Gail Howell

signed up w/Twitter while sick... but always feverishly opinionated #Resist #VoteBlue Women's Rights Are Human Rights!

[Gail Howell @feverbrain]

@RachelBitecofer Democrats outnumber Republicans.

We just need to VOTE.

Too many Americans think "everything is gonna be o.k." or they're way too busy with work & family . . . so they ignore politics.

Nope. Never make that mistake again.

Never sit out an election.

VOTE BLUE 🇺🇸

[Andy Kim @AndyKimNJ]

Because of your voice on Delaney Hall, the Trump admin just released 18 yr old high school senior whose story I told. They released the pregnant women held inside. These releases show ICE isn’t targeting the violent criminals. ICE is feeling the pressure. Keep raising your voice.

[Rep. Ro Khanna @RepRoKhanna]

$1.2 trillion for more war, which is 65% of our budget, is insane.

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.

Here's what happened:

He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.

Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.

A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).

The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.

But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.

With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.

And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.

The threat does all the work.

By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.

Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.

If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.

Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Rep. Angie Craig demolishes Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins: "Joe Biden is no longer the president. Mr. Trump is. Your party controls Congress. You own these numbers at this point. I'm sick of hearing you blame an administration from a year and half ago. You own every single bit of this."

[Gail Howell @feverbrain]

@AndyKimNJ PLEASE make the crimes against taxpayers STOP!
Trump & his cronies are doing everything they can to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense!
Trump crime & U.S. debt are a revolving door.

[Kay 🟧 @gregkay1927]

@AndyKimNJ @ProudAFAmerican Trump & his cronies getting fatter on taxpayer dollars & the @GOP are allowing it. The theft of our money is unprecedented. @SpeakerJohnson & @LeaderJohnThune have been derelict in their duties. They should be investigated for being complicit in this crime spree.

[Gail Howell @feverbrain]

@TheProtestFilms @atrupar There's a "Trump Promenade" in Israel? How 'bout that?
Meanwhile, Israel's further violence against Lebanon is said to harm an Iran/Trump peace deal.
Israel got Trump into this debacle & won't help him out.
Not surprising.

[Gail Howell @feverbrain]

@jamesjatlas @metal_patriot98 @thehill Yes, the IRS has been long been misused. HOWEVER, the allegation that CBS 60 Minutes changed Harris's interview answers was disproven after the full video was released. EVERYONE knows why CBS made the settlement. smh https://t.co/k0KyNZ7uNx

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

Todd Blanche is illegally withholding 2.5 million Epstein Files from the American people.

He must be immediately impeached and investigated.

[Rep. Don Bacon 🇺🇸✈️🏍️⭐️🎖️ @RepDonBacon]

🚨 The House just voted 218-204 to move forward on the discharge petition to provide military aid to Ukraine and impose tough sanctions on Russia. The House will vote on final passage tomorrow. This is our Churchill moment and we must pass the test.

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

Here’s a fact check of some of President Trump’s claims, including a bunch of long-debunked lies, from a single softball New York Post interview released this morning.

Claim: “We're the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots.” Truth: Dozens of countries have mail-in ballots, including Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland.

Claim: The 2020 election was “rigged” and has “been proven to be rigged.” Truth: Not rigged, there’s no proof for Trump’s assertion more than five years later, and he lost fair and square.

Claim: Trump won “three” presidential elections. Truth: He won in 2016 and 2024, lost in 2020.

Claim: In the 2024 election, “There were areas that were just rigged…rigged against me.” Truth: Nonsense again; he won that election fair and square but lost some areas of the country fair and square.

Claim: Democrats “could not win” “if they didn’t cheat.” Truth: Democrats, like Republicans, clearly win various elections legitimately.

Claim: California mails out “38 million ballots," and while "some people get three, four, five ballots," "Republicans get, oftentimes, none.” Truth: California mails a ballot to all active registered voters, of which there are 23 million, not the “38 million” figure Trump has used repeatedly; while there are occasional errors by county elections offices and the postal service, there's no general anti-Republican bias in ballot-mailing in the state.

Claim: “I inherited the highest inflation in the history of our country…Biden had like 9, 10% inflation. And I inherited that, and we have it way down.” Truth: The inflation rate the month Trump returned to office was 3.0%, lower than the most recent rate of 3.8%; Biden-era inflation did peak at 9.1%, but that was in mid-2022, and it wasn’t close to the all-time record of 23.7%. Regardless, it had fallen substantially before Trump’s inauguration.

Claim: “We have $18 trillion being invested in the country in just 11 months.” Truth: This is a completely fictional figure. The White House’s own website says there have been $10.6 trillion in “major investment announcements” this term, and even that’s a massive exaggeration that counts vague pledges, not-even-pledges, and pledges that are about mutual trade rather than investments in the US.

Claim: Trump had gas prices at “$1.85 in Iowa” on the day he visited there in January. Truth: The Iowa average gas price that day was $2.57 per gallon, per AAA; GasBuddy found four stations in the state out of 2,036 selling for $1.97 that day, none at $1.85; the station outside the venue where he spoke was at $2.69. (Ethanol-gas blend E85 was around $1.85, but that can only be used in a small percentage of cars, and he didn’t say that was what he was talking about.)

Claim: Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was still wearing a mask “a couple of months ago.” Truth: I've found no evidence for this; the Talarico video many Republicans have mocked shows Talarico wearing a mask in 2022, not 2026.

Claim: Mitch McConnell was “losing by a lot” in the 2020 Senate election in Kentucky but then Trump endorsed him and got him elected. Truth: McConnell, running in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992, led in all but one public poll in that race, and that one exception was a poll conducted for a pro-term-limits group in which he trailed by just one point; he was always the overwhelming favorite.

Claim: The Jan. 6 attack was “nonsense” in which “the FBI said, ‘Go in. Go in.’” Truth: That was a riot perpetrated by Trump supporters, and there's no evidence the FBI ever told rioters to illegally enter the Capitol. DOJ’s inspector general found the FBI had zero undercover agents at the riot…and Trump was president at the time and had personally appointed the FBI director.

Claim: Former VP Harris “was the border czar” but “never went.” Truth: She went to the border twice as VP, and the Biden administration repeatedly emphasized she was never “border czar” but had a narrower assignment focused on the “root causes” of migration from Central America.

Claim: Under Biden, “25 million people” poured over the border. Truth: This is a further exaggeration from the wildly exaggerated “21 million” figure Trump used to use; even counting “gotaways,” it’s not even close to correct.

Claim: Democrats are so dumb that “we had 11,888 murderers, most of whom committed more than one murder, allowed into our country.” Truth: The federal data it appears Trump is referring to is about people who entered the US over the course of multiple decades, *including during Trump’s own first administration.*

Claim: Under Biden, countries emptied their jail populations into the US – “the whole jail was emptied into our country.” Trump and his team have never substantiated this claim even though he’s made it for years, and experts on global prison policy and on the countries he has previously identified as the supposed culprits have told me they’ve seen no evidence for it.

More details: https://t.co/NtFk7PUfwN

[VPiscitello 🖖 @VPVP1957]

@MikeLevin American lives and livelihood should NEVER be based on pleasing a mad dictator wanna-be.
Pay attention and vote accordingly. 🌊🌊🌊

[Peggy Gabour @peggy_gabour]

@MikeLevin Russ Vought is an infamous Heritage Foundation white nationalist who co-authored Project2025: some background 👇
https://t.co/TrTDrymVxt

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of.

And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test.

His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.”

Not whether it works.

Not whether Congress authorized it.

Whether it pleases Trump.

This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people.
To my Republican colleagues: where are you?

Congress passed this funding. You voted for it.

Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend.

Grow a spine.

This is not about left or right.

It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt.

History will remember who stood up and who looked away.
https://t.co/2yHKBTNLbj

[The Tennessee Holler @TheTNHoller]

“The anti-weaponization (Seditionist Slush fund). Have you dropped that?”

TRUMP: “No. A court ruled against it.”

And Blanche refused to put it in writing. Taking their word for anything is a fool’s errand.

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨MUST-WATCH: Rep. Dean just read a page of Virginia Giuffre’s book to Todd Blanche:

"I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else."

POWERFUL! 💔

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

For four months, one man decided we were at war.

Today, the House said no.

We passed a war powers resolution ordering our troops out of Iran unless Congress votes to keep them there. Not the President alone. Congress. The people’s representatives.

That is not a technicality. That is the whole point.

Article One is clear. The power to send this country to war belongs to Congress. The framers built it that way because they had just escaped a king who could march a nation into war on a whim. They never wanted that power in one set of hands again.

But that is exactly where it has been. Four months of war we never approved. And we were never told how any of this ends.

Today, a majority of the House finally drew the line.

Is the fight over? No. The Senate is next. The President can veto. We know the math.

But for the first time, the People’s House went on the record and said the Constitution still means something.

That is not symbolic. That is the system waking up.

https://t.co/m6DBL04KzZ

[Rep. Jim McGovern @RepMcGovern]

Our joke of an acting AG @DAGToddBlanche—who “happens” to be Trump’s former personal attorney—just gave his boss a lifelong get out of jail free card (which also applies to Trump’s family and businesses.)

Doesn’t get any more corrupt than that.

[Gail Howell @feverbrain]

@CommittoVote @atrupar Doesn’t MAGAts fill that need?
How about Republican’ts because they can’t do anything for anyone but the rich? My favorite is Greedy Old Party.
Trump & Trump Republicans have gotta go!j

[Terry Virts @AstroTerry]

Please call your Congressman and tell them to vote for the Ukraine Support Act- the vote is tomorrow!

This bill will provide over $1B in arms (we send Ukraine our old weapons and buy replacements from American contractors, win-win) and $8B in loans.