As election day approaches, nonprofits, political parties and a billionaire have spent nearly $26 million on ads and other communications in an effort to convince voters to support or oppose Prop. 50 – the most of any ballot measure in recent state history. bit.ly/47l7aI4 📊 @jeremiak.com

Our members handed out flyers and buttons at the @IRE.org gala tonight! Our message is clear: We deserve a fair contract now! Support us by signing our petition. actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

Looks like Charles Munger Jr. is in for another $10 million, bringing his total contributions to California's Prop 50 opposition $30 million. So it's basically him and $5 million from a Republican SuperPAC cal-access.sos.ca.gov/PDFGen/pdfge...

An excerpt from "For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper": But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it? poets.org/poem/student...

Used the Internet Archive's news chyron data to get a sense for how much MSNBC, CNN, Fox and the BBC were talking about different topics. Increase for Epstein, lots of discussion of Zohran after his primary win, Musk flits in and out, not nearly as much as I expected to see for "Intifada"

A woman whose house burned down in the Eaton Fire earlier this year couldn't cash a ~$900k check from State Farm because, as somebody in the check-hold department of her bank said, the insurer's account had a negative balance. The largest property insurer in the state. A negative balance.

Was Gov. Newsom's return to office mandate a ploy for contract negotiations? @mayacmiller.bsky.social looks into it for her first story @calmatters.org calmatters.org/politics/202...

Which, you know, might be a good reason for high ranking government officials to not conduct business on commercial platforms like Signal? Maybe? Among other things (record retention laws, adding journalists into the chat, etc)

I know I’m old because one of the best emails I got today was from my doctor letting me know my cholesterol is way down. Hell ya

New 3-minute documentary from @calmatters.org @sergioolmos.bsky.social @bellingcat.com @evidentmedia.org show comprehensively how widespread the immigration raids in the Los Angeles area have been. Doc geotagged/verified 100+ videos of raids These occurred at: -15+ Home Depots -Private farmland

The disaster in Texas is so sad for the families and communities who lost somebody or are still searching for them. May their memories forever be blessings 🙏

A (super) negative downstream effect of election map-based coverage and descriptions like “deep red state” Gross idea even before you consider that kids died and kids can’t vote in the US

I spent a lots of time in (and complaining about) California's lobbying data so I _love_ to read about the deficiencies of other state's disclosures. The latest from @lmcgaughy.bsky.social goes through what you can and can't learn from Texas transparency reports www.kut.org/politics/202...

I used to live one block off of DeKalb Ave more than a hundred and twenty years later and sure do wish it had looked like this

According to the lawsuit, people are being held in an “ICE basement holding area in downtown Los Angeles” where conditions are “dungeon-like” More reporting from @wendyfry.bsky.social and @sergioolmos.bsky.social on the immigration raids in California

Incarcerated firefighters in California currently earn between $5.80 and $10.24 per day and get an additional $1 per hour when deployed to an active emergency. In 2026, the state will start to pay them $7.25/hour in line with the federal minimum wage. The state's minimum wage is $16.50/hour.

Just me or is it super annoying that the Javascript `.includes()` string method doesn't accept a regular expression?

big beautiful bill passing would make the budget for ice larger than most of the world’s militaries

I get that our society is obsessed with celebrities and the allegations (now convictions) against Combs are v. serious but it's THE headline for news outlets across the political spectrum on a day with a newly constructed Florida concentration camp and major legislation before the US House?

“Many a man has landed there, because of an incautious word or too much confidence in supposed comrades or friends.”

The tax on legal weed in California went up 4% yesterday, presenting another challenge for a struggling industry that just had one of the lowest quarters for cannabis sales in years reports @akoseff.bsky.social for CalMatters calmatters.org/politics/202...

What happens after a Los Angeles immigration raid? @sergioolmos.bsky.social, @wendyfry.bsky.social, Anat Rubin and Lauren Hepler spoke with men arrested off the street about how they were treated in government detention and, ultimately, how they were pressured to leave the country.

"The masked agents... wear blue jeans or battle fatigues. They approach Latino men, at times yelling and carrying assault rifles. When someone runs, they’re taken. When they don’t answer a question, they’re taken. When they can’t produce papers, they’re taken." calmatters.org/investigatio...

Just wondering, what do y’all type in the little emoji picker when you want to use this one? 🤌

Law enforcement agencies across Southern California violated state law more than 100 times last month by sharing information from automated license plate readers with federal agents, reports Khari Johnson and Mohamed Al Elew for @calmatters.org

As @adamrose.bsky.social says so succinctly in this piece, it’s not up to cops to determine who is and isn’t a member of the press. I’ll add that if an officer finds an indie to be “confrontational” in the course of their reporting, the onus is on them to deescalate—they’re the ones with guns

Trump wants to cut off funding for California. Newsom and legislative leaders want to cut off the federal government from our donor state tax dollars. @levisu.bsky.social reports on what's going on and actually possible calmatters.org/economy/2025...

Lobbying expenses in California surpassed half a billion dollars for the first time last year, @jeremiak.com reports calmatters.org/data/2025/04...

my job is 10 percent analysis and 90 percent putting data back in the form the government keeps it but won’t give to me

ah when they were talking about DEI they meant Dividends Equities and Investment, my bad

don't want much

Here's what I wanna know: how the hell do y'all post so much??

Looks like the Assembly Dems & Reps are having a little skeet spat (which... whatever) so that means a bunch of California legislators have joined Bluesky! I've added them to my starter pack of sitting state lawmakers, which is now up to 39 out of 120 representatives go.bsky.app/52JpVv6

just profoundly disturbed by the kidnapping and disappearing of people right off the streets of this country. hard to think about much else—and there’s so much else.

Damn, precomputed travel times between points is such an awesome idea! Plus there's data for cars (ugh), bikes (yay!) and walking

Purim is a top-notch holiday - it’s a story of survival, the cookies are sublime, & ppl get wasted. I’m _always_ in for a “People tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat” party! But, somehow, I never really knew that the story ended with a massacre of 75,000+ people

Just as you wouldn’t go to Candace Owens to comment on issues affecting Black Americans, nor should you ask Jonathan Greenblatt about Jewish issues.

Take a moment today to read about a few of the young children whom Trump and Musk killed by shutting down USAID. The blame for these deaths falls on them. There will be hundreds of thousands more dead kids before their lethal crusade against foreign aid ends. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The DSCC juiced its fundraising ads on Meta in February by 5x, spending up to $788k. The ads from Sen. Gillibrand called on viewers to "sign the petition and stop Elon Musk," or "Trump is backing Elon Musk's power trip." Then Gillibrand, Schumer et al voted for cloture.

"Objectivity must be operationally defined as fair treatment of data, not absence of preference." Stephen Jay Gould wrote that more than three decades ago, but elite journalism hasn't grasped his point to this day.

Saw "No Other Land" this week and if you haven't seen it, you surely should. It's harrowing and powerful - when it ended the entire theater audience sat in stunned silence for minutes NB: The footage comes from before October 2023 🧵 1/6

I'll never understand why anybody ever put one these things in their home. From @arstechnica.com: "In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally" arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

@maplibre.org and @protomaps.com (plus their supporting ecosystem of tools) are cool as hell and an amazing toolset for building maps in a newsroom. If you haven't played around with 'em yet, you should!

Major rate hikes coming for State Farm customers as regulators try to keep the insurer operating in California, @levisu.bsky.social reports calmatters.org/economy/2025...

I'm both old enough to remember Newsom's 2019 exec order directing the state transpo agency to "reduce vehicle miles traveled" and to "encourage people to shift from cars to other modes of transportation" but also naive enough to be surprised that since then CA has built 100s of new highway miles

This week was bittersweet for our merged union at CalMatters/The Markup. We were thrilled Monday to ratify our contract after months of bargaining, giving our members needed protections and raises.

Stay healthy y'all, this winter's disease buffet is no joke and I'm 2 for 4 of stuff going around: got the flu a few weeks ago and norovirus earlier this week but have fortunately missed COVID or the measles. For now. Masking and washing my hands every other second from here until summer.

Been a lot of talk about government data, so I wanted to say a few things about how reporters look and and analyze data we get from the government *before* we make conclusions about it.🧵

18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated shortly after midnight. Read our letter to the American people: 18f.org