dkueper.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Experts at Harvard's Kennedy School describe the reckless, slashing cuts imposed by DOGE as more about retribution than efficiency. As Professor Linda Bilmes says, "By focusing on destruction rather than construction, Musk is making it much harder for DOGE to produce sustainable efficiency gains."

submitted 3 hours ago • 0 comments

Ukraine was warned it faced an imminent shutdown of Elon Musk’s vital Starlink satellite internet system unless it signed the extortion deal on rare earth minerals, Reuters reports.

submitted 15 hours ago • 226 comments

CSPAN Caller from West Virginia: I’m a diabetic and I’m on Medicare. When Biden was in there, my insulin was $6 for a 28 day supply. I just went to CVS, it went back up to $80…

submitted 21 hours ago • 884 comments

More Americans say Trump is a dictator than say Zelensky is

submitted 1 day ago • 71 comments

New this am from @andrewperez.bsky.social @timdickinson.bsky.social and me for @rollingstone.com It’s….. yea. www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

submitted 1 day ago • 14 comments

Add up the claimed savings on the DOGE website and (right now )you get $7.19b from contract savings, and $0.14b from real estate, for a total of $7.3b, or $21.47 per American. Trump is talking about giving a "DOGE dividend" of 20% of these savings. Enjoy your $4.29.

submitted 1 day ago • 32 comments

I’m not sure the world has seen a genuine supervillain until 2025. Of course there’ve been countless monsters: hitler, Stalin, pol pot. But a real life figure who fits the Gotham/Metropolis model. Plutocrat bigwig who is actually deeply evil & wants to run the world for cartoonishly stupid reasons.

submitted 1 day ago • 534 comments

Extraordinary story the Wall Street Journal. X is threatening advertisers that if they don’t spend more, Elon Musk will use his influence in government to block company mergers. That’s extortion.

submitted 1 day ago • 177 comments

The City of Boston is leading 40+ mayors, cities, and counties in an amicus brief against the Trump Administration's drastic and illegal cuts to federal research funding—cuts that will lead to immediate job losses nationwide.

submitted 1 day ago • 22 comments

The “free speech absolutist” owner of X doesn’t like the output of the Community Notes program he has previously championed, so he puts his massive thumb on that scale to ensure it’s labels align with his twisted view of reality.

submitted 1 day ago • 46 comments

If the justice system is gutted, and replaced by a regime where cronyism makes adherence to laws optional, who will want to hire skilled lawyers trained to counsel clients on complying with the law? That's a question lawyers thinking about joining Trump's attack on the rule of law should be asking.

submitted 1 day ago • 64 comments

Americans overwhelmingly want Trump to follow court rulings if they conclude he has overstepped legal bounds. From a new WaPo survey: www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

submitted 2 days ago • 26 comments

This is how you know Patel has the votes. Collins would never be a deciding vote to sink one of Trump’s nominees.

submitted 2 days ago • 312 comments

Trump at +1.6 approval now as new CNN and Washington Post polls find Trump 5 and 8 points underwater Lower than any president at this point in their term, excluding Trump's first term

submitted 2 days ago • 12 comments

“I will use every tool at my disposal to protect this country from Trump. I will litigate to defend voting rights until there are no cases left to bring. I will speak out against authoritarianism until my last breath. “I will not back down. I will not bow or scrape. I will never obey.”

submitted 2 days ago • 383 comments

Today is it—Kash Patel is dangerous & unqualified to to be FBI Director! Call: Sen. Todd Young of Indiana (202) 224-5623 Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska (202) 224-6665 Sen. Susan Collins of Maine (202) 224-2523 Sen. John Curtis of Utah (202) 224-5251 Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota (202) 224-5842

submitted 2 days ago • 51 comments

How incompetent is Muskrat and DOGE? They just fired the newly hired future director of the NIH center for Alzheimer’s research just because she was still in her probationary period.

submitted 2 days ago • 5 comments

Scoop --> Trump-Musk cuts just resulted in the firing of numerous top researchers at NIH's center for combating Alzheimer's, sources tell me. They predict big setbacks to fighting dementias. This cause was once championed by Republicans. Details here: newrepublic.com/article/1917...

submitted 2 days ago • 176 comments

My cab driver in Kyiv was terrified by Trump's declaration that Ukraine was to blame for Russia's invasion. But he also said that if his country falls, he couldn't blame US voters, given that they never saw Kamala Harris at a UFC fight or on the Joe Rogan Experience.

submitted 3 days ago • 25 comments

An unconscionable post from Donald Trump about Zelenskyy, in which he calls him a "dictator" and threatens Ukraine's existence.

submitted 3 days ago • 1168 comments

Tastes like hypocrisy www.politico.com/live-updates...

submitted 3 days ago • 139 comments

Here’s a small, easy thing Dem communicators can do: when stories like this break, call the reporters and a) ask to be contacted going forward on stories within their jurisdiction, b) give them a blistering statement, c) blast it out on all channels. www.nbcnews.com/politics/dog...

submitted 3 days ago • 23 comments

How much is Congress cutting from their $6.5 billion/year budget? Don’t you think congress can operate on say, maybe, $5 Billion? And each congressman has 18 staff, they could operate on say, 14? What about the White House?

submitted 3 days ago • 1469 comments

Jesus christ, was I giving him ideas?

submitted 3 days ago • 460 comments

They screwed this all up.

submitted 3 days ago • 43 comments

It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings & pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.

submitted 3 days ago • 1052 comments

Jim Acosta: I think the AP should consider whether or not to sue the administration… and the rest of the press corps should start seriously considering whether it’s worth sending everyone into the Oval Office, onto Air Force One, or into the briefing room.

submitted 3 days ago • 1886 comments

"In less than a month’s time, Rubio has presided over America’s willing abdication as leader of the free world. It’s a shameful legacy that cuts against everything he once proclaimed to stand for."

submitted 3 days ago • 991 comments

www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

submitted 3 days ago • 37 comments

Still hard to believe we voted for fascism with unemployment at 4.2%, the strongest performing economy in the rich world, & inflation, at 2.4% PCE in Nov 2024, closer to target than 85% of the months since we established it in 2012: bsky.app/profile/mcop.... Verily, a marvel of political economy.

submitted 4 days ago • 39 comments

I can only imagine the reaction from these same quarters if George Soros, who also "doesn't need your money," would have been given 1/1000 of Musk's power under a Democratic president.

submitted 3 days ago • 78 comments

The question isn’t IF climate change is making extreme weather worse—it’s how much. Science can put a number on how many more homes flood, how much more rain a hurricane dumps, how much larger wildfires grow--and how much worse it will get if we don't act now. More by @frediotto.bsky.social & I:

submitted 4 days ago • 11 comments

Not all that familiar with the New Testament, so perhaps some of the good Christians who serve in the Trump administration could explain how this gibes with their deeply held beliefs. Remarkable reporting via a 5-person NYT team. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/w...

submitted 4 days ago • 104 comments

Here are the GOP members of the Senate Finance Committee--consider going to their LOCAL office this week and exhorting them to figure out why DOGE is in your financial records.

submitted 4 days ago • 198 comments

The top criminal prosecutor in the U.S. attorney's office in Washington quit today, citing pressure by the Trump administration to open what she viewed as an improper criminal probe of a federal contract. ca.news.yahoo.com/senior-u-pro...

submitted 4 days ago • 170 comments

1/ I am seeing a lot of comments on the slashing of NIH support along the lines of “universities should just spend their huge endowments.” I’m the last person to cheer on the institutional stratification rising endowments have contributed to. But let me explain why this is not a solution.

submitted 4 days ago • 46 comments

People will die because Trump and Musk are reckless clowns.

submitted 5 days ago • 61 comments

We should start tallying Bobby's body count now. It's going to be big.

submitted 5 days ago • 69 comments

1. OSHA has ordered the digital and physical destruction of 18 publications on workplace safety practices, according to an email obtained by Popular Information. The email says the publications have been removed from the web and tells staff that physical copies should be "disposed of or recycled"

submitted 5 days ago • 483 comments

Elon Musk posted these two tweets on the same day

submitted 5 days ago • 276 comments

“Under what authority are you directing us to do this?” "EO [?]" (sic) www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

submitted 5 days ago • 475 comments

The "large scale social deception" contract Musk is conspiracizing about was: * first awarded under Trump * paid to Reuters' data division, not the newsroom * for researching defenses against deception * not revealed by "DOGE investigations" and was a public record, visible online for many years

submitted 9 days ago • 185 comments

What Trump has done for US farmers so far: -frozen their foreign aid program (and left their food to rot) -encouraged EU to ban their products -frozen legally-owed reimbursements for their energy efficiency upgrades etc. -threatened to deport half their workforce -suppressed research on bird flu

submitted 5 days ago • 190 comments

As a political scientist who studies countries that managed to stop the slide into authoritarianism, I can assure you that refraining from provoking the authoritarian is not how it works. Without further ado, I will now go tear out another chunk of hair.

submitted 6 days ago • 275 comments