Ethan Wechtaluk

Sunday: Jeffries says he's a "hard yes" on impeaching Hegseth. Tuesday: no whip, 11 Dems no-show, GOP buries it 211–204. Every day in the job is an audition for the next one. If you can't find 11 votes in the minority, you don't get the gavel in the majority.

Pete Hegseth calling critics slanderous is hilarious because we’ve been sticking to the actual facts this whole time. Pete, if you want to see real slander, just ask! We can easily spread rumors that you wash your hair with mayo or that you're afraid of room-temperature water.

The election’s over. The accountability work isn’t. 🌊 Power doesn’t get a pass because the votes are counted, no matter which party holds it. I’m watching Maryland’s institutions the same way I did yesterday. Know something that should see daylight? My DMs are open.

To everyone who knocked a door in the rain, made one more call, or drove a neighbor to the polls: this one’s yours. 🌊

Josh Turek opened his new ad talking about being bullied as a kid in a wheelchair. Then he called for ending taxpayer-funded care for trans adults. You don't get to cite your own discrimination as the reason to discriminate against someone else. Trans rights are human rights.

I backed a Democratic gerrymander in Virginia. Call me a hypocrite. I'm voting no on Maryland's Question 3. The difference comes down to five words Annapolis left off your ballot. Read more: bit.ly/48j5FcY

500 applications in 13 months and just 12 interviews. I’m not an outlier. In July, the US hiring rate fell to 3.2%. The last time it averaged that was 2010, when unemployment was 9.6%. Employers are posting like it’s normal and hiring like it’s 2010.

Maryland wants you to stockpile water — but not for a storm. Because on Sept. 29 the plant serving 75% of WSSC customers lost power, and nobody has said why. WSSC's release says service was maintained. WSSC told reporters some taps were hours from dry. Records request is out.

As a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting and now a parent to three young daughters — including an elementary schooler and a preschooler — the news from Bend hits with a weight that is hard to put into words. It brings back memories I wish I didn't have, alongside the acute fear every parent feels today. Having lived through mass violence, I am begging everyone to stop sharing the shooter's name and photo. Criminological research and the No Notoriety movement have shown time and again that giving perpetrators widespread media coverage, infamy, and a platform creates a proven contagion effect. It provides future copycats with the exact reward structure they are seeking. When you share their image and identity, even out of anger or grief, you are inadvertently giving them the one thing they wanted: notoriety. Please starve them of the attention. Blur the face, leave out the name, and instead turn your focus toward honoring the victims, supporting the heroic educators and first responders, and protecting our children. We cannot undo the trauma, but we can stop giving these individuals the legacy they crave.

At 6 a.m. today, federal agents raided Rep. Ilhan Omar's home in DC. The alleged crime: immigration forms her late father filled out when she was a child. Tom Homan went on Fox last month, confirmed a criminal probe, and wouldn't say whether there's evidence. Now a pre-dawn search, timed to the midterms. DOJ's answer to the election-year norm? The raid wasn't meant to be public. This is from the man who called the Mar-a-Lago search a raid by a weaponized DOJ. His own DOJ then stood up a Weaponization Working Group to settle his scores. He never objected to political prosecution. He objected to being on the receiving end. If they can send agents to a congresswoman's door over a form she couldn't have read when it was filed, they can come for anyone with a file. That's the point. Fear is the product.

They fired SEVEN rounds into a car with a 5-year-old in the back seat. At school dismissal. On a street full of kids. This was Thursday afternoon in Marble Hill. Agents in plain clothes walked up to Oscar Belgal's car. Witnesses saw a man in a bright yellow construction vest holding a gun. Not a uniform. Not a badge you could see from the sidewalk. A construction vest. Then an agent opened fire into a car where a little boy had just climbed into the back seat. I pick my daughters up from school. Picture your own kid in that back seat. The glass. The noise. Seven shots. Then picture a federal spokesman calling it a "targeted enforcement operation." DHS wants to talk about his record. A record gets you arrested. It gets you charged. It gets you in front of a judge. It does not justify getting shot through your car window while your son watches. Watch what they say next. “The car moved.” They said it in Minneapolis. They said it in Houston. They said it in Maine. Same fucking alibi every time, and the footage almost never comes out. That boy will carry Thursday for the rest of his life. He's five fucking years old. That wasn't an arrest. That was terrorism. ICE got lucky that boy is alive. This agency can not be fixed. We've tried body cameras. We've tried oversight. We've tried asking nicely for the footage. Every time, we get another shooting, another alibi, another family wrecked. You don't reform an agency that fires into a car with a child inside and calls it an operation. You end it. Release the footage. Name the agent. Then abolish ICE.

Two of us are registered at the same Clarksburg address. Each of us received two official mailers from the Montgomery County Board of Elections. Our correct polling place is Clarksburg High School, and only half the mailers say so. One sent one of us to Lake Seneca Elementary in Germantown. Another sent the other to Poolesville Elementary. That's a 50% error rate in one household. If the Board's mailers are this unreliable at one address, how many voters across the county are holding the wrong location and won't find out until they're turned away on Election Day? Don't trust the mailer. Confirm your polling place with the State Board of Elections before you vote:
voterservices.elections.mary…

A follow-up to my post about my benefits case with Maryland DHS. While working through it, I discovered a sizable security gap on the department's website: the kind of basic configuration issue I've spent my career advising federal agencies on how to avoid. I've reported it through Maryland's statewide Vulnerability Disclosure Program. I have to give a modicum of credit that the state actually has a channel for reporting issues. I won't share specifics until it's fixed because publicizing a security gap before it's closed puts the people who depend on these systems at risk, and those are often Marylanders in some of the hardest moments of their lives. The larger point is this: the agencies that handle child protection, food assistance, and disability benefits deserve the highest security discipline. Too often, government IT gets attention only after something breaks — if even then. I'll share more once the issue is resolved, including what it tells us about how we fund and manage the technology people rely on.

Maryland just closed my family's SNAP case for not returning a form they never gave me. September 25: the state emails me that a review form is waiting in my benefits portal. I log in. Nothing. I check again. Nothing. I check for ten days. Nothing. Tonight: another email. My case is "Closed." Want to guess whether that notice is in the portal? It isn't. No phone call. No letter. Nothing. A timer ran out and a computer closed the case. And here's the part that should make every Marylander furious: this is by design. The system is set up to let cases close automatically. Nobody checks whether the family ever had a chance to respond. The burden is on them to prove they didn’t fail because the assumption is they did. I'll get mine fixed. I know how to make the calls, build the paper trail, and push until someone answers. But how many families got the same email tonight? How many will assume they did something wrong? How many will just go without? That’s the part that makes me the angriest. A safety net that drops people because of its own broken software isn't a safety net. It’s a trapdoor.

"Super Intelligence" in the headline. "Unites States" on the signature line.

Redundancy only works if you keep it. WSSC took one of its largest plant's two power feeds down for maintenance two weeks ago and kept running with no fallback. The other feed failed today, and Pepco says WSSC's own equipment caused it. That wasn't bad luck. It was a decision, and whoever made it should lose their job.

Fewer than 10. That's how many trans athletes the NCAA president told the Senate he knew of, out of 510,000. About 1 in 4. That's how many undergraduate women at major universities report being sexually assaulted by force or while incapacitated. If this is about protecting women, the math tells you where the fight is.