I think the correct dimension to categorize Democrats isn't liberal to moderate, but those who think elected office is for the exercise of power and those who think elected office is your just reward after climbing the career ladder and waiting your turn.

Right, the answer isn't to abandon the party to these weasels. The answer is to flood the party with people who will take it over and transform it.

"strategist"

I legitimately can’t tell if the 8 folders are stupid or they just think we’re stupid

i find every story about costco's brand strategy and overall approach completely fascinating.

many people have been saying

The difference in time between now and I can has cheezburger Is the same between I can has Cheezburger and the Berlin Wall falling

like this is basically it, the melts melted under pressure

one of my first blog posts is about inclusionary zoning mandates and how they so often backfire by resulting in *less* subsidized housing being built

“Germany used renewables to phase out nuclear before coal” is the most accurate way of describing it. which is still a nonsensical decision given the relative emissions profiles of nuclear vs. coal

Dems backed Trump into a corner where he’s advocating for starving Americans and hemorrhaging support. If they vote to let him off the hook in exchange for nothing it’s a cataclysmic failure. I know people are in pain but insulating Republicans from political consequences is not the answer.

10/10 recommendation in the “so bad it’s good” category

China beat us to BBQ in space… Our space Mission Control is in Texas! And we let the Chinese beat us?

folks. this is not going to blunt the blue wave. i am going to need you to ease all the way back on the dooming. trump is going to do eighteen more horrible things that eat news cycles by next *week*. no one is going to still be fuming about this in a year

The average SNAP benefit per month is $177 a person. The average ACA benefit per month is up to $550 a person. People want us to hold the line for a reason. This is not a matter of appealing to a base. It’s about people’s lives. And working people want leaders whose word means something to them.

so currently defectors are: Kaine (2030) Shaheen (Retiring) Hasan (2028) Fetterman (2028) Durbin (Retiring) CCM (2028) Rosen (2030) King (2030)

I recall @eean.dev getting ratio’d for observing during the Biden administration the obsequiousness the admin and Congress pays to air travel compared to any other form of transportation or communication.

Turning your back on politics is simply not an option in this moment. If you don't like what you see happening, get *more involved*. Become a PCP with your local Dem group. Take over the local party and push them in a better direction. Run for something.

Either way, so many Dems... the bulk of the Senate caucus, House leadership, governors, etc.,... all quickly throwing down the gauntlet with such open unrestrained attacks on any Dems who cave is new. It wasn't like that in March, not nearly as loud and widespread and immediate, much more base-only.

Brian Schatz is probably our best prospect as a post-Schumer leader and he's at least showing the ability to listen. we'll see about his chops to lead.

This moment demands fighters, not folders.

son brought home a pinto bean plant from school last spring. it yielded one (1) bean, which we planted. *that* plant yielded ... one (1) bean, which we have also planted. Five months of cultivation has yielded two beans. anyway, you were saying something about "grow your own food"

it bogles my mind that FSAs exists

This is why I don’t take “degrowth” seriously. Human flourishing and long term ecological sustainability require *more* economic growth, not less.

this, too, is Pivot to Wiki. we have to build & use info sources that exist both outside of elite-controlled media AND outside of the social media/attention economy. Otherwise, lying wins.

i am begging every skeptic to find some middle ground, any middle ground at all, between rejecting speculation as sci-fi and refusing to speculate even slightly about what happens next

Musk, Andressen, Thiel--they lack virtue. It's as simple as that. If you have love in your life, you are richer than they are.

I am once again saying that we saw what wall to wall, panic coverage of a crisis looked like after the Biden debate and there’s no reason Trump isn’t getting that kind of coverage except for class solidarity.

even within your own lifetime it is difficult to recall how much better everything you eat, drink, and touch is than it used to be

We need more writing on this. The class character of a the PMC is undertheorized. At least undertheorized for what it is: a historically progressive force. There’s been a fair amount of dismissive sneering from self conscious intellectuals.

was over by the Parkway today and wondering about this I do hope they can figure it out because “cannabis lounge movie palace” is a vision I very much am here for read through for the “discretionary land use approvals invite corruption” angle oaklandside.org/2022/08/29/p...

Cross-posting my discovery of the day. This guy could have been the Shoup of design review. He's was a random architect working from home in Bernal Heights. Never had a faculty position. He churned out scores of academic papers and one great book. threadreaderapp.com/thread/19873...

My mortgage payment is $1100. A house with the exact same floor plan as mine and a worse yard around the corner is being rented for $2500. You are not speaking from a place of knowledge or numeracy.

I think we should make it legal and easy to build starter homes like townhouses and condominium apartments in more places so people can get on the homeownership ladder affordable without having to sign up for 50 year loans they’ll probably never pay off.

So it turns out... the US air travel system was incredibly, deeply dependent on federal funding to just run day-to-day all this time, to the benefit of private airline shareholders, when everyone thinks that state-run trains are leeching off the government. Weird!

across all wikipedias in all languages, vietnamese wikipedia's "game boy" article is the only place that uses the public domain shots of hillary clinton as a tetris addict taken on air force one

Virginia House seats won by Democrats this century, out of the chamber's 100 seats: in 2001: 32 in 2003: 34 in 2005: 40 in 2007: 44 in 2009: 39 in 2011: 32 in 2013: 33 in 2015: 34 in 2017: 49 in 2019: 55 (first Dem majority since 1999) in 2021: 48 in 2023: 51 2025, i.e. this week: 64

pre-writing a devastating obituary for your enemy is god-tier hating of a kind you don’t often see anymore. renaissance haterism. beautiful stuff.

in the same sense is that Nazism was an attempt to construct a universe in which the war propaganda of WWI was true, Trumpism can be understood as an attempt to construct the reality which Fox describes. in that reality, every recipient of food stamps is a jobless Black woman with nine kids & a Dem.

the OTHER thing is that no filibuster defender has yet to articulate why it is that people who happen to live in low density states not only deserve additional representation but also deserve to exercise a veto *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!

incredible that these guys have a massive hard on for a country that, if it were a state, would rank behind kansas in terms of wealth and which would be a total backwater if it weren’t economically integrated with more functional countries