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Friday, September 25, 2026

A drastically diminished Justice Department workforce is struggling to keep up with its civil side caseloads, according to documents obtained by The Hill and NewsNation. A series of charts, apparently inadvertently shared and then recalled, show how the number of attorneys within the civil division has plummeted under the Trump administration.


In a single day in January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent more money than it had on any other day in either of President Trump's terms, federal spending records show. The agency advanced billions to Chicago Title Insurance in escrow to acquire detention facilities, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson. Over the next two months, ICE used $1.07 billion of the funds to purchase 11 warehouses it planned to convert to detention megacenters, seven of which the agency now plans to sell.


More than 40% of Americans have a positive image of socialism, a new Gallup poll released Wednesday said. The concept now ranks ahead of big business in opinions of the five economic concepts measured by Gallup. read more


Vendors rolling out AI have an "incentive to deny as many claims as possible."


The 30-second ad, apparently paid for by U.S. tax dollars, features photos and videos of Trump, the American flag and military aircraft. read more


Comments

Tangentially related ...

Five Indianapolis officers charged following The Post's reporting on Flock misuse
www.msn.com

... Prosecutors in Marion County, Indiana, criminally charged five Indianapolis police officers Wednesday, accusing them of misusing their access to Flock license-plate-reader cameras. The action comes weeks after outreach from The Washington Post highlighted thousands of questionable Flock searches, leading the city to suspend one officer and conduct an audit of its system. ...

The charges in Indianapolis came nearly seven weeks after The Post asked the city about potentially suspicious activity from one of its officers. Using publicly available information, The Post found that Rogers, one of the officers charged Wednesday, appeared to have relied on Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife and two close personal acquaintances, searching the plates 3,759 times over a 10-month period -- an average of about 12 lookups per day.

At the time, Police Chief Tanya Terry said she suspended one officer while the department conducted an investigation into possible misuse and a systemwide audit of the city's 301-camera Flock system.

That audit led to the discovery of more widespread abuse, Mears said Wednesday. ...


@#10

'Total delusions': GOP senator blasted for bizarre claim colleagues 'didn't legally win' (July 2026)
www.rawstory.com

... "It's a low bar these days, to be sure," wrote sports reporter Mike Lupica. "But Tuberville doesn't sound like someone who coached football. He sounds like someone who played it without a helmet." ...


More from the article ...

... Peggy Dixon is a former environmental tester turned whistleblower with the Government Accountability Project.

She worked on the cleanup of the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train wreck. Twenty of the affected train cars contained materials the Environmental Protection Agency deemed hazardous, including vinyl chloride, ethylene glycol, ethylhexyl acrylate, butyl acrylate and isobutylene.

Now, in the affidavit, Dixon says the company that hired her was Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (now known as Onterris).

Norfolk Southern contracted the company, and Dixon writes they both worked to hide how bad the contamination really was.

"That was a turning point for me. I realized this wasn't about public safety -- it was about liability," Dixon said. She was part of the response teams in the weeks after the derailment, in the excavation work in 2024 and last year's work to close the site.

According to the affidavit, Dixon said project managers emphasized to field staff they needed "zeroes" " results indicating things were safe -- or they would be presumed incompetent and sent home.

The former tester also said EPA and Ohio agencies went along with it.

"These actions, which I personally observed, were part of a coordinated effort by government and corporate entities to conceal the true environmental and public health impacts of the derailment and open burn of five vinyl chloride train cars," Dixon said.

Dixon worked with Onterris for five years as a rapid responder and environmental scientist with degrees in biology and chemistry plus certifications in rail safety and hazardous waste response, and she passed a federal background check, according to the affidavit.

Norfolk Southern, the EPA and Onterris have not responded to requests for comment as of publishing. ...



Ex-Energy chief warns that diesel export ban is a 'terrible investment signal' to send to industry
www.foxbusiness.com

... Former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette joins 'Varney & Co.' to discusses President Donald Trump weighing a diesel export ban and California electricity pricing in 2025.

Former Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette joins 'Varney & Co.' to break down the consequences of a potential U.S. ban on diesel exports. Brouillette argues that such a move would send a negative signal to energy investors. He also discusses data highlighting California electricity prices from 2025. ...


@#34 ... No one is denying anyone the right to vote. ...

Oh, sometimes your trolling alias says the funniest things.

The GOP is actively trying to deny the right to vote of those who might tend to vote against them.

To wit ...

U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down North Carolina's Voter ID Law (2016)
www.npr.org

...The appeals court noted that the North Carolina Legislature "requested data on the use, by race, of a number of voting practices" -- then, data in hand, "enacted legislation that restricted voting and registration in five different ways, all of which disproportionately affected African Americans."

The changes to the voting process "target African Americans with almost surgical precision," the circuit court wrote, and "impose cures for problems that did not exist."

The appeals court suggested that the motivation was fundamentally political -- a Republican legislature attempting to secure its power by blocking votes from a population likely to vote for Democrats....

[emphasis mine]


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