BlueSky, March 2025, Part 1

I'm breaking up these long, long months once again, with the first half of March 2025 today, and the second half tomorrow. It's in reverse chronological order, starting with  March 1 through most of March 15. Tomorrow will cover the rest of March 15 through March 31.

The month began where February left off: Reactions to Trump and Vance trying to belittle President Zelenskyy in the White House. There was the state of the union (which I tried to ignore) and the Democratic response. DOGE continued its rampage through federal agencies. Mahmoud Kahlil was abducted by ICE, which I posted about earlier. Tesla's stock, the stock market, and economy generally were tanking, so Trump and Musk set up a car lot on the White House lawn. The half-month ended just when it still wasn't clear whether Senate Democrats would help pass the Republican Continuing Resolution.

As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.

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Out of all the bullies and monsters in the administration, Marco Rubio seems like the purest specimen of how Nazism happened — not a sincere bigot or ideologue, just an empty shell who has literally no limits on what he will agree to do or pretend to believe, embracing brutality to fill his weakness
Tom Scocca

only segregationists get mad about “hands of different skin tones” on display in a school
Nicole Hemmer @pastpunditry.bsky.social

On This Day 1941: The surprise "Ides of March" blizzard of March 15-17 begins, striking Minnesota and North Dakota, creating 12' snow drifts and causing 71 deaths. The shocking tragedy prompts the US Weather Bureau to rethink forecasting, including the creation of more local weather offices:


Vince Mpls

Irony of Department of Education's 150 + year old stats agency being demolished is that this was the very issue that led to the OG ED being blown up in 1867. Confederate states hated the idea of feds monitoring the literacy rates of former slaves. Here we are again
Jennifer Berkshire

It is clear that white people don’t want to be saved and this country will continue to suffer until they do
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Watching Trump speak publicly lately is…just humiliating. Monotone reading of embarrassing lies and insults off the teleprompter, only ad-libbing to add ridiculous sounding adjectives to over-exaggerate his points like a braggy small child. It would be sad if it wasn’t so dangerous and scary.
Brent Toderian

The historical precedents for what we're seeing in the US right now are the Alien & Sedition Acts and the Palmer Raids. The first generated widespread backlash and an almost religious embrace of free speech rights, the second more or less faded out amid the euphoria of 1920s prosperity.
Judah Grunstein

the truth about jd vance is that he’s almost certainly right that his classmates looked down on him and they were right to do it
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

"They support Hamas" is the new "they're a communist". Clear as fucking day.
Nick Brumfield

a liberal doing a boycott or a leftist doing a sit in or nonviolent occupation of a building all get called terrorists, a conservative shooting people or running them down with their car or blowing up a building is defined as let's not talk about that too much more of them might kill people
Robert Evans @iwriteok.bsky.social

This week, Trump:
* Tried to deport a student protestor
* Blackmailed a prestigious university over protests
* Told USAID to burn documents
* Ordered plans to seize Panama Canal
* Criminalized NGOs for taking grants from the EPA
* Called for imprisoning his opponents in speech to DOJ
Jocelyn Leitzinger

if you think the economics of clean air are great (and they are!) - you should see the economics of climate action.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

Civil servants, by and large, *care*. I really think that explains why reactionaries are so hostile to them. Reactionaries can't conceive of sincerely dedicating yourself to others, sacrificing for others, so they must invent elaborate "deep state" conspiracies to explain it away. "Everyone is selfish" is central to the reactionary worldview. It's a permanent permission slip for being shitty. The very existence of good, pro-social, other-oriented human beings is a threat to their self-image, their weltanschauung, so all such people must be explained away or destroyed.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

We shouldn't have to nearly break the telecommunications infrastructure of Washington DC every time there's a self-evident position for the Democrats to take. They should be the ones firing *US* up, not the other way around. I'm so tired.
RamsHornStudios

It’s awesome that Senate Democrats are voting to pass Trump’s budget while he’s at the DOJ calling them a bunch of criminals and saying newspapers and MSNBC should be illegal. That’s great, good job guys.
Max Berger

Hellebore float #4. I got my hands in the dirt for the first time this year planting the three new hellebores. One of them is the bright green at 6:00. The others aren't blooming yet:


The Garden Hermit

This is not a victory for "centrists" or "moderates" over "the Left" or the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. This is a faction of accommodationists, people entirely incapable of imagining anything but politics-as usual, and outright collaborators sabotaging those who wish to fight back.
Thomas Zimmer

If Democrats were unwilling to fight over cabinet nominees and unwilling to fight over the budget/shutdown, it’s safe to assume they’re not going to fight over anything.
Kyle Foley

With the attacks on science and academia by the current administration, if those of us who have tenure don't speak up, it's really hard to continue justifying the tenure system based on academic freedom.
David Ho

Just one example of how breaking the government can be the opposite of efficiency: Trump’s push to layoff half of the IRS workforce would cost the government $350B over 10 years, as the revenue lost from unpaid taxes is about 9x the amount saved from layoffs.
Steve Rattner

New analysis says ~2/3 of unpaid taxes come from the top 10% of households, w/ 28% coming from the top 1%. The GOP CR would cut $20.2 billion of IRS funding for catching rich tax cheats - because the GOP is laser-focused on helping the rich cheat on their taxes.
Bobby Kogan @bbkogan.bsky.social

On parents' rights: fuck you. Parents have no rights. Parents have responsibilities. CHILDREN have rights. Stop seeing your children as your possessions and maybe they’ll talk to you after they turn 18.
Donna Fox @donnamatrix.bsky.social

Trump's only goal is chaos. He needs to be able to declare a state of emergency in 18 months & cancel elections. Otherwise, he's fucked. Resistance now is our only chance to stop him. Appeasement is the worst possible strategy.
Dan Marshall @danmarstp.marshallwords.com

It is hard to overestimate the damage caused by "move fast and break things." It took root in our culture as a belief in it as a necessary or even admirable approach to progress, but it is rotten at the core. It doesn't even hold up in tech, let alone traffic safety and now the entire US government.
Tara Goddard @drtaragoddard.com

A lot of the “achievements” of western civilization actually kind of suck but one thing that definitely does not suck is how half our children don’t die anymore
lukelukeluke

The (dirty and hazardous to health) fossil fuel system needs 100 times more material by weight than the renewables system we're replacing it with, because we burn oil, gas and coal every second of every day:


Assaad Razzouk

Rural person with a congressman who hasn’t had a townhall in over a decade: no one is being paid to show up to empty townhalls. We are angry and we finally have enough others who are angry too. We finally have the numbers to fill up gymnasiums and libraries. We don’t need a dime to show up.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

no matter what the circumstances, democrats are always saving their energy for a mythical future situation where they will do something good
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

“Illegal immigrant” was their first success. Now comes
“Illegal boycott”
“Illegal protest”
“Illegal votes”
“Illegal posts”
Until the “illegal” is you.
Anonymous @youranoncentral.bsky.social

At least 95% of everything that is going on in the US wouldn't be right now if y'all just elected the qualified Black woman and the former classroom teacher. It really didn't have to be this way.
Shana V. White

What kind of humiliation kink drives someone to roll over for Donald Trump a day or two after he publicly called you a fake Jew
Ned Resnikoff

19-20 months from now, Trump will have pushed the economy off a cliff and left the civil service a smouldering husk. If you're a Democratic elected and you think a government shutdown from a CR fight is gonna be the thing voters remember, you need your fucking head examined.
Jason Linkins @dceiver.bsky.social

Worth pointing out amidst Trump/McMahon's firing of half of the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights yesterday that the agency was already staggeringly under resourced. The Office of Civil Rights' budget had remained flat over the last two decades while its caseload quadrupled.
Rachel M. Perera @rachelmarisa.bsky.social

When I was in school, they told us we'd get a quadruple F minus if we cited Wikipedia and now governments are like "Coin Toss Computer, should I bomb Norway?" and I just want to know how we got here.
Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty @irhottakes.bsky.social

Folks, I hate to state the obvious here and I know it's scary as hell, but this shit won't stop without mass mobilization. "But Amy then they will just declare marshal law!" Babe, if you're afraid to protest, you're already living under marshal law.
Amy Westervelt

It would all be very unpopular if you could convince people it was happening
Dave Levitan

This machine fights the fascist, billionaire broligarchy:


Pedaling Professor

I guess Republicans could go with "It's the Democrats' fault there's a shutdown because they wouldn't obey us," and there are certainly D.C. reporters who are stupid or craven enough to parrot that, but it does seem fairly easy for any Democrat with a mouth and a microphone to refute convincingly.
Mark Harris

The Education Department’s civil rights branch is losing nearly half its staff in the Trump administration’s layoffs, effectively gutting an office that already faced a backlog of thousands of complaints from students and families across the nation.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

In the disability world, where I am expert, Republicans tell white parents of disabled kids and white disabled adults – constantly – that the lack of resources is because of fraud committed by non-white disabled people and families. That "those people" are just lazy and could work.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

I think one thing about the DOGE guys is they believe no one is actually a liberal, all of their opponents are paid shills, because they themselves faked being liberal for years and assume everyone is actually like them
Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social

We're at a point where if you simply explained in neutral terms what the administration is doing, an otherwise uninformed person would simply not believe you. "We're defunding cancer research, ending weather reporting and legalizing the dumping of poisons? You're joking."
Craig Calcaterra

proselytization is fucking rude and violent leave me ALONE
Talia Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social

was never a fan of this but it became much more sinister to me when I eventually realized that public proselytization isn't designed to convert members of the public (it literally never works) but as a brainwashing/indoctrination technique aimed by the religion at the proselytizers. sending people out to rudely acost strangers about religion will predictably and rightly lead to many rude responses and a feeling of alienation, frustration and fear towards the general public and a feeling of bonding and comraderie towards the people inside the religion
mtsw

N of 1, but my daughter is on her phone as much as any teen but also has an active social life in large part because we live in a place where it's easy for her and her friends to walk and take transit. Access to public space and safe streets are missing ingredients in a lot of American kids' lives. People move to the 'burbs for all kinds of reasons but a big one is that they get more space for their money: a house with multiple bedrooms, a rec room, a big backyard, etc. But kids don't necessarily need a lot of space. What they need are other kids.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

The thing about scientific research is that it’s one of the few national investments that’s a clear public good even if you entirely discount the actual ostensible point of it.
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com

it really is something that almost a century later, oligarchs and economic royalists still see social security as an affront that must be destroyed
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Despite Rubio’s grandfather’s “insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies…That charge, had they pursued it, could have led to a conclusion that he was a national security threat.” Oh. The. Irony.
Mehdi Hasan

Here are some nice mushrooms:


lukelukeluke

The news media gave more coverage to the idea Tim Walz retiring from the National Guard after 20 years was scandalous than to Trump's promise to destroy the department of education
mtsw

I'm waiting for this administration to criminalize climate scientists claiming that we defrauded the US by receiving government grants to conduct fraudulent climate research. I'm not even kidding.
David Ho

The EPA now stands for Environmental Poisoning Agency
Steven G @stevencal03.bsky.social

Trump’s EPA just went full scorched earth.
• 31 rules wiped out — climate protections, pollution limits, EV standards gone.
• Environmental justice? Scrapped.
• Coal and oil cash in — everyone else pays the price.
H. John Tran @johnhtran.bsky.social

The FBI is now moving to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” This comes after EPA Director Lee Zeldin eliminated the EPA headquarters in D.C. and 10 other regional offices.
The New Republic

Crushing the labor market is one half of why Musk and Trump want to cause a recession. This is the other half. You and other working people will be wiped out but that creates "buying opportunities" for those with enough capital accumulated to weather the storm.
mtsw

As I like to say: Whenever two or more people gather together to destroy what's best about America, you can be certain that at least one of them went to Yale.
Jon Schwarz

Here are the parts of the world that exceeded 2C in the past five years:


Zeke Hausfather @hausfath.bsky.social

Moving a detainee around to evade judicial review is classic authoritarian behavior.
Domestic Enemy Hat @kenwhite.bsky.social

The fresh horror: the US is becoming a net importer of food. Which is wild, because the US has probably the most high-quality farmland per person of any country on the planet. WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE FOLKS???
Sarah Taber

I have been covering agriculture, on and off, for 30 years. This involves talking to a lot of farmers and people in the business. You know what I have never heard? Not once? Farmers complaining about USDA's Agricultural Research Service and its outreach programs—the ones Musk just randomly cut.
Charles C. Mann

Republicans in West Virginia passed a bill that would allow health care providers to “visually or physically examine a minor child” for the purpose of identifying their “biological sex” without the “consent of the child’s parent, guardian, or custodian.”
Dr. Jack Brown

USDOT Secretary's office sent an email to DOT agencies instructing them to review competitively awarded — but not yet fully obligated — projects under Biden that include:
—Green infra
—Bike infra
—EV infra
—Project purpose to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
DOT wants to revise project scopes or cancel.
Yonah Freemark

"Car dealership that disappears political dissidents" really does feel like the form America has been building to this whole time.
@gonebabygone.bsky.social

one thing i keep thinking about is how there is simply no way to design a constitutional system that can resist authoritarian incursion if participants in that system do not actually care that much
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I am doing it but FUCK it feels bleak to every day have to call my safe Democratic representatives and be like "please do not vote for the They Shoot You With a Gun act. The writers of this bill have promised to shoot you, personally, with a gun"
droog barrymore @markpopham.bsky.social


James R (Randy) Fromm @randyfromm.bsky.social

Opposing the majority party is being the opposition party; signing on to what the majority party does makes you the junior partner in a governing coalition. When they succeed you get zero credit and when they fail you share blame. This isn’t hard, nor is it new ground.
Ed Burmila

trump came to power both times arguing that america was in the dump — that nothing could be worse than it currently is. and both times what he meant is that *he* would make it that way
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

abundantly clear that this administration takes “discrimination” to mean “any regard for minority communities” and treats “merit” as a synonym for “white (and preferably male)”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

EPA Head Lee Zeldin said that "environmental justice — which the agency defined in 2013 as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income"...was tantamount to discrimination."
Yonah Freemark

In case you were wondering if the "anti-racists are the REAL racists" talking point was new:


Seth Cotlar

the opportunity costs of car ownership are *massive*. if you invested the ~$1k/mo average cost of car ownership - over 20 years, you'll have $460k at 6% interest, v. wasting $240k on car ownership. that's a swing of $700k folks. e-bikes are an *incredible* investment.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

"A study in the American Economic Review found that consumers paid $817,000 for each new manufacturing job created by Mr. Trump’s washing machine tariffs in his first term"
Simonetta Vezzoso @wavesblog.bsky.social

in america you have several inalienable rights unless you poll badly with white suburbanites
skáld @danglinghemmie.bsky.social

An internal EPA memo directs the closure of offices designed to ease the heavy pollution faced by poor and minority communities.
Anthony Michael Kreis

Mid Week Mood Enhancer, Kyoto, 2018:


Present & Correct

So we’re clear: the movement to get rid of public school in the US is one long extended tantrum response to Brown vs Board of Education. That’s who’s in power right now.
Amy Westervelt

Someone I know saw someone working at Wal-Mart who had "weird hair," tattoos, and piercings. The fact that she had to see this meant Christians were being persecuted. It's not just that they want to be liked. They want to not be reminded that people different than them exist.
@wake3d.bsky.social

I know this is going to sound naive or earnest, but I genuinely find myself shocked by how little people seem to be upset by the levels of corruption we're seeing. Is that the median voter assumes everyone is corrupt already? Or isn't actually getting stories about the corruption?
Chris Hayes

Kill someone with a car and you'll likely see no jail time. Damage cars or chargers and the president (and others before him) insists you're a domestic terrorist. Welcome to the US, where corporations and cars matter more than human beings.
Pedaling Professor

Trump is using the White House to make a commercial for the richest man in the world while Americans’ 401ks are plummeting.
Brian Tyler Cohen

Get in loser, we're tanking the economy:


The Daily Show

You don't need unity to fight fascism. You need solidarity. They are not the same thing.
@recombobulating.bsky.social

I don’t understand why the president is allowed to spout nonsense about colonizing another country and the 25th amendment isn’t being invoked in addition to all the other horrors this is insane. It’s absolutely insane. It isn’t funny or even weird.
Roxane Gay

Are they going to argue that some random student who was engaged in protests or activism is materially impacting American foreign policy?
Adam @wyseapple.bsky.social

A lot of public-facing public service jobs have all the negative elements of retail, plus half the country will demonize you and call for your pay to be cut or your organization to be eliminated, then complain when quality of service declines. (sent from a public library reference desk in Indiana)
Mike/MJ @cosmicspaceslug.bsky.social

Free speech doesn’t mean I get to say the r-word on Twitter, it means I get to say to the U.S. government I fucking hate you and everything you stand for and the government is only allowed to reply ok thank you for sharing your feelings.
Helen Rosner @hels.bsky.social

Anti-trans laws mostly harm cis women and bring male cops into women’s toilets.
Natacha

NOAA saves lives. Every day. That's literally their job.
Eric Holthaus

it is absolutely incredible that elon's companies did not all crash to zero when he brought out what was clearly a guy in a robot suit and told everyone that it was a humanoid robot
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social

What's funny about Tesla: their still-huge share price isn't just about cars. It's predicated in part on the idea that Tesla's Optimus robots will sell by the billions and do household chores for people. But who could possibly now think people will want Elon's robots in their homes?
Ben Wikler

Efficient transport looks empty. Inefficient transport looks full:


Dr Matthew Hardy

the actual way to Make America Healthy Again is to build cities/towns that are safe and convenient to walk + bike in. not fast food that’s fried in beef tallow
Sam @samd.bsky.social

musk illegally seized control of the treasury and now wants to end social security and medicare and plunge tens of millions of americans into destitution so that we won’t go “bankrupt,” a thing that practically speaking can’t happen
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Trump complains that wind turbines "kill the birds," then, on behalf of the oil industry, goes after the Migratory Bird Treaty Act
Elizabeth Kolbert

The vast majority of us behave every day as if society and community are good things that we protect by participating in them. Watching most of the most powerful people in the country just stop doing that, at all, is heartbreaking.
Angus Johnston

It’s amazing to find out at this late date how much the rule of law depended on people simply deciding, on a voluntary, daily basis, not to break the law.
Peter Sagal

I find it baffling that Musk‘s eugenicist world view is almost completely missing from the coverage of his political actions. Why does he hate USAID and is willing to cause deaths? Because he only views certain people worthy of life and dignity. It’s not a mystery. It’s out there for all of us to see.
Annika Brockschmidt @ardenthistorian.bsky.social

The Trump administration wants to "protect Jews" about as earnestly as it wants to "protect women."
Talia Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social


paulpro @mariopro.bsky.social

People don't appreciate how much money has been concentrated by so few people. The difference between a billion and a million is a billion. The amount of money Elon Musk lost today (TODAY!) is more than the GDP of 85 countries.
David Ho

So an infamously bad businessman known for cheating suppliers and contractors, declaring bankruptcy, lying about his success, and being bailed out by shady and corrupt global players, is going ahead with the tariffs that every credible economic expert in the world  agrees is a colossally bad idea.
Brent Toderian

The Destroyer in Chief wants to shut down 34 National Park services by cancelling their leases. The parks budget is 1/15th of 1% and contributes $58.66bn to the economy and has 400,000 jobs. This can't be about government efficiency. What's the reason for this insanity? Drill baby drill?
skippyoz

RFK Jr is blaming a dead child for not exercising more
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

When you hear Trump and his supporters defend the detention of a Green Card holder by pretending to care about 1) antisemitism on campus, and 2) trespassing on college property, remember that Trump 1) hosted a Holocaust denier for dinner and 2) pardoned violent insurrectionists.
Mehdi Hasan

today it's the edgier portions of pro-palestinian activism, tomorrow it's "gender ideology," a year later maybe it's "the climate hoax." you draw the line here or not at all.
William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social

I need y'all to sit with this headline and understand what is being done to our community. They're trying to criminalize our very existence. This is a campaign of eradication:


Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net

Trump’s retaliation against law firms is having its predictable chilling effect. Punishing law firms for representing clients the president dislikes infringes on the 6th Amendment right to counsel of one’s choice and the 1st Amendment right to free association.
Barb McQuade

9 years ago, Musk got big coverage for saying that his target for manned flights to Mars was 2025. 2025 has arrived. Those flights to Mars have not. Instead Musk has destroyed a social media company, is destroying a car company, and is wrecking the US government + US economy.
James Fallows

backing off "they're weird" was an incredible mistake. Musk is just weird. He's a weird weirdo billionaire weirdly obsessed with ruining normal people's lives. this is not a complicated message.
Tom Tomorrow

More generally, Democrats and the left need to start using moral language again. It’s not just “shocking” or “unhinged” that Trump lies as easily as he breathes — it’s wrong! And it’s okay to say so!
Athul K. Acharya

Two Social Security insiders and former commish Martin O'Malley tell me that Trump and DOGE are going to break the SSA until payments are affected. It's inevitable, they say.
Justin Glawe

[I posted a number of things previously from this part of the timeline about the Mahmoud Khalil abduction.]

A reminder that this entire Trans Panic thing is just another shitty step in a long history of fake panics completely invented by political hacks. Trans people are very likely not affecting your lives at all and they certainly are not the cause of any problems on a national level. It's BULLSHIT.
Gail Simone

Cartoons?


DrMacLeodCartoons @macltoons.bsky.social

The co-president says speaking against Putin’s interests is akin to treason. So I guess that’s where we are now.
Radley Balko

One thing that's a 1000% clear to me is the manufactured media firestorm over Claudine Gay paved the way for all of this
Gillian Branstetter

Last week: SpaceX ship explodes, shutting down a huge chunk of Florida airspace.
Today: X completely down.
The last month: Tesla stock price down by a third.
Gotta hand it to Musk: He really is running the government like he runs his businesses.
Josh Chafetz

Good morning S&P 500:


Owen Winter

Tesla Takedown has been so successful because it came from the people. Musk and his goons are desperately trying to silence #TeslaTakedown protests. They spent the weekend trying to target some organizers. Unfortunately this decentralized movement only gets stronger each time they try to attack us.
@teslatakedown.com

Costa Rica has massively rewilded over recent decades. Has this led to the collapse of farming, rural society, or national wellbeing? Totally the opposite, and we in Ireland have SO much to learn from their example.
Eoghan Daltun @irishrainforest.bsky.social

if you needed another reason to hate henry kissinger (rest in piss) he also invented the political consulting industry as we know it
bobby @bobbylewis.bsky.social

Elon’s goal is to reduce waste, fraud and abuse in the same way that a massive asteroid’s goal is to remodel an apartment building
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Trump stole truck loads of classified documents, lied about it, harbored them, openly shared them, and zip. But 2 ICE agents are getting criminally charged for talking to the media.
Here's MAGA's response: "No sympathy for traitors!" "Finally! Accountability! Excellent!" "Hang them!"
Denise Wheeler

How is DOGE “saving” money by cutting from something we’ve already paid for (Social Security), and by cutting funding to the national parks – which actually bring in revenue?
Michelle likes democracy. @democracymichelle.bsky.social


William Gibson @greatdismal.bsky.social

Imagine if we had a newsroom in every county that focused on municipal meetings.
Kimberly Griffin

30 years ago, we did. They were called "local newspapers." Then the Telecom Act of 1996 allowed essentially unlimited corporate consolidation of media outlets and they killed off local news in the space of a single generation.
Gravy Crockett @bostonjerry.bsky.social

Governments shouldn't care this much about what happens on college campuses
Kelsey Atherton

It’s hard to reconcile the “they’ll go after ideologies they don’t like next” talk with the fact they’ve been openly targeting a whole suite of them associated with Black scholarship already. They’ve already threatened to defund any university teaching critical race theory. Why doesn’t that count?
Zack Pizzaz @chadstanton.bsky.social

but just to be clear if the trump administration gave a shit about antisemitism, as opposed to just lusting to oppress palestinians/immigrants, they would not employ so many nazis
Talia Lavin @swordsjew.bsky.social

Under the category “you wouldn’t believe it if you hadn’t read it”"
VA Secretary Doug Collins says he’s going to improve services for veterans
By cutting over 70,000 VA employees
Not only will that significantly DEGRADE services
It also means the VA will probably wind up FIRING about 24,000 vets
Adam Cohen @axidentaliberal.bsky.social

Not the first person to make this observation, but it's so striking how the media covered the crack epidemic as a problem caused by black/urban drug users and the fentanyl epidemic as a problem imposed externally on white/rural drug users.
mtsw


Catherine @cmyskill.bsky.social

As of today, there are more kids infected with measles than there are trans athletes playing in college sports in the U.S.
Clark @clark408.bsky.social

Congress voted to roll back the “methane fee,” a penalty on excess methane emissions. The EPA estimated the fee would have reduced 1.2 million tons of methane emissions over the next 10 years.
David McGlinchey

When Trump was sworn in, Elon Musk's corporations were under more than 32 investigations conducted by at least 11 federal agencies. Most of the cases are now closed or likely to be closed soon, and the federal agencies are being defanged by DOGE. Funny how that works, huh?
Robert Reich

Is there a single person who thinks political fundraising text messages do more good than harm to Democrats?
Hank Green

The Jevons Paradox haunts my waking hours
Sarah Goodyear

Elon Musk is actually the name of the monster, he was created by Dr. Capitalism
Tom Tomorrow

The United States was one of the most successful experiments in self-government in human history (yes, despite our flaws), and now we’re throwing it all away for two nepo baby grifters because we applauded a guy saying: “the scariest 9 words are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’”
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

once again I have to invoke the specter of Ronald Wilson Reagan, who is in Hell now. under Reagan, the term "government spending" was effectively demonized. fuck you, Reaganite ghouls! spending money, on its people and their needs, is the function of government! public works are good! say so!
the Mountain Goats

Twice as many children die in car crashes than from all pediatric cancers combined. This does not count the long term health effects of breathing exhaust, brake and tire particles or the loss of physical activity and independence from living in a world hostile to traveling outside of a car.
Bella Chu @isabellachu.bsky.social


Dr. Kim @pdxminddoc.bsky.social

Columbia University loses its federal funding while Elon Musk, who actually is antisemitic, does not
Will Bunch

my father, retired white engineer who has lived in oklahoma 45 years: “they should deport the son of a bitch to south africa and then south africa should bury him under a prison,” in case you wondered what the medicare set thinks
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Motherfuckers been looking for an Antichrist for 2000 years and they can't see this one in front of their fucking nose.
johnnylengacher.bsky.social

I have to say, International Women’s Day hits different when you’re in a country led by people who don’t believe women should be free and equal members of society.
Molly Coleman

The Fulbright program is required by law. It’s literally named after the senator that passed the bill.
Jonathan Ladd @jonmladd.bsky.social

Snidely's cousin in the news:


Chris Steller

republicans were weirdly into that "daddy's home" thing but it's more like an evil abusive stepdad who's decided to save money by not paying the mortgage or buying groceries, and keeps talking about how nice it would be to make the neighbor's back yard part of his own
Tom Tomorrow

its amazing how chatgpt knows everything about subjects I know nothing about, but is wrong like 40% of the time in things im an expert on. not going to think about this any further
Mike Ginn @shutupmikeginn.bsky.social

I got your waste, fraud, and abuse right here:


Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

Something darkly comic about the Trump administration, run by shameless liars from the very top, forcing polygraph tests on some employees. Trump, Vance, Musk, Noem, Lewandowski, et al, should take polygraph tests to set a good example.
Bill Kristol

I always find it interesting that NASA, in 6 successful missions out of 7, put 12 men on the moon in a glorified tin can with the computational power of a 1st generation iPhone and zero in-flight fatalities.
Yet 60 years later private space companies have about a 20% success rate.
The Southernerd

Pew recently asked Americans if they knew what right the First Amendment guaranteed. Here's the religious breakdown of adults who knew it guaranteed freedom of religion. Yes, education explains some of this. But it's also likely those most aware they need that right protected know this right best:


Samuel Perry @profsamperry.bsky.social

So it goes without saying, but let's say it anyway: the concentration of attacks on trans people isn't because trans people are the only people fascists hate (although they absolutely do hate them). It's because they're the people they think non-fascists are least likely to defend.
Ian Rennie @theangelremiel.bsky.social

Cyclists are treated like pests, when they're actually shopping more than drivers, costing less in healthcare than drivers, and killing/maiming fewer neighbors than drivers. If your mayor, planning and public works depts aren't putting transit, peds and cyclists first, they're the problem.
@marymm.bsky.social

DOGE cut off payments for the electricity, cell phone, and internet service of U.S. government employees who work in a high-risk area in Central America. Meanwhile, DOGE apparently plans to spend $25,000 to install a washer and dryer for their own personal use in a federal office building in DC.
Anna Bower

Cis black women are targeted by transphobes because America's definition of feminity has never included Black women. That one of the many reasons why I don't understand how some of us can be transphobic.
Starscape @starscape15.bsky.social

I don't condone violence, but I think when you treat so many people like dirt, as President Musk is doing, eventually they will fight back. I do worry that this sort of thing could become a Reichstag fire and be used to justify further repression.
Bruce Bartlett

if i lived in the 1800s and making dinner meant spending every waking hour baking bread and plucking a chicken or whatever and then my husband sat down and said "let's thank god for this meal" i think i'd poison him
Natalie Alana Ashton @natalan.bsky.social

Again, the Republican "reasonable" position on e.g. trans participation in high school sports can only be implemented by incredibly invasive shit against kids and as the parent of several: fuck no.
Leon English

A number of conservative personalities over on the other place are calling for Trump to ‘ignore’ judges and just do whatever he wants under his ‘Article 2’ powers. I actually think we do have judicial overreach in this country BUT can you imagine their reaction if Dems had said or done this?
Mehdi Hasan

Some days you just wanna give up, let everything go and follow the light inside of a red cabbage:


Ditch Skipper @narrowboatireland.bsky.social

Washington Post under Trump: "151,000 jobs is solid"
Washington Post under Biden: "194,000 jobs is another weak month"
Abel @abeljaimes.bsky.social

It’s striking how similar Trump and Elon Musk actually are. Both got money from dad and started on 3rd base, both were more ruthless than intelligent, and both had fake and manufactured reputations, one thru a TV show and the other thru spin that he was “the real Tony Stark“ when he never built anything.
Brent Toderian

The examples of research deemed unnecessary focuses mostly on the relationship between climate change and conflict, and research on extremism. All of the social science research being cut amounts to a fraction of the cost of a single fighter jet.
Don Moynihan

I feel like if Trump had campaigned on making things more expensive and threatening to invade multiple U.S. allies that he might not have done as well in the election, tbh
Parker Molloy

I keep seeing the same common theme: the impossible standards placed on anyone advocating changes to our transport system. Question car dependency and you're expected to address every inequality and injustice at the same time; but support car dependency and you'll never be challenged on these issues
Prof. Ian Walker

Zoomers, this will not make any sense to you but the Republican Party and others used to talk about “democracy” in justifying what they did overseas. Thinking back on all the American imperialism of the immediate post 9/11 era and how much they tried to say oh that’s just liberal lies we aren’t doing this for the oil, and trump ever since 2015 has been openly saying: yes we need to take the oil and also gimme them minerals, slaves
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

Walgreens getting bought by private equity. The true death spiral starts now. Start the countdown.
Phineas

No matter what anyone may say, Al Green did the right thing. We can’t just stand by while Trump slashes our healthcare and destroys our country. Other democrats should follow his lead, not turn their backs:


Professor Adeyemi Adams

Judith Butler: "Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?"
Dan Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social

Veterans should know that they’re included under most corporate definitions of DEI and also Trump does not actually give a shit about them
Jeff Yang @originalsp.in

So are they saying he was unfairly given the opportunity to throw himself on a grenade and the job should have gone to someone who was qualified? Who's responsible for this?
CB @cryptopitcher.bsky.social

Being a historian, people ask me if I think the US is living through Germany 1933. I answer no, analogies are always imperfect but to me it feels more like Russia 1999: a blatant theft of state assets and liberals in a fugue state, refusing to believe the arc of progress is bending against them.
Maurice J. Casey

I'm not an environmental expert but if I had to guess, I'd say that giant rockets repeatedly exploding and raining flaming debris into the ocean is not probably environmentally ideal.
Jill Weinberger @jillybobww.bsky.social

The Pentagon is erasing history, scrubbing tens of thousands of images deemed DEI. One marked for deletion is Harold Gonsalves, a WWII Medal of Honor recipient who threw himself on a grenade during the Battle of Okinawa to save his fellow Marines:


Fal Rising

I remember with Brexit the boosted rhetoric in 2016 was “all your stuff will be cheaper” and by 2022 they were like “eating turnips all the time will be good for the national character.” MAGA’s doing that now except over 6 weeks not 6 years.
Alan Allport

Imagine being in Congress right now and thinking the most important thing to worry about is whether you’ll get reelected.
Janet D. Stemwedel @docfreeride.bsky.social

Been reading through a lot of December 1860 news, and I’m gonna tell you now: Abandon the Trump voters. They’re not worth the energy. They will either convert themselves through misery or die for their beliefs. Instead, focus attention on shoring up the people who are already doing the work, or can be convinced to join. Anybody who’s checked out but is going to lose something big? That’s who you should talk to. People who are uneasy but don’t know what to do? Your new best friends.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

They think Enola Gay is a homosexual airplane in the same way that they think biodiversity is woke.
David Ho

Two Boeing 737 MAX airliners crashed and we (rightly) grounded the entire fleet until investigations and fixes could ensure safety. How many people on airliners (and elsewhere) have been endangered by the two recent SpaceX disasters? Is there no clause in that 8-launch contract to stop this?
Tara Goddard @drtaragoddard.com

These are heads of butter lettuce that grew after I put grocery store lettuce in the dirt — the kind of lettuce you buy that still has a tiny root ball. These had only a couple of leaves when I started, and I'm amazed how well they're doing! (Toes at bottom for scale.)


Mignon Fogarty @grammargirl.bsky.social

when they try to ban all trans healthcare due to “a lack of research” remember that they are actively trying to dismantle any research on these topics that isn’t being done with an already predetermined outcome of “it’s evil and harmful, ban it”
eva @eva.computer

If you're 60, 69.1% of all job growth since your birth occurred under Democratic administrations.  
If you're 45, that number is 74.7%.  
If you're under 30, the number is 100%.
@sundaedivine.bsky.social

Americans got more outraged over the possibility of losing TikTok than they did over the rise of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and the collapse of democracy. That alone says a lot about the state of society.
American Fietser

It would be helpful if more people understood renewable energy is actually an extremely disruptive technology and the reason monied interests are trying to make folks hate it is that they are the ones which will be disrupted.
Technology Connections @techconnectify.bsky.social

17 bar and club sign, billings, montana, 1980:


old roadside pics @roadside.xor.blue

Once again, adding seats to SCOTUS has rapidly become the only serious baseline pro-democracy position at this point. A Republic cannot have half of the members of its constitutional court totally disregard the constitution itself, contracts, the plain meaning of words, and all empirical evidence.
Mark Copelovitch

​This story from Charleston, SC shows why on-demand transit can't scale:
1 Transit agency offers those 55+ $21 off 20 monthly Uber/Lyft rides if they pay $4/trip
2 Seniors sign up in droves, blowing the budget
3 Transit agency quickly tightens eligibility, lowers subsidy by 1/3, and raises copay 25%
No question: Most people would prefer door-to-door, on-demand trips over a fixed-route bus. The problem is that each trip on microtransit/ridehail is *massively subsidized*.
Over time, the transit agency has only bad options:
- Spend additional $$ on on-demand
- Ration trips
- Let service degrade
David Zipper

“Those nasty Canadians are ripping us off and are controlled by Mexican cartels. They’re poisoning us with fentanyl and need to become the 51st state or they will pay a high price” is a belief that literally ZERO Americans had six weeks ago. It’s entirely invented from scratch.
Chris Hayes

It's just enormously important to understand that the goal of this tariff policy isn't to raise money or to increase manufacturing in the United States. The goal is to make some of the nation's largest companies subject to Trump's personal discretion and dependent on his favor.
Binyamin Appelbaum

It’s striking how effectively republicans tied mainstream dems with random internet communists, despite the two groups hating each other, while the vice president and shadow president are clearly in a million group chats with literal nazis and people hardly notice
James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social

American exceptionalism is the bill of goods they sold you so that you wouldn't realize that other countries give workers rights, reasonable minimum wages, and health care that isn't job dependent.
Courtney Milan

Bureaucracy is the rule of law made manifest. Without bureaucracy society is just the whims of those with power, however that power was gained.
Kevin J. Maroney @womzilla.bsky.social

This has been reported. So I'm not breaking any news. But it's amazing: Kristi Noem is literally running campaign commercials for Trump using the DHS budget. I knew this was happening from news reports. But I hadn't seen them until I saw them yesterday on the local ABC affiliate at the gym.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

Conservatives opposed Title IX when it was implemented. They are opposing the expansion of its protections now. Republicans don't care about women's sports except when they provide an opportunity to persecute trans people.
Karrin Vasby Anderson


Patton Oswalt

“Feminism went too far” is such a wild thing to say in a time where reproductive rights are being stripped and birthing people are going septic in hospitals
Lyz @lyz.bsky.social

"They'll never cut Social Security" is the new "they'll never overturn Roe v Wade."
Randi Mayem Singer

Astonishing that four SCOTUS justices think the president can order the federal government to refuse to pay congressionally appropriated funds to contractors for *work already completed.*  And in fact they’re “stunned” that anyone would disagree.
Radley Balko

Alito and Thomas full-blown think of themselves as medieval clerics ordained by an angry God to burn witches and oppress the peasantry.
Ody @odeecs.bsky.social

Musk states "the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy." Charles Darwin, who actually researched this stuff, showed it was empathy, specifically, that enabled humanity to flourish.
Dave Vetter

socrates argued that “to do what’s unjust would be worse than suffering it,” but this so called defender of “western” civilization says, “well what if he was wrong?”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Happy Free Borsht Day to all who celebrate!


Eugene Finkel

How fucking broken do your brain and heart have to be to look at this world and say, "Yeah, the number one problem is that people have too much empathy"
Devon Biere

Reagan has been dead for over 30 years, not a single person under 45 has a substantive living memory of him as president, and everyone else knows him as the Republican God. Centering him in a DEMOCRATIC response to a GOP president in 2025 is like if Dems rallied around Herbert Hoover at Woodstock.
Craig Calcaterra

The only reason to bring up Reagan in a comparison to Trump is to note that Reagan was an icon for the right for decades "but even *he* wouldn't do ________." If, however, you pretend that Reagan was some kind of uncontroversial moderate, you're severely undercutting the point.
Kevin M. Kruse

Essentially, Reagan gave us distrust in government, plus trickle-down economics, plus precarity, plus scapegoats. And those things together are what gave us Tr#mp.
Jess Calarco

38,000 workers didn’t die building the Panama Canal, and the 5,000 who did die were almost all Afro-Caribbean workers who toiled in segregated conditions under white American supervisors.
Jonathan M. Katz

The Trump administration has the audacity to talk about a child who overcame brain cancer after firing countless cancer researchers.
Hemant Mehta @friendlyatheist.com

I don't think there's precedent for this level of open corruption at the federal level, certainly not in the last 100+ years.
Filipe Campante

Wanna know how fucked the Minnesota economy is re: tariffs on exports? In 2023, over 50% ($12B+) of our exports went to Canada, Mexico, and China.
Nick Harper

Turns out an $820 billion military budget isn't enough to defend the country when the attack comes from inside.
Peter Gleick

been thinking a lot about the media reaction to Biden's first debate performance compared to its response to fascism
Joshua Erlich

Moss and lichen:


L Wasson @wassonl.bsky.social

we can argue about whether democrats have the right tone, or are saying the right things, but the republican president's advisor is saying that veterans aren't fit to work and the unelected co-president says social security is a ponzi scheme, the bar for breaking through is incredibly high
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

You know what would be really cool? A system of government where the whims of the head of state could be constrained by some kind of parliament or legislature, or there were some kinds of “checks” or “balances” that ensured that one person didn’t simply get to dictate how the government worked
Will Stancil

I love how The “liberal” media say they want a Joe Rogan when their podcasts are already a bunch of men talking to men about men. Folks you are Rogan. You just have diff politics but your grip on the mic and of the spotlight is just as domineering.
Tanzina Vega

I think everyone knows someone who Went Weird during the pandemic and never quite came back. That’s a lot of someones.
Naomi Alderman

DOGE list this week:
1. Ancient tome in locked crypt? Feed that book into ChatGPT. Knowledge wants to be free!
2. Night’s Watch all laid off, winter is not coming. Mentioning winter is now illegal.
3. All these magic potions in different vessels? Just pour them all into one big tub. Savings!
Naomi Alderman

While a lot about this current political moment is genuinely shocking, America is exactly what my Black Southern family has always said it was. It’s not exactly a comfort, but it is grounding.
Ryan Ken @ryankenacts.bsky.social

Being able to drop a quarterly US GDP prediction by 5.1% from +2.3% to -2.8% in a single week is one of the most impressive economic developments in the history of the world.
Oliver Alexander @oalexanderdk.bsky.social

JFC. The US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index is at its highest level since 2000, higher than during the Financial Crisis, higher than during COVID:


Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social

I’m not really surprised by anything the admin has done, but I expected the vibes to be closer to “private equity stripping a company down for parts” rather than “meth head stripping the walls for scrap metal”
James Medlock @jdcmedlock.bsky.social

The GOP vision is a Minnesota where a little girl can’t learn sex education in school but can be forced to have an invasive medical exam to verify her reproductive organs because a random guy in the bleachers thought she was a little too good at soccer.
Carin @mrotzie.bsky.social

You want to know what has kept girls/women's sports from being extinct? DEI. Title IX mandated that schools give equal resources to girls (vs boys) sports. The right spent years raging against Title IX claiming it took opportunities from boys/men, and now they pretend to be "saving" women's sports?
Kate Starbird

the more democrats concede to the republican war on trans people, the more that signals to the public that trans people are a problem and should be stigmatized.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Yes, millions of people will suffer but at least it's for a good cause: because one old asshole wanted to avoid going to jail for crimes he committed
I am no longer kidding @internethippo.bsky.social

So far, every fraud claimed by Musk has turned out to be a fraud by Musk. But guarantee MAGA will never catch on. I know a lot of Repubs and they all think Musk is doing an outstanding job. To them, he is like Goliath slaying the fraud and crimes of Biden and Dems the suckered dumb shits.
Denise Wheeler

The average American voter thinks that the government is too big but that it should spend more money on everything it does. This explains a decent share of the political chaos of this country:


Jonathan Cohn

If you were looking for a unified theory explaining the last 20 years of Supreme Court politics, you could do a lot worse than “Citizens United was a direct reaction to Obama winning, and Shelby County was a direct reaction to Obama winning again”
Jay Willis

The state of the union is that the President is spitting in the face of the law. He is letting an unelected billionaire fire cancer researchers and wreck federal agencies like the Social Security Administration at will. I won't be attending tomorrow's Joint Address.
Senator Patty Murray

If I have to read one more "news" report that claims that these tariffs on Canada have anything to do with fentanyl, I will lose it. Why doesn't the media fact check baseless statements from the President? Why do they just repeat his lies?
Leah Stokes

This is Oakley, Kaos, and Charlie. They are proof that if you like something, you should get it in a couple colors:


WeRateDogs

I need a reality show where we lock RFK in a house with 10 ebola patients and tell him to demonstrate the value of diet and exercise
Shiv Ramdas Rice Lord @nameshiv.bsky.social

Missouri has been running the pilot for Project 2025 for a couple of decades. With a GOP Supermajority, over 30% of our schools are on a four-day week. We fund vouchers for private religious schools. Our starting teachers are 50th in the nation for pay and they pay for their own supplies.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

“The ‘war on woke’ did not suddenly appear. It is an idea deeply rooted in a form of scientific racism that has been laundered into the mainstream over decades by the Pioneer Fund and right-wing activists connected with this group”
Rebecca Sear

We could have eliminated child poverty over the past 100 years but instead we eliminated the one amazingly beneficial thing that all children, rich or poor, had daily access to: outdoor play and freedom.


Playing Out

We've gone from a country where the government maintains parks, builds schools, infrastructure, and protects civil rights to a country where the government specifically buys money laundering tokens and tells companies it won't litigate money laundering cases. And not a peep from the GOP congress
@sidewalkslam.bsky.social

Why are American taxpayers going to bail out scam artists losing money in the crypto markets? We are going to borrow more money to pump it into the crypto market to enrich scammers and leeches who produce nothing of value for humanity?
Ron Filipkowski

I don’t recall Elon Musk ever thanking taxpayers for his tens of billions of dollars in subsidies.
Bgrahamdisciple

The GOP legislators aren't "cowards." They're collaborators.
Peter Gleick

The highest federal welfare recipient in the U.S.? Tesla gets a $7500 federal subsidy per car, and $4000 state subsidy. $2.8 billion a year in carbon credit. Without this Tesla will be bankrupt company. No amount of DOGE savings from government layoffs can come close to the subsidies Elon got.
@onecaliberal.bsky.social

So Musk’s people, who misread $8 million as $8 billion, who counted the same contracts multiple times and counted as savings programs that ended last year, claim that their AI is finding lots of Social Security fraud. Why should anyone worry?
Paul Krugman

Becoming increasingly clear that the Democratic party would rather feed every trans person into a wood chipper than support universal healthcare
Laura Jedeed

a super annoying thing about this is that politico and axios and even the big politics reporters at the NYT do this on purpose; you never hear about some moderate centrist republican interest group trying to get the party to moderate, it's *always* one-sided reporting, *and that is by design*
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Edward Steichen – The Sunflower, 1920:


Dianne Sherman

The amount of the economy that is comprised of elaborate schemes to get suckers to hold the bag is honestly pretty staggering – crypto, AI, natural gas – all useless economically as a product but all making people billions by kicking the burden down the line to marks
Jay @jdbatts79.bsky.social

People were so busy being annoyed by “therapy speak” that they forgot why we started openly talking about why it was a good thing to go to therapy in the first place.
Ashley C. Ford @smashfizzle.bsky.social

Something I struggle to accept is how much this moment we're in together is being determined by the fact that our overlords and many voters have had their brains completely fried by abusive family dynamics. The reason they can't stop talking about Daddy is exactly what it looks like.
Mike Meginnis

The Biden Admin, funded through the climate laws passed by Congress, made the biggest investment in rural electrification since the 1930s. It helps millions of folks have reliable, clean, affordable electricity and more competitive businesses. Musk is illegally canceling stuff we already paid for.
Costa Samaras

"The value of an electric train isn’t its speed; it’s the acceleration. Push/pull diesel units are notoriously sluggish in speeding up and slowing down... Electric trains do this much more quickly, allowing them to spend more time cruising at their top speed."
Bill Lindeke

Jim Jordan has not authored A SINGLE piece of legislation in 17 years.
Cara Stevens @cara-nichole.bsky.social

A Shared Memory. Hawaiian Ti Plant releases positive energy in its tropical space. A pleasant weekend to all. My Garden Photo, E. Coast:


Genevieve Boiko @genboiko.bsky.social

Over the last month we’ve seen the death of the post-WW2 era of American allegiance with Europe and most Americans don’t even know it happened
laura olin

It’s interesting to go back and look at the work of Congress at this time in 1933. It was rampaging through legislation. The DOGE-era House is just waiting for Elon to fix things.
Dave Weigel

Dems have a trans messaging problem. Don’t overthink it: Trans rights are human rights. And human rights are non-negotiable. It’s actually quite simple.
Rep. Leigh Finke

These guys strike me less as executives (which, at the end of the day, is an Actual Job with Actual Responsibilities) and more like modern day nobility. They own the grand estates [gov't contracts or social media monopolies] and other people get the money for them.
NeoTiamat @neotiamat99.bsky.social

Spotted in DC. #TeslaTakedown:


Conor P. Williams

What is the point of all of these “savings” but to make the common person, the average citizen, poor, sick and disabled have to rely on the private sector for mercy. Nahhhhh. They will ALWAYS be motivated by one thing. Profits
Woodsy Woman @nuttyhutter.bsky.social

The actual premium that people get for choosing a government job over other options is the stability, no government on earth can afford to pay salaries that compete with the private sector, they've gone and shat all over their best sunday suit, good job
Shiv Ramdas Rice Lord @nameshiv.bsky.social

I think that if I could give a gift to human beings as a whole it would be to destroy smart phone technology and make it impossible to recreate. It’s like the “If there were no Beatles” movie except even that one guy doesn’t know about them and we all just live our lives without that ever happening.
Rob @stpaulbikescum.bsky.social

Hi, broken record here. The same degraded information environment that led to Trump being elected is still in place. Most people still aren't being told what's happening, who's at fault, or what the effects will be. And there's zero reason to think traumatic events will "wake people up."
David Roberts @volts.wtf

We live in the world where cycling to grab lunch is more surprising than driving to walk on the treadmill.
Natalia Barbour

one thing that drives me mad about all the claremont ghouls is they *clearly* hate that they're americans and can't be some kind of "real" blood and soil eurofash (thus all the obsession with Orban and Franco)
Reconstructionist @unavaleable.bsky.social

Mike Myers, Canadian legend, on SNL tonight:


Brent Toderian

The US has been taken over by private equity run ostensibly by a man-baby.
David Ho

Seems very likely the Musk/Trump regime could also try to use IRS data to get home addresses for dissidents, queer people, and other minorities.
Faine Greenwood

Truly, it began when the Republican Party decided to embrace climate denial in the early aughts. That was the foundational break with reality. And it metastasized into full-on post-truth partly because they suffered no consequences for lying in their media coverage or other public branding.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Normality bias – ‘the tendency to underestimate the likelihood or impact of a potential hazard, based on the belief that things will continue as they have in the past’ - is a very hard habit to break.
James O’Brien @mrjamesob.bsky.social

american masculinity is so amazing. caring about clothes as a man apparently makes you "gay" but our position on geopolitics totally depends on whether you wear a suit
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social

By 2030, at least 2000 4-year schools will be out of business. Very few institutions have a plan beyond that event horizon. The chaos you see is so real, and it is about to get much worse.
@walterdgreason.bsky.social

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signs a bill that strikes gender identity from Iowa civil rights law, making the state the first to remove civil rights from a previously protected class.
NBC News

They pardoned people that took shits in the capitol building. Struggling to understand the sudden interest in decorum
Flannery Dean

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not welcome in Trump's America. Andrew Tate is.
Frank Conniff

HEY EVERYONE REMEMBER WHEN TRUMP WAS IMPEACHED FOR DENYING AID TO UKRAINE BECAUSE HE WANTED ZELENSKY TO LIE AND SAY BAD THINGS ABOUT BIDEN AND ZELENKSY WOULDN’T DO IT? Maybe literally one fucking American newspapers could mention this in their, “think pieces,” about what happened yesterday.
Mikel Jollett

"Have you said thank you even once?"


Derek Johnson @derekjesq.bsky.social

What could be more fundamental to free speech than the ability to choose the language you speak?
Vic Thorstenson

People ask me why bother having kids right now and I think it’s useful to point out that all four Beatles were born during the blitz.
The Matt's DeMello

DOGE is saving us nothing, and costing us everything
Costa Samaras

You know what they say: March comes in like a lion and goes out like a fascist oligarchy.
Ward Q. Normal

'Did you even say thank you?'


Tim Dickinson

It's like a Russian nesting doll of illegality: Musk holds no office running DOGE, DOGE has no lawful authority to direct OPM, and OPM has no legal power to insert itself in the chain of command from agency heads to their employees.
Andy Craig

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.
Eliot Higgins

every day I spend time thinking about how stupid and unnecessary all of this is and I hate it. this is my entire life right now:


Micah @rincewind.run

RFK Jr. is eliminating transparency and public engagement on important HHS decisions that have been in place since 1971.
Chris Geidner

Interesting that Trump would issue a speak-English executive order today when his Oval Office remarks were likely first written in Russian.
Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social