Ben Falk

You're really doing the work. 🙏🏼

Good luck to Chris Pappas, scion of the chicken tender, on your run.

NYC>Chicago is legitimately a great corridor for high-speed rail, if states of NY, PA, OH, IN & IL could unite for it.

You could hit:
—NYC—20m
—Philly—6m
—Harrisburg—600k
—Pittsburgh—2.4m
—Youngstown—400k
—Cleveland—2.2m
—Toledo—600k
—Ft Wayne—500k
—South Bend—300k
—Chicago—9m

On a ~straight route

Trump’s new passport rules are trapping transgender Americans in bureaucratic limbo “Can I leave the country, and how can I leave the country?”

Some transgender Americans report they’ve been refused a passport altogether — with any gender marker — in recent weeks. “The goal is to make life untenable”: www.vox.com/politics/399...

USDOT is proposing to prioritize areas with high marriage & birth rates for funding.

Our new analysis @urbaninstitute.bsky.social shows this approach would produce a massive redistribution of transportation funding to rich, car-dependent, high white population areas.

www.urban.org/urban-wire/d...

yikes. not sure what to do right now, concretely, but links to advocacy groups in chicago within this article -> boltsmag.org/chicago-immi..., this crowd sourced skeet -> bsky.app/profile/joek..., know your rights & links to local events & organizations -> www.chicago.gov/city/en/dept...

Tomorrow is the big day (when stats showing crime declines and real wage increases suddenly become not fake)

Virginia state flag hung in Gwangju as mayor labels President Yoon Suk Yeol a ‘tyrant’ Published : Jan. 3, 2025 - 14:14:47 Yoon Min-sik This photo, posted by Gwangju Mayor Kang Ki-jung on his Facebook page, shows the state flag of Virginia hung outside the Gwangju City Hall on Friday. (Facebook) This photo, posted by Gwangju Mayor Kang Ki-jung on his Facebook page, shows the state flag of Virginia hung outside the Gwangju City Hall on Friday. (Facebook) The city of Gwangju on Friday hung the flag of the US state of Virginia outside City Hall, in apparent defiance to President Yoon Suk Yeol and in support for his arrest on insurrection and power abuse charges. The flag, which was apparently sent by the governor of Virginia, bears the Latin phrase "Sic semper tyrannis," which means ""thus always to tyrants," which is the state's motto. The state was among the 13 original British colonies in North America, and is where Patrick Henry famously said, "Give me liberty or give me death," during the Second Virginia Convention in 1775, amid the buildup to the American Revolutionary War. https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10382358

gwangju,,,, welcome to the commonwealth

Opinion | The Supreme Court Case Over Trans Youth Could Also Decimate Women’s Equality The principle of sex equality itself is at stake.

Excellent overview of how and why the Supreme Court's trans healthcare case could impact sex discrimination and gender inequality writ large.

"Tennessee’s argument would call into question the longstanding freedom we all enjoy to live our lives as we wish, regardless of sex."

Season five of Borgen: Birgitte defends Greenland against Trump, who wants in on the oil exploitation deal from season four.

American media continues to be lazy and use words like "surge," "wave," "flood" etc. etc. to describe migration.

"Increase" or "decrease" are just fine, American newsrooms.

Keep perpetuating fear. And this applies to all major news outlets, no matter their ideological bias.

A trans person who attempts suicide but lives to transition can report suicidality. A trans person who completes suicide before transitioning will appear in statistics as cisgender. It's not that hard to understand.

Basically it seems the conservative justices will freely cherrypick both history and European laws to support a preferred outcome, but ignore them in all other cases. Which is not a legitimate way to do originalism or comparative legal analysis!

I also can't get over the conservative justices favorably citing European laws about transgender health care when they vociferously refuse to consider other nation's laws and traditions when dealing with issues on which the U.S. is an outlier, like gun violence and the death penalty.

i think this is right and i will observe that this is essentially the position the court took in plessy v. ferguson, which held that the constitution has no bearing on inequalities of social power

Is there any world where we just end up with the NFP-RE government that would have avoided all this from the beginning, or is Macron really that stubborn?

UNANIMOUS ratification iktr 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

Would obvi be a nice boon to his start as DNC chair if he’s elected and then his state party wins two months later.

But like, if it's right, it's right.

My main nerves on this are if knowing his state REALLY well transfers to a national role, and if the unfortunate calendar timing slips focus on the elections in April (primaries in February right after the DNC election) to hold the state supreme court majority and superintendent (and downballot).

Extremely proud to have been part of this process from our organizing committee all the way thru to this first union contract! 💪

Urban Institute and Urban Institute Employees Union Reach Historic Collective Bargaining Agreement

We are excited to announce that Urban Institute and Urban Institute Employees Union have reached a historic collective bargaining agreement. Learn more in the full press release.

www.urban.org/press-releas...

The real horseshoe theory is less ideological than it is attention-seeking narcissists coalescing around hatred of the liberals in their upper-class milieu and the liberal institutions that get in the way of them realizing their personal hero's journeys.

The Urban Institute on Bluesky Join the conversation

One of the perks of working at Urban is the wide range of policy issues my colleagues care about - a complex web of topics that influence equity and well-being across communities. Follow along

go.bsky.app/8vqjVD2

Did we ever get an answer on growth v proficiency from DeVos? Is it worth just doing a re-run of that hearing with McMahon?

Not just Budget, he leads HELP now!