“Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.
This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks.
On March 3, 2025, a Florida lock company called Proven Industries released a social media promo video just begging for the McNally treatment. The video was called, somewhat improbably, “YOU GUYS KEEP SAYING YOU CAN EASILY BREAK OFF OUR LATCH PIN LOCK.” In it, an enthusiastic man in a ball cap says he will “prove a lot of you haters wrong.” He then goes hard at Proven’s $130 model 651 trailer hitch lock with a sledgehammer, bolt cutters, and a crowbar.
Estate tax should be 95% and all trust/evasion vehicles outlawed.
Beginning in the early 20th century, a new ethos for taxes took hold: Taxes should be imposed on the basis of means, with the greatest burden falling to those with the greatest capacity to pay.
Such “tax the rich” sentiments informed the design of the two tax rules at the core of the modern tax system: the income tax, adopted in 1913, and the estate tax, adopted three years later, in 1916. The income tax had “progressive” tax rates, meaning taxes were higher for people with more taxable income; and it exempted many lower-income Americans altogether. And the estate tax was designed to impose a separate tax on the richest Americans as they pass their wealth to the next generation.
These two taxes originally applied to only the very wealthy, leaving more than 95 percent of Americans unaffected. But even when the income tax system was expanded to apply more broadly to fund World War II (which is sometimes described as moving it from a class tax to a mass tax), the focus on the rich was maintained.
Our income and estate taxes are still structured the same way, with progressive income tax rates and an estate tax that only applies to the richest Americans. Yet evidence shows that these taxes are not doing what they purport to do.
The capacity of the income tax to take the most from people who can most afford it has been undermined by wealthy people’s avoidance of taxable income. Economists and tax experts have long recognized the ability of the wealthy to avoid taxable income, but with secrecy around tax returns, it was difficult to uncover real-world examples. This all changed in June 2021, when journalists at ProPublica published a series of articles based on actual tax returns leaked by an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) contractor (his name: Charles Littlejohn, like the Robin Hood character). These tax returns confirmed that many of the richest Americans — like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg — were able to avoid income taxes altogether by avoiding taxable income.
The other plank of the tax code, the estate tax and gift tax (along with the generation-skipping transfer tax, adopted to fortify the estate and gift tax in 1986), was explicitly designed as a bulwark against large intergenerational transmissions of wealth. They promised to preserve an egalitarian American society for many decades they largely did.
But the estate tax, like the income tax, is no longer doing what it was designed to do. While there is no Charles Littlejohn-style cache of elite tax returns to substantiate how the tax isn’t working, the American economy itself provides the proof. Concentrations of wealth have moved from historic lows in the 1970s to heights not seen since before the advent of the modern US tax code. And while the richest Americans control more wealth than ever, the amount of money raised by the estate and gift tax is minuscule, providing less than one-half of percent of total federal revenue. The channels to avoid the estate tax are not just well known; they are thriving, and the result has been the safe passage of wealth within families across decades.
The tax life of America’s rich is, by nature, unique to each individual. But a few core themes have emerged in the new school of tax avoidance and the building of dynastic wealth — that is, wealth passed down through families.
How rich people avoid income taxes
Most Americans depend on heavily taxed earnings from work to support themselves and their families. Meanwhile, many of the richest Americans avoid taxes by avoiding salaries — with many like Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) having taken $1 a year, while others, like Elon Musk (Tesla), have taken zero, causing the state of California to charge Tesla with violating its minimum-wage laws. In some cases, these billionaires paid no income taxes at all despite their shared status as some of the wealthiest people in the world.
Avoiding salaries provides other tax benefits as well since avoiding salaries also avoids payroll taxes, which are used to fund the country’s biggest expenses, Social Security and Medicare.
When the wealthy avoid salaries, these individuals are not eschewing financial gains from their businesses altogether. Instead, they are counting on the growing value of their stock holdings to build their wealth. Relying on growth instead of income helps them avoid significant taxes because that growth is not subject to tax until and unless they sell the stock. And if they hold it until their death, all the gains are washed away, never to be taxed. Then, their heirs are treated as if they bought the stock at market value, so they don’t pay taxes on any of the deceased’s gains, either. Meanwhile, by using these assets as collateral for loans, the wealthy can enjoy all of the financial benefits of selling without the burden of taxes.
Separate from the question of how to share the costs of government fairly, the failure to tax the rich also allows for that wealth to grow at warp speed, producing ever-greater concentrations of wealth.
The ability to avoid taxable income is not limited to billionaire entrepreneurs. Many “regular” rich people can also enjoy the benefits of borrowing tax-free against their growing investments instead of selling their stock or receiving dividends. What is relatively new, though, is the widespread reliance on increases in stock value, as opposed to salary or dividends, as a means of acquiring wealth.
Before 1982, this path was not generally available, because corporations typically shared profits by paying salaries to top executives and other workers, and stock dividends to shareholders. Both salaries and dividends were generally subject to tax at the highest rates. However, after 1982, due to a change in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules, many companies stopped using profits to pay dividends to shareholders —and instead used profits to purchase their own stock on the open market (called stock buybacks), which had the effect of raising the value of said stock. The shift from dividends to stock buybacks eliminated a significant source of tax revenue (taxes on dividends) and gave wealthy investors an easy way to grow their assets tax-free.
In terms of the raw volume of taxes being paid, no group pays more than the working rich of the United States: the people working high-paying jobs (and thus paying high income taxes on top of payroll taxes) and not benefiting from the tax-avoidance devices of those who can afford to live without salaries. This amounts to a crucial difference between America’s working rich and its plutocratic rich: The former work and have to pay taxes; the latter might work but have the means to circumnavigate the system to avoid paying taxes in ways the working rich can’t.
A frequent refrain of those defending the status quo is that the income tax system already heavily burdens the rich because the top 1 percent of earners pay 40 percent of all income taxes while 40 percent of Americans pay no income taxes at all. This is partially true: Individuals with the most taxable income do pay the most income tax. However, this statistic is about people who have high incomes, typically from work; it tells us nothing about the tax liability of those with the most wealth. Studies have shown that there is only about a 50 percent overlap between America’s wealthiest people and those who earn the most income. Moreover, as the leaked tax returns of several of the wealthiest Americans reveal, the ability of wealth owners to avoid taxable income means that they are just as likely to be among the 40 percent of nonpayers as they are the top 1 percent of earners.
The death of the estate tax
Although the estate tax — a tax paid on inherited wealth over a certain threshold — still officially exists, its efficacy and public perception was severely damaged as part of a 1990s public relations campaign to portray it as a “death tax” and “an unfair double tax that hurt family farms and businesses.” The campaign, financed by some of America’s wealthiest families, achieved only limited success in its goal of repealing the estate tax altogether — they managed a one-year suspension, in 2010 — but its more fundamental success was turning public sentiment negative against the tax. Since then, public antipathy, along with pressure from rich donors, has deterred lawmakers from doing basic upkeep to close the tax’s loopholes.
Indeed, since 1990, Congress has not taken a single step to close any loopholes in the estate tax. As a result, the tax stands in name only, and wealthy Americans and their financial planners avoid taxes through a virtual alphabet soup of loopholes: names like SLATs, SLANTs, GRATs and GRUTs, CRATs and CRUTs, QTIPs and QPRTs and NIMCRUTs and Flip CRUTs.
The US income tax system—developed on the assumption of a well-operating estate and gift tax— continues to impose no income taxes on people who receive gifts, inheritances, or life insurance distributions, no matter how large.
The rich person’s game
The rich are frequently celebrated for their charitable largesse, but their philanthropy often imposes significant costs on the federal government in terms of forgone revenue, and it often provides uncertain benefits to the public. People who work for their money receive few, if any, tax benefits from charitable giving, despite most people’s assumptions to the contrary. Indeed, 90 percent of Americans get no tax benefits for their charitable donations. In contrast, those with wealth who plan their philanthropic gifts well — as most wealthy people do — can save on income taxes, capital gains taxes, and estate and gift taxes by making charitable donations of appreciated property, including stocks, real estate, cryptocurrency, and other property interests that have gone up in value. Taken together, these tax savings can save the donor, and thereby cost the federal government in forgone revenue, as much as 74 percent of the value of the donation. This makes American taxpayers, who must cover this forgone revenue, the unwitting and principal funders of the philanthropy of the very rich.
While some donations provide benefits to the public, there is no certainty that this will be the case. The reason is that the wealthiest Americans frequently donate their money not to food banks or homeless shelters (or even already-rich alma maters) but to their own private family foundations or donor-advised funds. These charitable intermediaries provide wealthy donors all the immediate tax benefits of charitable giving without imposing any time frame for the funds to be spent toward charitable ends. As a result, there is no certainty that the public will ever benefit from the donations.
The future of the United States and its economy depends on decisions the country makes today about taxing the rich.
Separate from the question of how to share the costs of government fairly, the failure to tax the rich also allows for that wealth to grow at warp speed, producing ever-greater concentrations of wealth. As others have noted, extreme concentrations of wealth threaten the continuing existence of American democracy. This is not only because wealth confers power — over companies, the media, philanthropy, and politics — but also because democracy demands that elites and regular people are united in the shared endeavor of a democratic republic.This is an issue not just for Democrats or Republicans, but for all Americans.
sure, but it won't change their voting. So fuck 'em.
ACT I
President Donald Trump posts on Truth Social in March:
To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!
ACT II
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins says in April:
There's no one that's going to fight harder or smarter or more strategically than @POTUS—for ALL Americans ... we are going to put America FIRST; not China, not India, not beef from Argentina, not dairy products from Canada — but America first.
Trump: "The only price we have that's high is beef, and we'll get that down. And one of the things we're thinking about doing is beef from Argentina.
Weirdly, American farmers don’t like this play. The people who most strongly supported Trump in all three of his elections are now crying about it.
“NCBA’s family farmers and ranchers have numerous concerns with importing more Argentinian beef to lower prices for consumers. This plan only creates chaos at a critical time of the year for American cattle producers, while doing nothing to lower grocery store prices,” said Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a strongly pro-Trump organization.
“Field of bad dreams” by Tim Campbell
Actually, this self-interested industry hack is wrong. Importing Argentinian beef will lower prices. It’s basic Econ 101: more supply means lower prices.
And that’s exactly the problem for America’s farmers—they’re not essential. If food can be produced cheaper elsewhere, we’ll buy it elsewhere.
For decades, blue America and blue cities in red states have subsidizedrural America’s inefficiency—funding hospitals, schools, postal service, broadband, and other infrastructure in places with more cows than people. And for that generosity, we’ve been repaid with resentment, bigotry, division, and the election of the man who embodies all of it.
So to hell with all their precious subsidies. There’s a certain poetic justice in watching Trump’s most loyal supporters become his latest victims. Just months after his agriculture secretary promised to protect them from Argentinian beef in the name of “America First,” Trump threw them under the tractor.
That’s the story of Trumpism, really—betrayal dressed up as populism—as he works to help his friends (in this case, Argentina’s right-wing president Javier Milei) at the expense of his country.
Now, the people who cheered him the loudest are finally learning what the rest of us already knew.
And DOJ has definitely been behaving like one would expect when it has a nazi as a loyalty enforcer
Paul Ingrassia (center), then-White House liaison to the Justice Department on January 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Pete Kiehart/Washington Post via Getty
In a recently leaked group chat, it was revealed that a Republican operative named Paul Ingrassia referred to himself as having a “Nazi streak.”
The leak is just one among many recent signs that this kind of radical and incendiary rhetoric has become increasingly normalized among some up-and-coming Republican staffers.
But Ingrassia wasn’t just any other MAGA edgelord; he was President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Special Counsel before he withdrew his nomination. And during the time he’s served in the administration already, he has already acted as a de facto “loyalty enforcer.”
Already under scrutiny for his associations with antisemitic figures and extreme public commentary, the group chat leaked to Politico this week revealed several other nasty comments Ingrassia made, including: “Never trust a chinaman or Indian,” musings about the “natural state” of “Blacks,” and a demand that Martin Luther King Jr Day should “be eviscerated.” Ingrassia also used an Italian slur to refer to Black people, went so far as to declare that “the founding fathers were wrong that all men are created equal,” and said: “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.”
Despite his ultimately withdrawing his nomination, Ingrassia’s influence on the administration has already been felt — he’s helped vet appointees and staff two key agencies.
He began the year as a sort of loyalty enforcer to Trump at the Department of Justice, when he made highly inappropriate demands that people up for top FBI jobs tell him their voting history. That’s according to a lawsuit filed by three fired FBI officials, one of whom described being grilled by Ingrassia in January with questions such as “Who did you vote for?” “When did you start supporting President Trump?” and “Have you voted for a Democrat in the last five elections?”
According to ABC News, Ingrassia was the White House liaison for DOJ, had “significant authority to help interview and select candidates for senior and lower-level positions,” and called himself Trump’s “eyes and ears” at the department.
However, he soon clashed with other Trump appointees there, and in late February he was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, where he held a similar role (and was accused of sexually harassing a female colleague, by booking a work trip for them and ensuring she would have to share a room with him).
Throughout all this, Ingrassia demonstrated a remarkable staying power in Trumpworld. He clearly had protectors high up in the administration. And the story of his rise reveals much about the bizarre moral economy of the second Trump administration.
How did Ingrassia rise in Trumpworld?
Ingrassia was a minor figure on the right during Trump’s first term. He hosted a right-wing podcast (with his sister, another Trump appointee), interned with the White House’s National Economic Council, and won fellowships at the Claremont Institute, an increasingly influential right-wing think tank.
During the 2020 election, he shared an article posted by his podcast’s account calling on Trump to use the “martial law option” to stay in power. The article was signed “Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus,” a Roman figure who, according to CNN, Ingrassia has repeatedly referenced.
But it was in 2023 that Ingrassia cracked the code on how to truly rise to Trump’s attention. One part involved writing sycophantic pro-Trump articles on his Substack and at MAGA publications — articles that somehow were brought to Trump’s attention, spurring him to post them on TruthSocial. The other part involved frequently visiting Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster, where he encountered Trump in person.
In 2023, Ingrassia received (and posted) multiple messages Trump sent him, inscribed on Ingrassia’s articles or social media posts, sometimes making reference to having recently seen him (and calling Ingrassia handsome and good-looking).
“Paul, great seeing you. The man behind the great writings – you are looking good.”
It’s hard to overstate the sycophancy of Ingrassia’s public commentary toward Trump — and his stated willingness to back almost everything Trump would do to seek power. He has posted images of Trump as a king, said Trump would be the savior of Western civilization, and posted on X: “Trump is the constitution.”
As he was rising in Trump’s orbit, Ingrassia also defended some of the most controversial figures on the right. For instance, he did legal work for “manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate (helping arrange his interview with Tucker Carlson.
Ingrassia also argued in 2023 that the antisemitic, Hitler-defending commentator Nick Fuentes should have his account restored to Twitter. The following year, a reporter spotted Ingrassia at a Fuentes rally, though Ingrassia claimed to have stumbled on it accidentally.
In a typical administration, associations like these would likely have been disqualifying — caught in a vetting process. But none of this mattered. All that mattered was that Ingrassia was loyal — utterly, completely, and totally loyal to Trump personally. That’s the only qualification he needed.
Update, October 21, 7:25 pm ET: This story was originally published earlier on October 21 and has been updated with information about Ingrassia withdrawing his nomination.
Kohler has launched the Dekoda, a $599 smart toilet camera that analyzes users' waste to track hydration, gut health, and detect potential issues like blood. "It also comes with a rechargeable battery, a USB connection, and a fingerprint sensor to identify who's using the toilet," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The Dekoda is currently available for preorder, with shipments scheduled to begin on October 21. In addition to the hardware purchase fee, customers will need to pay between $70 and $156 per year for a subscription. If you're uneasy about the privacy implications of putting a camera right below your private parts, the company says, "Dekoda's sensors see down into your toilet and nowhere else." It also notes that the resulting data is secured via end-to-end encryption.
During Monday’s press conference on the GOP’s government shutdown, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas delivered a dog-whistle-laden rant filled with Christian nationalist boogeymen in a bizarre attack on the No Kings protests that took place over the weekend.
“The truth is, the Marxists, the radicals, and the Islamists the Democratic Party promoted this weekend—they cannot handle the truth,” Roy said. “The truth is that there is a king, and that king is Jesus. And the president has been willing to say it. His administration has been willing to say it. And Charlie Kirk was willing to say it, and he got killed for it.”
Roy, who often positions himself as a maverick—though primarily an all-talk-no-substance figure within his party—is once again abandoning his role as lawmaker to enforce his own Christian nationalist beliefs.
The White House’s relationship with the public and the media is changing rapidly. Professionalism and political norms have been replaced by trolling and social media trends superimposed with messages promoting deportation and patriotism.
But what creeps behind the memes and the snarky remarks is a darker, more concerning message: The Trump administration is cutting off the flow of information from the press to the people, and they’re doing so while cracking a joke.
During a White House press conference Friday, HuffPost asked who suggested that President Donald Trump meet with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Hungary to discuss the war on Ukraine.
“Your mom did,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded.
“Your mom,” added White House Communications Director Steven Cheung.
Yes, really.
Daily Kos contacted Leavitt and Cheung about the nature of their sarcastic responses, but they did not respond before publication.
At surface level their answers are harmless jokes. But a darker picture is painted as the White House continues to cut off journalists’ access to information—whether through jest or through contractual obligation.
Earlier this week, Pentagon journalists handed in their press passes in protest of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s new requirement for all reporting to be pre-approved by the department. Reporters from outlets like The New York Times, NBC, and even Fox News were among those who refused.
In March, the White House tried to overextend its censoring power by booting The Associated Press for not referring to the Gulf of Mexico as “Gulf of America.”
While that move was shot down by a judge,it hasn’t kept the Trump administration from shutting out the media.
This is a lot of words for "Vance agrees with this shit"
This week, Politico revealed the contents of Young Republican leaders’ group chats, which were filled with rampant bigotry, endorsements of rape, and praise for a certain fascist dictator (“I love Hitler”).
Some Republicans, including those who have directly employed the people in these chats, condemned these messages. But Vice President J. D. Vance had a different, and more telling, response. “I refuse to join the pearl clutching,” he posted on X defiantly.
When a political ally does something controversial, there are three ways to respond: defend it, repudiate it, or deflect attention away from it. Defense is the obvious option if you think the action is acceptable enough to the public. Repudiation makes sense if the matter is so toxic that you can’t afford to keep the guilty party in your coalition.
Deflection is the response of choice only when the behavior of an ally is too toxic to defend, but so widespread within your coalition that you cannot afford to criticize it.
Deflection can take different forms. You can insist that the story does not merit attention, because other issues are more important (as if the public can entertain only one subject at a time). Alternatively, you might claim that the offenders in question are too powerless to be held publicly accountable. Vance employed both tactics. “Grow up! I’m sorry; focus on the real issues. Don’t focus on what kids say in group chats,” he said on The Charlie Kirk Show. This despite the fact that the participants included people in their 30s, and many work as high-level staffers in Republican politics.
A decade or so ago, as illiberal norms were spreading in progressive spaces such as universities, deflection was by far the most popular way for Democrats to address the subject. Why focus on the excesses of the left when the right is doing worse things?, many progressives would insist, as if the awfulness of the other side precludes ever criticizing one’s own. Or they’d say the troublemakers were just young people—“college students” was a common shorthand—doing silly things they’d soon outgrow. It was never true that left-wing illiberalism was confined to campuses, or that campus illiberalism was confined to students, but the pretense was useful for purposes of deflections.
If progressive illiberalism had been confined to a handful of unruly teenagers, cutting them loose would have been easy enough. The fact that allies were so reluctant to repudiate leftist cancel culture was itself a sign that these illiberal ideas weren’t marginal. The reliance on deflection was a sign of underlying changes within the progressive coalition, which suddenly included a lot of radical, illiberal activists whose ideas and rhetoric alarmed the general public.
This dynamic is now playing out on the right. Yet the rhetoric in the Republican chats is far more disturbing, in both its nature and its influence.
That a group of ambitious professional Republicans can spread nakedly racist messages without rebuke signifies the transformation of conservative political norms in the Trump era. Party members now regularly engage in what the political commentator Richard Hanania has called the “based ritual,” a kind of game of rhetorical one-upsmanship. The only professional risk they perceive is being seen as insufficiently devoted to the MAGA cult. Displays of devotion involve espousing authoritarian, racist, and sexist concepts.
Given Vance’s evident ambitions to succeed Donald Trump as the Republican standard-bearer, his response is revealing.
The vice president apparently grasps that openly defending references to Black people as “watermelon eaters” and quips about sending political rivals “to the gas chamber” would hurt his political standing, but he also clearly needs these Young Republican leaders if he hopes to consolidate the Trump base behind him. Deflection is a calculated response. In the racist provocations of conservative cadres, Vance clearly sees the future of the party he intends to lead.
In a completely shocking move, President Donald Trump’s latest immigration proposal seems to favor white, Christian immigrants.
According to documents obtained by The New York Times, the Trump administration has a slew of ideas for lowering immigration rates while giving priority to people they say align with their ideology. The proposal suggests slashing hundreds of thousands of current applicants already in the process of coming to the United States.
Not only that, but the documents suggest that a cap will be imposed on cities with higher counts of immigrants as a way to avoid “the concentration of non-native citizens.”
“The sharp increase in diversity has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity,” the proposal reads, suggesting that they should only welcome “refugees who can be fully and appropriately assimilate, and are aligned with the president’s objectives.”
White Afrikaner refugees from South Africa arrive to the United States on May 12.
And if that’s starting to sound about white, that’s because it is.
Despite its cuts to immigration overall, the proposal prioritizes white people from places like Europe and South Africa.
Earlier this year, Trump pushed for the resettlement of 59 white Afrikaners, who he said were targets of violence in South Africa because of their race. But many—including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa—have called this theory of “white genocide” false.
And this push to protect whiteness is growing across Europe too, with the far-right Alternative for Germany movement promoting a nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment.
Elon Musk has outright supported AfD, while Vice President JD Vance has stood by the group’s right to exist without silence from the government.
“It’s one thing to say that a particular set of views is gross ... or somehow outside the Overton window, outside the bounds of reasonable discourse,” Vance said in May. “I think that it is very, very dangerous to use the neutral institutions of state—the military, the police forces ... the intel services—to try to delegitimize another competing political party. I think that’s especially true when that political party just got second in an election and is, depending on which poll you believe, either the [most] popular or the second-most popular party.”
The new proposal hitting Trump’s desk seems to echo this sentiment.
According to the proposal, the Trump administration wants to prioritize people who have been targeted for “peaceful expression of views online such as opposition to mass migration or support for ‘populist’ political parties.”
But that’s not all; Trump’s goons also want to remove the United Nations from the equation.
Instead of honoring a longtime practice of having the U.N. make referrals for refugee status, the Trump administration is advocating for giving that power to the U.S. embassies. In other words, people of color seeking refugee status might have a harder time making it across the border.
Much of this is already being implemented. Trump has already revoked Temporary Protected Status of several immigrants and has placed travel bans on certain countries, some of which he has affectionately called “shithole” countries.
This proposal technically hasn’t come to fruition yet, but Trump is making sure it’s the reality for immigrants anyway.
President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan took to Fox News Thursday, where he threatened "bloodshed" over anti-ICE rhetoric.
“I said back in March, if the hateful rhetoric continues, there will be bloodshed. People are going to die. And they have, unfortunately. One person died trying to attack the border patrol facility in Texas, and those officers killed him. Then we got another group show up at an ICE detention facility, and they wounded one officer by shooting him in the neck,” he said. “I've seen this play out before. It's not going to stop. There's going to be more bloodshed unless this hateful rhetoric stops."
Considering that the Department of Homeland Security has labeled merely recording ICE raids as “violence” against agents, it’s hard to see Homan’s statement as anything less than a direct threat against any form of resistance to the Trump administration.
Republican lawmakers have been screaming for weeks that anyone who calls their party fascist is responsible for political violence across the country.
And yet, on Wednesday, a GOP lawmaker from Ohio was caught with a swastika in his office—a symbol appropriated by Adolf Hitler’s’ Nazi Party and one that white supremacists continue to use as a sign of their hatred today.
Republican Rep. Dave Taylor of Ohio denounced the swastika, which was spotted on Wednesday on a wall in the background of a videoconferencing call that a constituent had with one of Taylor's congressional aides. The swastika appeared as part of an altered American flag, with the flag’s red stripes forming a swastika in the middle.
In a press release, Taylor called the symbol "vandalism.”
A friend in DC had a Zoom call with Congressman Dave Taylor’s office today… Taylor’s legislative correspondent, Angelo Elia, had what can only be described as an American swastika flag prominently displayed in his background. pic.twitter.com/zFn3QowS0c
“I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office. The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff, or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms," Taylor said in a statement. "Upon learning of this matter, I immediately directed a thorough investigation alongside Capitol Police, which remains ongoing. No further comment will be provided until it has been completed.”
Let’s not forget when right-wing billionaire Elon Musk—a former member of the Trump administration—performed a Nazi salute while speaking at an indoor inauguration event in Washington on Jan. 20.
This is just the latest instance in which Republicans have been shown to traffic in Nazi symbols and rhetoric.
On Tuesday, Politico published a report on a group chat between GOP operatives in which they fantasized about putting their opponents in gas chambers, like Hitler did during the Holocaust, and spewed racist and antisemitic rhetoric, among other despicable comments.
Rather than condemn the chat, Republicans like Vice President JD Vance wrote it off as a conversation between “college” students, even though many of the group chat’s members were in their 20s and 30s and worked in Republican politics, in the White House, and even as elected officials.
At the end of the day, the Trump administration is unequivocally fascist.
Just look at the Merriam-Webster definition of fascism:
A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.
That is exactly what President Donald Trump is doing.
Federal officers hold down a protester in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago on Oct. 4.
Trump is also moving to amend the refugee policy to favor white people who claim, without evidence, to be persecuted in their countries for espousing racist opposition to immigration, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.
In fact, the Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday posted on X the word “Remigrate,” a term used by global far-right groups that calls for the mass deportation of migrants in order to preserve a white society.
Trump is also forcibly suppressing opposition by using the Department of Justice and other levers of government to hamstring and prosecute Democrats and Democratic groups, without credible evidence of wrongdoing.
The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday night reported that Trump is planning on having the Internal Revenue Service investigate progressive nonprofit groups, an effort to keep them from being able to oppose his agenda.
Fascism is here in America—both in Republican policies and even apparently on the walls of Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Scientists from Spain and China have successfully repaired the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer's-model mice, enabling the brain to naturally clear amyloid-beta plaques and reverse cognitive decline. "After just three drug injections, mice with certain genes that mimic Alzheimer's showed a reversal of several key pathological features," adds ScienceAlert. From the report: Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The mice had previously shown signs of cognitive decline, but after all three doses, the animals performed on par with their healthy peers in spatial learning and memory tasks. The benefits lasted at least six months.
These preclinical results don't guarantee success in humans, but they're an encouraging start, which the authors say "heralds a new era" in drug research. "The therapeutic implications are profound," claim the international team of researchers, co-led by scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the West China Hospital Sichuan University (WCHSU). The findings have been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.
New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani appeared on Fox News Wednesday as part of his campaign against disgraced—and clearly compromised—former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Mamdani said he had a message for President Donald Trump, noting that he might be watching the right-wing propaganda network.
"I just want to speak directly to the president,” he said, turning to look into the camera. “I will not be a mayor like Mayor Adams, who will call you to figure out how to stay out of jail. I won't be a disgraced governor like Andrew Cuomo, who will call you to ask how to win this election. I can do those things on my own. I will, however, be a mayor who is ready to speak at any time to lower the cost of living. That's the way that I am going to lead the city.”
Mamdani then called out leaders like Cuomo for pushing aside the needs of working-class Americans.
“Too often, the focus on the needs of working-class Americans, working-class New Yorkers, are put to the side as we talk more and more about the very kinds of corrupt politicians like Andrew Cuomo that delivered us into this kind of crisis,” he said.
Mamdani has proven to be deft at speaking directly to working-class voters who are fed up with rising costs and the transparent corruption between the city’s politicians and Trump.
No argument that depends on the Supreme court doing the right thing is worth a shit
This is why we can’t have nice things. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is among the most successful laws in US history. And it is one of the most morally righteous things the United States of America has ever done.
The law was America’s first serious attempt since Reconstruction to build a multiracial democracy, and it succeeded beyond even the most radical post-Civil War Republicans’ dreams. On the day President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, Black voter registration rates in the Jim Crow haven of Mississippi were just 6.7 percent. Two years after the VRA became law, that rate was 60 percent.
So the Voting Rights Act, which the Republican justices are expected to take another bite out of during the Supreme Court’s new term, was a triumph. But it also rests on assumptions about how power is distributed in the United States that may no longer be true. The sad reality is that we may no longer be able to trust either the executive or the judicial branch with the powers given to them by the Voting Rights Act.
The central problem that the VRA targeted was illiberal states, ruled by white supremacists determined to cut Black Americans out of political power. In the mid-1960s, the federal government were the good guys on racial equality, led by its greatest champion to occupy the White House since President Ulysses S. Grant. In addition to the Voting Rights Act, Johnson signed laws banning race discrimination in employment, schools, hotels, restaurants, theaters, and housing.
So it made sense that his signature voting rights law centralizes power in the federal government. One key provision, which the Republican justices effectively repealed in 2013, required states with a history of race discrimination in elections to “preclear” any new election laws with federal officials in Washington, DC. Another, which is now before the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais, allows federal judges to intervene when a state enacts a law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any US citizen to vote on account of race or color.”
The central premise of the VRA, in other words, was that federal officials in both the executive and judicial branches could be trusted to pursue the goal of racial equality in elections — without regard to which political party would benefit if this goal became a reality.
Thus far, the Court’s Republicans have only sought to dismantle the Voting Rights Act. Chief Justice John Roberts, in particular, crusaded against the law for nearly half a century. As a young Reagan administration lawyer, he was a central player in a failed effort to convince Ronald Reagan to veto a 1982 law strengthening the VRA’s protections against race discrimination.
If Roberts and his fellow Republican justices strike down the VRA, their party is likely to benefit. The Callais case targets the Voting Rights Act’s restrictions on racial gerrymandering. Moreover, while racial gerrymandering is a separate legal concept from partisan gerrymandering (which occurs when the majority party draws maps to reduce representation by the minority party) the two concepts are intertwined. This is especially true in states with large numbers of Black voters. Because Black Americans overwhelmingly prefer Democratic candidates to Republicans, Republicans can often use race as a proxy to determine which voters they want to disempower.
Thus, in the likely event that the VRA’s restrictions on racial gerrymandering fall, it will be easier for red states — especially in the South — to eliminate districts that elect Democrats of color and replace them with districts that elect white Republicans. In the South in particular, many red state congressional delegations could become entirely white, as the Republican state legislature draws new maps that deny representation to (predominantly Black) Democrats.
The Voting Rights Act’s language is quite broad, and unscrupulous judges could easily manipulate it to partisan ends. In the future, the law may be worse than insufficient at protecting Americans from disenfranchisement, racial or otherwise. Partisan judges may use this very law, aimed at ending discrimination at the ballot box, as the justification for discriminating at the ballot box.
Democrats, in other words, may need to rethink whether it makes sense to centralize power over something as important as elections in a federal government that is increasingly controlled by illiberal Republicans eager to entrench their own rule.
How the Voting Rights Act targets racial gerrymandering right now
In the Callais case — the Voting Rights Act case that the Supreme Court will hear on October 15 — the current crop of justices will decide whether to overrule a 1986 case called Thornburg v. Gingles. That case set the framework for when federal judges should strike down legislative maps because they dilute minority representation — and it grew out of a political fight that Roberts lost.
In City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), the Court ruled that plaintiffs alleging that a state law violates the VRA must show that the state legislature enacted that law with “racially discriminatory motivation.” That’s a tough bar to clear, because neither voting rights lawyers nor judges are mind readers. And, by the 1980s, states rarely enacted laws that explicitly discriminated on the basis of race in the blatant way many Southern states did during the Jim Crow era.
In response to Mobile, Congress amended the VRA to add its current language targeting any state law that “results” in someone being denied the right to vote because of their race. Thus, even if a Voting Rights Act plaintiff cannot prove that a particular state law was motivated by racism, the law may still violate the VRA if it has a negative impact on minority representation.
The amended VRA’s language is sufficiently broad that illiberal judges could easily read it to achieve much more nefarious ends.
To the Reagan era justices’ credit, the Supreme Court responded to this rejection of the Mobile decision with good faith attempts to implement the amended VRA. In Gingles, the Court considered what impact the 1982 amendments had on claims that a state’s congressional or state legislative maps unlawfully prevented voters of color from electing their preferred candidates. And the Court’s answer to that question was fairly ingenious.
Authored by Justice William Brennan, a liberal lion who Justice Antonin Scalia once described as “the most influential Justice of the twentieth century,” the Gingles framework is fairly complicated. But it primarily turns on two questions: 1) whether a state is residentially segregated by race; and 2) whether the states’ voters are racially polarized, meaning that voters of one race tend to vote for one party while voters of another race tend to vote for the other party.
The genius of Brennan’s approach is that it recognized that, when residential segregation and racial polarization coexist, they produce two separate political communities who will consistently vote for opposing candidates. And, in a state with separate political communities, the majority community can draw maps that leave the minority community with little, if any, representation in the legislature.
Thus, to ensure that both communities are represented, Gingles held that judges must sometimes redraw a state’s legislative maps if the state’s original maps dilute a minority community’s representation. Gingles also has a built-in sunset. As a state grows more integrated, and as its voters become less racially polarized, the VRA plays less and less of a role.
But, if the Republican justices overturn Gingles as expected, Gingles will sunset before many states have fully integrated. And those states could quickly return to the circumstances Brennan was trying to prevent, where white lawmakers intentionally draw maps that deny representation to non-white members of the other political party.
The 1982 amendments’ language — which, again, prohibits a state law that “results” in someone being denied the right to vote because of their race — is open-ended. The way the Court read that language in Gingles is certainly a permissible reading of the amended VRA. But it is also safe to say that the elaborate framework Brennan laid out in Gingles does not inexorably flow from the Voting Rights Act’s broadly worded text. Brennan, the Supreme Court’s great liberal, understood that the primary problems that 20th-century civil rights laws were supposed to address are racial segregation and racial exclusion from the political process. And so he read the VRA in light of this historical purpose.
But the amended VRA’s language is sufficiently broad that illiberal judges could easily read it to achieve much more nefarious ends.
Lots of state election laws will, at least at the margins, have a disproportionate impact on one race or another. A MAGA judge could simply read the Voting Rights Act to strike down laws that have even the slightest negative impact on white Republican voters, perhaps stating that they are the racial and political class that needs protection from discriminatory maps. Meanwhile, the same judge could uphold state laws that have much greater negative impacts on racial groups that favor Democrats. Such a judge might even order blue states to draw maps that maximize congressional representation for white Republicans.
Indeed, this scenario isn’t even particularly far-fetched, as the current Supreme Court often gives favorable treatment to Republicans and to causes that are favored by the Republican Party.
As I laid out in detail here, the Supreme Court’s Republican majority applied one set of rules to Joe Biden and a better set of rules to Donald Trump, and they applied one set of rules to abortion providers and another, less favorable set of rules, to abortion opponents. The Republican justices handoutfavors to the religious right like indulgent parents dolling out candy to trick-or-treaters. And, of course, this is the Court which held that Donald Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.
So they could just as easily apply the Voting Rights Act selectively to strike down state laws that supposedly burden white Republicans — while simultaneously blessing voting restrictions that target racial groups that tend to favor Democrats.
In fairness, the current crop of Republican justices have largely resisted this temptation. While their decisions limiting the Voting Rights Act often take extraordinary liberties with the Constitution and with the VRA’s text, they’ve largely attempted to shut down the Voting Rights Act rather than to weaponize it to benefit Republicans. The Republican justices’ decision in Shelby County v. Holder(2013), for example, effectively neutralized the VRA’s provision requiring certain states to preclear new election laws with federal officials. It didn’t green-light red state voter restrictions, while blocking progressive voting legislation in the blue state of Virginia.
But that could change overnight if Trump gets to fill more seats on the Supreme Court. While Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett may not want to use the Voting Rights Act to lock their political party into power, it’s easy to imagine a Supreme Court staffed by MAGA judges like Andrew Oldham, James Ho, Aileen Cannon, and Emil Bove doing so.
For a window into how many younger Republican judges approach election cases, consider Oldham’s opinion in Republican National Committee v. Wetzel (2024), which was joined by Ho. Oldham claimed that an 1872 law setting the date for federal elections prohibits states from counting absentee ballots that are mailed prior to Election Day, but that arrive after that date — and that somehow no one noticed this prohibition for the previous 152 years.
Trump and his Republican Party have targeted mailed ballots because, in recent elections, Democrats were more likely to cast a ballot by mail than Republicans.
It’s difficult to even find a legal argument in Oldham’s opinion. But he does spend three whole sentences claiming that Congress’s decision to set an election date implicitly requires state election officials to know how many ballots they need to count by the end of that day. He cites no legal authority that supports this argument.
Wetzel shows just how far the next generation of Republican judges are willing to stretch the law to lock their party into power. If they can read a law setting an election date as a license to toss Democratic ballots in the trash, imagine what they could do with the open-ended language of the VRA.
The Voting Rights Act only works if we can trust the people who administer it. And it is potentially a very dangerous weapon in the hands of a hyperpartisan judiciary.
Federalism is (sometimes) good
The American left has historically been skeptical of federalism, the idea that some political power should be held by the states and not the federal government, and for good reason. It was a strong Union that defeated the Confederate states and ended slavery. And it was a strong federal government that enacted laws like the Voting Rights Act, which broke the back of Jim Crow.
If American democracy survives the second Trump administration, and if Democrats do regain power in a future election, they must reckon with the question of whether too much power is concentrated in the federal government.
More recently, Republicans have often used dubious appeals to federalism to attack liberal victories in Congress. The first major lawsuit seeking to repeal Obamacare, for example, was at least nominally rooted in an appeal to federalism. Republicans claimed that only the states, and not the federal government, can require people to buy health insurance — even though the federal government has long taxed Americans to pay for federal health insurance programs such as Medicare or Medicaid.
But federalism is also one of the most important checks on Trump’s attempts to consolidate his authoritarian rule. Trump, for example, is pressuring Republican states to redraw their congressional maps to lock Democrats out of power in the US House — something Texas has already done. But these red state gerrymanders can only do so much, because not all states are red. And blue states like California may enact their own gerrymanders to balance out the impact of the new Texas maps.
In an alternative version of the United States where congressional maps were drawn by Congress, by contrast, the GOP could redraw the maps in all 50 states to maximize their own power. At a minimum, states having the power to draw their own maps prevents Congress or the president from manipulating maps in Democratic-controlled states to Republicans’ benefit.
Similarly, another important check on federal power is that the US government does not actually employ very many law enforcement officers. And, under the Supreme Court’s “anti-commandeering” doctrine, the federal government is not allowed to take control over state or local police — or, at least, it cannot do so without the state’s consent. So this aspect of US federalism prevents Trump from transforming every beat cop in America into his own personal enforcement squad.
But, if American democracy survives the second Trump administration, and if Democrats do regain power in a future election, they must reckon with the question of whether too much power is concentrated in the federal government. Laws like the Voting Rights Act were written on the assumption that federal officials, and particularly federal judges, could be trusted to apply the law in a fair and nonpartisan way. But that assumption is no longer true. And the courts will only grow more partisan and more sympathetic to MAGA authoritarianism as Trump fills more seats on the federal bench.
Perhaps, by 2028, American voters will be so sick of MAGA Republicanism that they will give Democrats the power to do something even President Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn’t accomplish at the height of his power and popularity: packing the Court with more Democratic justices to dilute the votes of its current Republican majority. But, realistically, that is unlikely to happen. The federal judiciary is likely to be controlled by highly partisan Republicans for decades.
And that sad reality, at the very least, requires liberals and Democrats to confront the question of whether we can still have nice things — at least when those nice things depend on the premise that federal judges can be trusted.
In the ultimate act of flattery, House Speaker Mike Johnson is launching an international campaign to get President Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize he’s long coveted—this time for brokering a fragile ceasefire in Gaza and securing the release of Israeli hostages.
“This is a historic moment that deserves enormous credit and recognition on the world stage. It’s truly, truly historic,” Johnson said on Tuesday. “For generations, we have aspired to peace in the Middle East. Everyone around the world has. And now President Trump has delivered it.”
Johnson made the announcement during what’s become a daily ritual on Capitol Hill: a press conference in the middle of a government shutdown dragging into its 14th day. He opened the event by talking not about the stalemate in Washington but about Gaza.
President Donald Trump, shown in October.
“I’m proud to announce that together with my friend Speaker [Amir] Ohana of the Israeli Knesset, the equivalent of our Congress, we are going to embark upon a project together to rally Speakers and Presidents of parliaments around the world so that we will jointly nominate President Donald J. Trump for next year’s Nobel Peace Prize,” Johnson declared. “No one has ever deserved that prize more, and that is an objective fact.”
Ohana first laid the groundwork on Monday, saying Trump deserved the “highest honor” for his role in the Middle East. Johnson’s announcement formalized the partnership between the two speakers—part of a growing international campaign that already includes Pakistan’s prime minister, who made a similar pledge with Trump standing next to him.
Johnson’s praise came fresh off Trump’s trip to Israel and Egypt to celebrate the first phase of the peace deal. The president’s 20-point plan for Gaza is still fragile and early, but the return of hostages and the start of reconstruction talks are a major achievement.
Johnson, though, didn’t temper his enthusiasm.
He called it “an indisputable fact that no president has undertaken the work of saving lives and pursuing peace with such determination—and with such remarkable success—as President Trump.” He then went further, proclaiming that under Trump’s leadership, the world is witnessing the dawn of a “new Golden Age” for “the entire free world.”
It’s not the first time Johnson has tried to elevate Trump to Nobel status. Earlier this year, he claimed Trump deserved the award for a reported drop in crime in Washington, D.C., after the president’s takeover of the police department—a drop that started well before Trump showed up.
For years, Trump and his allies have insisted he deserves the prize, with the president at one point claiming “everyone” agrees. But polling suggests otherwise.
María Corina Machado, a leader of the Venezuelan opposition party, shown in 2023.
According to a September Ipsos poll for The Washington Post, 76% of Americans believe Trump does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, while just 22% think he does. Even Republicans are split down the middle, while independents and Democrats are overwhelmingly opposed.
And Trump didn’t get it this year. The Nobel Committee awarded Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado the prize shortly after Trump announced the first phase of the Gaza peace deal.
As Johnson works to boost Trump’s international prestige, he has little to show on the home front. The government shutdown grinds on. On Tuesday, the Senate will hold its eighth vote on the GOP’s short-term spending bill, which Democrats have already rejected seven times. The House, meanwhile, hasn’t voted on anything since Sept. 19, and many members remain in their districts.
Pressed on why Democrats aren’t budging, Johnson grew testy.
President Donald Trump’s ventriloquist dummy, House Speaker Mike Johnson, held his daily government shutdown press briefing on Tuesday, where he admitted that he has no plan to reopen the government.
“Why don't I change my strategy? I don't have any strategy,” Johnson said in response to a reporter’s question. “I'm doing the right thing—the clearly obvious thing. The traditional thing.”
He then went on to tout that same old, tired lies about how the government shutdown is Democrats’ fault.
“The strategy is to do the right and obvious thing and keep the government moving for the people,” Johnson said. “Their position is they want to spend $1.5 trillion in your tax dollars to fund nonsense overseas. They want to give $200 billion to illegal aliens. We are not going to do that. We're not going to do it. The American people don't want us to do it.”
He may not have a good strategy, but he clearly does have a strategy: lying to the American people about the nature of the government shutdown.
Johnson has been unable to offer even an outline of a plan that would make Americans believe that the GOP will prevent health insurance costs from skyrocketing.
They never cared about black lung, just fucking over black people. They got what they voted for.
Coal miners, who largely work in states that President Donald Trump won by large margins in the 2024 election, are criticizing his administration for failing to enforce federal rules that would limit the spread of potentially fatal black lung disease.
“The coal miners have supplied this country with electricity, and now they’re just cast aside to die,” West Virginia-based Judith Riffe, whose husband died of the ailment, told The New York Times.
A federal rule limiting miner exposure to silica dust—which causes black lung disease—was set to go into effect in April, but it has been opposed in court by the mining industry, which alleges that it’s too expensive to limit the use of the material, despite the health risk.
A group of coal miners hold signs that read, “Trump digs coal,” at a 2020 rally.
The Trump administration has decided not to enforce the rule until the court case is resolved, demonstrating its support for the mining industry. But then in September, the administration said that it would put at least $625 million into subsidizing the coal industry—ignoring all environmental impacts.
“The companies might be getting a handout, but the miners ain’t getting none,” Gary Hairston, a retired West Virginia coal miner who has suffered from black lung disease for more than 30 years and is president of the National Black Lung Association, told the Times.
In 2024, Trump won West Virginia by more than 41 percentage points, with 69.97% of the vote. That made it Trump’s second-best performance behind Wyoming, where he received 71.6% of the vote.
The rule to protect miners was proposed in 2024 under President Joe Biden and was the first time in U.S. history that silica dust was regulated.
“We’re making it clear that no job should be a death sentence, and every worker has the right to come home healthy and safe at the end of the day,” Julie Su, who was the acting director for the Department of Labor at the time, said.
Congressional Republicans have voiced their support for holding back the rule. In a July letter to the head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration at the Labor Department, House Education and Workforce Committee Republicans complained that the rule is “unwarranted and costly.”
But despite the position of the industry and the Trump administration, mine workers are developing black lung disease at an earlier age. Data shows that the current rate of the disease is back to rates last seen more than 50 years ago in the 1970s.
Black lung disease is an incurable condition and can lead to deadly outcomes like lung cancer, tuberculosis, and heart failure.
By backing the industry Trump is once again betraying the residents of states that have supported him the most. Trump promised blue-collar workers in states like West Virginia an economic boom, but instead he’s given them a slump.
While some voters in the reddest states of America still back Trump, he continues to embrace policies that make their lives miserable—even to the point of death.
First amendment is dead anywhere the GOP can reach
As the U.S. enters Day 13 of the GOP’s government shutdown, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has found someone new to blame: Americans protesting President Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda.
Bessent was asked by Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Monday whether he thought Democrats were prolonging the shutdown to overlap with upcoming “No Kings” protests against the Trump administration—despite Republicans currently having the votes to end the shutdown.
“If, in fact, [Democrats] are waiting for this No Kings protest—you know, ‘No Kings’ means no paychecks. No paychecks and no government,” Bessent said.
He continued, “I think the dirty secret here for why this has dragged on for so long is the Democratic friends in the mainstream media have been downplaying the shutdown, and this is getting serious. It’s starting to affect the real economy. It’s starting to affect people's lives.”
The truth is, despite controlling all three branches of government, the GOP continues to blame Democratic lawmakers for the shutdown. Instead of working to protect health care subsidies for millions of Americans, GOP leadership has opted to go on vacation.
This is what they voted for. They can live with their choices, or die with them. They had a chance to avoid this and doubled down on fascism.
Glasgow, Kentucky—just outside Mammoth Cave National Park—is proud Trump country. Its home county of Barren gave 76% of its vote to President Donald Trump last year.
This rural town of about 15,000 is 78% white, with a per capita income of around $29,000. It’s the kind of place that has long benefited from subsidies generously funded by Democrats, blue states, and urban areas. Between 1995 and 2024, Barren County received more than $67 million in farm subsidies, according to the nonprofit Environmental Working Group.
But rather than support the party supporting them, Barren went for Trump. And now, thanks to their Dear Leader’s so-called Big Beautiful Bill, the town of Glasgow is losing its all-inclusive elder care facility.
“As of Friday, we [were] told that this is closing down on November third due to Medicaid not letting people in fast enough,” one patient told a local news outlet. “Don’t let it close. We need our family. We need our group. Please don’t let this Horizon close. There’s too many of us that want to stay here.”
When Republicans run the country like a business and brag about cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse,” it turns out that rural health services are what get labeled wasteful—an “abuse” of resources provided by the more economically productive parts of America.
Democrats don’t believe in running the country as a business. We believe everyone deserves dignity and equal treatment. But we were outvoted—by the very people who’ve benefited most from that generosity.
This is just a preview of what’s coming for Kentucky’s rural population.
One hospital executive warned that the Big Beautiful Bill—supported by the entire Kentucky Republican congressional delegation—will cost the state’s hospital system $15.1 billion in lost revenue.
And a KFF study from June found Kentucky would be hit harder than any other state, losing over $10 billion in funding over the next decade. Worse for them, that estimate came from an early draft of the bill. The final version slashed Medicaid even deeper.
Had Kentucky gone for Democrat Kamala Harris last year, Glasgow’s elder care facility wouldn’t be in danger.
But that’s not the reality we live in. Glasgow is getting what it voted for.
But it's a fucking supreme court case if the Biden administration even tries to give guidance. Trump? Sure, Meta bends right over, first amendment be damned.
Attorney General Pam Bondi today said that Facebook removed an ICE-tracking group after "outreach" from the Department of Justice. "Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago," Bondi wrote in an X post.
Bondi alleged that a "wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs." She added that the DOJ "will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement."
When contacted by Ars, Facebook owner Meta said the group "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm." Meta didn't describe any specific violation but directed us to a policy against "coordinating harm and promoting crime," which includes a prohibition against "outing the undercover status of law enforcement, military, or security personnel."
An anonymous reader shares a report: An attorney in a New York Supreme Court commercial case got caught using AI in his filings, and then got caught using AI again in the brief where he had to explain why he used AI, according to court documents filed earlier this month.
New York Supreme Court Judge Joel Cohen wrote in a decision granting the plaintiff's attorneys' request for sanctions that the defendant's counsel, Michael Fourte's law offices, not only submitted AI-hallucinated citations and quotations in the summary judgment brief that led to the filing of the plaintiff's motion for sanctions, but also included "multiple new AI-hallucinated citations and quotations" in the process of opposing the motion.
"In other words," the judge wrote, "counsel relied upon unvetted AI -- in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues -- to defend his use of unvetted AI."
The case itself centers on a dispute between family members and a defaulted loan. The details of the case involve a fairly run-of-the-mill domestic money beef, but Fourte's office allegedly using AI that generated fake citations, and then inserting nonexistent citations into the opposition brief, has become the bigger story.
It's almost like resource misallocation is the bigger issue, not production.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures.
Engineer Denis Stetskov, writing in a blog: The Apple Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. Not used. Not allocated. Leaked. A basic calculator app is hemorrhaging more memory than most computers had a decade ago. Twenty years ago, this would have triggered emergency patches and post-mortems. Today, it's just another bug report in the queue. We've normalized software catastrophes to the point where a Calculator leaking 32GB of RAM barely makes the news. This isn't about AI. The quality crisis started years before ChatGPT existed. AI just weaponized existing incompetence.
[...] Here's what engineering leaders don't want to acknowledge: software has physical constraints, and we're hitting all of them simultaneously. Modern software is built on towers of abstractions, each one making development "easier" while adding overhead: Today's real chain: React > Electron > Chromium > Docker > Kubernetes > VM > managed DB > API gateways. Each layer adds "only 20-30%." Compound a handful and you're at 2-6x overhead for the same behavior. That's how a Calculator ends up leaking 32GB. Not because someone wanted it to -- but because nobody noticed the cumulative cost until users started complaining.
[...] We're living through the greatest software quality crisis in computing history. A Calculator leaks 32GB of RAM. AI assistants delete production databases. Companies spend $364 billion to avoid fixing fundamental problems. This isn't sustainable. Physics doesn't negotiate. Energy is finite. Hardware has limits. The companies that survive won't be those who can outspend the crisis. There'll be those who remember how to engineer.
An anonymous reader shared this excerpt from a Los Angeles Times newsletter:
One of the most consequential moments in California's drive to beat back climate change will take place next month. The state will stop receiving electricity from the Intermountain Power Plant in Central Utah, meaning our reliance on coal as a source of power will essentially be over...
[T]he U.S. got nearly half its electricity from coal-fired plants as recently as 2007. By 2023, that figure had dropped to just 16.2%. California drove an even more dramatic shift, getting just 2.2% of its electricity from coal in 2024 — nearly all of it from the Intermountain plant. Operators plan to cut off that final burst of ions next month.
"And with improved technology to store power, the change has been made without the power shortages that dogged the state up until 2020..."5
