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Oak

@liveoaklaurels.bsky.social
872 followers 1.7K following 402 posts

What do you believe? Why do you believe it? What does that encourage you to do or not do? Writer, Editor, Historian, Folklorist. Currently a Floridian, but that may change. Always an American.

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Reposted by Oak
Phillips OBrien @phillipspobrien.bsky.social · 3h
Look, Zelensky signalling that the US has cut off all warning of Russian missile attacks on Ukraine.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 1h
Look at the shabby state and increasingly authoritarian trajectory of the country and ask yourself if we can endure 2 more years of a lawless Trump administration wreaking havoc with no check from Congress, then vote accordingly. This is not the time for a protest vote or purity politics.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 4h
SUSAN COLLINS: My heart goes out to the family of the man who was shot in Biddeford. My Duran Guerrero TROY JACKSON: Well the man's name was Johan Sebastián Guerrero. That was his name.
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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 5h
Watch this clip from the Elon Musk documentary that he’s losing his mind over. I need to know what y’all think.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 4h
We scoured social media, court records and local stories for instances of immigration agents holding citizens against their will. The administration doesn’t track these cases. So we have. We’re sharing our database with you.
projects.propublica.org
More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown — ProPublica
The government doesn’t track how often immigration officers detain U.S. citizens. So ProPublica did. We’ve found more than 500 Americans who were held against their will during this Trump administrati...
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Ricky Davila @therickydavila.bsky.social · 6h
Fascist republicans are in full panic after accidentally spending money on propaganda ads in support of lifelong fraud and bribery criminal Susan Collins in Portland, Oregon instead of Portland, Maine. I love this for them. Idiots.
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 5h
Ossoff: "You stand here and say you're gonna be a champion for Black Georgians when you elevate to positions of leadership in your political organization people with ties to the Ku Klux Klan."
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Kate from Kharkiv @kateinkharkiv.bsky.social · 4h
Rostov oil terminal is booming 🔥 The curious thing is that there were no new attacks reported, it's been on fire for a few days, and a new reservoir exploded tonight.
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Grudgie the Wail @grudgie.bsky.social · 4h
What I like about what he does is demand they disavow Nazism and refuses to let them dodge it. Republicans won’t denounce it but they also won’t fully support it
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Charlie Warzel @cwarzel.bsky.social · 4h
Get that these guys think that messaging to the permanent underclass is unimportant. But saying you're building the equivalent of a planned natural disaster & scolding people to stock up because you won't stop building it. Man. They better hope they're right about the chaos or it'll be pitchfork szn
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StrictlyChristo 🇺🇦🌻 @strictlychristo.bsky.social · 4h
Katie Zacharia's only qualifications to be Trump's press secretary seem to be her blind loyalty to him and her unbridled devotion to lying. She claims to be a lawyer...in China? But you have to be a citizen to take the bar in China and US state bar exams cannot be administered in China.
scmp.com
New Trump press secretary says she passed bar exam in China, raising eyebrows
Katie Zacharia worked at a Beijing law firm and calls herself a lawyer, but reporters found no record of her admission to practise in the US.
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Dom Ervolina @dominicervolina.com · 4h
Holy shit, it's almost like some drunk podcaster is in charge of the FBI
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 3h
Like a dumbass, I wrote a thread when I should have written a blog. Anyway, here it is in blog form. If you think others would benefit from a deeper dive on this topic, please repost. bsky.app/profile/donm...
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
The DOGE people were idiots unable to think about second order effects. Lets use IRS data to round up immigrants! That data comes from immigrants who voluntarily pay about $66 billion a year taxes. What happens to the deficit when they are too scared to pay taxes? budgetlab.yale.edu/research/pot...
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
6. DOGE lied and the government lied to the press and in court about what was going when it came to the stealing of data (l). As @vanessawilliamson.bsky.social wrote in her review of the state of the IRS, more than 90% of the data was improperly shared. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/things-rea...
He was too busy doing his job to notice when, on 11 February 2026, the Washington Post reported that the IRS had shared with the Department of Homeland Security the tax data of 47,000 undocumented workers. On the heels of the Post’s scoop, a federal judge hearing a case on the subject summoned the IRS lawyers who had previously sworn that the agency had rebuffed the DHS demands. Under questioning, the lawyers confessed that the agency had lied to the court and that it had in fact shared the data. “The IRS violated the [Internal Revenue Code] approximately 42,695 times by disclosing last known taxpayer addresses to Ice,” the judge wrote in her opinion.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
5. At the time what we could see from the outside is that a lot of IRS career leaders were resigning, with stories that they were resisting the DOGE press to illegally grab data because they did not want to be blamed. What I wrote at the time was on the left. Lewis gives the insider perspective.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
4. DOGE officials were told datasharing under certain conditions was illegal. The most obvious is IRS data. Need an act of Congress to share. They did not care.
Everyone in the agency knew that its data was valuable. That was the reason for the strict laws that prevented it from being exploited for profit or political gain. “He said this in a way that he expected everyone to clap when he was done,” said Kathleen.

“No one said a word.” The people around the table – a group that included a woman who had worked at the IRS for 54 years, or 53 years and 50 weeks longer than Gavin Kliger – looked down, or away. Kathleen felt embarrassed for Gavin Kliger. But now it was clear what the meeting was about. Gavin wanted, in his words, “to explore how we can share our data with other agencies”.

Interestingly, he never once mentioned Ice or DHS. Instead, that week, he sought to share data with himself, by trying to access files detailing IRS contracts with outside consultants that also contained taxpayer information. Kathleen denied him access.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
3. DOGE made false claims about employee performance in order to fire them, but did not want to put their names to these emails. So they would coerce civil servants into doing so. If the civil servants refused, they were fired. (Not just DOGE, other Trump appointees like Kash Patel did this).
The revealing moments in the civil service were lonelier. They occurred inside people’s hearts and minds, and seldom leaked to the press. After his arrival at the IRS, one of Gavin Kliger’s first acts had been to demand that the agency fire its 6,700 probationary workers, who had yet to be granted civil service protection. By law they could be fired only for poor performance. Gavin had asked Traci DiMartini, in her capacity as head of human resources, to agree to put her name on an email to the mostly young employees telling them that they had failed at their jobs. The Doge people played this trick often. They’d use or try to use civil servants as a kind of ventriloquist dummy so that they, the Doge workers, could keep their names off official documents. But Traci took one look at the email, saw it was plainly a lie, and refused to have anything to do with it. The price of that single act of resistance was her job. Gavin didn’t have the authority to fire Traci, but his new acting commissioner did. “He asked Melanie to fire Traci, and Melanie did it,” said Kathleen.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
Lewis also claims the footsoldiers had a certain type: white, middleclass, desperate to have Elon's attention. Many had been rejected from elite institutions and had a chip on their shoulder and enjoyed their sense of power over people who knew much more than they did.
The people who rallied to the cause and felt qualified to execute Elon Musk’s vision for the federal government shared certain qualities. They were mostly young white males. They were mostly from upper-middle-class or rich families. Most knew or pretended to know how to program a computer. Not all of them, but enough of them for there to be a pattern, had been rejected from the most selective colleges and universities and ended up feeling they’d been screwed by the admissions process. They landed at Penn instead of Princeton, or the University of Nebraska instead of Harvard, with a grievance that added to the foundation of their politics. They thought of themselves as the smartest people in the room and couldn’t understand why the rest of the room didn’t simply stand up and cheer. In Washington they borrowed from Elon Musk their status and sense of superiority. They also seemed to share his pleasure in the idea of people being afraid of them.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
Excerpts from Michael Lewis on DOGE (Guardian article). 1. Gavin Kliger, white nationalist, refused to shake hands with the Black IRS staffer who briefed him on privacy issues. Or pay attention. Kliger now has a defense start-up valued at 1.4B thanks to DOGE. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
Phyllis, who loved working for Kathleen and saw falling on hand grenades as part of her job, never told her how this one had felt. She knew Gavin had expressed enthusiasm for white nationalists, and he likely knew that she knew. She tried to break the ice by walking in with her hand extended; Gavin stared at it and declined to shake it, though he had shaken the hands of the white men who had offered them. “He was kind of cool towards me,” said Phyllis. Before she could even start the briefing, he said, You know, I’ve heard these rules before at other agencies. Yes, she said, but these rules are different, because no other agency is governed by this privacy law, and this law can get you thrown in jail very quickly. As she walked him through the basics – how you can’t use your personal phone for business, how if you happen to so much as glimpse a form 1040 with someone’s name on it you must avert your eyes – Gavin played on his phone. “He’s multitasking right in front of me, typing and texting,” said Phyllis. “It was, here’s a routine that I must endure.”
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Oak @liveoaklaurels.bsky.social · 2h
Full disclosure: I used to teach at Penn. This type is very familiar to me.
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Oak @liveoaklaurels.bsky.social · 2h
How much does this country have to suffer before we deal with the problem of White Males' Resentment? For those not old enough to remember: even back when "White Men Ran the World," it wasn't these white men. Rejected by top schools & top companies. Now they blame "DEI" & unfair systems. Losers all.
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
If you recognize Kliger's name, it is probably in this context: he manually shut down life-saving aid from USAID. In between his DOGE work and starting his defense start-up he was appointed to the DOD as - brace yourselves - chief data officer. bsky.app/profile/donm...
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Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social · 8h
The way in which DOGE fucked up the IRS - *massive leadership turnover *1 in 4 employees gone, more in tax enforcement *loss in trust of the public *employees fearful of reporting wrongdoing - all of that remains, increasing deficits & reducing performance. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/things-rea...
donmoynihan.substack.com
Things Really Are Getting Worse at IRS
Data show damage to service quality and taxpayer privacy in a more politicized agency
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Mike Luckovich @mluckovich.bsky.social · 10h
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Spencer Ackerman @attackerman.bsky.social · 12h
NEW: The US theft of Venezuelan oil resources appears to bring the Pentagon its own source of money — something that should be understood as another milestone in the collapse of constitutional government.
forever-wars.com
The Dawn Of The Self-Funding Pentagon
It's not like the military is cash-starved from Congress. But it looks a lot like it's going to make money off Venezuelan oil
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Matt Shuham @mattshuham.bsky.social · 13h
Donald Trump has asserted the right to jail millions of people who've never been charged with a crime, without bond, for the duration of their immigration proceedings, which can take years to resolve. One circuit judge said Japanese internment was "limited in scope in comparison." Will SCOTUS agree?
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Benjamin Dreyer @bcdreyer.social · 13h
Back when I still had some control over these things, I pushed back, successfully, against the idea that notes take up too much space in a print book and should be accessed elsewhere. (Also, I don't know why you'd inflict a QR code when you could simply provide a URL...?)
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Oak @liveoaklaurels.bsky.social · 13h
Odds are good that book will outlast that website and the notes will never be available again.
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 12/10/2026
"The amount of fuel Russia could export is too small, the impact on pricing too slight, the narrative too late to shape electoral outcomes: This looks, instead, like something very different: an abrupt, Hail Mary attempt to force Ukraine to surrender" www.theatlantic.com/idea/2026/10...
theatlantic.com
Trump’s Message to Ukraine Is Now Crystal Clear
The president’s actions over the past 72 hours look like an effort to force Kyiv to surrender.
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former dog @warybear.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
“They’re assimilated when I stop being racist about them” is accidentally a lot closer to honesty than they usually get
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Angie Nixon @angieforfl.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I don’t go high when they go low. I get LOUD. Because the soul and humanity of this country are at stake. /end
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Angie Nixon @angieforfl.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Wanting lower property insurance and healthcare for everyday families isn't un-American; it’s what working people deserve. They can take their tech-bro cash and their weird, intrusive agenda somewhere else, because I'm not going any damn place. /3
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Angie Nixon @angieforfl.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I don't wanna COUCH my words here: I know JD Vance, his eyeliner, and absent Ashley Moody are used to running away from people when things get tough because they care more about themselves and their billionaire buddies than the people they represent. But this is my home. /1
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Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Rufo has his fingers in all of ugliest MAGA propaganda campaigns — DEI, CRT, Somali daycare fraud, "groomers," Haitians stealing & eating pets... — and now "The Indian Question"
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 09/10/2026
American "free speech defenders" pressure other people not to exercise their right to free speech www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...
theguardian.com
EU drops sponsorship of disinformation conference at Trump officials’ request
Lithuania and Canada were also pressured to withdraw, and days before #Disinfo2026, logos were wiped off website
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Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu · 08/10/2026
The Trump administration wants to lift sanctions on a Russian company to benefit mostly Middle Eastern investors (who also happen to be Trump family business partners) www.nytimes.com/2026/10/08/w...
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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
I just got back from the Middle East. What I saw made clear that Trump and Hegseth aren’t telling the American people the full story about the cost and damage of this war. Here are my four biggest takeaways.
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Adam Rogers @jetjocko.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Again I know I’m falling for bait here, but there’s a whole speech chiseled into the side of the Lincoln Memorial about how wrong this is.
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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Like my friend @rokhanna.bsky.social says here, Congress has a constitutional right to assess the damage of the Iran War. Denying a Member of Congress even a briefing with military officials is a full blown cover up.
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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
This level of naked, open corruption is unprecedented in our history.
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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
How do I know Hegseth’s order to deny access to bases to members of Congress is about a cover up, not about safety? Because I asked for a military briefing at the embassy as a substitute and was told the policy prohibited military leaders in the region from even talking to me.
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Roger Parloff @rparloff.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Trump et al. switch theories for delaying 11th Cir appeal seeking release of Jack Smith’s Vol 2. Tho key atty trial conflicts have vanished, they say that briefing a new motion by former FBI agents, raising overlapping issues, will overtax their attys. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...
Further, since Defendants-Appellees filed their motion on October 5,
an additional development has reinforced the need for a continuance.
On
October 7, current and former Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") agents
involved in the underlying criminal investigation that led to these proceedings
filed a new motion to intervene in the District Court, seeking permission to
both disclose and publicly discuss non-public information covered by the
District Court's February 23, 2026, Order prohibiting the release of Volume II.
That motion raises significant issues overlapping with arguments made in these
appeals, including those concerning the availability of intervention in criminal
proceedings and Article III standing. Defendants-Appellees must now respond to that motion by October 21, with further briefing scheduled through October 28, just days before the currently scheduled November 2 oral argument.
Counsel thus face the unjust prospect of simultaneously litigating substantially
overlapping issues in two courts, without the opportunity to assess the District
Court's treatment of the newly raised matters.
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Ricky Davila @therickydavila.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
I’m so fucking tired of seeing weak men attacking, demeaning, hurting and disrespecting women.
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Cas Mudde @casmudde.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Here is a link to the article:
tandfonline.com
Cleavage politics in ordinary reasoning: How common sense divides
This study explores how the ideological divide between the radical right and liberal left is anchored in the common sense reasoning of ordinary citizens. Across Western Europe, cleavage research ha...
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Eric Lipton NYT @ericlipton.nytimes.com · 08/10/2026
This story follows up on piece we published over the weekend detailing the role that Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have played in negotiating this multibillion-deal--with Russia even though some of the deal investors are family business partners. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/03/u...
nytimes.com
U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies (Gift Article)
President Vladimir V. Putin brought up a sale of Russian energy assets with President Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, pushing a deal that raises new questions about conflicts of inter...
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Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com · 13/10/2026
LIKE THE NEW SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK, BUT FOR GROWNUPS Billionaires bankroll politicians. Senators confirm Supreme Court justices who serve for life. Roe overturned. Voting rights weakened. Presidential power expanded. This didn’t happen by accident. Elections have consequences & we’re living with them.
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Marc Elias @marcelias.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
My Latest: He hates that I won’t be intimidated. He hates that I speak out without fear. Most of all, he hates that I win. www.democracydocket.com/opinion/trum...
democracydocket.com
Trump hates me personally. Now he’s taking it to the Supreme Court
When I tell people that Donald Trump hates me, they often assume I mean it in a generic sense — that he hates Democrats and people who fight him in court. No, I correct them: he hates me personally.
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Schooley @schooley.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
Sherrod Brown should put up an ad that says, "Trump hates my ass."
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Oak @liveoaklaurels.bsky.social · 13/10/2026
All of those words were chosen by The Guardian, not Toksvig. A "rival" and "something better" do not mean "destroy the current one." There are other wikis or similar out there that have not ended Wikipedia. The one about "better intentions" appears to have been directed to Grokipedia, not Wikipedia.
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