Here's Your Substitute Town Hall Already! Tabs For Friday, March 14, 2025

Your news roundup, things to read, and oh boy! Thornton!

Tabs gif by your friend Martini Glambassador, who’s just panda-ing to our weakness for cuteness.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will start holding town halls in Republican congressional districts where the GOP reps have noped out of meeting their constituents. The first two will be tonight, Friday, in Iowa and Nebraska, in the districts of Zach Nunn and Don Bacon, respectively. No, not simultaneously, you goofballs. [CNN]

Two federal judges, one in California and one in Maryland, ordered the Trump administration to rehire a metric fuckton of the “probationary” federal employees shitcanned from their jobs in an assload of government agencies. The judges also ordered Donald Trump and Elon Musk to stop being so lame and to get a fucking clue. The administration plans to appeal. [AP]

Sigh. Chuck Schumer has caved and will vote for cloture on the Republican government funding bill, even after we went to the trouble of photoshopping his face onto a kabuki performer to emphasize what a bad move that would be. We’ll have more on that in a little bit. [AP]

Florida’s bigot state attorney general is trying to sue Target Stores for selling Pride merchandise, claiming it violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 because it should have disclosed “known risks of customer backlash” to its “radical and extreme 2023 Pride Campaign.” Which was no different from previous years, except that was the year wingnuts suddenly lost their shit over rainbow. So hey, Target, how’s that plan to appease the Bigot Right by embracing discrimination and inequality working out for ya? [Erin In The Morning]

After spending $16 million to open up an immigration detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the Trump administration has given up on the idea and flown the last of the immigrants held there to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana. Trump had bragged that Gitmo would hold up to 30,000 migrants who were such terrible monsters that they couldn’t be held anywhere else. Instead, the camp never held more than a few hundred, and the expensive tents slapped up to house them didn’t meet ICE standards. [ABC News]

Nearly 100 protesters organized by Jewish Voice for Peace were arrested after filling the lobby of Trump Tower for a sit-in Thursday to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil. Kahlil remains in an ICE prison in Louisiana while the administration tries to detain him, although he hasn’t been charged with any crime and is a permanent legal resident. [NBC News]

Donald Trump has asked the Supreme court to pretty please let him change the Constitution by executive order, after federal judges keep preventing him from eliminating the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris is asking the Court to limit judges’ injunctions in three separate cases that have blocked the change nationwide; Harris is requesting that the orders only apply to the plaintiffs in those cases. For extra laughs, Harris argued that allowing the policy to go ahead in Crom knows how many thousands of cases was a “modest” request. [CBS News]

Blast from the very recent past! We somehow missed this one when it came out in November: The Heritage Foundation wants major changes to education policy so fewer women will go to college, or pursue higher degrees, because ladies need to be having a lot more babies instead to increase the “married birth rate.” [Heritage Foundation]

Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona has died at the age of 77, his office announced Thursday. He died from “complications related to his cancer treatments” after serving the people of his Tucson district for over 20 years. Hell of a guy. [KVOA-TV]

Once we have a sane president again, one of these days, here’s what Heatmap News calls a “stupidly easy way” to incentivize people to install efficient heat pumps, one of the best ways to cut all those greenhouse emissions from homes currently heated with fossil gas or fuel oil: subsidize utilities to offer homes with heat pumps lower electricity rates in the winter, to offset the sometimes narrow differences between the costs of gas or electricity. [Heatmap]

Also, a happy reflection on Elon Musk’s turning himself and his electric car company into toxic brands: Thank goodness he only went batshit off his rocker after making electric cars a huge market success. Plenty of competitors are now here to take the industry forward. [Heatmap]

Here’s a cool new development in the rapidly-growing field of enhanced geothermal, which gets clean energy from hot rocks deep in the earth. To reach the really hot layers of rock that are currently too deep to exploit with conventional drilling, because the high temperatures would destroy drill bits, a startup is developing a way to drill deep wells with high-energy millimeter waves, which just melt right through rock. Dang! [Canary Media]

EVAN POPS IN! At my Friday place, a former Trump spiritual adviser and megachurch pastor has been indicted for WHAT? You already know. Weird, this one isn’t a drag queen either! Come by and see the new project I’m working on keeping track of all these motherfuckers. And subscribe! [The Moral High Ground]

OK EVAN BACK OUT.

If Dok’s doing Tabs, then you know there will be Thornton pictures. Here’s the good boy, whose favorite evening napping spot is this shelf in the bathroom. We don’t use those towels anyway; they’re his. He preferred not to look up when I called his name.

Last summer, one of his canines on top had to be pulled, so now yawning is a fangless task.

As so often happens, while I was adding these pics to the post, Thornton decided to curl up with a paw over his nose and get more cuter.

Dang kitty.

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That’s right, even when Rebecca isn’t writing Tabs, she’s still here to hound you to buy the pizzas: Detroit Public Schools is working on the assumption we’ll have budget cuts next year of between $30 and $80 million for just our district. You help me fund the girls’ Detroit public elementary school, and I help you eat delicious fucking pizza, mailed right to your door. Buy the fucking pizzas everybody. They’ll FedEx em right to your door. Pizzas. (Pizzas.) This motherfucking pizza ad will be up all month.

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