney pointed out that crosswalks are not included in the state’s definition of traffic devices. Moreover, courts have repeatedly ruled that sidewalk chalk is protected First Amendment speech, not graffiti.
3. State officials are moving to erase rainbow crosswalks across Florida, but the Pulse site has become a flashpoint of resistance. Protesters have returned again and again to chalk the rainbow colors back in, while state police have dispatched round-the-clock patrols to monitor the intersection.
1. On Saturday, a judge ordered Pulse pride crosswalk protester released from jail. Police arrested him after he chalked the bottom of his shoe in rainbow colors and walked across it. Sunday, police arrested 3 more under the same charges. Subscribe to support my journalism.
The sole mention of RFK Jr's opposition to vaccines is a throwaway aside in the 12th graf of the story, amidst some credulous useful idiocy from Zeke Emanuel. Nothing about his destruction of medical research in America. It treats him like he and Obama are pursuing the same goal slightly differently
Dems shouldn't make trans rights the focus - they should just have the preparation to quickly and confidently shut down anti-trans attacks and pivot back to what they want to run on.
Judge Sooknanan: As I said at the start of this hearing, I got a call at 2:36 am [last night] because the government chose the wee hours of the morning on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend to execute a plan to move these children. That's why we're here.
Trump did this
This was incredible, important lawyering from National Immigration Law Center (@nilc.org) over the past 24 hours. Here's their case page: www.nilc.org/litigation/l... Here was the statement from Efrén Olivares, NILC VP of litigation, from earlier today regarding the TRO:
Trump limits National Guard assignments to 29 days at a time to keep the called up service members from getting healthcare and housing benefits while on duty. And the NG troops are catching on. Stereotypical Trump. Don't give those losers and suckers an extra dime. www.rawstory.com/trump-infuri...
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
Anna has had excellent coverage of this developing case in which the Trump administration tried to use the holiday weekend to secretly and illegally deport children.
This is what happens when you obliterate the presumption of regularity. Endless homework assignments because the court can't trust the government to follow orders in good faith.
Never underestimate the tenacity of bigots.
Black women have every right to be furious. The irresponsible choices of white voters has for many of us, taken our livelihood with consequences for our homes, the education of our children, our ability to care for parents. It’s unconscionable. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/u...
Meanwhile, did you see? A federal judge on Friday allowed the Trump admin and the Oklahoma AG to use his court to subvert democracy through a sham lawsuit manufactured to get rid of a pro-immigrant state law they don’t like without needing to go through the trouble of actually repealing the law.
“If programmers ask the model if a certain part of the codebase is working, and it doesn't know, it may say "yes," when the opposite is true. It might also confirm that it completed a test the engineer asked it to do when it did not.” www.pcmag.com/news/groks-f... 😨
This entire article can be summed up as, “Steve Witkoff is an ignorant motherfucker.” www.politico.com/news/2025/08...
This firefighter arrived in the US at age 4, has been here for 19 years, was on track to legal status, and was on a crew trying to contain a major blaze (in Washington state, vs Oregon, fwiw.) h/t @joshuajfriedman.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Thread 🧵
That Trump and Trumpism are fascist doesn’t explain the sheer vandalism of unleashing mass murdering mayhem via RFK to replace medical/scientific institutions of immense value and prestige with medieval peasant superstitions. That is a criminal madness facilitated by but above and beyond fascism.
What the fuck. Article ends noting that there are now 46 fewer personnel fighting this fire than there were on Thursday. Washington state needs to look at every piece of data we share with any federal agency and not share it if it could potentially be used by immigration
The extent to which ICE is ignoring all civil rights and due process is astounding — and indicative of a culture where they’ve been told they can do literally no wrong. Agency and admin leaders must face sanctions and legal consequences.
Netanyahu is restricting aid trucks into Gaza—the best way to get food to starving people there—so Jordan is delivering some with air drops. The Jordanians said @merkley.senate.gov & I could join one of those flights to see the devastation, but Israel denied authorization for our scheduled flight.
Frustrated about the difficulty in getting a COVID19 shot and wondering who to blame? It’s not healthcare workers, pharmacies, public health or Big Pharma. It is Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. and every Republican Senator who voted to confirm him, especially Bill Cassidy.
NEW: Federal judge signs off on DOJ and Oklahoma's sham anti-immigrant lawsuit. Judge Ronald White did not even consider a brief arguing the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the matter before issuing an order striking down a decades-old Oklahoma law. Tonight, at Law Dork:
"When the public asks, 'How did we get here?' after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond NRA lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like Richard Dyke." www.propublica.org/article/how-...
I know my usual beat is AltNPS, but since yesterday when this Politico article dropped, I've seen a lot of chatter about the ICE List, an activist project focused on unmasking ICE officers. That's a noble goal. ICE doesn't deserve to hide. But I want to encourage some healthy skepticism here.
But by far and away, the biggest priority for a Heritage Foundation-captured CDC is going to be using the agency's legal frameworks for access to medical data, and weaponizing them to control women. *Most* of the Project 2025 plan for CDC is a witch hunt against abortion on an unprecedented scale.
Granting anonymity to a source that is obviously lying does nothing to inform the public.
"If immigration has been the mechanism for diversifying the nation, deportation is the mechanism for its whitening." Fantastic piece that exposes the many illusions of "due process," and the complicity of Obama and Biden in laying the groundwork for this current deportation machine.
I really hope this becomes the black eye it deserves to be www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
The method you’re looking for is impeachment. It cannot go unchallenged that one Senate-confirmed appointee can decide to fire another Senate-confirmed appointee for speaking with Senators. Cabinet officials who hold this view must not be allowed to serve. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/h...
A public health catastrophe. Not “immanent,” not “potential.” This is the catastrophe.
It’s not just that every accusation is a confession; every accusation is also a rationalization. Trump constantly pretended Biden was personally directing prosecutions of Trump & allies, when of course DOJ norms would have made it unthinkable for the White House to have any direct contact.
“…I am infuriated that the Air Force plans to grant military funeral honors to Ashli Babbitt. She did not die defending the Constitution. She died trying to overturn it.” My latest in @thebulwark.com www.thebulwark.com/p/honoring-a...
Right now, your ability to get access to a COVID vaccine this fall is in jeopardy, whether or not you fit the new, restricted eligiblity criteria. Please send a letter to your member of Congress here. And spread the word. @defendpublichealth.bsky.social actionnetwork.org/letters/writ...
In response to a suit by @maketheroadny.bsky.social a federal judge has blocked Trump’s expanded use of “expedited removal.” The courthouse abductions w/o due process that we’ve been protesting are illegal—and must stop. We’ll be back next week to make sure they do. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/u...
Once again, we are in the midst of the worst, most unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis in 🇺🇸 history
what a mess and a stupid way to run a country
The country is so poorly run we can’t receive packages from overseas anymore, and I’m not sure it makes the top 10 of the administration’s dumbest, unforced errors
When the executive ignores laws they find inconvenient, it is called a dictatorship.
Trump take LEGO www.404media.co/lego-stops-s...
Hearing that the whistleblower, Charles Borges, has now resigned. He was the SSA Chief Data Officer. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...
Major update: As of this morning, CVS says it's decided it can offer the vax in 13 of the 16 states IF you get a prescription. Still a big new barrier for many people, but a change from its "no vaccines at all in these states" position yesterday. The three remaining absolute-nos are MA, NV and NM.
Good piece, includes the fact that Pulte was investigated for giving $500K to a Trump superpac via his wife and a shell company he controlled.
"Trump 2.0 so far shows every sign of doing anything the NRA wants it to do. They can prattle on about mental health...but...their actions say they’re perfectly content to let more children die." Good @mjtoma.bsky.social dive into policy reality on Trump/guns: newrepublic.com/post/199838/...
President Donald Trump has fired one of two Democratic members of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board to break a 2-2 tie before the body considers the largest railroad merger ever proposed. https://to.pbs.org/45G2Qm2
Please comment: Some source material to draw from here: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-death-...
Military officials raised alarms that using troops during a July immigration raid on Los Angeles' MacArthur park posed an "extremely high" risk, including the possibility of "miscommunication and fratricide." The Secretary of Defense ordered that it go ahead. www.reuters.com/world/us/mil...
The IRS wants Americans to weigh in on Direct File, the agency's free tax filing program. We already know Direct File has been widely popular and successful. The program could save Americans billions annually between filing fees and time costs. www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs...
🚨BREAKING: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed Republicans’ gerrymander into law Friday, officially moving the redistricting battleground from the state capitol to the federal courthouse. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
This is a terribly drafted (on purposes) survey designed to lead you to view Free File negatively. The survey is set up just to create a pretext to cancel the program. Participate, but be sure that all you answers prefer "the government" doing stuff over someone else doing that same stuff.
RFK must go. Please contact your congresspeople about this. Ask them why RFK was allowed to unilaterally fire a senate appointee because she contacted senators – the appropriate oversight body – after the HHS secretary demanded that she break the law & betray Americans’ public health.
Adams admin officials just confirmed this reporting by us on a briefing — that NYC's historically bad Legionnaires outbreak has been traced to Harlem Hospital and an EDC site. Before we ran this story, Adams spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak claimed we would be "wrong" if we published.
Welp guess who figured out a new way to explain bad tariff policy to his kids.
jaoswald.bsky.social (@jaoswald.bsky.social) reply parent
I would bet it is worse: Facebook non-English content goes all the way to genocide.
DOJ has also dismissed another case brought by federal agents after the D.C. surge began, this one involving a man who police said was found asleep in his car. The police searched the car and found a handgun; the driver had a felony record.
The thing about Ashli Babbitt that I kept saying is that, for most of history, most countries would have strung up a bunch of the J6 folks in the capitol steps as a sign. And for good reason. This is what happens when you don’t.
Recall that in Bush v Gore, the court said that if Gore were to ever go ahead in the recount it would cause Bush irreparable harm. Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett all worked for Bush in that case. Thomas was actually on the court. And there's no doubt that Alito and Gorsuch were cheering them on.
Multiple choice: A) they want a government shutdown this fall B) they think the Dems will cave and agree to a deal, despite the obvious risk of rescission/impoundment C) October is like a month away, you can’t expect the WH to be planning for it already D) filibuster reform/party line vote
Rebo is back? 