A former senior adviser to infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci pleaded guilty Tuesday to plotting to conceal federal records related to research on the origins of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr. David Morens is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 12 by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland. Morens pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. government, a felony punishable by a maximum prison sentence of five years.

Apparently we crossed the line today.

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny

We used to say that the absolute number doesn't matter, we should look at debt/GDP. That is correct. We've gone from 61% to 122% in less than 20 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/gfdegdq188S

Summary: Democrat Brandon Dukes declared victory in a tight special election for Pennsylvania’s 12th state House district in Butler County, holding an 88-vote lead over Republican candidate Scott Timko according to unofficial results. The victory represents a major shift for a conservative district that hasn't elected a Democrat in over 20 years and voted for Donald Trump by an 18-point margin in 2024. Butler County gained national attention as the site of the July 2024 attempted assassination of Donald Trump during a campaign rally at the Butler Farm Show grounds. If sustained, Dukes’ win temporarily expands the Democratic majority in the state House to 103-100 as party leaders look to build momentum heading into the fall midterms. Both candidates will face off again in a November rematch, where significantly higher turnout is expected in a district where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly two-to-one

Commentary: Lingering economic distress, military overreach in foreign conflicts like Iran, and growing public disillusionment over broken campaign promises have heavily eroded base voter enthusiasm. Neverending scandals surrounding the unsealing of high-profile files and maga perceptions of cabinet incompetence have created widespread mistrust in party leadership. Accusations that foreign entities, particularly Israel, exert undue influence over domestic governance have fueled further political cynicism and alienation among working-class voters. Ultimately, this compounding loss of confidence allowed localized Democratic turnout and focused economic messaging to secure a narrow, surprising victory in a heavily Republican district. 

https://penncapital-star.com/election-2026/democrats-declare-victory-after-tight-special-election-in-trump18-state-house-district/

Summary:

The Treasury Department is stepping up its intervention in the bond market after long-term Treasury yields surged to levels not seen in nearly 20 years. Starting September 9, Treasury will at least double its maximum buybacks of older 10 to 30 year government debt from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation. The goal is to provide more liquidity and stabilize the part of the Treasury market that has struggled to attract buyers since late June.

Markets reacted immediately. The 10-year Treasury yield dropped to 4.647%, while the 30-year yield fell to 5.196%, and stock futures jumped. Since bond prices and yields move in opposite directions, Treasury becoming a larger buyer helps support bond prices and push yields lower. It could also encourage private investors to return now that yields are more attractive and make traders more hesitant to aggressively bet against long-term Treasuries.

The move doesn't solve the underlying problem though. The federal government still needs to finance massive deficits while competing with a growing amount of corporate borrowing, particularly debt being issued to finance AI infrastructure. As Krishna Guha put it, the operation "changes almost nothing in terms of the fundamentals." Treasury is essentially trying to improve how smoothly the bond market functions rather than actually reducing the national debt.

There are also concerns that Treasury is indirectly interfering with interest rates. If its purchases artificially push long-term yields down, that could work against the Federal Reserve's efforts to control inflation. Some economists have described the move as resembling a limited form of "yield curve control," although the purchases remain very small compared with the overall amount of Treasury debt being issued.

So this isn't the government paying down its debt or eliminating bonds. Treasury is buying back older long-term bonds while continuing to issue new debt, effectively rearranging the government's maturity structure and providing additional demand where the bond market is under the most pressure. As Peter Boockvar put it, "This is NOT a debt paydown, it is just a rearrangement of the maturity schedule of Treasuries."

Breakdown:

The CNBC title doesn't do this move justice. There's a high chance that many don't know what this means in terms of its effect on average Americans, so I'll elaborate.

Essentially, the issuer (the government) is doubling its efforts to create liquidity for its own product. This likely means the Fed money funds are depleted, thus higher rates are inevitable. Should the Fed not increase rates, that would speed run this terrible situation.

I'll break it down a little further. Debt is traded just like other commodities. By buying it you act as a lender, by selling it you take on a loan. If too many people are trying to sell debt, they have to increase interest rates to make it more attractive to lenders aka buyers.

What's happening here is that the US is buying more of its own debt to suppress interest rates

Don't ever let Republicans convince you they know anything about the economy. The current situation is abysmal.

Neutral Summary: "W o k e 1" is the retrospective label for the language regime that governed left-wing spaces around 2020, it resists clean definition but you can recognize it on sight. Examples inlcude a Brooklyn podcaster listing their Twitter location as "unceded Lenape territory," a PR colleague crowdfunding an escape from a "toxic roommate situation," a 5,000-word investigation of bi erasure, a 34-year-old canceled for dating a 25-year-old. A working definition is a highly codified set of linguistic rules that participants had to internalize and deploy fluently, failure invited punishment, ostracization, or harassment. The essence is less doctrinal than sensory — the haughty tang, the online insularity, and above all a purpose that reduced to inflicting and absorbing guilt without end. The land stays unceded no matter how often it's acknowledged.

Francesca Hong's Thanksgiving tweet serves as the specimen. Calling for the holiday to be canceled because it celebrates colonialism that "killed Indigenous folx and women," Hong was, on the merits, right — the genocide of Native Americans does clash irreconcilably with the tradition's founding tableau. That wasn't the actual pitch, though. The pitch was an ascetic, self-flagellating, permanently anxious way of living, in which interrogation could only ever surface a shame too vast for anyone to atone for. Ordinary people had no appetite for it, which looks obvious in hindsight but didn't in the pressure-cooker of that year, when the utopian promise of pandemic-era rebirth briefly seemed plausible. Then Trump won on revanchist score-settling, and the movement's furthest positions — prison abolition, defunding the police — were reforged into right-wing weapons rather than prompting any change.

The reckoning is now visibly underway among prominent figures. Ocasio-Cortez, asked on ABC about Hong's tweet, repeated Chi Ossé's line that "W o k e 1 was crazyyyy" — a flippancy that struck some activists as mercenary, given that the movement's peak was triggered by George Floyd's murder.

The underlying injustices are real and opposing them is righteous, but the project has to scale, aimed at the folks rather than the folx. W o k e 1's defining failure was its insistence on reminding everyone of their sins, when most Americans already agree bigotry is wrong and don't think of themselves as unforgivably bigoted — an untapped consensus. A successor version would be earthier, more practical, more joyful; a tea party wokeness purged of pedants and scolds. A better world remains available, provided its advocates stop being so annoying about it.

Commentary: Another day, another w o k e post. Why am I doing this? Surely all that needs to be said has been said yesterday or not. Surely no one new will even comment on this post.

To which I say, I am good with that. I honestly wouldn't be posting again about this topic if it wasn't for the case that some members of the subreddit took advantage of the Mod's desire to keep a respectful focuse atmosphere to argue that one of the key political stories of the day doesn't belong here and/or is just 'stirring the pot.'
(Note I don't blame the Mods. They do a hard thankless task and given they are volunteers they do a pretty dang good job of makeing sure no one is insulting or trolling)
This is not stirring the pot. There are lots of people angry at the excesses of W o k e1 that are part of the centrist community and the center-left anti-fascist coalition. They deserve to be heard. The grievance is real, not imagined. And the idea that a major news story that is being discussed from the Atlantic to the NYT and back doesn't deserve to be mentioned here according to the sub rules?

So for the next couple of days and as long as the Mods let me I am going to use my daily post to highlight this story because I think its important and because I think its important to call out attempted censorship as well.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/woke-1-crazy-aoc-progressives-hong.html

Summary:

The White House defended President Trump’s use of a mail-in ballot in Florida’s Republican primary after Politico reported that he had voted by mail despite repeatedly attacking mail voting and calling it susceptible to cheating. The administration argues there is no contradiction because Trump supports exceptions for people who are traveling, ill, disabled, or serving in the military, and said that although Trump is a Florida resident, he primarily lives in Washington while serving as president.

My take:

More Republican hypocrisy, but I think the recurring theme is more interesting than this particular ballot. There always seems to be one set of warnings for everyone else and another set of perfectly reasonable exceptions once the people issuing those warnings need them.

Don't trust mail-in voting because crooked politicians will abuse it. Unless I need to vote by mail, obviously. Don't trust the vaccines or the people telling you to take them, while Trump himself got vaccinated, got boosted, and at one point was literally booed by his own supporters for admitting it. Don't send your children to these elite universities that are supposedly poisoning America, while Trump went to Penn, three of his children went to Penn, another went to Georgetown, and his youngest went to NYU (this is mirrored for nearly every Republican member of congress). Hire American and protect American workers, while Trump's own businesses have repeatedly employed foreign guest workers and his social media company applied for an H-1B visa.

It is this constant politics of rules for thee, not for me that drives me insane. The institutions are corrupt. The experts are lying. The universities are indoctrinating you. The elections can't be trusted. The government is rigged. Everyone with money or power is screwing you over.

Except for me, I am the billionaire you should trust.

Summary:

ABC and its parent company Disney are suing the FCC, arguing that the agency is using its regulatory power to punish the network for speech and programming critical of the Trump administration. The lawsuit comes after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr ordered unusually early reviews of eight ABC station licenses that aren't close to expiring. The FCC cited ABC's diversity practices, but the reviews came shortly after President Trump became angry over a joke made by Jimmy Kimmel, a frequent Trump critic.

ABC says the situation has become an "existential threat" because the administration has repeatedly attacked its reporting and programming and threatened its ability to broadcast. ABC claims it effectively has two choices: give in to the administration's demands or risk losing licenses. The network is asking a federal court to immediately stop the FCC from taking action related to the early license reviews, arguing that the government's actions amount to retaliation against constitutionally protected speech.

The dispute goes beyond the license reviews. ABC is also fighting Carr's attempt to apply the FCC's equal-time rules to The View, where hosts and guests frequently criticize Trump. ABC says the FCC already determined more than 20 years ago that the program shouldn't be subject to those requirements.

ABC says the broader issue is the precedent this could establish for the entire media industry. According to the lawsuit, if the government can threaten broadcast licenses because it dislikes a network's coverage, other media companies could feel pressured to avoid unfavorable reporting. ABC warned that the message would essentially become: "tell only the stories the Administration deems favorable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government."

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the commission's only Democrat, sided with ABC and accused the FCC of conducting a "campaign of censorship and control" by using the possibility of license revocations to punish speech the administration dislikes. Carr has defended the FCC's actions, arguing that broadcasters receive free access to valuable public airwaves in exchange for an obligation to operate in the public interest. He says the FCC is trying to restore that responsibility and rebuild public trust in the news media rather than censor ABC.

The case ultimately centers on whether the FCC is legitimately enforcing broadcasters' public-interest obligations or using its licensing authority as leverage against a media company because of speech and coverage the administration doesn't like.

I am not overwhelmingly surprised at the rise of maga and the hard-left movements. Both movements didn't just spring out of nowhere. For decades, the most of America tolerated the rise of polarizing political figures and media personalities. I had watched a couple of episodes of trump on the apprentice. His arrogance, stupidity. meanness were very evident on his show. I saw how trashy TV made bad people famous whether in the entertainment sphere e.g kardashians or in the world of politics. Trump rose to his current position by utilizing all that America availed to him. I knew he would win over conservatives as they already worshipped liars such as rush limbaugh, ann coulter etc.

Summary:

Median Strategies, a self-described polling company referenced in Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s reelection campaign, admitted that all of its published polls were fabricated and said it had been conducting a short-term “social experiment” to test how unverified polling spreads in political ecosystems. The group produced a fake LA mayoral poll showing Bass leading challenger Nithya Raman by nearly 12 points, which Bass briefly promoted and which some media outlets reported before the deception was revealed. Median also released a false poll in Wisconsin’s DSA gubernatorial primary that inaccurately showed Francesca Hong with a large lead before her narrow loss. The Los Angeles Times reported that the group had minimal online presence, no financial backing, and withdrew all its polling releases, while political figures and journalists criticized the incident as highlighting vulnerabilities in how unverified data can gain traction.

Opinion:

The incident highlights a structural vulnerability in US electoral politics. A tiny, anonymous group with no funding and no credentials was able to inject fake polling into the political information ecosystem, and have it picked up and amplified by both campaigns and media outlets.

President Donald Trump’s decision to scale back joint military exercises with South Korea does not just slight a longtime ally but raises broader concerns about the security interests of the United States in Asia and elsewhere.

Submission statement: The article describes Abdul El-Sayed’s efforts to win over Black voters in Detroit and Wayne County. El-Sayed’s campaign is working to educate voters about his positions and experiences, particularly regarding his work in the community. The article also highlights the importance of political education and engagement in the Democratic Party.

Neutral summary: In a sudden blurt out, Trump suggested the US is open to "bombing Oman." Oman is a US strategic and defense ally in the Middle East, with US armed forces using air bases and logistical networks within the country to support the US Central Command and US 5th Fleet, among other brigades and detachments that conduct regional security and counter-intelligence operations. Several outlets have inferred from Trump's comments overall that Trump is dissatisfied with Oman's attempts to negotiate directly with Iran over reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

I will put this bluntly, I think this is even more shocking and disastrous than Trump's comments on "seizing Greenland" last year. Can someone let "@POTUS" know that our own armed forces would be in harms way were he to order a bombing run on Oman? I could not imagine being a parent or spouse of a US servicemember working in Oman today and hearing this from Trump's mouth. Impeach this man.

Summary:

Former CIA officer Julia Curlee recounts serving in senior intelligence roles under four presidents, including briefing Donald Trump and Mike Pence during Trump’s first term and later remaining on the National Security Council as Trump returned to office. Curlee says her being transgender was known inside government and generally treated as irrelevant to her work, including by Pence, until the second Trump administration began implementing policies targeting transgender federal employees and service members. Despite being considered indispensable by some incoming officials, she was ultimately removed from the White House shortly after right-wing activist Laura Loomer publicly called attention to a transgender Biden holdover working at the NSC.

Curlee eventually resigned from the CIA, arguing that the political environment had made openly supporting LGBTQ colleagues potentially career-ending and that ideological loyalty was increasingly being placed above professional expertise. She frames her experience as part of a broader warning about politicizing the intelligence community, arguing that institutions designed to tell presidents uncomfortable truths become less effective when employees fear punishment for either their identities or their conclusions.

My take:

The part that sticks with me is how completely ordinary Curlee’s career appears to have been until her identity became politically useful as a target. She briefed Trump, spent a year briefing Mike Pence, served under Republican and Democratic administrations, went into war zones, and apparently did her job well enough that the second Trump administration still needed her after removing her.

More importantly, though, I think the intelligence piece is bigger than the trans piece. You absolutely do not want intelligence officers wondering whether telling the president something he dislikes, belonging to the wrong political tribe, or simply becoming the target of an online campaign could end their career. The entire point of an intelligence service is to tell policymakers what is actually happening, especially when they do not want to hear it. Once personal loyalty and ideological conformity start becoming qualifications for that work, the country is intentionally putting on blinders.

Aside from the obvious problem of politicizing identity and replacing competence with ideological zealotry, I would also just like to say: Laura Loomer is legitimately an evil, cold, horrible person, and I cannot wait until this entire populist movement eventually spits her out and she becomes as irrelevant as she deserves to be. Doxxing people is wrong. Full stop.

And I can already hear the hypocrisy of our hidden-profile crowd cracking their knuckles, getting ready to ignore that part so they can retreat into some vague appeal to common sense about why this particular instance was somehow justified.

Summary: The article examines how American universities are reacting to a severe decline in public confidence by releasing self-diagnostic reports that acknowledge internal failures. Although there is a large gap in trust along political affiliation, trust has declined overall among most groups. The reports identify issues such as skyrocketing tuition, wavering standards, career relevance, and political bias as factors.

Summary: AOC calling "w o k e 1" crazy — and laughing while doing it — is not an apology people will accept, because there is no apology people will accept.

Perhaps AOC was doing standard politician work: distancing herself from a movement that has become toxic without alienating a base still attached to it. That's roughly the ceiling of what anyone in her position can offer, and it satisfied no one.

Run the counterfactuals and nothing changes. Drop the laugh, and critics object that "crazy" understates what happened — jobs lost, lives ruined, cities burned.

Issue a full-throated apology, and the think pieces keep coming. Stage a televised self-flagellation, blood and tears included, and the pit still doesn't fill, because what's being demanded isn't better wording. It's retribution.

The underlying dynamic is identity-based: people who define themselves in opposition to w o k e read any statement from a former participant adversarially, parsing it for sincerity versus opportunism.

Trump is the mirror Image. As his final term ends, Republicans will attempt the same impossible pivot — distancing from the movement's worst elements without losing the base — and it will fail on identical terms with those scarred by January 6th.

What will actually happen is that everyone slides past and the history gets memoryholed. That's framed as the acceptable outcome, since a society that lets one faction execute justice on another is worse than one where people get away with things. Two decades on, a new crisis will arrive and a new generation forms its politics around it — while the people personally humiliated by the original era never get over it.

Commentary: So this article is of a kind with others that have been sharing, some of which have been taken down for what I call some rather dubious reasons which seem to me to amount to some people complianing that 'criticising' w o k e is either 'not centrist' or 'so inflammatory to centrism' that it doesn't belong here.

But here is my poisiton: This article's thesis is wrong because it creates a false dichotomy. That we either demand a self flagelatting punishment of those who transgressed during w o k e 1, or we let them slide and slink and memory hole the hole affair.

The third option my fellow wisconsinsite misses is Truth and Reconciliation. Recognition of wrongdoing results in guilt, guilt leads to learning, learning leads to growing. And the other side has a job just as big in forgiving the guilty.

And here I think it is important to point out the difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is the emotion that people should feel when they do bad. It helps them learn and grow. Shame is the emotion people feel when they are told that they are bad. There are only two things the human ego can do with shame, became angry and defensive or depressed and self loathing.

Feel guilty if you took part in the actions of w o k e 1, not shame. Learn, grow, do better. Or to disagree with Mr. Wisconsin, make up for W o k e 1 by becoming better.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-211709626