This, Part 2 of BlueSky for November 2024, begins on November 7, just after the previous round-up left off, and goes through November 19 or so. (Here is Part 1.)
That date range means it includes "takes" on the election outcome, though I tried to avoid those as much as possible because it was too early. Most of the posts are about Trump's various cabinet and other high-level appointments, or about anticipated effects of policies he or they will implement. As always, the remainder are on my usual topics, with some random silliness and "timeline cleansing" thrown in.
Some of the images that are not related to the election or current political situation have been moved up or down for better visual balance.) Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.
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It’s remarkable that the events of the 2019 Samoa measles outbreak aren’t more widely known:
Adam Kucharski
The entire campaign was Trump going "I am going to screw you over" and voters going "he doesn't mean it." Meanwhile, Harris was saying, "I am going to help you" and they all went, "she doesn't mean it." No fucking idea how you win elections or run a country like this.
Michael Hobbes
When Weber talked about “charismatic authority,” he straight up said there’s some unknowable magic about those kinds of leaders and that seemed very silly to me reading it in 2005.
Compounds Plural
I don’t know how real this male loneliness epidemic shit is but I know it’s a lot easier to have and maintain diverse and fulfilling friendships when you’re not a bigoted piece of shit.
@knilirabaj.bsky.social
Gratifying to see a gay/trans-baiting SOB like Eric Hovde [candidate in Wisconsin] piss away $20 million out of his pocket and get left out of the GOP Senate majority.
Vic Thorstenson
I don’t want to hear anything about where the Harris campaign went wrong. There is literally nothing they could have done to overcome *waves hands about* this. “This” being white supremacy.
Erica M @ericamauter.bsky.social
We are still not going back.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social
This front porch is seared into my brain forever. This is the first post I saw when I turned my phone on at 1:45am on November 6.
Christine_Mpls
[Referring to this post from late October:]
Look at this front porch. Really look at it. The entire Pennsylvania
town where I canvassed today looked like this. Towns all across America
look like this. Fuck macroeconomics. Until the Democrats manage to pass
policy that really renews this country, the fascist threat will never go
away:
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Politics and public opinion didn’t suddenly disappear overnight because 3 out of 100 voters switched their votes.
Chris Hayes
I really despise that corporations are not taking more heat for inflation. they knew damn well it’s political poison and would lead to this because they want lower taxes and less regulation . liberals if you are pisses and work in corporate America, probably something to think about
Bryan @bryanformhals.com
I 1000% understand this psychological impulse to lean into the doom, but
I spent a lot of years covering these jabronis and it’s not like they
*suddenly* got super competent. Part of the con job of Trump and his
band of weirdos is this Big Bad Wolf/Bond villain shtick that I have no
patience for indulging. They are very bad and are absolutely going to
try to do awful and cruel things. But they are not evil geniuses and a
lot of them are genuinely idiots.
Chris Hayes
It seems we are already losing sight of the fact that a handful of billionaires effectively turned our information ecosystem into a Superfund site, no one knows how to clean up the mess, and simply telling the truth and hoping people find it is woefully insufficient
Soraya Nadia McDonald
NFL stats nerd getting it better than every political pundit reading the polling entrails for meaning:
eric gonzalez juenke @egojunk.bsky.social
*That's* the right-wing myth, that radicals have taken over the Democratic party and that centrist and right-leaning men are under attack. If anyone actually believed that political parties should be held responsible for the worst behavior of their supporters, no one would vote Republican.
Michael Hobbes
Before you give up on the future, remember this is already someone's utopia. We can build better.
Sonia Sulaiman
One aspect of the economic situation that I think has not gotten enough attention, is how much the withdrawal of pandemic income-support programs worsened people's material conditions.
JW Mason
"Democratic messaging didn't seem to land this cycle, which is why it's time for a pivot to embrace racism and misogyny" — some asshole, pretty soon
@kevinrowe.bsky.social
I really don't think the analysis about the abortion ballot initiatives is good at all. This mirrors the rest of the analysis of this election. People who voted for 45 voted to enshrine abortion in their own states to protect THEMSELVES. They weren't thinking about reproductive justice for all.
Prisonculture
Walking and biking for transportation means I can pause to notice and appreciate neat-looking leaves on the sidewalk. Look at this one! 
LauraGMitchell
I think if someone is looking to hire a plumber and one makes all sorts of unrealistic promises and gives an impossibly low quote and the other charges industry standard and has impeccable Yelp reviews, if that someone goes with the bad plumber it's not really the fault of the good plumber.
Schooley
Here’s what’s wrong with Dems and this whole shithole country: MEN HATE WOMEN. And yes most masculinity IS toxic and that’s why it’s being suggested that we STFU about the problem because MEN DON’T WANT TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM BECAUSE IT IS *THEM*! Dems need to move LEFT and men need to stop being SEXIST TRASH.
TM @tm71.bsky.social
what i found so starkly shocking about the raids of the protest camps in, say, Columbia was that they were brutalizing the children of bankers and ambassadors in the leafy refuges of the ivy league while the political consensus cheered them on. may have been short sighted. ugh. just like obama turning over a turnkey drone striking surveillance state to trump the last time, biden just turned over a state that has advanced the normalization of cracking the heads of anyone who peacefully protests anything
jeff computers featuring minipan and stripey @helldude.bsky.social
It's easy to tune out the news when you can just put on headphones and slip into the warm, eternal embrace of writing about climate change.
Eric Roston
We’re doing some before/after analysis of recent non-separated bike lane projects on residential streets that included speed humps. Full report to come, but this stood out. Speed humps reclaim neighborhood streets from aggressive drivers:
Jascha Franklin-Hodge @jfh01.bsky.social
How did he "broaden his support" in getting two million less votes than he did in 2020? He didn't broaden anything.
bdonnelly
A lot of these suggestions for how Democrats should “tone down” their messaging (which is never actual Democratic Party messaging) read like “Democrats should make my kids start talking to me again”
Louisa @louisathelast.bsky.social
In two months, Trump will stand on the steps of the Capitol that he sent a violent mob to storm 4 years ago, place his hand on a book he has never read, and swear an oath he has previously violated, as administered by the Chief Justice who placed him above the law.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
I mean, you can talk about disaffected young men, culture war issues, Harris' strategy, Israel/Palestine, rebelling fsagainst elites, or whatever else. But there's a pretty compelling Occam's razor explanation that I'm going with until I see some pretty compelling evidence for something else.
Jeff Lazarus
So much of what we think we know about American politics, about the American political order is now gone, or in question. And what replaces it is still so murky.
Angus Johnston
People are interpreting the election results 17 ways to Sunday but the best evidence we have suggests that simply *being a woman* costs a candidate about 3% at the polls, and Harris is on track to underperform Biden by pretty much exactly 3 points.
Jeff Lazarus wants to live in a democracy @jlazarus.bsky.social
I don't think it's a huge ask to wish voters had a basic understanding of recent history, like Trump appointing the justices who ended Roe, a thing he openly bragged about for a long time! Or, you know, that minor matter of attempting to overthrow the government. And yet.
Tom Tomorrow
Americans are looking powerfully into tariffs now that the election is over:
Denny Carter
Still wild to me how the conservative vision of masculinity isn't just toxic, it's *only* the toxic parts. Zero sense of duty, responsibility, stoicism, manning up, taking things on the chin, protecting the weak, etc, etc. Just endless whining, entitlement, and abuse of others.
Max Kennerly
It's terrible to cheer on the demise of other people just because of their ignorance and folly. Black Americans vote the way that we do because we know this country's worst impulses; others don't believe it. They'll have to see for themselves, and no, I don't rejoice in their FAFO. It's a tragedy.
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.bsky.social
kinda curious as to what happens when someone ineligible by the plain text of the constitution to be president is sworn in. like does that void it or something?
Jason Smith @newqueuelure.bsky.social
at 12:01pm on 20 January 2025 the constitution becomes null and void due to internal contradiction (tell your friends)
Jason Smith @newqueuelure.bsky.social
Toxicologist here for any fluoride concerns! The amount of fluoride added to water to prevent tooth decay is so minuscule that — no matter your age, size, or health status — you would die from water poisoning long before you could ever even start getting toxicity from fluoride. Fluoridated water is safe
Ryan Marino, MD
To me: Trump's orders have no force of law. And when SCOTUS says they do, you shrug and say “nope” and then the cold constitutional crisis goes hot. But it would take a brave blue state to do it. And I don’t believe it’ll happen.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
it is not my job to say what a political party should or should not be doing. it is my job to tell the truth, and the truth is that a lot of people willingly abandoned their faculties to make a bad, destructive choice. as long as journalists and pundits act as if they are amateur political strategists and not people trying to understand and tell the truth about the world, they are going to take the implicit view that voters can never be wrong, which then demands endless explanation of their morally blameless choice
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
"When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed." –Rebecca Solnit
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social
Won’t be surprised if the birth rate drops even more dramatically now. Intentionally having children while Trump (or any Republican) is POTUS seems like not a good idea.
Carrie @bellatrixcrawley.bsky.social
Good morning:
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul
Who will pick the crops if we deport the immigrants? It’ll be the same people, but sourced through private detention companies that take all the wages and return the immigrants to their indefinite holding cages overnight. Chattel slavery, back again.
Alex Wild
just want to note that zero republicans in my life have reached out since tuesday to try and find common ground
@pnutsmama.bsky.social
If she won, the win would never be big enough. Since she lost, everything is about what she didn’t do. But again, I look at Republicans and I ask: What did they do right? And there’s nothing there.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also going away, so junk fees and extortionate overdraft fees are on their way back too.
daniel sieradski @self.agency
Harris voters voted thinking, "I don't like X, but the alternative is worse"
Trump voters voted thinking, "He says the economy is bad, which is what I think. I don't care about that other stuff"
Proud Anselmo
In the aftermath of a disaster, most people respond not with greed or violence, but with courage and compassion. Tackling the climate crisis and growing democracy require both, regardless of whether the federal government is working to advance or obstruct these goals.
Bob Kopp
i think people half remember learning something about inflation in Germany leading to the Nazis and have decided saying inflation is a good excuse for their fascism
Big Fat Bartolo's Colon
But here is the real kicker: This man is disqualified from holding office under our own Constitution. I do not have to view him as legitimate regardless of whether voting had fuckery afoot or not.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
Reason, Noah Smith, etc. are citing an exit poll showing 65% of Native Americans voted Trump. It's nonsense. Reservations aren't included in exit polling. It's a tiny sample (about 200) of self-identified Native Americans at non-reservation sites.
Radley Balko
Here are some nice mushrooms:
lukelukeluke
I really think at its heart philosophy is one giant battle, taking place over many eras and nations, between people who are basically pleasant bureaucrats and people who are sexy murder poets, and it’s both super important and super boring that the pleasant bureaucrats must win.
lastpositivist.bsky.social
I am pretty sure when right-wingers say, "elite" they just mean people who they are resentful of. Like, they call people who serve them coffee elites.
Unbreakable Peter @loki1001.bsky.social
Compared to 2020, Trump’s coalition was “older, wealthier, and about equally white.” And yet, conventional wisdom is quickly coalescing around ideas of a working-class revolution, racial realignment, and young men’s “crisis of masculinity.” The punditry doesn’t care about what really happened.
Thomas Zimmer
My fellow neurodivergents, can we agree that blenders are the worst kitchen appliance? Machines for covering everything in your kitchen with goop. No way to spin that as a rebellion against elites unless you define it out of existence
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social
“voters revolted against elites” DOES NOT MAKE SENSE unless we are using bespoke definitions of “elite”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
An example of how words have no meaning: Ohio voters replaced Sherrod Brown with a car dealer chain owner and blockchain investor with numerous wage theft complaints against him and $100+ million in wealth.
Jonathan Cohn
imagine how little the national corporate press would care about watergate if it happened today lol
Greg Pak
I'll be honest: if you'd told me that Harris was going to lose all 7 swing states, no way I'd have believed that Dems would have held the Senate seats in at least 4 of the 5 of those states that had Senate elections.
Josh Chafetz
Nothing more important to remember than every democratic president is a smol bean bound by the constraints of the office who can defeated by the merest whisper of lack of confidence while every republican president is an unstoppable titan to whom rules never apply. That's Just The Way It Is.
Kelsey Atherton
TAKE NOTE: In the conversation about better city-building, one of my goals moving forward on this and other platforms, and in my overall political and media discourse, is to take back the phrase “common sense” from those who badly want it to mean “ignoring evidence-based reality.”
Brent Toderian
I reported on this when I was still a reporter. Called every school where this was a rumor and only found one instance of cat litter being in schools. And you will be fucking furious when you learn why.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social
Not an expert, but something tells me asking drivers to drive responsibly might not actually be working.
Tom Flood
This narrative that the Democrats ignored the working class is really aggravating. Be specific. You’re talking about the white working class because the Black working class understood the stakes of this election just fine.
Roxane Gay
The impending damage Trump 2.0 will do to the public services is one of the most disturbing and potentially long lasting threats. (Alongside a set of truly frightening possibilities for changes in US foreign policy.)
Jesse D. Jenkins
I’m all for the Democrats embracing populism and ditching neoliberalism. I just want someone to explain how that works in a post-Citizens United environment. Dem populist hero Sherrod Brown was beaten by a Mercedes dealer in Ohio because he was swamped by crypto super pac cash.
Lydia Polgreen
The way people use “elites” usually means “Black and Jew-coded conspiracy of the decadent bourgeoisie against the true working volk and their billionaire avatars.” I wonder if there’s a word for political tendencies that adopt that frame.
Ned Resnikoff
the problem with saying we need a “Joe Rogan for the left” is that Rogan was not a creation of conservatives. he was a regular guy who became conservative because he’s very stupid.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
You could tax the billionaires—just the billionaires—at a level that *leaves all of the billionaires as billionaires* and give a rebate to every taxpayer of $30k. That's *fucking wild*
Pwnallthethings
Finding out that Lake Superior "Never gives up its dead" because it's so cold that the colonies of bacteria that decompose corpses can't survive in it so those bodies never fill up with gas and surface, all because I looked up the lyrics of a 1976 folk song, is what the internet should be more like.
Judge Anon
TURN THIS UP! 
Angelia @imangelia.bsky.social
this is an extremely important reminder – remember that Trump kicked off his last administration with the Muslim Ban. this time will be far worse, immediately, to send the message that resistance is futile. it isn’t
Micah @rincewind.run
Realizing I’m going to probably spend the next two weeks or so writing on why each of the embarrassment of embarrassments that Trump appoints is their own particular flavor of terrible and/or unqualified
Hayes Brown
If you are a Democrat who is spending time attacking Kamala Harris or her campaign rather than focusing on the fight ahead, you aren't helping anyone.
Marc Elias
People will be like "Oh! These trans people want outrageous things!" and the "outrageous things" are literally just
• legal protections against discrimination in employment, housing, healthcare, public accommodations, etc
• the ability to update identity documents to accurately reflect name/gender
Parker Molloy
Hey, remember the Elian Gonzalez saga? Remember how much righteous anger there was in Republican circles over this image of one (1) armed federal agent taking custody of (1) undocumented minor in order to reunite him with his father? These are the images Republicans will soon be celebrating:
Kevin M. Kruse
There are five words that might help you survive what's coming: "I don't recognize your authority." Even if you can't say them out loud, you can keep saying them inside your own head.
Charlie Jane Anders
We are going to see some significant stress tests of federalism in the coming years. It may surprise you to know that the GOP is much more flexible* on the topic than they had previously indicated.
*Whichever approach achieves their desired results.
Jeffrey Vagle @jvagle.me
Here’s one of my main takeaways: the point of governing is to make people’s lives better, but the point of politics – especially campaigns – is to give people a story about who to blame for things sucking. It’s a real mistake to confuse one for the other, as I have often done!
Chris Hayes
Biden won the 2020 popular vote by 4.5 points. Trump has likely won the 2024 popular vote by less than 1 point. If Trump is "who we are now," then Biden is who we were a short time ago, and I don't think either claim is particularly useful.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
The public: The media is falling apart.
Journalists: We need unions to protect our jobs.
The public: Our schools are falling apart.
Teachers: We need unions to protect our jobs.
The Atlantic magazine: Good news! We've built an AI tool to replace journalists and teachers at the same time!
Annalee Newitz
This election is so painfully mundane in poli sci terms:
-An incumbent party being defeated in the face of public economic discontent
-An authoritarian capitalizing on discontent to return to office, paying less of a price than we might hope at the ballot box because the public has other priorities
Brendan Nyhan
This is the best election victory for Republicans since 1988, which was an actual landslide. People have memory-holed just how long it's been. Obama did better than this in both 2008 and 2012! Republicans haven't even won the popular vote in 20 years before this.
William Adler @williamadler78.bsky.social
We know FOR SURE that there are huge pollution, climate, health, equity, and public/personal cost consequences connected to continued car dependency from all the highway, road-widening and parking CONSTRUCTION supporting more vehicles, whether they are EV or not. This siphons $ from better solutions:
Brent Toderian
Eleanor Rigby
Peeling bananas with feet as she swings through the trees
Like chimpanzees
Left her enclosure
Where they were breeding their half human hybrids with apes
They've all escaped
Mike. @dumbmike.bsky.social
We solved so many problems so well that most people don’t know that they were ever problems, and so their base assumption is that this is the natural order of the world when it’s actually a fragile system held up by an expansive administrative state…which millions just voted to dismantle.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
It’s not remarked upon all that much, but the fact that a man – a *republican* candidate! – can twice win the presidency on an openly anti-constitutional platform is probably the main biggest change in US politics in my lifetime. If you’re under 30, I’m not sure it’s possible to understand the degree to which, in the politics of the US right, religious fealty to the constitution and a wholesale hatred of Russia were articles of faith without squinting quite hard. Both those things have gone through a full 180° in a generation.
Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social
The symbol of this incoming administration should be a cheerfully painted tiny coffin
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
It's #RoseWednesday:
Fahrul @roellatief.bsky.social
Ask yerselves:
1. "Do all road users deserve to be safe on all surface streets of Minneapolis?"
2. "What percentage of public land is the correct percentage to devote to the convenience and comfort of those who get around town in the second-leading cause of death in children?"
MPLS Bike Wrath
hey @profgabriele.com this is the new nominee for defense secretary:
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
Oh great. This is even worse than I thought. And I thought it was pretty bad.
Melissa Ryckman @missoularedhead.bsky.social
An antivax secdef is crazy. Nothing has killed more soldiers in the history of human civilization than disease.
Adam Serwer
the thing to note about the Elon “Department of Government Efficiency” thing is that the Government Accountability Office already exists and serves this basic function. the problem is that it’s largely serious and nonpartisan. they’re trying to build their own hyper-ideological version of it.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
morning moment of beauty in the the autumn garden:
kms @karmso.bsky.social
listen, the only way trump can force congress to adjourn if it is not already planning to adjourn is if he sends men with guns. and if that happens the game is already over.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
"All capitalists want capitalism for the masses and socialism for the super rich elites. That's kind of the definition of capitalism in my honest opinion." –David Graeber
David Graeber Institute
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida to serve as his attorney general.
CNN
The Department of Justice isn't within 100 feet of a school, is it?
The Daily Show
I’m starting to understand what it must have been like when Caligula made his horse a senator.
Heather in Chicago @heatherk.bsky.social
As a child of the 80s, this is not how I imagined the Russian takeover of America
Willy Lee (they/them) @advicepig.bsky.social
Am I the only one who didn't know Matt Gaetz was even a lawyer?
Marc Elias
There isn’t going to be a lot of ideological coherence to this administration except stupid and cruel
bill @bill-of-lefts.bsky.social
I’m sure this is just a misunderstanding and these two radicalized egomaniacs will continue to get along swimmingly forever:
Taylor Lorenz
When I was a kid, people in my teachers' and parents' generation, who'd fought Nazis and the Axis in WW II, knew 'but the trains ran on time' as shorthand for Italy's embrace of fascism. For our time, counterpart would be 'but a dozen eggs cost so much.'
James Fallows
darkly funny that the end result of QAanon was making a pedophile in charge of law enforcement
America's Lounge Singer @krang.bsky.social
The first known use of singular “they” is so old that not only does it pre-date singular “you,” it wasn’t even spelled with a “th.” When William and the Werewolf, in 1375 CE, used singular “they,” it was spelled with a Thorn:
Dr. Frizzle @swilua.bsky.social
Vivek's "plan" is to get rid of funding for:
—Veterans' health care
—Funding for research into new medical treatments
—Foreign embassies
—Affordable housing programs like Housing Choice Vouchers & public housing
—Head Start
—NOAA
—Drinking water revolving funds
etc.
Yonah Freemark
If you give a shit about urban planning and transit you should expect no funding from the feds for the next 4 years and you should entirely focus your advocacy on state and local politicians. You should also try to build community as best as you can to save people from rightwing media
Alan Fisher @alanthefisher.bsky.social
thinking about Matt Gaetz saying abortion rights protestors are fat and ugly, and shouldn't worry about needing an abortion. "Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb," he said in 2022
Rachel Cohen
Taking back the phrase “common sense” from those who badly want it to mean “ignoring evidence-based reality” is something that’s needed in almost every area, from medicine to politics to … culture.
Robert Kowalenko @rob-kowa.bsky.social
Another common sense position: the whole Me Too movement proved definitively that there are many quieter and easier ways for men to assault women rather than pretend to become part of an oppressed minority just so they can enter a women's bathroom.
The Alternate Historian
Trump is basically appointing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This guy is Pestilence:
Brent Toderian
I'm a tolerant person but it's 2024 and everyone knows about climate change, and if you sit there in your car idling for half an hour and it's not a literal matter of life or death like you're keeping warm in a blizzard, then I vote we get to destroy your car with our heavy artillery of choice.
Antony Ingram
Good advice for troubled times: use cash to pay for a burner phone. Get a prepaid credit card and use it to pay for whatever you use the phone to do. Use public wifi/a vpn from home if you are Doing Things. Go private. Otherwise use Signal.
Dr. Sarah Parcak @indyfromspace.bsky.social
People who say they care about women’s and girls’ sports are noticeably quiet about how eliminating the Department of Education would end federal oversight of Title IX enforcement of the equal existence of women’s and girls’ sports
Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social
Watching 47 assume the Presidency feels like watching an angry Godzilla raze a city. Lord have mercy.
Jennifer Mendelsohn
Things make a lot more sense when you realize Trump and his gaggle of idiots are intended to lesser the standing of the United States, meltdown the economy while liberating capitalism from centralized control, and finish off federal regulatory power.
Jared Yates Sexton
The pending dismantling of our regulatory system has me thinking about an insight from a book I reviewed a while back: For almost all of human history, average life expectancy was capped at ∼35 years. We invented all kinds of clever things, but even for the rich, this didn't budge. What changed?
Brooke Jarvis
$65 to $250 billion in benefits annually from decarbonization, seems good? Anyway EPA’s whole annual budget is like $9 billion
Costa Samaras
Hegseth has a goddamn Jerusalem Cross tattoo on his chest. So we are all entirely clear, this symbolizes exactly what it says: Christian military conquest of Jerusalem, not some orderly resolution of the Israel-Hamas war
Tom Pepinsky
this guy being named as Secretary of Defense feels like the sort of thing we should remember when the attacks on DEI and various Black and brown professionals / defenses of "meritocracy" and stray Dr. King quotes ramp up:
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
appointing a guantanamo bay prison guard to be secretary of defense who is totally unqualified except for writing a book that's like "let's do more war crimes." donald the dove strikes again
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social
*Trump slapping the side of the Cabinet* “You would not believe how many sex offenders can fit in this baby.”
Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social
blah blah blah i don't want to be in a place where everyone thinks like me blah blah. shut up thats exactly what i want. a place where everyone hates the cops, agrees that fascism is bad, and thinks that it's our moral obligation to protect people and the land. we can disagree on strategy
Ashley Fairbanks @ziibiing.com
We should be building versions of this on neighborhood corners across the country:
Jason Cox @jasoncoxnc.bsky.social
I don't want to sound alarmist or anything, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to skip FBI background checks and bury congressional ethics reports about nominees to the most important posts in the federal government.
Kevin M. Kruse
It’s nuts that having a Black president one time drove white people this crazy.
Akilah Hughes
I am old enough to remember the terror of children I knew personally who were consigned to life inside an "iron lung," because of polio infections in the days before effective, mandatory vaccines. RFK Jr is old enough to remember that too. So is man who appointed him.
James Fallows
When Obama nominated Tom Daschle – a congressional leader with three decades of experience working on federal health care policies – to be HHS secretary, the senator had to withdraw because a donor provided him with a car. If only he'd beheaded a whale!
Kevin M. Kruse
As someone with a friend group that’s like 50%+ autistic, it’s really fucked up to see people ready to jettison life-saving medicine like vaccines because they get it into their heads that it somehow causes autism. That’s worse than dying?? Is it???
Louisa @louisathelast.bsky.social
Trump's Pentagon pick:
1. Was a Guantánamo prison guard
2. Sympathized with the Nazis in Charlottesville
3. Has a bunch of white supremacist/Christian nationalist tattoos
4. Wants to fire the Joint Chiefs chairman because he's Black
5. Loves war crimes
What could go wrong?
Jonathan M. Katz @katzonearth.bsky.social
The more magazine covers like this, the closer we get to when Trump turns on Musk:
Leah McElrath
imagine tearing down the foundational principles of this democratic republic in service to Donald Trump's nomination of Matt Gaetz, two of the most repulsive men ever to have walked the earth
Tom Tomorrow
The Onion should buy Elsevier next
MadScientist @mads100tist.bsky.social
From a friend: “Someone I know had a meeting with a Trump agriculture transition team member. This person said surely you’re not going to impose tariffs on food imports. He responded why wouldn’t we? And my person said: because about 30% of the food Americans regularly consume cannot be grown here and this will cause widespread food shortages (think coffee, cacao beans, many fruits and veggies, especially off-season and tropical). The Trump transition team member said: “maybe Americans shouldn’t eat those foods.”
Fred Wellman @fpwellman.bsky.social
"A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter." 
ryan cooper
A Washington Post review of Pete Hegseth’s writing shows he
rejected steps to integrate women and transgender troops across the
military, and called for a “crusade” to protect “Judeo-Christian”
values.
The Washington Post
1) The term “Judeo-Christian” first appeared in the 19th century, in the context of trying to convert Jews to Christianity.
2) It’s Islamaphobic
3) Most Jewish advances (Talmud, law, etc) developed under not-Christian rule, that’s usually sucked for us
4) The Crusaders mass-murdered Jews.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social
Every single time someone says “Judeo-Christian” the sentence would be more accurately phrased if they just said “Christian.” It’s some weird appropriative fig leaf.
Naomi Alderman
What an achievement vaccines are. What a monument to our love for each other it is to stare straight into the face of something as horrific and unstoppable as smallpox or measles or polio or cervical cancer and say “You know what, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
Hank Green
I'm genuinely terrified of a polio outbreak now, because that shit could evolve and would have to create a new vaccine.
Dog/catpetter @tomboyrespect.bsky.social
Had a flash premonition of myself in a year, arguing online with a Jacobin editor who wants to say that jackboots and camp guards are part of the working class.
Moira Donegan
Love this map! It shows the grades of the streets in order to help pedestrians and cyclists plan their routes (from Queenstown, New Zealand):
Jason Thorne
Everyone likes post-apocalyptic fiction because you don’t have to go to work anymore
Lostcatdog
Me: what’s that black bird with the red on its wings called
Bird watcher: that’s a red winged blackbird
Me: holy shit
lukelukeluke
Matt Gaetz will be the very first cabinet appointee in history who will plead the 5th during his Senate confirmation hearings.
Robert M @rdm23.bsky.social
We're not going to terraform Mars, but we're doing a good job of venusforming Earth.
Peter Gleick
If you wouldn’t tolerate some random stranger shrieking in your ear about how minorities deserve to suffer or about how vaccines cause mega-autism, then why would you tolerate it on social media? Block the miserable assholes. Remove them from your sight. Be at peace.
Faine Greenwood
Apparently Trump is awarding three of the top positions in the DOJ to the defense attorneys who served him in his cases over the past year or two. He figured it was the least he could do since there was no way he was going to pay them!
KittyKatGirl @mary1kathy.bsky.social
1981: If libs warn trickle-down will wreck the middle class, call them Commies.
2024: If trickle-down has wrecked the middle class, blame Libs.
John Fugelsang
Over 80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024, including supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for undocumented immigrants (83%)...decriminalizing border crossings (77%), and defunding the police (72%).
Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social
Western media will surely attack China for doing too much to save the planet.
Daniel Chomsky
It already sort of does. The fact that China heavily subsidizes its
exports of electric vehicles and other types of clean technology is
treated as a criminal act. This is at the same time that we supposedly
want rich countries to help finance the clean energy transition in
developing countries.
Dean Baker
bro the Vatican is literally a 15-minute country:
mel~ @melissanarchy.bsky.social
If Dems flip CA45 and CA13, then the U.S. House majority will have literally come down to the 3 NC the GOP flipped thanks to its new gerrymander. And that itself hinged on NC's supreme court flipping in 2022.
Taniel
If you want to know where we're at – the President of COP29 used his speech to talk about proud history of oil drilling in Azerbaijan and refers to oil and gas as a “gift of the gods” at the opening of the CLIMATE SUMMIT!! Time to end fossil fuels.
Mike Hudema
I had the German measles, chickenpox and mumps consecutively in the second grade. I don’t wish that upon anyone. This is a FAFO timeline that affects children who didn’t ask for this. SMH
Becky Maruca
Don't be deceived. RFK doesn't care about corporate greed. He only attacks the pharma industry because he wants to make it easier to hawk dubious supplements and products from a wellness industry that is already worth trillions and is regulated far less than vaccines and drugs.
Dr. Lucky Tran
Words of wisdom:
Tim O’Brien
If you operate under the assumption that the Trump presidency is primarily motivated to enrich Trump and his allies, you’ll have an understanding of most everything that comes from his White House. However, the purpose of public office is to provide public goods for the general welfare.
Jennifer N. Victor
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” –Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Leah McElrath
Vaccines are cool yes, but have you ever considered cake? I'm not even joking. First, you take bread (already impressive) and tinker with how much flour, eggs, butter, and sugar you put in. But then for some reason, you add a bit of baking powder? It wasn't even invented until 1840!
Geeky Meerkat
Missing targets RAISES the urgency of near-term action, it doesn't relax it. But setting out unachievable targets as 'do or die,' as has been the case around 1.5°C for a decade, absolutely feeds fatalism. I've seen it so often in the young people I talk to and teach as well as friends and neighbors.
Jesse D. Jenkins
Donald Trump is now (1) below 50% popular vote and (2) has a margin of popular vote victory roughly HALF of Hillary's victory in 2016. They believe the left has to lay down and shut up because of this "landslide" victory.
David Pakman
TIL that one reason raw milk is having a comeback is a lot of people don't know what pasteurization is. They think it's adding "chemicals" not a rapid heat treatment
Kendra Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.bsky.social
why do all the people who are obsessed with bluesky being an echo chamber write for national publications headquartered in new york and dc?
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
The Democratic Party is radically to the left of where it was in 2000 and it’s also not left enough and both of these things can be true simultaneously because our cultural context has changed and the politics necessary to move us forward has changed with it.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
It’s kind of wild we witnessed multiple bomb threats traced to foreign adversaries and targeting polling stations in key swing states, and we’re all kind of like, “Well, that’s just a thing that happens now.”
Leah McElrath
American white identity politics has always been defined by its combination of entitlement to unearned privilege on one hand, and a bitter sense of grievance that the entitlement into which you believe yourself to have been born has been taken from you by non-white and/or non-Christian others.
Seth Cotlar
Biden doesn't have much time left in office, but he should immediately transfer all $300b in Russian frozen assets + interest to UKRAINE To help them buy all the artillery + fighter jets+ ammunition they need to fight Russia.
Tracy @blondiebombshell.bsky.social
This resonated:
Peter Gleick
Trump is now < 50%, and leads Harris < 2%. This election was extremely close. That margin will have enormous consequences. But it’s small enough that instead of debating which vulnerable groups and standards of decency Dems should abandon, they could just focus on how to better defend both.
Radley Balko
The paradox of tolerance can be solved with mutual respect. Give only what will be reciprocated. Nazis won’t give us space, so we don’t owe it to them.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
"It should go without saying that Gaetz is not, by any normal standards, even a tiny bit qualified to be attorney general. He practiced law for only about two years...suing an old woman for money she owed his father’s caregiving company."
Jenn&Tonic @jtsveigdalen.bsky.social
DOGE isn't real, it's an angle for Elon to fire the regulators who he doesn't like regulating him, and to gain a wedge for his personal businesses that all heavily depend on and benefit from government subsidy
scoops @scoopsstp.bsky.social
Annual morbidity in the 20th century, before and after vaccines:
Measles:
Before: 530,000, After: 47
Mumps:
Before: 160,000, After: 429
Rubella:
Before: 50,000, After: 3
Diphtheria:
Before: 20,000, After: 2
Smallpox:
Before: 30,000, After: 0
Polio:
Before: 16,000, After: 0
Mikel Jollett
Hypocrisy is one thing. The same ghouls who deployed the “groomer” smear now demanding Gaetz be handed the highest law enforcement office in the country — while keeping the House report about his alleged statutory rape secret — is just straight up nihilism.
Radley Balko
Trump is asking Congressional Republicans to publicly stain their souls as proof of their total compliance.
Travis View
Clematis fuzz:
amohr
I really don’t understand this whole ‘stay on Twitter and fight’ thing. You’re jousting with bots and reply guys and wading through ads it’s not Waterloo.
Nesrine Malik
The only thing RFK Jr might have a point about is the revolving door between the FDA and pharma. Even then his assessment is massively exaggerated and utterly divorced from reality, nor does he have clue one about how to reform the system to address the problem without making things worse.
David Gorski, MD, PhD @gorskon.bsky.social
One thing I find hilarious about the argument about whether we can stop climate change without changing lifestyles is that advertisers are constantly working to manipulate lifestyles. If ads didn't manipulate lifestyles, why would companies spend untold billions on them every year?
Kevin J. Kircher
Walking, biking, transit, and fruits and veggies have a combined ad budget of roughly $0. And then we pretend people eat corporate fast food and drive SUVs because The Free Market Decided
Miles Grant
People sure have elaborate theories about the magic combination of economic factors as to why the metrics show a great economy but people think it sucks when it’s just… the media coverage. Absent that, it’s impossible to explain THIS:
Grudgie the Whale
There is no “game over” in the fight against climate change. Today, it remains our collective task to continue to bend the arc of global emissions towards net zero. The next battle begins today.
Jesse D. Jenkins
100%. Plus, the discourse has convinced many that 1.5 C is a “tipping point” as opposed to a policy milestone that signifies that we are already experiencing dangerous climate change, and the discourse is laying groundwork for a loss of credibility when 1.50 C turns out to be nothing special.
Bob Kopp
About 3,000 people die of food poisoning in the US each year, but apparently, that's not exciting enough for some people.
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social
Hey you:
Ethan M. Aldridge
Imagine 21 fully loaded 737-8 MAX going down, with no survivors—every
day. That's how many people will die in car crashes in the world in next
24 hrs. Based on 1.3 million road deaths in 2023, 40,900 of them in US.
@taras-grescoe.com
In addition to climate and water and politics, I follow mandolin posts here, but those are a mix of bluegrass/Irish music and people slicing their fingers up with sharp kitchen tools.
Peter Gleick
they should invent a bed that makes you as sleepy as a couch
@pleasebegneiss.bsky.social
Apparently everyone is supposed to believe that "woke" college students have equal power to the US government which is now fully controlled by MAGA. Think about how bonkers that sounds.
Prisonculture
There are books to be written about the pathologies in this photo. Mr. Covenant Marriage beams with a sexual predator, serial adulterer, and weirdo breeder. Clean Food/Earth nut clutches a burger with Drill Baby Drillers. Nepo-baby failson. World’s richest man reduced to a truckling sycophant:
Radley Balko
You got the United Nations, the Lemkin Institute, and the damned Papacy saying Israel's actions in Gaza are either consonant with genocide or need to be seriously investigated as such. I really don't see how anyone can look you in the eye and deny it at this point
Nick Brumfield
incredible number of you do not seem to understand the difference between trump’s base and the marginal trump voter, i.e. “the people who gave trump the win.” and the reason this is important is that politics have not stopped happening. trump is set to squander whatever goodwill he has with the voting public and this is an opportunity
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
Something I think about not infrequently is how sure Madison and Hamilton were that each branch of the government would jealously protect their powers and how badly political parties have blown up that theory.
Hayes Brown
I was today years old when I learned that our future Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem launched a public awareness campaign in South Dakota with the tagline, "Meth. We're On It":
Will Bunch
If you really want to worsen the problem of homelessness in American cities, cutting Medicaid and other services for the poor is definitely a way to do it.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social
If you know anyone who opposes birthright citizenship, ask them this: “if you had to prove you are actually a citizen without reference to where you or your parents or their parents were born, could you?” For most of us, birth certificate is all we’ve ever needed.
Whey Standard
A diesel transit vehicle only needs to carry a few passengers to be better for air quality than the same people driving cars. But California state policy is eager to force more people to drive in order to make transit vehicles "cleaner."
Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social
Editorial cartoon, November 18, 1924:
Paul Fairie @paulisci.bsky.social
NEW: Private schools across the South that were established for white children during desegregation are now benefiting from tens of millions in taxpayer dollars flowing from rapidly expanding voucher-style programs, a ProPublica analysis found.
Charles Ornstein
“Nearly 2,000 children under 5 are dying every day from air pollution, which has become the 2nd biggest health risk factor for young children around the world. More than 8 million deaths of children and adults were caused by air pollution in 2021.”
Brent Toderian
I think why the trans thing has me riled up beyond the obvious “some of them are my friends” thing is that it really sums up the philosophy of Trumpism, namely that People Who Matter should get to punch whoever they want and are the victims because their knuckles got sore from hitting them too hard.
Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social
"The purpose of a system is what it does."
Warren Wells, AICP
The most underrated piece of winter clothing is the scarf. Every year I re-learn this lesson when I wait too long before wearing one. And then it makes a huge difference in my outdoor comfort.
Alex Schieferdecker
I hate that Trump is the most successful foreign intelligence op in history. Like when else has a country just straight up installed their adversary’s leader in plain sight? He’s going to wreck us and tell us it was our own fault and Putin will be laughing the whole time.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com
the thing about being a political junkie is you have extremely difficult time conceptualizing how someone could be totally ignorant of politics. but i would strongly encourage you to imagine the kind of person who googled “did biden drop out?” on november 4th and then cast a ballot on november 5th
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
From Harry Enten:
Trump's mandate? It's very shallow. Trump's now under 50% in the popular vote. His margin ranks 44 of 51 since 1824.
Weak coattails: 4 Dems won for Senate in states Trump won. (It was 0 in 2016 & 2020.)
The GOP is on track for smallest House majority since there were 50 states.
Leah McElrath
This one is doing the rounds again, for (I presume) obvious reasons:
Brent Toderian
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