Politics

The need for validation made me break open the vault, lol. You asked for it:

• What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol
• The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on possible obstruction by President Trump of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election
• Memo reveals a House Republican strategy on shootings: downplay white nationalism, blame left
• Panic buttons were inexplicably torn out ahead of Capitol riots, says Ayanna Pressley chief of staff
• Who’s who of Jeffrey Epstein’s powerful friends, associates and possible co-conspirators
• FBI’s Comey: Republicans also hacked by Russia
• Unsealed flight logs show that Trump was on Epstein's private jet in 1997
• Devin Nunes after Ambassador Sondland's testimony
• Lev Parnas Helped Rep. Devin Nunes’ Investigations
• Alphabet puts another $375 million into Josh Kushner’s Oscar Health, just months after previous investment
• The Program on Extremism has launched a project to create a central database of court records related to the events of January 6th, 2021.
• User Clip: Raskin - House Impeachment Video Evidence
• Here’s the Whole Transcript of That Leaked Steve Bannon Tape, Annotated
• Florida changed its COVID-19 data, creating an ‘artificial decline’ in recent deaths
• Leaked Audio of Sen. Joe Manchin Call With Billionaire Donors Provides Rare Glimpse of Dealmaking on Filibuster and Jan. 6 Commission
• Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows
• Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House
• “We’re going to take over Washington, D.C. We’re going to federalize. We’re going to have very powerful crime, and you’re going to be proud of it again,” the former president said
• Donald Trump’s Many, Many, Many, Many Ties to Russia
• All of Trump’s Russia Ties, in 7 Charts
• Here’s A Closer Look At Donald Trump’s Disturbingly Deep Ties To Russia

Edit (I found some more, but they're more propaganda focused):

• Astroturfing Information Megathread- revision 8 (old-reddit link)
• Link within previous thread and archived- "Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people, or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc)."
• Russia and the Menace of Unreality-How Vladimir Putin is revolutionizing information warfare
• Russia is using the power of 'Black PR' to destroy political reputations and spread disinformation in the West
• The availability heuristic, also known as availability bias
• What Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán Understand About Your Brain-Why do some people who support Trump also wind up believing conspiracy theories? There’s a scientific explanation for that.
• Political Misinformation Game: Harmony Square-it's an actual game
• Max Fisher on How Silicon Valley Has Rewired Our Brains | Offline Podcast
• Amygdala hijack occurs when strong emotions “take over” the thinking part of your brain.
• Asch conformity experiments
• Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services
• It's My Right to Hold This Turd
• 5 studies about fact-checking you may have missed last month
• This Video Will Make You Angry

President Donald Trump kicked off his latest evening bloodbath on Friday with the firing of the highest-ranking military officer in the country, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Charles Brown, Jr.

The unprecedented move came as one small part of a shakeup of the Pentagon's top brass. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the highest-ranking officer in the Navy, Admiral Lisa Franchetti, and the Air Force's second-in-command, Gen. James Slife, would be relieved of their positions.

Trump nominated Brown to the Joint Chiefs in 2020, picking him to serve as Chief of Staff of the Air Force. His nomination made him the first Black leader of a branch of the Armed Forces. President Joe Biden tapped Brown to chair the Joint Chiefs upon the departure of Gen. Mark Milley — who has no shortage of words about the danger Trump's second term poses.

I expected to see this story covered heavily here, but nary a peep, and within hours, it was scrubbed from both the Daily Beast’s site, as well as various other outlets on the internet. There is no retraction on the Daily Beast site, or even any acknowledgment that the story existed, and several republishers have pulled the story as well.

If you go to Google news and search “Trump Krasnov,” you may still find a couple of sites where the story, either in the van Brugen version, or under other bylines, is still up, but they are dropping like flies.

According to these sources, IRS employees slated for termination were “deemed as not critical” to the ongoing tax filing season. Managers have been told be be “hands-on-deck” in the office Thursday and Friday to help with the offboarding process.

According to the latest data from the Office of Personnel Management, the IRS had more than 15,000 employees with less than a year on the job, as of May 2024. In some cases, however, IRS employees may have probationary periods that exceed one year.

Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, called the layoffs “arbitrary and unlawful,” and said NTEU “will keep fighting until every wrongful termination is reversed.”

The plan to carry out mass firings of civilian probationary employees at the Department of Defense has been temporarily paused until a more thorough review of the impacts can be done, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

The pause comes after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth directed the military services to identify $50 billion in programs that could be cut next year.

Pentagon lawyers reportedly started reviewing the legality of the planned firings after CNN reported it could conflict with Title 10 section 129a of the US Code.

The red billboard, located at Sealy Avenue and University Boulevard in Galveston, (Texas) says "Welcome to the Gulf of America" in a white font and all capital letters. "Sponsored by Enron" appears below the message.

Enron had not posted about the billboard on its social media pages, as of Friday morning.

The company didn't immediately respond to a request to confirm its sponsorship of the billboard.

The top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., told ProPublica she didn’t believe DOGE had the legal authority for the actions it’s taken. She called it a “made-up federal department” that’s wasting taxpayer dollars.

“This unlawful effort is stealing federal funds from American families and businesses,” DeLauro said.

Most of DOGE’s money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority.

The North Carolina Supreme Court denied the state board of elections’ petition to bypass the appeals court level in an ongoing legal bid by GOP candidate Jefferson Griffin to overturn his 2024 election loss. As a result of the court’s 4-2 order issued today, Griffin’s challenge will proceed in the North Carolina Court of Appeals before ultimately ending up in the state Supreme Court — a move that could potentially benefit his legal efforts to unseat incumbent Democratic Justice Allison Riggs.

By contrast, bypass directly to the North Carolina Supreme Court might have been more favorable to Riggs, as it would have enabled a recent Wake County Superior Court ruling rejecting Griffin’s challenge to remain in place if the justices (with Riggs recused) deadlocked in a 3-3 split.

U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem Thursday cut protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants, leaving them vulnerable to deportations by August.

“We are returning integrity to the TPS system, which has been abused and exploited by illegal aliens for decades,” a DHS official said in a statement. “President Trump and Secretary Noem are returning TPS to its original status: temporary.”

It’s the second time Noem has revoked an extension of Temporary Protected Status renewed under the Biden administration. TPS allows people from countries deemed too dangerous to return to their home due to violence, natural disasters or other unstable circumstances to obtain U.S. work permits and protection from deportation.

In recent days, the US Army Corps of Engineers created a new designation of “emergency” permits for infrastructure projects, citing a Day One executive order signed by Donald Trump which claims the US is facing an “energy emergency” and must “unleash” already booming energy production.

The move from the Army Corps could allow officials to rubber-stamp 688 pending applications for permits—including more than 100 for pipeline projects and gas-fired power plants—which are necessary for any entity aiming to build infrastructure in navigable US waters or wetlands, or discharge pollutants into them. Environmental reviews could be circumvented, and public comment periods could be skipped over.

Not content with spending more than a quarter of a billion dollars to elect Donald Trump and Republican candidates in 2024 and then taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, Elon Musk is now trying to flip the balance of power on the top court in one of the country’s most important swing states.

Building America’s Future, a dark money group backed by Musk, is spending at least $1.6 million in support of Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, a conservative judge in suburban Milwaukee who is running for an open seat in an April election that will decide whether progressives or conservatives control the court. The group began running ads across the state on Thursday.

I was considering creating an open source project for an application that could send emails to your senators or reps on a schedule without having to manually enter info on those we forms everyone is using.

Web scraping and auto fill info kind of app.

Is this something that folks might want?

In a room at the luxury Decápolis Hotel in Panama City, two girls hold a piece of paper to the window with a written message. "Please help us," it reads.

The hotel offers its clients rooms with sea views, has two exclusive restaurants, a swimming pool, a spa and private transportation. But it has now become a "temporary custody" centre housing 299 undocumented migrants deported from the US, the Panamanian government said on Tuesday.

Some migrants raise their arms and cross them at the wrists to indicate that they are deprived of their freedom. Others hang small signs with other messages such as: "We are not safe in our country."

The new reporting shows that, after the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid COVID-19-related distortions. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, ProPublica found, it rose substantially in Texas.

The new analysis comes as Texas legislators consider amending the abortion ban in the wake of ProPublica’s previous reporting, and as doctors, federal lawmakers and the state’s largest newspaper have urged Texas officials to review pregnancy-related deaths from the first full years after the ban was enacted; the state maternal mortality review committee has, thus far, opted not to examine the death data for 2022 and 2023.

Federal agencies employed more than 17,000 wildland fire staffers last year, many of them in seasonal roles. This year, many of those workers had job offers rescinded — or had their transfers and promotions put on hold — just as they were set to begin onboarding and training for the 2025 fire season.

Trump’s efforts to cut the federal workforce are led by his newly created commission dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency, helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.

Aside from the hiring freeze, the Forest Service fired an additional 3,400 staffers last week, many of whom provided critical support for wildfire operations. Meanwhile, Trump’s freeze on federal spending has cut off funding for projects such as prescribed burns to reduce future risk. Wildfire officials offer mixed reports on whether that funding has been restored in the wake of judicial rulings.

Of the DOGE list's initial claim of $16 billion in savings, half came from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) listing that was entered into the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) in 2022 with a whopping $8 billion maximum possible value.

According to a DOGE post on X, that number was a typo that was corrected in the contract database to $8 million on Jan. 22 of this year before being terminated a week later, and DOGE "has always used the correct $8M in its calculations."

But for much of this week, DOGE listed the outdated $8 billion for its savings claims while linking to the termination notice with the smaller ceiling amount.

Some time Tuesday evening, the DOGE link was changed to point at the original $8 billion entry, and on Wednesday morning, the site was revised once again to show $8 million in savings — but still linked to the larger, outdated claim. The site also continues to list $55 billion in total estimated savings — the $8.5 billion in alleged contract savings and another $46.5 billion with no specifically documented source.

An order obtained by NPR on Wednesday that was sent to service members showed that they were instructed about a deployment for more than 180 days, to a location that was redacted.

The doctors and others who are getting deployed were told the site would be at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo and would last six months, according to internal communications reviewed by NPR and two sources familiar with the planning who were not authorized to talk publicly.

A federal judge on Tuesday invalidated President Trump’s attempt to fire Cathy Harris, the chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, finding that her term in office is protected by a federal law meant to ensure the board’s independence from political considerations.

Judge Rudolph Contreras granted Harris’ request to issue a temporary restraining order on the basis that the two-sentence White House email purporting to remove her from her position didn’t meet the legal requirements to fire a member of the MSPB, the three-member board that adjudicates federal employees’ claims of wrongful termination and other allegations of civil service rule violations.

“Harris has established that this case represents a ‘genuinely extraordinary situation’ meriting injunctive relief for a discharged government employee,” Contreras wrote. “The conditions under which the president may end her tenure are made plain by federal statute and supported by ninety years of Supreme Court precedent.”

Even when Guantánamo was housing only a small population, officials from the International Refugee Assistance Project found in 2023 that detainees were still being "held in dilapidated facilities with faulty plumbing, rodents, and a lack of potable water," according to Henrike Dessaules, the group's the senior director of communications.

"This administration's attempt to send thousands of people from the United States there all but guarantees that conditions will be even worse," she told Salon.

While many prisons run by the United States have faced scrutiny for mistreating its prisoners, Guantánamo, a "legal black hole" where people disappear without normal due process and evoking images of blindfolded prisoners prostrate before heavily armed guards or being threatened with snarling dogs, has an especially dreadful reputation.

The cruelty, Dixon told Salon, is exactly the point.

A federal judge in Washington D.C. refused to grant a request brought by 14 attorneys general to block Elon Musk’s DOGE from accessing private information across several agencies and laying off huge segments of the federal workforce. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, acknowledged DOGE was causing confusion in her ruling on Tuesday, but would not put a halt to the destruction of the country.

“The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents,” Chutkan wrote. “But the ‘possibility’ that defendants may take actions that irreparably harm plaintiffs ‘is not enough.'”

“Terminating thousands of federal employees may cause extreme harm to the individual employees, and potentially the institution writ large,” Chutkan argued. “But ‘harm that might befall unnamed third parties does not satisfy the irreparable harm requirement in the context of emergency injunctive relief, which must instead be connected specifically to the parties before the Court.'”

Chutkan’s ruling suggested there may be some possibility to put a halt to Musk’s destruction in the future if attorneys present more evidence. But it’s a lot easier to fire people than it is to rebuild things that have been torn down. More than 300 workers at the National Nuclear Security Administration were fired last week until someone apparently told the DOGE boys those are the guys who are protecting the nation’s nuclear weapons. The Trump regime wanted to rehire many of the workers, but couldn’t find contact information for many of the people who were let go, according to CNN.

President Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order to give the president greater power over independent regulatory agencies — government entities Congress set up to be shielded from White House control.

Well-known independent regulatory agencies include the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which issues recalls and safety warnings; the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees markets; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures bank deposits.

The Federal Reserve, which sets monetary policy, is intentionally designed to be independent from the whims of electoral politics, a separation considered central to its ability to stabilize the economy.

The order calls for the affected agencies to submit any new regulations to the White House, set up White House Liaison offices, and "regularly consult with and coordinate policies and priorities" with the White House. In claiming this new power over agencies, the order also gives the president and attorney general the sole abilities to interpret laws for the executive branch. The order stands as yet another example of Trump's pushes to aggressively expand executive power.

The Coast Guard is in the midst of investigating a data breach within its personnel and payroll system that delayed bi-weekly pay for 1,135 service members.

The Coast Guard said it temporarily shut down its Direct Access system as it investigates the breach.

“Workforce access will be restored as soon as possible,” the Coast Guard told Federal News Network in a statement.

Some service members’ direct deposit account and routing information was compromised. It is unclear what types of data besides service members’ bank information may have been exposed or how widespread the breach is.