Trump administration submits regulations to weaken federal worker protections

“The Office of Personnel Management has formally submitted draft regulations that would make it easier for agencies to fire career government officials who push back against presidential orders.
The move laid out in documents obtained by POLITICO on Tuesday is the latest step toward rekindling a plan initiated at the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first term to eliminate civil service protection for federal employees who play a role in policy development or advocacy.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/trump-administration-federal-worker-protections-00203598

How to make sense of all the court orders against Donald Trump

“Still, only the most naive legal analyst would conclude right now that the US constitutional system will survive Trump’s second term intact, or that the courts have definitively ruled that Trump’s agenda is in jeopardy. It is certainly possible that, when all of this litigation is over, Trump will face loss after unambiguous loss and be forced to give up many of his attempts to defy the Constitution. But it is far too soon to predict how all of these lawsuits will play out — or even if Trump will comply with any court orders against him.
To date, no appellate court — the mid-tier courts in the federal system — has weighed in on any of these cases, not to mention the Supreme Court. Similarly, while some federal trial courts have ordered Trump to stop some of his illegal actions, many of these decisions are temporary stopgap orders that expire quickly, and that are intended largely to maintain the status quo while the judges hearing these cases get up to speed on the legal issues that they present.

It’s a lot to keep track of. And, in many of these cases, there are likely to be months or even years more litigation before the legal issues presented by these cases are fully resolved.

It’s also worth noting that, as these cases make their way through the federal appellate process, they are more and more likely to be heard by judges who tend to be sympathetic to Trump — including a Supreme Court that has held that Trump may use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.”

https://www.vox.com/scotus/399265/supreme-court-lawsuits-donald-trump-appeals

Trump’s shocking purge of public health data, explained

“In the initial days of the Trump administration, officials scoured federal websites for any mention of what they deemed “DEI” keywords — terms as generic as “diverse” and “historically” and even “women.” They soon identified reams of some of the country’s most valuable public health data containing some of the targeted words, including language about LGBTQ+ people, and quickly took down much of it — from surveys on obesity and suicide rates to real-time reports on immediate infectious disease threats like bird flu.
The removal elicited a swift response from public health experts who warned that without this data, the country risked being in the dark about important health trends that shape life-and-death public health decisions made in communities across the country.

Some of this data was restored in a matter of days, but much of it was incomplete. In some cases, the raw data sheets were posted again, but the reference documents that would allow most people to decipher them were not. Meanwhile, health data continues to be taken down: The New York Times reported last week that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on bird flu transmission between humans and cats had been posted and then promptly removed.”

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/399319/trump-cdc-health-data-removed-obesity-suicide

Jon Stewart & John Oliver Welcome America to Its Trump Monarchy Era | The Daily Show

If Trump can act the way he is, breaking the law, taking powers clearly meant for Congress, and if he runs over the judiciary to do it, The United States will no longer be a Constitutional democracy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdygrcFcyyY

Rogan Spreads Insane Conspiracy Theories About DOGE Victim USAID

Joe Rogan spreads false and misleading information about USAID.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ5rdhXUzl4

Trump’s Aggressively Broad Executive Order on Transgender People

“In an effort to “defend women’s rights” against “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex,” the order—titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—seeks with the force of federal law to establish men and women as distinct and immutable categories.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” which “are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” the order states. It defines “sex” as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and notes that the term is “not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity,'” which the order says “does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex.”

Perhaps ironically, supporters of transgender equality might agree with parts of this characterization. “Sex is a label—male or female—that you’re assigned by a doctor at birth based on the genitals you’re born with and the chromosomes you have. It goes on your birth certificate,” according to Planned Parenthood. Gender identity, on the other hand, “is how you feel inside and how you express your gender through clothing, behavior, and personal appearance. It’s a feeling that begins very early in life.”

The executive order defines “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” and “male” as the opposite—”a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.” In other words, anyone with an XX chromosome is a female, and anyone with an XY chromosome is male, with no exceptions. The order tautologically defines “sex” in terms of “male” and “female,” which are then defined in terms of “sex.”

But by ruling so starkly, the order completely writes intersex people out of existence.

“People who are intersex have genitals, chromosomes or reproductive organs that don’t fit into a male/female sex binary,” according to the Cleveland Clinic. “Some people who are intersex consider their gender to be intersex. Others identify as female, male, nonbinary or a different gender.” In this case, a person’s professed gender may change from the one assigned at birth because they literally have biological markers of both. The clinic further notes that one in 100 Americans is estimated to be intersex.

The executive order criticizes “gender ideology,” which it says “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity” and “diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category but nevertheless maintains that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body.” But intersex people literally are born in the wrong sexed body, at least as defined by the executive order, which says everyone is either all male or all female.”

https://reason.com/2025/01/22/trumps-aggressively-broad-executive-order-on-transgender-people/

Like Biden, Trump Does Not Control the Price of Eggs

“Trump talked repeatedly about runaway grocery prices during the campaign, pledging that if elected, paying over $4 for a carton of eggs would be a thing of the past. “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day 1,” he pledged.  But after