The UC Berkeley IGS poll is out! Becerra 25 Hilton 21 Steyer 19 Californians: it is your patriotic duty to vote for Steyer to give us a Becerra/Steyer matchup so we can depress Republican turnout for every congressional and down ballot race in the state. www.latimes.com/california/s...

real personal income is now falling behind in both absolute and relative terms it's not a mystery why consumer sentiment is falling off a cliff. this is literally worse than 2022/23

Miserable theme and variations: My variation is "10% of voters have 40% of the Senators."

one member of Los Angeles County's board of supervisors has more constituents than the U.S. senators of 12 states

two fairly useful heuristics: 1) if someone is talking about cutting income taxes it is not For You 2) if someone is talking about cutting payroll taxes they are trying to shred the safety net

I’m not sure why this isn’t being mentioned more, but: IRS policy for 50 years has been that the sitting president & VP get audited every year, in an effort to reassure the public they’re not corruptly abusing the office to enrich themselves.

Published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Peer-reviewed. Large sample size. Sound methodology. An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in individuals exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Ensitrelvir blocks the enzyme coronaviruses need to make new copies of themselves.

turns out that you can drive up the birthrate with a baby bonus, you just need to crank it up to twice the per capita income www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/o...

Mamdani has demonstrated something that Democrats have largely forgotten. You can't just do good things for voters and expect to be rewarded for it. You have to tell them about it, over and over again. You have to advertise your work in office just as much as you did on the campaign to win it.

The lesson of deliverism's failure and popularism's hollowness is that you assemble durable political coalitions out of thick social ties and serious institution-building efforts. The rise of tax cut slopulism indicates that a lot of D officials think the lesson is they need dumber policy platforms.

The ballroom, the arch… I have a PhD in Egyptology and I know a mortuary temple complex when I see one.

6. Republicans will use Callais to give themselves up to 19 more seats in the House of Representatives (probably fewer; I'd guess closer to 10). But Democrats can use it to "unpack" their VRA districts and flip a bunch of red districts. In fact, courts might force them to. slate.com/news-and-pol...

4. Kagan explains this well, but what's perhaps most galling about Callais is how the majority effectively overrules Congress's judgment about how best to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments, as it did in Shelby County. This extreme judicial activism is a huge threat to democratic self-governance.

I continue to think that one of the first things Democrats should do if they retake the House — and especially if the manage to retake both the House and Senate — is impeach the most blatantly corrupt members of Trump's Supreme Court.

there are threats against every president, but never before have so many been allowed to get so far

Immersive theater / interactive experience venue and production company.

Hell yeah please vote to save BART and other Bay Area transit this November they are facing an existential funding cliff.

At the end of 2024, the National Academies put out a report concluding the NIH has woefully underfunded women’s health research, and they suggested $15 B should be invested over the next 5 years. Here’s what’s happened instead. Hard to study women’s health if you can’t say “women.” wapo.st/4euUt1c

I haven't heard a single post about this anywhere-- disney's had their animators reanimate some of their recent iconic songs in ASL?? here's "we don't talk about bruno"??? this is amazing??? www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBrv...

On the right, Ds are this ludicrous "woke" stereotype, obsessed with pronouns. On the left, Ds are this ludicrous "no different from Republicans" stereotype, forever hooked on corporate money. The reality? The Maryland legislature. Good, hard, unflashy progress. Pay attention for once.

Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history

The sex difference on disability impact vs funding always depresses me(the colors denote sex predominance), but a few years ago, I really thought Long Covid would be different.

Theme parks are art, cultural institutions as vital to Southern California as Griffith Park, Dodger Stadium and the Getty. That’s one reason we’re launching a theme park newsletter. Welcome to Mr. Todd’s Wild Ride! www.latimes.com/newsletters/...

This is what the wealthy and political elites they fund don't want you to know about universal programs and why they insist on means-tested and targeted programs. Universal programs mean more taxes. They are also much harder to erode. The rich don't want to be taxed in a way that is harder to erode.

Pfizer has ended its large Phase III Trial of an updated COVID19 vaccine. They were not able to enroll enough people to meet their goal. A major problem is the FDA’s wholly unreasonable demand that people with chronic conditions, who benefit most from the vaccine, not be allowed to participate.

i like to call this "electoral college brain," when politicians (or hell just regular people) confuse the fact that the electoral system privileges closely competitive interior states with some deeper, fundamental meaning

I think we're going win, but I want to win hard enough that we start paying artists to paint murals in post offices again. (This time the post offices are also banks.)

lmao 10/10 translate.kagi.com?from=en&to=N...

"government can't deliver so you might as well not pay into it" is nothing more than a suicide note for left and liberal governance

Oh Maryland, my Maryland!

Acadeics began studying this failure and realized that the WWII FIRCs didn't create democracies from thin air. They restored democracies. Successful democratization requires prior democratic institutions, economic development, and total military defeat. 11/ www.jstor.org/stable/24480...

DM: Roll for charisma to determine the outcome of the negotiations. MAMDANI: *rolls natural 20* DM: That’s a D6 how did you MAMDANI:

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland. And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

I Photoshop Paddington into a movie, TV show, or pop culture until I forget: Day 1792

omg everybody go draw a horse this is what the internet was made for gradient.horse

Next time somebody tries to get me to justify the existence of the humanities, I’ll just point out how for the past two Super Bowls we’ve all jumped online and engaged in collective semiotics and hermeneutics of the half-time show as text.

You can test new tech ideas using the Seinfeld Test Would the product eliminate the plot of an episode? (Google maps, cell phones, paypal, battery packs) Good tech. Would the product inspire new Seinfeld plots? (NFTs, AI chatbots, crypto currency, blindboxes, metaverse land sales) Bad tech.

if bovino is out and conservatives are turning on noem then there is a real opportunity to demand that miller resign too.

My hot take is that at minimum a domestic violence conviction should carry a lot more of the shame and restrictions of a sex offender; it should ban you nationally from gun ownership, jobs in law enforcement, schools, pretty much any public sector work. It’s our clearest red flag for future violence

It is worth being on Bluesky for this account alone.

"Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car" "His wife, Destiny Jackson, told FOX 9 their 6-month-old infant stopped breathing and lost consciousness. She then performed CPR on her baby."

I mean, here we have a feel-good story of ordinary defiance. Pushing back against hate. But you, the reader, may know (as I did not) who Mark Harris is and that his husband is in fact legendary American dramatist Tony Kushner. This would be like if Saul Bellow or Joan Didion told you to get fucked.

Progressives HAVE been weighing in. -universal health care -streamlining immigration processes -universal basic income -more funding for childcare But no one wanted to listen.

This is exactly what I mean when I say that UX has no value when the business model is not "make a thing people want and sell it for more than it costs to make." The top 10 most profitable tech business models these days are different kinds of scam. You don't need design for that.

This comment from the Auschwitz Maemorial FB page is VERY important to read today in America.

It strikes me how hard it is to be successful at opposition messaging if you’re reacting to each new offense. It feels like a ton of things. So we have to make it one thing. Ideally super short, but that every specific response bubbles up to, refers back to, nests under.

Why—said with feeling (and, compulsively, lots of further punctuation)—not both?

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

Hell yes. Put this quote in the rafters.