Before it could go to its new owner, a sold F-250 truck at Olathe Ford Lincoln first had to serve as the home of a family of robins.

What the dealership called an “unexpected adventure” on Facebook, started about a month ago when an employee noticed a robin building a nest on the truck’s right front tire. Days later, the bird laid four eggs.

It is forbidden to move robin’s nests under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty — so the employees had to wait until they left on their own. But the dealership embraced the young birds, naming them Lugnut, Turbo, Diesel and Axle and “interviewing” them on Facebook.

After 4 weeks of nesting, the dealership announced the birds flew the coop — er, tire — on Wednesday.

During the time the baby birds were nesting, Olathe Ford Lincoln turned to Operation Wildlife, the largest publicly funded clinic and wildlife rehabilitation service in Kansas, for guidance.

“All birds are protected by federal law,” Operation Wildlife Executive Director Diane Johnson told the Post in an email. That protection includes birds’ nests, eggs and “pieces, parts” of the animals.

On May 14, the company announced that the eggs had hatched. Employees checked on the new family daily.

Luckily for the dealership, the truck’s new owners were willing to share with the robins.

“We want to give a huge THANK YOU to our incredibly kind and understanding customers, who have been so patient and thoughtful while we wait for these little ones to grow up and leave the nest safely,” the dealership wrote on its Facebook page on Wednesday.

According to Johnson, robins learn to fly in about 30-35 days, but Lugnut, Turbo, Diesel and Axle were advanced — leaving in just under two weeks.

Even though the birds have flown away, the dealership posted on Facebook that it will wait a few days to make sure they don’t return before removing the nest and allowing the owner to drive their new truck away.

Y’ALL. Okay, so I have been in a very deep depression lately so I had an emergency ketamine session and I’ve been following all of my normal tools and they’ve helped but I was still struggling a little and finally I admitted that this house is just too sad after the loss of my twoContinue reading "I can literally feel my heart expanding in such a good way that’s probably normal where ginger boys are concerned but also maybe I should call my doctor?"

TOPEKA — A Kansas judge blocked the state from enforcing portions of a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, allowing transgender kids in Kansas to undergo hormone therapy and use puberty blockers.

In a 117-page Friday ruling, Douglas County District Court Judge Carl Folsom said provisions of Senate Bill 63, dubbed the Help Not Harm Act,” likely violate the Kansas Constitution. He also disputed the credibility of most of the state’s expert witnesses, who testified before the court in November.

The decision, while temporary and part of ongoing litigation, is a blow to Kansas officials who passed the ban in 2025 in an attempt to levy civil, financial and regulatory sanctions against the provision of gender-affirming care to minors.

Attorney General Kris Kobach, who represents the state, said in a Saturday statement the decision “is a stark example of judicial activism.” He vowed to appeal the judge’s temporary injunction, which immediately halts enforcement statewide of the ban on hormone treatment and puberty blockers for kids under 18 in Kansas.

“The judge invented a new constitutional right out of whole cloth,” Kobach said. “Even though the Kansas Constitution says nothing about it, the judge created a new right of parents to obtain otherwise-illegal treatments for their children.”

According to Folsom, the families were trying to preserve their constitutional rights, including “the natural right to personal autonomy,” equal protection under the law and the right to make parenting decisions.

Folsom said the pseudonymous parents and their teens were likely to prevail in their argument that SB 63 infringes on their right to personal autonomy by prohibiting them from making medical decisions on behalf of their children, “in accordance with their children’s wishes and doctor’s recommendations, including the decision to treat gender dysphoria with puberty blocking medication or hormone therapy” and replacing those decisions with government preferences.

He added that the parents are “substantially likely” to show that the state has failed to demonstrate SB 63 satisfies strict scrutiny, the weighty and highly specific test states must overcome to defend a law against legal challenges. They must justify a compelling government interest in regulating an issue and prove its actions advance that compelling interest in a narrowly tailored way.

Kobach and state lawmakers have argued that SB 63 protects kids from experimental and harmful medical interventions and shields the integrity of the medical profession.

“Protecting children and regulating the medical profession are likely legitimate and important state interests,” Folsom wrote, “but such broad articulations are likely insufficiently specific to satisfy the strict-scrutiny standard.”

Folsom came to the decision to issue a temporary injunction after two days of testimony in November. The four witnesses for the teens and their mothers included pediatric endocrinologists, a pediatric and adult hospitalist and bioethicist, and a child and adult psychiatrist. Folsom deemed each of the witnesses credible, gave full weight to their testimony and relied heavily upon their facts in his decision.

The state’s eight witnesses included a plastic surgeon, a medical ethicist, an endocrinologist who treats adults and a neuroscientist. Folsom gave little weight to three of the eight, some weight to one and little-to-no weight to another. Folsom deemed Chloe Cole, who received puberty blockers and hormone therapy treatment as a minor in California, credible but gave her testimony less than full weight because her experiences didn’t occur in Kansas.

Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBT & HIV Rights Project, said the decision was “an enormous relief.”

The ACLU and ACLU of Kansas represent the two teens and their parents, along with lawyers from the Philadelphia-based law firm Ballard Spahr.

“Our brave clients invested tremendous effort to represent not only their interests but also the interests of all transgender youth in Kansas,” said Kristen Broz, partner in the firm’s litigation department.

In addition to the Attorney General’s Office, the state is being represented by First and Fourteenth, a Colorado-based boutique law firm that is also assisting the attorney general in a lawsuit in Johnson County challenging the validity of a set of anti-abortion laws.

The Republican-led Legislature passed SB 63 in January 2025, and Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed it. Republicans overrode her veto, the bill became law in February 2025, and the ACLU and ACLU of Kansas challenged it that May.

I am dying to know how much money Plex is about to make the next six weeks charging people to stream their own video from their own homes. Today, it's giving every prospective customer until July 1st to lock in a lifetime subscription at today's rates - before it triples the price to $750.

Plex already more than doubled the price of a lifetime Plex Pass subscription from $119.99 to $249.99 last March, and it'll triple again on July 1st to $749.99. At that price, you'd have to subscribe for 11 years (at the current annual rate) to make the lifetime sub worthwhile.

Plex isn't choosing the new number because it expects you to pay $750. In a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Jamelle Bouie writes that each US president molds the presidency in his own image and Trump has constructed a “government as protection racket and the president as mob boss”.¹

So what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

As I wrote last month:

I’ve found it useful to think of DJT’s 2nd term primarily as a heist: a theft of money & power from the American people by a con man who finally found the perfect score.

Trump feels like he’s running the largest casino in the world and he’s gonna take his deserved cut.

1. I love Bouie but “pecuniary presidency” isn’t going to catch fire in the public’s imagination. But I also do not have a better suggestion beyond “mob boss presidency”. And maybe it doesn’t matter much anyway. Even “liberal” Americans are still hesitant to believe that the high office of the US presidency, the duly elected “leader of the free world”, could be corrupted so completely that you can plainly and factually refer to him as a thief and mobster. ↩

Tags: Donald Trump · Jamelle Bouie · politics · usa