It's (at least in part) an availability bias for him -- he attracts the scolds, and is annoyed by them.
It's (at least in part) an availability bias for him -- he attracts the scolds, and is annoyed by them.
Don Jr... Helps keep him from running in 2028.
Immortalized by xkcd... xkcd.com/2400/
I love looking at this graph, showing it to my students, and sharing it on social media, even though it unerringly brings out the trolls. This is the efficacy curve of Pfizer's mRNA COVID vaccine. This, people, is what ended the emergency phase of the COVID pandemic. Despite what RFK Jr says.
The thing is, Trump's response wasn't particularly popular *at the time* -- and in contrast Cuomo's seeming earnestness was. But there's been a concerted campaign in the last 5 years to make people believe that COVID itself was never a problem, only the government response.
It's this point by @sethcotlar.bsky.social -- everyone treats right-wing grievance as something organic and spontaneous, not something carefully planned by right-wing ideologues... bsky.app/profile/seth...
Planning an emergency seems a bit oxymoronic?
Remembering when the NYT went on a weeks-long bender covering a decades-old real estate deal the Clintons were involved in, in which they *lost money*.
And bizarre claims like 8th grade reading levels would take 20 years to recover, because somehow children yet-to-be conceived would suffer from learning loss...
Remember when people used the term "false equivalency"?
Also, a lot of the frustration about school closures came during the omicron wave, when many schools were open -- and then had to close because of staffing shortages.
everyone who is treating unblur like science really needs to look at "white unblurred obama" again
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
If youâve ever compared unvaccinated kids to vaccinated kids, youâve seen the former are more likely to die.
People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.
Good to see a bipartisan group of former CDC Directors raise alarms in the NY Times about RFK Jr. dismantling US public health. And I canât help but feel frustrated that they didnât do this last year when public health was on the ballotânor did NYT frame it that wayâwhen we had a chance to stop it.
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, former chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) & director of budget and spending policy for Marco Rubioâs 2016 presidential campaignđđœ
Fifty-one of the 85 Federalist papers were written by a guy born in Nevis.
Itâs not that Klein doesnât take the right seriously. Itâs that people like him take the right TOO seriously. They examine right-wing beliefs as an extension of valid policy objections, rather than almost entirely arising from the right giving people permission to indulge in inchoate resentments
One of my pet peeves. NYT and others keep calling him a vaccine skeptic not a vaccine opponent.
I've said it before and I will say it again: Choosing people to hate together is not unity.
The mechanism he's used most effectively for his extra-legal ventures is the ability (which SCOTUS seems to have green-lighted) to withhold federal funds at will. Can he tie up highway (or even Medicaid) funding to state that don't bend to his EOs? We may be about to see...
This âexplicitâ is a weird editorial choice. The constitution gives the president no power over this at all. Itâs not ambiguous.
âTexas Democrats lost. But they drew attention to Republicansâ efforts to put their thumb on the scale, and demonstrated a valuable tactic for galvanizing their beleaguered party. They lost, but they lost loudly. Losing loudly has been a crucial feature of successful political movements.â Gift:
Hey friends, Defend Public Health has a new campaign if youâd like to join in. Write your elected reps about ensuring that COVID19 vaccines are available this Fall!
Republicans had a chance to protect public health. Instead they chose to put a dishonest quack in charge of it. They own the nightmares to come.
But all of them see parts of the liberal order of as the enemy, and they've all been given free reign by SCOTUS and Congress to trash what ever they can while Trump redecorates the White House.
Trump isn't exactly fascist -- he has no ideology beside glorifying himself and exacting vengeance on his detractors. And to do that he has surrounded himself with an incoherent collection of authoritarians of various stripes. 1/
i think about the âdo not splitâ principle from hong kong often
This is the ballgame:
Is he getting ChatGPT to edit his "truths" for him? Does Truth Social have its own Grok?
This firefighter arrived in the US at age 4, has been here for 19 years, was on track to legal status, and was on a crew trying to contain a major blaze (in Washington state, vs Oregon, fwiw.) h/t @joshuajfriedman.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
Children with brain cancer
Related, from Walter Benjamin, before he died fleeing the Nazis:
This past week, ICE seized people while they were fighting a wildfire in Washington State. Today, this report about hospitals and surgical centers in California. calmatters.org/health/2025/...
What I was surprised to learn after decades of âstate loyalties were stronger than national loyalties thenâ: There were 7 Virginia colonels in the Regular Army in 1860. Lee was the only one who defected.
There's been a tariff one hasn't there?
According to this announcement, the Oregon national guard will go on a year deployment to deal with the nonexistent emergency at the border. A friend tells me that one guardsman is a Medford cardiologist. Thereâs a one year wait to see a cardiologist there. www.nationalguard.mil/News/Article...
Roughly one third. The biggest spike under Trump for ICE detentions of those arrested in the interior has been among those with no prior criminal history, but those with at least one prior conviction (of any kind, no matter how minor) remain the largest group. By next month that may change.
Whatever you think about Robert E. Lee's portraits important to remember he never achieved a rank higher than Colonel. But don't tell Trumpers that because they get super triggered. Sad.
People are often surprised to learn that Lee was an officer who never made it past colonel. The purported promotion to general was awarded by a treasonous cabal calling itself the "confederate states of america" which was put down by force by the Union army, which also had superior generals.
Super important piece on how states can help fill the gaps created by RFK's anti-vax policies. We desperately need RFK out of the job, where he's doing immense damage to public health, but Dem Governors can take effective steps here if they want to. (So can R Governors! Not sure they'll want to.)
Worth reading CDC's Pledge to the American People from 2024. It is, put simply, the antithesis of RFK Jr.'s actions in office to date. www.cdc.gov/about/pledge...
But probably not Democrats
It never occurred to me before, but we should absolutely make calling him "Colonel Lee" a thing to piss off Confederate defenders.
âA respected network of hospitals and cancer centers is halting enrollment in clinical trials for children with brain cancer after the federal government said it would no longer provide funding to the groupâ
RFK Jr.âs FDA Denies COVID Vax to Millions of Americans talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
The shift away from mass immunization for COVID by making healthy people under 65 ineligible for it without a scientific basis for doing so and outside the normal process has adverse health implications for millions of Americans. Whatâs it mean for you and your family?
Iâm a little surprised that the refusal of CDC Director Susan Monarez to go quietly and the resignations of other top CDC officials eclipsed rather than amplified the FDA anti-science decision to deny healthy Americans access to the annual COVID booster. talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...
Why is in the purview of the "border czar" to threaten Chicago??
the founders envisioned a madman potentially becoming president what the founders did not envision was the majority of Congress and the Supreme Court becoming part of a cult of personality around said president. itâs both pathetic and horrifying
A military academy shouldnât hang a painting of a person who, among other things, actively sought to kill graduates of that military academy.
Thread đ
www.niskanencenter.org/honoring-the...
Dem Govs and Health Secretaries need to organize a ferocious campaign of resistance to what Kennedy is doing to their constituents.
I have a column on this going up in the morning, but I'm telling you folks, there's an immediate need for people to light up lawmakers' phones and clang pots and pans and protest and do whatever the hell can be done to get RFK Jr. booted, or at least constrained. This is a five-alarm fire.
I wish Americans would get louder about their opposition to this man in particular; he is damaging global public health for an entire generation and millions of the most vulnerable around the world will suffer and die directly because of him. A mortality rate equivalent to plagues.
That seems like a lot... How many accountants do you have???
Fucking losing it how little of the reporting Iâm reading about the CDC not mentioning how an anti-vaxxer gunman killed a police officer and fired hundreds of rounds at the building 2 weeks ago. An end to end ouroborous of delusional mania. The GOP will probably give the shooter a posthumous medal.
Gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/h...
Maybe they'll eventually regain their nerve, but for the moment, JB Pritzker appears to have single-handedly spooked the Trump administration into backing down with one 12-minute speech.
"Germ lives matter!"
little known fact: In 2020, Republicans lost the White House and the Senate.
You can believe plenty in prayer and still find it utterly lacking as a concrete public policy response from an elected leader. If Biden had asked people to pray for inflation to cool off, what would these exact same people have said?
Reuters repeating a falsehood here. Most of this money was already granted to intel under the chips act passed by Biden. The rest under other pre-Trump programs
I think probably it's not a poll tax if drop boxes are available? And everywhere I've lived you could go into the elections department to drop off your ballot or vote.
Buying anything from overseas is about to get more expensive, more logistically complicated, slower, and overall more annoying. Film photography community, retro games community, people into skincare already seeing chaos on eBay. eBay sellers locking US buyers out. www.404media.co/trump-tariff...
This đ
A notable characteristic of Republicans is that they don't care about an issue until it affects them personally, and it seems to be a growing trend with a certain brand of centrist Dem...
The Trump administration says they're the "most transparent" in history. But when I asked the Department of Homeland Security who writes their social media posts, something extremely weird happened: www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
I think we are in a quantum superposition between democracy and competitive authoritarianism. The 2026 midterms will collapse the wave function: we'll look into the box and see whether the cat is dead or alive.
It's possible ... hear me out, here âŠ. It may well be that these people lie their asses off whenever they exhale
bsky.app/profile/keit...
The common denominator in all this is they donât value lifeâborn, unborn, young, old, human, animal, plant, past, present, or future
This country's tolerance for the continuing murder of children, here and abroad, is repulsive. It's a clear and disturbing symptom of our national moral rot.
Absolutely bonkers personalist regime stuff www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
If they can monitor conversations for dangerous things said by the human, why can't they monitor them for dangerous things said by the LLM?
Pretty sure normal people don't say "actionable" either. (I'm old enough -- and perhaps British enough -- that "actionable" still mean "lawsuit provoking" to me...)
Blue state governors should pledge to provide universal access to safe vaccines under prior authorizations, protected from federal goons by state police & national guard if need by.
Damaging a blue state (even the rural parts of it) is a feature, not a bug.
Yes! Now get started on that process.
One more time, shout out to the very serious people who suggested that RFK had some really good points about public health. No way to have predicted how things would turn out, except to look at his past record and everything he said about vaccines.
Itâs outrageous that Sec. Kennedy is trying to fire the CDC Director â after only a few weeks on the job â for her commitment to public health & vaccines. The Sen. HELP Committee must hold a hearing with Kennedy & the CDC Director as soon as possible. Vaccines save lives. Period.
An interesting question for another poll would be to ask people *what* issues might warrant cutting off a family member, including identifying as gay or trans, dating someone of a different race/religion, as well as "political views."
đšBorder Patrol arrested two firefighters who were actively fighting a wildfire at the time. When the other members of the crew asked for a chance to say goodbye, a Border Patrol agent told the crew member âyou need to get the f*ck out of here. Iâm going to make you leave.â
Agree with this. Make them fight for every inch. Worth reading this thread.
Donald Trump can't win the 2026 midterms fair and square - so he's trying to cheat by calling up his cronies in red states and asking for seats. California: YOU have the power to stop him. Vote YES on Prop 50 to defend fair elections and STOP Trump's election rigging.
"I have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people." ...
You could loudly make immigration rules that sounded incredibly tough, with forms and checks and all the rest and it would still be a huge liberalization of immigration.
Yes -- I've seen and increasing number of students with near perfect homework scores and absolutely dismal exams in intro calculus and stats classes in the last year or so. Pre AI, good homework scores were a pretty reliable predictor B-ish or better exams, but not so much now.
Explaining this: As a presidential nominee who was confirmed by the Senate, Trump has to fire her, and her lawyers say that has not happened yet, so she is still in office.
Few doctors have wreaked as much medical havoc as Bill Cassidy, the senator who overcame his initial, well-founded concerns to pave the way for RFKâs HHS confirmation
It's not tyranny if the gun nuts are in control.
Many disease therapies take aim at proteins, making mRNA a potential technique for developing new treatments, and researchers already are testing an mRNA-based therapeutic vaccine for pancreatic cancer.
Just to circle back, at this point in 2021 Republicans were not exclusively choosing between "Biden is screwing up COVID," "Biden is screwing up Afghanistan," and "Biden is screwing up inflation."
Me, trying again, on how John Roberts gave Big Balls access to all our Social Security data. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzdH...
Alex got 11%!! Yes, a loss - but a 2 point improvement is a step in the right direction, and the only way we eventually one day win back places like this is by chipping away at it one race at a time.
while Republicans howl about DC being a den of iniquity, worth remembering that House GOP still refuses to let the district use $1B of its own taxpayers' money. That plus the economic hobbling from the DOGE layoffs have left the district in a much more damaged state than it was pre-January 20th
Per @ballotready.org: Dems have won 3 upsets for open state senate seats that Trump won - & all were uncontested in prior cycles. IA 35 - uncontested in 2010, 2014 & 2018 IA 1 - uncontested in 2014 & 2018 PA 36 - uncontested in 2022 This is why @runforsomething.net recruitment never stops.