On Friday it was announced that my alma mater, Cornell, had caved to the Trump administration and agreed to a “deal” the federal government had offered them to get back the funding it had illegally cut off from Cornell as part of its authoritarian efforts to bully top universities into submission. This capitulation came just […]
We’ll see where this goes from here, but for the moment, this order [PDF], issued by federal judge Karin Immergut still stands: For the above reasons, this Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated that Defendants violated 10 U.S.C. § 12406 and the Tenth Amendment and satisfy the requirements for a permanent injunction. Therefore, this Court […]
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Reagan-appointed federal judge Mark Wolf has resigned from the bench in Massachusetts, and his explanation is blunt: he can no longer bear the ethical constraints that prevent judges from speaking out publicly while Trump dismantles the rule of law. This doesn’t happen. Federal judges—especially Reagan appointees—don’t quit to become activists. They stay in their robes […]
You might recall that not that long ago Trump managed to get CBS to pay him a $16 million bribe based entirely on a lie: that the network’s 60 Minutes program had unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. In reality it was a minor, ordinary edit, and CBS could have easily fought the case […]
Earlier this year, I wrote about how ICE had decided to publish a horrifying recruitment video that mixed in footage of ICE raids, including one that got Kristi Noem in some hot water, along with the introduction to the Pokémon animated series, complete with the theme music behind it. The video itself wasn’t terribly surprising. […]
After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats saying this is the line—healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first. Chuck Schumer just taught Donald Trump that hostage-taking works. Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver’s license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship. The plan, outlined in a public notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative […]
Over the weekend, the President of the United States fell for obvious satire from a website literally called “The Dunning Kruger Times.” Donald Trump—a man with access to the best, most accurate information on basically any subject—posted to Truth Social a screenshot claiming that “DOGE halts yearly payments of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for […]
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This administration isn’t content to be normal awful. It insists on being ghastly awful as often as possible. Not content to eject hundreds of migrants into foreign torture prisons, the administration has decided it’s time to start killing foreign people in boats just because. That’s not me using a worn-out turn of phrase. That was […]
For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts. For the end user, so-called “retransmission feuds” usually go something like this: a TV broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment on our post about receiving a bogus DMCA takedown from CyberGhost over our previous post about receiving a bogus DMCA takedown from CyberGhost: Sometimes the cover-up’s worse than the crime I’m really struggling to think of a non-damning […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about why most complaints about Section 230 are really just complaints about the First Amendment, and another with a deep dive into the implications of the presidential election for various issues in tech. As the votes from said election poured in, we noted […]
Thankfully, the Stop Killing Games movement isn’t stopping this time. YouTuber Ross Scott kicked the movement off in 2024 to generate political action around the disappearance of games that people had bought purely because the company that sold them decided to no longer support them or run backend infrastructure needed play them. While the movement […]
When Congress eventually reopens, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) will be moving toward a vote. This gives us a chance to see the priorities of the Secretary of Defense and his Congressional allies when it comes to the military—and one of those priorities is buying technology, especially AI, with less of an obligation to prove it’s effective […]
Within twenty-four hours of Republicans getting crushed in elections they’d convinced themselves were winnable, Fox News deployed the counter-move. Not denial—the losses were too visible for that. Bret Baier had already explained to Fox & Friends viewers how bad it was. “It’s a big loss,” he said. Not just the results, but “the spreads are surprising.” Not acceptance—that would […]
VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright. I’m not sure I’d trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly. There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it’s sometimes tricky to tell […]
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This news should be far more heartening than it is. In any normal version of the United States, it might have been. The administration’s willingness to perpetrate immoral and illegal evil on a daily basis has outpaced efforts by citizens and the judicial branch to stem the tide. Still, maybe this is hopeful? I mean, […]