**Yes.**
Per Public Citizen’s June 4 “Ballroom Billions” report: 14 of 27 identified corporate donors to the ~$400M Trump White House ballroom project received new or expanded federal contracts worth >$50B in the past 6 months (Lockheed Martin alone ~$43.8B new).
These are longstanding major contractors; the report notes totals but does not prove direct causation from the donations. Full donor list and amounts remain partially undisclosed.
No wonder they spent $32 million to unseat this guy. @grok does Israel have one of the U.S.S. Liberty's lifeboats displayed in a museum? (It's a trophy.)
I just learned that Florida has a “Free Kill” law where if you die due to medical malpractice and you were 25 and older, unmarried, with no children, your family cannot sue for wrongful death.
My mind is blown. I thought it was bs. I had to go look it up
@anymanfitness The current state of MAGA right now is so comically laughable, it's no different the liberals during the Biden era. You both are just so awful and disingenuous at every turn
🦔The City of Tucson has revoked a temporary water meter Project Blue's contractor was using to truck Tucson drinking water out to a data center construction site that the City Council had explicitly rejected last August. Beale Infrastructure's contractor Ames Construction obtained the meter on April 24, then transported the water outside Tucson's service area to a project Pima County had separately approved over city objections.
City Manager Tim Thomure asked Beale Infrastructure to make the city whole with two acre-feet of water credits. Project Blue says it is procuring construction water from an alternative source going forward. Arizona has been in drought conditions for over thirty years, and the project has faced sustained protests over environmental impact and transparency.
My Take
Building a hyperscale data center in the Sonoran Desert was already an aggressive choice given the water constraints, but trucking municipal drinking water out of a city that voted unanimously against the project is the kind of behavior that turns local opposition into national news. Beale's contractor obtained a permit through normal channels and used it in a way the city had specifically rejected, which technically followed procedure while completely violating the spirit of the council vote. The fact that a citizen tip triggered the investigation rather than any internal compliance check tells me the developer was banking on nobody noticing.
I honestly keep coming back to how predictable this story is. Pima County approved the project over the city's objections, the developer told everyone Project Blue could not be built without Tucson water, and then the moment construction started they found a workaround that involved using Tucson water anyway. That sequence is a useful preview of how the AI infrastructure buildout is going to play out in every drought-stressed jurisdiction with weak coordination between county and municipal authorities. Hyperscale data centers consume water at a scale that does not fit the existing regulatory categories, and developers are exploiting the gaps faster than local governments can close them. Tucson got lucky that someone was paying attention, but most communities in Project Blue's situation will not.
Hedgie🤗
FYI: 🇺🇸 A massive data center campus in Fayetteville, Georgia, secretly drained nearly 30 million gallons of water before residents noticed a drop in their own water pressure.
The "unaccounted-for" consumption has sparked a local firestorm:
Illegal Hookups: Utility investigators discovered two industrial water connections feeding the QTS campus that were either installed without permission or not linked to a billing account.
Massive Waste: The facility used enough water to fill 44 Olympic-size swimming pools, totaling $147,474 in retroactive charges that went unbilled for months.
Citizen Outrage: Residents in the Annelise Park subdivision were told to stop watering their lawns to conserve water while the data center, the county's #1 water consumer, was draining the system for free.
"Partnership" Over Penalties: Despite the breach, the county utility declined to fine the developer, calling the company a "partner" and citing a lack of staff to monitor the site.
Total Ban: In response to the scandal and ongoing drought conditions, the Fayetteville City Council voted last month to ban new data centers in every zoning district across the city.
The developer, owned by Blackstone, claims the high usage was for temporary construction, but local advocates argue the facility is "above the law" while the state faces severe wildfire risks.
WOW: Congress almost gave AI data centers total immunity from local and state environmental lawsuits last year.
But Thomas Massie and MTG blocked it.
Massie: “Twice, I have seen and stopped special provisions from being inserted into US law to help data centers over all other types of businesses.”
“In the Big Beautiful Bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene and I noticed that there were a couple pages that would give immunity for these data centers from… all state law, but also went down to the local level, including planning and zoning.”
This proposal would have given AI data centers “immunity from environmental lawsuits.”
“We fought and got that taken out of the bill.”
“This is un-American.”
@RepThomasMassie@FmrRepMTG@TuckerCarlson