The Supreme Court yesterday effectively provided the executive branch with a technical manual for legally disappearing people to foreign slave labor camps. While claiming to require “due process,” the Court’s ruling dismantles real protections by treating fundamental human rights violations as mere procedural technicalities that can be overcome with minimal paperwork. We’ve been covering this […]
We came a bit too close to losing one of the most important First Amendment protections in American history — but at least for now we have a tiny bit of good news. Billionaire Steve Wynn, joining a growing chorus of the wealthy and powerful who want to make it easier to sue critics into […]
Last week, Mike put together a detailed post explaining the Trump tariff rollout, how the calculations for it were built, some of the more idiotic aspects of it, and basically how stupid the whole program is. If you haven’t read the whole thing, you really should. If you want the briefest of summaries: Trump based […]
Some days, you just have to take the small victories. As the Trump Administration continues to barrage the nation with every terrible thing it can think of doing, it’s clear there’s no level of reprisal capable of keeping pace. This is one of the small victories, even if it — at first glance — it […]
More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” […]
A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of U.S. federal consumer protection. Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. right, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental […]
In what might be the most perfectly on-brand Elon Musk move yet, at the end of March on a Friday evening, Elon Musk suddenly declared that xAI, his AI company that was always connected at the hip with X (which we’d been calling ExTwitter to avoid confusion), was officially “acquiring” X at a valuation of […]
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Less than a week ago, the Trump Administration and its assorted haters undermined one of their own lies. Among the many smears leveled against immigrants, the one that claims they’re lazy freeloaders who take more than they give back to the US is one of the stupidest. Immigrants pay taxes, even if they’re not here […]
When most people make a serious mistake that harms someone else, they try to fix it. That’s basic human decency. But when the Trump administration admits to “mistakenly” trafficking someone with protected status to an El Salvador slave labor camp, their response is to mock the judge who ordered them to try to fix it. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump’s unhinged trade war that includes uninhabited islands: Reminder: This policy was spearheaded and implemented by a man who thinks nobody says the word “groceries” these days because “it’s an old-fashioned word” and he somehow brought it […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the COVID news continued. Some hospital administrators were trying to silence doctors and nurses from commenting on pandemic shortages, voluntary virus tracking apps were trying to get a grip on the spread, and the UK’s NHS was enlisting Palantir to analyze data. We wrote about the tone deafness […]
Israel-located NSO Group may no longer be a malware option for the US and other discerning governments around the world, thanks to blacklists, lawsuits, and its disturbing willingness to sell to some of the most abhorrent governments of earth. But the market for powerful phone exploits isn’t dying up. Governments still want powerful surveillance tech, […]
If you’re the President of the United States and you don’t like a law, you can apparently just… decide not to enforce it for a while? I mean, it’s not supposed to work that way, but for the past 74 days, that’s exactly what’s happened with the TikTok ban. Not just ignoring it quietly — […]
Healthcare.gov, the government health insurance marketplace website, launched in October 2013 only to buckle under the weight of just 2,000 simultaneous users. As millions of Americans stared at error messages and frozen screens, a political crisis unfolded, but so did a new era of government technology. The result was 18F, an in-house digital services consulting agency that […]
The measles outbreak that began in Texas continues at a brisk pace. RFK Jr. and his Department of Health and Human Services, as we’ve discussed, continues to make the outbreak worse through a combination of public opining on alternative treatments that are making some even sicker, garbled messaging that seeks to downplay the severity of […]
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Trump has always considered cops to be better people than regular people. Unless they’re defending a federal building under attack by Trump’s people. Then they’re no better than anyone else. Trump’s first term came coupled with an announcement that cops would be elevated above the people they’re supposed to serve and that the general public […]
If you think back to Brendan Carr’s first tenure as a regular Commissioner at the FCC, he was constantly warning about “FCC overreach.” We couldn’t have privacy rules or net neutrality rules protecting consumers from Comcast, he said, because that would be an extremist abuse of government authority. In fact, any oversight of shitty telecom […]
We chronicled the implosion of the company Nikola and the fall from grace of its CEO, Trevor Milton, for years. If you don’t recall the story, Nikola was built to develop over the road trucks with a hydrogen propulsion system. In 2020, in a bid to gain more investment and boost confidence of current investors, […]
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