Karen Adams 💙

Crone. Dreams, Art & Research. Friend of Bill’s. ❤️ On Bluesky & Substack.

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

The Revolt Inside 60 Minutes Just Got Worse.

Legendary correspondent Steve Kroft is now accusing CBS leadership of "journalistic interference."

His verdict?

"It was a slap in the face to everybody who has worked there."

Notice the pattern.

Scott Pelley says he was stonewalled.

Sharon Alfonsi says Pelley was fired for asking questions.

Now Steve Kroft says management is interfering with journalism.

At some point, this stops looking like a personnel dispute.

And starts looking like a newsroom rebellion.

[VoteVets @votevets]

BREAKING: Rep. Pat Ryan just got the House Armed Services Committee UNANIMOUSLY to force Pete Hegseth to explain every senior military firing within the next 5 days. Hegseth has fired 24+ officers without cause or explanation. Even Republicans want answers.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Bill Cassidy (R-primaried out of the Senate by Trump) & Cory Booker (D-king of the filibuster) join forces to object to Trump’s slush fund. Trump’s time will come to an end.

[No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC]

Marco Rubio yesterday: “I have never seen Trump fall asleep.”

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Trump appears to be completely passed out asleep during his 3pm Oval Office announcement

[Democratic Wins Media @DemocraticWins]

BREAKING: Governor JB Pritzker just slammed DC Republicans for failing to stand with working class Americans. This is spot on.

[Democracy Docket @DemocracyDocket]

NEW: The NAACP asked a federal court to stop the USPS from enforcing a new rule that would only send mail ballots to voters on lists controlled by the federal government.

The group argued the proposal, which stems from Trump's executive order targeting mail voting, violates a 2021 settlement. https://t.co/cpUNiCeEGM

[Dr. Allison Wiltz @queenie4rmnola]

America is racist. Two white men chased and shot at a Black delivery driver. But, the judge dropped the charges. This is the same way southern judges refused to prosecute lynchmobs

[Niall Stanage @NiallStanage]

Astounding times.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Kelly: What are the American people getting out of this conflict with Iran right now? Iran wasn’t about to develop a nuclear weapon. Their enrichment went up because Donald Trump tore up the JCPOA. So this conflict is of Donald Trump’s doing and making.

[Pablo Torre Finds Out @pablofindsout]

Amidst Julie K. Brown's investigation, Jeffrey Epstein warned his legal "dream team":

"She is going to start trouble."

@jkbjournalist sat down with @PabloTorre to shed light on Epstein's secret deal and how prosecutors "just wanted this case to go away"

[Chuck Ross @ChuckRossDC]

Former Lincoln Project guy has some intel on the supposed Graham Platner bombshell

[Norman Ornstein @NormOrnstein]

Dear Scott Pelley: pull the entire 60 Minutes team together and go to MSNow and offer a package deal to recreate the show for Sunday night and call it The Hour

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of.

And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test.

His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.”

Not whether it works.

Not whether Congress authorized it.

Whether it pleases Trump.

This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people.
To my Republican colleagues: where are you?

Congress passed this funding. You voted for it.

Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend.

Grow a spine.

This is not about left or right.

It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt.

History will remember who stood up and who looked away.
https://t.co/2yHKBTNLbj

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.

Here's what happened:

He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.

Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.

A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).

The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.

But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.

With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.

And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.

The threat does all the work.

By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.

Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.

If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.

Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR

[Leela Gray @LeelaJGray]

You can't solve problems you refuse to measure.

Yet this month, 900 ocean monitoring instruments are being physically pulled out of the water. A $368 million system. A decade to build. Designed to run 15 more years.

Gone.

This network tracked hurricane intensity, coastal flooding, marine heatwaves, and sea level rise. The data was free, public and used in over 500 scientific publications. Congress tried to stop it... twice. They got overruled anyway.

For a coastal community like FL-13 that just lived through Helene, this isn't abstract. This is the difference between an evacuation order that comes in time and one that doesn't.

Florida deserves a representative who fights for the science that protects us, not one who looks the other way while it gets dismantled.

#LeelaGrayforCongress #LeelaJGray

https://t.co/8SBFNnsFcU

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Kyle Kulinski: “Jake Tapper wrote a motherfucking book about Joe Biden and his cognitive decline and the massive cover-up. Well Jake, why don’t you get to work on your Trump book now because I guarantee you the cover-up that’s happening with him is way worse and way more severe and they’re covering more extreme stuff. His body is failing and his mind is failing on a regular basis”

[Dr. Daniel Grossman @DrDGrossman]

Ectopic pregnancies (i.e., when an embryo implants somewhere other than the uterine lining) are never viable & can be life-threatening.

Despite this, doctors in Arkansas & Oklahoma tried to discharge a patient with an ectopic pregnancy without treatment. https://t.co/t5IsdNOaf9

[Claude Taylor @TrueFactsStated]

Wtf?

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

A court found Alabama's maps were drawn with "intentional race-based discrimination." The Supreme Court said: use them anyway. This is what the end of the Voting Rights Act looks like in practice. https://t.co/ZX42bXZ4WP