Dear Democratic Party,

I need more from you.

You keep sending emails begging for $15, while we’re watching fascism consolidate power in real time.

This administration is not simply “a different ideology.” It is a coordinated, authoritarian machine — with the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, and the executive pen all under its control.

And you?

You’re still asking for decorum and donations. WTF.

That won’t save us.

I don’t want to hear another polite floor speech. I want strategy. I want fire. I want action so bold it shifts the damn news cycle — not fits inside one.

Every time I see something from the DNC, it’s asking me for funds.

Surprise. Those of us who donate don’t want to keep sending money just to watch you stand frozen as the Constitution goes up in flames — shaking your heads and saying, “Well, there’s not much we can do. He has the majority.”

I call bullshit.

If you don’t know how to think outside the box… If you don’t know how to strategize… If you don’t know

This video inspired my posting here, it is really dystopian looking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr107NgoKaE

A friend recommended I try the chicken and I laughed for a bit about the site. Had to post here.

A federal judge who blocked President Donald Trump's administration from dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ruled Friday that the bureau can't go forward immediately with plans to mass fire hundreds of employees.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she is "deeply concerned" that Trump administration officials aren't complying with her earlier order that maintains the bureau's existence until she rules on the merits of a lawsuit seeking to preserve it.

During a hearing, Jackson said she will bar officials from carrying out any mass firings or cutting off employees' access to bureau computer systems on Friday.

The suspect in the Florida State University shooting shared white supremacist views with concerned classmates before yesterday’s attack that killed two people and injured six others, it is claimed.

Seybold, the group’s president, told NBC Ikner had been asked to leave because “he espoused so much white supremacist rhetoric and far-right rhetoric”.

“There’s always room to increase productivity… but that’s not what the DOGE/Musk/Trump team has been about. They are gutting this agency’s staffing with a chainsaw, and they are driving it into a total system collapse,” O’Malley said. “It’s going to be extremely expensive to put Humpty Dumpty back together again once they wreck it.”

“I suppose that if they want the $2.7 trillion surplus that this agency has – no other agency generates and runs a surplus like Social Security does – 
I suppose they can't do that in an agency that's respected... and trusted by the public,” O’Malley told Salon. "They appear to be wrecking it so that they can rob it and get away with it," he said.

First up, the FDA is suspending quality control testing at the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) Proficiency Testing Program, according to a report from Reuters. The program tests for parasites like Cyclospora in spinach and the pesticide glyphosate in barley, among other foods. The suspension was announced internally at the FDA on Tuesday, according to Reuters, which cites an email distributed about staff leaving. The program oversees testing at about 170 labs, which will no longer get quality control checks through at least Sept. 30.

The changes to FERN are a direct result of staffing cuts at the HHS, which oversees agencies like the FDA and CDC. Kennedy is overseeing a reduction in force at the agency that’s seeing about 20,000 people leave through layoffs and departures.

Second, and perhaps even more troubling, is a report from CBS News that the FDA is currently making plans to end most food safety inspections at the federal level. The theory, if you can call it that, is tha

With no advance notice, roughly 1,500 CFPB employees received news Thursday afternoon that they're being fired, a major step toward billionaire Trump lieutenant Elon Musk's stated goal of deleting the bureau. The mass terminations, if upheld, would leave the CFPB with a "skeleton crew" of around 200 staffers.

"This is another assault on consumers and our democracy by Trump's lawless administration," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a key driving force behind the creation of the CFPB in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. "We will fight back with everything we've got."

To date, every court to have considered Trump's executive order banning birth right citizenship, issued on day one of his administration, has blocked it. But he has doggedly persisted in his contention that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, an idea widely considered a fringe view because the Supreme Court ruled to the contrary 127 years ago, and that decision has never been disturbed.

A group of states challenged Trump's order, contending that the right to birthright citizenship is not, even remotely, an open question. As they put it in their Supreme Court brief: "For over a century, it has been the settled view of this court, Congress, the Executive Branch, and legal scholars that the Fourteenth Amendment Citizenship clause guarantees citizenship to babies born in the United States, regardless of their parents' citizenship, allegiance, domicile, immigration status or nationality."

Visiting America is not an entitlement. It is a privilege extended to those who respect our laws and values. And, as secretary of state, I will never forget that. U.S. law lays out clear rules about who can and cannot come to the United States. The State Department’s consular officers are required to apply these rules to each of the millions of visa applicants around the world each year. ... We expect — and the law requires — all visa holders to demonstrate their eligibility every day their visa is valid. This includes respecting our laws, behaving appropriately according to their visa type, and continuing to meet these standards throughout their stay in our country.

Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit to help families pay for private school tuition and homeschooling, Idaho has shut down a program that helped tens of thousands of public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other educational expenses.

The Republican leading the push to defund Idaho’s Empowering Parents grants said it had nothing to do with the party’s decision to fund private schools. But the state’s most prominent conservative group, a strong supporter of the private school tax credit, drew the connection directly.

Soon, those 40 veterans grew to 275 a month. Then 275 soared to 500. Last year, Taylor and Greenblatt’s company Veterans Guardian assisted about 30,000 veterans with benefits claims, according to Taylor. “We have your back,” the company’s website says. “Together we can uncover all the benefits you deserve.”

With no accreditation, the company is charging veterans thousands of dollars for guidance that veterans service organizations and other nonprofits advise vets on for free.

A whistleblower lawsuit from one of Veterans Guardian’s former employees claims the firm’s business practices are “permeated with fraud and deceit” and cheating the federal government out of millions of dollars. A lawsuit filed by veterans alleges the company “preys on disabled veterans by unfairly and deceptively taking tens of millions of dollars of their disability benefits in violation of federal law.”

A US senator has met a man who Trump administration officials have acknowledged was deported in error from Maryland to a mega-prison in El Salvador.

Democrat, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen posted photos with Kilmar Ábrego García, as the administration continues to resist his return to the US despite yet another court ruling against the government on Thursday.

After the meeting, which appeared to take place in a hotel, El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said the detainee would remain in the country's custody.

Federal employees who were recently fired from their jobs by the Trump administration have a new place to turn for pro-bono legal advice.

A coalition of good government organizations and federal unions has launched an initiative called “Rise Up,” a network of thousands of lawyers who will offer free legal support to employees impacted by the Trump administration’s recent actions to overhaul the federal workforce.

The project is led by Democracy Forward, AFL-CIO and We The Action, and has the backing of multiple federal unions and long-time good government organizations, such as the Partnership for Public Service.

The special attention Gruenbaum paid to Ramp raised flags inside and outside the agency. “This goes against all the normal contracting safeguards that are set up to prevent contracts from being awarded based on who you know,” said Scott Amey, the general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight. He said career civil servants should lead the process to pick the best choice for taxpayers.

GSA is eying Ramp to get a piece of the government’s $700 billion internal expense card program, known as SmartPay. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at GSA have been moving quickly to tap Ramp for a charge card pilot program worth up to $25 million, sources told ProPublica, even as Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency highlights the multitudes of contracts it has canceled across federal agencies.

Founded six years ago, Ramp is backed by some of the most powerful figures in Silicon Valley. One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who was one of Trump’s earlie

After a $242,054 boost in salary, a nearly 21% raise, Migoya is pulling in about $1.4 million a year at the nonprofit Jackson Health, one of the largest public hospital systems in the nation.

▪ The highest paid South Florida hospital CEO in total compensation is Albert “Bo” Boulenger, the president and CEO of Baptist Health South Florida, the largest not-for-profit hospital system in the region and the future teaching hospital of Florida International University. Boulenger, who became Baptist Health’s CEO in October 2022, received a total compensation of about $3.05 million during the 2022 fiscal year, which ran from June 2022 through September 2023, according to the most recently filed tax documents with the IRS.

He was promoted to the CEO job after Baptist Health’s longtime leader Brian Keeley retired. Keeley, who had been CEO since 1986 and then became a trustee member, received a total compensation of about $4.88 million during the same time period.

The information revealed in the slides isn’t necessarily the most earth-shattering disclosures. As reported by The Verge, one slide showed data, seemingly from Apple, that shows the frequency of use of several different apps that have messaging features—including Apple’s Messages, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Snapchat—that suggested Messages dominated iOS when it comes to communications, not Meta’s offerings. Another slide, per The Verge, was titled “Snapchat in 2020: Competitors Are Succeeding and Not Just Meta Apps” and said apps other than Meta’s own are “thriving.”

But the fact that information made its way to public consumption was a pretty big “oops” on Meta’s part. The information was visible because of how the company redacted the documents, which it turned out was pretty easy to remove…which, of course, people did. That did not inspire confidence among the legal representation for companies, including Apple, Google, and Snapchat, that Meta was doing al

An immigration judge denied bond on Wednesday, ruling Öztürk was both a “flight risk” and a “danger to the community” despite the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) only arguing the flight risk aspect, according to the petition filed by her legal team later that night.

According to the documents, the DHS case against Öztürk in immigration court consists solely of a “one-paragraph Department of State memorandum” that revoked her visa, citing her co-authorship of an op-ed that had “found common cause with an organization that was later temporarily banned from campus”.

The Trump administration has moved to classify more than 6,000 living immigrants as dead, canceling their Social Security numbers and effectively wiping out their ability to work or receive benefits in an effort to get them to leave the country, according to two people familiar with the situation.

The move will make it much harder for those affected to use banks or other basic services where Social Security numbers are required. It’s part of a broader effort by President Donald Trump to crack down on immigrants who were allowed to enter and remain temporarily in the United States under programs instituted by his predecessor, Joe Biden.

Trump has already attacked the ESA during his current term by issuing an executive order declaring a "national energy emergency" meant to promote his "drill, baby, drill" fossil fuel policy. The order states that the ESA and Marine Mammal Protection Act will not be allowed stand in the way of fossil fuel development.

The proposed redefinition of "harm" in the ESA comes as the Trump administration, spearheaded by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, eviscerates federal agencies including the Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA. As he did during his first term, Trump is pursuing a massive rollback of climate and environmental regulations and has appointed Cabinet secretaries whose backgrounds and beliefs are often inimical to their agencies' purposes.