John

The last sentence of that first post applies much more clearly to "why you should oppose Platner" than to anything related to Schumer.

The Third Reich?

It's already sort of a rump of the original Home Office, which was responsible at one point for basically all domestic policy. Other things gradually got split off, leaving only policing and immigration.

What is even happening

I think "Kamala's for they/them; President Trump is for you" was a fairly effective slogan not so much because people hate trans people and buy into the Republican agenda on them but because they thought Democrats are obsessed with culture war stuff rather than issues they cared about.

It can't work optimally, but I don't think you've demonstrated that it's not still better than the alternative.

"I promise to enforce the laws" should be good politics -- sounds reasonable and strong to people who don't care much about the issue, but people who *do* can understand that she has their back. It's a real problem to not be able to do that.

I don't have a solution but "pander more explicitly to your own base voters during the general election so that bad faith interlocutors don't twist your words to try to depress base turnout" isn't a great equilibrium.

Ideally you dog whistle to your own supporters while saying things that sound reasonable to swing voters. Demanding that candidates do the opposite because their own supporters are being riled up by the intermediaries they trust for no reason but clout is bad.

I think people who view themselves as advocates should act like it instead of pretending to be stupid for clout. I don't have a solution for how to achieve that unfortunately

I'm talking about trans or trans-friendly journalists working on the trans beat.

Emigres, man. This is their thing

Knowledgeable journalists who were absolutely capable of understanding the subtext could have explained the truth to their readers but instead spread hysteria for clicks.

'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Campaign Where This Regularly Happens

Now the Norwegian princess who took up with and married an African-American shaman who considers himself a Reptilian is good stuff, though.

We've had some Dem row officers from the city -- Mike Stack, Joe Torsella at least. And a fair number of statewide electeds from the suburbs, including Shapiro.

Hello doesn't need royal gossip to be about people who are currently royals, but it definitely gets more zing that way.

Kenyatta is great, but "black gay guy from Philly" is a really bad starting point for a statewide run in Pennsylvania, unfortunately.

Because while it seemed unlikely anyone could beat Fetterman, Lamb was the better bet, and I was skeptical of Kenyatta's ability to win the general even if he had won the primary.

I remember the Prince of Prussia (Kaiser Wilhelm's great-great-grandson) giving a quote at some point in the 2000s saying he expected Germany would bring back the monarch at some point and it came off as more delusional than optimistic. He was like 30 at the time, too.

All the Balkan ones (except Constantine of Greece) really thought they had a shot in the 90s.

He was a real one, but he died over a decade ago. And he'd more or less given up by the end.

I also thought Lamb would likely be a more reliable, normal Democratic senator than his campaign suggested he would be.

I think I was right about everything except the electorate thinking he was too extreme, but I can't expect other people to intuit that Lamb wasn't the guy he was running as.

I voted for Lamb, but I can't say this is wrong. My vote was some combination of distrusting Fetterman's vibes, thinking he was maybe vulnerable to "too extreme" attacks in the general, and (probably decisive) being worried about the stroke.

I mean, of course he is. This is literally his raison d'etre. The last of the pretenders, really, I think all the others have basically given up except maybe the last Yugoslavian crown prince.

A good rule of thumb is probably "things he says in Persian" vs. "things he says in English/directly to the western press"

I mean, if you had to replay it, you'd obviously do it differently, but "do normal governance, try to do good policy that will build constituencies for Democratic voting, and hope that the fever breaks" wasn't obviously wrong a priori. It just didn't work.

And you had Manchin and Sinema there preventing any kind of non-budgetary legislation that couldn't get ten Republican votes.

More energetic pursuit of prosecuting top figures for January 6...I mean, maybe, but I think there's just inherent limits to how effective the court system can be here. The problem is political; the solution is unlikely to be judicial or legal.

I feel like you are maybe asking for something from Biden that he was not really capable of doing. His theory of how to do it proved to be wrong, but there's no particular reason to think that another approach would have worked.