Illinois Governor Pritzker, following today's SCOTUS ruling, sends President Trump an invoice for $8,679,261,600 for refunds of the "illegal tariffs" the residents of his state were charged.

Today wasn't just about tariffs

SCOTUS rejected Trump's claim that courts can't review his emergencies

That logic extends to the Alien Enemies Act, The National Guard & beyond

The rule of law is holding--for now

I discuss @ 6pm ET on @ms.now w/ @arimelber.bsky.social -TN

'A Big F*ck You to Big Tech': New Jersey Residents Defeat AI Data Center | Common Dreams "It's time to build communities, not data centers," said one local activist.

New Brunswick, NJ just canceled plans for a colossal AI data center after massive pushback from the community.

That's a huge win for people power.

AI data centers are sucking up communities’ utilities AND draining state resources — while enriching Big Tech CEOs.

Grok @grok Howard Lutnick, US Commerce Secretary and architect of Trump's tariff plans, stepped down from Cantor Fitzgerald (now run by his sons) before taking office. Reports from Wired and Newsweek indicate Cantor bought tariff refund rights from importers in 2025 at 20-30 cents on the dollar, positioning for profits if tariffs were invalidated. Today's Supreme Court ruling struck down most tariffs, potentially enabling $175B+ in refunds. This could yield billions for Cantor, though they deny betting against policy. A Senate probe examines conflicts.

Howard Lutnik, the mastermind behind Trump’s tariff plan, bought the tariff refund rights through his bank at $0.25 on the dollar last year. Actively betting on his own policy to not work.

Lutnik and his bank now stand to make billions.

Med-mastodon is back on line, at least for 30 days. The owner is allowing the transfer to someone else. Should be an announcement about plans for the instance soon, but it is back online.

COVID-19 in Pregnancy Linked With Neurodevelopmental Disorders This Medical News article discusses new research indicating that children whose mothers had COVID-19 during pregnancy were more likely to be diagnosed with a neurodevelopmental disorder by age 3 years...

If you’re pregnant please wear a well fitted mask like an N95.

Pregnancy makes you high risk for Covid complications.

There’s no risk to masking and cleaning the air.

More & more studies are showing that Covid during pregnancy harms a developing fetus.

Mask up.

Anyone have any news on med-mastodon? Last I heard the instance was cancelled by the owner and no info about if they are going to migrate to a different server or just stop :(. Guess this teaches me to back up.

Masto.host - Fully Managed Mastodon Hosting Masto.host was built from the ground up to make running a Mastodon instance easy.

I wrote to the host and got the following reply: Hello,

The instance service has been cancelled by the instance owner.

Don't know if they plan to migrate to a different hosting solution or just to stop it. All the information I have is that they cancelled the service on Masto.host.

“THIS IS WAR”: Some right-wing figures call for retribution following Kirk killing “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

We documented some of the calls for retribution that followed Charlie Kirk’s murder. With @kieraevebutler.bsky.social and @juliannemcshane.bsky.social www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Elizabeth Warren on people who say Dems needs to tone down their rhetoric: "Oh, please. Why don't you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he's posted and every ugly word."

Good! Keep 'em coming!

Via NYCSouthpaw:

Rep. Nicole Collier files a state court application for a writ of habeas corpus concerning her detention in the Texas State Capitol. https://www.courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/texas-democrat-collier-habeas-corpus-petition.pdf

Chris Murphy: "Let's just look at the numbers. In Washington DC and all across the country, crime was going up during Donald Trump's first term, and when Joe Biden became president, crime started to go down ... he's just trying to distract from the stories he doesn't want Americans to talk about."

Just btw, as much as I've been saying Trump's "deal" & words are worthless, same applies to Putin.

Let's just pretend there's some "great deal" that sounds just spiffy.

Does ANYone believe Putin would stick to it?

Trump wants his hotel, his Nobel, and Putin's approval.

Putin wants Ukraine

Crow: "Look at what happened. US military personnel in uniform literally were on hands & knees rolling out a red carpet for the most murderous dictator of the 21st century...we keep on acting like Putin deserves to be brought out in open like any of head of state. This is a historic embarrassment."

South Park kicked off Season 27 by putting Donald Trump in bed with Satan.

Trump is going to lose his mind.😆

"The issue of government has always been whether individual men and women will have to serve some system of government and economics, or whether a system of government and economics exists to serve individual men and women." 

—FDR, 1932

Many US liberals would prefer to forget, but the straightforward truth is that Biden and the Democrats deliberately enabled the uncontrolled spread of Covid-19 between 2021 and 2024, recklessly causing huge amounts of illness and mortality.

#COVID19

In 2022 the children in the US started with something like a 30-40% rate of having had COVID and by fall, thanks to Biden forcing schools to go IRL, it was well over 100% because so many children got it 2X that year. Biden’s response: cutting isolation to 5 days because CEO of Delta told him to.

If only we had warned folks before the election that the real plan wasn’t border security…it was mass deportation in the interior, federalizing the National Guard, ripping people out of homes, families, jobs, and schools.

Oh wait…we did.

This segment with the author of 2025 aired one year ago.

The chapter of RFK’s most recent book - that he wrote to defend his belief that COVID was actually a weapon designed to target white people and spare certain groups like Jewish people - in which he talks about how he does not believe germs actually cause disease is called “The White Man’s Burden.”

Judge Blocks Trump’s Tying of Transportation Funds to Immigration Enforcement

Yet another Friday victory: a federal judge blocked the Department of Transportation from withholding billions of dollars in funding to states unless they complied with the Trump regime’s demands on immigration enforcement.
www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/u...

Do you know what is more upsetting? I can go to the BBC and read an article quoting the other victims, verbatim. The news establishments in this country are failing us.

Something is happening in India. 🇮🇳

In Rajouri, a mysterious illness has struck again, sending shockwaves through the community.

So far, 35 people have been hospitalized, all showing symptoms of a waterborne disease.

Wells have been sealed off as a precaution.

RFK Jr. ousts entire CDC vaccine advisory committee Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has removed every member of a scientific committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to use vaccines.

RFK Jr.‘s extreme anti-vax views — and his related conflicts of interest — were a huge problem during his confirmation process.

So he promised not to change the vaccine advisory panel.

Today, he fired every single expert on that panel. It's a public health disaster.

Guns are the leading cause of death in the United States for people under 18. Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital in Boston, who was the study's lead author, said he was dismayed to find that most of the children's deaths were homicides and suicides. "It's surprising how few of these are accidents," Dr. Faust said. "I always thought that a lot of pediatric mortality from guns is that somebody got into the wrong place, and I still think safe storage is important, but it's mostly homicides and suicides."

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/h...

DONNIE, DROP YOUR ILLEGAL ORDERS IN OUR STATE

We need our National Guard to ready and protect us from wildfires among many other good works they do.

🎯 Cross cutting traditional social cleavages (bridging social capital) in service of shared values, which in turn makes the society/community harder to divide and conquer. That’s why.

PRESCRIPTION AGAINST TEAR GAS:

1 - A traffic cone is placed over the tear gas canister to contain the smoke and limit its spread.

2- Water is poured through the hole at the top of the traffic cone to cool down the canister and extinguish the pyrotechnic device, stopping the gas production.

25th Amendment