I am a single issue voter and that issue is I want the Republican Party in federal prison.

The most charitable explanation is that a guy with very poor judgment talked to his way into the progressive lane of a competitive primary. The least charitable is that he actually is a right winger trying to infiltrate the Dems to cause psychological harm to our coalition.

Yeah he’s on track to hit Biden levels unpopularity.

new gallup data comes out showing democrats taking a lead on trust to handle the economy, just as they emerge with an edge in national party ID www.gelliottmorris.com/p/no-kings-n...

I think Maine Dems watched Sara Gideon, the former speaker of the State House get pasted when they thought Collins would go down with Trump in 2020, and it had a chilling effect.

I suppose my stance is that there’s no way we get out of this intact if we do not take necessary risks or take unnecessary risks. The Nazi skull tattoo is an unnecessary risk.

Critical support to comrade Janet Mills (D-ME)

Maine statewide races currently in a state of having the elderly grandma, snippy concerned aunt, and “edgy” problematic cousin locked in the car with the keys while everyone else normal is afraid to get in and stop them from taking off.

the whole bench is in the gubernatorial race because everyone is afraid of collins and mills froze the senate primary. there are 5 extremely prominent dems in it

how do you not have a single person on your bench under 60 in a swing state with an aging GOP incumbent. how have you let the party apparatus languish like that

I think the problem here is that the list of proven Democrats in Maine is pretty short, Mills would be an impressive candidate in every way but one, and Collins has proved incredibly difficult to beat. But that one thing has been a pretty big sticking point for Dems lately

“Use competitive primaries to improve Team Fight margins in our Senate ranks” challenge. Primary voters need to vote the way their No Kings marches would indicate.

Why is getting a not-problematic and also not-ancient-and-pro-filibuster candidate to run in Maine so goddamn hard? Think maybe the House Speaker (Fecteau) might be the best option here. Everyone else is either too obscure or a scam PAC carpetbagger.

Whats happening in Broadview IL is less about “whether the Governor can tell ISP to leave and/or oppose ICE” and more a symptom that there is a deep, deep rot at the center of Civ-Mil relations regarding police oversight.

“They don’t want power. They want to endlessly critique power.”

I think this is also true. A key component in RW thought leaders investing heavily in podcasts and youth media was not just to undermine the libs’ advantage with young voters, it was to cut off the trend of younger *Republicans* becoming more socially liberal than their parents in the Obama years.

winning elections is pretty much the only way to solidify the gains of social movements though. and winning them often enough that they can't be immediately repealed.

The one caveat I would add to this is that it is not a viable strategy *on its own*. Winning as many elections as possible *should* be part of a wider strategy that includes organizing as well as enforcement/creation of laws that shore up weaknesses and overhaul what isn’t working.

In other words, “the death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.” “When truth leaves us… when it is ripped from our hands, we become vulnerable to the appetite of whatever monster screams the loudest.”

“We live in a society” and “Everyone is 12” are complimentary halves of the best (imo) working theory of Trump-era politics.

we're all very powerless right now and for some people having their cynicism proved right gives them the illusion of control

Yeah, this is the fundamental tension. While I also would like for ICE/DHS to stop their operations, the only ones who can stop them legally are the feds who sent them. Getting arrested by state police means the state has control over charges and sentencing. Better Dem state AG than Bondi.

Jfc, the fact that people on here can discuss the prospect of civil war almost flippantly, as if it’s guaranteed to happen, is an indictment of our society-wide desensitization to political violence.

Again, when it comes to Governor’s relationships with their state police in any state, not just Illinois, there is a real risk of forcing them into a polarized conflict against the administration.

Coming back to this, I think it’s true that the “do no harm” option was for Pritzker to not mobilize the IL state police at all, but also that this discourse about “whether cops are gonna cop regardless of authority” implies a much wider issue than one governor or state.

Considering the relationship between De Blasio and the NYPD, this is a problem that is not going to be easy to fix. People acting like a governor could do one thing to end fascism is just a different version of pundits claiming one neat trick to win elections.

I’ve mentioned this to people before, but Anemoia is the word to describe having nostalgia for an era you’ve never lived in. Explains a lot of MAGA pervasiveness among younger people. They yearn for a past fueled by rose colored glasses and imagination.

The parents who freaked out about the possibility of post-2020 teaching more minority history (see CRT) or their kids having queer classmates in HS was a precursor to Revolt of the Bosses.

I think if you are feeling powerless, a good way to alleviate that, genuinely, is to get outside and engage with your community. Community organizing, political canvassing (if it’s happening near you), even attending a protest. Joining non-political group activities works too.

I think everyone left of center who actually cares about this country understands, deep down, that all we can effectively do *at present* is rage against and obstruct the admin where we can, and vote when its time.

This is why for Woke II to succeed it must be built on people believing in things, and also in better things. Performative nihilism/irony/sarcasm might have been a teenage defense mechanism in the 90s, but in 2025 it corrodes our ability to say, feel, and believe things genuinely.

Was thinking more about this, and the opposite side of this is that there are plenty of candidates who run *terrible* campaigns and still win. Win/loss is an important factor in determining a candidate’s overall value, but it’s clearly not the only thing.

Additionally, I find the assertion that “if candidate X or Campaign Y was akshully good, they would have won” to be a bit of a “no true Scotsman” argument. Yes, “good” campaigns and candidates do win, but sometimes it really is out of their hands.

They don't want debate, they don't want argument. They want to endlessly perform the aesthetics of wanting debate and argument

“Conservatism consists of two propositions, to wit: there are out-groups the law binds but does not protect, and in-groups the law protects but does not bind.” After all this time, still one of the simplest yet most insightful political observations to come from a blog post.

This double standard in the press is what is going to push me into “we should erect statues of Grant and Sherman like the Gates of Argonath in red states daring them to try that shit again” territory.

Imagine an org being so insecure that the president of the United States didn’t do an interview with them or give them the access they wanted or make them a ton of money like the guy from before, so they decide to go all-in on the elite capitulation to fascism.

It’s not just that the teachers; unions; natsec experts; scientists; minorities/LGBTQ folks, and anyone negatively polarized into being a Lib, were all in fact correct about things, it’s that they should be the *only* people allowed to run the country, because what we have right now sucks.

I think the defining political axis of this era is whether or not someone is willing to grow up. Not just reaching adulthood, but accepting behavioral and moral responsibility in a pluralistic society. Unsurprisingly the people who refuse to do that are the bigots and Trumpers.

I’m not even sure what the most recent historical parallel for this is— when the country is in crisis, and you don’t have a national election on the horizon to fix it— the only one I can think of is asking the people who lived between October 1929 and Spring 1933 how they felt.

Insisting “Issue A or Crisis B is a distraction from the REAL PROBLEM which just so happens to be the issue I, the speaker, am personally invested in” is missing the point. If all of it is a distraction, then none of it is, and therefore everything—collectively—has a point.

The GOP and reactionary media centrists pretending to care about crime while supporting a President who does not care about the rule of law really makes the blog post maxim of conservatism more relevant.

Just a thought: the pervasiveness of “the customer is always right” mentality is part of why it’s not “politically correct” to hold your fellow voters responsible for decisions made with their political agency.

To CBS, Columbia, and any other legacy institution who capitulated to the petty tyrant posing as “leadership”: Going along to get along does not work. Ask Vichy France how it went for them.

I think it’s worth being explicit about what’s going on with the Zohran admissions stuff - this is a bad faith attack designed to try to drive the older Black voters that made up Cuomo’s base in the primary and who vote party line in the general to support Eric Adams to keep Mamdani out of City Hall

I also don’t think it’s going to work, because the crux of the attack is the white people making it think that Black people aren’t smart enough to have the complicated understanding of identity and ethnicity that they lack, and that’s not the case at all. Racists failing because they’re too racist.

Tomorrow is Independence Day. So my thoughts are this: When you take healthcare and food assistance away from your own countrymen, you are not a patriot. When you pardon people who attempted to overturn a lawful election, you are not a patriot.

Late to the discourse but I think on some level what upsets pundits and electeds about Zohran is his compassion. Just subconsciously reminds them they could also not be sh*t people, but they are too self absorbed or cowardly to do that kind of introspection and change.