I've mentioned Present & Correct, a graphic design-oriented stationery store in London before. Recently they posted a few scans of 1960s German paper bags, and linked to a blog post with more scans.
The bags were all for carrying pens and pencils, and the artwork is so evocative of the time period.
I especially like the pink guy with the bow tie.
There's always a big argument whenever trees are cut down in cities to build something, including housing. Seattle architect and urbanist Matt Hutchins posted an interesting set of datapoints about this topic a week or so ago:
I hate whenever urban trees get cut down — it is a visceral loss. But let’s put the problem of tree canopy loss in perspective. In 5 years we [Seattle] lost 0.0229% of our tree canopy during development and could easily be offset with new public trees.
It isn’t the biggest crisis we need to plan our future for.
Now imagine those 40,000 homes don’t get built in Seattle, in an urban area, because we can’t bear to sacrifice any canopy — and instead are built as sprawl in a clear-cut ex-urban forest at 10 dwelling units per acre.
For those 35 acres of urban canopy lost, we preserved 4,000 acres of forest.
In answering a question about how the other 1.4% of trees were lost, Hutchins answered, "Age, disease, hazard."
Here in the Twin Cities, we've had a large number of trees lost to an invasive insect called the emerald ash borer, which arrived here about 25 years ago. That's an example of the kind of thing that has a much bigger impact than development on our tree canopy.
The most recent issue of Discover magazine had a couple of articles I flagged to share.
One story reported on a 2024-published study about the possible adaptive benefits of ADHD. Modern humans were hunter-gatherers for about 300,000 years, with agriculture developing only about 12,000 years ago. Before that,
While once our days were filled with exploration and ever-changing means of survival, we were suddenly consumed by the need to home and perform a single job.
We lived and evolved as hunter-gatherers for at least 288,000 years, but we're a lot less experienced with sedentary living.
The study had participants simulate berry-picking in a game. The longer you pick from a single bush, the fewer berries you get as the bush gets picked out, but going to a new bush takes time. Which strategy would maximize the berry harvest — staying at bushes longer, or switching more frequently?
After picking the virtual berries, participants did questions to allow the researchers to assess their level of ADHD:
[The researchers] expected the ADHD-prone subjects to move between bushes too quickly to gather many berries. But, as it turned out, the subjects who self-reported ADHD symptoms actually did better than their counterparts.
So that's some evidence for the ADHD as adaptive behavior in a hunter-gatherer way of living. (The HBO show The Pitt, about an emergency room, had one of its characters say ER doctors all have ADHD, and in some ways that seems a bit like a modern, very technical hunter-gatherer situation.)
The other story was about the design of clothing for space travel. As readers may have noticed, I've recently been rereading Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut novels, so space suits were top-of-mind for me when I saw that story.
I recognized a lot of details Kowal described, like the need for flexibility in the gloves (which makes the more vulnerable to damage) compared to the rest of the space suits. One thing I didn't know about the reality of the current clothing was this:
[At the International Space Station, they wear] T-shirts, shorts, and cargo pants. The priority...is comfort and practicality, with a heavy emphasis on materials that are easy to care for in a zero-gravity environment. After all, astronauts are only able to bring a set amount of clothing to the ISS, depending on the duration of their stay.
Donning the same outfit for several days in a row, ISS astronauts change only when necessary. This isn't due to poor hygiene but rather a result of limited storage and lacking laundry capabilities. Clothes are worn until they are visibly dirty or start to smell, after which they are packed away to be jettisoned from the ISS so they can burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
That made me wonder what clothes the two astronauts who were recently stuck aboard the ISS for nine months wore, if they had not intention of staying there. Are there backup clothes on board?
A friend who was visiting Italy saw this machine in a museum.
She described it this way: "An almond-grinding machine that they tried using to grind salt but that made it rust."
She sent the photo to me because, as you can see, it looks like a robot.
Poor thing.
And then there's the story of the Star Gazer lily. But I won't steal Amy's thunder on that one.
In April there was a BlueSky thread that started from one person posting plant names that sound like insults. Others replied with more, and it was so much fun I wanted to preserve it:
Plant names that sound like insults:
- spurge
- goatnuts
- giant snowflake
- caucasian wingnut
Pavel @spavel.bsky.social
Goutweed
Kate Schmidt
hairy beardtongue
brokenseed
- bladderwort
- pond scum
- sensitive plant
- dodder
Mike Keesey @tmkeesey.bsky.social
- bastard toadflax
- spikenard
- pussytoes
- beggarticks
Phloem Chomsky @plumicorns.bsky.social
- Virginia creeper
Richard Waite
I've heard others over the years, but they aren't really common names. Though I admit I haven't hear anyone call a plant goatnut or Caucasian wingnut either.
I know old upright pianos have no value and people are desperate to get rid of them, but still, it was sad to see this one dumped in a parking lot recently:
It was broken into pieces, probably from the fall when it was pushed out of the back of a truck.
I'm sure it was impossible to keep in tune, but think of the life it had. How many families took pride in it? Or what kind of businesses did it provide music in?
And who was it who painted it salmon pink?
In the middle of everything bad that's happening, today I learned there's a small nonprofit organization in the Twin Cities called The Free Book Buggie, and it was a spot of brightness.
For a very reasonable price, the staff and volunteers will bring the buggie to community events. It's filled with kids' books, and children can take as many as they want.
What a cool idea.
Prof. Ian Walker, head of psychology at Swansea University and trustee of Wheels for Wellbeing, posted this on BlueSky today:
Four questions for people who say their driving is essential:
1. why is it essential to drive THAT car?
2. do you drive it as little as possible?
3. why is it essential to drive it that fast?
4. why do you need priority over people who aren't driving?
Then three hours later he added:
PS If you're thinking I've said that nobody should ever drive anywhere ever then you're misreading this
Sally Watson added five hours later:
5. Have you chosen to live somewhere that makes it difficult to get around without a car when you had other housing possibilities?
Many of the responses to Walker were in the vein of "not all men"... i.e., "I'm one of the good ones" — my driving is essential [usually because they're disabled] and I don't speed and I give priority to people who aren't driving.
Why do they feel the need to answer? Everyone should know after all these years of social media that if that is what describes you in any circumstance like this (such as the effects of sexism or racism), you don't have to answer. The person who posted know it's "not all," and the other people reading don't know you so they don't care that you're a good person.
All Walker is doing is posing questions to get people to think about their behavior, and instead these people reflexively defend. Why are they reading posts from a person like him if they don't want to think about the things he writes about?
People are so weird. Something, as they say, is wrong on the internet.
I can't keep up with all of the b.s. coming out of RFK's Department of "Health" and Human Services. He said yesterday that the Biden administration was responsible for child trafficking, blabbed about the MMR vaccine containing aborted fetus debris, and now there's a new report lying about transgender treatments. I'm sure there have been seven other things in the past week I'm not mentioning.
But the thing I wanted to call attention to was the news from a few days ago that his FDA plans to require new clinical trials for the Novavax covid vaccine with each update. Novavax is the one covid vaccine that is not based on mRNA technology, which the vaccine fear-mongers supposedly had no problem with, and updates are the equivalent of an annual flu vaccine change. Such vaccines have not required new trials in the past.
The former vaccine chief for FDA said there's no reason to do this, and if it became a requirement, "you'd always be doing clinical trials and you'd never have a vaccine that was up to date."
Which, one assumes, is likely the point of the requirement from RFK and the Trump administration: to undermine vaccine efficacy and faith in vaccines.
Over on Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Jonathan Howard wrote a scathing post about the same topic, pointing out that the new head of FDA, Dr. Martin Makary, was a fan of Novavax, but now that he's in the Trump administration, he no longer is. And that while he and his compatriots working with RFK claim to want the "gold standard of science" (random, controlled trials), they really just want to support their predetermined results... which sounds a lot like RFK's announcement about autism.
Big shock.
And now the second half of April 2025 in reverse chronological order, which means it starts with April 30 and goes backward to about April 15. Here's the first half of the month.
Yesterday, I left off in the midst of Trump's illegal renditioning of people to El Salvador and kidnapping student visa-holders. The financial implosion from Trump's tariffs continued. The Trump administration began dismantling AmeriCorps and took on Harvard (and other universities), and it finally got some push back on that. Elon Musk's bizarre need to breed a crew of sons with surrogates he recruits online was exposed further. Public opinion on Trump's actions became increasingly negative, sometimes reaching levels as low as the bubonic plague.
As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance.
Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.
___
RFK Jr. is a disgusting liar. This is psychotic. He claimed today that "during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking, and for sex, and for slavery"—and that there are "300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration." This is complete bullshit.
Adam Keiper
Why are fewer women using AI than men? Because if I wanted someone to confidently make up answers to my questions I would simply ask a man
Laura Jedeed
I could be wrong about this but I really think most Americans do not want to be forced to “do their own research” about food and drug and product safety and would rather that the government agencies that have been sorting that all out for them for decades not be obliterated in the name of “efficiency.
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com
“And I’m like, what do you mean, you ‘do your own research’? You running a double-blind study in your living room, dawg?” –A guy walking ahead of me with his friends on a NYC sidewalk in 2021, also my favorite overheard dialogue of the entire pandemic
Emily St. John Mandel
Howard Lutnick: "It's time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future. This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life and your kids work here and your grandkids work here. We let the auto plants go overseas."
Aaron Rupar
This is the future Lutnick has planned for you and your kids. For his kids? Well, Lutnick appointed his sons Brandon and Kyle, ages 27 and 28, CEOs of the investment firm he led, overseeing 14,000 employees. I’m sure he did an extensive search and they were the most qualified.
Sherrilyn Ifill
I just want one reporter, ONE, to say “there’s a lot more evidence that you are a rapist than Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.”
Jon Cryer @mrjoncryer.bsky.social
I am sick and god damn tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing. The media is complicit in accepting fantastical nonsense - both in the numbers put out by OpenAI and the silly jobs created by Anthropic - and it has to stop. Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. The tech and business media must change their ways, or risk repeating these cycles forever. Generative AI is a remarkable con — a just-good-enough simulacrum of human expression to get it past the gatekeepers in finance and the media, knowing that neither will apply a second gear of critical thinking beyond "huh guess we're doing AI now." It's a disgrace. It's blatantly obvious that generative AI is a bubble. The returns and products just aren't there, and yet the media compliantly prints whatever OpenAI wants, even when it's insane things such as "they'll make $3bn from an agent product that barely exists in 2025."
Ed Zitron
"Your health records will be on the block chain."
"Everyone will live in the Metaverse."
"All art will be NFTs."
"Generative AI will replace the need for humans."
We need to reckon with the reality that the tech industry no longer creates things that anyone wants.
Ashley Lynch
Considering there are still dupes out there going, "he just wants to prevent chronic disease!" I feel the need to point out that RFK Jr. has been working on these issues for decades and has not bothered to learn the most elementary facts about how vaccines or the government work.
Michael Hobbes
Cartoon with caption by my buddy @jackhauen.bsky.social:
Gabrielle Drolet
We made a deliberate choice as a nation, until now, not to have a police state. We siloed off federal data and put in place laws, regulations, policies and internal norms to prevent the federal government from putting together everything it knows about you into one place. Trump is ending all that.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
The speed with which Congress not having the power of the purse, law and the Constitution be damned, has been normalized by the press is the most terrifying thing to me.
Dan Murphy @bungdan.bsky.social
They will try to distract us from things that are horrible with things that are ridiculous.
Bethany Albertson @albertsonb2.bsky.social
My question is whether Judge Hannah Dugan will still be allowed to hear cases while the case against her plays out. Because if she gets suspended, that becomes a pretty convenient way for Trump to purge the entire judicial system of anyone who doesn't show fealty.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social
We got our answer. Dugan is suspended.
Matt Novak @paleofuture.bsky.social
Using uniformed military as political backdrops causes the public to consider them political forces, a dangerous thing in a free society.
Kori Schake
gretchen whitmer completely misreading the moment and tanking her presidential hopes in the span of a few weeks caught me a bit off guard. never followed her too closely but it seemed that she was normal and even savvy. if you’re a Dem doing “anti-woke” posturing you’re an idiot, but at least there’s a logic to it. if you’re *speaking at Trump rallies* I really don’t know what to say
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social
It's fun to remember how Republicans insisted Biden wasn't running his own White House and then hear Trump assert in an interview: "I'm not the one making this decision."
Kevin M. Kruse
#BuffaloNYProtest:
Country Over Party @crazyheart007.bsky.social
whining out loud during a televised interview that the reporter should let you lie because they owe you for the interview is pretty wild
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social
Harriet Tubman [supposedly revered today] would have been dragged on social media based on how people are. Accused of supporting *violence* due to her close friendship with John Brown and her history of de-arresting enslaved people. Accused of being a religious *zealot* Accused of being a grifter because she was ALWAYS fundraising... LOL.. the list is long.
Prisonculture
There's tons of evidence that Trump genuinely thinks that F-35s are literally invisible.
Michael Paulauski @mike10010100.bsky.social
And that asylum seekers came from insane asylums.
Radley Balko
Car supremacy is kind of a fascinating tic of conservative ideology to me: They can only conceive of liberty within the structures of the status quo. Driving in a dense city is *theoretical* freedom but in practice it’s oppression. Meaningful freedom is walking, biking and regular public transit.
Michael Hobbes
Also see: healthcare. Private healthcare is *theoretically* more free in that there are more options (for the wealthy), but *functionally* worse for more people. It's slight of hand.
Atalanta @atalantadoll.bsky.social
Dems bend over backwards to appease farmers and what do they get out of it? They are a small minority of people who are generally the most reactionary right wingers in the country. They back plans like Trump's tariffs with the knowledge that they will get a gov handout to mitigate their suffering.
The Alternate Historian
The U.S. Secretary of Transportation hates the greatest public transit system in the United States. That explains a lot.
davidrlurie
As usual every US economic graph is just another way of telling you when Reagan was elected.
Phineas
Clay Jackson, a Texas lawyer, provided basic legal advice to an immigrant family fearing deportation. Then, two officers visited him at his home, accusing him of "obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation." Then, after speaking publicly, he was fired from his job at a Fortune 500 company
Judd Legum
The entire legal community is being threatened into de facto abolishing the US system of legal representation
Jake Grumbach
Economists now saying the average—AVERAGE—annual hit American households will face because of Trump’s trade war will be $5,000!!
Clara Jeffery
I see the already historically unpopular president is exploring how to get the military involved in “assisting” local law enforcement just a few weeks before the real shortages caused by his inept economic policy start hitting. Probably nothing to worry about.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social
The price of racism? Was your freedom. Was it worth it?
Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon @blackamazon.bsky.social
Just about everyone in Trump’s circle is profoundly evil and corrupt, and yet Stephen Miller somehow always manages to make the rest of them look like amateurs.
Brent Toderian
A small harbinger of spring:
Olivia When
Fully on board with dems running for office promising to reinstate fired federal employees and jail this administration’s various criminals, but let’s go ahead and add “we will seize by eminent domain any national parkland sold to developers”
Dennis B. Hooper
randomly watching a documentary about led zeppelin and TIL: jimmy page and john paul jones were session musicians for the shirley bassey goldfinger theme.
Tom Tomorrow
Streets are not “closed” when they’re free of cars; they’re car free. They’re safer. They’re full of people. They aren’t “closed.” Language matters.
@fulllanefemme.bsky.social
Preparing for severe weather events and for public health crises have a great deal in common. Both are largely lose-lose propositions from a PR perspective. Which is a huge fucking problem! Prepare and avoid? You're accused of over-reacting. Fail to prepare and disaster? Why didn't you do more?!
Tinman contra la caste @bcmfietser.bsky.social
Wherever there’s a Black woman with an opinion, there’s a white man with a beard waiting to tell her she’s wrong.
Ally Henny
Now that his polling is underwater on every issue across the board I’m looking forward to seeing what the fallback position is for the Sensible Centrists whose argument was, “You shouldn’t oppose him on this, he’s got public opinion on his side!” (My money is on “OK, oppose him, but Not Like That.”)
Tim Carvell
Trump is cancelling the Congressionally mandated National Climate Assessment. I don't want to hear one word about "cancel culture" from the right wing ever again.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Billionaires ramped up support for Trump in 2024 and are now watching their fortunes plummet (-7.4% already). Not surprising for a GOP admin—it's history repeating itself. The billionaires who attended Trump's inauguration are faring even worse—they are down a combined $194B YTD, a 17.5% haircut:
Adam Bonica
We talk a lot about social media radicalizing the population but it's been far more efficient at radicalizing public figures. Humans are not designed for the amount of feedback being a public figure on social media provides. Whether it's praise or criticism, receiving an avalanche of nonstop attention is profoundly corrosive to your brain.
Michael Hobbes
It's why social media has, if anything, had a profoundly anti-social effect on society. It only works if everyone is a 'reasonable person.' Sadly, that isn't the case; add in commercial and other nefarious interests, and the resulting cocktail is most likely psychological poison.
Equiton Press
there are some days where i have more people mad at me online than my ancestors would have had mad at them in their entire lives. there is functionally no difference between this and being cursed by a witch
@cait.bsky.social
Serious question: What is the non-sociopathic policy argument for eliminating FEMA?
David Roberts @volts.wtf
It’s so funny that conservatives and billionaires have convinced themselves their ideas are unfairly discriminated against—even though almost all media in the US is corporate owned. Meanwhile, Marxism is so genuinely absent from US discourse that most Americans can’t even define it.
Max Berger
I will never not be bitter over the fact that Minneapolis had a massive street car system in the first half of the 1900s that ultimately got shut down in the 1950s.
Audrey, friend of eggbug @audreydog.online
Eternally ashamed of my gender and my generation:
David Roberts @volts.wtf
ICE is now asserting it's a federal crime for bystanders to request that masked people in plain clothes show identification as they're handcuffing folks and stuffing them into unmarked vans.
Jèf Uphoff
Another frame constricting our imagination is the belief that if one names a problem one must also have a solution to propose. This incentivizes ignoring problems or falling back on cliches.
Jeff Sharlet
You can’t say criminals don’t deserve due process when due process is the thing that decides if they're criminals. Otherwise you're just kidnapping people you don't like.
God @godpod.bsky.social
NEW: Trump on Wednesday quietly pardoned Paul Walczak, a healthcare executive sentenced just 2 weeks ago for tax crimes. His mother and sister had played a role in an unrelated scheme to publicize Ashley Biden’s stolen diary ahead of the 2020 election.
Ken Vogel
Let’s start with the basics:
George Takei
Vance's Easter visit to Rome clogged its streets with a 40-vehicle entourage. He also demanded the Coliseum be closed so he and his family could tour it alone. Tourists who properly booked slots in advance got screwed. He's apparently the first to make that demand. Then he didn't bother to show up.
Radley Balko
It's not just Vance – the sense of unearned entitlement is a defining feature of this administration. People who know their careers are built on a grift respond by self-righteously demanding deference and respect. "Did you even say thank you?"
Don Moynihan
Since Trump told us that we have millions of dangerous criminals here, it's really pathetic that he's wasting taxpayer dollars deporting a 2 year old.
Dean Baker
It is not lost on me that a man who attended the funeral of Pope Francis also deported a child with metastatic cancer, innocent people to a gulag, and feels not one shred of remorse about either.
Anthea Butler
Reminder that words matter. You can’t “deport” a US citizen. You might be kidnapping, disappearing, exiling, expelling, illegally removing, etc., but you’re not “deporting” a US citizen.
Garrett M. Graff @vermontgmg.bsky.social
Steel yourself for the “that toddler with cancer was no angel” takes that are coming
Costa Samaras
Aside – Has anyone asked him a question in the last two months that doesn't start with a preliminary "HUHH?!?" before he can actually answer the question?
The Wet Tank Tops
Mendocino Coast rhododendrons on a beautiful drizzly Friday evening:
Megan P @megawatts.bsky.social
According to three members of Congress, Rumeysa Ozturk has been repeatedly denied access to her lawyer, refused asthma medication despite attacks, forced to endure extreme temperatures, and denied religious accommodations. Her ‘crime’? An oped in a school newspaper.
Nathan Kalman-Lamb
The Trump administration is literally kidnapping and torturing people.
Judd Taylor
Under German law, if a person is determined to have worked at a death camp, that individual can be charged as an accessory to murder for every single person ever killed in that camp during their time there. A 94 year old man was convicted in 2016 for 170,000 murders. Just something to think about.
Alice @nolas-socks.bsky.social
Two things are true. This is the country we have always lived in. This is what it has always been like for millions of people. It's nevertheless worse now.
Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social
Donald Trump turned due process into a four-year circus and then as President decided others weren’t worthy of it.
altNOAA
Shanghai-to-Beijing high-speed rail, 50 trips a day, takes 4 hours and 15 minutes, and runs roughly the same distance as NYC to Chicago or Seattle to San Francisco or Atlanta to Houston. Construction began in 2008 and was completed by 2011. (Can you imagine?)
Bill Lindeke
"waste, fraud and abuse" is one of the great pieces of propaganda in the last 25 years. It's astonishing how the mainstream media just repeats it over and over again with absolutely no seeming awareness that it's just propaganda used to attack the social safety net.
Bryan @bryanformhals.com
PhD Timeline:
Randall Munroe @xkcd.com
Texas bookstores erupt over a new censorship bill that would allow a parent to sue them if their child reads a book with a sex scene or LGBTQ+ characters. So-called "harmful to minors" laws are being introduced across the country to force censorship of libraries, schools, bookstores and websites.
Mike Stabile
New NYT/Siena Poll:
—Trump's approval rating is 42% vs. 54% disapprove
—59% of voters think Trump's 2nd term in office is "scary"
—54% say Trump is "exceeding the powers available to him"
—Trump has negative approval in all policy areas
SIENA POLL
Yonah Freemark
It’s pretty hilarious how unless your baby is clad head to toe in pink and purple (and no other colors) everyone just assumes it’s a boy
Ned Resnikoff
I've ended up on cradle catholic tiktok and the overwhelming vibe is : evangelical converts are in it for the aesthetics. Exact quote: i get it it's beautiful churches very aesthetically pleasing, you know, coming from people worshiping in shopping malls
Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com
i feel like trumpcoin, and the fact that we never talk about it, is pretty emblematic of the way the press refuses to grapple with trump. it exists in order to pay him bribes. it expressly gives you political access. it does not pretend to have a licit motive. it was a one-day scandal.
rev. howard arson @theophite.bsky.social
Let's say Harris won last year and Vance was holding 10k-20k person rallies where he railed against left-wing "oligarchy." Would the common wisdom be that this was crazy and a waste of time? Or would we be seeing NYT op-eds and A1s about what "oligarchy" is and why the GOP base was on fire about it?
Dave Weigel
When someone is that bad at their ostensible goal, it's good to think about how their stated goal might not really be their goal. DOGE has never been about "saving money." It has been about preventing government from working.
Jonathan Cohn
It's only in a broken unhappy nation that you have to think about the president many times a day. On top of everything else, narcissists are just...exhausting
Bill McKibben
The fertility rate has been declining in the US for over a decade, and we’re currently below the ‘replacement rate’. But Americans are still having more babies than the Europeans and Chinese:
Steve Rattner
Federal agents did not have a warrant when they arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student who had been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian rights, according to court documents.
The Washington Post
Maddow: 88% of the country says no, no, he cannot defy a supreme court ruling. Only 9% say yes he can. And you know, it's not the same thing. But I should mention that 9% is also the proportion of Americans who told yougov this week that they have a favorable view of the black plague
Acyn
How can someone who deliberately posted classified material on Signal — including to family members and a journalist — lecture people about leaks? Plus they are career professionals whereas he’s a career clown. He has lost any vestige of moral authority or integrity that he may have had.
Dr Keith Wilson
BREAKING: The Interior Department just used a fake “energy emergency” to greenlight gas and mining projects on public lands. It’s a lie. There is no energy emergency. This is a giveaway to big oil.
Christopher Webb @cwebbonline.com
Today Trump ordered DOJ to investigate ActBlue, which is payment processing platform for basically every progressive organization in the US. Trump is ordering DOJ to disrupt the opposition party. Yesterday Trump personally got $10s of millions in cash from untraceable foreigners in new crypto scheme
David Rothschild @davmicrot.bsky.social
People sometimes ask "what are the crimes" and let me tell y'all, as a lawyer, that intentionally copying, altering, destroying, or disrupting government computer systems is super-duper illegal if you don't have a spotless paper trail authorizing it, which none of these DOGE people do.
Max Kennerly
my endorsement for any democratic presidential candidate who promises to send the entire DOGE team to prison
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
For Easter, a Roman metal brooch in the shape of a rabbit (or hare), with traces of its original enamel decoration still adding a splash of colour. Animal-themed jewelry was popular in the Roman world, especially brooches:
Dr Jo Ball @drjeball.bsky.social
Americans (likely voters, to be precise) support impeachment by 52% in our most recent survey. This includes 55% of independents. And the plot thickens when you look at how they responded to other questions...
Anat Shenker-Osorio @anatosaurus.bsky.social
People keep voting for sociopaths because what they want from government is impossible and only liars would promise it to them
bdonnelly
Well, no surprise here: A new study from the Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI) found that women are 2X as likely to die during pregnancy in states with abortion bans. Twice as likely. Meanwhile, maternal mortality in pro-choice states fell 21%.
Jessica Valenti
It’s almost like putting politicians in charge of women’s healthcare was…bad actually?
Aubrey Hirsch
Maybe before we start talking about whether AI systems deserve "human rights" we do a better job of guaranteeing those rights to, well, all humans.
Peter Gleick
make america healthy again is all about eating more fast food and making lists of queer and autistic people but does not include cheaper or free healthcare which is interesting
onion person @junlper.beer
biggest divide in american politics is not between left or right. its between people who believe adulthood requires self-discipline and those who do not
@aelkus.bsky.social
As we build more pedestrian spaces, I am begging American DOTs to learn Row of Bollard Technology™. Stop making excuses. Figure out how to install and maintain it. Don't wait for someone to be killed or injured:
Qagggy!
I'd say more precisely that we have people going all in on the idea that self-discipline is about having what it takes to dunk your head in a bowl of ice water every morning rather than having what it takes to treat someone different from you like a human being.
Osita Nwanevu
Gandhi listed the sins as:
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
Paul Lee @paulytheism.bsky.social
I discuss this with students by pointing out the enduring gender gap in crime, which doesn’t (for some reason) lead us to deny due process to *men* on the grounds they’re an extra-dangerous group. As it shouldn’t! But in our quest to identify and incapacitate problem groups, it’s never them.
Roco Foucault
When Fox smears Abrego Garcia as MS-13 while citing a murder committed by a different migrant, they're only making the case for giving him due process stronger. The whole point of due process is to determine who is guilty of such crimes and who isn't!
Greg Sargent
U.S. could face millions of measles cases over the next 25 years if vaccination rates drop 10 percent, according to new research.
Kins @kinsleyayay.bsky.social
Trump’s 100 day job approval polling is worse than any other president in the last 50 years by a minimum -10. It’s incredible that Republicans and business leaders continue to fall all over themselves to appease such a historically incompetent and epically unpopular leader.
feminist next door @emrazz.bsky.social
Number of elected Republicans standing up for the fundamental principle of due process for all: 0.0.
The Massachusetts Spy
‘Bee-eautiful’ gold pendant from Bronze Age Malia, Crete. Usually said to represent a pair of bees placing a drop of honey into a honeycomb. A delightful piece of Minoan jewellery inspired by nature 3,800 years ago! Heraklion Archaeological Museum:
Alison Fisk
Toxicologist here! Eliminating dyes will improve the health of zero Americans. Current synthetic food dyes are not causing health problems, and are often times used because they are actually safer than natural food dyes. Reminder that guns are the #1 cause of death of children but we are going to ban food dyes.
Ryan Marino, MD
Guns are the #1 cause of childhood death in the United States; cars are #2; and we have increasing evidence that air pollution in childhood might be a major source of early death (and dementia) in adulthood. The Trump admin is cancelling and attacking the best efforts to limit each of those
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
"they are going to end cancer research and kill its top scientists" is the kind of thing that would get you laughed out of the writer's room on saturday morning cartoons and it is literally what's happening
Micah @rincewind.run
No transphobe has ever been able to explain to me why a man would pretend to be a woman in order to abuse and harass women in women-only spaces when cis men abuse and harasses us in the street, in our workplaces, in our homes and literally everywhere else without consequence
Charlotte @charlottor.bsky.social
my plan to get people to start having more kids? make climate change worse. abolish the department of education. also milk is poison
Ahhhhh @nerdjpg.com
Any measure to “persuade” young women to get married and get pregnant that isn’t “because it makes them happy” is a measure to coerce, entrap, and control. It’s rape culture, and it’s dehumanizing as fuck.
feminist next door @emrazz.bsky.social
Our goldenseal plant is finally old enough to flower! And not all of them even flower:
splodinvark
A thought for all the city council members making decisions on bike lanes and parking: If after saying, "I'm all for safety" your next word is, "but" — consider that you may not be "all for safety."
Warren Wells, AICP
Still wrapping my head around a President with 34 felony convictions snatching people off the street if they have a speeding ticket on their record.
Schooley
It's like people in this administration read Leviathan and thought government should also make life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
David Ho
"While anyone can repost an article, researching and writing is hard work that requires time and money. Before you deride 'mainstream media,' note that it is *no longer the mainstream.* It is derision that is mainstream and easy, and actual journalism that is edgy and difficulty." –Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
Jeff Sharlet
i think it is bad that among the most influential people in government are the monomaniacal adherents of a millenarian tech cult
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
Really need journalists to push back on bullshit [like Homan saying Abrego Garcia] "got more due process than Laken Riley got." When they say this, just ask them point blank: "Are you saying that because one Latino man committed a murder, another Latino man deserves a life sentence? Do you think all Latino men interchangeable?"
Radley Balko
If Laken Riley had been murdered by an abusive boyfriend, which happens about 3 times every day, MAGAs wouldn’t even know her name.
Bob-Parker54
Or in a mass shooting. Or from a complicated pregnancy.
kristibjork.bsky.social
“Experts estimate that drones of all types now contribute to about 70% to 80% of military casualties on both sides.”
Bill Lindeke
White folks commit most of the crimes in the USA. Just to be safe, maybe we should round up white folks and send them off to prisons in foreign countries without a hearing. If u think this is absurd, it's no different than doing the same to folks with brown skin, tattoos, or who speak Spanish.
The March Hare @therealmarchhare.bsky.social
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength":
Alex Steffen
So basically our core biomedical agenda has gone from cancer and heart disease research with major investments in alzheimers/dementia research to jacking up the sperm count of teenage males and a new wild goose for the 'hidden causes' of Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social
Someone on Threads noticed you can type any random sentence into Google, then add “meaning” afterwards, and you’ll get an AI explanation of a famous idiom or phrase **you just made up**.
Greg Jenner
The Trump admin is demanding universities institute anti-mask laws for student protesters, holding the schools’ funding as a ransom, while sending secret police in balaclavas to disappear immigrants
Christopher Mathias @letsgomathias.bsky.social
Trump placidly presiding over the largest measles outbreak in 25 years, with no end in sight.
Rachel Maddow
In the late 19th century and before widespread pasteurization, many children under the age of five died of TB from the milk of infected cows. In the 1930s when Iowa mandated tubercular testing of cows, farmers staged riots to prevent scientists entering farms, in some cases prompting martial law
@scoopsstp.bsky.social
I'm listening to argument in Mahmoud v. Taylor, the conservative Christian attack on books with LGBTQ characters in elementary schools, and it is impossible to overstate how contemptuous Sam Alito is of the idea of treating LGBTQ people with respect. He is a rank homophobe. Nancy Mace in a robe.
Jay Willis
As part of the GOP effort to heat up the world beyond survivability, the US Commerce Department has announced plans to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on imports of solar panels from Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Goal: Crush universities
Need a policy tool: Civil Rights Act Title VI gives tools to stop funding to universities if they violate someone's civil rights.
Need a violation to allege: Use the Jews!
Using us as a wedge to attack free speech & inquiry does not protect us.
Aaron Sojourner
And it doesn’t even work this way! Title VI only allows revoking the funds of the discriminatory program being federally funded, not the entire institution. And it requires due process
before funds can be halted: a charge, presenting evidence, opportunity to defend and appeal, etc.
David Brody
Two headlines in the New York Times today:
StrictlyChristo
If I see another article about birth rates that refuses to grapple with the way having children systematically disadvantages women I swear to god. There is no mystery. Stop pretending there is. We’ve got to do away with credulity for nonsense.
Deva Woodly @devawo.bsky.social
Of the people who have ever lived to age 65, 2/3 are alive today! We've added many years to our lives, not enough life to those years! Some cities are great: Barcelona. Olders go out, are AND feel SAFE. Laugh. Walk. Bike. Chat. Play. Are ALIVE! Cities should make it easier to live Older, Healthier, Happier.
Gil Penalosa
The conservative movement has turned against reality on every scientific issue of our time, from gun violence to climate change to epidemiology. If campuses are ideologically homogenous, it's not because academia has ostracized conservatives. It's because conservatives have ostracized academia. When Republicans take power do they expand "viewpoint diversity"? No. They purge scientists, delete data and promote their own mediocre minds. If you support Trump you are signaling membership in a movement that *hates* science, science is not obligated to pretend otherwise.
Michael Hobbes
This is deranged. Jan. 6 defendants were repped by one of the best
public defender offices in the U.S. They were more likely to be released
pretrial & got comparatively light sentences. SCOTUS threw out a
bunch of convictions, which almost never happens. They got gold-plated
due process!
Radley Balko
The MAGA rage won’t be confined to foreigners. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow. It’s never far from “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” to “the enemy within.”
Thomas Zimmer
Vance didn't convert to Roman Catholicism, he converted to the American Protestant idea of Roman Catholicism. Viewed through that lens he kind of makes sense
Jer @jerandom.bsky.social
Trump and Musk kill Americorps. Why waste money helping people?
Diane Ravitch
These are the things my mom texts me:
Miranda Yaver
When troops get killed because of Hegseth, no one will know since they will bury the story.
Carmela @carmelacruz.bsky.social
I think the only thing more pathetic than being a fascist is being a fascist nepo baby of another fascist
Kate Barrett @thewaether.bsky.social
Touching grass is not enough I need to get stuck in a hollow log
lukelukeluke
Alito releasing an opinion on Easter showing that if he had his druthers he would happily allow the regime to imprison and rendition political undesirables to foreign prisons is exactly the kind of Christian I believe him to be.
Haydon @haydonmp.bsky.social
Will always bother me that Christianity took a holiday celebrating joyous sex and common fecundity and made it into a holiday about a torturous death and esoteric metaphysics. An interesting and creative conversion but a loss in many ways too.
Leah McElrath
I am tired of people acting like Vice-President Kamala Harris didn’t have targeted, pragmatic policies to address just about every damn thing people seem to be mad about.
Eric Lee @ericleeacts.bsky.social
They are very concerned:
Rob @stpaulbikescum.bsky.social
If Jesus had focused more on kitchen table issues and less on unpopular outcasts like lepers and prostitutes, he might have won more support from white working-class Judeans.
New York Times Pitchbot
“When somebody gets pushed onto a subway track in New York City, that is national news,” Litman says. But “on any day there are people who are injured or killed in road rage incidents, and that is local news.”
Will Jones
Some people who never had a real problem in their lives got annoyed by some college kids and decided they must embark on a campaign to save civilization. Now masked men armed to the teeth are going to raid churches on Easter. Congrats guys! Amazing fucking work you did there.
The Alternate Historian
I really have a huge problem with the use of “DEI rollback” because it implies that DEI has made significant impact and there’s any kind of argument to suggest imbalance. But all we have is hurt white feelings and delusion.
Frankie Huang @ourobororoboruo.bsky.social
April 19, 1775 (1 a.m.): Capt. John Parker of the Lexington militia receives word that the British regulars are marching toward the town on their way to Concord. The 46-year-old farmer, mechanic and veteran of the French and Indian War quickly assembles about 130 fighters on the town green. Parker, 46 is "a stout, large framed man of medium height," with a long face—and ailing from tuberculosis that will leave him dead in a matter of months.
250 Years Ago News
WSJ: No confidence. Worst April since the Great Depression:
Howard French @hofrench.bsky.social
Meeting with the victim of one crime to rationalize keeping a man accused of no crime in prison is an evil thing to do.
Patrick Chovanec
Dystopia is the AARP advising older Americans about how to live in a police state
Don Moynihan
I am old enough to remember when a movie character said "PAPERS PLEASE" it was a universally understood signifier of an evil regime
Tom Tomorrow
What if Elon is the first autistic person RFK has ever actually met and that’s why he assumes we don’t pay taxes or go on dates
@gonebabygone.bsky.social
If you’re changing the definition of human rights, it means you plan on violating people’s human rights:
Melanie D’Arrigo @darrigomelanie.bsky.social
The government isn't doing universities a favor by channeling federal funding through them. It's using a private entity to realize public goals, to accomplish things that benefit the entire nation. You'd think conservatives who call for privatization all the time would grasp that.
Kevin M. Kruse
Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants. the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever. they aren’t going into universities’ endowments. they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research
Maya Sen
I, for one, think the median congressional Democrat should be to the left of David Brooks.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
Reminder that Americans can sign up for Canadian food recall alerts at the website below. We have pretty rigorous standards and share a lot of the same food as the US, so it’s a good back up option for when the FDA decides not to disclose (or for if trump cuts their funding)
Kelly @broadwaybabyto.bsky.social
Shark Tank ranks among the most tone-deaf TV Shows on the air right now. People pitching billionaires for small amounts of funding for things mostly made in China.
quick13
Thirsty Iris:
Rick Smith @rick8437.bsky.social
A personal pet peeve: Politicians and car owners who talk about “cyclists” as though they’re a distinct human species. In reality, urban cyclists are just regular folks who decided to travel by bike. Many, many more people will make that decision if a city provides high-quality infrastructure.
David Zipper
“Constitutional crisis” is really not an adequate term to describe an aggressive effort to undo every government achievement of the past century
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
The CFPB is one of those things where like, virtually every single person in the United States would support its existence if they were told the truth about what it is/does. Or used to do, I guess.
Sam Biddle
The remarkable resilience being shown by some of our judges and courts just shines a spotlight on the cowardly silence of the legislative branch.
Peter Gleick
I really would like people to not focus on 2026, but to realize that the way things are going in America, there won't be elections in 2026, or 2028.
Anthea Butler
oh there aren’t any true fascists
well but there are so few fascists
well but they aren’t ALL fascists
how can you say “fascist” about millions of people
ok they do talk fascist but they can’t act fascist
ok maybe they can but I’m sure they won’t
you saying “fascist” made them be fascist
A.R. Moxon @juliusgoat.bsky.social
What the Republicans are doing is PROPAGANDA, not messaging.
Mary Annaïse Heglar
Republicans talking about cities with racist disdain doesn’t spawn any media think pieces but if anyone from a city questions the motives of a rural voter, get them to a fainting couch.
Dave Zaffrann
Bob Dylan on the bus:
Chris Steller
At every turn they're removing all the safeguards -- *all* of them. Disease, cybersecurity, financial and banking protections, housing, disability, inequity, social security, environmental, alliances with other nations, all of this and everything else. A willful and cruel dismantling of government.
Chuck Wendig
“People call [the antiscience movement] ‘misinformation’ or ‘the infodemic’ as tho it’s just random junk out there on the Internet or social media, and it’s not— it’s organized, it’s well-financed, and it’s politically motivated.” —Dr. Peter Hotez
Brent Toderian
Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, Mohsen Mahdawi, 34, saw his best friend killed by an Israeli soldier. Rather than calling for vengeance, since immigrating to the U.S., he has delivered 100+ lectures extolling empathy as key to a resolution in the Middle East. He is a practicing Buddhist, he said.
Jennie Coughlin
JK Rowling, like Musk, demonstrates why the ultra-wealthy cannot be allowed to be so: because they use their wealth to buy the world they want to live in
Abby IRL @popeguilty.bsky.social
“The human being is not an enemy. The enemy is fear, segregation and ignorance.” The words of Mohsen Mahdawi, arrested at his citizenship interview. The values he expresses are what the USA was supposed to be about, pre-Trump.
Karrie Jacobs @karrieurbanist.bsky.social
People love to talk about how renewable energy will leave coal miners (and thus Appalachia) behind, ignoring the ways they’re already being left behind by the same people who oppose green energy. The “regulatory state” is vital for mine workers and their families.
Emily M
yes, we should build on federal land, but the best way to do that is by building on top of VA parking lots, post offices, and other federal land in already-built up areas rather than just going deeper into exurban sprawl. here’s the VA parking lot in the Bronx just a short walk from the subway:
Sam @samd.bsky.social
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if we got an executive order announcing a “purge”
Mary Annaïse Heglar
it's hard to find a motivation for DOGE other than 'hatred of the good.' these are bad people fundamentally envious or un-understanding of the idea that you might work or give for others, and attempting to punish it.
BeijingPalmer
imagine how fox would cover it if the biggest obama donor led a baby-making cult
Oliver Willis
Elon using the social media platform he owns to DM random women with the promises of financial rewards to have his children so he can create a compound filled with women in Texas is the sort of thing that sounds like it should be a QAnon conspiracy instead of being a real story from WSJ.
James @gravitysra1nbow.bsky.social
As I’ve been saying for years, Trump’s pronouns are me/me/me/me/me/me/me. Everything is always about him. He has no consideration or empathy for anyone else, and no principles or values other than what’s best for him.
George Conway
If they’re arguing that Harvard hasn’t done enough “in the public interest” to deserve tax exempt status, wait until they get a look at evangelical megachurches!
Kevin M. Kruse
nothing says Make America Healthy Again like stopping the data collection of drug side effects
Rachel Cohen
Remember when only a few Republicans were actively working for Russia? I miss those days.
Gary Bunker @andysocial.com
how the white house press corps hasn't lit up karoline leavitt is beyond me. they're going to replace you with brett swastika of the keto-rahowa podcast at the drop of a hat anyway, you might as well earn it instead of taking it like little worms, writhing in the most prestigious career filth
muscular baby jeb lund @mobute.bsky.social
I went to the Tate Modern yesterday. In the Rothko room with all the
Serious Art Connoisseurs there was a ~5 year old kid who walked up to
each painting, pointed at it and shouted 'RECTANGLE' at each one in
turn, then left the room:
Jon Walmsley @arghzombies.com
In 90 years of social security, we have never had a check bounce or be late, but they want you to believe the system is broken.
Bennie Thompson
It works. The government here largely works. Because we are so spoiled by how well it works, we are letting a fool convince us it is broken.
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Now there's a memorable stat! "Colleges and universities are among America’s most competitive international exporters. In dollar terms, last year, the United States sold more educational services to the rest of the world than it sold in natural gas and coal combined."
Jesse D. Jenkins
When American citizens have to worry about returning to their own country from travel abroad, you ain’t living in a free republic.
Tea Pain @teapainusa.bsky.social
The ridiculous part of Trump's boneheaded effort to reindustrialize America is that without unions, manufacturing jobs are not good jobs
Dean Baker
What have Republicans done for the rest us? Defunded our schools and roads and hospitals and post offices and social safety nets…and for what? To send tax cuts to billionaires. Wake up, friends. They hate us. They laugh at us. The loathe us.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
Someone learned a lesson:
Oregon @oregonthedm.bsky.social
It is time for Democrats to go on the attack, and take away tax-exempt status for every church that unabashedly campaigned for Trump. Take off the gloves, start to destroy the opposing institutions that fund the fascist movement.
Anil Dash
The President of Harvard (student body of 21,278 in 2023) was made to resign over a plagiarism accusation that made front page news. The arrest and indictment of Pastor Robert Morris of Gateway Dallas Church (weekly attendance 25,805 in 2023) for sexually assaulting a 12 year old did not.
Queerhawk @alwaysadorecats.bsky.social
Basic Netflix—$100/year
Spotify Premium—$150/year
Xbox Game Pass—$180/year
NOAA—$21/year for the average US taxpayer
Elizabeth Smith @eeeeelizzzzz.bsky.social
The way Bukele was treated in the oval vs. Zelenskyy is all you need to know.
Karly Kingsley
Defamation law applies to press secretaries too, yes?
Erin Maye Quade
They all laughed as they spoke of an untried man, tortured in a cell with no way out, no hope of justice. From the comfort of a gilded room, wrapped in luxury and power, they laughed. These are not men. These are monsters.
Miss Cami
Chris Hauck
Good news moment: the fruit and nut trees I planted in the last major global meltdown ('20) are starting to bear in time for the 2025 global meltdown
Sarah Taber
The year is 2025. Your right to control your own body has been replaced by incredible breakthroughs in female space tourism.
L O L G O P
I am once again begging people to realize that the law is words on paper and is not self executing. "That's illegal" is not and has never been synonymous with "that's impossible" or "that can't be done." "That's illegal" means "you might get in trouble for that depending on who you are.
Sheryl Weikal (The Leftist Lawyer)
It's genuinely hard to express to sort of normal not politically plugged in non-lawyers *how* lawless the Trump administration is, and I think that's some part of the problem. You sound like you're hyperventilating, but it's just a flat description of what is going on.
Raffi Melkonian @rmfifthcircuit.bsky.social
Remember that Trump’s own undocumented workers — oh yeah, his businesses have hired and exploited the same folks he’s demonized for political gain — paid more in taxes than he did
Gabe Ortíz @tusk81.bsky.social
The right: take over universities, rewrite curriculum, force everyone to study christofascist ideology.
The left: STEM STEM STEM (but only the stuff you can apply we actually don’t care about abstract math lol that’s practically poetry)
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
Don't forget business
Dr. Cara Berg Powers @clbergpowers.bsky.social
I will go to my grave believing that the undergraduate business degree is the most one of the most damaging things to happen to higher education.
John Halloran @profhalloran.bsky.social
Once widespread, smoking is now uncommon in Great Britain:
Saloni @scientificdiscovery.dev
"These guys are so clearly guilty of terrorism we couldn't run the risk of basic due process." Sure, sure.
Kevin M. Kruse
This administration is one step away from conducting drone strikes on people in the US.
David Ho
Some stats from 100 days in on congestion pricing:
- Complaints about car-honking are down 70%
- The Holland Tunnel has 65% fewer delays at rush hour; time to get thru it is down 48%
- 6 million fewer cars
- Half as many traffic-related injuries
- 1.5 million more visitors to BIDs year over year
Amanda Litman
scammers are using LLMs to take up all the slots in community college courses in San Diego as part of a financial aid scam. Hard to see a way this doesn't eventually kill remote learning for these colleges. Huge deadweight loss generated by LLMs.
mtsw
“We are going to deport Italians with tattoos of tribal symbols or a family member’s name on suspicion of ties to The Mafia” would be just as credible, which is to say not at all
Hayes Brown
Trump ordered his DOJ to investigate 2 innocent people who criticized him. That is impeachable.
He has kidnapped people from American Soil with no due process. That is impeachable.
He is defying courts. That is impeachable.
There is nothing about this administration that is constitutional.
Common Sense Matters
I'm gonna need all the blue states to stop focusing on whether or not Canada still likes YOU because YOU are a good one and start fucking recognizing this *entire* country is going off a cliff. No, Canada does not like any of us! AS THEY SHOULD NOT! leave them alone, we got our own shit to focus on!
Bree @mostlybree.kitrocha.com
Bill Garrison
Harvard is very rich and they aren't the only institution pushing back against trump. Michigan State has been pushing back a lot but they aren't "fancy" so they get less attention.
Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com
DOGE is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the people of the United States
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
I will say this - EVERYONE with power seems to be desperately hoping that unpopularity does the work that consequences need to do
Andrew Tobolowsky @andytobo.bsky.social
Trump pretends to love coal but his administration has been systematically attacking coal miners by slashing health programs, killing regulations, and closing mine safety offices. Meanwhile, one in 20 Appalachian coal miners has the most severe form of black lung
Kim Kelly
Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.
Sam Halpert
I gotta say, “women are going to space” sounds a lot nicer than “the ultra rich are taking hyper-polluting joyrides to space while the planet descends into climate chaos”
Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social
Legal permanent resident of the U.S., showing up to apply for citizenship, with no allegations of criminal activity, is arrested and detained by masked police. This is fascism, and that is not a word I use lightly.
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
What do these corporations have in common?
Netflix
Ford
Tesla
T-Mobile
Duke Energy
DISH Network
Metlife
Dominion Energy
United States Steel
In recent years, they all paid their execs more than they paid in taxes. This is what a corporate-rigged system looks like.
Robert Reich
Pretty striking that Trump and Republicans are prepared to destroy our university system, ostensibly in the name of combatting antisemitism, but when there is a blatant act of antisemitism, threatening the life of a Jewish governor, Trump can't bring himself to say a word.
Dean Baker
🚀🚀
Jon Cooper
““Many people don’t realize how high the American quality of life is because...of regulations.This affects airplane safety, baby formula safety, the safety of meat, vegetables and packaged foods, the water that you drink, how you get to work safely and whether you’re safe in your workplace.”
PM2.5 Kills ~9 Million People Worldwide Annually @tkovach.bsky.social
The simple lesson is – however bad you think it will get, you are wrong. Why? Because you are a normal human and they are criminally insane, deranged psychopaths.
Andy Fraser
Someone once said NextDoor is the social network for dogs if they could type. It’s always “what’s that noise?” and “who’s that stranger?” which is exactly what I imagine my dogs would text other neighborhood dogs.
Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social
We've reached the point in our descent into fascism where the Jewish governor's house getting firebombed on Passover by a guy trying to bash his head in with a sledgehammer is overshadowed by the story of the President saying he wants to build foreign gulags for US citizens.
Max Berger
I demand viewpoint diversity in the nation's police forces. From now on, every city has to hire 40% liberals.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
We traded Europe for a guy that builds concentration camps for profit:
Ron Filipkowski
Here's the first half of April 2025, once again in reverse chronological order. That means it starts with April 15 and goes backward to April 1. Tomorrow will cover the rest of the month.
The month began just before the April 5 Hands Off marches across the country. It also saw the first illegal renditioning of Venezuelans to El Salvador and Trump's "Liberation Day" when he decreed his random tariffs. Those two things were really close together! Then there was Cory Booker's 25-hour speech and the Wisconsin Supreme Court election upset. Was it an upset? I guess it was.
Later in the month there was even more about illegal renditioning (including Trump's meeting with the president of El Salvador) and economic havoc from tariffs. DOGE continued its path of destruction and it became obvious they were not saving money in any sense. RFK was intent on making us all sick, if inot dead. Just another half-month in Trump's America.
As usual, I have moved some of the less timely images up or down in the order for better visual balance.
Everything below the line is quoted from the attributed account.
___
They want you to be ok with this shit. That's why they keep talking about "toxic empathy," the "sin of empathy." They want you to silence your own basic human morality and replace it with their violent, racist, cult ideology.
Soraya Nadia McDonald
About 1 in every 60 people in El Salvador is incarcerated. That is more than twice the runner-up (Cuba, which is around the same ballpark of estimates for North Korea) and more than three times the notoriously high rate in the United States. It is about on par with the gulag population under Stalin.
Andy Craig
Numerous BlueSky posts about Trump's meeting with El Salvador's Bukele, which I put up on the blog back on April 14.
These guys are all convinced that they are out-of-the-box thinkers, but they all end up building prison plantations, one of the oldest capitalist enterprises.
Ian Carrillo @iansociologo.bsky.social
I'm with her:
Diane Ravitch
Back during Trump’s first term, I used to make “AUTHORITARIANISM ALERT” posts to raise awareness about the rhetoric Trump engaged in and where it would lead. That seems quaint now. We are so far beyond that. As I’ve said before, authoritarianism happens slowly and then all at once.
Leah McElrath
Vaccinating is “a personal choice” but your child getting lead poisoning from your municipal water supply is mandatory
Ryan Marino, MD
Teaching kids about climate change is not what causes climate anxiety. *Not doing anything about climate change* is what causes climate anxiety.
Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social
The Federal Housing Administration supports more than 25% of mortgage originations throughout the US by backing loans to homebuyers. But the Trump Admin is cutting it massively—even though it makes money for the federal government!
Yonah Freemark
People love to list useless things done by Roman emperors, namely Caligula’s declaring war on the sea. But a technocrat “conquering space” with an 11 minute rocket flight carrying a brigade of rich female celebrities — when ticket $ combined are worth the entire NEH budget for a year — is beyond Caligula levels imo.
Sarah E. Bond
If you are attracted to the phrase “We build to dominate,” seek professional help immediately.
Rachel Klein
it has never been more dangerous to be jewish in this country and it has nothing to do with college students protesting genocide and everything to do with nazis controlling the white house. republicans are disappearing people under the guise of fighting antisemitism and can’t even pretend to give a fuck when a jewish governor’s house gets firebombed on passover
Marisa Kabas
I love being in the woods and not knowing wtf is going on in the stock market
lukelukeluke
The reason why Bluesky is left-leaning is that Elon Musk took Twitter and turned it into a right-wing cesspool. Not sure what all the hand-wringing is about.
Judd Legum
Andy Singer
Not Antisemitism (according to MAGA):
- Firebombing a Jewish governor‘s house during Passover
- Doing a Sieg Hitler salute
- Eating dinner with neo-Nazis
Antisemitism (according to MAGA):
- Saying Israelis and Palestinians deserve rights and dignity
- Using freedom of speech on campus
Max Berger
Today a bunch of women "hand selected" by a billionaire's girlfriend are taking an 11-minute trip in the Bezos Dick Rocket, and some in the news are going to call it a breakthrough.
Robert Moffitt @justplainbob.bsky.social
America and every European country goes back to the dark ages without slave/cheap labor. They exist purely off stealing from the global south.
Dayna Lynn Nuckolls @thepeoplesoracle.com
America doesn’t know how to function without free/cheap labor cuz it never intended to be without slaves.
wafflehausa.bsky.social
The data are in: Battery-electric cars require only 40% the repairs as internal-combustion-engine (ICE) cars
BEVs: 4.2 breakdowns/year per 1,000 vehicles
ICEs: 10.4 breakdowns/year per 1,000 vehicles
Mark Z. Jacobson
The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory. 80+% of both Democrats and Republicans believe America would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing, but < 30% say that about themselves:
Jonathan Cohn
Solar farms can host up to three times as many birds as crop fields, study shows.
Nick Hedley
bill maher's only audience at this point is conservatives who have become addicted to going “wow even bill maher agrees with us”
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social
Again: it is supposed to be commonly accepted nonpartisan morality that “i'd rather let a hundred guilty men go free than imprison one who was innocent” but this administration and its party are gleefully inverting that premise and then some. The premise has been despicably inverted really hard out in the open since at least the start of the global war on terror and we are currently seeing the even further pathetically terrible consequences and outgrowth of those supposed principles.
Asawin Suebsaeng @swin24.bsky.social
It's not even that Abrego Garcia /may/ be innocent. He is concededly innocent! Like it's torturing a guy they know didn't do anything wrong "because I can" and "because you can't make me stop"
Pwnallthethings
My cartoon for this week's New Scientist:
Tom Gauld
The Social Security Administration was very lean. Expenses for the retirement program were less than 0.4 percent of benefits. Elon's pay at Tesla was more than the full cost of administering a program with 60 million beneficiaries.
Dean Baker
One of the doctors RFK claimed was doing “heroic” work “curing” kids of measles . . .
a) is treating kids with a steroid, which is making them sicker
b) said the idea came from god in a dream
c) boasted about treating kids *while he himself had the measles*
Radley Balko
I could have sworn that this country fought a desperate, grinding guerrilla war for five years just so random rich people couldn’t obliterate public policy on a whim
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com
remembering fondly the historically correct behavior of purchasing a thing with money and never hearing from the seller of the thing again in my life
Ms. Tinzley Henrietta Tottenham-Emsworth @feralhattie.bsky.social
Think I caught the cats shooting their album cover in the bath:
Rose Ruane @regretteruane.bsky.social
there is simply no amount of child death that will move RFK to change his mind because he is a predatory narcissist who cares less about health than the gratification of his own ego
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
If an administration can get away with falsifying social security records to target individuals, then there is no bottom. There's also no such thing as a "citizen" because that can be changed with a couple button presses too. Mark your SSN and passport as dead then ship you to El Salvador.
Max Kennerly
Musk's DOGE goons physically dragged a high-ranking Social Security executive from his desk for not going along with their plan to list more than 6,000 migrants as dead despite being alive.
StrictlyChristo
The Courts have maintained since the 1890’s that deportation is not a punishment. That’s how it is a civil offense, not a criminal one. And why they can get away not giving people a lawyer and all kinds of due process rights. If this with El Salvador doesn’t prove what total BS this argument is... When I teach students that it is not “punishment” and we talk about the horrors of immigration detention and the many problems of the deportation process, they see it for what it is and do not understand how the courts can just be like “it isn’t because I say it isn’t.”
Emily Farris @emayfarris.bsky.social
if you are looking for a politics that fights for the conditions in which families can flourish you are looking for feminism. if you have ended up in “pro-natalism” you have taken several wrong turns and are surrounded by racists and eugenicists. turn back immediately and reflect on what happened
Julia Carrie Wong @joolia.bsky.social
i think about this photo a lot:
Sharon @sharonk.bsky.social
“The reporter from MyPillow asked the White House press secretary why the president looks so healthy and robust” is a true sentence that exists in our current reality.
Radley Balko
The mainstream press viewpoint is that no one mainstream is racist, and therefore, as ideas approach the mainstream, they become less racist
Will Stancil
Trump admin has a private goal of 1 million deportations per year. Immigration officials and analysts say that’s unrealistic.
@kinsleyayay.bsky.social
i do not think the mainstream press is equipped or capable of covering ideological white nationalists and eugenicists as such, or even capable of noting that this is what they are. it is related to the wide belief that racism is simply a matter of manners.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
If birthrates are unsustainably low in particular places in the world — a real problem — the easiest solution we have yet devised is to have people from other parts of the world move there. This track record of this approach has been phenomenal.
Osita Nwanevu
I tell anyone who will listen that Missouri has been running the pilot for Project 2025 for decades. Here are two Missouri Senators burning the “woke agenda” nearly two years ago. The photo op was meant to simulate Nazis burning books:
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
Here are two straightforward and incontrovertible statements of law about Mahmoud Khalil:
1) Khalil is a political prisoner of the United States
2) Khalil is a "prisoner of conscience" as defined by Amnesty International
We need to say these things, and the world needs to hear them
Matt Cameron
I think a lot of what they're doing - deliberate provocative illegality followed by brazen noncompliance with courts - amounts to a program of acclimatising people to a post-legal government; training the public to accept their tacit declaration that they no longer consider themselves bound by law.
Jack Graham @timescarcass.bsky.social
“Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals—and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records… [T]hose suddenly declared dead… become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for.”
David Brody
The moment a Low Traffic Neighbourhood goes in, drivers who want to rat run through your street will start shouting that ‘the old and disabled can’t cycle!!!’. As Zwolle, Netherlands, clearly shows, segregated cycling and LTNs *increase* freedom for those with mobility issues:
Jon Burke @jonburkeuk.bsky.social
3 days ago RFK Jr. told the CDC to stop recommending water fluoridation, claiming it was a neurotoxin (this is a lie). Turns out he also just eliminated the CDC’s entire Lead Program, and now lead poisoned children in Milwaukee are just on their own. Lead IS a neurotoxin and harms brain development
Ryan Marino, MD
guarantee they're going after foreign students because they're a fucking easy quota point, just like going after immigrants who have been keeping all their appointments with the government. 'we're deporting criminals' was always a fucking lie
hammancheez
I didn’t realize you could just lay off whole government departments. We could have abolished ICE this whole time??
Carly Goodman
First thing we do, let's be disappointed in all the lawyers
Emily Nussbaum
I was once stopped at a red light when a driver leaned out her window and yelled at me, "Cyclists don't stop for red lights." I said, "I am stopped at a red light right now." She responded, "Yeah, well cyclists don't stop at red lights" and then the light changed and that was that.
Doug Gordon @brooklynspoke.bsky.social
I think you can now understand how people justified chattel slavery to themselves. You are seeing people justify genocide in real time.
Prisonculture
Federal employees can't accept a free turkey sandwich at a meeting but law firms can give one dude $100 million in gifts of services? Wack.
Costa Samaras
NEW: Entire scientific fields have been wiped out by the nearly 800 grants cancelled at NIH, finds a
@nature.com analysis of the unprecedented cuts. About half of all 2024 NIH projects related to LGBT+ health or vaccine hesitancy — gone.
Max Kozlov
People on foot, horseback, bikes and wagons were perfectly safe at uncontrolled intersections, but stop signs were created shortly after the invention of cars because cars are dangerous and drivers are assholes.
Jemaleddin Cole @jemal.co
Just a reminder that Germany led the world in science until the Nazis came to power and fired, exiled, and/or killed all the non-Nazi scientists, which was most of the scientists.
Laura Helmuth
the ladders have ladders. a dutch masterpiece. the light. a vermeer. this belongs in the louvre:
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social
“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still on the shelves at the Naval Academy. But a critique of the book was pulled.
Jen Mercieca
every third post these days is just “this is so fucking terrible” with a link to some news story and they’re all 100% correct
Tom Tomorrow
Man, I assume these Chinese tariffs are going to decimate our Shen Yun billboard industry.
Norm Charlatan
The world knows about climate change mostly because of great American researchers, and that work has been largely centered at NOAA. Trump and Musk are now shutting down that brilliant work. They are contemptible, short-sighted, and sold out
Bill McKibben
More autonomous vehicles means More driving means More pollution, gridlock, and sprawl. New study projecting AV use across Texas:
• "Results showed statewide daily VMT rose 24%"
• "With the widespread use of []AVs], individuals are likely to choose more remote destinations"
David Zipper
i have already seen too much of that picture of chris rufo. dude looks like incel lurch. he is just the most obvious loser. a miserable mediocrity whose response to his own failure is to try to destroy institutions that rejected him
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
BREAKING from @science.org: The Trump admin is seeking to kill nearly all climate research at NOAA, its climate science agency. Its near-final budget proposal would end all NOAA research labs, academic institutes, and regional climate centers. And it wants to fully end the NOAA Research division.
Paul Voosen
One thing I think we really need to drill down on is that these cynical weaponizations of the rhetoric of combating antisemitism and sexual violence *are themselves* antisemitic and misogynist: they mock the suffering and desire for justice of people who have experienced these.
Moira Donegan
I'm going to start a magazine that just endlessly cycles through the exact same profiles of Chris Rufo, the creepy "pro-natalist" couple and the Guy Who's Using His Kid's Blood To Live Forever. Apparently, there is an IMMENSE market for these stories.
Kevin M. Kruse
Hello, just for reference: I’m an American and a Jew and I don’t want my government making decisions about what counts as antisemitic enough to deny someone legal status in the US.
Dara Lind
BREAKING: The Trump Regime and RFK Jr. will lie about the “cause” of autism by September. (I’m surprised they’re going to pretend to take that long.)
Brent Toderian
Federal spending is *up* under Trump according to the Wall Street Journal. Chaos is not actually the same as cost savings. Actual budgeting is a kind of actual policy-making and takes real work spread over real time. Running around breaking stuff isn't that:
Jacob T. Levy
BREAKING — DOGE will descend upon Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) buildings tomorrow, an agency source tells me. FDIC is responsible for insuring all commercial/personal US bank accounts for up to $250k and regulating banks. Scary in light of Trump’s manipulation of markets this week.
Marisa Kabas
The FDIC has one job, preventing bank runs, which it has done effectively for nearly a century at negligible cost
Seth Masket @smotus.bsky.social
If they could get Kristi Noem there for a photo op, they can go rescue the innocent guy they shipped there.
Mark Thompson @sonofathomp.bsky.social
Can confirm US immigration in Canada looks like a zombie movie, and I got to personally see like 12 security agents and three customs and border people totally by myself:
Lesley Carhart @hacks4pancakes.com
I'm as big a USA booster as you'll find. But why would people from anyplace else *risk* coming to the US right now? What if Customs/Border people at the airport find something about you they don't like? Good luck to US travel/tourism industry
James Fallows
The central paradox of Elon Musk is that nobody gets more trust than he does, but nobody earns that trust less
e.w. niedermeyer
I’m not reposting anything with RFK Jr’s face on it out of respect for your eyes but “autism epidemic” is like saying “freckles epidemic” or “cleft chin epidemic” it’s not a disease it’s just a way some people are and the thing we need to fix is a hostile societal framework.
Tea Berry-Blue
No he isn't going to ban vaccines. He's going to say the government doesn't recommend them so people will now have to pay out of pocket to get their kids vaccinated. This whole thing's an insurance scam.
Saien
Oh fuck you, RFK Jr. Nothing "caused" autism other than our genetics and being born. Autistic people have always existed. The numbers have only increased due to better identification and screening. In the past, they were just the "weird" kids you bullied for fun because you're a sociopath.
Christina M @bluebird-of-fury.bsky.social
I'm not going to stop saying this. We need to stop calling it "deporting." It may not always be fair or humane, but deportation has a process. And it means you're sent back to where you came from. These people are being trafficked and sold to slave prisons. Not deported.
Randi Mayem Singer
The SAVE Act just passed House. It is modern-day poll tax that would disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans, end online, mail + voter registration drives & require voters to register in person at election offices, forcing some rural voters to drive 8 hours to register. Total disaster in every way
Ari Berman
On Thursday, April 9th, the President of the United States put into effect the largest tax increase in American history. The average household will pay $4000 more a year. It's a flat consumption tax that hits the poorest families the hardest.
W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social
Not only are they canceling the world-class US Global Change Research Program, the Republican regime is exploring ways to fund a so-called "science" that shows Climate Change has *benefits*, on the way to overturning the Endangerment Finding, which allows the government to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
Dr. Genevieve Guenther @doctorvive.bsky.social
Whether it’s Republicans causing chaos with random arrests and deportations, Republicans causing chaos with mass layoffs, or Republicans causing chaos with whiplash tariffs, voters are exhausted by chaos from both parties.
New York Times Pitchbot
"The government’s three main payroll processors have all surreptitiously ceased collecting union dues directly from employees’ paychecks."
Rebecca Givan @rkgwork.bsky.social
Inflation hit like 6% because the Biden administration did everything they could to keep people employed and the headlines were “100% guarantee of recession”, meanwhile Trump declares that prices are arbitrary going up 10% and nobody takes it seriously. Why would anyone try to do good policy?
Cooper Lund
There are only two kinds of Trump EOs.
The first: legal or illegal ones written by his anti-government, authoritarian Project2025 puppetmasters.
The second: the illogical, incoherent, or bizarre ones he just would tweet if he wasn't president.
Peter Gleick
This is a 12 alarm fire for the economy. If being friends with the president and giving him kickbacks makes you exempt from large import taxes Vs your competitors, it will stratify the whole economy and push corruption and loyalty and political controls deep into the private sector:
Pwnallthethings
Fun fact: Trump's backing down on tariffs generated roughly $5 trillion in stock wealth yesterday. If Trump friends got 10% of that through advance knowledge, that's $500 billion. That would be roughly equal to the entire food stamp budget for five years. Unfortunately, anyone who could investigate this possibility has been fired by Elon Musk and Trump.
Dean Baker
Don’t overthink this. He’s asking for bribes.
Rick @rickylongthread.bsky.social
there’s a reason why so many families that were supported by factory jobs pushed their kids to go to college – it’s because they wanted the next generation to not have to work factory jobs!
april showers Social Justice Road Warrior @sjroadw.bsky.social
I still can’t figure out when “we can deport you” turned into “we can put you in a hell hole prison in a third country, indefinitely, with no legal recourse.”
Joyce White Vance
The IRS working with ICE is proof this was never about removing dangerous criminals. Criminals don't pay their taxes. ICE is too lazy to find criminals.
Leftist Connection
10/10 Onion headline:
Daniel Aldana Cohen @aldasky.bsky.social
We coulda future-proofed and upgraded US steel-making, starting with a plant in Middletown Ohio, in the heart of Trump country and JD Vance's hometown. But the bucks came from Biden, so we can't have that. No sir. Not in Trump's America.
Jesse D. Jenkins
NEW: WIRED has obtained a service agreement between DOGE and the Department of Labor. The agreement calls for the DOL to pay DOGE up to $1.3 million for work done by four DOGE operatives. That's around $217,000 per person as annualized salaries.
Katie Drummond
Here’s the best way to understand what’s happening. Trump genuinely wants to impose a 19th century mercantilist model that would crash the economy and destroy the global trading order but the idea is just so colossally stupid and destructive, he can’t actually do it. So we get this.
Chris Hayes
Really great that we appear to be sliding into the sweet spot of inflicting crippling long-term damage on US institutions and influence while keeping the consequences diffuse enough to not break the Republican Party.
Nathan Goldwag
If there was functional legislative branch in the US, it would use the 90 day pause to pass legislation to rein in Trump’s tariff power.
Tuffy @smtuffy.bsky.social
Somehow, the future is both going to be a dystopian techno sci-fi hellscape AND we're gonna have coal and measles and robber barons and a permanent underclass. Philip K. Dickens
Ward Q. Normal
President signs Exec Order to raise temperatures and sea levels, burn down homes, raise the price of food, make insurance unaffordable, make Earth unlivable. Oh, and poison your kid’s tuna fish sandwiches with mercury. #climatecrisis
David Fenton
Reminder that all the tech billionaires believe in (and want to usher in) the singularity - where humans merge with the machine super intelligence - and they think AI is going to be the way in. And they’re throwing all their money behind it. And yes this is 100% not a joke and yes it’s a cult. It’s a death cult by way of an immortality fetish.
Erin Biba
so we're trying to recreate 1933 germany but also 1929 america in a whole new mash-up, I feel like somebody took the wrong lessons from a half-remembered high school history class
Tom Tomorrow
Good morning. A reminder that historically when the US has wanted to punish other countries, it imposed sanctions on them, cutting their people off from global trade, hoping to create enough economic havoc that they rein in their leaders. Trump has imposed economic sanctions on the American people.
Justin Wolfers
Bike paths are red
Amtrack is blue
I shouldn't have to fly from Madison to Chicago
And neither should you
Sam Clemente
Today's US EO orders the Attorney General to identify + take expeditious action to stop enforcement of "all State and local laws... purporting to address “climate change” or involving “environmental, social, and governance” initiatives, “environmental justice,” carbon or “greenhouse gas” emissions."
Katharine Hayhoe
This new White House executive order says that the US Attorney General is going to prevent states from implementing democratically passed laws regarding climate change and clean energy. It scarcely needs stating at this point that this is wildly, unambiguously unconstitutional. Dictator shit.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
If you're an American, your *personal* exposure to climate risk (and its economic fallout) is skyrocketing right now. This will not end pretty.
Alex Steffen
Illegal attempts to access IRS data was an article of impeachment against Nixon.
Denise Wheeler
"The 'emergency' Trump is *actually* responding to — the one that motivated his Big Oil donors to donate $500m in the last election cycle — is the rapid increase in renewable energy deployment" says
Bill McKibban.
Damian Carrington
Trump said if America elected the wrong president, the market would crash. Well...
Republican Accountability @accountablegop.bsky.social
A funny thing is that "how would they treat a Democratic President in the same situation" thing is totally hypothetical because all the huge market crashes in my lifetime happened under Republicans.
mtsw
I don’t really know how to communicate that you can’t have a mass movement if you constantly gatekeep who is allowed to be mad now.
Courtney Milan
you can't spell "tariffs" without "FFS"
Robert Armstrong
I'm not kidding that any Dem who wants to run in 2028 should get out ahead of this and loudly say if El Salvador puts American citizens in Trump's gulag we'll fucking invade.
Zeddy @zeddary.bsky.social
will the military obey orders from the president to fire on peaceful civilian protesters, a question one frequently contemplates in a healthy, functioning democracy
Tom Tomorrow
Remember SignalGate? (One of Trump's superpowers is being involved in so many scandals all the time that very few of them end up having staying power beyond a news cycle or two.)
Aaron Rupar
Kelly Meggs was not just convicted of sedition, he was adjudged to be a terrorist (he got a terrorism enhancement). The acting US Attorney for DC is, quite literally, palling around with a terrorist.
emptywheel
"take your medicine" what the hell, we weren't sick, this isn't medicine, it's poison
Tom Tomorrow
There are more yoga teachers in America than there are coal miners
wesinjapan
in case you're wondering, "what's the harm in claiming an extinct species has been brought back from the dead" when it most certainly has not, our interior secretary is already using it to justify taking animals off the endangered species list
daniel sieradski @self.agency
The last thing conservatives want is transgender people coming into the bathroom while they're shitting on the constitution.
Frank Conniff
something I haven't seen yet: isn't a massive increase in the range of goods worth smuggling going to be a big boost to exactly the kind of cross-border organized crime the White House claims it wants to stop?
BeijingPalmer
At the rate we're going, there are a hell of a lot of children named things like Mason, Wainwright, Cooper, Tanner, and Miller who are gonna learn the hard way where these names come from.
John Garrison Marks @johngmarks.com
Book Cover of the Day:
Rachel Deering
It was never about reinvigorating manufacturing, it's about destroying industries he doesn't like such as clean energy and extorting money from other countries in the hopes he will lift tariffs. He's nothing more than a cheap gangster, and not a particularly smart one at that.
David J. Loehr @djl.bsky.social
I find “people don’t actually know how things work” has a lot of explanatory power. I don’t mean this in a holier-than-thou way. I’m only vaguely aware of how my microwave or the car radio work. A lot of modern life is assuming the functioning of complex tech and models.
Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social
Going to keep saying: a society that wants to keep its basic functioning has to discourage lying. rewarding it instead is suicidal
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Idea: A stupid reality show that asks MAGA types to name a year when America was "great" and then forces them to spend 6 months living exactly how a household at the 75th income percentile lived in that year.
Josh Chafetz
Trump administration aims to spend $45 billion to expand immigrant detention.
The New York Times
This is equal to or greater than the budget of five different cabinet departments (Justice, Treasury, Energy, Interior and Commerce). They are building a concentration camp network that dwarfs entire federal agencies.
Brandon Friedman
this is a staggering amount of money to build camps — suggesting that building and running a gulag will be the primary function of the otherwise gutted Trump-state. in last fiscal year: "D.H.S. allocated about $3.4 billion for the entire custody operation overseen by ICE"
Philip Gourevitch
This Court considered it an egregious abuse of executive power for Biden to modify student loan payments based on a statute authorizing the executive branch to "waive or modify" student loan payments
Scott Lemieux @lemieuxlgm.bsky.social
Reminder: We are not at war with Venezuela. The people deported are not enemies. The law in question should not apply. Among the most dangerous aspects of the SCOTUS ruling is the idea that the president and his people have the right to arbitrarily determine who our enemies are.
David Rothkopf
It's important to underscore that MAGA's Great Patriotic Trade War is very clearly and consciously an intentional project of self-impoverishment. As disastrous as the Great Leap Forward was, it was at least in intent an attempt to leapfrog development. This is closer to the Khmer Rouge.
Judah Grunstein
In Memoriam: 95% of the Arctic's oldest, thickest ice has disappeared since 1984; and Arctic sea ice continues to melt, hitting record lows for the end of the region’s winter [Note to self: File under "History", "Souvenir"]:
Assaad Razzouk
I think the stock market has a better shot at bouncing back from this moment than the forests or the oceans or the kids who don't get their health care or their school lunches or the sea ice. At least the stock market seems to have some billionaires standing up for it, sort of.
Dr. Elizabeth Sawin @bethsawin.bsky.social
It is offensively ridiculous to think that any but a handful of people disappeared by ICE will be able to file habeas corpus, because it relies on them having informed families with connections to available knowledgeable lawyers with time and resources to act instantly.
@kenwhite.bsky.social
This may sound silly and have no effect but please remember: As soon as you are detained. Demand to be brought before a judge without delay. State that you are your lawyer until better representation is available and you would like to file a habeas corpus. Love even the whip that scourges.
August in the Garden @veritashortus.bsky.social
I'm not a lawyer but if I follow this correctly, an additional burden is that habeus has to be filed in the jurisdiction where the person has been whisked off to, correct? So even if you did have a good local legal network wherever you lived, you need to suddenly find one elsewhere in the country?
And second — again, as a non-lawyer — but since this was a shadow docket ruling, that means one of the parties was claiming irreparable harm, and in this case, it was the US government claiming it would be irreparably harmed if they weren't allowed to detain people at will? Is that the right read?
@jamesfrye.bsky.social
roberts et al have divined the Actual Intent of the constitution, which is to allow the government to exercise nearly unaccountable power to strip people of their rights. it is why we fought the revolution!
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
“Cryptocurrencies … burn through massive amounts of energy, thus driving up greenhouse gas emissions *** But the industry also devours water,” so much so that a “study last year found that a single bitcoin transaction can use enough water to fill a small swimming pool.” –Gil Duran
Jenny Cohn
The 1950s and 1960s were not a natural state of affairs 'pre-neoliberalism'; they were a product of a very strange time period in which every other industrialized state had seen much of its capital stock absolutely obliterated while ours was mostly untouched
Matthew Downhour
A lot of people seem to be under the belief that the post-war factory jobs their parents and grandparents had were good jobs because they were masculine and tough instead of, say, protected by a union under a progressive tax rate and a massive surplus
Gillian Branstetter
it’s like we’re being governed by an email that starts with FW: FW: FW: FW
shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social
My working theory is that someone once told him that it was called "The Gilded Age" and went "You mean... like gold?"
E.J. Fagan
Fun fact: the term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain to satirize the promised "golden age" after the Civil War. Instead what we got was lots of social problems and corruption. So, not a golden age but a thin gold gilding covering up all the rot.
Jacqueline Antonovich
when people say "this isn't what I voted for" they should be forced to list what they DID vote for
shauna @goldengateblond.bsky.social
Donald playing golf every weekend isn't just an opportunity to ignore the problems of the American people, it is also an opportunity to rip off the American taxpayers. Here is a bill the Secret Service got for staying at Mar-a-Lago for a few days in his first term. 42 rooms at $396.15/night:
Mrs. Betty Bowers
Trump: "The reason we're not talking about tariffs with Russia is because we're not doing business essentially with Russia."
US-Russia trade totalled $3.5 billion in 2024.
US-Lesotho trade totalled $240 million in 2024, yet Trump imposed a 50% tariff on the impoverished country.
Adam Schwarz
Understand that when they talk about Americans working in textile factories and assembling iPhones, they are not envisioning their own children in those jobs. They are envisioning a class of people over which they and their children will have more power, with less irksome pushback.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
Reminder that
(a) the current share of U.S. workers in the public sector (working for government agencies) is at historic lows
(b) It was not until the 'post'-Civil Rights era, when Black workers gained footing in public sector jobs, policymakers began to frame public sector workers as "waste"
Arrianna Marie Planey, PhD MA
I’m seeing a lot of posts about how certain immigrants sent to El Salvador are not actually criminals and this is true but I would also like to remind you that people with criminal records shouldn’t be subjected to this, either.
Tea Berry-Blue
In just two months, DOGE has —lost— the government an estimated half a trillion dollars. I propose that Musk pay it back personally.
Timothy Snyder
less than ten trans women tried to play collegiate sports and now the car dealership class gets to crash the global economy and set up sweatshops in the midwest
@lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com
what the fuck the founder of chipotle literally just looks like someone shaved the grinch:
business goose @goose.art
Don’t vote for anyone who is genuinely concerned about parking
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social
big shadow docket decision coming: can the us government exile you to a torture prison overseas vs no it can't
Adam Serwer
If SCOTUS decides in Trump's favor, we are in Argentina's "Dirty War" territory, where the Argentinian junta at the time disappeared thousands of citizens, and even threw some opponents out of planes at 10,000 feet.
Andrew M_Founder @andrewmceo.bsky.social
every single time a politician bitches about spoiled Americans wanting new tech, new appliances, and new vehicles, the reporter should reply with, “So what progress are you making to ensure Right to Repair?”
sarahquaint
"DOGE is eliminating the government's tape backups because they're too stupid to know why they're important" is the generous interpretation, when what they might actually be doing is stealing all the money and trying to destroy the records of them doing so.
mtsw
We have a vaccine in sight for pancreatic cancer and we just stopped it! This hangs on the GOP for the next 30 years.
Nate Pentz
David Brooks, who holds no advanced degrees but has nevertheless served as a visiting professor at both Duke and Yale — solely on the basis of his conservative ideas — thinks that universities are deeply unfair to conservative thinkers.
Kevin M. Kruse
the demand scale for data centers is so much higher than you can imagine. 10 upcoming data center mega projects in Minnesota are estimated to have the demand of every household in the state, combined
ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com
jim frey birdhouses, trenton, maine, 1995:
old roadside pics
darkly funny that every big tech CEO prostrated themselves in front of Trump admin and he still sent their companies through a cheese grater
rat king @mikeisaac.bsky.social
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
Hank Green
Damn nanny state, keeping me alive to complain about it.
Matthew McLeod @vai.noetic.work
Just as a reminder, we WERE onshoring a bunch of manufacturing jobs, thanks to the CHIPS and IRA acts. Those jobs were spread around the country, many/most in red districts. Trump trying to kill them all.
Clara Jeffery
60 Minutes could find no criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
60 Minutes
One really important thing to notice about the tariffs is that there are at least half a dozen explanations **from their proponents** about what they're meant to accomplish. Meanwhile there are another half dozen explanations from their foes. It is highly reminiscent of 2002 during the build up to the Iraq War. More than anything it is a sign that there actually is no central reason or strategy. You have a central drive, driven by a man who hates trade deficits, thinks you can only be great and strong and rich by building machinery of some scale and lives on the need to dominate.
Josh Marshall @joshtpm.bsky.social
Props to George Soros. Hundreds of thousands of paid protestors yesterday, and yet not a single copy of a check or any evidence of electronic transfers to them.
George Takei
Class action lawsuit for the whole country for the wasted time and business interruption of all these lawless actions, then a special top marginal tax rate increase to cover the damages
Costa Samaras
John Lipponen
It's already true that we can't save everything from climate chaos and ecological destruction. What's happening in America right now, though, is that the Republicans are smashing the very mechanisms by which we might have saved more places— and helped millions relocate away from danger.
Alex Steffen
Trade deficits do weird things to people in power. Britain became so upset about their trade deficit with China they became the world's largest drug dealer. Hong Kong wouldn't exist without some posh British aristo deciding to become Pablo Escobar.
The Alternate Historian
"Nazis used trains, ICE uses planes" is one of the most powerful statements I've seen.
Tiffany Vilchis
I would strongly urge Republicans to make "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones" its vision for America in the 2026 midterms.
Radley Balko
RFK Jr. wants to send mental health patients to 'wellness farms' to do manual labor without medication, based on a failed 18th-century practice. In contrast, JFK aimed to create more community mental-health centers with less federal oversight—a goal unrealized.
Fal Rising
This is part of the big manufacturing lie: that people can get jobs with no education or training just wielding screwdrivers. Apple cannot make iPhones in the US without an army of tooling engineers, and we don’t even have the tooling engineers here to educate an army of tooling engineers.
Courtney Milan
the sick thing is, we have an actual policy that was revitalizing US manufacturing without relying on the nimble hands of underpaid 10yo wastrels. it’s called the Inflation Reduction Act and they are shoving it into the wood chipper. bonus: the new manufacturing jobs the IRA was creating were mostly making things that we will need for the clean energy transition. these guys have decided that’s bad for some reason
Lissa Harris
I've seen polls from Zoomers saying they needed an $800k salary to feel like they made it, so I don't think the young are going to sign up willingly for tiny screw technician.
The Alternate Historian
I don’t think people have fully grasped that you can get measles from walking through the same room as someone who has it hours later. Most contagious disease we know.
Joshua Eaton
I scanned dozens of newspapers from around the U.S. and world. On average, international newspapers cover the widespread protests against Trump/Musk and for democracy much more prominently on their covers than those in the U.S. This isn’t due to deadlines, protests were daytime in the U.S. #handsoff
Kat O’Brien @lavidagata.bsky.social
you, a rube: “i want my kid to grow up to be a doctor or an engineer or a teacher”
lutnick, a genius: “to make america great again your child will make iphones that they will not be able to afford”
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
Sometimes the most unassuming artefacts are utterly incredible! This piece of wood for example, is a spear point worked from yew wood about 420,000 years ago! Known as the Clacton Spear it is the oldest known preserved wooden spear in the world! Natural History Museum, London. Photo by me:
Alison Fisk
As I stood in this completely free institution that exists for no other reason than to help us learn something about itself, I learned the Smithsonian is not filled with hatred toward awesome country; it is filled with the deepest love, and that is what I learned at the museum.
Norma Shulman @nbsh.bsky.social
3.5 million people turned out yesterday. Not one Capitol building stormed, not one police officer attacked. #handsoff
@realbiscuitspaw.bsky.social
Number 9 of 10 reasons authoritarian leaders deliberately crash their own economy while attempting full overthrow of democracy: Facilitate Corrupt Wealth Extraction – By crashing the economy, those in power can buy distressed assets at bargain prices, launder money, and consolidate personal wealth while the general population suffers.
Christopher L Kaneff @humanbeinghuman.bsky.social
This is free money. Foreign tourists:
- spend billions in the US
- create many American jobs and displace none
- pay taxes (sales, hotel, etc.) and use a trivial share of services and none of the expensive ones (schools, Social Security, Medicare)
- increase our soft power when they go home happy
Greg Shill
thinking about the amount of context necessary to explain to someone from 2010 what people are protesting with signs reading "cheap eggs not measles" or "tax the rich, not the penguins"
Ariel Edwards-Levy
BREAKING: Hedge funds are facing Lehman-style margin calls due to the market crash triggered by President Donald Trump's tariffs, per DailyMail
Unusual Whales
Making transit easier to use is (should be) a Vision Zero strategy.
K.H.I. @sheridesabike.bsky.social
I'm on a listserv to receive weekly funding opportunities from the #NIH, which is usually long and descriptive. This is what it says now. I've NEVER seen it like this before:
Thanh Neville, MD, MSHS
when was the last time the GOP didn't wreck the economy
Emma Evans @trance.bsky.social
At least Nero could play an instrument
Seth Abramson
I explained it to several young teens today: imagine we wanted you to become more self-sufficient in the kitchen, so we decided to charge you $20 every time you got takeout. But also we have no food in the house, we won't let you go to the store, and also you don't know how to cook.
Celeste Ng @pronounced-ing.bsky.social
Well, I'm mean, we've been fucking around for nearly 50 years, we were bound to find out.
Bob Alberti @a1batross.bsky.social
The “we’ll recreate the whole manufacturing supply chain here in a year” thing is like a baby lacking object permanence, an inability to see literally all of human history. Adorable.
Dave Levitan
Donald Trump was not elected to bring prosperity to America. He was elected to dismantle America for the Russians and the oligarchs.
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
A plate of Spring:
Present & Correct
Pakistan went full renewables slowly, slowly then all at once, importing 22GW of solar panels in 2024 - to multiply its installed solar capacity by 17 times in just 1 year. That’s more solar than the UK added in the past 5 years combined
Assaad Razzouk
funny how Jeff Bezos pivoted to "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets" thinking that would be obviously pro-trump
Atrios @eschatonblog.com
China spent 4.5% of its GDP on the energy transition last year, more than double the global average. Other big countries are spending more on their militaries than on the energy transition. -BloombergNEF
Nick Hedley
our problem as people not infected by the authoritarian mind virus is that we are trying too hard to make sense of Trump’s tariffs as economic policy. Instead it is primarily symbolic, an attempt to reassert the fantasy of a racial colonial patriarchal family romance onto the world.
Louis Römer @lromeranth.bsky.social
My daily daycare drop off is a 2-mile round trip on neighborhood streets. This week the city schools are on spring break. The change has made it crystal clear that 90% of the stressed drivers whipping around on a typical morning are just other parents driving their kids to school.
Warren Wells, AICP
Billions of dollars in clean energy projects have been canceled since Donald Trump took office again — leaving thousands of jobs and the shift to clean energy in doubt.
The Washington Post
If the government’s position is that being trafficked to El Salvador by Donald Trump and Stephen Miller amounts to a final and irreversible deprivation of all rights, then it seems to me every federal court has a duty to permanently enjoin the practice as soon as it possibly can.
southpaw @nycsouthpaw.bsky.social
You have to admit, Trump's plan to get the media to stop talking about Signalgate with his massive tariffs was pretty brilliant
Dean Baker
Petabytes of critical government research that is marked for possible deletion cannot be archived because of technical and legal restrictions, meaning it is very likely to be lost forever:
Jason Koebler
Imagine you’re Timothy Haugh, a decorated general, confirmed unanimously by the Senate to head the NSA. And while you’re traveling abroad, you find out the President just fired you on the advice of a 9/11 truther whose bigotry once got her banned by Uber.
Mehdi Hasan
“At 3C of global heating, climate damage cannot be insured against, covered by governments, or adapted to. That means no more mortgages or new real estate devt, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function and capitalism ceases to be viable.”
Brent Toderian
(Again for those in back: a giant building boom is what successful climate action looks like.)
Alex Steffen
NOAA’s office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research’s main contract for its websites was not approved for renewal, so I’m told we should expect some of them to start to go down. “Lutnick's position on every contract is ‘no’ and agency reps have roughly a minute and a half to convince him otherwise.”
Dave Levitan
The irony of Americans electing a fascist because they were more concerned about getting lower grocery prices than saving democracy and then they end up losing democracy AND getting higher grocery prices
Mehdi Hasan
Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, points out that turnout for Susan Crawford's state supreme court election was so high that she got more votes than any Republican running for governor of Wisconsin has ever earned.
MaddowBlog
I just got confirmation that National History Day, a program that does more to ignite K-12 students' love of history, learning, and yes, even the United States than anything else I've ever seen, had all its funding cut yesterday by the DOGE-axe at the NEH - including for this year's ongoing contest.
Anise K. Strong
From my time in Paris, I know that in France people would have burned a lot of stuff by now.
David Ho
scha·den·freu·de @blisterpearl.bsky.social
NEWS: Whirlpool Corp. announces Iowa's largest layoff of 2025 in Amana manufacturing facility. Nearly 1/3 of the company’s workforce in the Iowa facility will be let go due to current market conditions.
Tracey Jennings Cavasin
I don't understand why parents parent their sons differently from their daughters. You let your sons run rampant because of the 'boys will be boys' mentality while micromanaging the girls. The result? Your sons are rampant with degeneracy while your daughters are burnout overachievers. fuck you.
@astoldbynai.bsky.social
Make America Great Depression Again
A.J. Bauer
If you've been accumulating $250,000 annually since the rise of the city of Babylon 4000 years ago, you'd have $1 billion today. It's really an absurd amount of money. I am more convinced than ever that billionaires should not exist.
David Ho
Companies are not going to invest more in American manufacturing under an administration that contradicts itself/changes its mind every 5 minutes.
Elizabeth Kolbert
In its own way, gutting the Institute of Museum & Library Services is as damaging as what is happening at NIH, CDC, USAID, elsewhere. Even tariffs. It's the Cultural Revolution. Year Zero. And GOP grins and claps. I am no longer kidding
James Fallows
Ohh "America First" was a hit list
@internethippo.bsky.social
The American public:
Rich Cassara
fun fact about President Businessman: he didn't just bankrupt *a* casino. He bankrupted *multiple* casinos.
Tom Tomorrow
Ok I'm just going to say it: I don't even think President Sanders would be this bad for the economy.
The Alternate Historian
You know what's cool about all of this is climate change. We're still cooking the planet but giving it zero attention
Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis @kendrawrites.com
I really wish I could directly post gifs here that I have saved because I have a gif of a kid setting his own crotch on fire for no obvious reason and then having the fire stamped out by his friends and there's no better metaphor for what's happening in the US right now
Dr. SkySkull
is this what they meant when they said daddy's home and he's going to punish us
Tom Tomorrow
Republicans went nuts and accused Biden of tyranny when he tried to cancel student debt. Right now, their guy just imposed the biggest tax rise on Americans in modern history by fiat, unilaterally, with no congressional or judicial approval.
Mehdi Hasan
My mother is a protester again!
Conrad Lange Zbikowski
Everyone wants there to be a grand scheme behind all of this but the terrible truth is that extremely stupid people are in charge and they have a fanatical devotion to wrong, childlike concepts of society and economics cooked up by right wing radio hosts in order to sell tainted dietary supplements
Ian Boudreau
As far as I can determine, Trump's supposed legal authority to impose these incredibly sweeping and destructive tariffs rest largely on the idea that trade deficits constitute a national emergency. How on earth is this remotely legitimate?
Greg Sargent
People don't miss manufacturing jobs. They miss the effects of having 30+ percent union density. And we can build worker power again, with good policies, for the jobs most working class people actually have today rather than hoping mumbo jumbo will make it 1955 again.
Osita Nwanevu
i want nothing more than for jd vance to become a pariah whose name is a burden on him for the rest of his life.
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
I lost my job, my kids have measles, and I had to drive my parents 200 miles to a Social Security office, but at least I know that immigrants are getting sent to torture prisons in El Salvador.
New York Times Pitchbot
Tulip timeline cleanse:
melomys
Not having a functional FTC — the two Dem members have been locked out of the building — is already costing us all. The FTC has suspended its case against PBMs (for jacking up insulin prices) because "there are currently no sitting Commissioners able to participate in this matter."
Stacy Mitchell
The US and the world had lots of really big problems before Trump came along, but it's staggering to reflect on how little Trumpism is an attempt to fix ... any of them.
Angus Johnston
The thing is Hoover had a strong humanitarian record before blowing it all up
Adam Miller @ajm6792.bsky.social
The GOP COVID Committee report is wild. The virus is a Chinese bioweapon designed by Fauci ... and it was so mild that the US should have taken zero precautions ... and Democratic governors didn't take enough precautions ... and we should have let everyone get it.
Michael Hobbes
Our monopolized payments system is hindering 80% of small businesses, according to a Fed survey. Swipe fees, slow funds availability, data theft. Our banking system should be designed to facilitate commerce, not bleed it dry.
Stacy Mitchell
I’m not an economist but it would seem that, at a certain threshold, there may be diminishing returns to how much market bounce-back occurs as actors begin to fully price in chaos. You don’t have to touch the stove for long to get a pretty bad burn
Sean Sellers @sellazz.bsky.social
Many people have already said this, but CyberTruck crybabies would mentally unravel after 5 mins of riding a bike on a city street. The crap that cyclists have to deal with.
Baseball Enthusiast @iluvbaseball.bsky.social
People will say this is the result of a presidential election, and that’s partly true. But the Constitution does not delegate tariff power to the president, and he is only able to impose these ruinous, peace-destroying taxes because Congress has let him do so. Congress can end this at any time.
Robinson Meyer
frolics motel sign, route 1, miami, florida, 1980:
old roadside pics
Liberation Wednesday followed by Tanking Thursday
Jen Mercieca
Great article. Here’s the 5 key steps identified for effective net zero action:
1. Galvanise people (eg by backing policies like school streets)
2. Focus on fairness
3. Make the policy process relatable
4. Give people the chance to listen to and engage with each other
5. Accept some opposition
Stephen Frost
Life comes at you ... at exactly the rate it promised to come at you during its 4-year re-election campaign where it told you exactly what it planned to do literally thousands of times.
Craig Harrington @craigipedia.bsky.social
I tried to simplify tariffs to my kid like this: you buy something at the store for $50. Then Trump says that store stole $50 from you so he's going to tax the store $25. Store now charges $75.
Mike Masnick
Of all people, the Wall Street Journal's editorial board took off the gloves, put on brass knuckles, and with relish waded into the Trump Tariff brawl. "Liberation Day is Buy Another Yacht Day for the swamp."
Professor Furious
thank you donald trump for your diligent work as you make the US a stagnant, backwater pariah state and playground for sociopathic tech oligarchs
jamelle @jamellebouie.net
i miss discourse that didn’t involve the collapse of the government
Marisa Kabas
Once thing we can say for certain is that Donald Trump has been convicted of more crimes than some of the people he is deporting to a black hole in el salvador with no due process or recourse
Adam Serwer
it's not a "war on science" it's a war on knowledge, and the big money STEM fields have been complicit in it for decades because it served them well. and now we're all fucked and we can work together on this, but please care about humanists going forward. Work to allocate resources.
David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social
As has been stated quite a few times, Republicans could shut this down at any time if they wanted to…
Jess Piper @piperformissouri.bsky.social
We all know what's going on here, right? Tariffs not as economic policy, but purely to consolidate political power. From here on out, every day for Trump will be one of CEOs, presidents, prime ministers showing up to grovel, kiss the ring, ask for special favors. That's a gravy train of corruption if there ever was one. And now that everything is artificially, deliberately depressed, all he needs to do is lift some of these tariffs in "surprise" moves, say, 6 weeks before the next election, and stock markets jump.
Gernot Wagner
March saw the third-highest number of layoffs in U.S. history, and 80% of them were caused by DOGE. This was before the tariffs. It's just...unbelievable
Will Bunch
there is a greater than zero possibility that the market tanks so badly tomorrow morning that Trump walks this whole thing back, which would be the funniest outcome, in a very dark and still-damaging way.
Tom Tomorrow
I'm making jokes but this country is being destroyed by the dumbest President ever and his apartheid sidekick and law firms and universities think they can save themselves by kissing these men's asses.
Anthea Butler
in a few years, all the same political reporters who are sanewashing and steelmanning every trump statement will laugh and tell you "everyone knew" how senile trump was. "an open secret" they'll say. Not open enough to tell their audience but all the "right people" already know now and are hiding it
mtsw
well republicans, you've tied yourself to an asshole that everyone in america hates and you cant distance yourself from him or else he’ll fully fund a primary campaign against you so i dunno, good luck with that
Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social
"Age verification" laws are actually "upload your ID or get your face scanned to access every website, ending anonymity and associating your identity with everything you do online" laws and if more people understood that they would not be down for this authoritarian nonsense
Evan Greer
One thing I'll say to Democratic Party insiders... Please stop listening to people who make all of their money selling TV ads. Just...every Monday for the next year, spend time imagining what you'd do if you couldn't spend money on TV and had to do other things with that money.
Hank Green
The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024 — a rise they attribute to AI crawlers. AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege
CAMERON WILSON
One way to think of what’s going on is that Trump and his gang are trust fund kids spending down the reservoir of U.S. power and influence without understanding or caring where the balance in that account came from. They treat it as just a fact of nature that there will always plenty there.
Julian Sanchez @normative.bsky.social
Aren't you tired of how central money is to our democracy? To give a sense of out-of-kilter we are, a single state court race saw significantly more spending than the entire United Kingdom national election. Thanks John Roberts!
Don Moynihan
Wisconsin is the first of many big defeats for Elon Musk. He is delusional, unstable, and weak. He is overplaying his hand. If we fight, we win. He will go down as one of the most despised men in history. It is up to us. Time to turn the tide.
Gil Durán
Elon Musk: pours tens of millions into a race that has never seen even a fraction of that much money. bribes multiple voters with $1 million checks to vote. offers any Wisconsin voter who proves they voted $50. wears a fucking cheesehead
Wisconsin: votes against his candidate by historic margins
Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans) @iwriteok.bsky.social
The lesson of the evening is clear: voters absolutely hate Elon Musk and no amount of money can convince them otherwise.
Max Berger
No matter what they take from him they can’t take away his dignity:
Tim Carvell
Senator Cory Booker concludes his record-breaking Senate Floor speech after 25 hours. Massive applause for Booker
Acyn
The most notable fact about US politics at the moment is one that, for reasons of politesse, almost no one is allowed to say out loud, namely: the Republican Party has gathered to itself all the biggest losers and assholes in America. That's the real "sorting" — all the worst people, clustered.
David Roberts @volts.wtf
What has been broken by this administration probably will never be rebuilt in our lifetimes which means we must build new systems and structures both physically and mentally outside of government now that look to that ambiguous and dangerous new future with sober eyes and thinking. We are in a fundamentally new world and that means we have a chance to build new things. New structures of thought and action new ideas for how we do democracy better for more people.
Karl (sad trombone noise enthusiast) @brainnotonyet.bsky.social
White entitlement has spawned this catastrophe in which everything they’ve taken for granted is dismantled under the banner of permanently securing their social position via reinstated apartheid. They were told they would rule and didn’t hear that it would be a reign of ashes.
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com
When you find yourself basically going "blah blah blah why are you talking so much about innocent guy sent to a gulag, get over it," your sense of humanity has been fundamentally broken and you've lost the plot. Either we are a nation of laws or we are not.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
It’s a graph of estimated GDP decline from the Atlanta Federal Reserve with a severe drop—which is to be expected, given that government spending is a factor (along with investment and consumption) in positive GDP growth. Cut government spending; cut GDP:
Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com
Stop calling them layoffs, and start calling them what they are: purges.
Fatima Ayub @thecynicist.bsky.social
wild how much disdain this administration has for the average worker
Mike Eliason @holz-bau.bsky.social
one thing that Booker repeatedly references is the fact that US citizens are now terrified of their president. he keeps reading the letters of constituents who are really scared of the people in power—especially of losing their benefits, but there's something deeper and commonly felt.
Alexander Reid Ross
there is NO FUCKING WAR. there is NO WAR EFFORT. there is no avalanche of fentanyl coming over the Canadian border. there is no invasion from criminal foreign hordes. there is one increasingly dementia-laden wannabe dictator nonchalantly flushing his nation's economy down the toilet.
build-er-berg workshop @werrrp.bsky.social
I have a funny feeling the people who saw lockdowns, social distancing and masks as tyrannical aren't going to be the best soldiers in your trade war.
The Alternate Historian
He is taking on water like the fucking Titanic after it hit that iceberg. Prepare for the crazy to get turned WAY UP as they cling to power. It will likely come down to us prying the nation from his hands, but if that's what it takes.
Joe Edwards, LSW, LCADC @bustersbuds.bsky.social
Gang members should not be disappeared to an unaccountable torture prison either.
Caitlin G. DeAngelis
just days after Trump declared himself the "fertilization president" the entire team focused on Assisted Reproductive Technology (which includes treatments like IVF) was laid off at the CDC
Rachel Cohen
Most Americans seem to understand that “Liberation Day” is about liberating them from cash in their wallets.
Stephanie Kelton
Semantic note: An “invasion” is what Putin did to Ukraine and what Trump is contemplating for Greenland, not what poor people do to make a decent living for their families or to escape danger. Let us call things by their proper names, shall we?
Michael DeMoor
The US government just admitted to a federal court that it deported a father by mistake. It sent him to an el Salvadoran torture chamber and separated him from his US citizen family. Several DOJ lawyers have just now argued that the courts lack power to bring him home. The logic of the new argument should be shouted from every rooftop: according to DOJ, even if you are a US citizen, after they kidnap you, you would have no recourse once they illegally hand you over to any other country in the world. In this case, immigration judge had blocked his removal. They kidnapped him anyway. Sold him to El Salvador. Now people who graduated from a law school are saying habeas corpus can’t apply if US sells you to a foreign country before you can get to court.
alec karakatsanis @equalityalec.bsky.social
Pay attention: Look at the injuries on Amazon warehouse floors — look at Amazon’s contributions to the president — and then look who has been nominated to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Alvaro M. Bedoya @bedoyaftc.bsky.social
Amazon's own internal studies identified the max number of repetitive motions warehouse workers can perform before the risk of injury skyrockets. Their productivity quotas exceed that number by 67%.
Athena Coalition @athenaforall.bsky.social
Lend him a hand:
Peter Norton
You know it's bad when the naturalized citizens in your life (acquired citizenship after birth) are asking for advice about what to do if masked secret police come for them.
Wedge LIVE!™
You can probably trace this back to the Nixon pardon, the post-2008 "Too big to jail" decline in white collar prosecutions, and of course more recently the half hearted Trump prosecution. These are fundamentally political, not legal problems
I am no longer kidding @internethippo.bsky.social
One of the defining feelings in American life, for decades now, is elites doing plainly criminal shit and nothing at all happening as a result. It is deranging in a way that virtually nothing else is. Media fixates on perceived street lawlessness but shit like this matters much more in my opinion.
David_j_roth
Interesting how Republicans are quietly seeking exemptions to protect their states and districts from the fallout from the Trump tariffs that they publicly say will be great for the economy and country
Greg Sargent
The same thing that happened with birthright citizenship is happening again with presidential term limits. A historical experience, followed by an original principle, entrenched by a consistent understanding and practice is now being slowly undermined by stupid games and academic parlor tricks.
Anthony Michael Kreis
Elon Musk is so obsessed with declining birth rates that he’s personally inseminating lots of women, but immigration has fixed that birth rate problem — except the people who are reproducing aren’t white and that infuriates him. White supremacy is what keeps Space Caligula dwelling on this issue.
Sanho Tree
20 years for vandalizing a Tesla dealership, a pardon for vandalizing the US Capitol.
Bethany Albertson
If Oct. 7 had never happened, Trump would right now be pulling funding from Columbia and Harvard because of DEI policies or admissions requirements or what research they were doing or all of the above. The right hates universities and that’s it.
Philip Bump
Find someone who loves you as much as Republicans hate trains.
Bill Lindeke
