Bloomberg and CNN have both reported it now but this pathetic Bluesky pro-Schumer Kremlinology will never die, huh

the repeated willingness of Senate Democrats to not so much backstab their House colleagues as fling their own wet shit in the House Dems' faces is something to behold

cnn has confirmed the axios story but keep bleating that it's just axios bs guys

oh for fuck's sake "in exchange for a promised December vote" how did the DC funding restoration go, Chuck???

been doing some light reading about the aftermath of the korean dictatorship and I think it's really important that we repeat this to ourselves, to our friends, to our neighbors, to our politicians

No kings, only this queen

ran out of room

the aim of the american constitutional structure is twofold: to prevent major change without consensus and to have a workable system of self-government. supermajority rules for ordinary business might promote consensus (i think this is wrong btw) but they make government unworkable!

congress is a russian nesting doll of counter-majoritarian structures. seems to me that there's no need for a supermajority rule on top of that!

one thing i find crazy-making is the idea that getting rid of the filibuster would make congress a purely majoritarian institution. bicameralism itself is counter-majoritarian! equal state representation is counter-majoritarian! the fact that senate elections are staggered is counter-majoritarian!

If I have to see this face again when I open the news I may have some sort of complete mental breakdown.

Chappell Roan as Ms. Frizzle: -canonically lesbian -redhead -flair for the dramatic -flamboyant style

Underrated aspect of killing the filibuster is making pundit hacks at Cook Political p-p-p-piss their pants

Talarico's response is so cool though. "Jesus followed strippers, and are we not commanded to live like Him?" beastmode lmao

so the DSCC is responsible for the Talarico story, right

oh so these people do pay attention to who politicians follow on social media, they just don’t care that the vice president follows a bunch of actual neo-nazis

1) oh it's cool that spiders exhibit social behavior up to and including the creation of spider cities 2) STOP TOUCHING THAT

If you’re wondering what a “least weasel” is, they absolutely live up to the name. This is the least amount of animal you can have that can still meet the bar for “is weasel”

I love that the Boston cop slide never got fixed and now people just willingly go down it in tribute. It’s basically a national landmark at this point

he did call desantis a desperate eunuch. got to hand it him there

all of this is also true for sexism. you tell me you think women are biologically less smart and i’ll suspect that i could probably convince you to drink your own piss

bring back maligning racism as the mark of a stupid person. prejudice is the mark of an idiot. if you believe that shit i bet you also don’t wipe your ass

apropos james watson’s death i had an idle thought today about how stupid race/iq stuff sounds. “buh if your skin is darker you are biologically less smart” is a thing only a dumbass can believe

he won an absolute majority in a 3 person race. the 100k or so people in those neighborhoods don't all have substacks.

we are 10 years into the dem base being raging mad about threats to democracy while dem elites have been entirely sanguine, had to be constantly harassed into even pretending to give a fuck, and then half-assing their way through defending democracy. we need new politicians so fucking badly.

i do want to point out that this does challenge the ironclad conventional wisdom that no one gives a shit about democracy

gerontocracy is bad, however, she has enough of a spine of steel that it's legit worth keeping her for life lmao

she's so cool

no better way to get from Queens to Manhattan

America has a massive prison system & we use it all wrong

so there's the kind where you bill for procedures you didn't do, and then there's the kind where you do unnecessary procedures without the consent of a sedated patient for extra money, and I think I've seen both from the same guy?

everyone has a scam story but I still think people who don't work in the area struggle to appreciate the scale of everyday fraud in the American economy

I spent a year in government in a civil law enforcement capacity and there is nothing on this Earth that has come close to the experience of being the guy who gets to say "I'm from the government and we think what happened to you is really fucked up, would you like to testify against the bastards?"

do you think when Boomers and Silent Gen decided that Everyone Goes To College Now they understood they were reorienting the US political economy in a way that would create a large and militant social-and-fiscal left wing where basically none existed previously

This is the facility that I and many others have been protesting. We’ve been hit, thrown, gassed, and shot with pepper bullets but none of that holds a candle to what is being done to people *in* the actual facility. Read this thread. Don’t look away. Keep your eyes and the pressure on Broadview.

i think were gonna have the political will to straight up jail these people after this falls apart

I think the question "is Trump a good politician?" is genuinely a complicated one. He is extremely good at running for office in the United States as is, slotting into deep-rooted material and cultural dysfunctions that other politicians who are less sociopathic were loath to prod so directly.

cannot emphasize enough that the level of coordinated messaging in the last 72 hours more or less guarantees this as a fact. the only margin for hyperbole is the level of panic itself.

says "the institutional left" and then lists two people who are effectively unemployable because nobody at a respectable institution has any patience left for them, and a third I've never heard of

I feel like people on Bluesky who have convinced themselves that the institutional Left in the United States is pro Trump and falling over backwards to credit Trump should have to reckon with the fact that the only Palestinian in Congress, and a DSA member, says (rightly) that the ceasefire is fake.

Seen some contrarians say that Zohran should visit Israel and meet with "left wing Israeli Jews who share his vision" (who?) but do these people realize that Mamdani wouldn't be allowed into the country or the occupied territories in the first place? No one remembers the Tlaib and Omar issue?

Lotta good back and forth in the various strains of this thread about Jay Jacobs, but I really just want to focus on Brian's last line here. Nassau County Dems - Suozzi, Gillen, Jacobs - all spent more time melting down over Mamdani than boosting their own candidates. It's a huge failure.

"The legislature has to legislate" is the absolute bare minimum requirement of a republic, and that hasn't been true in the United States for over a decade at the very least

this will never work

I kind of expect that 25 in this legislature very quickly becomes like 8 in the last one, where the two incumbents from opposing parties each openly want the other blasted off the face of the planet