I have some bad news - buried in the appropriations bill being voted on this week is a terrible new gun policy rider that significantly rolls back the firearms background check system.

1/ You need to know about this - it’s bad enough that I will vote against the entire bill. 2/ Republicans (and one or two Democrats) pushed for the new rider that allows, for the first time in 30 years, veterans judged by the VA to be mentally incompetent to buy guns.

These are very very mentally ill veterans - those at the highest risk of suicide.

Minutes ago, the text of the bipartisan national security funding bill was released. It:

-funds Ukraine, Israel, and humanitarian relief
-secures our border and reforms our asylum law

1/ As the co-author of the immigration provisions, here's a THREAD on the key elements: 2/ First - it would be easy to just keep immigration and border policy as a political cudgel for another 40 years. But politics at its best is about finding bipartisan compromise on the toughest issues. That's what we've done here.

Here's a snapshot of what's in the bill.

I support Israel in its mission to seek justice for the worst terrorist attack in their history.

1/ That means providing funding and weapons. But it also means making sure they don't repeat our mistakes in Afghanistan when we invaded after our nation's worst terrorist attack. 2/ We were too permissive of civilian casualties, and we did not understand that our operations were creating two Taliban recruits for everyone we eliminated.

You cannot defeat a movement if you are constantly providing it bulletin board material for recruitment efforts.

The UAW fight is so important because it strikes at the heart of America's spiritual crisis.

The hollowing out of workers' economic power has been devastating for American families. So many people feel not in control of their lives, because they work so hard and get so little. Both parents work. Child care is outsourced to strangers. There's not enough money coming in to do anything other than pay the bills. No vacations. No college savings. One big medical bill away from insolvency. No breathing room.

It's an exhausting existence.

I attended today's meeting and will play a role in the upcoming debate. But I have concerns unique from many of my colleagues.

1/ Yes, deep fakes/job displacement worry me. But I'm more concerned with the psychological cost of outsourcing so many basic human functions to AI.

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1701946279620702633

2/ Conversation, composition, creativity, discovery, in person connection - these are the things that make us human and fill our lives with meaning and value.

What happens when AI writes our e-mails, composes our music, creates our art? What happens as machines replace teachers?

Thousands of gun dealers currently do not do background checks, allowing loads of criminals to get guns.

The 2022 gun bill sought to change that, and today Biden announced the rule to implement the change.

1/ This is a BIG deal. Let me tell you why.
msn.com/en-us/news/pol… 2/ Only people "engaged in the business" of selling firearms have to conduct background checks on buyers. In the era of gun shows and , with thousands of part time sellers making big profits off selling guns, the pre-internet definition had become outdated.armslist.com

Nearly every word of this thread is flat wrong.

1/ It’s useful to explain why, bc this critique hits all the highlights of the neocon, Iran hawk, anti-diplomacy argument (the policy that keeps failing)

https://twitter.com/mdubowitz/status/1690337214243246081

2/ For the last time, it’s so hacky to say it’s a “ransom”. It’s not. The fact that Iran is our enemy doesn’t change the law. And the law says the $6B is Iran’s money that we were holding.

And it can only be used to buy oil and food for people in need.

It appears that the United States trained yet another coup leader in Africa. It's a disturbing trend, and a sign of how badly misallocated our national security spending is on the continent.

1/ A short thread on some of what's gone wrong.
theintercept.com/2023/07/27/nig… 2/ Like many low income African nations, Niger's problems are inherently economic. 20% of the country doesn't get enough food to eat. 40% on Niger citizens make less than $2 a day.

But the bulk of U.S. spending in Niger is for military operations, not economic development.

Yes, Ukraine needs ammunition.

Yes, there is a real moral difference between Russia using high failure rate cluster bombs on foreign soil and Ukraine using low failure rate bombs to defend their own country.

But on balance, this transfer isn’t worth it. 1/ Here’s why: 2/ Ukraine needs to maintain both a practical and moral advantage in this war. The ability to rally the world against Russia gets harder if our war efforts start to fudge ethical lines.

Finished Of Boys and Men by @RichardvReeves. Just excellent and so necessary. Covers some of the themes I wrote about in my book.

1/ The bottom line: the left is missing the crisis happening w men today and we need to talk about it openly and without fear.

2/ We cannot avoid the biological/evolutionary differences between men and women. It’s not “toxic masculinity” that causes men to commit 90% of murders, for instance. Both biology and thousand of years of culture have wired men differently. Policy has to acknowledge that.

I and my team are following events in Russia and Ukraine closely. Here’s what I can share right now.

1/ Putin’s weakness has been exposed. He could survive, but power in Russia will be forever scrambled after this weekend. 2/ Prigozhin believes he has the Russian people on his side. But the force he is moving toward Moscow is small. No way to know if there will be military conflict and whether Prigozhin is right. Putin still controls the media. He hold on the Russian mind is still strong.

Gun violence rates are falling. Quickly. And the author of this article speculates that the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act is partly responsible.

I want to expand on that argument in a couple tweets.

1/ Please hear me out and share this. It’s important.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 2/ This new dip may be temporary. But maybe/hopefully it’s the start of a trend.

It would represent the third major sharp decrease in U.S. violence rates over the last 100 years.

Look at this chart. The last two dips were in the 1930s and the 1990s.

1/ A had recent chilling conversation with a group of teenagers and I want to tell you about it.

They were upset by my bill to ban social media's use of algorithmic boosting to teens. This practice is used to curate (often harmful) content to keep kids addicted to screens. 2/ I told them the result of my bill might be that kids would have to work a little harder to find relevant content. They were concerned by this. They strongly defended the TikTok/YouTube/ algorithms as essential to their lives.

"It's how we find community," one said.

Putting some of my recent writing all in one place.

The Wreckage of Neoliberalism
The Politics of Loneliness
Individualism vs. The Common Good
The Left Needs a Spiritual Renaissance theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

I want you to know this story. So you can understand how sweeping and suffocating the gun violence epidemic is.
 
I hope you read this entire thread.
 
1/ It starts with the shooting of 20 year old Shane Oliver on October 20, 2012. 2/ Shane was a hustler, in the best sense of the word. He fixed up old cars and resold them.
 
One night, during a sale, an argument broke out btwn Shane and his buyer over a comment the buyer made abt Shane’s girlfriend.
 
The buyer went to his car, got his gun, and shot Shane.

I understand the limitations of Twitter polls, but I really want your help on this one. Genuinely interested to see what Twitter thinks of these two (unartfully drafted) questions.

1/ Please read the next 2 tweets and then answer the questions in tweet 4 and 5.

Thx. 2/ Arguably there are two ways to practice democracy.

First, the "compromise model" - voters elect representatives. We are happy that this results in a diversity of views in the legislature bc the point of the legislature is to work out compromises on issues that divide us.

I was at Hartford Hospital today and spent some time with a young man named Kevin. He has been using heroin and fentanyl for 6 years and he just had open heart surgery for myocarditis, a condition caused by his drug use.

1/ My interaction w him rattled me and I want to share it. 2/ Kevin wanted me to know he had no family history of addiction and he didn’t use habitually until he was 29. His addiction caught him by surprise. He says “I never ever thought I’d end up like this.”

The Army selected Bell's Valor as their new assault helicopter.

It's a dangerous, costly decision.

How do we know this? Well, the V-22 Osprey, the Valor's predecessor, has been, according to Fortune magazine, "wildly expensive, ineffective, and unsafe."
fortune.com/2017/08/05/v22… Just last week, the Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force grounded hundreds of Ospreys due to multiple problems with the clutch that endangered airmen.
defensenews.com/naval/2023/02/…

Before the right wing conspiracy machine digs their teeth into this, let's be clear - these claims about the Global Engagement Center are MADE UP OUT OF THIN AIR. None of this is true.

1/ As one of the bipartisan creators of the GEC, let me explain:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1622739987031552002

2/ The GEC was established, through legislation written by me and Republican Senator Rob Portman, to counter Russian/Chinese/Iranian and foreign terrorist group propaganda. It does no work inside the United States. Its focus is on competing with foreign propaganda abroad.

I get it. The instinct is to make everything a fight. Make everything partisan. I fall victim to this instinct often, too.

I really think the conversation about loneliness and restoring meaning to people's lives doesn't have to be partisan or full of snipe.

https://twitter.com/MikeGrant262/status/1620760323379838977

Yes, states run by Democrats did mostly keep schools closed longer (note though that most Connecticut schools reopened the same the time Texas and Florida schools did), but schools were closed for a long time in Republican states.

I’m going to be at the border today and tomorrow with a bipartisan group of Senators interested in finding common ground on solutions.

What I’m not interested in is acting like this is just the Administration’s fault when Congress has refused to act for a generation. Crossings at the border spiked in 2019 under Trump. They only came down because of the pandemic. When the virus abated, the numbers predictably returned to 2019 levels. This doesn’t seem to be a political problem. Numbers were high under R and D Presidents.