Mary F 🐝

“Life is good when you are happy, but much better when others are happy because of you.” 😇 🐝#ButtigiegDemocrat #UnsaltedSharkFree #BoilerUp

[Jack Danger @JackDangerLIVE]

🚨NEW TENNESSEE LAW REQUIRING DATA CENTER CORPORATIONS TO PAY ENTIRE COST OF UTILITY INFRASTRUCTURE IS A MUCH NEEDED WIN FOR COMMUNITY🚨

Tennessee just sent a message to every state in America:

If Big Tech wants to build massive AI and hyperscale data centers, THEY pay the bill.

Not taxpayers.

Not families struggling with inflation.

Not small businesses already drowning in utility costs.

THEM.

For years, Americans have been told that giant corporations bringing in data centers is an automatic win. Jobs. Growth. Progress.

But what they don’t tell you is that these facilities can consume staggering amounts of electricity and require billions of dollars in new transmission lines, substations, and grid upgrades.

And guess who often gets stuck helping pay for those upgrades?

YOU.

Your electric bill.

Your community.

Your local infrastructure.

Tennessee just drew a line in the sand and said enough.

If a data center needs massive new power infrastructure, the company building it bears the cost—not the public.

That means families aren’t forced to subsidize trillion-dollar tech companies.

That means retirees on fixed incomes aren’t paying higher utility bills so AI servers can run 24/7.

That means local governments aren’t pressured into socializing the costs while privatizing the profits.

This is what real corporate accountability looks like.

Whether you’re pro-AI or anti-AI isn’t even the point.

The point is simple:

If a corporation creates the demand, the corporation should pay the cost.

Not the people.

Tennessee may have just created the blueprint every state should follow.

RT if you believe taxpayers should NEVER be forced to subsidize Big Tech’s power addiction. 🇺🇸⚡️🔥

[Indiana Democratic Party @INDems]

Indiana Republicans’ SB1 disaster is making schools cut teachers, transportation, and forcing a record number of new property tax referendums this fall.

Over 100 school district referendums are expected this November.

[PBS News @NewsHour]

Starting this month, more than 900 deep-sea ocean sensors will be pulled out of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans off the coast of Washington, Oregon, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland. https://t.co/jmm86WQNcY

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

The next time you pull up to a national park and pay the entrance fee, know this:

Our parks have $23 billion in repairs that have never been made.

But instead of prioritizing that our national parks are clean, maintained, and ready for your next visit, the President is spending some of the money on vanity projects like painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue.
https://t.co/VMWYaT0UgB

[CNN @CNN]

Pete Buttigieg has become one of the most prolific midterm campaigners among possible presidential candidates, backing candidates in more than 30 races and traveling to over a dozen states.

Those endorsements give him a record to tout on a potential future debate stage, especially as the party looks for leaders who can break through in Republican territory. https://t.co/QuShgAZJZc

[Adam Wren @adamwren]

.@PeteButtigieg on his approach to Fox News: "I'm always imagining the viewer as somebody who I knew growing up in Indiana, and disagreed with, and actually liked."

[Elizabeth Warren @ewarren]

Trump’s government just gave him and his family immunity from tax prosecution. For life.

Which begs the question: What is Trump hiding in his taxes?

[James Martin, SJ @JamesMartinSJ]

Pope Leo XIV: "Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them." #MagnificaHumanitas

[Mary F 🐝 @mcfetsch]

👇👇👇

[Democratic Coalition @TheDemCoalition]

These quick thoughts by Michael Jochum on the disturbing reason Trump gets as much support as he does is a must-read 👇

I used to wonder how it was possible that Trump could have won in 2016, and then again in 2024, given how emotionally toxic and depraved he is.

I don’t wonder anymore. I think he won for that exact reason. Because he carried at least one broken shard to reflect the broken shards in millions of others.

If you’re a racist, you found your guy. If you’re a misogynist, you found your guy. If money is your only religion, you found your guy. If your heart is armored shut, you found your guy. If you mock the disabled, you found your guy. If intelligence makes you insecure, you found your guy. If you’re a sexual predator, you found your guy. If you trade in humiliation and conspiracy and filth, you found your guy.

If you’ve never done a single hour of emotional inventory, you found your guy. If you cheat, stiff contractors, bankrupt your obligations, and call it savvy, you found your guy. If you lie as easily as you breathe, you found your guy. If cruelty feels like strength, you found your guy. If white grievance is your comfort food, you found your guy. If your ego is a black hole no title can fill, you found your guy. If warmongering fuels your ego, you found your guy, If empathy feels like weakness and dominance feels like oxygen, you found your guy.

If he’d only carried one or two of these pathologies, he might have been dismissed as just another loud, damaged man. But he carried a buffet of them. That was the appeal. Millions could locate themselves somewhere in the wreckage. They didn’t have to agree with all of it. They just had to recognize a piece of themselves in it.

It was never really about him. It was about the validation. The absolution. The permission. He didn’t invent the resentment; he amplified it. He didn’t create the cruelty; he normalized it. He gave millions the intoxicating relief of hearing their ugliest impulses echoed back at rally volume.

Trump is a symptom. The deeper illness is collective. If there’s one sentence that defines his power, it’s this: “He says the things I’m thinking.”

And that’s the part that should chill us.

Because what does it say about us that so many were thinking those things? That tens of millions of Americans harbored resentments so deep, so seething, that they were simply waiting for a demagogue to baptize them as virtue? That after decades of supposed progress on race, gender, and equality, so many white men felt so threatened, so displaced, so furious, that cruelty became a political platform?

Maybe we were living in a fool’s paradise, mistaking silence for healing, politeness for progress.

Now the mask is off. Now we know.

And knowing is a far more dangerous place to stand.

– Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance. This is the risk of dehumanization: building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means.

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

Over a million acres of pristine wilderness lakes in Minnesota.

The most visited canoe country in America.

Generations of families have paddled it, fished it, camped it.

The Senate just sold it out outright.

They called it "America First."

Then handed it to a Chilean billionaire — so his company can ship the copper to China.

The Senate voted 50-49 to gut 20 years of Boundary Waters mining protections.

Here's the deal they made.

A Chilean billionaire's company digs the mine.

America can't smelt the copper — we don't have the capacity.

So the ore ships to China.

China processes it.

Sells it on the world market.

Chile keeps the profits.

Minnesotans don't even get the jobs.

Minnesota keeps the pollution.

And Americans get to buy it back from China at full market price.

This same company has a documented history at their Chilean mines: pipeline spills, regulatory fines, and locals fighting back for years.

They paid a former Trump Interior Secretary $380K.

The protection died by one vote.

Here's exactly how it happened — and who made it happen.

Who do YOU think this mine actually serves?

#DemsUnited

[scha·den·freu·de  @BlisterPearl]

The United States has no universal healthcare, but we DO have 49 private insurance billionaires.

[Rachel Coyle @RachelCoyleOhio]

With this money Ohio could have hired 10,535 teachers AND 7,530 librarians AND 11,421 park rangers

[Hillbilly @JamesHu27192912]

Erin Brockovich is back, and this time she's coming for the AI industry, calling out Big Tech's data center boom as the next great environmental shakedown of American communities. She launched a self-reporting map at https://t.co/ODEJlqLss3, and within a week over 1,600 residents had filed complaints spanning noise pollution, skyrocketing utility bills, and serious water depletion concerns. The pattern she's seeing looks awfully familiar: corporations dangle promises of jobs and tax revenue, municipalities wave projects through with minimal environmental review, and the people who actually live there get left holding the bag.

The water issue alone should be setting off alarm bells. Data centers gulp enormous amounts of water to keep their cooling systems running, and some are being planted directly above critical aquifers. As Brockovich put it plainly, "Wasting heat is wasting water. We can't afford either." The technology to capture and reuse that waste heat already exists, it's just not being required. That's a policy failure, not a tech failure.

A recent Gallup poll found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers being built in their communities, with many saying they'd rather live near a nuclear plant. Brockovich's demand is straightforward: if Big Tech is going to drain public water supplies and jack up utility bills, the public deserves full transparency. "If you're using public resources, the public has a right to know how much. Sunlight is the best disinfectant."

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Here's how the corruption works:

Thursday: RJ Reynolds donates $5M to Trump

Saturday: Trump invites RJR execs to Mar a Lago; execs ask to loosen regs on flavored vapes; Trump calls up RFK Jr. and tells him to change it

Friday: FDA changes the policy
https://t.co/Udu1RhYtKI

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

As evidenced by the unbridled promotion and implementation of technology at the expense of human dignity, we are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human. It is imperative to recover an understanding of the true meaning and grandeur of humanity as intended by God. It is in this sense that the challenge we currently face is not technological, but anthropological, and it is my hope that the Encyclical Letter to be published within a few days will contribute to answering this challenge.

[Angry Staffer @Angry_Staffer]

Party of fiscal responsibility, my ass

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

No nation, no society, and no international order can call itself just and humane if it measures its success solely by power or prosperity while neglecting those who live at the margins. Indeed, Christ’s love for the least and the forgotten compels us to reject every form of selfishness that leaves the poor and the vulnerable invisible.

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

For years, the railroad lobby and conservative Republicans have stood in the way of much needed reforms to prevent derailments and make railways safer. President Trump is absolutely correct to demand that Congress pass the Railway Safety Act.

It would take key improvements I put into place as Secretary and make them permanent, and also deliver legislative reforms that I called for in the wake of the 2023 East Palestine derailment - giving DOT more tools to prevent tragedies and hold railroad companies to the highest safety standards.

Democrats and Republicans should join @RepDeluzio and others who have been leading this bipartisan push to include strong rail safety reform in the transportation bill.
https://t.co/Xn70XUWTcg

[Pete Buttigieg @PeteButtigieg]

The Montana Plan is bipartisan, common-sense, and one of the best opportunities in a long time to put Citizens United where it belongs: in the ashbin of history.

Thank you to everyone who came out to our town hall in Butte and showed the rest of the country what it takes to make progress on an issue this important.