Man, ICE is still driving around schools during school drop off times taking pictures of children. Fucking maddening.

It is interesting to me* how this total military, geopolitical, & economic omnishambles is not being covered in the press with remotely the same fierce EPIC DISASTROUS FAILURE urgency that Joe Biden’s not 100% surgically clean withdrawal from 🇦🇫 was covered 🤔 [*It is not remotely interesting to me]

It's win win because basically everyone who voted against him owns a car.

This is probably one of those situations where conservatives will go bonkers and then it will counterintuitively end up benefiting everyone who owns a car.

it's sort of tough to explain just how gutted the federal government is right now because inertia gives it the appearance of running well-enough along until so many roads and bridges break that it can't do anything at all. [the pundits will, in this event, recommend additional cuts.]

angel playing the lute

democrats still seem to be laboring under the delusion that they can introduce stuff to pass while trump is president and they, not trump, will somehow get credit for it. they learned nothing from trump taking credit for covid stimulus checks

It's looking increasingly like these guys thought that if they could wreak more death and destruction than the other side then they would be respected as strong powerful men and they would "win" and that would make them big important heroes. Very possibly they had no rationale deeper than that.

None of them can talk coherently about strategy or goals but they are completely in sync in all their macho posturing because that is all they’re really focused on. Everything else is just whatever limply offered fiction is convenient to them at the time.

Total abortion bans may have reduced rents by 4 percent (?!?!?!?!?). That shows huge demand for living in states that protect women’s lives. California should expand housing production as a matter of civil rights because living here means you simply have more rights - something people really want!

If you get into a “who can cut taxes more” battle with the GOP, you’re going to lose because they are far more shameless and antagonistic to the idea of living in a functioning society. Don’t concede to their framing that taxes are nothing but a problem to be solved.

The public is bad at understanding tax incidence or the second order effects of taxes but surely part of the problem is most newsrooms don’t even try to relay this information.

I'm just gonna say it: Booker's proposal to end income taxes below $75k is idiotic. We've just crippled our state capacity and your response is a tax cut? Come on man

it's funny that our entire social order is determined by upstream decisionmaking around transportation and building codes

pretty much every poll at this point comes to the incredibly obvious conclusion that republicans absolutely hate this country and living here no matter how much they wrap themselves in the flag

There’s no goddamn reason why TSA should not be under the Department of Transportation

DHS must be dismantled so that TSA agents and other non-fascist frontline employees who have nothing to do with the atrocities committed by ICE and Border Patrol are not collectively punished every time we try to stop funding the ghouls

What’s crazy is for every one “town” that has gotten too big in recent decades to be quaint, there are at least a dozen dying towns in the Rust Belt that are plenty empty, and contracting rather than expanding why can’t all these nostalgia freaks move there and leave the rest of the world alone

I will never forget Chuck Todd calling 100 million vaccines in 100 days a trump-style overpromise and when we hit it on day 65 he sneered that they set a low goal on purpose to look artificially good when they beat it

Okay, something in English media that had a line like "Por qué?! Por qué, Cassandra?!". Does anyone remember what it was?

there's a lot going on right now but did you know a massive amount of the world's fertilizer flows through the middle east, and did you know that that fertilizer needs to be shipped to the us *right now* for planting season, and uh did you know we are at war with iran

people still talking about how Democrats need to do more for the working class of middle America have to contend with the fact that we did exactly that and it did not work Biden spent all of his political capital on bipartisan infrastructure and manufacturing bills and got nothing in return

my final project for an econometrics class was seeing whether there was any association between CHIPS Act funded projects and Democratic vote share in 2024 no amount of p-hacking could find any relationship btw

One thing I feel ought to be discussed more is the fact that basically all rural and suburban places in the US are subsidized by cities. They resent cities. They insult cities. They elect politicians who abuse cities. But none of them could survive without cities.

Lots of folks cling to the idea that this comes down to Biden's inability to "sell" these accomplishments. I'm sorry, though, that's pure cope. Whiny resentfulness toward Dems & cities is *constitutive* of the RW worldview today, not something that can be turned on & off with policy.

Tapping the "poor areas don't vote for conservatives because they're poor, they're poor because they vote for conservatives" sign

A federal judge in DC rules that Kari Lake was not lawfully appointed and that actions she took as the claimed head of USAGM "shall have no force or effect," including last August's RIFs at the Voice of America.

If accusations like the US intentionally destroyed a desalination plant prove true, elite accountability will become a national security imperative. Rehabilitation into multilateral security arrangements will require repudiation of the administration’s crimes, and imposition of a credible deterrent.

The obvious wisdom and effectiveness of Housing First is obscured by the fact we've made "a tiny, no-frills apartment" an expensive status symbol in huge swathes of the country by creating an artificial housing shortage

In part due to the fact Sacramento is a city filled with civil servants and good government nerds, our city subreddit is obsessed with a parking enforcement worker named “Nakamura” who apparently nails mfs left and right who are illegally parked.

you never hear "build more grid". why is that?

Yes. And we have to talk about this now, because talking about it is the first step to making it seem like a callous crime rather than a surprising emergency.

Driver seen reversing down Kearny 30+MPH, hitting & killing a person on the sidewalk. “They (SFPD) literally said the following to him (the driver): 'You're free to go, we appreciate your cooperation. Don't be too hard on yourself, it's an accident, it happens.'" This should make your blood boil.

being a carless american is awesome. financial harm caused by rising oil prices won't directly effect me, and secondary effects aren't something we are trained to think about. when the time comes i'll just blame the rising prices i do experience on supernatural causes. maybe goblins

health of a society is inversely proportional to how badly you need a dashcam in it

If China bombed a school on a military base in Honolulu and assassinated the president and major Republicans *and also* Schumer, Harris, Sanders, AOC, etc. in the name of No Kings, how exactly do you think that would affect the liberal opposition in America?

The trend shift in adults per family household is so insane. its even more insane that every important policymaker and economist thought we were slowly soaking up a glut of homes even into the 2010s. And it’s even more insane that there are still supply-crisis skeptics today.

she was the minority chair in the georgia house, btw. not just anyone. there was a lot of anger in our community over her refusal to fight for trans kids, especially. other democrats should take note

It makes me really sad that Ken White (who I genuinely respect) still podcasts with a transphobic motherfucker like Josh Barro. If you subscribe to Serious Trouble, your money is funding this. NB: If I had wanted to tag folks, I would have. So please don't do so for me.

Why are 50,000 housing units entitled in San Francisco, but not breaking ground? Last year, I authorized a first-of-its kind study from our city's analyst division: comparing our city's post-entitlement permitting system with other cities to understand how to fix this. Here's what we learned:

feels like a minute since i have pointed out that donald trump has pardoned more child sex offenders than every other president of the united states combined

PEPFAR, the program to stop hundreds of thousands of children and adults from dying of HIV/AIDS, was $6.5 billion a year.

i have been to the emergency room for a dental abscess. it is a uniquely excruciating kind of pain. this man was tortured to death via medical neglect.

If you're wondering about US Capitol Police's opinion on Senator Tim Sheehy after he attacked a protesting veteran that they were in the process of also attacking... they gave him a patch. This is what the Capitol Police think of protesters. Remember j6th with that in mind.

hate knowing that this skeet is gonna get the "apollo gift of prophecy" meme appended to it in like 3 years

Hey that’s about the cost of the SSI Restoration Act, which would cut recipient poverty by 60%, eliminate marriage penalties, and modernize draconian asset limits.

I always tell my friends who are looking for a man over 40 that I have found them. They are all at physical therapy.