Chicago Gay. Day job is healthcare analytics, unpaid night gig is trying to get my friends to play math rocks with me. Recovering policy addict. Cat pics are my own, but it's not my cat.
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Gutenberg printed his bibles in 1455. Shakespeare's plays debuted in the early 1590s. Until the late 20th Century, printing was expensive and centrally controlled, and what languages got printed was an expression of politics and economics. And in the 18th & 19th, nationalism centralized it all.
I often marvel at the fact that American patriots put an INSURRECTION CLAUSE into the US Constitution in 1868, and then we all just let a corrupt, packed Supreme Court pretend it didn't apply to an insurrectionist candidate for President. We did a bad job making noise about this.
Still a violation of the various records acts and getting the Administration on the record for negligence or malice will be important when making the case to impeach or imprison them, if we are ever to see and end to this.
We don't know; but Trump did do exactly that with DC because our Founders idiotically denied its citizens full representation in our democracy. DC should have been granted statehood before any of us were born, and the reasons it hasn't mostly boil down to racism.
I don't think he's perfect, but JB appears to actually be fighting, not just tweeting. He sheltered the TX Dems and gave them the platform to galvanize the party in the counter-gerrymandering fight and he's excoriating the press for failing their duties to the Republic. Thus: presidential shit.
If you ask me, being born into a hotel family is less problematic than *checks notes* soullessly throwing vulnerable minorities under the bus based on David Shor's vibes newsletters or gleefully moonlighting in the business of destroying the belongings of the homeless for a photo op.
Pritzker: "It breaks my heart to report that we have been told ICE will try to disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades. Let's be clear -- the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anybody living here."
I know, I know, but: The president of the US saying, literally, "we're going in" in reference to sending the military to an American city for no reason beyond terrorizing the local population should be the most immediately impeachable shit imaginable
I mean fuck, it's possible that Trump didn't bother telling Abbot he was gonna borrow the Guard and just assumed it'd come together like DC did. JB is doing the work though and getting spotlights and using it properly. Presidential shit.
At which point you point and laugh at them and give them a link to Carlos Maza: youtu.be/MCKeXhta3H0
However, they're cued up for Chicago this week and he fucking hates this city. So it's entirely possible that the whole Weekend of Seclusion was about lining up the occupation of the city that's thwarted his goons the most effectively so far.
The people who control our information environment want to help Trump so have waged a years long propaganda campaign to turn his most deadly disaster into something else.
I guess perhaps it is still coy; they aren't secure enough yet in their ability to control electoral outcomes so they still bother to lie. But they don't care about making the lies taste sweet anymore, and some of their fellow-travellers recognized it and flinched.
I don't find them meaningfully different; cultural conservatism pretty much always devolves into fasalcism if given enough license. Theirs is the idolatry of the king and sceptre, of slave and master, and it always will be. They were always hungry to become this; it just wasn't so candid.
Hand the keys to Liz Warren and let's get some shit done.
And the function and structure of the White House Correspondents Association in our society hasn't changed much since then, even if the technology and media system they feed in to has. They're meant to be the stenographers trusted to ignore the boxes marked "Top Secret" in the waiting room.
Most of the public didn't know FDR could barely walk due to polio sequelae or that JFK had crippling back pain, while either were alive. Reagan supposedly had significant dementia and trouble focusing as early as 1984, while in office. The press pool doesn't look for things it isn't fed.
To a lesser extent it's been happening in the US more often since 9/11. I remember ~2011ish Penn Station NYC, seeing uniforms with automatic weapons. Realistically, the war was always going to come home. Our society's failure to confront conservative assaults on civil liberties helped this outcome.
i am almost 40 and i literally do not have any point in my life where the right wing has not been doing moral panics about imaginary child abuse while institutionally working to enable real abuse of real children. if it's not the satanic panic it's fucking pronouns.
I don't particularly feel any need to absolve the Republican party for creating the authoritarian monstrosity that consumed their party. Every step of the way they gleefully fed it more of their own morality and agency, so it's their baby. It should bear their name.
I'd settle for the next iteration of emergency reponse and criminal investigation to be a) separate if interlinked functions and b) actually under the control of the governments that pay them. For many (most?) cities is the US they're basically sinecured gangs with no real oversight or checks.
It is just wild to me that the largest facility used during Japanese internment will now be used to intern immigrants from ICE raids, people who are disappeared by masked officers off the streets, and there is still a debate about whether naming and shaming those doing it is fair.
Pritzker on Trump sending troops into cities: "He has other aims other than fighting crime... he would like to stop the elections in 2026 or frankly take control of those elections. He'll just claim there's some problem with an election and then he's got troops on the ground that can take control."
It's a lie. Stipulating "explicit" carries the implication that he *does* have some other kind of informal, traditional or implied authority over elections, when he does not. Don't print lies in the newspaper.
IMO he's way too valuable as a prominent Democrat in Kentucky. He'll be term-limited as governor in 2028, so I think he's not a bad choice, especially if he can get a Dem over the line to replace McConnell. But it would be way better for him to replace Rand Paul in 2028, if he can.
Every authoritarian regime that embraced this aesthetic inflicted violence and chaos on its society
Not a very long path from "Why wouldn't you want the regime to deploy federal troops in your city when it reduces carjackings?" to "Why would you be opposed to the erection of internment camps for deviants when it reduces crime?" And a good chunk of mainstream media will just follow along.
Unbelievably bad. “The CDC you knew is over. Unless someone takes radical action, there is nothing there that can be salvaged.” www.advocate.com/politics/dem...
We'll still have fascists and antivaxxers and centrists eager to use transphobia to justify tax cuts or whatever and all manner of ugly things. But the media's specialest golden boy won't be around for them to debase themselves before, and the conservatives might implode in an orgy of power-grabs.
Many things will still suck. But the media has a fascination and love for Trump-as-vulgarian that Vance simply cannot pull off. Even if he takes on the mantle of MAGA and attempts to be the Stalin to Trump's Lenin, the movement collapses without Trump pushing it, (see: Epstein backlash).
Old Soviet joke for today: A man walks into a newsstand every day, looks around, and leaves. After a long time of this, the owner says “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for the obituaries.” “The obituaries are in the back of the newspaper, comrade.” “Not the one I’m looking for.”
Pro-AI narrative starting to sound a lot like pro-gun narrative: “The weapons industry & guns don’t kill people, people kill people” = “people who create & profit from AI don’t kill people, AI kills people… I mean they kill themselves, nothing to see here move along now, why do you hate science ☹️?”
BREAKING: Social Security Administration chief data officer and whistle-blower Charles Borges has resigned after bombshell report that SSA put highly-sensitive data at risk. He sent out an email to colleagues moments ago. Here is the text of his email shared with me:
I think they crave the fear and submission more, personally. They recoil from defiance, especially when busting with moral contempt for their behavior. So many of these officials crumble under the slightest pushback; their self-image can't survive outside the Fox News Reality Shear Vortex.
What a cursed sentence (gift link) “The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.”
While ICE agents can note in their database if someone they’ve investigated turns out to be a citizen, they are not required to do so. As a result, records are often wrong and left uncorrected even after agents have been told of a mistake. (Published March 2025)
These bigots want every LGBT person removed from public life. They want to dissolve our marriages. Close our community spaces and bars. Hide our histories. Steal our families from us, fire us from our jobs, and take our healthcare. Their hate will not rest. We must never forgive them or forget this.
To the extent that politics has been debased to a spectator sport, the presidential contest is the only one most people have time for. And most vote or live as if it's out of their hands anyway, like the weather. Because for the cozy majority of Americans, that's true.
Because the media is national, with most local newsrooms either withered away entirely or filled with Sinclair synthetic engagement. Not that it was good before, but most people don't know their reps, have been gerrymandered into a rep they're OK with, and can't influence higher offices without $$$$
They're openly calling to lock up every trans person by force. We need every ally to speak out forcefully against this because trans folks cannot do this on our own.
He's nodding along and agreeing to fascist podcasters saying that the state should forcibly detransition anyone under the age of 25. That's transphobia, plain and clear, and the audience for it is fascists. Newsom is choosing them and their position over the entire LGBT community, and you are too.
People need to understand just how openly genocidal the rhetoric on the far right is getting towards transgender people. They're openly talking about eradicating us and forcefully mass institutionalizing all trans people. These are people with direct ties to the Trump administration.
"Americans are less free than they were a year ago, more subject to state power directed by an President disinterested in democratic norms. It doesn’t mean we should give up, or that improvement are not possible. But it is difficult to move forward if we don’t acknowledge where we are."
And it doesn't have to be zero-sum! There's more than enough to go around, based on the macroeconomics. But rural conservatives keep voting in favor if everyone getting exploited. Because urban populations suffer a bit more than they do. And for too many of them, they consider that a win.
After all, cities have ports, railroads, and airports, the moeny to run them, and the administrative capacity to shift consumption patterns to other suppliers. And rheal environments lack the solidarity to withhold their labor whent they're functionally feudal territories for their local bourgeois.
The cities don't have enough capacity as it is! Because we keep dumping hundreds of billions of dollars a gear into subsidizing wasteful, inefficient rural economies and indulging the fantasy that they make America go when they mostly provide low-margin inputs to more productive, urban industries.
I don't want to punish rural voters for their votes. But I don't want to continue to subsidize them when they adamantly, joyously vote to cut their own subsidies and act confused when their politicians do what they said they were going to do to get those joyous, enthusiastic votes.
Rural residents have, by law, more power over our political structure than anyone else. They own more responsibility than anyone else for what our government does. My entire life I've been told we can't do good things because rural voters hate city voters and politicians have to cater to them.
Because conservatives said that Democrats said the words. Which they didn't. If this advice were useful, we'd have already seen it yield results. It didn't. All it does is reveal we're in a conservative propaganda environment that warps people's perceptions of political reality.
Random people being black bagged and disappeared on the streets of the Capitol by unidentified secret police, etc.
And of course Trump isn’t just saying it. He is explicitly defending his ability to use the US military to occupy American cities controlled by the opposing party - a straightforwardly dictatorial policy, which he has already enacted. And from the media? From the Dems? Murmurs of mild concern.
(Three, forgot Obama.)
If you want everyman politicians, you need an entirely different politicial and social structure, and probably a different economic one too. And it might require undemocratic and unpopular things like sortition, compulsory political service, and the like. So, a titanic amount of political will, too.
The only two candidates I can think of who'd fit your criteria in recent memory are Harris, Buttigieg, and Obama. All three would be, and are, dismissed as out of touch elitists because, well, they're politicians and have a lot of academic and professional achievements. Therefore, elites.
Their policies aren't the problem though: if your job is politics on the national level, by definition you're no longer an "average American." Getting the ability to participate in it removes you from most of the standard class markers and disqualifies them by the standard you put up.
I'm not sure there's a valid candidate then: anyone with the political capital to run for president will get access to the power and resources that naturally takes them away from the lived experience of the average American. Our system does not permit a random schmuck to rise to office without it.
Don’t let them tell you he’s joking. He’s putting armed troops in the streets. Not a joke. Not a drill.
No amount of evidence stopped a career civil servant (Harris) from getting framed as an out of touch elitist by a propaganda engine set on turning her in to one. Ant future liberal leaders have to take that hostile ecosystem on directly if they want to win elections.
On the other hand the conservative incumbent has the taste of a Liberace impersonator and is looting the treasury like the fraud he is, so ... I think being able to resist conservative media lenses and framing is the most critical skill they all share, and JB has that juice, it seems.
2028 implies they're looking for it in the next administration, and hoping that administration will be held by a Democrat willing to do seriously prosecute the Trump officials. The bigger barrier will be SCOTUS, most of which has to be inpeached and removed.
What I'm looking for in the 2028 primary is someone who will put Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem in jail, and so far, that's Pritzker
Page One. @chicago.suntimes.com
Pritzker: To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country, I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story.
If they gerrymander more aggressively, he might be toast just from the growing popular backlash to Trump. The economic and demographic cores of the state are Baltimore, and the DC suburbs. They are not going to become more conservative, and the Eastern shore's aging and its economy, shrinking.
And trying to do it is gonna make some people violent and angry, for that matter. And should.
Eastern Shore, MD GOP rep whose primary job seems to be screwing with DC sovereignty to own the libs and crow to his supporters that he's done so. I think DC residents actually made a PAC expressly to fund his challengers at one point.
Or to authentically react to current events like we are, so we can get a sense of whether their morals and principles align with ours. Without that we can't make principal-agent decisions necessary for representative democracy to work.
Wealth transfer, but it's welfare for fascists, paid for by their victimss.
The removal of Andy Harris from Congress is a universal moral good, independent of any tactical advantage it would net the Democratic party.
People I know in DC have stopped going out to dinner because they don't want to witness their neighbors getting black-bagged by the fucking Gestapo, Jeanine.
Specifically, of every ICE employee, appointee, official, contractor, and detailee whose disciplinary record does not indicate rank insubordination in defense of human dignity.
this is fixable and the way you fix it is with public trials
The more radical (read: morally correct) position, of course, being:
And it shows that the law was immoral to start with, and that those defending it or prosecuting it now are on the wrong side of history.
all of this is impeachable btw
I legit teared up a bit when I heard that Doomed Twink's voice again and saw where it was coming from. My heart wasn't ready.
There's a lot of coordinating, sure, and maybe there's an iceberg of strategy and preparation that Trump et al will crash into and crumble, but to me this still reads like a defensive crouch at best and clinging to the Constitution and hoping SCOTUS come to their senses and save us at worst.
I think it is, in part. Fed's still got a lot of power and corporations will bow to it over state sovereignty. The "maker" states, for example, can't stop income tax flows from individuals to the IRS, which is the kind of capital strike that would actually cause a crisis in DC and Wall Street.
The State of Illinois at this time has received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention.
Barely two weeks since, and it's now routine for citizens of our capitol to witness their friends, coworkers, and neighbors black-bagged and abducted in broad daylight. Pure Gestapo shit, and it's coming to your doorstep sooner than you think.
Sorry, 535, because of course: DC doesn't count. Just another undemocratic feature of our constitutionally undemocratic Republic.
Yeah that bit about fixation was more an earnest wish that the media and social discourse would unfixate on the presidential contest because frankly, the fix has to be at Congress because that's where the rot is deepest. But there's 538 of them and thus attention is hard to focus for national media.
To my knowledge nsither has publicly declared a campaign for President, because it would be unhinged to do so two years before the first ballot drops in the primaries. Stop fixating on a hypothetical presidential savior in three years, or our democracy might not make it that far.
Pritzker, for one. He's the one that enabled the Texans to flee the state in the first place. But he's not willing to throw trans people under the bus to appease conservative Democrats, so the media is fixating on astrofturfing a consensus about Newsom instead.
He's clearly the media's preferred candidate; that said, he's doing what they want in producing stunts and appearances that they can use to showcase conservative Democrats as the foil to Trump. More serious contenders need to take the media to task for obviously putting their thumbs on the scale.
"That’s what autocrats do. They cow public servants into submission—and in doing so, they create a closed system that is free of opposing views and inconvenient concerns. Their policy making, their ability to realize their aims, suffers as a result."
He instructed his political allies to break norms and give him five more seats to ensure he maintains his power, knowing he will likely lose power without rigging. He also wants to unconstitutionally cease legal voting means. And journos still don’t want to call him anti-democratic/authoritarian?
Could be an official cover. E.g. their cover identity is as a federal employee in another agency like State, DoD, or Treasury.
At Trump’s request, multiple red state governors are sending hundreds of armed National Guard forces into DC. This military occupation of the district is unprecedented and unjustified. If it’s allowed to stand, this country will be well on its way to becoming a police state. 1/22
Actual question: It has been only 72 hours since the disastrous puppeteer/puppet show in Anchorage. Has there yet been a background story on how, and by whom, this emergency intervention of *eight* big-time world leaders was pulled together, over a weekend?
Controversial opinion: When it comes to US presidents, "blatantly breaking laws and violently violating people's rights" is a bigger deal than "is old," meriting greater public concern and a higher percentage of attention.
1995, for some of them.
And "activist" means anyone who asks their electeds to do anything they didn't already want to do (or which wasn't pushed by leadership). A contagion theory of politics, where democratic input is the contagion. Best evidence I've seen yet of the thesis that the US has *two* conservative parties.
If pundits would like to talk about violence, a terrorist recently shot up the CDC and another assassinated Democratic officials in Minnesota but they sort of let both stories disappear Not as threatening as motorbikes in DC I know but maybe we could circle back?
Declaring a fake emergency as an excuse to deploy the military to police civilians is one of the most canonical examples of authoritarian takeovers. Overseas, people see clearly what Trump is doing. Here in America most people — especially those with power or influence — are in denial.
Or everyone is waiting for the first person to lose their nerve and then it's a stampede of capital flight. Maybe the first arrest of a disloyal Fortune 500 CEO. But they can stay delusional longer than democracy can withstand fascism. And they're short-sighted enough not to care.
They want to weaponize the judiciary? We can break it so hard that the reform produces an actual aystem of justice instead of whatever distorted protofascist mess we have now.
This, but it's arresting the 5th Circuit for 72 hours every week or so using the Patriot Act's "we don't have to charge you with anything to detain you" provisions. Get some evangelical pastors and GOP legislators in there too, for funsies. Charge the LEOs with treason when they refuse orders. Etc.
Like, it's a fun fantasy but the DC Statehood people went point by point in drafting this thing. It's really hard to find a base that isn't covered, which is why the GOP was whinging about mines and car dealerships instead of anything substantive when it came up for hearings in the House.
The underlying section of the US Code that provides for those votes would be struck, per Sec 223, and a new amendment tabled to remove the EC votes: www.congress.gov/118/bills/hr...