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And much of the motivation comes from existing wealth. Rich politicians "can't be bought" only in the sense that they've already been bought by their own conflicts of interest
Btw, this is a common argument in Eastern Europe when people rationalize voting for an oligarch-- he's already rich, so he won't steal as much. The reality is that corruption does not result from the need to steal but from a motivation to do it and the lack of meaningful constraints/accountability.
Jamie Raskin on Trump's Qatar plane grift: "We’re talking about corruption at just an epic scale."
This is a remarkable description from Raskin of how Trump's various corrupt schemes all interlock with each other:
newrepublic.com/article/1951...Murphy gets it. Calling the administration's flagrantly illegal & unconstitutional acts exactly what they are.
I know your goal is to try to make life as hard as possible for immigrants.
You really can't understand T's policies without understanding that he doesn't know the difference between the trade deficit & the budget deficit. That is the hidden logic. That is the answer to the great mystery of how he makes these decisions
REPORTER: But we're seeing as a result that ports here in the US, the traffic has really slowed and now thousands of dockworkers are truck drivers are worried about their jobs
TRUMP: That means we lose less money ... when you say it slowed down, that's a good thing, not a bad thing
Beautiful. Now do drivers too
Every spring, Montreal police do a ticketing blitz against cyclists for things like helmets (required only on e-bikes) and wearing headphones (prohibited for cyclists but not drivers).
Today they’re at Bellechasse between Saint-Denis and Saint-Vallier.
One of grants frozen at Cornell: $6.7M (4 yrs) to develop heart pumps for babies born w/ heart defects.
It took decades of work to get to point of prepping device for in-human clinical trials. No private company could do this.
The cruelty of the Trump administration is heartbreaking. So to speak.
Research at risk: Life-saving heart pumps for babies | Cornell Chronicle
After receiving a stop-work order from the federal government, the future of a device to help children with heart defects is uncertain.
Philadelphia Inquirer knows where this story belongs
Page One must have been crowded.
So NYT puts it on Page 13. 🤡
@schooley.bsky.social
Spoken like someone who thinks the trade deficit & budget deficit are the same thing
Amazing definition of hawkishness
@nytimes.comI love having the freedom to walk, bike, train, bus, OR drive just about anywhere I go on a daily basis. Republicans are attacking that freedom in the name of forcing everyone else to use their preferred transit method.
Duffy: "She wants to take people off the road and she's taxing people to do it, raising money for the subway system in New York. But then, to put people in the subway -- the subway is dirty! There's violence. There's criminals. It's not safe ... By the way, I like freedom. Let me drive my car."
Halfway to the Trumpcession folks
www.bea.gov/news/2025/gr...To top it all off the DV in this unethical study was a self-reported measure of attitude change (a button you click if the post changed your mind), which is not a good way to measure persuasion!
doi.org/10.1093/poq/...The mods of r/ChangeMyView shared the sub was the subject of a study to test the persuasiveness of LLMs & that they didn't consent. There’s a lot that went wrong, so here’s a 🧵 unpacking it, along with some ideas for how to do research with online communities ethically.
tinyurl.com/59tpt988
From the changemyview community on Reddit
Explore this post and more from the changemyview community
Deaths from heart disease down 75%, that’s NIH.
Deaths from stroke down 75%, that’s NIH.
HIV/AIDS no longer a death sentence, that’s NIH.
99% of FDA approved drugs in the last decade, that’s NIH.
Please show this video to anyone who doesn’t understand why the NIH is so important.
A horrible story but god bless this woman so accurately reading the ICE goons for filth here
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Nice to see the costs covered, frustrating to see the piece start by repeating DOGE's false claim that they've saved $150B. $135B in costs is far more than any credible estimate of how much DOGE has saved.
NYT: One estimate finds that DOGE’s “firings, re-hirings, lost productivity and paid leave of thousands of workers” will actually COST taxpayers “upward of $135 billion this fiscal year.”
@nytimes.com 🤡
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/u...
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US FDA suspends milk quality tests amid workforce cuts
reut.rs/4cHdnz3Dr. Josephine Baker fought for milk testing in lower Manhattan over a century ago, where babies were 7 times more likely to die than WWI US soldiers in the trenches. Milk was often adulterated with chalk and germ-y water. Today the FDA stopped testing milk due to lack of staff. Shame on you, Trump.
The Trump-Supreme Court battle is not really the crisis.
The crisis is here now. Trump is enacting an insidious coordinated attack on our institutions of democratic accountability, designed to crater democracy before next fall.
1/ A long 🧵to explain the plan & how we stop it.
Philadelphia
Followers see this and say "let's not defend the Constitution." Leaders see a need for leadership.
🚨News: A prominent author reached out to me about how the Trump administration tried to denaturalize her father-in-law and end his social security benefits and Medicare.
Her family speaks English and was able advocate for him. But what about those that can’t?
The crucial part about these 2013 videos is that R elites have been repeating the lie, for 12 years, that conservative groups were singled out for political reasons. Most probably do not even realize it's a lie. So they feel justified in doing the same.
“Cyclists” are not a unique species of urban resident; they are simply people who decide to bike instead of using another mode. (In North America, that usually means driving.) -
@davidzipper.bsky.social
h/t
@shoshannasaxe.bsky.social @uoftcities.bsky.social @goodroads.bsky.social #BikeTOIn Bloomberg CityLab, I explained why cities must build cycling *networks* – not just lanes.
It’s a lesson that many elected leaders have yet to learn (esp Ontario’s Doug Ford, who is taking a sledgehammer to Toronto's cycling network).
🧵
Why the Best Bike Lanes Always Get Blamed
A standoff over cycling infrastructure and traffic congestion in Toronto shows why building protected bike lanes on essential corridors draws controversy along with riders.
With Trump reportedly planning to end the IRS Direct File program, there's no better time to remember how TurboTax owner Intuit spent two decades fighting to prevent Americans from filing their taxes online for free.
(Published 2019)
Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free
Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.
New visualization tool alert!
The vayr package version 1.0.0 is now on CRAN.
It contains position adjustments for ggplot2 that help with overplotting in pleasing ways. My favorite is position_sunflower().
- install.packages("vayr")
-
alexandercoppock.com/vayr
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"You don't deserve due process if you're a criminal" has got to be among the least "American" arguments the government has put forward in a century
This explanation from
@leahlitman.bsky.social on why law firms are surrendering to Trump is really dark stuff:
newrepublic.com/article/1939...While liberals have grown far more supportive of free trade during Trump's presidnecy, conservatives are unmoved.
Data from
@prl.bsky.social[Not loaded yet]
Good morning.
Today is the 80th day that the U.S. President is running a backdoor bribery scheme in which any CEO or foreign oligarch can send him money secretly through his crypto coin scam in exchange for favors.
It's the biggest scandal in the history of the Presidency.
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This looks great --- earlier research on whether pre-post designs attenuate treatment effects was underpowered. This study finds modest attenuation.
New paper on misperceptions out in PNAS
@pnas.org
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Why do people overestimate the size of politically relevant groups (immigrant, LGBTQ, Jewish) and quantities (% of budget spent on foreign aid, % of refugees that are criminals)?🧵👇
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Road pricing that accounts for vehicle weight anyone...
NEW: Donald Trump announced the US was imposing reciprocal tariffs on a small collection of Antarctic islands that are not inhabited by humans, as part of a global trade war aimed at asserting US dominance.
The Heard and McDonald Islands are known for their populations of penguins.
Trump Tariffs Hit Antarctic Islands Inhabited by Zero Humans and Many Penguins
The Heard and McDonald Islands are among the dozens of targets of President Donald Trump's latest round of tariffs. But they have no exports, because no one lives there.
Keep in mind POTUS doesn't know the difference between the trade deficit & the budget deficit
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “TRADE DEFICIT”—IT’S JUST CALLED “BUYING THINGS.” YOU DO NOT HAVE A TRADE DEFICIT WITH YOUR DENTIST JUST BECAUSE HE NEVER BUYS ANYTHING FROM YOU.
This man gets it
Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.
No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.
1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.
Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive.
No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief.
1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.
Clyburn's phrasing here is not remotely hyperbolic, Trump has said pursuing his agenda would justify terminating the Constitution
Clyburn: "People better get serious about this. When he says he's not joking about throwing away the Constitution, which is what he'd have to do to have a third term, and we are not gonna rise up in opposition to that? I think it's time for us all to wake up."
The former ambassador to Denmark for the United States, Rufus Gifford, posted this video on his Facebook account:
Ht:
@hpsc24.bsky.social[Not loaded yet]
Put it in your calendar!
Is the presidential pardon power absolute? Can presidents pardon themselves? How has the interpretation of the presidential pardon power evolved? Join us Tuesday, April 1 at 8 PM for a Zoom chat with Akhil Reed Amar and Alan Gerber. Register:
bit.ly/3XyV7Sh
How a glitch in an online survey replaced the word ‘yes’ with ‘forks’
Dating back to at least early 2023, a bizarre and alarming technical glitch started popping up in some organizations’ online surveys and forms.
