Atlanta: 67°, mostly sunny — warmth like a last exhale before tomorrow's rain and the reckoning it brings.

Detroit: 43°, clear but cold — the Great Lakes hold their breath, waiting to see if anyone in Washington remembers they exist.

Kansas City: 24°, frozen and sunny — the heartland keeps showing up anyway, stubborn as a union man.

New York: 37°, heavy clouds (80% rain) — the sky looks exactly like the DOJ's Epstein releases: grey, full of something, telling you nothing.

San Francisco: 41°, cloudy — California's AG is the warmest thing in the Bay today, filing letters that actually have a spine.

Miami: 75°, gorgeous sun — paradise tax: your beach sits two feet above sea level, and Big Oil wants to drill the floor out from under it.

The hot mic never lies — CNN peeps laughed out loud with a one-word reaction when Trump said something so bizarre it stops the room cold, and we're all wondering if the man doth protest too goddamn much.

First time here? Pull up a chair — thistleandmoss.com

Editor's note: The hot-mic story isn't about the one word — it's that we've been saying the quiet part out loud for years about a man who threw Epstein parties in gold-fixtured clubs, honey, and those ain't straight-man hobbies. And how much sucking did “Bubba” really get from Trump.

The files smell like rot, and even his own base can't pretend otherwise.

What they said: "This very much is about a schism that is happening in MAGA... the people willing to attack Trump over Epstein already had problems with Trump." — Historian Nicole Hemmer, The New Republic

The turd-munching ass-waffle is repeating "totally exonerated" like a man whose mouth learned the phrase before his lawyers could stop him. The Trump DOJ continues to heavily redact the Epstein files — so aggressively that even conservative Rep. Thomas Massie says they're breaking the law.

The damage: A woman's 2019 FBI interview — alleging Trump forced himself on her when she was a minor between 1983 and 1985 — was pulled from public access this week. Agents found her account credible enough to investigate. Virginia Giuffre, who said Maxwell recruited her from Mar-a-Lago, died by supposed suicide last April. Trump and Epstein "talked at least three times a week" in the mid-to-late 1990s; he called him a "terrific guy" in 2002.

The schism forming in MAGA is between people wanting accountability and people protecting the man at the top — and the redacted files are the fault line. Demand transparency at aclu.org. alternet.org

The floor is glass, Donald. Keep walking.

Stand at the Gulf's edge and smell it — oil in saltwater has a sweetness before it kills everything.

The Department of the Interior's proposed 11th National Offshore Leasing Program opens 1.3 billion acres of Outer Continental Shelf — Alaska, California, and Gulf waters near Florida — to oil and gas extraction. Over 250,000 Americans submitted opposition letters during the 60-day comment period.

California AG Rob Bonta told BOEM directly: "Time and again, President Trump has shown that his interest lies with his Big Oil friends." Earthjustice's Erik Grafe on Arctic drilling: "There is no way to clean up oil spills in this environment, and they are inevitable."

The shit-stained ball-sack Interior Secretary Burgum calls this "energy dominance." The 1969 Santa Barbara blowout and Deepwater Horizon say otherwise. California can veto onshore infrastructure; Florida Republicans are privately terrified of an oil spill wrecking spring break dollars.

Action: Earthjustice.org is tracking the revised BOEM draft. earth.org

The ocean doesn't care who runs Interior. The ocean remembers everything.

On February 17th, Fox's Lawrence Jones said — under those studio lights, with a straight face — that gender dysphoria should be a disqualifying checkbox on a federal gun form.

What he said: "If you, from a psychological standpoint, think that you are another sex, you should not have a gun." Jones argued gender dysphoria — the condition trans people are required to be diagnosed with to access healthcare — should disqualify them on federal gun forms.

The actual data: Up to 98% of mass shooters are cisgender men. Being transgender is not a mental disorder. The trans person who shot a family in Rhode Island was a person in acute pain — not a policy argument to be strip-mined for talking points.

What the actual fuck is happening is primetime television proposing to strip civil rights from millions of people who are already disproportionately victims of violence. That's not gun policy. It's a target, painted in network colors.

Movement: Trans Lifeline (translifeline.org) and GLAD (glad.org) are tracking legislative attempts to codify this. pinknews.com

Trans people have the right to exist. Trans people have the right to protect themselves. That's not a debate.

Survival wisdom: That quote lands hard this morning when Fox is proposing federal checkboxes to strip rights from trans Americans. What Anzaldúa knew — and what Lawrence Jones will never understand from his studio desk — is that liberation isn't finite. Someone else's freedom doesn't cost yours. But erasure costs everyone. When the machinery of state turns toward any of us, all of us are in the crosshairs. That's not paranoia. That's fucking history.

Eric Dane, 1972–2026 — Euphoria's Cal Jacobs, Grey's Anatomy's McSteamy — died February 19th at 53, less than a year after his ALS diagnosis. His portrayal of a closeted man destroying everyone he loves rather than face himself was devastating, careful work. Queer complexity on screen saves lives. pinknews.com

Trans People, Targeted — The administration falsely linking trans people to violence is coordinated, not accidental. The target it paints is literal. Rhetoric precedes legislation precedes violence. lgbtqnation.com

Your Brain Isn't a Computer — Good — Osaka University researchers found human language is deliberately inefficient; familiar patterns demand less cognitive effort than compression. The way we tell our stories is literally how our brains survive. sciencedaily.com

Air Pollution Is Eating Your Brain — A study of 27.8 million older Americans links long-term fine particle pollution directly to higher Alzheimer's risk through brain effects. Who pays: communities downwind of the fossil fuel infrastructure Trump just expanded. sciencedaily.com

Grocery bill bleeding out → Swap two weekly dinners to dried beans and rice: pinto beans ~$1.50/lb, feeds 6. That's roughly $40/month back in your hands — $480/year — with 15g protein per cup. Feeling: a small rebellion against the system that wants you broke.

The inbox that never empties → Two folders only: "Needs Action" and "FYI." Sort immediately. Nothing stays in the inbox overnight. Twenty minutes daily, hard stop. The inbox is not your to-do list. Feeling: someone handed you a map of the building.

Regrow your scallions → Drop root ends (1 inch) in a glass with ½ inch water on a sunny windowsill. Harvestable in 5 days. One bunch = months of free scallions. Every meal you don't pay for is a small act of economic sovereignty.

Pantry pasta, feeds 4, under ten minutes → Boil 12 oz pasta. Sauté 4 garlic cloves in olive oil, add 1 can white beans (drained), ½ tsp red pepper flakes, salt. Toss with pasta + ¼ cup pasta water + lemon zest. Seven ingredients. Feeding the people you love doesn't require money or permission.

Moving forward — your armor: Marsha didn't survive by getting harder. She survived by being undeniable — sequins when the world said disappear, food for homeless queer kids when the government was letting her community starve. Today's machinery asks trans people, immigrants, and everyone who loves them to shrink. Don't. Being too fucking present to erase — that's the actual strategy. Show up. Feed people. Stay loud.

Essex Hemphill — Black gay poet; Ceremonies is a monument of AIDS-era rage and tenderness for every Black queer man whose name wasn't carved anywhere permanent.

Leslie Feinberg — working-class butch trans revolutionary; Stone Butch Blues won't close. Ze knew class war and gender war were the same boot on the same throat.

Yuri Kochiyama — internment camp to Malcolm X's arms as he died; six decades organizing across Black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, and Japanese-American reparations — refusing to choose which freedom mattered most.

These three knew: solidarity isn't strategy. It's survival.

Trump's Slush Fund: Venezuela Oil, Gaza, and the Board of Peace — Vox. The deal takes shape in the dark — tariff leverage, energy concessions, an unaccountable "peace board." Read The administration rebranded extraction as diplomacy; affected communities are already organizing a different response.

Nashville ICE Raids: When State Police Become Federal Immigration Agents — Mother Jones. Families separated at Tennessee traffic stops, state troopers operating under 287(g) agreements. Read GOP legislators call it law enforcement; Nashville immigrant-led networks have thousands of rapid-response contacts.