Florida paid a portable toilet company called Doodie Calls more than $92 million over six months to haul wastewater out of the Everglades. The state projected it would pay Doodie Calls $480 million over two years. For comparison, building a sewage treatment plant for a city of 10,000 people costs about $5 million.
That is one vendor. At one facility. Built in eight days on an Everglades airstrip using hurricane disaster funds because Ron DeSantis declared immigration a state of emergency in 2023 to access a $5 billion fund set aside for floods and hurricanes.
The facility costs between $1.2 million and $3 million per day to operate. A conservative estimate puts the annual per-capita cost at $500,000 per detainee. Florida spends $30,000 a year to house a convicted criminal in a state prison. The math on Alligator Alcatraz is not tougher than a prison. It is more than sixteen times more expensive.
Three quarters of the men held there have never been convicted of a crime. They are awaiting civil immigration proceedings. They are being held in kennels - cages with steel mesh sides, 16 bunks, three toilets, brightly lit 24 hours a day. Amnesty International documented what it called deliberate neglect designed to dehumanize, including credible allegations of men held in stress positions in direct sunlight without food or water for hours at a time.
Governor Braun opened the Speedway Slammer at an Indiana prison. The Cornhusker Clink in Nebraska. The Louisiana Lockup at Angola. The naming contest is ongoing. The cruelty is the point. The cost is someone else's problem. Florida's emergency fund has dwindled to $200 million. The facility cannot run to the end of the year.
The men in the cages are still there.
The intense media focus on Graham Platner is understandable. He is an unknown in a crucial Senate race with a lot of baggage. Less understandable is the lack of coverage of Ken Paxton, whose sins are far worse. That it is “old news” is no excuse. Most voters have no clue.
So you’re telling me there’s some nefarious stuff surrounding the supposed assassination attempt of Trump?
You mean the one where the cops admitted to seeing him THREE TIMES in a restricted area with a scope & a backpack & yet never did anything?
The one where a bunch of people in the crowd saw the shooter on the roof but no cops or secret service officers or sheriff’s deputies or State troopers saw him?!?
The same “assassination attempt” that Trump had no interest in investigating & even shut down the investigation?
You mean that one?
Imagine there were a person so reckless that their actions led directly to the Ebola outbreak, the screwworm outbreak, and millions of people dying from starvation and AIDS.
Would you invest in that person’s company?
Welcome to America’s new nuclear family: three marriages, multiple affairs, got wife #3 pregnant while still married to wife #2, and paid $50,000 to settle a sexual assault.
John Fetterman seems to genuinely think that the reason no one likes him is because he refuses to wear a suit.
It's not the hoodie, dude. It's because you've become a stooge for AIPAC and the Republican party.
In half a century, we’ve held the screwworm at bay.
Enter Trump and his chainsaw waving, DOGE crew of morons and they cut funding to monitoring and treatment programs.
🚨 Republican Susan Collins has been caught illegally hiding $395,000 in stock trades.
Some analysts say her trades show clear signs of insider trading.
STAGED Assassination Attempt (Butler) UPDATE: Butler, PA Sheriff’s Office reportedly exchanged EMAILS with gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks BEFORE the incident!!
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was forced to release heavily redacted documents that revealed Thomas Matthew Crooks, trump’s would-be “assassin”, had exchanged emails with a Butler County Sheriff’s deputy prior to his attack on July 13, 2024.
Judicial Watch forced the FBI to make dozens of documents public through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, revealing that the deputy exchanged two emails with Crooks before the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. The heavily redacted document was part of an FBI electronic communication titled “Disc of 5 Deputies of Butler County Sheriff’s Office” conducted on July 16, 2024, which compiles interviews the bureau conducted with deputies.
The file indicates that a deputy had “checked her emails and records and only had two email communications” from Crooks. The nature of the communication was redacted, and the unnamed deputy said she had not had any “personal interaction” with Crooks.
WHY redacted? What was that conversion? What are they hiding??
Remember how I reported the Butler Chief of Police retired just one month before the incident and my earlier reports outlined how local law enforcement seemed coordinated in the effort to allow Crooks to get into position, even after several eye witnesses were pointing him out. This further indicates a multi-faceted scheme, complete with local law enforcement and the Secret Service to pull off the greatest HOAX in the history of American Politics! STAGED!!
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
Trump & Don Jr. looted national security—forced the Pentagon to hand $620M to Jr.’s firm.
Jr. got a 10x return in MONTHS. Where's the investigation? This is TREASON and CORRUPTION.
War Machine is now a family ATM.
Every dollar = treason.
Taxpayers funded their heist.
@davidfrum@shannonrwatts Fuck off w/ this shit already. Did you listen to voters in ME ? They don’t care about these stories esp when one is from a republican heritage and Collin’s liar. Are there skeletons? Yup. But this is a fight for our democracy and soul of the USA so time to do what’s needed.
MAJOR BREAKING: Canada bans Texas cattle over flesh-eating screwworm outbreak.
Remember that Trump/DOGE pushed broad USDA staffing and budget cuts that affected APHIS, which happens to be the the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, responsible for overseeing screwworm in cattle at the federal level.
Thanks Trump for screwing us, you worm....
Trump has just destroyed the US beef industry. No country in their right mind is going to import US beef.
After Trump cut funding for Screwworm monitoring programs, the dangerous flesh-eating parasite has been found in US cattle for the first time since 1966.