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Ethan Wechtaluk

@ewechtaluk.bsky.social
340 followers 144 following 1.4K posts

Former Congressional Candidate. Husband & girl dad x3. Democratic Socialist. The work has just begun. ethanwechtaluk.com

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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
That’s the part that makes me the angriest. A safety net that drops people because of its own broken software isn't a safety net. It’s a trapdoor.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
I'll get mine fixed. I know how to make the calls, build the paper trail, and push until someone answers. But how many families got the same email tonight? How many will assume they did something wrong? How many will just go without?
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
And here's the part that should make every Marylander furious: this is by design. The system is set up to let cases close automatically. Nobody checks whether the family ever had a chance to respond. The burden is on them to prove they didn’t fail because the assumption is they did.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Tonight: another email. My case is "Closed." Want to guess whether that notice is in the portal? It isn't. No phone call. No letter. Nothing. A timer ran out and a computer closed the case.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Maryland just closed my family's SNAP case for not returning a form they never gave me. September 25: the state emails me that a review form is waiting in my benefits portal. I log in. Nothing. I check again. Nothing. I check for ten days. Nothing. 🧵
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
"Super Intelligence" in the headline. "Unites States" on the signature line.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Redundancy only works if you keep it. WSSC took one of its largest plant's two power feeds down and kept running with no fallback. The other feed failed today, and Pepco says WSSC's own equipment caused it. That wasn't bad luck. It was a decision, and whoever made it should lose their job.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
About 10 in 510,000. That's how many trans athletes the NCAA prez told the Senate he knew of. About 1 in 4. That's how many undergraduate women at major uni report being sexually assaulted by force or while incapacitated. If this is about protecting women, the math tells you where the fight is.
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Reposted by Ethan Wechtaluk
Hagerstown Rapid Response @hagerstownrapidresponse.com · 27/09/2026
Why Was Donald Trump's former NSC Senior Director, Derek Harvey, Saving Washington County Emails That Did Not Belong to Him? blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com/p/we-request...
blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com
We Requested Former Trump NSC Senior Director Derek Harvey’s Emails. His Bizarre Email Behavior Led Us to Evidence the County Misled the Public About the ICE Detention Center
Before Abruptly Resigning, Derek Harvey Forwarded County Emails to an Outside Account. What We Found Revealed the County Knew More About the Proposed ICE Detention Center Than It Told Residents.
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Hagerstown Rapid Response @hagerstownrapidresponse.com · 25/09/2026
Congress keeps demanding answers from ICE. But ICE may increasingly be able to ignore them. That’s because there’s a funding loophole that could make congressional oversight largely toothless. blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com/p/the-letter... by @ewechtaluk.bsky.social
blog.hagerstownrapidresponse.com
The Letters Aren’t Working. Neither Is the Law Congress Keeps Pointing To. The Reason Is Buried in How ICE Gets Its Money.
ICE didn’t simply ignore Congress. It found a weakness in the way Congress wrote its own oversight rules, and then built a policy around exploiting it.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
What the Cornell administration decided to do here is unconscionable — and I say that as someone with deep, personal ties to both Cornell and Ithaca. There must be justice and accountability.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Having served on Student Conduct and Honor Court adjudicating organizational misconduct while in college, I know what standard disciplinary accountability looks like. We routinely handed down far stiffer penalties for significantly minor infractions. 🧵
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Democrats spent years courting data center developers. Now public opinion has turned, and they're pivoting badly. Nowhere is that clearer than Maryland, where @iamwesmoore.bsky.social and @mddems.bsky.social are blaming Dan Cox for a tax break that passed the House 123-6.
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Erin Reed @erininthemorning.com · 24/09/2026
We are at the break glass moment on the Democratic Party and its treatment of transgender people, and it is my opinion that if we don’t act now and loudly demand to be heard, we will suffer the consequences of their shift.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Maryland is about to make a decision about data center development without the analysis it commissioned for those exact decisions. I asked the developer and the state the same category of question. The developer responded twice in an hour. The state didn't respond at all. Read more: bit.ly/4ySZU15
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Wes Moore, TeraWulf, and the Morgantown Opportunity Zone
TeraWulf answered my questions about the Morgantown data center. Wes Moore's office answered none of them, five days before he decides whether to hand the site a federal tax break.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
While researching the potential data center development in Charles County, it hasn’t escaped my notice that formal requests for comment and public records have yielded substantially more information from TeraWulf than from the State of Maryland itself.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
I want to be clear that I made an informed adult decision to care about the Washington Commanders again this year and I have nobody to blame but myself. 0-2. Eagles and Cowboys. Same elbow. See everybody next Sunday. Obviously.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
A state agency told me in writing that the 911 fees on my smartwatches should not be there. Maryland has never issued guidance on the exemption that covers them. Nobody has ever filed a complaint about it. Not one, in seven years. bit.ly/4jdvbaa
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The State Says These Charges Are Wrong
I asked Maryland whether a smartwatch counts as a phone line. The answer came back in writing: it does not, and the fees on mine should never have been charged.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
Thursday in Dallas, Ted Cruz named Mamdani, El-Sayed and Talarico. The crowd shouted "he should be shot" after each one. He did not flinch. Saturday, ESPN handed him College GameDay. The boos in Austin were the only accountability offered.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The double standard is a total farce: we are forced to jump through insane, punitive hoops in the name of "procedure," while corporations and the institutions in power operate with absolute impunity to spy on, log, and violate every single aspect of our lives.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
At the same time, federal agencies analyze financial transactions to flag innocent people for police stops, street cameras scrape the Bluetooth signatures of our devices to map who we travel with, and tech giants like LG build unwarranted surveillance directly into the hardware in our living rooms.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
In state proceedings, the system treats ordinary citizens like security threats and demands total compliance under threat of arcane laws that don’t reflect the realities of modern society.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
"Privacy" and "confidentiality" aren't being used to protect us — they’re being used to control us. 🧵
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
That's one piece of something bigger I wrote about today: an economy where the headline numbers are accurate and still describe almost nobody's life. Nobody is lying to you. The averages just stopped meaning what they used to mean. bit.ly/4co3EyP
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Nobody Is Lying to You About the Economy
In 2009 I applied for hundreds of jobs into the worst market since the Depression, and my degree still put me ahead of the country. I'm applying again now but this time it doesn't.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
The gap between them is the workweek, which got 0.3 percent longer. Figure out what's coming next? The raise isn't actually a raise. People took home a little more by working a little more, and after inflation the average weekly wage grew by roughly a dollar. Not a $1 an hour -- $1 a week.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Every few months somebody tells you real wages are up. It's actually true, but there is a twist. Over the past year, real average hourly earnings fell 0.2 percent. Real average weekly earnings rose 0.1 percent. Both numbers are in the same BLS release, published the same day. 🧵
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
We were told the AI buildout was private investment. Private money, private risk, private reward. The bond market is repricing the cost of borrowing for everyone, and nobody put that on a ballot.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
For those of us in Maryland, it lands twice. Once in your mortgage. Again in your utility bill, when the transmission upgrades these projects require get spread across every ratepayer in the state. Thanks, Wes.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The problem is, that's not a footnote. The 10 year Treasury sets your mortgage rate. It closed at 4.75% Monday, the highest since January 2025. Every dollar of AI capex raised in the long end competes with the paper that prices your house.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Here is the part buried at the bottom of all of these stories that they hope you ignore: the bond market is also under pressure from a deluge of issuance as hyperscalers raise money to fund the AI boom. Corporate debt and government debt are bidding for the same buyers.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
The proximate cause is oil — well it's Donald Trump but you know what I mean. Strikes around Hormuz pushed crude up again and inflation expectations with it. Markets are now pricing a Fed hike in September, not a cut. That part will be everywhere today.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Japan's 10 year bond hit 3% this morning, the first time since September 1996. UK gilts hit 5.2%, highest since June 2008. German 10 years hit 3.34%, highest since 2011. The US 30 year closed at 5.25% Monday. Everyone around the world is paying more to borrow. 🧵
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
This makes me ... vomit. Thank you for sharing. I hadn't seen this but it validates my ongoing skepticism towards Bulwark that I had never been able to fully explain.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
I asked Montgomery County for a copy of Montgomery County's own audits. No reply. So a state agency in Hanover sent me Montgomery County's audits instead. Thirty four days later the county still has not said a word. Read more here: bit.ly/3UggAAG
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Hanover Answered. Rockville Didn’t.
Part Two of an ongoing series.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
That matters here more than almost anywhere else. Maryland lost 31,100 federal jobs last year. Those people are out there applying right now, into a market where nobody is required to tell them what is real and what is a resume collection exercise. I wrote the whole thing up. bit.ly/4zFFPMH
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The Repost
Maryland made employers tell the truth about the money. It is time we make them tell the truth about the job.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
In Maryland it is illegal to post a job without listing the salary. It is perfectly legal to post a job that does not exist. Penalty for hiding the pay: $300. Penalty for inventing the entire job: nothing.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Nobody counts ghost job postings. Not the BLS, not the state, not anybody. There is no law that says they have to. So the number does not exist, and a problem that does not have a number does not get fixed.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
You are not bad at applying. A lot of those postings are not jobs. No budget, no hire, nobody on the other end of the portal. They’re called ghost jobs.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
The unemployment rate went down last month. Nobody got hired. A million people gave up and stopped being counted. That is not a statistic, that is a fucking magic trick.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
If you have a job right now, you are lucky. You probably have no idea just how lucky. And every number the government publishes is built so you never have to find that out. 🧵
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emptywheel @emptywheel.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
From my post yesterday, posted BEFORE we learned she refused applying for a security clearance and BEFORE we learned world leaders get to Trump via Natalie. emptywheel.net/2026/08/19/n...
And all the while we’re not talking about what it means that anyone with a trusted relationship with Harp could learn anything about Donald Trump, could learn the content of all his meetings, all his messages, all his phone calls, could pass him — and pass on, in his name — any kind of untoward message.

Natalie Harp may be just what the far right wants to pretend she is: A staffer who has gone nutso for her boss, and therefore lavishes the kind of treatment on him that his increasingly fragile ego needs to function in the face of Narcissistic injuries.

But if she were something else, no one would be in a position to know about it.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Montgomery County, Maryland raised the 911 fee on every phone, watch and tablet in the county 157 percent in two years. The public hearing had one item on it and zero speakers. Nobody knew. That is the whole story. Part one of a new series. bit.ly/3U7hj76
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Nobody Checked
Have you ever really looked at your phone bill? The people who send it hope you don’t. I looked at mine in July and could not account for $163.34 of it.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Using state power to shame a reporter's family is not political strategy, nor is it "fighting back." It is the posture of a weak, insecure apparatus that knows it cannot win on substance. Real authority faces the press; cowards go after the kids.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The White House response contained no facts, no policy defense, and no intellectual argument. Instead, the administration deployed official state channels to conduct a low-rent personal attack on a reporter's family.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Strip away the political theater and look at the operational reality: A journalist asked a public official to respond to a public statement made by a sitting U.S. Senator — routine, baseline press scrutiny.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
When the official communications apparatus of the United States government targets a press correspondent by declaring that her minor children will be "sickened and embarrassed" by her, it isn't demonstrating power. It is broadcasting frantic, uncontrolled weakness.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
The weaponization of children by an official White House account isn't just a moral collapse — it is a complete, public degradation of institutional authority. 🧵
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
If a single meme causes a gubernatorial communications team to lose its discipline and punch down, the issue isn't the critique — it's the insecurity behind the response.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
When a sitting governor's press office spends state time pulling archived election data to trade personal swipes with private citizens on the internet, it proves the exact point the original GIF was making: thin-skinned defensiveness.
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Ethan Wechtaluk @ewechtaluk.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
3. Instead of letting a minor comment with virtually zero views fade into the void, the Governor's press office takes the bait, digs up primary election spreadsheets, and replies with my 5.5% vote total from MD-06 to try to land a personal dunk.
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