Micki🌊TrueBlueCalifornia

Support Dems dedicated to civil rights, equality. #StandWithUkraine🇺🇦 #dolphinproject Ⓥ

[Micki🌊TrueBlueCalifornia @starry_galaxies]

💔💔💔

[Blue Planet Society @Seasaver]

'as a result of excess killing, they were burning some of the blubber of over 1,000 dolphins in an incinerator' https://t.co/udLoRWPH8Q

[Sam Stein @samstein]

The art of the deal:

pay billions of dollars to take offshore wind farms offline

then pay hundreds of millions of more to prop up coal plants

https://t.co/4V9tCFjzoS

[Fred Wellman @FPWellman]

This is how fast things collapse when you feed massive parts of our government “into the wood chipper.” Trump and the Republican Doormat Congress have destroyed some of the most important pieces of our nations defense against disease, crime, and much more. We must take back our government this fall.

[Lauren Underwood @LaurenUnderwood]

Republicans didn’t cut “government waste.”

They cut your health care.
They cut your social security.
They cut your retirement.
They cut your SNAP.
AND they raised your taxes.

They’re just hoping you don’t notice.

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

DOGE was just a cover for the largest robbery of the American people in history.

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

The whole point is that he is unqualified and will make us less safe. This isn’t a glitch. It’s the design. The US is to bend to its rivals abroad and collapse from within. For this he is the right guy!
https://t.co/76hGh4lbnA

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Trump’s budget director Russ Vought is the most dangerous person you’ve never heard of.

And he just proposed turning every federal grant into a loyalty test.

His plan would make funding for cancer research, housing, transportation, and public health depend on one thing: whether it “advances the President’s policy priorities.”

Not whether it works.

Not whether Congress authorized it.

Whether it pleases Trump.

This is the appropriations power. It belongs to Congress and to the people.
To my Republican colleagues: where are you?

Congress passed this funding. You voted for it.

Vought is telling you to your faces that your votes do not matter, that he and his enablers will override the law whenever it suits them. Every day you stay silent, you give away the institution you were elected to defend.

Grow a spine.

This is not about left or right.

It is about whether Congress still exists as a coequal branch, or whether we have quietly surrendered the purse to an unelected hack who holds the Constitution in contempt.

History will remember who stood up and who looked away.
https://t.co/2yHKBTNLbj

[Jack Hopkins @thejackhopkins]

According to Andrew Weissmann, Blanche using sleight of hand; they’re not killing the deal. Trump still gets $1.776 billion. He still gets a sweeping civil liability shield. They only removed the J6 slush fund piece. Same jackpot. Less scrutiny. Worse than before.

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.

Here's what happened:

He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.

Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.

A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).

The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.

But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.

With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.

And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.

The threat does all the work.

By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.

Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.

If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.

Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

Ultimately, I think this is one of the reasons we're cooked as a nation. The media - writ large - has just completely abdicated its role to fact check and report objectively and become Mean Gene standing like a potted plant while Republicans cut bullshit-filled promos.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

There is no world in which this is okay.  

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito did not recuse himself from cases involving Trump’s Treasury Department while his own son was secretly working there as a political appointee and attorney. 

His son's employment was hidden so thoroughly that his name appears nowhere on the Treasury Department website, he has no public resume, and his bar listings are outdated. 

If Alito had recused himself, the secret would have come out. He didn’t recuse himself. 

This is a clear conflict of interest, and the American people deserved to know about it. 

The federal recusal standard is clear: a justice must step aside in any case where there is a reasonable basis to question whether he or she can be impartial. A justice ruling on cases involving the department where his son works fails that test. The Treasury Department sits at the center of some of the biggest legal fights of this administration, and challenges to Trump’s $1.776 billion January 6 slush fund could be headed to the Court next. 

The Supreme Court is the only court in America with no binding code of conduct. That is completely unacceptable, and it has to change NOW. 

Congress controls the Power of the Purse, and therefore the Court’s funding. If the Court will not adopt a binding code of conduct with real recusal review on their own, I support withholding their funding until they do. 
 https://t.co/FV2Tkpz7Dk

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

When this war is over, and Ukraine is victorious and whole again, and every innocent victim, every fallen defender, every destroyed city and town is documented, let no one say they did not know. These Russian crimes against humanity are happening in full view in real time.

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

Most of these terms were in the JCPOA Trump tore up in 2018, only difference now is that Iran has proof of concept it can hold the global economy hostage by cutting off the Strait of Hormuz but watch Trump spin this as a great win while his trained seals in the media clap along

[Fred Wellman @FPWellman]

We are destroying our entire scientific community for the idiocy of a few.

[scary lawyerguy @scarylawyerguy]

The end result of roughly 40 years of regressive tax policies that have allowed wealth to flow upward to a degree unseen since the 1920s all while those same people do nothing but complain about their supposedly crippling tax burden. Media shrugs.

[Timothy Snyder @TimothyDSnyder]

“Superpower Suicide” is a concept to help understand the approach of the Trump regime to the rest of the world. We are fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda.
https://t.co/m8iQvUGOlW

[Johnny FD @JohnnyFDK]

For those wondering why NATO exists and why countries want to join the defensive alliance.

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

CNBC correctly told Trump that inflation had come down to about 3% when Biden was leaving office.

Trump falsely responded: "No it wasn't. It was down to 5%, it wasn't down to 3%."

Inflation was 3.0% in the month of Trump's inauguration, January 2025. It hadn't been close to 5% since early 2023.

Trump then said he should get credit for how prices fell right after he was elected in November 2024. Except...not only did prices continue rising in November and December 2024, the *inflation rate* rose both months: from 2.6% in pre-election October 2024 to 2.7% in November 2024 to 2.9% in December 2024.

Fact check: https://t.co/5CbxGOVkUR

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Gen. Hertling: Anyone saying Ukraine should give up territory for peace is out of their mind. Ukrainians are fighting for sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Ukraine is conducting terrific operations and right now is the ultimate fighting force in Europe.

[Daniel Dale @ddale8]

On CNBC, Trump repeated his long-debunked lie that "no country in the world has" birthright citizenship other than the US. About three dozen countries offer automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, including US neighbors Canada and Mexico, while others have more restricted forms of birthright citizenship. (No pushback from the interviewers.)

[Michael MacKay @mhmck]

The russia-backed Trump regime of the United States is suspending arms deliveries to Finland, Estonia and other front line countries to russian aggression.

Trump works for Putin.