gAlienLifeform

Them: "Save the planet!"

Bezos: "... and redeem it for valuable prizes!"

Yeah, if they hadn't had an angry crowd of protesters show up this morning I bet they would've kept on enabliing DHS, so thank you protesters!

Does Tom's Guide (arc) count?

But they have some caveats,

... due to the size and the fact there's no way to check one dataset to another, it's highly likely there's overlapping information. Meaning the researchers don't know exactly how many people have been compromised.

All we know is that, according to the Cybernews [(arc)] report, one dataset (with over 455 million records) was named to "indicate its origins in the Russian Federation". Meanwhile, a second containing over 60 million records, was named after the messaging platform Telegram.

While this is (to date) seemingly one of the biggest troves of stolen login data discovered, the researchers said the datasets they found remained exposed only for a brief amount of time.

"The only silver lining here is that all of the datasets were exposed only briefly: long enough for researchers to uncover them, but not long enough to find who was controlling vast amounts of data," Cybernews reported.

That does not sound like a silver lining?

Well either way, I'm not that familiar with CyberNews as a source, but glancing at their home page there's like 3 or 4 stories about data leaks, so idk if that's just life in 2025 or if they've got a bit of a preoccupation with that subject

Yeah, I understand the mods' hesitance in opening that particular can of worms, but misleading and manipulative headlines are a pervasive and severe problem in major publications.

Also, little local news sites have a bad habit of writing generic headlines (e.g. saying things like "Fire in Springfield Kills 7" and assuming you know which Springfield they're talking about, or "Johnson slams Smith" and assuming you know Smith is the mayor and Johnson is on the city council), which is a shame because occasionally there's some excellent reporting or at least some hilarious townie drama in those stories.

to the voters that never hold them to account

How many of these lawmakers even had primary challengers last time they ran?

Yep, which leaves all of us citizens stuck between a violently racist organization that has lied to us repeatedly and another violently racist organization that has lied to us repeatedly. Fun times /s

Because Republicans hold a 53-47 advantage in the Senate, it will be difficult for Democrats to regularly defeat judicial nominations. But a clip of, for example, Missouri district court nominee Josh Divine trying to explain why he endorsed literacy tests for voting and analogized homosexuality to bestiality is the sort of thing that, if done correctly, would have a chance to go viral enough to get Susan Collins to have second thoughts.

The bad news is that no such clips exist, because when Senate Democrats had the chance to question the nominees in person, they decided they had other things to do or other places to be. Illinois’s Dick Durbin, California’s Adam Schiff, and Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse spent more of their allotted time lauding Federalist Society judges for sometimes ruling against Trump than they did asking questions of Whitney Hermandorfer, the pending nominee to the Sixth Circuit. Incredibly, their performances were still more impactful than those of Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal, New Jersey’s Cory Booker, Hawaii’s Mazie Hirono, and California’s Alex Padilla, who did not say anything to Hermandorfer at all.

Democratic politicians are fond of casting Trump as a threat to democracy and the rule of law, and are very aware of the power of political theater when they have new books to promote or campaign donations to solicit via lengthy, meme-laden, green-blubble text. But it is difficult for Senate Democrats to persuade voters to care about judicial confirmation battles when they, the Democrats, are so uninterested in fighting them.

That's the whole point of the article

Phoenix officials have offered assurances that police reforms will continue, despite President Donald Trump’s order ending federal scrutiny of alleged misconduct by local law enforcement.

Seeing as how this guy and Mike Johnson are both connected to the same weird little new apostolic sect it's amazing he hasn't been getting more grilling about this. Like, whenever a Muslim in this country just looks at somebody funny Ilhan Omar always gets screamed at for days.

Roberts first asserts that the law does not discriminate on the basis of sex, allowing it to evade heightened scrutiny. Then, having settled upon a deferential standard of review, he dismisses the law’s overt discrimination on the basis of sex as constitutionally unconcerning. These two lines of logic cannot be reconciled. Surely a regulation that instructs girls to be girls (and boys to be boys) by compelling both genders to “appreciate” their sex classifies children based on their sex. The law is impossible to enforce without taking sex into account. And that classification should trigger heightened scrutiny at the outset. Yet Roberts ignores this sex-based classification at the outset, pretends the law is sex-neutral, then writes off its most overtly discriminatory provision by applying relaxed scrutiny. That’s simply not how the law of equal protection operates.

...

SCOTUS has also rejected “separate but equal” in the context of sex discrimination. Yet Roberts brought it back in Skrmetti, giving states leeway to discriminate on the basis of sex as long as they pretend they are discriminating “equally” against both genders. Is this actually the new law of sex discrimination? Is it a bespoke exception from the rule, one the chief justice used to cobble together a majority that, behind the scenes, disagreed about major aspects of the case? Or is it the majority’s way of hobbling constitutional challenges to anti-trans laws without admitting that it must kneecap bedrock principles of equal protection?

We will not know for sure until SCOTUS revisits the issue and tries to make some sense out of Wednesday’s hash. For now, one thing is certain: To carry Skrmetti over the finish line, Roberts abandoned coherence and candor in favor of a crude exercise in outcome-oriented reasoning.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/skrmetti-john-roberts-anti-trans-supreme-court.html (arc)

Here's a driver's license. ~~Good luck.~~ Now get to work you lazy bum!

Conversely, I should not be required to show my face to anyone if I'm not trying to assert authority over them. Being a public servant means having a public identity, being a private citizen means you have the freedom to make choices about what you share.