alfred rivera

Retired IT Professional, Dog lover, Theater fanatic. (Opinions are my own)

[Ted Lieu @tedlieu]

-Gas prices are up

-Grocery prices are up

-Credit card delinquencies are up

What are trump and @WhiteHouse focused on? The size of the reflecting pool.*

*This is not a Saturday Night Live skit. It’s real.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I swear to God we are living in Idiocracy. Everyday I think 'This can't be real.' But it is.
You couldn't write a satirical movie like the insane shitshow we are being forced to live through in real life.

[Molly Jong-Fast @MollyJongFast]

I didn’t think this was real but it is. Our president is comparing a pool to skyscrapers because that’s totally normal and not at all insane.

[Jim Acosta @Acosta]

When 60 Minutes is in trouble, we are all in trouble. When Pelley says CBS is meddling in his reporting for political reasons, believe it. https://t.co/lWpjdv1Unm

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Hegseth consistently gaslights that Iran's military is "destroyed". It's a total lie - as evidenced by today's devastating attack on Kuwait.

13 Americans dead, billions wasted, and Iran still has the majority of their missiles/drones; control of the Strait.

A disaster.

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

Here’s a fact check of some of President Trump’s claims, including a bunch of long-debunked lies, from a single softball New York Post interview released this morning.

Claim: “We're the only country in the world that has mail-in ballots.” Truth: Dozens of countries have mail-in ballots, including Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, and Switzerland.

Claim: The 2020 election was “rigged” and has “been proven to be rigged.” Truth: Not rigged, there’s no proof for Trump’s assertion more than five years later, and he lost fair and square.

Claim: Trump won “three” presidential elections. Truth: He won in 2016 and 2024, lost in 2020.

Claim: In the 2024 election, “There were areas that were just rigged…rigged against me.” Truth: Nonsense again; he won that election fair and square but lost some areas of the country fair and square.

Claim: Democrats “could not win” “if they didn’t cheat.” Truth: Democrats, like Republicans, clearly win various elections legitimately.

Claim: California mails out “38 million ballots," and while "some people get three, four, five ballots," "Republicans get, oftentimes, none.” Truth: California mails a ballot to all active registered voters, of which there are 23 million, not the “38 million” figure Trump has used repeatedly; while there are occasional errors by county elections offices and the postal service, there's no general anti-Republican bias in ballot-mailing in the state.

Claim: “I inherited the highest inflation in the history of our country…Biden had like 9, 10% inflation. And I inherited that, and we have it way down.” Truth: The inflation rate the month Trump returned to office was 3.0%, lower than the most recent rate of 3.8%; Biden-era inflation did peak at 9.1%, but that was in mid-2022, and it wasn’t close to the all-time record of 23.7%. Regardless, it had fallen substantially before Trump’s inauguration.

Claim: “We have $18 trillion being invested in the country in just 11 months.” Truth: This is a completely fictional figure. The White House’s own website says there have been $10.6 trillion in “major investment announcements” this term, and even that’s a massive exaggeration that counts vague pledges, not-even-pledges, and pledges that are about mutual trade rather than investments in the US.

Claim: Trump had gas prices at “$1.85 in Iowa” on the day he visited there in January. Truth: The Iowa average gas price that day was $2.57 per gallon, per AAA; GasBuddy found four stations in the state out of 2,036 selling for $1.97 that day, none at $1.85; the station outside the venue where he spoke was at $2.69. (Ethanol-gas blend E85 was around $1.85, but that can only be used in a small percentage of cars, and he didn’t say that was what he was talking about.)

Claim: Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was still wearing a mask “a couple of months ago.” Truth: I've found no evidence for this; the Talarico video many Republicans have mocked shows Talarico wearing a mask in 2022, not 2026.

Claim: Mitch McConnell was “losing by a lot” in the 2020 Senate election in Kentucky but then Trump endorsed him and got him elected. Truth: McConnell, running in a state that hasn’t elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992, led in all but one public poll in that race, and that one exception was a poll conducted for a pro-term-limits group in which he trailed by just one point; he was always the overwhelming favorite.

Claim: The Jan. 6 attack was “nonsense” in which “the FBI said, ‘Go in. Go in.’” Truth: That was a riot perpetrated by Trump supporters, and there's no evidence the FBI ever told rioters to illegally enter the Capitol. DOJ’s inspector general found the FBI had zero undercover agents at the riot…and Trump was president at the time and had personally appointed the FBI director.

Claim: Former VP Harris “was the border czar” but “never went.” Truth: She went to the border twice as VP, and the Biden administration repeatedly emphasized she was never “border czar” but had a narrower assignment focused on the “root causes” of migration from Central America.

Claim: Under Biden, “25 million people” poured over the border. Truth: This is a further exaggeration from the wildly exaggerated “21 million” figure Trump used to use; even counting “gotaways,” it’s not even close to correct.

Claim: Democrats are so dumb that “we had 11,888 murderers, most of whom committed more than one murder, allowed into our country.” Truth: The federal data it appears Trump is referring to is about people who entered the US over the course of multiple decades, *including during Trump’s own first administration.*

Claim: Under Biden, countries emptied their jail populations into the US – “the whole jail was emptied into our country.” Trump and his team have never substantiated this claim even though he’s made it for years, and experts on global prison policy and on the countries he has previously identified as the supposed culprits have told me they’ve seen no evidence for it.

More details: https://t.co/NtFk7PUfwN

[Ben Rhodes @brhodes]

Some guy named Nick Bilton serving an audience of 1 (Bari) service an audience of 1 (Ellison) serving an audience of 1 (Trump). This is how oligarch-authoritarian takeover of media happens

[Terry Moran 🇺🇸 @TerryMoran]

Scott Pelley told the truth. So CBS News fired him.

[Jake Tapper 🦅 @jaketapper]

“HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN” the president says about a congressman who hasn’t been seen publicly in nearly three months, hasn’t voted since March 5, and has yet to tell his constituents where he is.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

Hilariously bad take that aged so so badly even by Scott Jennings standards

[Tim Miller @Timodc]

Saturday US sources said we were on verge of a deal but it would take a few days because the Iranians are in caves and can't communicate. In the next 48 hours Iran rejected deal, bombed Qatar, and announced they are halting communication with US. Cave wifi must be improving.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

Gas prices are $6 a gallon and going up because Trump is bored and doesn’t want to do the work to end the war.

That’s the actual truth.

[Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom]

7 lies in 2 sentences.👇

[Eamon Javers @EamonJavers]

I spoke to President Trump on the phone last hour about the end of negotiations with the Iranians. He told me: “I don’t care if they’re over, honestly. I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over. If they’re not, you know, I think they took too much time. Frankly, I thought they started to get very boring.”

https://t.co/Erp6SKZ2Tx

[Acyn @Acyn]

Ossoff: This war in Iran is the worst foreign policy blunder since Iraq. And just like the Iraq War, it's a war built on lies. Let’s update the record:

On day one, the president said it was running ahead of schedule. On day 10, he said it was very complete . Day 21, getting very close . Day 32, leaving very soon . On day 39, the President of the United States said a whole civilization will die…

And on the next day, day 40, he declared total and complete victory . Day 67, great progress. Day 79, the clock is ticking. Today is day 92 . And on day 92 Iran's ballistic missiles and drones have not been destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz, which was opened before the war is still closed. The regime is intact along with its stockpile of highly enriched uranium—a stockpile Iran only built after President Trump shredded President Obama's Iran deal

[Gavin Newsom @GavinNewsom]

Donald Trump is weak.

When you stand up to his bullshit, he retreats. When you challenge him, he folds.

Bullies count on fear. Stand up to them.

[VoteVets @votevets]

Trump is reportedly about to hand them $300 BILLION to end a war that he started but can't win. This is what losing a forever war looks like.

[Brian Krassenstein @krassenstein]

Remember when Republicans melted down because Obama settled a legal dispute with Iran for $1.7 billion?

The proposed US-Iran peace deal includes a $300 billion “reconstruction fund.”

MAGA, any comment?

[Barb McQuade @BarbMcQuade]

We already have a process for determining whether accusers are credible. It’s called a trial. And a jury already decided they believed E Jean Carroll. THIS is weaponization.
https://t.co/wKl1B9YX4v via @NYTimes

[Acyn @Acyn]

MacFarlane: Comey's arraignment is now set in that seashells by the seashore case. If the calendar holds up, the DOJ is going to have to show some of its cards in that case—they have filed so little, they've put nothing on the record in that case, wondering if it's going to implode between now and then. And all of this all of this seems to be rooted in based on the lie about the 2020 election.