mlev

Never Trumper.. Breast cancer survivor ME/CFS sucks. #CovidIsNotOver #RESIST #VOTEBLUE #Harris Walz 💙

[mlev @levinthalmindy]

@josiahjdp This is so beautiful that it made me cry

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

Yesterday I paid $375 out of pocket for one month of a prescribed full agonist opioid pain medication.

Not surgery.
Not a hospital stay.
Not an emergency room visit.

One month.

People ask why chronic pain patients have anxiety.

Because every refill feels like a financial emergency.

For those asking why insurance doesn’t cover it, every situation is different.

In my case, the VA will not cover Schedule II medication unless it is prescribed through the VA pain management program.

I left that program after being told my medication would shortly be discontinued as the VA continues moving toward a predominantly opioid-free model.

That meant finding outside pain management and paying out of pocket for the medication that allows me to function.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love America enough that I was willing to die for my country as a young United States Marine.

I just never expected to spend my 40s fighting my own healthcare system for the medication that allows me to function.

And I know I am not alone.

There are tens of thousands of Veterans who served honorably, sacrificed their bodies, and are now fighting not the enemy overseas, but the battle to receive adequate pain treatment here at home.

Our service ended.

Our sacrifice did not.

@SecVetAffairs We kept our promise to our country. Will the VA keep its promise to us?

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

Exactly.

Chronic, uncontrolled pain isn’t merely a symptom.

Research has shown changes in brain regions involved in memory, stress, emotion, and pain processing.

We spend so much time discussing the risks of treatment that we rarely discuss the consequences of prolonged suffering itself.

Why is untreated pain considered acceptable collateral damage?

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

The majority of America feels the EXACT SAME WAY.

[Sarrah Bellus @sarrah_bellus]

Trump is desperately trying to get this picture removed from social media!

You know what to do! 🤣🤣🤣

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

A brand new bridge between Detroit and Canada is finished and ready to open. It would speed up traffic for millions of trucks, cut delays for American businesses, and help the auto industry that employs people in every state. There is just one problem.

Donald Trump won’t let it open.

Here is why.

The family that owns the old bridge stands to lose business when the new one opens. So in January, they gave one million dollars to a pro-Trump super PAC.

Weeks later they met with Trump’s Commerce Secretary.

He called Trump.

Hours after that, Trump announced he would block the new bridge. The opening was set for June 12. It got canceled the day before. The bridge sits there finished and empty.

Now here is the part that should make every taxpayer angry.

Canada paid for the entire bridge.

Every dollar. And the United States already owns half of it for free. Trump is holding up a bridge we got for nothing, to protect a donor who wrote him a check, while picking a fight with our closest ally and biggest trading partner.

This is corruption in plain sight.

A billionaire pays, and the President delivers. American workers and businesses pay the price.

Open the bridge. A government should work for the people, not for whoever writes the biggest check.
https://t.co/9o9Gz9UrBo

[Sassy Devil Dog 🔥 @VinoNStrosGal]

This is the reality that the anti-opioid crowd never wants to talk about.

Not addiction.

Not diversion.

Not statistics.

Human suffering.

Read that quote again.

A cancer patient literally reached the point where he didn’t care if he lived or died because the pain was so severe and treatment was being withheld.

Think about how catastrophic pain has to be before death starts feeling easier than another day of suffering.

Nobody should ever be pushed to that place.

Not a cancer patient.

Not a chronic pain patient.

Not anyone.

Pain relief isn’t some luxury prize that people have to earn.

It’s basic human dignity.

And if we’ve reached a point where people battling cancer are being forced to beg for relief while society congratulates itself for being “tough on opioids,” then something has gone terribly wrong.

A civilized society should be judged by how it treats people who are suffering.

Right now, we’re failing that test.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

RETWEET if you stand with Michelle Obama!

[Thrilla the Gorilla @ThrillaRilla369]

When I point the remote directly at the TV, nothing happens.
If I accidentally drop it between the couch cushions, it switches from Netflix to Hulu, opens four apps, changes the subtitles to Portuguese, and somehow starts playing Christmas music.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Alabama women have to take a monthly pregnancy test to get a cannabis rx filled. Where it begins is never where it ends https://t.co/tYUcvw3sw3

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Posted by former US Congressman @AdamKinzinger on Facebook. Beautifully written, in both form and substance:

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am.

We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.

Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.

For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.

The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.

What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about.

It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.

They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.

The welcome only got bigger from there.

The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.

These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves.

Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.

But it's not just Lawrence.

This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.

The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.

There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.

And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.

That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.
— Adam

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

It’s like poetic justice how there’s a double rainbow outside the John Kennedy Center as Trump’s name is being removed.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

Holy shit, this sick old man can't even keep himself upright, seated in the Oval Office.

He's practically sideways. How TF is this not a bigger story?

[Forrest Knight @ForrestPKnight]

Looks like Verizon has scammers in their company.

My wife just called Verizon (the number listed on their website) to get a new phone line, and the guy who answered that's supposed to transfer you to the correct department actually transferred her to some random lady who, when answered, just said "hi".

My wife say's "hi" back.

Random lady: "who is this?" (on a sales call, btw).

My wife: "who is this?" (since it sounded suspicious).

Random lady in broken English: "Uhh... oh, this is Tasha with your phone company... what do you need?" (she didn't specify which phone company).

My wife: "I'm calling to get a new line."

Random lady: "Have you been on any trips recently?"

My wife: ??? *hangs up*

Then my wife calls the same Verizon number again from their website, gets on the phone with a different person who saw the record of my wife calling but it doesn't show that she was transferred at all.

So it appears some scammer got a job at Verizon and instead of transferring customers to a different department, he transfers them to his scammer friend.

This is super sketchy. I bet a lot of folks have fallen for this scam, unfortunately. Verizon needs to vet their people better.

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

Ken Paxton is the most corrupt politician in America. 

He embodies the broken system we’re running against.

It’s time to come together: The People vs. Ken Paxton

[Mia @MiaForTrump]

This is retired Army Staff Sergeant Sean Ortega, the first openly trans service member. He served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and was involved in 400 combat missions.

RETWEET to wish Staff Sergeant Ortega a Happy Pride Month and Happy Veterans Month!

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

“THIS IS NOT LEADERSHIP, JEFF.” Pope Leo XIV stunned the world after publicly criticizing Jeff Bezos and threatening to remove all Vatican-affiliated publishing partnerships and official merchandise agreements connected to Amazon platforms.

The shocking statement came after Bezos was once again linked to political alliances that critics say are deepening division across America.

“You cannot claim to support humanity while empowering voices that profit from fear, hatred, and division,” Pope Leo XIV declared during a rare public address that instantly exploded across social media.

For several moments, Bezos reportedly offered no response.

The silence only intensified the global reaction.

The Pope continued with a warning that many are now calling one of the boldest confrontations ever directed at a tech billionaire:

“When profit becomes more sacred than people, society begins to lose its soul.”

Within minutes, political commentators, journalists, celebrities, and religious leaders around the world began weighing in.

Then Donald Trump erupted on Truth Social.

The former president mocked Pope Leo XIV as a “global activist in religious clothing,” accusing him of attacking free enterprise and “desperate for media attention.”

But the Pope refused to back down.

Hours later, he answered Trump with eight calm words that instantly shook the internet:

“Truth does not fear wealth, power, or noise.”

And suddenly, the entire conversation changed.

Millions praised the Pope for standing against corporate influence and political intimidation, while critics accused him of crossing into dangerous political territory.

But regardless of where people stood, one thing became undeniable:

Jeff Bezos had just been publicly challenged by one of the most powerful moral voices on Earth — and the world could not stop watching.