Maile, RN

RN and volunteer FF/EMT...wonderful husband of 29 yrs, huge Star Wars fans and 3 beautiful daughters

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

That's so cruel. No one should repost this over 100 times.

[ᒪᗩᑎE @lanechanged]

Right on the heels of scientists discovering that a very potent peptide in bee venom can rapidly destroy aggressive cancer cells- esp the kind in breast cancer- our govt's decided to close the nation's Bee Research Lab in Maryland.

I swear to you, they want us all dead.
Particularly women.
This admin's depravity knows no bounds.

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

A reminder to my former political party: You cowards who sold your souls to Trump deserve everything that’s happening to you now and everything that will happen to you in Nov.

A reminder to my new political party: You will take back the House in Nov and maybe even the Senate. But it has NOTHING to do with you. It’s ALL bcuz of Trump. Voters are pissed and despise both parties. To win in 2028, YOU need to get YOUR act together. Or say hello to another MAGA president.

[Ford News @FordJohnathan5]

BREAKINGNEWS: FBI Director made claim that @ChrisVanHollen paid over $7,000 bar tab in El Salvador while visiting Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

We find out the $7,000 tab wasn't in El Salvador or wasn't at a local bar. It was through a catering service for staff paid for by campaign funds. Not a single dime from tax payers, but from contributions.

FBI Director Kash Patel should resign for this reason and 100 other reasons. 🚨

[Who Was That Masked Man?🇺🇸🦅 @WasMasked]

@mmpadellan @marusoze

[BigDaddy @strujillo075]

BREAKING: PARTY OF PEDOS! Texas Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton gets caught letting his pedophile crony off the hook, reducing his sentence from life without parole to just SIXTY DAYS IN JAIL!

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

We recently interviewed one of the guys on the Explosive Media Lego team and he said that, surprisingly, their attitude toward the American people has significantly *improved* throughout this conflict, as they have come to recognize that both they and we are subjects of the Epstein class, that Americans voted against war and are appalled by what we're doing. I think the same is true for Americans, and these videos have helped humanize Iranians, in a weird way (considering they are Lego characters and not humans in the videos)

[Brian Allen @allenanalysis]

🇺🇸BREAKING: Louisiana Republicans are cancelling an ongoing election to eliminate Black majority districts.

The election already started.

People have already voted.

Republicans are about to cancel those votes.

Never in American history has an election been cancelled this way.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨MAJOR BREAKING: Rep. Pat Ryan just revealed that Pete Hegseth ordered military members to an area in Kuwait with an ACTIVE WARNING they had ZERO defense against drone attacks and he IGNORED IT.

Six were then KILLED. Survivors blame Hegseth.

This is even WORSE than Benghazi.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have two stacks on my desk. The left stack is financial disclosure forms from members of Congress. The right stack is waivers for members who filed their financial disclosures late.

The right stack is always taller.

On Wednesday morning, I watched a soldier get arrested on CNN.

I am a Disclosure Analyst for the House Ethics Committee. I have held this position for eleven years. My job is to receive the forms, verify their completeness, and file them. I do not investigate. I do not flag. I do not refer. I file. I have a lanyard. The lanyard says ETHICS.

The soldier's name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke. He is thirty-eight years old. He was stationed at Fort Bragg. He was Special Forces. In December, he created an account on a prediction market called Polymarket. On January 2nd, he bet $32,500 that the president of Venezuela would be removed from power. On January 3rd, he helped remove the president of Venezuela from power. He collected $409,881.

He has been charged with five federal crimes. Commodities fraud. Wire fraud. Unlawful use of confidential government information. Theft of nonpublic government information. Unlawful monetary transaction. The Department of Justice called it "the first-ever insider trading prosecution on event contracts."

I watched this on the television in our break room. Then I walked back to my desk and processed a late financial disclosure from a member of the House Financial Services Committee who purchased $250,000 in bank stocks eleven days before his subcommittee held a closed-door hearing on proposed capital reserve changes.

The filing was forty-seven days late. The STOCK Act requires disclosure within forty-five days. The penalty for late filing is $200.

I waived it.

I waive most of them. In 2021, fifty-four members of Congress and senior staff violated the reporting rules. The fines were minimal. Most were waived. I have a form for the waiver. The form has a box that says "Reason." I write "administrative delay." In ethics, "administrative delay" means the member's office forgot and then remembered when a reporter called. My approval rate is one hundred percent. In any other field, that number would trigger an audit. In mine, it is called thoroughness.

Let me show you what I processed this year.

January. A senator on the Armed Services Committee sold defense contractor shares worth $1.2 million. Three days later, his committee received a classified briefing that the Iran campaign had exceeded its projected cost by 340%. The stock dropped 8%. He filed the disclosure sixty-one days late. I calculated the fine. $200. His chief of staff asked if it could be waived. He did not ask what the senator traded on. Nobody asks that. The form does not have a field for it. I waived the fine. The senator's portfolio returned 23.4% in 2025. The S&P 500 returned 16.8%.

February. A representative on the Energy and Commerce Committee bought pharmaceutical stocks worth $400,000. Two weeks later, her committee advanced a bill that would extend patent exclusivity for the exact drug class she purchased. The stocks rose 14%. She filed on time. There was no fine. There was no investigation. There was nothing to investigate because buying stocks in companies regulated by your own committee is not illegal. It is legal. The STOCK Act made it legal by making it disclosed. In Congress, disclosed means legal. In my office, legal means filed.

March. A member whose spouse manages a portfolio worth $9.2 million reported forty-three separate transactions in a single quarter. Twelve of them were in sectors directly affected by legislation the member co-sponsored. The timing on eight of those twelve was within a two-week window of committee action. I logged all forty-three. None were flagged. We do not flag. We file.

I asked my supervisor once what would happen if I flagged a filing. She said we do not have a form for that. I never asked again.

In 2020, I processed 847 disclosures. In 2023, 1,211. In 2025, 1,614. The number of enforcement actions in each of those years was zero. The numerator changes. The denominator does not.

I want to tell you about the soldier again.

He made $409,881. He tried to delete his Polymarket account by calling customer service and saying he lost access to his email. He moved his profits into a foreign cryptocurrency vault and then into a new brokerage account. He used his real identity. He placed thirteen bets. Every single one was connected to an operation he personally participated in.

In my eleven years, I have processed disclosures from members of Congress who traded on:

Pending FDA approvals they learned about in committee.
Defense appropriations they voted on.
Trade policy they negotiated.
Pandemic response measures they drafted.
Interest rate decisions they were briefed on before the public.

None of them have been charged. None of them have been investigated by the Department of Justice. None of them have been referred to the SEC. The STOCK Act has produced zero prosecutions since it was signed on April 4th, 2012.

Fourteen years. Five hundred and thirty-five members. $635 million in trades last year alone. Zero cases.

My daughter asked me once what happens when someone breaks the rules. I told her we write it down. She asked what happens after that. I said it depends. She was nine. She is twenty now. It does not depend. Nothing happens after that.

The soldier made $409,881 and faces decades in prison. Nancy Pelosi entered Congress in 1987 with a portfolio worth approximately $785,000. It is now worth $133.7 million. That is a return of 16,930%. The Dow Jones returned 2,300% over the same period. Professional fund managers who beat the market for three consecutive years are considered exceptional. She has beaten it for thirty-seven. If a hedge fund produced those returns, the SEC would subpoena the records on a Thursday. She produced them from a building with a chapel and a gift shop.

She announced her retirement last year. No investigation was opened. No disclosure was flagged. Her filings were on time. In my office, on time means compliant. Compliant means closed.

I want to tell you about the fine.

$200. That is the maximum penalty for violating the STOCK Act's disclosure requirements. $200 for a member of Congress whose portfolio gained $4.7 million in a single quarter. I calculated what $200 represents as a percentage of $4.7 million. It is 0.004%. I could not find a comparison that made it meaningful. It is less than the price of the parking pass in the Rayburn garage. It is less than lunch at the members' dining room if you order the crab cakes, which I am told are excellent though I eat at my desk.

Since 2012, thirty-one bills have been introduced to restrict congressional trading. I keep a list. The list is longer than the STOCK Act itself.

On March 5th, 2026, a representative from Michigan introduced the thirty-second. He called it the "No Getting Rich in Congress Act." The bill would prohibit the President, Vice President, members of Congress, and their spouses from trading individual stocks, cryptocurrency, futures, and commodities while in office.

The bill was referred to committee. The committee has not scheduled a hearing. The committee is chaired by a member whose spouse executed $2.1 million in trades last year.

The bill will be reviewed. In my office, reviewed means read. Read means acknowledged. Acknowledged means a status has been assigned. A status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

The soldier used classified information to make $409,881 on a prediction market. He has been charged with five federal crimes. The Department of Justice announced the case on the same day I processed three disclosures from members who traded on committee knowledge worth a combined $3.8 million.

The difference between the soldier and the members is not what they did. It is the building they did it in. He did it from Fort Bragg. They did it from the Capitol. He used a prediction market. They used the New York Stock Exchange. He bet on a military operation. They bet on the legislation they write.

He did not write the law. They did. They wrote the STOCK Act. Then they funded its enforcement at zero dollars. Then they set its maximum penalty at $200. Then they gave my office the authority to waive it. Then they traded $635 million.

The soldier flew to Caracas. He breached a compound. He put his body between a mission and a bullet. The people who ordered the operation were in a building with a credenza and sparkling water. They did not go to Caracas. They went to their brokerage accounts. The soldier made $409,881 and is now in federal custody. The people who knew what he was going to do before he did it made more and filed less. His prosecution is not a failure of the system. It is the system. One conviction per decade, at the lowest level, so the briefing slides can say enforcement exists. The $409,881 is not the crime. It is the cost of making $635 million look supervised.

In my field, we call this self-regulation.

The soldier's Polymarket account has been frozen. His military career is over. He will spend years in federal prison. My office will process every congressional disclosure filed this year. Every trade logged. Every $200 fine calculated and waived. The system is immaculate.

Fourteen years. Zero prosecutions. $635 million a year. A 16,930% return.

I have not leaked a document. I have not filed a complaint. I have not deviated from the process one single time. The process was written by the people whose forms I process.

As long as the disclosures go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

My lanyard still says ETHICS. In eleven years, nobody has asked me to define the word.

[Andy Kim @AndyKimNJ]

I’m leaving the Capitol at 4am after Republicans rammed through a vote paving a path for $70B to fund ICE for years without any reforms/accountability. They rejected all Dem proposals to lower your healthcare costs, housing, and gas prices. Spread the word. We need to stop this.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be a much bigger story.

The Trump administration is about to hand TotalEnergies, a French oil company, nearly $1 billion of your money to cancel its American offshore wind projects. And they are pulling the cash from an account they are not allowed to use this way.

Here is how it works. The government has something called the Judgment Fund. Think of it as an emergency savings account for when the government loses a lawsuit or settles a real legal fight. It is not a checkbook the President can use whenever he feels like rewarding a company.

To get around that rule, the administration is pretending TotalEnergies was about to sue. But TotalEnergies had no case. The company signed a contract in January 2025 with clear rules: the government cannot cancel these leases unless it first pauses the project for five years. The lease is less than four years old and was never paused. TotalEnergies agreed to those terms. There was no real lawsuit coming.

So the administration invented a fake legal threat to justify raiding an account Congress controls. That matters because the Constitution says Congress, not the President, decides how taxpayer money gets spent.

It gets worse. The White House claimed TotalEnergies would take the money and reinvest it in American oil and gas. The actual paperwork, now public, requires nothing of the kind. The company gets a billion dollars of taxpayer money and owes us nothing.

So Americans are paying a foreign oil company to shut down clean energy projects here at home, using money that was never supposed to be spent this way, with zero strings attached. That is illegal, unethical, and a scandal hiding in plain sight.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

A new watchdog report from the Government Accountability Oversight Project alleges that President Donald Trump directed $3 billion in federal funds toward his own properties and political allies. The report claims this was achieved through a series of classified security agreements and no-bid contracts authorized during his final year in office. Investigators suggest that emergency national security designations allowed these properties to receive federal payments at rates significantly higher than market value.
The most substantial allegation involves a $1.2 billion security agreement at Mar-a-Lago, an amount that reportedly exceeds the security budget of any private residence in U.S. history. While the Trump legal team has dismissed these findings as a partisan attack, federal investigators are currently reviewing the data. If verified, this would represent the largest alleged self-dealing scheme by a president in the history of the United States.
Critics have noted that the funds in question were drawn from the national treasury, which traditionally supports essential services such as veterans' hospitals and disaster relief. While no formal charges have been filed, the scale of the alleged diverted funds has sparked intense debate over executive accountability. The Government Accountability Office has yet to issue a formal comment on the specific findings of the report.

[Dittie @DittiePE]

Syrian billionaires needed U.S. sanctions lifted. So they pitched a Trump-branded golf course to members of Congress as a lobbying prop — complete with a carved stone emblazoned “Trump International Golf Club, Syria” — while simultaneously negotiating an equity partnership with Jared Kushner on a separate $1.4 billion resort deal in Albania.

Congress repealed the sanctions on December 18, 2025. The Kushner deal is now a joint venture.

The golf course is aspirational. The Albania deal is not.

[GrrrGraphics 🇺🇸- Ben & Tina Garrison Cartoons @GrrrGraphics]

Strait of Hormuz is Open!
Strait of Hormuz is Closed!
Open! Closed!

[Acyn @Acyn]

Buttigieg: Maybe you voted for him because when he said he was going to keep us out of foreign wars, you believed him.

I can’t stop thinking about what it felt like when it was my turn to be going on one of those C-17 aircraft with a one-way ticket into a war zone, praying that the people who sent me there knew what they were doing.

And we owe our service members a lot better than what’s going on in this Pentagon and in this White House.

[Christina Holbrook ThoughtCriminals @DangerousTruth1]

It appears Erika Kirk is committing felonies.

Standing at that podium with the presidential seal while addressing an audience at a non profit event is against the law.

[Asante @realtalktruthD]

BREAKING🚨 A man was choked to death by ICE guards and DHS hid his body at a military base to block the autopsy.

His name was Geraldo Lunas Campos. When the county medical examiner finally performed an autopsy, the conclusion was devastatingly clear: his death was ruled a homicide.

But here is the detail that should make your blood run cold.

When another man recently died at that exact same ICE facility, DHS didn't call the local medical examiner. Instead, they moved his body to a nearby U.S. Army base.

And that Army base is now flat-out refusing to release the results of the autopsy.

This was revealed by Senator Dick Durbin in a horrifying congressional hearing about the explosion of deaths in ICE custody under the Trump administration.

At least 17 people have already died in ICE custody in just the first three months of this year alone. Many of them died from easily treatable illnesses.

911 logs show ICE facilities are completely overwhelmed, ignoring basic human rights.

But moving a body to a military installation to dodge a local homicide investigation? That isn't just negligence. That is a coordinated, state-sponsored cover-up.

They are operating mass detention facilities with zero accountability. They are treating human beings like they are disposable. And when their guards cross the line, they use the full weight of the federal military apparatus to hide the evidence.

We are watching human rights abuses happen on American soil, funded by our tax dollars. We must demand the autopsy report.

Share this. Do not let them sweep these deaths under the rug.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨HOLY COW: Jon Ossoff just HUMILIATED JD Vance:

“I don't know if you saw, but JD Vance was in Georgia this week.

NO ONE SHOWED UP. The stadium was empty.”

AND THEN OSSOFF WENT NUCLEAR:

“But JD came to UGA to attack the Pope, two days after Donald Trump depicted himself as Jesus Christ.

The faithless President depicts himself as Christ while he plunges the nation into wars of choice.

While he and his family rake in billions from foreign princes.

While he plunders our health care to cut taxes for the rich.

Meanwhile rent, power, groceries, and health care have hit all-time highs this year.

Ground beef's up 20% since Trump took office. Coffee, 40%. Health premiums: through the roof.

And remember: while you pay more for everything, the First Family’s wealth is growing by billions of dollars.

Because they’re crooks, and everybody knows it."

[Dittie @DittiePE]

DC police responding to a domestic assault call documented that Rep. Cory Mills, on a phone call with the victim, instructed her to lie about where her bruises came from. Officers listened.

They still sent an arrest warrant. Trump’s US Attorney for DC, Ed Martin — who calls himself “President Trump’s lawyer” — refused to sign it.

A supervisor reclassified the assault as a family disturbance. The arresting officer told the victim on body cam: “I have bosses making this into a family disturbance instead of an actual domestic assault.”

MPD internal affairs opened an investigation into its own handling of the case. The criminal probe was later closed. The House Ethics Committee investigation remains open.

https://t.co/7RrAG8XNyD