E. Broderick☮️

This is very compelling! Pete Buttigieg just gets it. The sheer humanity in this clip is why I like this man so much, everyone should watch it.

However dumb you think the process for destroying USAID was, it was dumber. This is from Nicholas Enrich's new book Into the Wood Chipper, describing a meeting with Trump-appointed USAID leadership *after* they had largely gutted the agency

The Office of Personnel Management is asking insurers that cover federal employees and retirees to hand over details about their medical visits, their pharmacy claims, and more. cbsn.ws/4tBfdJ7

My problem with the “he wouldn’t actually do it” and “institutional checks would step in to stop him” arguments regarding any of Trump’s unhinged threats is that we are in this position precisely because, at every prior stage, he did do it and nobody stepped in to stop him.

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next. Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades. George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks. The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order. No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide. A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute. The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no. The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

🙌🏼 f*ck, yeah

I want to flag something that may have flown under the radar, but shouldn't. In December 2025, President Trump and @SecVetAffairs Doug Collins moved to ban access to abortion care at the VA, even in cases of rape, incest, or when the health of the mother is at risk. Earlier this week, the Senate voted on our bill to overturn that policy. 50 Republican Senators opposed it, meaning the abortion ban remains in effect. This threat to women's healthcare continues to be real. After losing elections in the wake of Roe falling, Republicans know that it's not politically popular to be publicly for abortion bans. So they do it just like this: quietly, in the dark of night, through bureaucratic rule-making -- hoping we won't catch it. Our veterans deserve access to abortion care. Period. And I will not stop shining the light on this and working to overturn this new ban. ms.now/news/senate-re…

Donald Trump got the Director of the US Patent and Trade Office to apply for trademarks for the Board of Peace—something it does for no other entity and which is not allowed under federal law. Then he waived the fee for registration. Now he’ll decide whether to grant the application he submitted! No one knows what this Board of Peace is or where the billions of dollars gathered from corrupt foreign states will go. We're exposing this devious scheme.

Pete Hegseth wasn’t removed from the DC National Guard by accident. A Major General is now warning that his rhetoric and actions are putting him on a path toward war crimes—and he lays out exactly why.

Endless propaganda has convinced Americans that bombs dropping in the Middle East is “normal.” As if those families don’t have jobs, school, hopes & dreams. As if every life lost isn’t someone’s entire universe. Geographical luck. That’s the only difference between you & them.

Congress gave themselves a raise last year. They also voted against raising the minimum wage. The minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009. Congressional pay has gone up 9 times since then. But sure, it's the workers who are greedy.🙄

again I point out how strange it is that high-level diplomatic negotiations of war and peace are being conducted by freelancers Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, both of whom have egregious conflicts of interest, and not the actual secretary of state

Anyone who thought creating the largest internal security force in the country, answering only to the president, was for anything else hasn’t been paying attention.

Here’s the part no one is saying: The next president won’t get a real first term. They’ll inherit a repair job. Rebuilding alliances. Restoring credibility. Undoing damage. An entire presidency spent fixing what Trump broke.

Let me get this straight. The leading Senate Republican walked into the White House Sunday with a bipartisan deal to end the TSA nightmare. Fund everything except ICE now, get TSA agents paid today, handle ICE separately. Senate Republicans and Democrats said yes. Trump said no. Why? Because Trump is holding TSA workers’ paychecks hostage to try and force Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill that would knock millions of eligible Americans off the voter rolls. He wants to make it harder for Americans to vote. Like a petulant child flipping the board when he’s losing, Trump torched a bipartisan deal his own Senate leader handed him on a silver platter. His tantrum continues as he unleashes ICE agents into airports. Agents with zero screening training, zero TSA authority, and a good chance of making everything worse. Democrats have been ready to fund TSA from day one. What we refuse to do is write a blank check for an ICE agency that gunned down two American citizens in Minneapolis and still demands the ability to kick down doors without a judge’s approval while hiding behind masks. We will not pass the SAVE Act either. Call it what it is: the SAVE REPUBLICANS Act. Non-citizen voting is already illegal. It was illegal yesterday. It will be illegal tomorrow. This bill solves nothing except the Republican party’s losing electoral math. Fund TSA. Reform ICE. End this today. Trump is the one standing in the way.

The President of the United States learned that Robert Mueller had died. And he picked up his phone and typed: “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.” I need you to stop. Put down whatever you’re doing and feel the full weight of those words. Good. I’m glad he’s dead. Said by the man who holds the most powerful office in the history of human civilization. The office of Washington. Of Lincoln. Of Roosevelt standing in the rubble of Pearl Harbor promising a nation trembling in the dark that we would rise. That office. Those words. Now let me tell you who Robert Mueller was. He did not have to go to Vietnam. He had every reason not to. A Princeton degree. A blown-out knee. A future waiting for him in the comfort of civilian life. He waited a full year for that knee to heal, just so he could serve. Let that sink in. He walked into hell when other men were running from it. He came home with a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart soaked in the blood of his sacrifice. He spent the next four decades standing in the breach, as a prosecutor, as FBI Director, as the man who held this nation together in the smoldering ash of September 12th, 2001, when we were all afraid and we needed someone steady, someone serious, someone who loved this country more than he loved himself. He was all of those things. He was a Republican. He was, by every honest measure, an American hero. And the President danced on his grave.

From today’s New York Times: Across both of his terms, Mr. Trump has granted clemency to more than 70 allies, donors and others convicted in fraud cases. In his second term, Mr. Trump’s pace of pardoning those convicted of fraud has increased. In the first year of his second term, he handed out nearly three dozen pardons and commutations for people accused of fraud. Mr. Trump is unabashed about using the government to reward friends and supporters and punish foes. Still, his handling of fraud cases stands out. Not only are there striking similarities between some of the crimes that were prosecuted and those that were pardoned, but the president also has excused some of those who have stolen the most. . . . . . Last March, Mr. Trump pardoned Trevor Milton, the founder of electric vehicle start-up Nikola, who had been sentenced to four years in prison on allegations he had defrauded his investors. Before Mr. Trump granted the pardon, his campaign received donations from Mr. Milton and his wife totaling more than $1.8 million. . . . . . Mr. Herrera and the others pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, but Mr. Trump pardoned them before sentencing. The clemency grants came after Mr. Herrera’s daughter, Isabela Herrera, donated $2.5 million in 2024 — and then another $1 million in 2025 — to MAGA Inc., a super PAC devoted to Mr. Trump and run by his allies. . . . . . Mr. Weinstein has not been as fortunate as Adriana Camberos. In 2021, Mr. Trump commuted the sentence she was serving for a fraud scheme involving fake energy drinks. A lawyer who had worked in the Trump White House assisted her with her case. Three years later, Ms. Camberos was convicted with her brother of defrauding food wholesalers. In January, Mr. Trump pardoned them both, with no explanation. _________________ Imagine that — a rich felon convicted of fraud excusing rich felons convicted of fraud … if the price is right. They say actions speak louder than words, and Trump’s actions on behalf of large-scale fraudsters speak as clearly as his actions on large-scale drug traffickers (see Trump pardoned drug traffickers including former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández and Silk Road online drug market founder Ross Ulbricht). Particularly galling is pardoning a fraudster who then goes out and frauds again and then scores a second fraud pardon. How do you square fraud x2/pardon x2 with the claim that you’re serious about cracking down on fraud? The old saying was “justice is blind.” The current saying is “you get as much justice as you can afford to buy.” If we’re serious about rooting out fraud, I know exactly where we should start.

Sen. Warnock on the SAVE Act: In the words of the administration itself, "we just want to make sure the right people are voting." That was the argument in the 1960s. I don't believe in the right people, I believe in we the people. Every American citizen must have access, it is a right.

I reviewed the Heritage Foundation's database of voter fraud cases since the 1980s. They had just 10 examples of undocumented immigrants voting. I know of 2 more. Over decades. Importantly, several would NOT have been impacted by voter ID, as they involved stolen identities.