A certain New York Times columnist is out making the claim that the key to understanding most of the right wing intelligentsia is that they live in cosmopolitan, urban cities that are centers of media and learning and thus there are no Republican politicians in power so they just pretend them up
tired: harassing athletes for not covering the spread
wired: harassing journalists for not making things up
All the indicators are bad, but the future is unwritten and you can't surrender. That's just history. That's just life. You get up each day and struggle. The struggle is how you know you're alive and you're alive b/c others refused to just give up. That's the way of things.
Lawyer: You don't regret that people might have lost income?
Cavanaugh (DOGE): No, I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from two trillion dollars to close to zero.
Lawyer: Did you reduce the federal deficit?
Cavanaugh: No, we didn't.
Most accurate portrait of modern culture currently available
"Who was president during the whole fucking pandemic year" is mysterious to the public and the reason is because they're stupid, and conditioned and expectant for Democrats to save everything and thus are blamed for everything, no matter who did what and when
The reason Biden caught the fallout over the economic recovery, which was EXCELLENT unlike what everyone on this fucking website thinks and will get to learn over and over again in the next four years or so, is that wreckers come on here and say stupid shit like this
The single most important window to do something Trump just allowed to lapse. He did so with the lab leak investigation (people forget but blaming china for the pandemic came months into it, at first Trump was trying to pony up to Xi), and he did so with the public health response, generally
Every critical decision which cemented the disease's course through this country and thus the resultant economic damage was all Trump
The reason Biden shares Trump's shame in mishandling the pandemic is Murk's law, no more, no less
I will never forget Chuck Todd calling 100 million vaccines in 100 days a trump-style overpromise and when we hit it on day 65 he sneered that they set a low goal on purpose to look artificially good when they beat it
Another issue with prosecuting this as Aggression is that there's a valid case to be made that Israel and Iran have, for international law purposes, been legally in a state of war since shortly after the Oct 7 Massacre.
And that the US is merely joining *Israel's* preexisting war as an ally.
this is one of the key thing i keep hammering to detractors. you want to shame people for not paying attention to the nuances of the news. most people just do not have the time. theyre at work 9-5, taking care of kids, making family dinner, trying to have a smidge of downtime.
Lastly, they are for the soul of your nation and your cause. Limits on war preserve humanity. Mercy transcends violence. After the fighting, there has to be something more. Rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict protect you; abandoning them is dire.
I know that the people who need to read this aren’t here, but here goes:
Rules of engagement aren’t for the enemy. They’re for you. They’re for your soldiers when they’re captured or wounded. They’re for your civilians when they’re in range of the enemy. They’re for your allies, to reassure.
A new Chotiner interview means I get to repost this.
If I read this correctly, DOJ waited until just before its brief was due to ask to dismiss, then about-faced the next day and is going to try to use that to get an extension on its brief.
There are less humiliating ways to get an extension on your brief, like saying you needed emergency ass surgery
serious question @kenwhite.bsky.social does perjury come into play in this room
“Add to that your fire-setting and wetting the bed….”
The relatively low support ("only 69%") / high unsure responses from the GOP respondents in these early polls is probably a reflection of poor communication from the White House and resulting inability for their co-partisans to effectively cue-take
yougov.com/en-us/daily-...
Immediately need non-fully informed, ethics-dubious speculation from every medical professional in my timeline.
This scenario is far worse for Trump than if the allegations had simply been made public, because he could have moved to the phase of denouncing them as false immediately. But now the focus is going to be on whether they exist, why they were covered up, and what they say, not if they’re real.
This now has the basic structure of a fatal scandal: there’s a terrible secret, an apparent effort to cover up that secret, and everyone knows that the secret and coverup exists. And so the frenzy builds, attracting attention, as everyone becomes increasingly fixated on uncovering the secret
Snap SOTU polls notoriously over-estimate speech approval because supporters of the president are more likely to watch it
The important bit is that we have villains to blame, and it’s the BAFTA operators and the BBC
The Dem establishment has been happy to use the specter of an authoritarian threat to democracy as fundraising rhetoric, but they’ve mostly behaved as though they don’t quite believe it — as though if they keep acting normally, things have to return to normal.
“We made a movie about your life and your struggle for acceptance and the guy who played you is going to win award!”
“Oh, neat, should I come?”
“Oh god no, sorry, we can’t accept you. Only the normal guy who played you, please.”
The claim I made in 2022-23 was not "Biden cannot serve another term." The claim I made was "his age is a huge political liability that is only ever going to get worse, because the press and social media are fixated on it. And that's before you consider the medical vulnerability of someone his age."
Tell your story to media! It's YOUR CHANCE to institute your narrative on what's going on. Reporters might not weigh your tale the way you think they should, but it's MUCH BETTER than journalists telling stories WITHOUT your narrative!
But the biggest way people trip up interacting with journalists is just being too paranoid about it, leading them to not disclose helpful information that makes their perspective more sympathetic, and to be generally weird and guarded with press. Unless you're the subject, that's rarely necessary.
