brian e. 🌵 🌻 🇺🇸 🇮🇪 ☘️

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

You didn't think this through. Not born in the USA.

House Republicans (7 from official list)

Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) — Born in Mexico (naturalized) .clerk.house.gov

Andrew S. Clyde (R-GA) — Born in https://t.co/EgnLTGPB8e

Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) — Born in Scotland (to US parents) .clerk.house.gov

Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) — Born in https://t.co/jrKIacI4oS

Young Kim (R-CA) — Born in South https://t.co/SZzOWEniNo

David Rouzer (R-NC) — Born in Germany (US Army base, to American parents) .clerk.house.gov

Victoria Spartz (R-IN) — Born in Ukraine

Senate Republicans (2) Ted Cruz (R-TX) — Born in Canada (to US citizen mother).

https://t.co/kQ9E7mZezm

Bernie Moreno (R-OH) — Born in Colombia (naturalized immigrant).

AND FLOUTUS too.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

I literally felt a pang of embarrassment reading this

[PBS News @NewsHour]

All told, 321 diamonds, 56 sapphires, 13 emeralds and six rubies encrust the watch-sized gold ring presented this week to Bill White, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, to give to U.S. President Donald Trump. https://t.co/WOnbjjxJtu

[Fred Wellman @FPWellman]

They are stealing from the public for Trump’s pet projects. The Republican Doormat Congress hasn’t said a word.

[Rachel Kryshak @RachelKryshak]

To be clear: Whether it is or isn’t a red to Balogun is now irrelevant. Government interference is a violation of FIFA Article 2 & 15, and the punishment is disqualification and suspension. Nepal was suspended.

This is an admission of the violation.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: Disturbing new allegations accuse Republicans of hiding Mitch McConnell’s health status in order to prevent a special election that could put Trump’s enemy Thomas Massie in the Senate!

This seems INCREDIBLY shady…

Independent journalist Desirée Townsend laid out the disturbing case with clarity:

“Senator Mitch McConnell has now been hospitalized for three weeks. The gravity of this situation cannot be overstated, especially given that his wife, Elaine Chao, appeared in China just days after his hospitalization to meet with high-ranking Chinese officials.”

“The question now is about national security: if Senator McConnell has been unable to independently perform his duties, what safeguards exist to ensure classified intelligence briefings, defense appropriations information, or other sensitive congressional matters could not be accessed, discussed, or shared by individuals operating behind the scenes? And given the timing of Chao’s meeting with China’s vice president, what exactly was discussed?”

These are important questions that we NEED answers for.
Mitch McConnell has not been seen in public in over three weeks, nor have we had any update on his health after he suffered cardiac arrest, was given CPR, and then hospitalized.

Curiously, his wife Elaine Chao, who is not a government official, suddenly flew to China just three days after the incident – meaning that the person with power of attorney over his affairs is out of the country, meaning there is nobody to declare him brain-dead if he is indeed in a coma or otherwise mentally unfit to do his job, which it was unclear that he was capable of doing before.

Is she hiding in China to keep him alive as a vegetable?
In Kentucky, a special election to replace a Senator will NOT be called if it’s closer than 3 months till the next election, and that date is August 3rd.

If a special election was called, Trump’s vocal critic Thomas Massie would certainly run and likely win – which would be a HUGE headache for Trump and his agenda. If he didn’t win, he would split the vote, allowing a Democrat like Charles Booker to fill the seat.
That’s why they’re trying to conceal his condition as long as possible.

Either way, this is absolutely unacceptable. Mitch McConnell is the chair of the important Senate Rules Committee.

We cannot allow Republicans to just lie to the American people and treat their jobs like its a position they OWN, especially when so much is at stake and one vote could change history forever.

Republicans need to tell us what the hell is going on with Mitch McConnell, ASAP.

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The Trump administration approved three new “forever chemical”-based pesticides last week for use on food crops, including corn and soybeans — the most widely grown crops in the country — as well as wheat, kiwi, oats, peas, broccoli and coffee.

These new chemicals — diflufenican, epyrifenacil, trifludimoxazin — have all been quietly approved without a standard press release.

Trump approved other PFAS-based pesticides cyclobutrifluram and isocycloseram earlier this year, and the first food use of chlormequat — which is already found in 90% of Americans’ blood.

An EPA scientist wrote in the approval documents that at least one of these new PFAS-based pesticides is “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential.”

These approvals come just days after the Supreme Court sided with chemical maker Bayer and the Trump administration in limiting Americans’ ability to sue pesticide companies for harms linked to pesticides.

Now, Americans will have a harder time holding companies accountable for the cancer-causing effects of their pesticides.

[The AZ - abc15 - Data Guru @Garrett_Archer]

Pokemon gotta catch em' all ESA edition.

The priciest Pokemon purchase on ESA was for a Scarlet & Violet 151 Elite Trainer box. This now retails for almost $900 on Amazon, but the ESA parent got in early and snagged this bad boy for $488.

There are 22 purchases of Pokemon trading card box sets priced over $300 in the Classwallet Marketplace data.

[Michael Beschloss @BeschlossDC]

This has been called the first time our Declaration of Independence was published in a newspaper—Pennsylvania Evening Post, July 6, 1776:

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

Trump is using the government’s power to take ownership in private companies. It’s what Putin did.

Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

Every carton of milk you have ever pulled from a refrigerator was designed by a woman locked inside a freezing boxcar in 1905.

Her name was Mary Engle Pennington. She was thirty-two years old. She was a Quaker-raised bacteriological chemist from Philadelphia with a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first woman ever hired as a scientist by the Bureau of Chemistry — the federal agency that would eventually become the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Her job, on paper, was to sit at a back desk and file paperwork.

Instead, she strapped a thermometer to her belt, climbed into a moving freight train in the Chicago rail yards, and let them lock the door behind her.

Then she did it again. And again. Five hundred times over two years.

In 1905, most Americans died young because of food.

Milk shipped from Wisconsin dairies to Manhattan tenement apartments arrived in wooden barrels packed with dirty lake ice harvested from frozen ponds. By the time it reached the city, half of it was curdled. Dairies covered the sour smell with formaldehyde. Butchers rubbed borax on decomposing beef to hide the rot. Children in New York and Philadelphia were dying by the thousands every summer from milk-borne bacterial infections.

The federal government had almost no power to stop it.

Dr. Harvey Wiley, the head of the Bureau of Chemistry, was fighting to change that. He needed a scientist willing to prove — in hard, incontrovertible temperature-log data — exactly how and why the American food supply was rotting in transit.

He needed someone who would ride in the refrigerator cars.

He knew exactly who he wanted.

Pennington was the daughter of a Quaker family that had moved from Nashville to West Philadelphia when she was three. She had discovered chemistry at twelve by borrowing a college-level textbook from the public library. She had completed the coursework for a bachelor of science in chemistry at Penn's Towne Scientific School — and the university's trustees had refused to grant a woman a degree. They handed her a "certificate of proficiency" instead.

She stayed anyway. She kept working. She wrote a doctoral thesis. She forced the same trustees to grant her a Ph.D. at twenty-two.

Wiley had known the Pennington family for twenty years. He knew what she could do.

In 1905 he had her take the federal civil-service exam under the signature M. E. Pennington. The score guaranteed a hire. When she walked into the Bureau of Chemistry office the following Monday, the personnel officer realized what had happened. Federal law required them to hire her anyway.

They tried to bury her at a back desk.

She spent one week doing filing. Then she walked into Wiley's office and asked for the rail schedules.

The Bureau had no cold-weather field gear cut for a woman. She went to a Washington department store and bought her own — heavy wool skirts, oversized men's sweaters, thick wool socks, leather-lined boots. She packed a glass thermometer, a set of sterile glass sampling vials, a leather-bound ledger, and a fountain pen.

She walked into the Chicago slaughterhouse rail yards at dawn.

She climbed into the ice bunkers of moving freight cars packed with raw poultry and beef. The doors were locked from the outside. She sat in the freezing dark for hours. She measured the temperature wall by wall, floor to ceiling, corner to corner. She sampled the meat every three hours. She wrote everything down in the ledger.

She did five hundred of these expeditions over the next two years. She slept in cabooses on rural sidings. She caught pneumonia twice. She kept going.

The rail companies had believed for fifty years that cold air, once loaded into a boxcar with ice, would fill the space evenly.

Pennington's measurements proved them wrong.

Cold air fell to the floor. It stayed there. Warm air generated by rotting cargo rose to the ceiling and stagnated. The meat stacked near the roof was slowly cooking in its own bacterial gases while the meat near the floor was flash-frozen solid. The corners of the cars had dead zones the cold air never reached at all.

She discovered that a constant thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit — exactly at the freezing point of water — completely halted the growth of the specific bacterial strains that caused most food-borne deaths.

The average American refrigerator car was operating at forty-five degrees.

She drafted a complete redesign specification. Exact ice-bunker dimensions. Elevated floor racks so cold air could circulate underneath the cargo. Precise insulation thickness in the walls. Ventilation channels to move air through the dead zones in the corners.

The rail industry fought her. Their lawyers, their lobbyists, their Congressional influence, and the political backing of the meatpacking monopolies. They argued a female chemist could not tell railroad engineers how to build trains.

She did not argue back.

She published the temperature data.

The rail companies could not dispute the math. They eventually adopted her specifications wholesale. Spoilage rates collapsed. Big-city childhood mortality from milk-borne infection dropped inside a decade.

Her defining test came in April 1917.

The United States entered the First World War. The War Department needed to move thousands of tons of perishable American beef across the Atlantic to the Western Front. The commercial rail industry contributed forty thousand refrigerator cars to the war effort.

Pennington evaluated every single one.

Only three thousand of the forty thousand — seven and a half percent — met her institutional standard. She spent the next eighteen months personally overseeing the emergency retrofit of the other thirty-seven thousand cars. She standardized freezing at the slaughterhouses before the meat ever touched a train. She specified the exact temperature the ocean cargo holds had to maintain from Chicago to Brest.

The spoilage stopped. The troops were fed.

She served on Herbert Hoover's War Food Administration through the end of the war. In 1919 she left the federal government. In 1922 she founded her own refrigeration-engineering consulting firm, which she ran until she died. In 1923 she founded the Household Refrigeration Bureau to educate American consumers about the emerging home-refrigerator revolution.

In 1940 the American Chemical Society awarded her the Francis P. Garvan Gold Medal.

She was still consulting on a commercial refrigeration project the week she died — on December 27, 1952, in New York City, at eighty years old.

In 2018, sixty-six years after her death, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

You walk into a grocery store in July. You pull a carton of milk from the back of the case. You do not smell it for rot. You open it. You pour it.

You are drinking from the specification of a woman who let them lock her in the freezing dark for two years to prove she was right.

If her story stayed with you, drop one word in the comments — Mary, ice, thirty-two, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

When two people were killed during the immigration crackdown in Minneapolis this year, David Streever sent a scathing note to the director of ICE. Five months later, DHS agents came looking for him.

Now, he's suing DHS officials. https://t.co/hcBH9EqBhY

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump: "You know who the number one person on Tic Tac is by far? Trump. Me. Taylor Swift was number 11."

[Wally Rashid @wallyrashid]

Activists built a water station providing clean drinking water to Palestinians.

He posts about it's launch on X.

One hour later Israel bombs it, killing the workers.

[Michael Weiss @michaeldweiss]

"During their chat, Trump told Merz he had something to show him, and walked the chancellor of Germany into a small study off the Oval Office. It was, Trump announced, 'the Lewinsky room' and he had filled it with MAGA memorabilia, including red hats and boxes of Florsheim dress shoes. 'Just grab whatever you want,' a congenial Trump told his German guests, adding that their wives could sell the swag for 'thousands of dollars.'" https://t.co/IODwG6mIE7

[Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew]

We filed a complaint with the Interior Department inspector general last week about some eyebrow-raising government contracts, including for the Reflecting Pool "renovation."

Let's just say there's *a lot* that should be investigated: https://t.co/LtbtyJw7mf

[William Dalrymple @DalrympleWill]

"Detained Gaza doctor almost unrecognisable after injuries in Israeli jail. Hussam Abu Safiya faces ‘tangible danger to his life’ following 18 months in prison without charge or trial"
https://t.co/1ejGwv9RP5

[Hoodlum 🇺🇸 @NotHoodlum]

Elaine Chao: “I had to flee the hospital. My family runs a $14 billion shipping and chemical empire in China. And the staff kept forcing me to plug Mitch back in while I was charging my iPhone.”