Notices by Sean Casten (seancasten@mastodon.social)

You can embrace progress or you can stand athwart history whining. I choose the former. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/renewables-fossil-fuels-us-grid

As Trump destroys our economy, wrecks your 401k and diminishes US global standing, his lackeys are... insisting on better cookies. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/04/burgum-cookies/682319/

Paul Krugman making the point here that the tariffs Trump says other countries are imposing on the US are entirely fabricated. Does anyone know how he calculated these? Or if anyone checked his math? https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-goes-crazy-on-trade

My word. They are dumber than I thought. And I thought they were really, really dumb.

In the wake of the massive incompetence coming out of Speaker Johnson's office today, don't lose sight of the fact that Mike Waltz is ALSO incompetent and continues to present a massive security liability to the United States. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/04/01/waltz-national-security-council-signal-gmail/

Let's give some color here. Johnson is pretzelling himself to try to make him and his leadership team look less incompetent than they are. Here are the facts:

"We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” - Justice Louis Brandeis

My statement on the failures of Trump's entire national security team. We cannot be constrained only by what is deemed to be politically possible. We must do what is necessary. https://casten.house.gov/media/press-releases/casten-calls-for-resignations-of-vance-hegseth-waltz-rubio-gabbard-ratcliffe-others

No one is this sloppy just once. We should assume these clowns have compromised significant portions of our natsec system by now.

I cannot stress this enough - so many of the people in the Trump WH, including Trump himself would NEVER pass even the most rudimentary background checks. They have access to intel only because the Senate Republicans confirmed their incompetencies. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/trump-administration-accidentally-texted-me-its-war-plans/682151/

Someone recently described the GOP as a bunch of dudes at a strip club, throwing dollars at Trump while he dances, telling themselves he loves them. Anyway, their crypto deregulation is their way to try and get invited to the champagne room. https://decrypt.co/311362/trump-world-liberty-financial-stablecoin-ethereum-bnb

In our modern financial system, we limit people's ability to deposit large chunks of cash in bank accounts, or to suddenly pay someone in securities that they quickly liquidate so that we can stop the bad guys from getting paid to do bad things.

Tornado Cash is a "mixer" that allows you to take crypto currency, commingle it with lots of other people's crypto and spit other crypto out of the back end that has broken all of the transaction history.

That tracking is a key tool to block child trafficking, drug trafficking, Russian sanctions evasion, terrorist finance, funding North Korean nukes, tax fraud, etc.

This action by the Trump admin basically opens a door for people to do all of that more. The ONLY people who benefit from this are tax cheats, terrorists, Russians, child/drug traffickers... and even worse people. It's f*ing insane that we even have to push back on this.

In a long list of horribles, this is one of the most dangerous and irresponsible things coming out of the Trump White House. Tornado Cash exists to make it easier to launder money. Period.

And what’s true of religions is just as true of secular societies. Our founders spoke of how important virtue is in a society because they knew that rule of law doesn’t work without a collective commitment to a higher, collective ethical standard.

Was speaking at an iftar last night and noted that no religion encourages people to be selfish, mean or hateful. But there are lots of politicians who drape themselves in religion to spread their hatred. Speaker Johnson is only the latest iteration.

Unethical people (Trump, Putin, Musk, etc.) seek to encourage our worst impulses because that breaks down the rule of law. Johnson seeks to encourage our worst impulses because it lets him be greedy while cloaked in hypocrisy - and counts on you to fall for his false sanctimony.

In an entirely unsurprising development, right wing anger moves straight into misogyny. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/06/amy-coney-barrett-trump-criticism-supreme-court/