Maelli🇺🇦🌻🟧

Needed: active moral Congress, articulate thoughtful President, respect for the rule law. A world where billionaires share not hoard wealth. Compassion.

[Maelli🇺🇦🌻🟧 @Maelli14]

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

- Margaret Mead

[FactPost @factpostnews]

The Trump administration has forced the National Parks Service to remove any photos of Harriet Tubman from their website covering the Underground Railroad.

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

Hawaii just enacted a law that effectively neuters Citizens United.

Montana could soon follow suit via a ballot referendum.

Here's what you should know about the plans to get Big Money out of politics — and how they could be replicated where you live.

[Maelli🇺🇦🌻🟧 @Maelli14]

Grifters gotta grift…

[Scott Robertson @sarobertson_]

Blundell: When Trump took over the board with all of his loser pals, he also got access to The Kennedy Center bank account. And there's about $17 million that should be in this account for operational expenses that has disappeared ... where did that $17 million go?

[Really American 🇺🇸 @ReallyAmerican1]

Former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s crusade to purge women and people of color from our Armed Forces has never been subtle.

But today, a New York Times exposé revealed exactly how far he’s gone to dismantle the careers and achievements of our finest servicemen and women.

More than a dozen military insiders — both active duty and those already purged — spoke to the Times anonymously to unmask a horrific ongoing attack.

They detailed a process used by Hegseth and his team to halt senior officer advancements for reasons completely unrelated to merit, job performance, or fighting wars.

Hegseth’s efforts are part of a quest to advance his white-and-male centered worldview, facts, history, and actual service be damned.

In the absence of any such evidence, insiders confirmed that he has used his position to withhold promotions from qualified, decorated veterans. The Times cited several enraging examples:

• Last fall, Hegseth ordered Army Secretary Daniel P. Driscoll to remove two Black and two female officers from a 29-person promotion list. Driscoll repeatedly refused, citing their decades of exemplary service. In March, Hegseth bypassed him, removed their names, and sent the modified list to the White House.

• In total, Hegseth has removed 32 officers from Air Force and Navy one- and two-star promotion lists. He also pulled the only Black officer and the only female officer from a Marine Corps list, leaving their promotions in limbo.

• Vice Adm. Sara Joyner, a highly decorated three-star fighter pilot, saw her advancement stalled over a 2021 Navy recruiting ad where she said, "I’m not just a girl with a dream. I’m a sailor with one." Hegseth deemed the line a "big problem." Joyner has since retired.

• Rear Adm. Stephen D. Barnett was recommended for a promotion after successfully managing the aftermath of a massive Navy fuel spill in Hawaii. Hegseth blocked his advancement after Barnett participated in a Navy-sponsored Pride event back in 2018.

It is an outrage to watch a media personality whose greatest battles have been with hangovers intentionally harm the careers of people who risked everything to keep America safe. Hegseth’s actions are insult to all who have served and a risk to national security.

[Image: REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov]

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

ICE spent over $1 billion buying 11 warehouses to cage human beings. Now it’s quietly trying to sell or give away seven of them, more than $700 million gone, with not a single facility open and an inspector general investigation hanging over the whole mess.

This is the waste they swore they were elected to root out.

The fraud, the abuse, the blank check spent without a plan.

They bought industrial buildings at up to $145 million apiece, before renovations, with no environmental review, no community buy-in, and no real strategy for what came next. Even Republican officials told them to stop. Taxpayers are left holding the bill for warehouses that detained no one and accomplished nothing but fear.

It’s total hypocrisy.

An administration that lectured the country about efficiency lit $700 million on fire as part of Stephen Miller’s cruel fantasy of mass detention. Imagine what that money could have done for veterans waiting on housing, for families crushed by costs, for the working people they claim to serve.

I’m glad this plan is dying. It was inhumane from the first day, designed to warehouse people far from the rule of law and basic decency. But being glad it failed does not erase how it failed, recklessly and expensively. We must have full accountability for the officials who pushed it.

https://t.co/5nryYka2vq

[Maelli🇺🇦🌻🟧 @Maelli14]

Of note 🚶🏽‍♀️🌲🚶🏾‍♀️🌲🚶🏽🌲🚶🌲

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[ProPublica @propublica]

The morning that Cmdr. Elizabeth Nakagawa was scheduled to have a D&C to remove fetal tissue after losing a very wanted pregnancy, she learned the surgery had been canceled because the military’s health insurance plan refused to pay for it.
https://t.co/8GraqKrj2z

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Social Security is earned, not given.

We paid into it our entire working lives.

Speaker Johnson knows how unpopular cuts would be. That’s why these conversations happen behind closed doors instead of out in the open.

We earned these benefits. We’ll fight to keep them.
#HandsOffSocialSecurity

[Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired) @ColMoeDavis]

Trump was able to quickly put together $300 billion in recovery money for Iran after he decided to bomb it.

He stood in Swannanoa NC not far from my house in October 2024 and said he’d build back bigger, better, more beautiful, and faster than Biden after Hurricane Helene inflicted $60 billion in damage in the Blue Ridge . . . and then he went MIA.

Imagine if @realDonaldTrump cared as much about rebuilding Western North Carolina for Americans as he does about rebuilding Iran for Iranians.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Land bordering Yosemite, Sequoia, and Pinnacles National Parks — now cleared for oil rigs and fracking. YES fracking!

Two hundred thousand people said NO. The federal government did it anyway.

Over 1 million acres of California public land just got opened up - land that touches ancient sequoia groves older than the country itself and sits right in Yosemite’s backyard.

Patagonia's CEO came out swinging, accusing the administration of putting oil profits over the planet's health and saying public land was never meant to be sold off to drilling companies.

And the man who'll make the final call? He was recently confirmed to run BLM after his own state party called him "an outright enemy of public lands."

Who's going to tell a tree older than the country that its time is up?

#DemsUnited

[Rep. Dr. Jasmine Clark @jasmineforga]

When I head to Washington, I will be the first woman in Congress with a science PhD. That matters. At a time when science is under attack, Congress needs more leaders who understand the value of evidence-based decision-making.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump looked into the camera and said of the ballroom, “This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents.”

Three weeks earlier, his own contractor had already put it in writing. The ballroom would cost $600 million, with half of it from you, the taxpayer.

Trump knew. He said it anyway.

This administration has no problem shortchanging Medicaid or food for kids.

But $300 million for a ballroom and a private bunker? Found that money instantly.

I am an appropriator. I see the budget. This was never about what we can afford. It is about who they choose to spend it on.

I will fight this in every hearing, every markup, every vote, until the last dime is accounted for.

Most of my Republican colleagues are silent while the public is robbed in broad daylight.

Where in the hell are they?
https://t.co/rAptrfcaCd

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “Headline: ‘Donald Trump can’t open the Strait of Hormuz, so instead he’s blocking the Strait of Detroit.’ It’s a headline from The Globe and Mail, the Canadian newspaper. The big beautiful new bridge that Trump is not allowing us to use, is a bridge that crosses the Detroit River. It goes from…Detroit…to…Ontario. Canada fully financed and paid for this bridge. It is ready to be opened, it will be the biggest U.S. border crossing in Canada, it will be one of the most important routes for trade in the entire world, the single most important one with one of our two most important trading partners, Canada, but Trump won’t let anybody use it, even though it’s ready, ready to be driven on.” 🤦‍♀️

[Ryan Hisner @LongDesertTrain]

Confirmed again, for a fourth time: the greatest anti-dementia treatment ever discovered is the Shingles vaccine.

[GOP Ls @GOP__Ls]

🚨 Trump's Campaign Chairman Tim Nolan has been convicted of trafficking 19 girls, 7 of them underage.

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

Elon Musk’s so‑called “Department of Government Efficiency” cut an effective screwworm monitoring program to “save” about $15 million a year — and within a year we’re staring down a screwworm crisis the USDA now expects to cost over a billion dollars to contain. That’s not efficiency, that’s sabotage.

Now we have confirmed screwworm cases in U.S. livestock and pets for the first time in about 60 years, and USDA is scrambling to rebuild capacity, rushing sterile fly facilities in Mexico and Texas and throwing more than a billion dollars at a problem we already knew how to prevent. This is what happens when you put a billionaire with no public‑health background and no respect for science in charge of hunting for cuts: he doesn’t see safeguards, he sees “inconvenient” line items that get in the way of his ideology and his bottom line.

And let’s be clear: DOGE was never just about “efficiency.” Trump’s order gave Musk’s operation sweeping access to federal data systems under the guise of streamlining government, with reports that DOGE‑linked operatives reached into sensitive databases at agencies like Social Security, OPM, Treasury, and Education. They were perfectly willing to ignore privacy protections that have been on the books for 50 years — but when it came to a relatively tiny $15 million program that protected ranchers, rural communities, and the broader economy, suddenly that’s where they “tightened belts.”

This isn’t fiscal conservatism, it’s deliberate cruelty dressed up as cost‑cutting. The programs they kill are always the same ones: the ones that regulate corporate power, protect ordinary people, or quietly prevent the next catastrophe. And when the crisis hits — when cattle and goats in Texas and pets in New Mexico start turning up with a parasite we supposedly eradicated generations ago — they point fingers at anyone but themselves.

[Maelli🇺🇦🌻🟧 @Maelli14]

@Suzierizzo1 @JamesLindholm1 Brava!

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Stephen Miller wants to flip a switch and erase one of your oldest rights.

It’s called habeas corpus.

Fancy words but a simple idea that the government can’t just grab you and lock you away. It has to prove to a judge why you’re behind bars. That right is 800 years old.

It’s older than America itself.

And Miller tried to kill it.

New reporting confirms it. Inside the White House, Miller pushed to suspend habeas corpus so agents could seize people, detain them, and deport them with no judge, no hearing, no chance to say “you’ve got the wrong guy.”

Even Trump’s own lawyers put in writing that this is illegal. Miller pushed anyway.
Miller screams “invasion” because the Constitution only allows this sort of thing during an invasion. But this same crowd brags every day that border crossings hit record lows. So which is it?

The right to challenge your own detention is the line between a republic and a regime. Lose it, and the government can disappear anyone.

I will fight this with everything I have.

The Constitution is not optional.

Not for Stephen Miller. Not for anyone.
https://t.co/cklllxnJMd

[Maelli🇺🇦🌻🟧 @Maelli14]

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[GOP Ls @GOP__Ls]

🚨 BOMBSHELL: Report reveals that ICE has separated over 100,000 children from their families.

[Rep. Melanie Stansbury @Rep_Stansbury]

Not believing in science really comes back to bite you, doesn’t it?