This Parkland Shooting Survivor Wants a Top DNC Leadership Spot

Parkland shooting survivor and gun control activist David Hogg is running for vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. 

Hogg, 24, is hoping to inject some of his youthful, progressive energy into a party still licking its wounds and pointing fingers after a devastating election night loss in November.  

“I think this role is a great way of, for one, bringing newer voices into the Democratic Party,” the Gen Zer told ABC News. “I just want to be one of several of those voices to help represent young people and also, more than anything, make sure that we’re standing up to the consulting class that increasingly the Democratic Party is representing instead of the working class.”

Hogg also took particular aim at what he sees as complacency and a lack of accountability from party leadership, many of whom were quick to defend the Harris campaign while blaming others for their loss. Black men, leftists, and trans people have all been scapegoated. Hogg called this out.

“What really bothers me is, we say to people all the time, ‘Who’s to blame for this election?’ It’s young people, it’s X minority group … but really, who’s to blame for this? It’s us. It’s us. Ultimately, we failed to communicate, and we failed to have a broader strategy within the party to make sure that we were telling the president what he needed to hear, rather than what he wanted to hear, which was that he needed to drop out.”

There are four elected vice chair slots up for grabs within the DNC, with three general vice chairperson roles and one vice chairperson for civic engagement and voter participation. Hogg is younger than anyone else who’s thrown their name in, and his victory would be a generational shift in the party.

“We need to realize that we are increasingly the party of sycophants,” Hogg said. “We are just surrounding ourselves with people who tell us what we want to hear instead of what we need to hear; we’re increasingly surrounding ourselves with paid political consultants that … are letting what donors say to them guide their talking points.”

Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan is sounding the alarm over … stars?

A recent spate of drone sightings over New Jersey have sparked widespread confusion and some panic among lawmakers, now including Hogan, who took to X Friday to call on federal officials to do something about the lights he saw floating in the sky. 

“Last night, beginning at around 9:45 pm, I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation’s capital). I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes,” Hogan wrote in a post.

The former Republican governor included a two-minute video of the night sky, in which a few small lights can be seen, and it’s unclear whether the lights are static or in motion. 

“Like many who have observed these drones, I do not know if this increasing activity over our skies is a threat to public safety or national security. But the public is growing increasingly concerned and frustrated with the complete lack of transparency and the dismissive attitude of the federal government,” Hogan wrote.

“The government has the ability to track these from their point of origin but has mounted a negligent response. People are rightfully clamoring for answers, but aren’t getting any,” Hogan continued, and he expressed frustration at not knowing the origin of the lights or whether they were dangerous.  

“That response is entirely unacceptable. I join with the growing bipartisan chorus of leaders demanding that the federal government immediately address this issue,” Hogan wrote. “The American people deserve answers and action now.”

While Hogan may have been speaking to the legitimate concern of citizens of the Eastern seaboard, it’s not clear that what he was able to film were drones at all.

Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist, replied to Hogan’s post with what feels like an important fact-check. 

“With immense respect, Mr. governor, this is the constellation ‘Orion,’” Cappucci wrote in a post on X. He included an image of the lights in the video labeled as the stars Bellatrix, Bettleguese, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak. 

“It’s made up of stars between 244 and 1,344 light years away. The stars will be in a similar place tomorrow,” Cappucci added.

Last week, right-wing fear hustler Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was quick to use the drones to suggest that the federal government was failing to keep Americans safe. Meanwhile, President-elect Donald Trump, clearly intent on taking the safety of his constituents seriously, used the drones to mock former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. 

Donald Trump hasn’t yet begun his second term, but his allies are already setting the stage for a third administrative run under the president-elect.

Speaking at the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, War Room podcast host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested that conservatives should rally to keep the MAGA leader in power via a supposed loophole in the U.S. Constitution.

“Donald John Trump is going to raise his hand on the King James Bible and take the oath of office, his third victory and his second term,” Bannon said at the club’s annual gala.

“And the viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, that, I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28?” Bannon continued, referring to one of Trump’s former attorney general hopefuls. “Are you guys down for that? Trump ’28?”

It’s not even the first time this year that conservative figureheads have argued in favor of violating the Constitution to upgrade Trump’s authoritarian power.

The Twenty-Second Amendment, which was ratified in 1951, states that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” Congress pushed for the term limit after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served three terms through World War II, fearing future abuses of power.

Only one clear exception exists for a person to serve more than two terms: a vice president who claims the Oval Office through succession after the death or resignation of a president could go on for another two terms, if and only if their initial time at the top of the executive branch lasted less than two years.

But in April, a feature story in The American Conservative flat-out advocated for the total repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment, arguing that the country should override the shackles of the two-term limit on the basis that the authors of the amendment couldn’t have predicted the allure of a far-right candidate with a frenetic base.

“If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?” American Conservative contributor Peter Tonguette wrote at the time.

Next up on Donald Trump’s lengthy Executive Office to-do list: Stop the clock.

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.

His promise would make Standard Time, which we are currently in and which people overwhelmingly hate due to the increased darkness, permanent.

Proponents for Daylight Saving Time argue that the country uses less energy by extending the long summer sun an hour later into the evening. That was the reason behind Congress’s opt-in to Daylight Saving Time during World War I and World War II, according to Seize the Daylight author David Prerau.

That rationale hasn’t exactly held up—a 2008 study by the Department of Energy found that the clock switch saves a minuscule amount on the country’s annual energy usage—approximately 0.03 percent—while another study that same year out of the University of California-Santa Barbara suggested that Daylight Saving Time could actually cost the country more than not switching the clocks at all. Still, the majority of Americans want to make it permanent.

Trump’s sudden rejection of Daylight Saving Time is a near-total reversal of where he stood on the issue in 2019.

“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!” Trump wrote at the time.

But you don’t have to search far to figure out why Trump might have changed his mind. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent a considerable amount of time at Trump’s side in recent months, has been a vocal opponent of the time change. Earlier this month, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other co-chair of Trump’s not-yet-real nongovernmental commission—the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE—voiced their support for abolishing Daylight Savings Time.

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk responded to an X poll indicating that the site’s users were no longer in favor of the back-and-forth.

“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy responded.

Of course, any concrete change to the country’s official clock would have to pass through Congress—though the increasingly MAGA complicit Republican Party would be in for a rude awakening if it approved the “permanent” jump. America last tried this experiment in 1974, when officials discovered that the only thing less popular than permanent Daylight Saving Time was ending it, with support for the permanent switch falling from 79 percent to just 42 percent within three months, The New York Times reported that year.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host Donald Trump has picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, may have a direct financial stake in three companies that would do business with the agency he intends to run.

A review of Oz’s 2022 tax disclosure by Accountable.US revealed that the Trump ally owned up to $26 million stake in Sharecare, a digital health company co-founded by Oz that operates CareLinx, the “exclusive in-home care supplemental benefit program” used by 1.5 million Medicare Advantage enrollees. The company went private in 2024, so it’s unknown whether Oz still owns a stake in the company.

Novo Nordisk, which produces Ozempic and Wegovy among other drugs, is also a client of Sharecare. As head of CMS, Oz has considerable impact on the pharmaceutical industry—but with business ties like these, it’s equally likely that these drug companies could have a profound impact on him.

Oz’s transition team spokesperson, Nick Clemens, told USA Today Friday that Oz had sold off his stake in Sharecare, but did not speak to the other stocks Oz owned with ties to the insurance industry.

In 2022, Oz also owned a stake valued at between $280,000 and $600,000 in UnitedHealth Group and between $50,000 and $100,000 in CVS Health, both of which provide insurance plans for roughly 41 percent of all Medicare Advantage enrollees as of 2024.

Oz also disclosed owning a stake valued at up to $25 million in Amazon and up to $5 million in Microsoft, which operate CMS’s “two primary cloud service providers,” according to its most recent budget.

Accountable.US did not find any indication that Oz had sold these stocks, and it was not confirmed by his spokesperson.

Sam Altman has joined the growing list of billionaires genuflecting before Donald Trump.

Fox Business reported Friday that the tech founder will personally be donating $1 million to the presidential inaugural committee. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Altman said in a statement.

We’ll have to see if the donation smooths over Altman’s rocky relationship with fellow OpenAI co-founder and President-elect Trump’s self-styled “first buddy,” Elon Musk.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018, reportedly after his fellow founders shot down a proposal to let him run the company himself. Musk has since taken shots at Altman (and launched his own AI company), but their feud has heated up in recent months. Musk sued OpenAI in March, alleging it violated its nonprofit principles, and his criticisms of Altman have taken on a distinctly Trumpish flavor: The world’s richest man and unofficial Trump co-president recently dubbed Altman “Swindly Sam.”

But with a second Trump administration on the horizon, plutocrats’ past beefs with Trumpworld are magically disappearing. The announcement of Altman’s $1 million donation to the upcoming inauguration follows reports of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos doing the same, despite their past run-ins with Trump.

Zuckerberg, who has called Trump “badass” even as Trump threatened him with imprisonment for supposed election interference as the owner of Facebook, will donate to the inauguration fund through Meta. Jeff Bezos—who has long been lampooned by Trump as the owner of The Washington Post—tanked the Post’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute in November. He will be donating his million via Amazon.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has taken the Lone Star State’s abortion battle to the national stage, suing a New York doctor for prescribing the abortion pill to an in-state resident.

New York’s state law protects doctors and providers providing abortion care from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, making the Empire State a home base for companies shipping out the abortion pill to consumers around the country.

Paxton has accused Dr. Margaret Carpenter of mailing the pills to a Collin County resident who allegedly consumed the medication when she was nine weeks pregnant, reported The Texas Tribune. The lawsuit does not mention if the woman was successful in terminating her pregnancy.

Now Paxton is asking the county court to order Carpenter to pay $100,000 for every violation of the state’s near-total abortion ban. (Violators of the draconian abortion law could also serve up to life in prison and have their Texas medical license revoked.) The lawsuit is the first attempt to enforce a state abortion ban beyond its borders.

“Abortion is, and will continue to be, legal and protected in New York. As other states move to attack those who provide or obtain abortion care, New York is proud to be a safe haven for abortion access,” wrote New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement responding to Paxton’s lawsuit. “We will always protect our providers from unjust attempts to punish them for doing their job and we will never cower in the face of intimidation or threats. I will continue to defend reproductive freedom and justice for New Yorkers, including from out-of-state anti-choice attacks.”

The two-drug prescription commonly referred to as the “abortion pill” is a mixture of mifepristone and misoprostol. The procedure accounts for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits. It is more than 95 percent effective at ending pregnancies when used before 10 weeks of pregnancy, according to statistics by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Access to mifepristone has become an increasingly fraught political issue in the years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In October, the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho—a cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation—sued the federal government to limit access to the drug, arguing that the medication should be illegal for minors (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments).

The suit also accused the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general described as a “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.

But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the lawsuit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.

“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit read on page 190.

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.

This article has been updated.

In an effort to shrink the size of the federal government, Donald Trump’s transition team is considering different plans to abolish a crucial financial regulatory agency—a move that could have far-reaching effects on the economy.

While interviewing potential nominees for positions heading up government financial agencies, Trump advisers have floated whether it would be worth dissolving some agencies, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The team is considering moving the responsibilities of the FDIC, which include providing deposit insurance for banks, to the Treasury Department, some people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Potential nominees have also been meeting with DOGE co-chairs technocrat troll Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, the major Trump donor tapped to lead the Treasury, according to sources.

The FDIC is key to financial stability and security because it insures funds in depositors’ checking and savings accounts. To threaten that insurance would almost certainly cause customers to fear that their money is no longer safe. It could potentially lead to a run on the banks, which might result in banks failing in a major financial collapse.

But if a cut makes the wiley DOGE czars feel like they’re reducing bureaucratic redundancies, it must be worth it, right?

Sheila Bair, who previously served as chair of the FDIC, warned about the plan to dissolve the essential regulator.

“Eliminating the FDIC is so out there, not sure it needs response,” Bair wrote in a post on X Friday. “FDIC has a perfect record of protecting insured deposits for over 90 years. Strong consumer confidence in the brand, providing stability during crises. During the [Great Financial Crisis], money was running INTO banks.”

Bair, who also served as the former assistant secretary for financial institutions, explained that the Treasury Department was not well suited to take on the responsibilities of the FDIC.

“As a former Treasury official, big supporter of the Department, but it would not be a good home for deposit insurance. Deposit insurance is funded by bank premiums, not taxpayers. Treasury has no expertise in handling bank failures. Changing the guarantor would create confusion among depositors who are comforted by the ‘FDIC Insured’ sign at their banks,” she added in a separate post.

Critics are torching a New York Times op-ed Friday by the chief of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, arguing that the $23.5 million-salaried executive’s message overwhelmingly ignored the failures actively perpetuated by his company in the American health care system.

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty condemned the American public’s gleeful response to the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was assassinated by a masked gunman last week on the streets of New York City just hours before an investor meeting.

In roughly 600 words, he also attempted to deflect his insurance network’s responsibility in the growing inequity in America’s health care system, vaguely pointing to a “patchwork” of failures decades in the making while swearing that his corporate network—which reported $22 billion in profits in 2023 alone, nearly three times the figure reported by CVS, the second-most-profitable health insurance company that year—was consistently fighting to “deliver high-quality care and lower costs.”

But readers weren’t buying it.

Instead, they swarmed the Times with negative feedback, piling on more than 2,500 comments within hours of the article’s publication, temporarily disabling its Comments section. Users shared their own horrible experiences with the health insurance industry, deriding Witty’s vapid analysis as a “self-serving essay” that did nothing to address UnitedHealthcare’s role in a system that prioritizes shareholder profits over successful medical outcomes for its clients.

Federal data from 2022 compiled by the personal finance website ValuePenguin found that UnitedHealthcare far outpaced its competitors when it came to denying coverage, rejecting 32 percent or roughly one in three claims. In 2024, the insurer’s parent group spent more than $5.8 million lobbying Congress on health care–related issues.

Meanwhile, Americans are paying more than ever for health insurance, with costs far outpacing the rate of inflation. A Kaiser Family Foundation report published earlier this year found that the vast majority of U.S. adults are worried about being able to afford a major medical expense, regardless of their financial position.

Tulsi Gabbard is flopping in her meetings to persuade Senate Republicans to back her unpopular nomination as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, according to a report from The Hill published Friday.

“She was proving to be a little shallow, like a House member talking at a hearing and not someone who needs to provide the president’s daily intelligence briefing,” one source familiar with the meetings told The Hill.

It seems that in her exchanges, Gabbard had been all sound, no fury. One Senate Republican, who called Gabbard’s meetings “BS sessions,” said that several Republicans were left wanting more substantive responses.

“I’ve heard that she’s not very well prepared,” the Republican senator said. “I’ve heard not great things.”

A second Senate Republican said she’d elicited “a lot of eyerolls” from senators.

One Senate GOP aide, whose member had met with Gabbard, said her disastrous audiences with Senate Republicans “don’t make it easy” for her to gain the support she needs to be confirmed. “She’s got some work to do if she wants the job. The more she meets with serious people, the more they’ll see there’s a competency deficit.”

The aide noted to The Hill that Gabbard’s “just not educated” on the kind of work involved in the position but said she was “a capable person who could learn quickly.”

Gabbard is “probably more vulnerable than [Pete] Hegseth right now,” another source familiar with the meetings said.

Yet another Senate Republican noted that Gabbard’s issues stemmed from having to walk back her position opposing reauthorization of FISA, a foreign spying tool that she would have to defend as head of U.S. national intelligence.

Gabbard’s bid for the high-ranking role has faced significant criticism, not only because she lacks experience in the intelligence profession but also because of her penchant for defending some of the world’s most violent autocrats—but of course she and Trump have that in common.

Trump transition spokesperson Alexa Henning pushed back on the characterization that Gabbard has been struggling in her meetings on Capitol Hill.

“These cowardly anonymous sources are desperately trying to hold on to power, so they hide behind the media to spread these falsities that directly subvert the will of the American people. President Trump won with a mandate for change from the American people, and that’s one of the reasons he nominated Lt. Col. Gabbard for DNI,” Henning said in a statement.