eWaDfan

retired wild land firefighter, musician. Centrist that leans a bit left, my dogs are important to me

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Five weeks ago, I reported the Senate gutted 20 years of protection on the Boundary Waters. 🛶

Over a million acres of pristine wilderness lakes.

The most visited canoe country in America.

Here's what happened next.

A House committee just voted to force federal agencies to reissue two mining leases that were already found to be unlawfully granted once before.

Those leases are the one thing standing between Twin Metals and permission to build a mine upstream of that same wilderness.

The plan: dig the copper-nickel ore out of Minnesota, then ship it to China. The U.S. doesn't have the smelting capacity to handle copper at this scale — and China is processing it for next to nothing, so that's where the profit is.

China processes it. Sells it on the world market. Chile keeps the profit.

Minnesota keeps the pollution risk. Minnesotans don't get the jobs.

Rep. Betty McCollum: "It makes no sense to put our waters at risk for the benefit of Chilean billionaires."

Who does Congress think these waters actually belong to?

#DemsUnited

[eWaDfan @eWaDfan]

@Castellani2014 If I let the Tigers impact my overall mood I’d have been on antidepressants for most of my 72 years! But I still watch most every game…

[NEW【テクノロジーニュース】 @sutoroveli_news]

【世界初】羽根のない風力発電機が誕生した。円筒形の柱を立てると風が渦を生み共振で柱が前後に揺れその振動を底部の発電機で電力に変換する。可動部の接触ゼロで鳥の衝突も騒音もなく2026年に100MW級の大型実証機を目指す。

[Mallory McMorrow @MalloryMcMorrow]

One billionaire family controls the bridge that carries 25% of all U.S.–Canada trade.

The good news? There's a brand new public bridge right next door (and Canada paid for the whole thing).

The bad news? Donald Trump won't let it open.

Here's the story:

For more than a decade, Michigan and Canada worked together to build a new public crossing right next to it — six lanes over the Detroit River, named for a Canadian-born Red Wings legend, built by thousands of union workers. Canada paid the entire bill. Michigan co-owns it. It's finished. It’s a shining example of international cooperation and collaboration, with a tremendous return for both sides: more jobs, faster trade, and lower costs.

So why isn't it open?

Because the Moroun family, who own the rival Ambassador Bridge just up the river, doesn’t want the competition. They spent years and tens of millions of dollars trying to stop any competing international crossing from being built or opening. They lost. So they went to the White House instead.

In January, Matthew Moroun gave $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC. Then the billionaire called Trump's Commerce Secretary and, just hours later, Trump suddenly attacked the same publicly owned bridge he praised in his own first term and threatened to block it.
Then, the day before the June 12th ribbon-cutting, the opening was called off indefinitely.

It's corruption so flagrant it would be laughable if it weren't so damaging.

Trump is screwing over Michiganders for the interests of billionaires — holding a finished, publicly owned project hostage to protect one donor's toll booth.

So a finished bridge sits closed, Michiganders keep paying the higher tolls, cars and trucks cost more, and a billionaire family keeps its monopoly.

Mr. President: stop playing games. Open the damn bridge.

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Insanely amazing

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Of the many stupid things this administration is doing, this is one of the very worst.

We are heading into a summer the experts are already warning about, after a dry winter across much of the West that signals elevated fire risk all season. And what is this administration doing? Cutting and threatening the very federal labs that forecast where and how these fires will burn.

Researchers say that if you cut these labs by 50%, you cut the quality of the forecast on your phone by 50%.

That forecast is how agencies decide where to stage crews, when to harden the grid, and which communities to warn before a wind-driven fire explodes. One or two fires often account for roughly 90% of the acreage burned in a season, so predicting rapid fire growth is everything.

These labs operate as one connected ecosystem. Pull funding from a supercomputing center here, and projects at multiple labs collapse over there.

Student fellowships dry up, new research stalls, and the expertise we spent decades building walks out the door right when we need it most.

Every dollar here saves homes, saves money, and saves lives when the next fire comes.

Gutting wildfire forecasting to chase a political talking point is not just reckless, it is insane.
https://t.co/NSob8UZDzy

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The U.S. government just handed sacred Apache land to a copper mine.

When they're done, the ancient oaks where generations have prayed and come of age will be gone - replaced by a crater two miles wide.

Chi'chil Biłdagoteel, known as Oak Flat, sits in Arizona's Tonto National Forest outside Superior. Its 2,422 acres of old-growth oaks, springs, and sacred sites have held San Carlos Apache prayers and coming-of-age ceremonies since time immemorial.

The endangered Arizona hedgehog cactus grows here. An endangered ocelot was struck and killed on a nearby highway - a reminder of what else calls this place home.

President Eisenhower protected this land from mining in 1955. That lasted 60 years, until the late Sen. John McCain slipped a last-minute provision into a must-pass defense bill in 2014, authorizing the transfer of Oak Flat to Resolution Copper.

Below Oak Flat, the Sonoran Desert rises to meet you in thousands of saguaro cacti lining the drive up from Phoenix. Environmentalists warn that block-cave mining at this scale threatens the fragile water systems that sustain this entire ecosystem.

Apache Stronghold fought it in court for over a decade.

They took it all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court declined to hear it - no explanation, no ruling on the merits, just a closed door. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the Court's most conservative voices, wrote a dissent calling it a grievous mistake. This past March, the transfer was finalized anyway.

The crater the mine leaves behind will be two miles wide and 1,100 feet deep. Permanent.

The American people will receive zero in royalties.

That's not an oversight - it's the 1872 Mining Law, a statute signed by Ulysses S. Grant that lets mining companies extract minerals from public land and pay nothing. It hasn't been updated in over 150 years. 150 years — can you believe it?

Twenty-one of Arizona's 22 federally recognized tribes oppose this. Seventy-one percent of Americans support protecting Oak Flat.

"We will never stop fighting," said Wendsler Nosie Sr. of Apache Stronghold. "This is a struggle for the soul of our people."

What kind of country lets a 150-year-old law give away sacred land and call it legal?

#DemsUnited

[😱 Scary Larry 😱 🇺🇦✊🏻🇺🇸🗽 @aintscarylarry]

So let me get this straight: Pulling a chunk of paint out of the Reflecting Pool gets you arrested for vandalism, but trump’s terrorists who attacked the Capitol, killed cops, broke windows, stole shit, and smeared their feces on the walls get to go free?

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

No vote. No law. No debate. Just a policy manual, rewritten in the dark — and if successful, some of the last wild land in America will lose its only protection. 🌳 ⛰️ 🦌

The Trump administration isn't waiting for Congress. They're rewriting the rulebook instead.

That rulebook has a name. It’s called the Wilderness Act. It’s protected places like Yellowstone and Yosemite since 1964. Repealing it would require an act of Congress. So instead, they’re rewriting the internal manuals that define what it actually means on the ground.

The law stays. The protection disappears.

Right now, when a tree falls across a trail in a designated wilderness area, a ranger picks up a hand saw. Not because it's easy. Because silence is the rule. Because a grizzly bear needs quiet to survive. Because noise means conflict, and conflict in bear country means a bear that doesn't make it - and cubs that won't survive the winter alone.

FOIA records show the Forest Service is already quietly moving to allow chainsaws in designated wilderness. Nearly 100 conservation organizations are sounding the alarm. And the internal manuals governing the NPS, BLM, and Fish and Wildlife are all now under review. More than 80% of National Park land is on the table.

For six decades, a fallen tree meant one thing: you work with the land on its own terms. That's not just a rule. That's a philosophy. And they're erasing it one manual at a time, while the clock on the comment period quietly ticks down.

Who decided the Wilderness Act was just a suggestion?

#DemsUnited

[Robert Reich @RBReich]

For those who have forgotten the past 40 years:

Tax cuts for the rich
...don’t trickle down

Boosting military spending
...doesn’t bring peace

Slashing regulations
...doesn’t create jobs

Folks, we’ve seen this all before.

[eWaDfan @eWaDfan]

@Janeiselite Your little patch

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Fifty years of rules keeping off-road vehicles on designated trails — GONE.

Lifted trucks, ATVs, dirt bikes, snowmobiles.

Anywhere they want. On your public lands.

Nixon protected it. Carter protected it. Trump just erased both quietly on a Friday afternoon.

A grizzly bear will abandon its habitat when there's just one mile of road per square mile. One mile. Now there's no limit on where these vehicles can go.

In the Mojave, desert tortoises have already lost 96% of their population in some monitored areas - partly because off-road vehicles crush their burrows. A federal judge just ordered 2,200 miles of trails closed to protect what's left.

Then Trump signed this.

No designated trails. No boundaries. No framework at all. When vehicles go off trail they shatter habitat into pieces too small for wildlife to survive in. They destroy stream banks. They push predators toward humans. And when that happens, the animals always lose.

There was no vote. No public comment. Just a signature.

Now the agencies tasked with writing replacement rules are the BLM, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service - all under an administration that has spent months dismantling every protection they had.

The Interior Department, led by Doug Burgum, is in charge of most of it. The same Doug Burgum who has opened public lands to drilling, mining, and grazing at every turn.

Don't hold your breath.

When the last quiet place is gone, what do we tell the children who never got to hear it?

#DemsUnited

[eWaDfan @eWaDfan]

@BeschlossDC I recall the thrill I had seeing the Mackinac Bridge as I headed home on leave from the AF, the entire year seemed special.
Trump has sucked the joy right out of me for the 250th

[eWaDfan @eWaDfan]

@Castellani2014 Preach brother

[Christopher Webb @cwebbonline]

Trump may as well have called the rest of us peasants.

According to him, it wasn’t workers who built America. It was rich guys like him and his cabinet:

“These people built the country, not the complainers. The complainers didn’t build the country…. Whether it’s fishermen or farmers or anything else. Me. Guys like me, they built the country. And you know, I watch all these ingrates, they’re always complaining, complaining. They didn’t build anything, they couldn’t build anything.”

[eWaDfan @eWaDfan]

@LongTimeHistory Jack booted thugs

[Acyn @Acyn]

Buttigieg: We didn't know it, but we've all been trusting our lives to the restraint of whoever the president might be. And now we have a president who is completely unrestrained. And so the only answer to that is a functioning Congress.

It turns out we do not have a functioning Congress. The House of Representatives is not representative. One of the most important organs of our democracy is not democratic.

They say, "Oh, no. We're not manipulating the map to disempower black people. We're manipulating the map to disempower Democrats who happen to be black people.”

So, the time has come to make it impossible to manipulate the map for any reason and just have fair maps.

[Common Sense 🇺🇸💙 @commons96055467]

Nipple mutilation of a minor during a rape by trump, shocks the hell out of my conscience. If it is true, it should shock everyone’s conscience. If it is true, trump needs to be dragged out of the White House in handcuffs and shackles, and thrown into a jail cell. Today!

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

Trump is trying to turn every federal grant into a political loyalty test.

Before any grant for things like medical research, housing, public health, and more gets approved, a political appointee would have to sign off that it serves Trump’s personal agenda. If they don’t like what you’re working on, the funding disappears.

The Founding Fathers gave Congress the power of the purse precisely so no president could ever do what Donald Trump is trying to do right now. It is the most fundamental check in our entire system of government, and Republicans are forfeiting it without a fight.

Where on earth are my Republican colleagues on the Appropriations Committee? You and I spent the last year fighting for every single dollar of this funding. Every. Single. Dollar. And you are letting this president TRAMPLE all over Congress and your own job.
https://t.co/QCH17wANNb