ИATHAИ

Pizza enthusiast, comic nerd, amateur dad.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

The US is getting ready to spend a billion dollars to get rid of screwworms because Doge canceled the $300 million dollar contract to control them. Doge should pay the full amount with penalities not us taxpayers.

[Judd Legum @JuddLegum]

1. The Pentagon has refused to provide an accurate accounting of the costs of the Iran War, so Popular Information crunched the numbers.

The DIRECT COSTS are at least $103 BILLION in the first 120 days.

This is $73 billion more than the latest official estimate.

[Jo @JoJoFromJerz]

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
George Orwell, 1984

[Kevin Van Valkenburg @KVanValkenburg]

This is a good read.

[We Used to Be a Proper Country @Mzandthropic]

@jimgeraghty How much time is left in extra time?

[Jim Geraghty @jimgeraghty]

"But a goal will not count if a player is offsides."

"When is a player offsides?"

"Whenever anything exciting happens."

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

To everyone celebrating the first flight on Qatar Force One today, understand what you are actually applauding.

A foreign government handed the sitting President of the United States a $400 million plane. American taxpayers then paid to retrofit it, with an estimated cost of at least another $400 million (some estimates far higher), for security and communications work in a Texas hangar since last September.

When Trump leaves office, the plane does not stay with the government. Ownership transfers to his presidential library foundation. In other words, he keeps it.

You are being asked to treat pure corruption as normal, to shrug at a President personally profiting from a foreign gift the taxpayers paid to upgrade.

In any other administration this would be the scandal that ends a presidency.

With Trump, it’s Wednesday.
https://t.co/qAfVUp8KBd

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Psaki: “Do you remember last year when Trump announced his massive across the board tariffs…He called it liberation day, it actually led to a stock market crash. That liberation day announcement was made on April 2nd of last year, and Trump’s financial disclosures show that he made 327 stock purchases six days later, on April 8th, while the market was down…So he makes those purchases on April 8th. The next morning, just after the market opened, he told his followers on Truth social: ‘THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY.’ Hours later, he paused his tariffs and the stock market had a historic rally, so historic in fact, it represented the biggest single day gain in the history of the Bloomberg billionaires index. To put it simply, it appears an official act by Trump cratered the stock market. Trump then bought the dip and then used another official act to bring the price of the market back up. Trump of course insists that all his stock transactions are handled by his two adult sons [@EricTrump & @DonaldJTrumpJr] without his involvement or knowledge of the individual trades carried out on his behalf. When asked about the timing of these specific trades, the White House told us tonight that President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public, saying there was no conflict of interest. The White House also directed us to the Trump Organization. We’ve reached out to them, but we haven’t heard [anything] back.”🤦‍♀️

[Zack Bornstein @ZackBornstein]

They made Jimmy Carter sell his peanut farm

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Theodore Roosevelt said the national parks were the greatest gift this country ever gave itself, and the greatest idea we ever gave the world.

More than 100 nations copied it.

Donald Trump looks at that gift and sees a piggy bank for his own pet projects.

This week we learned where our national park money has been going. Not to Yellowstone. Not to Yosemite. To the walkway outside his office, where Trump ripped out American flagstone and laid down Italian granite at a cost of $689,000 to taxpayers. He said he paid for it himself.

That was a lie.

To cover his vanity projects, they are robbing the parks. Spending on parks outside Washington is down $854 million. More than 900 projects went unfunded. They even pulled money from a guardrail on a Colorado cliff that the Park Service flagged as a safety hazard.

I serve on Appropriations.

The power to spend belongs to Congress, not to a king redecorating his palace. These parks are not Trump’s to loot.

They belong to all of us, and I will fight for every dollar.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Massie: "I think it's ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, and the White House, and we're yelling 'election fraud'? I mean, we won all the damn elections."

[ArtButMakeItSports @ArtButSports]

@IndianaFever Virgin of the Rocks, by Leonardo da Vinci, 1483-86

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Legendary #Maddow: “We got news that the so-called Alligator Alcatraz immigrant prison in Florida is now CLOSED. They shut it down as of today. This is from the CBS affiliate in Miami: ‘Companies hired by the state of Florida to operate the immigration facility known as Alligator Alcatraz were notified Monday morning…to begin a full demobilization of the facility, which quietly brings an ignominious close to a $1.2 billion experiment that had once been hailed by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and President Donald Trump, as a model other states should pursue. The final few detainees left the facility last week. Federal and state officials at the time said it was due to safety concerns over the start of hurricane season. They even suggested the facility would remain ready to take on new detainees,’ but none of that is true. Now we know it is closed, closed for GOOD!!” 👏👏

[Thomas Kennedy @tomaskenn]

Mounting invoices come as the Florida's emergency fund, originally designed for disasters like hurricanes but now misused for immigration detention, is running low on money.

The fund has $47 million left, down from $199 million in late April.

[Thomas Kennedy @tomaskenn]

Among the largest looming bills we taxpayers are on the hook for:

$122 million to a portable toilet company.
$79 million to a detention center operator.
$65 million to a security contractor.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build his show. She shaped everything: every script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.

The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children, the part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention, takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state.

What ended it had nothing to do with child development science. In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman Mark Fowler abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased by 300%, from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.

Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in Pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 60 four-year-olds across three groups: one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds; one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds; and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem-solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.

In the 1970s, children began watching television around age 4. Research from pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to 4 months, as the content got faster and the audience got younger. Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages 1 or 3 raised the risk of attention problems at age 7 by 9%.

[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

[Gigi @Gigi_chienergy]

The screwworm program wasn't charity, it was a $10 million fence that kept a billion-dollar problem from eating our own livestock alive. That's the thing with most USAID funding: it looks like "aid," but it's really cheap self-defense. Solve a problem there, and it never lands on our doorstep. But sure, let a bunch of guys who can't define DEI without Googling take a chainsaw to it. They didn't stop to ask, "Will this cut hurt us too?" Unless that's the point, burn it all down and call it efficiency.

As usual our inept agriculture secretary, blaming the Biden administration as usual, instead of offering a solution to the problem they created.

Texan here

A screwworm infestation is a nightmare for cattle, causing horrific wounds and economic devastation. For Texas, the situation has escalated dramatically in the last 24 hours with the first confirmed case of New World Screwworm (NWS) in over 60 years! This could have been avoided!

Infested animal can kill a cow in less than two weeks.

Treatment is extremely difficult and time-consuming, requiring the painful removal of every visible larva and deep disinfection of the wound. Ranchers no longer have much experience with this labor-intensive process, and there is currently no approved pharmaceutical treatment to make it easier.

This has triggered a massive economic threat. The USDA estimates that a widespread outbreak would drain an astonishing $1.8 billion from the Texas economy alone in livestock deaths, labor, and medication expenses.

How will this affect you? Tightening supplies will drive already high beef prices higher.

[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