curated news excerpts & citations

Closer to the Edge: Jessica Denson

Her name first appeared in the public record as a plaintiff, not a pundit. In 2016, she worked inside Trump’s campaign. When she reported harassment and discrimination, the campaign responded with a $1.5 million arbitration demand designed to bury her. It didn’t. Representing herself, she challenged the campaign’s NDA, won, and freed hundreds of former staffers who’d been forced into silence.

That case could have been her curtain call. Instead, it became her starting gun.

In 2025, Denson has remained one of the most persistent presences in Washington’s ongoing standoff between power and accountability. Her activism isn’t built on outrage—it’s built on procedure, law, and follow-through. She’s been in the streets since January: organizing, lobbying, and pressing lawmakers to enforce the Constitution they swore to defend.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Nature: 7 basic science discoveries that changed the world

Ozempic, MRI machines and flat screen televisions all emerged out of fundamental research decades earlier — the very types of study being slashed by the US government.

Under President Donald Trump, the US government is gutting scientific research. The National Institutes of Health has cut almost US$2 billion of grants that were already approved, and the National Science Foundation has terminated more than 1,400 grants. And the president has even bigger plans to eviscerate science. His proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut non-defence-related research and development by 36%.

“They have cancelled wholesale a wide variety of research efforts in midstream,” says John Holdren at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was the science adviser to former president Barack Obama during both his terms. “They intend to now solidify it with cuts in the budgets.”

The cancelled and threatened research is a mixture of ‘applied’ work that has stated applications, which can be commercial in nature, and ‘basic’ or ‘blue skies’ research, intended to develop new knowledge.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Inside Climate News: Climate Change Made Hurricane Melissa Four Times More Likely, Study Suggests

Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa this week turned into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. Now a new rapid attribution study suggests human-induced climate change made the deadly tropical cyclone four times more likely.

Hurricane Melissa collided with Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before tearing through nearby Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5, reserved for the hurricanes with the most powerful winds, has killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean so far. …
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Adam Chandler: SNAP benefits feed essential needs while still leaving many hungry for more

On Friday afternoon, two separate federal judges ordered the Trump administration to continue funding SNAP—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program often referred to as “food stamps”—hours before benefits would lapse. …

… While right now it’s not clear whether the Trump Justice Department will appeal the ruling or if the funds can be dispersed quickly enough to avoid an interruption to benefits, let’s seize on this brief moment where SNAP is getting some attention to talk a little bit more about this program. It’s easily one of the most politicized, important, and misunderstood federal social programs that we have.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Bulwark: Trump’s Targeting of ‘Narcoterrorists’ Is a Crime in Itself

THE UNITED STATES IS ENGAGED in summary executions on the high seas. That bald fact is being obscured by talk of drug interdiction and war powers and whether we’re certain the drugs on those boats were headed for the United States or somewhere else.

Let’s be clear. Even if we knew for certain that the boats being destroyed in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific 1) contained illegal drugs; 2) those drugs were headed for our shores; and 3) all on board were criminals, it would still be grossly illegal and immoral to blast them out of the water as we have now done some 14 reported times, killing 61 people. This is not drug enforcement. This is murder.

Drug trafficking is bad. It is a crime. But it is only very rarely a capital offense. In fact, no criminal in the United States has been sentenced to death for drug crimes that did not also include homicide since the death penalty was reintroduced in 1988. But the crucial thing to keep in mind is that the criminals involved were captured, charged, and tried. That’s what a law-abiding nation does.

The only time you can legally use lethal military force is when Congress has specifically granted authority against an enemy state or entity, or when American forces are attacked and act in self-defense. It was not illegal for American sailors to shoot back at Japanese planes on December 7, 1941. But we are not at war with “narcoterrorists.” That simply isn’t a thing, even if President Donald Trump has stated that the United States is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. Those words are without legal effect.

The “war on drugs” is a metaphor. Or was. …
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Bulwark: What We Choose to Nazi

The Department of Labor is posting Heroic Realism propaganda. What, exactly, are they telling us?
…

But it’s not the use of AI that’s giving everyone pause, of course. It’s that these pictures, released by the Department of Labor social-media accounts and bearing the department’s seal, are uncomfortably reminiscent of posters from the 1930s. To be more specific: the ‘Heroic Realism’ of Nazi propaganda posters and the similarly stylized patriotic posters later produced in the United States.

Why is this style being used now, and what are these images for? Only a few of the images explicitly say. But their purpose is explained in the accompanying captions: They’re promoting the department’s work on Project Firewall, meant to restore “pathways to the American Dream by ensuring American Jobs go to American Workers.”
…

There is a final irony. As millions of Americans are facing a real possibility of hunger in the days ahead and as tech giants like Amazon lay off tens of thousands of workers—adding to the material conditions that will make enlisting in the army ICE is building a more appealing option—all this AI-generated slop is being used to harden false, in-group thinking among impressionable and disillusioned young men. The very AI tools that are adding to today’s employment problems are being used by the Trump administration to chip away at reality, one white-supremacy meme and one fascistic propaganda video at a time.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

404 Media: ICE and CBP Agents Are Scanning Peoples’ Faces on the Street To Verify Citizenship

Videos on social media show officers from ICE and CBP using facial recognition technology on people in the field. One expert described the practice as “pure dystopian creep.”
…

Ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee Bennie G. Thompson said in a statement “Mobile Fortify is a dangerous tool in the hands of ICE, and it puts American citizens at risk of detention and even deportation.” He also said “ICE officials have told us that an apparent biometric match by Mobile Fortify is a ‘definitive’ determination of a person’s status and that an ICE officer may ignore evidence of American citizenship—including a birth certificate—if the app says the person is an alien. ICE using a mobile biometrics app in ways its developers at CBP never intended or tested is a frightening, repugnant, and unconstitutional attack on Americans’ rights and freedoms.”
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Free Press: Are Conservatives the New Snowflakes?

Members of the right once derided the left for emotional hypersensitivity. Today, they lead the charge to suppress ideas that unsettle them.

Slave owners tried very hard to justify themselves. In the early years of the 19th century, wave after wave of preposterous pseudoscience was published to help them rationalize what was obviously wrong but incredibly profitable. Soon, speech criticizing slavery was policed. Books were banned; possession of some, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were criminalized. Newspaper owners were targeted, their presses thrown into the river. Abolitionists were lynched and driven from the South. Slave owners’ sublimated guilt was so fragile that they needed soft and hard power—indeed, the entire force of culture and government—to maintain the specious lie that slavery was not only not bad, it was right.
…

The Civil War was driven by greed and cruelty, but another way to see it is that it was started rashly and stupidly by men and women who lived in a delusional, paranoid bubble in which they were the victims, that they were the ones being persecuted (by the North) instead of being the villains who enslaved and raped and killed. Slave owners were monsters, but they were also incredibly sensitive, unable to face what they’d done and terrified of living in a world where they couldn’t keep doing it.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Jess Piper: Show Me Misery

Author’s Note: This essay is about Missouri, but it applies to any other state with a GOP-dominated legislature. A state captured by the oligarchs. My state is representative of the “red states” you often read about.

We’ve elected clowns, and now we are privy to the horrible circus.

I live in Missouri. The Show Me state — a state that represented Midwestern values like kindness and morality and responsibility in government for decades. The bellwether state. A moderate state.

We elected a President from this humble state. He had a sign on his desk that said, “The buck stops here,” yet Truman would no longer recognize his state. He would mourn our trajectory under 22 years of a GOP Supermajority. His sign has no place in this state.

Republicans have no accountability, and the buck stops at a culture war and the awful circus they drum up to avoid accountability.

Harry S. Truman would loathe the officials running the state of Missouri. Particularly, our Governor, Mike Kehoe. A supposed “moderate” Republican who is tearing our state to shreds and dismantling the things that once made us a good neighbor.
(more…)

curated news excerpts & citations

Charlie Sykes: Spooked by Reagan

How thin-skinned is the uber-touchy Donald Trump? As you may have heard: A single Canadian ad triggered an extraordinary presidential snit and new trade war. Trump was so upset that he cancelled trade talks with Canada and then slapped an additional 10 percent tariff on American consumers of Canadian products.

And in a brilliant example of the Streisand Effect, he managed to call international attention to the words of Ronald Reagan, highlighting his massive break with the conservative icon.

(more…)