The second half of April 2026 is almost over. Like all the months of Trump 2, it is too much to take in, with a constant stream of mind-blowing stories that would occupy days of analysis in any normal administration. (This is Part 1, plus a little side spur).
The second half of the month was a lot about voting rights. It ended with the reprehensible decision on voting rights, Louisiana v. Callais. Earlier, there was the Virginia redistricting vote in favor of Democrats, and just after the half-month started, the New York Times story on how the new use of the shadow docket in 2016 reshaped the court's methods in favor of Republicans.
The war with Iran continues, but news is muted. Prices of gas and other items continue to climb. We just heard that the cost of the war so far has been $25 billion (or is it $50 billion?). King Charles visited and showed what rationality looks like, even though I wasn't paying attention. And then there was the White House Correspondents Dinner and its aftermath — so far.
There were a couple of interim topical BlueSky posts: Thoughts on Cole Allen and first-day takes about yesterday's Voting Rights Act decision.
Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed source, and is in reverse chronological order, except some of the images, which I move up or down for better visual balance.
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Someday your child is going to tell you they don’t want you to sing them songs and read them books. That special time will be over and you will grieve it. Do not give those moments to AI.
Carol Villeneuve @cvillenet.bsky.social
Republican New Hampshire Senate candidate John Sununu says he supports a work requirement for seniors on Medicare: "I certainly support a work requirement for able-bodied Medicare recipients."
@headquartersnews.bsky.social
Paris, 1954. Photo by Edouard Boubat:
Cool Bike Art
I am struggling to understand why for so much of the media, when a sitting president and his goons kill people summarily at home and abroad that that is somehow not categorized as “political violence.” Seems like the most relevant, most political kind of political violence, idk
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social
The House passes the Senate-approved DHS funding bill by a voice vote. It funds everything in DHS except ICE/CBP, including TSA, FEMA, Coast Guard, CISA. This ends a 75-day shutdown. Bill now goes to Trump to become law.
Sahil Kapur
Absolutely extraordinary. The Democrats conceded *nothing* and got everything they demanded. They said no ICE/CBP funding, and that's precisely what happened. In other words, they did not cave. At all. But the GOP did—completely.
David Nir
Study: Democrats in governance draw their staffs from professional fields where they have accomplished things and learned things. Republicans draw their staffs from propaganda outlets.vGood luck getting media to acknowledge it, much less draw out the obvious implications.
indistinguishable lol
David Roberts @volts.wtf
as long as john roberts has his majority, there is simply no pro democracy reform that will survive the supreme court. none.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
indistinguishable lol:
Keith Harris @usefulnoise.bsky.social
going for "I am not cognitively impaired but Obama was" is a hell of a thing.
Tom Tomorrow
Barack Obama edited the Harvard Law Review, but did he ever draw the hands on a clock?
@3fecta.bsky.social
Reminder that “Low IQ” is just how Trump pronounces the n-word.
Steven Alleyn
Imagine the thrill of a lifetime in going all the way to the moon... And then coming back and being forced to meet with this piece of trash:
Bob Geiger
Truthout scraped Truth Social a couple days ago and came up with 84% of mentions of "low IQ" were directed at Black and Brown people and apparently he didn't use it in regards to a white person at all in the first ten months of this term.
Lisa Needham @snipy.bsky.social
Every time someone says "the founders gave us..." ask yourself, did they? Or was that the Warren Court?
Courtney Milan
At the Minnesota Alliance of Local History Museums annual conference in Mankato, and the impact of budget cuts on local museums is simply lethal. They exist on small grants that are drying up rapidly. Their partners in local public media are under similar stress. There's no "fixing" lost museums.
Bob Alberti @a1batross.bsky.social
No bicycle is capable of this amount of destruction. Literally every car is. During this legislative session hours were spent debating the potential dangers of e-bikes. Our societal threat assessment ability continues to suffer heavily from autonormativity:
Erik Noonan
There is no possible justification for limiting e-bikes to 15mph but not cars. My least popular (and most correct) view is that cars should be automatically limited to the local speed limit. Put the pedal to the floor and you still can't go over 25mph in a residential area. (15mph in manhattan btw)
Michael Hobbes
I mean, we all saw that creepy picture of a prepubescent Ivana sitting on his lap. We all heard “grab her by the pussy.” We all knew about E. Jean Carroll. The terrible fact is that a majority of the electorate looked at a known rapist and preferred him to voting for “that woman.” Twice.
Malaclypse the Middle
conspiracy theories take hold because people see or are affected by very obvious, monstrous inequalities but do not have or refuse to accept straightforward material analysis about why, for instance, the richest country in history routinely lets thousands die for lack of basic, cheap care
Andrew Ferguson @epikt.bsky.social
Someone’s just described our shop as ‘oddly specific’, very much a compliment to us.
Present & Correct
US spending on data centers and computers has grown so much that it's larger than basically all other physical investment categories—more than all single-family housing construction, factories, power plants, industrial equipment, apartments. I'm running out of points of comparison:
Joey Politano
Jim Crow was in my dad's lifetime. Mass incarceration and the drug war continue in mine. The Interstate highway system and urban renewal destroyed -- and continues to destroy -- billions in heritable black wealth. And that's just the most prominent, state-endorsed, institutionalized stuff.
Radley Balko
there's just no coming back from this [the Voting Rights decision] without a complete tear down and rebuild of some of our most major institutions
Andrew Lawrence
it won’t be hard to discern to people in the future that the first black president led to a relentless and hyper-radical effort by conservative elites to destroy not only the voting rights act but reconstruction itself.
elias isquith
1966-1999: SCOTUS rejects various challenges to VRA
2006: VRA reauthorized with 98-0 senate vote
2008: Obama elected
2013-2026: SCOTUS dismantles VRA
Mike Thompson @passwordismiket.bsky.social
We will not get a second Reconstruction from people who don’t defend the first.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com
I don’t think I have ever seen the US legal system work harder than this endless effort to give Alex Jones 700 million chances to wriggle out of consequences
ryan cooper
L - North Korea
R - Miami:
Ron Filipkowski
I marvel at how fascist Republicans took the righteous, powerful anti-fascist energy of the Summer 2020/BLM/Floyd protests and used it to *their* advantage, while Democrats, ostensibly champions for justice, also helped Republicans use the movement to their advantage.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social
If we had taken all the money we put into AI and put it into trains, we would have such great trains. What a waste.
Courtney Milan
When Barack Obama and Kamala Harris were asked if they thought America was a racist country, that was a humiliation ritual. That was white power structures mocking them, and us, because they know the answer to that question and they're also the reason answering honestly is political suicide.
milky way ghetto dweller @amaratto-sour.bsky.social
Basically, the thing to understand why there are so many Tradcath converts in educated conservative circles is that there is intense demand there for a form of right-wing Christianity less embarrassing and low status than fundamentalist Evangelicalism.
@irhottakes.bsky.social
"Every new road is not an asset, but a financial obligation that creates new annual costs... to preserve the new 112,000-plus lane-miles added during [2018–2024] would require an additional $5.3 billion in annual maintenance obligations from states":
Ken McLeod
All the cautionary AI tales sound like “I let my autonomous angle grinder into my loose piles of gunpowder collection room and it went bad” and the comments are all either “angle grinders are a sin from hell” or “such is the price of progress, brother”
Coda @codahale.com
It probably doesn’t help that most traditional news sources are geared almost exclusively towards scaring the elderly
Andy Clark @andycruns.bsky.social
everyone else is already spying on me, why do i care if it's some chinese guy or some dickhead in silicon valley
blippy
this is very rapidly becoming the standard American opinion, and our lawmakers have absolutely not figured this out yet
Faine Greenwood
Wakes up in a parallel dimension where Howe marched up the Hudson to link up with Burgoyne in 1777 instead of dicking around in Philadelphia:
Dan Snow @thehistoryguy.bsky.social
$900 million to pay companies to not do wind energy and $400 million for the ballroom, that’s $1.3 billion or ~1,300 3 to 4-year NSF awards.
Chenxin Li, PhD
It still blows my mind that ~70% of antibiotics consumed in the United States are used for meat production, not human health. Not because the animals are sick, but because this reduces costs (because animal production systems are dirty and expensive to clean) and boosts meat growth. Yikes.
Dr. Jonathan Foley @globalecoguy.bsky.social
like, the conservatives are completely right: education challenges the family. it says "you are not the property of the people who violently manufactured your through biological domination. your teachers can show you that humans can be better than our base instincts," and men HATE that
ellie lockhart
The State Department has finalized a plan to put a picture of Donald Trump in passports. A portrait of an actual president has never been featured in a passport before, let alone a living one in office. This is dictator stuff.
Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net
Don't know what infuriates me more, that Trump's picture on the U.S. passport is being done, that it will be (at most) a one day story, or imagining the absolute Category 5 shitstorm any Democrat would be hit with if they tried something this North Korea coded.
scarylawyerguy.bsky.social
Redcoats on the lawn of a partially destroyed White House is a bit on the nose:
Zeddy @zeddary.bsky.social
not only are drivers often distracted or oblivious, they just assume pedestrians should be treated as guests rather than ever conceding the right of way if they don't have to. love waiting for a parade of cars turning in my neighborhood before i can cross straight ahead.
punished brian @brilandia.bsky.social
has the new york times ever thought about doing a focus group with someone who has read a book
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
Study: Pavement covers 40% of Phoenix - h/t ASU News
Planetizen
The EPA is no longer trying to keep lead, mercury, arsenic, and toxic pesticides out of your water but they are going to start trying to stop you from accessing safe, potentially lifesaving, medications
Ryan Marino, MD
If Republicans feel really strongly about getting taxpayers to pay for Trump's golden ballroom, they should go out there and hold some town halls with their constituents. They can bring photos of the chandeliers and maybe a sample of the marble for them to look at. I'm sure it'll be a big hit!
Kevin M. Kruse
I've always believed the surest way to defeat fascism is to subject it, city by city, to shouty public hearings and land use approvals:
Wedge LIVE!™
Stalin fundamentally crippled Soviet science in the 1930s and almost a century later it still hasn't recovered. That's what Trump, RFK Jr., Vought, and MAGA are doing right now to the United States.
Peter Gleick
Hold on. We the taxpayers are going to pay companies $900 million, which is more than 6x what we spend on wind power R&D, to NOT build wind power at a time when electricity prices are spiking and we need more clean power?
Costa Samaras
"The structure whose supports our elites are steadily kicking down is also the one that props up their own personal safety from disaster and political invulnerability to accountability. And all of this can go away."
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Excellent article. The “liberal consensus” they’re dismantling is the shed where the guillotines are locked away.
Boiling Boy @dreweliotcurtis.bsky.social
Russell Vought needs to be in the first rank of the dock at The Tribunal, along with Elon Musk
ryan cooper
apparently the US is anomalous even if you normalize by VMT:
Isaiah Bishop
You really cannot overestimate the level of status trauma a lot of white Americans experienced at the election of Barack Obama and how much of our politics is still influenced by it
Adam Serwer
"Enemy from within."
"Communists, Marxists, fascists, radical left thugs, vermin." "Garbage" Somalis, "low IQ people."
"She's an evil, sick, crazy, b..."
Republicans want the left to tone down the rhetoric. Erm, have they listened to Donald Trump??
Mehdi Hasan
‘In a 2-1 ruling, Appeals Court Judge Eric Tung, (a Trump appointee) found there’s no such right to be free from exposure to tear gas. ‘No such right exists in the Constitution,’ Tung wrote. ‘Nothing in our constitutional text or structure evinces such a right.’”
Alex Baumhardt
There’s nothing in the constitution that says you can’t spray peaceful protesters exercising their constitutional 1st amendment freedoms with dangerous chemicals so we should just allow it? There’s nothing in the constitution that says you can’t release wild skunks into a judge's chamber either.
Andy @andyoregon.bsky.social
Sticker on a sign in St. Paul, Minnesota:
The Screaming Butt Naked Patriot
The Iranian schoolgirl, the cancer patient whose clinical trial was cancelled, the African AIDS patient who can't get treatment anymore — none of these are "real" to our media elites. Can't imagine themselves in that situation or visualize it. But "panic at the fancy gala!" on the other hand...
mtsw
Always worth remembering that when authoritarians (such as the GOP) bring up the 1st Amendment, their primary concerns are continued priority access to opportunity, and blanket impunity/absolution for their transgressions. Speech has nothing to do with it.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social
Imagine if all the money billionaires have been pumping into may-not-be-a-thing life extension could be used instead on very-much-a-thing raising the baseline health of everyone.
Dan Turner @ddt.bsky.social
Tear-gassing college students for opposing genocide is also political violence, btw.
Sheryl Weikal @leftistlawyer.com
Look, it's honestly important to be clear about this: The thing inflaming violence isn't comparing Trump to Hitler, it's that Trump is so comparable to Hitler
Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social
World Tapir Day important reminder:
Art History Animalia
Barack Obama was targeted 11 times in assassination attempts during this two terms. I bet you don't remember any of them because they were handled through proper channels, professionally, and he isn't a whiny bitch.
D. Earl Stephens
The White House Correspondents Dinner constantly gaslights by claiming that the purpose of the dinner is celebrating the 1st Amendment. No, it’s to give reporters an excuse to dress up like they’re stars and hobnob with celebrities. There’s a million ways they could celebrate the 1st Amendment more directly than this dinner.
David Darmofal
If ~10,000 short-term rentals that charge high rents in high-demand neighborhoods are raising everyone’s rents by $67 a month by constricting housing supply, imagine how much lower rents would be if Los Angeles let apartment developers build 100,000 new high-end units in those neighborhoods.
Max Dubler
I’m trying to understand why corporate media is confused on why Americans don’t seem to care about this assassination attempt, when THEY didn’t care and went back to yukking it up and eating their food immediately after it happened.
Veronica McDonald
Humanity can survive without AI. Human civilisation is unlikely to survive in +2°C world though.
Rob Larter @polarrobs.bsky.social
Oh wow really:
Transphobes Can't Read @lordaslan.bsky.social
Driver:
Can I get the 9,000 pound, 1000HP electric Hummer? You can drive it home today
Do I need a special license? Nope
Do I need any extra training? None whatsoever
So I can just drive off in this monster truck? 👍
Community: Can we get a stop sign?
City: we’ll do some studies & report back in 2yrs
Tom Flood
Neighbourhood streets only work as low-stress cycling routes if the motorists that we share them with understand patience and lower their own stress. I'm really pissed right now that we had 7 motorists who couldn't control themselves behind a mom and 5yo trying to bike to the f'n library.
Cassie Smith
I was at a birthday dinner last night with about 25 other people, and spent the morning out in the real world. Literally nobody is talking about the shooting (at the WHCD). Most are unaware of it, or only peripherally aware and shrugging it off. It's a blip. We live in a violent country.
Chad Loder
Congratulations to the U.S. for building an educational and economic powerhouse envied around the world and then dismantling it because colleges were so bold to give lip service to non-discrimination efforts:
Damon Kiesow
Todd Blanche claiming that the Southern Poverty Law Center is pro-Nazi is up there with baby Catholic JD Vance trying to school the pope on theology.
Lindsay Beyerstein
Has the media ever demanded Trump tone down his violent rhetoric? Ever?
Grudgie the Whale
What tonight proved beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the current regime, and possibly a large clump of our esteemed media, can’t handle what they demand our children do every single day of school.
Laura Anne Gilman
I am begging “environmentalists” to understand that building dense infill housing is one of the most environmentally friendly policies possible:
Sam @samd.bsky.social
TRUMP: *starts illegal war crashes economy disappears people off the streets unleashes government death squads to execute Americans for protesting loots the treasury and is just super fuckin' racist every day*
DEMOCRATS: Guy's not doin' great for America
NEWS MEDIA: Wow. Let's tone it down, huh?
Jamison Foser
I was today years old when I learned that Peter Thiel and Sam Altman are both gay men... and my brain broke a little. OK, a lot. Yes, I know that there are fascists and collaborationists w/ marginalized identities. Sure. But posting manifestos that are applauded by white Christian nationalists...?!
Ebony Elizabeth Thomas @ebonyteach.blacksky.app
The way you stop Trumpism isn’t with an assassin’s bullet, which would only absolve his sins and cast him as a martyr. The way you stop Trumpism is by mercilessly exposing him as the cruel and corrupt f-up that he is.
Patrick Chovanec
It's a shame that "defend your culture" always means "hate strangers different from you" and never "enact anti-pollution laws so that you can go fishing with your grandkids the way your grandpa taught you."
Andrew Middleton @mapcenter.com
zesto ice cream sign, wichita, kansas, 1979:
old roadside pics
I agree that there's no place for political violence, which is why I think we need to abolish ICE and the CBP.
Courtney Milan
“No place for violence in a Democracy” say people you may remember recently encouraging drivers to run over protestors for being in the way
Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co
I don't know man, I think the journalists who have been traumatized the most were not sitting in that room tonight. The feds gassed the shit out of us, knocked us over, sent in the local PD to harass, detain, and hurt us, shot a teenaged photographer in the face and he lost an eye, and that's just in LA
Mel Buer
the irony is that there are many journalists who are threatened and killed for their work globally, except they don’t overlap at all with the people willing to attend the MAGA White House correspondent’s dinner
Faine Greenwood
Normally the assassination of a head of state would be a destabilising event that could throw a country, or even the world, into chaos. We’re in a somewhat unique situation at the moment, where a current head of state is responsible for so much chaos domestically and globally that the opposite is true.
It’s yer da! @bengc.bsky.social
The United States now has the most government restrictions on academic freedom of any high-income country:
Michael Clemens
Sabastian Sawe of Kenya has become the first person to run a marathon in under 2 hours.
The Associated Press
incredible – especially since the top two finishers both broke 2 hours!!! and third broke the world record too!!! London is known for record-toppling but my goodness
it's coup for my family @ghostesq.bsky.social
There are lots of ways to look at Sawe’s astonishing 1:59:30 time. One I like: it’s a ~17sec/100M split for the whole race. Bolt’s 100M world record is 9.58, which is “not even” twice as fast, even though a marathon is more than 400x longer. The human performance range on this dimension is surprisingly compressed!
Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co
u never see this on a tradlife mood board:
e.w. niedermeyer
I once investigated under 18 mortality based on census data. 40% mortality (25% under 5) was the norm in cities from basically all history until the 1870s. Sanitation, nutrition, and education brought it down to about half that, and vaccination took it to nearly none in the 20th century (0.5%).
dachicken.bsky.social
Hearing the head of the White House Correspondents Association — who just days ago participated in a Paramount dinner “honoring” Trump — say tonight that the First Amendment is “fragile” because of a random shooter rather than because of the president sitting next to her on the podium is, I guess, exactly as pathetic as you’d expect.
Hamilton Nolan
I don't think the shooting was faked or the result of some conspiracy, but there's no doubt that Trump's first thought after it happened was not about the safety of everyone in that room but about how he can exploit it politically.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social
"A [Texas Tech] history professor's course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it."
Quinn Slobodian
My PhD dissertation on how the separation of work and home shaped gender identity in 19th century America would have been prohibited in 21st century Texas
Jennifer Berkshire
Texas should change its name to the Republic of Gilead.
LK_Rigel
Hawthorn for #wildflowerhour:
Peter Brash
The amount of money he’s spending on rebuilding DC to suit himself is outrageous but it’s nothing compared to the money we’re spending on the war — $2billion a day. He’s going to drive the debt up so high we won’t have enough money to do anything except service the debt. He’s the bankruptcy king.
Laura Weatherspoon
One of the most consistent attributes of garden-variety Trumpers is an astoundingly credulous gullibility. You don’t need to listen to Trump for more than 60 seconds to know he’s a shameless bullshitter and congenital liar, but he attracts the gullible like a flame does moths.
bluestatedon.bsky.social
I sometimes think public engagement needs ground rules around what kind of objections will addressed. Nostalgia, property values, or “it will let the poors into our neighborhood” being the big ones that should just be ignored out right
clumsy_machinist
still can’t believe that given the choice between “bountiful, free, clean energy from the earth, wind, and sun” and “poisonous dead animal sludge price sensitive to global politics” we keep choosing the latter
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com
A 3,500 year-old Minoan clay pot shaped like a modern shopping bag! From Pseira, Crete. Heraklion Archaeological Museum. Photo by me:
Alison Fisk
I was always struck that historical authoritarian movements tend to start early on by killing or exiling their intellectuals. I'm not sure if the unrelenting stupid of it all explains that or flows from it. I'm surprised by the general inability of smart people to recognize it happening around them.
Geoff A. @pseudonymice.bsky.social
[Christian Dominionists] rather think of Jesus as a king than as a wise man who walked barefoot in the desert exhorting people to be nice to each other.
Marcelo Soares
A really bizarre thing about modern American media is that it treats "Christian antisemitism" as a completely incomprehensible aberration, instead of one of the bedrock pillars of Western Civilization.
Nathan Goldwag
China is installing the wind and solar equivalent of five large nuclear power stations per week
Dr Paul Dorfman
spotted: oaf on a bench:
midgie
The question that consumes much of political discourse is “why do Democrats lose?” when the question we should really ask is: why do Republicans win? And the answer to that is because they treat Democrats as enemies and politics as war.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com
The real conservative objection to Virginia redistricting is pure Wilhoit: you have to obey laws and proper procedure and we don't. They can't just out and say that in public though, at least not yet, so they are desperately flailing about for some kind of cover argument. The obvious solution is a national law that mandates fair, objective redistricting everywhere, but *conservatives do not want that*. To be subject to the same rules as everyone else — as all the lesser people — is inherently offensive to them. (All I ever do is restate Wilhoit.)
David Roberts @volts.wtf
Former tobacco industry executive Stephen Sayle has been appointed to a senior leadership role at the CDC. Sayle was a lobbyist for Chevron before working for Big Tobacco.
FactPost @factpostnews.bsky.social
There is more fraud to be found in the military budget and in police budgets than there is to be found in any other kind of public spending across the United States.
Bill Emory @oldmanemory.bsky.social
People online: arguing about e-bikes, scooters and bike lanes. Meanwhile in IRL:
Natalia Barbour
These are the same people who think we're weird for using a bicycle to pick up some groceries.
Fietser @americanfietser.bsky.social
I'm continually impressed at how motornormativity causes people to create a revisionist history of American cities where they sprouted up fully formed and filled with cars and parking spots. Motornormativity also causes these people to ignore the many places that have reversed car dependency.
Gravel Influencer
You hear a lot of crud about how cities aren't friendly, but my experience (especially having grown up in rural USA) has been the opposite. People smile at you on the street, neighbors will shoot the breeze if you're sitting outside your building, if you need help people show up etc.
Ryan Boyd
No one in Dem political messaging wants to touch it but the urban/rural narratives about friendliness and neighbor stuff are usually totally flipped
Erik Hane
it never passed the smell test even before, all you have to do is listen to literally anyone talk about why they want to live in rural areas (leave me alone, don’t want to deal with government or neighbors) to immediately understand
ddiiggss
Denmark's coal-to-wind transition is one of the most dramatic energy transformations of the past three decades. In 1990, coal provided 90% of Danish electricity. Today it is under 3%. Wind now covers roughly 60% of electricity generation. The last coal plant is scheduled to close by 2028:
Jan Rosenow
Hostel Takeover is the name of my new film about a mutual aid group that acquires a huge chain of bankrupted luxury hotels and turns them into affordable housing for young working class people.
Seth Cotlar
One of the big traps for climate communicators is to believe that their opponents didn’t understand the science – or how else could they not care about their kids’ future? This misunderstanding masks something much more terrifying: the opponents’ almost incomprehensible contempt for life and living.
Wolfgang Blau
It's not hyperbole in the least to say Musk purchased a six-month shadow presidency for $280 million and used the power of that shadow presidency to 1. Steal the government’s data, 2. Permanently damage the state’s ability to regulate his businesses, and 3, kill non-white people.
Jeff Lazarus
In communist China, they have built a new sun, and everywhere there is nothing, they put a solar panel
In capitalist America, the sun is illegal. You cannot farm if what you are farming is the sun, even on your own land; it is illegal. The wind is illegal, too. You can only farm rats, and mud.
Erin Fogg @criminalerin.bsky.social
late night fruit drawin’:
Mel Gillman
The richest man owns X.
The second and fourth richest men control Google.
The third richest man owns The Washington Post.
The fifth richest man owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
And now the sixth richest could soon take over both Paramount and Warner Bros.
See the problem here?
Robert Reich
I definitely see the problem that six men would have if all the rest of us decided to take everything they've stolen away from them.
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social
BREAKING: The Pentagon has fired the Stars and Stripes ombudsman — the role Congress created to protect the military paper's editorial independence — after she publicly criticized the DOD's overhaul of the publication.
Scott Nover
benches, buses, and bathrooms. they should be everywhere
Anthony Moser
I like my cities to be sittable, shittable, and public transittable.
Evelyn @evieevolving.bsky.social
Here are some nice mushrooms:
lukelukeluke
Democrats with aspirations to enact any kind of policy need to confront the fact that a right-wing super-legislature currently possesses veto power over anything any Democrat might want to do. Voters need to know their plan to clear this hurdle.
Jason Linkins @dceiver.bsky.social
The fact that Trump had appointed a totally unqualified donor to be Secretary of the Navy leading into what turned into the biggest crisis for the US Navy since World War 2 could be covered like the media covered Michael "Brownie" Brown during Hurricane Katrina. They choose not to do this!
mtsw
ICE has violated almost 100 court orders. Let me say that another way. 100 times ICE was caught brazenly ignoring the law. 100 times a court told them to immediately stop. And 100 times they ignored the order. That's an out-of-control agency that shouldn't get another dime.
Sen. Chris Murphy
Oh, honey . . . if Democrats could *really* rig elections, why aren't they in power in the White House, Senate, House, and Supreme Court right now? You're such a simple thing.
Mrs. Betty Bowers
This is what the budget of a police state looks like:
Scott Horton @robertscotthorton.bsky.social
Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
Yes, Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky coined the term “dark matter” which is impressive, but he also coined the term “spherical bastard” to describe people who are bastards no matter which way you look at them, and I think that should be celebrated more.
Fiona Tribe
Trump wants US taxpayers to bail out the UAE, a middle-eastern petro-autocracy, because he and his family have a lot of private deals going on in UAE and they need to make their money back.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
I’m pretty sure those bozos are not as smart as they think they are. Feel free to interpret with your favorite bunch of bozos
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social
'SWIMS' upside down is still 'SWIMS.'
Merriam-Webster
Poor little ziek vogel!
Anne Billson
A prolonged fossil fuel crunch just might, at this moment, be *the* exogenous shock necessary for a rapid global transition to clean energy adoption, but also it's going to be a brutally miserable experience for the world's poorest.
Chris Hayes
Trump may do more for the energy transition than any other individual through sheer incompetence, just like JD Vance may do more than anyone else for the cause of global antifascism simply by being viscerally repellent.
Ned Resnikoff
I am highly unsophisticated in my views on A.I. My entire approach, devoid of any philosophical or technical underpinnings, is “You can’t make me.”
Chris Steller
My hometown of Nashville -- a blue city which went about two-thirds for Harris-Walz in 2024 -- was gerrymandered by the Tennessee GOP into three different districts all represented by Republicans now, so please get in line to complain about how unfair this all is, Virginia Republicans.
Kevin M. Kruse
More climate change denialism from Minnesota Republicans: GOP Rep. Tom Murphy says he believes climate change is "not true science" because it comes from... universities, agencies, and scientists. Happy Earth Day, folks
Minnesota House DFL
this is how Utah's Congressional map deals with Utah's largest city, cracking it through to the middle into 4 different districts in order to deny it Congressional representation to make sure Dems get 0 seats:
mtsw
SCOOP: Two weeks ago, the head of the CDC delayed publication of a report showing covid vaccine cut likelihood of ER visits and hospitalizations by half. Now that report is no longer allowed to be published in CDC’s flagship scientific journal.
Lena Sun
The Republican plan for cities is more goons with guns. They have no ideas or even an interest in making them better places to live and work.
The Alternate Historian
Israel performed a literal quadruple tap attack in Lebanon to massacre three separate sets of medics. Truly pushing the bounds of human depravity.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb
you can acknowledge that something is a systemic issue that individuals don’t have the power to fix, singularly, while also not totally removing yourself from the problem. we could all live radically different lives to shut down fossil fuels. we don’t.
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com
fuck sam altman forever for taking away the last places where we could engage in good faith: the creative arts, which should be a testament to human ingenuity. i am so mad that everything i read or listen to or admire is now tainted with doubt. do you understand? he is a thief of joy and i HATE HIM
Mia Tsai, Ball Knower @itsamia.bsky.social
When I read Alex Karp’s book last year, I thought it should’ve been a tweet. Now Palantir has turned it into a tweet-length manifesto, which could’ve just been a picture of a MAGA hat.
Dave Karpf
The whole thing about the Virginia gerrymander would be less annoying had the Republicans not egregiously gerrymandered Virginia themselves after the 2010 census, only to lose control anyway because the state shifted so hard to Ds
mtsw
You can’t do that to rural voters! What are they, black people?
Adam Serwer
I think the gerrymandering race to the bottom is genuinely bad and undemocratic and unfortunately what the dems are doing is the least bad of the bad options available.
Adam Serwer
"E-bikes are cheating," says man wearing a space helmet whose bike and components are made of ultralight materials designed by NASA and aerodynamically tested in wind tunnels for F1 racecars.
Tom Flood
Several years ago, I was coming out of a local bagel shop. Dude looks at my e-bike, rolls down his window, and says "That's cheating." I looked at him and said "Dude, you drove an F350 to a bagel shop. I don't think you get to judge cheating."
Malaclypse the Middle
With Orban gone the EU has now approved the 90 billion Euro loan to Ukraine and another package of sanctions on Russia. Very good news.
Sam Freedman
Me, being left behind…
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
n.b. I fucking hate partisan gerrymandering, and I would like to see it outlawed nationally. I think it's bad for the actual citizenry that's supposed to be represented. But a one-sided Republican-only gerrymander is worse, so...
Naomi Kritzer
In 1982, the Minneapolis Public Schools closed three high schools where future Grammy winners had recently graduated or attended:
Central High: Prince
West High: Dave Pirner
Marshall-U High: the rest of Soul Asylum
Chris Steller
”How is this legal” is a really funny thing for a republican to say in 2026
baseball victim @stylo.bsky.social
Texas redistricts without a vote, Republicans cheer.
Dems in Virginia respond by putting it UP FOR A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE, it passes, Republican cry foul.
Oh well. Good job Virginia!!
Adam Kinzinger
Acknowledging the stark, ugly truth that the Republicans basically had no good reason to do what they have done for the last 11 years and have lapsed into vast collective psychosis over totally immaterial and utterly depraved delusions is terrifying, and as such most commentators simply do not do it. So, instead, we get endless made-up bullshit stories about poor little Okies in Michigan or Kentucky upset about the factory jobs going away under Nixon and Hillary Clinton doing Tumblrspeak so we don’t have to acknowledge that “para continuar en Español, oprima 2” made them crash out genocidally
Vaquera Elisa @boxelderdust.bsky.social
I think artichokes should have a shade of purple named after them. It is such a stunning color!
Wendy Miller @burrowingowl.bsky.social
We should go back to referring to people by their age group instead of by their generation. Enough of this “elder millennials” shit. Just say “people in their 40s” or whatever.
Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social
"In America today we have a party of ordinary governance and a personality cult party. Those are the two options we are now offered every general election, and it really is that simple."
Liberal Currents
"On the one hand, Russia demands recognition as a "great superpower," claiming the right to redraw state borders by force and impose a new sphere of influence. Yet, on the other hand, around 35 million Russian citizens still rely on outside toilets — shabby wooden huts in yards and gardens."
@GottaLaff
Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth and power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet. This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.
George Monbiot
The average American family paid $1,700 in tariffs last year, according to the bipartisan Congressional Joint Economic Committee. Few will ever see any of that money back. The refunds will go to companies, if doled out at all. What a joke.
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social
Transit construction costs in the US keep rising, and projects keep taking longer and longer to build. One possible explanation? Ineffective, inefficient community engagement processes.
Yonah Freemark
The problem is this post-Robert Moses trend in treating the "community" as if it's monolithic and knows more about transportation planning than the experts. We as a society can say "more transit good, road expansion bad" and ask locals to weigh in on where staircases go, not "should this even happen?"
Second Ave. Sagas @2avesag.as
I stole this from Facebook, but it's a good illustration of how rape used to be considered cute, even at a time when consensual premarital sex was much more stigmatized:
Mom for Gliberty @fakegreekgrill.bsky.social
I’m hearing a lot of “not all men” with regard to the 62 million views on the rape academy sites. You know what, it is all men until it’s no men.
Get Shit Done Girl @tmfloressb.bsky.social
Newly released records on the police response to the assassination of Melissa Hortman show officers knew a woman was lying motionless on the top of the stairs inside the Hortman home but waited 30 minutes to physically check on her.
Minnesota Star Tribune
Man, when you compare the bravery of everyday Minnesotans to the overpaid cops it’s astounding
Wes Burdine
If you eliminate all those facing sexual harassment charges and all those charged with excessive drinking and partying and all those charged with using government funds for their own private recreational purposes ... are there any Trump appointees left? Does that get all of them?
David Roberts @volts.wtf
The CEO of Palantir posted a fascist manifesto on X. I pointed out that it was fascist—which resulted in a permanent suspension from X (my second time!). So, when you hear the tweeters complaining that BlueSky is intolerant, remember why many of us came here in the first place.
Gil Durán
Harriet Love, contemporary stained glass artist:
womensartbluesky.bsky.social
It annoys me that AI slop, specifically, has ruined the niche of the quick photoshop joke.
Just an utter flood of garbage unleashed by removing the barrier of "spend a couple hours learning how a piece of software works."
Jordan Carlson
I've been thinking about the backlash Marie Kondo got and I think part of it was not just that she was saying "buy less shit" she was explicitly say "only buy what actually makes you happy" and in a nation of conspicuous consumption it pissed people off.
Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com
The appeal to "nature" is the siren song of fascism. It is the insidious lie of the so-called "transcendent" order that seeks to place humanity in its demented thrall, the idea that our desire and need to shape our world and our selves, which itself springs from nature, is somehow not "nature." Reject it. Reject it whenever and wherever it emerges. Anti-modernity is conservatism, and conservatism is fascism. Anyone who sells you a vision of the Idyllic Before Times seeks to enslave you.
open borders now @radtranslib.bsky.social
Browsing Palantir's website and the only way I can describe what I'm seeing is imagine a school shooter was a management consultant
Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social
Palantir should not be allowed to have any government contracts at any level because it is fundamentally opposed to the basic concepts of liberal democracy.
Jonathan Cohn
The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.
Ursula K. Le Guin Bot
One of the biggest social shifts of our lifetimes:
Michael Hobbes
in the 15-year debate about just temporarily pedestrianizing pike place market – seoul has pedestrianized miles and miles of streets, built miles of linear parks, and so much more. the scale difference, as with paris under hidalgo, is just so frustrating.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social
Cars and cows converge in the cornfields, consuming 75% of the entire crop. They dominate almost every planetary boundary.
Lloyd Alter
THREAD: The IEA global energy review 2026
* CO2 record high, but growth nearly ground to halt
* Clean energy shaved 3bn tonnes off CO2
* Fossil-fuel power pushed into reverse
* Age of Electricity "confirmed"
* "Extraordinary" solar growth
* Batteries up 40%
* EVs up 20%
Simon Evans @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org
The Major Issues Question is just bullshit invented out of whole cloth by a partisan hack who wanted to stop the regulation of coal-fired power plants. So is the Shadow Docket.
SheltieDad
HHS wants to move "away from reliable contraception and toward counseling men on erectile dysfunction, testosterone levels and sperm motility, each of which merits 3 mentions in the new guidance, while IUDs and birth control pills earn none."
Amy Diehl, Ph.D.
Paramount, Meta, and X are refusing to say what happened to their huge contributions to Trump's presidential library after Sen Elizabeth Warren raised questions about its fund getting dissolved. Ds say tens of millions remain unaccounted for.
Greg Sargent
Whatever you do:
Leslie Molson @ladymolson.com
I think before you build an Arc de Triomphe you should be able to identify at least un (1) triomphe
Joshua Erlich
i'm not sure how to live in a country in which the murder of eight children doesn't ... stop everything
Matthew Cortland @matthewcort.land
I find it interesting how long the term "Koch brothers" has lived on after David Koch died seven years ago.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social
people get hella mad when you say adult drivers should be more responsible than children on our streets.
Tom Flood
Sean Hannity says he’s no longer catholic due to the pope criticizing Trump. The years of documented and confessed child abuse didn’t do it, but one pope mildly rebuking war was the limit. how does anyone take maga seriously?
Casey Constantly @bluegenxveteran.bsky.social
“We’ll win the culture wars by erasure and annihilation of some cultures”- Palantir, actually
Syreeta McFadden @reetamac.bsky.social
I don’t see how Democrats, when they return to power, can continue to fund Palantir (well, I can imagine how they would, but they shouldn’t). Find yourself a Democrat who looks at the security state the same way Russell Vought looks at CDC and NIH.
Mike the Mad Biologist
[tech bros like Palantir] are immensely self absorbed men who pine for nazi germany and apartheid south africa — stagnant, backwards regimes btw — because they imagine themselves the masters of the universe.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
New Lorax just dropped. Clive is a little scared:
Christy Klancher @stpauligrrrl.bsky.social
Amazing that in the national divorce the libs are getting the NFL, butter and cooking oil, being attracted to adult women, standup comedy, Bud Light, and now also Catholicism
Jake Grumbach
Food banks are not part of a safety net. they are proof we do not have a safety net.
TJ @tjjohnson.bsky.social
84 days since the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.
101 days since murder of Renee Gold in Minneapolis.
Where are the arrests?
Mel won’t bend the knee @melluvsgators.bsky.social
Wow. SCOTUS’s “shadow docket” was first established to stop the Clean Power Plan. It’s remarkable how many assaults on democracy, or at least on established process, over the last decade have served to protect fossil-fuel interests from the energy transition.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Most striking to me about the 2016 SCOTUS memos [on the shadow docket] is the radically different assessment of the harm imposed by the president not being able to pursue his initiatives. Over the last 15 mos., that harm has in numerous cases been treated as almost per se serious and irreparable. Here, it gets no analysis at all.
Jamal Greene
More homes. More bike lanes. More bus lanes. More trees. Fewer cars. Better Cities are climate action!
Eric Doherty
Started watching The Pitt recently. So amazing. But it also was striking to see like, only one popular show that seems to actually address things like COVID, mass shootings, houselessness, opioid epidemic etc. Our media really does for the most part play on escapism and erasure.
Elad Nehorai
Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history
mtsw
The internet came at a point in U.S. history where it was the most pro-business and anti-consumer. So we don’t get laws like that anymore.
@belleofball.bsky.social
The three stages of life:
1. Too young
2. Too busy
3. Too old
Jo Wolff
Breaking: Japan decisively resolves the Strait of Hormuz situation:
Joolia Ghoulia
Pope: [moral critique of illegal war]
President: I am Jesus. The pope is gay
Media: they are feuding
journeyman folklorist @aniceburrito.bsky.social
An Assistant Director in the FBI has a link to get Outlook for IOS embedded in their email. Tell me you are not a serious person without telling me you are not a serious person.
thegrumpyolddad.bsky.social
do NOT call me a NIMBY. I FULLY support new housing if it is AFFORDABLE, passes my personal VIBE check, will not be lived in by people I consider UNCOOL and is constructed only when the MOON is waxing, upon the APPROPRIATE ley lines
William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social
I've long felt that people coexisting in public spaces (which leads to interactions with strangers that aren't transactional) is essential for the civic health of a community. And 10x as important for political leaders. Every local elected MUST make a point of walking their city:
Daniel Herriges
I’m going to be annoyed for life by the way people convinced themselves that opposing things like racism and transphobia meant you’d been “duped” by elites.
Doghouse Reilly @chadstanton.blacksky.app
“In 2025, 31 people died in the custody of ICE. In 2026, the count has already reached fifteen—and it is only April. Nearly every one of those deaths, as with nearly every death in ICE custody, would have been prevented with adequate medical care and humane treatment.”
Liberal Currents
Guess who's winning the war? "The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30m every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran..."
David Roberts @volts.wtf
If you get into a “who can cut taxes more” battle with the GOP, you’re going to lose because they are far more shameless and antagonistic to the idea of living in a functioning society. Don’t concede to their framing that taxes are nothing but a problem to be solved.
James Medlock
Can you spot the vehicle that offends the aesthetic sensibilities of historic preservationists? If you guessed Cybertruck you would be wrong:
Gordon Padelford @gordonofseattle.bsky.social
I think of war through the lens of someone who survived one. It means displacement and irreversible trauma. The continued war with Iran will mean more death, more suffering, and more chaos. End the war.
Ilhan Omar
the VP being a fucking groyper nazi should probably be a bigger story
atticus goldfinch
“Why does [insert thing here] suck now” is reliably answered by a) private equity, b) AI, or c) both
Sunny Moraine @dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social
I will always find it confusing that some people think a person riding a $2000 bike to commute is a privileged elitist but the guy in the $80k truck that costs $150 to fill is the working class average joe.
Melissa Hogan
i simply find it a little hard to believe that shortly after every website implemented ai code and fired a bunch of engineers they all started breaking constantly every single day but its not related to the ai code or the skeleton crew
perfect angel @shiningangelx.bsky.social
Just saw a Gen Z guy in a Liberty University Journalism School t-shirt. Afraid to know what they teach there.
@pattho.bsky.social
Northern Flickers with chokecherries:
rubylith @rubylith-art.bsky.social
I’ve read, commissioned or been part of many studies, and the results are ALWAYS the same — low-density suburban development is incredibly expensive for everyone, and doesn’t come close to paying its own way. It needs to be heavily subsidized by denser, mixed-use areas. So denser housing subsidizes lower density housing, and keeps taxes artificially low for the same low density home owners that ironically commonly protest against that higher density housing in their neighbourhood. It’s not surprising that people can be hypocritical. But they should be called on it.
Brent Toderian
"The rise of extreme wealth is one of the clearest signs of this imbalance. In 1987, billionaires held wealth equal to 3% of global GDP. Today this tiny elite, just 0.0001% of the world population, owns the equivalent of *16%* of world GDP in wealth."
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
And yet billionaires are the most fragile of smol creatures when faced with so much as an angry tweet and proceed to destroy democratic governance for fear of ever being told no
hammancheez
an underrated, unforgivable belief that remains prevalent among politicos and normies is that a rising tide lifts all boats when it’s been clear forever that a rising tide simply drowns the people on low lying land
Joshua Erlich
caveman statue, dinosaur gardens, route 23, ossineke, michigan, 1988:
old roadside pics
Fascists would very much like the frame of the Pope trolling to stick, since, by definition, it sweeps his moral authority, and the reckoning it implies, away.
LunchCounterPunch @theultrasecret.bsky.social
I don't actually think the Pope is trolling. Leo is doing very normal pope things during modern conflicts; he's just doing it with an american accent.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
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