Over the holiday weekend in Washington, DC, two members of the West Virginia National Guard, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom and 24-year-old Andrew Wolfe, were shot at a short metro ride from my house. Beckstrom died from her injuries and, as of this writing, Wolfe remains in critical condition. The news quickly spread that the shooter was a CIA-trained Afghan man named Rahmanullah Lakanwal, who seems to have been psychologically ravaged by his experience in a death squad underwritten with our tax dollars.
What changed? Republicans long characterized Silicon Valley as a bastion of liberalism. But over the past half-decade, many of tech's wealthiest titans rebelled against the Biden administration's criticism and policing of their industry. Last year, many tech barons threw their support behind the GOP, which they saw as more aligned with their often-libertarian ideals and their companies' economic interests.
Our national holiday, Thanksgiving Day, is a time for football, friends, family, feasting, feelings of gratitude, celebration of our freedoms, and reflection on our foundation. A day of immersion in the physiology of communing, breeding, feeding, digesting, nesting, and resting, and a reprieve from the grind and the physiology of fortressing, fighting, fleeing, freezing, faltering, or, for some, even fainting.
the U.S. bombed an alleged drug boat off the coast of Trinidad. According to a Washington Post report published Friday, anonymous sources familiar with the matter said Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered everyone aboard killed. After the first strike, which was conducted by the Navy, two survivors remained, clinging to the wreckage. Admiral Mitch Bradley reportedly deemed that the survivors were legitimate targets and ordered that Hegseth's directive be carried out.
Driving the news: Trump announced Friday that he planned to pardon Hernandez ahead of Sunday's elections in Honduras, where the White House backed the right-wing National Party that Hernandez led as president from 2014-2022. National Party candidate Nasry "Tito" Asfura is narrowly leading a center-right candidate as votes are being counted in a three-way race, according to the BBC. Zoom in: Shortly after Trump took office in January, Stone wrote three separate Substack posts calling for the pardon of
Krugman, who has made no secret of his contempt for cryptocurrencies (or for Trump and Trumpism), argues their rise is inextricably linked with the Trump administration's raft of friendly policies and actions toward crypto investors and exchanges. That includes calling for the creation of a government Bitcoin reserve, as well as signing an executive order in August to allow U.S. citizens to invest retirement savings in cryptocurrency, as well as other alternative assets.
Habba is not the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey by virtue of her appointment as First Assistant U.S. Attorney because only the first assistant in place at the time the vacancy arises automatically assumes the functions and duties of the office under the FVRA. Additionally, because Habba was nominated for the vacant U.S. Attorney position, the FVRA's nomination bar prevents her from assuming the role of Acting U.S. Attorney.
The texts between Gallego and an unnamed friend of 20 years discussed public perception of the Democratic Party and the party's future. The friend wrote "This is how the world views many [Democrats]," and shared a meme of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), who often has short purple-dyed hair, which had superimposed text reading, "If erectile dysfunction had a face." Gallego replied, "They aren't wrong!"
Donald Trump isn't going to be president forever, much as he would like to declare himself immortal. At some point, his unpopularity will catch up with him. It may be in the next midterms, as Democrats are increasingly dreaming about recapturing both houses of Congress. It could be in the run-up to the 2028 election, when Trump will have to contend with his lame duck status, even if he tries to run again as an 82-year-old.
For years, lawmakers at the state and federal levels have tried a variety of measures aimed at making kids safer on the internet, from kids-tailored design standards to age verification for individual websites. More recently, a new model has caught on in the states, and now it's gaining steam in Congress: putting the onus on app stores nationwide. The new approach to age verification orders mobile app stores to verify users' ages, then send that information to apps when users download them.
Andrew Yang has warned for several years that automation would upend the American workforce. In the run-up to his 2020 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he predicted that self-driving cars alone could displace a million mostly male truck drivers with limited education - a shift that could "destabilize society" and even trigger "riots in the street," he told The New York Times in 2018. Seven years later, Yang says the crisis he feared is no longer hypothetical.
Amid significant changes to the Pentagon's press policy which Lamothe and most of his peers refused to agree to Loomer has been granted not only a credential to roam and cover the Department of Defense's headquarters, but a desk there as well. The Washington Post @washingtonpost and Dan Lamothe @DanLamothe used to occupy this desk inside the Pentagon Press room, declared Loomer in a triumphant post on X. Now it's mine!
The Federalist Society has for decades now carefully cultivated a public image as both the all-powerful Oz behind the throne of the American judiciary and somehow simultaneously a benign debate society that takes no role in legal and political affairs. In the Trump years, the group has doubled down on the doublespeak, claiming that they are devoted believers in the rule of law, but also that they support Donald Trump and his judicial picks wholeheartedly.
The Social Security Administration wants to halve the number of people that go to its field offices in the 2026 fiscal year. More than 31 million people visited SSA field offices over the last fiscal year. Now, the agency aims to have 50% fewer visits - or no more than 15 million total - in fiscal 2026, which began in October, according to internal planning documents viewed by Nextgov/FCW.
First, this report is an attack on Kash from the right, complaining among other things, that he hasn't eradicated "Trump Derangement Syndrome" from the FBI and that Fox doesn't play in FBI break rooms, while applauding him for eliminating DEI. It was shared first with Miranda Devine, whose skillset is hit jobs, not government analysis. It was shared as a Sribd.
While many of the findings - such as the Fed, FDIC, and OCC pressuring banks away from crypto through informal guidance, and the SEC's "enforce first, make rules never" approach - were previously known, the report now places them squarely in the Congressional record. The report identifies at least 30 entities that were effectively "debanked" through informal regulatory guidance and supervisory pressure. These businesses, the Committee claims, were forced out of the U.S. banking system without formal enforcement actions.
The Massachusetts Seal, Flag, and Motto Advisory Commission was given a Dec. 15 deadline to produce recommendations. But the full body has not met since late August, and a round of public hearings that must occur before final recommendations are given have not been scheduled. The commission itself is the second such group to try to tackle the contentious topic in recent years. The first commission was created by state lawmakers in 2021, but disbanded by the end of 2023 without offering any concrete proposals.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth capped the Thanksgiving weekend with a meme about the Trump administration's drug boat strikes in the Caribbean, and the internet is crushing him for it. It all started on Sunday night when the former Fox News host shared a photo on X of a mock children's book cover with the title, Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists. For your Christmas wish list Hegseth wrote alongside the post.
You cannot run in a midterm election by saying, vote for us because we've done a great job,' particularly when people don't feel the consequences of the policies that you've enacted. he continued. If the president's Big Beautiful Bill was as instantaneously positive as he thinks, his numbers wouldn't be-, on approval numbers on the economy, wouldn't be in the 30s, and his overall approval wouldn't be in the low-40s.
US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that his administration would maintain a pause on asylum decisions "for a long time." "We don't want those people," Trump said. "You know why we don't want them? Because many have been no good, and they shouldn't be in our country." The president said there was "no time limit" for the pause. The decision followed the shooting near the White House on Wednesday, which resulted in the death of a 20-year-old National Guard member and left another critically wounded.
