considering that Phelan was giving press quotes as recently as last night I think Trump finally fired a man

It's a pretty rapid sequence of events but way more members of congress used to die in office, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

even our best retail politicians don't have adequate language for defending the idea of "we are going to recapture a material portion of the economic output of our nation's people and turn it into roads and electricity and retirement security and health care for those same people, who are, btw, us"

not even democrats believe this anymore. at best their pitch is "what little good we provide is at existential risk (true). voting for us will protect it (unfortunately false)

one required, but sadly enormous, shift in the way americans view things: recovering an understanding that a democratic government is a collective enterprise that should deliver tangible services and benefits to people

i mean this sounds almost like scare-quote "communism" when processed through the current american idiom

Train Station Benches Labeled "Remove" Inside a Cage

MTA, mixed media, 2026

"they aren't using the land so it's unfair to tax them"
why are we subsidizing people who aren't using land when there are more people who want land than there is land to use?? you should be taxed more on under-utilized land!!!!!

it's funny how you take macro econ and you learn stuff like property taxes exist to ensure efficient allocation of land, and then in the real world we give people a tax break when their property is vacant

A really fascinating little mini-genre is "movies where the director is clearly trying to undermine the screenwriter's intention" and SICARIO is one of the biggest ones. Not many of them because the director will usually just rewrite the script if they disagree with it! bsky.app/profile/bill...

SICARIO is a weird case tbh where I think there's a tension between the screenplay (which thinks Alejandro and Matt are cool guys) and the actual movie as directed by Villenueve (which clearly thinks they are the villains)

It’s his day

we need to gerrymander state boundaries

if we play our cards right we can probably drop the number of republican senators to 10ish

Amy McGrath shot down flight 93

This is genuinely one of the foundational copes of the modern conservative movement, a stabbed-in-the-back narrative about why the US lost Vietnam

The post-AI-bubble regulation should start by making it illegal to do circular deals - money invested cannot be used to pay for services, money invested cannot be used for buying hardware, etc, etc. Hell, I'm game for making it illegal to invest in customers at all.

IMMIGRATION ✶ Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke | Candace Dane Chambers/Sun-Times O'Neill Burke wouldn't denounce Trump, wanted to 'maintain' relationship with feds, emails show By Jon Seidel and Sophie Sherry

From the Chicago Sun-Times Morning Edition Email: "O'Neill Burke wouldn't denounce Trump, wanted to 'maintain' relationship with feds, emails show"

House Democrats should theatrically push for expulsion votes on Cory Mills and Andy "Straight White George Santos" Ogles anyway

with the water issues IT’S THE FARMER’S FAULT BLAME THE FUCKING FARMERS is like Newtonian physics: it won’t get every single particular right, but for practical purposes it’s all the information you need most of the time

Like... I'm sorry, but to win future elections, you need a good chunk of the people who sat out in 2016 or 2024 to vote for you, and I just don't think that sneering at them and saying it's their fault that things are the way they are right now is going to win them over, even if you truly believe it

Making it 2019 again via science or magic

the funniest part about this to me is that this would definitely end up in the supreme court because of the interstate commerce clause but in the meantime we could be fleecing people with out of state registrations for like $2 a gallon

I hope he went Method and knows Cedars-Sinai better than his own home.

Barney in a baby outfit

While looking for this I also found this very good screengrab

Linda Ronstadt singing MR. PLOW IS A LOSER

I like that the song isn’t even saying why Barney is good at snow plowing it’s just slandering Homer

Since 2016 people have been demanding that Democrats manifest a pan-ideological United Front coalition against Trumpism while refusing to grapple with the fact that vanishingly few conservatives have shown the slightest interest in such a project.

If you want to preserve your neighbor’s houses in amber in perpetuity you’re welcome to buy them yourself

Riffing on this: if you assume your neighbor’s house would become an 8-flat the moment it hits the market, you’re implicitly concurring that the housing shortage is real and that your local municipality is actively suppressing the market through restrictive zoning