hjsas

Fan of funny t-shirts, equality, health, safer courthouses. RTs aren't endorsements.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Follow the money on this one. It is rotten to the core.

The Pentagon just lent $620,000,000 to a tiny North Carolina startup called Vulcan Elements. The company is two years old.

It had fewer than 50 employees.

And three months before the deal was announced, Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm quietly took a stake in it.

Here is the part the administration tried to bury.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was weighing, Vulcan was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide. That aide was Peter Navarro, a close friend of Trump Jr. The order came down to move fast.

One official put it plainly: The call came from the White House. We have to get this done.

Staff worked late nights to push it through in weeks. Deals like this normally take many months of vetting. And when it closed, Vulcan’s valuation jumped from about 200 million dollars to roughly 2 billion.

A windfall for the investors, including the president’s son.

This is public money. Your money.

Routed through the Pentagon to enrich the president’s family and their friends. The Bush administration’s own chief ethics lawyer called it corruption we pay for.

And there is more coming.

A drone parts company Trump Jr. holds a stake in is also under Pentagon review.

This is not a one-off. It is a pattern. The president’s family is treating the federal Treasury like a private bank, and the bill lands on every taxpayer.

https://t.co/4kB1cZNmlE

[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No public resume, no LinkedIn, no mention on the Treasury website, outdated bar listings.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

[Olena Rohoza @OlenaRohoza]

“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”

Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.

This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:

“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.

A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.

A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.

A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.

A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.

You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.

In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.

Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.

Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.

Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.

Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.

Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.

And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.

And you call Greenland badly governed?

Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.

‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’

When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?

Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.

Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.

Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.

And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.

You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.

So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.

The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.

And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

MAGA: “If you’re here legally, you have nothing to worry about.”

Also MAGA: “Just comply and show your ID.”

The reality:

A U.S. citizen. Born in Colorado. Mother of four. Stopped in Lafayette, Louisiana. Shackled. Detained in an ICE facility anyway.

She showed agents her state-issued ID and Social Security card. ICE reportedly called them “fake,” handcuffed her, chained her ankles, interrogated her, and transported her to a detention center. She was released hours later only after legal intervention.

The lesson is not “show your papers.”

The lesson is that papers don’t protect you when power decides not to read them.

This is not “law and order.”
This is state abuse.

Fight Trump. Fight ICE: https://t.co/VXiWmshWgj

[Richard Stengel @stengel]

George H.W. Bush kept his assets in a blind trust, as did Bill Clinton. Neither Obama nor Biden traded stocks or bonds while in office. 3,700 trades is probably more than all the trades of all the presidents until now. And he is trading stocks that are affected by his decisions. A walking conflict of interest, at the least, and perhaps insider trading. Just as members of Congress should not be able to trade stocks, so too the president. https://t.co/yDqVXWfDgc

[Jamesetta Williams 💕 @jamesetta_w]

I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79 year old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all.

[Maine @TheMaineWonk]

I’ve written a few campaign ads in my day.

But holy shit.

This ad from @ossoff might be one of the best I’ve ever seen.

[Bishop Talbert Swan @TalbertSwan]

The same crowd clutching pearls over Jimmy Kimmel today had no problem quoting Psalm 109 when Barack Obama was in office. they made T-shirts, bumper, stickers, and social media memes that said “Pray for Obama Psalm 109:8.”

The passage says this:

“Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg: let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath; and let the strangers spoil his labour. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him: neither let there be any to favour his fatherless children.” - Psalm 109:8-12

They invoked scripture to cloak what was, at its core, a prayer for death, destruction, and generational suffering. Now those same voices want to act morally outraged because a comedian made a joke about Melania Trump being a widow.

Melania was silent about them praying for Michelle Obama to be a widow. She was also pushing her husband‘s racist birther conspiracy. Now she wants to clutch her pearls when the heat comes her way.

You cannot spend years weaponizing the Bible to wish death on a Black president and his family, then suddenly discover “decency” when the target changes.

MAGA are unrepentant racists and counterfeit Christians, who use the Bible as a prop while living in direct contradiction to the Christ they claim to follow.

[Elizabeth Warren @ewarren]

Companies that have paid settlements to the Trump Library Fund:

ABC: $15 million
Meta: $22 million
X: $10 million
Paramount: $16 million

That original Library Fund has now been dissolved. So where has all that money gone?

[Jesus Freakin Congress @TheJFreakinC]

🚨BREAKING: The Trump administration has fired 113 immigration judges since last January… without due process, explanation, or stated cause.

And this isn’t just unusual… it’s almost unheard of.

Immigration judges are typically protected by strict hiring and removal standards, meant to preserve independence in the system.

So, seeing this many removed, in such a short time, is raising serious alarms.

Jeremiah Johnson, a former immigration judge in San Francisco, told the New York Times:

“On Nov. 21, I heard my afternoon case. It was a family of four Indigenous Guatemalans, a mother and father and two children. They were refugees who had suffered physical abuse. The father’s leg had been broken, and his brother had been killed. They were targeted for their race and ethnicity. They had a fear of persecution, based on past persecution, which the government didn’t rebut.

I granted them asylum. DHS waived the appeal. My last words on the bench to that family were: You’ve been granted asylum in the United States. That decision is final. Welcome to the United States.

One of the kids — I think he was in fifth grade — jumped up and clapped his hands together.

Later, I went to my office and signed onto my computer and found out I’d been fired. I was escorted out without time to print the letter they sent.”

This is why what the Trump administration is doing has never been about “the worst of the worst” or “doing it the right way.”

It’s about who the government believes deserves to be here… and who it decides doesn’t.

And when you follow that pattern long enough, it stops looking like isolated decisions, and starts looking like a system built around white supremacy.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't invoke Weimar Germany as a rhetorical flourish. She cited a specific scholar by name in a footnote: Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish labor lawyer who observed the Nazi legal system from the inside, smuggled his manuscript out of Berlin in 1938, and published "The Dual State" at the University of Chicago in 1941.

Fraenkel's framework is precise. The Nazis didn't immediately collapse Germany's legal system. They left courts functioning - particularly in contracts and economic matters - while placing Jews and political enemies in a separate lawless zone where no legal protection applied. Most Germans lived in the law-bound "normative state." The targeted lived in the "prerogative state." The facade of normalcy was the mechanism of control.

Jackson invoked Fraenkel to name what the court's Republican majority is doing in real time. In 21 consecutive shadow docket cases, the six conservative justices have let Trump opt out of the law - often with no explanation given at all. They blessed ICE racial profiling without citing a single legal justification. They allowed Trump to ignore $4 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. They stripped lower courts of the ability to issue universal relief, meaning only those with resources to file individual lawsuits get protection from illegal presidential action.

Constitutional law professor Evan Bernick put it plainly: "The court is adjusting the law to make place for arbitrary power."

Jackson's dissent is not hyperbole. A footnote citing a 1941 manuscript about Nazi legal architecture is a Supreme Court justice blowing the cover on what her colleagues are building.

[Sarah Larchmont @SarahLarchmont]

Let me get this straight. Musk was paid $5 billion through the DOGE endeavor and the only thing DOGE did was dismantle the entities that were investigating him for fraud. Wow

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

If you paid even a penny in federal income tax last year, you paid more than:

Tesla
Southwest
Disney
Live Nation
HP
United
PayPal
CVS Health
Palantir
Citigroup
PG&E
3M

That's right. They paid $0 in federal income tax.

It's time for big corporations to pay their fair share.

[hjsas @HJSAS]

.@cvspharmacy pharmacy tech just stole my credit card on camera. Well done CVS.

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

The disclosure sequence here is what courts care about.

DOGE gets access to Social Security data. Court blocks it. Supreme Court allows it to resume. Then DOJ admits it gave the court incorrect information during those proceedings. Then discloses: unauthorized server used for the data, and a secret agreement with a political group to analyze voter data tied to overturning election results.

The conduct was happening while the court was deciding whether to allow the conduct. The incorrect information was provided while the court was making that decision.

The Fourth Circuit sent it back down for a fresh look with the newly disclosed facts included. It flagged "even more alarming" developments it didn't detail. The case now goes to discovery - meaning the full scope of the agreement, who the political group was, and what they did with the data, will be subject to legal compulsion.

Social Security numbers. Medical records. Financial records. Millions of Americans. A secret political operation. Courts told something incorrect during the proceedings.

The Fourth Circuit called it alarming. It said so twice.

[Ed Opperman @oppermanreport]

@MikeLevin LOl, boy is this guy out of the loop. The same guy was buddies with Epstein, brought Melania over on her Visa and now is trying to pay off some woman he raped.
Do you even lift bro?

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me get this straight.

A close personal friend of the president allegedly contacted a senior ICE official to have the mother of his child detained and deported during a private custody battle. 

She was ultimately detained and deported. 

The Department of Homeland Security denies the two events are connected.

You can decide what you believe. But here is what is not in dispute.

A man with direct access to the White House called a senior immigration official about his ex-girlfriend at the exact moment it would benefit him in a custody dispute.

That official then called ICE’s Miami field office to make sure she was picked up before she was released from jail, emphasizing that the case mattered to someone close to the White House.

This is the real face of the immigration crackdown.

Not dangerous criminals.

Not threats to public safety.

A mother caught in a custody dispute, deported because her ex knows Trump.
https://t.co/8z6TOf7FCQ

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.

ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.

My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.

I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.

Hedgie🤗
https://t.co/8Kg8FOrgHW

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

A Trump insider opened a $51,000,000 oil short position — hours before Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran. This guy is now 16 for 16. $170 million in profit. A perfect streak.
This is not a talented trader.
"We placed the bet." "The ceasefire dropped." "We cashed out." Sixteen times in a row.
That is not skill. That is not instinct. That is not research.
That is someone who knows what is coming before it comes.
Think about what that actually means. A private individual is placing a $51 million bet that oil prices are about to collapse — hours before a sitting president announces a ceasefire that collapses oil prices. Not once. Sixteen times. Zero losses.
There are only two explanations and both should terrify you.
Either someone inside the White House — or with direct access to it — is leaking ceasefire negotiations to traders before diplomats, before the press, before the American people hear a single word. That is insider trading. That is corruption. That is a federal crime.
Or the timing of the announcement itself is being shaped around the trade. Which is worse.
This is not a genius investor who reads the news faster than you do. The news hadn't happened yet. He wasn't reading the news. He was getting a phone call.
While Americans were watching the ceasefire announcement and feeling relieved — somebody already knew. Somebody had already bet $51 million on it. And somebody was already counting their winnings.
You are not watching a free market. You are watching a White House with a side hustle. Via~ Really American

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

ICE agents put a child in a chokehold, took his iPhone, and sold it for $250.

Read that again.

A child. A citizen. Brutalized. Phone stolen and flipped for cash.

ICE are criminals.

This isn’t “enforcement.” This is what abuse of power looks like.

Use https://t.co/rYrBQqyuu1 -
The Constitution doesn’t disappear because someone wears a badge. The Fourth Amendment protects against unlawful seizure. The Fifth protects due process. Those rights apply to everyone — especially a minor who is a U.S. citizen.

WANNA KNOW HOW TO FIGHT ICE: https://t.co/hN8SiV9y02