“Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.
Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.
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Also among the corrections: DOJ revealed that a DOGE team member was briefly granted access to private Social Security profiles even after a court prohibited it. Shapiro said the access was never “utilized.” And in another instance, a DOGE team member had access for two months to a “call center profile” that contained private information.
“It is unknown at this time whether any [private information] was accessed,” Shapiro said.
Shapiro also revealed that despite prior assertions in court, SSA’s DOGE team members “were using links to share data through the third-party server ‘Cloudflare.’”
“Cloudflare is not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA’s security protocols,” Shapiro indicated.”
The US electoral system pushes politicians to the left and right due to primaries, where politicians need to win over a small number of more polarized voters. We can change this system into non-partisan ranked choice elections so that politicians don’t need to bend over for the extremes.
The Trump administration told Texas to gerrymander based on race. Texas did as asked. A judge said the gerrymander was illegal because it was based on race. The Supreme Court said that despite the detailed investigation by the lower court that showed a race-based gerrymander, they don’t think it was based on race. They based that opinion on very little, and overturning a lower court based on one’s opinions of the facts is illegal, unless the lower court decision was overwhelmingly erroneous, which it was not in this case. The Supreme court also said it is too close to an election to make a change even though the elections are a year out. This means state legislatures can illegally gerrymander half the years because House elections are every two years.
The Supreme Court is clearly ruling on freedom of religion cases in a way that is biased toward Christianity and that allows Christians to risk and hurt non-Christians as long as they consider it a part of their religion.
The conservative court decided no matter how extreme a partisan gerrymander, it is legal. However, they said racial gerrymanders are illegal. A district judge dug into the Texas gerrymander and concluded that the actors involved explicitly gerrymandered based on race. Without disputing the facts, the conservatives on the Supreme Court rejected it.
“Bray also addressed threats of violence against many of his own members received after signaling they don’t support remapping the state ahead of next year’s midterm election.
“It’s unsettling for all of our members and people across the state to endure that,” he said of the dozen or so elected Indiana Republicans who have faced threats of pipe bombings, swattings and unsolicited deliveries of Domino’s pizza.”
“sometimes, when it comes to gerrymandering, politicians press their advantages too far. Political scientists have a term for parties spreading their vote perilously thin through redistricting: dummymanders. The idea is that, by spreading a party’s voters more thinly across a greater number of districts in order to pick up more seats, a new map will turn strongholds into potential areas of danger. Instead of having five districts where the party can generally count on 60 percent support, say, they’ll create seven districts where their likely share is more like 53 percent — leaving more of them at risk during a wave election.”
“Mamdani said that he is going to pay for his grocery stores by “redirecting” $140 million worth of city funding that is already being spent subsidizing corporate grocers. As the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney was the first to notice, that number is based on a misreading of a city website. The city subsidizes some private grocery stores at a cost of about $3.3 million per year. As some Bronx residents told Fox News’ Kennedy in a new video published by Reason, the city should focus instead on helping the homeless, dealing with “rats the size of cats,” and cleaning “all of the needles on the street.”
Direct assistance is a more cost-effective and less destructive way to support low-income households than government-run supermarkets, and it’s something the federal government already does in abundance. Through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, 1.79 million New Yorkers—20 percent of the city’s population—receive help purchasing groceries each month.”