Issues You May Know, 11 July 2025.
A list of things you might want to know about - or write your reps about.
Conflict of Interest: Rep. Rob Bresnahan campaigned on stopping congress stock trades and then dumped medicaid-related stock before voting for the big boondoggle bill.
Rob Bresnahan promised that he wouldn't vote to cut medicaid. Then he voted to cut medicaid twice. And benefited from dumping medicaid related stock prior to doing so. It's a little ironically insulting because he actually introduced a bill in Congress to supposedly ban stock trades. I guess he has to make a show of it because he campaigned on the issue.
The New Republic - Malcolm Ferguson/ July 3, 2025 Republican Votes for Budget After Dumping Medicaid-Related Stock Representative Robert Bresnahan has some explaining to do. GOP Representative Robert Bresnahan voted for Trump’s budget on Thursday, conveniently after he dumped his shares of stock in a Medicaid provider. The Pennsylvania representative sold his Centene stock in May, just one week before he voted “yes” on an early House version of the budget bill that crippled the health care system. By Thursday, when he voted for the final version of the bill, Centene stock had plummeted by 43 percent.
And he's been doing stock trades that have very much to do with his political shenanigans. For example he's trading tech stocks and all in on bringing the whole AI data center nightmare to northeastern Pennsylvania. He'd been pretty much a jellyfish. This I guess isn't surprising because there are ads on tv saying he identifies as a "business leader" not as a representative of the residents of northeastern Pennsylvania, after all. The two things are mutually exclusive because trickle down economics is a discredited right-wing economics pseudoscience theory that isn't real, but politicians of all types just keep trying to push it on us.
Rep. Rob Bresnahan in Pennsylvania noted to benefit with defense stocks from a war with Iran.
counterpunch June 20, 2025 Roaming Charges: Neo-Conned Again! Jeffrey St. Clair + Here are some the current US politicians who are benefiting with aerospace and defense stocks if the US goes to war with Iran: John Boozman Rob Bresnahan Gil Cisneros James Comer John Curtis Patrick Fallon Lois Frankel Scott Franklin Josh Gottheimer Marjorie Taylor Greene Bill Hagerty Diana Harshbarger Kevin Hern Julie Johnson William Keating Greg Landsman Michael McCaul Kathy Manning Jared Moskowitz Markwayne Mullin Carol Devine Miller Carol Miller Blake Moore Dan Newhouse Jefferson Shreve Mike Simpson Thomas Suozzi Bruce Westerman + There used to be a name for this. Now it’s just business as usual. +++
It's ironic because he campaigned on stopping Congress from trading stocks, and introduced legislation to that effect in May 2025, but he's continually in a position to be criticized for doing it himself.
Conflict of Interest: Stephen Miller financially profits from Palantir.
Stephen Miller’s Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir - Over a dozen Trump appointees in the White House and Department of Homeland Security have owned stock in the controversial company raising privacy concerns across the political spectrum. Jun 24, 2025 | Nick Schwellenbach Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s powerful deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor, is more than just the architect of the administration’s hardline immigration policies: He has a personal financial stake in them. Miller disclosed from $100,001 up to a quarter million dollars of stock in Palantir, a tech company woven into the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and used by other federal agencies such as the Pentagon. That stock ownership is previously unreported; this new information comes from his financial disclosure, recently released by the White House. Ethics experts say Miller’s deep involvement in ICE’s efforts and his financial stake in Palantir raises conflict of interest concerns.
Interview with the reporter:
Stephen Miller PERSONALLY PROFITING From ICE Terror He's Directing Status Coup News Jun 27, 2025
My letter to reps:
Stephen Miller has personal financial profiting interest in Palantir and he's in a position to make decisions about the government using Palantir, the company named after the bad guys tool in Lord of the Rings. This is an obvious conflict of interest and this corruption must be stopped. This should be obviously inappropriate to everyone working in government in any way.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Republican politicians have been using "natural" catastrophes for eugenics purposes.
Of course the Republicans are using weather now the same way they used the pandemic. It couldn't be more obvious. They openly talk about their "demographic" concerns. By not mitigating catastrophes, they know that such events hit non-white people harder, and they’re willing to sacrifice some white children, even in their own families, in the hopes that more non-white people will suffer and be wiped out. This is why they defund public health, the weather service, and other public goods, even though it hurts a lot of people, including white people.
This is why when they claimed that Democrats were controlling the weather, or using covid in some dark plan; it was all Accusation in a Mirror. It's rather obvious when you look at that and the rest of it in the Project 2025 document, together as a whole agenda.
My letter to reps:
I want the weather service to be fully funded. This attempt by politicians to dismantle public infrastructure for health and safety is unacceptable.
Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.
The bad guys use wild animals as torture weapons.
I'm remembering back to when I went to the cinema in 1984 to see Romancing the Stone, a romantic adventure comedy set in politically turbulent Colombia. I was happy that the birds escaped. And I remember it was the bad guy who was keeping alligators in captivity and using them to threaten, scare, torture, and kill people. The bad guy. He was a corrupt and despotic high level official with the secret police who murdered someone in cold blood for a treasure map. And spoiler, the bad guy winds up getting his own hand chomped off by one of his own captive crocs. But the point is that it's the corrupt bad guy using alligators to threaten people. The bad guy.
I used to like the em dash, but I do not want to be mistaken for a chatbot.
I Can Spot AI Writing Instantly — Here’s How You Can Too Evan Edinger Jun 8, 2025
This gets at some of the things I find both annoying and a bit nauseating about synthetic text, that are phrasing techniques so obviously ripped off of very viral influencer writers on Medium, and then amped up.
Yes, calling and writing your elected representatives makes a difference.
And no, don't bother calling politicians if you're not a verifiable constituent they represent. I keep going over this because I continually people saying they're doing activism, and then telling people to make anonymous calls, or send emails to some official in another state, and that's just not going to do anything. I've explained the tallies, I've explained the point, I've pointed to experienced references on this stuff.
Well here are actual former congressional staffers explaining it. Again. This is from the Indivisible transcript for the stream on youtube.
5.15.25 What’s the Plan? A Weekly Discussion with Leah and Ezra Indivisible May 15, 2025
Martin asks, when I call MOC, which for those who are a new member of Congress office to leave a comment, the staff member always says.
00:36:54.000 --> 00:37:09.000
I'll pass that on to the member of Congress. Leah and I are former congressional staffers. I have said something to that effect to many a constituent who has called in. I'll let my boss know that. I'll pass that on to the member. I'll pass that on to the boss. That's a standard thing that people say. So Martin, that is accurate.
00:37:09.000 --> 00:37:30.000
I bet a lot of you are hearing that when you call a member of Congress. Martin continues, I doubt the staff member actually speaks to the member of Congress about my comment. So what really happens? Does my call end up as a check mark on a tally sheet? If so, would it be more efficient just to say to the staff member, put me down as a blah, blah, blah, no on Medicaid. I'm calling three members of Congress every day. So what's the best strategy?
00:37:30.000 --> 00:37:59.000
Love the practical question, Martin. Leah, do you want to reflect on your time as a congressional staffer? Sure. Yeah. So a very normal thing that happens if you are a congressional staffer is someone calls and they spend several minutes explaining how they feel about something and you say, thank you, I will pass that on to member of Congress. The way that you're actually going to pass that on to the member of Congress, as you note, Martin, is you're going to mark that comment down and you're going to say that person is a no on cuts to Medicaid. And at the end of the day or at the end of the week, depending on the office, whatever cadence.
00:37:59.000 --> 00:38:06.000
They're going to get a tally of how many people called in and said, you know, pass this tax bill versus how many people called in and said.
00:38:06.000 --> 00:38:35.000
No cuts to Medicaid. And they're going to just get a sense of the volume of coverage. And so you are totally right. Like you are free and welcome. And if you want to absolutely share to staffers, it can genuinely help with the vibes to like have a lot of people calling about something personal that's that's an intense experience and it does shape how people interact with it. But the actual content that will get shared to the member of Congress, unless you have some kind of extremely important, compelling personal story that they need to do something about.
00:38:35.000 --> 00:38:40.000
The actual comment, the way it's going to get shared is the number of people who called for cuts on Medicaid. So yes, if you want to save time.
00:38:40.000 --> 00:38:48.000
Call, Sam and no, hang up. That's fine. I mean, given your address and everything, but you don't need to do a longer story. They're not going to have time to share it all.
00:38:48.000 --> 00:38:56.000
Let me just 100% agree on that. Let me add a couple of more items or suggestions that are just practical.
00:38:56.000 --> 00:39:03.000
Your goal is to be counted, right? Your goal is to be one of many people who are there The people that get counted are constituents.
00:39:03.000 --> 00:39:19.000
Non-constituents do not get counted. Full stop. It doesn't matter how good or bad your member of Congress is. This isn't a knock on members of Congress. They will ignore you if you are not from the state of their senator or if you're not from the district of your representative, which means you have to give your address if you want to be counted.
00:39:19.000 --> 00:39:28.000
They are going to then enter you into a system if you're not already in the system. They've got this big complicated software system where they track all the calls that came in.
The Democrats nominated a Marxist like Joe Biden in 2020.
Photo is looking down the street with a double yellow line with sidewalk lined with telephone poles carrying wires down the road, there is a church sign that says Revival Baptist Church with the name of the reverend, phone number and address, and then the changeable sign area says A vote for Biden is a vote for Marxism. The photo is labeled Scranton Pennsylvania July 12th 2020 Chloe Kaczenski Humbert