But not every bit of funding was restored. Part of what DOGE cut was roughly 5,000 funding grants for USAID. One of those grants funded a detection and warning program for, you guessed it, screwworms!

Following the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s confirmation on Wednesday that the New World screwworm fly has reached south Texas for the first time in decades, questions are being raised about what role DOGE cuts played in what could become a crisis to the nation’s cattle industry.

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency gutted the United States Agency for International Development, which included a program dedicated to preventing the spread of the parasite across the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a report from Agri-Pulse published last March, which cited a list of cut programs sent to Congress.

The screwworm prevention program was part of roughly 5,300 grants and programs cut from USAID. The program also monitored outbreaks of avian flu in Asia, according to the report.

Everyone who was paying attention knew then that screwworm flies were a major problem. These parasites infect livestock, pets, and sometimes humans by burrowing into their flesh to lay their eggs, potentially killing the host in a matter of weeks. A mass-infection event would decimate the livestock of cattle specifically in America, which is already at an extremely low level. That reduction in cattle counts occurred because there are fewer ranchers today than before, which is itself due to the increasing costs of raising cattle in America. Those costs would be for fuel, parts for ranching equipment, and fertilizer. And you can explain most of those rising costs on a combination of tariffs and our idiotic maybe-war with Iran.

Meanwhile, the cost of beef has been further driven higher because of a USDA import ban on Mexican cattle that has been in place since May of 2025. You’ll never guess why that ban was put in place.

“The United States has ordered the suspension of livestock imports through ports of entry along our southern border after the continued spread of the New World Screwworm in Mexico. Secretary Berdegué and I have worked closely on the NWS response; however, it is my duty to take all steps within my control to protect the livestock industry in the United States from this devastating pest,” said Secretary Rollins. “The protection of our animals and safety of our nation’s food supply is a national security issue of the utmost importance. Once we see increased surveillance and eradication efforts, and the positive results of those actions, we remain committed to opening the border for livestock trade. This is not about politics or punishment of Mexico, rather it is about food and animal safety.”

But those increased efforts never came to pass, in part because DOGE cut the funding for them. This government doesn’t have the ability to claim they didn’t know screwworm flies were a problem. Its own USDA said it was. The Trump administration can’t claim it isn’t responsible for the reappearance of the parasite or blame the rising cost of beef and milk on someone else. Trump’s tariffs and war with Iran are directly responsible for it, and any significant issue with screwworm flies will cause that cost to rise even further.

Hell, ranchers have apparently been screaming about this to try to get the government’s attention for months and months now.

Agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders raised alarm about the cuts at the time and, for the last several months, pleaded with the government to step in as they monitored screwworm infections moving north through Mexico—but they were ignored, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told NBC News.

And now we’re here, once again, with another once-eliminated issue that will plague the American people due to this administration’s rank incompetence. Just like the measles. This government is leading us backwards.

So what’s the plan for screwworm flies now? Fly-sniffing dogs and the release of millions of sterile male flies to crowd out the parasite’s ability to reproduce. And that actually is the proper plan to combat this thing… long term. But not in the immediate, which is why we’re likely to see it spread.

The plan to prevent a US outbreak of the New World Screwworm focuses on deploying hundreds of millions of genetically-altered sterile flies. Experts, though, say the supply of sterile flies is too low to immediately impact and halt the growing screwworm population.

60 years our country has been without the New World Screwworm. And now it’s back. Because this government would rather do government cut dinner theater than the hard work of governing.

So they next time you’re at the grocery store and can’t believe the price of a steak, you can thank the Trump administration for it.

The group’s president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, wrote for the Washington Times about cases of sexual exploitation that could potentially harm individuals who are a part of the military-industrial complex. However, he offers no clear example of such cases and simply relies on the organization’s standard talking points that all sexual expression is bad. 

He writes:

Adults are often an underreported victim group because of shame and fear of social repercussions, yet they are deemed high-value targets by exploiters because of their financial resources.

This claim is meant to apply to military and government employees with security clearances who could be subject to coercion, extortion, and other legitimate forms of exploitation if they post nudes consensually or if they were legitimately victimized by criminals. All of these are real issues, but, in true NCOSE form, van der Watt falsely conflates activities that are illegal with those that are lawful. Van der Watt likens this exploitation as a “symptom” of pornography’s ubiquity in national culture, despite the resurgence of white Christian nationalism.

The argument can be summed up that military personnel have private lives, and sometimes those private lives involve pornography, and because of that, they may be coerced into sharing nudes, which means that the government must outlaw porn as a national security threat.

There are a few logical leaps in there.

He calls for the U.S. Justice Department to stand up its long-dormant obscenity task force that once went after legal pornography producers who released hardcore content. Van der Watt’s calls echo a recent attempt by Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana urging acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to reinstate the task force while singling out the $3.15 billion-valued OnlyFans.com. 

And it’s clear that the real threat here is just… van der Watt doesn’t like the idea that some people enjoy pornography:

Yet the national security threat posed by pornography is incubated on a far more granular level.

Pornography corrodes the exact social foundation that supports national strength. It normalizes sexual objectification and fosters impersonal, consumeristic attitudes toward sex. Over time, its use may lead to habituation, where users require increasingly extreme content to achieve the same level of sexual arousal.

Such rhetoric is part of the far-right’s project to eliminate legal and consensual pornography. This has long been a core tenant of NCOSE’s mission. This is the organization that used to be called “Morality in Media.” Remember, this is the same organization that called for the magazine Cosmopolitan to be removed from Walmart checkout lines because the publication was “pornographic.” NCOSE once went after academic database provider EBSCO for not blocking students from accessing anatomically correct sexual education materials. NCOSE is also one of the central groups to argue the pseudo-scientific claim that pornography is addictive like a drug and serves as a public health crisis. NCOSE persists in these claims, despite no evidence of such. And now it wants you to believe its a “national security” threat?

Michael McGrady covers the tech and legal sides of the online porn business.

To understand why none of this is surprising, you need to understand what Weiss has actually been doing at CBS. Indeed, we’ve covered a bit of the Bari Weissification of CBS News over the past few months. Remember, Weiss had no real reporting experience (she was a columnist, not a reporter) and zero broadcast experience. She was picked because, as my colleague Karl keeps reminding people, she’s mastered the ability to comfort the powerful by telling them exactly what they want to hear.

Radley Balko had a wonderful piece this weekend detailing how Weiss’s publication, The Free Press (which CBS massively overpaid for in order to get Weiss to come over and drive CBS News into the ground), seems to specialize in laundering bullshit, bigoted Trump talking points to sound like they’re mainstream “centrist” wisdom.

Of course, Weiss understands perfectly well the moment we’re in. She knows she wasn’t put in charge of CBS News because of her skeptical nature or keen journalistic eye. She was put in charge because she has shown that she can leverage a carefully crafted image as an iconoclast and teller of truths to launder MAGA propaganda so that it’s more palatable to centrists. She was put in charge because the Ellisons need Trump’s blessing for their mega merger – and if ever there was a favor tailor-made to win Trump’s approval, it’s kneecapping a major news network and toppling one of the last remaining pillars of broadcast journalism in the process.

Balko’s piece details how Weiss has done this with immigration:

When it launched in January 2021, the publication leaned heavily into the “Biden’s open borders crisis” narrative. And while it still publishes occasional pro-immigration pieces, that perspective has been overwhelmed by its water-carrying for the right on more immigration-adjacent issues like crime, Gaza, multiculturalism, protest and campus activism, anti-elitism (a fairly hilarious position given the social status of Weiss and her cadre of billionaire funders), and disdain for NGOs, academia, and institutions like USAID.

Rowley, who started writing for The Free Press at the end of 2023, was formerly a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the think tank that employs rabid anti-immigrant voices like Heather Mac Donald and Christopher “They’re Eating Your Pets” Rufo. A recent sampling of her social media feed makes pretty clear where her politics lie: She has pined for the days of prison slave labor, praised Donald Trump, amplified Rufo, pushed general anti-immigrant propaganda, and simped for authoritarian Trump policies like pursuing “fraud” claims against defense attorneys who represent people seeking asylum.

He goes through, in detail, how that one reporter, Madeline Rowley, completely misrepresented issues related to refugee resettlement in a manner that not only pleased the Trump administration, but set up a sort of mutual back-scratching between the Free Press and the Trump administration.

There’s a lot more in Balko’s piece, and it’s well worth reading (and should give you pause before ever trusting anything that a Weiss-controlled news organization puts out).

All of that is useful background as you read the interview that just fired 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley gave to the NY Times this weekend. There’s a lot in there, but here’s the bit that I wanted to discuss:

You’ve now accused Weiss of injecting “falsehoods and bias” into at least one of your politically sensitive stories. What did she specifically ask for? What story? That’s February, and my team and I are doing a story about the protests in Minneapolis against the ICE crackdown there. We’ve interviewed Senator Rand Paul, Republican, because he’s going to hold hearings into this, and the fact that a Republican was going to do that was quite newsworthy. So, we interviewed Senator Paul and then built out a story about what had happened — the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti, the protests. I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations, and so I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively. We found a picture of a protester chest-bumping an officer. We found a picture of an officer being hit in the head with a snowball. We culled together a lot of video of protesters screaming in the faces of officers because we were going to talk about the killing of Pretti and the killing of Good, and it seemed to me important to tell the audience about the entire context. I thought we’d done a really good job with this. We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did.

So, the story goes through screenings. It’s very well received. There are notes as always and we do rewrites as always. But this is on a very tight deadline. It’s Sunday; we’re going on the air that night. And in the case of stories that are, as we say, crashing, our deadline on Sunday is noon. So, we work on all of these things. We get the piece approved by everyone. And about four hours after our deadline, Bari Weiss sends an email to my boss, Tanya Simon. Two of the things in the email include, can we make the protesters look more violent? Now, I’m paraphrasing. I don’t have the quote, but that’s what was communicated to me. And the other thing, Renee Good’s car. You need to describe her as driving toward the officer.

This is not what you see on the video. On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her, and says something about her that I can’t repeat in polite company.

We have gone out of our way in our plan from the very beginning to show the protesters for the responsibility that they had. We had already scrubbed the video archives, looking for those scenes. Somehow that wasn’t enough for Ms. Weiss. The video showed that the officer wasn’t standing in front of the car and she wasn’t driving toward him, but that’s what the president said about that, and that’s the way she wanted it described.

There’s a lot in there, and many people are (understandably) focused on the ridiculous demands that Weiss made to inject clear bias and falsehoods into the report. But what should stand out even more is that Pelley here freely admits that he and the team at 60 Minutes had already inserted massive bias into the report, deliberately searching out footage that showed protesters in the worst possible light — “I instructed my producers to find images in which we see the protesters acting aggressively” — even if that was an outlier from the rest of the protests. He even made sure to include the fact that Pretti had, on a previous occasion at a different protest, kicked out a taillight on a federal agent’s car — information that has zero bearing whether or not CBP officers were justified in murdering him.

But Pelley insists that he had to do this to make the piece as “fair” as possible.

He doesn’t mean “fair.” He means the poisonous “view from nowhere” form of “fairness” — the one where if one side does something bad (say, murder a random person for protesting violent government agents kidnapping their neighbors) you have to show something to suggest “well, maybe they deserved it.”

That is already ridiculous, and should be a clear condemnation of where CBS News and 60 Minutes already have their heads at. The same company that had previously paid a bribe to the president to get its merger with Paramount approved has long been chickenshit about reporting accurately on anything that might make MAGA sad.

Weiss’s hiring was never about taking a “leftist” news organization and making it more balanced or right-leaning. It was always about taking a news organization that has been appeasing authoritarians for decades and ramping up that effort — making it even better at laundering MAGA bullshit to an unsuspecting public.

And, as Balko notes in his piece, that’s one thing Weiss has shown she’s truly experienced at doing.

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Lawyers with decades of experience were replaced with Trump loyalists, former Trump lawyers, and prosecutors so devoid of real-world experience they may as well still be interns. Not that this has slowed the administration’s attempts to strip the US of anything that actually makes it great. The efforts continue, but the DOJ’s flag is flying at half-staff (at best), to mix a metaphor.

Meanwhile, even Trump-appointed judges are getting tired of the Trump DOJ’s bullshit. It has sustained thousands of losses in immigration cases, seen most of its high-profile vindictive prosecutions dead-ended by grand juries and judges, and engaged in mostly-futile deck-chair rearranging/goal-post relocations that haven’t delivered it the streak of wins it clearly feels it’s owed.

In this case, the DOJ did a little of everything. Deck chairs were rearranged to sub in rookie lawyers, goal posts shifted between Texas and Rhode Island (despite the central subpoena targeting Rhode Island medical entities), and DOJ lawyers spent most of their time refusing to engage honestly with the targets of the subpoena (Rhode Island Hospital), much less the federal courts handling the cases.

While the Texas court was ultimately more amenable to the DOJ’s demand for sensitive medical information about Rhode Island minors (in furtherance of the administration’s war on trans people), the proper venue — overseen by Trump appointee Judge Mary McElroy — expressed her frustration and anger in a recent order blocking the subpoena and suggesting sanctions might be just over the horizon.

DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case. It has misrepresented and withheld information to both this Court and the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas (the “Texas court”). It did so in an obvious effort to shield it’s recent investigative tactics—previously rejected by every other court to review them—from this Court’s review, in favor of a distant forum that DOJ deems friendly to its political positions. Its representatives have, under oath, misrepresented salient facts. It has misled the parties with whom it was negotiating in Rhode Island, who have now been placed in an untenable and unprecedented procedural position. And when its attorneys came to this Court to explain their conduct, the senior attorney—who was present at many of the events that took place in this case—sat silently by as his counterpart, a junior attorney who has been practicing law for approximately six months and had no relevant information, was forced to answer questions about DOJ’s blatant disregard for the proper course of negotiations.

The government has long relied on the “presumption of regularity” in cases handled by federal courts. That presumption assumes the government is acting in good faith, even when it’s on the wrong side of the law. In less than two years, the Trump administration has destroyed this presumption — something the DOJ has had in its back pocket for most of the last two centuries.

Everything said above (just a small part of McElroy’s extremely scathing May 14 ruling) factors into this much shorter docket item. (h/t Josh Gerstein)

TEXT ORDER. Because of the representations made to this Court by the respondents’ attorneys, as well as the findings of the Court in its order of May 14, 2026, this matter is referred for further proceedings under R.I. Dist. Ct. Local Rule 210(b). So Ordered by District Judge Mary S. McElroy on 6/5/2026. (Potter, Carrie)

Sorry, I know that’s all super-dry and doesn’t contain anything pithy enough for bold text, etc., but here’s what that means: some DOJ lawyers — including ones hand-picked by Trump to do his evil bidding — are potentially headed for discipline.

Rule 210(b) gives the court permission to refer government lawyers for discipline. The more interesting part of the rules directly precedes this, where it says the end result could be government lawyers being disbarred.

The evidence against the DOJ lawyers was covered comprehensively by Judge McElroy in her earlier ruling. To sum up: the DOJ lied. More formally, it “misrepresented” and “withheld information.” Those are both forms of lying, with the severity shifting depending on the context. And when the DOJ knew it had been caught doing it, the most senior prosecutor dumped the case into the lap of the most junior prosecutor in the jurisdiction and forced them to personally absorb the righteous anger of the judge, as well as handle all the uncomfortable questions DOJ officials decided they simply weren’t going to answer.

And, of course, having been called out and threatened with meaningful consequences, the Trump DOJ has decided to pretend it has always been forthright and honest.

“The Civil Division has thoroughly reviewed the District Court’s allegations and concluded that they are without merit. Our attorneys did not misrepresent facts, withhold relevant information, or otherwise mislead the Court. The Department stands behind its attorneys without reservation and has appealed the District Court’s erroneous order.”

I assume that any day now the DOJ will move past its (literally unbelievable) defense of efforts to directly (and personally) attacking Trump’s own appointee as an “activist judge” or (as it often does) claim this is somehow the fault of Joe Biden, who not only didn’t appoint this judge but wasn’t in office when the judge pointed out the DOJ (under this administration) no longer has a reliable reputation.

Sure, this isn’t nearly as satisfying as a coup or the immediate jailing of lying DOJ lawyers. But it is a step further than many judges are willing to go, no matter how often the DOJ lies, cheats, and flat out refuses to play by the rules.

Last election season, Republicans (with Ezra Klein’s help) made a giant stink about how this program, the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, was taking way too long to connect anybody. So for the whole 2024 election season, Republicans blasted the program’s bureaucracy and promised how once they were in power, they’d completely revamp it and save taxpayer billions.

Yeah, well, about that.

After taking office this second time, the Trump administration rewrote the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable, and to ensure that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos got billions in new broadband subsidies for fledgling, costly, and congested satellite broadband networks. Note: they’re potentially getting these billions for service they already planned to deploy (while both routinely going on TV to pretend they hate subsidies).

Years later and most people are still waiting for broadband. Only one ISP in the whole country is currently serving a handful of subscribers with BEAD money. And in the states where we are starting to see connections, like Nebraska, many people are getting slower satellite service instead of fiber.

This is being celebrated by state Republicans as some sort of major victory for the public:

“At an event earlier this month in Ogallala, Gov. Jim Pillen, alongside U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Communications and Information Arielle Roth, celebrated the state’s first household internet connection facilitated through the BEAD program.”

But if you look closer, things are extremely fucked up. After Trump completely revamped the program to prioritize shittier satellite broadband service and strip affordability requirements, states had to completely revamp their proposed broadband plans. That created a bunch of new delays and even higher costs for states to absorb. So while a few people in Nebraska have gotten substandard access, that’s it.

Of the $405 million Nebraska was initially awarded through BEAD to connect unserved Nebraska locations to broadband, just $44.5 million is now earmarked for use. Nebraska now ranks dead last in granting BEAD funds for fiber internet, at about 9%, compared to a national average of 62%.

In short, the Trump administration “fixed” the program by lowering our standards, creating all sorts of new delays, and redirecting a bunch of money to billionaires for inferior satellite service they already planned to deploy. In traditional autocratic fashion, this is being sold to locals as some sort of massive victory.

Former Ted Cruz staffer Arielle Roth, now head of the NTIA for some inexplicable reason, has been going around falsely claiming that the original plan to use taxpayer money to provide faster, better fiber service is why the program took so long. Others, like Republican Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen, are trying to pretend that lowering program standards are actually improving program standards:

“Roth argued that Biden had a “thumb on the scale” for one method — fiber — which was a cause for the slower progress. Pillen called the perception that fiber internet is the gold standard of internet connections outdated. He said it ignores rapid advancements in other technologies like satellite and cable. He said the internet speeds established in Nebraska’s first connection were “off the charts.”

“What makes Nebraskans great is we don’t settle for mediocre,” [Governor Jim] Pillen said in a press release from the Nebraska Broadband Office (NBO). “And through this process we found a group of providers that will meet the high standards we have for connectivity.”

However, not all broadband advocates buy the governor’s story. Gage County farmer Emily Haxby, said it feels like Pillen is trying to justify the major changes his team implemented — changes that she’s uncertain will work out for Nebraskans in the long run.”

As I tried to explain to Ezra Klein, there were some very good reasons why BEAD was taking so long (as opposed to ARPA, legislation crafted that same year, that deployed a lot of fiber to a lot of places).

For one, the infrastructure law mandated that states work with the federal government to completely remap U.S. broadband access, something that had been opposed by Republicans and monopoly providers for years for fear it would showcase broad competitive market failure.

For another, the infrastructure bill Congress also mandated the creation of the Digital Equity Act, requiring that this taxpayer fiber be deployed equitably to everybody (instead of just cherry picking the country’s whitest, wealthiest neighborhoods, which caused much of our digital divide in the first place).

While BEAD would never be confused as any sort of poster child for government efficiency, this sort of massive coordination between states and the federal government takes time. Part of the reason there were more rules on BEAD is because a different program overseen during the Trump administration (the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund), wound up with oodles of failed bidding and fraud.

But again, when Trump came in he “fixed” BEAD by killing off (in some cases illegally) all of these congressional mandates and redirecting a bunch of taxpayer money to Musk and Bezos for inferior access. They then patted themselves on the back for money saved, but the end result, as communities will come to discover for themselves over the next few years, is going to be an epic boondoggle. Much worse than anything the Trump administration claimed to be fixing.

But wait, there’s more! For one thing, many of the original grant bids have become less feasible because Trump tariffs and wars have driven up the cost of deployment significantly. So I suspect you’ll see a lot of defaults on bids as companies give up on participating at all. That’s going to create all manner of additional costly delays and lawsuits and fighting (much as we saw with broadband programs during Trump’s first term).

At the same time, the “savings” the Trump administration created by fucking the BEAD program up (and redirecting billions to lower-quality fiber alternatives) is creating a giant pool of money Republicans and states are now fighting over. Despite the fact Congress demanded that this money be specifically used for broadband access.

The Trump NTIA is supposed to be giving guidance to states on how this money can be spent, but they keep failing to provide clarity. I suspect because the administration and Republicans are pondering how they can legally hijack the money as part of a new slush fund. For example, here’s Nebraska:

“Subtracting the $44.5 million Nebraska received for BEAD broadband expansion, that leaves about $360 million in federal funds not yet steered. State officials have given varying estimates of how much of that amount the state could receive.

[Governor Jim] Pillen said he was looking for ways to invest $350 million in leftover funds, noting technological support for precision agriculture as a top preference for him. The NBO statement said the NTIA is evaluating uses of non-deployment funds that could bring $317 million of the funds into Nebraska.

These funds could be used for “any use determined necessary by the assistant secretary to facilitate the goals of (BEAD),” according to the statement. Borchers-Williams said NTIA officials had said they would issue this guidance by March 11 — two months ago — but he has yet to receive word.”

I suspect a lot of this funding will be redirected to tech companies and AI data center construction (tangentially deemed broadband related). Some might even be actually directed to broadband, as promised. But this being Trumpism, I suspect there’s a very real chance that a lot of the money gets pocketed by Trump Incorporated and its allies.

And five years from now, when states and municipalities realize the full scale of the con being perpetrated here on taxpayers, architects like NTIA boss Arielle Roth and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick will, as per tradition in Republican policy, be nowhere to be found. Smart opposition party strategists, were there any, would be currently formulating their oversight hearing questions.

Let me suggest a different reason…

Let’s say that all of those J6 dumbfucks who livestreamed their crimes, and who now have received pardons for acting like trailer trash are looking to start rebuilding their pathetic lives.

Let’s also say that they feel burned by the Trump administration for letting them hang out to dry for 4 years instead of pardoning them in 2020. I’m assuming he thought of them as ‘contractors.’

I’m suggesting that ICE has a hardon for masks because that’s the reward for the J6’ers who got fucked for 4 years – ICE just let them apply, and blam! You have an ICE agency chock full of the garbage of America who have a boner for revenge, but if anyone compares them to J6 footage, they’d be fucked 6 ways to Sunday.

It’s not like security clearances make any difference to this clown car of fuckups.

Unmask those pieces of shit and let’s start comparing faces. I’ll bet once you dig a little, you’ll start to smell the white trash like the Proud Boys, OathKeepers, and all those other MAGAs with ‘small dick syndrome.’

In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone hammering home the most important point about the Bricks and Minifigs saga:

Dear everyone involved with this story:

This could have been a few emails between lawyers.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with a reply from dfbomb to the first place winning comment above:

This lines up with my observations that ICE’s behaviors with license plates, car stealing and general fuckery matches the patterns of the Boogaloo and Proud Boys that came to Minneapolis during George Floyd to start a race war.

They even target the same neighborhoods.

Next, it’s Nathan F with a comment about the Supreme Court’s transparently racist double standard on voting rights:

And Roberts still wonders why no one likes the SCOTUS or believes they make good, resonable, well thought out decisions?

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is j with a reaction to our piece on the LEGO dispute:

Wowsers…. There needs to be a length of story warning at the beginning.
I’m used to the normal two to five paragraphs on here. But eighteen page down presses later… just a heads up would be nice.

In second place, it’s Thad raising an eyebrow about one word in a line we wrote about Lindsey Halligan:

Lindsey Halligan — managed to set fire to pretty much everything she touched before deciding to exit to the DOJ.

“deciding”

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with an anonymous reply to a commenter who spotted a “Luigi” bumper sticker:

Glad that Mario’s brother is finally getting some recognition for helping to take down the evil boss in the mushroom kingdom.

Finally, it’s an anonymous comment about Greg Bovino’s not-so-subtle Nazi salute:

I think there is an innocent explanation for that gesture: Bovino was trying to make himself look taller.

That’s all for this week, folks!

• Independent Musician Sues Justin Bieber & Skrillex For Copyright Infringement… Over A Sample They Didn’t Use
• Oracle’s Lead Lawyer Against Google Vents That The Ruling ‘Killed’ The GPL
• Top Internet Companies Agree To Vague Notice & Takedown Rules For ‘Hate Speech’ In The EU
• This Is Bad: Court Says Remastered Old Songs Get A Brand New Copyright
• Investigation Shows GCHQ Using US Companies, NSA To Route Around Domestic Surveillance Restrictions
• Another Court Says Law Enforcement Officers Don’t Really Need To Know The Laws They’re Enforcing

This Week in 2011

• NBC News Produces Propaganda Video Highlighting NBC’s Views On Domain Seizures
• Hacking Egypt For Better Democracy
• Senators Want To Put People In Jail For Embedding YouTube Videos
• Talking About Why The PROTECT IP Act Is Bad News…
• RIAA Wants To Put People In Jail For Sharing Their Music Subscription Login With Friends
• Entertainment Industry Lawyer: The Public Domain Goes Against Free Market Capitalism

This Week in 2006

• War Propaganda Is Fun On Your Xbox 360
• How The Entertainment Industry Plans To Kill DVDs
• Can The Internet Destroy The Two Party Political System?
• Forget Astroturf, Fake Net Neutrality Commenters Popping Up Like Weeds
• Regulation For Regulation’s Sake
• DOJ Can’t Get Net Firms To Agree On Data Retention; Expect Legislation

So, let’s start at the beginning. Crystal Dynamics is making an updated version of the first Tomb Raider game and it looks pretty great from what I’ve seen. But, as gamers are now accustomed to doing, the public came to notice that the game’s Steam page included one of Steam’s mandatory AI disclosure notices. It reads thusly:

AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content. Any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team.

And from there, because, of course, everyone freaked out. Comments from all the corners of the internet began flooding in, swearing off ever touching this game because it was developed using AI. What AI? We don’t know. How much was it utilized? No real content there, either. But is the game going to be good? It doesn’t fucking matter, because AI was used and that’s all you need to know in order to know that this game is going to be artless pap fit only to be mocked and laughed at.

Even some gaming journalists have gotten into the habit. This is from Kotaku:

GenAI slop potentially showing up in Tomb Raider is disappointing but maybe less surprising than it should be. Phil Rogers, CEO of Crystal Dynamics’ parent company, Embracer Group, last year called genAI a “powerful technology” for “driving efficiency.” Crystal Dynamics has also undergone several rounds of layoffs, completing three just last year and one earlier in 2026.

Here you have a writer who has already reached their conclusion while having almost zero information on which to base that conclusion. They haven’t played the game. They’ve barely seen the content in the game, save for some trailers. They don’t know thing one about how AI was used, where, and in what way. But it’s probably going to be “GenAI slop”. As if there is simply no other possible outcome.

But it gets at least slightly stranger with Crystal Dynamics having responded to some of those concerns over at Eurogamer.

“At Crystal Dynamics, we leverage AI tools to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted. Our goal is to empower the creativity and flexibility of our developers to deliver the highest-quality experiences for players everywhere.”

This is where I get confused. If all of the content that is going to make it into the final product is “human-crafted,” then they shouldn’t even have needed to add the disclosure to their Steam page. Back in January, Steam updated its rules around its AI disclosure such that a game with an AI disclosure must have AI-generated content that is either in public marketing materials for the game or in the final product and with which the player of the game interacts in order to require the disclosure.

In its submission form, Valve now specifies that game publishers must disclose pre-made generative AI assets only when used in marketing materials or content that “ships with your game, and is consumed by players.”

In other words, Steam’s disclosure requirement is not concerned with generative AI tools used behind the scenes for efficiency gains (presumably including coding helpers) or office work, but with things like final art, sound, and writing.

Now, I’ll just note that there is a subtle difference in the disclosure notice and Crystal Dynamics’ statement. The former indicates that the game may include AI-generated assets that were then iterated upon by a human developer. The latter seems to say the opposite, where everything in the final game will be “human-crafted”. So… which is it?

As I said from the start, more questions than answers is all I have at the moment. But if the gaming public is going to freak out at the mere mention of some AI being used in some way, somewhere within every new video game that comes out, then this is going to be a very annoying time in which to be a gamer.

According to the DHS, ICE officers need to look like roving kidnapping squads because they fear for their safety. Supposedly, they’re under attack now more than ever, something not even supported by the DHS’s context-free claims of massive increases in assaults of ICE officers.

ICE has never been popular. People have been calling for ICE to be abolished for far longer than the last 18 months of its existence. But now that ICE behaves like an invading force, rather than an agency involved in immigration and customs enforcement, more people are reacting to its unwanted presence in their neighborhoods.

ICE’s excuses for mask-wearing were [cough] unmasked when ICE was asked to fill in for unpaid TSA agents. ICE officers showed up at airports without masks to stand around and milk the clock, apparently unworried about being “exposed” or subjected to threats to them or their families.

But now that the TSA is as staffed as it’s ever going to be, ICE is returning to American streets, long on masks and short on training. Criminal opportunists know a good thing when they see it. When it’s impossible to tell whether the person assaulting you/demanding access to your home/running off with your valuables is an actual federal officer or just someone with access to ski masks and camo, the criminals have the upper hand.

As of February, Noticias Telemundo had documented at least six cases of impostors posing as ICE agents to rob or harass immigrants. In mid-January, a man broke into a house in Pittsburgh claiming to be an ICE agent and threatening a teen with a knife. In February, police in San Diego said a man allegedly impersonated an officer and wrapped his arms around the neck of a restaurant manager, claiming the manager was in the country illegally and he was going to arrest him.

Sure, some of you may be scoffing at “six cases” since Trump won the election. But that’s only the ones where a (foreign!) news agency managed to put together the pieces to deliver reporting that should have been done much earlier by domestic new agencies.

Here’s the more damning stat:

Of the 31 impersonation cases documented in 2025, 84% involved individuals who claimed to be ICE agents. Others identified themselves as officers from Border Patrol or the Department of Homeland Security.

Thirty-one impersonations. Apparently all of them involved people pretending to be in the business of migrant deportation. And it’s not just the normal crime you’d expect from criminals seeing a flaw in the system and exploiting it. It’s also led to an increase in the sort of crime this administration will likely greet with pardons and payout from the “FUCK AMERICA $1,776 MILLION SLUSH FUND.”

The recorded incidents include intimidation, robbery and sexual assault, as well as so-called “immigration operations” carried out by armed vigilantes against what they describe as an “invasion” of foreigners in the U.S.

This was a problem the FBI recognized months ago, but rarely speaks of now because it’s being led by the only guy who has a chance at drinking Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth under the table. The current “leadership” has nothing to say about giving criminals more opportunities to engage in criminal acts.

Neither DHS nor ICE responded to Noticias Telemundo’s request for official statistics about cases of fake ICE agents. They also did not comment on the trends revealed by this investigation.

Not even the rote “fake news” quasi-rebuttal from this miserable assortment of inhuman asshats. Well, if DHS and ICE won’t speak for themselves, I’ll let this next quote from NBC/Telemundo speak for itself:

“You’re going back to Mexico,” a man told the immigrants in a video recorded from inside their truck. He insulted them for their appearance and for not speaking English, took their keys and snatched the immigrant’s phone when he called his boss. The manager later told the police that the fake agent had claimed to be from ICE and had warned him that all his employees were going to go to “f—–g jail.”

This isn’t fake news. This isn’t implication extrapolated from minimal inference. There are literal recordings of these impersonations.

This isn’t people imagining the worst because they’re politically opposed to the current administration. These are documented instances of the only thing that could be worse than the brutality and bigotry perpetrated by this administration: criminal acts encouraged by this government’s unwillingness to do its dirty work honestly.