Open Mic for the week of 1/27/2025
On this day in 1967, a fire in NASA’s Apollo 1 Command Module killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee.
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to the front page.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
The ADL appears to have realized exactly how bad they looked defending Musk, and are now…criticizing his jokes about the Holocaust.
Not any of the actual important things Musk is saying, like his recent comments in Germany.Report
On the strength of China’s DeepSeek AI, NVidia is down 15% and the NASDAQ is down almost 2%.
These AI Wars have begun.
Edit: I just checked and Pelosi sold 10 big lots of NVidia stock on December 31st.Report
Yeah, honestly, that seems to have been much less of a crash than I was personally expecting. But of course, it’s not over.Report
Oh, and while there’s plenty to criticize about Pelosi’s stock trading, as far as I’m aware, the slide so far and the expected crash of NVidia isn’t really inside information she’d have. Is it?Report
I’m not sure what information Pelosi is privvy to. To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that she has a lot more than you or I.Report
The return of gangster government. Denmark and other nations seek to higher Trump connected lobbyists: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/us/politics/trump-denmark-panama-greenland-lobbyists.htmlReport
Trump’s Tactics:
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-01-27-trumps-gestapo-raids/
At around 8 o’clock Sunday morning, in Mountain View, California, four ICE agents in full battlefield regalia followed a resident into a 19-unit apartment building. They carried M15 assault weapons, and had no warrants.
They were looking for two Venezuelans, who had lived there temporarily in the apartment of a lawyer, who was helping asylum seekers pro bono. The Venezuelans were legal residents with temporary protected status until last week, when Trump changed the rules and they suddenly became illegal.
The Venezuelans were not present at the time. There was another asylum seeker in the building with similar status, whom the agents ignored, apparently because she was not on their hit list. Residents called the Mountain View police, who said they could do nothing.
Despite brave words about sanctuary cities, state and local officials have not cooperated but have not resisted. Citizens who try to shelter targets of these raids are themselves inviting arrest.
This was only one of several ICE raids over the weekend. Others took place in Chicago, Boston, Austin, and L.A. Fox News reporters were invited to embed with the agents in Boston and Chicago, capturing the raids on video.
The agents wore tactical gear and vests with large letters displaying “Police ICE” and “Homeland Security.” According to CNN, at least two agencies told personnel to wear made-for-TV outfits, in case there were video opportunities.
This stunt suggests the performative aspect of these Gestapo-style raids, as red meat for Trump’s base. Trump has directed that ICE increase its raids and summary deportations, from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500.Report
There’s also the fear mongering performative aspect which is reported leading to immigrants abandoning crops in the field.
But this is what they voted for.Report
Incidentally, ICE almost never has actual judicial warrants that would allow them to enter premises and search for people.
They have things they wave around that they claim are warrants, and are warrants in the sense they are called ‘deportation warrants’. But all that means is they have identified someone they wish to deport, and can legally detain that person if they find them. It was signed off on by an immigration official, _not_ a judge.
A deportation warrant gives them _absolutely_ no authority to forcible enter a place and search for that person anywhere. None at all. They are just basically lying to you, hoping by waving a thing in your face and calling it a warrant that you think they have the right to enter somewhere.
You should never let them in anywhere. If they have judicial authority, they will force their way in, but 99.99% of the time, they do not, and will leave.
In fact, it might be a good practice to start doing that with the police in general.Report
Trump fires career DOJ lawyers who had civil service protections: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-administration-fires-doj-officials-worked-criminal-investigation-rcna189512Report
This is deeply concerning.Report
2025
This is deeply concerningReport
The massacre continues:
resident Donald Trump’s budget office on Monday ordered all federal agencies to temporarily block disbursement of grants and loans — other than for Social Security, Medicare and other programs providing direct aid to individuals.
The memo says the temporary pause, effective starting at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, is intended to ensure agencies are complying with Trump’s executive orders to root out “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies” from programs within their purview.
It’s not immediately clear how wide-ranging the pause will be in practice, due to the Office of Management and Budget’s ability to grant exceptions on a “case-by-case basis,” language exempting direct aid to individuals and a clause that states the pause is subject to what’s “permissible under applicable law…..
Still, as written the pause could affect a big swath of programs that aid lower-income households, including: Medicaid; school breakfast and lunch programs; Section 8 rental assistance; Title I education grants; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families; state grants for child care; Head Start; and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Program and EPA grants to states and localities for clean water infrastructure — both of which fund a large chunk of congressional earmarks each year — could also be impacted.
Foreign aid grants are likely to be put on hold as well as clean energy projects, as those are specifically named in earlier executive orders.”Report
Pete Beinart has one of his pieces where he questions whether “Israel has a right to exist.” A genuinely understand this line of thought for a few reasons. One is despite what a bunch of people outside I/P want, very few people who live in I/P actually wants a South African solution. It constantly doesn’t poll well among Israelis and Palestinians. Both want their own state. Also, well meaning outsiders imposing their solution on the people on the ground has a horrible track record of success and the idea of doing this to the I/P conflict is mind-boggling. The third reason why this seems like a no brainer solution is that Israel obviously currently exists and Israelis demonstrated that they will fight like hell for their country so making Israel not exist would require a massive use of force. That nobody is volunteering to be this force shows the questionability of the endeavor.Report
The massacre continues: Jim Acosta is out at CNN after having his slot moved to midnight.Report
He quit live on air.
You can watch the footage for yourself:
Report
More in the world of FAFO, Trump is threatening tariffs on Taiwanese chips: https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-to-tariff-chips-made-in-taiwan-targeting-tsmc
https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-to-tariff-chips-made-in-taiwan-targeting-tsmcReport
For years and years if you traveled down the highways of the Central Valley or San Joaquin Valley, you would see cranky right-wing ranch owners put up signs expressing their ire at CA Democrats for not giving them enough water. Trump is apparently trying to use the LA Wildfires to circumvent CA water laws and give water to the Central Valley ranchers on the pretense that it is for the wildfires: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-seeks-circumvent-laws-californias-water-wildfire-response-rcna189386
Of course the ranchers won’t have anyone to pick their ample crops because all the fieldworkers are hiding from ICE.Report
Question for you Californians — is this tweet accurate? It’s pretty jaw-dropping:
Report
They famously built one (I think it cost more than $11.6 million) that was finished early in the pandemic, but it was so poorly constructed that they just scrapped it.Report
Chris Cillizza has a twitter thread in which he apologizes for getting the virus origin story wrong. He talks about, among other things, all of the bad assumptions he made when he took Fauci at his word and downplayed Trump’s statements.
I don’t bring this up because I think that Cillizza is trustworthy! Heaven forefend! This isn’t evidence of *ANYTHING* having to do with the origin of the virus!
Windsocks are, however, evidence for the direction of the wind. The “THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED!” pro-censorship folks are going to have a bad time in a few months.
Because the CIA ain’t gonna be the last and final drip out of the faucet.Report
It really come down to just how biased these folks are to Trump. Trump said China was the cause, so they had to believe anything that said that was not true. Because Trump cannot be right about anything.
Like this whole Columbian thing. Trump cannot have a win, so sources like CNN and BBC are believing and spreading lies. It must be because TRUMP CANNOT WIN!
Nice to see a person admit they were wrong. Though I wonder how many people here will say the CIA is lying because TRUMP CANNOT BE RIGHT ABOUT ANYTHING!Report
It’s Colombia, not Columbia. Pretend to care.Report
Yes, let’s be sure to use the exact spelling the settler-colonists chose after taking over the territory.Report
you sir are a riot!Report
No one thinks the science is settled. The science is, however, almost entirely pointing in one direction. Who knows what we’ll find in a 5 years, or even next month? But right now, there are no good scientific arguments for a lab leak. There are, however, good political arguments for one, and the politicians are putting serious pressure on scientists, which your talk of censorship would suggest you’re opposed to, but your continued beating of any talk of scientist with a stick suggest you’re actually in favor of.Report
Sure! Nobody thinks that the science is settled enough to censor people who disagree with the consensus.
I’ve brought up scientists who have argued for reasons to believe in a lab leak. The pivot then switch from “any scientist” to “well, the *CONSENSUS*.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.Report
If you find a scientist who has published their arguments in the scientific literature — and there are some who have — then it will not be hard to find several scientists who’ve rebutted those arguments in the scientific literature. This is an exercise you can complete yourself, and I would hope that, since you seem to have largely made up your mind, you have done so and merely concluded that the counterarguments were impotent or incomplete.Report
denial: everybody’s saying it’s fake!
anger: nobody’s saying it’s true!
bargaining: find me anyone credible who’s saying it’s true!
depression: there’s still some people saying it’s fake!
acceptance: it’s Trump’s fault it happened!Report
I’m not smart enough to figure out whom this is meant to describe, but I am sure there is someone, and it describes them well.Report
you seem to have largely made up your mind
My mind hasn’t been made up on the origin.
Indeed, nobody knows where it came from and nobody can know where it came from.
It has, however, been made up on the topic of whether discussion of the lab leak ought to be censored on social media.
It remains made up on that topic and the whole “CIA changing its mind” and “reporters apologizing for how they covered it back then” is only making my mind even more made upper.Report
and nobody can know where it came from.
This is perhaps true in an abstract philosophical sense: there will always be room for doubt in any empirically-based conclusion, but it is not true in any meaningful practical sense. We absolutely can know where it came from. For example, if someone were, presumably at great personal risk, leak genetic evidence of laboratory-held viruses dated well before the pandemic (say, from 2018 or early 2019) that matched early strains of COVID in China (we have their DNA makeup, and have since early January 2020), that’d be dispositive under pretty much any theory of knowledge short of radical skepticism.
The same is true if we were able to find samples from the local wet market from well before the outbreak (similar timeframe) with the exact DNA signature, except this would give us pretty firm knowledge that it was the result of spillover.
Short of these two things, we have to go with the data we have, which is samples taken from the markets early in the outbreak, as well as later samples, and deduction from the genetic makeup of the early virus. These will not give us 99.999999% certainty, the way the two pieces of evidence described above would, but they’ll get us pretty close over time. To a large extent, they already have.Report
Wow. That is pretty damning for the conclusions of the FBI and CIA. Someone should explain that to them.
Maybe it’s good that the FBI was kept from briefing Biden with their findings, if what you say is accurate.Report
Yes, the FBI and CIA, two sources we should absolutely believe over the scientific literature.Report
As I’ve said elsewhere, the CIA (and the FBI) are intelligence agencies. They may have sources or insights the scientific agencies don’t have when it comes to figuring out the internal workings of Chinese labs. And they may not be able to tell us what those sources are. That’s what they’re good at, but I’m not aware of any particular spycraft basis for their very tentative, low confidence conclusions. If they are going on science rather than spycraft, the science stuff is more within the competence of our science agencies.Report
I thought “maybe I could do my own research…” and where better to do my own research than Wikipedia!
Here’s the talk page for the Covid-19 Lab Leak Theory. It’s even better than the real page.
It’s got a *TON* of sources in there.
I would like to hope that scientists are not particularly likely to be bullied into joining a consensus despite misgivings.Report
Hoo boy.Report
I dunno how to respond to a link to a Wiki talk page, but I can recommend this, and the works cited therein:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.01240-24?fbclid=IwY2xjawIGLypleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWomOrcIBe_iUiWbpbj6ZoSFfu-JjoScNehZvizY9avZG96I__pEajP61w_aem_4Dz7htJWLtKLWHfB_GG6CQ
Particularly:
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jvi.01240-24?fbclid=IwY2xjawIGLypleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWomOrcIBe_iUiWbpbj6ZoSFfu-JjoScNehZvizY9avZG96I__pEajP61w_aem_4Dz7htJWLtKLWHfB_GG6CQ
https://ct.prod.getft.io/YXNtLGFhYXMsaHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2NpZW5jZS5vcmcvZG9pL2Ficy8xMC4xMTI2L3NjaWVuY2UuYWJwODMzNw.O_lDOw2Z1t6rJr6L4WNDYt28rjYviyiQIL0SZvW8Hw0
along with this accessible counter to the main lab leak arguments:
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/lab-leak-mania
And this more formal one:
https://journals.asm.org/servlet/linkout?suffix=e_1_3_2_15_2&dbid=4&doi=10.1128%2Fjvi.01240-24&key=10.1128%2Fjvi.00365-23&site=asmjReport
(If you think those links look awful, you should have seen how it looked when I first posted it. Forgive me; I’m old, and these computing boxes confuse me.)Report
Well, had you clicked on the link, you would have been taken directly to “Lab Link Theory Sources”.
It’s got a bunch of stuff in there.
Here’s the most recent paper from last year: Use of a risk assessment tool to determine the origin of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)
Here’s the abstract:
They’ve got Patrick Berche’s Gain-of-function and origin of Covid19 that has a breakdown talking about the importance of the furin site and how unique it is.
Yeah, I wouldn’t click on them either. Life’s too short.Report
I’ve read this paper. As I’ve said, there are people publishing lab leak arguments in the literature. This should a.) be pretty strong evidence that your narrative about suppression of this theory among scientists is wrong, and b.) not be taken as indicating that there is not a consensus.
It’s important for scientists to publish ideas that challenge consensus, and they are doing so. Here you have a paper using a novel risk assessment method (novel as in, it’s the authors’ own method). I don’t yet know of a reply to this paper, though I’m sure they’re coming.Report
Nitpick. Covid-19, like all corona viruses, is an RNA virus.Report
Sorry, yes, I should have just said genetic material.Report
White House Counsel Alina Habba: “The law is ‘what our attorney general of the United States says'”
White House adviser Alina Habba lashed out at Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) after he blasted President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal grant programs.
“Your attorney general is not the attorney general!” she exclaimed. “We have an attorney general. That will be Pam Bondi.”
“And what your opinion is on what the law is doesn’t really matter,” Habba continued. “It’s what the White House counsel says and what our attorney general of the United States says.”
https://www.rawstory.com/alina-habba-attorney-general-law/Report
France is considering sending troops to Greenland to help the Danes:
https://ordinary-times.com/2025/01/27/open-mic-for-the-week-of-1-27-2025/#comment-4063674Report
It borrow from a classic movie, “it’s a trap” and a very stupid one: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-administration-offer-federal-workers-buyouts-resign-rcna189661Report
Musk’s lackeys, are storming into government positions: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-lackeys-office-personnel-management-opm-neuralink-x-boring-stalin/Report
Good news! New “Calexit” bid for California secession approved for signature gathering!
Should California be allowed to secede if this passes? Opinions differ.Report
This country is getting more absurd by the minute.Report
A modest proposal regarding the naming of things.Report
(Link broke)Report
I noticed and fixed it before you replied 🙂Report
Nice.
(Love it.)Report
JD Vance says Big Tech has “too much power”:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-vance-interview-big-tech-too-much-power/
The ability of these men to SAY one thing: Drain the swamp! Big Tech has too much power! That wasn’t a Nazi salute! while clearly doing the other – and have people BUY it – is absolutely gobsmacking.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/20/trump-inauguration-tech-executivesReport
Big Tech *DOES* have too much power. It probably should have been broken up back in the 90’s (though the web browser bundling case was probably the worst surface area they could have picked to make the particular attack against Microsoft).
I’m not sure that “Big Tech has too much power” and “He wasn’t Heiling Hitler” are in *THAT* much tension.
Remember those eHarmony ads back in 2010 for Tanyalee and Josh? They were everywhere. Well, Josh posted to social media back then that he didn’t support gay marriage and, gosh, he got JUMPED on for the hypocrisy of meeting Tanyalee on eHarmony while, at the same time, supporting traditional marriage.
It was hypocritical, you see, because technology made it possible for him to meet Tanyalee.
And people who supported gay marriage saw the obvious hypocrisy and the people who didn’t were confused.Report
Hypocrisy is when you at least pretend to be doing one thing while doing the other in secret.
These men see no need to pretend. They simply tell us to do that part for them, and some of us do.Report
Power to do what?Report
Among other things, censor.
Remember that whole “private companies can do whatever they want” movement that was so popular there for a while?
Perhaps that was a poisonous attitude to take.Report
Now that Musk is essentially USG via DOGE and his White House office space, it seems to me that any action he now takes to prohibit speech on X now may possibly be seen as having 1A implications, as opposed to when he was strictly a private citizen and could prohibit or promote nearly any speech he sees fit on the app he owns, and did so via algorithms and more direct moves to help the Admin and hurt its opponents.
Then of course you have Zuck and Bezos and Pichai there at the inauguration, with varying massive media-reaches themselves; and of course the end of Net Neutrality means that any sites that are NOT already directly under the Admin’s thumb can have traffic slowed to them, legally, by the ISPs.
Your ISP, should it want to, can slow traffic to OT until it’s basically unusable for you, while prioritizing traffic to X/FB/Instagram/Google/Amazon/WaPo etc.
Well, good night! [turns out the light]Report
As far as I can tell, he’d have to get Bluesky to do the restricting…
There’s a billion $ start-up for the people who invent the app that combines all the various feeds into one space…. so you can comment and link to other people’s bad ideas. Like old-twitter.Report
Threads came out and the users demanded that they get posts from people they followed in reverse chronological order (newest first, then scroll down) and they would be cool with sponsored content every four or five posts so long as they would get the people they were following in reverse chronological order in their feed.
AND ZUCK SAID NO!!! BUT DON’T WORRY! WE’VE GOT A GREAT ALGORITHM!!! AND HE LOST 80% OF HIS NEW SIGNUPS WITHIN A WEEK!!!
THIS IS FREAKING INSANE!!!
Anyway, Bluesky feels like 2017 Twitter.Report
Yglesias has a free post on where Democrats should go from here. Figured I’d share:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/throw-biden-under-the-busReport
It’s a good post. March and I talked about a possible way to impeach Trump the other day.
It involves impeaching Biden first. “Biden abused the pardon power!”, the impeachment would say. It would go over each and every particularly egregious pardon and commutation that Biden did. He signed a bunch of them for the ACLU and they include a drug dealer who had a couple of potential witnesses killed as well as, sigh, Leonard Peltier.
If you don’t want to include Lenny, you don’t have to.
Include the pre-emptive pardons of his family members and *IGNORE* the pre-emptive pardons of the congressmen/senators.
Hell, include the pardon of Fauci, if you really want it to pass.
Then impeach Biden. Impeach the hell out of him. Send him to jail!
That’s step one. You can probably guess step two. But you can’t jump ahead to step two without doing step one first.
Step one makes step two possible.
Throw Biden under the bus.Report
Heh I don’t think that’s on the table. And unless Trump really does go out and shoot someone on 5th Avenue I think it’s probably worth giving the impeachment power a rest for the time being. I don’t like the outcome of this election one bit but the only way out to maybe something better is through.Report
Without some norms that everybody can agree upon to the point where they’re willing to punish bad actors on their own side, we’re going to be in a tip-for-tap BUTWHATABOUT THE BAD ACTORS ON *YOUR* SIDE for at least another four years. Maybe eight.Report
Biden’s the bait for putting it back on the table.
But yes, in general, the Impeachment Power is quiescent during this era of Presidential EO governance and Omnibus Reconciliation Legislation Congresses.Report
I don’t disagree but I also think part of re-establishing credibility is agreeing to put certain toys away for a time. I’ve been thoroughly browbeaten for this but my opinion remains that Impeachment 2 was undermined considerably by the arcane nature of Impeachment 1, both in the charges and the investigation.Report
Both impeachments were undermined by spineless republicans who, among other things, didn’t want to protect their power of the purse.
No need to mince words.Report
Counterpoint: What both Biden and Trump did was perfectly legal under the Constitution. Terrible but legal. Why not demonstrate good governance, instead, by getting busy and trying a legislative solution (hint: alter the Constitution by removing or severely limiting the pardon power)?Report
Well, for that, we’ll need a constitutional amendment. To do that we’ll need 38 states to ratify an amendment and not put a time limit on the ratification and not rescind the ratification before it becomes an amendment.
Or, I suppose, we’ll need a Constitutional Convention. Might be nice to have one of those, actually.Report
Let’s do it!Report
Nightmare fuel.Report
I’m really excited for the new Constitution to ban “Woke Gender Ideology,” “Marxist equality,” anti-fascism, and DEI.Report
Iceberg <--> TipReport
Worse than what we have already happening?Report
Does “what we have already happening” include the backlash?Report
Small point of order, even if you impeached a President, you couldn’t prosecute him for exercising his Constitutional Powers… so there’s no ‘going to jail’ as part of the deal. SCOTUS is correct on this front.* I also strongly suspect that the Pardons themselves would still stand.
Impeachment is a political check, not a legal finding — which I wish the (too) many Lawyers in Congress would understand and step back from the overly ‘legal’ reading of the constitutional stipulations on conducting the Impeachment process.
But yes, throw Biden under the bus to build a consensus around Constitutional limitations; it may pay dividends in the future.
*unless there is a separate unique crime to which the Pardon was attached, like, say, bribery.Report
Sure. So “impeach and remove” then. You know all of those folks who sneered and said “I guess I won’t be voting for Biden in November”?
CALL IN THOSE CHITS!Report
Think of it as an agency restoring act for Congress. A therapeutic impeachment.Report
“March and I talked about a possible way to impeach Trump the other day. It involves impeaching Biden first.”
i think you might be a little late on that oneReport
Nah. We also want to establish that you can impeach a guy after his term is over.
Think big.Report
tired: Mormons declaring people Actually Mormon after they’re dead
wired: Americans impeaching Presidents after they’re dead (starting with Nixon)Report
Visited the comments, was not disappointed.
A guy agreed with Matty and said that the fact that the White House was not run by Biden but by unelected staffers was a scandal.
Someone responded with how “unelected” was such weak sauce. Biden won the election and was therefore entitled to staff his administration with whomever he deemed fit to do so to carry out his policies.
As if it were 2022. As if the argument were taking place in a vacuum.Report
I said long before the Biden implosion that we never really got to see what a Biden Presidency would look like; the best Biden could’ve done for the Dems was make the avuncular pivot to a ‘normie’ liberal position… but he didn’t. I think a lot of folks who voted for him wanted this kind of normalcy, but for various reasons, Biden didn’t deliver, and Harris couldn’t distance… To be honest, I’m not sure they were being ‘insincere’ just that they were proverbial frogs in the pot who didn’t notice that they were no longer in the Normie Lib space.
MattY kinda buries his more controversial take on ‘the groups’ in the link.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/opinion/democrats-interest-groups-majority.htmlReport
The whole groups thing has some weird dynamics.
Unions, back when unions were a thing, made a big deal out of solidarity.
Maybe the United Farm Workers and the United Automobile Workers didn’t have a whole lot of overlap when it came to the day to day stuff, there were events like the Delano Grape Strike that had the UAW guys refuse to buy non-union grapes and they participated in the national boycott. In 1970, the UFW got a new contract and that was a victory for the UAW too.
And during the Mostly Peaceful Summer, the Teachers Unions and the Police Unions had static and I remember a big blowup where one of the police union leaders threw a fit after Randi Weingarten said something about defunding or whatever and he said something to the effect of “you won’t support us, we won’t support you”.
And starting with 2021, there was a hell of a lot more support for Police Unions and vigorous policing than there was for keeping teachers safe by keeping schools closed.
And now there’s tension between Teacher Unions and Police Unions that they are having to patch up.
So omnicause thinking makes sense!!!
But Greta doesn’t go to Global Warming protests anymore. She just goes to the Palestinian ones.Report
Paywalled. 🙁
Matt Y had a separate piece in the last month or two directly addressing the issue of the groups and the way the dynamic has changed for the (much) worse. Unfortunately it is paywalled. I assume he didn’t directly take that on in this piece is because he dedicated a full essay to it quite recently. Below is the link if you want to try and use some magic to read it.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-the-veal-pen-to-the-groupsReport
Here ya go: https://archive.is/O4ucr (The NYT op-ed)
My take on this is it’s pretty good advice. Win first, then you can work on policy. Trying to please everyone before you get elected exposes the fringier elements in your party (at least for the Dems) who may hold some fairly unpopular opinions.
Changing people’s minds takes time and winning an election or two buys you that time. People think Trump just happened. We could probably trace his origins all the way back to Goldwater if we really tried.Report
You the man!Report
People think Trump just happened. We could probably trace his origins all the way back to Goldwater if we really tried.
Rick Perlstein made a good start.Report
Yeah I have this general feeling that, coupled with the social media dynamic, the success of gay rights, the #metoo movement and BLM the “groups” have kind of gotten the bit in their teeth and flat out forgotten how to politic. This demanding fealty publicly and in advance to every group is political malpractice in the extreme. As odious as the right wing groups are they don’t seem to police their politicians the same way. Part of that I think is that the main “group” the plutocrats, flat out knows their desires are unpopular and that the GOP will deliver tax cuts however they can. But even the socialcons and other less central right wing groups don’t seem to do the same kind of policing. Then again, the rights politicians are just off the rails right and constantly afraid of being primaried so such language policing maybe simply isn’t necessary.
It’s pretty hard to primary a Dem for being insufficiently left it seems.Report
From out here I. The cheap leftist seats he couldn’t have been more centerist in his economic and foreign policy. If you want to hang your hat on his willingness to allow trans people to exist free of danger go ahead.Report
I think the critiques I’m seeing from the front row Lib Normies is that the Centrist economic policies, were horribly impeded by requirements added by ‘the groups’ such that it wasn’t good enough to build more broadband or EV chargers, you had to build them with the proper intentions and deference to theoretical concerns not relevant to broadband or EV chargers…
A theoretical ‘healthy’ Biden might have objected to having his signature legislation undermined by omnicause goals orthogonal to the objectives.
I actually supported aspects of his foreign policy… but just taking Afghanistan withdrawal — his popularity tanked after that — unfairly I think. BUT, as I said at the time, he never held the Military accountable for poor execution. Also at the time I chalked it up to his excessive Washington Establishmentarianism … but it’s possible that his decline prevented him from acting more forcefully (but that’s just speculation, I go either way on that one).
On the Trans stuff… yes, that’s also a losing proposition, especially as it’s framed by ‘the groups’Report
I have read some recent damming reporting from gift links at WSJ and NYT that the decline may in fact have come into play with Afghanistan. It’s an issue where I am as generous as possible to the Biden Admin given that I think it was still the right decision but… yeesh.Report
I think, in the cheap leftist seats, you’re being pretty uncharitable. Biden did a lot of leftist stuff like industrial policy and direct intervention. Stuff Obama never would have touched. He also spent a lot more post Covid than Obama would have (and, I submit, he got a good recovery for it. People raise the subject of inflation but Germany stuck to balanced budgets, still got similar inflation and anemic economic growth as well so that complain strikes me as bogus). He also was extremely friendly to labor even by Democratic standards. Obviously Biden didn’t nationalize the means of production or anything but on the centrist to left wing spectrum Biden was pretty left wing.Report
I don’t think throwing Biden under the bus would accomplish anything and I think his shots against Harris are cheap. Harris ran as good a campaign as anyone under the circumstances and final result was not a 1984 blowout victory for Trump. Also polling on what Trump is doing is not good for them: https://digbysblog.net/2025/01/29/trump-isnt-popular/Report
I think MY sincerely dislikes Republicans and Trump but this whole column feels like a whole lot of retconning and taking what might be reasonable points and going off the deep end with them.
Harris was an untrusted and untested VP? She whipped up her party when it was at its lowest morale and got them back in fighting mode. She did not win but she was far from a distant second and the “throw the bums” out election trend is not unique to the U.S., it is hitting governments around the world.
Blocking US Steel from being purchased by Nippon Steel? Trump also opposes it and there is no indication that US voters are up in arms on this one. Unions are a core Democratic constituency and politicians do things for their constituencies, what a shocker!!
I can concede that there were probably times Biden did let the cart get before the horse on some social issues but MY’s rage does not reflect that the polling for everyone is very close. 46 R – 45 D is statistically a tie.Report
i think one could quibble on various details. However the main thrust, namely that (i) Biden appears to have been seriously compromised by his age from a pretty early point in his presidency, (ii) his inner circle went to great lengths to camouflage this fact passed the point of no return for 2024, and (iii) that this has resulted in massive brand damage requiring a serious reboot for the national party, is all pretty self evident.Report
I wouldn’t quite call it massive brand damage yet and MY himself conceded that things can change quickly and 46 R – 45 D is still a statistical tie.
No politician has been able to do what Trump does successfully. Every one who tries to be a mini-Trump fails.Report
I agree with his point that things can change quickly, but the support he is using is Trump’s loud and open rejection of a handful of important Bush II era GOP positions. In a 2 party system the Democrats will always be to some degree ‘in it’ and that’s especially the case where the GOP and Trump in particular also regularly does and says crazy and alienating things.
The key to making things change quickly and in more decisive ways is to actually make some changes. Tell some people that annoy the larger electorate that they need to shut up because they’re wrong. Pivot on a policy or two that’s important and that mitigates a D weakness. I don’t understand why those propositions are so highly controversial in left of center spaces when they’re just basic sense, at least IMO.Report
Tell some people that annoy the larger electorate that they need to shut up because they’re wrong. Pivot on a policy or two that’s important and that mitigates a D weakness.
Where is the net vote gain here? Loudly throwing some constituents under the bus will surely cost votes that the Democrats already have. What reason is there to think it will change the votes of significant numbers of Republicans, or drag significantly more non-voters out of the woodwork — especially since it would be so transparently opportunistic?Report
There’re some policies that’re net vote losers and saying you don’t support them both gains you votes and de-escalates your opponents. I’m beginning to fear that most matters involving child trans issues* and zero sum issues where trans issues conflict with womens issues may be those policies currently. You could absolutely disavow those and still support every other trans rights issue and win votes. For politicians coming out of the blue staying silent on the subject probably could mostly cut it but for Harris, specifically, who went on record during the special times in 2020 as being very out to the left being silent as she was simply didn’t cut the mustard.
All that said you’re right that feuding with your own wingers is a dicey political proposition.
*Though it could be my old gay background making me biased, when I was a kid several gay rights activists I knew were emphatically of the opinion that gay rights orgs should generally stay the fish away from kids issues. Also transReport
Cut myself off: Also trans issues impact on teenagers in a profound manner in a way that previous LGB issues, frankly, just didn’t. So it’s tough. But the Groups have done some serious political malpractice in this area not to advance Trans issues so much as to posture for each other and they’re gonna need to accept that such stuff has to fishin stop.Report
Yes, soft peddling abortion is going to be a sure fire winner for DemocratsReport
It’s a classic trope when someone says a bunch of marginal positions are unpopular and marginal to try and hide behind a non-marginal and popular position and claim that’s being targeted instead.Report
At the risk of invoking Godwin,
At first they came for the Jews, and I did not speak because I was not…
Sometimes you have to take a position that is moral and correct and advocate for it even though it is unpopular. Slate has a story about a trans person stuck in passport limbo because of Trump’s new EOs and it looks like they are going to try and ban gender affirming surgery even for people over 18 potentially.
So yeah these might be marginal positions but it doesn’t make them morally incorrectReport
And we should fight like hell for access to surgery for people over the age of consent and for equal treatment for trans people in government services and treatment. But, maybe, maybe, when teachers boast on social media about how they’ll encourage their 5th graders to consider trans and conceal any inclinations of those same kids from their parents we should probably be on record as not supporting that. Because, setting aside the grey zone morality of this (and it’s very murky grey indeed), if everyone but the very left wing most parents hear “we’re gonna support teachers hiding medical info about your kids from you” they’re going to nod soberly and then vote for someone (anyone) who is opposed to that. And those fishers who get elected that way will go after everything, absolutely everything, while we sit powerless on the sidelines. Pure, but powerless.Report
And we should fight like hell for access to surgery for people over the age of consent and for equal treatment for trans people in government services and treatment.
If we do that, who will be convinced that our throwing the rest under the bus is for real?Report
Persuadable voters but, obviously, not anti-trans absolutists; but we were never going to get their votes anyhow.Report
North, do you have any evidence _at all_ that there is a demographic of voters that a) would base their vote on trans issues, and b) thinks the correct place is the middle?
The Republicans are doing a very good job of trying to force this issue into the mainstream when the voters do not actually care at all, but there is absolutely no ‘middle ground’, Republicans will just keep attacking whatever the next thing is, trying to make ground on _that_, and at some point it will be ‘being trans in public is essentially illegal’.
There are exactly two groups who care about trans issues: Morons who have fallen for Republican propaganda, which will continue to shift wherever Republicans lead the hate, and injured trans people and people who care for trans people. There is no middle group, at all, whatsoever.
You just think there is a middle group because the current place that Republicans have managed to lead things is not very far. Give them a victory and they will happily move to the newest ‘middle ground’ they see.
I swear to God, this is the stupidest logic I’ve ever heard. It’s like saying ‘Look, the enemy troops are only trying to take _the next trench_, the one closest to them, if we compromise and fall back a few hundred feet, let them have the trench, everything will be fine’.Report
I think, DavidTC, we can recognize issues where we’re, to use your example, trying to defend a trench that is on the low ground and flooded because it was dug through a marsh versus a trench that is on a defensible elevated slope.
And I can certainly see that the right isn’t stopping only at their photogenic causes on Trans and are going for blanket persecution.
I respect the argument for total purity but I suspect we’re eliding the issue. Even if it was established that giving ground on those issues would mean that we’d win the median voter and keep the GOP from winning overall I presume you’d say that the cost of that victory was too high yes?Report
Every single person who goes ‘Throw them under the bus’ has failed to explain how that makes the bus stop running over people.
Also, who is going to stop Republicans from just lying about this, considering how much they lie about literally everything related to trans people.
I mean, North literally repeated a lie right there ‘“we’re gonna support teachers hiding medical info about your kids from you’. That is not a true thing that has happened or will be happening, there is absolutely no ability for _any_ minor to access gender affirming gender affirming care without parental involvement.Report
That’s semantics DavidTC even though I wish it weren’t. I agree no minor can transition without their parents becoming aware of the matter but parents assuredly want to know about this and teachers affirmatively saying on social media they’ll hide it, let that genie out of the bottle.Report
Why, it’s almost as if some sort of institution should be pushing back against the Republican narrative, and explaining things, instead of agreeing with it.
Also…look, you’re queer, please learn the terms. Transition is a giant group of stuff, not a ‘thing that is done’. And it isn’t a synonym with gender affirming care. Transition includes things like asking to be called different pronouns and trying on a name, which means parents can, indeed, be unaware of it. So can teachers, so can everyone but close friends. In fact, you can do thing that are part of transitioning without telling _anyone_, just seeing how things feel when you think about yourself in a different way. There’s not any way anyone would know that, so it’s not super-important to call it by the right name, but it is part of the umbrella of transitioning.
And part of the problem is Republicans abuse definitions and use incredibly vague terms. The transition confusion makes it incredibly easy to come up with a very high number of detrans people and imply they had some sort of medical things done. Same with ‘gender affirming care’, which is often just counseling. (Which, again, kids can’t get without parental knowledge, generally.)
Both the media, which is almost entirely controlled by transphobic billionaires, and the Democratic party, which is almost entirely controlled by hundred-year-old corpses animated by necromancy, do not bother to actually explain any of this.Report
Yes, if the media lies and presents the story in that manner, that would be something people wouldn’t like.
The media could instead be presenting the story as ‘A lot of trans and gay kids are forced into the closet by their parents by the threat of abuse or abandonment and teachers should not being outing them, either if directly confided in by the student or just based on the student’s behavior in school.’, a thing that would have infinitely more support.
You know, I see the meme that says ‘You are not immune to propaganda’, but it really is amazing to see people here just repeating propaganda without critically looking at it.
Oh, and BTW, if you want a reason not to throw trans kids under the bus here, North, it’s because if you start mandating that teachers report trans students, you’re also essentially forcing them to report gay students. Hell, a lot of the reporting laws _literally would include gay students_ because they basically demand teachers tell parents when students are not conforming to gender norms, and guess what dating someone of the same sex is doing? Hint: Not conforming to gender norms.Report
We deal with the media, including the right wing fisher media, we have because we have no choice DavidTC and it doesn’t change the fact that the right wing clowns managed to find teachers publicly talking about how they were hiding this info from parents.
Again, I personally think trans folks should be able to transition as soon as they’ve sorted out that they’re trans. But the vast majority of even otherwise supportive parents do not like that idea so it’s an extremely bad idea for teachers to be broadcasting that- especially if they’re ostensibly trying to protect their students. If you’re concerned that your trans students might be outed to their parents you might, maybe, want to consider not broadcasting to everyone on social media that you actively conceal such info from the parents of your kids. Apparently the teachers self aggrandizement is more important than the kids safety.Report
It seems like it should be uncontroversial that the only things teachers should be required to report to parents are things that either concern their child’s academic or behavioral performance (are they failing or disrupting class?) and things that may affect the student’s health (do they seem super-depressed because they are being bullied at school?)
Now, that latter one could theoretically cross over into tangentially inadvertently “reporting” on a student’s gayness or transness, if that is why they’re getting bullied. “Richard wears pink skirts to school, and the other kids pick on him for it.” And it would be unfortunate if saying that resulted in the kid catching hell at home, but also seems kind of unavoidable if a teacher needs to explain why Richard got into a fight at lunch today.
But the idea that a teacher has a responsibility to tell the parents if the kid is just a little out of the ordinary in some way – be that gay, trans, or they’re just a noncomforming duck in some other way – if it’s not affecting their school performance nor putting them at physical risk, seems batty in the extreme. My kids’ teachers don’t owe me any reports at all on my slightly-odd kids, unless that oddity is related to some actual academic or health problem.Report
I’m on board with all of that but surely we can agree that if a teacher is trying to protect their students privacy, advertising that posture for kudos from their social media circle where anyone can see is a very bad idea and can lead to some predictably bad results?Report
Well, it’s a good thing we’re in a world where Democrats can magically stop stupid people from doing stupid things?
Hey, you know what Democrats could actually do there?
Publicize the actual _violence_ done to trans kids by their parents. Publicize the sheer number of homeless queer kids that have been kicked out of their house.
Or murdered. The next time they start yammering about forcing outing queer kids, Democrats could respond with these: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/mom-pleads-guilty-murder-8-year-old-boy-thought-be-n848741
Pound: https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2018/06/parents-torture-kill-10-year-old-says-likes-boys/
It: https://www.ebony.com/father-kills-gay-son/
Into: https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/nevada-father-murdered-son-being-gay-former-foster-mom-claims-n817906
The: https://abc7.com/north-hills-father-gay-shooting-kills-son-hate-crime/1273400/
Ground: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/02/los-angeles-father-accused-of-fatally-shooting-son-for-being-gay/
Now, is this actually a lot of people? Not actually, but considering that only about 450 kids are killed by their parents a year, and 3/4th of them are custody ‘If I can’t have them no one will’ disputes, it is a noticeable amount.
But who cares the actual percentages? Republican blow up every single crime by an immigrant to get support for their policies, why don’t Democrats blow up every single instance of crime by homophobic parents for theirs?
And, of course, unlike with immigrants, the actual stats back up the position here…yes, child murder is incredibly rare, but a good chunk of that is because the queer children are either kicked out or run away first.
Make it clear that people who are demanding that teacher tell parents, or have a problem with teachers not telling parents, are demanding those things happen.
This would require some sort of backbone by Democrats, though, better just to throw those kids under the bus. Even some *looks pointedly* gay Democrats.Report
Hey far be it for me to disrespect the classically American strategy of simply repeating our position louder and slower. It hasn’t worked so far but maybe if we yell loud enough all the normie voters will just finally get it. Maybe the “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your kids.” chant should become mandatory for all Pride celebrations or something. Hopefully the thermostatic reaction to trumps being a dumb fisher will do the job for us regardless. I just prefer the party take more agency in its wins and losses.Report
It objectively _has_ worked. That’s how we have Trump as president.
The media are a bunch of easily lead idiots, and the Republicans understand how to lead them.
The Democrats do not.
Literally all they had to do was wait until some gay kid got murdered by their parents, and create a giant issue out of it. Talk about how teachers outing kids to parents is a huge problem. Propose legislation about it. Don’t actually pass it, that wouldn’t pass anyway, but be really really loud about it.
Trump signed the ‘Laken Riley’ law today, a law named after a person murdered by someone in the country illegally.
Why is there not a Giovanni Melton law?
There actually _is_ a Matthew Shepard law, over a decade ago, named after a gay guy murdered over two decades ago. That’s it.
Two can play at that game.
But only one does.Report
Whatever else can be said about North’s views, they are relatively nuanced and civilized. But how many Norths are there? Who, exactly, and how many, would accept his terms and vote accordingly?Report
Obviously we have no way of knowing for sure but I think a core question is being overlooked. -If- my general premise is correct and dropping the left most and most controversial, say, 10% of demands on Trans issues, for the sake of argument, would allow the Dems to win elections is that actually a sacrifice that you and/or DavidTC would even countenance? I think that is the question at the heart of the matter.Report
I think what’s at the heart of the matter is what’s so. What, exactly, would we have to “drop,” and is mere dropping enough, or would we have to performatively curb-stomp folks? And would it work? No point agreeing to curb-stomp in advance.Report
Can we start with the folks that the market is in the process of punishing anyway?
Run to the front of the parade and pretend that you’re leading it?Report
Piling on shouldn’t be countenanced. This is a pretty dark turn.Report
So just drop them quietly and then ask “why are you still talking about that?” five minutes after they’re dropped?
“Why are you so obsessed with this topic? We stopped funding that yesterday.”Report
Certainly I have never proposed curb-stomping anyone. At most I’ve suggested dropping some of the least popular stuff and stopping talking about the next least popular stuff, while still supporting it.Report
In principle, I’m fine with that, but I just don’t believe it would work. Such a subtle and civilized approach won’t change net votes because there aren’t enough subtle, civilized voters we don’t already have.Report
I don’t think anyone should be curb stomped either. I’ve been trying to avoid delving back into this topic but I think it’s worth remembering that adults were having surgeries and hormone treatments to try to resemble the opposite sex for decades without it being a serious political issue. I’m also not going to pretend that empathy is the strong suit of our species but all kinds of unusual and avante-garde appearances and self expressive behavior have been broadly tolerated in this country for a long time. No, not everyone is going to celebrate whatever any particular person is doing but that’s just life in a big pluralistic society. When I was in high school in the 90s enforcement of rigid gender roles was already history. There were goth kids who would cross dress or gender bend and I can’t imagine anyone ever denying that information to their parents, much less thinking it was part of some permanent identity in need of “validation.”
The fight got picked by a certain brand of activist pushing hard for medical interventions in minors, introduction of some pretty questionable, metaphysical stuff and dangerous policies into public school curricula, and the sudden appearance of men in womens sports and a handful of other places where women are vulnerable, like prisons and rape shelters. That’s what this is, and now predictably there is a backlash. I think it is a very open question as to whether pushing all of these things has shaken out to the benefit of those that identify themselves as trans. I for one am not sure that it has.
But if you really want to start somewhere it would be rejecting the kind of thing David is posting in the comment with all of the links. I read something like that and think I’d vote to abolish the public schools before I’d concede to them treating parents like criminals or telling lies to the tax payers they serve. It is not acceptable for reasons I think are quite clear, and it will never work.Report
Trans kids have been getting medical inventions for _decades_. There are almost no trans women in women’s sports, they certainly are not beating cis women.
And who is where in prisons is, and always has been, on a case-by-case basis, and trans women have been held in women’s prisons for decades. Please at least tell me you remember the TV show Orange is the New Black, a TV show that aired in 2013, and was based on a memoir book by Piper Kerman, about her 18 months in prison that ended in 2005…and the trans character in that show is loosely based on an actual trans woman in that prison with her.
A sentence that ended in 2005. A trans woman was in prison with her. Do I need to repeat that? This wasn’t some incredibly rare or crazy thing, either.
Rape shelters exist to protect victims of rape, which a hell of a lot of trans people are. They also set their own rules, and almost none of them have a problem with trans women.
What has happened here is that trans people have existed almost transparently for decades, doing things as their gender without any problems at all. We notably had most court cases without people even noticing. Nicole Maines parents sued her school in _2005_ for not letting her use the girl’s restroom.
Then Republicans lost gay marriage to the court, and found something else to scream about.
A deliberate reactionary surge is not a ‘backlash’, and the American people still care _almost nothing_ about trans issues, in either direction.
No one has been ‘pushing’ anything. Trans people have been fighting to not have things _taken away_ from them.
What _else_ should teachers be required to tell parents? If the kids are gay? It’s right there, it’s the next question, it’s actually technically the _same_ question because almost all the rules about teacher informing on students talk about gender roles.
Oh, so you actually _do_ think kids should be outed. Were you any of those kids? Was that you?
I love it when straight cis people wander around proclaiming that nothing bad ever happens to kids that got outed to their parents.
This is the point where I could mention the 120% higher homeless rate of queer kids, or stuff like, but I just linked to a half a dozen example of queer kids literally murdered, by their parents, for being queer.Report
The people talking about the ‘least popular stuff’ are _Republicans_. If you drop it, they will simply move on to the _next_ in the list to talk about.
Hell, they already moved on to talking about how trans people in the military are dishonorable liars and they all have to leave. Were Demcorats talking about _that_? Were trans people overreach on that? No? It already was settled? Huh, weird.
—
Trans people have not asked for _anything_. Or, rather, they asked for them, and got them, mostly two decades ago. They existed, quietly, for decades. Almost entirely ignored.
They already were, quietly, using the restrooms they felt like. They already were, quietly, competing in sports and usually doing quite poorly against cis people because it turns out that screwing around with your hormones (In either direction) is actually a good way to disadvantage yourself there against cis people. Prisons were already, quietly, dealing with the situation, and as always have the discretion to assign prisoners where they, and other, were safe, which almost always ended up with trans woman alone in a cell in men’s prisons.
There is literally nothing trans people were trying to do except get some non-discrimination stuff about workplaces, because there is still massive discrimination there, and maybe make it easier to change their gender in a few states. They could already do it all states except four.
This is not some ‘trans overreach’. There was no reaching. At all.
What happened is that Republicans started yammering non-stop about trans people, at which point all the goldfish ‘political knowledgeable people’ suddenly became aware trans people existed and ‘wanted things’. Thing that, in fact, they already had, and had for decades without a problem.Report
In my time as a politically aware person I have seen it done successfully twice, once by Bill Clinton, and now again by Trump.
Part of the key is of course figuring out what does and doesn’t have a popular constituency. Trump’s big insights, whether intentionally identified or fallen into by total blind luck, was that (i) there is no serious constituency for neoconservative adventures overseas, and (ii) that there is no constituency and indeed the voting masses are downright hostile to SS and Medicare privatization schemes.
If I had to pick a constituency that the Democrats could do this with today it would probably be something like ‘university professors and administrators and people who work for NPOs/NGOs.’
Again, what’s strangest to me about this conversation is skepticism towards changing the game plan after a loss. If you can’t run the ball maybe you need to try a new blocking scheme.Report
I think that an under appreciated implication of MattY’s thoughts here is the corollary to his point.
I agree, sorrowfully and reluctantly that, in the glaring blaze of hindsight, it looks like Biden did a lot of harm to the Dems out of hubris, venality and senescence (in that order).
The corollary to that point, however, is that Biden is gone; his heirs- if he even had any, are no longer extant as political forces in the party which means a great deal of the trouble the Dems face may simply be fixable by having a new set of politicians go through the crucible of primaries, define what they believe in and then they will be in a strong position to compete. The amount of movement in terms of core political beliefs and principles, for instance, is not very huge. You could disavow a very small number of fringe views, be silent on a slightly larger number of slightly less fringe views and avow some sensible reforms that don’t actually cut against but instead clarify left wing goals (permitting reform, educational excellence, most things YIMBY, etc) and probably have an excellent shot at major victory.
There, arguably, isn’t a big group of voters that’ll fight to the death against these kinds of changes. They are, instead, rooted in fashionable elites and groups. In theory, at least, that makes these changes a lot easier.Report
I am in total agreement.Report
Trump just tried to essentially ban gender-affirming care for people under 19.
I hope everyone here who was ‘just asking question’ about ‘how we need do more research on blockers for kids and what about detransition, a thing I am told is happening a lot’ is happy. Parts of the media have spent years carefully cultivating you into exactly this place, good job falling for it.
You may notice that 18 year olds are not, in fact, minors. A mere quibble, I guess.
This is along with kick trans service members out because ‘ adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.’, which is about six months from calling them degenerates.
And maybe people should start trying to calculate when, exactly, in the poem to get off their ass.
Oh, sorry, queer people didn’t even _make_ the poem because the poem was written by a Lutheran Pastor who didn’t really see any problem with the government coming for queer people, even in retrospect.
Or the disabled, in fact. It really is amazing how many of you keep talking about ‘DEI’ and have not noticed that Trump actually stopped DEIA, aka, accessibility, removing any sort of initiative to hire handicapped people, including handicapped veterans.
But hey, useless eaters, am I right?
Anyway, might want to pick when in the poem you will actually acknowledge what is happening, or at least start prepping the lies to your grandkids.Report
It’s better than that. Banning trans medicine and pharmacology from American minors, and litigating against the doctors who have been practicing minor transitions through drugs and surgery, will also have the knock-on effect of, at least some extent, de-transitioning trans adults who won’t be able to find or keep a steady supply of drugs they need to maintain the transition.Report
Hey, at what point are we going to start doing something about the open fascists on this site?Report
The New York Post is reporting that the pro-Palestinian protestors who are on student visas who broke the law as part of the protests will have their student visas revoked.
Now, there’s “breaking the law” as in “smoking weed” and there’s “breaking the law” as in “watching the jury foreman pass a note that says ‘guilty’ to the bailiff” (as well as a couple of waypoints in between) and so I don’t know what “breaking the law” means in this context.
But the college protests come springtime are going to be lit.Report
OMB orders rescindedReport
They will likely be back and better written next time.Report
Yeah, no doubt on the first part. This was a battle and the pushback needs to be quick and strong.
I’m not certain on their competency levels.Report
I think we *can* be certain.Report
I heard that the next orders will be plural and name specific names.
Project A will be shut down.
Project B will be shut down.
Project C will be…
You get the idea.
If Meals on Wheels shuts down, you can ask “why? You weren’t shut down. Point to the EO that shut you down! You aren’t anywhere in A through ZZZ!!!”Report
I listened to an R congressman on NPR this morning praising DJT for doing this. He said we need to get this spending under control, and I sat there thinking, “Dude, you’re in the body that passed all this spending. Just pull it back! Pass a budget! It’s right in the Constitution!”Report
Maybe y’all discussed it already, but Greg Palast wrote a detailed and numbers-based analysis purporting to demonstrate that all that was required for Trump’s victory was good ol’ racist voter-suppression (article is worth reading for deets on how some of these suppression schemes work), not Musk messing with machines. These schemes were successful enough to cost Harris both the popular and EC vote. The TL; DR’s are as follows, but really, read the whole thing:
Again, I’m probably late to the party on this but if you haven’t seen it, give it a read and maybe consider tossing some cash in his cup, since if we want journalists doing this kind of thing they need to eat.
https://www.gregpalast.com/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won/Report
If this analysis holds, it makes a lot of the local twittering around here about how the Dems need to throw Biden under the bus and change their messaging to better appeal to average Americans look a little frivolous.
If this analysis is valid, what the Dems REALLY need to do is get serious about calling out, challenging, and stopping Jim Crow-like voter-suppression efforts that are stacking the deck.Report
Given that these are state level activities in red states, that’s going to require a lot of legislating. Legislating that I’m not even sure is possible.
I once read that the U.S. could be thought of as a customs union instead of a country, and that seems truer and truer each day.Report
If the deck’s consistently being stacked like this, what difference does it make if your messaging is better than the other guy’s?
And maybe I still have too much misplaced faith in humanity, but I would like to believe that even a lot of people in red states don’t want to win the game by cheating. In that sense, even just consistently calling it out and continually drawing attention to it, might move the needle for them to back off on some of the more egregious examples.Report
We won in 2020Report
If it’s true then it means that state level politics, especially in purple states, has gone from important to nearly the whole fishing ball game.Report
It has always been thus. Draw the maps and decide who represents you in Congress.Report
Someone may need to let the Dems and the Groups know.Report
You would think that would be a good lesson to learn, but instead we’re trying to figure out how Dems can become just a hair more like Archie Bunker without selling their souls.Report
Your lips to His ears.Report
We also run a couple of really big insurance schemes and a huge military. But beyond that…Report
Sometime in the last few years Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was on one of the Sunday morning shows. He had a list of talking points about things that must be purged from state voting systems (vote by mail, online registration, others). I have wondered since if he got phone calls from the Republican majority leaders in the Utah legislature pointing out that they had only recently finished installing all of those things in Utah.Report
The WH Press Secretary’s response to rescinding the OMB order is interesting in a “these are not very smart people and things got out of hand” kind of way and a disturbing kind of way too because it might imply that they are going to defy court ordersReport
The blatant stupidity of the lies is the point: Trump claims to have found 50 million dollars being used to send condoms to Hamas: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lgvoyiy26v2eReport
I may be going out on a limb here, but I think Hamas is bad and if they’re having fewer kids because we sent them some free condoms I’m not all that upset about it. They just better hope the Mossad didn’t intercept that shipment and the condoms don’t burst in ways never before seenReport
How many condoms is that and how much Hamas f*****g has to happen to make this work?Report
It was the wrong Gaza. They were sending condoms to Mozambique.Report
Yeah I can see Trump making a mistake like thatReport
https://www.audacy.com/wwl/news/local/lawmakers-threaten-superdome-funding-over-halftime-show-smut
Bring back Up With People!
Remember when Tempe lost the Super Bowl because the AZ legislature wouldn’t authorize an MLK holiday? If there’s anything bigger than government in this country, it’s the NFL. They don’t like to be irritated.Report
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/29/opinion/trump-inflation-bonds-debt-yield.html
The Bond Markets are not happyReport