Tagrydd

Liberal in Texas. Veteran.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

FBI at the office. FBI at employees' homes. No explanation yet.

This is the third voting-related federal action since February. Ohio. Georgia. California. Seven months before a midterm Republicans are already losing.

Voter fraud is rare. Voter intimidation is happening right now.

[helen warlow @HWarlow]

Hello again
‘Sunlit Landscape, Villefranche
Belgian artist ( new to me) Paul Leduc (1876-1943)
The warmth emanates from it

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

JFK once invited to dinner 49 Nobel laureates, Robert Frost, William Styron, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Katherine Anne Porter, John Dos Passos, James Farrell and Lionel and Diana Trilling, and others. His line on the occasion became famous: “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House—with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Some of you were alive when that happened.

[Betsy Cuthbertson @vbtraveler1]

@jmontforttx But listen: All these women need to do is not vote. There. Problem solved.
But that's not what they're after.
They want to prevent *me* from voting.
No one is constraining them from not using their right.
They want to constrain me from using mine.

[Joel Montfort @jmontforttx]

The lack of respect these conservatives have for history and women is astounding.
In 1917, the women's suffrage movement in the United States was gaining momentum and becoming more defiant. They were being arrested and jailed for weeks at a time. During the Night of Terror, 33 women who had been arrested were tortured.

https://t.co/7RBbgWvml7

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

→ The full breakdown of what's in this land swap - the acreage, the wildlife, the 25,000 public comments that got ignored, and who's suing to stop it. Outdoor Life did the math and it doesn't add up:
https://t.co/lkVmIKagoY

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The U.S. government just made a land deal with the world's first trillionaire. Not a sale. A trade.

Because apparently that's how we do things now.

715 acres of the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge - built by Congress in 1979 to protect one of the most biodiverse wildlife corridors left in North America - handed to SpaceX.

Endangered ocelots. Aplomado falcons. Piping plovers. Land the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas has called sacred since long before there was a United States.

SpaceX built a rocket launch site next door. Then came the explosions. Concrete and metal hurled six miles across refuge land. A 2024 study found that after one launch, every single monitored shorebird nest near the site suffered egg damage or loss. The Fish and Wildlife Service's response was not enforcement. It was a land swap.

FOIA documents show internal planning for this transfer started as early as April 2025 - while Musk was running DOGE and threatening to fire federal workers who didn't justify their jobs to him. The agency developed what they called "the most expedited schedule possible" to get it done.

Part of what's being handed over includes the Palmito Ranch Battlefield - the site of the last battle of the Civil War. A National Historic Landmark. Once transferred, SpaceX can restrict public access whenever they want.

25,000+ people submitted public comments. Most opposed the deal. The government moved forward anyway.

A coalition of tribal and conservation groups filed a federal lawsuit this week to stop it. Because someone has to.

Why are we cutting real estate deals with a trillionaire when we could have just made him pay for it?

#DemsUnited

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

→ The story that broke it open - how Tennessee quietly moved to weaponize a children's health program that has protected some of the state's most vulnerable kids for over half a century:
https://t.co/YwGCJbxFEL

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Tennessee is sending letters to immigrant parents of disabled and terminally ill children enrolled in a last-resort public health program — kids on ventilators, kids with cancer, kids in wheelchairs - telling them that if their child keeps receiving medical care after June 30, the state will report them to ICE.

This program has existed for over 50 years. It has never required immigration status. Until now.

Children's Special Services is Tennessee's last-resort public health insurance program for low-income kids with the most severe disabilities and life-threatening illnesses - kids with no other coverage, no other options. The state just sent letters to at least 90 Nashville families giving them an impossible choice: keep your child alive, or stay invisible.

One mother, Gabriella, has a 10-year-old son born with spina bifida who requires near-monthly emergency care. They're six months from a final ruling on their asylum case. She said if they're sent back to Honduras, "he's not going to make it."

Here's the part that should make your head explode: the law Tennessee is using to justify this explicitly applies only to people 18 and older. These are children. Pediatricians, advocates, and lawmakers are all saying the state is misapplying its own law to reach kids it was never meant to cover.

The Tennessee Justice Center says the directive is unlawful and is preparing a legal challenge. But families are afraid to come forward as plaintiffs. Because coming forward means being seen.

The state health department has not responded to a single press request for comment.

What kind of government sends a letter to the mother of a child on a ventilator and calls it immigration enforcement?

📷 Jose Carlos Cerdeno/Getty

#DemsUnited

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The single biggest irrigated crop in America isn't corn, wheat, or soybeans. It's not even avocados or almonds. It's lawn.

We grow more grass than any food crop in the country, around 40 million acres of it, and almost none of it feeds a single living thing.

Think about how strange that is. We took a grass that isn't even from here, planted it coast to coast, and now we pour water, fertilizer, and pesticide into keeping it short, green, and perfectly useless.

To a bee, a butterfly, or a bird hunting caterpillars for its chicks, a manicured lawn is a desert. Nothing to eat, nowhere to nest, mile after mile of it.

But here's the good news, maybe the easiest win on this whole account: you don't have to fix the entire desert. You just have to claw back a corner.

Pick one strip. The hellstrip by the sidewalk, the run along the fence, that awkward patch you hate mowing anyway. Stop mowing it and plant it with native flowers, a few black-eyed Susans, some bee balm, a couple of coneflowers. That's it. No ripping out the whole yard, no fight with anybody. Just convert one piece.

And that piece stops being dead space and starts being habitat: bees, butterflies, and birds showing up to a spot that offered them nothing a year ago.

Now picture your neighbor doing the same, and the one after that. That's how a desert turns back into a meadow, one reclaimed corner at a time.

[ALEXIS ™I ❤️🇷🇼• @dufitalexis1]

One yogurt tub. One inch of cheap beer. Slugs gone by morning.

Slugs are drawn to the fermentation CO2 and yeast in beer — not the alcohol. Any beer works, including flat beer or nonalcoholic. The tub is the whole trap.

Dig the tub in so the rim sits flush with the soil surface. If the rim is above grade, slugs won't crawl in — they need a level path. Pour beer to ½ inch deep (not full — you want headroom so rain doesn't dilute it instantly). Place traps 3–4 feet apart in a grid across the affected bed. Empty every 48 hours: slugs decompose fast and the smell repels rather than attracts once the trap goes sour. Re-bait with fresh beer.

Peak effectiveness: set traps at dusk. Slugs move from 9 PM to 2 AM. Morning reveals 10–40 caught per tub depending on pressure.

Flat beer left in a glass works just as well as fresh — slugs do not care about carbonation.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Hayes: “According to the NYTimes, the USPS has proposed a new rule that would allow it to REFUSE to deliver mail ballots in states that don’t turn over voter rolls to the federal government. That vaguely written rule released last week calls on states to compile lists of mail voters that postal service employees would use to screen ballots for eligibility. And if states refuse to comply, the post office could refuse to send their mail ballots. Can you imagine postal workers deputized by the Trump administration just refusing to deliver mail ballots to Californians? What about states that comply? Imagine postal workers at some place reviewing a state’s voter roll to determine who can vote and who can’t? Its unconstitutional, its chaotic, It’s maybe the wildest attempt yet to interfere in free and fair elections, short of course, of using federal agents to criminally investigate voting rights activists, to raid their office, maybe even perp walk them in for charges. That of course has been a classic old school tactic of election-rigging autocrats for generations around the world.” 😳

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

A 250-foot arch at Arlington. No cost estimate. No congressional approval. Memorializes nothing and no one.

Trump: "We don't need anything from Congress."

There's a 34-year-old law that says otherwise. The graves there disagree too.

[ScandiFella 🇸🇪🇪🇺🇺🇦 @pegelowrikard]

@JWalters314 @ericmwebb1 “Bread and Games” was literally invented 2000 years ago in Europe. What the fuck is he on about? We also remember the construct behind it. Not only can we comprehend it, we know what comes next.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The EPA's public comment period on the coal ash rollback is open RIGHT NOW and closes June 29.

You don't have to be a lawyer to submit one. You don't have to be an expert. Public comments are something everyday people do — and they matter. All you have to do is put into your own words why clean water matters to you. That's it. Click the link, type your thoughts, hit submit.

Hoosier Environmental Council even has draft comment text ready to copy and paste if you need it. It takes five minutes.
→ https://t.co/SjlKZrngzc

Want to see every coal ash site across Indiana? HEC's Interactive Indiana Coal Ash Map shows them all.
→ https://t.co/YXXwndN8Jb

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The numbers they don't want you to see ⬇️

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

→ A plant that was supposed to close. A $27 million federal check. A 12-year data center deal. IndyStar has the full paper trail on Merom and exactly who benefits.
https://t.co/hrMzIXpapl

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

A coal plant that should be dead just got resurrected with YOUR tax dollars. 💵

The Merom Generating Station in Indiana was scheduled to close in 2023. Instead, the administration just handed it $27 million, invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950.

Same playbook. Different law. It's systemic. Just like the 1872 Mining Act. Just like the Antiquities Act. Another dusty backdoor law pulled out of history and bent to serve industry, this time to bail out coal so it can power data centers.

The communities living near Merom don't get cheaper electricity. What they get is coal ash. Unlined ponds full of it, sitting in the ground next to their water supply, leaching arsenic and mercury at levels 40 times the federal safe drinking water standard.

Those ponds were already decades without real oversight. A 2024 rule finally set cleanup deadlines. The administration just pushed those deadlines back another 3 years, giving utility companies until 2031 to even begin groundwater monitoring while people live downstream right now.

Merom is now locked into a 12-year contract powering data centers through 2040. The ash stays. The water stays contaminated. And a 75-year-old wartime law just made it all possible.

Who's going to tell Indiana families their water got traded for data center electricity?⚡️

#DemsUnited

[RC deWinter @RCdeWinter]

Fortunately Connecticut's entire congressional delegation is Blue and won't be voting for anything Trump proposes and in fact we'll probably vociferously oppose it but it's always
a good idea in probably most of the country to contact your senators and congresspeople to vote against just about everything of what Trump proposes.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Thirty-two houses in Buxton, North Carolina have fallen into the ocean since 2020.

The system that helps predict where the next ones will fall - and how strong the storms coming for them will be - is being defunded just as hurricane season opens.

The instruments will be pulled from the water. The data stops. The coast doesn't.