Former CQ Roll Call. Pretend techie. Freelance journo. MST3k lover. SciFi nerd. Talent-challenged musician. Expect typos. Walk towards the fire. RT=L show prep

Your Nation's Capitol
The people in my cover photo don't endorse my opinions
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
This is a brilliant piece of journalism - literally deconstructing the latest Russian strike drone, explaining how it works and where the components needed to make it work are being sourced by Russia, even after 4+ years of war
RFE/RL takes apart a Russian Geran-4 drone to uncover what makes the jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) faster, harder to intercept, and capable of operating deep inside Ukraine -- from its turbojet engine and advanced camera to foreign-made communications and navigation components. @cxemu @radiosvoboda
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
It is double the offense to our country when aliens first enter our nation illegally, and then violate our sovereignty again by voting in our elections. The Department of Justice will not let that happen anymore: Today we announce the latest series of noncitizen voter fraud charges against four individuals: Cliff Sanon, Dilea Ochoa-Perez, Sade Guppy, and Eduardo Gallardo Maldonado. These charges are just allegations, and every defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. However, this is another meaningful step forward to restoring the integrity of our elections. "We the People" means American citizens, and only American citizens, decide who gets to govern us. justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/fou…
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Me when seeing my mostly not-online family this week:
Explaining The Viral Lesbian Bar Story To My Normal Friend (He Doesn't Use Social Media)
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I haven't even tried with my church family and it is nearly impossible to restrain myself.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
If your press freedom ranking puts the UK above the US, then your press freedom ranking is a joke. Sorry.
Replying to @semafor
Washington’s outsized global role means such erosions of norms and freedoms threaten the rule of law worldwide, a Stockholm-based think tank argued, while a Carnegie scholar warned, “a less democratic America is a less powerful America."
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
They depicted Paul Ryan chucking Grandma off a cliff, pretended Brett Kavanaugh was a gang rapist, compared John McCain to George Wallace, and accused Mitt Romney of murdering a woman who died of cancer. But sometimes it pays to play dumb.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
There was a woman outside of @DailyCaller office in downtown DC harassing passerby and she actually SPIT ON one of my editors. We called the cops and apparently she is well known in the area for yelling at and assaulting people. Yet the police told us if she doesn't have any active warrants, all they can do is give her a citation and let her loose. No accountability.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
Kudos to @billburr for drawing attention to a real problem: that Americans have no freaking idea how health care works. The dead man charged exactly the rates for exactly the services that Barack Obama told him to under penalty of law. He neither set the price for a single medical procedure nor made a single person sign up for coverage .
.@billburr criticizes corporations' reaction to Luigi Mangione's killing of a health care CEO: “The response to the Luigi [Mangione] thing. It wasn’t ‘Maybe we need to look at what we’re doing if it makes some crazy person do this.’ [Healthcare executives’] response was to take their faces off the internet and get security. It’s like, you don’t think you need to examine this? You’re not the president. You’re just the CEO of a business.”
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
I have many thoughts on the Nikole Hannah-Jones story, especially having attended the kind of schools she sent her daughter to, but if we're looking for takeaways, here's a simple one. When an expert in education so thoroughly demonstrates a jarring and near complete lack of expertise in the act of getting an education for her own daughter, we should stop taking advice from her on curriculum, instruction, and all other fads disguised as wisdom she offers. That seems like the least we could do. Her daughter's personal struggle, which is indeed sympathetic, wasn't much of a teachable moment for her, as she doesn't seem to have updated any of her priors (and actually fudges funding facts, so as not to disrupt the narrative of under-resourced schools). But it should be a teachable moment for us, about the outsized influence of a scholar who claims to know better than anyone what her daughter would be up against in the school to which she chose to send her, but was inexplicably surprised and left her daughter completely unprepared for it.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
.@RepRickCrawford has the authority to push for the release of @DNIGabbard final report into the Biden-era coverup of Directed Energy Attacks. I asked @odni if Jay Clayton will make the public release of the report a priority. US government personnel are suffering. Some have told me they are on the cusp of losing their homes, and vehicles because of medical debt to deal with their injuries. Transparency works.
Thanks @C__Herridge for continued attention to the AHI issue. Next step is for HPSCI chair Crawford to release his staff’s report, as well as any other docs related to this investigation. The report is done. Release it. Period. Why it’s not out is immensely frustrating. Crawford will be out of a job soon, so I’d hope he honors the victims he has personally championed by releasing the report that has been in the works for over a year by his own staff. Multiple victims hav relied on and believed in HPSCI, and the report would be a part of Crawford’s legacy.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
American citizenship is being sold as a product out of an office in Irvine, California.
Meet the US Army vet running a California baby factory for Chinese nationals to have American kids trib.al/FDlITV3
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reminder: NYC just paid out $1.8B to teacher applicants who failed the LAST because it was determined that K-12 general knowledge & reading comprehension were "not shown to be directly related to, or representative of, the actual content/requirements of the teaching job".
Funny genre of tweet: non-American libs who think of themselves as American Democrats getting the occasional reminder that chud complaints about crime, schools, etc are not pure racist brainworms
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
As I said on Fox & Friends this weekend, prosecution is not the solution when the fraud rate is > 50%. That is the case with Medicaid home health care. The Trump administration must end the whole program by revoking all states' waivers for the "personal services" billing code.
A nondescript office building in Westbrook, Maine hosts eight home health care companies. Many had nonfunctional phone numbers, some with Minnesota area codes. None of the offices were open despite their posted hours:
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
This week my dream of 6 years came true and I finally mustered the courage to ask my neighbor if he'd allow me to take down the rusted old chain link fence that surrounds his house and borders our driveway. I finally made my pitch since we are getting our driveway repaved soon and *must* remove our section of the fence to do so. He VERY cheerfully said if I'm willing to do it, that would be fine. 20 minutes later I was outside with pliers taking that sucker apart. Bolts threadlocked from 75 years of rust were no match for my pure joy and enthusiasm to get it done as a surprise for my husband. I also didn't want it to be HIS project to do when I'm the one who hated the fence and he could care less. I was already exhausted when I triumphantly dragged a rolled up pile of chain link to the curb, but then came the fence posts. Sweet Lord. I used what is best described as the "mud method" of clearing the dirt from around the post down to the concrete, setting a hose on it for a few minutes, then wiggling it around before pulling it out. It worked great and reminded me a lot of being in labor with my first baby (IYKYK). I got TWO out in about 40 minutes. I was about to give up on the third when my daughter, sitting on the grass watching me, said "Jesus, please help mama do it!" and I knew I couldn't throw in the towel quite yet. I do thank the Lord for giving me that last bit of strength but I was SPENT after that. I looked down the yard to see six more posts left to remove (and this is just one of three fence sections) and wanted to cry. Reader, it took my husband less than 20 seconds to pull out each post. When I told him how difficult it had been for me and cheered his first removal, he chuckled and seemed to be motivated to pull them even faster. The last one was pulled so quickly he was clearly just showing off. Oh and he did this after coming home from the gym. Later I went out and found our local scrap guy filling up his trailer with the posts and chain link rolls, picking them up and tossing them like they were cotton candy. Vive la différence.
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My favorite 4D-chess conspiracy theory is that the Trump Admin is doing this just for the lawsuits to lose to set precedent for future admins that will want to ban all the newly credentialed right-leaning media. It's not true. But it is a, "be careful what you wish for" moment
JUST IN: POLITICO's joint lawsuit with CNN and MSNOW to lift the White House ban is now live. Read it here: storage.courtlistener.com/re…
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
Malcolm Gladwell is from Canada and lives in America.
Asked who would win in a hypothetical war between Canada and the U.S., @Gladwell tells @JeffreyGoldberg that Canada would prevail “because all of the American troops invade Canada, and then realize that they want to stay.” theatln.tc/65NUk0Q9 #TAF26
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
James Talarico isn’t a Christian and his pastor is an antichrist based on his teachings. The only true thing he said was, “Don’t let your children hear this abomination”
Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico’s pastor (PCUSA) preaches during his Easter sermon that Jesus NEVER rose bodily from the dead and that he does NOT believe in a literal resurrection.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
Everyone should read this entire thread
The daughter is correct. I called this at the time.
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Meredith Dake-O'Connor retweeted
Sound analysis from an unlikely source.
America’s corporate governance system is broken, and it’s killing public companies. Look no further than Cracker Barrel: Decades of brutal mismanagement have seen one incompetent CEO after another walk away with a massive paycheck while customers and actual shareholders take a beating. Why does this keep happening? Because proxy advisory firms like ISS are corrupt. They blindly rubber-stamp failing boards year after year, protecting the corporate elite while burning shareholder value to the ground. The root of the rot is index funds. There's no question that indexing one's money is a smart financial move for most people. But just because you passively index your investments doesn't mean your corporate votes should be handed over to the managers of your fund so they can play politics. Right now, passive funds hold massive, unchecked voting blocks while having zero skin in the game themselves. It is time for a simple rewrite of the rules: We need to index the votes of index fund investors. Passive index funds should be forced to automatically split their votes to proportionately mirror those of retail and active institutional shareholders — the people actually doing the research, risking their capital, and fighting for performance in the companies they hold shares in. No more rubber-stamping. A change like this will immediately strip corrupt gatekeepers like ISS of their toxic influence. True accountability happens when lazy, overpaid boards actually answer to the stakeholders they represent, rather than screwing them over. Actual, logic-driven governance when your money is passive happens when your vote passively follows the voting decisions of the actual market. We need to stop letting passive capital protect active incompetence. By stripping index funds of their arbitrary voting power and empowering engaged investors, we will finally torch corporate cronyism and usher American capital markets into a golden age of capitalism.
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