January 28, 2026

Guy talks economics of ICE--like Russia & Ukraine

Interesting POV. Cost of an agent in MN, & the tactics of citizens. 800k a year per agent. Citizens outnumber them by so much, and they have the time & energy to resist. Even with a large budget, there’s 50 states & 100s of cities. It made me feel better, that showing up, as one person among many, is even more meaningful than had considered.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DT8UGXxEQC-/?igsh=ZWk3aG5pZHJ0YnFv

March 21, 2025

Jamie Raskin Shows a Way-Stop Trumps Illegal Team

https://substack.com/@joanneccollin/note/c-100336667?r=fzwm5&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

While the Trump administration has come out and openly admitted that they are defying the courts.

What can be done about this?
Instead of going after Trump, the courts can punish members of his administration.
House Judiciary Committee ranking member Raskin (D-MD) wrote in a letter to Trump:
To your credit, you indicated that your Administration would obey the courts, stating “I always abide by the courts and then I’ll have to appeal it.”
It may therefore behoove you to remind members of your Administration that violating court orders personally exposes them to potential criminal and civil penalties. Federal judges do not need the assistance of the executive branch to impose civil or criminal penalties for violations of a court order.

In fact, in a 1997 brief to the D.C. Circuit, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. acknowledged that imprisonment of agency officials was a viable option to ensure executive branch compliance with the law.

Judges’ inherent authority includes the power to appoint a private attorney to conduct the prosecution of a criminal contempt proceeding should the government decline, and is reflected in Rule 42 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which lays out the procedure for criminal contempt.
Rule 42(a)(2) states that: [T]he court must request that the contempt be prosecuted by an attorney for the government unless the interest of justice requires the appointment of another attorney.

If the government declines the request, the court must appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt.24 This is not an untested hypothetical.

As recently as 2019, a district court has followed this procedure to appoint a private attorney who then successfully prosecuted a criminal contempt proceeding after the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York declined to do so.

Moreover, there may be collateral consequences for refusing to obey a court order besides contempt.

Trump May Not Be Able To Pardon Elon Musk Or Any Other Official
Raskin also pointed out in the statement provided to PoliticusUSA that accompanies his letter:

Moreover, Trump may be unable to pardon Elon Musk or other Administration officials or federal employees if they were found in contempt pursuant to the court’s inherent authority, because under the U.S. Constitution, such an offense may not qualify as an “offense against the United States.” Additionally, Trump’s pardon power does not apply to civil sanctions.

While it is true that the Trump administration could decide to ignore the rulings of courts, the court system also has the ability to strike back and enforce their rulings.

This possibility is why Trump administration officials are always named in the lawsuits.
These officials don’t have immunity, and if the courts decide to punish them with their direct authority, Trump may not be able to pardon them.
The courts may not be able to stop Trump personally, but they can punish members of his administration.

Thoughts?

March 14, 2025

Security Experts Agree-Voting Tabulators Hacked-Penn

“Don’t give me that look, I get How it Sounds”

https://open.substack.com/pub/tinfoilmatt/p/security-expert-says-vote-tabulators-hacked?r=fzwm5&utm_medium=ios

Spoonamore has served as a professional subject matter expert in the legal battle stemming from the 2004 Ohio Election hack, which has since been thoroughly documented. He also appeared on the Lou Dobbs Tonight TV show on CNN, where he discussed hacking, including of voting machines.
History repeats itself:
While watching vote tally data come in, Spoonamore concluded that vote totals in the 2024 General Election had been affected by a hack similar to the one two decades ago.
As a contractor associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies, Spoonamore has a Duty to Warn if he suspects a hack has occurred. On November 7, he wrote a formal Duty to Warn letter to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro with his conclusions about the election.
In this letter, he comments that the November 5 voter fraud was especially noticeable because the hackers “made a mistake triggering a system issue,” “the aggregate effects of the hacking creates results outside nominal expectations,” and an unrelated distraction (in this case, bomb threats) was “used to draw attention away from the hacking.”
“Here in Centre County initial tabulation was an absurdly low 67K votes when over 80K voters participated,” Spoonamore wrote.
In his letter, he states that Centre County’s “[ballet] scanner systems worked in testing, but were unable to communicate with tabulation systems after the bomb-scare. I note from experience—the failure of a scanning system to load a database is an extremely common development when a system is changed without notice to the users.”
On his Spoutable account, Spoonamore wrote the following: “Tabulation Systems at the County level were hacked far in advance of the election. The hack was probably written into the code even before the code was installed.” has served as a professional subject matter expert in the legal battle stemming from the 2004 Ohio Election hack, which has since been thoroughly documented. He also appeared on the Lou Dobbs Tonight TV show on CNN, where he discussed hacking, including of voting machines.
History repeats itself:
While watching vote tally data come in, Spoonamore concluded that vote totals in the 2024 General Election had been affected by a hack similar to the one two decades ago.
As a contractor associated with intelligence and financial agency technologies, Spoonamore has a Duty to Warn if he suspects a hack has occurred. On November 7, he wrote a formal Duty to Warn letter to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro with his conclusions about the election.
In this letter, he comments that the November 5 voter fraud was especially noticeable because the hackers “made a mistake triggering a system issue,” “the aggregate effects of the hacking creates results outside nominal expectations,” and an unrelated distraction (in this case, bomb threats) was “used to draw attention away from the hacking.”
“Here in Centre County initial tabulation was an absurdly low 67K votes when over 80K voters participated,” Spoonamore wrote.
In his letter, he states that Centre County’s “[ballet] scanner systems worked in testing, but were unable to communicate with tabulation systems after the bomb-scare. I note from experience—the failure of a scanning system to load a database is an extremely common development when a system is changed without notice to the users.”
On his Spoutable account, Spoonamore wrote the following: “Tabulation Systems at the County level were hacked far in advance of the election. The hack was probably written into the code even before the code was installed.”

March 10, 2025

19yr old DOGEbag, 1978 VISTA programming@ VA

“I wish I could have been a fly on the wall the moment a 19 year old DOGEbag got access to the VA system only to realize the VA still uses VISTA - a proprietary MUMPS-based programming language from 1978.”

Am not a programmer, but worked for a software company once & really enjoy reading their takes.

March 3, 2025

Best WH/Z cartoon "Why Aren't You Wearing a Clown Nose?"

https://imgur.com/a/0AuaOIJ

February 21, 2025

Most of us at 3 bad months away from homeless, &...

None of us are 3 good months away from being billionaires….
I know which side I’m on.

Can JUST this simplicity be a Democratic Party talking point?

— Rick (@rickylongthread.bsky.social) 2025-02-20T22:02:28.269Z

January 28, 2025

Tell everyone "5 Calls: to your Congressman" App

You can plug in your zip code & it tells you who to call.
DU members are good at knowing theirs, but you can put in other zip codes & call all of them.
Badger them. See bluesky post.



https://5calls.org/

January 28, 2025

Robert Reich 3 hrs ago--Concise status of the last week

I cannot copy & paste portion from FB, unfortunately. Apologies for those without fb. But it is an excellent summary.


https://www.facebook.com/1386931613/posts/10235559794960607/?mibextid=rS40aB7S9Ucbxw6v

November 16, 2024

Promise of "You don't have to think about other People"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/opinion/donald-trump-orban-putin.html


“problem solving without moral constraints” is half right.
No problems will be solved.
No moral constraints does happen though.

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will. Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban vowed to restore a simpler, more orderly past, in which men were men and in charge. What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and to heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”

July 14, 2024

Could we have jumped the Electric Shark?

Definition
(of a television series or movie) reach a point at which far-fetched events are included merely for the sake of novelty, indicative of a decline in quality.

Biden had just said let’s not treat politics like reality TV.
Saw someone say yesterday “we’ve crossed the Rubicon”, made me think of this.