Michael Barry

[Michael Barry @calijawn]

💯

[With Love, JerLisa Nicole @JerLisa_Nicole]

Being an American right now is just waking up and being told how much more money our president is stealing and having to go about our day like normal.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin: "We want to make sure that every vote actually counts, that we're not having games like you might see in sanctuary cities. Democrats always want to throw out the Constitution. Well great, let's throw out the Constitution."

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Markwayne Mullin is still talking about shutting down international travel to big blue cities: "I'm gonna have to go get the resources. The most logical way for me to get the resources is to go to CBP at the airports, because they are trained to deal with large crowds."

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin doesn't rule out sending ICE to polling places in November

[gato fumante @KweenInYellow]

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer caught on a hot mic talking about the controversial Al data center being built despite overwhelming opposition: "We're used to people saying 'f*ck no!', and then doing it anyway."

[Jonathan Lemire @JonLemire]

“President Trump himself will occupy an arena-level seat, positioned like a Roman emperor in his pulvinar—the imperial box—and surrounded by senators and dignitaries, if not the traditional six Vestal Virgins” https://t.co/TUZGqUaTvd

[Responsible Statecraft @RStatecraft]

Tucked into the 192-page annual intelligence policy bill is Section 622 which, thanks to Senator Tom Cotton, would mandate intel sharing with Israel in ways that are head scratching and unprecedented, writes ex-CIA Paul Pillar.

https://t.co/sKLZE6nAnx

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Burgum: "California was the only state really dependent on oil coming through the Strait of Hormuz"

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Kennedy's response to the NYT piece is a document worth reading carefully, because it contains several things that are documentably not true alongside several things that are legitimately contested.

His central claim: "I am knowledgeable and active on every issue in every division of my department, and I always make the final decisions."

The NYT piece was based on a dozen people with direct contact with him, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution. Kennedy's response: those sources are "flotsam and jetsam" he fired or who quit to avoid being fired, and therefore lack credibility.

That's a circular argument. If every critical source can be dismissed as a disgruntled former employee, no accountability journalism about any official is possible. Kennedy knows this.

What Kennedy does not address: when measles killed two children in Texas, the CDC official leading the response asked repeatedly to brief him and was rebuffed. He does not address being described as "checked out" and scrolling his phone at division chief meetings. He does not address the CDC director he fired telling senators she was directed not to speak with career scientists. He does not address the acting pandemic preparedness chief being a former firefighter who founded a vaccine mandate opposition group.

He does address Ebola: by not mentioning it at all.

What he does offer: God put us all on this earth to search for existential truths. The Times now employs propagandists. Becerra spent most of his term in California.

The response has 330,000 views and 3,400 retweets. The argument it makes will land with people who already believe it. The specific documented record it does not answer will remain unanswered.

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

Republicans are trying to exempt private jet owners from paying taxes.

Ladies and gentlemen, right-wing populism! https://t.co/wQzHkWCi9M

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan have funded a platform called https://t.co/RpVwfEXBbO that allows anyone to file a complaint against a journalist's story for a starting price of $2,000. A team of human investigators examines the story, then submits findings to a "jury" of AI models - OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google - which publish a "verdict" on the story's truthfulness and rank individual journalists on metrics including truth-telling and corrections.

If the journalist doesn't respond to defend their reporting, the verdict is issued and published online anyway.

The platform is being sold as "letting anyone fight the press like a billionaire." The creator is Aron D'Souza, who led the Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016.

The design choices tell you what this is. The system treats anonymous sources as less trustworthy and ranks anonymous whistleblower claims near the bottom. Anonymous sources are how most significant accountability journalism happens - they're how the Pentagon Papers got out, how the CIA's black site program got exposed, how the HHS stories we've covered this week were reported. The people who most need protection from powerful interests are specifically deprioritized by Objection's scoring system.

The creator calls it "the same as Community Notes." A civil rights and defamation attorney calls it "a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful."

One of those descriptions is accurate. The AI models being used as the "tribunal" were trained on journalists' work without consent or compensation. They hallucinate. They amplify bias. They are being deployed here specifically to issue verdicts on the work of the people whose labor built them.

Thiel killed Gawker with a lawsuit. This is faster and cheaper.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

The "Trump Kennedy Center" apparently repeatedly ignored the terms of a contract with the Washington National Opera, locked the WNO out from viewing their own financial records, and is now refusing to return$17 million of their own money — and even already spent some of it!

[The Lever @LeverNews]

BREAKING: ICE agents attempted to raid legal offices representing unaccompanied migrant children, lawyers tell The Lever.

The visits came after the Trump admin froze payments to legal providers and demanded sensitive client data on children facing deportation.

[Reuters Legal @ReutersLegal]

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday said it was sending to Congress landmark California vehicle emissions rules for potential repeal. https://t.co/mmH78Nc9K4

[Acyn @Acyn]

Fetterman on Platner: Like if you can't really defend him, you could at least say, well, I mean, at least he has a D after his name. But he's not even a Democrat

[philip lewis @Phil_Lewis_]

A federal judge just ordered the Trump admin to reinstall exhibits and signs relating to slavery ​and climate change that it ⁠had removed from ​parks and monuments nationwide https://t.co/pJHc9dGTCF

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

🚨EXCLUSIVE: A commercial airline pilot tells MeidasTouch they filed FAA and NASA safety reports after lighting from Trump’s UFC event at the White House allegedly flooded their cockpit on approach to Reagan National. The pilot called it “10 times worse than any laser illumination event” they’d ever experienced. https://t.co/L6taUKdgbG

[David Dayen @ddayen]

Jay Clayton is a bad selection for director of national intelligence, even if he seems better than Bill Pulte. He's a Wall St lawyer who's repeatedly intermingled financial & national security interests, a bad combo going back to the Dulles brothers.
https://t.co/4msSIAdC57

[Zoe Tillman @ZoeTillman]

Things are poised to come to a head soon in a pair of cases re: whether the Trump admin can turn over tapes/transcripts of Joe Biden interviews (DOJ opposed release pre-Trump) -- judge handling Heritage Foundation's FOIA case set to rule by next Friday; different judge handling Biden's suit to stop disclosure to House GOP likely to wait until after that

[Matt Stoller @matthewstoller]

"Warner stock offers a 17% return to the deal price of $31 a share in cash. That’s an unusually wide spread for a takeover deal."

https://t.co/Q3LstZs8PY

[Michael Barry @calijawn]

@TheWapplehouse @SEC As a Big Ten man, I approve this post