President Donald Trump hinted that Attorney General Pam Bondi will go after Democrats during a speech at her swearing-in ceremony on Wednesday.
"I know I'm supposed to say 'she's going to be totally impartial with respect to Democrats,' and I think she will be as impartial as a person can be," Trump said of Bondi, who stood behind him smiling. "I'm not sure if there's a possibility of totally."
During her Senate confirmation hearing, Bondi refused to say whether she would go after Trump’s enemies if she were to be confirmed.
“I am not going to answer hypotheticals. No one has been prejudged, nor will anyone be prejudged if I am confirmed,” she said.
Yet at her swearing in, Bondi stood by smiling and holding back laughter as Trump said that she might target Democrats—a terrible omen for what’s to come.
Prosecuting members of the opposition party is something that happens in autocratic nations—not in the United States. But Trump appears to be tossing out prosecutorial independence to make good on his threat to get revenge on anyone he feels has personally wronged him.
Pam Bondi being sworn in as President Donald Trump’s attorney general on Feb. 5, 2025.
Already, Trump is trying to purge the FBI and DOJ of anyone who worked on the investigations that led to his multiple indictments, or who helped indict and convict the hundreds of pro-Trump insurrectionists from Jan. 6, 2021.
According to the Atlantic, FBI agents are "stunned by the scale of the expected Trump purge," and they are going as far as suing the DOJ to block the purge.
Trump's threat to have Bondi investigate Democrats makes former President Joe Biden's preemptive pardons of the Congress members on the Jan. 6 committee look prescient.
In his final days in office, Biden pardoned all members of the now-defunct House Select Committee that probed the Jan. 6 insurrection, including Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who helped run Trump’s COVID-19 response; and Gen. Mark Milley, the former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who called Trump a “fascist” and is being targeted by Trump.
“These are exceptional circumstances, and I cannot in good conscience do nothing. Even when individuals have done nothing wrong—and in fact have done the right thing—and will ultimately be exonerated, the mere fact of being investigated or prosecuted can irreparably damage reputations and finances,” Biden said in a statement.
Ultimately, Trump promised to be a dictator on Day 1. His actions show us that he has accomplished that goal.
LOL but also it's sad this is what it takes for action to occur
Robocallers posing as employees of the Federal Communications Commission made the mistake of trying to scam real employees of the FCC, the FCC announced yesterday. "On the night of February 6, 2024, and continuing into the morning of February 7, 2024, over a dozen FCC staff and some of their family members reported receiving calls on their personal and work telephone numbers," the FCC said.
The calls used an artificial voice that said, "Hello [first name of recipient] you are receiving an automated call from the Federal Communications Commission notifying you the Fraud Prevention Team would like to speak with you. If you are available to speak now please press one. If you prefer to schedule a call back please press two."
You may not be surprised to learn that the FCC does not have any "Fraud Prevention Team" like the one mentioned in the robocalls, and especially not one that demands Google gift cards in lieu of jail time.
No shit, and dems are still singing fucking kumbaya
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Sometimes a constitutional crisis sneaks up on you, shrouded in darkness, revealing itself gradually. Other times it announces itself dramatically. Elon Musk, to whom Donald Trump has delegated the task of neutering the congressional spending authority laid out in Article I of the Constitution, could hardly be more obvious about his intentions if he rode into Washington on a horse trailed by Roman legions.
“This is the one shot the American people have to defeat BUREAUcracy, rule of the bureaucrats, and restore DEMOcracy, rule of the people,” Musk wrote at 3:59 a.m. today on his social-media platform. “We’re never going to get another chance like this. It’s now or never. Your support is crucial to the success of the revolution of the people.” Here is Musk, as proxy for Trump, casting himself as a revolutionary force and embodiment of the popular will, demanding extraordinary powers to fight some unstated emergency.
Why, exactly, is eliminating these programs right this very instant so important? If, as Musk says, they are teeming with waste and fraud, presumably Congress could pass legislation to reduce or eliminate the problem, and if that were to fall short, it could try again later. Instead, Musk cites a vague crisis that requires suspending normal operations and concentrating power in his own hands. According to various reports, he is holed up in the Eisenhower Building with a small team of young engineers who possess neither government experience nor the authority to question his impulsive judgments, on the hunt for Marxist plots lurking within long-standing federal programs.
The situation exposes a well-known flaw in the design of the Constitution. The Founders, famously, failed to anticipate the rise of political parties. They assumed that each branch of government would jealously guard its own powers, and thus check the others. But political parties created a different incentive system, in which members of the legislative branch can see their role as essentially employees of the president. Trump, who has convinced the Republican base that his interests are indistinguishable from the party’s and transposed his overbearing Apprentice boss persona onto his relations with co-partisans in Congress, is exploiting these incentives more than any other president in history.
In theory, Congress ought to revolt against the prospect of Musk deciding which federal programs should live and which should die. In reality, its Republican members largely share Trump’s goals—and to the extent that they don’t, they correctly fear that opposing him would invite a primary challenge. What’s more, this particular constitutional crisis has an inherent partisan asymmetry. If Trump and Musk succeed in taking the power of the purse from Congress, they will effectively reset the rules of the game in favor of the right. Congress’s spending powers would be redefined as setting a ceiling on spending, but not a floor. A world in which the president could cut spending without exposing Congress to accountability would hand small-government conservatives the opportunity to carry out policies they’ve long desired but been too afraid to vote for.
And so, although a handful of conservative intellectuals, including the budget wonk Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute and the law professor and former Bush-administration lawyer Jack Goldsmith, have described Musk’s ambitions as unconstitutional, most of the establishment right has cheered him on or stayed quiet. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that Musk’s project might not be strictly constitutional, but nonetheless told the news site NOTUS that “nobody should bellyache about that.”
Making things even more disturbing is the chaotic legal gray area in which Musk is operating. Musk and his team are working in secret, without hearings or public debate. According to Wired, they gained access to the Treasury Department’s federal payment system, shoving aside the longtime staffer overseeing it and ignoring its safety protocols. Democrats suspect that Musk is breaching numerous federal laws, but without any oversight, it is hard to tell precisely what he is doing. In any case, Musk might not have much reason to care about following the law. Trump has already made plain, by issuing mass pardons and commutations for the January 6 insurrectionists, that he will protect illegal conduct on his behalf.
Meanwhile, Musk has adopted Trump’s habit of deeming opposition to his actions inherently criminal. He has called the United States Agency for International Development, a decades-old program with support in both parties, a “criminal organization.” After an X user posted the names of the young engineers working with Musk, previously reported by Wired, he responded, “You have committed a crime.” The X user’s account has since been suspended.
Reporting on the identities of powerful public officials is, in fact, not a crime—even, or especially, if those officials have assumed public powers without going through formal channels. Musk has nonetheless gotten backup for his threats from Edward R. Martin Jr., a former “Stop the Steal” organizer whom Trump installed as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. In a vague but menacing message posted (naturally) on X, Martin warned that “certain individuals and/or groups have committed acts that appear to violate the law in targeting DOGE employees.” Martin declined to identify either the individuals or the laws they’d allegedly broken, nor did he acknowledge that reporting about or criticizing Musk’s work constitutes First Amendment–protected activity. Whether Martin acts upon these threats remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, he is contributing to the atmosphere of menace surrounding Trump and Musk by delivering their threats with a legal sheen, like some kind of MAGA Tom Hagen.
The courts will have the final say over Trump’s audacious power grab. In all likelihood, they will affirm congressional authority to set spending levels authorized by the Constitution. But the Constitution ultimately means whatever five Supreme Court justices say it means. The Court’s more conservative justices often apply the most right-wing interpretation of the text they can plausibly defend, and occasionally one they can’t plausibly defend.
What’s more, Musk seems to have intuited that he can destroy programs and bureaucratic cultures faster than the system can restore them. Firing officials en masse, throwing the people and clients that rely on those programs into confusion and financial risk, and striking fear into the whole federal apparatus can break down the institutions and destroy their institutional knowledge. Rebuilding is painfully slow; destruction is rapid. This may be the dynamic Musk has in mind when he insists that his work must happen “now or never.”
Not even the most committed small-government-conservative lawmaker would design a process like the one now occurring: a handful of political novices, many of them drinking deep from the fetid waters of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, tearing through the federal budget, making haphazard decisions about what to scrap. And indeed, no elected body has designed this process. Trump and Musk have arrogated the power to themselves. The true urgent cause is to return that power to the legislature before the damage becomes irreversible.
Jon Stewart’s broadcast Monday covered the frightening levels of racism, transphobia, and colonialism on display since President Donald Trump took office.
“DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion, MAGA world's blamed this scourge for everything from the fires in California, to the attack on Bourbon Street, to inflation, to the Baltimore bridge collapse, to why your children are confused about the race of mermaids,” Stewart remarked.
“But don't take my word for it. Let's let MTV's ‘Real World’ star and ‘Fox & Friends’ B-teamer, explain DEI,” he added.
After showing clips of Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pontificating about ending DEI initiatives, Stewart detailed how Trump and other Republicans turned the tragic plane crash near the National Airport into an erroneous attack on DEI.
“By culture warring this tragedy, Americans spent that terrible night holding their breath that the pilot or the air traffic controller wouldn't be a woman or a Black person or in a wheelchair, because what they're trying to do is make the default setting on competence in America a white guy. That's what this is a reset to the factory default, because of course, these two are there purely based on merit and smarts,” he said.
“That's the irony of this whole thing,” Stewart continued. “The people standing next to Trump on that terrible night, blaming DEI and trying to reinstall white guys as the only none-suspect pool of hires, are themselves DEI hires for one particular identity that they possess: The Ass Kisser.”
SO FUCKING DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Jesus motherfucking christ
Billionaire Elon Musk is using his sway within Donald Trump’s administration to try to destroy the United States Agency for International Development. USAID handles U.S. aid to foreign projects around public health, education, disaster relief, and promoting democracy abroad.
On Monday, congressional Democrats condemned Musk’s actions, calling them illegal during a press conference outside of the closed USAID headquarters.
“China is cheering at this action today,” Murphy said.
Murphy: "Let's not pull any punches about why this is happening. Elon Musk makes billions off of his business with China. And China is cheering at this action today. There is no question that the billionaire class trying to take over our govt right now is doing it based on self-interest."
“Elon Musk, you may have illegally seized power over the financial payment systems of the United States Department of Treasury,” Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said. “But you don’t control the money of the American people. The United States Congress does that under Article 1 of the Constitution.”
Raskin called the billionaire’s actions an “outrageous, scandalous, illegal maneuver.” The congressman questioned the target of Musk’s attempted budget cuts, noting the Pentagon, whose budget is more than 20 times the size of the USAID, does not seem to be on Musk’s list.
“The Pentagon budget is where the defense contractor, Elon Musk, who became the richest man in the world off of our money, he collects his payments from,” Raskin said. “And now he's trying to shut down USAID. We're not going to allow this to happen. It will not stand.”
Musk responded on his hate-filled social media site, X, with a bit of doublespeak that George Orwell would have probably found egregious.
Trump seems content with the perception that he is running the show, but it is clear that he is out of his depth when it comes to billionaire predators like Musk pulling the strings behind—and now in front—of the scenes.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won't use an AI assistant to help write their application. "While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process," the applications say. "We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree."
Anthropic released Claude, an AI assistant that's especially good at conversational writing, in 2023. This question is in almost all of Anthropic's nearly 150 currently-listed roles, but is not in some technical roles, like mobile product designer. It's included in everything from software engineer roles to finance, communications, and sales jobs at the company. The field was spotted by Simon Willison, an open source developer. The question shows Anthropic trying to get around a problem it's helping create: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own. It's also a moot question, as Anthropic and its competitors have created AI models so indistinguishable from human speech as to be nearly undetectable.
great, but as we're seeing, a completely lawless executive branch can still do lots of damage
A handful of GOP Congress members are demanding that their party make deeper cuts to the social safety net, or else they will derail President Donald Trump's agenda.
According to a report from Politico, Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Ralph Norman of South Carolina threatened to vote against the budget blueprint needed to get the ball rolling on Trump's legislative agenda, unless it includes more cuts to Medicaid and food stamps.
As Politico reported:
The Energy and Commerce Committee would need to increase its planned $200 billion minimum in cuts, which almost assuredly will trigger tough conversations around Medicaid. The Agriculture Committee, which had outlined a minimum target of $50 billion in cuts during the final retreat meeting, would now need to cut $150 billion. That would mean deeper impacts on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that helps feed more than 40 million low-income Americans.
Norman told Fox News that the budget blueprint’s $300 billion in proposed cuts is "laughable" and that he is “shocked it was that low.”
“We’ve got a math problem. We’ve got to get a resolution we need which has a number which can get through committee and get through the floor," he said, suggesting that he would vote against the budget resolution.
Norman added that he wants to see between $1 trillion and $5 trillion in cuts—an absurd number as the entire federal budget is $7 trillion, with the majority of that going to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense spending, and interest on the national debt.
While additional cuts would appease Norman, Roy, and other hard-line Republicans, they could lose the support of other GOP lawmakers in competitive districts, who would be wary of backing cutbacks that would significantly upset their constituents.
Republicans will have just 217 seats for the next few months, after Trump poached two GOP lawmakers for his administration and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida declined to take his seat after his nomination for attorney general went up in flames. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York is expected to resign once she is confirmed as Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations.
Such a narrow majority means that Johnson can’t afford to lose a single vote, which would result in a 216-216 tie.
The fact that Republicans are still squabbling to get past even the first step of budget reconciliation, which the GOP wants to use because it doesn’t require any Democratic votes, is a terrible sign for their ability to pass Trump's agenda.
House Republicans already left a retreat last week—which was meant to get the party on the same page on how to pass Trump’s agenda—without an agreement on how to move forward with tax cuts for the rich and Trump's anti-immigrant crackdown.
"After two days at our House Republican winter retreat, we still do not have a plan on budget reconciliation and our Speaker and his team have not offered one. Not even if we are in a one bill or two bill framework, even though President Trump (who prefers one big beautiful bill) literally told us here at the start of our conference that he now does not care if it’s one or two," Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote on X.
With such a feckless and incompetent group of Republicans in Congress, Trump’s legislative agenda might already be dead.
President Donald Trump talks to reporters in the Oval Office at the White House on January 30, 2025. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Things that, just a few years ago, would have been thought impossible in the American system of government are now happening.
Donald Trump is asserting the president’s power to remake the executive branch as he sees fit — empowering Elon Musk to push aside civil servants, wind down entire agencies, and generally strike terror into the federal workforce.
Musk’s effort seems to be willfully heedless of laws against firing certain employees and spending requirements from Congress, and outside experts have argued that much of what he is doing seems blatantly illegal. He is doing it anyway.
At the same time, the longtime professionalized “independence” of the US Department of Justice in conducting criminal investigations and prosecutions is being shattered.
Trump’s team has already fired dozens of prosecutors and top FBI officials who worked on the cases against Trump or January 6, 2021, rioters, and is laying the groundwork for an even more widespread purge of FBI employees who worked on the January 6 probes. Entirely unrelated prosecutions of Trump’s political allies are also being dropped or wound down.
Meanwhile, companies are not only prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet, they’re giving him massive payoffs. Meta paid $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit over the company’s suspension of his accounts, the bulk of which will fund Trump’s presidential library. Paramount, the parent company of CBS, is mulling its own settlement in Trump’s nuisance lawsuit complaining about how 60 Minutes edited an interview of Kamala Harris last year.
Both seem blatantly motivated by these companies’ fear that the president will turn the powers of the federal government against them for political payback. And initial actions from Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chief suggest they have good reason to fear this.
The common theme is that Trump is crashing through institutional and legal guardrails preventing the centralization of power in the presidency and the corrupt weaponization of government.
Those of placid temperaments, or those exhausted by years of anti-Trump panic and “threats to democracy” warnings, may be inclined to dismiss these as no big deal. But just try to put yourself into the mindset of a few years ago, to realize how shocking all of these things would have been.
We are still very near the beginning of this story and we have no idea how it will end. But there are two crucial questions going forward. First, what will Trump’s team do with their increased presidential power? Second, will they eventually hit a wall, doing things that are too extreme for the courts or Congress or the public to accept?
Elon Musk has assumed vast powers
The story that has most shocked Washington since Trump was sworn in has been the incredible power wielded by Elon Musk.
Musk has reportedly become a “special government employee,” though his formal role remains unknown. But various allies and former employees of his have been installed at several government offices, including the Office of Personnel Management, the General Services Administration, and the US Digital Service (now renamed the US DOGE Service). It has become clear that Musk is in charge of a vast effort to purge and reshape the federal workforce.
A key source of Musk’s power is that he appears to have gained the ability to place career civil servants who resist his demands on administrative leave. This is what happened to a top Treasury Department official and to security officials at USAID, the US foreign aid agency, when they resisted his team’s demands for systems access. Musk’s allies have also ordered civil servants working on DEI initiatives be placed on administrative leave, and his “fork in the road” email offered paid administrative leave to federal employees who agreed to resign later this year.
Previous presidents have not used administrative leave in this way — in part because it may be illegal. But that’s not holding up Musk, who seems to be using this as a “hack” to bulldoze past government employees who stand in his way — you defy him, and you’re gone. (“Career bureaucrats don’t get to violate lawful orders from the President of the United States,” Vice President JD Vance said in an X post Monday morning.)
Musk’s team has also gained control of the Treasury Department’s systems that disperse government salaries, payments, and grants. Previously, this has been controlled by professionalized civil servants who simply make the payments they’ve been instructed to. Musk, though, seems to want the power to freeze payments he doesn’t like.
Most dramatically, Musk asserted that USAID will be shut down, even though it was established by a law passed by Congress. Musk claimed that, after talking it over with Trump, the president “agreed that we should shut it down.” (“I actually checked with him a few times,” Musk said.)
How is he getting away with doing all this? The answer is, simply, that Trump wants him to. A Washington Post report Monday cited sources close to the president claiming “Trump is not closely monitoring Musk’s moves” but that “Trump views Musk as doing the task he assigned him.” So as long as Musk seems to be acting with the president’s blessing, so long as he can place civil servants on leave willy-nilly, and so long as lawsuits and judges don’t manage to rein him in, he will have immense leeway to operate as he sees fit.
The Justice Department’s independence is being shattered
Less surprising, but still quite concerning and consequential, is the purge underway at the US Department of Justice, which seems to keep getting bigger.
More than a dozen prosecutors who worked on the two federal cases against Trump were fired last week.
More than a dozen other prosecutors who had worked on federal prosecutions of January 6 rioters were fired late last week.
Several FBI executives or field office heads were told to resign or be fired late last week.
Over the weekend, FBI officials sent out a questionnaire to thousands of FBI personnel asking them to detail any involvement in January 6 rioter cases. The questionnaire seems to herald a potentially much more vast purge of FBI employees, since thousands are believed to have been involved in such cases.
It’s worth noting that Trump isn’t only retaliating against those who investigated him personally. He seems to want to retaliate against anyone who held his supporters accountable for breaking the law and storming the Capitol in an illegal attempt to keep him in power. (And of course, he already issued an incredibly wide-ranging pardon of those rioters, even violent ones who attacked police.)
Meanwhile, Trump’s DOJ moved to shut down an investigation into one Republican member of Congress, and a prosecution of a former member. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) was being probed over his finances, but prosecutors on the case suddenly withdrew last week, in what’s likely a wind-down of the case. And false statements charges against former Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) were dropped last week too.
All of this is happening before Trump’s appointees to head the DOJ and FBI — Pam Bondi and Kash Patel — are even confirmed. Patel promised with a straight face during his confirmation hearing that he’d work to protect FBI employees from political prosecution (despite years of saying otherwise).
Clearly, though, Trump has no intention of letting the longstanding independence of the DOJ and FBI in criminal investigations continue to exist. The question going forward is how aggressive his appointees will be at trying to fulfill Trump’s long-held desire that his critics and opponents be prosecuted.
Corporations are paying off the president to escape political payback
Meanwhile, the corporate world’s accommodation to Trump, evident at his inauguration, has taken on a troubling new dimension.
Back in 2021, Trump sued Meta because it had suspended his accounts after the January 6 riots. Last week, Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle the suit, of which $22 million will go to a fund for Trump’s presidential library.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump had mentioned the lawsuit during a dinner with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after the election last November, signaling it had to be resolved if Zuckerberg wanted a better relationship with his administration.
Similarly, during the campaign, Trump sued Paramount, the parent company of CBS News, alleging 60 Minutes deceptively edited an interview of Harris to help her campaign and hurt his. Brendan Carr, his new chief of the FCC, has asked CBS News for an unedited transcript of Harris’s answer.
Trump’s lawsuit is widely believed to be groundless, but Paramount shareholders fear that the Trump administration will interfere with a planned sale of the company unless they appease him. So they are now engaged in settlement talks too.
Overall, both of these look like companies responding to shakedowns by the president. Meta has already agreed to pay him off (or, pay his library fund off) to avoid political payback, and Paramount may do the same. All this smacks of practices in corrupt kleptocracies, where payoffs of top officials are necessary for businesses to operate without government crackdowns. How much worse will it get?
What comes next?
It’s worth pausing to note that all this has unfolded in just two weeks, with much of it happening in just the past few days.
Trump’s team appears to be on a very clear mission to centralize power in the presidency — taking it away from career civil servants, Congress, and the courts to the extent they can — so Trump will actually be able to wield government power as he sees fit.
That would mean he’ll be far better able to impose policies that career civil servants (and his own appointees) believed would be disastrous, corrupt, or illegal. He’ll also be far better able to weaponize the government against his enemies, like he’s always wanted.
There’s a lot we still don’t know about just what Musk is trying to do, or how wide-ranging exactly the DOJ and FBI purge will end up being. But the more limited the pushback against them ends up being, the more empowered the ideologues on Trump’s team will feel.
So one major question is: Will there eventually be real pushback? Will Musk’s efforts and the various purges get bogged down in legal challenges? Will the FBI workforce push back against attempts to fire their fellow agents for doing their jobs? Will congressional Republicans and swing-vote senators decide they actually didn’t sign up for this? Will there be a major public backlash?
Last week’s debacle over an order that seemed to freeze all federal grants shows there is a limit to how far the Trump administration will go — after a judge put a hold on the order, Trump’s team rescinded it and claimed it was never meant to be so broad. But Trump’s team continued to charge ahead on other fronts. And unless the courts stop them, they will likely keep doing so.
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday ordering the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments to create a sovereign wealth fund and said it may purchase TikTok. From a report: "We're going to stand this thing up within the next 12 months. We're going to monetize the asset side of the U.S. balance sheet for the American people," Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters. "There'll be a combination of liquid assets, assets that we have in this country as we work to bring them out for the American people."
Trump had previously floated such a government investment vehicle as a presidential candidate, saying it could fund "great national endeavors" like infrastructure projects such as highways and airports, manufacturing, and medical research. Details on how exactly the fund would operate and be financed were not immediately available, but Trump previously said it could be funded by "tariffs and other intelligent things." Typically such funds rely on a country's budget surplus to make investments, but the U.S. operates at a deficit.
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There’s a lot of talk of cozy games these days, and Civilization is definitely my personal cozy game. It’s relaxing to get lost in a flow state, making “a series of interesting decisions” for “one more turn,” then another, late into the evening.
Change is almost definitionally not cozy, though, and Civilization VII changes quite a lot —especially about the game’s overall structure.
Frankly, I’ve long felt the series peaked with Civilization IV, at least for me. But after playing VII for a couple of dozen hours, there’s a chance it’s at least as good as Civilization V, and it has the potential to even match IV with just a little more refinement.
What’s that old definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
Enter Kentucky.
Back in 2018, as then-President Donald Trump did his usual bullying act with Europe, the European Union hit back in a smart and targeted manner, slapping retaliatory sanctions against Trump-supporting industries (e.g., coal, agriculture) and states (e.g., Texas, Florida, Kentucky).
The tariffs cost those industries dearly, yet voters in those states seemingly decided that free and unfettered trade with our allies was too big a price to pay for transgender people having rights or the price of eggs being too high, so they voted for more of that pain last November.
And now in the spotlight is Kentucky’s whiskey industry. Here’s WCPO, an ABC affiliate out of nearby Cincinnati, Ohio:
The threat stems from actions taken by the first Trump Administration in 2018, when the U.S. first slapped 25% and 10% tariffs on European steel and aluminum imports, respectively. European Union officials then imposed a 25% retaliatory tariff on American whiskey exports, which it suspended in 2022.
"We saw tens—if not hundreds—of millions of millions of dollars of impact on exports that the bourbon industry is just recovering from," Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said during a Jan. 16 press conference. "A state, again, that voted for Trump by 30 points will get hit incredibly hard."
Eric Gregory, the president of the Kentucky Distillers’ Association, an industry group, told WCPO that the 2018 tariffs cost his industry—and hence the state—upwards of roughly $580 million, which is a breathtaking amount. Those EU tariffs were 25%. The new tariffs, set to take effect on March 31 if no deal is reached between the U.S. and EU, will be double that: 50%. Kentucky distillers export over 95% of the world’s bourbon products, with the EU being their biggest export market, according to Gregory.
Want to guess the next-biggest market? Mexico and Canada—Trump’s newest foes.
Bourbon is a $9 billion industry, according to the Kentucky Distillers’ Organization. The group says the local industry employs over 23,100 people and generates $358 million in tax revenue. In other words, these distillers and Kentucky could be in for a world of hurt.
"We're trying to sound the alarms as much as possible that these are good, paying American jobs that are in jeopardy," Gregory told WCPO. "We have been caught up in trade wars that have nothing to do with whiskey."
Donald Trump
Except it has everything to do with Trump’s trade wars. Trump started a fight that has already generated a great deal of collateral damage. The smartest trade partners will do what the EU did—retaliate against his own supporters. And given that Trump’s answer to everything right now is “TARIFFS,” expect the pain to go deep.
What’s worse for these guys, domestic consumption of alcohol is down.
“The new Generation Z (isn't) drinking as much. You've got everything from weight loss drugs that deter the effects of alcohol to supply chain issues," Gregory said. "When you look at cutting off a major supply market like the EU with all this bourbon sitting here, that's a recipe for trouble."
"We need President Trump's help to figure out a way to help us get out of this mess that we've been ensnared in,” he added.
Of course, Trump doesn't care. Kentucky could’ve done something about it on Election Day, but they opted for this—and by a massive margin. As the state that also foisted Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell on us (as well as Sen. Rand Paul)—if anyone deserves what’s coming, it may just be Kentucky.
The hope is now that as countries weigh retaliatory tariffs, they take the EU’s lead and focus their retaliations on red states and red-leaning industries as much as possible.
The next four years will suck, but anything that directs the pain at the right people makes it a little more bearable.
The Federal Communications Commission demanded that CBS provide the unedited transcript of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that is the subject of a complaint to the FCC and a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump.
CBS News on Wednesday received a letter of inquiry in which the FCC requested "the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds" of the Harris interview, The New York Times reported today. "We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do," a CBS News spokesperson told media outlets.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr repeatedly echoed Trump's complaints about alleged media bias before the election and has taken steps to punish news broadcasters since Trump promoted him to the chairmanship. Complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations were dismissed under former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, but Carr reversed those dismissals in his first week as chair. Carr also ordered investigations into NPR and CBS.
She's manifestly a terrible person. Being trans doesn't change that.
Karla Sofía Gascon at an Emilia Pérez photocall on November 28, 2024 in Madrid, Spain. | Borja B. Hojas/WireImage
Since its arrival on Netflix in December, the Spanish-language French film Emilia Pérez has been a nesting doll of controversies. The musical, directed by Jacques Audiard, has been slammed by critics and on social media for its regressive portrayal of trans identity. The film has also been critiqued for its “Eurocentric” depiction of Mexico — even inspiring a viral spoof film made by Mexican filmmakers, called Johanne Sacreblu — and Audiard himself has made dismissive if not offensive comments about Mexico and the Spanish language. Meanwhile, earlier this week, the movie’s Oscar lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, was most notable for being at war with “Brazilian Twitter” for comments she made about her Best Actress rival Fernanda Torres’s social media team.
Despite all this, Emilia Pérez is up for 13 Oscar nominations and is predicted to pick up at least one for Zoe Saldaña in the Best Supporting Actress category. Gascón’s Oscar hopes are likely done, however, following a series of offensive, resurfaced tweets in what might be one of the most surprising scandals in Oscars history.
On Wednesday, after Gascón was already in the news for her comments about Torres, X users began circulating years-old tweets from the Spanish actress using derogatory language aimed at marginalized communities. The tweets, from as recent as 2021, include disturbing remarks about George Floyd, Islam, and even the nonwhite winners of the 2021 Oscars ceremony. Other tweets find her casually using anti-gay and other hateful language.
The Oscars aren’t unfamiliar with controversy. However, the mounting issues corroding the Emilia Pérez Oscar campaign are pretty extraordinary — and even make the controversy surrounding 2019 Best Picture Green Book look quaint in comparison. In the days since her old tweets were exposed, Gascón has arguably dug herself (and the film) into a deeper hole, giving insufficient apologies and even implying that her calling-out is some sort of conspiracy. Now, the film’s producers are reportedly trying to distance the movie from its star,Audiard stated he isn’t speaking with her either, and the Oscars ceremony itself is adapting around the controversy. It’s an ironic trajectory for a movie that has been bolstered by the Hollywood establishment for its diversity and “progressive” themes.
What did Gascón’s tweets say?
On Thursday, journalist Sarah Hagi posted a thread with screenshots of more than a dozen tweets from Gascón (in her native Spanish) disparaging Islam and immigrants from the Arabic countries. In one tweet posted on July 2, 2016, and translated by Vox editor Izzie Ramirez, she says, “Islam is becoming an infection for humanity that needs to be cured urgently.” In another tweet from September 2, 2020, Gascón, who is from Spain, posted a photo of a Muslim family, including a woman wearing a burka, in a restaurant, mocking the role of women in Islam. In the tweet, she sarcastically decried the wearing of burkhas and what she perceives as the lack of respect for women in Islam, capping it off with a phrase that translates to “the deepest revulsion of humanity.”
In other posts, she points out the rising number of Muslims in Spain, lamenting that schools will start to teach Arabic instead of English. She blames Islam for several terrorist attacks. There are also multiple tweets where she a European slur referring to Muslims or people with dark skin.
it’s so insane that karla sofía gascón still has these tweets up. straight up have never seen tweets this racist from someone actively campaigning to win an ACADEMY AWARD. there are more than a dozen… pic.twitter.com/1rcNzkJXuo
Users then began circulating a startling now-deleted thread she apparently posted on June 8, 2020, about Floyd, whose death by a police officer ignited worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. In the first post, a user with Gascón’s name says, “Let me see if I understand, a guy tried to pass off a counterfeit bill after taking meth, an idiot cop arrives, and goes too far in arresting him and kills him, ruining the lives of his family and friends, and then then guy with the bill turns into a heroic marytr.” In another statement in the thread, the user refers to Floyd as a “drug addict and a hustler.”
The X account also exposed other unsavory comments, like a joke about China and Covid-19, and casual use of hateful language. A post about the 2021 Oscars ceremonies, read, “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films. I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M [feminist strike],” referring to an International Women’s Day march, which takes place on March 8. Users also found a bizarre post where she refers to paparazzi photos of Miley Cyrus cozying up with a woman as “lesbian perversion.” This post might be seen as particularly baffling, as Gascón is herself a trans woman who is married to another woman.
Gascón’s X account has since been deleted, although screenshots of her comments still abound online. On Friday, she also gave a terse apology to Variety: “I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt. As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well, and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life, I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”
She had previously sent a more defiant exclusive statement to the Hollywood Reporter, explaining why she deleted her account. In that statement, she called the backlash a “campaign of hate and misinformation,” while implying that the opinions she stated have changed:
“As part of this society, I have expressed my disagreement or agreement with all the related issues that have touched me and of which I have had an opinion, often erroneous, which has changed throughout my own experience. I have always used my social media as a diary, reflections or notes, to later create stories or characters, not as something that would be scrutinized down to the last of its 140 characters, since sometimes I, myself, am not even aware of having written something negative.”
On February 3, she addressed the controversy on Instagram in a statement that partly reads: “They have already won. They have achieved their objective, to stain my existence with lies or things taken out of context.” Later that evening, she appeared on CNN en Español where she sat down for a tear-filled, hour-long interview to clarify the context of her tweets and claimed that they aren’t representative of her character. She also alluded to a possible smear campaign, pointing out the timing of the resurfaced tweets during the Oscars voting period, which ends on February 18.
“They put them all together so it seems that she is a very bad person, and we remove her just when we can do the most damage right in the voting period,” she told anchor Juan Carlos Arciniegas. She also said a post credited to her where she calls her Emilia Pérez co-star Selena Gomez a “rich rat” was fabricated. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Gascón set up the interview independently “without the involvement of anyone working on the film,” including its distributor, Netflix.
So far, Saldaña is Gascón’s only co-star to address her resurfaced posts. At an Emilia Pérez Q&A in London on January 31, where Gascon was expected to appear but pulled out, Saldaña said she was “still processing” Gascón’s remarks. “It makes me really sad because I don’t support [it],” she said. “And I don’t have any tolerance for any negative rhetoric toward people of any group. I can only attest to the experience that I had with each and every individual that was a part, that is a part, of this film, and my experience and my interactions with them was about inclusivity and collaboration and racial, cultural, and gender equity. And it just saddens me.”
Oscars campaigns are usually messy, but not this messy
For decades, the sabotaged Oscars campaign has been a fascinating — and typically amusing — phenomenon of awards season. Outside of Gascón’s antics, this year alone has seen several other controversies threaten the chances of certain Oscar hopefuls. Last week, the editor of 10-time Oscar nominee The Brutalist, Dávid Jancsó, revealed that he utilized AI to perfect Adrien Brody’s Hungarian speech in a brief part of the film. This led to questions about whether Brody’s performance, which has already earned him a Golden Globe, should be re-evaluated.
Meanwhile, in the midst of Gascón’s controversy, social media users found an article that her rival Torres had written slamming Amber Heard during her 2023 defamation trial against her ex-husband Johnny Depp, as well as a resurfaced video of Torres appearing in blackface in a comedy sketch on a Brazilian TV show, for which she apologized earlier this week.
Other times, these flubbed campaigns have often emerged from aggressive PR measures, from the Bette Davis infamous write-in campaign to the supposed “overkill” of Diana Ross’s Best Actress campaign ads for Lady Sings the Blues to Melissa Leo’s self-funded “Consider…” plea — although she ultimately went on to receive her Oscar. This sort of zealous campaign was famously codified by former film producer Harvey Weinstein. Before Gascón’s scandal, the mantle for the most controversial recent Best Actress nominee belonged to Andrea Riseborough, who caused a huge kerfuffle when she received a surprising nod in 2023 for the small Sundance film To Leslie, due to sudden endorsements by celebrities and a dubious email sent to voters. The last-minute but shockingly efficient campaign ultimately didn’t go against the Academy’s lobbying rules, but it did put a mark on the actress leading up to the awards show.
In general, though, it’s much more rare that a contender’s Oscars chances have been tainted if not completely shattered due to hate speech — the most recent example being Lars von Trier’s antisemitic comments during a press conference for his 2011 film Melancholia. Still, Gascón’s controversy presents a more complex and head-scratching case, given that Gascón is the first openly trans acting nominee. Despite how groundbreaking her nomination is on paper, her hateful comments on social media blot out any perception that her nomination is a win for progress.
Awards forecaster Scott Feinberg also claimed that Gascón’s tweets have “severely damaged the Oscar prospects of her film,” outside of the Best Actress category. “Based on my conversations in recent days with Academy members, many are going to have a hard time voting for Emilia Pérez in any category, given that Emilia Pérez herself has become toxic,” said the Hollywood Reporter journalist. Likewise, Netflix has reportedly distanced itself from Gascón in order to salvage the film’s Oscar chances. In a report for Variety on February 4, sources said that Netflix had stopped communicating directly with Gascón, instead through her representative at United Talent Agency. Sources also claimed that the streamer would no longer be covering expenses for her travel during awards season. Additionally, a new “For Your Consideration” poster for Emilia Pérez doesn’t include any images of Gascón. The film’s FYC page also features a prominent photo of Saldaña, not the film’s titular lead.
Audiard has also disavowed Gascón publicly, calling her comments “inexcusable.” In a Q&A withDeadline on February 5, he said that he hasn’t spoken to her, saying that she “needs space to reflect and take accountability for her actions.” He also lamented that Gascón’s remarks and subsequent antics were impacting the entire Emilia Pérez team. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “And what I don’t understand about this too is why she’s harming people who were very close to her. I’m thinking in this thing of how [she’s] hurting others, of how she’s hurting the crew and all these people who worked so incredibly hard on this film. I’m thinking of myself. I’m thinking of Zoe [Saldaña] and Selena [Gomez]. I just don’t understand why she’s continuing to harm us.”
Her controversial comments also present a legitimate conundrum for the ceremony. Folks are already wondering how she’ll be included in the Best Actress presentation. The Academy recently announced that it would be bringing back the “Fab 5” format, where previous acting winners give a heartfelt introduction to each of the nominees. However, sources clarified to Variety, following the Gascón scandal, that they would only be utilizing the format for “the director’s category and other artisans awards.” There’s also always the possibility for more vocal backlash and even boycotts from the groups she targeted.
Overall, Gascón’s remarks have only continued to illuminate the shallowness of Emilia Pérez as a project and a “progressive” pick for the Academy. Following her scandal, folks have openly questioned why a European woman was cast in the role of a Mexican character, and recirculated comments about Audiard professing his own ignorance about Mexico. They’ve also affected any remaining amount of goodwill that the movie had going for it, including a powerful statement Gascón made at the Golden Globes earlier in January, when the film won Best Picture — Musical or Comedy.
“The light always wins over darkness,” she said. “You can put us in jail, you can beat us up, but you can never take away our soul or our resistance or our identity. I want to say to you, raise your voice and say that I won, I am who I am, not who you want [me to be].” Who knew that, a few weeks later, it’d be recycled for an apology?
Correction, February 3, 1:30 pm ET: An earlier version of this story misstated when Karla Sofía Gascón posted on Instagram and appeared on CNN en Español. They occurred over the weekend.
Update, February 5, 5:45 pm ET: This story was originally published on January 31, 2025, and has been updated several times, most recently to include an interview with Jacques Audiard, reports that Netflix has distanced itself from the star, and the Oscars are abandoning their “Fab 5” format for acting categories.
this will still be a disaster. Expect the Supreme Court to say "yep we think it's illegal, but the President is supreme and can't be ordered to do anything, Impeachment is the only remedy" and we know the GOP will never fucking do that
President Donald Trump shakes hands with Justice Brett Kavanaugh before delivering the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 5, 2019. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
McConnell’s order is significant not only because it puts a second court order between the Trump White House and its proposed spending cuts, but because of who McConnell cites to justify his decision: Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Republican appointed to the Supreme Court by Trump in his first term. That citation suggests Trump’s effort may be on its way to being declared unconstitutional before the Supreme Court, once this legal challenge reaches the justices.
Shortly after taking office this month, Trump issued a series of executive orders seeking to reduce or end spending on a variety of issues, from foreign aid, to diversity programs, to what Trump calls “gender ideology extremism.” On Tuesday, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memo purporting to implement these executive orders, which seemed to call for an absolutely sweeping pause on government funding.
Still, the current Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican supermajority. And all six of those Republicans ruled over the summer that Trump has broad immunity from prosecution for crimes he commits using the powers of the presidency. So it’s not entirely clear whether these Republican justices will follow the consensus view.
McConnell’s order, however, quotes from a 2013 opinion by then-federal appellate Judge Kavanaugh, which rejects the idea of impoundment and even cites a 1969 Department of Justice memo written by future Chief Justice William Rehnquist that reads: “It is in our view extremely difficult to formulate a constitutional theory to justify a refusal by the President to comply with a congressional directive to spend.”
According to Kavanaugh’s opinion, “even the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend” funds appropriated by Congress.
Meanwhile, another member of the Supreme Court’s Republican majority, Chief Justice John Roberts, expressed similar views when he was a lawyer working in the Reagan White House. In a 1985 memo, Roberts wrote that it is “clear” that the president cannot impound funds in “normal situations.” Roberts added that “no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.”
It is, of course, possible that Roberts or Kavanaugh have changed their views on this topic. It is also possible that they will ignore their own beliefs about the law because they want to help out a Republican president. But, assuming that both justices hew to their past views, it suggests that there are at least five votes on the Supreme Court against Trump’s impoundment efforts should this case reach the highest court: Roberts, Kavanaugh, and the three Democratic justices.
And, with five Supreme Court votes, Trump’s impoundment plans would be declared unconstitutional.
Ruin him. CNN should seek attorneys' fees and ensure that he never has another penny to his name
Former North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson dropped his libel lawsuit against CNN on Friday and said he is leaving public life, marking the final chapter for the disgraced Republican politician who was caught posting racist and sexually explicit musings on a porn website.
Robinson was suing CNN over its bombshell report during his 2024 bid for governor which revealed that in a series of posts on a pornographic website forum, Robinson described himself as a “black Nazi,” made racist slurs against Martin Luther King Jr., and said the only reason he wasn’t in the Ku Klux Klan is because he is Black and they wouldn’t let him in. Robinson made the vile comments on a website called Nude Africa, where he also admitted to watching “tr-nny on girl porn,” “peeping” on women in public showers, and cheating on his wife with his sister-in-law.
In a series of posts on X, Robinson continued to claim that CNN lied in the report that broke the story of his disturbing internet postings, although he never provided any evidence that the report was false.
But Robinson said that continuing his lawsuit would be too costly and that a "continued political persecution of my family and loved ones is a cost I am unwilling to continue to bear."
"The words of our Savior, along with the earthly reality that costly litigation and political gamesmanship by my detractors makes clear that continuing to pursue retribution from CNN is a futile effort," Robinson wrote. "That is why I have asked Jesse Binnall and his legal team to terminate any continued attempt to litigate with CNN on my or my family’s behalf."
Robinson added that he has no plans to primary North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, who is up for reelection in 2026.
"I will not run next year, nor do I have plans to seek elected office in the future. Until we change the hearts and souls of those inside the political arena, it is unlikely the political process itself will undergo any meaningful change," Robinson said.
Robinson handily lost his bid for North Carolina governor in November to Democrat Josh Stein, even as Donald Trump won the state.
Trump, who had praised Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids,” distanced himself from the tainted candidate after the CNN report on the Nude Africa posts.
Of course, Trump had embraced Robinson despite knowing about the other horrifying comments he had already made, including when Robinson denied that Adolf Hitler killed millions of Jews in the Holocaust, said 9/11 was an “inside job,” that the music industry leads people to Satan, and that LGBTQ+ people are “filth.”
Nevertheless, we may all be officially done dealing with Robinson. Good riddance.
gee, it's like having a right-wing TV host as a defense secretary may be a bad thing?
Donald Trump’s brand-new secretary of defense spoke with Fox News’ morning crew Friday and said that invading countries such as Mexico is a very real option.
“The drug cartels have been declared terrorist organizations,” “Fox & Friends” host Brian Kilmeade said, adding that invading countries such as Somalia, Sudan, and Syria would be prime for an American military strike if a terrorist organization such as al-Qaida was found there.
“As the secretary of defense, are you permitted now to go after them in Mexico or wherever they are?”
“Brian, I don't want to get ahead of the president and I won't, but that's ultimately going to be his decision,” Hegseth said. "But let me be clear. All options will be on the table.”
“The military is orienting, shifting toward an understanding of homeland defense on our sovereign territorial border,” Hegseth continued. “That is something we will do, and do robustly.”
The conversation was ostensibly about fentanyl coming into our country and how serious the GOP is about using might to stop it. Of course, one of Trump’s first acts as president was to pardon infamous drug trafficker Ross Ulbricht. The idea that the GOP is serious about anything other than what the billionaire class, led by Elon Musk wants them to do is laughable.
The preoccupation with Mexico, and many non-white countries for that matter, has been a focus of the GOP for decades, which has only heightened under Trump. Trump and the GOP have routinely used Mexico as a xenophobic scapegoat for their failed economic policies. From calling Mexicans “drug dealers, criminals, and rapists” to telling ghost stories about a mythical “caravan” of immigrants winding its way through South America to invade the U.S. to changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, nothing is too low for Trump.
Hegseth, a former Fox News weekend host, squeezed through confirmation, even as allegations of sexual abuse, domestic abuse, alcohol abuse, and a deluge of general inadequacies as a person were revealed to the public.
President Donald Trump is directly targeting transgender children in their homes and schools.
After signing an executive order Tuesday banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth under the age of 19, he signed another executive order Wednesday to cut funding for programs that promote “gender ideology.”
“Young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body and whether to view their parents and their reality as enemies to be blamed,” the latest order states.
Alternatively, the executive order pushes the idea of a “patriotic education” detached from ideas such as gender or critical race theory.
Chris Geidner, a legal reporter and analyst who publishes Law Dork, wrote on BlueSky that this executive order will “undoubtedly” be used to “create more oppressive environments for trans students.”
As for Trump’s ban on medical care, the executive order follows a Supreme Court hearing in December, U.S. v. Skrmetti, regarding a similar ban in Tennessee.
Chase Strangio, ACLU’s lead counsel and co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, argued before the Supreme Court that day, and he issued a statement provided to Daily Kos regarding the executive order.
“President Trump has shown a clear determination to drive transgender people out of public life while attempting to control our families, our bodies, and our lives,” the statement read. “Today’s order lays out a clear plan to shut down access to life-saving medical care for transgender youth nationwide, overriding the role of families and putting politics between patients and their doctors. We will not allow this dangerous, sweeping, and unconstitutional order to stand.”
The use of puberty blockers and rare cases of underage gender-reassignment surgeries in transgender youth were thrust into the spotlight on the campaign trail.
And while some die-hard Trumpers might be thinking that transgender children popped out of nowhere in the past few years, the reality is that transgender youth have been using FDA-approved puberty blockers since the 1980s.
But starting in 2021, states began banning gender-affirming medications for children, leading to an avalanche of more than 400 anti-trans bills.
Both executive orders are likely to be challenged in court.
The openly transphobic president has also signed an executive order that will effectively ban transgender people from the military. To avoid getting wrapped up in more legal battles, he’s hiding behind the language of “troop readiness.”
In other words, Trump’s executive order claims that transgender people are too mentally unstable to be fit for war.
Nevertheless, civil rights groups Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign are gearing up for a legal battle.
“Thousands of transgender troops are combat-tested, having been deployed to war zones and executed missions with distinction, many of whom are senior personnel with decades of experience,” Lambda Legal Counsel and Nonbinary and Transgender Rights Project Director Sasha Buchert told Daily Kos.
“It will hurt unit cohesion because it will discriminate against otherwise qualified service members,” Buchert continued, “sending the message that identity rather than merit is what is important and that some discrimination is acceptable.”
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Donald Trump likes to tell his supporters that he’s a fighter, a fearless champion who always has their back. Such guarantees, however, apparently do not apply to people who worked for him when they’re threatened by foreign assassins. Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and the former Pompeo aide Brian Hook have all been targeted by Trump for political retribution. They are also being targeted by the Iranians, but the regime in Tehran has marked them all for death.
The president may be spoiling for a fight with career bureaucrats and “woke” professors, but when it comes to Iranian assassins, he is willing to walk away from men who carried out his orders. Milley, Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook all served in Trump’s first administration—he appointed them to their posts—and they were part of the Trump national-security team when the United States killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a strike in January 2020. In 2022, an Iranian national was arrested and charged with trying to arrange Bolton’s murder, and American intelligence believes that other officials—including Trump himself—have been targeted by Iran because of their involvement in killing Soleimani.
The Biden administration briefed the incoming Trump administration on these threats and on the security details it had authorized to protect Bolton and others. Last week, Trump removed the details protecting Bolton, Pompeo, and Hook; yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth removed the guards around Milley and announced that he would be investigating Milley for undermining the chain of command during Trump’s first term. Trump also revoked the security clearances held by all four men.
The revocation of security clearances is petty, but it harms the administration more than it does any of these men. Retaining a clearance helps former federal employees find work in the consulting world, and it is typical to hold on to them after leaving government service. (I was offered the opportunity to keep mine when I left the Naval War College.) But at more senior levels, clearances allow people in government to get advice from former leaders. Some of these people could have been of significant help to Trump’s staff during a crisis, although Trump himself is unlikely to care about that possibility.
Removing the security details, however, could have deadly consequences. The Iranians seem determined to seek revenge for the killing of Soleimani, and sooner or later, they might succeed. (“The Iranians are not good but they’re very enthusiastic,” a former Pentagon official said in October. “And of course, they’ve only got to get lucky once.”) And the Iranians aren’t the only threat out there; the Russians have no compunctions about attacking people in their home country, often using gruesome methods.
Trump takes such threats very seriously where he is concerned. When Biden officials alerted Trump to the danger from Iran, Trump asked for more security from the U.S. government, and during his campaign, according to The New York Times, he even asked that military assets be assigned to protect him, something usually provided only to sitting presidents.
Lesser mortals, however, must fend for themselves: Trump and Hegseth not only took away the security details of these former policy makers but did so with significant publicity, almost as if to broadcast to America’s enemies that anyone who wanted to settle scores with these officials would get no trouble from the current White House. (Trump also canceled protection for 84-year-old Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been the target of multiple threats from other Americans.) Trump despises critics such as Bolton and Milley, and it is unsurprising that he has no obvious issue subjecting them to physical danger. But even some Republicans —who should be used to this kind of vengefulness from the leader of their party—have been shocked, and are trying to get Trump to reverse course. They are particularly concerned about Pompeo and Hook, loyalists whose lives have been placed in jeopardy for sins that are known only to the president.
In another time, Americans would rally to protect their own from the agents of one of their most dedicated enemies. Today, most citizens seem either unaware or unperturbed that the president of the United States is exposing his own former staff to immense risks. Nevertheless, it should be said clearly and without equivocation: President Trump will bear direct responsibility for any harm that could come to these people from foreign actors.
This is far more than Trump’s usual pettiness. He has always considered the oath of federal service to be little more than an oath of loyalty to him, and he has always been willing to threaten his opponents. (In 2018, he apparently considered handing Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, over to Moscow, a move that provoked a level of outrage that seems quaint today.) Trump’s message in this second term is that friends and subordinates are literally disposable if they cross him: He will not only humiliate and fire them, but he will also subject them to actual physical danger.
This escalation of Trump’s vindictiveness should serve as a very personal warning to anyone willing to work for him in his second term. Senior officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the National Security Council, and other organizations are routinely asked to go head-to-head with representatives of some of the most dangerous nations on the planet, and to contribute to operations against those regimes. In the past, such officials could do so knowing that their own government would do everything it could to keep them—and their family—safe from foreign agents. As one of Bolton’s former deputies, Charles Kupperman, told the Times: “Trump’s national security team must provide guidance based on their assessment of what needs to be done to protect America without regard to their personal security.”
Good luck with that. No one who works in defense or national-security affairs can assume that, when Trump orders them to cross America’s many enemies in the world, he will protect them from foreign vengeance. Trump has now made clear that he will abandon people who have taken risks in the service of the United States—even those who were following his own orders—if they happen to displease him. (Or, in the case of Pompeo and Hook, for no apparent reason at all.) Hegseth, for his part, may have no real idea what he’s done, and may merely be courting favor from a boss who has elevated him far beyond his abilities. But Trump knows better; he is himself the survivor of an assassination attempt, and no level of security was enough when he thought the Iranians were gunning for him.
People still considering whether to serve Trump can have no illusions about what awaits them. True leaders take responsibility for their team. Trump is no such leader; he will, on a whim, place other Americans in danger and then, as he famously put it in his previous term, take no responsibility at all.
This is an occasional roundup of people who voted for Donald Trump and are shocked to find out no one is immune from the damage and pain he causes. Many are now grappling with the consequences of their choice as it affects them and their loved ones—and possibly regretting their vote.
The “Leopards Ate My Face” meme hails from this iconic tweet:
It’s analogous to “Fuck Around and Find Out,” aka FAFO, and perfectly describes the new phenomenon of Trump voters unironically complaining about the consequences of their vote. It’s certainly my favorite genre of writing as of late (see here and here).
The leopards are feasting as the Trump administration 2.0 gets underway, and I’ve rounded up a handful of recent examples.
First up is this Trump-voting Latina on TikTok literally crying about Trump’s deportation scheme, set to the most maudlin music you can imagine.
This is so crazy that we voted for Trump. We trusted in the word that he promised, as Latinos.
This is crazy that starting next week, multiple cities will be hit by immigration. It is so crazy that multiple people are scared to go to work. Where I work at, a lot of Latinos did not go to work and that’s crazy because we have a living, too.
I hate that I voted for him, now I am so scared for my family.
We need to come together and do something about this.
Trump made two consistent promises during this past election: that he would deport everyone, and impose tariffs. If she really “trusted in the word that he promised,” SHE WOULD’VE VOTED FOR KAMALA HARRIS. In a previous post, I featured another Latino who was shocked that Trump was anti-Mexican, with several people insisting it was a joke or satire. It is not. These clueless people actually exist.
What did they hear that made them believe Trump would protect the Latino community or immigrants? It was certainly nothing he said, and not any of his speeches.
In a follow-up post, the crying woman insisted, “It doesn’t matter who you voted for, they both was full of shit” because both-sides blah blah. She also said, “We’re supposed to be here for each other, support each other.” That’s great, but if she really meant that, she wouldn’t have voted for Trump, the literal opposite of “being here for each other.”
Nom nom nom. Eat up, leopards.
Next up is Republican Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida, who suddenly wants Donald Trump to deport people—just not her people.
As you know, on Monday, January 20, President Trump ended the program formerly known as the “Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV).” Following up on this, yesterday’s guidance expands expedited removal against these populations. Since many of these individuals currently reside in Miami, there are open questions on how exactly this will be implemented.
Individuals must be afforded due process. I strongly urge you to ensure that all Cubans paroled in under the CHNV program eligible for or with pending applications for the Cuban Adjustment Act are protected from deportation until their cases are fully resolved. Additionally, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians who arrived under the CHNV program, have no criminal record, and have applied for asylum through the proper legal channels, should also be protected until their cases are fully resolved.”
The CHNV program began under former President Joe Biden, so it’s not surprising that Trump is targeting the immigrants protected by it. What is surprising is that one of Trump’s first actions effectively goes after the reliably Republican Cuban community.
But it’s not as if Trump didn’t warn his voters with some very clear words: “I don’t care about you I just care about your vote.”
Nom nom nom.
Next up, this masterpiece of a headline: “Chair of Arab election campaign for Trump blasts president’s ‘wild’ call to relocate Palestinians.”
Was there anything more self-defeating than the pro-Gaza community’s support for Trump, as they screamed about Genocide Joe and Killer Kamala? But this guy who was in charge of getting the Arab community to vote for Trump literally had the gall to say, “This is not what we voted for as Arab Americans for Trump.”
Get ready to hear a lot more of “That’s not what we voted for!” from Trump-supporting Gaza activists. And every single time, it will be exactly what they voted for. Because for all of Trump’s faults and bluster, he was mostly truthful about his agenda, and he was never anything but hostile to the Palestinian cause. Meanwhile, his son-in-law Jared Kushner was fantasizing about beachside condos in Gaza as recently as last year.
Harris would’ve been an honest broker in the conflict, while Trump will be happy to see Palestinians swept out of Gaza in favor of that sweet seaside real estate. There’s a reason right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did his part to help Trump get elected.
I’m going to admit surprise at this next item. Check out this headline: “Oil Executives Fume as Trump Shakes Up Climate Rules Again.”
The 47th president’s political agenda is nothing if not oil and gas friendly. In fact, oil and gas are among Trump’s top priorities, and he has wasted no time in making life easier for the industry players after four years of extra regulatory and political pressure under Biden. Yet oil executives' apparent frustration with Trump’s reversal of Biden policies is unlikely and perhaps surprising on the surface.
Below this surface sits all the money that Big Oil invested in its own transition, under pressure, indeed, but quite a lot of money. The projects this money has been invested in may well become stranded assets now, in an ironic twist of environmentalists’ warnings that oil and gas fields are about to become stranded assets in a transitional world.
“Big U.S. oil companies, however, believe the withdrawal only limits Washington's ability to influence an ongoing global energy transition and exposes them to an uneven regulatory environment, according to Reuters interviews with industry representatives,” Reuters reported.
In other words, the U.S.’s ability to impact the climate frameworks, and the energy industry’s ability to lobby for its own interests, are all gone now. The world can proceed without the U.S., and create regulatory frameworks that transnational corporations will have to abide by anyway.
Oh well. Maybe they shouldn’t have put all their eggs in the Republican basket.
This is a lot of words for "Zuckerberg wanted to pay a bribe"
Updated at 2:23 p.m. ET on January 30, 2025
Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories as litigants rush to settle their cases. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest. According to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, Meta will spend $25 million on damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump.
The Meta settlement follows a flurry of other legal developments. On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and for Elon Musk’s company X filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social-media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.
Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.
The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.
In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court—in some cases for years—have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant.The Wall Street Journalreported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, and the rest will go to legal fees and the other plaintiffs. “We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” the Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.
These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.
Neither X nor the president’s legal team has publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Holtzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class-action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan schoolteacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” the radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.
Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social-media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-plaintiffs, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.
Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry that the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.
“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing, but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”
The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which Trump sued for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanopoulos that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from its parent company, Disney, to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” the Paramount Global spokesperson Justin Dini told me in a statement.
Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll that the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signaled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.
The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict-of-interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”
The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of its parent company, Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.
Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company, too, seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.
This article originally misdescribed Trump’s co-plaintiffs as co-defendants.
First floated as a part of Deep Space Nine's Dominion War arc, the concept of "Section 31" has been divisive among Star Trek fans. Here's the idea: Buried deep within Starfleet exists an anonymous, ruthless intelligence agency that operates out of sight of most Federation citizens and Starfleet officers. Section 31 exists outside of typical Federation safeguards and restrictions, getting its hands dirty so that others in the Federation can pretend that dirt doesn't exist.
Subsequent Trek series would sometimes make a nod toward Section 31 or do contained Section 31-adjacent episodes or story arcs. But the inherent conflict between "post-scarcity utopian future where diplomacy and compromise are always the answer" and "autocratic future where shadowy extralegal spy agencies secretly pull all the strings" kept Section 31 from really feeling like a fully integrated part of the universe.
Surely a Section 31-themed direct-to-streaming feature film called Star Trek: Section 31 would be interested in exploring these contradictions? Surely it would have something thoughtful to say about our current age of misinformation and paranoia—the future reflecting and commenting on the present, as the best Star Trek media always has?
Nothing says GOP like lying with a vacant expression, bad dye job, and a cross.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt used her first media briefing to promote a lie about U.S. foreign aid spending.
The falsehood came as Leavitt attempted to justify the widely decried and possibly illegal federal spending freeze ordered by President Donald Trump via the Office of Management and Budget.
“DOGE and OMB also found that there was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza,” she claimed.
Trump megadonor and Department of Government Efficiency Chair Elon Musk amplified the made-up story on his X account.
“Tip of iceberg,” Musk wrote, later adding, “My guess is that a lot of that money ended up in the pockets [of] Hamas, not actually condoms.”
The attempted attack on the Biden administration is a complete lie. In September, the U.S. Agency for International Development released a report on government spending on contraception and condom shipments made over the last year. None of the $60.8 million was sent to Gaza or anywhere else in the Middle East.
Despite Leavitt’s attempt to scandalize President Joe Biden’s foreign aid spending on contraception, he wasn’t the only one to do it. During his first term in 2019, Trump spent about $40 million on contraceptive aids as part of international relief expenditures.
The aid package authorized by Biden in September was not nearly as salacious as Leavitt’s rhetoric would indicate.According to USAID, that disbursement to Gaza paid for food assistance, nutrition, emergency health care, access to safe drinking water, and emergency shelters, among other items.
But despite the lie—and Leavitt’s inability to inform the public about how vital services like Medicaid would be affected by the spending freeze—corporate media outlets like The New York Times claimed she had made a “steely and unflinching debut” in her new role.
“In First White House Briefing, Youngest Press Secretary Ever Eschews Tradition,” a Wall Street Journal headline similarly gushed.
Leavitt opened her briefing by committing to “telling the truth from this podium every single day.”
Absolute insanity. DOJ is done and no one with any shred of integrity should be found anywhere near its rotted corpse
The Department of Justice on Wednesday announced it is dropping its appeal against Donald Trump's two codefendants in the classified documents case, officially letting two men who allegedly conspired with Trump to impede the government’s investigation into Trump’s willful mishandling of the country’s secrets off the hook.
Walt Nauta, who has served as Trump’s valet, and Carlos De Oliveira, a property manager at Mar-a-Lago, were both indicted in 2023 and charged with conspiring with Trump to withhold classified documents.
The DOJ accused Nauta of helping Trump hide boxes of classified documents from federal investigators. The DOJ also accused Nauta and De Oliveira of deleting video footage of the documents being moved around at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Judge Aileen Cannon
Federal District Judge Aileen Cannon, who worked her hardest to delay the case against Trump and his codefendants, ultimately dismissed it in July with a ridiculous ruling that special counsel Jack Smith, who sought the indictments, was illegally appointed.
The DOJ was appealing the dismissal of Nauta and De Oliveria's case, but now that Trump won and installed yes-men, it dropped that appeal.
“The United States of America moves to voluntarily dismiss its appeal with prejudice. The government has conferred with counsel for Appellees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, who do not object to the voluntary dismissal,” U.S. Attorney Hayden P. O’Byrne wrote in a filing on Wednesday.
This is the final nail in the coffin of ever holding Trump and his codefendants accountable in federal court for flagrantly breaking the law by taking classified documents from the White House and refusing to give them back.
The DOJ already pulled this case—as well as the case accusing Trump of trying to steal the 2020 election—citing the precedent that the DOJ cannot prosecute a sitting president.
Of course, Trump is and always will be a convicted felon, after he was found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments he made to a Playboy model and a porn actress to keep them from going public about sexual affairs he carried out with both women.
yeah I don't give a fuck about DLSS. I don't want my graphics card making shit up. Do what the game tells you and stop making blurry guesses
Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080 graphics card was faster than the RTX 3080 card it replaced. But it was also faster than the RTX 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti. One of the good things about a new graphics card generation is that the new cards bring the last generation's inaccessibly expensive high-end performance down to cards that more people can actually afford.
That's not the case with the new $999 RTX 5080, which beats the previous-generation RTX 4080 Super by a little bit and the older RTX 4080 by a slightly larger bit but doesn't come close to beating or even replicating the performance of the outgoing 4090.
Nvidia points to its new DLSS Multi-Frame Generation technology as a mitigating factor here, leaning on its AI-generated frames to close the gap that the 5080's raw rendering performance can't close on its own. And sure, it's nice that this card can do that. On paper, the 5080 is also technically a good value compared to the flagship RTX 5090—between 60 and 75 percent of the performance for half the price (though talking about the MSRP of any of these cards at launch is strictly theoretical, given allegedly short supply and the demand from both actual buyers and scalpers looking to make a buck).
actively making the world worse while spouting conspiracy theories. It's going to be a very long 4 years
US President Donald Trump's pick to run the Department of Transportation was sworn in to his new job yesterday. And as widely expected, Secretary Sean Duffy moved to immediately rip up the nation's fuel efficiency standards.
Duffy issued a memo soon after starting the job on Tuesday evening, ordering the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "to commence an immediate review and reconsideration of all existing fuel economy standards applicable to all models of motor vehicles produced from model year 2022 forward," with particular attention to the tougher new regulations put in place last year by the Biden administration.
"The memorandum signed today specifically reduces the burdensome and overly restrictive fuel standards that have needlessly driven up the cost of a car in order to push a radical Green New Deal agenda. The American people should not be forced to sacrifice choice and affordability when purchasing a new car," Duffy said in a statement.
And it wasn't the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit's CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were "a pain in the ass to block," despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect "no scraping" robots.txt rules.
Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we'll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook's crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers "clobbering" websites that he told Ars he hoped would give "teeth" to robots.txt.
A group of House Republicans on Monday introduced a bill that would ban medication abortion nationwide and impose a prison sentence of up to 25 years on anyone who dispenses the drugs, which are used in the majority of abortions across the country.
"I’m taking a stand against the irresponsibility of the Democrats and working to protect women and girls across America," Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, the lead sponsor of the bill, wrote in a news release. "I’m taking a stand for life because, born or unborn, every single person is uniquely and wonderfully made. It's not merely a political issue; it's a moral duty to uphold the sanctity of life. I am committed to safeguarding the innocent and voiceless in our society.”
Ogles introduced the bill along with 18 other House Republicans, including Mary Miller of Illinois, who infamously declared that Adolf Hitler “was right on one thing”; Andrew Clyde of Georgia, who is against abortion but loves AR-15 rifles that are used to blow children to bits in school shootings; and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who believes teenagers should be paid below minimum wage.
Republicans are targeting medication abortion even though 72% of Americans support it, according to a March 2024 Axios/Ipsos poll. Civiqs’ tracking poll also finds that 60% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Ogles’ proposed nationwide abortion-pill ban is a reversal of a position he took in 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade to allow states to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy.
At the time, Ogles said he believed abortion is a state issue and that he wouldn't vote for a federal ban.
On the topic of abortion, Ogles’ opponent, former state senator Heidi Campbell, has said if elected, Ogles would pass a national abortion ban. Ogles said that is not true.
“I’m not going to address ridiculous claims by my opponent, but what I will say is what the Supreme Court got right is they referred that issue back to the states,” he said.
So much for that promise.
President Donald Trump has made similar promises.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” Trump said in a lie-filled video address during the 2024 campaign. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case, the law of the state.”
However, we shouldn’t take Trump’s word on anything.
President Donald Trump
Since he was sworn in roughly a week ago, Trump has pardoned unrepentant anti-abortion activists who illegally blocked access to a health care facility that provided abortions. One of his pardons was for an activist who violently assaulted a facility employee.
He also instructed the Department of Justice to stop enforcing the law that makes it illegal to intentionally injure, intimidate, or interfere with someone "obtaining or providing reproductive health services" or to damage a facility "because such facility provides reproductive health." And he reinstated the global gag rule, which blocks U.S. aid to foreign organizations that perform or discuss abortion care.
During the campaign, Vice President JD Vance said Americans don't trust Republicans on the issue of abortion.
“My party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American’s people trust back on this issue, where they frankly just don’t trust us,” Vance said during the vice presidential debate.
The White House released an order on Monday night effectively shutting off trillions of vital federal dollars for programs across the United States. Immediately, the order has been described as “insane” and a violation of federal law that will have a devastating effect on millions of people.
The memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget is a stew of right-wing grievances and complaints.
“Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal,” Vaeth wrote.
Conservatives in recent years have resorted to describing any advances on civil rights for historically oppressed groups—including racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ+ people—as “woke.” President Donald Trump has been at the forefront of these complaints and has acted in the presidency to undo decades of societal gains.
The order could lead to the cancellation of infrastructure projects currently in operation across the country, including repairs and construction involving roads, bridges, public transit, airports, and internet service. The directive also withholds funding for spending that could impact domestic and national security, while also hurting thousands of families who rely on employment directly related to government spending.
Democrats quickly slammed the radical OMB directive.
“Hey so this is insane,” Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee wrote in response on X.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described the order as “more lawlessness and chaos” in a statement. Schumer accused the administration of “blatantly” disobeying the law.
“Donald Trump’s Administration is jeopardizing billions upon billions of community grants and financial support that help millions of people across the country. It will mean missed payrolls and rent payments and everything in between: chaos for everything from universities to non-profit charities,” he added.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar
Sen. Amy Klobuchar noted that Article I of the Constitution gives Congress, not the presidency, the right to make sweeping funding changes. Klobuchar, a cancer survivor, also asked, “Are you stopping NIH cancer trials?”
The federal government funds cancer research in multiple ways, including through grants administered by the National Cancer Institute.
Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the minority leaders of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees, sent a joint letter to Vaeth opposing the directive.
“The scope of what you are ordering is breathtaking, unprecedented, and will have devastating consequences across the country. We write today to urge you in the strongest possible terms to uphold the law and the Constitution and ensure all federal resources are delivered in accordance with the law,” they said.
Diane Yentel, CEO and president of the National Council of Nonprofits, also raised the alarm on the memo.
“These orders threaten to unwind decades of progress improving systems for people who have been systematically discriminated against,” she said in a statement.
The funding order adds to the chaos currently underway under the administration. Trump issued a gag order that has prevented federal health agencies from communicating with the public, which has led doctors and other science-related officials to express concerns about their inability to inform people about health threats.
Simultaneously, Trump has signed executive orders repealing orders previously put in place to combat racial segregation among government contractors—giving a green light to restoring racism and bigotry.
The new order shuts down significant government functions and adds fuel to ongoing crises sparked by Trump.
