Leslie 🎃. Brown
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leslielkb.bsky.social
Leslie 🎃. Brown
@leslielkb.bsky.social
1.2K followers 450 following 3.8K posts
PhD, Curator, Photohistorian, Educator, and Scholar. Believer in wonder & kindness. Lover of art, music, history, science, rocks, weather, & tiny things.
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Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
As an educator, as a fellow woman in science, I’m fucking horrified that Lia Smith who was just a year from
graduation felt her only option was to take her own life.

I lay her death at the feet of all the people hounding trans women athletes like her, you fucking monsters
Lia Smith was 21 years old and transgender and she should still be alive
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Also, note that the person making all these decisions is not Secretary Noem; it's Corey Lewandowski, who is still a "special government employee" (and by many reports sleeping with Noem and running the agency while she does mostly TV), as well as Gregory Bovino himself.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
THIS is the reason why I have consistently tried to emphasize that Border Patrol and ICE are different agencies with different duties and different leadership and different styles.

Border Patrol are the aggro cowboys compared to ICE. Now they're going to be the ones running the show.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
🚨BIG changes happening -- ICE leadership is being purged tonight. The old guard, which prioritized targeted enforcement operations aimed at people with criminal records, is being replaced with Border Patrol and Gregory Bovino's "Midway Blitz" style.

Think things are bad now? It'll get worse.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Bill Cassidy, this is your legacy.
A vaccine schedule should be published by Jan 1, and Vaccines for Children – which provides vaccines to 52% of children in the US – depends on it, @kevinault.bsky.social said.

“All the vaccines for children and to some extent adults are at risk if that job does not get done in the next 2.5 months."
Threat to US vaccines as CDC staff supporting key advisory panel laid off
Critics say scientists ‘held hostage’ by RFK Jr as changes mean vaccine development and guidance in peril
www.theguardian.com
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
The Trump Administration’s assertion that it can't use SNAP’s contingency reserves for SNAP benefits is contrary to:
▪️The plain language of the law
▪️Their own (now deleted) shutdown plan
▪️Guidance from prior Administrations

We have the receipts:
SNAP’s Contingency Reserve Is Available for Regular SNAP Benefits, as USDA and OMB Have Ruled in Past
The Administration must use all available options to fund November benefits for the 1 in 8 people in the U.S. who need SNAP to afford their grocery bill.
www.cbpp.org
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Can someone please ask him how the GOP changed the 60 vote threshold twice in the last two months to approve 150+ trump appointees in one go? Cuz they are in charge and can change the rules to open the government. And they know it. They WANT the shutdown.
Mike Johnson: "Democrats are required to open the government. They keep saying, 'Republicans are in charge of government.' We aren't!"
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Tl;dr: DOJ makes a mad dash to deport Kilmar before he gets to depose Todd Blanche.
NEW: The Trump administration is racing to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia as soon as Friday, conceding it does not intend to follow through on his criminal case despite earlier assurances.

w/ @joshgerstein.bsky.social

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
> "a September contingency plan, since deleted from the USDA’s website...said Congress intended 'that SNAP’s operations should continue' and that contingency funds 'are also available to fund participant benefits in the event that a lapse occurs [mid-fiscal year]'"

www.huffpost.com/entry/govern...
Trump Administration Buries Legal Memo Suggesting It Could Pay November Food Benefits
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the food program, says its hands are tied by the shutdown.
www.huffpost.com
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Amazon is planning to cut as many as 30,000 employees, starting tomorrow.

The corporate giant made nearly $60 billion in profits last year.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Starving people right before Thanksgiving is actually diabolical on every level imaginable. It's also the kind of cruelty people don't forget.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
This thread makes a point I find myself coming to often these days.

It's hard to make this point in a way that doesn't sound like a threat, but it's just a fact that for centuries the wealthy in America worried that the mob would come get them and did all they could to avoid that fate.
lol what the wealthy today don't seem to understand is part of staying wealthy in society is not pissing off the masses.

There's a reason why Carnegie and the Rockefellers poured money into institutions. Gutting institutions and making it harder for the masses to survive is a...choice.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
This is like, a genocidal meme expressed through the imagination of a 12 year old boy in 1999 bsky.app/profile/athe...
I truly wish that I were joking x.com/dhsgov/statu...
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
[ripping a mother apart from her three children because she cleaned hotel rooms without the proper paperwork] This is just like Master Chief
I truly wish that I were joking x.com/dhsgov/statu...
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
impossible to overstate the degree to which we are being governed by people whose formative politics is gamergate, but DHS posting Halo memes to recruit for ICE is pretty close.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
"The next presidency is going to have to embark on a sweeping de-Trump-ification of the entire federal government to purge it of the culture of abuse and lawlessness that has taken hold, and there are few more vivid examples than ICE."

www.publicnotice.co/p/abolish-ice
ICE is out of control and beyond repair
This agency needs to be stripped down to the studs. Dems should start preparing now.
www.publicnotice.co
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
The party that has spent decades pontificating about personal responsibility is evading responsibility for keeping the government open when controlling all three branches of government.
Mike Johnson: "Democrats are required to open the government. They keep saying, 'Republicans are in charge of government.' We aren't!"
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
A core feature of our unprecedented Article I constitutional crisis is that the Speaker of the House is permitted to performatively lie in public with impunity from the podium every day & the assembled media in front of him offer approximately no pushback at all on the lies.
Mike Johnson: "Democrats are required to open the government. They keep saying, 'Republicans are in charge of government.' We aren't!"
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Between the tariffs, the immigration crackdown, and cuts to SNAP, Trump is creating a mass crisis in U.S. farming. And a lot of this stuff can't be walked back. Chinese markets for Argentine soybeans won't just switch back when Trump TACOs again. Bankrupt farmers can't just bounce back next year.
Not only is it going to be a hunger crisis, it's going to be a farm crisis. All those gallons of milk bought from dairy farmers, all the produce, all the on sale ground beef and packs of chicken that are paid for by SNAP are subsidies to farmers who don't qualify for commodities subsidies.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Gallego: "How can I negotiate? The president is in Asia for 5 days. Johnson is basically keeping the House out until January to protect pedophiles. So who am I negotiating with right now?"
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Love to show how smart I am by bragging about my score on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.
Reposted by Leslie 🎃. Brown
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.