ShePersistedOH

Political nerd, leans left but willing to listen to reasonable people. 🇺🇸 🇺🇦

[Jim Acosta @Acosta]

When 60 Minutes is in trouble, we are all in trouble. When Pelley says CBS is meddling in his reporting for political reasons, believe it. https://t.co/lWpjdv1Unm

[Dr. Amy Acton @amyactonoh]

As governor, I promise to have Republicans in my cabinet —because the best solutions come from working together.

[Rep. Shontel Brown @RepShontelBrown]

🚨Despite being a member of the Oversight Committee who represents 750,000 Ohioans – I was just blocked from participating in today’s sham Oversight hearing on Medicaid fraud in Ohio.

Why? Because they knew I was going to blast this hearing for what it was:

nothing more than MAGA fear-mongering to justify Republican healthcare cuts. Nevermind that the GOP has run Ohio for 15 years.
I won’t let my constituents be silenced.
Since they wouldn’t let me say it in the room – here’s what I was going to say: 

Let’s dispense with the pretense.
We should all agree that anyone who steals taxpayer dollars or exploits programs that help seniors, people with disabilities, and working families should be held accountable.

Unfortunately, my Republican colleagues on this committee seem to look the other way each and every time this President pardons individuals convicted of Medicare fraud, tax fraud, securities fraud, and wire fraud. Give me a break.

But let’s at least be honest – this hearing isn’t really about fraud … it’s about politics.

This is a political hearing built on allegations that remain unproven, amplified by partisan actors, and aimed at justifying a broader political goal: cutting Medicaid and shifting blame away from those who have actually been in charge.

Last year, Republicans cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy in their Big Ugly Law. Now they are holding hearings to convince the public the program itself is the problem.

And to do it, they’ve elevated a half-rate conservative blogger as a key witness, someone who has spent years promoting baseless allegations like these .. and building a political following around them.

As if that weren’t enough, they've assembled a witness list that looks less like a fraud investigation and more like a campaign event.

In fact, two of the three majority witnesses here today were at a press conference just last week with the out-of-touch Republican candidate for governor – the same candidate who called Medicare and Medicaid quote-unquote a mistake … and called working families in Ohio lazy.

So this isn’t really an investigation in search of facts, is it? It's a political campaign in search of headlines.

Which brings me to the question Republicans cannot answer: which is it?
Either these allegations are unproven, in which case this hearing is a political exercise built on speculation…

Or they are true and systemic, in which case they represent a massive failure of oversight under Republican control.
Because Republicans have had complete and total control of Ohio for more than fifteen years.

They controlled the agencies responsible for provider enrollment. They controlled claims processing. They controlled fraud prevention. They controlled Medicaid administration. And they eliminated the Joint Medicaid Oversight Committee designed to catch exactly these problems.

They don't get to spend years running the state and dismantling oversight, then show up in Washington shocked that oversight failed.

So let's be clear: if providers committed fraud, they should be prosecuted.
If taxpayer dollars were stolen, they should be recovered.

But Congress should not be used as a stage for political campaigns, racial scapegoating, or attacks on Medicaid beneficiaries.

The people who need home- and community-based services are not the villains here.

The seniors trying to stay in their homes are not the villains here.

People with disabilities trying to live independently are not the villains here.
If fraud occurred, the responsibility lies with the bad actors who committed it and the oversight systems that failed to stop it.

And if Republicans want answers about those failures, they should start by looking in the mirror to find out who has been running Ohio for the last decade and a half.

[Richard Stengel @stengel]

George H.W. Bush kept his assets in a blind trust, as did Bill Clinton. Neither Obama nor Biden traded stocks or bonds while in office. 3,700 trades is probably more than all the trades of all the presidents until now. And he is trading stocks that are affected by his decisions. A walking conflict of interest, at the least, and perhaps insider trading. Just as members of Congress should not be able to trade stocks, so too the president. https://t.co/yDqVXWfDgc

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Residents living within a half-mile of new AI data centers are reporting dizziness, nausea, vertigo, and sleep disruption from sound they can't hear.

The source is infrasound. Frequencies below 20 Hz sit beneath the floor of human hearing but not beneath human physiology. The body's vestibular system registers low-frequency vibration directly, triggering the same response as motion sickness. The cooling systems and gas turbines running these facilities 24/7 produce exactly this range.

Noise ordinances were written for audible noise. Decibel measurements start at 20 Hz. Infrasound doesn't appear. A 200-megawatt data center with tens of thousands of tons of cooling equipment can run around the clock with zero measurable noise violation under any existing zoning law in the country.

The developers know this.

They're not randomly selecting sites. Rural jurisdictions get targeted because they lack the legal staff, the engineering expertise, and the regulatory framework to mount any challenge. These facilities require new transmission interconnects that take 5 to 10 years to process through utilities. Building behind-the-meter with gas turbines bypasses that queue. Speed to power, zero delay, zero grid dependency.

Households who bought before the announcement have two options. Sell at a price no buyer will pay, or stay and live with symptoms their family doctor has no framework to diagnose as infrastructure-related.

That cost never appears in a hyperscaler's earnings call.

The regulation will catch up eventually. It always does. But the facilities will already be running. The permits will grandfather everything in place.

The turbines don't stop when the legal framework finally notices them.

[Adam Kinzinger (Slava Ukraini) 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @AdamKinzinger]

DEVELOPING: DOJ is investigating $2.6B in suspiciously timed oil trades made right before Trump's Iran decisions. The corruption is finally catching up to them.

Please like and share to get the word out!

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

Take a close look at this.

NBC News published a major investigation this afternoon. Six reporters. Six named sources inside the US government. The story breaks open something the Trump administration has been hiding for two months.

The damage Iran did to American military bases in the opening phase of the war is far worse than the Pentagon has admitted.

Repairs will cost billions of dollars.

Here is what NBC found.

[Ryan Crosswell @Ryan_Crosswell]

Donald Trump is purging DOJ attorneys, including the Public Integrity Section in which I served, and replacing them with lackeys who will enable his effort to take over elections. I spoke out against this effort - and the Justice Department had no response, because they know I'm right.

[Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale]

Ohio Senator @BernieMoreno attacks Pope Leo XIV.

Ohio is the home of our four million Catholics.

[Art Candee 🍿🥤 @ArtCandee]

Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen:

"There's nothing in the Constitution that says the president of the United States gets to start a war and wage a war for 60 days...You don't get to wage a war for 60 days without congressional authorization."

Bingo.

[Ron Wyden @RonWyden]

reminder that the IRS built a direct file program because doing your taxes should be free and easy, and then Trump and Republicans killed the program as a favor to TurboTax

[ProPublica @propublica]

Russ Vought set out to ensure a second Trump term would not be hampered by checks and balances: “I don’t want President Trump having to lose a moment of time having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.”
https://t.co/3MV5uuYAzi

[ProPublica @propublica]

The DOJ quietly closed 23,000+ criminal cases in the first 6 months of Trump’s second term, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases.

🔗 More: https://t.co/fYMlx6KbbF

[ShePersistedOH @ShePersistedOH]

@DHSgov What in the hell? This is a government account. Ever hear of separation of church and state?

[PBS News @NewsHour]

A drone maker backed by President Donald Trump's two oldest sons is trying to sell to Gulf countries while they are under attack by Iran and dependent on the U.S. military led by their father.
https://t.co/77E51TNvpK

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

The Pentagon is desperately trying to cover up a massive insider trading scandal. A prominent CNBC journalist confirms the Financial Times report about Pete Hegseth is rock solid and warns there is much more to this corrupt story than Washington is admitting.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

It's likely that experienced generals are telling Hegseth his Iran war plans are unworkable, disastrous, and deadly.

Also, Hegseth is firing a ton of experienced generals right now.

[Lesley Abravanel 🪩 @lesleyabravanel]

A UAE “Spy Sheikh” secretly bought a $500M stake in Trump’s crypto company — then got access to guarded U.S. AI chips Biden had blocked. Deputy AG Todd Blanche deflected when confronted on ABC News. This is corruption, plain and simple. The White House is for sale.

[Marco Foster @MarcoFoster_]

Julie K. Brown: “Scott Bessent is blocking Senator Wyden’s effort to look at Epstein’s taxes and his financial records. They go in front of the microphones, Karoline Leavitt, ‘oh we’re the most transparent administration ever,’ but in reality if they were so transparent then why aren’t they letting investigators with the House Oversight Committee look at the money piece of Epstein’s crime?”

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

PROPAGANDA BUSTED: Fox’s OutKick ran an entire hit piece on Ohio gubernatorial candidate Dr. Amy Acton based on tweets from a parody account they didn’t bother to verify.

They presented the posts as real, built a narrative around them, and used it to attack her record, only to later admit, in a small editor’s note, that the account was fake and not affiliated with Acton at all. Well, at least they acknowledged Acton's team "claimed" that despite it being the truth.

And what did they do after realizing the entire premise of their story was false? They left it up.

No full retraction. No accountability. Just a quiet half correction at the top while the entirely fake story remains live.