definitely from Bolivia

[Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald]

You won't hear a better 55-second description of MAGA and Trump than this: in terms of the perspective of any minimally honest MAGA supporter:

[Plant @plantmath1]

Trump 2 was given the easiest layup in history.

Inflation was already trending lower, take photo ops deporting a few migrant criminals, take credit for a boom in manufacturing from Biden's CHIPs and infra bills, still get all the bribes, and be popular. What an epic faceplant.

[Carrie Coon @carriecoon]

Anne Applebaum nails it:

[Ilan Goldenberg @ilangoldenberg]

Actually, the guy who was the point person for Iran at the White House and was fired by the Trump Administration after being Loomered wrote EXACTLY that warning 4 days before the war started. The article was titled “Why Iran Will Escalate.” But who needs experts…

https://t.co/CHufUnZivQ

[Felix Prehn 🐶 @felixprehn]

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends.

A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets.

Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses.

The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits.

A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days.

Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive.

The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away.

The investing angle nobody talks about.

Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in.

Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies.

The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates.

Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try.

(a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

[Hunter Kozak 🧦🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈 @HunterEKozak]

Insane that my wife got fired because this loser thought that her job was too “DEI”. Her job, btw, at USAID was determining if companies we traded with overseas were using slave labor or abusing workers.

[Danny Bloom🌷 @danzu72]

I worked for USAID when It was closed, these guys literally were firing senior Foreign Service Officers with 30 years of experience on the spot. These kids were drunk on power and a reckoning is coming. I will always be hot about this shit. I know for a fact we allowed children to die because of these snotty shits.

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Hidden on page 744 of the farm bill the House Agriculture Committee passed Thursday is a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates.

Rebranded the 'Save Our Bacon Act,' it's a pork-industry play to wipe out every state law banning the sale of pork from crated pigs — laws the conservative Supreme Court upheld in 2023.

Over 85% of Democrats and Republicans oppose these crates. Voters have backed ballot measures to ban them in state after state.

The pork industry knows it can't win a straight vote on this. So it's burying the provision in an 800-page bill and hoping no one notices.

Contact your senators and representative today and tell them: oppose the farm bill unless the Save Our Bacon Act is stripped out. You can reach them at https://t.co/MQvByA4atR and https://t.co/v6ghw99u1K — it takes two minutes and it matters.

[Elizabeth Dwoskin @lizzadwoskin]

SCOOP: Last year we reported extensively on Elon Musk’s desire to break into the data pipes of government to bypass the federal bureaucracy. That approach had major consequences — one of which we reveal today: A DOGE bro allegedly made off with volumes upon volumes of highly sensitive Social Security data - the agency’s “crown jewels” - which he downloaded on a thumb drive and brought over to his new job. Me, @MerylKornfield @FedGirlWaPo report on this unprecedented breach:

https://t.co/UItlpgJILo

[Carolina Forward @ForwardCarolina]

The @Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, is out with a major new research study showing that immigrants, both legal and illegal, contribute significantly more in taxes than they receive in public benefits.

And there's more: because immigrants (both legal and not) are such large net-contributors of tax revenue, they also structurally reduce government budget deficits.

[Rick Wilson @TheRickWilson]

You know, in the end, Trump’s name will be synonymous for the single most evil and destructive person to ever hold the Presidency, and it won’t even be close.

“I killed 500,000 people by botching COVID, wrecked our economy with a foolish trade war, set loose murderous domestic secret police, ripped off Americans in billion-dollar crypto scams, covered Epstein, sold out our allies, started a second Great Depression and World War III” is a hell of a resume.

[Brian Schatz @brianschatz]

This war is costing a billion dollars a day. In one fucking month we will spend more over there than we needed to save healthcare for more than 2 million Americans. They literally are taking away your food and your healthcare for this regime change war of choice.

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

Trump over the past month: The trade deficit is down 78% because of my tariffs
Official data released Thursday: The trade deficit fell 0.2% in 2025, and the goods-only deficit rose 2.1%

Trump over the past month: One year ago our country was dead, now because of me and my tariffs we have the hottest country; the Atlanta Fed is projecting 5% growth in 4th-quarter 2025
Official data released Friday: 1.4% annualized growth in 4th-quarter 2025, and the slowest full-year growth since 2020 and second-slowest since 2016 (though the fall shutdown was a significant factor)

[Chris Gloninger, CCM, CBM @ChrisGloninger]

Atmospheric scientist here. Let me tell you what was actually "slashed" today.

Slashed: The Endangerment Finding — a 200-page scientific review upheld by the Supreme Court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and reaffirmed by the National Academies of Sciences in 2025.

Slashed: The legal authority to regulate carbon from cars, power plants, and factories. All of it. Gone in one afternoon.

Now here's what you're "saving":

Yesterday Trump ordered the Pentagon — the largest energy consumer on Earth — to buy coal electricity.

Coal costs $69–$169/MWh.
Wind costs $27–$53/MWh.
Solar costs $38–$78/MWh.

99% of U.S. coal plants cost more to run than replacing them with brand-new solar or wind.

That's your tax dollars buying the most expensive electricity on the market. By executive order. While the Peabody Energy CEO stood in the room.

And the human cost of what you're "saving"?

460,000 American deaths linked to coal pollution in 20 years. Coal PM2.5 is 2.1x deadlier than other air pollution. (Henneman et al., Science, 2023)

All to protect an industry that employs 44,000 people total. Clean energy employs 3.5 million.

[Ron Filipkowski @RonFilipkowski]

4 months after Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, Forbes reports that Binance now holds $4.7 billion of the $5.4 billion supply of Trump’s World Liberty Financial stablecoin. That is 87%. It is the largest corruption scandal in the history of the US presidency.

[Shannon Watts @shannonrwatts]

Florida Surgeon General says the state will end vaccine requirements for kids in school and wants to end ALL mandates: “Who am I to tell you what to put in your body? It’s a gift from God.”

Innocent children with ignorant parents will pay the price.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Trump reversed decades of national security objections to selling advanced AI chips to UAE. National security experts were alarmed.

But there was a secret. Before the deal, UAE had sent $187M to the Trumps and $31M to the Witkoffs in secret payments.

Mind blowing corruption.

[Mikel Jollett @Mikel_Jollett]

We’ve spent the past 70 years being told by right wing dipshits the purpose of the 2nd Amendment was so free citizens could protect themselves against a tyrannical government.

And now we have masked federal agents murdering citizens in cold blood in the street and you know who supports it the most?

Those same right wing dipshits.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

🚨BREAKING: Trump is waiving remaining fines against Southwest for its holiday meltdown — and he’s shut down the government suit against the airline for “chronically delayed flights.”

The announcement came from the Transportation Dept, now run by fmr airline lobbyist @SecDuffy.

[Semafor @semafor]

Why does it matter that everything is becoming TV?

" Political success is becoming television, and even Gen Z's theory of economic success outside of the realm of politics is becoming associated with essentially being good at TV," @DKThomp tells @semaforben and @maxwelltani.