Open thread

Sorry for the recent quiet on my end: I've been programming. And programming some more. Oh, and despairing at, you know ... everything. For example:

That person's sin—she's a Fulbright scholar, by the way—was writing an op-ed asserting that Palestinians are in fact human beings with human rights, which in the United States of America is now reason enough to be kidnapped on the street and imprisoned without trial or recourse. Meanwhile, most of the top universities and law firms in the country continue to bend the knee.

Through most of the Trump team's plainly criminal acts, whether it be shipping migrants to an infamous torture prison in El Salvador or collecting the most sensitive government data about everyday Americans so that it can all be fed into an unregulated, insecure "artificial intelligence" wankometer, House and Senate Republicans have remained mostly silent—and almost entirely silent when it comes to responding to their own angry constituents, as Republicans cancel town hall meetings and hide in their lobbyist-fortified offices.

But that's not to say they've been completely silent. House Speaker Mike Johnson took a moment out of his day to betray his nation once again, because he's a dirty stinking traitor, a theocratic buffoon who would sell every one of us out in order to achieve his dream of a nation in which hard-right conservatives are in charge and everyone else has no rights that can't be taken away on a whim.

Johnson's contribution to the discourse was to opine that if the United States federal courts keep getting in the way of Donald Trump's aides and minions doing illegal things, well then maybe Republicans will just eliminate those federal courts so that they can't do that.

Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, raised the prospect of congressional intervention in the court system.

“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said.

What a small man. And every time he opens his mouth, he gets smaller. By next August he'll be able to sit comfortably on a spool of thread; by November he'll be able to live comfortably inside a hollowed-out cocktail olive.

And then there's WhiskeyGate, or SignalGate, or whatever the hell you want to call it. Yeah, the Trump administration's entire top-tier national security apparatus took to Signal to get the play-by-play of a secret military operation in Yemen. Signal text chats are not secure, according to the United States government itself. Several of the participants were participating in the discussion while in foreign countries—one idiot was, in fact, in Moscow at the time. And part of what was discussed was (1) the target of the attacks, (2) the weapons to be used, and (3) the exact timing.

If "Defense Secretary" Pete Hegseth were still a mere National Guardsman, he'd be in handcuffs right now. This sort of military breach is the stuff of long, long prison sentences. But in the utterly incompetent administration headed by the nation's most prominent seditionist and convicted felon, it's just another day in the office.

The reason all of these cabinet members, national security advisers, and JD effing Vance were on Signal to begin with? To evade federal records laws. The United States has robust communications systems in place for the transmission of sensitive military information, that being a Big Damn Deal, and any of these bleach-gargling yokels could have taken to those methods for these discussions.

The reason they used Signal despite the massive security risks (even if Signal transmissions are encrypted, accessing those texts from an unsecured, non-government phone defeats much of the damn purpose) is because Signal texts auto-delete after a set period of time, meaning there's no records to be turned over when a federal judge or FOIA-savvy journalist demands them.

It's unclear how many different federal crimes the participants here giddily broke. Probably more than two. Probably less than 20. Who the hell knows. Right now the question is whether anyone in the group will face consequences at all.

Normally, as we said previously, breaches of security this severe can get you scooped up on a public street by unidentified federal agents who load you into an unmarked van. But none of those people are currently available, because they're hunting for international students who have written op-eds that make Dear Leader look bad.

This is an open thread. If you've got some good news to share, please, please do it, because the rest of us are very tired. So damn tired.

Oh—and a site update: I should be releasing the first version of community diaries Real Soon Now, so that's something we can look forward to.