F Lam

MIT Polymath

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.

The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.

Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.

The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.

Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.

The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.

The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.

This is your tax money.

It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.

We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Ossoff: "Citizens United was the most destructive court decision in modern American history. It's unleashed a flood of secret money, corporate money, billionaire money on both sides. Donald Trump's rise is a symptom of this deeper disease. Our task is not just to contain his wickedness, but to cure the rot that gave rise to it."

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Trump has turned the White House into a 24/7 corruption operation. This is a national crisis.

Trump thinks the public will stop paying attention.

So I went to the Senate floor to call his bluff. I told the ENTIRE STORY of his 500 days of corruption.

1/ Here it is - in one🧵

[CALL TO ACTIVISM @CalltoActivism]

🚨BREAKING: President Obama breaks his silence after Trump signed the MOU surrender with Iran.

Obama says that under the JCPOA he negotiated, "Iran had agreed not to develop nuclear weapons," and Trump pulling out of it "caused Iran to develop more nuclear capacity."

Obama questioned Trump's rationale for his war, saying we're likely worse off now:

"We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, put an enormous strain on our military; a lot of people have died, and it feels like we are back where we were before we started the war, except maybe a little worse off."

This MIC DROP from Obama is guaranteed to drive Trump NUTS.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

here is Mamdani's entire speech at the Knicks parade, which is easily the best speech I've ever heard at an event of this sort

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

this is honestly an excellent celebratory and motivational speech from Mamdani at the Knicks parade. i'm ready to run through a wall, and i'm not even a Knicks fan

[Rep. Jamie Raskin @RepRaskin]

Congress never voted to bulldoze the White House or for a dollar to build Trump’s golden Ballroom for the Epstein class (or anyone else). But now we learn that Trump’s bad architecture obsession is costing us all $600 million. Turn your illegal Qatari jet over to the people and we’ll sell it for $400 million and we’ll take the rest out of other illegal emoluments and slush funds, including the $1.776 billion fund for insurrectionists, and the Board of Peace, another unauthorized Trump fund bankrolled by money misallocated from the State Department.

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

How the fuck do we have $300 billion to rebuild Iran after we spent $80 billion bombing it, when we don’t “have the money” for pediatric cancer research?

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

Is it just me or Trump deliberately does things to weaken the US, resulting in a win for Putin every time?

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

If what Dan Bongino told Tucker Carlson is true, then Thomas Matthew Crooks was a sacrificial dupe that Trump intentionally had murdered to help him win a presidential election and stay out of prison.

Jeffrey Epstein claimed Trump could "crack" under pressure and described him as "evil beyond belief" and "nuts" when feeling cornered.

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

New York Times investigative journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman are this generation's Woodward and Bernstein.

This story is Trump's Watergate and it's about to EXPLODE:

Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, White House Counsel David Warrington, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and former Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich converted the hallowed Situation Room — America's nerve center for real threats and decisive action — into a pedophile protection racket, where top officials huddled to cover-up the Epstein files scandal and protect a president who used to rape children for fun.

[Rep. Melanie Stansbury @Rep_Stansbury]

This is Trump’s Watergate.

Today, the @nytimes released a truly stunning report on the Epstein cover-up by the White House. 

Collusion, breaking the law, evading subpoenas—it’s all in there:
- Trump quashing the files
- The VP, COS, DOJ, FBI, and others colluding in the Situation Room to stop their release and compliance
- Officials lying to the public 
- Admin in-fighting and exits
- Officials who appeared in front of Congress during this time

Read the report here: https://t.co/prgyF2Isfg

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Scientists at Trump’s EPA say they are being told to make chemical risks “disappear on paper.” Not to study or manage them, but to make them vanish.

When a safety test on a household chemical shows danger, supervisors reportedly ask to keep shrinking the scenario until the poison looks safe.

They have reassigned senior scientists to paperwork and handed life-and-death risk assessments to staff with less experience. They have installed former chemical industry lobbyists to run the very offices that are supposed to regulate the chemical industry.

A gift to industry, paid for with your family’s health.

They are even throwing out research on how certain chemicals hit certain communities harder, calling decades of established science “DEI.”

You can make risk disappear on paper.

The cancer does not disappear.

The birth defects do not disappear.

The infertility does not disappear.

The kids drinking the water and getting sick do not disappear.

The EPA exists to protect people, not to protect the profit margins of the people poisoning them.

Every American deserves to know what is happening. #TrumpMakesUsSick

https://t.co/5DwXgxBybt

[Harry Sisson @harryjsisson]

This should be a career-ending scandal. But life under Trump is so hellish, it's not even front-page news.

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Velshi: “What if I told you this? The Trump administraction had ALREADY spent 50 TIMES that much in taxpayer money to build his ballroom? What if I told you Trump had already taken $50 billion out of the U.S. treasury and spent it, all as part of what looks very much like a pay to play scheme to finance his vanity project? And I’m not making this up, a brand new report from the government watchdog group Public Citizen looked into the private donors who are supposedly funding the Trump ballroom as a gift. Guess what their investigation found? ‘More than half of the publicly identified donors…have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more $50 billion during the past six months.’ The report also found that most of the same companies are also facing federal enforcement actions over alleged wrongdoing and that some have had such actions suspended by the Trump administration since the start of Trump’s second term.”🙄

[Molly Ploofkins @Mollyploofkins]

Screwworm has now reached Texas and New Mexico with maggots devouring cattle alive after Trump's early 2025 DOGE/USAID budget cuts eliminated key Central America monitoring programs, weakening the international barrier and allowing the northward spread to reach the U.S. border.

[Sawyer Merritt @SawyerMerritt]

Wow, the S&P Dow Jones Indices has just officially announced that they will NOT be changing their inclusion rules to make it easier for “MegaCap” companies (such as @SpaceX) to be fast-tracked into the S&P 500.

Their reasoning:
"S&P DJI determined that exceptions to the financial viability, seasoning, and IWF requirements should not be granted solely based on market capitalization. The decision not to adopt the proposed exceptions preserves core index principles by maintaining consistent application of these key requirements. Although there may be trade-offs between strict adherence to these eligibility requirements and broad representativeness, the current methodology provides substantial market coverage and sector balance. As a result, the indices can continue to meet their stated objectives while preserving their role as representative and investable benchmarks for the U.S. equity market.

No changes will be made to the eligibility criteria including financial viability screens, seasoning period, or minimum IWF, for the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, or S&P SmallCap 600 as a result of the S&P Dow Jones Indices consultation on the treatment of MegaCap companies. Accordingly, there will be no changes to existing methodology for this index family."

This means that the earliest @SpaceX could be eligible to be added to the S&P 500 would now be June 2027.

The requirements that will now remain in place are:
• No changes to S&P 500 eligibility rules for mega-cap companies.
• Mega-cap companies will still need to wait 12 months after their IPO before being considered for S&P 500 inclusion.
• S&P will not waive profitability requirements for mega-cap companies. The company must have positive GAAP net income in the most recent quarter, and the sum of the most recent four consecutive quarters.
• S&P will not waive minimum public float requirements for mega-cap companies. At least 10% of a company's shares must be publicly tradable ("free float").

The S&P rejected proposals that would have:
• Reduced the IPO seasoning period from 12 months to 6 months
• Waived profitability requirements
• Waived minimum public float requirements

[Greta Berlin @Truegreta]

I stood at this pool, at both monuments and saw both reflections…
He’s a God damn idiot, as are the fools that support him. The “Reflection Pool” wasn’t designed by American architect Henry Bacon a hundred years ago to look like a swimming pool. It’s designed to have a darkened characteristics that has reflective qualities to reflect the monuments.
That way, the Washington Monument is reflective to you when at the Lincoln Memorial, and when at the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial is reflective to you.
It’s designed to enhance the grandeur of monuments, create an illusion of reflection, and inclusion of expansive space of unity.
He’s a tacky vulgar person that vulgarizes everything he touches. America isn’t becoming great, it’s becoming vulgar.

Credit - Mathew Reed

[FactPost @factpostnews]

Rep. Fletcher: The New World screwworm has been found in Texas. This flesh-eating parasite previously eradicated from the U.S. poses a huge threat to our cattle. Last March, the Trump administration fired more than 15,000 USDA employees and eliminated a program to contain the screwworm in Central America. The threat of New World screwworm is just one consequence of the Trump administration's reckless campaign to eliminate funding for government programs that Americans rely on.

[Michael T. Lester @MichaelTLester]

Yesterday I told you the government is pulling 900 ocean monitoring instruments out of the water.

Here is the part that should make every American angry, regardless of where you stand on climate.

Congress voted to fund this network. Not once. Twice. The Trump administration proposed cutting it by 80 percent in 2025. Congress restored the money. Proposed the same cut in 2026. Congress restored the money again.

So the administration labeled it a "descope" and ordered the instruments pulled anyway.

That is not a budget disagreement. That is an executive branch telling the legislative branch that its votes do not matter. The public paid for this infrastructure. Congress protected it. One office in Washington decided the public should not have it.

This is the pattern I document in 𝑾𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒂𝒅 𝑮𝒖𝒚𝒔. It is not about left or right. It is about who decides what Americans are allowed to know about their own planet.

Who should make that call?