LeannaB

CA girl. I think best in the 🏔. Just a farm kid who still loves 🐑. Past = politics, family policy, non-profit management. John 6:68.

[Marc Joffe @marcjoffe]

Under California SB 143 (2023), goat herders have to be paid ~ $17,000 per month effective July 1. That's because they are now entitled to minimum wage 24/7 plus applicable overtime.

Unless this is fixed, goats which protect us from wildfire by consuming grass in danger zones will be slaughtered because it will too costly to keep them.

Just another instance of sloppy, union-driven legislation in California!

https://t.co/YrRlamow64

[Rachel Bovard @rachelbovard]

This is absolutely true, except the issue isn't the filibuster. It's the bipartisan commitment that senators now have to their own comfort.

The Senate floor, by design, is inherently unpredictable. Deliberation -- which the Senate was made for -- is unpredictable. When the Senate is functioning, votes can happen at any time. Senators can wander down to the floor and make amendments pending, second degree other amendments, try and move to proceed to new bills, etc. Individual senators have incredible power to do things! That's why Senate > House (sorry not sorry).

But the modern Senate prioritizes predictability over everything else. Senators want to know exactly when they're voting so they can get downtown for mid-day fundraisers, schedule constituent meetings, leave early, etc. All of this is understandable and can, to some extent, be accommodated, but it's evolved into an iron shackle around the Senate floor: senators must never be inconvenienced.

This results in a Senate that doesn't do anything outside of Monday at 5:30pm to Thursday at noon. It's not the filibuster, it's institutional laziness.

[John Fabbricatore @JohnE_Fabb]

Section 235 of the TVPRA has to go. It’s become a golden ticket for smuggling networks. Kids from non-contiguous countries get handed to ORR and released to sponsors, often the very people who paid the smugglers. Cartels know this, so they flood the border with unaccompanied minors, raking in cash while abusing the kids en route. Smugglers routinely rape, beat, and extort these children, yet the law keeps the pipeline open. Time to scrap this loophole and stop using children as pawns. Protect kids by closing the door smugglers walk through. @FoxNews @KimWexlerMAJD @NICEnforcement @Heritage
https://t.co/MfZS2KvRwU

[David Pivtorak @TheDavidPiv]

Just a reminder my law firm is investigating companies who discriminate against Americans in favor of H-1B workers. If you've been rejected or replaced by Xbox or Microsoft, feel free to reach out.

[Chief Egregore Officer @ChiefEgregore]

It simply cannot be the case that you do layoffs and apply for H1Bs at the same time.

It is bewildering that there is no consequence for this. It is brazenly fraudulent and obviously damaging to the American people.

[Will Swaim @WillSwaim]

"Allows government officials to waive the requirement that employees contribute equally to the cost of their own pensions. No new funding to cover these changes, despite adding billions to long-term pension obligations."

California is about to repeat its worst pension mistake | Opinion by @lancelands
https://t.co/MsUPdatRFt

[@amuse @amuse]

https://t.co/4F1eNuuISq

[LeannaB @L_Baumster]

In the small towns of the Sierras, we parade earth moving equipment, stage coaches, and honor our country’s remarkable frontier-expanding history because we love our country and home! 🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Brandon Gill @realBrandonGill]

Not merely an idea.

Not an economic zone.

Not for the world.

A nation, a people, and our home. 🇺🇸

[LeannaB @L_Baumster]

@MTMehan California, too?!

[LeannaB @L_Baumster]

@innoutburger_ “We take pride in being part of a country founded on freedom, opportunity, and a strong spirit of service, where people are free to choose their path, speak their minds…” Well done, In-N-Out! 💥🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[Spike Brehm @spikebrehm]

they did it. the mad lads actually did it.

i never talked about my time at DOGE last year because it was so controversial and contentious (remember that?)

early last year, @jgebbia recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the "retirement paper" problem.

processing a federal retirement took months, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to 6 months for their full pension to arrive. what was the holdup? paper. remember hearing Elon talk about "the mine" in Pennsylvania? we got to visit it. in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone, there were literally acres of file cabinets, as far as the eye could see, storing files detailing federal employees' employment and paystub history. a simple "case" might be only a quarter or half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. one famously took up a whole pallet.

each case was hand processed by case workers in cubicles deep underground. they checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly (many weren't), and handled a long tail of complex issues. we'd watch as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the COBOL mainframe built many decades ago.

since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review, and additional rounds for complex cases. case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. sometimes it would sit in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

to OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of "digital transformation" spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. there was a big effort in the mid-90s. but the systems were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. there was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the necessary forms — just to be mailed to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. and few federal agencies were even using it.

when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation, delivered by a software contractor.

the blackpill was seeing the terrible quality of the software and interacting with the contractors. coming from silicon valley, i couldn't believe how low the talent and quality bar was for selling software to the government. it's clear, as the OG USDS people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. it's a huge moat. delivery of quality product be damned.

we fired the vendor and took over the project. they'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. at first we tried to bend it to our will, to actually connect all the various data sources and get to a decent UX for case workers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were going to have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch.

it was around this time I had to go back to new york — i had a new job waiting for me, a four month old, and a wife whose patience was running out. but i got to watch from afar as the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. and now they've fully done it.

huge congrats to Joe and the team. @yatshitcray was the hero in the trenches. indefatigable, unrelentingly optimistic, and determined to see this project through. when i recruited him for "ok i can do two, maybe three months", he stuck it out over a year making this project a reality.

while the retirement project was under the DOGE banner, it operated different from what you heard from the breathless, negative media — we came in with the attitude of partnering with career OPM employees. we were team members determined to bring our software talents to bear on the problem they've been trying to fix for years, which they hadn't had the resources to solve before. they were wary at first, not sure about us, but they quickly saw how authentic and determined we were to work together toward the same goal. props to Joe for developing those relationships, setting the example of how to collaborate together.

what's the end result? lifelong federal employees, veterans, postal carriers get their full pension installments almost immediately. days instead of months. peace of mind for these people to devoted their careers to serving our country. massively streamlined operations inside of OPM. and NO MORE PAPER 🫡🇺🇸

[John Eastman @DrJohnEastman]

Here's my more fulsome analysis of today's Supreme Court decision on the President's birthright citizenship exec order, published at @theammind. On this, the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the majority seems to have overlooked "consent of the governed." https://t.co/2oNdsqgmtd

[John Daniel Davidson @johnddavidson]

In one fell swoop a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court hasn’t just opened the door for unlimited anchor babies and Chinese communist birth tourism, it has redefined citizenship itself, replacing the American idea of a citizen with the older British idea of a subject.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

It’s a perversion of self-government.

Judicially mandating that foreigners are entitled to birth US citizens against the wishes of the people as reflected in law means we cease to be our own rulers.

[Andrew Beck @AndrewBeckUSA]

Being born on American soil does not make you an American. That is the truth. The Court denying the truth does not change it.

The path forward is overwhelming cultural, economic, and political force to first circumvent and eventually nullify this decision.

[Jeremy Christiansen @TradVat2]

"This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake." -Alito, J.

[𝗥𝗢𝗖𝗞𝗬 @TheWarKitchen]

Reject pickleball. Embrace tennis. It's the most aesthetic sport in the world. You can play pickle when you're 72. Tennis requires vitality. A lust for life. You need to move, yet hit the ball with effortless grace. You get to be outside with the sun on your skin and a breeze in your face. Hitting a forehand with perfect topspin produces a sound that heals all.

[Autism Capital 🧩 @AutismCapital]

Trump isn't wrong about any of this. It's worth reading the whole thing. He's correct. That *is* exactly what Communism is and Communists are like. Talk to anyone that escaped communism, talk to some of your friend's parents, talk to a Miami Cuban Uber driver, ask them what's up and they'll tell you how horrible it was. People ESCAPE communism, you never hear a story of people ESCAPING TO communism.