Firthermor

Hi! I am new around here. Sometime doomscroller. Sometime hopescroller. Sometime serendipitous learnscroller. First time BlueSky poster. It may look dark now, but with our work & what we build can reconstruct our democracy for the better. Succession happens, sometimes with a bit of engineering.

Send this to all your family outside DC who assume it’s just peachy. Seen this repeated over and over with so many people, including ones who aren’t even specialized or former Feds/contractors.

If they lose power, expect Republicans in several states to strip powers from incoming Democrats, pass voting restrictions, and new gerrymanders. They did it after losing governors races in NC in 2016 and 2024, MI and WI in 2018, and KY in 2019. They preemptively did it ahead of losing IA this year

Well played

I know there's a lot going on but I feel it should probably be more of an above-the-fold story that members of Congress released a thoroughly documented report directly accusing the president of the United States of being a serial rapist.

Homepage of the @miamiherald.com with story by @jkbjournalist.bsky.social that mentions rape in the first paragraph. See, it's not so fucking hard. www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-...

Wildlife photography is almost always a representation of the idyllic. Today, I capture this decent image of a Hairy Woodpecker - but if you look at my photo roll you can see that any 'decent shot' may be no more than 1 in 50! #birds #wildlifephotography

BREAKING: Judge Reyes issues a preliminary injunction in the East Potomac Golf Course case, blocking more tree removal and requiring 10-day notice "before making any irreparable modification to any forms or features" of the park. Background: www.lawdork.com/p/golf-argum...

Beyond disgusted by even more rape allegations against the President of the United States. "In total, more than 25 different women...have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct." Report w/ new details: democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

BREAKING: Judge Reyes has issued a preliminary injunction over the golf course and begins with this: "Rarely, if ever, has the United States Department of Justice urged a federal court not to believe the sitting President." ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show...

Another banger from @vermontgmg.bsky.social. The only solution will be expropriating all the ill-gotten gains secured by the Trump Crime Family & all their hangers-on (the Witkoffs, the Lutnicks, the Kushners), and criminal indictments, convictions & prison. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/trump-s-ty...

We have an interest in preserving democracy worldwide. We got off track fighting wars to export democracy, but wanting democracies to flourish in other countries is entirely reasonable.

It's well-documented that the president maintained a years-long friendship with the world's most notorious child sex trafficker. It might strike you as odd there aren't direct allegations of Trump engaging in child sex trafficking.. except there are. There are SO MANY. They just never get reported!

10 years ago today, Trump’s DC hotel opened. It taught him people will pay a sitting president, and there will be no repercussions. Want to understand the second term’s corruption? Start with the hotel:

The extent to which Trump regime officials behaved badly in 2025 when they imagined permanent majorities & pardons for corruption is still not widely appreciated by all Americans. House impeachment investigations of Cabinet officials will both inform people who tuned out & inevitably lead to Trump.

The US is not about to have a free and fair election. The state has put its thumb on the scale to favor the ruling party in multiple ways. It's a mostly free, somewhat unfair election. But still one where the ruling party can be overwhelmed by numbers. Hence the term "competitive authoritarianism."

Want to put the brakes on this runaway presidency? Here's a to-do list. Get the details in our new @brennancenter.org report: www.brennancenter.org/our-work/pol...

NEW: At least 18 voting centers in Alaska Native communities have not opened despite early voting having already started in the state last week. “There is no legal excuse for the failure to open these sites,” one state senator wrote to the Alaska elections chief.

Arizona Democrats may be on the verge of passing sweeping expansions to voting access if they win. Arizona Republicans have relentlessly tried to suppress voters, leading to the Supreme Court’s 2021 Brnovich ruling where Alito gutted Voting Rights Act section 2 protections for voting access

Ex-DOGE staffers break into Anthropic. (fixed it)

Leaders of the No Kings movement are already gearing up for the next major grassroots campaign: Making sure congressional Democrats don’t wimp out. My first piece at @newrepublic.com! (Reposted to update link card) newrepublic.com/article/2168...

Eric Lipton. below, has led an effort over the past two years to document the destruction of environmental protections under Trump II. It has gone for the most part unnoticed compared to, well, many other things, probably because it’s happening far from the Oval Office. But it’s very important.

“The Department of Justice is putting its formidable thumb on next week’s elections in a way that seems clearly intended to call into question the legitimacy of any result that is especially unfavorable to Republicans—before those results have even come in.” Me on DOJ’s California and Alaska suits:

I’m not a political journalist, so was gladly surprised at the community I found here last night. To Americans anxious about the upcoming elections, a key thing we learned in Brazil that might help you: DO NOT engage with the far-right online. Don’t share rage bait. Amplify your people. Ignore them.

Lula is to my left. Magyar is to my right. And I don’t care in the slightest, because they are the candidates of democracy against autocracy.

Huge event. Failed Jared Kushner/Trump luxury hotel project planned for Belgrade played a role in starting expanded protests against Vucic.

The election results in Brazil and Serbia suggest the polling error at the moment understates the anti-authoritarian sentiment around the globe.

THREAD 1: The Nuclear Option. Using Presidential Power to Wipe Out EPA Toxics Rules For decades now, Clean Air Act has allowed the president to issue a so-called presidential exemption to at least temporarily suspect a rule intended to protect public health/air quality. I found this from 1973

We saw reports of "machines switching votes" in TN & TX. These are typically real issues — a calibration problem w/ older touchscreen machines — but not intentional efforts to rig the vote. Always good for voters to check that their vote is being recorded correctly. www.cip.uw.edu/2026/10/22/e...

Our research team is doing real-time coverage of emerging news and rumors related to election integrity. We put out several outputs this week. Several of the rumors we covered are still percolating. Some of the stories may become seeds for conspiracy theories later in the cycle. Some highlights...

Here are my thoughts on the oral argument: electionlawblog.org/2026/ninth-c...

Bolsonaro-friendly mayors appear to be sabotaging public transport on Election Day. Buses aren’t running in Lula-friendly areas, flights and ferries mysteriously canceled. Traffic lights have gone out and people’s power cut in Salvador, indigenous people’s travel restricted

Here’s the editor of the Intercept Brazil as Lula tells the press that “something abominable is happening”

In a little-noticed webpage update, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced a plan to decommission its online web archive at the end of the year, a move that would wipe tens of thousands of publicly available environmental resources from the web.

So in a huge surprise to absolutely no one, it turns out that NIH director Jay Bhattacharya's new journal based on the premise of letting his friends and only his friends publish essentially whatever they want is full of crackpot nonsense from retired cranks.

Small-dollar donations to Republican candidates are just apocalyptic. Selected examples here. Our forecasting research found in-state individual contributions are a strong predictor of results. Way stronger than PAC spending! votehub.com/2026/10/24/2...

New w @pamherd.bsky.social: Trump's Bribe State is a mix of empty promises and real benefits. But watch how automation is used: to buy votes, or allow billionaires to buy off dissent via Trump accounts, even as Trump has made automation harder for Mediciad. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/automating...

Early this year, I visited Ingram, a TX town of ~1,900, to check out a tip. The area was starting to recover from its worst flood in a century. But as Latino workers drove to jobsites to help rebuild, the tipster said, a cop in a black Dodge Charger kept stopping them ... 🧵

Next up in my occasional series: "Can it swim?" BATS!🦇🏊 As video captured by Rob Mackereth (@mack2526 on IG) in the Lake District, England shows, bats can indeed swim. In fact, they're pretty good little swimmers. But there's an asterisk. Also, standard disclaimer: do not handle downed bats!

@gabrielzucman.bsky.social: So let met get that straight: paying a wealth tax is impossible (“billionaires have no liquidity”, “it would be taxing unrealized gains”, “their wealth is virtual”) but one man paying half a billion to influence elections is possible. Did I understand well?

Building on @tbonier.bsky.social's terrific analysis below it is pretty clear now we are seeing a national surge of blacks, young people, and Hispanics in the early vote across the country (all data via TargetEarly):

The generality principle of the Rule of Law is its most essential concept. A class of people outside criminal law is incompatible with a law-based society.

THREAD. I've been feeling bad that Jim (tomcox.substack.com/p/jim-an-ins...) & Roscoe (tomcox.substack.com/p/at-home-wi...) have had all the attention recently so I wanted to say a bit about our other cat, Professor Charles Cardigan, who is also an uncompromising individual & fabulous companion...

Here's the NYT story about how Trump is inviting Russia into AK to drill for oil. Literally selling out Alaska to Russia. www.ft.com/content/e9cf...

To folks who follow me on Bluesky & appreciate the journalism I do. Can you please read the EPA story and post on social media platforms if you are so moved. This kind of work is important. But it only matters if people read it and engage with it. Here's the link. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/24/c...

I have not yet read the majority opinion in full, but an unstated principle here is, IMO: if a person can be indefinitely detained on the allegation that they are in the country unlawfully, then a CITIZEN can be indefinitely on the erroneous allegation that they’re an alien

The Andromeda Galaxy, low in the sky over New South Wales, Australia.

That it'll fail because they lack sufficient consolidation and centralized control does not make it trivial that the president of the United States is trying to steal elections and produce an illegitimate sham Congress. It is open rebellion against the Constitution and morally tantamount to treason.