AFSCME Solidarity

We make Minnesota happen!! Standing stronger together ✊

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

This week someone targeted my family for harm with a false report. We’re physically OK, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t harmed. I am beyond furious.

Whatever your politics, this is awful, wrong, and can never become normal. https://t.co/72wxaVLzVT

[Former Republican 🇺🇸 @Sjacobs2020]

Allegations of child abuse must be investigated...

But you separate children from their home and traumatize little kids with an hour-plus interrogation because of an anonymous call, which you believe was politically motivated?

The investigation should have started with verifying the caller and the claims before traumatizing the children.

CPS, maybe you could look into the Epstein files next.

Our government IS being weaponized...
against the innocent and weaponized to protect the criminals.

[Maria Shriver @mariashriver]

My heart goes out to Pete and Chasten and it enrages me that this happened to them. Of course it could happen to anyone who uses their voice about anything today. We must all denounce this and stand with this family. This anonymous caller should be arrested. @PeteButtigieg

[Governor Tim Walz @GovTimWalz]

61 days until America’s best fair.

[Hillary Clinton @HillaryClinton]

Maybe Vance doesn't know this history because it's in one of the books his administration banned.

The difference between Watergate and now is that back then, Republicans actually did something about a law-breaking president. Today, they only roll over for their cult leader.

[Keith Ellison @keithellison]

Always a great day at the Hmong International Freedom Festival!

Grateful for the chance to celebrate with Minnesota's Hmong community and catch up with so many friends. Thanks for the warm welcome!

[Covie @covie_93]

The Faith and Freedom Coalition conference is the largest gathering of pedophiles in Washington DC since Jan. 6.

[AFSCME Solidarity @2672Local]

Secretary Mansplainer is a bully and a lair.
He knows he is wrong and being shown just how wrong by a black woman which drives his lying, mean-spirited stupidity.
@DHSgov @SecMullinDHS

[CSPAN @cspan]

Heated exchange between @RepUnderwood and @SecMullinDHS on death rates in ICE detention centers.

Secretary Mullin: "You need to be informed about what you're saying.

Underwood: "I am informed."

Mullin: "No, you're not."

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

Just a reminder that Rep Lauren Underwood is the beating heart of the Democratic party. She’s ushered 19 bills into law; she consistently wins in a swing district; she’s a leader on maternal health, particularly for Black women; and she has one of the strongest constituent-service operations in Congress.

And she’s not even 40 years old…

[Victor Shi @Victorshi2020]

There is no better politician or candidate out that who’s able to directly link corruption of this Administration and the Republican Party to the suffering of everyday Americans than Jon Ossoff. To say it’s impressive is an understatement. A true masterclass.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.

The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.

Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.

The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.

Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.

The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.

The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.

This is your tax money.

It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.

We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC

[Mike Norton @NortonMpls]

People keep saying they can’t believe we used to treat gay people like second class citizens not that long ago, but look the other way when trans people are treated like second class citizens today

[Reuters @Reuters]

A US agency said it was investigating the June 19 crash of a Tesla Model 3 that was reportedly using an advanced driver assistance system when it struck a home in Katy, Texas, killing a 76-year-old woman https://t.co/ibk86bgO6j

[AFSCME Solidarity @2672Local]

Trump is a waste of human endeavor.

[Reuters @Reuters]

A California court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Trump's administration against Los Angeles over a city ordinance limiting its cooperation with federal immigration authorities https://t.co/tyho0PGlsU

[Reuters @Reuters]

A California court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Trump's administration against Los Angeles over a city ordinance limiting its cooperation with federal immigration authorities https://t.co/tyho0PGlsU

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

The Lessons I Learned from My Dad

I am not the man my father is.
I am trying. Some days closer. Some days farther.
He never sat me down and explained these lessons. He lived them. I’m still learning them.

Show up.
The kitchen table. The hospital room. The funeral. The picket line. The call from the son who won’t answer.
Show up.
Most days that’s the whole job.
My whole life I watched him do it. Not for cameras. Not for headlines. Not because there was something in it for him. He showed up because someone needed him.

I learned that grief doesn’t make you special.
My father buried a wife and daughter. He buried a son. Yet he never treated grief as a claim on other people’s sympathy. Instead, it made him notice theirs.
A mother who lost a child. A father sitting beside a hospital bed. A kid scared about what comes next. A son who lost his mother, his sister, his brother.
He always noticed.

I learned that power is not the point.
The people who chase power eventually confuse the office with themselves.
My father never did.
Whether he was a county councilman, a senator, vice president, or president, he was the same man.
The title changed.
He didn’t.

I learned that family comes first.
The train from Wilmington wasn’t symbolism.
It was every night.
He read to us. Showed up to games. Sat through hospital rooms. Waited up for children who were lost.
And when the day came that the country and the family could not both have him at full strength, he chose family. He relinquished the last chapter of how he wanted to be remembered. And he never complained about it.

Most of all, I learned that love is not soft.
Love is discipline.
Love is showing up at one in the morning when nobody is watching.
Love is answering the phone.
Love is staying.
Love is getting back up after life knocks you down and doing it all again tomorrow.
That love saved my life.
I’ve failed at many of these lessons, sometimes in very public ways.
He loved me anyway.

That’s the last lesson.
I am not trying to become my father.
I am trying to carry what he gave me.
And if I can do that, even imperfectly, that will be enough.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I love you.

[Nancy Reeck @njreeck]

When will he be arrested for bribery??

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

A Justice Department lawyer just signed a memo saying disabled Americans have no right to live in their own homes. In the same document, she admits no court in the country agrees with her.

Read that again. A government official wrote down, in black and white, that her own argument is wrong by every legal standard of the last thirty years, and she made it anyway.

Here is what it means in plain terms.

Right now, 8.4 million people get help that lets them stay in their own homes. Aides who help them dress. Care that lets them work, see friends, raise their kids, sleep in their own beds at night.

This memo tells states they can cut all of it.

And if they cut it, where do those people go? Into nursing homes. Into institutions. Into facilities where someone else decides when you wake up, what you eat, who your roommate is, whether you go outside today.

A lawyer who has visited people locked in these places said their whole world shrinks to one hallway. That is the future this memo is opening the door to.

Keeping people in their own homes is cheaper. In one case, home care cost under $7,500 a year. The nursing home would have cost close to $50,000. The cruel option is also the expensive one. They want to spend more money to make people's lives worse.

So why?

Because last summer Trump signed an order to deal with homelessness by force, by sweeping people off the streets and committing them. He said it out loud during the campaign: the mentally ill belong back in institutions.

The only thing standing in the way was the law that says people deserve to live in their own communities.

This memo is how they get around it. And it landed the same week Republicans slashed Medicaid, giving every cash-strapped state the perfect excuse to start cutting.

A think tank drew up the plan. A lawyer wrote the memo. A president signed the order. Three signatures, and millions of people could lose the right to their own front door.

We are about to spend the summer celebrating 250 years of American freedom.
Some Americans are about to find out it doesn't include them.

[AFSCME Solidarity @2672Local]

Definition of gaslighting mfer.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

This exchange is nuts.

TRUMP: I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up, and we also have pictures of it.

O’KEEFE: Can you release the photos? We’ve been asking for them.

TRUMP: Yeah, at the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. But all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior, and I don’t know if their lawyers will allow you to speak to them, because you write fake news.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

This exchange is nuts.

TRUMP: I can’t help it if somebody goes in with a knife and starts hacking it up, and we also have pictures of it.

O’KEEFE: Can you release the photos? We’ve been asking for them.

TRUMP: Yeah, at the right time you’ll see it. You’ll see it in court. But all you have to do is call the Parks Department, call the Department of Interior, and I don’t know if their lawyers will allow you to speak to them, because you write fake news.