Feral Garage

No, that's not the name of an indie rock band.

I saw this feral garage in St. Paul last weekend:


The vines are even swallowing the trash can:


Thanks to Sweet Juniper for the applying the term "feral" to structures.

Feral Houses, Hospital Mulberries

More of Detroit's feral houses, posted by Jim over at Sweet Juniper.


Accompanied by a bittersweet running text, including this bit:

What is a house, really? Isn't it simply raw materials brought together to shelter us from the elements, from the wind and the rain and the bugs? And because they bear those burdens for us, a house is in perpetual decline. Without maintenance, every house is always on its way to ruin. Every homeowner that's ever paid a roofer knows this. A feral house exposes its vulnerable material core: concrete, wood, brick, mortar. Every home, even yours, will one day be broken down to such brute matter.

Jim also took his young kids on a gleaning trip to pick mulberries in the parking lot of an abandoned hospital near downtown Detroit. He includes photos of what the hospital's interior looked like not long after it was abandoned. They made "Detroit Jam" from the results of their picking.


And another recent series of Sweet Juniper posts has described with loving detail and engaging photos the locally owned businesses that make Detroit unique, even as the national chains have deserted it. Honey Bee Market La Colmena is one place where Jim's family buys their groceries; R. Hirt Jr. Co. is another, mostly for fresh dairy goods; and Busy Bee Hardware meets their needs for anything from seeds to snow shovels.

About that NRA Ad

Have you seen the NRA video that juxtaposes video footage with a carefully written script (voiced intensely by conservative talk show host Dana Loesch) to call gun-owners to arms against their fellow citizens?

Several million people have seen it so far. I hope most are like me, watching it with their jaws at maximum drop. I was going to write about it but I've since seen two other pieces of writing that say it all for me.

One is from Bill Moyers:

Take a look at the ad and ask whether the National Rifle Association can go any lower. Ponder this flagrant call for violence, this insidious advocacy of hate delivered with a sneer, this threat of civil war, this despicable use of propaganda to arouse rebellion against the rule of law and the ideals of democracy.

On the surface this is a recruitment video for the National Rifle Association. But [it's really] a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, each word and image deliberately chosen to stir the feral instincts of troubled souls who lash out in anger and fear.

Disgusting. Dishonorable. Dangerous. But also deliberate. Everything deplored by the NRA in the ad is committed by “they” — a classic manipulation turning anyone who disagrees with your point of view into “The Other” — something alien, evil, foreign.

“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”

“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”

Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.

It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling automatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Watching this expertly produced ad, we thought of how the Nazis produced slick propaganda like this to demonize the Jews, round up gypsies and homosexuals, foment mobs, burn books, crush critics, justify torture and incite support for state violence.

It’s the crack in the Liberty Bell, this ad: the dropped stitch in the American flag, the dregs at the bottom of the cup of freedom. It’s a Trump-sized lie invoked to bolster his base, discredit critics, end dissent. Joseph McCarthy must be smiling in hell at such a powerful incarnation on earth of his wretched, twisted soul.

With this savage ad, every Democrat, every liberal, every person of color, every immigrant or anyone who carries a protest sign or raises a voice in disagreement becomes a target in the diseased mind of some tormented viewer. Heavily armed Americans are encouraged to lock and load and be ready for the ballistic solution to any who oppose the systematic looting of Washington by an authoritarian regime led by a deeply disturbed barracuda of a man who tweets personal insults, throws tantrums and degrades everything he touches.

Look again at the ad. Ask yourself: What kind of fools are they at the NRA to turn America into a killing ground for sport? To be choked with hate is a terrible fate, and it is worst for those on whom it is visited.

Take one more look, and ask: Why do they get away with it? What is happening to us? How long do we have before the fire this time?

The second piece is by screenwriter Rider Strong, and it was shared on Facebook by a friend who introduced it with her own analysis:

Read all of this! The NRA has had zero to say about Philando Castille. Blue Lives Matter silent on off duty black cop shot by fellow officer when he came to help at a crime scene. And the ramped up talk from Trump and his surrogates about Chicago lately make this incredibly troubling.

Strong's words:

The 2nd Amendment ostensibly exists as a bulwark against an oppressive government. Under Obama, this was the argument opposed to any attempts at licensing or regulation: if we don’t preserve our constitutional right to defend ourselves with firearms, then the government — the military, the police — could take advantage of us. They could force their agenda via violence, and before you know it, we could lose our representative democracy. That’s why we, the people, need our guns.

But now, with a reliably pro-gun party in both legislative and executive branches power, Dana Loesch's NRA spot insists the 2nd Amendement is the only tool to protect “us” from “them.”

And just who are they?

“They” are never named. “They” are an ambiguous other. A fill-in-the-blank, an open collective that manages to string together looters, violent extremists, Black Lives protestors, the media, Hollywood elites, school teachers, even mere Obama supporters — Obama is “their" ex-president, not “ours.”

Incredibly, the ad makes no distinctions between modalities of protest. A stand-up comedian, that teacher, that Obama voter — they are all the same as an anarchist who breaks a window in Berkeley.

But here’s the point: “they" are citizens. They are people of this country who, for a variety of reasons, might stand against the policies of the current administration.

And in this context, post-Obama, it is the police who is on “our” side. And now, it is necessary to rise in defense of these overwhelmed agents of the state. As Loesch spits and fumes in the final frames, we must "fight this violence of lies” with the “clenched fist of truth.”

That is some sophisticated verbal jujitsu.

"Violence of lies” is, notably, not actual violence. But it SOUNDS violent. 'Cause, you know, there’s the word violence in there. (Just like that opening line, which declares “they" use “the media to ASSASSINATE real news.”)

But luckily, for Loesch, there’s a “clenched fist of truth.” Which doesn’t SOUND like violence, does it? It sounds noble, defensive, maybe it's a hand raised in a power salute...

…except when you couple that phrase with an NRA logo.

When you do that, those words change, and the message becomes clear. That fist is clenched around a pistol grip. Or you know what, maybe that interpretation is giving her writing too much credit. Maybe it’s simpler than that, because I know what an NRA logo stands for, and Loesch does too. It stands for defense of GUN RIGHTS.

So in one clever sentence, the abstract words of protestors (lies) is rendered violent, while the actual violence (guns) is abstracted to the realm of truth-telling.

Since the ad has gotten attention in the last couple days, Loesch has been posting and tweeting and twisting herself in more verbal knots to ensure that everyone knows the ad was intended as a criticism of the violence of the left, and she continues to point to the instances where this has occurred (most notably, the Berkeley Yiannopoulous riots).

She does so as if no one on the left condemned these actions, and, most importantly, as if her ad was not made by and in support of **a weapons’ rights interest group.**

She is correct in that she was careful enough to not have her script actually say the words, “Go out and hurt people you disagree with.” She can continue to cower behind her own cleverness and wordplay, but she can not avoid the underlying logic of her ad, which should upset even her supporters on the right. Namely, that in 60 seconds, Dana Loesch manages to not only subvert the basis for the 2nd Amendment — the guns of the people are there to to defend from an oppressive government — BUT ALSO TO COMPLETELY REVERSE IT: the guns of the people are there to help the government shut down dissent.

In her formulation, those who agree with the electorally legitimized authority (the non-protestors, the non-looters, the non-complainers) must “fight” in support of the government aaaaaand CUE NRA LOGO.

In other words, “we with guns” must stand against our fellow citizens who dare to feel oppressed, those who have the audacity to disagree.

This is advocation of violence in the name of the state. To borrow from Max Weber, this is a call to extend the monopoly of violence from the state to the private citizens who agree with its current, dominant party.

This is the most chilling message I have heard these days. Because this is not Fox news encouraging your uncle to rant about “the lefty snowflakes” at your Thanksgiving dinner; this is one of the most well funded lobbying group in the country encouraging him to bring a gun to the table.

It is, literally, a call to arms.

Hell in a handbasket, indeed. Meanwhile, the county where Portland, Oregon, is located is deputizing right wing militias like the Oath Keepers to "help" police at protests.

Feral Houses

Amazing photos by Jim of houses that are returning to nature along the streets of Detroit. From sweet-juniper.com (via BoingBoing).

Which reminds me of a favorite Carl Sandburg poem from high school:

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Twitter, February 2018

February 2018. Whew. There were lots of tweets about gun violence in schools because of the Parkland, Florida, shooting, of course. Including commentary on the Parkland students, the NRA, and the idea of arming teachers:

The way every gun owner imagines themselves as the “good guy with the gun” is the same way everyone thinks they’re an awesome driver and everyone else is the problem.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee

Every person who complains that the phrase "assault weapon" is misleading or meaningless has used the phrase "partial-birth abortion."
Osita Nwanevu

*hiding in a closet from an active shooter*
Me: This psycho has a machine gun and he just loaded another clip. Somebody help!
GOP: We’re here to help! It’s actually a semi-automatic rifle and they’re called magazines, not clips. Okay bye!
@mtobey

*Cop shoots unarmed black person* "You don't know what he was going through. He was in fear for his life."
*Cop fails to approach armed white shooter* "What a pussy. It's his job to risk his life."
Jay Kirell

look on the bright side: every armed teacher gets us that much closer to Starship Troopers
Elizabeth Bruenig

If owning a gun was an effective means of self-defense, your insurance rates would go down when you bought one. But they go up, because actuaries have proven that you’re far, far more likely to shoot yourself or a family member than someone attacking you.
@jndevereux

It is notable that most of the NRA's public messaging isn't even about firearms anymore. It's mostly culture war agitprop about fake news, Trump, obedience to the flag, feral leftists, socialists, antifa street gangs and other similar incitement. This is for a clear reason. The terms of the gun debate have become so extreme that a) there's no many more 'rights' to argue for and b) it's hard to argue the absolutist case on the merits. The goal is increasingly to permanently and inextricably embed maximalist gun rights into the country's partisan polarization. So whatever the merits of particular merits of an argument, any defeat for guns is a defeat for Trump, the flag, the police, traditional families, racial order and all the rest. The culture war and partisan polarization now backstop maximalist gun rights. Ergo, any intensification of the culture war and partisan polarization protects gun maximalism.
Josh Marshall

skip gates [Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates], one of the most well-known black educators in the world, was arrested for trying to get into his own home so excuse me for having a difficult time imagining what they would do to a black teacher who they thought was about to reach for a gun much less their own keys
Clint Smith

I have a note over my computer that reads "save your contempt for the powerful." These teens are living my maxim way better than I am.
@kevinbaker

The School Resource Officer in Parkland who stood outside while a mass shooting took place was suspended and resigned. Why should any Member of Congress who stands inside the Capitol and refuses to protect our kids keep their job?
Adam Schiff

No, gun-humpers, I'm not going to learn all the names and distinct functions of all the guns to earn my right to express the position "killing machines = bad." There's no secret nuance here.
Kate Harding

The NRA has 5 million members. That is LITERALLY ONLY 1.5% of the U.S. population. How dare they presume to rule us. Make their money toxic, take their power. I’m so grateful to these teens for showing us just how small those assholes actually are.
Joanna Robinson

parkland is the first mass shooting in memory where i know more about the survivors than the perpetrator
SeanMcElwee

After Columbine over 10,000 school police officers were hired just in case a school shooting happened. Two decades later, they haven't stopped a *single* school shooting. Instead they've arrested over 1 million kids, mostly students of color, for routine behavior violations.
Samuel Sinyangwe

You know, when I said I wanted the real world to be more like Harry Potter I just meant the teleportation and the magic stuff, not the entire plot of book 5 where the government refuses to do anything about a deadly threat so the teenagers have to rise up and fight back.
@MrFilmkritik

Chris Kyle the greatest american sniper in military history was shot and killed when confronted by a "crazy guy" with a gun. So we just have to train the teachers a lil bit better than Chris Kyle.
@TimfromDa70s

The posture on the Left cannot be that there is *no money* to arm teachers. THERE IS. Our posture needs to be that we OPPOSE militarism on its face and refuse to allow our children to be educated in prison prep and in fortresses.
Prisonculture

Yeah... this idea that people secure freedom by gaining the empathy of those oppressing them is ahistorical and will lead movements astray. You have to shift power and make it untenable for status quo to remain.
Bree Newsome

The NRA is like if there was an insane car lobby that was so powerful we couldn't have seat belts, speed limits, traffic lights, DWI arrests, licenses, or vision requirements because of "freedom," that kept pushing for a Formula One racer for every 14-year-old.
Summer Brennan

the fact that we're so awestruck by someone (a teenager) publicly asking Marco Rubio if he'd stop taking NRA money tells me we haven't been asking politicians tough enough questions in public
@jpbrammer

Ronald Reagan was surrounded by Secret Service agents when he was shot.
The Hoarse Whisperer

I think it's pretty clear that maintaining an armed constituency is a key part of Republican strategy. Democracy.
Michelle Allison @fatnutritionist

For a lot of people on the right, they aren't talking about taking up arms against the government when they're talking about fighting tyranny, they're talking about Jews, and people on the left, and LGBT folks. That's who they're fantasizing about killing when they say tyranny.
@CaseyExplosion

FYI, nearly every police chief I know wants fewer guns and fewer assault weapons on the streets. Hard to be pro-law enforcement and pro-gun proliferation. Jus sayin.
Phillip Atiba Goff

The NRA doesn’t work for gun owners. They work for gun sellers.
Brian Schatz

There is no anti-racist lens being applied to this national gun debate right now. This is by and large white America having a conversation with itself about preventing gun violence from penetrating affluent communities.
Bree Newsome (referring to Philando Castile)

The teens are seeing conservatives for what they are: an enemy to defeat rather than people who can be won over with magic rhetoric.
@samknight_one

School teachers carrying firearms and readied for gun battles in grade school classrooms is a level of social pathology that signals the end of any viable, coherent society. Travel such a path, and the barbarism and fearmongering of the American abattoir can only accelerate.
David Simon

All this talk about tightening school building security five months after a guy shot 500 people at an outdoor concert. Schools have courtyards. Schools have playgrounds. Schools are just one of a long list of places where children congregate in large numbers, and school shootings are just a fraction of mass shootings.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

Why would anybody become a teacher if your $30,000 job includes paying for your kids’ school supplies AND training to be a paramilitary fighter expected to face down homicidal maniacs spraying the school with assault rifles? What kind of armed camp country do these people want?
Joy Reid

The idea of arming teachers is terrifying. Can you imagine how many guns would end up pulled on students? Or worse. Outbursts that should end up being suspensions or detentions could end up being death sentences. Especially in states where "fear" is all you need to shoot/kill.
Trymaine Lee

Gotta say, Republicans and right-wing media are not doing a great job of ensuring that an entire generation doesn’t grow up politically driven and wholly determined to end them. Not a hell of a lot of foresight happening here.
Rebecca Traister

Right now in America there are Republicans who received millions of dollars from the NRA accusing CHILDREN who survived a massacre of being PAID to speak out on guns.
Mikel Jollett

y'know I didn't think conservative media could go lower than "arguing in favor of electing a child molester," but "publicly smearing the teen survivors of a massive school shooting" is a shining achievement in douchebaggery
andi zeisler

on guns, david brooks proposes a bridge to nowhere — with lots of safe spaces along the way for gun owners to feel unthreatened while the people who don’t like being shot dead apologize for antagonizing them by advocating for life-saving policies
Philip Gourevitch

If "thoughts and prayers" are good enough for people who've lost their families then it's good enough for people who've lost their guns.
Erica Buist

My favorite thing is when the conservatives who scream about supporting the troops and are mad that people protest the police then insist that they need guns because they may need to kill all the troops and police.
LOLGOP

if you would sincerely rather send your kid to rikers island middle school in a kevlar backpack than simply give up one of your fucking toys you are unfit to be a parent
rob whisman

I wish, for once, instead of ambushing survivors for interviews after they've been traumatized by a mass shooting, members of the media would ambush politicians in their most vulnerable moments and demand to know why they haven't done anything to prevent this.
Charlotte Clymer

The moral perversity that allows one to think that universal healthcare is tyranny but dead school children are the price of freedom is what is corroding the soul of the United States.
Christian Christensen

A shameful distinction: The United States has become the most dangerous affluent nation in the world for children. Why? Because the U.S. is an outlier when it comes to the number of kids who die from:
1. Infant mortality
2. Car crashes
3. Guns
David Leonhardt

Fox News just had an “expert” on to discuss how AR-15s are misunderstood and not as bad as you think. They think Muslims are all the same, but guns deserve to be treated as individuals!
Hari Kondabolu

On Mulligan and his latest antics, some of which overlaps with the NRA and Florida shooting:

BREAKING: DC area man with five draft deferments who mocked tortured war hero John McCain for being captured says he believes he would confront an active shooter—with an AR-15 assault weapon—unarmed.
Brian Klaas

He woulda killed Hitler too. Could probably handle the devil with his bare hands
Adam Miller

Evangelicals created an atheist strawman, arrogant and selfish, consumed by greed and materialism, who will lie about anything, even belief in God, if it's to his advantage. Then they found him and voted for him.
Jools Chadwick

You couldn’t design a worse president for a time with more critical, pressing issues. Just worthless.
Jared Yates Sexton

Most high-level politicians are psychopathic narcissists, but having spent a career trying to curry favor with voters, they learn how to approximate empathy. Trump, having been a real-estate crook and media huckster his whole life, never had to develop those skills.
Matt Christman @cushbomb

"Putin didn't pick Donald Trump because he thought he'd be great for America. He wanted someone who was going to do the most harm to his adversary. And boy, did he pick the right horse." –Phillip Reines on All in with Chris Hayes
Pat Thompson

Trump's total capture of the Republican party and its base fits a pattern. Just like he has done for decades, Trump took a garbage thing and put his name on it, sold it to rubes, and is collecting as much money as he can from it, before he declares bankruptcy and discards it.
Wil Wheaton

It costs $200,000 to join the Mar-a-Lago Club, then $14,000 a year in dues. Pretty cheap way to get access to a sitting president and influence his agenda. Doesn’t hurt either that it’s unregulated by any of those campaign finance rules or that it goes straight to the president’s pocket.
Jared Yates Sexton

The message of Trumpism is Good Things should happen to people we like and Bad Things should happen to people we don’t like, and we’ll fill in the petty details about how the “law” works later. It feels almost like missing the point to call it hypocrisy.
Benjy Sarlin

On Mulligan’s appointees, policies, and the Russian conspiracy to interfere in American elections:

The president’s chief adviser, a general, has allowed the president’s unqualified daughter (who lacks permanent security clearance) to brief a key ally on diplomatic decisions involving the risk of nuclear war. This snapshot belongs in an authoritarian banana republic.
Brian Klaas

Imagine a Muslim head of the EPA saying that the Quran inspired him to— you know what, I think imagining a Muslim EPA chief is challenge enough.
LibyaLiberty (responding to EPA head Scott Pruitt saying the Bible inspires him advocate use of coal)

One shocking aspect of this is the overall state of white collar crime enforcement is so lax Manafort and Gates only got caught because of the special counsel.
Matthew Yglesias

Oh yeah, I keep forgetting Scott Pruitt is stealing money from us as well as stealing our future. So many things to remember these days.
Pat Thompson

This Russian operation had staff in the hundreds, and a monthly budget of $1.25 mil PER MONTH by Sept. 2016 -- for context, this is more manpower and resources than most Republican presidential campaigns.
Elise Jordan

What the indictment reveals is that there was, essentially, an entire shadow campaign - money, structure, organization, ads, metrics, all of it -- run by the Russian government. And it spent much of 216 trying to elect Donald Trump president.
Chris Hayes

Silly white liberals, quit trying to polish turds to prove a political point: the FBI is just as corrupt and evil and oppressive as Donald Trump says... Just not against him. #FredHampton #LeonardPeltier #MLK #COINTELPRO #Panthers #AIM #MMIW
BigIndianGyasi

You all should be thinking about what these immoral, law-breaking men do after they leave the White House with state secrets many hostile parties would find valuable.
Sarah Kendzior

Republicans just passed a law that allows rich kids to inherit 135 times the average American income tax-free without ever working a day in their lives.
LOLGOP

The GOP dismantling of Medicaid deserves more attention. It's a brutal retrenchment of the welfare state at a time of unrivaled prosperity, with the sole purpose of immiserating the most vulnerable.
SeanMcElwee

It needs to be said: Donald Trump was put into office with the knowing help of a foreign enemy who sought to weaken our world leadership and has succeeded. Trump is now undermining our institutions and democracy. He is a traitor to America.
Amy Siskind

We know now the FBI was actively investigating both campaigns during the 2016 election but only chose to publicly announce (repeatedly!) their investigation of Clinton while keeping the Trump campaign investigation *completely* secret the entire time. If *anyone* working on the Trump investigation wanted to hurt Trump in 2016 they could have leaked details of the investigation. They did not. In fact, FBI sources went so far as to tell the Times there was no Russia connection! And all this is, apparently, evidence that the FBI was engaged in a conspiracy to get Clinton elected? Literally none of this makes any sense and it's an insult to everyone's intelligence. And it's depressing as hell to watching smart people pretend to be this stupid.
Chris Hayes

Oh, yeah, the Rob Porter domestic abuse story! Remember that? Also wiped out by the Parkland story:

Trump Gives Wife Beater Praise He Usually Reserves for Child Molesters and Nazis
Susan Ohanian

Prediction, we'll recall this line from @Dahlialithwick often: "[To the Trump administration], women are to be cherished and protected right up until the moment they stop being docile and decorative, and then they are to be dismissed and humiliated."
Monika Bauerlein

for the morally dense: This is why you don't elect a president who abuses women -- he will tolerate it in others, give cover to the abusers and demean women brave enough to come forward. Oh, and since abusers lie you'll have someone dishonest to the core
Jennifer Rubin

A lot of pastors have to encourage women to stay with abusive husbands because if they taught women how to recognize abuse and leave it, women would be leaving their churches too.
@TenaciousMandy

I'm very shocked that the guys who wanted to jail a woman for using personal email are very cool with men who abuse women.
LOLGOP

The state of conservatism and our politics in general:

35 years of hostility to women, black people, immigrants, and gay people, while happily rolling back democracy just to win elections isn't just some fucking up. It's a bad legacy of bigotry, and if there's anything to salvage in conservatism it will take more than Never Trump.
frannypak

Boy, it's sure really convenient for fascists that it's not reasonable to talk about fascism until things reach the point where we're literally not allowed to talk about it.
Alexandra Erin

Folks, if you're a political party who can't win elections without suppressing the minority vote, gerrymandering the shit out of districts and having Daddy Putin step in to lend you a hand, maybe you don't deserve to be at the table right now. Which is to say, we see you, GOP.
John Scalzi

i can’t relate to anyone who thinks political disagreements shouldn’t ruin friendships. we could get nuked at any point i’m not making time for catch-up brunches with My High School Algebra Classmate Who Thinks Welfare Is For Lazy People
@electrolemon

A good time to recall the three core arguments of reactionaries:
Perversity - attempts to solve problem will make it worse
Futility - attempts to solve problem will fail
Jeopardy - attempts to solve problem will cause other problems
David Roberts

Just wanted to get on and remind you that "fiscal conservatism" is social conservatism, and anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is trying to bring about a certain social outcome without admitting who that outcome will harm most.
Ja'han Jones

"Trump won white voters at every level of class and income. He won workers, he won managers, he won owners, he won robber barons. This is not a working-class coalition; it is a nationalist one."
Richard Florida

Conservative critics don’t want mainstream journalists to be better or more balanced. They want mainstream journalism, as an institution, to fail.
brianbeutler

What Fox tells us about conservatives is that they don't win by having serious ideas, they win by being a well-funded, sleek propaganda machine that stokes the fears of stupid older white people with disposable incomes. That's what conservatism is.
David Klion

“Even dictatorships are dependent on the population and societies they rule...People are never as weak as they think they are...[but if they resort to violence, they’ve] chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority” –Gene Sharp (1928–2018)
Alfie Kohn

The State of our Union is fine. It’s these Confederate-minded bastards I’m worried about.
John Dingell

Racism, white supremacy and police violence:

When a cop is so afraid he won’t go into a school after a shooter, he’s a coward not doing his job and blamed for the loss of life. But, when a cop is so afraid he shoots an unarmed black man dead in the street, he’s a hero doing a tough job and his actions are justified.
Brett Erickson

People don’t want to be criticized for what their ancestors did, but they surely want to hold on to the profits their ancestors left.
merelynora

I love y'all, but I need y'all to understand that white racists are going to white racist and it's not a matter of your ability to prove that black youth are as human as white youth. They don't care about stats or facts. They care that white supremacy remains status quo. People have been engaged in the process of proving to racists that black people are fully human for hundreds of years. Racists do not care. They are aware that they benefit from the status quo and uphold it out of self-interest. Again, this idea that we gain freedom by gaining the empathy of those who hate us is not how this works.
Bree Newsome

Presidents Day is a great day to remember that many of the people who founded and led this country were brilliant but also deeply flawed & deeply prejudiced. When we celebrate the social contract they created for this country it’s always worth remembering who they didn’t include in that vision
Clint Smith

I very much support LeBron James and his refusal to shut up and dribble. But could we please implore him to set aside the "beating the odds"/outlier fantasy that fuels racism in the U.S.? Dear LeBron, let's create society of equity instead
Paul Thomas

terrorism is one of the only areas where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit
Ken Cheng

*whispers in your ear* white nationalists murdering people will never be called terrorism in America because terrorism implies its a threat to the state apparatus but white nationalist violence only reenforces the state apparatus in America
@PeopleRepellent

“Wealth is how history shows up in your wallet.” - Connie Razza
Angela Hanks

Racial dot map of Detroit. Dividing line is 8-mile road. Think of the forces that must be in play to maintain that strict a level of segregation:


Angie Schmitt @schmangee

"...the first enslaved African in Massachusetts was the property of the schoolmaster of Harvard. Yale funded its first graduate-level courses and its first scholarship with rents from a small slave plantation it owned in Rhode Island..."
@NewBlackMan

Dear White People:
People of color know "not all white people” are white supremacists and not all white men are mass shooters. People of color don’t push blanket travel bans, house raids, and border walls. We need y'all to work with us to dismantle white supremacy — not worry that we can’t distinguish a white guy from the KKK.
MuslimIQ

OVERPOPULATION IS A MYTH. Western powers consume disproportionately, then use colonialism/the IMF to impose their unsustainable systems on the global South. Anyone pushing the overpopulation line either doesn't understand this, or is seeking control over brown mothers' bodies.
shaadieali

Obama faced such racist backlash that white America elected Trump to undo his presidency because no matter how much he approximated whiteness biologically (his mother), educationally (Columbia & Harvard) or behaviorally (suit, tie, English) his skin tone was too much. And he chose to marry an unambiguously Black woman and embrace his Black identity in ways that made white America uncomfortable. One of the greatest amounts of backlash he faced was for saying that if he had a son, his son would look like Trayvon Martin.
Bree Newsome

The median wealth for black people is projected to be $0 by 2053. $0. Yes. You read that correctly. And it is not that blacks just didn’t *work hard.* The legacy of both being property AND later not being allowed to own property PLUS Jim Crow = $0 wealth. The response of white people that they “work(ed) hard” as a way to dismiss every aspect of systemic and structural racism is one of the few things that pushes me over the edge.
deray

Are you sitting having milkshake poured onto your head? Are you pouring the milkshake? Egging on the friend who is? Are you casually observing? Looking away, disgusted but not saying or doing anything? When we look back ... who will you be in this image?


Dr. Courtney Cogburn

Isn't it fascinating that Europeans, who are, after all, descendants of African migrants, work so hard to exclude African migrants?
Crystal M. Fleming @alwaystheself

If you're upset at the way rural white people are being discussed, hi I would like to introduce to the way that Black and Brown people in the inner city have been discussed forever. Maybe you could challenge that rhetoric going forward?
Mikki Kendall @Karnythia

The fact that RACE is a social/political construct doesn't mean RACISM isn't real. It simply means the ideology and pseudoscience upon which racism was developed is false. Again, racism is a system organized around oppression based on ancestry and appearance. The system is very real. There's literally no equivalent between the political repression experienced by Black Americans and whatever form of prejudice white people occasionally experience. Literally the whole economy and political infrastructure is built on anti-Black racism.
Bree Newsome

White sports fans damaging property after a game is a *RIOT*. Black people damaging property after centuries of oppression and yet another racist police killing is an *UPRISING* against white supremacist capitalism .
Bree Newsome (responding to the Superbowl in Philadelphia)

In 1944 a sixteen-year-old black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme 'What to Do with Hitler after the War' by submitting the single sentence. "Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America."
Jemisha

I will never say Black History month isn't important because I think visibility is important. This month shows just how inclusive people can be when they feel like they need to be. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if we felt like we needed to be inclusive all the time?
Cacje

On feminism, toxic masculinity, misogyny…

A lot of movies are basically 'wouldn't it be great if something happened to your wife/daughter thereby justifying the commission of mass murder.'
David Kaib

Queer Eye is fine but I would like a companion show with butch women helping straight women who want to feel comfortable being less performatively feminine
Hannah Goldfield

There are a lot of white women for whom equality means being equal to white men in power, wealth and the ability to oppress others and dassit
Bree Newsome

All I want is for men to do better. That's all. I've never thought that it was too much to ask, although all my life I've heard, "That's why you're single!" But why is a modicum of respect -- from one human to another -- so darn difficult? I'll never understand. Look, I don't want to be worshipped, and I don't believe that men should be doormats. But not being violent in your actions or language? What's wrong with that being the bare minimum for human interaction?
Ebony Elizabeth

BRB: going to whisper "burn down the gender dichotomy" to my sleeping children:


Maggie Koerth-Baker

Women are often told to avoid "weak" language like "I think," but the truth is it's often more accurate. I find it more troubling when people state their opinion as if it's an undisputed fact. We don't need to fix women; we need to appreciate what they're already doing.
April Wensel

Baby Boomers: You young people should rebel against society like we did!
Millennials: Okay, I don't fit into a rigid gender binary, I'm not strictly heterosexual or monogamous, and I think we need to dismantle capitalism and kyriarchy
Baby Boomers: no not like that
Doubting_Tom

I'd love to see the chattering classes switch from "Why don't men believe women?" to "Do men actually think these things are wrong?"
Erin Bartram

Women: Dear men, please treat us with respect
Too many men: FINE, I GUESS I'LL NEVER SPEAK TO A WOMAN AGAIN EVER
@_ElizabethMay

Explaining emotional labor to my mother so she can figure out why she is so tired. "Wait a minute! I need a pen to write this down."
Tressie McPhd

"girls don’t mature faster than boys, girls are punished from an early age for the same behaviour that boys are allowed to indulge in well into adulthood.” LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE AT THE BACK
EVA_SlVE

Normalize women not being baby incubators by showing them in pregnancy test commercials celebrating negative results
Rachel Fisher

People: ummm queerness in children's media is INAPPROPRIATE like we don't want to RUIN our children's INNOCENCE with this SEXUALITY NONSENSE
People: oh look at that infant wearing pink and that other infant wearing blue in close proximity to each other THEY'RE GONNA GET MARRIED
@ellle_em

Climate change and livable cities:

Vienna, regularly ranked as the Most Liveable City in the World, is growing faster than any other city in the European Union. More roads to accommodate all of this growth? No, residents can access *all* transit for just 1 Euro a day.
jennifer keesmaat

In an era of planetary crisis, walkability should be the top transportation priority in every city. Walking is itself a major means of transport in any coherent city, but walkability is also the underpinning of good transit and biking, sensible car ownership and vibrant density.
Alex Steffen

THE NEXT BIG THING in transportation isn't the Hyperloop. It's buses. The task at hand right now isn't building a new big thing. It's making the big things we've already built work better for everyone. These things require humility and hard work and focus and leadership.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee

I find wealthy old people blaming the environmental crisis on poorer young people having families extremely distasteful, even vile. (Doubly so since longevity gains, not birth rates, are the main drivers of population growth now!)
Alex Steffen

Congestion is a reason to oppose car infrastructure and free parking, not housing. Congestion is a reason to support dense, walkable neighborhoods. If you oppose housing because of congestion, you're admitting that car-centric models only work if we exclude people.
Zachary Wefel

We are only at the start of the great migrations of the 21st century. Some will be obvious — streams of refugees fleeing flooding shorelines and withered fields. Others will be hard to see — wealthier people moving to places they expect to be less hard-hit in the future.
Alex Steffen

If you want to live in a congested & irrelevant city 20 yrs from now — keep on building freeways to the suburbs. If you want to live in a prosperous & efficient city 20 years from now — invest in best transit you can today.
Taras Grescoe

The fact that nobody goes to jail for dangerous driving and people go to jail for transit fare evasion doesn't have anything to do with the relative harms of those activities. It has to do with who has political and social power in our legal system.
Angie Schmitt @schmangee

If you think the kids are pissed off about what gun manufacturers have done to their schools, wait til they find out what fossil fuel industries have done to their entire future lives.
Alex Steffen

Many people today are caught in a mental trap of thinking that since travel time improvements brought us economic growth in the past, greater travel time improvements will bring us even more economic growth in the future. The urban challenge of the 21st century is to take those (very real) improvements gained between 1870 and 1970 and leverage them by restoring the urban design wisdom, gained over the last 5,000 years, that we largely discarded in the late 20th century.
Jason Segedy

The high in Washington DC today is 78. Here’s a friendly reminder that humanity will ONLY be saved with large-scale economic planning & mass carbon capture. Otherwise, most of us die. The poor ones. The brown ones. The wealthy will survive; they have no incentive here. They’re your enemy.
peg_mclaugh

Some people argue that the interconnected nature of high carbon industries makes them less likely to change — I think a more accurate assessment is that it makes them one large, brittle system, ripe for profitable disruption. If I had more time, I'd go into how many of the component parts of the high-carbon economy face viable and rapidly scaling competition now. Building a carbon-zero world is completely within our technical and industrial capacities.
Alex Steffen

PSA: in the downtown area you may not always be able to park in the precise location you desire, which may lead to side effects like walking. Please pardon our success and vibrancy.
Tony Kroeger

If this were a drug it would make world wide headlines: British study demonstrates that cycle commuters had a 52% lower risk of dying from heart disease, 40% lower risk of dying from cancer. A 46% lower risk of developing heart disease, 45% lower risk of developing cancer at all.
jennifer keesmaat

me, a dumbass: "smart cities" are cities with great transit, affordable housing, divested from fossil fuels
you, supreme tech genius: no "smart cities" means your car can mine bitcoin and there's an app for dialing an immigrant to do your chores for free
@mcmansionhell

It’s pretty extraordinary how people at public meetings treat the danger of crossing busy streets as a feature of nature, like a rushing river or a steep ravine.
Alex Schieferdecker

The ideal climate for us is a stable climate. The whole infrastructure of our civilisation has evolved around the climate that has existed in the past millennia.
Stefan Rahmstorf

Today’s Climate Fact: Air pollution was responsible for 6.1 million — or 12% — of all deaths in 2016 around the world. Another reason to transition to 100% clean and renewable energy.
Senator Jeff Merkley

One potentially positive outcome from the Amazon shakedown is broad cultural disgust for the use of development incentives. Huge opportunity for political leaders to fill an intellectual void and promote a vision of strength through incremental development.
Strong Towns

The last time Earth was as warm as it is now was about 125,000 years ago. And we know sea level was 6 meters higher than it is today.
InsideClimate News

"Think of an e-bike as a replacement for a car, not a manually powered bike, and suddenly it seems cheap. It seems easy. It seems green. Parking is a piece of cake. And unlike a car, it never gets stuck in traffic."
HFrazey

There was just 4 hours and 20 minutes of coverage on climate change in 2017 -- in total -- on the four major TV networks. That is completely unacceptable. We're plummeting headlong into one of the greatest challenges in the history of our species and almost no one is talking about it.
Eric Holthaus

One thing we don’t talk about much is that the US now has tens of millions of people that only have ever known a lifestyle built around driving to everything. So the idea of walking, biking - it all seems not just foreign but also absurd. Anytime I leave my little walkable bubble in Savannah, I’m reminded of just how much of the country is complete auto-oriented suburban sprawl, and how futile it seems that it will change in significant amounts. We have what we have, to a large degree.
Kevin Klinkenberg

Can we get an acknowledgement that bike/pedestrian projects are actually car projects? If no cars, no separation from cars is needed and we have all the infra we need. Bike/pedestrian projects are $$$ because cars. Therefore all bike/ped projects are for traffic throughput.
From the Crosswalk

Stock markets slide for a day. Result: mass panic and wall-to-wall coverage. Soil is sliding off the land worldwide, threatening the entire basis of human survival. Result: indifference, no coverage. What is salient is not important What is important is not salient.
GeorgeMonbiot

Auto-oriented spaces rob children of "everyday freedom," the ability to have independence for daily activities. We can't expect young people to suddenly become self-sufficient when we deny them a childhood of practical experience.
Strong Towns

Land is the most valuable asset a city has. We should maximize use of it by building narrow streets.
Strong Towns

On the current administration’s proposal to gut SNAP and replace it with a box of commodity food (remember that issue? it was right before the Parkland shooting):

IDGAF if a microscopic portion of people commit food stamp fraud. I CARE ABOUT PEOPLE NOT GOING HUNGRY. And the cost of that fraud? MINISCULE. It's a fraction of a drop in the bucket. *stares at trillions of dollars of tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires*
Chelsea M. Cameron

conservatives: socialism is bad because we need to be able to choose from 35 brands of bread or freedom dies. also conservatives: a box of government selected monthly rations sounds good
@EternalBusboy

None of the problems our country is facing can be blamed on poor people getting too much.
Rainbow Rowell

Proposing that we cut food stamps and ship a box of government canned goods to poor families to save money right after they pass a $1.5 trillion tax cut for corporations and the wealthy is so vulgar and obvious I don’t know what to say.
Jon Lovett

so the guys who got upset because Michelle Obama changed nutrition requirements for school want to literally mandate what poor people eat and deliver it to their homes?
Caitlin Legacki

On immigration, DACA, and ICE:

Under the Border Patrol’s expansive definition of the border zone, the entire states of Massachusetts and Florida and the city of Chicago are border areas despite not actually bordering any foreign countries.
Matthew Yglesias

This administration is literally rounding up and detaining more undocumented parents for traffic violations than white supremacists for training and arming terrorists.
Samuel Sinyangwe

The Republican Party's platform in 2018 is that the country has too many legal immigrants, too many poor people with subsidized health insurance, too many rich people paying punitive tax rates, and too few guns.
Ezra Klein (written before the shooting in Parkland)

ICE is engaged in an ongoing, large-scale ethnic cleansing campaign right now, and it's incredible how little most people have to hear about it. 143,470 arrests just last year. 226,000 deportations.
@joe___nelson

I don't want to hear one more fucking word about how stopping immigration is supposedly for the safety of Americans, when the GOP absolutely refuses to lift a finger to try and prevent 35,000 yearly firearm related deaths
Alt Fed Employee

Is fascinating that when people suggests ICE be abolished the reaction by some is to say “but what would you replace it with!” as if ICE was a part of the constitution & we’ve never operated without it. It was created in 2003. It’s far from a requisite feature of our government.
Clint Smith

On education and children:

There are MANY things in life that are counter-intuitive. One is that the solution to low test scores is NOT more drilling but more recess.
Alice Keeler

wait i'm sorry why are we not talking about this more when we teach american history? a) kids would be so much more engaged if they knew these people were also kids b) why are we so obsessed with what these 20-somethings thought was a good idea 300 years ago?
@RubyGraceLevine (responding to a tweet that listed the young ages of Lafayette, Monroe, Hamilton, etc. in 1776)

The voting age should be whatever age the youngest person tried as an adult in that state was
ramsincanon

Hitting children should be ILLEGAL just as it is illegal to hit adults, prisoners, folks in the military, and animals. People don't think hitting kids should be illegal because they don't view children as fully human. They believe that children are natural objects of violence.
Stacey Patton

Y’all, being able to look at a news story on the internet and figure out if it’s real or fake is JUST AS IMPORTANT as knowing how to sound out words in a sentence and decipher meaning. It’s a different kind literacy that affects our ability to navigate the world.
Kimberly Nicole Foster

At age 12, my English teacher told me I had a shallow intellect and would "never be a deep thinker". Was angry/devastated until the poetry unit, where he made us read *HIS OWN* (terrible) poetry, and I realized adults can be idiots.
Holly Krieger

“It really bothers me that as I do research regarding empathy in schools, everything I find is about teaching kids empathy instead of teaching adults empathy.”
Sisyphus38

And the best of the rest:

If the Supreme Court is going to rule that government workers don't have to pay any fees to the unions that represent them because of political differences, shouldn't SCOTUS rule that shareholders can insist on repayment for any corporate political spending they disagree with?
Steven Greenhouse


A 144 year-old wisteria tree from Japan:


Nature Is Weird

I can honestly say in my almost 7 years as a public defender in Brooklyn, I have never ever had a misdemeanor marijuana case that began as a 911 or 311 complaint- it is always cop-initiated and largely cop-created (“empty your pockets”) #EndBrokenWindows
@brooklynPD

Pro tip: Deeply question any prediction of a catastrophe whose precise shape just happens to force society to conform to the ideological preferences of the predictor—and cast it aside completely when those preferences are socially reactionary.
Alex Steffen

I'm not really interested in African apologies for complicity [in the trading enslaved people]. This is a human problem. Europeans enslaved and raped and exploited their "own" people too. Otherness is a liquid category and it's flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of violence.
Crystal M. Fleming @alwaystheself

I saw a heartfelt apology [for the slave trade] circulating around Facebook, written by (I believe?) a Nigerian-American. A lot of us were moved and said so in the comments. Reconciliation is important. But I'm kinda ready to move on. *None* of us are our ancestors. I'd rather join hands and kick ass. Instead of endlessly examining all these deep cross-Atlantic wounds (again, important), I want to know how I can turn away from a lifetime of unquestionable allegiance to a nation-empire that'll never accept me, and turn toward building something new. How can we build together?
Ebony Elizabeth


Oh cool, an escalator to Twitter:


Holly Nielsen

Someone recently argued that we need a new Billy Graham; I wish Graham’s urgent public Evangelicalism had died with him. America needs a new Fred Rogers. His Christianity I can approve of. It wasn’t a spectacle; Mr. Rogers just genuinely cared for people. We didn’t deserve him.
Christopher Stroop

What have I done to deserve being on a plane with a bunch of young conservative missionaries wearing T-shirts showcasing their most recent “saving” of people who don’t need their “saving”?!
Molly Priesmeyer

Just spotted a cat on someone's porch, miaowing to be let in. Without thinking, I walked up to the door, rang the bell, nodded to the cat and left. It was only I rounded the corner I realised what I'd done as I heard the owner shouting FUCK ME SARAH THE CAT JUST RANG THE DOORBELL
Philip Larkin

There is no way to craft a real health care proposal that won't cause serious pushback. Because serious interests are at stake.
David Kaib

It is hard for me to fathom how anyone who deals with private companies on a frequent basis - which is to say, anyone at all - can walk around believing that the private sector is generally better at doing things than the government is.
Ben Spielberg

Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse
The Economist


What's up book nerds? I made a quilt I think you'll dig:


Kady Yates

Nazi/stasi/slaveowner heroes are a reminder of how willing we are to bestow Happily Ever Afters and applause and cookies on white men who briefly stop being evil whereas marginalized groups must be perfect at all times or they're too unrelatable. Redemption plots are very popular as long as it's a (rich, cis, het, white) man who is being redeemed. Nobody else gets redemption. About five nazi heroes ago, somebody was like "actually redemption plots are popular because it's an important element of Christianity" which might be plausible if literally anybody other than white men got redeemed (usually by a less privileged woman, because of COURSE.)
Cat Sebastian

The neeeeeeeeed to be seen as hyper-rational...does not necessarily come from a super rational place. The need to be seen as unemotional (whether appropriate or not) can be complicated by irrational family of origin baggage unaddressed...
@gdtrble

Y'all, did you know that "free" government services are actually paid for by taxes?! I didn't until 437 conservatives mansplained it to me on Twitter.
David Roberts

it's amazing how willing people are to admit that their business models will fail if they can no longer exploit their employees. capitalism is flawless
ben wyatt, human disaster

Just a reminder that Uber has about the same farebox recovery ratio as WMATA, NY MTA, or Sound Transit, while underpaying its employees.
Christof Spieler

No matter how many plausible psychological explanations I read, I cannot overcome my deep-seated contempt and alienation toward people who respond to anxiety by clinging to an authoritarian.
David Roberts

I love this idea that we can't enact any kind of change that moves us towards a more structurally just society if even a single person is harmed by it, no matter how much the inaction harms that same person
@fishmanpet

The beautiful colours of the rose finch!


Strange Animals

That federal "tipped minimum wage," passed in 1991, was separated from regular minimum in 1996 — the year I began a decade of waiting tables and bartending for $2.13 an hour. Utter scandal that it hasn't been raised in 27 years. Idea: Shift our elected officials to a tipping system?
Sarah Smarsh

The road to hell will be paved with mealymouthed privileged peoples' unwillingness to be inconvenienced, while democracy is dismantled around them piece by piece and their fellow citizens die.
N. K. Jemisin

Giving money to the poor is the most magical thing you can do for society and for business. People whose basic needs aren't being met will spend 100% of the money they get, which means it goes right into the economy. And the money they spend? Will likely get spent again. And again. The further from the top you place the money, the more times that same money will be spent. It's like magic.
Alexandra Erin

"Socially liberal but fiscally conservative”:


@casual_front

None of this "access to quality, affordable health care" nonsense. Guaranteed universal health care free at the point of use.
Nikhil Goyal

will there ever be an act more heroic than a white dude playing devil's advocate?
ben wyatt, human disaster

I'm being snarky, but a lot of the fortunes made by Web 2.0 "disruption" are textbook examples of what Naomi Klein called "disaster capitalism.” Paul Graham fucking admitted his strategy was to see any heavily unionized industry as having "potential energy waiting to be liberated.” You say potential energy waiting to be liberated, Marx says surplus value waiting to be extracted, potato, potahto, let's call the whole thing profiteering bullshit.
Arthur Chu

PSA: "use" and "utilize" are not the same thing.
Claire Major

Wouldn't it be easier and cheaper for the country to just write the Koch brothers a check each year for a couple billion dollars and ask them to stop fucking with our economy?
James S.A. Corey

This is the greatest humanitarian achievement in history:


Jason Pontin

I tossed something that said “best before November 2016” today and all I could think was, man, me too, buddy.
Sarah Mackey

Summer Time, and the Tweeting Is Easy

July 2013 includes a lot of tweets about George Zimmerman and institutionalized racism, plus a little bit of Egypt, Edward Snowden, and Jenny McCarthy. But only two about the royal baby, and they're good ones.

Learning about feminism is like learning about typography. Once you know, you see the injustice everywhere. And it hurts.
By Jan Lehnardt


This is another one of those "Adulthood Tests" isn't it?
By Garrett Miller

God grant me the serenity to accept the tabs I cannot close, the courage to close the ones I can, and the strength to know the difference.
By Laura June

I wonder if we're reaching the point where genuine human emotion is cliché and a sign of bad writing.
By Ryan Dow 

Will the people who won't let public speakers be clear just stop.
By Chris Steller 

Girl are you a copy editor ’cause your body is [sic].
By matt 

You know how women writers have had to write under male names for centuries? Male developers should release code as women just to see the hatred.
By Jack Danger Canty

The more roads you build the more parking you need. Cars don't fit in cities.
By Free Public Transit 

Dear President Obama: If Michelle Bachmann and yourself both agree on NSA dragnet surveillance, I'd suggest you get a reality check.
By Nikhil Goyal 

The royal birth cost $15,000. The average American birth is billed at $30,000.
By Ezra Klein 

My daughter asked 2 questions tonight; why don't women have a Tour De France & why do women stand on the podium doing nothing. I had nothing
By Simon Clancy

"Millennials are lazy," declares generation that could spend an entire decade hitchhiking on acid and still buy a house before age 30.
By Michael Hingston

Let's respect the fact that the Royal Baby is very important to people who have no concept of what is and isn't important.
By Frank Conniff 

What did we we not want to know and when did we not want to know it? #Weiner
By Chris Steller 

It's really touching to see so many white conservatives all torn up about the number of black youths being killed in Chicago.
By Christopher Hayes 

If a restaurant's website doesn't have a long musical intro, how can we ever know if we're in for an elegant dining experience?
By Julieanne Smolinski

We can put a man on the moon yet we still keep using the same dated analogy for scientific progress.
By matt 

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT. Does it change the myth of Sisyphus for you if Sisyphus is paid? Does it make it better or worse?
By errolmorris

"Normal is fading away. Governments and industries and schools like normal, because it’s easier, it scales and it’s profitable."—Seth Godin
By Nikhil Goyal 

"Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?" -Edith Wharton. Flip this: Make Ideals Real
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter 

Great news if you lose your job! Thomas Friedman says you can make living renting out your kid's room, power tools and car. PROBLEM SOLVED.
By Tom Tomorrow

Do white folks using the term 'reverse racism' know they're admitting that white folks are the source of racism?
By Sherman Alexie

Nowadays they don't say the N word. They say code words like Detroit, Stand Your Ground, Voter ID and food stamps that mean the same thing.
By Keith Boykin 

Everyone SAYS they want a fairytale wedding but when I show up and curse their firstborn suddenly I’m a jerk.
By Atom Bombshell

A thrill of being indie is earning money even while you’re "not working." The flip side is earning nothing even as you work your ass off...
By Daniel Jalkut

Opinions are like assholes. Everyone wishes strangers would unreservedly compliment theirs.
By Merlin Mann  

99 little bugs in the code 99 little bugs in the code Take one down, patch it around 117 little bugs in the code
By Alex Gnatishin 

Note: when a black man (the Prez) discusses racial profiling he's "dividing the country" but when whites deny racism they're uniters!
By Tim Wise

Can Ta-Nehisi Coates please replace David Brooks on the @nytimes Op-Ed page?
By Nikhil Goyal 

When did the pretentious of "Let me know your thoughts" replace the simple "Let me know what you think?" #BusinessSpeak
By Robert O. Simonson 

No offense, but am I the only one entirely failing to see the hotness of that Tsarnaev photo?
By Monika Bauerlein 

Don’t let anyone tell you that public education cannot work. If we give students dominion, honor teachers, fund schools adequately, it can.
By Nikhil Goyal 

I think we'd mind insomnia less if we thought of it as a fun little art house retrospective of all the worst things we've ever said or done.
By Julieanne Smolinski

Big difference between OJ case & Zimmerman case is that after OJ got off every white blonde woman in America wasn't afraid for her life.
By W. Kamau Bell

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating people who are being oppressed, and loving people who are doing the oppressing.”
By Nikhil Goyal 

Sometimes, I look at "news" story and feel like reporting on it just gives the stupid what it wants. #JennyMcCarthy
By Maggie Koerth-Baker 

Horrible that USA Today describes the link between vaccines & autism as "controversial" instead of "a goddamn lie."
By Anil Dash

Unlike Florida today, only if threatened by another gun did "Wild West" codes of conduct allow you to shoot another person.
By Neil deGrasse Tyson

If only Zimmerman had leaked government surveillance documents. Or shared JSTOR articles. Or sold weed.
By Joshua Eaton

If the networks that went wall-to-wall Zimmerman can't be bothered to cover protests after the trial maybe they need to be sites of protest.
By Jay Rosen 

How do you know when race has something to do with it? You see white dudes forcefully trying to explain why race has nothing to do with it
By leighalexander


Why hasn't EVERYONE RT'd this by @johndonoghue64: Anyone got a photo of a church that looks like a confused chicken?
By Philip Ardagh

Idea: Thought Leader-hosen
By Chris Steller 

Arizona: "At least we're not Texas." Texas: "At least we're not Florida." Florida: "You can't prove we're Florida."
By Guy Endore-Kaiser

If only Zimmerman had taken this long to decide if someone was guilty.
By Alex Baze

The great thing about the phrase "clothes horse" is how perfectly it sums up horses' notorious love of clothing.
By Tim Carvell 

A person who is nice to you but is not nice to the waiter is not a nice person.
By Bill Murray

The fundamental danger of an acquittal is not more riots, it is more George ZImmermans.
By jay smooth

Oh, Galleria. You make me want to sell everything I own & never buy anything again unless it's a boat to take me far, far away from you.
By Molly Priesmeyer 

Ten out of one women is a Russian Nesting Doll
By Megan Amram

AKA fear of being treated like you treat women. RT: @homophobes: Homophobia Driven By Fear of Unwanted Sexual Advances
By Erika Hall

I keep reading about these amazing designers who live perfect minimalist lives. Three kids will mess your shit up I'll tell you that much.
By Josh Williams 

Cars selling like hot cakes, methane melt plumes are 1km in diameter, and #freetransit is extreme?
By Free Public Transit 

Walmart finds it outrageous someone would use their power to dictate payment levels. Wonder what their suppliers think of that
By ryangrim 

Diamonds are a terrible, deadly scam so please let's stop getting engaged with them, okay?
By lia bulaong

I would be an awesome mom, but only for 15 minutes a day. Which is pretty much the culturally-accepted definition of an awesome dad.
By Paul Ford


DontSpy
By Bruce Sterling

"Too Old" Hillary is 65. "Inexperienced" Warren is 64. Funny thing about double standards. Whatever they are, you can't live up to them
By Wyeth Ruthven 

Sometimes I think the "artists must never have a profit motive" thing is so they can be easily manipulated by people who do.
By Brooks Sligh

Autocorrect tried to turn "gov't" into "gotcha"
By Chris Steller 

If ignorance is bliss, then why are Glenn Beck’s supporters so unhappy?
By Joel Ross Housman 

If we provide free buses, we get immediate payback of all the benefits of fewer cars on the road. A medium city exports $1.5M a day for gas.
By Free Public Transit 

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.
By Kyle Marquis  

Please check to make sure your industry is dominated by the children of subsistence farmers before calling it a pure meritocracy.
By Pinboard

Things Our Children Won't Understand: a phone ringing and someone yelling "I'll get it!"
By Cabel M. Sasser

Just very quietly saying “lean in” during times of stress is a great way to completely enrage the women in your life.
By Paul Ford

The increasingly ubiquitous social sharing prompts at the end of user workflows are the “exit through the gift shop” of consumer computing.
By Alex Payne


The time an interviewer tried to get Toni Morrison to shame pregnant teens, and she was totally not having it.
By D. M. 

Is it just me, or do feral children seem less respectful, more unfocused, and have bad attitude these days?
By Bigfoot TheBigfoot 

Mandatory ultrasound before you can get an abortion. Brought to you by the people who pretended to fear "government takeover of healthcare"
By The Mountain Goats

People who don’t build things themselves greatly overestimate the value of ideas.
By Luke Chamberlin

You have to admire the Kochs. They realized they could only buy 1% of climate scientists, so they bought 99% of GOP politicians instead
By Donald J. Drumpf 

David Brooks says Islamists "lack the mental equipment to govern." Too bad they can't be as smart as neocons and advocate disastrous wars.
By Robert Wright

Capitalism wasted the oil and created an unequal mess. Does anyone expect it to be sensible and fair about #degrowth?
By Free Public Transit 

Funny how genetics folks always think genetics is key to improving agriculture, when much of world is actually limited by soil and water.
By Jonathan Foley 

We already have a punctuation mark for sarcasm, it’s called the period.
By Okay Type 

Canada is a chilling reminder of what would have happened if there had been no Declaration of Independence
By Pinboard 

I don't like when people ask me what my five or ten year plan is. Treat every day like your last.
By Nikhil Goyal 

America is a place with a lot of imperfections where you feel there's always a chance of those problems being fixed
By Zaid Jilani 

Take a minute this July 4th to thank the immigrants and socialists that made America free.
By Mike Monteiro

If structural racism benefits me everyday, what good does it do to think of myself as "not racist"? Make me feel better?
By Brother Ali

"Vision without execution is hallucination.". Thomas Edison.
By Neil Hawkins 

North Americans use more electricity on Christmas lights than the entire yearly usage of the entire African continent.
By Injustice Facts 

I'll admit that a small, conservative part of me looks at Egypt and thinks living in a revolutionary society would be *exhausting*.
By Christopher Hayes

Egyptian Army says Morsi is now its "guest" -- then that's all he ever was: in a coup-driven system, a president is always the army's guest.
By Philip Gourevitch 

Imagine how woefully uninformed you'd be if you get all your news from TV. That's a majority of the population.
By Anthony De Rosa

So glad the NC state legislature is attaching abortion restrictions to an *anti-Sharia* bill, because basing laws on religious texts would be crazy!
By sethdmichaels

I hope all the journalists penning anti-leak screeds will foreswear the use of anonymous sources from here on out.
By Tom Tomorrow 

from @CNN tonight: " N word or cracker...which is more offensive?". Probably the one you won't spell out, you fucking hacks. Just a guess.
By el-p

No, no, "cracker" isn't the "N-word" for white people. You want to drive a white person crazy? Call him a "racist."
By daveweigel

"Winning over Hispanics" seems sorta like walking up to a woman and patiently, awkwardly mansplaining that you're going to get her to kiss you.
By James Poulos

The proper collective noun is "an intrusion of cockroaches. God Bless the English Language
By Nicholas Beaudrot 

I regularly give thanks for various failures at learning social rules -- poor gender socialization has done wonders for me.
By Nancy Sims 

Said a white, old man. MT @aspenideas You need to be a pretty serious drug offender to go to jail. - Asa Hutchinson #AspenIdeas
By Nikhil Goyal 

All that surveillance, and yet there seems to exist just one goddamned picture of Edward Snowden.
By Paul Kafasis


1 car space = 10 bicycles
By erik spiekermann

Here's an #aspenideas idea: hold these sort of things, not in Aspen, but some super poor town in middle America where no one has a job.
By ... (@hoosier114)

Think #freetransit is only about oil? It makes the city attractive, shows the auto unnecessary, and breaks the critical mass of #autosprawl.
By Free Public Transit 

Unlike #Zimmerman, the average racist doesn't have the guts to hunt & kill a black person, so they use Twitter as a fantasy lynching league.
By W. Kamau Bell

Never forget that the U.S. Government classified Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and the CIA helped have him imprisoned for most of his life.
By Jonathan McIntosh

BlueSky February 2025, Part 2

More of February 2025 and Trump 2.0 (and Musk 1.0). This covers February 15–28 in reverse chronological order, starting from the top with February 28.

The previous post ended mid-month with Musk and DOGE illegally cutting employees and cancelling contracts. Lawsuits galore were filed. There was the point where Trump declared himself king, which I wrote about when it happened. He also signaled he would abandon Ukraine to Russia.

Then Elon emailed all federal employees on a Saturday, demanding five bullet points about their past week's work, or they would be fired by Monday night. Confusion ensued. Hegseth and Trump fired key leaders military leaders because they either were not white men, or because they would stand in the way of enacting illegal orders. Near the end of the month, Republicans in the House gave preliminary approval to Trump's budget resolution, which would lay waste to Medicaid and SNAP and many other programs, while funding tax cuts for the wealthiest. 

And then at the very end of the month (today, a Friday) we saw Trump and Vance ambush Volodymyr Zelensky in front of the whole world for the benefit of Putin.

Whew. That's leaving out a lot, and I only went through 7:00 p.m. on the 28th because I couldn't stand it anymore.

I've 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.

___

The first front pages of Saturday’s newspapers in the UK.
“Ukraine Hero Ambushed”
“Trump stuns world with vile rant at Zelensky”
“A spectacle to horrify the world”
Trump is obliterating the global reputation of the US:


News Eye

People need to understand that we are in an entirely new paradigm. It is now Russia the US against Ukraine and Europe. This is not a shift in US policy, it is a transformation of what kind of country the United States is in the world
Ben Rhodes

Trump’s disgusting behavior in our Oval Office in the company of a genuine hero and defender of democracy like Volodymyr Zelensky may be the most disgraceful public behavior by any president in our history.
Steven Beschloss

Russian state media was given access to the Oval Office for the disastrous Trump-Zelensky meeting while the AP and Reuters were blocked
Jon Passantino

This whole thing was a deliberate set-up, and the real audience for it was not the American people. It was the global fascist movement.
Greg Sargent

Trumpkin expected Zelinsky to be bullied into ritual submission though. He did not expect to be told to fuck off — that is a victory for Zelinsky.
Will Evans @will99.bsky.social

the last 10 years have been pretty eye opening realizing how many americans conceptualize masculinity exclusively in terms of abusive behavior!
mtsw

“Why don't you wear a suit? You're at the highest level in this country's office & you refuse to wear a suit. A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the office”:


Carl Quintanilla

If you missed today's lowest point in US History, do not despair. A new lowest point is expected to arrive tomorrow.
Ward Q. Normal

This just all feels like some dumb sci-fi alt-history where the Confederacy won and formed an alliance with the Soviets
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social

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

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

People who brag about 60 hour a week are really talking about how poorly they manage their time
Nate Pentz

It should go without saying that firing the people you've most recently hired is bonehead move for any organization. Almost by definition, they are the people who you need for your new approaches, products and problems. Bird flu? AI/ML? Next-gen weather models?
Gavin Schmidt @climateofgavin.bsky.social

In addition to what Gavin said, the thing about probationary government workers is that some of them have worked for the government for years as contractors, and then they get hired as federal employees. We're losing not just the newest and brightest but also the most experienced people.
David Ho

How it started/How it's going:


Billy Bragg

“We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s.” –Garry Kasparov
Koosemar

a few years ago if you said "college republican clubs are hotbeds of white supremacism and enthusiastic support for rape" people looked at you like you were wearing a barrel on a street corner and if you said it today most people would still do that because the newspapers won't print it
geoffrey @parsnip.bsky.social

You know why hurricanes have gotten less deadly over the past century? Not because they're less dangerous. Because scientists at NOAA have gotten really good at predicting their tacks, enabling people to get out of harm's way. Gutting NOAA will kill people.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Having competent, trained people working in the federal government, with sustainable enough workloads and sufficient autonomy to do their jobs well, helps all of us in the biggest and smallest of ways. Now, I’m sure, those particular jobs will become AI.
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

Why do I feel like the Trump message to people who have been contributing to Social Security for 50 years is going to be, “Too bad.” But the message to dudes who went big on crypto in the last year will be, “The government is going to help you out.”
Schooley

People always say: "if libraries didn't already exist, you could never create them today." Well, lots of the stuff MAGA nihilists are destroying right now is like that. We're not just going to put it all back in place when this if over. It's going to take *generations* to repair this shit.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

Thinking about the good people of NOAA and NWS today. Such a dark day for our nation and our safety:


Marshall Ramsey

Many Medicaid recipients do not know they receive it because Medicaid is called different things in different states. The public narrative of Medicaid focuses on a distant other, but 40% of US children and 60% of nursing home residents receive Medicaid.
Lauren Rivera

as part of a larger conservative push to deregulate child care, Idaho is set to become the first state in the country to gut all state-required child-to-staff ratios
Rachel Cohen

do you ever think about how conservatives were sending bomb threats to childrens hospitals and the media and the dems just ignored it
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social

No more work-from-home, government workers, except for Kash Patel, who will run the FBI from Las Vegas:


Drew Harwell

Everybody has civil rights or nobody does
Costa Samaras

The National Weather Service took more than 150 years to build. Forget flight or the internet or whatever - public-service systems like this are the marvels of the modern world. Conceptual cathedrals, constructed across generations and dedicated to the public good.
Josh Lappen @jlappen1.bsky.social

Musk’s hackers burglarized "a vast trove of information about the entire federal workforce” on OPM computers even as Trump was being sworn in — that is "hours before Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, was officially created by an executive order.”  
Philip Gourevitch

Essentially ALL tuberculosis programs funded by the U.S. Government were officially terminated last night. Horrifyingly, that includes the Global Drug Facility that coordinates the vast majority of TB treatment and tests purchased globally. Shuttering the GDF will stop TB treatment for the entire planet....
John Green

This is their plan:
Step 1: exploit legitimate pain suffered by young people and families caused by online harm
Step 2: implement government-mandated online ID checks to "keep kids away from harmful content"
Step 3: define all LGBTQ content as "harmful to kids"
Age verification is a trojan horse
Evan Greer

It’s the way Black people and Native people are not surprised by anything the US does and how others continue to be surprised that is quite the thing.
Shani @blerdmommy.bsky.social

I wrote about what's really behind the assault on the Department of Education. Hint: Americans have long placed their faith in the idea that schools can *equalize* us. Now that equality is a banned term, both the department and public education are on the chopping block
Jennifer Berkshire

I think that it's important to share examples of visible dissent. Normalcy bias is real. Sharing how people continue to dissent is helpful.
Prisonculture

You can’t make this stuff up. Trump supporters spent the past few years obsessing over an apparent sex trafficking cabal in charge of our country. And yet one of the first things Trump seems to have done, apparently, is push to get Andrew and Tristan Tate, charged with sex trafficking, released from Romania.
Mehdi Hasan

Funny how they call immigrants rapists. Until they find some that are actually accused of rape… who happen to support Trump. And suddenly, they’re fighting to bring them into the country
Joshua Reed Eakle

He said he was “deporting criminals” but he’s actually importing them…
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

Backlash to #metoo is brutal
Regina Schrambling @gastropoda.bsky.social

women requested that they no longer be raped and American men decided to burn down the planet
Faine Greenwood

Sometimes, the road to hell is paved with bad intentions
Don Moynihan

The GOP has become the party of pollution, deadly food, disease, and crippling work. Who benefits? The billionaire class…including Trump, Musk, Putin, and their buddies.
Kraig Peck

Was just reading an assessment of the budget fight that was like “Trump’s team says tax cuts will boost spur growth that offsets them.” What it doesn’t say is that they said that last time, too, which everyone said wouldn’t happen and which didn’t happen. Seems important to note!
Philip Bump

I'm curious what it means to vote for a budget when no one has any idea if Musk-Trump is going to spend any of it? Seems Congress is one of those wasteful government entities that DOGE is looking to eliminate.
Dean Baker

This photo says 1000 words. Musk, standing, the center of all eyes. Trump possibly asleep:


Helen Kennedy

Undocumented immigrants paid about $26 billion per year into Social Security, even though they will get nothing out of it. They subsidize citizens to an extraordinary degree.  
Don Moynihan

Utah could soon become the first U.S. state to ban the addition of fluoride to drinking water. The move could affect children’s health, experts warned.
The New York Times

Republican efforts to repeal the 20th century proceeding apace I see.
Seth Cotlar

It is really hard to watch people willfully tear down an infrastructure that allowed us to double lifespans, drastically reduce poverty, and become one of the richest countries in the world.
Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social

George Washington's cabinet included Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Edmund Randolph, John Jay. Trump's includes Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, RKF Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Sean Duffy, WWE's Linda McMahon. Musk says this is "the best cabinet ever. Literally — and I do not give false praise." No, he's just nuts
James Fallows

they think russia is big and powerful because it occupies a lot of space on a map
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Something that’s very clear is that Trump is old and checked out. He wants to play the role of president but has zero interest in doing the job and is happy to outsource the real work to Musk, Vought and a crew of feral zealots.
Chris Hayes

The GOP claims slashing $880 billion from Medicaid is about eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse.” That's a smokescreen. The “fraud” amounts to less than 1/10th of 1%, not even close to $880 billion. Their actual plan slashes coverage for millions & leaves families without care. We won’t be fooled.
Rep. Diana DeGette

I’ve been arguing for four weeks that Trump is basically a ceremonial head of state while Musk is the actual head of government. There is nothing in today’s Cabinet meeting that argues against that theory. Musk has even paid Trump $10M for the privilege!
Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social

The "campus free speech" and "cancel culture" panics were obvious efforts to seed the ground for a huge expansion of left-wing censorship and right-wing propaganda. That effort appears to have worked.
Michael Hobbes

Life wasn't simpler when you were a kid. You were simpler when you were a kid.
Lee Casebolt

Bezos destroying the Post opinion pages is just another reminder: Conservatives think free speech is when they can say what they want and when you can say what they want.
Adam Serwer

Here's my new WaPo op ed: abortion rights are a personal liberty and represent the right of patients to access the freedom of the medical market. Done.
Lauren MacIvor Thompson

Freedom is when the boss tells you what to write and think.
Adam Serwer

Never forget. Cargo bikes aren’t a new invention. They’ve been around as long as cars, and have always been used both business and people carrying kids:


Cargo Bike Ben

Once motorists are allowed into an urban space, every bit of infrastructure adapts to serve them. Where cars don’t exist, sidewalks and bike lanes are unnecessary, and even signage becomes obsolete.
American Fietser

If you’re just opening up social media for the first time today, your forecast calls for a 99% chance of Oh God My Eyes, followed by intermittent periods of Cannot Unsee. Be prepared, and self-medicate accordingly.
jabberwoCKY @ckyonwords.bsky.social

It is amazing to me that Republicans have one (1) economic idea: Cut taxes for the super wealthy and big corporations by pillaging medicaid and social security. Fifty years now, that's the only idea.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

Remember, Elon's handout from taxpayers is roughly equal to the pay of 380,000 government workers (or "bureaucrats," as Elon calls them)
Dean Baker

Note: Whatever you think of DEI, gender and race are essential to understanding transportation. Examples:
• Women commute less than men, and they take more off-peak trips.
• Highways have been deliberately sited in minority areas, leaving a legacy of crashes and pollution.
David Zipper

It's wild to run on "running government like a business" when 50% of businesses fail within 4 years and 75% within 15 years. Seems like such an obvious Dem clapback to a widespread Republican slogan.
Darrell Owens @idothethinking.bsky.social

It's honestly kinda hilarious that Republicans are going to pass a wealth tax but it's on the elitist colleges they all graduated from.
Chris Miller @iamcurious.bsky.social

Every House Republican just voted to defund Medicaid. Reminder: there are no moderate Republicans in Congress, and stop pretending there are.
Jonathan Cohn

In this rambling babble, Trump says that they sent the email to see “if people exist.” He also said they have to go to Fort Knox to see if the gold really there. Never expected “object permanence” to be a problem for a sitting president, but here we are.
Kevin M. Kruse

Genuinely kind of funny that after White House reporters spent years complaining that Biden wasn't accessible enough and saying how much more access they have with Trump that they're now getting the door slammed in their faces, tbh. TRUMP WILL SELECT PRESS POOL The White House said it would handpick the pool reporters who cover President Trump, breaking with decades of precedent.
Parker Molloy

How can you tell that Trump and Musk don’t actually care about going after waste and fraud? They just fired someone at the Minnesota VA whose job was to find waste/inefficiencies to save taxpayer money. It’s all a façade to shell out more money for billionaires and big corporations.
Senator Tina Smith @smith.senate.gov

If Harris were president, she'd be facing impeachment proceedings over $8/dozen eggs.
cdwilsher.bsky.social

I'm sorry to tell you this, but the Nature Conservancy is in the business of selling carbon offsets to corporate clients. (In 2020 it was revealed that many of these were BS offsets for already-protected trees.) They are always going to side with power, even authoritarian power.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Government efficiency is when every federal agency has to send a daily emergency email to its workers telling them to ignore another daily email from a different department trying to fire them without knowing what their jobs are.
Mike Drucker

The Six Kinds of Republican:


Barry Deutsch

They’re not called Rare Earth Metals because they’re scarce, but because as a group of elements they took a long time to isolate. It’s an antiquated English use of rare meaning “widely distributed or isolated” that died in Victorian times.
Ed Burmila

Saw a cybertruck and my son asked why Elon Musk would think that looked good and I said "remember that drug they gave you at the hospital when you broke your arm, and you got scared and said everyone had 4 eyes? he takes that all the time"
Christina Holland @mortalwombat.info

The richest man in the world donated 0.0625% of his wealth to a political campaign and now acts like he runs the entire country. This is not a difficult concept to get across to the American people.
Courtney Milan

Your regular reminder that the US air and water pollution laws passed in the 60s and 70s — and the elaborate federal bureaucracy created to administer them -- constitute one of the most successful gov't interventions in history. WILDLY successful. The envy of the world.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

I don’t want us to “resist” the Trump administration. I want us to DEFEAT it. I don’t want us to just “resist” the unholy alliance of fossil capital, big tech, and authoritarian power-grabbing that has captured the US government. I want us to OVERTHROW these people.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

Musk is stupid in the sense that he is profoundly incurious about the workings of the world and the lives of other people.
Quinta Jurecic

Resistance genealogy, in a nutshell:


Jennifer Mendelsohn

Interesting fact: One thing that's generally overlooked in cost-benefit analyses of government spending is benefits.
Eric Roston

If you’re cheering for a South African sociopath to fuck over US military veterans then you should probably stop with that America first bullshit.
Adam Parkhomenko

Has anyone called Bitcoin “Dunning-Krugerrand” yet?
Kevin M. Kruse

As Elon demands justifications from all federal workers (including many who are not Executive Branch employees), remember that if he paid his taxes, it'd pay for 677K federal jobs.
emptywheel

Wait. Elon Musk now has the email for every federal employee? Isn't THAT a bigger story than the stupid request for 5 bullet points of what they've been doing?
Peter Gleick

Social Security has a payment accuracy rate of over 99 percent. Only 0.3 percent of Social Security benefits are improper payments, which are typically caused by mistakes or delays. That's better than any private insurance company.
Sharil @veggiare.bsky.social

there are so many things happening right now to federal employees that are illegal under current employment laws
Karen K. Ho

Gen-X knows:


Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com

Shutting down already installed EV charging infrastructure isn't "efficiency," it's sabotage
Gernot Wagner

It’s like the conservative version of blowing up pipelines
Eric Bottorff @torff.bsky.social

“I spent hours with Musk and walked with him thru Auschwitz. I stood with him, looking at the nauseating heaps of hair, luggage, and  shoes flooded with violet light meant to preserve it. Is Musk an antisemite? People, actually, it’s worse—he doesn’t care whatsoever…He was unmoved by the experience.” –Elon Musk's biographer
Brent Toderian

Something that's maddening about the cases involving DOGE access to our most sensitive private data and the irreparable harm standard is that the ACCESS ITSELF is the irreparable harm, and some judges just aren't getting that.
Sarah Posner

we need a new slur to describe the bizarre combination of traits exhibited by elon musk. traditional insults are simply not enough
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

The point is, we are *ALL* being punished for letting a Black man lead white America for 8 years. Trump and Musk represent a global white supremacist ideology that would rather destroy everything than let this happen ever again. This is not something elite media likes to discuss.
Karen Attiah

Illegally cutting cancer research and meals on wheels to pay for PR ads for themselves.
Nicholas Grossman

if you look at a bad thing that happened and assume, evidence-free, that it's because a Black person got a job they shouldn't have, you're not a "DEI skeptic," you're a dumb gutter racist
Seth D. Michaels

Want to tell the public what US government workers actually do, vs. the propaganda spewed by DOGE? This incredible website, "We the Builders," is asking for first-person testimonials from government workers about their actual jobs, and how they make the government work.
Annalee Newitz

For decades, the US government has painstakingly kept American science #1 globally — and every facet of American life has improved because of it. The internet? Flu shot? Ozempic? All grew out of federally funded research. Now all that's being dismantled.
Karen Hao

Humans have three life support systems — our bodies, our infrastructure, and our environment — and Trump and his enablers are attacking all three. They are going to kill us all.
David Ho

The media made a big issue of low homeownership rates among the young under Biden, even when the rate was above the pre-pandemic peak. Will it be an issue under Trump now that it is below pre-pandemic levels
Dean Baker

Elon Musk's private security detail has been deputized as Federal Marshalls and can carry firearms on Federal property. What could possibly go wrong?
Rick Wilson

Trump: Fire hundreds of thousands of career civil servants trying to keep America safe and running.
Also, Trump: Give DHS a budget of up to $200 million to run anti-immigrant ads that repeatedly thank Trump for leading an immigration crackdown.
Josh Sternberg

This is a micro photograph of a sand sample from North Beach on St. Paul Island in Alaska. Photo credit: Leo Kenney:


International Sand Collectors Society

No matter how preposterous, the Times headlines nearly every Trump story as if it were written by the White House comms team.
Larry Glickman

A core problem here is that like many things, the public discourse is totally playing on the right's terms. It's not "DEI" to research gender/racial inequality. DEI is a propaganda phrase to denote unnecessary excess in the mind of the public, like HR trainings. That's not what they're eliminating.
W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social

a lot of people want to not be held responsible for slavery and indigenous genocide but want to hold onto the generational wealth and preferential structures resulting from them. I mean, I know it's obvious but I think it should probably get said out loud a lot more often
Dr. Damien P. Williams @wolvendamien.bsky.social

Hegseth called Brown unqualified solely because he's Black. Then they fired him... and replaced him with a white guy so indisputably unqualified that he requires a Presidential waiver. This is what "merit" means to them.
Max Kennerly

So they removed the black chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the middle of his 4-year tour, without cause, and they're seeking to replace him with a white **retired** Air Force three-star general who lacks the requisite experience as a service chief or combatant commander? Huh, how about that
Adam Weinstein

Side note. There are eight members of the joint chiefs. the chair is black. the CNO (navy) is a woman. the other six are white guys. chair and the cno got fired tonight.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

Hegseth is going to fire every woman or Black person in military leadership.
Clara Jeffery

Remember when having a really old president and questioning his mental acuity was front page news everyday for months?
Renée Graham

You should question the merit of any white man in a position of power. Did they earn it or was it the result of racial and gender assumptions?
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social

Remember when John Roberts gutted the Medicaid expansion because he said the *offer* of medicaid money was too coercive to the states?
Adam Serwer

The year is 2033. Baron Trump is about to be inaugurated for his second term. The dollar is underwater, and a potato costs $10. I show the bank teller my attache of Forever stamps. She gasps out loud, and quietly tells me to meet the manager in the back office, make sure I wasn't followed.
@scoopsstp.bsky.social

wearing sunglasses inside and following an event where he at times had a hard time speaking coherently, Elon Musk walks off the CPAC stage waving around a chain saw. this is the guy currently running our government. Congrats, America!
Aaron Rupar

I was watching an interview from 1982 with the imperial wizard of the KKK yesterday, and in it, he was like, “despite what you may have heard, I really hate Nazis.” Did he really hate Nazis? Probably not. But he sure felt like it was the right thing to say to win people over.
Nicole Hemmer @pastpunditry.bsky.social

Meta has spent over $100 billion on VR.
Aftermath @aftermath.site

Meta could have solely funded the ENTIRE WORLD'S 2022 CLIMATE FINANCE GOAL instead of this
Ketan Joshi

In addition to Congress being the place that makes the laws, a pretty key thing, the constitution explicitly says Congress gets to create the postal system. It’s not left implied that that comes under law making generally. The President has no power to unilaterally abolish it and move it to commerce.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social

IMO journalists shouldn’t grant people anonymity if the sensitive information they’re providing is “I personally disagree with the fascist coup but won’t do anything about it.”
Ned Resnikoff

A delicate Roman yellow glass cup with white trail decoration and various Roman glass cosmetic bottles, 1st–3rd century AD. Excavated from Turin and surrounding areas. Museo di Antichità, Turin. Photograph by me:


Alison Fisk

Kash was I'd say the worst nominee and probably the most tail-end risk for people domestically. Completely unqualified, unhinged, and traitorous. Vile to his very core, and someone who if you inserted in any other right wing country, would probably be leading its secret police. You just don't come back (at least not in any near term timeline) from a political party essentially unanimously confirming someone like Kash. It's a signal that half the country would either support or throw a blind eye if you and your loved ones were sent to a gulag because of political dissention
AdotSad

The corruption that has happened in this month alone could take all of the nation's remaining journalists years to fully document.
Clara Jeffery

Look at how Elon Musk treats his own kids and then think about what these people are willing to do to *your* kids
Ned Resnikoff

the whole 2020-2024 era of “dems shouldn't aggressively use the levers of power because then republicans will do the same thing when they're elected” sure looks dumb as dog shit right now huh
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social

The Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff at Yosemite National Park on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms (which apparently happens a lot.)
Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social

Thinking about how Musk once floated the idea that we roll back all government regulation on industry and then reinstate “the ones that are needed” as they come up, as though that wasn’t how all existing regulation was created over the last two hundred something years
Cooper Lund

Your elected officials and DOT claim climate and technical leadership while prioritizing essentially no modern infrastructure. No high speed trains, no statewide bicycle highways, no municipal sidewalk plowing. We simply build roads. How do we move elected officials and sustainability staff to act?
Mary Morse Marti @marymm.bsky.social

Trump's Pentagon just called climate change "woke" but four decades of defense and intelligence assessments have consistently identified climate change as posing serious threats to US national security and the operations of US military assets.
Peter Gleick

I've read most of the analyses of the DOGE 2025 "receipts" site. This, from NPR, is the best I've read so far. Some of what they claim to have cut haven't been cut, other "cuts" will incur costs down the road. NPR says DOGE has made $2B of cuts, not $55B.
emptywheel

"I am a person and you are not" is one of the worst possible sentiments anyone can adopt.
North Easton

Musk and his twerps have exposed us to pandemics, broken science, stolen all your data, endangered the U.S. payments system, threatened air traffic control, and cut off HIV medication to 20m people in order to save ::checks notes:: 2/10th of a percent of the federal budget.
Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social

There are two people in Congress — the chairs of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees - who have enormous power over the illegal impoundment of funds appropriated by Congress, which is sowing chaos across the US. They need to be relentlessly contacted at their offices, in person and by phone.
Gregg Gonsalves

You never imagine the descent into despotism being quite this embarrassing, you know? You expect liberal democracy to fall to a Palpatine, not Biff Tannen.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social

Trump falsely claimed “fraud” to attempt to steal the 2020 election from the people — he failed. Now, he’s falsely claiming “fraud” to steal the government from the people — he’s succeeding. The analysis below proves Trump’s DOGE is ideologically targeted, meant to consolidate exec power.
Jennifer N. Victor

Cuts that cost more are expenses.
Cuts that hurt public safety qualify as malignant negligence.
Cuts reducing tax collection increase deficit and line rich men’s pockets.
Cuts that destroy the rule of law are Fascist.
Cuts that destroy America’s scientific advantage are economic suicide
Linda James @ljamesnc.bsky.social

I work in audit. It's takes us, on average, approximately 5-6 weeks to audit 1 area of the business (of an EXTREMELY LARGE GLOBAL FINANCIAL SERVICES FIRM). And we're to believe Elon and teen posse have "audited" the largest employer in America in less than 3 weeks. Lying liars who lie.
Jennifer Gordon Thomas @ragekitten.bsky.social

CISA controls the .gov domain registrar and the national public key infrastructure (PKI). This means Elon Musk has the ability to shut down any federal, state, or city government using a .gov domain. Musk can also now prevent .gov agencies and officials from registering their .gov BlueSky handles
Chad Loder

Ukraine voted for a comedian and got a president. America voted for a president and got a clown.
Bonnie Resist! @bll4ever.bsky.social

By a 42-6 vote, the Washington Senate just approved a bill directing the state to adopt standards for passenger and freight elevators that are more reflective of global standards, including a specific requirement to allow smaller elevators in buildings with fewer than 25 units.
Ryan Packer @typewriteralley.bsky.social

I was alive when Barack Obama had 45% approval ratings. The MSM treated that as NO MANDATE for anything.
Prisonculture

The Trumpies are trying to gin up a fake Solyndra-style scandal around EPA climate funding, so that they can shut down that funding through DOJ (rather than through Congress, per, y'know, the law). A brave DOJ prosecutor resigned in protest.
David Roberts @volts.wtf

"America has no king" seems like a good theme to rally around
Don Moynihan

There needs to be a word for when a state DOT converts a shoulder to a travel lane (“sure, we’re adding capacity, but it’s free!”), waits, and then builds a new shoulder (“we’re not widening the freeway; we’re just making it safer!”), rinse and repeat.
Qagggy!

"Move fast and break things" sounds like some bold techbro vision of innovation, but it's also the same motto of thieves who want to do a smash-and-grab and get the fuck out before anybody can catch them.
Chuck Wendig

if the president is breaking the laws you wrote, your authority and duty under the constitution is to *impeach him,* not ask nicely for individual favors
Seth D. Michaels

DHS is spending $200 million money on ads to thank Trump. Entirely plausible that this money is being stolen from migrant shelter money. Last term, Trump took money for health care for detained migrants and spent it on dog food.
David Bier

A key aim of Putin has to been to delegitimise the democratically elected Zelensky and the Ukrainian government. He now has the active assistance and connivance of the President of the United States in that effort.
Lewis Goodall

we're going to miss the regulatory state when it's gone
Tom Tomorrow

The good news is that the United States has a relatively low percentage of religious nationalists. The bad news is that it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.
Hemant Mehta @friendlyatheist.com

A lot of people now see that Musk is a vile extremist. But many still struggle to accept that he is also an oblivious fool. Once you actually listen to what he has to say about the world, you realize it’s all faux-visionary nonsense layered on top of profound ignorance.
Thomas Zimmer

Democrats made the choice last year that they would rather beat in the heads of college kids and banish people like Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman from the party than they cared about beating Trump. We’re living through the consequences of that decision.
Carter Moon

I will fix my finances using the DOGE roadmap:
Step 1: save 5 dollars by not getting coffee
Step 2: record it as 5,000 dollars in the spreadsheet where i track my finances
Step 3: tell everyone I saved 5,000 dollars already
Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social

In the world of privacy coverage, there has always been a central question of who is a greater threat to it: the government or corporate America. Now with DOGE, the two are merged into one.
Kashmir Hill

“Life under autocracy…is stultifying. It’s boring. It feels like trying to see and breathe under water — because you are submerged in bad ideas, being discussed badly, being reflected in bad journalism and, eventually, in bad literature and bad movies.”
Leah McElrath

It seems almost unavoidable at this point that we are headed for a deep, deep recession. Just based on 200K+ federal firings and pullback of contracts, the March employment report (to be released April 4) seems certain to show bigger job losses than any month ever outside of a few in 2008-9 and 2020.
Jesse Rothstein @jrothst.bsky.social

Huh, lots of angry people, some with security clearances and lots of knowledge valuable to foreign adversaries, suddenly facing mortgage payments and hungry kids, with no jobs, limited prospects and a feeling that their nation just betrayed them. That won’t end badly, will it?
seangralton.bsky.social

National Park Employee Laid Off:


Federal Employee News

what does it do to someone with a pathological need for adoration to instead become one of the most hated human beings on the planet? we shall all find out together!
Tom Tomorrow

I hope America is as lucky as the Toronto Delta jet — everyone survives but the right wing explodes
James Medlock

Sure all the best scientists may go to Europe, Canada and elsewhere, but we will still have Wall Street and private equity scammers, as well as the crypto bros, so all is good.
Dean Baker

Again, "probationary" means "at this particular position for less than a year." Probationary workers may have Ph.D.s, decades of experience, etc.
Dan Turner @ddt.bsky.social

True story: a few years ago, I was being interviewed by a reporter for the New York Times. I mentioned the history of eviction statutes and how they tied into Jim Crow. The reporter asked "what's Jim Crow?" When I explained, the reporter didn't believe me and said the US wouldn't do that.
Sheryl Weikal (The Leftist Lawyer) @leftistlawyer.com

Yes and: whatever you think of Latinx as a term, the intent was to acknowledge the existence of and show respect for a marginalized group of people. The intent behind "Gulf of America" is racist, imperialist bluster with a dash of obedience demand from an authoritarian regime
Coffee and Fingernails

Allowing the administration to define broad swaths of history, programming and civil rights compliance as “DEI” and then regurgitating  that language instead of clearly articulating what specifically is being targeted is spreading disinformation and propaganda.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social

The most shocking thing about this is that anyone took him at his word:


Jess Calarco

FDA employees reviewing Elon Musk’s brain implant company Neuralink were fired over the weekend as part of a broader purge of the federal workforce. The cuts included about 20 people in the FDA’s office of neurological and physical medicine devices, several of whom worked on Neuralink
Unity @unityndiversity.bsky.social

It’s infuriating beyond belief that Democrats are constantly defined by “defund the police,” “war on Xmas,” “open borders” and countless other bullshit right-wing narratives while Republicans are always allowed to distance themselves from the terrible things they actually do.
One Eyed Jack

The billionaires have been working on their merger with the evangelicals and “conservatives” for decades…abortion was the wedge issue to get Christians to vote against their own good. It was never about babies. It was to bring about a coup…it is an oligarchy taking over the US inch by inch.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

There probably won't be any National Parks in a generation.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com

americans see the labor of generations around them and assume that it always has been there and always will be there no matter what
Leger-Felicite Snorlax @segatape.bsky.social

scientists say that the disposable nature of starlink satellites results in tons of metals burning up in orbit degrading the progress made on repairing the ozone layer. and the worst part the service isn't even affordable to the people who need it most
Karl Bode

I’m not sure the rest of the country fully grasps the panic and anger building in DC, MD, and VA. The entire economy of this area is about to collapse. Paychecks are stopping. Careers are ruined. Taxes are about to plummet. Yet no one seems able to stop this madness.
Siva @sivav.bsky.social

"The sheep like the shade, plus the solar panels increase grass yield and protect sheep from predators," said Pearce. Meanwhile, Pearce revealed farmers and shepherds reap their own set of benefits, as "sheep eliminate the need for herbicides or costly grass cutting on the solar farms":


David Roberts @volts.wtf

Elon Musk's DOGE team of misfits have fired everybody at the Federal Aviation Administration who is a probationary employee. Thinking they have got rid of all the new hires. It turns out many of these were experienced technicians, recently promoted and were on probation for their new senior role
Louis @louishenwood.bsky.social

Once again, I am so old, I do actually remember rightwingers losing their shit over "political correctness" 35 years ago, which is all this stuff, but with slightly less obvious racist overtones, because they've actually gotten worse in the interim.
Dave Andress

Federalist Society boss overheard telling private gathering that Chief Justice John Roberts was a solid pick for the Supreme Court because “he attends an Opus Dei evening of reflection once a month.” When the Federalist Society advocated for Roberts to be nominated to the Supreme Court in 2005, it was the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate. Leonard Leo actively campaign for him to be nominated — we know Leo is close to Opus Dei, and is a director at the Opus Dei-run Catholic Information Center in DC
Gareth Gore

this will end up leading to disaster and it will cost significantly more in taxpayer dollars for the trouble, and republican members of congress should be asked about it every single day, particularly if they serve on related committees
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

remember, trump swore to protect, preserve and defend the constitution "to the best of his ability." he's just not very good at it!
Tom Tomorrow

i don't mean to be alarmist but the nazi who wants to turn the microblogging platform he owns into a bank just dismantled the consumer financial protection bureau and got everyone's social security number
Gallifreyan Jedi @jediofgallifrey.bsky.social

The telegraph on Trump’s plan for Ukraine: “The terms of the contract that landed at Volodymyr Zelensky’s office a week ago amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity.” It seems without EU support, Ukraine has two options: eternal economic servitude or annihilation. “If this draft were accepted, Trump’s demands would amount to a higher share of Ukrainian GDP than reparations imposed on Germany at the Versailles Treaty, later whittled down at the London Conference in 1921, and by the Dawes Plan in 1924.”
Maximilian Mayer @maximilianiras.bsky.social

Men older than me (I’m 50) who need to show their virility and do it by toting their small children (like, mine is 21!) around are so stunted.
Nnedi Okorafor

OSHA has ordered the digital and physical destruction of 18 publications on workplace safety practices, according to an email obtained by Popular Information. The email says the publications have been removed from the web and tells staff that physical copies should be "disposed of or recycled"
Judd Legum

'Josephine Baker wearing her medals from her service in French Resistance at the Civil Rights March on Washington DC, 1963':


Sardonicus

Black history is only offensive if you side with enslavers, segregationists, and other racists. It slaps if you have morality.
Dr. Allison Wiltz @allyfromnola.bsky.social

If you wanted to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you would empower the inspectors general. If you wanted more waste, fraud, and abuse, you would fire them.
Pete Buttigieg

Musk and his army of dipshits on Twitter keep pointing to Bill Clinton’s federal worker reduction in the 1990s to defend Trump. The difference? Congress passed a law that Clinton signed, he didn’t just get the nearest billionaire to illegally start dismantling the government based on his whims.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

Can you imagine thinking a government employee making 40K processing Medicaid payments to a parent with medically fragile children is the enemy, while thinking a billionaire who sends his sperm to random women and takes billions from the government to go to Mars is the good guy? WTF.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social

Most Americans have no idea that anything unusual is happening. This is probably the weirdest I’ve ever felt as an observer of politics, aware that the whole world is locked into a new order and equally aware that I can’t talk to the average person about it.
Nick @slothropsmap.bsky.social

This is how almost everyone who works on climate feels almost all the time.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

I feel like I'm going insane every time I see a media story about DOGE that doesn't also mention the fact that the Government Accountability Office exists and performs the exact function that DOGE pretends to, only in a credibly constitutional, non-partisan, and conflict-of-interest-free manner
O.K. Computermeyer @niedermeyer.online

The geniuses at the Democratic Party settling on “maybe we were too woke” rather than “a cabal of billionaire pedophile Nazis are stealing your money and taking a sledgehammer to your future” is astonishing. Just one of those things
journeyman folklorist @aniceburrito.bsky.social

Trump and Putin meeting to “negotiate peace” on anything should be seen for what it is — two criminals discussing how to split the loot.
Brent Toderian

The new Trump administration has illegally removed far more people from their jobs because of speech and beliefs in the last month than the entire list of cancelled or pressured people (many of whom were criticized, not fired) compiled by FIRE and others over years. It’s not remotely close.
Nicholas Grossman

Fascism is always a counter-revolution to a revolution that never was.
rationalpear.bsky.social

Musk might not be doing much to increase government efficiency, but he is doing a great job in helping cancer and other diseases
Dean Baker

The ship "California" arrived at Ellis Island from Naples in May, 1900. You had to give the name and address of the person you were meeting. Many immigrants said "Nobody." They just showed up. How many of their descendants are currently lecturing immigrants about doing it "the right way?"
Jennifer Mendelsohn

As a reference, the $46B that Meta spent building its VR shit is about the same amount of money Spain used to built its WHOLE high speed rail network. All 2469 miles of it. Zuckerberg got that money selling shitty ads and destroying democracy, and gave the world this.
Roger Senserrich @4freedoms.es

"You see, we had the right completely beaten on race and gender issues, until someone said Latinx in 2020, and then it fell apart and we're reinstituting segregation and the country's fascist now."
Will Stancil

just speaking from personal experience now, i think it is really important to understand that simply being black is read by a non-trivial number of people as anti-white extremism
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Deputy AG Lionel Hutz quickly scribbling an ampersand onto it:


Andy Craig

Elon Musk's DOGE boys have identified spending as "waste" that is roughly equal to 10 percent of Elon Musk's net worth. Raises the question of whether the spending Musk doesn't like will be more than the money he gets from being Donald Trump's co-president?
Dean Baker

Elon Musk's Scrooge on Steroids campaign will do more to convince voters that billionaires are bad for society than any amount of political opinionating previous to the Trump administration could accomplish.
Helaine Olen

You cannot determine whether you saved or cost money based solely on one side of the ledger. Example: I saved my household $2K by not paying the mortgage.
Lawprofblawg

I don't see any way they can spin access to our personal tax data as a "cost saving," but this is the same group that tells us trans people are a threat to America.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social

donald trump has ordered the IRS to hand over all of your personal information to a Holocaust denier who works for the richest man on Earth, who is a Nazi
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social

People shocked by this statement are likening it to one made by fascist dictators. It's worse: this is the self-justification used by terrorists everywhere:


Billy Bragg

I’m in Munich and people keep asking me to decode Vance’s speech. OK: In Vance English “free speech” means “Let Musk run your elections” and “democracy” means “let Russia run your elections.” Now move on. 2025 is about what Europeans do, not what Americans say.
Timothy Snyder

The Musk-Vance administration is resegregating the federal government at home, then going to Munich and telling the Germans they need to allow Nazis into the government. This is a fascist movement and we need media not afraid to use the proper words for what is happening.
Dante Atkins

Our nation's federal employees are more than just numbers on a spreadsheet.
They make sure we have clean water.
They protect us from financial fraud.
They provide healthcare to our communities.
They make our government actually work for people.
Do not forget this.
Robert Reich

Did you know the most powerful force for climate action is LOVE — for our children, their future, and the world they’ll inherit? That's right! Research shows this message moves hearts 12x more than jobs and 2x more than extreme weather:


Katharine Hayhoe

They are laying off 1 in 5 of the people who manage the Pacific Northwest power grid — even though tax dollars don’t pay for it. (We do, through our utility rates, which aren’t going down.)
Craig Welch

They’re fighting against racial equity. They’re literally saying don’t treat people equally. And somehow media just keeps repeating “DEI”, like wtf
Erin Maye Quade

One enduring problem with the American electorate is how millions of people convinced themselves the government plays no role in their economic situation except to tax and to hinder them while giving money to undeserving people.
Max Kennerly

It should go without saying, but perhaps not: Removing uncomfortable histories because they fail to glorify the dominant group in power is not the sign of a healthy and free society.
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones.bsky.social

This is an administration led by people who view numerous other people here and abroad as human dirt. That’s it. An objective analysis of the matter
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social

After a decade of right-wing fools yelling about “cancel culture,” “free-speech,” and an (imaginary) threat of left-wing censorship, the first thing they do when the get power is ban talking about anything that hurts their little feelings.
Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social

Musk has so much conflict of interest with adversary countries that he wouldn't pass the first background check for a project manager job at some defense subcontractor.
Jean-Marc Liotier

going back in time to tell myself this image is going to end the human race:


Amy Ash @lolennui.bsky.social

Seven years on from when the then-schoolgirl Greta Thunberg first began her simple call for action on climate change, it's remarkable - and so telling - that she is *still* living rent free in the minds of some of the world's most privileged and powerful men
Leo Hickman

The Department of Government Efficiency isn't interested in efficiency. Or transparency, or cutting costs. Its real goal is to destroy the federal civil service. In other words, regime change.
Anne Applebaum

What these nihilistic vandals are doing to dismantle science and medicine—generations of expertise and public service and life improving benefits — is cultural revolution level national self harm. No foreign foe could inflict such brutal damage & senseless suffering on US so fast and effectively and unresisted.
Philip Gourevitch

Trump and Musk are “shrinking” government like cutting off limbs and calling it “weight loss”
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com

Tip for Democratic pols: About 40 percent of Americans will get cancer sometime in their lifetimes. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Did Trump voters angry about the price of supermarket goods really vote to let Elon Musk and Doge hand a victory to cancer?
Helaine Olen


omgisme @omgisme.bsky.social

republican governments thinking the "department of energy" is about oil drilling and installing solar panels and not the agency that controls the nuclear weapons stockpile is one of the funniest running subplots in american politics
mtsw