Ann Heiser MD

Resistance warrior with Saint Croix Valley Indivisible, Ob/GYN physician, retired. Retired Army Medical Corp AMEDD 0-4.

[Marc Polymeropoulos @Mpolymer]

Very tough read. Once people get into positions of power, and they become part of the system they railed against, all their bullshit promises for accountability go up in smoke. Happens time and again.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

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

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

You have to read this. 

Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House and replaced it with a private ballroom funded by corporate donors. Now we know what they got for it. 

More than half of the publicly identified donors to that $400 million project won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion in the 6 months after they gave. Most of those same companies also had federal enforcement actions against them suspended by the Trump Administration during the same period. 

There is no honest word for that other than corruption. 
https://t.co/r40hZyargd

[austerity is theft @wideofthepost]

Here's what Phil said last October, he explicitly said they didn't look up the meaning, and picked it when looking at skull tattoos they could get together. https://t.co/GZu7YFFbxw

[austerity is theft @wideofthepost]

Zeteo followed up on this specifically, and got Proschko on the record for a second time, corroborating Platner’s account and categorically rejecting Fifield’s story about the tattoo. https://t.co/TTD3JG1iQ9

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Please don't drink raw milk

It's filthy

Yours sincerely

A microbiologist

[austerity is theft @wideofthepost]

no comment necessary

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

Powerful piece, highly recommend reading. Democrats need people like Platner if they are going to come to terms with the true nature of our country, with what we have done to people at home and abroad, and pull together the coalition needed to heal and reshape it.

“A tiny minority of Americans (6%) ever serve in the military. Of these, only 40% of veterans have ever deployed to a combat zone. And of those deployed, only about 10% participated in actual ground combat. I am one of those, and so is Platner. His pathology: a combination of traumatic stress, substance abuse, impulsive decision-making in the past, and deep anger at the moral injury he sustained wearing the cloth of this nation, is something this country ought to consider when it sends its young men and women to war. The question before Maine is not whether Graham Platner is perfect. The question is whether the United States Senate, the state of Maine, and the country as a whole would benefit from having his voice in the room when decisions are made. The answer is yes…”

“A democracy that insists on perfection will eventually find itself represented only by people skilled at hiding their flaws.”

[Krystal Ball @krystalball]

The concept of founding Ladies for Kavanaugh and then expecting everyone to uncritically take your word for uncorroborated “toxic boyfriend” claims.

[Sarah Ironside 💙 @SarahIronside6]

Hey, Lisa Murkowski, was selling your soul and selling out Alaska worth it?

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

A standing ovation for Graham Platner at his rally in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Platner's campaign announced that it raised over $200,000 since the publication of the recent New York Times article. They say that’s more than any day since Janet Mills suspended her campaign.

[Grace Panetta @grace_panetta]

Team Platner just put out this release highlighting his Marine friend denying Lyndsey Fifield’s story re: the tattoo: “Same accuser, same smear, new byline.”

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

James Carville backs Graham Platner: “We’ve got a fucked up guy who could be 100x more fucked up than he is and he’d never be as fucked up as what we’ve got in Washington. This country is about to lose it, the whole goddamn thing. We gotta win this. If we got a person that’s understandably got issues, good. Maybe people oughta see it and maybe we oughta be reminded what these stupid wars have brought about and the consequence of said stupid wars that stupid Susan Collins’ been for all of her political life”

[masspolprofmo.bsky.social @MassPolProfMo]

The New York Times put "two veteran political reporters" assisted by four other staffers on the story for several months and were able to show that Platner's chief accuser is a right-wing staffer who wants to work for Susan Collins. https://t.co/Xda3mAWfjz

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it.

More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months.

And here’s the part that should make your blood boil.

Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence.

The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it.

Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price.

We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us.

https://t.co/4MGFzSseFl

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

There were multiple votes tonight to make the $1.8 billion cop beater fund illegal and Republicans blocked every single one, paving the way for Trump to resuscitate his slush fund.

[Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 @RachelBitecofer]

America Last

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of.

And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test.

His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.”

Not whether it works.

Not whether Congress authorized it.

Whether it pleases Trump.

This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people.
To my Republican colleagues: where are you?

Congress passed this funding. You voted for it.

Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend.

Grow a spine.

This is not about left or right.

It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt.

History will remember who stood up and who looked away.
https://t.co/2yHKBTNLbj

[Ruben Gallego @RubenGallego]

So putting a bunch of 20 something incels with no life experience in charge of making cuts to necessary government programs was a bad idea? Who could have seen that coming?

[Meriwether Farms @MeriwetherFarms]

BREAKING NEWS: The USDA has officially confirmed a positive case of the Newworld Screwworm in LaPryor, Texas

This announcement comes less than 24 hours after the Secretary and her allies discredited concerns from elected officials and producers in South Texas, accusing them of spreading misinformation and FAKE NEWS, and reassuring that there were no active cases in the United States

We are immediately calling on the White House to step in and declare a National Emergency to ensure that the USDA does not continue to throttle the funding and resources required to contain this as effectively as possible

The risk of this spreading outside of Texas and even into HUMANS is getting higher and higher by the day, and WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME