Zach Cockrum

Eventually you grow to be so hated even your personal helicopter pilot “runs out of fuel” and lands at an army base where you’re arrested.

I seem to a recall a perhaps apocryphal story about University of Wisconsin Halloween always turning into a riot. The police tried not showing up in riot gear one year and amazingly there was no riot.

It is deeply hilarious that the Hudson's Bay Company was founded in 1670 and chugged along for three and a half centuries and Private Equity finished it off in like five years.

It's also giving a lot more credence to Andor.

In fact a resounding endorsement.

Capital does love a good ole fashioned pump-and-dump scheme, too, which is what this is.

Bet the counter protesters don’t even know German.

a man is smiling with the words if the rule you followed brought you to this ALT: a man is smiling with the words if the rule you followed brought you to this

“Keep your powder dry and move to the right.”

100% - setting aside policy differences, what centrists fail to understand is the role of theatrics in a fractured media environment. The lesson they take from Trump is "guess the country is right wing now" when it should be "you gotta do wild shit and repeat simple messages to break through."

Also, her speech failed by the most important metric - nobody cared or noticed. The argument "this is what people want to hear" falls flat when it's obvious nobody paid attention.

There is a little bit to the fact that Dems look at politics and power as a constituency box-checking exercise and lack a cohesive narrative and vision for the country they want to see. Centrists are focused on rejecting the first with no interest in creating the second. The Republicans do both.

Wait, wait. I'm going to need $500k and a 3-day retreat in Virginia (beltway accessible) to tell you how this is going to land with the blue collar worker I've invented in my mind because I haven't interacted with anyone with less than a master's degree in a decade.

I suspect this is a buildup to some arbitrary demands he's going to make in his joint address tonight.

But I wouldn't put any money on there being strategy behind anything he does.

Their insistence on egg prices shows they don't get it one bit. It's not about grocery store prices per se. It is that Trump's narrative is that things have gotten worse (more expensive) for you, while the Democrats have made it easier for others. Democrats have no overarching narrative, period.

My dad graduated HS during the OPEC crisis and his eccentric valedictorians’s speech in its entirety was “Invest in dirigibles and learn to live off the land.” And I’ve been thinking recently how that might have been the soundest advice in modern history.

I can’t believe I’m defending a billionaire, but his net worth according to Forbes is $5.7b. USAID’s budget was $40b PER YEAR and it never came close to ending hunger.

This is exactly why we need government programs like this - they are bigger than even some of our wealthiest members of society.

Yes and better yet do it without the existing party. Build an actual movement with organizers all over the country to work on issues impacting people and use it to take the reins of the party.

What we need isn’t a spokesperson for the Dems but a leader to build a movement that is entirely adjacent to it (a progressive MAGA) The party is incapable of saving itself from within. The first talented politician not busy in office (ahem, Pete) to realize this will control the fate of the party.

I am so glad there are people in leadership positions like you starting to say (and do!) this.

We need more of this! Stop trying to sell policy outcomes to a dwindling number of supporters and start winning hearts and minds!

I’ve done climate advocacy for going on 20 years and this is exactly what we need - a marketing campaign to win people over on the need for action. So many enviro groups have stopped trying, burning what capital they have on specific policy solutions rather than winning over hearts and minds.

Maybe the key part of what little civics education we have (there are checks and balances) contributes to an overall feeling that if it were as bad as we say, someone stop it. The average person does not understand to what degree those checks and balances have been compromised.

I am thinking of how they’re so deep in it that they can’t see that when the regime falls or Musk falls out of favor- and inevitably both will happen - they will be the scapegoats.

But of course, only the Dem leadership can't turn "world's richest man takes over government agencies" into a winning argument.

Focusing on groceries, Dems miss half of the MAGA argument: Things have gotten worse for you *while getting easier for "other" people*. The easiest solution is to redefine "other people" as the elite, which shouldn't be hard when the richest man in the world is running amok in our government.

They definitely asked ChatGPT to come up with a name that was like SkyNet but not.

How Senate Republicans react to this will be really telling. Senators, especially appropriators, are very protective of their role, if for no other reason than ego. This threatens that role AND spending in every state across the country. I can't imagine they're happy - but will they do anything?

We’re gonna have to bail out the AI industry aren’t we?

I work for a company doing olivine-based carbon dioxide removal and this is an absolute gem.

But what we need is a PR campaign to turn Trump’s protectionism against him by changing the story on China and clean energy. I wouldn’t be shocked if in 10 years we are bailing out US automakers because of BYDs dominance...