Katie

I wish I didn’t feel so much relief when a politician does the bare minimum.

a young person in and their parent, faces cropped out, stand in front of a marble rail, holding a handmade poster: DON’T TREAD ON ME with a riff on the Gadsen flag snake against the pastel blue/pink/white stripes of the trans pride flag. the young person has on a LOVE MORE (rainbow heart) tee; their patent is in a LOVE IS LOVE tee.

thinking of this young person I met nearly five years ago at the Texas state Capitol—when activists defeated a raft of anti-trans laws introduced that year—and this sign they made:

Through the first 3 days of early voting in Texas, a fifth of Democratic primary voters have been people who have never voted in a primary before (D or R).

ryandata.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?...

There seems to be something happening in Tarrant County 🧐

ICE's budget has increased by more than 1,300% since 2015 — to $85 billion today. USAspending.gov & House Appropriations Committee

tonight’s data snapshot on NewsHour

It’s -9 degrees. Downtown Minneapolis is packed for the anti-ICE rally and the crowd keeps growing

it does feel fundamentally dysfunctional, right, to beg lawmakers to use the law to force law enforcement to obey the law

today is the day that donald trump finally became precedential

The way the press is treating chatbots, like they have agency and they “know” things all of a sudden, crossed the line recently from dumb and obsequious to something else entirely. Treating them as alive and making conscious decisions is an almost religious belief. It won’t age well.

To all the people who don't care what happens to trans people: that is my son that they are attacking. What would you say if someone attacked your son? “Put on your big boy pants and suck it up.”? “Don’t be a purity pony.”?

On Power Liminal thoughts from a liminal space, "The Perineum" between Christmas and New Year

I wrote this yesterday. It’s my message in a bottle from 2025. May it find you where you are xx

open.substack.com/pub/broligar...

In the 00s, when the "digital nomad" thing got popular, a bunch of tech bros left the country to avoid taxes, Thiel included (who went to NZ). It always amazed me how they spent $$$$ to buy residency in countries who used that $$$$ to fund their own welfare states. Like, what was the point? ...

It's so fucked up to have been a kid during the D&D is the devil freakout and the Tipper Gore dirty lyrics freakout and live to see the teen suicide machine get such a pass.

We Did It, Texas Dems, We Did It Candidates in every legislative, statewide, and federal race. Now it’s time to build power where it counts.

Texas Democrats just did something historic under the leadership of new state party chair @kendallscudder.bsky.social. We have filed a candidate in EVERY 2026 race.

U.S. Senate: 1 of 1
U.S. House: 38 of 38
State Senate: 15 of 15
State House: 150 of 150
State Board of Education: 8 of 8

As you’re preparing for your Thanksgiving meal, remember the skilled work it took to get that food to your grocery store.

Tell us your favorite Thanksgiving dish, and we can share some of what we know about the work behind the ingredients.

🧵

The way we talk about the economy as positioned the losses of workers as male losses, wrong and threatening because of the way they endanger male status. But women are workers, too, and they deserve dignity and decent wages.

What’s safe? How do we know? The anxiety of pregnancy in America. The way the government talks about pregnancy has transformed, putting choices about medications, vaccines and care under heightened scrutiny.

The government has promoted a birth boom while discouraging pregnant people from taking

-SSRIs
-COVID vaccines
-Tylenol

all going against medical consensus & evidence.

We spoke to the people trying to keep their pregnancies healthy in the face of govt misinformation

19thnews.org/2025/10/preg...

A multiple line chart of YouGov polling data with the headline: "Views of Donald Trump by age in his second term." The chart has the sub-headline: "Do you have a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of the following people? [Donald Trump] (% with a very or somewhat favorable opinion minus the % with a very or somewhat unfavorable opinion)." The chart has the note: "Note: Responses of "don't know" are not shown."

NEW Economist/YouGov
Net favorability of Donald Trump [at the start of his second term | now] among U.S. adult citizens by age
18-29: +5 | -39
30-44: -6 | -14
45-64: +12 | -10
65+: -4 | -10
today.yougov.com/politics/art...

HHS Appears to be Cutting Its Entire Family Planning Office Almost every member of the Office of Population Affairs lost email access and is unable to tell if they were laid off, workers told NOTUS.

Disastrous. “If there’s no one who works at the Office of Population Affairs, there’s no one to administer the Title X family planning program, which is a massively important program for reproductive health and rights in this country."
www.notus.org/health-scien...

Although the Callais case at SCOTUS involves a high-profile congressional redistricting dispute, important to remember that most Section 2 cases (2/3!) continue to involve local government bodies like city councils & school boards. - mostly challenges to at-large systems.

KPop Demon Hunters - SNL YouTube video by Saturday Night Live

SNL comes out swinging with the first network appearance of Huntrix. What a get! youtu.be/LW9QJIT_T-A?...

60 years ago today, LBJ signed the Immigration Nationality Act of 1965 into law at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

Midcentury 76 station in Beverly Hills, designed by Gin Wong.

Beverly Hills, California.

Can we get some focus on the perfidy of Speaker Mike Johnson?

So much of Trump’s excesses are made possible because Johnson has disabled the House as a check on the President. He has handed Trump his gavel symbolically and in reality.

We need to focus on Trump’s enablers.

New brief, hot off the presses!

Abortion, Economic Hardship, and Crime Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, an...

New paper finds lack of abortion access leads to "significant economic hardship...lower labor force participation, rising debt, widening income inequality, and heightened housing insecurity." www.nber.org/papers/w34245

Texas drops lawsuit against doctor accused of illegally providing care to transgender youth Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office says one of the first doctors in the U.S. accused of illegally providing care to transgender youth under GOP-led bans was found not to have broken the law.

Wow: Texas quietly dropped its lawsuit against Dr. Hector Granados, an El Paso pediatric endocrinologist who Ken Paxton called a "scofflaw" for allegedly violating the state's ban on providing hormones / puberty blockers to trans kids:
apnews.com/article/tran...

OK! 👀

Screenshot of an announcement from SESAME WORKSHOP. The Sesame Street library is coming to YouTube! Beginning in January 2026, YouTube will have the largest digital library of Sesame Street content, with hundreds of full episodes coming to the Sesame Street channels. Join us as we help children everywhere grow smarter, stronger, and kinder, one episode at a time.

Oh HELL yes