Lisa Olsen 💚

Teacher and a mom, living with probably Lupus and a #mediumwriter. Follow for stories in education, politics, parenting, adoption and chronic illness.

[Lisa Olsen 💚 @fawyndra]

I consolidated most of my education articles into one blog page, with links leading to the Medium articles.

I also put some of my most helpful Pinterest boards for educators or homeschooler parents looking for ideas onto this page.

https://t.co/CFTTDeVW89

[Lisa Olsen 💚 @fawyndra]

@AceOfSpades_04 At my school we do. The school gives us the lanyard to identify us as a staff member and my id/badge is on it to get me through the gate onto campus. It also has my key, which is important because every classroom door is locked, all day, so to get inside any class I need it

[⋆˙⟡ ash | tgd vancouver 🐞 @swiftie1ncanada]

hi oomfs! this is a long shot, but does anyone have any kind of connection at all to anything professional hockey related?

theres a lil 3 year old boy in my town fighting neuroblastoma that was placed on hospice care last week, and his make-a-wish was scheduled for october (1/2)

[Lisa Olsen 💚 @fawyndra]

@_samantha_joy My recommendation is to go to the board book of the children's section of the library. Pick some different ones every week or so to start, then buy the favorites.

[Lisa Olsen 💚 @fawyndra]

@_samantha_joy And the repetitive reading of that book helps to make the connection between words spoken and letters on the page, sometimes to the point that toddlers will memorize favorite books. So when they start learning reading the connection between how letters make words is even clearer

[Polling USA @USA_Polling]

America needs to use only paper ballots for their elections, I'm extremely serious

[Bill Kristol @BillKristol]

"In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia...Once you have seen that Donald Trump is confabulating, it cannot be unseen — and all sorts of other mildly disturbing incidents suddenly fall into place."
https://t.co/o5vReAKulq

[Lisa Olsen 💚 @fawyndra]

@mich___l @GBPolitcs I agree. If they wanted to represent British traditional culture, they should have gone with something like https://t.co/v0VUsuZckV

A dress from the 1960s ish can't be really considered "traditional," and considered they didn't ask the teacher first, I assume they wanted drama

[Juanita Broaddrick @atensnut]

Who else thinks we should go back to this? 🙋‍♀️

[Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris]

Thanks to Senate Republicans, 17 million people will lose their health care.

Thanks to Senate Republicans, rural hospitals will close.

Thanks to Senate Republicans, three million Americans, including veterans and seniors, will lose food assistance.

Thanks to Senate Republicans, families will see their energy bills go up by $400 a year.

Senate Republicans are doing all of this and more — hurting working people across our nation — in order to pay for $1 trillion in tax cuts for billionaires.

There is still time to stop this bill before it passes in the House. Call 202-224-3121 and tell your representative to vote no.

[Dittie @DittiePE]

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” isn’t just about tax cuts it quietly guts federal protections and reshapes entire agencies. Here’s what��s buried inside:

- Closure of the U.S. Department of Education

- 25% expansion of logging in national forests, bypassing environmental reviews and fast-tracking timber production

- Rollbacks on clean energy incentives, cutting tax credits for EVs and renewables, gutting key climate provisions

- More public lands opened up for drilling, mining, and logging, with royalty breaks for fossil fuel companies

- Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, ending U.S. participation in global climate efforts

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- Executive Order 14215, forcing independent federal agencies to follow White House legal interpretations and centralizing authority under the presidency
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- Pension changes for federal workers hired before 2014, cutting take-home pay by raising required contributions, reducing future payouts, and eliminating early retirement supplements

- REINS Act-style regulation repeal, where major federal rules expire unless Congress re-approves them every 5 years allowing Trump to quietly erase protections without rewriting laws

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- Expanded executive control over agency budgets, allowing the White House to move federal funds internally without explicit congressional approval

- Restoration of impoundment powers, giving Trump the ability to block or delay spending already passed by Congress reviving powers stripped after Watergate
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-‼️‼️Creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), placing White House–aligned teams inside every federal agency with access to internal systems and influence over hiring and daily operations‼️‼️

- Sharp cuts in regulatory enforcement, with agencies like the EPA, CFPB, and Labor and Transportation Departments halting enforcement of key safety, environmental, and anti-discrimination rules
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- Trump’s personal control over economic policy, strengthening his power to direct tariffs, pressure private companies, and dictate pricing with little resistance treating the U.S. economy like his own business
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This bill isn’t just “big.” It’s a roadmap for dismantling oversight, hollowing out federal protections, and handing Trump sweeping, unchecked control. Read the fine print.

This would make him a dictator . (Credit @ALTUSNPS )

[Roman Sheremeta 🇺🇸🇺🇦 @rshereme]

A sobering message from a history teacher:

I’ve spent years teaching American and international government — from strong democracies like the UK to authoritarian regimes like russia and China.

But lately, the most alarming lesson comes from home.

1/n

[Robinson Meyer @robinsonmeyer]

What remains astonishing is that this isn’t a “natural” recession. There’s no cyclical slowdown or housing bubble. Consumers were holding up okay.

This is about one man choosing to crash the economy because of a dumb idea, and 273 of his party’s lawmakers letting him do it.

[Trumpton @Trump_ton]

Yesterday I bought a cup of coffee for $3

I now have a $3 trade deficit with the coffee shop so I am imposing a 50% trade tariff on them.

Today my coffee cost me $4.50

#winning

[Conor Sen @conorsen]

Nobody has put forth a credible way that this stops without Congress stepping in.

[Elizabeth Warren @SenWarren]

Republicans in Congress can join Democrats right now to turn off the bogus emergency Trump has declared to impose worldwide tariffs.

Or they can continue to bend the knee to Trump.

[Jo Thomas @rthomas86]

I own a small dessert business. My business has a 100% trade deficit with the grocery store. I’m always buying from them, and they’ve never once bought anything from me.

Now, of course, I take products I buy from the grocery store, turn them into delicious baked goods, and make a 50%+ profit, while the grocery store is running on 2-4% profit margins, but WE HAVE A TRADE DEFICIT! They’re ripping me off with their low, low prices, because they NEVER buy anything from me!

Of course, the alternative is for me to grow, harvest, thrash, grind, then finely mill all of my own flour, including into the various mixes of flour that I use for various products (cake flour, bread flour, all-purpose, etc…), maintain and milk a dairy cow, churn my own butter, make that milk into heavy cream, yogurt, sour cream, condensed milk, and evaporated milk, etc…grow cacao, and then turn into all the different kinds of chocolate and baking cocoa… grow and harvest sugar cane, sorghum, mine salt, make baking powder, baking soda, grow vanilla beans, etc, etc, etc…

All of that (plus WAY more), and we haven’t even talked about all the different fruits and nuts I would need, or how I would only be able to offer certain products during certain times of the year, or how a lot of what I said before wouldn’t even be possible in the climate I live in, but I digress.

If all of that wasn’t cost-prohibitive enough to completely wipe out my profits (it would be, and then some), the time commitment and significant additional physical labor certainly wouldn’t make any of it worth the tiny remaining profit.

Now, compare that to the current screeching about the trade deficits we have with other countries. We import raw materials (aluminum, steel, lumber, etc…) from other countries, which would be labor and/or cost prohibitive for us to make, or that we simply cannot produce or source here, and then we take those materials, and turn them into higher profit margin products, which we then export to other countries. It is exactly the same as my example, but on a macro scale.

[SteveThinks @stevethinks612]

A trade deficit isn’t a “loss”—it’s not a scoreboard. It means we’re buying more goods than we sell, often because Americans can afford more, and our dollar is strong.

Calling a deficit a “loss” is like saying you’re losing money at the grocery store because you bought dinner instead of selling it.

The President of the United States thinking this way is reckless beyond belief. This isn’t how global economics works—and treating it like a zero-sum game is how you crash economies, kill jobs, and drive up prices for every American family.

This isn’t tough negotiating. It’s economic malpractice—and we’re all going to pay for it.

[Scott Lincicome @scottlincicome]

Trump's reciprocal tariffs:
1) Impose hundreds of billions of dollars in new taxes on Americans without public/congressional input
2) Are based on secret calculations that have little, if any, connection to actual foreign trade barriers
3) Ignore all US tariff/non-tariff barriers, which in some cases are quite high
4) Are justified by a "national emergency" that reflects a total misunderstanding of how trade deficits work
5) Disregard US trade agreement commitments, including ones made by Trump himself
6) Will make us all poorer, and likely do real & lasting harm to the US economy (incl in manufacturing)
7) Embolden our adversaries around the world

And those are just the ones off the top of my head.