One of the problems with creeping authoritarianism is that the system is too broken for the forces of democracy to fix. Filibuster is part of that.
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One of the problems with creeping authoritarianism is that the system is too broken for the forces of democracy to fix. Filibuster is part of that.
In my view the first problem is the Courts but after that is the filibuster. I don’t have words for the level of disillusionment from normies who say Congress and Dems never do anything. And we can’t really.
Because what health care legislation, voting rights legislation— how can we pack the courts? What anything would we be able to pass with a filibuster. Of course this is very theoretical as it projects (hopefully not wishful thinking) that Ds have President + Congress at some point.
It means Ds will have to explain what’s going to happen when they lose Congress.
There’s a trade off. The fact the Republicans allow the trade should be an indication of which side gets the better half. Their fact is we’re trading the entire agenda, no ability to use Congress to do anything to benefit Americans. We should end it when (if) Dems have Congress ofc.
Serious Q: don’t presidents regularly get check-ups there? Age may cause him to go more often. Is the hospital shut down like this each time?
Is it like this every time a president has a check-up?
If you're a dem pol and you are openly agreeing with sean trende on anything, you need to a) resign immediately b) publicly list your entire staff so they can be blackballed from any future employment in dem politics c) commit seppuku
Skeptical he’s Nate
We have to end the filibuster. The fact is the situation of non-movement helps Republicans. Their agenda is unpopular. They know it. They don’t have to pass it. Dems can’t do anything when it’s their turn. It’s win-win.
I would strongly encourage my cis friends to read these. I am not exaggerating when I say the last ~6 months or so has been an endless cycle of watching things become materially worse/more harmful every week or so and just having to go to work or whatever and go make small talk.
Ever since we gave the vaccine, he’s been licking the space where his balls used to be
It makes me emotional to see Judge Sooknanan showing that she values each individual child’s life at a moment when this administration is doing exactly the opposite
Can someone tell Krugman to move
Haha my response
when i think “guy who really gets ‘normal people’” i think nate silver
My take is R party was starting down the path, T kind of forced it. I don’t think the result would have been identical. But same direction.
Related question- was the anti-democratic tendency of the R party inevitable? 2 points - they denied Obama an SC justice. Not playing by “the rules.” Not abandoning Trump when he said he would not accept losing. Note McCain was a Maverick. HW was 40 years ago.
I have a scientific question. Is Nate silver normal? Who made him the arbiter of normal? Does he have normal whisperer skills?
“They’re not doing it to improve public safety,” he continued. “It’s designed to humiliate political opponents.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
I have an opinion piece in the New York Times today on how the labor movement has failed to step up to the moment in countering Trump, even as Trump unilaterally strips public sector workers of collective bargaining. Labor will die as a movement if this continues. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...
Sounds like politico
Honestly, I think a lot of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic got psyoped into viewing salt of the earth bigots as more authentic and worthy than them and thinking therefore they must ritually cleanse their sin of education by rolling in the gutter.
Once, not all that long ago, BBC was considered by many around the world—including a good share of us liberal Yanquis—to be the gold standard for journalistic quality and integrity Whoops
Evergreen
bsky.app/profile/oluf...
the US public sphere gives voice to the worst people
The United States had one of the worst COVID outcomes in the entire world from a body count standpoint. Anyone who argues with a straight face we were TOO cautious is an unserious imbecile.
The “Nzi super-science” trope is so destructive and so misleading; in reality they could barely do “Nzi regular-ass science” because they were always saying shit like “relativity is a Jewish plot.”
How much do dead students learn?
@nytpitchbot.bsky.social did you see the subheading
(2) the reason you say you want bipartisan talks is so that you can blame the other party for the shutdown, which will suck. “We wanted to solve this, they chose not to” This is very basic stuff!
Two things: (1) I want people to perhaps take a beat and wonder if “unnamed aide for unnamed senator speaking on background to a Politico reporter in a story that seemed intended to rile up lefties” is an authoritative pronouncement of party policy
Billboard on Westwood, approaching UCLA.
Fucking embarrassing and shameful
This is "the one big trick" that the right has mastered. They present their movement as just "the authentic voice of the volk outraged by Democratic overreach," when really what they're doing is just old fashioned political mobilization. Organize a passle of pissed off people & call it a movement.
What these Schatz posts say to me is that Dem elected officials like him seem incapable of perceiving the right as a *political movement.* The response to Covid mitigation and the Floyd protests was not a spontaneous reaction...it was a right wing backlash organized by a reactionary movement.
@chrismurphyct.bsky.social do you seriously listen to red scare?
ChatGPT says to write me a check for all of your money
lmao YOU LITERALLY TARIFFED LUMBER
Enormous impoundment-related changes in Trump/Vought's Circular A-11 update from Friday, which is OMB's guidance to agencies They: -removed the definition of impoundment -said GAO's impoundment determinations don't matter -claimed pocket rescission authority -claimed profound deferral authority 🧵
I need y’all to understand this is what the Yglesias crowd wants to turn our country into even as they have clear evidence that it doesn’t work from this very dumbass.
So glad to see him reelected, and y'know *in* office since they literally changed the locks on him I wrote about this town last year bc there was a lawsuit to make it have elections, which coincidentally stopped around when the Voting Rights Act was passed 🙃 ballsandstrikes.org/law-politics...
Just basking once again in the wonder and glory of this one.
This is beautiful
They’re on here… @foddy.net
From QWOP to Baby Steps, Bennett Foddy has spent nearly two decades making physical comedies about the human body. Why does he keep circling back to walking? To understand his design philosophy, I asked him to take a long walk with me. www.polygon.com/bennett-fodd...
people like Ro Khanna who continue to boast about being text buddies with this man are showing how little they give a shit about his white supremacy that goes for all the journalists who characterize him as a “troubled genius” or whatever
Really! I need help here!
From the U.S., Kier Starmer really does come across as a perfect example of you cannot successfully try to ape reactionary conservative politics in the long term. Labour got a single win and Starmer proceeded to drive the party into its worst polling in generations by courting the right.
52 of 53 Republican senators voted to confirm him.
Schatz is dead to me when he supported Schumer in the last CR
You guys see where this is going? Right?
In seriousness, I think our expectations of how a social medium should work for us (and how we gauge our success about it) is greatly informed by our previous social media, all of which are famously dishonest about their numbers and cultural influence.
Well Labour is dead
Because politics reporters simply post whatever they get texted and can’t be bothered to do shoe leather reporting and we do not have functional metro desks at large traditional media
The paralegal should put on her CV that Pam Bondi personally fired her.
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
To be clear, the “official” here is a paralegal. The attorney general of the United States fired a paralegal. She also concedes that disrespecting the National Guard is disrespecting “law enforcement,” which … the military cannot do under federal law. Happy Labor Day, Pam Bondi!
Mussolini didn’t actually make the trains run on time. That’s propaganda. 20th century fascists did “sheer vandalism” and elevated superstitions above science, often in self-harming ways. The competence of fascists is another of their self-aggrandizing myths. It’s just that destroying is easy.
Might I suggest the high esteem given to guns is form of idolatry, where fealty to the guns is placed above their children
Speaking of guns, since the ostensible justification for having them in the US (standing up to government tyranny) is clearly bullshit, it seems the only reason for having them is to commit mass murder, shoot schoolchildren, kill hapless animals, commit suicide, or keep people from taking your guns.
Politics today is less driven by ideological conviction and more by parties chasing votes based on a distorted picture of public opinion, one filtered through algorithms that amplify emotionally engaging content. This incentivises performance over substance and erodes democratic deliberation.
Does the Republican Party recruit their candidates at the stupid people convention? Don’t answer that- they do it at the white power convention
The irony is the change in design was by no means an endorsement of woke. It was just a decision that marketing put out after several layers of review and then management said yes this is good for sales. It did not go well.
And their understanding of public opinion is fixed, even if public opinion were to change.
if Al Capone was a financier, & T***p is a financier, then Epstein can be a financier, too. seems just fair.
Judge Sooknanan and her team have been working for almost 22 hours straight now. I imagine they will stay up till the last child has been returned (2 more hrs?). That puts them at 24 hours straight defending the rule of law & protecting the children. #DOJ #ICE
If they don’t go to jail we can do the equivalent of following them around shouting shame! Shame! Shame!
Saw another reply post saying “nobody will be punished for any of the administration’s crimes” in response to a post saying there need to be charges. Again, I say: fuck doomerism. You don’t have to be 100% convinced justice will be done but being the opposite is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Vance is the guy who crashed into your parked car explaining why it’s your fault.
The moment a city starts complaining about "transplants," it's officially cooked. At that point, you're just renting a $2,500 a month for a studio in the equivalent of suburban Dallas and giving yourself an aneurysm as you try to believe that a bar with $9 Modelos is the cutting edge of culture.
Reminder: the apparent plan was to spirit these children away in the middle of the night without them ever seeing the inside of a courtroom to challenge their deportation. Children.
Houses require maintenance. On the plus side, I’m sure there are tons of buyers who were looking for precisely this kind of customization.
some white racists mad as hell today
She was arrested on the morning of Feb. 20 at her home in Charlotte while caring for her three younger siblings — the youngest of whom has autism — while her mother was at work.
If you haven’t heard about the protests in Indonesia. Reuters, the Guardian, and NYT have some write ups available
It got a snort from me, Reddit caught it right away if that means anything
I called this segregationist way back in February: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
I see it as foreshadowing that he’s out of depth. Some pretty heavy foreshadowing of how he’ll end up later
Represents a willingness to get your hands dirty. Try something new.
Any good commentary (preferably by an actual doctor) on the Trump had a stroke claim?
Important context here is Mamdani is muslim and Bill Maher hates muslims.
Robert Mueller has Parkinson’s disease, his family said, and will not be able to comply with a request that he testify before Congress
As a friend recently put it: the venn diagram of people who assured us the gun violence was worth it because we need the guns to protect ourselves against a tyrannical federal government and the people cheering on Trump as he deploys the military to take over American cities is a circle
At some point you have to just admit that the reason this endless farrago of hatred and filth from the intelligentsia of the modern Right doesn't inspire rejection from the media, commentariat, or political elite writ large is that they don't consider it particularly bad.
GWB but to a much lesser extent.
Irvine CA protest, August 31st, 2025. Cohosted by @50501oc.bsky.social & @ocindivisible.bsky.social
as a DC resident I cannot overemphasize how much less safe I feel
It’s the rule, you have to do it
Why is the Draft Dodger-in-Chief trying to drag us into a war with Venezuela? The claim is that drug cartels are so out of control they’ve been designated an international terrorist organization, so we need to send warships. But we’re denying Venezuelan’s asylum claims who fled for their lives. 🤔
Black women have every right to be furious. The irresponsible choices of white voters has for many of us, taken our livelihood with consequences for our homes, the education of our children, our ability to care for parents. It’s unconscionable. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/u...
Not a majority. Plurality among those who voted.
Shot/chaser
What was she in that caused this remark?
And obviously some of it is just a straight-up double-standard: it's been clear since the campaign that he has very, very visibly aged and has days where he's not mentally sharp.