alanwessman.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

there is literally no reason to lie about this bill when it's already horrible. This bill does not give Trump the power to end democracy, it does not track VPN or allow him to ignore the SC. IT WILL CLOSES RURAL HOSPITALS AND CUT MEDICAID. THAT WILL KILL PEOPLE, FOCUS ON THE TRUTH NOT LIES

submitted 6 hours ago • 0 comments

Responsibility for events isn't a fixed pie to be divided. If a bad thing happens, one can bear full responsibility while another that contributed also bears full responsibility, rather than each being half responsible. I got that idea from @epicciuto.bsky.social, and second this application of it:

submitted 6 hours ago • 4 comments

When my wife became a citizen, the judge said a few words before administering the oath. She said "In a few moment, you will become as American as I am. There is no second-class category of citizens in this country." It was deeply moving.

submitted 7 hours ago • 6 comments

No one has a more cynical or contemptuous view of American citizenship than Trump republicans. To them it's not a promise of fundamental and inalienable rights, it's a favor to be granted or taken away at the whim of the government.

submitted 8 hours ago • 5 comments

Even if you have private insurance or are rich, these cuts are going to make you have to wait longer for every medical service, and when you have a heart attack, stroke, or significant trauma, will reduce the odds that a facility capable of treating those things is close enough to make a difference.

submitted 9 hours ago • 4 comments

Concentration camps kill the elderly and the young. It is a feature, not a bug, of such places as neglect, bad sanitation, poor food, and all the rest are like COVID--they hit those who are most vulnerable. It didn't have to be this way.

submitted 11 hours ago • 4 comments

This logic would allow certain of my religious tradition to object to the portrayal of ANY wedding: non-LDS-temple weddings because they aren’t for eternity, and temple weddings because portraying temple ceremonies would offend their sense of the sacred. Which is a bonkers result.

submitted 10 hours ago • 1 comment

We've got new distributional data on the Senate's "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" from @natasharsarin.bsky.social and team at @budgetlab.bsky.social. The results are stark. Top 0.1% _GAINS_ $97,000, or 1% of household resources. Bottom 20% _LOSES_ $600, or 3% of household resources.

submitted 11 hours ago • 27 comments

Opponents of social safety net programs claim that gobs of cash are being paid to people who refuse to work. But as @propublica.org showed in 2021, several states have refused to spend BILLIONS in federal funds meant for families in need - or made it effectively impossible for them to qualify.

submitted 11 hours ago • 3 comments

"A New Kind of Judicial Supremacy" Excellent post from Vladeck connecting changes in emergency relief to how the Court understands and exercises its supremacy. open.substack.com/pub/stevevla... @stevevladeck.bsky.social

submitted 17 hours ago • 5 comments

NEW: Kristi Noem, while governor of South Dakota, supplemented her roughly $130,000 salary by secretly accepting $80,000 donated to a political nonprofit she was affiliated with, records show. She never disclosed this income on federal ethics forms.

submitted 17 hours ago • 1616 comments

NASA is being told to cancel 19 active missions to save $6B, which looks to be less than the ICE hiring/retention budget going forward. I need people to let that sentence sink into their bones for a minute.

submitted 1 day ago • 74 comments

Bill being considered by Senate is even worse than House. Cuts are about 25% higher than House bill. Cuts more than $1 trillion from Medicaid, leads 11.8 million more to become UNINSURED. The cuts to MO are 1/5th of MO Medicaid budget, with disprortionate share hitting RURAL PEOPLE, esp. hospitals

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I find myself thinking about historian Robert Paxton’s 2004 definition of fascism far too often than I’d like these days. Note that these sentences were written back when Donald Trump was a NYC playboy libertine who donated to Democrats.

submitted 1 day ago • 10 comments

Friends, I’m polling for your ideas. I will be presenting to a lay audience of older adults (empty nesters) in roughly a month, for about half an hour, on the topic of detecting and avoiding scams. What key points, core questions, or specific guidance do you think a good presentation would cover?

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

This quiz is a good opportunity to emphasize again that all short-form video below 6 seconds without cuts has now been rendered fundamentally untrustworthy. That length of time will go up, likely quite soon.

submitted 1 day ago • 8 comments

While this is catchy, I don’t think it’s a valid comparison. Yes, the lump sum ICE gets IS larger than one year of the Marine Corps’ budget, but ICE has 51 months (until Sept. 30, 2029) to spend it. Effectively, ICE’s annual budget for FY26-29 would go from 18% of the Marine Corps’ budget to 50%.

submitted 1 day ago • 28 comments

I can not stress enough that ICE does not have the budget of the Marine Corps. They would have a large budget increase spread over multiple years. They are not going to be fielding a MAGTF with fixed wing assets.

submitted 1 day ago • 35 comments

CBO cost estimate of the Senate GOP bill is out! But this is the version where they pretend $3.76 trillion of tax cuts are actually free. When you account for that CBO estimates that their bill will increase deficits by $3.3 trillion over the decade, much more expensive than the House.

submitted 2 days ago • 11 comments

Lisa Murkowski cuts a last minute deal solely to benefit Alaska, exempting it from some of the more odious parts of the bill to secure her vote and sell out the rest of the US. Yeah this stuff sucks and hurts a lot of people, but I got Alaskans exempted so the hell with you.

submitted 1 day ago • 1315 comments

🚨 ICE disappeared a woman on Wednesday night. She was grabbed by men in plainclothes and taken to an unidentified location. ICE is refusing to say where she is being held. It’s 72 hours later and not even a dedicated team of lawyers can find her. This is WRONG. We can’t let this be the new norm.

submitted 2 days ago • 364 comments

The Trump admin in a nutshell; in order to justify their own mistake, they’re going to release a violent felon with five deportations so he can testify against the guy with no criminal record they mistakenly deported. In other words, the story is always more important than the principle.

submitted 2 days ago • 164 comments

The fact that the State Department is planning to open an Office of Remigration didn't get even anywhere close to the attention it deserved. Remigration is explicitly a European far-right/neo-Nazi word that in Europe refers quite explicitly to ethnic cleansing beyond simply immigration enforcement.

submitted 20 days ago • 40 comments

Thinking again about how the media turned Bill Clinton talking to AG Loretta Lynch for 15 minutes into a major scandal for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

submitted 3 days ago • 31 comments

“The Secretary has determined that it is not in the national interest to love thy neighbor as thyself.”

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

NEW: DHS's claim that TPS for Haiti was terminated because DHS thinks Haiti is now "safe for Haitian citizens to return to" is FALSE. According to the termination published in the Federal Register, the ONLY explanation Noem gave is that letting Haitians have TPS was "not in the national interest."

submitted 3 days ago • 20 comments

I was adopted via closed adoption, born in North Carolina. It was closed so I have no knowledge of or access to my biological mother’s details. It also means my biological mother isn’t on my birth certificate. So if birthright citizenship becomes a patchwork right, what’s someone like me to do?

submitted 3 days ago • 88 comments

The phrase "whatever you did for one of the least of these ..." has been used so often that it's become cliche. But look at the passage in the Bible where this comes from. Matthew 25:31-46 describes Jesus teaching the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. And He talks to two groups of people.

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

Warning signs flashing red - increasing dehumanizing rhetoric from a fascist authoritarian leader and his partisan allies

submitted 3 days ago • 199 comments

In El Salvador, tens of thousands of people were jailed as part of President Nayib Bukele crackdown on gangs. Some police officers now admit they arrested people on flimsy or nonexistent evidence to meet quotas.

submitted 3 days ago • 37 comments