by Jordan Rubin | Sep 22, 2026 | Civil Rights, Deadline: Legal Blog, News, Science
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan on Tuesday declined to intervene in a contentious surrogacy and custody dispute, rejecting an emergency application from surrogate McKenna West, who asked the high court to halt a California court order that backed the child’s biological parents.
The denial is the latest in a series of legal wins for the biological parents and losses for West. Tuesday’s order declined to provide her with what the parents said would have been a chaotic, confusing and needless judicial intervention.
As is typical for such orders, there was no explanation accompanying the denial from Kagan, who is assigned to field emergency litigation from California.
West gave birth in August to the child at the center of the dispute. The Alaska woman did so in Texas, which bans abortion. She said the California couple, Nausheen Gilkar and Omar Ahmed, pressured her to have one after learning that the baby faced a life-threatening heart condition.
The surrogate argued at the Supreme Court that the California court order backing the couple’s parental rights violated her due process rights because, she said, the state court didn’t have jurisdiction over her. Among the firms representing her was Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian conservative legal group that has had success at the high court.
The parents opposed West’s application on both the facts and the law. In their partially redacted response, they said there was no emergency to resolve because they had been providing the care that West said she wanted. They said they had been with the child, whom they named Rumi, “around-the-clock in a hospital’s pediatric intensive care unit,” and so, they said, Supreme Court intervention would
by Steve Benen | Sep 22, 2026 | Health, Maddowblog, Science, White House
Last month, Donald Trump issued an indefensible broadside designed to upend the childhood vaccine schedule. The accompanying White House event was a misinformation extravaganza, which included the president falsely claiming that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines can possibly be “quite lethal” when combined into a single shot.
Asked if he had any evidence whatsoever to back that up, the Republican replied, “No, what I’ve heard is that there are, there are some people that say it is that way.” (He didn’t say who might be among “some people.”)
A day later, Trump kept this going, again falsely arguing, “MMR, if you give them separately, the M, the M and the R, it’s fine. When you put them together, they’re sort of like a nuclear weapon, according to some.” (He again failed to explain who’s included among these unidentified “some.”)
The president’s comments were preposterous nonsense, which he managed to make worse late last week.
Trump: “We’re also going to be demanding the drug companies, with respect to a certain situation — the autism — that they make their doses in 20% shots. So you have shot 1, shot 2, shot 3, shot 4, shot 5 … I think you’re gonna see a massive reduction in autism”— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-18T20:04:37.916Z
At an unrelated Oval Office event, Trump said his administration would be “demanding” even more changes to the childhood immunization schedule, which he said were intended to address autism, which even he ought to understand by now has nothing to do with vaccines.
According to the president’s vision, it’s not enough to separate the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines needlessly; he also wants to divide
by Ja'han Jones | Sep 16, 2026 | Business, News Analysis, Science, White House
Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, some of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of technology and politics.
Thiel takes Antichrist lectures to Tennessee
MAGA-aligned tech oligarch Peter Thiel is bringing his bizarre Antichrist lecture series to Tennessee later this month after hosting similar events at the Vatican and in San Francisco.
As The Tennessean reported:
Details about the lecture series appear sparse and secretive. The event page describes the series as a “closed-door, off-the-record event” hosted by The Pamphleteer, an online news publication in Nashville that bills itself as an alternative to “corporate and progressive” media, and Meriwether Academy, a Nashville-based nonprofit that says its mission is to “grow fraternal networks and educational societies across America” with the ultimate goal of developing boys’ schools in every state offering a classical and outdoor education.
It’s a curious decision for a Big Tech leader to take such talks to Tennessee of all places, given that the state is at the heart of the backlash to artificial intelligence data centers. Vice President JD Vance, a protégé of Thiel’s, has also pushed rhetoric about an Antichrist possibly living among us, an assertion that has come as he has publicly derided liberal Christians.
Read more at The Tennessean.
Crypto bill crashes
Three Republicans joined Democrats in opposition to a bill on cryptocurrency regulation that many in the GOP — and the president, in particular — have sought to pass. Democrats have raised concern about the so-called Clarity Act’s potential to help enrich President Donald Trump, who raked in more than $1 billion from the crypto industry in 2025, and his family.
Read more at The Hill.
Regulatory oversight of AI
At a
by Steve Benen | Sep 15, 2026 | elections, Maddowblog, Science, White House
As this week got underway, Donald Trump responded to growing concerns about the threats posed by artificial intelligence by staking a position that even many in the industry see as indefensibly extreme: He rejected the idea of AI guardrails altogether, telling the public that the only necessary safeguard is having an American president with a “high IQ.”
The White House policy, in other words, is to simply do nothing except hope for the best.
In the hours that followed, Trump published a half-dozen related items to his social media platform, calling AI fears a “hoax,” including his Monday afternoon online rant:
AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct.
He went on to argue in subsequent items to compare AI concerns to the climate crisis, which he also dismissed as a “hoax,” adding, “The AI Hoax being perpetrated by the Radical Left Dumocrats is reminiscent of their Global Warming Scam of not so long ago, where everyone was going to die from extreme heat. What happened?”
The answer, incidentally, is that the climate crisis has intensified, putting the world at great risk, as a sitting American president really ought to know and understand.
To be sure, Trump’s tiresome rhetoric was familiar. After all, he effectively uses the word “hoax” to mean “stuff I don’t like,” having applied it to everything from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to
by Ja'han Jones | Aug 12, 2026 | Business, Opinion, Science
Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, some of the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.
Zuckerbot’s populist manifesto
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg yet again appears desperate for a populist rebrand.
After years of sidling up to the MAGA movement, Zuckerberg just unleashed a 6,500-word manifesto outlining his vision for artificial intelligence titled “The Future Is for Everyone.” And it reads like an AI chatbot’s poor attempt to relate to humans.
Zuckerberg criticizes people who predict AI “doom,” while arguing for the industry to adopt Meta’s open-source model strategy — that is, rather than the proprietary models offered by Meta’s competitors at OpenAI and Anthropic. Put another way: What’s best for the AI industry is what serves Zuck’s company best. Otherwise, he says, AI labs other than his own will control access to “superintelligence.”
If you’re thinking Zuckerberg may not be the best messenger for this kind of populist rhetoric, you’re not alone. Over at Tech Crunch, Russell Brandom rebuked the Meta CEO’s dismissive tone, explaining that distrust toward Meta and social media more broadly makes him difficult to take seriously on this matter. Brandom also argued against the sunny portrayal of AI tools, saying: “Even as Zuckerberg tries to paint a picture of the wonderful future abundant superintelligence will bring, he keeps reminding us of all the ways it’s likely to go wrong.”
Read more at Tech Crunch.
Truth Social special access
Donald Trump’s media company said more than 10 customers have agreed to pay $60,000 to $100,000 monthly for the brazenly corrupt feature on Truth Social that allows Wall Street to obtain early access to the president’s social media posts.
Read more
by Miranda Yaver | Aug 11, 2026 | Congress, Opinion, Science
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s announcement that she is freezing her eggs has set off speculation about her future political decisions. It has also shined a light on the need to normalize and broaden access to this opportunity.
Ocasio-Cortez, who has historically been guarded about her private life, has been notably transparent in chronicling her fertility journey. She has shared reflections on the need to combat negative messaging directed at women who postpone having children in order to prioritize career and financial security and has even administered her injections on camera as part of the egg-freezing protocol.
Ocasio-Cortez has also been explicit about the exorbitant cost of this undertaking, with her insurance plan excluding coverage altogether.
Ocasio-Cortez has also been explicit about the exorbitant cost of this undertaking, with her insurance plan excluding coverage altogether, leaving her with what she estimated to be between $8,000 and $9,000 in egg-freezing expenses (not including the cost of their storage) that do not count toward her deductible or out-of-pocket maximum.
With health insurance plans usually excluding this type of care except in certain narrow circumstances (such as prior to cancer treatments), most women find this a prohibitive price to take control of their lives. While 21 states mandate some type of coverage for fertility treatments, there is wide variation in the breadth of these requirements, and the majority of employer-sponsored health insurance plans are exempt from these requirements due to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act’s preemption provision.
American women are having babies later in life, such that 21% of births in 2023 were to people ages 35 or older. Not only does older age put one at risk of
