Dale

Life enthusiast

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.

A Syrian billionaire needed U.S. sanctions lifted so he could cash in on $12 billion in reconstruction contracts.

In an attempt to influence American foreign policy, he proposed a Trump-branded golf course, cut Jared Kushner & Ivanka Trump into a multibillion-dollar real estate deal for a resort in Albania, and had someone physically deliver a stone engraved with the Trump family crest to a Republican Member of Congress with instructions to take it to the White House to get the President's attention.

Trump threw his weight behind repealing the sanctions. They were lifted. The contracts are moving, the Trump family’s deals are expanding, and not a single Washington Republican is willing to say a word about any of it.

This is a corruption of everything the office of the presidency is supposed to stand for, and the American people deserve to know about it.
https://t.co/A4lQE3ktoG

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

In the dramatic circumstances of war, information must guard against the risk of turning into propaganda. It is every journalist's duty to verify the news, so as not to become a megaphone for power. They must show the suffering that war always brings to populations, which entails showing the face of war and recounting it through the eyes of victims.

[Senator Joe Manchin @Sen_JoeManchin]

When Democrats wanted to eliminate the filibuster in 2022, I stood my ground because I understood the consequences of turning the Senate into a glorified House with simple majority rule. Senator John Cornyn said of Democrats at the time: “They'll soon find themselves rueing the day their party broke the Senate.”

The filibuster exists to make both sides work together and produce good legislation that can withstand the test of time. Eliminating the filibuster would consolidate even more power into the hands of the majority party’s leadership — and take power away from the minority and everyday Americans.

When I was a U.S. Senator, there was not another person more committed to keeping the filibuster than Senator John Cornyn. He understood the incredible political pressure I faced from my former party to get rid of the filibuster and give Democrats complete power — and at the time, he understood why neither party should take our country past this point of no return.

The filibuster — the soul of the Senate — has preserved the Senate’s role for nearly 250 years as the institution that cools passions, protects minority voices, and demands consensus. America was built on institutions designed to resist political convenience, not surrender to it.

It’s deeply disappointing to see that Senator Cornyn is now willing to scrap the very rule he once praised and personally thanked me for defending. These extreme election-year politics that put party power over everything else are why Americans are sick and tired of the duopoly of the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans.

[Thomas Massie @RepThomasMassie]

Can you, the people, “vote your way out of this?”

Honestly, not if you get your news from these folks.

The swamp has tricks for deceiving the public, and most even work on congressmen. Here’s an example of how Laura and Greg played along as happy tools of the swamp.

Please ask yourself why your own congressman has never talked about this. He either hasn’t gotten this far in the game (80% chance), or he likes the way the swamp obscures what’s going on (10% chance), or he dislikes the system but the price he’d pay for telling you is too high (10% chance). If a congressman sees this post and wants to debate me, I accept!

The House has rules we adopt at the beginning of each Congress. Honestly we should just use those - some go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. Some are like Robert’s Rules of Order which branched from House rules a century ago. But we have a rules committee that modifies the rules every week. I served on the rules committee for two years. When I was on the committee, I refused to vote for rules changes if the purpose was to mislead or obscure. Every week, the rules committee bends the rules to suit the Speaker, but you can’t place the blame just on the committee or the Speaker. Every rules change must be approved by the whole House with a majority vote.

Rank and file congressmen are told to vote for these rules modifications each week for the sake of party loyalty because the rules are temporarily modified by the majority to keep the minority from using the permanent rules against us. This is partly true, so most congressmen never question beyond this.

Typically, every week the rules committee meets before other committees and writes a rules package to protect bills that will come to the floor that week. Then the whole house votes on this rules package early in the week before significant legislation comes to the floor. The vote is typically on party lines. Sometimes a block of congressmen in the majority will take the rules package hostage and withhold their vote to get something else that has nothing to do with the rules. I’m not a big fan of this, but after 13 years, my hands aren’t completely clean of this tactic.

The high-road position that I try to maintain is that if the rules package is bad, you shouldn’t vote for the rules package, and in general you shouldn’t withhold your vote from a rules package if there’s nothing wrong with the rules package… even if you disagree with the policy that is enabled to come to the floor by the rules package.

There are more details, but that’s all you need to know to understand what I’m going to explain next.

This week the Speaker wanted to do two things outside of our base rules, so he put those inside of the rules package that also had the rules for bringing bills like the popular SAVE Act to the floor, knowing members would be afraid to vote against something associated with SAVE. THIS IS INTENTIONAL.

The Speaker wanted to circumvent the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to avoid voting on tariffs and he wanted to turn off the ban on bringing a spending bill to the floor the same day it’s introduced.

The first rules package that came to the floor this week failed because myself and other republicans objected to it. The rules committee met again, wrote a new rules package without the tariff-trick, and we voted on the second rules package. I voted no but internet goons, like clockwork, characterized this as a vote against the SAVE Act.

The swamp used that second rules package to give them authority to pass a bill before anyone could read it. They hid that authority inside the rule for the SAVE act because they knew people like Laura and Greg would help them disparage anyone who didn’t go along.

If you fell for Laura and Greg’s slop you were cheering for the Pelosi doctrine that we should pass bills to see what’s in them. If the rules package had failed, the rules committee would have written a better one and SAVE Act would have still come to the floor.

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[Mitt Romney @MittRomney]

We’ve reached a point where any mix of solutions to our nation’s economic problems is going to involve the wealthiest Americans contributing more. https://t.co/m0zXuXeC43

[Anne Applebaum @anneapplebaum]

Darren Beattie - the State Dept official who dismantled the US government's main center for fighting Russian and Chinese propaganda around the world - turns out to have personal ties to the Russian elite.

https://t.co/0PkpBze4qK

[tern @1goodtern]

Look at that.

That is just incredible.

Seriously.
Just look at it for five minutes.

Let it soak in.

[Dale @beets212]

@santiagoroel @bondexapp When it happens. I’ll pay more. Good luck with that. That’s the whole fucking point.

[Prof Jeffrey S Morris @jsm2334]

The report HHS sent to congress to justify the changes in vaccine recommendations for healthy non-elderly people and pregnant women has all kinds of misrepresentations and errors, as outlined by this report, and clearly does not accurately reflect the state of the scientific literature.

For myo/pericarditis, it cites a paper that is currently under investigation with a "notice of concern" and misrepresents VAERs data to imply a 2500% increase in myocarditis. There are much better papers that document the myo/pericarditis risk and accurately describe the magnitude of the increased risk.

He cherry picks a paper (that is not peer reviewed yet) to say that only vaccinated had myocarditis, when clearly there is vast literature showing myocarditis also occurs in unvaccinated individuals, especially after covid infections. Social media posts have tried to make these claims based on this paper, and the authors of the paper have argued that is not an accurate interpretation of their results of their study.

The scientific literature has documented evidence of significantly increased myo/pericarditis risk after mRNA vaccination, especially in young men and teen boys, and especially after doses 1-2 when the dosages were higher. But his justification misrepresents and exaggerates.

For pregnancy risks, his evidence is even worse.

With many other papers showing no increase in pregnancy loss after vaccination, he cherry picks one paper claiming it shows increase of pregnancy loss, when their analysis after confounder adjustment showed no evidence of any increase. And as I mentioned he ignores all of the other papers showing no evidence of an increase.

He cites a paper for a claim that vaccines increase placental blood clotting, but that paper does not even study placental blood clotting, or even study pregnant patients.

Not sure who wrote the report, but it is not a quality scientific report providing evidence for the proposed changes.

https://t.co/oghWDYz6yD

[Ed Markey @SenMarkey]

My entire back and forth with Donald Trump's nominee to run NASA but I zoom in 75% every time he says the "President of the United States".

[Dale @beets212]

@ErikVoorhees https://t.co/PlOPzTV1FN

[Nicole Lee Schroeder, PhD @Nicole_Lee_Sch]

Just reflagging this resource: LitCOVID has over 440,000 articles on covid. The media isnt highlighting how bad covid is, but it is proving out to be so, so, so incredibly dangerous. Pubs updated daily: https://t.co/aPeP40sWaD

[Laura Shin @laurashin]

I agree that it’s great if people work hard and think it’s cool when people do well at things, whether it’s STEM or sports or the arts or something totally different.

But as the daughter of Asian immigrants, I would say Vivek is missing the mark on what makes America so great. My mom was the valedictorian of her high school class, which made her kind of famous because it was a top high school in Seoul. This concept might seem weird to an American, but the only thing I can think of to equate it to would be like if you were valedictorian of one of the top schools in NYC? I am not sure as I’m not from NYC (and perhaps this is no longer true in Korea), but at least for my mom’s generation, I gleaned this from the way people spoke to me about my mom. Also, she went to the Harvard of Korea.

Anyway, probably because my mom is smart, she would compare the US and Korean educational systems and laugh at how her schooling was based on rote memorization and marvel at how I was learning to write long papers of my own original thoughts. For that reason, she thought the US educational system was far superior.

Vivek seems fixated here on STEM as if that’s the only thing that can make a country great. But the U.S. encourages people to be the best they can be in whatever it is they are good at. Individuality is prized, and if your gift is cracking jokes in the lunchroom cafeteria rather than winning math competitions, we wouldn’t force you to become an engineer. We would love to see you become the next great comedian, which is not the kind of career that most Asian countries or cultures would value.

Yes, I agree aspiring to mediocrity is a bad thing. But also, the school system isn’t even all that. Einstein was a middling student and become one of the most important scientists in all of history! And he himself said imagination was more important than knowledge! People who excel in the system generally reinforce the system. People who learn to think original thoughts can upend the system and improve it.

Let’s celebrate each person becoming the best at their specific gifts, whether it’s something that initially seems unimportant.

I wrote my college thesis on Nietzsche who said, “God is dead,” by which he meant that science is the new religion that displaced God. I think Vivek is falling prey to the same fallacy here.

There are many axes on which humans can excel, and the U.S., because it fosters creativity, originality and diversity of thought, is the best place for any one human to fulfill their potential.

[Rep. Ritchie Torres @RepRitchie]

I confronted SEC Chair Gary Gensler with a deceptively simple question: Is a Yankee ticket a security?

Mr. Gensler claims that NFTs are securities. I see no legal difference between a Yankee ticket that offers access to a Yankee game and an NFT that offers access to an animated web series (as in the case of Stoner Cats). Mr. Gensler is misclassifying collectibles, art, and tickets as securities.

[norah~ small but mighty 🔥 @TheNorahEffect]

As usual, John Stewart is 100% spot on.

[John E Deaton @JohnEDeaton1]

Please watch this short clip of @ewarren talking about anything other than my centrist common sense stances. Notice how she couldn’t come up with ONE SINGLE THING about my views or stances that’s troubling. Since it’s difficult to argue with common sense, she uses misdirection and fear mongering when answering questions about me.

@SenWarren: the ONLY time I’ve been recruited to do anything in Massachusetts, was when the Marine Corps recruited me to serve my country. I couldn’t afford Harvard Law in the 1990s - probably because they paid a law professor several hundred thousand dollars just to teach one class and do “research” - but I was very proud to beat out students from Harvard, as well as the other great law schools here in Massachusetts, for the 1994 Judge Advocate Law Contract.

Her attempt to paint me as a stooge for crypto billionaires reeks of desperation. In fact, she’s the one closely tied to a “Crypto Billionaire”, not me.

She’s friends with @SBF_FTX’s Criminal parents - Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. Joe Bankman wrote @SenWarren’s tax policy when she ran for President and Barbara Fried runs Mind the Gap - a Super Pac for Progressives like Senator Warren. SBF’s parents had tens of millions in luxury real estate in their names, paid for by money stolen from FTX customers. They also received $10M in stolen funds. Also, SBF was the SECOND LARGEST DONOR to her party ONLY AFTER George Soros, during the last election cycle - using stolen money to donate to some of Senator Warren’s colleagues. 🤔

Where is her selective outrage?

I’ll tell you what Senator Warren, I’ll agree to an entire debate on crypto since you think it’s such a weakness for me, if you find the courage to debate me on WOMEN’S RIGHTS.

What do you have to lose? The election?

[Hester Peirce @HesterPeirce]

We should heed these 2 CFTC Commissioners and avoid chilling DeFi innovation. @cftcmersinger: https://t.co/XojCfkWGKI @CFTCpham : https://t.co/h8VL54iJEr

[AUTOfinance (prev. Tokemak) @autopools]

The campaign starts now.

Tokemak Autopilot launches on September 16th.

Tune in to the new Autopilot Radio channel for a taste of the universe: https://t.co/Rntod3EAno

[Billy Hanlon @bhanlon15]

Dr. Amer, Ohio State Univ. on IPM today, "I got COVID three times...after the second time, I suffered from brain fog..it was the most horiftying experience of my life. This was very scary..my job depends on my brain. All of a sudden I couldn't even type...it was really shocking."