Lisa Ross 🇺🇸

Former Loggie. Now a Photographer, Swim Coach, and Nana. she/her

[Unlearn16 @unlearn16tweet]

European Union 101

[Truth Matters @politicsusa46]

Nobody does deals better than Wun Dum Fuc. Here’s the latest subjugation statement from the Kingdom of Denmark.

Don’t you just love it when everyone is laughing at the global village idiot and he’s the only one who doesn’t get the joke. Priceless.

Thanks to Pernille Haaland for this gem.

🎥 TikTok - https://t.co/AfIazGvYdq

[theleahfiles @leahfiles]

People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true.

I took the UN's definition of corruption, turned it into eight criteria and 100 points, and scored the leaders history remembers for looting their countries: Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin.

Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions.

Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25.

Trump's second term scored a 91, which ties him with Suharto and Mobutu and puts him above Marcos and Abacha.

So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years.

PSA: don't come in my comments arguing about the results if you haven't read the full article, because ignorance is a choice.

Full article is up now on my Substack (link in bio) and it's free.

[MAGA Cult Slayer @MAGACult2]

If he went on a geriatric tirade like this where he accidentally just admitted everything and then keeled over, I think I’d probably die of shock honestly.

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie reads articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth.

About. Damn. Time.

[Forbidden HQ 🐇 @WearForbidden]

FORBIDDEN STUDIOS PRESENTS: UNSINKABLE

They were promised the ship could never go down.

He believed them.

[Swimming World @SwimmingWorld]

On This Date: 54 Years Since Mark Spitz Went 7-For-7 at Munich Games - https://t.co/Gt9HiAZ1r7

[Norm Clark @Normsmusic]

Jason Duchin
We want our fucking country back. Your neighbor is not your enemy. The teacher down the street. The farmer in Iowa. The Black mother in the Bronx. The white guy driving a pickup truck in Kentucky. The immigrant pouring concrete in August. The boy holding another boys hand. The MAHA mom reading the ingredients on a cereal box. None of them is your enemy.

We have been sold a magnificent steaming pile of bullshit. We have been told that America is two hungry tribes crouched on opposite sides of a river, sharpening knives, waiting for the opportunity to wade across and murder one another.

The great political scam of our time was convincing 340 million people who share a country, schools, roads, rivers, grocery stores, hospitals, fears, children, mortgages, illnesses, dreams and funerals that we have nothing in common. That we are enemies.

There is an enormous amount we agree on. We want clean water. Clean air. We don’t want corporations filling our children’s bodies with poison. We don’t want plastic in our oceans, our soil, our blood and our babies. We want food that is actually fucking food. We want our children educated. We want to be able to go to the doctor without wondering whether the bill will bankrupt us.

We want a decent job. We want Social Security when we’re old. We want politicians to stop using public office as an ATM. We don’t want political violence. We don’t want our government owned by billionaires. We want our votes to matter. We want a country where the law applies to the rich bastard in the penthouse as surely as it applies to the poor bastard standing before a judge.

And while we’re being made afraid of one another, somebody is picking our fucking pockets. The billionaires figured something out before the rest of us did: Anger, fear, loneliness, and resentment are business models. And Donald Trump understood the product better than anybody. Grievance. Barrels and barrels of grievance. Bottle it. Brand it. Sell it.

Tell a man whose factory disappeared that an immigrant stole his country. Tell a struggling mother that some other struggling mother is getting something she isn’t. Tell rural America the cities despise them. Tell the cities rural America wants to destroy them. Tell white people Black people are coming for them. Tell Black people every white neighbor is secretly waiting to put them back in chains.

Keep everybody suspicious. Keep everybody angry. Keep everybody separated. Rape us one by one. Then watch as Trump and the billionaires walk through the wreckage taking everything. We all see it.

Democracy will be saved by finding the places where we already agree and building from there. Citizenship is not a subscription service. Democracy is not something delivered to your doorstep. You don’t get to order it from Amazon. You don’t get to complain that democracy is dying while sitting on the toilet scrolling Instagram. Democracy requires something from us. Time. Courage. Attention. Neighbors. Argument. Forgiveness. Work.

And sometimes the willingness to stand up and say No. No, you will not make me hate my neighbor. No, you will not make me afraid of somebody because they pray differently or vote differently or love differently or were born somewhere else. You will not convince me that cruelty is strength. You will not convince me that corruption is patriotism. You will not convince me that billionaires need another tax break while teachers buy their own fucking pencils. No, you will not divide us and then sell off the pieces to the oligarchs.

Reimagine the country. Rebuild the democracy. Rework the communities. Find each other again. Fight like hell for the enormous territory we share. Because beneath all the noise and bullshit and algorithms and campaign advertisements, there is still a country here. Ours

[MAGA Cult Slayer @MAGACult2]

Bill Clinton explains how Jon Ossoff’s speech wasn’t just another political propaganda moment behind a podium.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

There’s a part of Jon Ossoff’s Atlanta rally everyone missed, and it may have been the most powerful moment of the entire night.

“I’ve got two little girls at home. Eva’s four and Lila’s one… But this isn’t the world I want to leave them.”

Then he put America’s broken priorities into one devastating sentence:

“We’ve amassed enough firepower to end the world a thousand times over, but we can’t summon the will to guarantee health care and pre-K.”

And then came the line every parent will feel in their bones:

“When Eva’s old enough to ask me why I let this happen, I’m determined to answer truthfully…

THAT I DIDN’T.”

🔥🔥🔥

This is the entire damn fight.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I set the schedules at Walmart.

66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it.

People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay.

I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me.

Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of.

Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall.

Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers.

The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line.

We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares.

We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have.

The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short.

I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door.

You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store.

There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying.

The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour.

Monday through Sunday, we pay our half.

The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program.

It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.

[Todd Spence @Todd_Spence]

When Dire Straits took the stage at Live Aid in '85, most fans had no idea why Sting joined them, but when he started singing the opening lyrics to "Money For Nothing", they realized it was his voice on the radio hit which widely went unnoticed til then 🔥 Goosebumps when Mark Knopfler finally plays that guitar riff and the crowd takes over for the drums.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Oyer: "I had great hope Blanche would be an effective leader and responsible steward of the DOJ, but he quickly proved me wrong. Two days after Blanche was confirmed as deputy AG, he fired me from my position as DOJ's career pardon attorney. I declined to rubber stamp a political favor for a friend of the president, and it cost me my job. Mr Blanche's office had asked me to restore the gun rights of a convicted domestic abuser ... I was shocked to hear Blanche's testimony about this yesterday. What he said about my firing is provably false."

[Jeremy @jeremyct]

Just got off the phone with my college roommate.

His daughter was diagnosed with leukemia in January.

He has insurance. Good insurance. The kind you feel safe having.

7 months later:
Savings: wiped out. 401k: cashed early. Penalties and all. House: refinanced to cover the gaps insurance decided weren’t their problem.

He told me he’s not the same person anymore.

Said watching your child fight for her life while simultaneously fighting an insurance company over coverage codes does something to you that doesn’t go away.

They did everything right.
Two incomes. No debt. Responsible their whole lives.

One diagnosis undid all of it in 7 months.

And somewhere a health insurance CEO is getting a $30 million bonus this quarter.

I don’t know how people defend this system with a straight face.

I really don’t.

[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.

[Lisa Ross 🇺🇸 @LisaRoss_1]

@Sp_bo1 @threadreaderapp unroll

[Lisa Ross 🇺🇸 @LisaRoss_1]

@AIPandaX @threadreaderapp unroll

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”

Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.

This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:

“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.

A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.

A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.

A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.

A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.

You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.

In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.

Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.

Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.

Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.

Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.

Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.

And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.

And you call Greenland badly governed?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.

‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’

When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?

Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.

Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.

Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.

And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.

You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.

So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.

The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.

And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

[SunderlandLollipops 💙 @SunderlandLolly]

I love this so much. What a refreshing change from the inflated lips, paralysed foreheads and botox at 25👏 👏 👏 👏 #RachelWard