Here's what I'd tell Wilson if he asked today: 1) Let people share roofs, pipes & land if they want to...most notably, do @pnwelcome.bsky.social's Inner Eastside for All upzone portlandneighborswelcome.org/inner-eastsi...

if i want water from the sink, i have to turn on the faucet. if i want to ride my bike, i have to pedal and engage the gears. there is a mechanism. my point is that there is no *mechanism* by which elections can be canceled. it's not about norms, it is about how things work.

okay the actual last thing i have to say here is that a lot of you are responding with "you think guardrails and institutions will hold!" and that is a sign you aren't actually engaging with the words you're reading. (cont.)

anyway i already see people with undiagnosed anxiety replying to this with lurid fantasies of trump's god like powers so i'll end it here

you can't actually suppress away a wave of discontent. (relatedly, i think a lot of you have no idea how large this country is and how small its various military and security forces are relative to its population)

now, of course, when you point out the practical obstacles to "canceling the elections" people move the goal posts to "voter suppression and various shenanigans." yeah, those things exist and they always have. but the other thing is that those things work *at the margins*

here's what happens after house elections, which are conducted by each state and locality: the state certifies the winner the winners go to washington they convene a new house they choose a speaker notice who isn't involved here? the president or the current speaker or the senate.

who cares what he cares about, the question is "how does this process actually work, and what mechanisms exist for him to affect it." the executive branch plays exactly zero role in the composition, certification and seating of a new congress. bsky.app/profile/push...

when the current term of the 119th congress ends on january 2 (or 3, i forget) 227, mike johnson ceases to be speaker of the house bsky.app/profile/gran...

i don't even know why i'm raising this here because i know i'm going to get a hundred replies of "Trump has god powers that will let him do whatever he wants and thus we have no choice but to bend to his will," but for those of you capable of complex thought, these are questions to ask yourself.

ICE can't even deal with irate middle-aged midwesterners. how does he occupy hundreds, if not thousands, of polling cites and precincts? trump v. illinois clarified that he has no legal authority to unilaterally commandeer national guards, how does he move forward from there?

what does he do about the fact that in most states midterms and statewides are on the same cycle, so "canceling the elections" might mean that tennessee doesn't have a governor next year. how does he convince tennessee republicans to give up power in their own states?

the question to ask about this is, okay, he wants to cancel the midterms. how does he get the VA state board of elections to cancel the midterms? how does he get the georgia board of elections to do it? how does he convince republican house members to quit their jobs and give up their paychecks?

why is it that Trump could not get Indiana Republicans to redistrict their states?

set aside whether it is legal or not. what do you think an executive order is, and what do you think the relationship of the president is to a governor or state secretary of state is? do you think the president is their boss?

Will Stancil, a man disliked for his inability not to annoy large numbers of people, being lauded for his complete commitment to fighting fascism on the frontline, puts him in the same category of basically half the special forces operatives of the second world war

The GOP has explicitly advocated that the Education Department be abolished for decades, an issue which never polled as well as abolishing ICE does today. Abolishing the Education Department was part of the GOP's 1984 platform… and Reagan won 49 states.

i will go to my deathbed ashamed that i lived in an america were secret police grabbed citizens off the street

She says ICE agents mocked her: “The ICE agent who had pepper sprayed into the vents of my car said ‘you guys gotta stop obstructing us, that’s why that lesbian b—— is dead,’ verbatim, speaking of Renee Good. Which filled me with absolute rage and shock..." www.mprnews.org/episode/2026...

There is no hell hot enough for ICE agents and the administration that has empowered them.

ICE not only manhandled and terrorized a 10th grader who is an American citizen, they stole his phone. And then they sold it. I repeat, they stole his phone, and then they sold it.

Social consequences for fascism, harm and complicity with same. Or: Kindness and "nice" aren't the same fucking thing. Kindness centers human dignity and the preciousness of all life, not social comfort.

ICE shot out a young trans man's eyes for the crime of caring about his neighbors.

Rich cultural text that Will Stancil is in the streets of Minneapolis fighting ICE while the ten thousand losers who want him to dead are petrified of No Kings events because they might see a mom with a cell phone. Just a perfect distillation of every discourse.

do you ever wish you could resolve all of your problems by sword fighting them inside a giant mech on top of an exploding building

I'm sorry, but if you're a Bluesky lib, you HAVE to be gracious about this. You HAVE to practice the principle of charity. You HAVE to give people off-ramps, especially when they're massively influential media figures. You don't have to be *happy* about that, but you've gotta suck it up anyway.

some of you never got yelled at by a friend's parent at a soccer game for being a sore winner and it shows

Bodega Shelf Stopped to grab some okay coffee and a breakfast sandwich in New York, there was a charm to wall of noodles and sauce. 📷: Pentax MX, 50mm f1.7 🎞️: Fuji 400 #film #photography #filmphotography #BelieveinFilm #analog #NYC #Bodega #BaconEggandCheese

living in a world where the only two jobs are “gambling” and “murder” isn’t nearly as cool as Cowboy Bebop made it out to be

i feel like this is the kind of illegal violence that state authorities should deploy force to prevent

Coronado Watchtower Taken on a walk around Coronado beach in California. 📷: Pentax MX, 50mm f1.7 🎞️: Kodak Gold 200 #film #photography #filmphotography #believeinfilm #analog

i’m sorry but you can’t just make joe manchin types not exist or matter by fiat. the radical republicans had to deal with a conservative wing of the party during reconstruction. even FDR had to play ball with a bunch of degenerate segregationists. bsky.app/profile/shoe...

on ramps are important. it is how we got joe manchin to vote for a climate bill, by calling it “the inflation reduction act”

anyway as i have said many times — and literally just wrote on saturday — i think we should abolish ICE as well as unravel DHS and i welcome elected officials who embrace both outright but i am also aware that any senate majority will contain moderate and conservative democrats who need an on-ramp.

Will focusing his endless font of energy when it comes to being annoying towards ICE totally rules and I tip my cap. Someone buy that man a tank of gas

hold on now, let him cook

to any politicians out there: the only metric by which i am deciding my votes in any future Democratic primary is how far they're willing to go in punishing this administration and i am far from the only one

They wrote & wrote & wrote, & they could not have hated anything more than Trump & what he represents. They did everything they could to prevent precisely him, or a more militarily distinguished equivalent. And they believed that if a man like him wasn't stopped it would be the end of the republic.

They keep saying this “didn’t you learn your lesson?” bit like murdering Renee Good was a flex and we’re all supposed to bow to their dominance.

a rather significant portion of the founding was based on “no guys like Donald Trump in particular” they really specifically wanted to avoid this type of know-nothing demagogue

"Bill Kristol, flag bearer for Woke 2" is a sentence that would have killed a younger me dead.

With Trump going full authoritarian on Venezuela-Greenland, ICE, and the Fed, the response has to be serious. Four Republican senators (Tillis, McConnell, Murkowski, Collins?) could announce they’ll caucus for now with the Dems to give them control of the Senate to check Trump.