News / political
-
1 min read
The Fork Led to a Ditch
Read more . . . →DOGE paid 144,000 federal workers $6.7 billion to sit at home and do nothing. That was the efficiency plan. A 435 percent spike in paid administrative leave. Six times the salary cost of the year before. The program was called “Fork in the Road,” and it was sold as a way to trim the fat. The GAO just showed everyone what it actually trimmed: seven billion dollars from the treasury, for the privilege of having fewer people do the work. Then the agencies started rehiring. Over 20,000 new hires by June, same kinds of roles they’d just paid people to...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
Thirty Billion and a Soccer Ball
Read more . . . →The US and China just released their big tariff deal. Seventy-seven items get relief. The list includes fireworks, Christmas ornaments, tableware, and soccer balls. That’s the headline from the summit: you can buy a cheaper soccer ball now. Meanwhile, tariffs have cost the average American household over $2,500 this year. Congratulations, you got about nine percent back. Mostly in ornaments. This is the cycle. Break something big, fix something small, hold a press conference. The Supreme Court ruled the IEEPA tariffs unconstitutional back in February. Didn’t matter. Trump kept collecting and now wants a standing ovation for agreeing to stop...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Eight Hundred Million and a Loophole
Read more . . . →Eight hundred and ten million dollars. That’s how much Congress voted to spend on refugee services, children’s programs, and domestic aid. The president decided he’d rather keep it. Not through a veto, not through any process involving another branch of government. He used something called a “pocket rescission,” which is a fancy way of saying he let the money expire in a drawer. The GAO already ruled it illegal. Lawmakers in both parties said the same thing. He did it anyway, because consequences are for people who can’t afford lawyers. Over $567 million of that was earmarked for the Office...
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
Chinese State TV Had a Better Seat
Read more . . . →Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House for writing things he didn’t like. A federal judge told him that was unconstitutional. The White House kept barring reporters anyway. And while American journalists stood outside on the sidewalk, Chinese state media walked right in to cover Xi Jinping’s state dinner. The President of the United States gave a propaganda arm of the Chinese Communist Party more access to his own house than the American press. This is the same man who spent a decade calling China the greatest threat to American security. The same guy who slapped...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
Four Days Until Your Whisky Disappears
Read more . . . →In four days, it becomes illegal to import Canadian whisky into the United States. Also banned: Canadian beer, wine, vodka, cider, motorcycles, and whey protein. Trump signed the executive orders as retaliation for Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, which were retaliation for his original tariffs, which were retaliation for Canada having the nerve to exist next door. The circle of punishment lands, as it always does, on the person holding the receipt. This is what a trade war looks like when one side runs out of ideas. You can’t negotiate your way to a win, so you take the other country’s beer...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
Equal Footing
Read more . . . →The guy on the left isn’t faster. His lane is. Same track, same distance. One runner is standing on a conveyor belt doing the work for him. The other is ankle-deep in sand and losing ground with every stride. Nobody built the sand lane by accident.
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
Obsolete Since 1980
Read more . . . →The Labor Department just repealed protections for migrant farmworkers that have existed since 1980. Forty-six years of requiring OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division to actually coordinate on enforcing the rights of the people who pick your food. Gone. The official reason: the rules are “obsolete” and don’t reflect “modern, effective, and flexible coordination models.” Which is a beautiful way to say nobody’s watching anymore. This takes effect September 30. One week from now, the already threadbare safety net for seasonal farmworkers gets thinner. These are people who work in 100-degree heat for wages most Americans would reject on...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
Five Hundred Dollars and a Closed Hospital
Read more . . . →Trump is mailing $500 “Obamacare refund” checks to about a million people while the bill he signed last year cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid. Read that again. A trillion. Three hundred and eighty rural hospitals are now at risk of closing, and the guy who killed their funding is sending out rebate checks like a car dealership running a Labor Day sale. The total payout is $500 million. He cut two thousand times that from the program that keeps those hospitals open. The math is not complicated. The check is a prop. It is a photo op with an...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
Your Frustration Has a Score
Read more . . . →Amazon built an internal system called “Atlas” that assigns every warehouse a score between 100 and 900. A hundred means workers are organizing. Nine hundred means they’re not. Machine learning models crunch daily sentiment data to predict which buildings will unionize next, sort them into tiers, and deploy what the company calls “empathetic listening” before anyone can get to a card signing. Your break room conversations are a signal. Your desire for a living wage is a risk metric on a dashboard in Seattle. Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility voted to form a union in April 2022. Four...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
Procurement Art
Read more . . . →Fourteen thousand dollars and it still can’t find a nail. The cushion is red velvet. The case is museum glass. And the thing on display is a claw hammer from any hardware store, eleven dollars with tax. Somebody in procurement signed that up to fourteen thousand, and then everybody went to lunch. The museum-goers walking past it are having a better afternoon than the taxpayers who bought it, which is usually how government spending works.
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.
