February had fewer tweets than usual. I guess I've been busy and not getting through all of the Twitter goodness lately.
Let's start with Individual 1 and his administration, including the Cohen hearing:
Obvious but worth repeating: "the President has had a lying dirtbag as his right-hand man this whole time" is the PRO-Trump argument today.Then it's on to the Wall, the "emergency" at the border, and immigration generally:
jay smooth
Apparently working for Donald Trump for ten years makes you really good at keeping calm while getting yelled at by mendacious, barely coherent assholes.
Ben Ehrenreich
The problem is that every legitimate point about Cohen’s bad character....only makes the President look worse!
Chris Hayes
love how we use "fixer" as if that's just a very normal job description that very normal people have
@AsteadWesley
It would truly be *chef’s kiss* if Donald Trump got taken down by a signed personal check. History textbooks would have to have a sidebar explaining what personal checks are and inevitably at least one student in every class would ask if there were transfers or digital means and that teacher would have to say there was and no one knew why he wrote a check. I’m positively giddy over this possibility.
Jared Yates Sexton
Take home message from today: Imagine a world where white-collar crime, bank fraud, accounting fraud, and tax fraud were properly investigated and prosecuted. That’s a world where “President Trump” is an impossibility.
Jesse Eisinger (Politico reporter who covers the IRS and white-collar crime)
Call me old-fashioned, but when a judge says a member of the president's cabinet covered up for a serial child rapist, I think that ought to be a huge scandal. But I guess that's not the world we live in now.
The Rude Pundit
Things that disqualify you from the presidency:
1) Eating chicken with a fork.
2) Not remembering what song was on when you got high in college.
3) Believing family lore about your ancestry.
Things that don't:
1) Being a know-nothing racist with no qualifications whatsoever.
Ian Millhiser
I wanted to see what would happen if I took the natural skin color from around his eyes and applied it to the rest of his face and took away the comb-over and hair dye. So I guess this is what donald would look like if he was a normal man:
@stonecold2050
It’s really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really really hard to believe this guy is President
Mike Royce
Can someone explain to me why Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Native American heritage warrants continued, obsessive coverage by the political media but the fact that at least 12 women accused Trump of sexual assault was forgotten as soon as he was elected?
Judd Legum
This [nuclear] disarmament fiasco [with Russia] requires multiple perspectives. It greatly lessens our security. It also kickstarts weapons spending, leverages fear over two separate citizenries, and supplies convenient doubt of collusion and Russian interest. Important to note that whenever the suspicion of collusion begins to coalesce there's always some "crisis" or "raising of tensions" between the US and Russia. It feels so organized, like professional wrestling or staged theater.
Jared Yates Sexton
My octogenarian mom just called to report that Stephen Miller is a "son of a bitch bastard."
Jennifer Mendelsohn @CleverTitleTK
Republicans are now for asset forfeitures to fund eminent domain condemnation of private property by unilateral executive action.Followed by racism, white supremacy, police brutality (this time with Virginia blackface):
Scott Shapiro
Oakland tells it like it is!
Tom Steyer
As someone who has visited our Southern border several times, the only emergency is the crisis that was created by this administration’s cruel immigration policies that separate families and put innocent children in cages. The wall is a Fake Trump Emergency.
Nanette D. Barragán
There's more of a threat of white supremacist terrorism than anything coming across the border. The difference is that there's no political win to be had from fighting white supremacist extremism and the Republican Party has built its power base on scapegoating minorities.
Jared Yates Sexton
Declaring a fake national emergency when you cannot pass a law democratically is FASCISM. This is an unconstitutional, illegal power grab and it must be stopped.
Mikel Jollett
The fact that white supremacist terrorism isn’t a major priority and a totally imagined border crisis is should tell you everything you need to know.
Jared Yates Sexton
BRILLIANT >> A street artist has responded to Trump's hate-filled War on Immigrants by installing a huge photo of a child on the Mexican side of the US border fence. Street artist JR has just installed a new piece along the Mexican border wall. This is a continuation of his work talking about immigration:
Steven Greenhouse
Reminder: The only crisis at the southern border is the way we are treating migrants there.
Carol M @camarch45
If all undocumented immigrants were deported today, next year’s Social Security trust funds would have approximately $13 billion less for benefit payouts.
Undocumented immigrants quietly pay billions into Social Security and receive no benefits. Undocumented immigrants contributed an estimated $13 billion into Social Security funds in 2016.
Marketplace
Guess what? A study shows that self-driving cars are better at detecting pedestrians with lighter skin tones.Sexism, misogyny, and toxic masculinity:
Kate Crawford
Segregation benefits white people both materially and psychically. Racism evolved to justify first the extraction of capital and profit from black bodies and then to justify the hoarding of resources for white people and the deprivation of resources for black ones. Today's seg is manifestation of both prejudice and material interest
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones
Identity is political because this country was founded by straight white men who used (and use) political power to advance their interests at the expense of everyone else. If you don’t see how politics affects different identities it’s probably because our politics centers yours.
feminist next door @emrazz
Plenty of black folks have graduate degrees. They can even compete with white folks on income. What they don't have is wealth, which white people have inherited. Universal graduate school does not ameliorate that inequality. Wealth is what saves you from hardship and economic calamity. What allows you to buy a house. Pay for a kid's college. Start a business.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones
I will never, never, never get over being furiously angry that I will always be randomly selected, and that there is no status or power or rank or title or wealth that will ever make me a full person when traveling. I resent being humiliated in front of my child, for a pointless, worthless performance. Especially while being surrounded by dudes who look exactly like the terrorists who keep planning mass assassination plots & shooting up houses of worship, targeting innocent people.
Anil Dash
I keep hearing people say that universal health care only works in homogeneous countries and I just can’t make that shake out in any way that doesn’t mean: “I’m just too racist to let anyone who doesn’t look like me stay alive long-term.”
Catherynne Valente
Funny how one rich white guy in the white house lies every single day and no one ever says it means we’ll stop believing rich white guys.
Liz Plank @feministabulous
Anyone asking if the arrest of Christopher Hasson - the U.S coast guard member plotting carnage against Democratss, left-leaning media & had arsenal in his home - set white men back the way they’re asking if Jussie’s arrest set Black gay men back? Just curious.
Midwin Charles
Us white folks were taught to think of racism as something you sign up for, instead of something you learn to do without even thinking about it. So we think not wanting to be racist is the same thing as not being racist.
Brian EdwardsTiekert
Calling a Black POTUS married 25 yrs to 1 wife with 2 children, no mistresses, affairs or scandals, ‘the antichrist’ but a white POTUS married thrice, 5 kids by 3 women, mistresses, affairs & scandals, ‘God‘s anointed,’ proves your religion is white supremacy.
Bishop Talbert Swan
Speaking as someone who said "I don't see color" embarrassingly late in life, there's a high correlation between saying that, and not acknowledging systematic issues and biases that mean your "not seeing color" doesn't make life better for people of color, and can make it worse. Or to put it another way, "I don't see color" is what you say when you want credit for being a good person but don't want to do any work to make life better for people whose color is seen, often intensely, by others, and by society.
John Scalzi
All these colorblind folks still manage to never hire black people, so what’s really going on here
@fivefifths
“I’m not fighting to see past race. I’m fighting to get past racism.” ~@MsPackyetti Being ‘colorblind’ does not = consciousness and compassion. Seeing race isn’t the evil. Cultivating and being complicit in racism is.
@BerniceKing
“Reverse racism” is one of the most powerful tools white supremacists ever created. Makes room for a lot of people under a big tent racism who might otherwise do some self-reflection.
Ryan W @RyWig
God save me from white men who think their jokes about racism are funny and edgy instead of a sign of their inability to take anything seriously.
Amity Foster
Seems worth saying and repeating: The point of blackface isn't to make you look like a black person, much less to make you look like a SPECIFIC black person. The point of blackface is to make you look like a racial caricature.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism
A serious question for GOP folks: how can you call for elected officials in Virginia to resign, but did not call for President Trump, Steve King or Senator Hyde-Smith to resign?
Matthew Dowd
when we said more black faces in government, we should have been specific.
@silkyjumbo
Preview of a data project I've been working on about the naming of public schools after Union and Confederate generals. While Union names usually coincide with military anniversaries, we find strong evidence that Confederate school names cluster around Brown v. Board aftermath.
Phil Magness
it’s wild how senate and the electoral college are basically affirmative action of the worst kind for white people who live in racially homogeneous states with small populations. if affirmative action is “extra points” “just because you’re black”... isn’t that what the senate and electoral college do? and if skin color, and all that comes w it, doesn’t entitle someone to “special treatment,” why should geography?
@slickforreal
It'll be awesome when it really clicks for folks that the white elite and ruling class aren't any more law abiding than the general population. They simply have power and resources that allow them to freely operate while poor folks die in jail because they can't make cash bail.
Bree Newsome Bass
I think my favorite part of the is-trump-racist? debate is the part where everyone ignores that his entire rationale for running in the first place was to undo the achievements of the first black president and keeping non-white people out of America.
Adam Parkhomenko
Twitter is reflection of society: all the real estate is owned by a wealthy white man who's indifferent to systemic racism and can evict people at whim; Black activists are policed more than white supremacists; and folks divide themselves into social classes based on who has blue check
Bree Newsome Bass
Northam refused to grasp that blackface is dehumanization. Wearing us like costumes makes it easier to render us homeless. Easier to take away our ballots. Easier to silence our voices in the public square. To miseducate us. To let us die in hospitals. To kill us with impunity.
Jamil Smith
Feminism isn’t about shaming women for their choices. It’s about recognising that we live in a sexist society that offers women choice without control, sets us up to fail and then blames us for not being ‘good enough’, however hard we work at whatever it is we choose.As always lately, it was a big month for tweets about climate change and how to create livable cities:
Laurie Penny @PennyRed
Gay man: "My partner and I were denied to adopt because we're a same-sex couple."
Black man: "A cop pulled a gun and threatened me during a routine traffic stop."
Jewish man: "My house of worship was vandalized by Nazis."
White man: "The next Marvel movie is about a girl!"
Faith Naff
A clueless jerk said women were in charge of computer programming when it was tedious, manual labor. In fact, women liberated themselves of the manual tedium inventing assemblers (Kathleen Booth) and compilers (Grace Hopper). Then programming got easier and men took over.
Luciano Ramalho
Not sure why a mass shooting inspired by hatred of women doesn’t qualify as terrorism… unless, maybe, we don’t respect women as people? Not exactly the most comfortable truth in the national discourse.
Charlotte Clymer
Is there a bigger public display of misogyny than a bunch of white bros protesting outside of Planned Parenthood?
@mollypriesmeyer
The purpose of #NotAllMen is to silence all women.
Stephen Black
As I've noted, Paris has achieved a more effective reduction in traffic than London, despite only the latter having congestion pricing. It's because of Paris' very strong strategy, since 2001, of redirecting street ROW to buses, bikes, and people. Paris' example is really worth studying. The city has no congestion charge yet has managed to reduce in-city traffic by 45% since 1990. This is better performance than London, which has such a fee.There was a subset of tweets about the Green New Deal specifically:
Yonah Freemark
the fact that anyone alive thinks there’s such a thing as a good car for the planet is why we’re all about to fry. spoiler: they’re all bad (yes even electrics). take transit. and everyone who’s going to say “it’s bad where I live”: join advocates and make it better
Travis R. Eby @travis_robert
If you threatened a pregnant women you don't know in any other social setting -- but a crosswalk -- probably someone would frown upon it?! But in a car, it's just you and her and she's costing you 8 seconds.
Angie Schmitt
The youth are rising up for their future against criminal government inaction on the sixth mass extinction.
Extinction Rebellion
Transit is expensive. It succeeds when it can run in straight lines through dense and walkable places, so that it has enough ridership over a short enough distance that it can afford high frequency. Linking transit investments to upzoning delivers this.
Jennifer Keesmaat
Driving a car 1 kilometre costs society 89 cents – but cycling the same distance benefits society by 26 cents.
Brent Toderian
In today's "totally normal" climate news: Parts of the Arctic north of Alaska are currently 50°F warmer than "normal", creating periodic open water in normally hard-frozen sea ice in the dead of winter.
Eric Holthaus
Anybody who thinks a program like the Green New Deal is unmanageably expensive is going to be a bit surprised by the costs of a fifty-year evacuation and abandonment of all of South Florida and significant portions of coastal eastern North America and the Gulf.
Timothy Burke @swarthmoreburke
STUPID KIDS: “We don’t want to get killed crossing the street on our way to school!”
SERIOUS ADULTS: “You haven’t lived long enough to understand why losing one parking space would completely destroy this community.”
Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke
It always amazes me that any city in America old enough to be built with a human scale is so novel it becomes a tourist trap. We could actually build cities this way again — to live in and enjoy every day! And it'd be cheaper:
Matt Staub
Donald Trump is President, maybe time to adjust your sense of what's politically possible
Ken Klippenstein
By far the best take on climate "hope" I think comes from Kate Marvel. We should have courage -- not hope -- because courage is what helps us confront our fears, embrace them, and be grounded in the reality of the moment. Courage brings us to action.
Eric Holthaus
I love these lectures that climate writers somehow have a duty to convey hope and the morality when what's the real evidence that has ever been an effective form of communication? Society mostly has too much hope it'll all work out, not too little
Rebecca Leber
Climate change is not an "environmental problem." It's far deeper than that. Solutions require basic changes in technology, law, and infrastructure, none of which is affected by individual behavior. I can't build a subway or pass a carbon tax or string transmission lines. Voluntary personal choices matter ONLY to the extent they raise the probability of policy/structural changes. If they don't, then you're not doing a little good on climate, you're doing, effectively, none. There are lots of reasons to live a clean life, but climate ain't one. Right now, I fly and eat meat. I also advocate for policies that would make flying and meat eating meat much more expensive (i.e., more reflective of their true social costs). If such policies pass, I will fly less and eat less meat. So will everybody else! Voila, no hypocrisy.
David Roberts
Cities should be designed for living in, not driving through.
Robin Mazumder
Saving the planet seems pretty pragmatic, actually. Being so focused on money that you'd let people drown or burn is the radical position.
Deborah Roseman
only 21 months until the presidential election is over, and then we can focus on how we have 9 years to avert total climate catastrophe
@panndder
It's not a house, it's a oneplex:
@alfred_twu
Remember how fucking cold January was? Yeah, it was the 3rd warmest January ever measured. We've forgotten what "normal" weather even feels like.
Eric Holthaus
Climate scientists are too alarmist, say people who claim a carbon tax will destroy the economy, crush freedom, and turn the US into a communist dictatorship
Kate Marvel
When we devote so much of our cities to parking spaces and make it nearly impossible to incrementally increase housing intensity on the land where we *do* allow homes to be built, are we really surprised that this is where we end up?
@StrongTowns
The way to tax (correctly price) Uber and Lyft is the same way with private cars: enough to peel off the marginal drivers/riders who with modified incentives would be in buses, on bikes, on foot, or avoiding the trip. We don’t need to get the person who is avoiding an hour and a half late night transit trip to switch. We do need to get the UCLA students who would otherwise just walk to class.
Angie Schmitt
Climate change is making it harder to find good parking. American coastal cities, like Annapolis, were built too close to the sea.
Eric Roston
British PM says that the children on school strike are “wasting lesson time”. That may well be the case. But then again, political leaders have wasted 30 yrs of inaction. And
that is slightly worse.
Greta Thunberg
Some evidence that gentrification is worsening transit ridership, as lower-income households who use transit more frequently move to less-transit friendly, cheaper neighborhoods.
Streetsblog USA
We need smaller lots with taller buildings. All my favorite new construction around town is narrow and tall. It’s much easier to make the architecture handsome. Wide facades are a design review trap.
@wbbbmr
Highways: publicly subsidized
Parking: publicly subsidized
Gasoline: publicly subsidized
Suburbs: publicly subsidized
Auto industry: publicly bailed out
Car driver: DEFINITELY NOT A SOCIALIST
David Wagoner
If you want transit to be permanent, it needs permanent high ridership, which requires a permanent favorable land-use pattern. Land-use, not rail in the street, is the only permanence that matters.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit
"i hate buses, but if something that looked like it belonged in the Jetsons offered me service right from my doorstep to wherever I wanted to go for cheap I'd consider taking it" –too many people who control our transportation systems
Atrios
The hottest four years since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution:
1. 2016
2. 2015
3. 2017
4. 2018
David Roberts
Its 2019 and renewables are set to become cheaper than Fossil Fuels if not already. Granting permits to extract oil is stupid and best but potentially suicidal for our society.
Dean Storer
Think some folks are placing too much emphasis on the idea that public transit should be free, and not enough on the idea that parking should cost at least double. Hiking parking costs is probably more likely to increase transit ridership and it’ll increase walking and biking. You still can and should create programs for low income riders that offer sharply reduced fares. But high transit fares are not preventing most people from riding. Bigger issues are subsidized driving and poor transit service. New money better spent on service, not lower fares.
Alex Schieferdecker
Kids (dumb, no priorities): “Please tackle climate change before we all die”
Adults (smart): “We’re going to spend 10 years making sure that when the world burns your passports will be blue”
James Felton
Seems to me that if you're going to put your name on a bus bench, you should also clear the bus stop in winter so it's usable.
@pattho
very few people are prepared for the rage and resentment of the generation we’re fucking over with our climate policy and I can’t wait to see them confronted with it
Brandy Jensen
Density of new housing in the US is similar to China. While the 30-story towers look impressive, the 6-story buildings popping up throughout American cities are more efficient. Both have around 150 homes per acre.
Alfred Twu
Electric buses are already responsible for several times more fossil fuel reduction than electric passenger cars. Few know this, but it's true. A remarkably fast-growing market.
Ramez Naam
“The car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes." One of the most important truths ever stated about car dependency.
Brent Toderian
Here's a little tidbit from a story I'm writing, a quote from an urbanist: "If you don’t have public space, you don’t have city, you just have urbanization." Been thinking about that a lot.
David Roberts
Fascinating results: drivers of powerful cars failed to give way at a pedestrian crossing 50 per cent of the time. Drivers of less powerful cars always gave way to pedestrians. Power makes us more likely to violate the codes of civil society.
@anotherJon
In the spring of 2015, 63% of Americans said they believed climate change was happening and 52% said they were worried about it. By the end of 2018, belief was at 73% — and almost 70% were worried.
FiveThirtyEight
Nothing could concentrate wealth and power more than another two decades of the dirty economy followed by desperate, authoritarian responses to climate chaos—and nothing could be more unjust for the world's poor. Carbon corruption & disaster capitalism are completely compatible.
Alex Steffen
“Large scale problems do not require large-scale solutions – they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework” –David Fleming, Lean Dictionary
Rutger @RutGrr
New idea: Protected bicycle lanes, but traffic engineers have to be willing to test them out with their own children and grandparents.
Doug Gordon @BrooklynSpoke
As Saint Paul debates its 2040 plan, worth noting that in 1922 you could build 4 stories (40 feet) by right everywhere in the city, and higher in many places.
Evan Roberts
If someone chooses to live in a smaller home in the inner city to avoid a commute, they generally don’t pressure society to build them a bigger house with more stuff. So if you choose a bigger stuff-filled house in the suburbs, don’t expect society to build you a fast commute.
Brent Toderian
Highways thru cities don't accelerate traffic but they do accelerate socio-economic segregation and income disparity, perhaps their true intention. (2016 is the first map)
patrick kennedy @WalkableDFW
Republicans can vilify the Green New Deal all they want, but if AOC and colleagues sell this thing as the job creating, town revitalization program it is they’re risking losing a huge chunk of their already unsteady base.There were a handful on health care:
Jared Yates Sexton
The GOP wants to take the country back before the modern welfare state, to pre-Lochner law, with unrestrained monopolists & plutocrats & no protections for the vulnerable. That is both wildly radical & accepted across the party. For some reason, radicalism in service of racists and plutocrats is just, ho hum, an accepted feature of the landscape, but radicalism in service of egalitarian social and environmental progress is just, oh, gasp, those crazy unrealistic kids!
David Roberts
i like how a green new deal is childish daydreaming but posing in front of a coal mine in a hard hat with the promise of returning blacklung jobs to WV five days before the mine closes down anyway is “mature”
@dolladollabille
Personally, I'd rather see people tweeting/talking about projected decimation of tropical regions and famine with as much horror as they do renovating all of America's water heaters.
Meg RW @TricksyRaccoon
Do you support the #GreenNewDeal?
1) Yeah, let's save humanity from impending doom and create millions of green jobs
2) Nah
MoveOn
No one criticizing the Green New Deal -- not a single person -- has an alternative plan for transitioning the American energy economy in the timeframe climatologists say we must. Nobody. If you don't think it's realistic, put out something else. What should be done instead?
Osita Nwanevu
Too many Americans live hard lives burdened by chronic diseases that can exacerbate disparities in health and economic security. We need to use the tools of government, policy, and public health to lift more people out of hard circumstances and help them realize better lives.And a lot on my new favorite topic of late, income and wealth inequality joined with the problems of our economic system:
Scott Gottlieb, M.D.
If we paid research costs for drugs upfront, we wouldn't have to worry about bringing down prices, they would already be cheap, like paper plates and shovels.
Dean Baker
“We’re not allowed to bring peanut butter sandwiches to schools to protect those kids who have peanut allergies. So why are children who are unvaccinated, who are potentially spreading a deadly illness around allowed to go to school?”
Brent Toderian
Free opioids with your feminist art?
Anand Giridharadas
Actual language from the State of Massachusetts' lawsuit against Purdue Pharma: “Eight people in a single family made the choices that caused much of the opioid epidemic." Stunning.
Alec MacGillis
Raising the federal minimum wage would disproportionately benefit black workers because they are over-represented among low wage workers and less likely to live in states that have passed a minimum wage that is higher than the current federal minimum.Education:
Elise Gould
“The Walton family makes more money in one minute than Walmart workers do in an entire year."
William Lindeke (quoting a MinnPost story)
Ivanka Trump thinks most people don't want to be given things. You think she means things like inheritance, and obscene privilege, or immunity from the law? One must wonder ...
Paul Thomas
I simply do not understand why more people aren't furious that Republicans deliberately underfund the IRS to help rich people cheat on their taxes. Since coming into power, Republicans have forced real per capita cuts to the IRS of THIRTY percent!
Bobby Kogan
Generosity isn’t a substitute for justice.
Anand Giridharadas
The ongoing horror of economic devastation in Seattle due to livable minimum wage:
Glenn Fleishman
people who can't imagine making a few rich people a little less rich don't get to decide what's impossible
Saladin Ahmed
The "socialism" critique wouldn't get anywhere if everyone who isn't a wingnut just laughed at it when they heard it, which is the sensible reaction. But a lot of people feel personal and professional pressure to pretend to take wingnuts seriously.
David Roberts
Middle-Americans who make up the GOP’s base aren’t anti-socialism. They’re way, way, way pro-socialism as long as it’s benefiting them. Republicans eat their own propaganda so much they confuse their economic principles and social scare tactics as being one in the same.
Jared Yates Sexton
I just filed my taxes and claimed the mortgage interest deduction. Unlike people who apply for public housing in many cities, I didn’t need to disclose criminal history, pass a drug test, or promise not to smoke in my home. Welfare for the haves and have nots looks very different.
Abraham Gutman
After the last 40 years of redistributing wealth from middle and poor to the top 1%, they now denounce as "wealth redistribution" when people want to redistribute in the opposite direction. The richest 1% only want one-way redistribution.
Richard D. Wolff
Capitalism brought us rampant inequality and a dying planet. People asking for a better world that works for everyone isn't alarming, it's democracy.
Eric Holthaus
Per Thomas Piketty roughly 60% of America's wealth is inherited, meaning most of America's riches are owned by people who didn't work for them:
Christopher Ingraham
"...the rich are obsessed by social 'purpose' at the very time they are hoarding opportunities. Framing problems as 'win-win' excuses the rich from making real sacrifices. They have rigged the system as much through this idea as by any law."
Anand Giridharadas on the fallacy of billionaire philanthropy
New York Society for Ethical Culture
One of the great tragedies in this country is how business has coopted and perverted fields integral to the health and happiness of people, including healthcare, science, education and journalism. Fields that should have literally nothing to do with business. This is all so wrong. People are suffering from preventable illnesses, science is being bought and sold by corporations, teachers and students are being bled to death, and at a moment where our country needs journalists the most they're being laid off by the dozen
Jared Yates Sexton
"If they can do the worksheet, they don't need it. If they can't, it won't help them." –Marilyn AdamsAnd at the end, as always, there's the best of the rest:
Alfie Kohn
One of my biggest fears as a teacher is that I’ll take a sick day and the sub will interact with my students like Diane Feinstein.
Jersey Jazzman
I cringe whenever I hear “Respect is earned,” because if that’s true how could a child earn it? Respect, like trust and love, has to be given.
@tiersaj
"we must treat charters as equal and equivalent to all other nonprofits, except the part where we allow them to serve as the wards of 50 percent of our children and we fund them virtually in their entirety out of taxpayer money" is a Very Smart Argument That Makes Sense
Will Stancil
“Among all the districts that have retained all their librarians since 2005, 75% are white, Education Week reports. On the other end of the scale, student populations in the 20 districts that lost the most librarians in the same time comprised 78% students of color.”
Kenny Garcia
My new favorite teacher strike sign:
evelyn pollins @ampersander
If you like your neighborhood public school, do not support Cory Booker. He supports corporate charter chains and vouchers, not public schools.
Diane Ravitch
james madison, to his credit, favored popular election of the president.
@jbouie
There is no legitimate paranoia about voter fraud. There is only racist paranoia about Black and brown folks being able to vote and participate in democracy and white people no longer controlling everything.
Bree Newsome Bass
“FRAUD” should be a major Dem oppo argument going into 2020: Trump is a fraud. His family got rich thru tax fraud, stayed rich by using illegal labor and other work frauds, and won the 2016 election thru election fraud. It’s a devastatingly simple playbook if they can execute.
Amanda Carpenter
In 2005 Florida was the first state to enact a Stand Your Ground Law. Since then they have seen a 250% increase in gun sales and an 8% in gun related killings. There are over 1.1 million ppl in Florida that are registered to carry, 3 times as many as 2005.
Cacje @CJ_Hende
Gotta love the idiot in the American flag shirt, waving a Confederate flag. Maybe he's still undecided on who he's rooting for?
Paul Swinebaum @GusFantastico
I’d really like to think that all the extinct animals are alive and just avoiding us.
Ben Ehrenreich (commenting on a Formosan clouded leopard being spotted in Taiwan)
Household income distribution, United States of America
Less than $50,000 - 42%
$50,000-$100,000 - 30%
$100,000-$200,000 - 21%
Over $200,000 - 7%
@JasonSzegedi
I created mankind to spend half its time praising Me and the other half killing each other over who praised Me better.
@TheTweetOfGod
Did you know? There are two colonies of bees that live atop NPR HQ's roof garden. They are appropriately named All Stings Considered and Swarming Edition.
NPR Extra
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Singular *they* is older
Than singular *you*
Dennis Baron @DrGrammar
“The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression." –Jane McGonigal
Rob Hopkins
"So far the cryptocurrency craze has made online criminality easier, created bubbles, fleeced naive investors, imposed grotesque waste in so-called mining, offered funding for malfeasance and facilitated tax evasion. What is the social value in any of this?"
Frank Pasquale
53,000 people were denied voter registration in Georgia in 2018—90% of whom were people of color.
@BrookingsInst
This happened to me so many times: you have an interesting conversation with a thoughtful producer, and then the actual interview is with a presenter who reads nothings, knows nothing and asks one stupid question after another. Just now with BBC World News.
Rutger Bregman
Any time you ask "why isn't the left doing X!?" the answer is usually "because no one is funding organizing around it"
Brett Banditelli
You know who are the perfect parents? People without children.
@tiersaj
Everything happens for a reason you make up afterwards.
@TheTweetOfGod
Whenever there's a cool fact going around that I already know, instead of being holier than thou, I think of this comic and get excited for today's lucky 10000:
@ryanqnorth
Student loan debt = training wheels on how to be a good, eternally indebted citizen who treats handing over thousands of dollars to huge banks from birth to death as an inescapable fact of life. It's a scam.
Heather Havrilesky
Sometimes it is hard to remember what we talked about before the news cycle went to light speed. Days went by where we just never discussed any sort of government or political situation!
Sarah Mackey
Prison abolitionist are consistently harangued while prison preservationists are not challenged with questions of how they plan *successfully* to *re-form* these torture chambers... The prison ITSELF was a *re-form* & preservationist have had since 1790 to *get it right*
@prisonculture
The problem with this "critique" of prison abolition is that it misinterprets the work that prisons actually do. Even under mass incarceration, the majority of lawbreakers, including violent ones, are not locked up.
chanice kobolowski @ThomasPetrino
The Parish Comes Alive (1961 ed.) [from the Tumblr or Jello Biafra]:
@doctorow
The same people mad at Malia Obama for drinking wine and wearing a bathing suit at age 20 are the same people who excuse Brett Kavanaugh for drinking beer and assaulting a woman at age 17
Zack Bornstein
We need a moral movement that offers marginalized communities a better identity than whiteness — the hope of a shared life where all of us do better when all of us do better. Yes, we need a new President. But that is not all. We also need a better imagination of greatness.
Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove
No comments:
Post a Comment