Ethan Wechtaluk

500 applications in 13 months and just 12 interviews. I’m not an outlier. In July, the US hiring rate fell to 3.2%. The last time it averaged that was 2010, when unemployment was 9.6%. Employers are posting like it’s normal and hiring like it’s 2010.

Maryland wants you to stockpile water — but not for a storm. Because on Sept. 29 the plant serving 75% of WSSC customers lost power, and nobody has said why. WSSC's release says service was maintained. WSSC told reporters some taps were hours from dry. Records request is out.

As a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting and now a parent to three young daughters — including an elementary schooler and a preschooler — the news from Bend hits with a weight that is hard to put into words. It brings back memories I wish I didn't have, alongside the fear every parent feels. 🧵

It provides future copycats with the exact reward structure they are seeking. When you share their image and identity, even out of anger or grief, you are inadvertently giving them the one thing they wanted: notoriety.

Please starve them of the attention. Blur the face, leave out the name, and instead focus on honoring the victims, supporting the heroic educators and first responders, and protecting our children. We cannot undo the trauma, but we can stop giving these individuals the legacy they crave.

Having lived through mass violence, I am begging everyone to stop sharing the shooter's name and photo. Criminological research and the No Notoriety movement have shown that giving perpetrators widespread media coverage, infamy, and a platform creates a proven contagion effect.

At 6 a.m. today, federal agents raided Rep. Ilhan Omar's home in DC. The alleged crime: immigration forms her late father filled out when she was a child. 🧵

This is from the man who called the Mar-a-Lago search a raid by a weaponized DOJ. His own DOJ then stood up a Weaponization Working Group to settle his scores. He never objected to political prosecution. He objected to being on the receiving end.

If they can send agents to a congresswoman's door over a form she couldn't have read when it was filed, they can come for anyone with a file. That's the point. Fear is the product.

At 6 a.m. today, federal agents raided Rep. Ilhan Omar's home in DC. The alleged crime: immigration forms her late father filled out when she was a child. 🧵

Tom Homan went on Fox last month, confirmed a criminal probe, and wouldn't say whether there's evidence. Now a pre-dawn search, timed to the midterms. DOJ's answer to the election-year norm? The raid wasn't meant to be public.

They fired SEVEN rounds into a car with a 5-year-old in the back seat. At school dismissal. On a street full of kids. DHS wants to talk about his record. Nothing on it is a license to do that. That wasn't an arrest. That was terrorism. ICE got lucky that boy is alive.

Two voters at my address. Four official mailers from the Board of Elections. Our polling place is Clarksburg HS. Half the mailers say otherwise: Germantown and Poolesville. Weeks before a critical election. Don't trust the mailer. Check yours: voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/PollingPlace...

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. 🧵

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?

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.

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.

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.

"Super Intelligence" in the headline. "Unites States" on the signature line.

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.

Hagerstown Rapid Response

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.

Ethan Wechtaluk reposted

@hagerstownrapidresponse.com

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.comWe 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 CenterBefore 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.

Ethan Wechtaluk reposted

Hagerstown Rapid Response

@hagerstownrapidresponse.com

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.comThe 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.

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. 🧵

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.

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.

Ethan Wechtaluk reposted

Erin Reed

@erininthemorning.com

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.

bit.lyWes Moore, TeraWulf, and the Morgantown Opportunity ZoneTeraWulf 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.

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

21 Sept

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.

20 Sept

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.

bit.lyThe State Says These Charges Are WrongI 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.

16 Sept

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

12 Sept

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.

"Privacy" and "confidentiality" aren't being used to protect us — they’re being used to control us. 🧵

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.

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.

"Privacy" and "confidentiality" aren't being used to protect us — they’re being used to control us. 🧵

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.

3 Sept

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. 🧵

3 Sept

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.

bit.lyNobody Is Lying to You About the EconomyIn 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.

3 Sept

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

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. 🧵

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

bit.lyHanover Answered. Rockville Didn’t.Part Two of an ongoing series.

29 Aug

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

27 Aug

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.