Twitter, May 2024

My May Twitter round-up is not as short as the one for BlueSky, but it's still shorter than average for Twitter, I think. Like the one for BlueSky, it ends with Trump's conviction and starts with the student protests, and follows the story of Alito's flags. It has more about Gaza itself, and also more about Trump's plans for 2025 (!).

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

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If you can be convicted of a felony and continue to run for President, every one convicted of a felony should be able to vote.
Nina Turner

Pretty funny that the Republicans think their best candidate for president is a convicted felon who lives in a fantasy world where his 10k sq ft condo is 30k sq ft, global warming isn't happening, and he won the last election.
Dean Baker

It's insane that pedestrian deaths have increased by 75% in the last decade yet the media's main focus is fearmongering about transit:


Naqiy Mcmullen @NaqiyNY

Obviously, nobody should drive without a license. Just as obviously, if a society spends decades making it almost impossible for most people to live without driving…people will drive even when they aren’t allowed to, cannot do so without risk to public safety, etc.
Rik Adamski

The average U.S. president has been convicted of 0.74 felonies.
Ryan Godfrey

You know who feels pretty stupid right now? Nikki Haley. If she had waited, she could have mounted up a counter campaign- do you want a Felon to Represent the RNC? BUT NOOOOOO. She had to kiss the ring, and sign the bomb. Just venal.
ProfB @AntheaButler

One awkward fact for all the Trump apologists is that the people who "did this to him" were 12 anonymous jurors with nothing to gain politically and no mandate other than to fairly consider the evidence.
David Roberts @drvolts

Nominating candidates that have been indicted for felonies is bad, actually
Lovable Losers

It's weird how 1 felony can prevent you from getting a federal job, but 34 can't stop you from running for President!
DL Hughley

This trial could never have happened in the countries Trump admires. No one can hold Xi, Putin, Orban, Erdogan, Lukashenko, or any other of these vile strongmen accountable. This is why we invest in democracy and work to uphold it when it is being attacked.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Wouldn’t it just be a hoot if Samuel Alito had recently published an opinion in which he expressed his belief about flags and whether people viewing them would naturally assume the flag conveyed a message on the owner's behalf… [of course he did, and an image of the decision is provided in the tweet].
DTwyman

“…Nearly 75% of India’s workforce, or 380 million people, depend on heat-exposed labour.”
Aruna Chandrasekhar @aruna_sekhar

Maybe as a goodwill gesture Biden can get Israel to tell him why it is holding all these Palestinian doctors, or at least where it is holding them
Dean Baker

Traffic calming is actually insanely simple. Put shit in the road drivers don’t want to hit and they will slow down:


Sam Balto @CoachBalto

I can’t control my wife when it comes to flying a flag. However, I can control your wife when it comes to getting an abortion. –Justice Samuel Alito
Alex Cole @acnewsitics

The very lowest bar of sustainable urbanism is this: Cities should not grant permits to new gas stations, period.
Alex Steffen

Imagine Alito a supreme court Justice was caught in an outright lie. How can you trust that Justice ever again. Was he the one who leaked his decision on Roe V Wade? So many questions.
Armand Hamouth @AreMond2

hearing a lot about “precision strikes” and so am left with no choice to assume that the children burned alive in rafah were precisely targeted
michael wave @SzMarsupial

Israel and its proxies repeatedly claim Hamas uses “human shields,” but the reality is that Israel systematically targets civilian women and children as a tactic to create great emotional pain in the hope of demoralizing the Palestinian people. We’ve seen this play out for years.
Leah McElrath

I did a little math on California's e-bike and e-car subsidies. CA gave away $26 per person to subsidize electric cars (mostly Tesla) and 26¢ per person to subsidize electric bikes.
Dave Snyder @dave_bikes

Eight years ago, Hillary called *some* Trump supporters (the super-racist ones) “deplorable” and folks still talk about it. Eight hours ago, Trump called all Biden voters “human scum” and we’ve already forgotten about it
Ben Wexler @mrbenwexler

It’s never spelled out – and I think it should be – that since 1948, 95% of all casualties in Israel and Palestine have been one side of the conflict. Since October 7, that rises to 98%.
Elvis Buñuelo @Mr_Considerate

The evidence is mounting that [voucher] schemes are bad for education, bad for cities--and bad for vulnerable students. We've seen declines in learning, growing funding challenges, and increased divisiveness. Most of today's families taking vouchers never attended public school.
@SerafinaScheel

It’s strange to grow up and you’re taught that genocide is the crime of crimes, the worst thing a government can do, then to read the founder of Human Rights Watch call Gaza a genocide, then open up DC media and see opposing it talked about like a trivial, far left, boutique issue
@adamjohnsonCHI

The biggest problem with cities in America is that they're governed by people who hate cities.
Housing Spock

Interesting study. Shows that if your genuine concern is being able to identify criminals, a state ban on sunglasses is better policy than a face mask ban:


@JeromeAdamsMD

May 24, 1924: “Stay woke,” a new slang expression, catches the notice of a columnist in a Black newspaper, the Houston Informer. It means to be true and focused on what matters. “The man who is unconcerned about himself, his family, his race or the human family, is asleep.”
100YearsAgoNews

Funny, the Washington Post didn’t decide to sit on the story when Bill Clinton spoke to Loretta Lynch on the plane, even though Bill Clinton was the candidate’s spouse and even though it wasn’t clear whether the conversation related to politics.
Daniel Plainview

The dating scene is ROUGH but please know that settling is so much worse than loneliness. Because that’s just loneliness without the privacy. Like great I’m still sad and longing for a deep, life-changing love but now there’s some guy in my apartment
Splenda Pappy @caroline_oreo

Bail for the right-winger who allegedly assaulted students with a deadly weapon at UCLA: $30k
Bail for nonviolent protesters arrested for occupying an abandoned building owned by UC Berkeley: $120k
Jonah Gottlieb

Speeding is the number-one contributing factor to fatal crashes in Minneapolis. But we ticket speeding more leniently than parking violations. Your first speeding ticket is free, your second only $40. Parking in a handicap spot is $285.
Conrad Lange Zbikowski

Why is divestment considered "political" but investment isn't?
A.J. Bauer

It's not just Justice Alito. Here's the "Appeal to Heaven" flag flying outside of conservative powerbroker Leonard Leo's home in Maine. Photo taken by a nearby resident who shared it with @ProPublica and gave us permission to publish it:


Andy Kroll

can you imagine a woman demanding men care about her because she has all her teeth
Dr. Dracula @watercrime

Among the exhibitors at this year’s Texas GOP convention:
- The Epoch Times
- The John Birch Society
- David Barton’s WallBuilders
- The Texas secessionist movement
Robert Downen

Is it the media’s job to thwart authoritarianism? Or simply to report its rise with cool neutrality?
The.Ink, from Anand Giridharadas @AnandWrites

These evil motherfuckers want to make it illegal to collectively post bail for a community member, but carve out legality for a usury profit driven bail bond industry.
D.A. Bullock @BullyCreative

I find it interesting that so many men who love freedom cannot understand why women are offended by their blatant desire to want us to be submissive. Our highest calling is to serve your needs?  You don't love freedom. You love power.
@HazeyDaisey17

Fun fact for the day: The average unemployment rate under Biden is lower than the lowest unemployment rate during the Reagan "boom."
Dean Baker

Again it bears repeating over and over....media, get folks to help you who understand religion. Alito flying an Appeal to Heaven flag isn't just right wing, it's Dominionist theology. He and his wife want America to be an authoritarian theocratic state..don't believe his BS.
ProfB @AntheaButler

Brexit, the gift that keeps on giving. The only nation in history to ever impose sanctions on itself.
Rob Hopkins @robintransition

Came across a beautiful patch of purple milkweed in one of my restoration areas on a mtb ride tonight!


Prairie Czar

Look, we obsess on here over how Biden gets covered (horribly) by the NYT or the Post for good reason. But Biden actually wins newspaper readers in a 70-21% landslide. He's getting clobbered with voters who don't read ANY news. Let's focus on that!
Will Bunch

When you spend years building education systems around "college and career readiness," you shouldn't be surprised when people don't take their civic obligation to read the news and be informed seriously. The "reformers" have sold their "reforms" ("choice," "accountability," "science" of reading, etc.) almost entirely in economic terms, and almost never in terms of strengthening democracy. We teach *how* to read but not *why* to read. Of course, it's nearly impossible to teach tolerance and critical thinking-what used to be bedrock American values- without someone yelling about "indoctrination." This is, of course, by design.
Jersey Jazzman

Trump's use of Nazi "reich" terminology to frame his campaign isn't an accident -- it's a Trial Balloon. As usual, he's floating offensive and outrageous idea to push extreme ideas and test public reaction. More at FrameLab with @GeorgeLakoff
@gilduran76

There is no such thing as a "rules based international order" if the rules only apply to people and countries you don't like.
Ben Rhodes

We are herd animals. We only act when others do. The bystander effect - we will watch someone die if everyone else is pretending it’s not happening… Which is what we are doing now on a mass scale to ourselves
Matthew Todd

“Unified Reich” “Vermin” “Poisoning the blood of our country.” He is telling us. HE IS TELLING US. BELIEVE HIM.
Michelle Kinney

What the Washington Post called a bad month for job creation under Biden would have been an average month (pre-pandemic) under Trump. More affirmative action for the billionaire's son.
Dean Baker

It’s so clear that all the people who claimed to be worried about chilling free speech on campus just don’t want to hear from leftist students under any conditions.
A.R. Moxon @JuliusGoat


Vagabond X @GatzTdaMax

I don’t think people are taking this seriously because it sounds so crazy. It isn’t a joke. It’s not a fake outrage story; it’s not hyperbole. Trump - and the Republican Party - are seriously planning to deploy troops into your town to round up immigrants and put them in camps.
ClearingTheFog

Best estimate from a former ICE chief of staff is Trump's plan would require 100-150k immigration officers for deportation and another 50k to run internment camps. Stephen Miller has said they'll reassign other agencies and deputize red state National Guard.
Ronald Brownstein

Rep. Elise Stefanik does not like being reminded that she once called Donald Trump a “whack job” and “insulting to women.”
Rolling Stone

NEW: Robert Kennedy Jr has been voting for years from a residence in NY state- a residence where he doesn't live and where neither neighbors nor law enforcement have ever seen him
Lis Smith

It's past time for us to start asking tech developers why their products and innovations are always aimed at eliminating jobs and supercharging exploitation and rent-seeking as opposed to making people's lives better. The answer is what's wrong with this society.
Jared Yates Sexton

When you're in a car, other people in cars are traffic and competition for parking; the more cars there are, the worse driving is. When you're on public transit, other people are community, and the more people there are, the more money and will there is to improve service.
Lian Chikako Chang

A monopolist is like a politician who wins power - whether through greatness or by deceit - and then gerrymanders their district so that they can do anything and gain re-election. Monopoly is capitalism's gerrymander — by Cory Doctorow.
Patrick Vera @iiradned

California homeowners will declare with a straight face that multi-million dollar properties which they own outright on which they pay taxes from the 1980s don’t count as wealth.
Bella Chu

A thing that is still fascinating to me, after living on the East Coast in the proximity of rich people for years, is that no rich person ever think they’re rich. They all think other, richer rich people are rich
Amber Sparks @ambernoelle

so Alito’s story is that a neighbor called his wife a treasonous confederate and cursed at her, and she responded by hoisting a treasonous confederate flag — and he thinks this is supposed to reassure us?
Philip Gourevitch

I will note Alito did not attend the inauguration. Neither did Clarence Thomas.
@pygmalion55

The cigarette of today consists of just two-thirds tobacco, to which literally hundreds of substances are added: moisturizers, impact boosters, cough suppressants, flavorings, you name it. All to make the product as addictive as possible.... This means that cigarette smoking isn't 'a free choice'. In reality, most smokers start when they are minors, and most want to quit. Every year more than half attempt to do so, but because the cigarette has been made so addictive, that attempt is often in vain.... That makes nicotine totally different from alcohol, because only 3 percent of alcohol users are alcoholics. For cigarettes, it’s 80 to 90 percent. People who are happy to smoke are so rare that the industry has a name for them: the ‘enjoyers'.


Rutger Bregman

In a private Mar-a-Lago meeting, Donald Trump offered oil companies a massive rollback of American clean energy regulations if they gave him $1 billion. Here’s why a single story on this, run last week, will be plenty.
New York Times Pitchbot @DougJBalloon

Records show the Minneapolis Police Department had the wrong house when they pretended to see a dead baby through a window and broke in. It's not that we're trying to hold them to some impossible ACLU-level standard. We just want police to only invent dead baby stories for guilty people, not the innocent.
@WedgeLIVE

New paper with @drkaenzig showing that the Social Cost of Carbon is above $1,000/ton. Time series variation in global temperature implies 6x larger damages and more extreme events than panel variation in local/country-level temperature.
Adrien Bilal

In the past decade, the average vehicle got 12 percent longer and 17 percent wider. (Cars’ blind spots have also gotten larger.) Yay!
@motorisms

5 cars now take up same length that previously would have been 6-7. auto-besity not only embiggening cars — also making them consume significantly more public realm. even if there weren't more cars on the road, congestion would get significantly worse (more cars most places, too)
Mike Eliason @holz_bau

The really striking thing about the last 20 years of heating in eastern England, and particularly the massive rise in recent years, is that this isn't even compared to the pre-industrial average. It's compared to the average from 1961-2010:


Dr Charlie Gardner

Like it is WILD listening to people with multiple vacation homes, constantly flying overseas, owning multi-million dollar homes and sending their kids to private school complaining about “rich people”
Amber Sparks @ambernoelle

Academics across the country are talking about how students struggle with reading: Many have weak vocabulary, are unable to analyze complex texts, or understand different points of view. Here's what they're seeing — and what may need to change.
The Chronicle of Higher Education

"After forcing the nation's educators to teach to national tests for three decades, academics are shocked and surprised by a decline in the quality of education." Fixed it for you.
Charles W McKinney, Jr.

If we restored the Danelaw would we also get some hygge?
Nufc Dotcom

Wanting to preserve the conditions in which humanity thrives is not extremism. Extremism is forcing us to leave those conditions for the purpose of 'maxing out' oil reserves.
Dr Charlie Gardner

On Mother’s Day, a reminder one of the most supportive things our society can do is build infrastructure that relieves them of the role of taxi driver—saving untold time, money and stress. While cities sit waiting for autonomous cars, they could be designing for autonomous kids:


Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife

More on Big Oil's capture of universities. Carbon capture and storage doesn't work. If it did, it would make dirty energy dirtier. It's an excuse to continue polluting: in other words, a scam. Universities/ consultants pushing CCS are some of the worst climate villains out there.
Assaad Razzouk

I have become convinced over my 22+ years of practice that municipal requirements for traffic studies and parking studies are usually a waste. [Reposted 10 years later...still true.]
Brent Toderian

Dayton and Cincinnati are 50 miles away from each other, and it takes 8 hours to travel between them via transit. Turin and Genoa, with equal metro populations, are further apart and have 26 round-trip trains per day that take less than two hours, even through a mountain range.
Hayden Clarkin @the_transit_guy

in 1932 a bunch of world war one veterans occupied buildings in DC. they were starving and wanted their bonuses out from a fund that wasn’t set to disburse until 1945. the police attacked with tanks, burned their belongings, and killed two men. hoover blamed outside agitators.


dr caitlin green @caitlinmoriah

The fact that Israel banned Al Jazeera hours before beginning its assault on Rafah is not a coincidence. After everything we’ve seen in the last 7 months, imagine what they’ll do when they think no one is watching.
Assal Rad

It is true some student protesters are not giving full first and last names to reporters. I will also note that 1000s of government corporate spokespeople refuse to let journos cite their names on routine anodyne statements — THAT THEY ARE PAID TO MAKE. This happens every day.
@RichardKimNYC

Shell sold 5.7 million carbon credits that had no actual CO₂ reductions, suggesting the oil giant committed fraud
Tyson Slocum

An insane thing I read this morning was that MIT's endowment employs like 10 officers and directors that make over twice as much as the university president, over $1.5M a pop. I guess if you're sitting on a $40B endowment you can afford $10s of millions for your hedge fund guys
@ScoopsStP

If we had a serious press, the stories would be about how the party of "Jews will not replace us," is pretending to care about antisemitism. But we know the people who own and control the media will pay lower taxes with Donald Trump back in the White House.
Dean Baker

Pro tip for white people, because someone needs to hear this. "Diverse" is not a synonym for "people of color." One Black person and nine white people does not make that group of 10 diverse. And vice versa.
Pete Saunders

Median American: I basically agree with the campus protesters but I hate them and want them to go away
Alex Yablon

Saturday greetings from the Flamingos in Como Park Zoo and Conservancy in St. Paul, Minnesota. Hope you are having a splendid weekend!


@KerryLe49858718

If we are:
Students - unserious and naive
Not students - agitators
Non-disruptive- performance
Disruptive - that’s not “peaceful”
Learning  from the past - brainwashed
Something new - can’t they be like past “good” ones
There is no protest they will not reject. Keep going!
Katie Unger @KUngernyc

Re: the decision of campus leaders at Columbia, Texas, Yale, and elsewhere risks normalizing heavy-handed responses to all sorts of dissenting speech and protest everywhere. The very fact that ostensibly liberal campus leaders hastily deployed the police sends a dangerous signal to bad actors who are eager to silence those with whom they disagree. Evoke "safety"--usually without evidence of serious danger--and you have a license for repression.
Thomas Sugrue

If occupying buildings is now considered violence deserving of violent response, what is occupying Palestinian territory?
Leah McElrath


Cory Doctorow

"Later that night, the UCLA campus was invaded by a violent mob.... History faculty who were present reported that many were middle-aged men; some shouted white supremacist slurs; and others brandished flags linked to violent, right-wing organizations."
Rebecca Solnit

One of the best things I learned reading about the Civil Rights Movement is that all movements are imperfect and that those expecting perfection (in strategy, from activists, or in actions) are not only opposed to the movement but often too cowardly to admit it.
Victor Ray @victorerikray

Biden has issued more “red lines” with American protesters than he has with Netanyahu.
Samuel Sinyangwe @samswey

The Mayor, NYPD and much of the corporate media are desperately trying to manufacture reasons that this isn’t exactly what it looks like: young people protesting an immoral war.
Emily Gallagher @EmilyAssembly

One of the more persistent myths of education: If we just get every teacher to do X, then all students will learn Y. This is also one of the dumbest myths of education, but it is a freaking titanium cockroach.
Peter Greene @palan57

This is the share of Catholics who:
Oppose Capital Punishment
Oppose Abortion
Oppose Euthanasia
These are some of the tenets of the "consistent ethic of life." Never more than 7% agree with the Church's teachings. It was ~1% of Catholics in 2022:


Ryan Burge

Declaring peaceful, nondestructive protest to be violent and destructive, and suppressing it on those grounds, is a recipe for fostering violent and destructive protest.
Angus Johnston @studentactivism

Fewer than half of all NYPD officers live in NYC and only 25% of LAPD officers live in LA. But keep talking about “outside agitators” coming onto campus to do violence.
Samuel Sinyangwe @samswey

We hate young people so much in this country. When they protest, no matter how righteous their cause, they get scorn. If they are in college, they are mocked for that, for being “pampered.” If they aren’t, they are called “ignorant and unschooled.”
Brandon Wilson @Geniusbastard

Becoming very clear that by “peace” so many people mean “quiet”
Mary Annaïse Heglar

I don’t hate cars. But we should all hate decisions that create car dependency. Cartoon by @cowanrob:


Brent Toderian

The mainstream media’s coverage of the campus protests against the Gaza genocide is actually worse, more biased, more dishonest, than its coverage of the Gaza genocide itself, which I actually didn’t think possible.
Mehdi Hasan