The Day After the Election

A post on BlueSky (which is unlinkable) resonates with me:

I don't regret the last few weeks/months of copium, because no amount of dooming would prepare me for the reality of this shit. At least I had a nice time and felt joy in the interim.

And I reiterate this front from the New York Times opinion section, which I previously posted on October 27:


I'm not able to read anything longer than a BlueSky post/thread on this subject today, so clearly I can't write anything either.

Last-Minute Reading on Election Day

I don't bother linking to New York Times articles that are paywalled, much as I love Jamelle Bouie. 

Jason Kottke quoted from a couple of Bouie's recent columns, which is good enough for me. He included substantial bits from "Donald Trump Is Done with Checks and Balances" and "The Guardrails Failed. Now It's Down to Us."

(I just realized there are gift links in Kottke's post, so have at it if you prefer to read them in their entirety.)

And if you're up for a depressing but necessary read, here's a gift link* to the Atlantic's Adam Serwer reporting his thoughts from several late-October Trump rallies, compared to his 2016 rallies: Trump's Followers Are Living in a Dark Fantasy. 

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*I discovered I can bypass the need to submit an email to read the article on my phone by using the reader function in Safari... maybe everyone else already knows this.

And Now a Pause to Hear the Ocean

Now that it's Election Day Eve, here's something I've been saving.

While I learned a fairly long time ago that the scallops some humans eat come from the sea shells called scallops (which is obvious in retrospect), I had no idea how they live within the shells until I saw this on Twitter, which shows how scallops move across the sea floor.

Other people in the thread responded with additional facts I never knew:

They spit jets of water and have bright blue eyes. Makes for very thrilling water fights in marine biology labs. 

My dad had a huge fish tank at our house in Antigua. It was the entire back wall of the dining room. My dad used to catch fish and put them in it. One day he added a gorgeous scallop. In the morning it was the only thing left. It cruised around and ate all night.

Here's a photo another commenter posted:

I had no idea.... The world is a startling and mysterious place. I love it here.

A Bonus for Voting Early

I went to vote early at the Frogtown* Community Center on Thursday. The building opened in fall 2019, but I haven't been there before, so the ingenious, colorful terrazzo floor was a surprise to me.

Frogs, water, and lily pads are the theme:

When you reach the hallway that leads back to the community room (where voting was being held), there's a series of figures that starts with a stylized tadpole and grows into a frog:

According to the city's website, three Saint Paul artists — Tou Yia Xiong, Myc Dazzle, and Megan Tate — created the design (though based on their styles it looks as though Xiong is the primary illustrator), and a terrazzo company from Menomonie, Wis., did the installation over five weeks. (Here's the company's write-up, with better photos than mine.)

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* The origin of Saint Paul's Frogtown neighborhood is disputed. It may be because it was a wetland with a lot of frogs, or it may be because there were a lot of French/French Canadian residents in its early days. Or both. These days it's a racially and ethnically diverse area

Twitter, October 2024

My Twitter list for October 2024 is not as long as the one for BlueSky, a sign that I'm making progress weaning myself from Elon's sewer.

The tweets are also almost totally focused on the election, and they begin (or end, since they're in reverse order, chronologically) with the VP debate. They also include Halloween, Hurricane Helene, and a handful of my usual topics.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order that I saw it, except some of the images, which I move up or down to get better visual balance.

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Trump says he can tell if an immigrant is “good or bad” based on how they look.
Kamala HQ

He's literally doing the meme:


@BlackKnight10k

Bike-lanes don’t cause traffic congestion. Car dependency, land-use sprawl, too many cars driving too much taking up too much space, highly subsidized driving costs, and not enough choices in how to get around, ALL cause traffic congestion. Think about it. THAT’S common sense.
Brent Toderian

It’s remarkable how often someone is asked by the media why they support Trump and the person’s answer describes Trump in a way that bears no actual resemblance to Trump.
Better Urban Planning & Mobility @UrbanismAvenger

My neighbor is a Little Free Library and yes she is giving out books:


Jeff Melnick

It's baffling to me that every news story covering the tech-right seems to frame their support of Trump as a pure business calculus and not the obvious fact that a ton of them are deeply reactionary and sympathetic to authoritarianism as, like, a core value
Becca Lewis

Putin wants Trump to win. There's no serious debate about that. Does Putin want America to be weak or strong? There's no serious debate about that either. Why would you vote for the candidate Putin wants you to vote for?
Paul Graham

They're eating the dogs:


Mary D @IncognitoBanski

When they say "make America great again," who knew that they meant before we had the polio vaccine.
Dean Baker

"as no-fault divorce became the norm in state after state, domestic-violence rates dropped by some thirty per cent, suicides among women dropped by as much as sixteen per cent, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by ten per cent."
Rebecca Solnit

Mark Cuban: "Trump doesn't surround himself with strong, intelligent women."
Trump: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face."
GOP: Mark Cuban is mean!
Elie Mystal

MeidasTouch has identified 15 of the 16 “random black voters” in a Trump campaign ad, who supposedly just decided to support him, as longtime GOP operatives, candidates, and paid influencers. The ad was featured in an NBC news story.
Ron Filipkowski

Rich guys are having kids in their fifties and sixties with their second and third wives and then blaming vaccines — which save tons of lives! — for rising autism rates.
Matthew Yglesias

The Onion remains undefeated:


Griffin Wasdin @heflinhollis

RFK Jr's ex-wife committed suicide after she found his diary where he wrote in very graphic detail about 37 different affairs. He also rated his sexual encounters with a numerical scale in the journal. He’s not a doctor or scientist. Sure, he should be in charge of women’s health.
Ron Filipkowski

LLMs "favored resumes from white-associated names 85% of the time and female-associated names 11% of the time." These findings should trouble not only job candidates but also college students, whose applications are increasingly being screened using AI.
Jess Calarco

This is truly wild. The Washington Post and New York Times both have the Biden gaffe as their top stories (the NYT has *two* stories about it on their home page) and not a single mention of Johnson saying they’ll repeal the ACA or a Trump official saying they’ll pull vaccines.
Liam Martin @LiamFromBoston

The Madison Square Garden rally was a cornucopia of crudeness, illustrating how Trump has erased the line between propriety and profanity. This year alone, he has cursed in public at least 1,787 times and is doing so 69% more often than in 2016.
Peter Baker @peterbakernyt

It could not be more “on brand” for the Republican Party right now than to invite a racist comedian to their Nazi rally, claim that all the racism is “jokes,” then feign offense at you pointing out their racism and and calling their event a Nazi rally. If this is how the GOP is talking about other people when they’re *asking* for power, imagine what they’re gonna do if they get it
Elie Mystal

The biggest donor for the guy holding a Nazi rally tonight is an illegal immigrant from Africa.
emptywheel


CAKE MUSIC

I love how a ton of offensive stuff was said at Trump's MSG rally and Republicans are just apologizing for that one joke
Thor Benson

Since people seem to have missed this one, unsealed in the Smith filing:
-Trump used a burner phone, routed through a foreign country to contact Michigan house speaker.
-He tried to pressure the speaker in this off book call.
-Speaker McCarthy knew about the burner phone line.
-The phone showed up as “Spam Risk Egypt” on caller ID.
If the President thought his attempt to overturn the election and forge elector documents were legitimate “official acts” why was he using an insecure, foreign routed burner phone for these calls?
Adam Cochran @adamscochran

If Trump makes taxes tips free, there is nothing to stop a honcho lawyer from getting paid $400k a year in tax free tips. Of course, no one pays lawyers in tips now, but that's because there is no incentive. If Trump tells them tips are tax free then they will structure payment schemes so that much of their income is "tips." That may violate the law, but one of Trump's big campaign promises is to gut IRS enforcement powers so that there will be no one to police these scams. You'll also see investment bankers earning millions of dollars of tax-free "overtime" pay.
Dean Baker

Clarence Thomas has been on the Supreme Court for 33 years as of this week. During that time he's received at least 193 gifts worth an estimated $4 million from wealthy benefactors. He only reported 27 of the gifts on his financial disclosures. How is he still on the court?
Robert Reich

This is who the Supreme Court gave absolute power to:


The Intellectualist @highbrow_nobrow

As a lifelong [nonprofit] PR guy, I often wished I could get the guaranteed media coverage the "new foods at the sports stadiums" stories get, year after year. Don't even get me started on minor tweaks to uniforms...
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob

Broadcast news mostly ignored Kamala Harris’ proposal expanding Medicare to cover in-home health care for 15 million seniors, with just 35 seconds of coverage over two weeks
Media Matters @mmfa

When you read between the lines, the Post's non-endorsement of Harris is a much stronger endorsement than if the paper had explicitly endorsed her as expected. It says, "We are anticipating fascism if Trump wins."
Andy Harless

When the Washington Post said, "Democracy dies in darkness," we thought the slogan was pro-democracy, but maybe it's pro-darkness.  At any rate we're in the "dies in" phase for legacy media.
Rebecca Solnit

What's great is that Trump says all his former cabinet members who refuse to support him, or now actively oppose him, are stupid and incompetent. Why would anyone elect a president who appoints so many stupid and incompetent people to top positions.
Dean Baker

So team Trump’s closing argument is “you need a spanking little girl,” Hitler “did good things,” and we are “the garbage can of the world”? Yeah, that tracks.
@JoJoFromJerz

We tell ourselves that if we have money we’d be brave. Jeff Bezos has $204 billion and he’s a coward.
Bill McKibben

during this election cycle, 150 billionaire families have spent $1.9 billion to support presidential/congressional candidates. $700 million (+58%) more than 2020:


ian bremmer

I'd say healthy masculinity is just healthy humanity, using your strength to stand up for the weak, opening doors for those who've been shut out, standing on principle, staying open to learning, being kind.
Rebecca Solnit

Hitler didn't start off by murdering 6 million Jews, he ended there. He started by suspending the constitution, made all the other parties illegal, made it illegal to "insult" the regime, and by rounding up all his political opponents. All things Donald Trump has said.
Rachel Bitecofer

NVIDIA now has a greater market value than the entire German stock market and the entire Italian stock market. Combined. [h/t Torsten Slok]
Jason Zweig @jasonzweigwsj

The richest man in the world:
is one of the biggest political donors in the world.
and one of the biggest government contractors in the world.
while owning one of the biggest social media platforms in the word.
while warning about a cabal of elites ruining the world.
Sam Stein

Every single day Trump makes up stories about American towns that have been conquered — which is not a thing that has happened. It's delusional but the media completely ignores it.
Aaron Rupar

The cost to Lebanon of Israel’s attacks have already exceeded the country’s GDP:
Leah McElrath

Show me another defense contractor where the CEO could have casual chats with Vladimir Putin and face zero consequences.
Rick Wilson

Conservatives who take issue with Tim Walz's statements about his military service seem less concerned when one of their own faces similar scrutiny [the Republican Senate candidate in Montana]. Gee, we never saw that coming, amirite?
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob

Not to be that guy, but if a polling place isn't served by reliable transit or walkable, it's a form of voter suppression to require someone to have a car to vote.
Hayden @the_transit_guy

If you import 1 tonne of coal, you can burn it to generate ~2 MWh of electricity. If you import 1 tonne of solar panels, you can use them to generate ~1,000 MWh of electricity.
Jesse Peltan

Some Democratic anxiety is of course about winning/losing the election. But a lot of it comes from repeatedly learning that so many of our fellow Americans are rooting for the Hitler guy.
Sam Youngman

It's so cool how everything from prescription drugs to McDonald's to frozen waffles is contaminated now. It's almost like government regulations were the only thing keeping manufacturers from cutting costs and poisoning us.
@abby4thepeople

Carbon capture instead of stopping oil and gas
EVs instead of reducing car dependency
Ocean cleanups instead of stopping plastic production
Planting trees instead of ending deforestation
Ever notice how all the fashionable 'solutions' are all aimed at not changing anything?
Dr Charlie Gardner

What will happen if Trump orders Border Patrol to go into Seattle or New York and round up suspected illegal immigrants, against the wishes of the mayors of those cities? Or if he orders the National Guard to fire on protestors, again in defiance of mayors and governors. What happens?
David Roberts @drvolts

Buried in a study about child aggression is an interesting finding (that's confirmed by other research, incidentally): Narcissism is more likely to result from lack of parental warmth than from parental permissiveness.
Alfie Kohn

The only reason you’d “need the kind of generals that Hitler had” is if you’re planning to do the kind of things Hitler did.
Santiago Mayer

It should not require experiencing an injustice to care about it.
Be A King @BerniceKing

It's aggravating this is never mentioned in the campaign, but you can draw a direct line from Trump's steel tariffs to skyrocketing construction costs post-2018. It's not a theory it's what fucking happened.
Darrell Owens @IDoTheThinking

In 2022, Norway increased their wealth tax to 1.1%. In response, some high profile billionaires moved out of the country. According to a viral claim, this resulted in a net loss of revenue. Is this true? No. Over the next two years, wealth tax revenue soared to all time highs.
James Medlock @jdcmedlock

Yeah, you run into this with the various states here. While I think it is true that Minnesota's high income tax drives some people out of the state, they sure as hell raise a lot more revenue per capita than Wisconsin and its lower taxes.
Sir Humphrey @bdquinn

NEVER FORGET: Not one Republican officeholder who objected to Biden’s victory has objected to their own wins on the same day, on the same ballots, using the same election systems.
Robert Stern

Florida is able to count all its votes by Election Night because state law allows it to count mail-in votes as they arrive. Because of Republicans, state law in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin prohibits mail-in ballots from being counted before Election Day.


James Surowiecki

Remember when Trump promised to release video of the Arlington fracas where his goons accosted a staffer and she was so scared of MAGA harassment she withdrew her complaint? Or release his medical records, or his tax returns?
Lindsay Beyerstein

You'd never get a Trump voter to believe it, but in Obama's 2nd term, the economy created 30,000 more jobs a month than it did during Trump's pre-pandemic presidency.
James Surowiecki

any city not fully invested in rapidly transforming streets to prioritize transit, bike lanes and pedestrians – is a city investing in injuries, deaths, and destruction.
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

3 reasons why Electoral College should be abolished:
1. It’s fundamentally undemocratic and excludes 85% of Americans from counting
2. It incentivizes election rigging and partisan manipulation
3. It’s antiquated, racist and dates back to slavery
Ari Berman

I've long wondered why "defund the police" became politically toxic but "defund the schools" is a routine campaign promise for Trump and his ilk and it usually just slides right by Dem strategists
Gillian Branstetter

i love when americans talk about long wait times in canadian health care like it's some kind of gotcha. i've also lived in the states and the wait times are exactly as bad but then they also bankrupt you
katie @focusfronting

Republicans barricading the door on the “Day of Love”:


@KellDA

it's weird how consistently throughout history people have mistaken "being bad at basic morals" for "being superior to literally every other human being in existence"
Michelle Allison @fatnutritionist

When you go to vote just remember that they are more obsessed with regulating what women do with their own bodies than regulating lunch meat factories.
Ashley Winter MD || Urologist @AshleyGWinter

Thomas Gordon: Parents who constantly criticize what their kids do or say "foster in these children a deep feeling that they are unacceptable as persons.” That doesn’t change just because the parents say soothingly, “Oh, we love YOU, honey; we just hate almost everything you DO.”
Alfie Kohn

New: JD Vance requested first-class flights, private cars and speaking fees as high as $40,000 from Midwestern public universities during his 2017 book tour — with University of Wisconsin Madison breaking off negotiations for a campus visit in part over the fee.
Adam Wren

Just a reminder that while Republicans publicly distance themselves from abortion in these last critical weeks before the election, they're quietly filing lawsuits against mifepristone that would impact the whole country – not just anti-abortion states
Jessica Valenti

Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly: “He was always telling me that we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people–it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now.” There will no John Kellys in a 2nd Trump Admin.
Barb McQuade

I'm genuinely horrified by people who think that Dubai is cool
Anita Zsurzsan @iamjourjean

"Once migration is cast as a problem, it always redounds to the benefit of the far Right, which need not deliver ​solutions as long as it diverts social malaise away from structures and toward scapegoats." Alberto Toscano, In These Times magazine
Kathryn Joyce

Part of me thought that when Biden stepped aside for Kamala, the race wouldn't end up being such a nailbiter because the contrast in candidate quality would be clear and undeniable. Well, the contrast in quality is clear and undeniable, but it turns out something like 45% of voters still want diarrhea forever. And it's hard to persuade someone they shouldn't want diarrhea forever if that's their thing. So here we are.
Aaron Rupar

The mainstream media is covering the odds and NOT the stakes. Yet again.
Molly Jong-Fast

I still can't believe that the trick to defeating journalism was to just be so openly evil that reporting on it accurately sounds partisan.
Johnny McNulty

Y'all understand if Trump wins, both Alito and Thomas retire within 6 months and he replaces them with two 40-something justices who ensure a right-wing majority until 2050, give or take. So, if you're 30 or over, that's your SCOTUS for the rest of your life.
scary lawyerguy

A man replied to me telling me that most women want to stay home to raise kids. I thanked him for telling me what most women want. In the comments, there are dozens of other men who assured me that they also know what most women want. This is not parody.
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

Fossil capital could lose up to $1 trillion in profits if assets are stranded as a result of an energy transition.
Andrew Ahern @AndrewsonEarth

this $1 trillion in stranded assets is actually a bargain — less than 1% of global GDP
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @DoctorVive

The annual number of murders in Aurora, Colorado has not risen over the last five years. The number of gang-related assaults has fallen this year. This plan to invoke a wartime law for military rule in the United States rests on fabricated propaganda.
Michael Clemens

The fact that we're on track to meet the global goal of tripling renewables, largely thanks to solar, is not news/ But the absolutely massive role distributed generation plays relative to utility scale solar is:


Justin Guay @Guay_JG

hackers taking down the internet archive instead of student loan websites or credit card debt or medical debt or anything even remotely useful shows how much of that community is absolutely useless
in the mood for adulation @fagittarius_jd

Uber's goal wasn't to provide good jobs, flexibility, or convenient transportation; it was to use immense private capital to control our transportation system—all underpinned by labor exploitation and prolific lawbreaking.
Daniel Hanley

Trump is now calling humanitarian *parole,* a many-decades-old immigration policy, “probation,” and lying that it means those who came in under the policy were prisoners. An immigrant being paroled doesn’t mean they’re a criminal; it’s not the same as being out of jail on parole.
Daniel Dale

Donald doesn't have a "fascination with genes." He has a fascist’s obsession with eugenics and white supremacy.
Mary L Trump

Finally a story about grocery prices that gets it right, shows that grocery is more affordable today than it was before pandemic – once you factor in rising wages (as you should).
Arin Dube

During disasters, your community will be better off and recover faster if more of its businesses are locally owned.
Stacy Mitchell

‘Prodigy’ comes from Latin ‘prodigium,' meaning "omen" or "monster." It now refers to a highly talented child, but in the 15th century, a prodigy could be any strange or weird thing that might be an omen of things to come.
Merriam-Webster

"The US should decarbonize." "But what about China?" "China is expected to account for almost 60% of all renewable energy capacity installed worldwide between now and 2030 ..." From theguardian.com. It's funny that, during the *exact stretch of years* that US conservatives were saying "what about China?" as a response to US decarbonization policy ... China was doubling down on clean energy and subsequently ate our f'ing lunch and now dominates the global industry.
David Roberts @drvolts

Evergreen nowadays:


CalvinEllis23 @MojoPharoah

"[It] is a 'crime' in most of America for the poor to wager in the streets over dice. Wagering over international currencies, entire cities’ worth of mortgages, the global supply of wheat needed to avoid mass starvation, or ownership of public corporations is accepted behavior."
@KittenBalerion

You show up to work, ready to work, and your boss randomly and regularly locks you out *SO HE DOESN'T HAVE TO PAY YOU* while telling customers they have to pay more because there aren't enough workers.
Zephyr Teachout

"The Kavanaugh investigation stopped" is a Watergate level story
"The Putin gets COVID testing machines meant for hospitals" is an Iran-Contra level story
"The 7 calls with Putin while in possession of classified materials" is a Rosenberg level story
The news is failing us
Devin Jackson 4 Senate @DPurdyJackson

You'll never, ever, ever catch Trump saying anything positive about the United States, and you'll never, ever, ever catch Trump criticizing Russia.
Alex Cole @acnewsitics

I'm an old man.
Graduated HS in 1965.
Fought in Vietnam.
Fought against the war.
Protested for The Environment™.
I never  thought I'd live to see the day when a genuine Bond villain was running the US space program and a Nazi with multiple convictions was running for President.
Jeff McFadden @JeffAndDonkeys

When it comes to a Green New Deal people ask: “How will you pay for it?” As though we're not paying for it now in loss of life and billions of dollars in destruction. The Green New Deal isn't radical. Transforming our energy system saves lives, saves money and saves the planet.
Bernie Sanders

I've been telling you this – Trump thought our nation was "great" during the Gilded Age, the Robber Baron years – that's what he wants to bring back. Massive wage slavery, factory towns, filthy water and air, no regulations on food or business. His policies only help the ultra rich.
Jennifer Mercieca

Maybe we shouldn't allow 53 ft trailers in the core of our cities:


Stephen @PedalByte

The next time a climate "person" of any ilk is invited on cable news to do a live interview during an acute crisis, I would love it if they asked the anchor "hey, why don't you talk about this more often?" I double dog dare you
Mary Annaïse Heglar

On this date in October 9, 1635, Roger Williams was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading "newe & dangerous opinions." Williams had argued that Natives were the legitimate owners of the land, & that colonists should acquire property by purchasing it from Native peoples.
@OTDRhodeIsland

Climate skeptic: "Humans can't change the climate"
Recently from probably the same crowd: "Humans are controlling the weather/hurricanes"
My head hurts....
Dr. Marshall Shepherd @DrShepherd2013

For those buying the 'manipulated weather' garbage on here ... 'A hurricane releases heat energy that is the equivalent of a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes — more than all the energy used at a given time by humanity.' –National Hurricane Center chief Chris Landsea
Brad Crawford @BCrawford247

“i don’t want to be alarmist—” no i do want to be alarmist. this is ALARMING. you should be ALARMED. we are in the midst of a climate crisis, a pandemic, multiple genocides, economic turmoil…and you’re expecting me to remain calm? because you don’t want to be upset? oh honey
@utah_thedude

Data centers use 26% of Virginia’s total power consumption, Apollo’s Torsten Slok notes:


David Gura

Uhhhhhhh. Why has Trump kept having private 1:1 calls with Putin as a private citizen? “According to Trump’s aide, there have been multiple phone calls between Trump and Putin, maybe as many as seven in the period since Trump left the White House in 2021”
Ian Sams

A historic natural disaster happening four weeks before Election Day shows exactly why 30-day voter registration deadlines and restrictions on early and mail voting are voter suppression
Stephen Wolf @PoliticsWolf

TRUMP: (ducks second debate)
TRUMP: (ducks 60 Minutes)
MEDIA: Why Is Kamala Hiding?
Ben Wexler @mrbenwexler

Some reply guy called me a “DEI PhD”, which is pretty funny considering how hard I had to work to get a PhD in geography, as opposed to 100 years ago, where a white guy could write a dissertation on the “economic geographies of Guersney County, Ohio” and get a doctorate.
@DeondreSmiles

For the first time ever recorded, October finds three hurricanes spinning simultaneously in the Atlantic. Hot new world
Bill McKibben


PatriotsLady777 @Patsgirl777

You are literally the richest person in America, and you choose to be a weird cheerleader for a treasonous bastard.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob

Pretty wild how 40+% of US emissions are attributable to cars yet basically every state DOT is still spending billions every year to add/widen highways. There’s seemingly no amount of climate catastrophe that will shake this country out of its insane (car) path dependency
Travis R. Eby @travis_robert

democracy was never made to withstand this combination of money and disinformation.
ian bremmer

A point that is very hard for elite types to understand is that economic outcomes are determined by policy not a "free market." That absurd myth is held as widely among people on the left as on the right.
Dean Baker

So “leave it to the states” should really be changed to “leave it to the individuals,” and those individuals should have the freedom to decide, in concert with whomever they decide to include in that decision, what happens to their own bodies.
Dr. Rob Davidson MD, MPH

the first person to invent a browser plug-in that blocks you from having to see any AI "art" is gonna be a millionaire
@katefeetie

Israel has destroyed 814 Mosques and 3 Churches in Gaza over the past year.
@Lowkey0nline

Republicans make up stories about things the Biden administration handles competently, like disaster relief, because they can't govern and can't imagine that anyone else can
John Harwood

If your bath is overflowing, you don't start investing in fancy new mops. You turn off the tap:


Dr Charlie Gardner

Hillary Clinton was probably the most left-wing Democrat on immigration in history and lost to an anti-immigration candidate while leftists voted for Jill Stein and then leftists are like “gee why is no one willing to run on a left-wing immigration platform anymore?”
Swann Marcus

I love how J.D. Vance always links his mother's addiction with the border. She stole drugs from the hospital, J.D. They came from the drug factory in a box that said Purdue Pharmaceuticals on the side.
TheRealThelmaJohnson

"Biden is old" was a multi-week news cycle while "Trump committed dozens of crimes and is a traitor to the US" isn't even going to get a single day of oxygen from the press.
@50megatonFbomb

We don’t talk enough about the illegal immigrants who got here in the 1600s and almost immediately started human trafficking
Lisa Snowden

78-Year-Old Man Running for President Won’t Release Medical Records
The New Republic

You know Biden-Harris are doing a good job on hurricane relief because Fox needs to make shit up to say they are doing a bad job. If there were actual failures, Fox would be highlighting those, not inventing failures that don't exist.
Dean Baker

People keep saying "post-pandemic" when they really mean "post-public health."
Carolyn Marshall @_carolynm_

Donald Trump hired more than 100 migrants in 2023 to work at Mar-a-Lago, despite casting himself as an immigration hard-liner.
Arizona Political @AZVotes

Liz Cheney can bring herself to support Kamala Harris despite disagreeing with her on 90% of things, while many online leftists can't bring themselves to support Kamala Harris despite agreeing with her on 90% of things.
The Biden Accomplishments Guy @What46HasDone

Using the *PRELIMINARY* USGS streamgage located in the Ashville, NC area, this was a roughly 14,000 year flood. Every year, this flood has a 0.007158% chance of happening. The estimated discharge was 248,862 gallons per second at peakflow.
Reilly Dibble @Simcoe12_Wx

“Kids these days can’t ___ like we used to do” is rarely a serious argument
Ralph Pantozzi @mathillustrated

Notice how Jimmy Carter never gets condemned for mixing politics with his Christianity. That’s because he focused on living it out rather than making grand declarations about it or using it as a legislative weapon against others. Jimmy Carter just focused on loving others well.
Rev. Benjamin Cremer

Final version of my paper on the greenhouse gas footprint of liquid natural gas exports from the US is now published. Conclusion? LNG has a larger climate impact than any other fossil fuel, including coal.
Robert Howarth @howarth_cornell

Trump’s “Freedom Cities” are weird, but let's go deeper. Peter Thiel and other pro-Trump tech billionaires are OBSESSED with building new corporate-run territories – “network states.” They want to change how the entire planet is governed.
gil duran

If spending a little bit of time in Hebron can make Ta-Nehisi Coates see apartheid Israel for what it is, imagine what covering the genocide in Gaza would do. That is why Israel bars journalists.
Laila Al-Arian

Vance last night [at the VP debate]: "We should be making more solar panels here in the United States of America." Meanwhile:


Michael Thomas @curious_founder

listen up, stupids:
John McCain lost his election and fucked off back to Congress.
Mitt Romney lost his election and fucked off back to Congress.
Hillary Clinton lost her election and fucked off and went home.
Al Gore challenged the results in ONE STATE, and when he lost, he fucked off and went home.
Donald Trump lost his election and freaked the fuck out and sent a mob of armed morons to the Capitol to disrupt the certification, and he also headed up a ginormous criminal conspiracy to commit election fraud in Georgia, all so he could cling to power — because he's a big fucking baby who can't deal with being the huge fucking loser that he is. and that's why your guy is in deep fucking shit right now
Jeff Tiedrich

It’s darkly funny to me that cities have budget processes with so much engagement, more than I have ever seen for higher levels of government with exponentially bigger budgets. We quibble over pennies for potholes but spend the dollars on missiles without a word.
Tom Basgen, Mr. Saint Paul

Can you imagine telling a man that his bodily autonomy should be left up to states?
Jess Piper @piper4missouri

I realize this is out of bounds for news journalists, but I’m dying for someone to ask Vance how he thinks his feelings about his mother’s neglect in the past affect his attitudes towards women now.
Leah McElrath

The GOP position is to do greenfield development on federal land LOL
Ed Mendoza @orangutanagram


@eats_master

I end [the debate] tonight reflecting on how central untruth has become to the American right.  The lying we heard tonight was staggering.  Lying is an illiberal act, deeply contemptuous of democracy.  Legacy media's struggle to challenge the lying/untruth has let us all down, profoundly.
Simon Rosenberg @SimonWDC

Louisiana has reclassified the abortion pill as a Schedule 4 dangerous drug, making possession of a single pill punishable by 5 years in prison.
Ron Filipkowski

The corollary: If we continue to *not* build enough homes, we’ll give fuel to people like Vance who want to kneecap immigration.
Rik Adamski

maybe im just a partisan hack but i think sending a murderous horde to the us capital was a bigger threat to democracy than not being allowed to suggest horse paste to treat covid on facebook
Andrew Lawrence

The clear and indisputable difference between Trump and Vance:


Alan Mills @alan_uplc

The irony of blaming immigrants for rising housing prices when they are hands down the most exploited workers in the construction industry and any attempt to improve their conditions results in the developers who get rich off of them threatening to stop building housing
hodel in the streets, chava in the sheets @mrotzie

Liars will always sound better than truth tellers to people uninterested in the truth.
Jarrett Walker @humantransit

Ok, just a reminder that almost everything JD Vance says is exactly the same thing that Trump says. He's just calmer, but he's still also fascist.
amityf

BlueSky, October 2024, Days Before the Election

I knew the month of October 2024 on BlueSky would be long, but... it's really long. 

There was lots of angst about the election, of course, and specifics of what happened in the campaign timelines, particularly the Trump dumpster fire and Elon Musk's egregious election law-breaking. Oh, and it begins with the VP debate, which was on October 1. 

The end of the month covers Halloween, while the early weeks include Hurricane Helene's devastation and the Right's politicization of the tragedy. Other than climate/urbanism, sprinkles of good news, and random funnies, there aren't a lot of other topics. (Oh, I forgot: there are a few about Tesla's robot and cyber-bus announcement. All around, there's just too much Elon Musk. Sigh.) 

Everyone is gripping the handlebars of the election.

Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account and is in reverse chronological order that I saw it, except some of the images, which I move up or down to get better visual balance.

___

She got a lot of compliments and was very pleased with herself:


Maggie Koerth

It's weird to think that if the Trump Access Hollywood tape came out right now it would just be digested in the daily grind of insane shit he says. Don Jr. would be cracking jokes about it on Instagram live.
Gillian Branstetter

In 2016 I recorded a conversation among 8yo boys:
Boy 1: I heard a tape of Trump saying nasty things about women.
Boy 2: My dad is so mad. He says Trump just lost the election for the Republicans.
Boy 3: Trump sure doesn't like women. Is he gay?
Boy 2: No, gay guys like women, just not to marry.
Serafina Scheel

[In a University of Washington study] “Over the 3 million job, race and gender combinations tested, Black men fared the worst with the LLM ("AI") models preferring other candidates nearly 100% of the time.”
Hypervisible

Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly a quarter of buildings in Lebanon’s south
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

Governments who can’t build things break things to preserve the illusion they’ve accomplished anything at all.
Glyn @glynbowerman.bsky.social

Wall Street Journal reports that the National Archives museum has removed references to Martin Luther King, Japanese internment, Native Americans, union organizers, and birth control, because presenting American history honestly would make Republicans uncomfortable
Harlem Writer


bettybarcode

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — A co-chair of Donald Trump’s transition team said Trump supporter Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants access to federal health data so he can show vaccines are unsafe and lead to them being pulled from the market in a second Trump administration.
NewJukeboxCafe

Can’t overstate how dangerous it is that vaccine denial has completely captured one of the two major parties. We’re an election or two from unraveling one of humanity’s greatest achievements. The potential long tail damage is millions of preventable deaths. Just absolutely bonkers.
Radley Balko

Public ownership of the electricity system – the grid – in the U.S. is a necessary step to break the link between fossil fuel profits and our future. And we think it’s one of the best ways that we can make sure we get more renewables, faster, and without excluding millions of people in poverty.
isaac @sevier.io

[Doug Ford's attempt to remove separated bike lanes in Toronto is] premeditated Road Violence. You know what? Bike lanes do take away space from driving, let’s get rid of sidewalks too, hell the school zones really slow you down...get rid of schools! And why not remove parks and residential areas, nothing but a utopia of roads and parking lots!
Tom Flood

Streets are for trick or treating:


Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

“Common sense” is the last refuge of someone with no real facts or knowledge.
Glyn @glynbowerman.bsky.social

imagine having less political courage in standing up to the right than *literally The Economist* [which endorsed Harris].
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

Trump's explicit, stated climate policy plans are to make everything about the issue worse.
Dave Levitan

I am a single issue voter in this election, and my issue is that I never want to have to think about That Fucking Guy ever again for the rest of my life
Ravi Kanodia @ravikanodia.bsky.social

The best way to defend our right to bodily autonomy is to defend EVERYONE’S right to bodily autonomy.
Courtney Milan

The actual best book about America cities is “Downtown” by Fogelson because it looms before and after the war, looks abroad, and actually understands something about cars. (Urban planning in the USA has a particularly bizarre relationship with cars.) The American Planning Association's required planning history class [in contrast] makes *no mention of cars or the interstate highway act*.
Nilo Cobau

This lovely train and bicycle trail has approximately 8 times the carrying capacity of the equivalent amount of space devoted to car lanes. Instead of loud, polluting, dangerous, ugly-ass freeways plowing through our cities, we could have this. Walking, biking transit is cheaper, safer, better:


isabellachu

Another Halloween reflection: The US adopts parking lot standards that are supposed to accommodate the peak number of shoppers on Black Friday. Why can't we also adopt street safety standards for when the highest number of kids are walking on the streets (i.e., Halloween)?
Alessandro Rigolon

Can't believe hundreds of years of vaccine research and progress against murder germs hinge on if a couple yinzers [Pittsburgh residents] think Trump will cut their grocery bill by 80 cents.
Brett Banditelli

Anyway I think it’s neat that our electoral system drives everyone like 92% insane in the final month or two
Dave Levitan

Absolutely insane how effective Trump’s ‘are you better off than you were four years ago?’ is when exactly four years ago Covid deaths hit 1 million worldwide, vaccines weren’t out yet, food insecurity in 52 million US homes, and Trump almost died of it. Literally one of the worst times in US history!
Aaron Stewart-Ahn @badideas.bsky.social

to heal the nation, joe biden must apologize for being mean to people with 'fuck joe biden' flags
Microplastics Sommelier @leastactionhero.bsky.social

Racist rally? Not a big deal, barely makes the front page. Biden misspeaking condemning that racism? Front page, above the fold, big font. That’s a judgement call about what they think is important and what they think isn’t.
Adam Serwer

I feel like if more people were hip to how hot and sexy and cool pre-Hayes code movies were, people would have a better understanding of how progress is often ripped back and we can't rebound until much later (the 1970s).
@katiemcvay.bsky.social

This is absolutely true. Even 100 years earlier, Victorian morality was largely a reaction against the (comparatively) horny and tolerant late Georgian period. There were drag bars in London in the late eighteenth century!
Brian Phillips

When you see cities and police handing out hi-viz, please remember that they are not trying to help, they are simply removing the responsibility from themselves and placing it directly on those they should be protecting:


Tom Flood

Journalists should have used the increasingly dubious quality of polls as an excuse to spend this election talking about actual issues but instead they doubled down on the horse race. It’s always been hard to predict turnout (especially in the tiny swathes of the population that matter for choosing the president), but it’s even worse this cycle because the last election took place during a pandemic. They’re adjusting the models to fit a scenario that doesn’t exist anymore. Even if the polls were perfect, there’s still an argument that outlets should focus on issues rather than predicted outcome. Constant stories about polls themselves have electoral consequences! Just inform people about how their lives will change and encourage voting on that basis.
Michael Hobbes

Aspect of climate change I didn’t know in advance: How disorienting it is when the morning is hot but stays dark until 8am
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

"The President should be elected through..."
Popular vote: 54%
Electoral College: 28%
Unsure: 18%
YouGov / Oct 29, 2024 / n=1587
Mark Chadbourn

It’s wild how every billionaire with “esoteric” and “iconoclastic” politics ends up believing the exact same fucking thing in a completely cookie cutter midwit nonplayer character robot sort of way
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

trump is a thousand annoying verbal tics stuffed into a suit and wig, but the one that's really annoying me lately is "like nobody's ever seen before," which he say pretty much every other sentence.
Tom Tomorrow

Your regular reminder that the thing you were bombarded with wall-to-wall headline news about in 2022 is now totally absent from media coverage of the economy now that it (nominal gas prices) is *below 2011-14 levels*  this doesn’t fit The Narrative™️
Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social

Valencia this morning. A jaw-dropping 343 mm [13.5"] of rain was recorded in just 4 hours yesterday, between 4:30pm and 8:30pm:


Fat Apollo

As the world gets warmer, the hydrological cycle is accelerating. Today’s victims: Valencia, Spain.
Katharine Hayhoe

Cars are not only one of the biggest causes of global heating and the related increasing intensity and frequency of storms, they are also its collateral damage. A system built around the private automobile will not save us, and cannot save itself. Survival requires that we change, and fast.
Tara Goddard, PhD @drtaragoddard.bsky.social

Incredible stat: A single container ship of solar panels can provide as much electricity as more than 50 large liquid natural gas tankers – or 100 large coal ships. –IEA
Simon Evans @drsimevans.carbonbrief.org

I’m fine with limiting the speed of e-scooters just as long as we do the same for every vehicle on our roads.
Tom Flood

Researchers at the United States Geological Survey announced they've found lithium in an underground brine reservoir in Arkansas. They estimate there might be up to 19 million tons—more than enough to meet all of the world’s demand.
Ada Palmer

Lithium is fully recyclable at end of life. So if there's more than enough to replace all vehicles currently on the road, the answer to "how long" is essentially "forever".  And given that the average 8v has ~10kg, and 1.6 billion vehicles worldwide, millions of tonnes would be enough.
Dan @dandwiggins.bsky.social

This was my biggest-ever result at the bad place. Five years later, with people who throw around the word "communist" like a Valley girl saying "like" losing their minds at being called "fascists," I'd say it holds up:


Jacob T. Levy

Ladies and gentlemen, the GOP’s closing message:  
1) A promise to send the economy into a major tailspin.
2) A pledge to throw millions of people off of their health insurance.
Throw in Trump’s commitment to rule as an autocrat, and you have perhaps the least inviting campaign conclusion ever.
Larry Glickman

worth emphasizing that it is absolutely disgraceful that Puerto Ricans on the island, American citizens all, have no representation in Congress or votes for President. statehood referendums have won more than once there
ryan cooper

"Here is the thing about Donald Trump’s neofascism, ethnonationalism and the threat he poses to democracy: however you label his prejudices, US voters who do not have an opinion on this subject never will. Or at least not until it is too late."
Huss Banai

Some people attribute congestion to cycle lanes. However, I have another theory:
in 1970, there were 200 million cars worldwide
in 1990, there were 500 million cars worldwide
in 2023, there were 1.47 billion cars worldwide
@bobfromaccounts.bsky.social

I was just thinking “god I can’t wait for this all to be over” and then I realized it won’t be over even when it’s over and now I feel like I need a nap.
Leah McElrath

On the one hand, the rise of solar has been a big deal. On the other: Greenhouse gas levels surged to a new record in 2023
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

I think we’ve yet to fully process just what it means that many of our carbon sinks … just aren’t really working anymore
Bunch of numbers @bunch0fnumb3r5.bsky.social

Except Musk isn't obsessed with population decline — else he wouldn't be so anti-immigrant. His is the dream of white ethnonationalism, where every home (compound) is a patriarchal cult.
Angela Mitropoulos

The reason folks think we don’t need the EPA is because we have the EPA.
Andrew Pritchard @skydrama.bsky.social

If the Trump era of Republican politics makes you nostalgic for the Reagan/Bush era of Republican politics, you have no fucking memory of the Reagan/Bush era of Republican politics.
Frank Conniff

When a society breaks stuff faster than it heals stuff you get the world we've got. When a society heals more than it breaks, well...that is a world we could have, with discernment, mindfulness (and a wholly different economic system).
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

Kinda depressing we fought like THE most famous war over it and still couldn’t make it a century between Nazi movements in the US
@lefttheprairie.bsky.social

When he says the country wasn’t built by DEI, does Dr. Phil mean “Disingenuous Enslaver Inheritors?”


Seth Cotlar

[David] Leonhardt — like [Jonathan] Chait — is a member if the "we are cynical, ennui-filled journos due to our enormous brains and flawless egos" club. Consequently, both are continually praised despite their clear track record of always being wrong.
@theprestige.bsky.social

I just keep going back to how the billionaires don’t buy and paywall right wing papers. They keep going after institutional left-leaning papers, breaking them down for parts. This is as much a policy choice as anything
Amanda Smith

This is why HOV [high-occupancy vehicle] lanes are just bad policy. The fact that you need cops out there to see if the cars actually have 2/3 occupants dooms them to failure. Just toll the roads, and let people split the toll by carpooling! It's not that complex! And if you're worried about low-income drivers, use the money you get from the tolls you're charging on everyone to give out "car stamps" or something (or, better, run the trains and buses more frequently). This is the great power of congestion pricing/road tolling. It generates the revenue to solve whatever problems is causes for low-income people, while solving congestion for everyone.
Warren Wells, AICP

"Fifty of the world’s richest billionaires on average emit more carbon through their investments, private jets and yachts in just over an hour and a half than the average person does in their entire lifetime."
Emma River-Roberts @er-roberts.bsky.social

Some who are drawn to fascism think it is a better system because they imagine a state led by an intellectual elite, but fascism actually concentrates power in the hands of people who are ruthless but who despise intellectualism. Hence the idiocracy fascism we see on display in the MAGA movement.
Leah McElrath

only one of these is illegal on our roads. guess which one!


Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

If, as new UN projections suggestion, human numbers peak at 9 billion in 2054--much earlier and smaller than previously thought--the likely climate implications will be major. (Ugh. My error. The new UN projections are indeed lower than before, but the exact numbers I cited (9B, 2054) came from a well-known demographer, Jesús Fernández-Vil­laverde of the University of Pennsylvania, not the UN.)
Charles C. Mann

The more I think about it, the more “this country was built on hard work, not dei” about a country that wrote slavery into its constitution perfectly encapsulates the way racism and denial work hand in glove
Adam Serwer

The threat implicit in the white supremacist rally is:
* if Trump loses, there will be violence
* if Trump wins, there will be even more violence
Courtney Milan

Promising to put an antivaxxer lunatic in charge of medicine and health is a pledge to let preventable diseases kill children. Any media outlet that does not inform its audience of this incredibly clear implication is abdicating its responsibility.
Peter Jacobs

The MSG rally is so much darker than the RNC was. A lot of the same speakers were at both. But oof, the Trump campaign has gotten so much angrier and weirder since then.
Nick Martin

Please enjoy this female spiny-backed orbweaver (Gasteracantha cancriformis) in South Florida:


Stray Matt

Just realizing I've seen some weird reasons over the years why people chose to become fascist. The prices of eggs, gas and a private cab for their burrito. Women in video games and Star Wars. A red coffee cup. A remake of a cartoon heroine not having big boobs...
The Alternate Historian

t-shirt I saw on a bro in the trump line [at Madison Square Garden]:
A woman in every kitchen
A gun in every hand
Tom Tomorrow

BREAM: Do you think people like John Kelly and General Milley are lying?
MARCO RUBIO: Yes, I do.
Aaron Rupar

“Everyone is lying but Trump” is the literal stance of the GOP
Grudgie the Whale

Seeing people once describe Trump and Musk as "working class billionaires" almost made me set my computer on fire.
The Alternate Historian

NEW: American billionaires have given at least $695m to Biden/Harris/Trump groups, per our analysis
Billionaires have given at least $568m to pro-Trump groups — about 34% of their total fundraising
They've given $127m to Harris/Biden groups — about 6% of their total
Sam Learner

I wish everyone would accept that things really can change – in either direction: It really could get much, much worse. But it could also get better. There is nothing inevitable about either doom or progress, nor are we fated/guaranteed to experience the status quo for all eternity.
Thomas Zimmer

One of the older political rules is that issues affecting white men are “economic issues” and therefore Important™️ while issues affecting everyone else are “social issues” and therefore “lol who cares.” It’s amazing how this framing permeates so much of reporting from even the “liberal media”
Micheál Keane @aexia.bsky.social

Still hard to process the chutzpah level of Republicans whining about Harris calling Trump mean names. If you had to sum up this election in two words, "double standard" would do it.
Schooley

People always point out that taxing the super-wealthy wouldn't actually raise all that much revenue, but it's becoming clearer that the primary benefit is just taking away their money.
Michael Hobbes

I keep thinking about the fact that the Starbucks CEO commutes from Newport Beach, CA, to Seattle every day on a private jet. Looking forward to naming a hurricane after him. Tax billionaires into millionaires.
Courtney Milan

Jeff Bezos is worth $204.3 billion – and even he's afraid of what a Trump dictatorship could bring. Money and privilege won't buy you safety from fascism. But you can still resist and prevent it, right now. VOTE.
Tristan Snell

This is your periodic reminder that it's Reagan's fault. In the 80s this Canadian  watched his clusterfuck perfect storm of economic policy, political moralizing, and his absolute hatred of lgbt people was going to destroy the US (and Canada) if left unchecked. And here we are.
@nrlines.bsky.social

Cops are huge crybabies who won’t do their jobs if you’re mean to them. This is the pro-cop position.
@haredurer.bsky.social

i wonder what would happen if a normal guy with a security clearance lied about being in touch with vladimir putin, would it be "calls for an investigation" or "the FBI takes you into immediate custody"
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

Art Nouveau is when stuff looks like it was made by Elves.
Art Deco is when stuff looks like it was made by Dwarves.


Cezary Jan Strusiewicz @ostrichson.bsky.social

What I’ve learned from being taught Black history from childhood is that It Did Happen Here. Not only have Black people lived under fascist structures for the vast majority of US history, but the Confederacy was the forerunner of fascist ideology and antidemocratic efforts before Europe tried. The fundamental problem with the Union was that it didn’t have the will to punish the Confederacy. So here we are. Again.
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

thinking about how little coverage Trump's promise to put the nation's health infrastructure in the hands of an insane crank has gotten compared to coverage of Tim Walz' decision to retire from the National Guard after 24 years.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

The guy who wants to deport half a million people from the city I live in says that we shouldn't "cast aside" friends and loved ones on the basis of their vote.
Angus Johnston

Saying you're voting for Trump because prices were lower four years ago is like doing it because you were younger four years ago. He has as much of a plan to make you four years younger as he does to lower prices.
Schooley

Elon Musk
a) has a top secret security clearance
b) is in regular contact with Vladimir Putin and lied about it
c) according to US law is grounds for instant clearance termination and possible criminal penalties
ryan cooper

Welp. "...Elon Musk worked illegally in the United States as he launched his entrepreneurial career after ditching a graduate studies program in California, according to former business associates, court records and company documents obtained by The Washington Post."
Justin Hendrix

This is the spot where there were a bunch of posts about the Washington Post publisher's decision not to run an already-written endorsement of Kamala Harris, which I previously posted here.

It's egregious how much polling dominates our national political conversation but somehow even more egregious that we get constant news about *national* polls. It's gonna come down to like five states, everyone knows this! Minutes after the election we're going to get a bunch of savvy takes about how national polls aren't useful because of the electoral college and swing-state polls aren't useful because they're smaller and harder to sample — IF YOU KNEW THIS THE WHOLE TIME WHY WEREN'T WE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING ELSE
Michael Hobbes

What is the term for the opposite of synergy? Where every little part of a system is good, but the whole thing is a mess?
Charles C. Mann

Consider the scale of the hypocrisy here: Musk entered the US as a migrant in the 90s and—to put it charitably—cleaned up his paperwork much later. American openness and prosperity enabled him to become the world’s richest man. Now he’s pouring that wealth into a retrograde mass deportation program.
southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social

As I’ve always said. The electorate is a woman:


cootie cavanagh @hipopener.com

One of my favorite parts of Arthur Koestler’s memoir of the early days of WWII is learning about the 1939 equivalent of doomscrolling: Hanging in a cafe while you and your fellow neurotics read newspapers and pause occasionally to yell, “DID YOU SEE THIS SHIT??” so you can all agree the shit is bad
@josie.zone

"Free speech" argument for voting Trump is the most ironic imo. (It's the start of Elon's Trump pitch.) Heritage's Oversight Project has been peppering the admin w FOIAs to find employees who use liberal language so they can be fired. Trump wants to use DOE funds to push leftists out of academia.
Dave Weigel

We use the horserace metaphor for political coverage, but not even the reporters who cover sports -- horse racing or anything else -- spend as much time obsessing about the odds of what might happen. Imagine if NFL Sunday Morning was just three solid hours of FanDuel spots, nothing more. Ugh.
Kevin M. Kruse

You literally couldn't do this at any tariff rate. The federal government spends more than twice the total value of US imports each year. Aside from crashing the global economy, you hit returns diminishing to zero, eventually stopping all trade, long before you hit any feasible total federal budget.


Andy Craig

Musk has been in regular contact with Putin since 2022. Can we strip Musk of his government contacts yet?
Leah McElrath

Big news: For years I've been investigating Jared Kushner's business deals with foreign governments. He's masquerading as an investment manager, but the evidence I've seen makes him look like an unregistered foreign agent. Rep. Jamie Raskin and I are calling on the DOJ to appoint a special counsel.
Senator Ron Wyden

Spot on: “The road to fascism is lined with people telling you to stop overreacting.” –David Neiwert
Leah McElrath

Listening to a succession of interviews with low education voters who are the core Trump demographic, it’s clear what a nightmare it must be for Democrats campaigning. These people have constructed an alternate reality where they believe just what they want to believe. Evidence doesn’t matter.
Mark Chadbourn

JFC, the most exhausting thing about being an advocate in urbanism, especially with bikes for transportation, is dealing with all the people who want to reply with either excuses why it won't work for them or the "WHAT ABOUT...?" provocative questions.
American Fietser

I sometimes avoid telling people what I do for work because I can't take another one of these conversations.
Sarah Goodyear

I've been saying over and over. We absolutely do not have a "polarized country" problem. We have a radicalized conservative electorate problem. Polarization suggests symmetry but it's 100% one side that's the problem. Democrats and their voters are not doing this anywhere.
The Pines

Trump claims Harris called him “Adolf Hitler.” She did not. She called him a “fascist,” which he is. You know who did call Trump “America’s Hitler”? His running mate, JD Vance
Leah McElrath

Donald Trump’s closing argument, by ad spend, is that trans people are bad and he will remove them from public life. this is what he thinks will win him the election. tell him to go fuck himself – and be ready to protect your trans friends and neighbors
Micah @rincewind.run

the pushback against condemning toxic masculinity is so funny. "how DARE you want men to be happy and healthy!"
Wagatwe Wanjuki

fuck all this fucking bullshit. that's my concise analysis. we are currently on bullshit overload.
Tom Tomorrow

Someone named Spud Klingbeil did this and I have so much respect and envy:


Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg @theradr.bsky.social

North Carolina calculates at least $53 billion price tag for the state's fossil-fueled Hurricane Helene damages, a little less than the $56 billion in half-year profits reported in August by SaudiAramco.
Brad Johnson @climatebrad.hillheat.com

We as a society will have to choose: Do we want the tech that grooms children into suicide?
OR
Do we want to solve the climate crisis? I know this is hard. AI would be easy to kill. Pass a law saying that the owner of the AI corporation is as legally liable for what AI says as if an employee said it.
Courtney Milan

Still striking how little it gets talked about that the guy running the most obviously misogynistic campaign in modern American history is afraid to debate a woman.
L O L G O P

Trump is making his closing argument at Madison Square Garden, where American Nazis held a massive rally in 1939. Harris is making her closing argument at the Ellipse, where Trump incited an insurrection against the United States in 2021.
Jen Mercieca

Kamala Harris is a uniter, it's good to unite against fascists
Ryan Casey @roscone.bsky.social

“Hello, yes, Madame Vice President I am an undecided voter, and while I fully recognize that your opponent has vowed to ‘incinerate’ my immediate family in ‘murdercubes,’ I’m worried that if one day I become a billionaire, I might not be able to afford a seventh superyacht, can you address this?”
Chris Kluwe @chriswarcraft.bsky.social

so this is a psycho-sexual thing for the MAGA people, right?


Sharon Kuruvilla @sharonk.bsky.social

The fascism debate seems to have made its inevitable progression from
-Trump is a fascist v. No he's not
to
-Trump is a fascist v. Okay fine yes he is, but saying so is pedantic and/or ineffective.
Ned Resnikoff

it rocks that his chief of staff just came out and said "Donald Trump told me he likes Hitler" and everyone is like "Okay but what if something DAMNING is coming"
Jason O. Gilbert @gilbertjasono.bsky.social

Walz is what every midwestern boomer dad could have been if Fox News and Limbaugh didn't brainwash most of them.
Mothman Lousyton @hershellousyton.bsky.social

Half the time I encounter aggressive driving on my bike nowadays, the person has an altered license plate. We should not be tolerating these. Parking enforcement seems an excellent way to start. Plate removed and vehicle booted until fine is paid
Ellery @biknmusicmama.bsky.social

Lawbreakers break laws. More at 11. But seriously, what clearer indicator do we need of people who think that the rule of law is a joke? If people believe traffic laws will be enforced, they will act accordingly. If they believe traffic laws will not be enforced, they will also act accordingly.
Warren Wells, AICP

If only we were prepared to tackle catastrophic climate change the way we are in the off chance everyone on the planet drives their car to the mall on the same day:


Tom Flood

Shouting into the wind, at this point, but I wish people would stop talking about the threat Trump poses to "democracy" and start talking about the threat he poses to "freedom."
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social

My kid has never been served juice (nutritional understanding has changed a lot since my '80s childhood), and as a result, she just referred to the juice at the bottom of a bowl of frozen raspberries as “the broth.”
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

I may be just a small-town political scientist, but I reckon that if retired four-star generals are calling Donald Trump a fascist and billionaires are behaving like he’s a fascist, then Trump is probably a fascist.
Daniel Drezner

If only we were prepared to tackle catastrophic climate change the way we are in the off chance everyone on the planet drives their car to the mall on the same day.
Tom Flood

A republic, if you can keep it
Keep it: 49%
Don't keep it: 48%
Undecided: 3%
Pwnallthethings

I'd submit that the possible next president of the united states being like "I need to be more like Hitler" might be a bigger anti-semitism issue than college sophomores chanting "from the river to the sea palestine will be free" at a campus protest?
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

Silos and public art for the win:


Ady rides bikes @jardlshd.bsky.social

a very weird thing that perhaps I will come back to in a few days is that Donald Trump is running around explicitly threatening to jail people for political speech and I haven't seen a single one of America's many high-profile self-professed free speech warriors say shit about it.
Jamison Foser

When Harris took over from Biden I was like "thank god this campaign is only going to take 100 days" but now I realize that is at least 30 days too long.
Michael Hobbes

one thing I have never understood is how in coverage if one side sticks up for lgbtq rights it is treated as unhealthy focus on a boutique issue but if the other side attacks those same people it is treated as effective messaging
Gerry Doyle @mgerrydoyle.bsky.social

A single small project in England that reclaimed old farmland as a salt marsh captured more carbon than all the direct air carbon capture plants in the world projected for the next decade. Where are the billions of dollars for this proven climate solution?
Aaron W. Gordon

The extent (and volume) of global sea ice cover is currently the lowest on record for this time of year, even surpassing last year's outlier. Woah:


Zack Labe

It seems pretty likely that Elon Musk is about to engage on a rash of campaign finance law violations the likes of which we’ve never seen because he has calculated, likely correctly, that he will never face a consequence he can’t afford to pay. billionaires are a threat to democracy and our tax policies should reflect that
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social

We're spending billions on ads to persuade just 200,000 voters. Imagine spending a tenth of that on organizers who can activate the millions of discouraged Americans who will sit out this election.
L O L G O P

Bidenism [Bidenomics] has been the refutation of supply-side economics that we've been demanding for 40 years and if we don't acknowledge it and support its continuation under Harris, we will be living in supply-side hell for another generation.
Constant Screams @ajaxsinger.bsky.social

i always think about the fact that both california and texas, whose lawmakers agree on almost nothing, have chosen to keep sports betting illegal as strong evidence that this shit is way too dangerous to touch
@dansolomon.bsky.social

Sometimes borage has amazing colors:


amohr

Stunning how seamlessly and shamelessly heterodox types pivot from “free speech!” to gleefully championing aggressive crackdowns on Palestine protesters, with no attempt to explain the discrepancy.
Radley Balko

Under federal election law, paying people to register to vote, including via entry to a lottery, is illegal. Under Pennsylvania law, any unregulated lottery is illegal. Under federal law, a PAC coordinating and campaigning with a candidate is illegal. I'm in the camp that says laws should matter.
Nicholas Grossman

Asked about threats against FEMA workers (that he inspired), Trump basically says they had it coming
Aaron Rupar

Project 2025's chapter on transportation essentially redefines "public transit" as anything a member of the public uses for transport. Under this definition, private-hailing would qualify for all kinds of government subsidies.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

[women are lonely]: well, women just need to lower their standards, change themselves, and put other people's needs first
[men are lonely]: well, women just need to lower their standards, change themselves, and put other people's needs first
Janel Comeau @verybadllama.bsky.social

every year that passes Citizens United looks worse. arguably top 10 worst Supreme Court decision in history at this point
ryan cooper

Election choices: affordable efficient climate-resilient homes OR you pay a private company to know the weather forecast
Costa Samaras

What better way to celebrate a disconcertingly hot late October Monday in Minnesota than to bike 37 miles past dry brittle trees suffering 3 months of drought for a beautiful view of an oil refinery on the banks of the Mighty Mississippi:


Dan Marshall @danmarstp.bsky.social

it's quite simple: Elon Musk is attempting to buy the election so he can steal billions of dollars from the public
ryan cooper

It's the refusal to enforce the insurrection and emoluments clause that really broke me. The text clearly says these things are aren't allowed. And the original meanings cover pretty much exactly what happened now. But it felt unfair to some to enforce them, so pundits and judges just said "nah."
Jonathan Ladd @jonmladd.bsky.social

I continue to rise in opposition to redefining “blue collar” and “working class” to mean “person of any wealth, profession, or education level, who holds right-wing culture war views.” Definitions that are connected to material reality in some manner are better.
Nicholas Grossman

Elon Musk doing election crimes out in the open is another (terribly bleak) reminder that there is no law anymore, there is only power.
Denny Carter @cdcarter13.bsky.social

If you're at the airport and the pilot says he's going to crash the plane, you refuse to board. You don't say "well, he says lots of crazy things and the first officer will keep him from doing anything too dangerous." We can argue about the exact probabilities, but you wouldn't get on that plane.
Brendan Nyhan

I think it was very nice for the Make-a-Wish Foundation to shut down that McDonalds and let little Donnie Trump play pretend at the drive thru before he finally succumbs to the ravages of tertiary syphilis
Kevin M. Kruse

Side by side, same bush, I don't know how it does it:


Scott B @justadood.bsky.social

Hey headline writers: “Arnold Palmer Cock Tale” is sitting right there for you.
Ward Q. Normal

Nothing better is going to happen on TV today than a Speaker named Johnson flipping out because Jake Tapper keeps saying "penis."
Mark Harris

The gaslighting of living through the media spiking Howard Dean for yelling funny, swift boating Kerry, even Hillarys emails, to watch them shrug as a blood and soil coup-attempting rapist spends 15 minutes at a rally talking about Arnold Palmers giant hog is extremely fucked up
Vicky ACAB

"Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes."
Adam Bonin

I have adopted Ta-Nehesi Coates position on the Israeli-Palestinan discourse where talking about the "complexity" of the situation is a red herring for avoiding the morality of it, which is *extremely* simple.
Unobtanium Daydreams @shimminykricket.bsky.social

There can be no acceptable justification for the dehumanization of a population. It's a simple guiding principle.
Dr. Mansa Keita @rasmansa.bsky.social

If people can be sentenced to jail time for registering to vote when they thought they were eligible and were not, Elon Musk should be sentenced to jail time for open attempted vote buying!
Naomi Kritzer

Montreal really shows how pleasant northeastern US cities could be if they just put some limits on cars:


Jarrett Walker @humantransit.bsky.social

A billionaire blatantly breaking election laws to get his preferred candidate into power is the sort of crime that law enforcement should address immediately, rather than giving it a chance to work first and prosecuting only if it fails.
Nicholas Grossman

A really basic social principle is if you have a culture that rewards lying, bullying, and harassing people, especially in its government, you’ll end up with something that looks like a fascist society. Instead you need a culture that acts against these things with architecture to disincentivize it
@vortexegg.com

Musk's election interference (paying voters, pushing fake ads/sites, coordinating with Trump) is arguably even *more* dangerous than Trump's fascist rhetoric. That Musk appears to be operating with total impunity here is as egregious an indictment of our "system" as anything we've seen, I think.
Carlos Noreña

Developing a crank theory that talk radio is uniquely good for making reactionaries because it often reaches you when you’re driving, which is also when you’re most susceptible to psychopathic thoughts already
Matthew Downhour

i continue to be convinced that a driving, motivating factor for elon musk is that his many jenga tower endeavors are reaching critical instability and that he believes government intervention will be necessary to stabilize them. for him, harris winning probably *is* an existential threat.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

AI is a bright shiny new thing, and its energy consumption is important, but ... mundane things like driving are still many orders of magnitude worse. Back of the envelope: One AI-assisted web search is equivalent to driving about 11 feet in an average US car. Reducing vehicle miles traveled by 3%, or improving fuel efficiency by 3%, would reduce GHG emissions by more than shutting down all the cloud computing (AI and non-AI) in the US. Of course we can address both, but comparing magnitudes is helpful for setting priorities.
Jonathan Gilligan

If cycling is a cult, then whose temples are these?


Warren Wells, AICP

Trump's policies and Supreme Court Justices actively dismantled the food safety inspection apparatus and now we deal with goddam food recalls literally every week and some people out here want to RE-ELECT that man? I mean come the fuck on.
@wolvendamien.bsky.social

A new 11,766-km2 area off the Central California coast was officially designated the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary by NOAA last week. The sanctuary is the first ever designed with the involvement of Indigenous groups.
Ada Palmer

I would LOVE if some reporter asked Trump, "you have lost the popular vote twice. Why are you so unpopular? Why do so many Americans not support you?"
ApocalypticaNow

Zoning in theory: clear rules about what you can build, and where
Zoning in practice: subjective Rube Goldberg corruption machine
Building code in theory: scientific design rules to protect people’s health and safety
Building code in practice: superstition, tradition, and self-interest, codified
Max Dubler

zoning in theory: you can’t build a pollution factory next to that apartment complex
zoning in practice: you can only build that apartment complex next to the pollution factory
@aceckhouse.bsky.social

THIS IS HUGE! Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a vaccine against the bacterium Clostridioides difficile (C.diff), that in preclinical studies, protected against succumbing from infection AND prevented recurring cases. Let’s talk about that!
Chise @sailorrooscout.bsky.social

One reason why marginal tax rates should be extremely high is so oligarchs don't start buying votes and straight up blowing up popular sovereignty
Concept of a Professor @darinself.bsky.social

Today is World Menopause Day. It is one of the least-researched and treated conditions in the world when almost every women in the world will suffer from at least some symptoms. If 1/100th of the $ spent on erectile dysfunction was spent for women, there would be so much impact.
quick13

I dream that one day our sidewalks will be as wide as our trucks:


Tom Flood

Supporting Trump means believing Harris will do all kinds of stuff she has never mentioned (banning cows and cars! voting rights for migrants!), while insisting Trump won’t do the crazy shit he’s openly promising.
Radley Balko

It's been interesting watching the legacy media very slowly almost sort of catch up with what some of us have been saying about techno-fascists for years now. We told you the industry that's eating every other industry was fascist, cult-y, and determined to consume governance as well.
Puff the Magic Hater @mskellymhayes.bsky.social

In wonderful salmon news, Chinook have returned for the first time in 60 years to the upper reach of the Klamath River, only 2 weeks after the completion of the biggest dam-removal project in US history. "Salmon remember...the fish are bright, strong & beautiful."
Bathsheba Demuth

hard to think of a purer form of antisemitism than Elon Musk, who has thirty-five times more money than George Soros, complaining that Soros is manipulating the lugenpresse with his Jewish wealth
CHOAM Nomsky @thielman.bsky.social

Reminder that Musk is a federal contractor and thus what he’s doing here is illegal. Does anyone give a fuck about this? Hello, FEC?
Thomas Fuchs

On average, 113 people are affected when a person dies in road traffic, according to a study commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Transport:
42 emergency services on the road,
56 friends and acquaintances,
four closest friends,
eleven relatives.
This means countrywide traumatization.
Katja Diehl

the foundation of conservatism is the idea that the world is inherently and intractably harsh. it can’t be changed, you can only be harsh in return. solidarity just makes you a sucker.
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

"private equity-owned hospitals now account for approximately one in five for-profit hospitals in the United States":


John Schmitt @jschmittwdc.bsky.social

conservatism is inherently a political philosophy of wanting bad things to happen to people you don't like.
Cyberized

One of the things that fucks me up about the whole “parental rights” discussion when talking about LGB and especially T children is that the specific parental right they want is the right to abuse their children.
Courtney Milan

It is really weird that congress (especially the non MAGA ones) don't treat this man (and his supporters) like they actually tried to kill them. You do not have to be polite and civil to people who tried to have you actually killed – that goes beyond decorum.
Dumbstash @dnlmsstch.bsky.social

the reason why people think ongoing diversity at elite institutions is evidence of illegal behavior is because they believe that there is no way a black person could gain entry into an elite institution on their own merit. that's it.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

Walz: This might be the first time both Democrats on the ticket are gun owners. And it might also be the first time the guy on the other side can't pass a background check because he has felonies.
Aaron Rupar

Something I'm genuinely surprised I haven't heard more about this campaign is Supreme Court nominations. It's not unreasonable to think the next President could have three chances to shape the Court and Democrats need to start running against Dobbs the way Rs ran against Roe
Gillian Branstetter

How to most effectively choke off and destroy your city's economic and cultural engine in one step - surround it with oversized, loud, and polluting freeways and stroads. I always love this view of downtown St. Paul in ways, but hate the sea of cars:


Pedaling Professor

Donald Trump is the first presidential candidate for whom "proof of life" videos are needed in the final weeks of the campaign.
Kevin M. Kruse

Most of the criticisms of Lina Khan oddly forget to mention two things:
- she's very popular with the actual public
- she's constantly taking aim at obvious consumer pain points past regulators spent 30 years ignoring
one last thing: Republicans are currently using the corrupt Supreme Court to effectively and successfully dismantle what's left of corporate oversight and consumer protection. but oddly, week after week, I see more stories talking about Khan's "radical" agenda than I do those efforts
Karl Bode

Trump did a Fox News “town hall” with an all-woman audience and *started* the event by mocking the family of a woman who bled out and died because of GOP policy. And that audience of mostly white women LAUGHED. Loudly. Go watch it. And don’t you ever in your life blame or pressure black voters.
Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social

lol hat on a hat indeed:


Chris Hayes

Every rich person is a libertarian right up until they realize the only mechanism for contract enforcement without the rule of law is drug cartels killing each other’s entire families
CHOAM Nomsky @thielman.bsky.social

"While transit costs rose 28.7 percent between 2019 and 2023, the cost of buying and fueling a car rose 72 percent during the same period."
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

Driving the speed limit or below is the most rebellious thing you can do in modern times. Scream and shout all you want behind me and tail me as close as you want when I’m driving "slow" in our neighbourhoods. The anxiety you’re giving me pales in comparison to the relief of being able to stop in time if a child runs out on the street.
Tom Flood

Something the anti-trans right does is manufacture controversy around individual parts of a trans person's existence to allow a lot of people who don't think of themselves as hateful to nonetheless adopt positions that, at their core, reject trans people's subjectivity over our own lives. Consider care trans care in prison. It seems like an edge case, but in order to get there you have to first believe our health care is frivolous and excessive rather than a human right, a position that requires you first ignore trans people's experiences having their lives saved by it.
Gillian Branstetter

The chances of me and my family getting killed by the military for peacefully protesting go from zero to “it could absolutely happen” just from this violent lunatic becoming President.
Grudgie the Whale

The framing is always “women have to be nicer to men” - the idea that they might be the problem isn’t even considered. This is also true for a lot of reporting on men in general. You will read a million articles saying “society is too mean to men” before you read any saying “a sizable contingent of men are refusing to adapt to societal changes”
Little Miss Neurosis @phantasm.bsky.social

As a climate scientist, here’s 3 things I wish everyone knew:
1. How much of our current warming is human-caused? All of it + then some.
2. What happens from year to year? That’s weather. For climate, see decadal trends.
3. What’s the most important thing you can do? Not recycling; this:


Katharine Hayhoe

someone asked me yesterday if i thought the political press had learned any lessons from the previous years for covering Trump and not only was my answer “no” but i think they’ve gotten even worse. more solipsistic, more obsessed with theater criticism, more willing to be manipulated.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

"There is no GOP governor in the US that fears Harris’ presidency on the grounds that if something bad happens to their states, the federal government will abandon them."
Greg Sargent

"One party is made up of public servants and the other just isn't." –Brian Beutler
@heartonastick.bsky.social

IMO this is an under-discussed part of the average person's sense of financial precariousness. When economists say inflation is going down, job growth good, they fail to take into account that ppl are paying to replace every single household appliance every 8-10 years now. Phones/laptops every 3-5
G. Willow Wilson

There's something distinctly American that our fascism comes in the form of a game show host who rants about concentration camps and banning dissent before cutting himself off to listen to Y.M.C.A. and "Cats."
Andy Craig

why is it that, every single time, the people claiming "the media doesn't matter, stop bugging them, the press can't affect public opinion" are... journalists
Will Stancil

Do they think people organically cared about Hillary Clinton's private email server? The thing that the previous 2-3 Secretaries of State also did but didn't admit to at the time? Could the difference perhaps have been the 44 articles written on it in 30 days, most of which were on the front page?
Charlie Thomas @cthomasjamh.bsky.social

a mass timber multigenerational cooperative... with abundant outdoor space, community space, solar protection... pretty slick project by werkpunkt architekten. Photo by Thomas Telley:


Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

From "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to "Hey, man, it's not our job to point out that Donald Trump is a barely coherent, lying fascist."
Simply Ed @gojira65.bsky.social

Drivers honestly believe that *being late* exempts them from traffic laws.
Warren Wells, AICP

Underrated reason so many men in the United States are angry and consumed with feelings of powerlessness and rage is that many of them in the last 10 years have given away their financial security in scams, ponzi schemes, online gambling, crypto etc
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

I swear, we could get cities to change a lot faster if we took away the city council members’ car keys for a month.
Nick @thesunglasskid.bsky.social

strikes me that there's a parallel between Israel and the anti-antisemitism movement, and the Soviet Union and the international working-class movement. in both cases a principled politics was cynically looted for the short term interests of a particular state. when Stalin jerked around the international communist parties for his own purposes, they eventually became empty husks or just collapsed. I suspect something similar will happen to the ADL etc, sooner or later
ryan cooper

A troll on twitter asked me "Who are you?" and I replied "I'm nobody! Who are you?" and it made me laugh and laugh and I know it's so specific but my college prof who's an Emily Dickinson scholar would be proud, I think.
amityf

Reading through the SCOTUS amicus briefs in support of a gender-affirming care ban (this one filed by chapters of the Family Policy Alliance) and they're basically arguing there is no such thing as a social determinant of health and trans people's suffering is their own problem
Gillian Branstetter

The assumptions and beliefs that drive the climate crisis are unlikely to deliver us safely out of the climate crisis. Most people and leaders don't believe that and instead push harder on the same dangerous levers.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

A reminder to Americans. In none of our lifetimes:


Nnedi Okorafor, PhD

NYT OPINION: America Needs a Candidate Who's Willing to Rock Back and Forth for 39 Minutes to the Weird Songs he Likes
Jeff Mac @jeffmacishere.bsky.social

I have been thinking how just a few months ago the big story was we can't add more electric cars to the grid because it will collapse. But now we can add unlimited AI energy eating server farms no problem. Its frustrating.
The Angry Old Geek

What we already knew, but has come into question lately. Blacks and Latinos do better under Democratic administrations.
Thinkerbelle

I do not think it is ideal that we are raising a political generation to whom the entire concept of scandal - that there might be something a politician does or says that materially harms their campaign - seems like a quaint anachronism
Micah @rincewind.run

anyone who looks back to the democratic party of roosevelt or johnson or even carter as an example of ideological coherence and forthright adherence to a set of broad and inviolable beliefs needs to read more. “the democratic party is a cobbled together and ideologically incoherent coalition of disparate and often mutually antagonistic interests” has been true since it was founded to elect andrew jackson in 1828 and is arguably less true now that it has ever been in its history
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

In a normal campaign there’d be repercussions for a guy that pardoned or commuted a half dozen or so people who went on to commit more crimes.
Schooley

People like to underestimate the value of just good old fashioned freedom in the most banal sense of that word, and also underestimate the sheer horror of its absence. One of the problems with the mainline liberal or even Hayekian critique of "communism" is that it is too elaborate. The reason why Stalinism was horrible has relatively little to do with market inefficiencies and everything to do with tyranny. Also like honestly there are many horrible things about the communist movement that have absolutely nothing to do with misunderstandings of human nature and absolutely everything with "you can't just give a small unaccountable group of people absolute power."
drow zelensky @dov.bsky.social

It doesn’t even register amid… everything else, but it’s wild that after months of fearmongering about harm to pets, Trump brought the woman who bragged about shooting her own dog to close the deal in a crucial swing state.
Tim Carvell

Reminder that for as hot as our summers have been lately, most of Minnesota's climate change has taken place in the winter. Not only have Minnesota winters been getting warmer, the season itself is getting shorter and shorter. Note that the northern half of our state has warmed the most:


Christine_Mpls

watching a showtime documentary on the supreme court (it’s fine) and it  occurred to me that the choice in november is between someone who represents a legacy of Brown and someone who embodies the opposition to it. you can vote for the america of thurgood marshall or that of orval faubus.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

none of the usual suspects covered Trump calling half of America "scum," because Republicans have always had a special dispensation to delegitimize others that Democrats have never had
@jesseltaylor.bsky.social

"Pedestrian deaths are highest in formerly redlined areas ... Governments invest in roads for people driving through such neighborhoods, but not in safety measures—like sidewalks, crosswalks, traffic circles, and speed bumps—that protect people living in them."
Gravel Influencer

more jobs should be like baseball. I should get four months off every year when the weather starts getting cold and then I should get six weeks in florida to remember how to do my job again before the real work starts. also I shouldn’t have to work more than three hours at a time or when it rains.
@garlicbuffalo.gobirds.biz

not to be a snobby cyclist but i passed by a 3 car rear-end pileup that almost certainly totalled one of the cars and all i could think is that the situation wouldn't have happened had they been on ebikes. we need better bike infrastructure immediately. people should not  drive at 6am.
@juicysteak117.gay

Insurance companies should pay us to ride our e-bikes.
Iam Onlyjess

Despite representing just 13% of journeys and being owned by 33% of households, cars take up more than half of the public space in Paris. Which is why Mayor Anne Hidalgo is removing 70,000 of its 140,000 on-street parking spaces, to make the city greener and more people-friendly.
Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife.bsky.social

It is striking how it is absolutely standard to act as though the huge distortions created by government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, which are far larger than those created by tariffs, are just part of the market rather than the result of government policy.
Dean Baker

Declaring how much one admires a dictator because he 'rules with an iron fist' would instantly doom a Presidential candidate's campaign in saner times. MAGA is one of the most un-American movements to have ever come out of America.
Scorpion Fella @jeffengert.bsky.social

Always shit-talking America and pining for pathetic dictators and criminals to “rule” America with “iron fists.” He will get what’s coming to him and it’s not going to be pleasant for him. Or his disciples.
Citizen E

Here is the part NOBODY ever gets about bail reform: Pretrial incarceration causes MORE CRIME than cash bail prevents. WHY? Because arrest and pretrial incarceration put people in crisis, even when they are innocent they lose jobs, and can't support their families...it creates massive insecurity
joshuabhoe.bsky.social

People will say, "the schools are really good" when they mean just mean, "only rich families can afford to live there."
Warren Wells, AICP

it's funny how closing off neighborhood roads to car traffic for 2 hours would basically solve Halloween, but the thought doesn't even occur to most people
Joad The Wet Sprocket

With 6000 sample loan apps, “chatbots recommended denials for more Black applicants than identical white counterparts. They also recommended Black applicants be given higher interest rates, and labeled Black and Hispanic borrowers as ‘riskier.’”
Hypervisible

Barriers:


Tom Flood

After WWII, women were called "crazy" for wanting to keep the "men's" jobs they'd held (and the affordable public childcare they'd been given) during the war. Now, the GOP is using that same playbook to gaslight women for protesting the fall of Roe.
Jess Calarco

republicans are right in that there are absolutely immigrants working to destroy the US, it's just that those immigrants are elon musk, rupert murdoch and peter thiel
Shiv Ramdas @nameshiv.bsky.social

love when someone says "historians will look back in horror" and historians chime in like "we are presently horrified also", great times to live in
Ingrid Burrington @lifewinning.com

In February 2016 The Federalist (yes, THAT Federalist) published an article that gave 5 reasons why every American should oppose Donald Trump. Reason 5 was "Trump Is an American Fascist."
Seth Cotlar

Someday, I think we look back at this month and wonder how we all kept putting one foot in front of the other, going to work, feeding the kids and pets, with the flashing lights of fascism and climate chaos going off in all directions, and so much riding on the thinnest of margins.
Kate Starbird

this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with zoom meetings and carpool.
Big Demon Energy @mayawest.online

it's fun to remember how the political media rose up as one to absolutely murk Howard Dean for an inadvertently too loud expression of harmless enthusiasm; when they want to end someone, they let everybody know
Jason Linkins @dceiver.bsky.social

Sometimes you find some art by someone where you can't help but mourn that they missed the internet by nearly three centuries:


Jess McLaughlin, PhD (they/them) @jfmclaughlin92.bsky.social

i am essentially unable to get into the headspace of a person who sees trump rant and rave and thinks to themselves “i trust this guy to decide on whether to use nuclear weapons”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I don’t think they think that way. it seems clear that those in his base are all stark raving mad with irrational fear of invading brown people. it’s all they think about. it’s the same visceral fear evoked by zombie films. except they don’t realize that they are themselves the zombies.
Lance Ellisor

From a purely data driven perspective, you’d make the country safer from sexual assault by deporting Donald Trump than any random undocumented dimmigrant.
Peter Sagal

There is no one who hates more Americans than Donald Trump. He’s badmouthed multiple cities and states, trashed entire races, even called soldiers killed in battle “losers.” He’s the scum the rest of us have to deal with
Kevin M. Kruse

when trump says "our country," he means "trump"
Tom Tomorrow

The people who recognized Trump’s fascism in 2016 were ruthlessly mocked with shit like “everything I don’t like is fascism” and now he’s literally vowing an immigrant Holocaust.
Grudgie the Whale

Lemme get this straight: the people apoplectic about immigrants taking our jobs, would like to replace our jobs with robots? It’s almost as if, wait , no that couldn’t be…
Wes Burdine

Instead of reporting outside in a hurricane to show viewers how windy or wet it is, TV journalists should report from an oil refinery and explain why the world has become so dangerous.
David Ho

Seeing how many nearly abandoned cars there are in Minneapolis (and St Paul) has been a revelation of running the alleys. Technically not abandoned, they're on the owners property. But you can tell they've not been driven in a long time. This is the most scenic version I've seen:


Evan Roberts @evanrobertsnz.bsky.social

Eric Trump on Fox & Friends claims fentanyl killed 300,000 children (!!!) in America THIS YEAR. (Fentanyl killed less than 15,000 Americans total in 2022, so yeah ... no)
Aaron Rupar

GUNS & CARS killed 300K
quick13

Tesla’s Optimus robots walked out into the crowd after the new Robovan reveal. It will be able to “babysit your kids, walk your dog,” Elon Musk said
Phil Lewis

I would be surprised if these are compliant with any laws, much less the Three Laws
Greedo

Evil right wing fascist billionaire building a robot army while owning a fleet of satellites that blanket the sky. what possibly could go wrong?
Bryan Formhals @dromomaniampls.bsky.social

The tech crowd wants to improve the bus by making it easier to exclude people they don’t like or even want to see from riding it. That’s the only real “innovation” going on here.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social

The reason why people keep accidentally reinventing the humble city bus is because it's an amazing piece of transportation technology and difficult to improve upon. As for why they get such a bad rap, it very often just comes down to classism.
Ned Resnikoff

I have invented a city bus, but less practical, please give me all the startup money
Tom Tomorrow

Is it also very likely to kill all occupants?
Chrissy @gonyr24.bsky.social

We found the weather machines:


The War on Cars

It sounds dumb but I think it is genuinely hard to understand: all this incredible reorganization of American society — the subservience of an entire political party, the fracturing of reality/elevation of the most absurd lies, the sheer concept of presidential immunity — all that for THIS fucking guy?
Dave Levitan

It definitely makes me think a lot about what I think I know about History and other moments where societies have fractured.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social

400 ads a day here in Wisconsin that make the Willie Horton ad look like it belongs on PBS Kids
Patrick Iber

You’re all being really insensitive to me, a person who has never witnessed an aurora. I won’t forget this.
Tyler King

So if our work gets stolen and used to take our jobs and then we get asked to correct the terrible AI decisions and hallucinations (and autocarrot) so things can keep moving, that means AI is just basically at the end of the day replacing bad managers. Did I get that right.
Fran Wilde

The Trump Bibles are made in China and sold at a 2,000% markup and it's not really much of a story?
D Lavoie @djlavoie.bsky.social

In Ancient Rome an entire class of people ate by ingratiating themselves to richer people so they’d get invited to dinner. And the rest of the people got takeout, and free bread from the state, daily. We don’t even get fucking free bread now. Eat however you can
Lizzy Bored-on Roderick @talesfrompurgatory.bsky.social

What is standing in the way of decriminalizing abortion once and for all? The refusal to let go of the myth that we need laws to keep “the wrong people” from “misusing” abortion services.
RHAvote

How did Paris become a cycling city? By carving out a substantial portion of roadway for bikes:


Qagggy!

Political news media has decided basically en masse that Trump deserves a mulligan for his entire first term
Daniel Gilmore @gilmored85.bsky.social

Occurs to me that part of the reason why NYT/Politico/et al are mad about their lack of access to Harris is because without access the political desk is totally adrift. There’s shockingly little capacity to, say, read campaign policy papers and find the story in there.
Ned Resnikoff

Remember Octavius Catto today, on the anniversary of his death. He helped register thousands of African Americans to vote after the Civil War, and led efforts to integrate streetcars in Philadelphia. He was murdered on Election Day in 1871 as he attempted to vote.


Ryan Godfrey @rgo.bsky.social

I feel like if you're cleaning up stuff like 'immigrants have bad blood infecting our vital fluids' into 'lifelong interest in genetics' you're doing so knowing what you're doing and knowing that its not at all illuminating as to what was actually said
Lord Businessman II

Just heard this quote from some prospective voter, on NPR: “I’m not sexist, but if she were a man she would 100% have my vote… I just don’t think the WORLD is ready”
@pronounced-ing.bsky.social

I think the reporting that trump gave covid testing stuff to putin is not quite emphasizing trump didn’t give that ratfuck twizzler nose sticks, he gave him lab machines US hospitals were begging for to test their clinical staff. So they would have a chance at not dying
hammancheez

Book Cover of the Day:


Rachel Deering

seems obvious to me but haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet: a big reason that the GOP is running so many anti-trans ads despite their (apparent) ineffectiveness is because the top GOP megadonor is elon musk who is obsessed with attacking trans people because he hates his own trans daughter.
Michael Tae Sweeney @mtsw.bsky.social

This headline stack is one for the time capsule. First, analyzing Harris's message discipline, which is common to normie politicians, as if it's uniquely revealing and shifty. Second, framing Trump's openly racist, completely dishonest stump rhetoric as if it's quirky and full of subtle meaning.


Mollie Wilson O'Reilly


Hemry, Local Bartender @bartenderhemry.bsky.social

The "genetics" bit here isn't even bad framing, it's just straight-up false. The man knows nothing about genetics, he's not sitting up poring over the latest mRNA paper in Nature. His "fascination" is with racist eugenics. That has as much to do with genetics as flat-earthers do with physics.
Andy Craig

“Trump is interested in genetics” is not a fucking story. “Trump thinks whites are genetically superior” is a HUGE FUCKING STORY and one that is true!
Grudgie the Whale

I cannot over-emphasize the colossal loser energy of taking a platform [Twitter] where once the biggest stars in the history of popular culture voluntarily posted original content every day because they enjoyed it into a pyramid scheme where the worst dipshits on earth pay to be fake friends with each other.
@rob-sheridan.com

Elon wants to run a Nazi bar that is also a Nazi carnival where people pay to play rigged games in the hope of winning attention and pennies
@booktweeting.bsky.social

It's not like there's any mystery whatsoever about why hurricanes are so much bigger, deadlier and more expensive these days. Climate folks have been warning you of exactly this for decades. It's time to grow up and face our problems now.


Bentley @bentleyitems.bsky.social

FYI, Lina Khan is the reason why Elon is all-in on Trump. And the rest of those insufferable techbros. They are afraid of her, and for good reason.
Kelly Barnhill

here's a photo to add to my file of "climate change insanity"


Bill Lindeke

Every job that entails maintaining a functioning and healthy society is actively under attack at both the professional level and, if you are unlucky, the individual level
@vortexegg.com

I do think it is INCREDIBLY fucking ironic to vote for Jill Stein on a basis of "refusing to support genocide" when that loathsome woman has consistently helped Assad and Putin push their own blood-soaked agendas.
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social

"There is no precedent for this at all: a former president in regular private conversation with any foreign head of state, but especially one that is actively hostile to the United States."
Greg Sargent

It’s incredibly frustrating that there are no discernible consequences for this major federal contractor who consistently acts against the interests of the united states, on disaster relief and a whole host of other issues:


southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social

the media continues to portray john roberts as a hapless victim of modern reactionary politics when he is in fact one of its primary architects
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

Nobel prize in physics for … AI research? Come on, there’s a ton of amazing work happening in Actual Physics! Kind of outraged.
@lmcboy.bsky.social

Okay does Bob Woodward know any other absurd things about Trump he would like to share rather than sitting on them for years until another book comes out
Dave Levitan

In a society that actually cared about things like accountability or integrity or anything other than "as much power as you can grab, held as tightly as possible," learning that a Supreme Court Justice's entire vetting process was a sham would be cause for said Justice's immediate removal. Ah well.
@wolvendamien.bsky.social

Don’t mean to brag, but I’ve been selected by my bank to provide essential feedback on the customer experience.
@dorsalstream.bsky.social

In all the outcry over the ridiculous NYT "undecided" focus groups, why don't we see more pointing fingers at the fact that it's being run by Frank Fucking Luntz! He's a rabid partisan who is arguably one of the top architects of the modern GOP, but the NYT just credits him as "pollster"!
Jason Mittell

A paper out of New York University on social media finds "0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news," and "74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities"
Phil Lewis

Wow. I knew the shit-stirrers were a minority, but not this much of a minority.
N. K. Jemisin

The Midwest is going to be haven for Americans from climate change, but we need local leaders to prepare for that. More housing, better funded services, expanded public transportation, etc. in order for the "Rust Belt" to evolve into its next form.
The Alternate Historian

the press loves interviewing guys named like “geoff in dayton” who is “an undecided voter who retired from the welding business and now runs a local civic organization” - and then 5 seconds on facebook tells you he’s never voted dem, was an accountant at a steel multinational and runs the local klan
@rickywlmsbong.bsky.social

I love when the “community service” officer parks to take up the whole sidewalk and leaves their empty car idling, I feel so served:


Anu Li @awil.bsky.social

Remember this, again and again, when people ask where the peaceful Palestinians are: they are dead.
Fatima Ayub @thecynicist.bsky.social

You can be a giant baby about it all you want, but even the most absurd-seeming Russia Russia Russia shit people complain about all the time was right. They were paying rightwing influencers and Putin was effectively a friend and mentor to Trump the whole time.
Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social

Up until recently we had a heathy distrust of “businessmen” but now we’ve been programmed to think of them as our benefactors. It’s like we’ve reverted to a feudal mindset where we’re peasants worshiping the king
David Kuhne

[60 Minutes] asking a Black and Indian American woman how she is going to fix America’s centuries old racism and misogyny is not, in fact, a good question.
OuterBoroPrincess @outerbororoyal.bsky.social

also the question was not that trump was a racist POS but that harris claimed he was and not that people supported the racist pos but harris was accusing them of that. it was a bad faith question framed to get harris to repeat the deplorables thing
darth

I’m sorry, what the fuck? You expect Harris to explain why racists like a racist candidate who gives them permission to hate even harder? And you expect her to somehow “bridge that gap?”
@jweland.bsky.social

Millions of Americans are racist. Kamala Harris obviously can't say that for political reasons but it's still true ... and we want her to do it on air, in a live interview, so she can't take it back.
@wikisteff.bsky.social

Blame:


Tom Flood

Climate change isn't only a threat multiplier it is also an inequity exposer.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social

It is genuinely disturbing to see The Democrats Are Controlling the Weather go almost *mainstream* as a thing Republicans believe. That was, not long ago, something only genuinely delusional people would believe or say in public.
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social

Feels like the widespread “pandemic” psychosis was a real watershed moment, and a harbinger of how people would process climate-induced cognitive dissonance
Ned Resnikoff

My next door neighbor’s terrifying Halloween decorations:


@mitch-alexandria.bsky.social

“I don't really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.” –The Message by Te-Nehisi Coates
Saeed Jones @theferocity.bsky.social

The GOP base savaged Chris Christie for the sin of putting aside partisanship and working with Obama to help his constituents after Hurricane Sandy. The rest of the party got the message — don’t work with a Democrat, even if it hurts your own people.
Kevin M. Kruse

The Southern Strategy and its successor, the Try to Get Your Own Constituents Killed Strategy
Ned Resnikoff

Saying elderly people shouldn't have to drive isn't ageism. Forcing elderly people to drive through bad policy is.
Warren Wells, AICP

Trump, basically: "People with inferior genes should be purged from the country. Also, why aren't more Jews voting for me?"
Radley Balko

90% of florida residents believe climate change is happening. less than half want to pay $10/month to attempt to mitigate or adapt to it. we are not serious about climate adaptation.
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

“The harms imposed by the Rivian [electric truck] are three times the harms imposed by the Prius, in terms of air pollution and death from accidents, but we are subsidizing the Rivian and not the Prius.”  –Stanford prof Hunt Allcott
David Zipper

There are no climate refuges, but there are climate hellholes: The Great Florida Migration Is Coming Undone
David Brauer

Way ahead of ya...


John Lipponen

What a real, sincere conversion looks like: “I’m learning things every day about God and they are shining out of me, I can’t keep it in”
What Russell Brand’s conversion looks like: “I have learned one thing about Jesus, which is that he thinks I’m great.”
Naomi Alderman

Just this one provision in the Inflation Reduct Act – $1.5 billion for green infrastructure to cool down cities – would have been a career-defining climate win a decade ago. The Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act is a huge climate win. Let’s do another one.
Costa Samaras

I think if you described the Trump/Vance campaign to someone in 2014 as a hypothetical everyone would agree this is textbook fascism. But now that it’s actually happening it’s verboten to say so
Grudgie the Whale

[The damage in western NC] is tragic, but I don't think "more and better insurance" is a core climate adaptation strategy. Climate risk doesn't fit the insurance model, which is to widely distribute the costs of low-probability, high-impact events. Risk pooling doesn't help with high-probability, high-impact events.
Zane Selvans

Pretty on-the-nose that the New York Times' "political roundtable" is 100% white people, three out of four them white men, and the frame is all horserace, no material stakes:


laura olin

GOP: We oppose RELATIVISM, POSTMODERNISM, and REVISIONIST HISTORY. We are for TRUTH, FACTS, and OBJECTIVITY.
Literally Anyone: Who won the 2020 US Presidential Election?
GOP: Questions like this are fundamentally undecidable; indeed, it is impossible to meaningfully ask them. As Lyotard showed, th
Kieran Healy

politics is, by nature, full of spin and bending the truth but it really feels like we’ve crossed a threshold with the extent and scope of the lies coming from Republicans these days. standing in front of a blue sky telling people it’s green, and blaming it all on migrants
Micah @rincewind.run

“you shouldn’t lie or spread lies to make your point even if you think your point is true” is apparently a very unpopular opinion these days
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

I mean I realize no one enforces our campaign finance laws anymore but isn’t the head of a superpac and a candidate appearing together a problem?
Kevin Collins

i would like to observe and note here how wildly inappropriate it is for a major defense and aerospace contractor to appear on stage with a presidential candidate at a political rally and tell brazen lies about voting
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

Your reminder that, less than two weeks ago, far-right House Republicans stripped the $10 billion supplemental for FEMA’s disaster relief out of the government funding bill, even though the DRF was already out of money, Helene was on its way, and we were in the middle of hurricane season.
Bobby Kogan

Your regular reminder that four years ago Trump declared that stocks would crash if he lost the election:


Paul Krugman

I FOIA’d the FTC for consumer complaints about Truth Social and users are getting scammed out of so much money
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social

We stopped adding seats to Congress after the 1910 census. Alabama had ~2.1 million residents. California had ~2.3 million. The US is a grown adult country basically wearing its baby clothes, as far as our government is concerned
Kaitlin Has Had Enough @gothamgirlblue.com

Every national disaster or tragedy now immediately has bad actors injecting political disinformation into the news bloodstream which is amplified and led by the world’s richest/most pathetic man and then amplified by a walled off news ecosystem to a sizable portion of the country. Analysis: not great
Costa Samaras

I think what a lot of folks thought sports gambling would be is that your buddy puts down $20 on their favourite team to win a playoff series, but that's not the core of any kind of gambling. It's always about finding the people who will lose compulsively. That's *the whole point* of the industry.
draglikepull

Trump 2024 is like if 9/11 were a Presidential candidate, and its message was “9/11 was great, actually” and “Weren’t you better off during 9/11?” and “What everyone wants is another 9/11”
Thanks For Sharing, Jerk @thx4sharingjerk.bsky.social

Large fluffy Teddy Bear sunflowers growing at the local allotment:


Deana @dsz.bsky.social

Who do you trust more to fix America's rent affordability crisis? VP of an administration that's taking shady landlords to court over alleged price fixing schemes? Or an actual shady landlord?
Robert Reich

Lead poisoning kills more people than HIV and malaria combined. Now the first-ever global public-private partnership has committed $150 million to end lead poisoning in children in developing countries once and for all.
Ada Palmer

Really tough couple years for all the folks rooting for a recession!


Denny Carter @cdcarter13.bsky.social

I disagree with [people who say you can vote for a third party in a "safe" Blue state]. 1) Voting frivolously in a non-swing state is free-riding on the moral labor of others — show solidarity. 2) The Electoral College is an antidemocratic travesty. Vote as if it didn't exist to heighten its absurdity—massive popular vote wins with EC losses erodes EC legitimacy.
Paul Crider

So, under current law, the President can execute political opponents with no legal consequences, but cannot forgive student loans. Seems reasonable.
Mike Masnick

so much ink is spilled about how Democrats need to be a party for the entire country, especially rural white voters, but it's just taken as a given that Trump will quite literally refuse disaster aid to people who didn't vote for him. this all on its own should have been grounds for impeachment
Micah @rincewind.run

Walz did much better [in the debate] than people are giving him credit for. This is how degraded things have gotten. He was a bit awkward but steady, decent and knowledgeable. We’ve become so accustomed to the gutter politics Trump revels in that a normal, nice candidate seems impossible.
Roxane Gay

I did not realize how badly Republicans had failed in polarizing public opinion on the Electoral College over the last eight years. Excellent news:


Angus Johnston

JD Vance probably knows how to pass a lie detector test. He never seemed to physically sweat during the debate, even at points where it was clear he was cornered. Then out popped a lie or evasion.
@pattho.bsky.social

i *do* think that if trump loses, it's the beginning of the end of vance's political career, and it's the end of trump's, and those are both worth pulling out all the stops for
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE

It’s wild to see people like Tina Peters getting years in jail for election interference while Donald Trump, the FUCKING RINGLEADER OF THE CONSPIRACY, plays golf and runs for president again.
Charles Johnson @charles.littlegreenfootballs.com

Elites decided long ago that Trump is what Americans want. They've been trying their best to force Americans to acknowledge this ever since.... People are going to look back at the Trump era and wonder if there was something in the drinking water, mass hysteria, etc
ApocalypticaNow

I have been saying for the last year, cops don't want money, better equipment, etc. They want impunity and that's what Trump offers.
Jessica Pishko

Camus was exiled from the Parisian scene for being a bad (insufficiently theory pilled) leftist which is fitting given that it was Camus and his circle of bad leftists that helped push for women’s reproductive freedom in France while his ex-comrades in the Communist party denounced it as bourgeois
utopia deferred

It's insane to me that in the last five years we've apparently all agreed that random federal judges have nationwide jurisdiction to issue injunctions
Todd Bonzalez @deminimisfringe.bsky.social

James Carville is THE leading expert on winning elections, that take place in 1992, and benefit from Ross Perot splitting off 20 million votes as third-party spoiler.
Mat Johnson

Oct. 4, 1944: Minneapolis Daily Times staff photographer Powell Krueger falls to the floor to test his speed camera. Image: Hennepin County Library:


Gary Hornseth

US codes (both building and zoning) result in huge, heavily capitalized buildings w/ high rents and levels of embodied carbon, little room for open space and blue green infra. they also result in poor quality units that cannot cross ventilate. this isn't the case in other countries,
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social

it's cool that if Trump loses, election day is now understood to just be the start of a three month attempt to overturn the election because one party has decided the rules don't apply to them
Tom Tomorrow

Surprise, surprise. Microsoft wants to shift the risk for reopening Three Mile Island onto taxpayers.
Elizabeth Kolbert

A school district in Pennsylvania approved nearly $9,000 ‘to cut windows into the ‘gender-identity’ student bathrooms so passerby can look inside’
Phil Lewis

America isn't debating if Trump and Co. attempted a coup, conspiring to overthrow the Constitution of the United States to stay in power after losing reelection. Not really. America is debating whether it was bad or good (or at least acceptable), and if the people who did it should be empowered.
Nicholas Grossman

Very excited to release this paper today. By using a staggered roll-out of heat pumps in the UK, we find that: Heat pumps reduce households’ total energy use by a whopping 40%, and carbon emissions by 36%, evidencing the real-world impact of their superior efficiency over gas boilers.
Robert Metcalfe

St. Anthony Falls as It Appeared in 1848:


MIA: Paintings @miapaintings.bsky.social

conclusion from just giving a talk is that some people are extremely resistant to the idea that one party is currently the problem in american politics
jamelle @jamellebouie.net

i've started just saying "twenty gallons of water" immediately and flatly whenever someone tries to tell me how they used ChatGPT on some work project and boy it's pretty effective to dissuade people from using ChatGPT
Jesse Raub

Elon Musk regularly promotes accounts that push phony race science. He uses X to pay money to neo-Nazis. He lies about Black and Brown immigrants. He positively engages with antisemites. Musk is a white supremacist who whines and fear-mongers while continuing to accept millions in taxpayer dollars.
Nick Martin

Never forget that George Will wrote a column in 2014 saying that being a victim of rape is a coveted status young women gain privilege from and that’s why there are so many sexual assault reports on college campuses
Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social

Yes, and as a result, the women's college where I teach withdrew an invite for him to give a (very handsomely paid) lecture funded by a trustee's 'listening to conservatives' speaker fund. He then wrote at length in the press about how he was the victim of unfair speech suppression.
Sumita Pahwa

More than anything, Elon has destroyed any consequence for associating with Nazis, at least for himself. Twitter is now a never-ending Unite the Right rally, and Elon is always giving the "Very fine people on both sides" answer.
L O L G O P

amazing that the whole Trump arc is:
people reject Trump
sorry, Electoral College
people reject Trump
Trump does coup
people point out Constitutional rule barring coup-doers from running again
every pundit in America: "tsk tsk it's not legitimate unless the people reject Trump"
Jason Linkins @dceiver.bsky.social

"it's not legitimate unless the people reject Trump, but it's also unfair to encourage people to reject him by accurately describing what he believes, what he's done, or what he's likely to do"
Seth D. Michaels

Happy Peanuts Debut Day! 74 Years! This ad is from one of the seven debut newspapers, the Chicago Tribune:


@benjclark.bsky.social

Wall Street Journal: Elon Musk funded Stephen Miller's superPAC, which ran some of the nastiest, most vile and vicious anti-immigrant and anti-trans ads in 2022. "more than $50 million of Musk’s money funded a series of advertising campaigns by a group called Citizens for Sanity"
Joe Sudbay

Government is a very big mutual aid scheme
Heather Glass

The ease and comfort with which JD Vance lies, much like Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, makes one wonder just WTAF is going on at Yale Law School
Michael P. Breen @mpbreen21.bsky.social

People seem to breeze by this point a lot: Migrants, for the most part, aren't smuggling drugs. Many of them immediately surrender. Most known fentanyl trafficking is done through checkpoints, mostly by U.S. citizens, who are less likely to be searched.
Brad Heath

Like his policy proposal is "cut America off from the world, build Shangri La, breed babies there and give everyone hover cars" and media reaction is "interesting proposal here, sir"
Meanwhile the reaction to Build Back Better was "wow way too ambitious! And isn't paid parenting leave slightly unamerican?"
@convolutedname.bsky.social

I’ve said it before and will keep saying it again: the Responsible Adults (TM) of the Republican Party could have removed him, quickly and easily, by voting to impeach for Jan. 6. They had the political cover and public sentiment, at that moment, to do it. And they chose not to. Burn it down.
Jason Vorhees Bailey @jasondashbailey.bsky.social

I keep coming back to this. Trump was absolutely not rejecting his defeat. He was rejecting the very idea voters should be allowed to defeat him.
Grudgie the Whale

It has been a mistake, not just on the merits but tactically, for Democrats to essentially give up on even making the argument that Trump is ineligible to be president, and a regime with him back in the White House would be constitutionally illegitimate and owed no loyalty or obedience by any American.
Andy Craig

hey. you. move to minnesota. we wanna keep that eighth seat in congress.
@mercurymn.bsky.social

I know this will shock you but there is actually no Federal Reserve study that says mass deportations would help the housing shortage.
Eleanor, OFS @eleanorofs.bsky.social

The unspoken creed of the U.S. press is that its task is to keep the major parties in thermostatic balance — always comparable to one another, always operating from a shared moral plane. Mass deportations, given moral  equivalence to tax breaks? Impartiality between the two parties requires it:


Greg Greene

a very confused Trump confuses Kim Jong Un with the president of Iran and claims Kim Jong Un "is trying to kill me"
Aaron Rupar

The path to every better policy runs through keeping the GOP out of power. Every single one.
@clofsnitville.bsky.social

The audience for the polished, clean-cut, erudite fascists like Vance, Cotton, Youngkin, etc is not normal people; it's elite media who will tell normal people repeatedly that this guy's OK to like because he's not a scary boor like Trump.
@edburmila.bsky.social

As an Irish guy (ie a lapsed Catholic) the vibe I get from 95% of converts from Protestantism is that the main attraction is feeling you have religious cover to hate women and homosexuals, and unsurprisingly in the US context this also tracks with hating minorities.
McDaragh

Q: there's a shortage of 4 million homes in the US, and that drives up rent and mortgages. What's your plan to make it more affordable?
Walz: giving people money
Vance: seize land; ethnic cleansing
Q: are you sure ethnic cleansing will reduce house prices tho
Vance: yes. Look, we're a country of builders, a country of dreamers. A country of explorers. And we are committed to deporting all of those people.
Pwnallthethings

All the data in the world about how ridiculously good immigration is for the US is not winning against the basest blood and soil nationalism what the fuck
Carly Goodman

Vance’s two most memorable debate moments seem to have been complaining that he was supposed to be able to straight-up lie and refusing to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election, both of which should be disqualifying and also are scary given he’s a coin flip away from being VP come January 20.
Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social

Trump and Vance’s mass deportation plan would lead to a humanitarian (and economic) disaster and concentration camps, according to a historian of concentration camps.
Laura Helmuth

You ever think how weird it is that punditry is like “sure he wants to introduce a program to make women into large breeding animals that graze in meadows but is he smooth about explaining it?”
Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social

Tim Walz forced to explain how the federal government works to a U.S. Senator
Timothy Burke @bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us

JD Vance's housing policies are straight-up Nazi shit. No way to listen to him talk and not hear someone arguing that the Holocaust was a successful German housing policy. Just a despicable human and despicable party.
Jonathan Cohn

The gun trafficking across the US-Mexico border goes the opposite way than Vance said
David S. Bernstein

It's all so stupid:


Shawn Connery

the last 10 years in the US have been exquisitely designed to drive people who study totalitarian regimes and genocide absolutely weasel-shit insane
Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social

Violence begets violence, and entire generations will only know one thing: retaliation. Terrorism takes many forms.
quick13

A reminder that the election isn’t about the person at the top of the ticket as much as it is about the thousands of people they’ll put in positions of power. One candidate will give us more people like this idiot
Kevin M. Kruse

extrajudicial violence is not an example of executive power, and it does not impose *order*. It's extrajudicial violence that imposes fear, destroying accountability and legal recourse, clearing the way for further rights and democratic violations. NO.
Doctora Malka Older