Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Within six months Twitter will be fully self-driving.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

She burned that motherfucker down, and I am so here for it. Thank you, Caroline Kennedy.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

“They all knew.”

’Where will you hide, Roberts, the laws all being flat?’

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Giving up is unforgivable.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Petty moves from a petty man.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

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Thursday Morning Open Thread

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Good news, if true:

WASTE! FRAUD! ABUSE!
Send the $400 million bill to Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump.
??Alligator Alcatraz will be empty within days, according to an email obtained by ABC News.

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— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline.com) August 27, 2025 at 9:50 PM

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NAACP asks court to block new Texas congressional map www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202…

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— Timothy McBride (@mcbridetd.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 12:58 AM

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Voters elected Trump to make them rich, & Democrats are doing their best to hang him on it

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) August 26, 2025 at 8:37 AM

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Getting rid of De Minimus right as we gear up for stocking for Christmas is the most impressive piece of "fuck your treats" I can thunk of.

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— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) August 24, 2025 at 3:46 PM

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I encourage Republicans to continue to do all they can to make "Republicans versus everybody else" the basis of our politics

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— Chatham Harrison dba TRUMP DELENDUS EST (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 2:56 PM

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“Dems/libs need their own media to match the Repubs” discourse often ignores 2 big Q’s:
A. Would rightwing media be feasible and as influential if it had to appeal to anyone other than white people (especially men)? If not, is it a replicable model for Dems/libs/progs?
/1

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 2:35 PM


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B. Is rightwing media based on manipulation? If so, should we assume people who don’t consume rightwing media are as easily manipulated as those who do? Are people blank slates RE manipulation & watching Fox makes them easier to manipulate, or is Fox appealing to those who are easily manipulated? /2

— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 2:42 PM

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Cold Grey Dawn Open Thread: Dems, Once Again, Blamed for Doing It Rong

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people have been calling for The Broad Left to do this for literally years? i guess i'm not seeing the problem

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— post malone ergo propter malone (@proptermalone.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 2:24 PM

Taylor Lorenz (IMO) is one of the people whose brains broke bad during the pandemic. She used to be a reasonable reporter, but since her all-too-online Covid health crisis, she’s increasingly been pushing right-wing talking points about GUBMINT SECKRISSY (which is bad, but only when Democrats do it). Her latest, at Wired:

In a private group chat in June, dozens of Democratic political influencers discussed whether to take advantage of an enticing opportunity. They were being offered $8,000 per month to take part in a secretive program aimed at bolstering Democratic messaging on the internet.

But the contract sent to them from Chorus, the nonprofit arm of a liberal influencer marketing platform, came with some strings. Among other issues, it mandated extensive secrecy about disclosing their payments and had restrictions on what sort of political content the creators could produce…

The influencers in the chat collectively had at least 13 million followers across social platforms. They represented some of the most well-known voices online posting in support of Democrats, and they’re key to wherever the party moves next. But ultimately, the group didn’t make much progress…

After the Democrats lost in November, they faced a reckoning. It was clear that the party had failed to successfully navigate the new media landscape. While Republicans spent decades building a powerful and robust independent media infrastructure, maximizing controversy to drive attention and maintaining tight relationships with creators despite their small disagreements with Trump, the Democrats have largely relied on outdated strategies and traditional media to get their message out.

Now, Democrats hope that the secretive Chorus Creator Incubator Program, funded by a powerful liberal dark money group called The Sixteen Thirty Fund, might tip the scales. The program kicked off last month, and creators involved were told by Chorus that over 90 influencers were set to take part. Creators told WIRED that the contract stipulated they’d be kicked out and essentially cut off financially if they even so much as acknowledged that they were part of the program. Some creators also raised concerns about a slew of restrictive clauses in the contract.

Influencers included in communication about the program, and in some cases an onboarding session for those receiving payments from The Sixteen Thirty Fund, include Olivia Julianna, the centrist Gen Z influencer who spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention; Loren Piretra, a former Playboy executive turned political influencer who hosts a podcast for Occupy Democrats; Barrett Adair, a content creator who runs an American Girl Doll–themed pro-DNC meme account; Suzanne Lambert, who has called herself a “Regina George liberal;” Arielle Fodor, an education creator with 1.4 million followers on TikTok; Sander Jennings, a former TLC reality star and older brother of trans influencer Jazz Jennings; David Pakman, who hosts an independent progressive show on YouTube covering news and politics; Leigh McGowan, who goes by the online moniker “Politics Girl”; and dozens of others. (The first two declined to comment; the rest did not respond to requests for comment.)

According to copies of the contract viewed by WIRED that creators signed, the influencers are not allowed to disclose their relationship with Chorus or The Sixteen Thirty Fund—or functionally, that they’re being paid at all…

The structure of the program highlights the vast differences between how Democrats and Republicans attempt to amass online influence. Republicans have spent decades building up a powerful independent media ecosystem, though the right-wing influencer world is far from transparent. In September 2024, a federal indictment alleged that the Russian state-sponsored network RT was covertly providing millions in funding to Tenet Media, a company working with major right-wing influencers including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern. In 2024, the National Republican Congressional Committee spent nearly $500,000 on work with Creator Grid, an influencer marketing company whose website says it “connects Republican candidates with the internet’s most powerful conservative influencers,” according to analysis of campaign finance filings from The Washington Post.

Steven Buckley, a digital media sociologist at City St. George’s, University of London, says that these sorts of programs have been “happening in the right wing for ages.” But Heider said that the structure of The Sixteen Thirty Fund deal raises the question, “Is it ethical to match the tactics of your opponents?”

The Democrats appear to have no real counter to this system. “Democrats missed the next generation of media,” says Brendan Gahan, cofounder of influencer marketing agency Creator Authority. “Historically they owned Hollywood, but this next generation of influence is digital, and they’ve miscalculated that. I don’t think they feel comfortable in arenas where they lack control.”

So: Only Republicans are allowed to spend money on ‘propaganda’? They got there first, we can’t step onto their territory?…

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Late Night Open Thread

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Quiet night.  Looks like no Cole post tonight unless this post from me brings him out,  which would be just fine with me.

I’m about to head to bed, but thought I would put up a post before I do.

We can talk about anything you want, but I’ll get you started with 3 bits of good news from the courts.

VICTORY: In a major victory for voting rights, the Arizona Court of Appeals has rejected a lawsuit brought by right-wing groups and the Arizona Republican Party that sought to limit how election officials verify mail-in ballot signatures. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/…

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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 8:02 PM

I think this is different from the one above it, but I haven’t clicked through enough to be sure.

🚨BREAKING: Arizona Court of Appeals REJECTS right wing challenge to Arizona’s signature matching process. Another VICTORY for my law firm’s clients and the voters of Arizona. www.democracydocket.com/cases/arizon…

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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 7:48 PM

I love how bold Marc Elias is with his contempt.

Apparently Trump just figured out that the Utah court struck down the gerrymandered congressional map and reinstated the citizen-led redistricting reforms.

If he subscribed to Democracy Docket he would have learned about this on Monday. Don’t make the same mistake sign-up now. hubs.ly/Q03jcjqP0

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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 7:20 PM

We all knew about Utah yesterday, of course, but the gold guy, with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, had no clue until today.

What was your favorite news today?

Totally open thread!

 

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War for Ukraine Day 1,280: Russian MiG-31Ks Are Up & All of Ukraine Is Under Air Raid Alert

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Painting by NEIVANMADE. It has a white background an in the center are Soldiers in green doing air defense by firing at incoming Russian missiles in the upper right. The missiles are red and yellow. In the upper left, written in green, is the text: "SAVE THE BRAVEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD!" Below the Soldiers, also written in green, is "SUPPORT FOR KHARKIV"

(Image by NEIVANMADE)

It’s 4:05 AM local time in Ukraine/9:05 PM EDT and the air raid alert maps are showing Russian MiG-31Ks up over northwestern Russia and southwestern Russia/the Black Sea approaching Ukraine. Air raid alerts are up for all of Ukraine for Russian drone swarms, rockets, and missiles. Stay in shelter orders have been issued for Kyiv as of 4;45 AM in Ukraine.

Four Russian MiG-31K fighter-bombers in air, and Tu-95 strategic bombers too – thus threat of attack by 4 Kinzhal aeroballistic missiles from MiGs soon, and cruise missiles within an hour from Tu-95s. Kyiv seems to be main target. Just heard another blast, quite far off.

— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 8:57 PM

Sound of drone here in western Kyiv, and anti-aircraft fire. High-rise on fire, and damage to kindergarten in east of capital following Russian attack.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 9:06 PM

Now sound of Gepard air defense cannons, far off: The Shaheds are here.

— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 8:50 PM

Russians are bombing Ukraine with drones and ballistic missiles right now‼️ Also, cruise missiles were launched and will reach our airspace in a while

Kyiv 👇

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 8:53 PM

Kyiv right now ‼️

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— Kate from Kharkiv (@kateinkharkiv.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 8:32 PM

Smoke over Kyiv after sneak fascist Russian ballistic missile attack at 3 a.m. Russians launched 7 missiles from nearby Bransk Oblast, giving air defenses little time to react – 10 blasts heard in Kyiv, including a large one here in west Kyiv. Capital also threatened by drones.

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— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) August 27, 2025 at 8:18 PM

More after the jump.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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The World Is Not Neat and Tidy

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There is so much going on!  It’s a good thing we can walk and chew gum at the same time.  At least on our good days!

Exciting news from Iowa!

The House special election win itself is huge – no more supermajority for Republicans in Iowa!

Interview with the Democratic candidate who won.

And it’s generating a lot of energy – people are jazzed, people are pumped, people are hopeful – and that’s exactly what we need to do in Virginia, too.

We need a cascade of wins – as tsunami, if you like – to roll over the other side and give them pause.

Virginia Candidates

So I’m hoping we can get some momentum going for our two Virginia candidates.  These races tick all our boxes, right?

  • strategic races
  • great candidates or organizations
  • promoting communities of color or reaching voters who are otherwise underrepresented
  • in swing districts
  • where our money isn’t like salt in the ocean

So we have kind of a 3-legged stool thing going on here with Virginia.

  • Four Directions working with the Native vote  (done!)
  • 2 great candidates  (in progress)
  • National Ground Game  (something new and different)

We talk a lot here about how the Republicans not only have the mainstream media on their side, but they also won social media in the 2024 elections.

Now for something new and different

To repeat myself, the world is not neat and tidy.

Nothing is in a schedule that we can control, and we’ve got a lot of important things going at once.

It’s a good thing that we can keep our eye on the prizes, because between now and November we are gonna have to walk and chew a lot of gum at the same time.

You may remember National Ground Game.  We supported their work for the Florida special elections.

Well, here’s our chance to do something new with National Ground Game that directly addresses the social media side of things and has the potential to support the GOTV side of things in Virginia this fall.

National Ground Game is challenging Charlie Kirk on his own ground in Virginia.

  • Charlie Kirk is going to Liberty University in October
  • National Ground Game plans to be there, too
  • They have a key influencer – Destiny – lined up
  • They have commitments from CNN and the Washington Post to cover them
  • They will use video and media that comes from that event to raise funds for a massive GOTV effort in October

I’ll share more information in another post, but this will get you started if you are interested.

Like the other groups we support:  They don’t spend funds on consultants or TV.  They spend money on staff and field operations.  Exception: they do spend money on  texts and emails to raise more money.

We raised $20,000 for them in the Florida special elections and I’d like to support them again.  If the can get going here in Virginia, I think this group can be a real powerhouse in 2026 with the audiences we are missing.

What do you guys think?  Too wild and crazy, or just what we need?

I am on Team This Is Another Tool In Our Belt.

Speaking for myself, I am ready to take the fight to them, and challenge the piece of shit Charlie Kirk who has the balls to tell Taylor Swift that she is basically nothing and should submit to her man.  He lies and spews propaganda like we breathe air.

My contact with this group is Zee, who is a force of nature!  She is happy to come zoom with us if there is interest.  If you need a shot in the arm, I recommend coming to the zoom.  (date and time not set yet)

Updated to add the contribution from Omnes: Who Dares Wins (credit to the British SAS, also)

 

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Timeline Cleanser: How the Muppets Helped Me Grieve

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When her father got sick, Sophie Brickman turned to the Muppets. “I had no grand plan,” she writes, but “simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they’d help keep me afloat.”

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— The Atlantic (@theatlantic.com) August 12, 2025 at 1:15 AM

Gift link, “Grief Counseling With Kermit”:

Jim Henson’s Creature Shop has sat, for the past 16 years, on the fourth floor of an office building in Long Island City, New York, behind a metal door that looks like any other. When I opened it one gray morning after the holidays, I was greeted by a plastic Christmas tree hung with fake fish skeletons and desiccated banana peels, Oscar leering nearby from his can, and a brown, fuzzy blob sitting on a table. At first I thought it might be a complete Muppet, until I saw, a few yards beyond, a matching brown, fuzzy, headless body. As the archivist Karen Falk began to lead me on a tour of the workshop—drawers of googly eyes, noses, and “special facial hair”; filing cabinets for “fur” and “slippery sleezy”; a stack of banker’s boxes, one marked “Grover,” another “Boober”—I looked back, briefly, to catch the bulbous nose and round eyes of Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock staring at me, or perhaps at his own body, waiting to be reunited.

“There are only three Snuffleupagi in the world,” Falk told me, gesturing toward a puppet near the entrance that she said was kind of an extra, deployed when Snuffleupagus needs a family member on set next to him. I reached out to give Snuffy’s relation a little pet—his soft brown fur, curly and dense like a poodle’s, was overlain with orange feathers—and scribbled a note: “remarkably lifelike.” For a what? I later asked myself. For a giant woolly mammoth cum anteater puppet? But the space made it easy to slip across the human-Muppet divide and into Henson’s world, where the realness of the puppets is sacrosanct. When I asked to take a picture of the decapitated Junior Gorg, just for my notes, Falk looked at me as if I’d asked to check under Miss Piggy’s dress. “We don’t allow photos of things like that, Muppets without heads,” she tutted, and ushered me to another part of the workshop, where a handful of archival boxes had been set aside for me.

After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I’d come to grieve with the Muppets.

My father, Marshall, amassed many accolades over the course of his career—a gold record for playing bluegrass banjo on the Deliverance soundtrack; an Oscar for co-writing the script of Annie Hall; a Tony nomination for Best Book for the musical Jersey Boys, which won Best Musical in 2006 (and an Olivier Award, too)—but way cooler to me, as a kid, was the fact that for a brief stint, long before I was born, he’d been part of Henson’s crew…

Dad and Henson first connected through Al Gottesman, Henson’s longtime lawyer. Their mutual affinity makes total sense to me, even a generation later. They were born three years apart and grew up delighting in Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip. They shared an off-kilter sense of humor and a reverence for the silly. Although I can’t remember ever seeing Dad with a puppet on his hand, when I was growing up he would put on elaborate bedtime shows for my sister and me, starring our menagerie of stuffed animals. Using a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool case—a bulky, black-leather valise full of primary-colored screwdrivers I liked to play with, a relic from his days attending Brooklyn Technical High School to appease his practical immigrant father—he made pince-nez out of a paper clip for my plush dachshund, Ollirina, a feisty Southern grande dame who propelled herself around by farting (my contribution); he then had her perform miraculous acts of levitation. Dad’s tried-and-true finale: shooting my Ping-Pong-ball-size plush hedgehog through a toilet-paper-roll cannon as I drumrolled on my lap. Looking back on this now that I’m a parent of three young children, I marvel that he could summon this level of creativity after dinnertime.

For a few months in the mid-’70s, Dad helped Henson write a failed Broadway Muppets revue, and what would become the pilot of The Muppet Show, called “Sex and Violence With the Muppets”—Henson’s attempt to establish the Muppets as not just for kids. Dad is listed as head writer on the script, in which Nigel, Sam the Eagle, and a few other Muppets put together a “Seven Deadly Sins” pageant to determine which sin is the most deadly. Although the final show evolved from the pilot—Kermit replaced Nigel as the emcee; a human guest star was added—you can see from the script that its style was already developed, as was its tone: equal parts outlandish and sophisticated, countercultural, never talking down to the audience. Sloth arrives, of course, during the closing credits, too late to participate. One stage direction reads, simply, “Chaos in progress.” The script established the framework with which Henson would go on to parody a vaudeville show from all angles—the divas (Piggy), the technical malfunctions (Crazy Harry, blowing up sets left and right), the well-meaning guy trying to hold the whole ball of crazy together (Kermit).

My father’s contributions are impossible to disentangle from the general Muppetness of the script—collaborations work, he always told me, because they are collaborative—save for one: Despite being Brooklyn born and bred, with not a Nordic bone in his body, he is, by many accounts, the source of the Swedish Chef’s accent and nonsense lexicon, the one typified by “Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy, bork bork bork!” The character had originated with Henson in the ’60s. Back then, he’d been German. For reasons lost to Muppetdom, at some point the character moved northwest, to a place with more centralized health care. And he needed an accent to match…

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(Grand) Jury Nullification

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Graffiti depicting a double image of a man preparing to throw a sandwich.

Sandwich Bro might beat the felony charges, y’all!  (NYT)

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday were unable to secure a felony assault indictment against a man who threw a sandwich at a federal agent on the streets of Washington this month, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington was the second time in recent days that it was unable to persuade grand jurors to bring an indictment in a felony assault case against a federal agent. And it amounted to a sharp rebuke by ordinary citizens against the team of prosecutors who are dealing with the fallout from President Trump’s move to send National Guard troops and federal agents into the city on patrol.

The rejection by grand jurors was particularly noteworthy given the attention paid to the case. Video of the episode went viral on social media, senior officials talked about the case, and the administration posted footage of a large group of heavily armed law enforcement officers going to the apartment of the man, Sean C. Dunn, to arrest him.

This is the U.S. attorney’s office currently headed by braying former Fox News personality Jeanine (*hic*) Pirro, a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent clown who is allegedly fond of boxed wine, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

More from the Times:

It is extremely unusual for prosecutors to come out of a grand jury without obtaining an indictment because they are in control of the information that grand jurors hear about a case and defendants are not allowed to have their lawyers in the room as evidence is presented.

But Mr. Trump’s decision to flood the streets of Washington with federal agents and military personnel who are generally not trained in conducting routine police stops has resulted in a flurry of defendants being charged with federal crimes that would typically be handled at the local court level, if they were filed at all.

It has also led to an increasing number of embarrassments for federal prosecutors, who have had to dismiss weak cases or reduce the charges that defendants were facing in recent days.

The article also says the clock is ticking on the hoagie hurler case — prosecutors have 30 days to secure a grand jury indictment. If they can’t, they have to reduce the charges to a misdemeanor or dismiss them.

Speaking of corrupt, incompetent clowns: (NPR)

A whistleblower says that a former senior DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to a private section of the agency’s cloud. That private cloud environment is accessible by other former DOGE employees at the SSA and is lacking adequate security, the whistleblower claims, potentially putting an enormous amount of private information at risk to being revealed and possibly used by identity thieves.

In a written complaint filed through the nonprofit Government Accountability Project, Charles Borges, the chief data officer at the Social Security Administration, claims that senior Trump appointees at the SSA who were recently part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team made the copy in a way that “constitute[s] violations of laws, rules, and regulations, abuse of authority, gross mismanagement, and creation of a substantial and specific threat to public health and safety.”

Borges says that career cybersecurity officials within the SSA described the decision to copy the data as “very high risk” and even discussed the possibility of having to reissue Social Security numbers to millions of Americans in the event the cloud server was breached.

These fucking DOGE dipshits need to be held accountable for their carelessness and crimes if voters get a chance to stand up a functional government again. I’ve heard a couple of elected Democrats say there will be no “look forward, not backward.” That’s the spirit!

Open thread!

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