Marie & The Snakecharmers 🎵 🇺🇦🌻

This is getting wild now 👀 So I started looking at the ballroom after digging into the Reflecting Pool yesterday. I’m starting to see some patterns. The playbook works like this. Pick your contractor personally. Invoke “Unusual and Compelling Urgency” to skip competition. Use the 250th anniversary as the justification. Inflate the price. Don’t disclose who’s actually doing the work. Repeat. Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. $13.1M. No bid. No competition. Justification: “Unusual and Compelling Urgency” 250th anniversary. Contractor: Atlantic Industrial. Zero prior federal contracts. No pool or monument experience. The subcontractor doing the actual work doesn’t appear anywhere in the justification documents. Now the ballroom. Trump personally selected Clark Construction to build his $400M White House ballroom. Clark is already on site with people and equipment. Then NPS quietly awards Clark a separate $17.4M no-bid contract to fix two fountains in Lafayette Park directly across the street. Never posted publicly. Never competitively bid. The justification? Clark was already nearby. That’s it. The original estimate for those fountains in 2022 was $3.3M. The consultant who wrote that estimate said the administration literally took his cover page and added millions with no itemization. Final price: $17.4M. Same urgency exemption. Same 250th anniversary justification. Both contracts bypassed competitive bidding. Both used the same urgency exemption. Both cited the same 250th anniversary. Both awarded to contractors with direct Trump connections. The Lafayette Park contract was never posted in public federal spending databases. The Reflecting Pool contract was posted but the subcontractor doing the primary work appears nowhere in the paperwork. Combined taxpayer bill: over $30 million. Combined competitive bids received: zero. This urgency exemption has been used in less than 1% of NPS contracts over the past decade. They used it twice in the same year. For birthday decorations. Senator Blumenthal is already demanding answers on the Lafayette Park contract by May 15th. The Reflecting Pool has a Cabinet secretary photographed on site and a subcontractor with an expired federal registration that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the contract documents. This isn’t two separate stories. This is one story. The 250th anniversary isn’t just a celebration. It’s a billing mechanism. And taxpayers are footing the bill with zero say in who got the work or why..

What it's like to be an owl – the strange and wondrous science of seeing with sound themarginalian.org/2023/12/24/owl…

I hate to keep asking because I don’t want to know the answer but where is Bobby getting all this semen from minors to enumerate all this sperm?

@HeathaT @Patranoid @svdate Anecdotally, I'm 70 & frequently travel to the UK. I'm definitely feeling jet lag more than I did 10 years ago. It might be a little better if I could travel private on a plane like Air Force 1!

@Patranoid @svdate Those long distance foreign trips seemed to really exhaust Trump in term one…and Biden too during his presidency. (There doesn’t seem to be a lot of definitive research on jet lag and aging, but it certainly does feel like time zone differences get harder to handle)

Jokes aside, Trump’s combo of agitated insomnia (as witnessed by his late night Truth Social benders) and then crippling exhaustion the next day is familiar to anyone who has taken care of an elderly person suffering from a number of age-related conditions.

Thomas Massie: The Epstein scandal is “deeper and darker” than anyone imagined. “It’s bigger than Watergate.” “It’s bigger than Iran-Contra.” “It’s not about Joe Biden or Donald Trump.” “There are degrees of evil here that we’ve never seen at this scale … ” “Our government was compromised by wealthy, connected billionaires, and by Jeffrey Epstein himself.” “At the age of 14, these girls that were being sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein were told if they could go find another girl to take their place, then they wouldn’t have to be sexually abused.” “And some of them took that deal.” “It’s one thing to be evil to a child.” “It’s another thing to get a child to do evil.” “The light sentence that was given to Jeffrey Epstein in 2008 that allowed him to victimize hundreds of more women, we want to know, why was he given that light sentence?” @RepThomasMassie @MassieforKY @Local12

So you're telling me that cutting tariffs leads to lower prices? Fascinating.

Oh really

The Trump appointee in charge of grazing policy owns at least 5 cattle operations that will directly benefit from the opening of federal lands to cattle grazing.

Supreme Court today: We'll allow Alabama Republicans to change the congressional map in the primary election even though absentee voting has literally already started Supreme Court last December: November's too late to strike down the GOP's map in TX's March primary election!!

RT @MacFarlaneNews: Watchdog formally requests probe into Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s “road trip” reality series ====> https://…

Want to help Texans shape our future? Start by supporting trusted reporting. Become a Texas Tribune member during our Spring Member Drive. trib.it/donate

I first met Clark Reynolds when he was just three years old at our Black History Month reception at the White House. Over the last ten years, it's been wonderful getting updates about his life through his letters. Check out how he’s doing now:

The current Trump-appointed head of the CDC didn't think COVID was deadly and said we should "let it rip." Forgive me for being nervous about how he's handling hantavirus.

important thing to note here is dr oz cites a current american replacement rate of 1.5, which is not true. the american replacement level in 2025 was 1.79. interestingly, the white replacement rate is in fact at 1.5 though

"You may say 'That would be crazy!' Perhaps. But that’s what people thought about refusing to hear the nomination of a Supreme Court justice, right up until Republicans did it in 2016. That’s what they thought about the kind of mid-decade redistricting Trump ordered. That’s what they thought about the idea of wiping away the Voting Rights Act, but Republicans did that too. The point is that Democrats need to start thinking creatively, and take this cue from Republicans: 'That would be very controversial' is not a good enough reason not to take action." publicnotice.co/p/vra-democrac…

Is anyone investigating why the president keeps falling asleep in public, or do we have to wait on the tell-all book to come out?

Mafia boss or president? 🤷‍♀️

Ewwwww

Trump rejects Iran peace proposal, oil rises; Israeli base allegedly found in Iraqi desert; South Korea condemns Hormuz attack on Korean ship.

Released Ukrainian POWs honored mothers of the missing and captive during a support rally in Cherkasy on May 10. Video: @vitaliia_r / threads.