Rick Alther 🇺🇦

Software dev @owlcyberdefense. Happy pappy, @NASCAR and @Dodgers fan, diver, and various other interests. My tweets are my own.

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

The unarmed American citizen shot by ICE was not in China.

The country where nearly half of people delay medical care because they cannot afford it is not China.

The country where 37% of adults cannot cover a $400 emergency expense is not China.

The country with a record 770,000 homeless people is not China.

The country where 45 million people are trapped under student debt is not China.

The country where 200 million people drinking PFAS-contaminated water is not China.

The country with $1.18 trillion in credit-card debt is not China.

The country where more than 40,000 people die from gun violence every year is not China.

The country where child marriage remains legal in the country is not China.

The country that spent 250 years existing and only 17 of them without war is not China.

But yes, keep telling us how “Communist China” is the danger.

At some point, anti-communism stopped being an argument.

It became a blanket America uses to cover its own corpse.

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot by ICE.

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

Security footage from nearby businesses and residences, obtained and analyzed by The Post, capture the minutes leading up to and immediately after an ICE agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, in Houston on Tuesday. https://t.co/k6UsVJfJPv

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Georgia's 2020 vote was counted three times, once by hand. Biden still won by 11,779 votes. Kash Patel just ordered 260 FBI analysts to spend their weekends hunting for derogatory information on Fulton County residents anyway. That's not law enforcement. That's a taxpayer funded grudge.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Here’s Trump repeatedly lying to journalists on his way back from Turkey, falsely claiming there were no security concerns with his Qatar gifted plane

He’s desperately trying to bury the story because he doesn’t want people remembering that he accepted a luxury jet from Qatar, that it’ll end up at his presidential library after he leaves office, and that hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent upgrading it, yet it’s still not secure enough to carry the President of the United States.

No wonder they subpoenaed the New York Times journalists who reported on it. Sick!

[MightyZekken @MightyZekken]

Look, I get it. I used to work on Apaches. They're cool as hell, and I promise the pilots were just as amped as the crowd.

However, safety regulations are written in blood. There's a reason they weren't supposed to fly over crowds at such a low altitude. At that altitude at that speed, if anything had gone wrong, we wouldn't be seeing people crying about how unfair it is to the pilots. We wouldn't be seeing Kegsbreath saying "we'll fix this." We'd be seeing people demanding answers about why they were flying like that. We'd be seeing crying and angry families on the news demanding justice. And we'd be seeing the Secretary of "War" throwing these pilots under the boss so fucking fast there wouldn't even be skid marks.

[Drey @thedreydossier]

Trump Accounts are no longer going to be optional- so if you ever plan on having a child in the USA, you should read what I found:

According to the @SocialSecurity Administration's announcement last week, they are modifying the hospital birth registration form so that a Trump Account is AUTOMATICALLY created for your child through that same process.

It will be bundled into the Enumeration at Birth program (EAB), which is the already automated gov pipeline that gives your newborn a Social Security number. It’s one box that you check, you don’t have the option of unbundling it. So if you want your kid to have a Social Security number, they have to have a Trump account.

Which is strange, because according to the IRS and @USTreasury’s public announcements, these accounts only open when a parent actively elects to open one. So which is it? Why is nobody in the government interested in explaining this flagrant contradiction?

Who is going to answer the basic question of what a parent does if they don’t want a government-linked investment account (one that collects biometric data, by the way) created for their child at the exact moment their child’s Social Security number issued?

They can call it a savings account all they want, but a $1,000 deposit is a hell of a cheap price for building a lifelong financial file on every American child before they can consent to anything.

And once the government normalizes linking a person’s identity, financial activity, and predictive systems from birth, who gets to decide what that data will be used to predict later?

We deserve answers immediately. @ndstudio @WhiteHouse

[Steve Rattner @SteveRattner]

Companies associated with Trump's sons have received $1 billion and counting in government contracts since he returned to office.

We've never seen anything like this coming out of the White House.

📸: @MSNOWNews @Morning_Joe

[MeidasTouch @MeidasTouch]

NEWS: Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Iowa Ashley Hinson says her family can barely afford groceries. Her disclosures say she’s worth up to $7M richer since taking office. And the “all my stocks are sold” claim? Also false. The receipts 👇 https://t.co/ViK64xghxh

[sam @sam_d_1995]

this is a perfect example of the political double standard that republicans benefit from: Democrats have never denied disaster aid for red states, and it would be a massive scandal if they did

… but Trump does it and it’s barely a story because he does corrupt stuff every day

[Olivia of Troye @OliviaTroye]

I heard a bus full of judges was traveling across America so I got in my car and chased it to Ohio. What I witnessed was extraordinary.
Inspired by Poland’s March of a Thousand Robes, retired judges walked through Columbus to stand up for the rule of law.
Carlo 🐾 was a fan favorite. Watch:👇
https://t.co/DbH3J47LWN

[The Lincoln Project @ProjectLincoln]

Taxpayers funding Trump using two jets for a single trip is the actual "waste, fraud and abuse" that they're telling you rural hospital funding, Social Security, or Medicare is.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board tears apart Trump’s tariffs in a blistering editorial:

“The President is right that his tariffs are at work—in destroying U.S. jobs and raising prices. The U.S. has lost some 75,000 manufacturing jobs since January 2025, including 25,900 in motor vehicle and parts production...

there’s no question his tariffs are raising costs for U.S. manufacturers.…Mr. Trump and his advisers claim that foreigners pay his border taxes, but the evidence shows that U.S. companies, workers and consumers are picking up most of the tab.

The Anderson Economic Group estimates that auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico alone added about $1,600 to the cost of each car made in the U.S. last year. While auto makers absorbed some of the Trump tariff costs, they also passed on a large share to customers…Call it the Trump tax.”

[Rick Alther 🇺🇦 @rickalther]

Wow, you don't say. This administration violating laws and misusing resources?

[The Washington Post @washingtonpost]

Breaking news: The Department of Homeland Security misused Federal Emergency Management Agency resources when it diverted dozens of staff to help with immigration enforcement, a new report by a group of House Democrats shared first with The Post says. https://t.co/6g4aLBTsAx

[Acyn @Acyn]

Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Iowa, Ashley Hinson, is suggesting that her family struggles with groceries despite disclosures indicating she’s millions richer since taking office.

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Houston Mayor John Whitmire: For the Salgado family, life will never be the same. At no fault of theirs, Mr. Salgado was chased by a unmarked vehicles. Before he could identify himself and speak as a Houstonian, he was shot and killed. We will use all of our resources to pursue an independent and transparent investigation.

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Tonight I wrote about two cases that demonstrate DOJ is no longer committed to doing justice. https://t.co/KUmL5uPLQ5

[Gianl1974 @Gianl1974]

Three Florida Republicans were just charged with creating a fake voter guide to steal an election.

They did not hack the machines. They did not stuff the ballot box. They printed a fake Republican voter guide, made it look nearly identical to the real one, and mailed it to tens of thousands of voters before a 2024 primary.

It worked. An incumbent won by fewer than 1,000 votes. Now three elected officials in St. Johns County, Florida are facing criminal charges for it.

[The Shallow State @OurShallowState]

Do you not despise Trump enough? Then read this:
Today, the Trump Interior Department and Commerce Department announced a rule that says that destroying an endangered species’ nest or habitat would NO LONGER be considered illegal. (MAN this pisses me off!)
Why would the scumbag f*ckfaces do this, you ask?
So that fossil fuel companies, agricultural interests, land developers, and others can disturb and destroy the habitats of vulnerable species, of course.
Environmental law firms plan to challenge the final rule in court, charging that it violates the Endangered Species Act as well as a 1995 SCOTUS decision.

[Amee Vanderpool @girlsreallyrule]

ICE claims that Araujo drove into one of their SUVs with his van and then tried to run over an agent.

There were no marks on the van and KHOU11's @JRogalskiKHOU found surveillance footage showing ICE chasing Araujo and cutting him off.

Renee Good all over again.