In the early 1960s, the Nashua River in central Massachusetts was so polluted you could smell it from a mile away.
Marion Stoddart was a stay-at-home mother in Groton, Massachusetts, three-quarters of a mile from the river, with a background in anthropology and education and no particular expertise in environmental science or policy. She moved there in 1962, smelled the river, and decided she was going to fix it.
She gathered signatures, 6,287 of them, from residents in communities along the river. She showed up at the Massachusetts State House with bottles of the river water and made legislators look at what they were allowing.
She organized mayors, selectmen, and paper mill executives into a coalition. She lobbied for legislation. In 1965, Massachusetts passed the first state clean water act in the nation. Federal funding followed. Treatment plants were built. The discharges stopped.
The Nashua River is now swimmable. Salmon and other fish have returned. In 2019, sections of it were designated as Wild and Scenic under federal law, the same designation given to places the country considers worth protecting as national treasures.
Marion Stoddart is 98 years old. She still lives near the river. She's a reminder that the person who fixes a broken thing is usually someone who decided it was their problem too.
“The cost of living is outpacing wages, groceries are too expensive, gas prices are through the roof, people are dying because they can’t afford healthcare—”
The President:
This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.
Trump’s DOJ just shut down a federal investigation into a coal company owned by Sen. Jim Justice, one of his closest allies, after it racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations for dumping dangerous chemicals into our waterways. A veteran federal prosecutor with 24 years on the job said he had never seen anything like it.
The man who killed the case was Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer and current Acting Attorney General. This is the same guy who just gave Trump, his family, and his companies permanent immunity from IRS audits. Now Trump wants the Senate to make Blanche’s appointment permanent too.
Equal justice under law was never supposed to come with exceptions for the President’s friends.
The pattern isn’t subtle: protect Trump’s friends, prosecute his critics, and get rewarded with more power. That is corruption, plain and simple. Todd Blanche must not be confirmed.
https://t.co/95K8zIySPz
The Texas screwworm story is a version of this. The Reflecting Pool fiasco is a version of this. The Iranian war is a very large and ongoing version of this.
Everywhere you look, incompetence is having its natural consequences, with more to come. Much more, I'm afraid.
Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went.
The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.
Oh look. Someone’s testicles came rolling by after he lost his primary. I mean, he’s 💯right, but he never ever would have said this before. And that, ladies and gents, is why the Cassidys of the world are as responsible for everything that has happened under Trump.
Elon Musk held up a chainsaw, fed USAID into the wood chipper, and at least 600,00 people have already died as a result - two-thirds of them children.
History's first trillionaire.
Corporate donors to President Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom project have received more than $50 billion in new or expanded government contracts in the six months since demolition of the East Wing began, per Public Citizen.
Social Security’s trust fund is now due to run low on money beginning in 2032.
The government acknowledged that the Trump administration’s immigration policies and tax cuts are expected to contribute to the insolvency. https://t.co/FpQywAm1Hv
In a two-way race in 2024, Donald Trump got 26.5% of the vote in City of Los Angeles. In a three-way race in 2026, Spencer Pratt has 26.7% of the vote. I'm not sure what the mystery is that demands a conspiratorial explanation.
We are ten years into allegations of widespread election fraud - only for elections Trump or republicans lose, mind you - for which Trump and allies have either not produced evidence, or claimed evidence which was subsequently debunked. And blatant contradictions - such as celebrating wins under the same laws and practices while confidently declaring theft for any losses - are now the norm.
Election Day is the deadline to vote, not the deadline for election workers to finish counting millions of ballots.
How are people this fucking stupid?
Rep. Byron Donalds R-FL still has not explained how he voted on the House floor in Feb. 2025 while he was in Los Angeles for the Bill Maher show. Someone voted for Donalds twice that day - another Florida Republican perhaps used his voting card?