Once & Future Ebike Owner, Kevin Elliott

My congresswoman is pictured

*SIGH*

Yet even many of the post-Bush generation of Dems have imbibed this nonsense

Democrats are still in the defensive crouch George W Bush's aggressive domestic warmongering put them into after 9/11. They don't believe you can politically survive opposition to any aggressive foreign policy.

(This seems like zombie common sense, to me)

A data point to remember re: “popularism” is that the popular position on what is happening in Iran and happened in Venezuela is “no war, this is insane, full stop” and the moderate elected officials we are supposed to like are saying contorted, legalistic, unpopular word salad instead of that.

Post See new posts Conversation Laura Rozen @lrozen · 2h From US admin official background briefing recording listening to, seriously question if US negotiators understood what Iranians were proposing. One official keeps saying acronym for “IAEA” wrong. They seem astonished Iran would not agree to the US supplying them nuclear fuel Laura Rozen @lrozen · 2h They took as suspicious proposals that Iran saw as concessionary. Laura Rozen @lrozen · 2h Explains why Oman FM tried to come to DC to explain what US negotiators may not have fully understood Laura Rozen @lrozen Am not saying what Iran proposed would have been enough, I dont know, but it seems US negotiators did not have the expert guidance to understand it correctly

On top of all the reporting that this war of aggression was planned well in advance, it seems that the reporting also indicates that the US political leadership are quite literally too stupid to understand basic diplomacy. I mean literally not smart enough.

Honestly, TMZ seems to be the right publication in terms of seriousness to cover & break news from this clownish regime

On the one hand, the presidency is a fundamentally broken institution.

On the other hand, Congress is a fundamentally broken institution.

On the third hand, the Supreme Court is a fundamentally broken institution.

Holy race to the bottom, Batman

Omg, yes

If we were behind the veil of ignorance and someone offered us the de facto Constitution, we would kick him until he wasn’t ignorant anymore.

Undermining the conventions and practices underlying a peaceful international order on a retail basis

On attacking Iran:
My guess is that the US and ISR top aims are pure decapitation. ISR may have a plan for What Comes Next, but I doubt the US does.

It’s crazy that it’s basically just a combination of the single worst most disastrous parts of every administration in history

Holy race to the bottom, Batman

Opinion | Trump’s Strikes on Iran Were Unlawful. Here’s Why That Matters.

The strikes on Iran are blatantly illegal. I explained in June why the strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities were unlawful under US and international law. Everything I wrote then is true today, but this is a far larger assault with far graver consequences.

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/o...

The media simply refused to describe the actual, real world stakes of the 2024 election. The Republican nominee was a demonstrable violent lunatic hell bent on revenge and that man was covered like a normal guy who would tame inflation.

FWIW, this is sec. 2(c) of the War Powers Resolution:

In the past, sometimes presidents have said it’s just a military operation or limited airstrikes to skirt Congress. Trump has unilaterally launched major combat operations, declaring war with the goal of regime change. A major violation of the U.S. Constitution, also illegal under international law

In case you’re just waking up, the U.S. has teamed up with Israel overnight to start an illegal war of regime change, apparently on a presidential whim with no involvement of Congress, and they are already committing horrific atrocities.

They don't understand that regular people won't just swallow and regurgitate any old random propaganda the way people on the right will. They thought slapping a CBS sticker on right wing nuttery would work but it's not.

This worked on "conservatives," but will backfire in this context.

"Y'know that political thing that everyone hates? Let's try to sell that"

the other thing about opposing Putin in Ukraine is that Putin keeps directly intervening in american elections. like, if you want to defeat fascism at home, preventing putin from expanding his power is a pretty good investment.

You may worry the patterns of self-selection they document are out of date given the age of these books in this fast-growing literature but I can assure you nothing much has changed regarding the 'denominator' problem: even when they stratify invitations & include payment, only single digits say yes

Thanks! If you're planning to dig into this literature, I'd recommend Fournier et al's When Citizens Decide and Warren & Pearce's edited volume Designing Deliberative Democracy (esp Ch.5 by James on descriptive representation), if you're concerned about elitism-in-practice.

The basic argument is as follows. Though mini-publics seem to be able to cultivate stand-by citizenship for those who participate in them, they cannot do so for the mass public through their deployment at the na-tional or state level. To do so at mass scale, they would have to be multi-plied enormously for citizens to have a decent chance of being selected. Multiplying the number of mini-publics, though, would require a more thorough renovation of democratic institutions than most imagine; do-ing so would require going far beyond the most successful examples to date. Most importantly, multiplying mini-publics would almost certainlyinvolve displacing elections and political parties as the cardinal institu-tions of democracy. Yet this would hobble the institutions that currently do the most to reach citizens where they are and make politics cogni-tively tractable. These tasks are, as we have seen, the core needs of a de-mocracy for busy people. I conclude then that mini-publics are not likely to be a

Oh, yes, I'm very familiar with Fishkin's work and I cite him.

Very valuable for dispelling naive concerns about deliberation. My worries are a bit complex and discussed in chapter 7 of my book:

I remember when ppl told me that moderate Dems would never even consider inflicting real consequences on MAGA Regime loyalists.

Well, if you're a star—er, very special boy president—they let you do it

(I was SO THRILLED to write that section; it was probably the main reason I agreed to write it)

Dark

The conspiracy theory was that we'd be forced to eat bugs