So does that make Canadian bootleg 60 Minutes samizdeh?

So how long before they start mandating Trump portraits in every classroom and TrumpGPT minders to enforce ideological anti-woke conformity?

Trump class battleships are such a stupid idea I expect them to get intentionally stuck in development hell until either ADHD or the actuarial tables change leadership priorities.

Y'know, I don't really give a shit about the social consensus on correct parenting. The consensus used to be in favor of child labor and beating kids into silence. The evidence on nonviolent but firm consequences is pretty clear cut.

Cons don't want to hear this, but the critical piece missing from Obamacare is strong provider price controls. We were starting to move that direction under Biden by having Medicare negotiate some pharmaceutical prices but that goes against the core Republican tenet of deep throating plutocrats.

Look, we've run this experiment. Health insurance does not work as a deregulated market because of adverse selection and information asymmetry. High risk pools also don't work because the sickest 5% simply aren't a big enough bloc to lobby for adequate funding.

I'm again begging people to remember the pre-ACA practice of recissions. It's not just that insurance was hard to get as an individual, it's that the entire individual market was a huge scam and people who thought they were covered faced a nasty rugpull if they developed an expensive malady.

Political hobbyism is going to be the death of the left.

Frankly I think the liberal patriotism that says this country and its ideals are too important to leave to the gutter racists is a better political program than a knee jerk "America is evil" sneer that never grew past freshman dorm room bullshit.

American Liberalism does have a historical aesthetic to draw on if it wishes: the New Deal architecture of the Works Progress Administration. You don't have to go fash to have a distinctive point of view.

If we have to do gilded retvrn shit I'd much rather an Art Deco revival than this bastardization of neoclassical and dictator chic we're actually getting.

The propaganda power of Ellison TikTok is only leavened by the speed they're likely to enshittify the thing because extraction is all they know.

In this house it is still the Gulf of Mexico and the John F Kennedy Center For The Performing Arts no matter how much Mango Mussolini stamps his footsies.

AI is massively disruptive technology and I've gotten a lot more circumspect thinking I know how it will all play out. More people should read gilded age utopian fiction and realize our ability to predict the *human* response to massive changes in technological capabilities is just shit.

I don't think Democrats have the agenda setting power to make immigration non-salient. If it was an easy switch to flip they would have done it.

Honestly on food inflation I think we're just screwed because climate change has baked increased volatility into the cake for the foreseeable future. There will always be something to get mad about.

"Trump is more interested in slapping his name on gilded bullshit than standing up to the robber barons in his party ripping you off" is a campaign message that practically writes itself.

Some things, like ending PEPFAR or letting Musk destroy USAID simply cannot be erased and we're going to be spending generations atoning for letting it happen at all.

So many Trump 2 decisions need to be damnatio memoriae'd because they are intolerably evil, stupid or both. Let the 2025-2028 period be treated as a bad acid trip not to be enshrined in custom or law.

Tbf I don't think this makes a lick of difference over the next two elections or even over which SPACs get favored. It's just another piece of evidence that Democratic insiders don't understand how to play the modern social media game.

Republicans love using panics about fake problems to indulge their natural cruelty and distract from their real goal of immiserating the masses to make rich people even more ungodly wealthy. GRS for kids being a prime example.

The sensible thing for the DNC would have been to release the autopsy and then quietly ignore every prescription when primary voters pick a nominee who wants to do something different. Now they've just chummed the water for 2 more years of circular firing squads. Heck of a job, everyone.

Not a bad inflation report, but it's important to remember companies are eating like 80% of the tariffs so there is still substantial upside risk if shareholders get tired of taking it in the shorts. And some highly salient prices like electricity are going nuts.

To a first approximation, Bouie is right about audiences. Readers already side with Democrats by a healthy margin. Going after people who *don't read* is vital if you understand where the fault lines were in 2024.

Anyway, I don't think that's going to generate the ambient vibes needed to reach your regular all American politics haters. He's only going to get more unhinged.

Man, we really didn't know how good we had it with President Obama. I wonder if we'll see that level of speechifying again in my lifetime?

Americans famously love being told their opinions are wrong.

I guess it should be fairly doable to purge the small number of anti-trans conservadems in the caucus, but the more daunting reality is the other major party is pretty much all in on trans genocide and fixing that from the left is impossible.

My hopeful prediction is absent the post-9/11 bloodlust, a war of choice goes over very badly. It will be very hard for normal Americans not to see it as a "we're the badguys" moment since not punching first is a pretty core thing.

Being governed by people stupid enough to think Blood for Oil was actually a great idea and Bush was a wimp for not going there is going about as well as you'd predict.

I guess it's worth pointing out lame duck president's still have a lot of power, but without a compliant Congress their ability to make enduring change is constrained and their cultural capital does wane as people inevitably start looking for the next big thing.

Walking to school on their own is often a kid's first real taste of autonomy, and if that is no longer a safe and rational choice because of how we've built our environment and raced to ever larger and faster vehicles that is a catastrophic collective action failure.

Conservatism is basically a personality trait so the right wing isn't going anywhere, but I find the take MAGA is eternal just as laughable as the idea we'd be talking about freedom fries forever. New leader, new cult with new pathologies.

Next Democratic president should immediately paint the oval office Millenial Grey as a huge fuck you to the wannabe emir.

On disability accommodations in school, extra test time is a poor example of an out of control accommodation since it's generally used to assist people with dyslexia or dysgraphia. If you think those demonstrated medical issues ought to disqualify one from elite society you may be a eugenicist.

It's giving 50 state strategy part 2 these days. Doesn't mean Democrats win everywhere but we cannot afford to write off entire states when the power to block Trump's nominees is paramount.

Times change and systems should change with them. I just wish for a little more honesty in this debate instead of twisting the words of the founders.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills in that the House was always intended to be the closest to the people (hence the 2 year terms) and the Senate and Presidency were intended to serve as brakes.

I think Trump's approval bottoms at 27% just to prove John Rogers correct. Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/4 of Americans are just irredeemably nuts.

Trump 2028 is giving "please proceed, Mr GOP" vibes tbh. He's not going to be less radioactive at age 82 and I doubt people will be more receptive to waiving the 22nd amendment by then.

Starting to think the Volker recession was a clear reason the vibes in the late 80s and 90s were good because it broke the mass psychological fixation on prices and reset the baseline by providing something else to be mad at and new media narratives.

It's the top down directives that are so irksome. I wouldn't have an issue if they treated us as intelligent professionals and allowed an organic process of figuring out how best to slot these tools into work to play out. Because their utility is definitely much higher than 0%.

And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be mad at the companies hawking generative AI and in particular the marketing mega bucks they've poured into generating FOMO and convincing companies they must force their employees to use this stuff or go extinct.

The hyperfixation on data center water usage is one of those things that makes me think people are largely hunting around for respectable reasons to be mad at people they've already decided are evil based on emotional or tribal affinities.

Collective punishment is still wrong and un-American no matter how much racist grandpa and his ghoulish vizier scream.

Turkey is overrated. We're doing wine braised short ribs this year and I will not be shamed.

Have people forgotten the running joke on infrastructure week already? This president has a predictable pattern of overpromising and never delivering (unless he can figure out a grift) and I feel like the I'm taking crazy pills with the lack of media skepticism.

Now I'm really interested in the counterfactual where Harris picks Mark Kelly as her running mate and he absolutely takes JD Vance to the woodshed.

RFK, Jr exists to remind us why dynastic families should be taxed into oblivion. You get one generation in the limelight and then your spawn have to get real jobs changing bed pans in the old folks home or whatever.

Been quiet lately because I'm taking a mental health break from the daily tempests in a teapot that will ultimately mean fuckall to anything. Republicans mistook 2024 for an endorsement of Trump's revenge plots, they're going to get spanked, and we'll keep muddling along.