periodic pop quiz: What's the population of the US of A?

Thinking about this Mary Oliver poem this morning. Don't hesitate.

Some will credit national winds for Virginia’s blue wave last night, but Speaker Scott and Chair Helmer built it from the start. Dems can win big when we elevate leaders with the vision, brains, and hustle to make it happen.

I have to imagine far-right Catholics are really struggling with the fact that they can now hear this stuff in English directly from the pope.

Uh — her campaign was laser-focused on the cost of living in Virginia. Try again, @nytimes.com.

This Friday at 3:45 PM EST, I’m calling it. It will be The Holidays. I cannot take anymore input. It’s over. This year is over.

i want to repeat this: mamdani and spanberger have run similar campaigns tailored to their respective electorates and it is maddening to watch political journalists attempt to create some broad contrast where none exist

Democrats can keep hunting for The Blueprint for winning candidates who know what The People want. Or they can adopt election rules that foster competition and let vision and ambition do the rest.

This isn’t just an improper blending of church and state. It’s a twisted mockery of Christianity that ought to offend any actually devout Christian. Showing armed soldiers moving into battle as you lip service “… as we forgive those who trespass against us” sorta misses the point.

It’s okay to be glad that restaurants are doing stuff like this AND absolutely furious about the utter failure of the United States government.

Lift these stories loud and proud.

Imagine being the elections director in actual Defiance County, OH. I hope Shondaland sends her staff one heck of a fruit basket every November.

I regret to inform everyone that my pedantic brain couldn’t let me live until I knew whether or not dodger blue and blue jays blue are the same blue. They are ONE PANTONE NUMBER APART.

I also wonder how many Virginians even know that Maryland ends west of Charlottesville. Blue Ridge borders get wild up there!

I've met a lot of soybean farmers who understand why tariffs are bad macroeconomic policy and don't spend their days apologizing for Trump. But I've never met a soybean farmer who pretended to be a hedge fund manager.

Scott Bessent owns $25m of rent-seeking soybean property that he promised-- and failed-- to divest. I cannot imagine another farmer considering that actively being a "farmer." I'm fairly certain Jimmy Carter wouldn't.

This is several days old. But amidst so much else id missed it. That’s a stunning number. No wonder they about-faced. Reminder of the power of consumers in oligarch era, not subject to the same kind of targeting.

wow, which common vaccine was it?

I had to look this up since I was too little to remember it and…I’m sorry, I’m crying I’m laughing so hard

1/3 of US GDP growth since 2000 is disaster recovery — and data centers drive nearly all our GDP growth this year. What a baffling, brutal cycle.

WELL HOW ABOUT THAT "A millionaire levy in Massachusetts has generated $3 billion more in revenue than expected without forcing significant high-profile departures from the state." www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

AOC has just officially become the top House fundraiser, beating out Hakeem Jeffries. Now lemme take a big sip of coffee as I look at the age distribution of donors to AOC vs Jeffries

Wow. The agenda is up for the 10/20 Council meeting... and it includes a settlement agreement in the White v. Charlottesville case. The city will prepare a Traffic Impact Statement by the process in 24VAC30-155. In exchange, the plaintiffs will drop the case against the new zoning ordinance.

white reactionaries disenfranchising black voters to secure political power? that’s a jim crow. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/u...

This is going to be my soapbox for a while, but we're seeing this jurisprudence change in real time. When Rucho was decided, the Court at least acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering was unfortunate. Today, it's treated as a legit goal for states to pursue and one that VRA districts must respect

Virginia — we have our own state Voting Rights Act that protects our right to continue this work — but only with an AG and Gov who are willing. It’s among the sky-high stakes of November’s election.

In the last 70 years, federal jobs fell from 4.5% of all employment to below 2%. Civil servants aren't what's driving government debt, and firing them won't address it.

Today I learned that MIT is in Massachusetts because its founder, William Barton Rogers — a UVA prof and the state geologist — decided he just couldn’t with Virginia anymore.

"The U.S. is two economies. There's an enormous AI boom going on, huge investments, particularly in data centers. If you took that out of the numbers and you just looked at the non-AI parts of the economy, it's basically flatlining. We're on the cusp of a non-AI recession." -- Me

Finally realized what the freakout over Mamdani becoming mayor reminded me of, and it's the freakout over the first black mayors in southern cities. New post at CAMPAIGN TRAILS:

Good for them: it is a violation of the Hatch Act that limits the use of public assets for partisan messaging. Orgeon has its own version of that law, and covers those who run the airport. Other airport administrators should look to see if they are in the same position.

This Tuesday, October 14 @cvilledems.bsky.social are hosting a Charlottesville City School Board Candidate Forum at the Jefferson School from 6-7pm. This may be the only forum, so it’s an important opportunity to learn more about the candidates.

No words

Millennials were too young to see the subprime mortgage crisis coming. Is this what it felt like?

Can someone conduct focus groups with travelers in terminals after watching this? They‘re a captive audience!

Black families tend to have strong preferences against nursing homes, usually driven by concerns of inadequate care. Seeing that Black nursing home patients have significantly worse outcomes, and that they are driven by *within-nursing home* differences in care, confirms this suspicion.

What a beautiful passage from Lincoln in the Bardo, necessary to take in given today’s news

We used to be a proper country.

When the supply of available homes goes down relative to demand, prices increase. This is one of the best established findings in housing policy, and policymakers who don't center this aren't going to fix the housing crisis.

It’s never not election season in Virginia. Hats off to the Fairfax Dems for using ranked choice in their 4-way race for County Board next week!

Jimmy Kimmel returns, defiantly: “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke…We have to speak out against this because he’s not stopping…He’s coming for our journalists, too…A govt threat to silence a comedian the president doesn’t like is anti-American.”

In Swedish, a word for what you eat to bridge the gap between meals (or while waiting for the main course to cook) is stödmacka. It means "support sandwich." A similar word in Norwegian is ventepølse, or "waiting sausage."

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

92% of Americans say it's very or somewhat important that the media in the US can report the news without government censorship. www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/...

The GOP nominee in a Virginia state House race this fall has dropped out. He says he lost his government contracting job and has no income, so he's had to take a job out of state & move away. That's... literally what Dems are campaigning on to win VA. www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/gop-nom...

If you’re wondering how a culture steps from camps and cages to killing chambers, here it is.

Universities teach people to solve their problems through the 1st Amendment not the 2nd. Our main contribution — in the long arc of history — is “use your words, not your gun.”

For most Americans, the date 1913 means nothing. For Americans on the far right fringes, 1913 has long been a date of great significance. Here’s a piece from the antisemitic rag “American Mercury” in 1957, for example. One of their writers at the time was George Lincoln Rockwell.

Jerome Adams, who served as US surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first administration, is calling for Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be fired as controversy continues to swirl over his handling of vaccine approvals. https://cnn.it/47s9lKt