It’d be exciting to think that Bluesky has people pretending to be American like Twitter but I honestly don’t think they could talk about Star Trek Deep Space 9 the way it’s expected here without having watched all the episodes a dozen times

From The Archives: ‘We Will Never Speak Of This Again,’ Says Trump To Mohammed Bin Salman As They Dump Khashoggi’s Body Into New Jersey River https://theonion.com/we-will-never-speak-of-this-again-says-trump-to-moha-1830547181/

Reporter to MBS: "U.S. intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist..." Trump: "Fake news...He's done a phenomenal job. You're mentioning someone who was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about…things happen."

A staggering statistic: "North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year." What are we doing?

If the U.S. had 100 people, what would religious affiliation look like? 🧵👇 Find the full analysis here:

@thenewjerseyer.bsky.social has unearthed a crazy nugget here, from an interview with incoming NJ governor Mikie Sherrill. She clearly says that she stopped talking about building new housing, even though she thinks it's a good idea, because most every voter she spoke to hated the idea!! (1/5)

Turns out poor people spent a lot of money on tea and sugar *because they were poor* and that was their inadequate replacement for unaffordable things like cooking fuel, food with actual nutritional content, and enough calories to slave away over a loom for 12 hours.

Bucks County, PA

Assume all the yes and no votes from Dem senators are strategic and not sincere votes. The party caucus made a decision. No way to know how many were in favor. Then the caucus decided who would vote yes and no based on what would protect each of them politically the most. That’s how this works.

Yes. And it has had all sorts of cultural implications too. American evangelicalism is now largely white Southern Baptism spread across the country.

Attention pollsters, election nerds, and associated #MitofSKY folks: in honor of Ann Selzer's victory, @raygunsite.com has produced a run of "Polling is not a Crime" shirts. Order yours today!

A short #election 🧵- Democrats had historic victories across the nation; in Virginia they dominated. The outcomes are a strong repudiation of Trump who is a polarizing & unpopular figure in the face of high inflation, democratic erosion & a government shutdown voters largely blame on Republicans 1/

Hey, if Mr. Grand Nagus is out there going door-to-door, you can show up to vote on Tuesday.

New Jersey early vote update as of Friday, with a same-day comparison to 2024 open.substack.com/pub/michaelm...

It’s Halloween post your Worfs in jeans

1000%. But more specifically, what the founders didn't anticipate that leads these other folks to sublimate their own authority in deference to Trump, is partisanship.

One county in NJ will be "monitored": Passaic County. Passaic has the highest percentage of Latino/a residents in NJ and has a huge foreign-born population more generally (Paterson is the county seat). Press release provides no rationale beyond "transparency" and election integrity.

Voters across democracies are very sensitive to public officials enriching themselves on the public dime, likely b/c it suggests they are out to serve themselves instead of the public. It likely explains voter antipathy toward pay increases for officials and appeal of the wealthy class in elections.

The White House is a public building and a National Park, maintained by the National Park Service. The President is a tenant. He has zero authority to tear up this building.

Section 2 of the 15th Amendment explicitly delegates to Congress the right to decide how to enforce Black voting rights. That's what the text says. And that's the original intent of the framers.

They're getting desperate for revenue.

To everyone who says, "But this won't matter": *MAKE IT MATTER.* You have that power! This is not inside baseball and your friends and neighbors will likely be appalled. And if they're *not* appalled, don't be cynical yourself. Take the lead, give the cue.

Trump took office with a Israel-Hamas ceasefire in place, then announced a vision for Gaza as a US-owned resort, with most Palestinians living there gone. Israel restarted military ops in March and imposed famine. Thousands of dead Palestinians later, the Trump admin helped broker another ceasefire.

The regime is nervous. They know No Kings protests are widely appealing, deeply American, and unignorably large.

By the time you get to the point where the Transportation Secretary is complaining about political protests, you know the administration is truly scared of the public backlash.

On the blog: how to map hundreds of thousands of US Census blocks performantly with R and PMTiles. This is the first in a three-post series on production mapping workflows for big spatial datasets with PMTiles. Read the post: walker-data.com/post...

Too Close for Comfort - College Sweatshirt Heaven - Commish looks at the 1980s TV show and does a deep analytical dive into all 129 episodes where the main character wore so many different college sweatshirts. sickos-newsletter.beehiiv.com/p/too-close-...

we have been working on this new polling aggregation website for a few months now, and are excited to share it with the world! plenty more features and polls to come.

Jack Ciattarelli tonight at the debate: “I’d certainly give the president an A.”

OK. It's going to be coming out soon because of the relentless investigations of Pam Bondi and Kash Patel, so I might as well admit it before the news breaks: I am the General Counsel of Antifa.

The thing that distinguishes Trump’s approach to federalism from that of his predecessors is that he rejects the ontological premises of federalism itself, primarily the premise that states are sovereigns in any sense of that term. /1

This paper was a long time in the making, one of my favorites I’ve ever worked on, and is now live at SPPQ! doi.org/10.1017/spq....

You. Are. Allowed. To. Insult. The. Police. It’s a core First Amendment principle. This is utterly lawless behavior, for which there will be no (short-term) consequences. That he does it so casually, as they are walking away, in front of cameras. Rightly confident in his impunity.

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand

“He takes food and health care from the neediest and tries to, in his words, traumatize people—then he calls himself a Christian,” (Russell Vought's) neighbor said. "Pretty despicable."

One of my Russian professors told me the difference between autocracy and democracy is in a democracy a portrait of the leader is hard to get, while in an autocracy the portrait is hard to get away from

If you've ever wanted to learn how to make beautiful websites with #QuartoPub and #rstats , check out this workshop I'm giving in a couple weeks! It'll be a blast (and we're covering Quarto's brand new _brand dot yaml system!)

New paper with @hjghassell.bsky.social and @michaelheseltine.bsky.social out in @bjpols.bsky.social. We develop measures of voter perceptions of candidate ideology and candidate messaging ideology and find that perception's are related to what candidates say www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Folks, we need to be supporting decentralized systems with multiple ways to access tools and communicatation methods. Apple's one-source model for software does not serve the world we live in. www.theverge.com/news/791170/...

Really enjoyed this read. Athletes and coaches need to learn to be ok with failure - with losing - in a way that most people do not. But the same lesson applies to many areas in life. www.nytimes.com/athletic/667...

For public policy scholars: JPIPE published our article that uses machine learning to code the universe of congressional and state legislative data since 2009 by the Comparative Agenda Project policy codes. That's 1.68 million bills. OPEN-ACCESS here: www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

wtf. This will be a huge issue in the NJ gubernatorial race.

The GOP controls all of govt. The GOP has broken so many promises to the democrats, like rescinding money they passed, cutting programs they approved by executive order, that trust cannot be assumed. So, fund govt GOP. If you need Dems help then ok, but there is a price. Easy

The reason we have rules of engagement isn’t to keep warfighters from killing our enemies. It’s to keep them from killing a farmer with a shovel bc they thought it was a rifle and didn’t bother to wait to check. Or a family in a car bc the driver looked nervous. Or a boat full of fishermen.

There are only 41,000 coal miners in the United States. By way of comparison, there are 100,000 **registered** yoga teachers, 361,000 Starbucks baristas and 265,000 faculty and staff members working for the University of California system alone.

Labeling domestic political opponents as "terrorists" and characterizing a US city as being at war as pretexts for deploying troops against US citizens.

In a speech before the United Nations General Assembly today, President Trump said climate change is a “con job” and climate scientists are “stupid people” — and he called green energy and immigration a “double-tailed monster” that is destroying Europe. 🧵 1/5

I can't believe there are gummies shaped like Shaq's head and none of you told me.