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[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

“It was always bad. And now it’s at a breaking point.”

That’s how a VA psychologist described mental health care for veterans after the Trump administration hollowed out the system meant to serve them.

That same psychologist described one-on-one sessions for the veterans who need them most being pushed online, with some cut to as little as 16 minutes. In one case, individual therapy was replaced by group sessions packed with as many as 35 veterans at once.

Hundreds of mental health staffers have left the VA under this administration and haven’t been replaced. So when a veteran needs more time, more care, more attention, it simply isn’t there. The VA now has around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it did a year ago, and the numbers keep falling.

This is the country’s largest health care system, serving 9 million veterans.

They face mental health challenges at higher rates than the rest of us. They die by suicide at roughly twice the rate.

When their care is neglected, it costs lives.

Secretary Collins was handed a fundamental responsibility, and veterans are paying the price for his failure to meet it. We must not stay silent while those who served scream out for someone to listen.
https://t.co/ySYwRLlp9C

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is not a gray area. Trump is running the government for the private enrichment of his own family, in the open, while the guardrails that used to catch this are dismantled one by one.

Trump’s sons have poured money into more than a dozen defense tech companies. Most of those bets were placed after their father won a second term. Those same companies have since pulled in billions in government business, and the Pentagon they now depend on answers to the man whose last name they share.

Either we end the corruption or the corruption ends us. There is no version where we look away and the country stays intact. 

Where is the outrage from my Republican colleagues? The ones who spent years lecturing this country about corruption and the swamp. Wake up!
https://t.co/jzVDi9iCV0

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

It has now been revealed that the CEO of StubHub also owns hedge fund that scalps millions of dollars worth tickets on StubHub.

[Joe Kent @joekent16jan19]

This week the Senate will vote to merge our military’s most sensitive & secretive capabilities with Israel. This merger is buried within the massive NDAA and they’re hoping you won’t notice.

Merging our military with a foreign country is a treasonous betrayal of our sovereignty.

Call your senators & tell them to vote no on the NDAA until the merger w/ Israel (section 219) is taken out.

Tell them that we will never support merging our military with a foreign nation.

The senate switchboard number is: [phone].

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

The New Mexico Attorney General is claiming that the Justice Department — effectively acting at the behest of Trump — is obstructing the investigation of Epstein's former Zorro ranch.

"Survivors of serious criminal conduct at Jeffrey Epstein's Zorro Ranch in New Mexico are being denied justice. That harm is a direct consequence of the USDOJ's continued failure to comply with the NMDOJ's outstanding records request." https://t.co/ZEVtUjPpKI

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Exclusive: Trump is using tens of millions in taxpayer money meant for national parks to fund his desired projects, including White House paving stones he had promised to pay for, documents obtained by @michaelscherer show: https://t.co/uRQEFX2KED

[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.

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

For the last 2 years, @LeverNews has been warning about this case spearheaded by JD Vance - it is his plot to create Citizens United 2.0 and destroy what remains of America's anti-corruption laws.

Today, the Supreme Court gave Vance the ruling he sought.

[Chris Murphy 🟧 @ChrisMurphyCT]

It’s important to understand that the Court is now just an arm of the oligarchy.

This decision strips the people of the right to limit the role of money in politics. It gives billionaires special rights to buy our elections. A precondition of oligarchy.

[Amy Siskind @Amy_Siskind]

A NYT analysis found that despite Trump’s promises that private donors would cover all his self – aggrandizing projects in DC, in reality these projects will cost of billions for taxpayers. At a time when most Americans are struggling with affordability.
I gifted this so you can read it.

https://t.co/zOys8KvkBC

[Anderson Cooper 360° @AC360]

NY Times investigative Reporter Eric Lipton breaks down his investigation into how President Trump and Howard Lutnick's families stand to profit from a $1.6 billion mining deal with Kazakhstan.

[Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1]

Justice Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench.

It reads in part: "Today, this Court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three branches of Government have been acting in open defiance of the Constitution all this time. Its conclusion is wrong."
…
"In holding otherwise, the Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws."

[David Sirota @davidsirota]

This remains one of the most corrupt votes in the history of Congress.

Lawmakers — including @SenSusanCollins — blocked an amendment to reinstate a longstanding rule requiring medicines developed at American taxpayer expense to be offered to Americans at reasonable prices.

Now, Americans pay the world’s highest prices for medicines that we taxpayers paid to develop.

[Nicholas Kristof @NickKristof]

.@elonmusk says that no one can name a person who died from his aid cuts. In fact, I've met the kids who are dying, and I've talked to the families who lost children. In my columns, I've cited many, many names of people who have died because of Musk's aid cuts. A few examples:
*Yamah Freeman was a 23-year-old woman who died in childbirth because Musk cut funding for the diesel for ambulances in her part of Liberia. She couldn't get to a hospital and died as people were carrying her there. I talked to her parents and sister in their village.
*Gbessey Kiadu, age 1, died of malaria because of his cuts to malaria medication in Liberia. I talked to his mom in her village.
*Ibrahim Koroma, an infant, died of AIDS in Sierra Leone after he interrupted HIV supplies. I talked to health workers who cared for him.
*Achol Deng was an 8-year-old girl with HIV in South Sudan who died when Musk cut funding for the health care worker who provided her medicines. I talked to the healthcare workers.
I could go on and on. In almost every village you go to in South Sudan, Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone or other countries I reported in, you find people dying because of aid cuts. I challenge Musk: Come with me on a reporting trip, and we'll talk to these moms and dads, and you'll see the dying children themselves. I think if you see the kids whose lives are at stake, maybe you'll change your mind.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Let me tell you what just got reported, because you will not believe it until you see it laid out.

The Trump administration cut a billion-dollar tungsten deal with Kazakhstan. Tungsten is the metal we need for missile warheads, fighter jets, and computer chips. Trump himself got on the phone to close it. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick worked it from the inside, sending letters, leaning on the Kazakh president, lining up as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing.

Within weeks of those negotiations, investors tied to a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a 20% stake in an entity connected to the very same Kazakhstan project their father was negotiating. Around that same time, Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Lutnick’s own sons, raised $210 million for a partner in the deal and pocketed the fees.

The fathers set the policy. The sons cashed in.

Six days after the Trump sons and their partners moved their money, Lutnick signed the final deal.

The reporting found one or both families have financial ties to at least 14 companies working with the government on critical mining deals.

The total federal funding flowing toward those companies tops $8.9 billion.

This is your tax money.

It is supposed to secure our supply chains and protect our troops, not pad the portfolios of the President’s children and the Commerce Secretary’s children.

This is the most corrupt administration in American history. It is not close.

We must keep digging, and keep asking the questions they do not want asked. Republicans in Congress are unwilling to lift a finger. Mike Johnson is running a protection racket.

Either we will end the corruption, or the corruption will be the end of us.

https://t.co/yFOl7zvOhC

[Emoluments Clause @Emolclause]

#BREAKING: Hayes: “Acting AG Todd Blanche told Congress not to worry about the $1.8 billion slush fund for insurrectionists…The DOJ then told the court the same thing—don’t worry, it’s moot, it’s dropped, and then last week, the judge said okay, fine, put it in writing. She ordered Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and an associate AG to all sign ‘a declaration under the penalty of perjury, they will not take any action to create or operate the anti-weaponization fund and that the anti-weaponization fund will not proceed in any manner or under any name.’ Well, today was the deadline for that and guess what? They came back to the court and they said no, we’re NOT doing it. We’re NOT filing any declaration to officially kill the fund, which probably means the slush fund is NOT dead.”🙄🤦‍♀️

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

A note to my friends who still back Trump:

I am not here to dunk on you. I am writing because you have a working brain, and this story insults it.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool got a $14 million paint job. Shortly thereafter the water turned green and the new “American flag blue” coating started peeling off the bottom in sheets. Trump says vandals did it. He claims, without evidence, that someone took a knife and cut a 300-foot slit, a number that grew to 350 feet while he was still talking.

Back on May 4, Trump bragged about that same coating and said, if you had a knife, you could not even cut it, so strong, like powerful rubber. He cannot have it both ways.

And the green water?

A George Mason scientist tested it and found ordinary, non-toxic algae, the kind that blooms in any shallow sunny pool. To fight it, crews dumped hydrogen peroxide into the water.

Hydrogen peroxide is also a paint stripper.

That, not sabotage or vandalism, is the obvious reason the paint came off. They wrecked their own paint job, then blamed phantom vandals for it.

The lone "vandal" they paraded is a 67-year-old Olympian who touched a flap of paint already peeling on its own.

Here is the thing. If they will look you in the eye and lie about something this small, something you can see with your own eyes, ask yourself what else they are lying to you about.

Again, you have a working brain. People like Karoline Leavitt are counting on you to stay loyal instead of exercising independent thought.

Prove them wrong.

[Rep. Mike Levin @RepMikeLevin]

This should be on the front page of every newspaper in America.   

Trump’s DOJ just shut down a federal investigation into a coal company owned by Sen. Jim Justice, one of his closest allies, after it racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations for dumping dangerous chemicals into our waterways. A veteran federal prosecutor with 24 years on the job said he had never seen anything like it.  

The man who killed the case was Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer and current Acting Attorney General. This is the same guy who just gave Trump, his family, and his companies permanent immunity from IRS audits. Now Trump wants the Senate to make Blanche’s appointment permanent too.  

Equal justice under law was never supposed to come with exceptions for the President’s friends.  

The pattern isn’t subtle: protect Trump’s friends, prosecute his critics, and get rewarded with more power. That is corruption, plain and simple. Todd Blanche must not be confirmed.
https://t.co/95K8zIySPz

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

Some thoughts on the new Epstein Files revelations:

I’ve now read everything that’s come out from the new Haberman and Swan book, and the thing I keep coming back to is the Situation Room. They held multiple meetings in the Situation Room about the Epstein files. That room is for war. It’s for national security emergencies. It is not for figuring out how to spin a scandal you’re telling the country is a hoax.

While the President was deflecting or calling this old news, his own Vice President and Chief of Staff were huddled in the most leak-proof room in America because they knew how bad it really was.

You don’t take a nothingburger to the Situation Room.

And I have to be honest, reading all this brings back a lot of frustration about what happened in the House of Representatives. I sat there and watched Mike Johnson send the House home early to dodge a vote on releasing these files. I watched him refuse to swear in a duly elected colleague for months just to stall the discharge petition. Month after month of excuses, arm twisting, and procedural games, all to keep this information from the public. We only got the files because survivors, families, and a handful of members in both parties simply refused to let it go.

So when people ask me why I talk so much about transparency and accountability, this is why. The truth eventually comes out. It always does.

The only question is whether your leaders helped reveal it or helped bury it.

Everyone who voted to keep these files hidden should have to answer for that.

Finally, notice what’s missing from all of this is any sign that Trump’s DOJ will actually investigate the powerful men named in these files.

Draw your own conclusions about why a Justice Department run by the President’s former defense lawyers might not be eager to pull that thread.

[Micah Erfan @micah_erfan]

CNN = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
CBS = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
FOX = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
WaPo = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.
WSJ = Owned by a right-wing billionaire.

Ah yes, tell me more about how the mainstream media is “far left.”