I haven't, I don't follow the cinema closely, especially since my local one has ensh*ttified badly, and yes I'm aware that makes me a part of the doom loop of cinema but I was never a cinephile so my conscience is clear.

Right, so basically the demented republitarian billionaire running around the apparatus' of the Federal Government trying to close various elements down with just the fig leaf of an executive order at most has nothing at all to do with a backlash to some kind of similar or equivalent actions on the other side. Just that the woke indulgences of the late Obama on era are fourth order drivers of voter discontent with the Dems. I'd say, then, that my objection to Dark stands.

The academy is up its own posterior about social fads of the current day? I am shocked, shocked!

If you want to make a case that the electorate that elected Trump did so on some form of libertarian backlash grounds you can feel free to try. I have my doubts.

I mean, not only has Wicked made bank at the box office it also has banging good music and the remake is shockingly clever and funny in winking at its own past broadway incarnations and the acting is phenomenal.

Emelia Perez... well the music thuds along like a triangular wheel, the writing is meh and, of course, the audiences ain't impressed.

How do you figure? Have I missed some wave of unilateral and dubiously legal Executive based expansions of government recently?

You're asking policy questions, Dark, when the pertinent questions are procedural ones. For decades libertarians have asserted that the executive can't unilaterally make decisions on spending, either spending more or spending less, without cooperation from congress (while on the side inveigling that neither should be allowed to spend at all since the constitution requires Gilded Age degrees of government size). Now it sounds like you're saying that since Trump is proposing to spend less then screw the procedural questions- it's all good. If you can't see how that incredible reversal can't come back to bite the right, especially the libertarian right, something fierce in the near predictable future, well I dunno what to tell you.

Thank you

Yes, the uncertainty that has come in where once there was certainty is going to be absolutely awful. Businesses are going to need to hedge their bets for long term planning and these are deeply integrated and huge markets we're talking about Trump fishing with.

Entirely true and well put Saul from where I sit, well done.

Something you, and a lot of idealistic leftists and Berniacs don't really internalize is how little power the DNC has. I mean, and first let's acknowledge that they've been a clown show lately, they have very little influence on who gets the presidential nod, what goes into the platform or who gets nominations for lower levels. The quip "I'm not a member of an organized party- I'm a Democrat." has a lot of truth to it. The next time someone says "The DNC rigged the game against Bernie." or "The DNC should be steering the party a lot more competently." try and think back to this moment. This is the DNC; kindof always had been I gather. This institution didn't rig things against Bernie- it couldn't even if it desperately wanted to. This organization didn't force out Biden nor did it get him the nomination in the first place in 2020. This -is- the DNC. This -isn't- new.

Somehow I find myself unsurprised by this yet also disappointed.

Times like this make me wish I had a NYT subscription so I could see the comments on this article.

I have absolutely no doubt that she and her fam are in some way profiting from that wine store. Ugh.

Short of high altitude bombing nothing will ruin a city more effectively than rent control. As I read the story all I felt was mild disgust.

I agree entirely which is the devilishly obnoxious thing about Trump. He's an utter idiot but he has this instinct that sends him squirming into the crevice of any given situation where crushing him requires actors to behave profoundly contrary to their immediate interests.

I want to say something about how the Dems can use this precedent the next time they get in the executive but my expectation is this is eventually going to run into a brick wall of court judgements against it and then that wreckage will explode into a massive fireball as data leaks and other fish ups absolutely explode in ineptness and disaster so the only precedent will be "if you do this it'll blow up in your faces like you'll never believe".

Mhm, so this looks like what the markets (and I) were expecting. A bunch of already existing moves and realities being repackaged as concessions to Trump; basically kayfabe. What'd probably be good "in principle" would be for a leader to refuse to do this kind of kabuki and insist that Trumps tarrifs were a violation of existing agreements, would hurt Americans etc... but what is good for the foreign countries in each of these specific situations, though, is to simply give Trump his fig leaf and then get on with business without the disruption of an actual fight.

It's too soon to tell but the Canadian vibe has moved strongly against Trump and by association strongly against the right in Canada which is exactly why you see Poilievre, who is no idiot, tweeting that kind of stuff. This could, entirely, be just vibes based so who knows but, pre-Trump, the question in Canada was "how huge will the Liberal wipeout be?" and now it's "Everyone hates Trump, maybe Justin shouldn't resign?"

But, again, it's far too soon to tell and if this is the Trump bumpkum that I presume it is, everything could easily revert to the mean if the massive uncertainty gets resolved.

It's slightly complicated by the fact that Trump also promised to "take steps" to reduce arms smuggling into Mexico. So it's mostly just a lot of symbolic hand waving in both directions. This sort of plays into my general expectation that Trump was mostly looking for symbolic exchanges and a lot of smoke so he can peddle that to his supporters as triumphs while blowing confusion around to try and distract from the nonsense that Musk is up to on the homestead.

Of course he's juggling lit matches in an ammunition dump and if he fishes it up he'll get one heck of a market crash. It'll be interesting to see what the exchanges with the Canadians results in. So far he seems to be almost single handedly destroying the prospects for the Canadian right wing in the next election which is ironic.

Harris was an unavoidable candidate and I think she did ok with the hand she was dealt both by her past 2020 decisions and by Bidens' decisions. Harris was an unambiguously bad candidate in 2020- that's not controversial, she didn't even make it to voting; and that past haunted her in 2024. Maybe a better candidate would have either sold their past positions in a way that moved voters; or reversed on their past positions in a way that was convincing to placate voters or cleverly dodged their past positions in a way that charmed voters. Was Harris a good candidate? We can argue that I suppose but what is not ambiguous is that Harris wasn't good enough.

Catastrophically wrong would be like the reverse of Obamas victory in 2008: the GOP with 60 or more Senators and a much bigger margin of victory than 3 congrescritters, obviously.

I don't know that you're wrong, you could be right, but you could also be catastrophically wrong. Counterfactuals are hard as fish. Me, when I wanna daydream, I imagine Biden had bowed out after the midterms or, if I'm really ambitious, if he hadn't run in 2020 in the first place.

See further up in these comments Saul.

Heh that's just Captain Hindsighting Jay. For all we know had a convention been held we'd be looking at bigger losses as a bloodied and divided party crashed and burned worse in November* and you'd be here saying "you thought it wasn't important enough to unify behind a candidate quickly in order to prevent this, well... who do you expect to disagree with you?"

*And, yes, it's also possible some remarkable and gifted politician could also have risen from the scrum, united the party, raised tons of money and trounced Trump but you keep pointing out that many of the Dems politician and apparatus people are heavily into DEI stuff- who do you think would have been choosing the new candidate at the convention?