data visualization is my passion.

Hey, what's that in the rearview mirror? Oh! That's the U.S. fading into obscurity on every major transportation and energy innovation front. #ElectrifyOrDie

The second person that ICE "warned" about their protected speech has filed a First Amendment lawsuit. The complaint, linked in this story, does a nice job making ICE look both menacing and incompetent www.npr.org/2026/07/06/n...

Tucson, not even a checkpoint: agents smash windows, drag a US citizen to the ground, falsely claim he had a gun — then assault the man filming it. Fourth Amendment, First Amendment, § 242, all violated in one stop. This is what 'law enforcement' looks like when profiling replaces probable cause.

Trump and Infantino

What will FIFA do if Belgium win? Vacate the result and send the USA through anyway? 🙄

It was overshadowed by the country's 250th birthday, but something else major happened yesterday: @ppfa.org regained access to hundreds of millions of dollars in Medicaid funding after Republicans in Congress allowed their one-year defund provision to lapse. www.politico.com/news/2026/07...

Mike Luckovich

We still could have nice things, but y'all gotta vote the opposite of fascist to get there. Let's start the push to the Tricentennial the right way, y'all!

Always looking for ways to drive Stephen Miller crazy.

“Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.”

Good, resulting in good law, killed off the Klan once. We WILL do it again.

The Declaration of Independence specifies 27 grievances with King George III and Britain. Donald Trump and his regime have committed at least 20 of those same offenses highlighted in yellow. Happy 250, America!

Florida is ramping up executions at a record pace, ProPublica reports:

Thank you, Orange Menace, for the metaphor.

What a fantastic article! Free the rivers, save the salmon, save a culture. www.hcn.org/articles/the...

For America's 250th, I read Frederick Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” on the House floor—for the first time in history. His speech endures as a mirror & mandate for us all—to confront our inequities while fighting for an America as good as its promise.

No, it wasn't me! But I did have the honor of talking about this very fight today on my tour. What a very special retirement gig I've gotten myself into.

Happy “liberal arts professor helps save the Union” day to all who celebrate

Since 1994, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they receive in benefits every year. Do not believe the lies you hear about immigrants. They are good for society and the economy.

As we head into the holiday weekend, July 4th is not just the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but also marks 1 year since H.R. 1 was signed into law, which made the largest #Medicaid cuts in history & with ACA Marketplace cuts makes 10 million people uninsured.

Clarence Thomas says the 14th Amendment should be read narrowly because it was written for formerly enslaved people. By that logic, the 2nd Amendment was written for muskets, not AR-15s. Funny how that kind of originalism only shows up when it's convenient.

Absolutely, I am originally from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the way Miller and the rest of MAGA talks about (non-white) immigrants is very much how those who waged war in my country talked about the other ethnic groups.

One hundred sixty-three years ago today, as the light faded over the first day’s field at Gettysburg, an enslaved man from Lexington, Virginia walked out to the unfinished Railroad Cut west of town. #CivilWarMemory open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle...

Texas has no clean energy mandate. It just beat fossil fuels with wind, solar, nuclear, and hydro on 62% of days this year. Nobody told the grid to do this, just the market.

"The district will earn revenue for the power it shares, perhaps even enough to cover the costs of charging up during the school year,said Kate Crosby, energy manager for the Acton-Boxborough school district. Plus, the strategy will help lower the emissions & cost of the region’s electricity supply"

He doesn't need to hide it because everyone & every institution in American politics & society has completely normalized it. A total collapse of every norm, law, & institution in the country.

Hegseth has started and lost wars with Iran and the flu. The calls for his resignation, as he purges the military of anyone who doesn't look like him, should thunder from everywhere.

I'm proud of you, Mount Olive Pickle Company! Yours were the products I was raised on, growing up in North Carolina. Show 'em real Tar Heel values: love, respect, support, community.

And The Corruption rolls on:

This is what it looks like to take wildlife collisions seriously. There are >40 wildlife overpasses and underpasses with fencing along the Trans-Canada Highway near Banff, Alberta. They’ve reduced wildlife-vehicle collisions by 80%, saving human & animal lives while promoting connected ecosystems.

The midterms are a battle between the privileged and the oligarchs against the rest of us. The time to stand up and fight is now before it is too late.

"Are you saying God was misquoted?" That's our @pocan.house.gov forcing Russell Vought to morally justify the deaths of children killed by the cuts to USAID, with names for Russ to hand over to Elon Musk.

Yeah, the same D politicians worrying about progressive candidates not reflecting their values are celebrating “birthright citizenship is the law of the land!” today, and that’s a bonkers takeaway. The takeaway is that we’re 1-2 appointments away from overturning the reconstruction amendments.

The entire case for "the law is a discipline requiring deep expertise & training & we can't have non-lawyers adjudicating the law in democracies' highest courts" collapses completely in a world where the lawyers are burning entrails & acting as pure partisan hack politicians & we are that world now.

Oppression proceeds in many ways. Blocking justice by creating an unjust justice system disconnected from founding principles, facts, and morality has to be one of the cruelest of all, stripping hope and foreclosing opportunity. That's what a "chilling effect" is all about.

5-4 for what it explicitly says in the constitution is incredible. They were this close to undoing the civil war entirely. bsky.app/profile/mjsd...

The infamous Dred Scott decision declared Black Americans to be objects and to have no rights. And that's where we are regarding trans folk.

The biggest beneficiary of corporate contributions behind the corporate supremacist super PACs is the Trump-backing MAGA Inc., having received $120.6 million in corporate contributions during the 2026 cycle.

NEW @publiccitizen.bsky.social report: Corporations have already spent $517 million on the 2026 midterms. That's more corporate money than any previous election cycle -- and nearly 1/3 of all corporate political spending since Citizens United www.citizen.org/article/corp...

The administration straightup lied about the reasons for halting the project because the ONLY reason was t-- didn't like it. What an insanely small man. It's politics: you win and you lose. Or if you're him, you mostly lose and still make the regular person suffer: stupid politics.

Today’s decision in Slaughter will destroy the independence of the Merit Systems Protection Board, which will have a cascading effect on all federal employees, who have been free from political interference for 150 years. The spoils system is back, baby!

End. The. Death. Penalty. Justice is not being served when the innocent die at the hands of the state.

I was an intern at the Smithsonian's Festival of American Folklife in '76 along the reflecting pool. The program was a delightful feast of our cultural diversity: Black gospel singers, Swedes who made chairs from blocks of wood, instrumental music galore. The list was endless, crowds huge, vibe +++.

Michael Cembalest is out with his annual energy report for JP Morgan and it's full of fascinating stuff, but this graph jumps out: Trump is succeeding in stifling America's clean energy boom. Absolutely ceding the field to China.

Can we pause a moment and observe how juvenile The Capital Letters on Random words Looks? Like the idiot has no idea what a "proper noun" in English is. We've all seen it for years, but let's never forget the self-own built into every random cap by the self-proclaimed "genius."

The Cheaps Elysee.

I was pleasantly surprised the other day when a contractor friend in a red county said that heat pumps are now simply the industry standard. Apparently they’ve outsold gas furnaces in the US for the past four years and are poised to overtake conventional AC. That’s really good news.

AI is shit. Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.