MICHAEL BREEN

Living in Austin, Tx. I tweet about energy and politics, etc.

[Norman Ornstein @NormOrnstein]

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.

[Conspiratorial Templates @mynamehear]

Just like trump said, the ballroom will cost $100 million and all $200 million of it will be privately funded. Taxpayers won't pay a cent of the $300 million because all $400 million of it will come from donations. Only $1 billion will have to come from the taxpayers.

[Mike Nellis @MikeNellis]

It should probably be a bigger story that Donald Trump offered John Fetterman a significant “financial windfall” if he switches parties and becomes a Republican.

I know nobody bats an eye at the corruption oozing out of this White House anymore, but that’s fucking insane, and we shouldn’t ignore it.

[Craig Lawrence @clawrence]

I see many posts talking about how 'resource intensive' wind and solar are.

Check my math, but the world extracts, processes, transports, and burns 100 million barrels of oil a day, about 14 million metric tons worth.

My best estimate of the weight of all the wind turbine blades installed ON EARTH today (caveat, used Claude to help estimate, check my math) is 20 million metric tons. So, 1.5 days worth of global oil consumption. AND THEY LAST FOR 20+ YEARS.

Don't let people scare you with big numbers. There is nothing on earth more resource intensive than the oil and gas indsutry. It's just that when we burn oil and gas, the waste ends up mostly in the atmosphere (and your lungs), not in a landfill.

As if that is somehow better?

[MICHAEL BREEN @mdbreen]

Malicious compliance for the Texas religious overreach in schools.

Download the poster, give to a teacher

https://t.co/4pywtxlvPY

[Jon Cooper 🇺🇸 @joncoopertweets]

This photo should be on the front page of every single newspaper in America today.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[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?

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today.

I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.

It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC.

May God bless America.

[Protect Kamala Harris ✊ @DisavowTrump20]

Retired 4-Star Navy Admiral and former Navy SEAL William McRaven on Donald Trump: "Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation."

RETWEET if you stand with Admiral McRaven!

[Texas Longhorns @TexasLonghorns]

rep the champs 🤘

🔗: https://t.co/InwgCnB83C

[Joshua Reed Eakle 🗽 @JoshEakle]

It’s important that you understand what happened last night.

Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a candidate who, by all accounts, is on track in the polls to flip Texas blue.

In response, Trump’s FCC reportedly threatened CBS if the interview aired.

CBS caved and pulled the segment, citing “financial reasons.”

In modern American history, no president has been more hostile to free speech than Donald Trump.

But censorship always backfires.

Here’s the full segment Trump didn’t want you to see.

[Joe G @EastEndJoe]

Abolish The Electoral College too.

[Sebi | Crypto Analyst @sebiisb]

@unusual_whales Corporations are not people.

Money is not speech.

Simple as that.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

Buttigieg: In a country that amended its constitution so you could not purchase a beer and then realized it was a bad idea and amended it back, surely we can have an amendment clarifying that a corporation is not a person and money is not speech.

[James Brandt @j_e_brandt]

I will simply never recover from reading this sentence:

"Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people."

[Graham Platner for Senate @grahamformaine]

Susan Collins stood on the Senate floor today and called for more money for ICE, despite their blatant disregard for the law.

That is absolutely reprehensible, and Mainers need to call her office immediately and demand No More Money For ICE.

Here's her number: [phone]

[The Halfway Post @HalfwayPost]

BREAKING: ICE officials are reportedly worried that, if Congress requires ICE agents to unmask and wear identification, 75% of the agents will quit rather than be ostracised for the rest of their lives by family, friends, employers, and society.

[James Talarico @jamestalarico]

They shot Renee Good in the face.
They kidnapped Liam Ramos.
They just executed a man on the street.

Unmask them. Prosecute them. No more secret police.

[Tim Miller @Timodc]

Somehow the entire administration is in lockstep lying about how they murdered a citizen and not a single political staffer/appointee has quit their job.

You’d think murder would be at least one persons red line but apparently not. @SusieWiles