Paul Drougas @PDroug

@nicklalota Nick wants Gigi to use his bathroom. Hey Nick, are you getting so desperate that you're going full culture war mode?

@nicklalota Hey Nick what do you think of Trump lying about being carried out of 1 Liberty Plaza by two big, strong firemen on 9/11?

@nicklalota Your actual votes in Congress are for the Epstein class and your corporate donors. Come election time you pretend to be a working class champion

@RepLaLota There's nothing in the Constitution mandatimg the number of justices. There were 9 circuit courts over 130 years ago; now there are 13. Expand the SC by 4 to match the # of circuit courts. Oh and the current Congress is completely subordinate to both the Executive and Judiciary.

@JohnG_Arch @RepLaLota Heavy lifting of BS

The Trump White House has put into place a series of mechanisms to fix or invalidate the midterm elections. Congress will not save us. The courts will not save us. Our only hope — should the election be rigged or stolen — is nationwide strikes. Our only hope is to cripple the machinery of commerce and government, although this militancy will be met with savage state repression. Otherwise, we are doomed. There will be no exit. If the measures advocated by the Trump administration are implemented, emergency powers will be invoked to assert unprecedented federal control over voting. Federal agents will seize election materials. They have already seized ballots from previous elections. The U.S. Postal Service will only send ballots to those included on federally approved eligibility lists drawn from state voter rolls. These rolls, subject to citizenship checks, will deny election-mail services entirely in states that refuse the administration’s demands for voter data. Federal troops and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — with $113.5 billion in additional funding allocated by Congress through September 2029 — will be deployed to or near polling stations which have a traditional Democratic Party majority. Those branded as “anti-capitalist” and “anti-Christian” or charged with belonging to antifa will be intimidated or blocked from voting. Trump told The New York Times in January he regretted not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. Trump not only wants to abolish mail-in ballots – Democrats vote by mail in higher numbers than Republicans – but voting machines and tabulators which allow election boards to post results on election night. Trump and his supporters in Silicon Valley are acutely aware that the level of their corruption and disdain for democracy — unlike anything seen in U.S. history — makes them vulnerable if they lose power. They have no intention of allowing this to happen no matter how egregious the constitutional violations. They seek to extinguish the last vestiges of democracy. They believe, as PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel wrote in 2009, that “freedom and democracy” are not “compatible.” Theil is sweeping up all our information gleaned from government tax, medical and law enforcement records. This information is being delivered to databases that can be exploited for state control and profit. Thiel and his coterie of technocratic billionaires are implementing the agenda he envisioned 16 years ago: to make technology an “alternative to politics.” Read my full column, "The Next Election May be Our Last", at Substack — link below.

@nicklalota Suffolk continues to pay more in taxes than we get back; meanwhile your votes for Trump are ruining the country, from supporting the war, tariffs, to his paramilitary terror org ICE. You voted to increase health insurance to satisfy your donors.

@RepLaLota Nick is dumb or dishonest to say LEOs are above the law, and their enforcing the law separately from ICE goons is somehow shielding the undocumented.

Trump’s Wars of Whim, And How He Loses Them talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-… via @TPM

@RepLaLota Nick is either an idiot or flagrant lier to fit so many falsehoods in one tweet. At this point he's just pandering to the MAGA cult with this BS.

@RepLaLota Nick is still shilling for the SAVE voter suppression bill that many of his GOP colleagues won't vote for, because it requires documentation of citizenship like a passport or birth certificate with your current name. And now he's putting up "racist!" straw men while lying.

@nicklalota Nick is playing nasty games, giving $$ to Head of Harbor and screwing over East Hampton because we won't cooperate with his jack-booted thugs terrorizing us. The East End will remember in November.

@RepLaLota Nick thinks we don't know he voted for the upcoming cuts to Medicare that will destroy safety-net hospitals.

Senate Republicans do nothing as their liege loses a war--and America's future--to Iran, they install his consigliere so he can steal taxpayer dollars and pay it to adjudged terrorists, and they took away your health care. And they want to whine that Democrats have more important priorities?

Senate Republicans @SenateGOP

2 months ago

Schumer flat-out lied. Yesterday, every Democrat had a chance to vote for voter ID. Not a single one did.

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@RepLaLota And yet you're threatening to withhold same CPF from East Hampton unless they waste their resources on ICE thugs without warrants. Sounds like if it's a blue part of yr district: OK to hurt local LEO if they don't follow your authoritarian demands

@nicklalota I stand with EH police to be focused on local safety; not an arm of federal deportation machinery. You stand with fascistic ICE thugs to terrorize your constituents.

@RepLaLota Nick is not telling you he voted for a merger of U.S. and Israeli military. Even a fellow GOP rep called it “a betrayal of our sovereignty." Nick only pretends to be America First

@RepLaLota Nick is quoting the corporate friendly Tax Foundation, funded by ultra right figures like the Scaifes. He says he is trying to lower middle class taxes, but his real agenda is to lower the taxes of his rich donors.

@nicklalota Holy crap Nick what is wrong with you? That was a software error, not fraud! I think Trump's dementia must be rubbing off on you...

I set the schedules at Walmart. 66% of the working adults on Medicaid in this country hold full-time jobs. I am one of the reasons that number stays where it is. I tune your hours until you are valuable enough to keep and cheap enough that the state pays your doctor. There is a narrow line between those two facts, and my whole job is standing on it. People think a schedule is about the store. How many registers on a Saturday. How many stockers before a truck lands. On the surface, it is about that. Underneath, it is about a threshold. Schedule you a little more and you become my full cost. Schedule you a little less and you walk out the door. So I find the hour in between, the hour where you stay, and where a second office in a different building quietly covers the part of your paycheck I chose not to pay. I do not cut wages. Cutting wages is a fight, and it looks terrible on a poster. I hold the wage. I hold it at the number where a full-time associate still clears the Medicaid line, and I let the line do the cutting for me. Everything I just told you is legal. Sit with that one. Not a single statute says I cannot do this. The public covers the gap, on purpose, by design, and every inch of it sits inside the rules. That is the part I am proudest of. Here is the sentence the company loves most. Starting pay at Walmart is up 93% since 2015. It is true. We say it every chance we get, and we should, because it is a beautiful sentence. Here is the other true sentence, the one that lives on a different slide. Over those same years, more of our people landed on Medicaid. A raise that leaves more of your workforce on public insurance is a raise you frame and hang on the wall. Some numbers, because I am proud of the numbers. The median Walmart associate made $30,520 last year. Our chief executive's disclosed pay was roughly $29 million. That is close to 1,000 of them for 1 of him, and every one of those 1,000 is a person I keep parked an hour under the line. We spent $37.6 billion buying back our own stock since 2020. Spread that across the payroll and it comes to about $23,550 for every associate in the building. We chose the buyback. The shareholders needed it more than the shelf-stockers did, because the shelf-stockers already had Medicaid, and the shareholders had only the shares. We even help you enroll. Onboarding keeps a person whose whole role is walking a nervous new hire through the Medicaid application. She is kind about it. She tells you there is no shame in it, and she is right, there is none. She is also cheaper than the raise that would make her job disappear. She is the most efficient hire in the building, and I mean that as the highest praise I have. The wage reaches a certain point, the state reaches the rest, and she is the bridge between them, smiling, so you cross it feeling helped. A worker who feels helped does not come to my office asking why the check is short. I will not let Walmart take all the credit. Amazon's count of workers on public aid nearly tripled in five years while the company cleared $77 billion in profit. Dollar General runs on the same line. So do McDonald's and FedEx, same year, same math. The single biggest group of workers on food assistance does not clock in at any store at all. They drive for an app that calls them their own boss, so there is no employer on the paperwork to hand the bill to. We all found the line. We all stand on it. Mine just has a smiley face over the door. You paid for this already. You paid once at the register, for the low price. You will pay again in April, on a different form, for the Medicaid that makes the low price possible. The rollback sign on the wall is a receipt for the half of the wage we routed back to you to cover. You got billed on the back end and thanked on the front, and you thanked us back, because it was still cheaper than the other store. There is one entry on my staffing model that holds about 340 million people, and it is my favorite employee. It never calls in sick. It never files a grievance. It does not want a badge, a break room, or a name tag. In every year I have done this job, it has never once asked me for a raise. I do not write a name in that box. I keep the hours landing where they land, so the box stays full and the second office keeps paying. The wage was always going to be a little too low. I built it that way, inside the law, on purpose, down to the hour. Monday through Sunday, we pay our half. The other half clears the following April, from an office that believes it runs a health program. It has never once noticed it is running my payroll.