A funny but not.

 

True

 

 

So true

 

REDD FLAG WARNING!

USPS whistleblower describes new plans for voting by mail hidden from the public

By Tierney Sneed

The US Postal Service effort to develop a sweeping new system for verifying mail ballots has invited a host of IT concerns among agency officials, with some describing the process internally as a “shit show,” according to a new whistleblower report released Tuesday by a Democratic senator.

The unnamed whistleblower is alleging that some of the procedures USPS is planning – under mandates put forward by President Donald Trump – have been hidden from the public. Those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement, the whistleblower says.

The new report – which was assembled by the whistleblowers’ lawyers and released by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal – comes as multiple courts are considering the legality of the proposal, which would require that states submit to USPS lists of their mail-in voters. The agency will not deliver ballots for states if there are any discrepancies between the voter information in the USPS system and what’s picked up by agency scanners on the envelopes of the ballots.

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation - raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the report.

CNN has reached out to USPS for comment.

Trump signed an executive order in March that gave the USPS an unprecedented role in screening states’ mail ballot programs. Election officials have already expressed deep concerns about having to use a system that has not gone through extensive testing and training procedures

Internally, according to the whistleblower, USPS’ IT teams were going to be given less than a week to test the system once it was finished, due to the time crunch of the electoral calendar; North Carolina begins sending ballots this week and other states join it later this month.

It’s not clear whether the portal is ready to be launched on Tuesday, as was the goal, according to the whistleblower report. A judge last week froze the mandates that the states use the system if they want USPS to deliver their ballots, but said USPS could still offer the portal to states that voluntarily want to upload the mail voter information. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling.

Haphazard development and testing process

In the final week of testing, the phrase “shit show” was used by multiple people to describe the process, the whistleblower alleges in the report, which identifies other examples of USPS barreling through the process of creating the system. The plans the IT staff were shown for the system were “constantly changing” from the beginning, and systems’ requirements were not clearly put in writing for the development staff, the whistleblower says.

USPS leadership was dismissive of concerns, and, according to the report “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.”

The report describes a haphazard effort to test the parts of the system as they became ready. Under the timeline sketched out to meet the September 1 deadline, there would only be four days allotted for it to go through a stage in the development process in which potential users of the system can test it out.

“For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, 4 days of user testing is entirely unreasonable,” the whistleblower report said.

Verification procedures with no room for error

The concerns about the untested nature of the system are particularly acute because if there are any discrepancies between the voter lists that election officials have submitted and the ballots they’re seeking to send, USPS could reject the entire batches of ballots – meaning tens of thousands of ballots could go unsent at a time – until the discrepancy is fixed.

The whistleblower says that there will be a first round of verification – in a process not spelled out in the public regulations – comparing the voter information in the portal with “manifests” election officials must also submit for each batch of ballots they intend to drop off. The information on the manifests – including unique bar codes election officials are required, under the rules, to assign each voter – must match perfectly with the information in the portal before election officials are allowed drop off the ballots, the report says.

When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped, according to the whistleblower. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.

“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles - and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots,” the report says.

What a fucking stupid fat brain-dead turd....

Communities That Oppose Data Centers Will Be “Backwards and Poor”

The president is still screaming into the void.

Alex Nguyen

On Monday, President Trump promoted continued data center construction and criticized opponents, despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the November midterms. 

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”  

The president also posts an endless stream of AI videos on social media. On Sunday night, he shared a video depicting the bombing of Kharg Island, a vital port for exporting Iran’s oil products amid the US resuming major strikes on the country. And the night before, Trump posted an AI video of himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and planting down a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place.

But boosting AI and the data centers that help power them is largely unpopular. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote in May, most Americans oppose a data center in their backyard. From Sophie: 

“Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.

Opposition to data centers is truly bipartisan, even in solidly GOP states like Florida. 

Food-Borne Illness

Here’s Why We’ve Been Seeing So Much Food-Borne Illness

It’s not just Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dylan Scott

Summer is supposed to be the best time for fresh produce. Corn on the cob at the cookout. Berries plucked right from the vine. Salads on the cafe patio while you take an extra long lunch break because the weather and the food is that good.

But this year, summer’s harvest brought something much different than the flavorful dishes we’ve come to expect. Since May, the United States has seen more than 17,000 lab-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases. Before this summer’s massive outbreak, the country had never recorded more than a few hundred infections in a single year from this parasite, which can cause watery and at times explosive diarrhea.

And that isn’t the only bug invading Americans’ digestive tracts.

One person died from a listeria infection traced to ricotta cheese. Close to 100 people came down with salmonella from recalled eggs, while more than 400 people have gotten sick in a separate salmonella outbreak involving jalapeños. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued its highest urgency warning for frozen blueberries believed to be contaminated with E coli.

And now several dozen people across 15 states have become ill after eating alfalfa sprouts in a new outbreak that involves salmonella and E coli. Four of them have been hospitalized.

It’s gotten so bad that one Washington Post columnist argued we should stop eating lettuce altogether. Experts have told me they were worried people might actually completely stop consuming vegetables—vital to any healthy diet—for fear of contracting cyclosporiasis and enduring a month of watery diarrhea. I personally avoided the bagged salad kits that provided me with many easy lunches on a workday.

While this spate of foodborne illness is especially bad, the worst may be yet to come.

It’s only natural to look for somebody to blame. Culpability has understandably fallen on the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helms the US Department of Health and Human Services—especially after his deep staffing cuts at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the two federal agencies most responsible for investigating and responding to disease outbreaks. Those cuts have slowed the response, and officials have struggled to communicate with the public clearly in a fast-moving crisis.

While our government officials are partly to blame, the problem is bigger than Trump and Kennedy, or even this one summer. While seasonal changes will always play a role—the warmer months, when people eat more fresh produce and consume more food that’s been sitting out at unsafe temperatures, typically have more foodborne illnesses—the underlying factors contributing to these outbreaks are becoming more potent. The food supply is more and more globalized. And the planet continues to warm, allowing these pathogens to spread to more and more farms all over the world, including in the US.

As the weather finally begins to cool down, I’ve been asking myself an uncomfortable question: What if diarrhea summer never really ends?

Our globalized food supply chain has a lot to do with our food safety—and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Americans expect access to any produce they want year-round, even produce that isn’t in-season locally, or that may not grow anywhere in the US at all. We source food from all over the world: Most cyclospora outbreaks originated with foods grown in other countries. This year’s crisis was eventually linked to iceberg lettuce from Mexico.

And as the New York Times recently documented, the sometimes international trip from the farm to the store for a bagged salad kit offers multiple moments for potential contamination, including tainted irrigation water, local wildlife excrement, and poor storage practices, making it possible for dangerous pathogens to take hold before a person even buys their groceries.

Warming temperatures around the world are also helping those bugs spread. Humidity is essential for salmonella and warmer summers will mean more humid-favorable conditions for the bacteria to grow. E coli likewise will thrive as temperatures rise. Cyclospora has historically been found in subtropical climates, so for a long time, infections from food grown inside the United States were unheard of. Not anymore.

“Climate change has allowed pathogens like cyclospora…to expand from the tropic, subtropic lines into areas more north and south of that tropic line,” said Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

“With respect to the US, we’re starting to see new infectious diseases in southern Louisiana, Texas; that also increases the presence of cyclospora in food systems in other countries,” he said. “It suggests that, through climate change, we might potentially start seeing it be endemic in the United States at some point.”

And indeed, cyclospora was found in farms in Florida in 2020. This is a problem that is going to become worse, not better, given the expected trends in global warming in the decades to come.

“It wasn’t until about within the last 10 years we started to see cases from domestic origin,” Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, told me. “Before, there were predominantly cases due to international travel or importation of products because it used to be endemic in some tropical or warmer climates.”

“It’s clear that now,” he said, “it’s become established in the domestic environment.”

To make matters worse, at the same time conditions for foodborne illness are ripening, the US government has been sharply cutting its ability to monitor for and respond to these outbreaks.

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, as part of the widespread government staffing cuts, the FDA laid off 3,500 workers. Between the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture, which also oversees food safety, and several related agencies, more than 11,000 workers have been lost, a 22 percent cut, according to the Partnership for Public Service. And the CDC, which helps respond to outbreaks once they start, has lost about a quarter of its workforce from January 2025 to October 2025, according to Reuters; by this summer, CBS reported, the number of scientists tracking food parasites at the agency dropped from 11 to three. Meanwhile, the administration has been rushing to hire 2,200 people in the middle of the crisis.

“There have been a lot of federal cuts. There have been cuts around CDC surveillance, around state and local public health. You’ve lost people,” Dr. Anurag Malani, vice chief of staff at Trinity Health’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus, told me. “The ability to do what you need to do to keep citizens safe and to keep the public safe, we don’t have as many people doing that as we used to.

The federal government also shut down several national monitoring programs for foodborne illness in 2025—including for the cyclospora parasite specifically. The state and local agencies that surveil for and respond to food outbreaks have also faced staff cuts because they depend on the federal government for their funding.

“It’s hard when there is one larger entity kind of controlling all of that,” Dr. Kathleen Linder, the hospital epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, told me in July. “Local health departments are having to do more on their own than they would have had to do in the past just because of decentralization at that level. It has been very hard to get updated information. The information has been lagging a little bit behind.”

Food safety is hard enough to tackle on its own. Part of the reason we experience regular outbreaks of cyclospora is that it can successfully infect people even when only very little of it is present, and because we can’t grow it in a lab to study it.

But the US has made things harder by cutting these important programs. Rebuilding the staff and capacity to do this work is not likely to happen under the Trump administration, and former FDA officials have described a “brain drain” for the food safety programs that won’t be easy to reverse in the next administration.

But something will have to be done if we’re ever to escape the food recall cycle. Despite the name, food has historically been neglected by the “Food and Drug” Administration, and better food safety could require serious restructuring and investment in these capabilities. And foodborne illnesses aren’t the only kind of infection that climate change will make more likely: The United States is also seeing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue. Responding to those new threats is going to require a rebuilt and potentially reimagined federal public health apparatus.

If there is any good news in the short term, it’s that there are a lot of great recipes for grilling your vegetables to eliminate any pathogens hiding in our side dishes at next summer’s cookouts. It sure seems like we’re going to need them.

Flailing like a fat drowning man in a sewage treatment plant...

Trump Is Growing Desperate on Iran

After threats of “financial violence” failed, the White House is back to regular violence.

Alex Nguyen

The Trump administration is back on the warpath. Over the weekend, the government resumed military attacks on Iran for the first time in a month, which in turn prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes against the United Arab Emirates and American bases in Jordan. On Monday, Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst said the president told him that “there will be a US response” to the Iranian attack on US forces in Jordan.

Which is all to say that Iran, thanks in part to economic support from China, isn’t backing down.

The Trump administration also signaled that it may ramp up economic sanctions on Iran this week, seeking to make good on promises of an “economic D-Day” against the country: “This is going to be financial violence if we have to,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press on Sunday.

On Monday, Iranian leadership joined an economic summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose largest members are China and Russia, in a meeting that many American outlets have characterized as adverse to US interests China has been Iran’s economic bulwark during the current war, defying US sanctions by remaining the main importer of Iranian oil. 

While struggling to fight Iran on multiple fronts—through Bessent’s “financial violence” in the form of severe economic sanctions—and the conventional violence of deadly military action against both the country’s civilian infrastructure and combat forces, the US has achieved little in terms of forcing Iran’s leadership to budge on negotiations.

We’ve seen this play out again, and again, and again in the months since Trump dragged the U.S. into war with Iran.

In response to an exclusive from the Washington Post citing classified documents in which top US military officials state the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the country from other threats, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, claimed that publishing the report was “a crime”—it is not—and evidence of “TDS and PDS”—Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome, respectively.

Even as it scrabbles for new tactics—and publicly appears at a loss—the Trump administration continues to deny that its war isn’t working. 

But as Bessent himself said Monday of Canada’s claim that it was weathering Washington’s trade war: “What else are they gonna say?”

"Likely unlawful" BUT YOU ARE LETTING HIM DO IT ANYWAY YOU FUCKER!

Supreme Court allows Trump’s ballroom construction, but Roberts says project is ‘likely unlawful’

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in dissent as the high court let the president’s passion project proceed.

By Josh Gerstein

The Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to press on with his White House ballroom project — over a strident objection from Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s liberal wing.

The justices’ 5-4 ruling maintains the high court’s hold on a federal appeals court ruling that called for a halt to the project after concluding it lacked approval from Congress.

In an unsigned order Monday, the Supreme Court’s majority said a historic preservation group that sued over the project appeared to lack legal standing, while national security concerns favored allowing the construction to continue. The majority did not opine on whether the project is legal.

Writing for the dissenters, Roberts said the project is “likely unlawful.”

“The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote, adding that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

The court’s majority insisted it was not resolving the legal arguments over the president’s power to unilaterally make major changes to the White House. But the decision Monday means it is likely that the ballroom will be fully built before that question is definitively resolved.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was “pleased” with the court’s ruling, adding that it would allow the project to be completed “without any further contingency, doubt, or threat.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche also saluted the ruling. “This is a no-brainer for national security, and future administrations will look back and be thankful,” he wrote on X.

The president initially touted the ballroom project primarily as an effort to create a larger, permanent space at the White House for ceremonial events like state dinners. In recent weeks, though, he increasingly billed the construction as a national security imperative due to features to be included in the redesigned East Wing.

On Trump’s orders, construction crews abruptly demolished the White House’s East Wing last October. He later sought approval from review panels to build a ballroom on the site, although Congress never appropriated funds for the project or signed off on it. Trump has said the ballroom and related facilities will cost $400 million, with private donors footing that bill.

In response to a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a district court judge blocked above-ground construction at the site, but that ruling never went into effect. A D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled, 2-1, earlier this month that Trump embarked on the project in violation of laws that require Congressional approval for construction in Washington.

The appeals court paused its order to allow the Trump administration time to seek relief from the Supreme Court. As that reprieve was set to expire on Aug. 21, Roberts stepped in with an emergency order allowing the project to continue while the full court weighed the administration’s request.

The ruling Monday was in keeping with a general trend at the conservative high court to more strictly enforce standing requirements, which are aimed at ensuring that the parties to a case have a concrete stake in its outcome and to prevent judges from ruling on abstract legal issues.

“Perhaps nearly any government action or project offends someone’s sensibilities,” the majority said as it snubbed the National Trust’s claim that it had standing due to the interests of Alison Hoagland, a historian who is one of its members.

Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Hoagland’s claimed offense at the project as the sole basis for the suit, but precedent is clear that standing can rest on the claims of a single individual.

The majority said the Trust was unlikely to be able to press the suit based solely on Hoagland’s “offense, disagreement, or distaste,” but Roberts said his conservative colleagues were twisting prior precedents in which environmental challenges were allowed to proceed over largely or entirely aesthetic claims.

“The distinction … does not hold up,” the chief justice said.

Brent Leggs, President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, expressed disappointment but took comfort in the chief justice’s dissent.

“We are pleased with Chief Justice Roberts’ strong dissent, " Leggs said, “which reiterated what we have maintained from the start of our case — that construction of the White House ballroom is unlawful.”

Latest whiplash

‘Eisenhower would be spinning in his grave’: Many Republicans are over Trump’s Iran bluster

Just days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new “economic D-Day” to choke Iran, the U.S. carried out its first known attack on Iran since July.

By Megan Messerly and Alex Gangitano

President Donald Trump threatens in one moment to slowly asphyxiate Iran’s economy and, in the next, to quickly bomb them into submission.

Republicans who disagree which option is correct are still united on one thing: They’re over Trump’s seeming indecision.

The latest whiplash came this weekend, when the U.S. carried out its first known attack on Iran since late July, hitting rocket launchers the U.S. military said were prepared to drop sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. The president then threatened on Truth Social to blow Kharg Island, the energy stronghold, to “smithereens.”

The threat came just days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced an “economic D-Day” to slowly strangle Iran’s economy. The value of the new, intensified sanctions, Bessent said, was to obviate the need for military escalation.

The seemingly contradictory efforts underscore the morass the administration finds itself in six months after the president launched a war he said would last only six weeks, and which he and members of his Cabinet have repeatedly described as over and successful.

“This was launched with no plan, has been executed with no plan, and has been largely driven by the politics of the moment,” said a former security official who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamics of the war. “That’s why you see this insane — we’re in, we’re out, we’re back, we’re out, we’re bombing, we’re not bombing. I mean negotiating by tweet — Eisenhower would be spinning in his grave.”

The president’s approach to Iran has left some of the GOP’s war-weary voices — who have at times included Vice President JD Vance and a slew of political operatives anxious over the conflict’s effects on gas prices and the midterms — disappointed that the war drags on. Meanwhile, his repeated unfulfilled threats to bomb Iran have disappointed the more hawkish camp, represented by the likes of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“A lot of Republicans who are supportive overall of holding Iran accountable or neutralizing the threat are frustrated,” said a former Trump campaign official. “He’s not pleasing anybody.”

One GOP strategist likened Trump’s Iran predicament to being stuck in the “friend zone.”

“You have two camps that are equally pissed — shows it’s not going great,” the GOP strategist said.

The handwringing comes at a precarious moment for Republicans who in just two months face an electorate that was demoralized over high prices even before the war began. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil once flowed, remains a chokepoint. The average price for a gallon of gas is $4.08, according to AAA, and diesel, which powers much of the American economy, is nearing a record high.

Still, some administration allies remain sanguine about the latest round of strikes and the president’s fresh threats to escalate the war. They believe Trump is astutely keeping the pressure on Iran, ensuring the Strait of Hormuz remains open to at least some commercial traffic while he bides time for Bessent’s economic noose to run its course.

“It’s just part of a tit-for-tat,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. “Neither side appears interested in a return to full scale strikes.”

Trump insists that Iran is a leaderless state that has only limited ability to wreak havoc in the region, telling reporters in the Oval Office Monday that “they’re a failed nation.”

“That doesn’t mean we won’t smack ‘em,” he said. “We will see what happens.”

The White House referred to Trump’s statement on Monday when asked for a request for comment.

But even his allies recoil at the wavering between threats to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” or economically pressure it into compliance — and offers to negotiate a truce.

“He can’t stay on message or stick to a coherent, disciplined strategy, because he feels trapped now,” said one person close to the White House. “Trump realizes the political peril but can’t figure out a face-saving way to end the conflict. The Iranians clearly know this reality, too.”

And while Trump insists politics do not play into his calculus, there is a growing “time to move on” sentiment inside the White House, according to an oil industry executive familiar with internal discussions.

“The motivation to end hostilities is immense,” the executive said. “But there remains a solid coalition of advisers — at the State Department and the White House — who maintain, as they have since the military campaign began, that the Iran regime will only come to the table to agree to an acceptable deal if they are pushed to near extinction and have no other choice. The president had remained confident that he can get the Iranians to do a deal — some would say over confident or naively confident.”

The latest escalation, however, highlights how for all the economic and military damage that the U.S. has inflicted, Tehran still has the ability to drive the narrative, fire missiles that endanger U.S. personnel and force Trump to respond. It’s the situation Bessent hoped to avoid when he announced new sanctions last week, a move designed to force Iran back to the negotiating table without renewed military conflict that spiked oil prices.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Vance tried to paper over the daylight between the economic pressure campaign and the president’s renewed threats of military action.

“He’s sending a message to the Iranians,” Vance said. “What the president is saying is, ‘look, you guys are shooting at commercial shipping, you guys are behaving like a terrorist country. You’ve got to stop, or there’s going to be some consequences.’”

Tehran, meanwhile, has shown little sign that it is eager to reach a deal, pushing back on assertions from Bessent and others that the economic pressure campaign would constrict the Iranian economy to the point where its leaders would have no choice but to make a deal.

“Liar liar pants on fire,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote in a post on X on Saturday.

And China, which purchases most of Iran’s oil, has balked at the threat of U.S. sanctions, with Lin Jian, the spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry, saying that the country “will do everything necessary to firmly safeguard its rights and interests.”

“China has made clear on many occasions its firm opposition to illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law or the authorization of the UN Security Council,” Lin said last week. “Economic warfare and maximum pressure provide no solution.”