Mark Publow

I try to live a life where social justice, kindness, science and curiosity matter.

[Jonathan O'Connell @jocwapo]

New on White House ballroom project:

Trump’s budget office on Friday quietly redirected $352M in Secret Service funds largely meant for staff training and retention to “White House Security Measures.”

Source tells us it’s for the ballroom project.

https://t.co/NBQp9vJn8s

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

A woman dies every two hours of cervical cancer in the US -- and these deaths are utterly unnecessary. HPV vaccines prevent it, and screenings catch it early when it's treatable. But we're dismantling federal support for reproductive health care programs like Title X.

[Akela Lacy @akela_lacy]

NEW: Cops chased the wrong guy. They followed him and intentionally crashed into his car twice, causing it to flip and catch fire. They fired 27 shots and then waited outside as Navy veteran John Andrew Jenuwine bled out and died. https://t.co/hUae8JSSdy

[Acyn @Acyn]

Gangel: In March, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan go to the oval office for a formal sit down interview with the president. He's very proud about some presidential historian has given him this document, which he says shows he's more powerful than Hitler and Stalin. 

He's proudly reading it and showing it to them, and they can't figure out who the presidential historian is. And they start searching. Name doesn't show up. But the president had said that this historian was a friend of former hall of fame golfer Gary Player. So they search…the historian is Gary Player's former caddie.

[Amanda Ungaro @AmandaUngaroA]

How did Paolo Zampolli obtain my phone while it was in the custody of the Aventura Police Department?

My phone was seized by law enforcement and should have remained secure as evidence. However, according to the location data from my Find My iPhone account, the device later appeared at Paolo Zampolli’s residence in New York.

I would like an explanation as to how a phone that was under police custody ended up in the possession of a private individual. Who authorized its release, who had access to it, and what chain-of-custody records exist to account for its movement?

This matter raises serious concerns regarding the handling of evidence and deserves a full investigation.@DHSgov @davidventutella

[Jamesetta Williams 💕 @jamesetta_w]

His plan is to overcome his unpopularity by doing illegal things and breaking democracy to suppress the vote. But the media describes this as some disagreements within his party over novel political strategy. This kind of sane washing is how the media is effectively pro-GOP.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Kratom is a plant from Asia that hits the same brain receptors as opioids. People take it for energy or pain. It can be addictive and it can kill.

People buy it at gas stations, with no age check and no honest label.

Markwayne Mullin owns up to a million dollars in a kratom company. Then he stood at an FDA podium and pushed rules to crush that company’s rivals. He never sold the stock.

The company was founded by a felon who stole $10 million and did prison time. His kratom shots are tied to liver damage, seizures, and death. The stuff showed up in 5,200 overdose deaths in five years. A 27 year old grad student took it for six weeks and died. His mother says a real ban would have saved him.

You cannot make this up. The same company paid a Trump connected lobbyist $600,000.

Then the payoff. The Justice Department dropped its lawsuit. The FDA scrubbed the warnings off its website. RFK Jr. called Ohio’s governor to kill a state ban. And the company wired a million dollars to a PAC tied to Kennedy.

This is the swamp they swore to drain. It is worse than ever before.

https://t.co/TxPRrLc7Ta

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Trump’s grift will be caught. It always gets caught.

The insider trading, the crypto grift, the international bribes, the ballroom donors getting contracts, the pardons going for five to ten million dollars a piece, there will be a reckoning for all of it.

It’s disgusting, but here’s the silver lining I want to leave people with.

If we get a reform-based president after this, they now have a complete playbook.

Every norm broken, every standard flouted, every weakness in the system exposed, it’s all documented.

That’s actually the roadmap for reform.

Trump has been so brazen about all of it that he’s inadvertently shown us exactly what needs to be fixed.

[Lily @lily_choudhury_]

William Zinsser taught writing at Yale, then wrote the book that has fixed more bad writing than every English class combined.

Here are 10 cuts from "On Writing Well" that instantly make your writing twice as strong.

1) Delete every word doing no work

[Brett Erickson @BrettErickson28]

I gotta be honest here... Everything being rumored about the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding... from countless sources, point to this being FAR worse than I think anyone thought... Washington's silence speaks volumes.

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time believing that an increasingly desperate and delusional Trump, addictively putting forth faux grandiosity that resonates with fewer and fewer people, feeble with age and illness, conscious of the sand pouring out of his hourglass, laden with humiliations, brimming with malice, and surrounded by an administration of real and imitative psychopaths and power-crazed ideologs, is going to easily allow our own US midterms to transpire in a free and fair manner.

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

As I said (and this story confirms) Trump is keeping the tarp up.

His spun-glass ego can't handle this. Meanwhile, we're losing a war, gas is still expensive, and some guys are gonna kick each other on the South Lawn. *golf clap*

https://t.co/YOjg4R8gS3

[Eric Lee @EricLeeAtty]

Staggering that the NYT reports Trump/Miller are plotting to suspend habeas corpus (i.e. end the constitution) & by the end of the day it's treated as a non-story, not anywhere near top of major news' outlets websites.

[Anthony Scaramucci @Scaramucci]

Henry Ford was generally a racist and a bad person, but he understood something our current broligarchs have completely forgotten.

He said: I have to pay my workers enough to afford the products they’re building.

Give them a house, decent schools, reasonable healthcare.

If I do that, they’re not descending on my Dearborn mansion with pitchforks while I eat my caviar.

We’ve lost that plot entirely.

We have broligarchs who want to be trillionaires and they’re missing the lesson that a deeply flawed man figured out a hundred years ago.

Capitalism works, but only if people believe the game is worth playing.

Right now they don’t and history is very clear about what comes next.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

As always, your regular reminder that despite having every law enforcement agency of the federal government and billions of dollars worth of surveillance tools available to them, the Trump admin has managed to find a grand total of zero (0) "paid agitators."

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

“Government resources” = your taxpayer dollars

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Clayton had no history of interest in election administration. No background in voting rights. No public record on ballot counting.

Then he went on CNBC and declared California's vote-counting creates "opportunity for fraud."

Days later: nominated as Director of National Intelligence.

Elias names it correctly. That was the audition.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Here’s the connection to be made: The administration bit off more than it could chew when it indicted SPLC, a group with national support. So now it will try to intimidate folks on the ground, small local groups who are supporting our right to vote. We must not let that happen.

[Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @ReichlinMelnick]

The "Trump Kennedy Center" apparently repeatedly ignored the terms of a contract with the Washington National Opera, locked the WNO out from viewing their own financial records, and is now refusing to return$17 million of their own money — and even already spent some of it!

[Sheila of the Most High @sheilatebra]

I finally understand what Machiavelli meant when he said, “Never play fair in a game where others cheat.” It doesn’t mean become evil. It means stop being naive. Stop bringing honesty to people who study manipulation, stop giving access to people who weaponize closeness, and stop expecting clean hands from people who already showed you they’ll throw dirt. Sometimes wisdom is not revenge. Sometimes wisdom is learning the rules of the room before the room uses your goodness against you.