Dad. Husband. Author of tales ruined by cabbage. Gardener. Democrat. #CALeg staff. Not angry it’s just my face. Fond of Muppets. He/Him/His. views = just me
Wow. Totally unhinged.
The GOP in CA know there isn’t voter fraud, even though they hate the late counting of ballots. They should speak up and say so.
We can disagree on electoral policy (VBM, late registration, curing) without undermining confidence in our democracy.
This is the type of crisis that a Democratic president would be held personally responsible for by the media. Instead it’s getting virtually no national attention despite the issue being directly connected to federal cuts enacted by the Trump administration
Trump has a meltdown and ends the interview
Welker: Just to be very clear, there's no evidence of what you're saying.
Trump: There’s a lot of evidence. There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. The election was rigged. And it’s happening again in California. They’re cheating.
Welker: Do you have evidence?
Trump: All I have to do is look.
Welker: That’s not evidence. The local officials acknowledge they are slow
Trump: They’re crooked. Just like you’re crooked. You’re either crooked or stupid.
Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.
This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ
This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.
The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.
And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.
Record-breaking temperatures.
A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.
The response?
Yank out the instruments and walk away.
That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.
For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.
The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.
That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv
I’m not saying Graham Platner should or shouldn’t be a candidate for a Senate seat, but I am saying that the media’s treatment of Platner as compared to its treatment of Ken Paxton is the same as the media’s treatment of Joe Biden as compared to its treatment of Donald Trump. The media bolsters the MAGA narrative that there’s never a decent Democrat nor an indecent MAGA Republican.
Multiple judges ruled that Alabama’s maps discriminated based on race. Yet the Supreme Court is bending over backwards to let them stand.
This court will do anything to help Republicans stay in power. No matter the cost.
They have lost all semblance of impartiality.
I know it’s become pretty cliche and cringey to talk about at this point but if you’re under like 25 I cannot stress enough how one time Obama wore a tan suit and people spent a week arguing over whether or not it was demeaning to the Oval Office and they were serious about it.
Trump, Musk and Rubio slashed aid and scoffed that it was woke nonsense. Now they're seeing that it not only saved one life every 10 seconds but also protected us from diseases like Ebola. Their actions constituted a security failure as well as a moral one.
More broadly, their fecklessness contrasts with the courage and humanity of doctors and aid workers in Congo and Uganda, lacking adequate PPE but still risking the virus to care for fellow humans.
Trump, Musk and Rubio might learn something from them. https://t.co/kPKj7fqJFZ
When Empires Decline
History rarely lets us pin imperial decline to one man. But at the pace of American devolution, Trump’s name will likely be etched into the story,perhaps in faux gold.
The fall of empires follows patterns. What differs is how people respond to lost status.🧵
There is no world in which this is okay.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney.
His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated.
If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself.
This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it.
The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next.
The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW.
Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do.
https://t.co/FV2Tkpz7Dk
If you thought CDC morale was in the toilet after literally getting shot at last year, then watching 25% of the workforce get axed while the rest were told to "do more with less" in emergencies... just wait until you tell them they're being shipped to a 50%+ fatality Ebola hot zone halfway around the world, with a rumored 3 days of training, and zero promise of medevac home for real U.S. standard-of-care treatment if they get infected.
Imagine telling troops heading to Iran: "Go fight for America, but if you get blown up, you're staying in the desert. Don't worry though - we're building an 'Alligator Alley' field hospital. You'll be fine!"
This isn’t sound health policy (for reasons detailed below by @ashishkjha). This is the American Hunger Games - except the tributes wear hazmat suits and the Capitol won’t even fly the losers home.
There are multiple reasons why Sudan is the world's worst human crisis today, multiple bad actors. But the UAE is one of the worst, with its support for the brutal RSF militia committing mass murder and mass rape. Pres. Trump, having taken $500m from the UAE, is silent about it.
This Ebola outbreak has been a slow motion disaster - 900 cases and and now threatening the U.S..
We know how to stop outbreaks like this. But Trump chose not to stop it. He destroyed our global health team, deliberately exposing us.
1/ Here's the story of how this happened.
If we don't do a better job shutting down this Ebola outbreak in Congo, Uganda and South Sudan, we inevitably will be facing cases in many other parts of the world.