Trump administration ruins an FBI agent’s career because he’s friends with the wrong guy. Every other agent now has to worry that if they do something that bothers Trump, even something that is legal and legitimate!, they might lose their job.
This is not the way to retain the best employees for our government! Nor how a democratic country operates.
Trump removes people with great experience for bad reasons, then puts in shills he thinks are loyal. The remaining underlings see that the way to keep their jobs is to shut up, and do what they’re told, even if the shills at the top don’t know what they’re doing.
Man-caused climate change is real, but it isn’t an existential crisis. It’s not going to destroy human civilization like a nuclear war would. Climate change will greatly damage economies and kill a lot of people, so it’s a serious issue that needs to be dealt with, but it isn’t existential.
Technologies like solar and windmills are good, but have trade offs. Many rightwing arguments like how inefficient these technologies are or how many birds they kill are based on original versions of these technologies that have been greatly improved upon; so these critiques are no longer valid and people making them either are ignorant on how outdated their information is, haven’t done their due diligence, or are being dishonest.
Cost benefit analyses on the benefits of reducing carbon emissions have already been done, and they overwhelmingly show that reducing emissions is worth it. However, it is only worth it if we cut emissions slowly. Cutting too fast likely makes the costs of cutting greater than the benefits.
Even conservative economists are saying that Trump’s pick to lead BLS is essentially a partisan ideological hack whose work is clearly biased and riddled with mistakes.
Trump fired the former BLS leader because he didn’t like the poor job numbers.
Economic data helps us know what’s going on in the country. If hacks lead the agencies that produce the data, we won’t be able to trust the data, and leaders and citizens won’t have this basic information to help them make decisions.
“Alabama can’t seem to decide whether it wants to discourage porn consumption or profit from it. Starting in September, it will levy a 10 percent tax on adult website proceeds from any porn produced or sold in the state.
Adult websites are reportedly being told to create their “Material Harmful to Minors tax accounts” now.”
“the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit largely affirmed a lower court ruling that found that the Trump administration was likely guilty of conducting illegal immigration raids in the greater Los Angeles area that violated the Fourth Amendment rights of multiple U.S. citizens.
Generally speaking, Fourth Amendment caselaw requires that an officer must have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity in order to stop someone. In the immigration context, a federal officer must have reasonable suspicion that a person is in violation of immigration law in order to detain them.
In this case, Perdomo v. Noem, the lower court held, and the appellate court agreed, that the Trump administration was apparently carrying out immigration raids and arrests without any semblance of reasonable suspicion, which invariably meant that U.S. citizens were also getting caught up in the federal dragnet.”
Companies are worried about quarterly earnings. The U.S. does not have a plan B for long-term research. We need to maintain the funding and focus on research in universities. Many technologies that are changing the world today are based on university research from decades ago.
Trump’s trade agreements are not trade agreements. They are not even trade deals. They are more press releases. It’s likely that many of Trump’s tariffs won’t even be legal under U.S. law.
The Israel-Hamas conflict is surrounded by so much misinformation, and people latch on to the misinformation and propaganda so unquestionably, that it makes it hard to tell what’s going on and many professionals don’t want to even touch the story. Everything is so he-said-she-said and stories always change after bad information has already spread, that it is difficult to know what the truth is.
“Sex offenders are supposed to be ineligible for minimum-security federal prison camps, but the rule was waived for Maxwell.
…
“Maxwell’s transfer raised eyebrows not only because it appeared to be part of an obvious quid pro quo between a rather infamous public figure and a president trying to downplay his connections to Epstein, but because it’s practically unheard of for a federal inmate with Maxwell’s record to get transferred to a minimum-security camp after serving only a fraction of their sentence.”