It’s now official: An initiative seeking to ban the sale and production of foie gras in D.C. will be on the November ballot. The elections board determined proponents of Initiative 86 collected enough signatures (from 5% of registered voters) to get on the ballot. 🦆

A foie gras ban will officially be on DC's ballot this November. I spoke to two chefs who said they'd continue to serve it even with a ban... washingtonian.com/2026/08/05/f...

Foie Gras Ban Will Be on DC's Ballot This November

A couple chefs say they will serve the fatty liver regardless.

washingtonian.com

Michael Flynn got paid by the Russian government to do anti-American propaganda, got paid by the Turkish government to conspire to break US laws, and now got paid by the US government for helping cover up a hostile anti-American foreign intelligence operation, ensuring perpetrators got away with it.

Mark Jacob@markjacob.bsky.social · 11h ago

🧵🧵🧵 A scandal that hardly anyone knows happened is Trump giving traitor Michael Flynn $1.25 million in your tax money. Flynn, Trump’s 1st national security adviser, pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI but was pardoned by Trump. He sued, alleging "weaponization," and DOJ paid him in March. 1/4🧵

Kansas voters have rejected an amendment that would have thrown out their current system for choosing state supreme court justices and replaced it with judicial elections. This is a huge win for judicial independence 🧵

Note of gratitude to Gillian Brockell for staying on the beat and keeping visible systems behind heartwrenching videos. That purple line is a plane likely full of families being broken, people who'll be lost to others & themselves, even young ICE employees who'll bring their violence home to others.

Gillian Brockell@gillianbrockell.com · 23h ago

Third long-range private jet ICE flight in one day. This one is headed for Africa, possible third-country nationals onboard.

Are these people's brains so rotted that they genuinely do not remember four years ago?

Alexander Glass@alexanderglass.bsky.social · 18h ago

I have one answer.

It's very very strange to be in a situation where Jeanine Pirro is the sane and responsible one!

Greg Sargent@gregsargent.bsky.social · 12h ago

It's funny that Jeanine Pirro brought a box of evidence to WH to persuade Trump. He wants her to consciously *throw out* exculpatory facts and *knowingly* prosecute innocent people. So facts can't persuade him by definition. Me and @barbmcquade.bsky.social on this: newrepublic.com/article/2139...

President Donald Trump’s administration has detained more than 50 spouses and parents of U.S. troops as it rolls back immigration protections for military families, an AP investigation has found.

AP Exclusive: Trump's immigration crackdown has detained more than 50 military spouses and parents

An Associated Press investigation reveals that President Donald Trump’s administration has detained dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops.

bit.ly

My Dad an Air Force Veteran (Vietnam) in 2025: “Once he puts on a uniform it’s too late.”

Adam Kinzinger@adamkinzinger.substack.com · yesterday

This is a man who has a hard time looking in the mirror

In the #DCision26 race for At-Large Councilmember, Independent candidate Jacque Patterson withdrew from the race yesterday; Independent candidate Danielle Urey submitted her 3,000+ signatures today. The other 5 Independent candidates have until 5pm, Aug. 5 to submit their sigs:

In addition to having no experience in immigration, their website shows Ilya Shapiro (!) and disgraced former law prof Joshua Wright (!) as Senior Counsel. I don't think this massive contract was awarded to give immigrant children effective, zealous advocacy. burkegroup.law/our-team/

Our Team - BURKE LAW GROUP, PLLC

Our Team

burkegroup.law

Politico@politico.com · yesterday

26-employee Texas law firm gets $150M to represent 24,000 children in immigration court

the intent is almost 100% to soothe Trumpy tourists and make sure that actual District residents know that the federal government hates and fears them, and to the Trump administration, getting to assuage their own feelings and hurt the feelings of others is priceless

At this point, Thom Tillis has nothing left to lose but his principles, so he made sure to toss them overboard too.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · yesterday

Tillis admits Trump is weaponizing the DOJ during his speech announcing he'll vote for Todd Blanche: "Maybe it's a little bit more intense in this administration than the last one ... I'm going to support Mr Blanche's nomination"

Happy There Will Come Soft Rains Day to all who celebrate. (Especially those in Allendale, California.) short-stories.co/@raybradbury...

the standard thinking amongst university presidents is still that they just need to play along until this is over, and i have heard that firsthand from more than one of them now

I’m much more afraid of people not from here walking around with guns than I am of any of my neighbors the delusion they want me living in is that my neighbors are to be feared

Musicology Duck@musicologyduck.bsky.social · 2d ago

like I cannot emphasize enough how far away I am from federal buildings, the monuments, etc. one man’s delusions means this is what our residential neighborhoods look like

All this exposes MAGA’s real position: Mass deportations must be carried out *even if* they hurt the economy. They should be prioritized *over* economic concerns. The goal is not primarily economic: It’s about ethnically purging the country. newrepublic.com/article/2138...

This blinded tf outta me when coming across Memorial Bridge today. I feel like it needs a warning sign as you come around the corner and approach.

While a thriving scitech ecosystem has indeed been an engine of prosperity for nearly a century, I don't do science to gain a strategic advantage over our enemies, let alone our closest allies. Yet under current policies I'm made to feel like a criminal for collaborating with Canadians. Fuck that.

NEW: ICE is collecting unprecedented quantities of DNA from detainees, including children. Those samples sit, indefinitely, in an FBI database built for criminal investigations. "People are very confused about why their DNA is being tested. I do not think they’re being told what the purpose is."

ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children

Internal documents show ICE's DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.

wired.com

It's absolutely insane we've somehow let the Covid recriminations debate become like "why didn't we reopen in person schools before there was a vaccine" and not "why did none of the trump guys go to jail for stealing PPE from New York hospitals in March 2020"

per this source: the blue ash ICE office said that for some of these Haitian clients, who got ankle monitors on today, the feds were placing them on a 75-mile restriction, but….. the court they’d need to go to is more than 75 miles from Springfield, Ohio.

To the extent that the media is treating this as a horse story: Max Miller is not a some random candidate from Ohio. This is a picture of President Trump speaking at the wedding of Max Miller and Emily Moreno.

Have you heard that there is going to be a Free DC event happening 6 pm Taft bridge actionnetwork.org/events/one-y...

the president of the united states regularly goes on incredibly embarrassing unhinged posting sprees full of AI slop and somehow the entire political system just reacts like the This Is Fine dog

Someone on here (@jamellebouie.net?) noted a while back that dealership assholes like Moreno are a bedrock of MAGA politics and the Democrats would be wise to do whatever they can to drive these moronic middlemen out of business.

Kevin M. Kruse@kevinmkruse.bsky.social · 4d ago

The best part of this rant was millionaire Bernie Moreno telling the world that he was so infuriated sitting on his couch in 2020 watching Anthony Fauci save people's lives that he had no choice but to sell off all his many car dealerships and run for the Senate. #Hero #Saint #Self-Sacrifice

Another datapoint for the fascist radicalisation of institutional pillars of much of the American Right

This is such a bald-faced that all of Fernando Burgos’s pants must’ve turned to ash by now. When I said in my @onthemedia.bsky.social interview that the Trump admin is pretending they don’t know what’s happening, this is what I’m talking about.

Apparently it's not enough for the Trump administration to waste hundreds of millions of dollars to house the soldiers occupying DC communities. They are now also blocking local efforts to meet the needs of homeless folks. www.bizjournals.com/washington/n...

HUD headquarters conversion to homeless services facility scrapped as GSA delists 3 D.C. buildings from sale list - Washington Business Journal

A proposal to convert the HUD headquarters into a massive homeless services facility is dead, while the General Services Administration has delisted several landmark D.C. buildings it had identified f...

bizjournals.com

I am less concerned with *whether* the government would have sought an indictment and much more with *how* the government got an indictment if there was no evidence

Eliot Higgins@eliothiggins.bsky.social · 5d ago

This is a clear example of the DoJ being weaponised against a member of the public to support The Dear Leader's lies. Really shameful behaviour.