What's your go to? Doordash, grubhub, Uber eats, etc?

If we don’t have a massive blue wave in the midterms, we’re fooked.

"In retrospect, there was no reason we should ever have expected Donald Trump to really embrace the “equal power” aspect of the presidency. Modern presidents have typically arrived at the White House after having served elsewhere in government, often the federal legislative branch. No one had come from running a private company. No one had come to power limited only by what his lawyers couldn’t wriggle him out of. But Trump did.

During his first four years in office and during the first few weeks of his return, Trump has worked deliberately and effectively to transform the presidency from being one-third of a governmental triumvirate into something more like what his ideological allies Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban enjoy. He has been aided by remarkable capitulation from the purportedly equal branches.
As he and his team — most notably Elon Musk — run roughshod over legal and ethical boundaries, it’s been hard not to notice how unprepared the system is for an internal threat. One would in fact be justified in assuming that Trump’s failures to comply with the law might trigger no repercussions whatsoever, just as they didn’t during his first term in office and largely didn’t during his interregnum.

Who will police the president? Barring an outbreak of self-respect at the Capitol, the answers are unsatisfying. There are the courts, though that path tends to be slow and depends on respect for the courts’ authority. There’s also the public — the same public that Trump still insists wanted him to be president in November 2020. And that’s about it.
Illegality by the administration is not an abstract question. Trump and/or Musk have blocked congressionally authorized spending, gutted a congressionally instituted governmental agency, fired inspectors general without the proper notice, reportedly put confidential information at risk and overseen other changes that appear to violate the Constitution or the law.

“Trump is asserting a constitutional prerogative to ignore, disregard or even openly violate laws that are inconsistent with his policy,” New York University law professor Trevor Morrison told the Wall Street Journal. Writing on Substack, former executive-branch attorneys Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith suggest that it’s likely that the Trump administration “doesn’t care about compliance with current law, might not care about what the Supreme Court thinks either, and is seeking to effectuate radical constitutional change.”

In other words: Violations of legal and precedential boundaries are about proving that no one can police the president, as much as revealing that no one can.
This would explain why Trump is trying to effect change through executive orders rather than getting legislation passed by Congress. He could pressure his party’s slim majorities in the House and Senate to, say, dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. It would take political capital and require a public fight. But if his intent is to demonstrate that he doesn’t need to defer to the legislative branch — the “most aggressive” implementation of the idea that the president holds uncontested control over the executive branch, as Michael Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, put it in a phone call — then the executive order itself is central to the point. Or consider the executive order on TikTok which, as Bauer and Goldsmith note, challenges both the legislative branch (which passed the law banning it) and the Supreme Court (for upholding the ban).
What have we seen in response to Trump’s and Musk’s actions? Not a lot.

Law enforcement​

If Musk’s team that is slashing through government agencies lacks the proper authorization to obtain classified information or access certain offices, for example, the Department of Homeland Security might usually get involved. Even if any individuals were arrested for violating federal laws, though, Trump could immediately pardon them, granting them both retroactive and proactive immunity.


If you’re curious what approach the Justice Department might take: Interim U.S. attorney Edward R. Martin Jr. sent a public message on Monday assuring Musk that his office in D.C. would work to protect members of Musk’s team from the putative threat of being publicly identified. It is similarly likely that a Trump-controlled Justice Department — and by all appearances this one is shaping up to be just that — would decline to launch an investigation or appoint a special counsel to evaluate Trump’s and Musk’s actions."

What a doosh.

Marco Rubio Pulls Out of G20 Summit Over ‘Very Bad’ Focus on DEI and Climate​

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he won’t attend the G20 summit in Johannesburg later this month, saying South Africa’s support for DEI and climate change policies are “very bad things.”

“I will NOT attend the G20 summit,” Rubio wrote in a post on X, saying, “South Africa is doing very bad things. Expropriating private property. Using G20 to promote ‘solidarity, equality, & sustainability.’ In other words: DEI and climate change.”


Relations between the U.S. and South Africa have been strained by threats from President Trump to cut off funding to the country in response to new land expropriation laws.

The controversial Expropriation Act, signed in January, allows the South African state to take land, much of which is owned by whites, without compensation.

It replaces a 1975 law which obliged the state to pay them.

One of the legacies of South Africa’s racist apartheid system is that white South Africans still own almost three-quarters of farm land, despite being only 7 percent of the population.

The country’s foreign ministry said the expropriation legislation was no different than land acquisition laws in other countries.

In a wild series of posts on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump claimed that “certain classes of people” were being treated “very badly” by the changes, and threatened to cut off all future funding in response.

South Africa-born “first buddy” Elon Musk has also weighed in with unfounded conspiracy theories about the law, and by appearing to endorse a message about race-based emigration from the country.

South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa defended the law in a post on X on Monday, and said that the country’s only funding from the U.S. is for programs tackling HIV and AIDS.


“South Africa, like the United States of America and other countries, has always had expropriation laws that balance the need for public usage of land and the protection of rights of property owners,” he wrote.

This feud may be familiar to observers of Trump’s first term as president, when he provoked a furious reaction in South Africa in 2018 for tweeting that he was closely studying the “large scale killing of farmers”.

pretty cool, I did see a walk off gland slam once but maybe it's not as rare of feat as I thought

President’s team blames Biden for stubborn inflation, but Trump’s own agenda could make it harder to defeat​

Nothing did more to deliver the White House to Donald Trump than inflation, which helped to sour Americans on former President Joe Biden’s economy.
Inflation is turning into a headache for President Trump, too. It is proving stubborn, just as he and fellow Republicans are rolling out their marquee policies of higher tariffs and lower taxes.

The aggregate boost to inflation from tariffs is likely to be small and from tax cuts smaller still (especially if they are offset with spending cuts). The problem is that Trump has inherited inflation above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, and his agenda risks keeping it there, making it harder to bring down interest rates.

This is in contrast to his first term, when inflation generally ran at or below 2%. So while Trump raised tariffs and cut taxes in his first term, the effect at the time was to help the Fed meet rather than miss its inflation target.

The latest data underscore the challenge. Core consumer price inflation, which excludes its volatile food and energy components, was 3.3% in January, higher than economists had expected. That same month, hourly wages jumped. And a survey by the University of Michigan showed higher expected inflation in the coming year.

Caveats are in order. The January price jump was concentrated in auto-related components and airfares, which might reverse, perhaps in February. The Fed targets a different core inflation measure that was likely around 2.6% in January. The wage jump might reflect weather distortions. And a Fed survey doesn’t show inflation expectations rising as much as the University of Michigan did.

Link:

Musk’s DOGE Teen Was Fired By Cybersecurity Firm for Leaking Company Secrets​

Edward Coristine posted online that he had retained access to the firm’s servers. Now he has access to sensitive government information.
By Jason Leopold, Margi Murphy, Sophie Alexander, Jake Bleiberg, and Anthony Cormier
February 7, 2025 at 1:41 PM CST
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Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s squad that’s criss-crossing US government agencies, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor.

“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this.”

A spokesperson for the Arizona-based hosting and data-security firm said Thursday: “I can confirm that Edward Coristine's brief contract was terminated after the conclusion of an internal investigation into the leaking of proprietary company information that coincided with his tenure.”

Afterward, Coristine wrote that he’d retained access to the cybersecurity company’s computers, though he said he hadn’t taken advantage of it.

“I had access to every single machine,” he wrote on Discord in late 2022, weeks after he was dismissed from Path Network, according to messages seen by Bloomberg. Posting under the name “Rivage,” which six people who know him said was his alias, Coristine said he could have wiped Path’s customer-supporting servers if he’d wished. He added, "I never exploited it because it's just not me."

His comments, made in a Discord server focused on another competitor company, worried executives at Path Network, who believed there was no legitimate reason for a former employee to access their machines, according to a person familiar with the incident. The person asked not to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.

In response to his firing, Coristine, who is wearing a blazer and shorts in one undated photo that was posted anonymously online, wrote on Discord that he had done “nothing contractually wrong” while working at Path Network.
Several of Coristine’s online peers and former co-workers said they were surprised that the teenage friend they knew has been brought into one of the most high-profile teams in the Trump administration. His 2022 dismissal and the circumstances surrounding it add to questions about how he arrived in this new job with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and how he’ll handle the sensitive government information that comes with it.

“Giving Elon Musk's goon squad access to systems that control payments to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other key federal programs is a national security nightmare," Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Bloomberg News about his general concerns regarding the DOGE team. "Every hour new disturbing details emerge to prove that these guys have no business anywhere close to sensitive information or critical networks.”

Earlier this week, Wyden and other Democrats on the Senate intelligence panel asked White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to explain how DOGE members were vetted and what steps the Trump administration has taken to ensure the classified and unclassified systems and records the DOGE team has accessed are safeguarded from disclosure.

Coristine didn’t respond to requests for comment. Attempts to reach his parents for comment through publicly listed telephone numbers were unsuccessful. The White House wouldn't comment directly on Coristine's employment, but an official who discussed the situation on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters said all DOGE staffers under Musk were working as employees of relevant agencies with security clearances. Their employment is in compliance with federal law and they are not outside advisers, the official said.

The official acknowledged that DOGE’s operations were being viewed by some government employees as disruptive, but said the efforts were necessary to carry out Trump’s vision.

Coristine, who also interned at Musk’s Neuralink according to a cached online biography, is part of a core group of DOGE employees who are gathering datasets on government personnel, contracts and programs, according to people familiar with the matter. They asked not to be named because they don't have permission to discuss the matter publicly.
In meetings at the US Agency for International Development and the General Services Administration, for example, Coristine and other colleagues have discussed how they can use that data to potentially replace government employees with artificial intelligence and train chatbots to do the work.

Coristine regularly posted on both Discord and the messaging service Telegram in 2021 and 2022, when he was under 18. His posts are a mix of discussions about Path Network, coder-talk and lewd insults. Wired also reported earlier on some of Coristine’s history online.

On Telegram, he used language that suggested he was seeking a tool used in hacking, according to three people familiar with his online personas, a copy of the messages and two people familiar with cyber attacks. The people asked not to be named to discuss sensitive matters.

DOGE Is Not 'Tinkering' With Payments, says Treasury Secretary Bessent

DOGE’s moves across US agencies have put a spotlight on how Musk, the world’s richest person with a $412 billion fortune, tends to operate without regard for norms or traditional boundaries. Coristine’s online postings and his termination from Path Network raise questions about how members of the DOGE team were vetted. Trump's administration has not provided detailed information on that process. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that a different member of the DOGE team had resigned after racist posts were discovered on his social media account.

People familiar with Coristine’s DOGE work said he would need a security clearance at least at the secret level to access the secure spaces that hold some of the information he and his coworkers are seeking. It’s unclear what clearance he has, if any, though Trump on his first day in office issued an executive order to grant top secret and sensitive compartmented information security clearances for six months to at least some individuals so they could “immediately access the facilities and technology” to perform their work.

​

Iowa City and Johnson County are exploring the possibility of merging local and county law enforcement into a single facility.

Officials are exploring a site off Riverside Drive near Highway 1 and the Iowa City airport. The city and county are studying the logistics of combining the Johnson County Sheriff's Office and Iowa City Police Department.

The Johnson County Sheriff's Office is currently housed at the Johnson County Jail at 511 S. Capitol Street, a location tight on space and housed in an older building. Iowa City's police department sits within the confines of the Iowa City City Hall at 410 E. Washington Street. Both facilities were built more than four decades ago when the community and its law enforcement units were less robust.

The wife and I usually catch a few episodes every Saturday morning on Quest. I find it fascinating watching Drew Pritchard rummage around in old schools, salvage yards, and English manors looking for interesting bits to sell. The most frustrating are the people who ask him to come visit, then refuse to sell anything. Especially the descendants of some marquis or earl who are drowning in debt, and have rooms full of stuff collecting dust.
The wife and I are planning a trip to Wales/Scotland in 2026, and I was disappointed to learn the shop featured in the show closed in 2022.

Enjoy Coop in 14 additional flavors

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Four top New York City officials are resigning after the Justice Department moved to dismiss Mayor Eric Adams’s corruption case in apparent exchange for his help with President Trump’s deportation agenda, according to three people with knowledge of their plans and an email sent by one of the aides on Monday.
The four officials — Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor, and Meera Joshi, Anne Williams-Isom and Chauncey Parker, all also deputy mayors — oversee much of New York City government, and their departure in the coming days is poised to blow a devastating hole in the already wounded administration of Mayor Eric Adams.
Mr. Adams, a Democrat, is forcefully resisting growing calls to resign. Gov. Kathy Hochul is also under increasing pressure to remove him from office.
The four officials who are leaving office are all respected government veterans. Ms. Torres-Springer was elevated to the second most powerful job at City Hall in October in an effort to stabilize city government and restore confidence in the Adams administration following the mayor’s federal indictment in September on five counts, including bribery and fraud.

The Iowa Civil Rights Removal Act will take away citizens rights and I dont care if it is a fairly small percentage of the population.

These kinds of laws will then aim to take away the rights of other groups so need to stop them. Tell these Repubs you are against denying civil rights.
Contact the majority leader in the house:
matt.windschitl@legis.iowa.gov
3 subcommittee members:
Republicans
steven.holt@legis.iowa.gov
samantha.fett@legis.iowa.gov
Democrat
ross.wilburn@legis.iowa.gov
Gov Kim Reynolds
Call 515-281-5211

Now, first off, I'm pretty certain this coastal shift is due to either a DEI hire(s) or DEI policies...regardless, 4" per week is pretty astonishing.

California coastal community shifts 4 inches closer to the ocean each week: NASA
A coastal community in Southern California is shifting downslope -- and closer to the Pacific Ocean -- at a rapid rate, according to NASA.

The Palos Verdes Peninsula is well-known for its landslides, which have been occurring for decades. But radar imagery recently revealed that the Los Angeles County community is experiencing a slow-moving landslide -- averaging about 4 inches per week between Sept. 18 and Oct. 17, 2024, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory found.

The landslide both expanded and accelerated last summer, drawing attention to a populated region that historically had not been moving, Alexander Handwerger, a landslide scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, told ABC News.

It can be credited to record-breaking rainfall in Southern California in 2023 and heavy precipitation in early 2024, according to NASA.

But the landslide has recently slowed, Handwerger said, explaining that it was moving faster before recent imagery was collected and has since slightly slowed.


PHOTO: NASA’s UAVSAR airborne radar instrument captured data in fall 2024 showing the motion of landslides on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. (NASA)
Little to no infrastructure was built on the portion that was previously known to be moving, Handwerger said. But the landslide is impacting hundreds of existing buildings.

"The speed is more than enough to put human life and infrastructure at risk," Handwerger said.

MORE: California landslide appears to leave 3 multimillion-dollar homes teetering on edge of cliff

Some of the peninsula is part of an ancient complex of landslides that has been moving for at least the past six decades, according to NASA. The peninsula juts into the Pacific Ocean just south of the city of Los Angeles.


PHOTO:A huge crack forms along Palos Verdes Drive South in Rancho Palos Verdes where a landslide has accelerated, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., Aug. 31, 2024. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
Researchers compared airborne radar images taken at four different points of time to measure the motion of the landslides in three dimensions, Handwerger said.

"That gave us more of a time series of motion," Handwerger said.


PHOTO: Palos Verdes Peninsula. (Jonathan Gonzalez/Getty Images)
MORE: Coastal US cities are sinking as sea levels continue to rise, new research shows

The region has been a big focus for scientific research due to the prominent landslide threat. NASA’s upcoming Landslide Climate Change Experiment will use airborne radar to study how extreme wet or dry precipitation patterns influence landslides.

In addition to airborne radar, scientists have been using satellite data to monitor the motion of the landslide.

Such analyses are provided to state officials to support response efforts to the landslides.

The threat of landslides is so persistent that the City of Rancho Palos Verdes manages a website that releases monitoring data for potential activity in the region.

And last October, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services unveiled a $42 million buyout program for Rancho Palos Verdes homeowners impacted by landslides.

When two northwest suburban childhood hockey pals launched Spiteful Brewing in 2012 as a post-collegiate enterprise, the business overcame long odds to grow from a stovetop startup into an award-winning craft brewery and tap room in Bowmanville.

But after successfully navigating everything from the pandemic to a flat craft brewing market that has forced several Chicago competitors to close, Spiteful faces an imminent new challenge: tariffs.

President Donald Trump’s 25% tariffs on imported aluminum, set to go into place March 12, will raise the cost to produce every whimsically adorned can of Spiteful beer, from its Working for the Weekend Double IPA to its Fat Badger Ale.

For Spiteful and other Chicago craft brewers, the results may be inevitable: libation inflation.

“Imagine something that you’re buying every day goes up 25% overnight,” said Jason Klein, 42, co-founder of Spiteful Brewing. “We would have no choice but to raise prices — there’s no way we can absorb that.”

A niche segment of the beer industry, craft brewing has become big business in Illinois, with hundreds of mostly small manufacturers generating $3.1 billion in economic impact in the state in 2023, according to the Brewers Association, a Colorado-based trade group. But after years of explosive growth, craft brewers have struggled in the post-pandemic landscape amid a glut of competitors, with a number of high-profile brewery and taproom closings in the Chicago area. Tariffs may be another blow.