Heather

When the Cass Review came out last year, the NYT rushed to cover it complete with post notifications. After reviews in Germany and Utah came out supporting gender affirming care for trans youth, dead silence. You can be just as biased in what you don't cover as what you do.

Of course they know this, and they have no magical plan to do all the core functions but this time Efficiently(TM). The plan is to break things, so government can’t help you anymore. So yes, absolutely you should worry about your financial aid being affected. It appears to me that is the intention.

As Trump tries to dismantle the Department of Education, remember that his plan to cut the corporate tax rate to 15% would give the 100 largest corporations a tax cut larger than the entire department's K-12 budget.

Really think about how twisted this all is.

Bernie Sanders is holding MASSIVE rallies in packed venues, bigger crowds than Trump was getting, and legacy media is practically silent. Bernie is talking to workers rather than hanging out with socialites with mediocre plastic surgery at Mar-a-Lago, and it's just not interesting to corporate media

JD Vance claimed on X that “Slava Ukraini” protesters followed him & shouted at his daughter.

Guess he didn’t realize it was caught on camera. No one yelled at his kid, and they didn’t follow them.

Vance & Musk need to quit using children as shields. The public isn’t backing down—we want answers.

I honestly don’t hate the picture of all the Chicago cops protecting Tesla because showing a bunch of armed agents of the state openly enforcing Elons will is revealing the truth of our situation much more clearly than anything protestors could show

Pretty sure he has a security detail and some sense of where people might be protesting. Time Magazine says hundreds are dead; the Trump-Vance plan is for far more Ukrainians to die, and Ukraine to lose its sovereignty and become a colony of Russia, aka permanent loss of rights and nationhood.

The perfect metaphor for what the Supreme Court did to this country with Citizens United v. FEC.

Some Democratic member of Congress should propose a bill saying that a POTUS may golf at government expense no more than, say, once every 14 days, and must reimburse the Treasury for anything beyond that.

The median household income would be DOUBLE what it is today if income inequality had remained the same as it was in 1975.

Read that again.

Decades of trickle-down tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations did that.

And Donald Trump wants to do it again.

I’d like to hear from voters of any race who were evacuated from polling places due to bomb threats and never voted.

Hundreds Dead: Inside the Trump Ukraine Fallout The US intelligence pause has undercut supply lines to Kursk, cut satellite imagery and tanked morale.

At least 20 Ukrainian civilians have been killed just this night by Russian missiles and drones. Hundreds of soldiers were killed on the frontline in recent days. These are the first results of the US suspension of military aid and intelligence to Ukraine: more deaths
time.com/7265679/sate...

A couple of golf outings could pay for over 300 federal jobs for an entire year.

How DOGE’s Cuts to the IRS Threaten to Cost More Than DOGE Will Ever Save The Trump administration claims gutting federal agencies will save money, but cutting the IRS means the government collects less taxes. “If you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would…

“By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” said an axed IRS specialist who’d been brought in to audit complex tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. “This was not about saving money.”

By @andykroll.bsky.social

you’re fired. wait you’re rehired. email us a list of things you’ve done today wait forget it you’re fired again. come back your job was important. you’re fired. or hired. come in to the office. wait the office has no computers go home. we are the department of government efficiency.

Enough about the price of eggs, from everyone. Cut the shit. The economy isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as they designed it—to keep you desperate, distracted, and exhausted while they cash in.

This is what @hcrichardson.bsky.social suggested today: Ask another politician to run a town hall if your “elected” scaredy cat GOP
Reps are too afraid to.

This made me happy.

Some DOGE Staffers Are Drawing Six-Figure Government Salaries Engineers and executives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries—sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting.

when Elon Musk started recruiting for DOGE last November, he said the work would be “tedious” and “compensation is zero"

now it turns out some DOGE operatives are earning six-figure salaries, one as high as $195,200, as much as a civil servant can legally make

www.wired.com/story/doge-g...

"No Other Land," the Palestinian-Israeli made film showing the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers, just won the Oscar for Best Documentary.

It can't get a distributor in the US.

Which tells you everything about censorship in the US.

Wyden to skip Trump’s first speech to Congress, hold town hall instead Democratic Oregon U.S. Sen/ Ron Wyden has announced he will be skipping President Trump’s first first speech to Congress in his second term to hold an online town hall.

Hope to see you there

Missouri GOP’s Effort to Take Over St. Louis Police Hearkens Back to Civil War City officials say the state’s plan to wrest back control of the police department is an attempt by white conservatives to weaken Black political influence. It’s part of a broader pattern of Missouri…

The last time Missouri took control of St. Louis’ police force, the Civil War was underway and the state’s secessionist-leaning leaders were trying to protect slavery and prevent officers from taking up arms against the Confederacy.

By @jeremykohler.bsky.social

These would-be dictators are rushing about severing alliances, sabotaging support, undermining cooperation within the nation and across the world. It seems to be in their nature to segregate, isolate, and disconnect. They cut the United States off from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Treaty. They cut off the countless beneficiaries of USAID programs as they left USAID workers stranded across the world. They cut off crucial parts of the federal government with reckless disregard for how those parts contribute to the functioning of the whole--or maybe with enthusiasm for its malfunction, perhaps because they're bought into the rightwing idea that all this stuff is unnecessary, obstructive. It's certainly in the way of some of their ambitions. Hannah Arendt described men like them well long before this era. A few days ago, the Arendt scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge called my attention to this passage from Arendt's On the Origins of Totalitarianism: “What binds these men together is a firm and sincere belief in omnipotence. Their moral cynicism, their belief that everything is permitted, rests on the solid conviction that everything is possible.…Yet they too are deceived, deceived by their impudent conceited idea that everything can be done and their contemptuous conviction that everything that exists is merely a temporary obstacle that superior organization will certainly destroy.”

Wrote about that here:

Here's what the idiots in the White House utterly fail to comprehend. They and the US came out of that argument weaker. Zelensky came out stronger, with Europe rallying behind Ukraine more than before. They came out looking like petulant idiots; he came out looking like a leader with integrity.

What we’re witnessing in America is what happens when disordered discourse captures a political party, then the state itself. The Republican Party was the first to fall - abandoning truth for conspiracy, ideology for grievance, and policy for performative outrage.

@lizcheney.bsky.social : "History will remember this day--when an American President and Vice President abandoned all we stand for."

I wonder if you have ever actually explored the New York City you claim to live in. I recommend it, because it has beauties and splendors that undermine so many of the assertions that I have heard you make during your campaign, particularly in the final debate. For starters, its eight million-plus population includes a huge percentage of immigrants, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans, and some lovely people who are black, Muslim, and immigrant all at once. Only a third of its residents are white. You talk as if should lots of undocumented immigrants and Muslims show up here, there’ll be trouble. I have news for you: they’re here, and it seems to be working out rather well. Do you ever come down from your tower, other than to stuff yourself into a limousine en route to a jet? In the course of a few years of working with New Yorkers on a book, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, coauthored with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, I came to love and admire the genius of diversity and diversity of genius that makes this city remarkable, glorious, and emblematic of some of the best of this complicated country. You rail against immigrants, but more than a third of New York City residents are immigrants—37 percent. About 500,000 residents are undocumented, and they are some of the hardest workers making this city go. If you drove them out, the restaurant and hotel industries would collapse into crisis. Unlike you, 75 percent of undocumented New York City residents pay taxes, according to former mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also points out the low crime rate among that population. Overall, whether they’re janitors or doctors, immigrants energize and enrich this city. You should check out Queens, the borough in which you were raised. It is now the most linguistically diverse place on earth. It’s the part of the city where most of the 800 languages to be found here are spoken. A lot of the languages here are vanishing tongues...

In 2016, I wondered what our NYC atlas had to say to the threat of Trump. Here's the answer: lithub.com/new-york-cit...

They can't eliminate the diversity of this country. It was always here and it always will be here in these places, whether or not the USA itself endures. They can create hierarchy and repression, and we can oppose it by embracing equality and diversity. Si se puede and sic semper tyrannis.

Trump is expected to declare English the nation's official language. America is an Italian word. California, Colorado, Nevada, Montana, and Florida are Spanish, and a bunch of other states have Indigenous names.