Cruelty rivaled only by stupidity

I’m gonna pop

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

Tonight things get a little heated, but no less informative. Tomorrow night, we’ll have a good news roundup that will give you a bit of hope headed into the weekend.

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The stupidity of evil

I try not to treat this newsletter like a personal soapbox, preferring to instead keep it mostly focused on reporting and professional analysis, but if Jeff Bezos can turn the Washington Post into a propaganda machine for his own financial interests and misleading political views, I’m going to indulge every once in a while.

The United States is being run into the ground by the dumbest, nastiest, and most toxic people alive, and the institutions that are supposed to act as countervailing forces are little more than collaborators in our collective decimation.

I spend all day every day talking to federal workers who were either fired or are living under the axe, their entire purpose in life being trashed by some corpulent shitheads, neo-Nazi children, and disingenuous politicians who couldn’t actually care less about anything other than hurting people. Nobody has any idea what’s going on, including their managers, and right now they’re experiencing the underwater quakes that they know will soon trigger the tidal waves that will wipe out so much of our society’s ability to function.

Tens of thousands of people have been fired from what were often modestly paid jobs at the behest of cackling billionaire ketamine addicts. Some are defiant, some want to stay anonymous, and others just don’t know what to do.

I spoke today with a former CDC worker named Carolyn Corrigan who was fired despite the fact that she had ten years of government service, coordinated critical trainings all over the world, and made a modest $67K salary. Now she’s got to apply for SNAP and Medicaid while trying to figure out how to put her kids through college as a single mother.

On Tuesday, I interviewed veteran named Mark Wagstaff, who spent 13 years in the Marines and went to work for the federal government after he was honorably discharged in 2018. He was just fired from a healthcare job at the VA, and now he and his wife have to move out of their apartment.

An HHS employee today told me that people were openly crying in meetings today because they weren’t on a list of “mission critical” offices that is being prepared for OMB’s next gigantic round of cuts. They’re watching former colleagues flail in a tight job market that can’t handle so many thousands of new applicants.

Here’s what they told me about one recently fired colleague, another military veteran who worked for the government for more than a decade: “All his medals, awards, and praise he’s garnered throughout his career meant nothing. He was kicked to the curb unceremoniously and is struggling to find work. He's a single father and keeps getting told he’s overqualified for the jobs he’s applying to.”

Beyond the personal, workers are terrified for what is going to happen to the country. The same HHS employee lamented what the loss of their team would mean for tens of millions of vulnerable Americans. “My bureau focuses on underserved communities,” they said. “We focus on providing access to high quality health care to women, children, those in rural areas, native Americans, people with specific health issues.”

There are endless stories like these, and likely hundreds of thousands of more to come. DOGE has taken aim at the Social Security Administration, looking to cut half of its workforce. Vaccine research is being halted. The Department of Education — which was supposed to have been shuttered! — is now operating a snitch line for allegations against teachers who talk about diversity. The new FBI director wants to wreck the agency, contract with UFC to teach agents how to fight, and took a second job.

And you know what people are talking about? A phony revelation about Jeffrey Epstein concocted by the Attorney General, who gave a bunch of numb-brained conservative “influencers” binders filled with old news for a chilling photo opportunity while the rest of the country burned.

It’s hard to believe, but it got even more clownish from there, as the AG then claimed that some saboteur within the FBI withheld the real information and is trying to foil the administration’s noble intentions to make a reality show out of years of sex slavery and brutal rape.

Anybody with a tadpole-sized brain would see right through this idiotic sequence event, but the right-wing misinformation sphere is so shameless that its most powerful grifters were still happy to take the ball and run with it, using the misdirection to stoke up the base of baying hounds even further.

The conspiracy theories they so regularly produce are simply the most idiotic possible explanations for their own failures, without even a glimmer of truth that usually lure people in. Shameless hucksters, their most fervent true believers are absolute rubes, gullible to the point that you start to second guess both Darwinism and the existence of the divine. Socket lickers, all of them.

Yet this is what’s playing on Fox News, what’s being covered in the New York Times, and what’s been trending on Twitter for the past few days.

Speaking of the Paper of Record, The Times has this insane habit of covering Trump’s patently illegal pronouncements as if they were legitimate and then adding as an aside that “opponents” say that they’re illegal. Why normalize law-breaking and make people who object to it seem like fringe scolds? Why is that the approach?

I wrote on Tuesday that DOGE will ultimately fail because it’s creating chaos and suffering in red districts, and I still believe that. But I also know that the people running that program couldn’t care less about the ultimate consequences of their actions, so there’s going to be an unbelievable amount of pain inflicted on Americans before it crashes out.

Democrats refuse to be an actual opposition party — leaders already equivocating and backing off the threat of not voting for the diabolical GOP budget, because they need to seem like the responsible ones, even if it literally means destroying Medicaid. Meanwhile, Chuck Schumer just announced that Sen. Elise Slotkin, a CIA spook who has voted for more Trump nominees than anyone that isn’t a gym shorts-wearing ogre, will give the response to Trump’s State of the Union.

I want to end this on a positive note, so keep in mind that Democratic voters are ready to launch primaries in a way that they have never done before. Change is on the way, even if it’ll be painful before then.

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Here a few quick headlines and trends — I’ll be back with a good news roundup tomorrow night, only for paid subscribers.

Taking the initiative (away)

There was a time, not all that long ago, when politicians would grumble but ultimately begrudgingly respect the will of the voters, even in red states where progressive policies passed via ballot initiatives. Those were the days.

That began to change in earnest when Florida gutted the historic constitutional amendment that should have returned the right to vote to 1.4 million former felons who served their debt to society. It continued with Missouri’s heel-dragging on implementing Medicaid expansion, and it’s really exploded in years since it became clear that respecting democracy was no longer a prerequisite to winning an election.

This week, Republican legislators introduced or advanced a number of bills to nullify successful initiatives and amendments, while in several other states, they moved toward making it even harder to qualify initiatives for the ballot in the first place.

Montana: Nearly 60% of voters supported a constitutional amendment that guaranteed the right to an abortion up until fetal viability (usually about 23 or 24 weeks), which puts Montana in line with most states where the right to choose is codified into law. It’s what happens after that period that may change in disturbing ways.

GOP Rep. Kerri Seekins-Crowe, looking for any and all cracks in the amendment to exploit, isn’t trying to roll back those rights, but instead violate them spiritually by trapping women who experience severe late-pregnancy medical complications in Montana, where they wouldn’t be able to access help.

It would create a criminal offense of “abortion trafficking” for certain individuals involved in traveling across state lines for abortions. But unlike new laws in Idaho and Tennessee that apply to adults who transfer pregnant minors, the Montana bill would extend penalties to anyone involved in transporting an “unborn child” for an abortion that would be illegal in Montana.

It stipulates that penalties can be imposed against the mother. Convictions would carry a fine of up to $1,000 and possibly up to 5 years in prison.

Not only is this dangerous and dastardly on its own — very few abortions happen after 23 weeks, and they almost always come as a result of medical problems — but it also risks setting a precedent of fetal personhood, which Republicans could later use to further encroach on abortion rights.

Also in Montana: Uninterested in having to deal with the pesky will of voters in the future, another Republican lawmaker has introduced two bills that would seriously restrict who could sign a petition in support of a ballot initiative.

Rep. Zack Wirth is the hater behind both bills, which would bar “inactive” voters from signing an initiative petition. If that sounds vaguely reasonable, note that all it takes to be considered an inactive voter in Montana is missing one federal or state election. Unfortunately, that means a majority of voters are technically considered inactive, which would make collecting signatures really, really difficult.

Arkansas: State Sen. Kim Hammer’s war on ballot initiatives and constitutional amendments continues apace, as the Senate passed two bills designed to make collecting valid signatures almost impossible:

Senate Bill 209 would disqualify signatures collected by canvassers if the secretary of state finds “by a preponderance of evidence” that they violated state law collecting the signatures.

Senate Bill 210 would require potential signers to read the ballot title of a petition or have it read aloud to them in the presence of a canvasser. It would also make it a misdemeanor for a canvasser to accept a signature from people who have not read the ballot title or had it read aloud to them in the presence of a canvasser.

How does one define a “preponderance of evidence” in this case? Who would make the decision as to what qualifies?Hammer tried to answer these questions with another bill, SB 212, which would create an investigative division with subpoena power within the Secretary of State’s office, but that proposal failed to garner support on Thursday after a bipartisan group of citizens and lawmakers spoke out against it.

What that means for SB 209 is up in the air, but we know for sure that Hammer isn’t pursuing a whole procession of these bills simply out of a deep concern about voter fraud — last month, he said that planned to run for Secretary of State himself in 2026, and clearly he’s trying to beef up the office.

Weed: One of the silver linings of last year’s election was voters’ ongoing embrace of legalized marijuana. One of the many dark clouds emerging from statehouses this year is from legislators trying to reverse or severely weaken those voter-backed reforms.

It’s especially egregious in Ohio, where Senate Republicans just passed a bill under the pretense that the 57% of Ohioans who voted to legalize recreational pot in 2023 didn’t actually know what they were doing and need to be protected from themselves.

In reality, the bill is simply a gift to corporate marijuana producers and retailers as well as police, at the expense of Black communities. Its provisions including halving the number marijuana plants that residents can grow at home, from 12 to six, reducing the potency of available marijuana, banning public smoking, and redirecting the tax proceeds intended to help historically over-policed communities get access to marijuana licenses and jobs in the industry. The money would almost definitely be directed to police instead.

The bill still has to pass the House before it can be rolled up and sent to Gov. Mike DeWine for his signature.

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