Emily

(she/her)

[Jake Scott, MD @jakescottMD]

Japan keeps coming up, so here's what actually happened there.

Japan pulled its MMR in 1993 over a real safety problem. The Japanese mumps strain, Urabe, caused aseptic meningitis. The American MMR has never used that strain. The data indicted one strain, not the idea of combining vaccines.

Japan then switched to a measles-only shot and a rubella-only shot, and dropped mumps from the routine schedule. No country has ever come closer to what this executive order proposes.

CDC documented what followed. By 2000, first-dose measles coverage was 78 percent. The 2001 epidemic caused ~265,000 cases in children under 15 alone. A second epidemic in 2007 & 2008 hit all 47 prefectures and exported measles into the US and Canada.

Japan recombined in 2006 with a 2-dose measles-rubella vaccine and needed a 5-year national catch-up campaign to dig out. Mumps never returned to the routine schedule. Japanese kids still lose their hearing to mumps.

Three months ago, Japan approved its first MMR in three decades.

The one country that tried separate shots spent the next fifteen years undoing it.

https://t.co/KFylaRFb22

[Adam Cochran (adamscochran.eth) @adamscochran]

In the US the total routine injections by age 2, is 13.

They are:

Hep B, Valexis (DTaP, IPV, Hib), PCV, Valexis dose 2, PCV dose 2, Vaxelis dose 3, PCV dose 3, PCV booster, MMR(V), Hib booster, Hepatitis A #1, DTaP booster, Hepatitis A #2

In Denmark, by age 2 it is 11 doses because they combine their hepatitis boosters with the MMRV doses.

Even with voluntary inoculations, no child in the US has 72 injections.

The average American who is not diabetic, will take 53~ years to reach 72 injections, assuming they get an annual flu shot.

There also is no blanket “European Standard” of inoculation, it varies by country with Denmark being the lowest because they have approved combination doses.

A child in Denmark still gets all the same vaccines that a US child did before Trump’s proposed changes.

They just think you’re too stupid to look.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

The idea vaccines cause autism was invented by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 in a fraudulent paper.

It's was so thoroughly debunked he lost his license for gross medical malpractice

And here we are 28 years later RFK Jr is dredging it up and using it to inform vaccine policy

[Elizabeth Warren @ewarren]

United & Delta donated $1M → Trump ended flight cancelation compensation rules.

TurboTax parent donated $1M → Trump killed free tax filing.

Toyota donated $1M → Trump canceled CFPB refund order for overcharged borrowers.

It’s a pattern of corruption that costs you money.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is a great piece by two ex-White House ethics lawyers, one Republican and one Democrat. It should alarm every American.

Trump and his family are profiting from the very industries he regulates.

Nearly a million everyday investors lost a combined $3.8 billion on his meme coin while Trump pocketed $636 million.

Then there is all the foreign money. The founders wrote the emoluments clause into our Constitution to stop exactly this. Foreign cash flowing to a sitting president was their nightmare, and we are living it.

Congress has the power to end this. We can ban officials from trading stocks and holding assets that overlap with their duties. We can investigate who paid, who benefited, and whether policy was bought.

Trump’s allies stay quiet because they fear his money and his threats. But we must fight back. Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.
https://t.co/7Kx0kAL9MQ

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

DOGE deletes itself on July 4th. It will be remembered as a hugely destructive failure.

Musk promised $2 trillion in savings.

What we got, by DOGE’s own unverified math, was $215 billion. Even that number was never proven.

The costs were atrocious. Nearly 140,000 federal workers pushed out. Veterans waiting longer for care. USAID dismantled while people died overseas as a direct result. 20-year-olds with Red Bulls and no college degrees rummaging through Americans’ most sensitive data.

Musk, the world’s richest man, a federal contractor with billions in government business, auditing the government that pays him, accountable to no voter anywhere. 

Even Musk now says he wouldn’t do it again. The guy who ran it calls it a mistake.

Government reform was there for the taking. Both parties know federal technology is outdated. Both parties know waste exists. Fixing it required serious people working with career civil servants who know where the problems actually are. Instead we got a chainsaw, a photo op, and years of lost expertise we now have to rebuild.

Now Trump’s budget director says there will be no final accounting or receipts. They promised transparency and they’re closing up shop in the dark.
They’re counting on us all to forget.
https://t.co/LhgbGUY2Ca

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This would be a scandal that would have ended any other presidency.

Qatar gave a $400 million Boeing 747 to the Pentagon. Trump calls it a “free” gift. It is not free. The Air Force just spent months retrofitting it with secure communications, missile defense, and electromagnetic shielding.

The cost of that work is classified.

Estimates say north of a billion.

The number is enormous, and you are paying it.

Now the part they bury.

Under the memorandum signed by the Pentagon and Qatar, ownership of the plane transfers to Trump’s presidential library foundation when he leaves office. His own son says it will sit in the lobby of a future Trump hotel.

So follow the chain.

A foreign government hands a luxury jet to a sitting president. American taxpayers rebuild it from the inside out. Then Trump takes it home.

A gift you use for four years and then keep is still a gift. The Constitution bars foreign gifts to a president without the consent of Congress. This one never got that consent.

We are paying a fortune to gift wrap a luxury jet that ends up in his private collection.

Grift in plain sight.
https://t.co/RqGjdCjV6n

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

140 police officers were injured on January 6. Last week, the Trump Administration deleted the government’s own prosecution records documenting what happened to them and called those records “partisan propaganda.”

Those records documented rioters who drove stun guns into the necks of Capitol Police officers, dragged officers into the mob, and beat officers with flagpoles. They documented guilty pleas, jury verdicts, and sentences of seven, ten, and twelve years.

Trump pardoned every one of them. Now he’s trying to erase the record of what they did from the history books.
https://t.co/UnwaQWRmYk

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Samuel Alito’s son has worked as a lawyer inside Trump’s Treasury Department since early last year. The administration hid it.

No public resume, no LinkedIn, no mention on the Treasury website, outdated bar listings. Four former officials confirmed it.

The public was never told.

Here is why that matters.

Philip Alito served as an attorney-adviser in Treasury’s general counsel office, briefed on department matters across the board, while the Supreme Court took up a case in which the Treasury Department was a named defendant.

The department never disclosed the connection in court.

Justice Alito did not recuse.

The federal recusal law is plain. A justice must step aside in any case where his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.

That is the test.

Not whether anyone can prove influence but whether a reasonable person looking at this would doubt it. A justice ruling on cases involving the very agency that employs his son fails that test on its face.

And Treasury sits at the center of many upcoming issues, including the fight over Trump’s $1.776 billion dollar fund to reward the January 6th rioters he pardoned. That fight could be headed to the Court too.

This is exactly why the honor system has failed.

The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no enforceable code of conduct. I support withholding funding from the Court until the justices adopt a binding code with real recusal review.

Congress holds the power of the purse.

We should use it.

https://t.co/t2aZrXpaoU

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This New York Times piece is worth your time. Here’s what is happening, as simply as I can put it.

Back in January, Trump sued the IRS, an agency he controls, demanding $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns a number of years ago.

IRS lawyers did their jobs. They wrote a memo laying out the defenses that could beat the suit, including the fact that Trump filed too late. His own lawyer was in court when the leaker pleaded guilty in October 2023, more than two years before Trump sued.

The Justice Department never showed up to court. Never argued back. Never used the defenses sitting on their desk.

The judge got suspicious and ordered both sides to explain whether they were actually opposing each other or just colluding. The day before that brief was due, Trump dropped the suit.

Same day, his Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded “anti-weaponization fund.” 

Trump gets a formal apology. The IRS agrees to drop any audits of him and his family, even though a 2024 Times report found a loss in an ongoing audit could cost him over $100 million.

The acting Attorney General, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, picks the five commissioners who decide who gets paid. Trump can fire any of them. Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not ruled out.

This is the most corrupt thing I’ve ever seen from an American president.

Where in the hell are my Republican colleagues?

https://t.co/La0nlLuz1r

[matt bernstein @mattxiv]

thomas massie pushed to release the epstein files and trump’s allies spent more than $15 million to remove him from office. the president is a pedophile

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump swore his new gilded ballroom would cost $200M and not one dime of taxpayer money. It’s now $400M, with Senate Republicans quietly tucking $1 billion of your money into a reconciliation bill for “security.”

He promised he wouldn’t touch the existing White House.

Then he bulldozed the entire East Wing without warning, ripping out a historic magnolia planted to honor FDR.

The corporate and billionaire donors writing checks are routing them through a nonprofit so they can deduct it from their taxes. Many have billions in contracts and pending business before the federal government.

At the exact same moment, Republicans rammed through the largest Medicaid cuts in history. Nearly 10 million Americans lose health coverage. SNAP is gutted by hundreds of billions, with millions kicked off and benefits slashed for the rest. Veterans, seniors, and kids pay the price.

A gilded ballroom for him.

Tax write-offs for his donors.

Hunger and sickness for everyone else.

His whole presidency in a nutshell.

[Fred Guttenberg @fred_guttenberg]

If you were horrified last night watching our elected leaders run and scramble because of gun violence, just imagine how my daughter Jaime felt in school running from an active shooter before she was killed.

Now, becomes a part of the solution and only vote for people determined to address gun violence in America.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be a bigger story.

It took years of fighting just to get this plaque honoring the officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th up on the wall.

And when it finally went up, Mike Johnson hid it in the basement.

These brave officers were beaten, gassed, and attacked by a mob trying to overturn a free and fair election. They were promised a plaque that would honor them in a place the public could see.

And after years of waiting, this is what they got: a plaque installed in the middle of the night in a location the public can’t even access.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me get this straight.

The leading Senate Republican walked into the White House Sunday with a bipartisan deal to end the TSA nightmare. Fund everything except ICE now, get TSA agents paid today, handle ICE separately.

Senate Republicans and Democrats said yes.

Trump said no.

Why? Because Trump is holding TSA workers’ paychecks hostage to try and force Congress to pass the SAVE Act, a voter suppression bill that would knock millions of eligible Americans off the voter rolls. He wants to make it harder for Americans to vote.

Like a petulant child flipping the board when he’s losing, Trump torched a bipartisan deal his own Senate leader handed him on a silver platter. His tantrum continues as he unleashes ICE agents into airports. Agents with zero screening training, zero TSA authority, and a good chance of making everything worse.

Democrats have been ready to fund TSA from day one. What we refuse to do is write a blank check for an ICE agency that gunned down two American citizens in Minneapolis and still demands the ability to kick down doors without a judge’s approval while hiding behind masks.

We will not pass the SAVE Act either. Call it what it is: the SAVE REPUBLICANS Act. Non-citizen voting is already illegal. It was illegal yesterday. It will be illegal tomorrow. This bill solves nothing except the Republican party’s losing electoral math.

Fund TSA. Reform ICE. End this today.

Trump is the one standing in the way.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is your daily reminder that Trump and Republicans are spending billions of your tax dollars on an unauthorized war in Iran and Stephen Miller’s ICE agenda while gutting Medicaid, slashing SNAP, and driving up your health care costs.

[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC]

Even with everything in this Epstein drop, remember: this is a minority of the files.

This is STILL just what they were *willing* to release - in violation of the law, which requires release of all files.

Pam Bondi’s DOJ is still hiding most of them. We need them all.

[Will Ragatz @WillRagatz]

I have always avoided talking about politics on this account. But this is my breaking point. I can't say nothing while ICE is going around executing people in broad daylight in my city, blocks from where I live.

They murdered a second person this morning. And I don't want to hear for a second that "he had a gun." Republicans' entire thing is about being pro-2A, that people have the right to be armed against a tyrannical government. Now a textbook example of government tyranny unfolds before you and your immediate response is to take their side? It makes no sense.

There were at least 7 federal agents on top of that man. IF he was armed, the video appears to show that he was disarmed before the shots were fired. There is absolutely zero justification for his killing. This is yet another example of these ICE agents being untrained, hate-filled escalators who are seeking out this kind of violence. They aren't making our community safer, they're making it 1000 times more dangerous.

Everyone can agree that violent criminals, of all backgrounds, should be prosecuted and jailed. A conversation can be had about immigration policy. But this isn't working. This has to stop. ICE has to get out of Minneapolis.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is your daily reminder that Republicans are planning to cut Medicaid to hand tax breaks to people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
https://t.co/PsAjf4YD1r

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

There’s an enormous amount of disinformation flying around about NIH right now, so let’s clear a few things up. The NIH is not Big Pharma. It doesn’t make drugs, it doesn’t set public health agendas, and it doesn’t profit from your illness.