Greg Collard

4 weeks ago | racket.news | Greg Collard |James Rushmore

There’s been a lot of celebration over NIH Director Bhattacharya’s announcement that the agency’s last in-house beagle lab is gone. Actually, announcement isn’t quite right. It was more like a matter-of-fact statement. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought he was just repeating what had already been announced. “We got rid of all the beagle experiments on the NIH campus,” he said in the middle of a May 4 interview on Fox & Friends Weekend as he talked about changing the culture at the agency.

1 month ago | racket.news | Greg Collard |James Rushmore

Research assistance by Kathleen McCookThe Rio Grande River received a lot of attention during the border crises. Migrants frequently entered the country illegally by crossing the river along the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. Governor Greg Abbott had a floating border installed on the river, which Mexico argued violated a 1944 water treaty between the two countries. Racket News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

1 month ago | racket.news | Greg Collard

Andrew Lowenthal is a familiar name to many Racket readers. He worked with Matt on the Twitter Files and played an instrumental role in developing Racket’stop 50 list of organizations that are part of the Censorship-Industrial Complex. We’ve reconnected with Lownethal in the last few weeks because of an impressive new searchable database developed by his nonprofit group, liber-net, on U.S. government grants awarded to groups to fight mis/disinformation. We first reported on the database here.

1 month ago | racket.news | Greg Collard |James Rushmore

The deadline for Real ID is now six days away. It’s only taken 20 years to get this far, which is bad even by government standards. Yes, Covid played a role, but the Real ID Act passed in May 2005. It had already taken 15 years when Covid became the excuse to extend the deadline not once, but twice more. The extensions were welcome news to many of us. The last thing any sane person wants to do is hang out at the DMV for a few hours.

1 month ago | racket.news | Greg Collard

The Trump Administration this week asked the U.S. Supreme Court to do what it did in 2019: lift an injunction that prohibits the Defense Department from proceeding with a policy that prohibits transgender people from serving in the military. In 2019, the Supreme Court lifted the injunction on a policy developed by former Defense Secretary James Mattis while also rejecting the first Trump administration’s request to bypass lower courts and take up the case.