Russell Sharp

I received this email about Democrats caving to end the shutdown from one of the SNAP recipients I spoke to:

Sounds like the squishes in the senate caucus are ready to pull the plug with no ACA changes. This is real. If you want to register your opinion you shld call yr senator in the next hour. They not only want to reopen w/nothing. They want cover from their colleagues who still want to hold out.

I don’t understand how someone who follows politics *for a living* can still be regurgitating middle school social studies talking points about the purpose of the Senate instead of, you know, looking at how the Senate actually operates in real life.

The Pedolands

A Campaign to Make Guam the 51st State Is Gaining Traction A U.S. military buildup stokes efforts to change the political status of the island in China’s crosshairs.

No I don’t want Democrats to add two new states. I want them to add three! www.wsj.com/world/guam-u...

Like I'm not aware of any pro-Roy White HOF campaign, and he had comparable WAR figures and a similar career length, and, unlike Mattingly, he won two world series with the Yankees

Agreed with this! Mattingly was a fine player, but I think the line should be drawn somewhere between "fine" and "all time great" and he's just not in the latter group. Could be pro-Yankee bias, yet multiple non-HOF Yankees of his era have better HOF cases: Randolph, Munson, Nettles, even Guidry

Judith beheading Holofernes, artwork 1612-3, by Artemisia Gentileschi

Did women ruin the workplace?

Which brings me to what I was trying to get at earlier…Considering how important and hotly debated this part of the “how to win” playbook is, anytime I see someone give either a descriptive or prescriptive account of how Dems will win, I want to see their account of this section of it in particular

I think that’s probably right but clearly there isn’t universal agreement on the subject

Indeed and I think last year’s election results suggest we don’t know the answer to that part of the problem anywhere near definitively

Yeah this is the sort of thing I’d like to see spelled out in greater detail. The “bad policies that harm people” => “voters actually blaming the right politicians” link explained with some empirical evidence. Not taking a doomer position, I just don’t think this part can simply be assumed away

Right wingers love high crime because it’s good for the GOP electorally and means more money for their cop pals. They also love brutalizing poor defendants in the justice system for its own sake. So of course they despise and want to stoke fear over any policy that reduces crime humanely

Sure, true also, but I’m not fully confident they’ll pay a political price for that. Same to an extent with the first point. Hence a desire to see the cause and effect spelled out in some specific detail

Yeah that is kind of what I was thinking

Anyway, my pet idea is not just to expand the court (sure, do that) but also to strip it of jurisdiction over constitutional law and then give that power to a newly created constitutional court under the exceptions and regulations clause of Article III, Section 2

A non-negotiable for Democrats in the 2028 primaries is that they must promise to expand and reform the court. The Supreme Court has lost all legitimacy to rule and it needs to be completely overhauled. Nothing less would be an abject failure and acquiescence to Republican ratfucking of the court.

This sounds great and I could guess how this could end up being the case, but could you spell out the rationale?

Mollie Hemingway was initially anti-Trump too, and now she's a total foam-at-the-mouth pro-Trump fascist. I can't remember whether Sean Davis was or not and didn't see anything when I did a quick search just now (though it wouldn't surprise me if he was and went to some efforts to scrub the record)

Before any centrist journalists give credit to Graham for holding the line as anti-Hitler (not that you should get any credit for that), let's see him actually hold the line. If we rewind the tape to 2015-2016, we can find him saying some pretty negative stuff about Trump, and what happened there?

"I'm...a liberal [who hates trans people, works at the Manhattan Institute and spends all day tweeting about how Democrats are bad, the NY Times is leftist propaganda and Joe Rogan and Elon Musk are great]."

The Republican justices are bigots who will continue to abuse their power to harm people they dislike for bigoted reasons as long as they are able to do so. Democrats can stop this if they can take back control of the Senate and find the will to do away with the filibuster. Expand the court.

*thing to happen

This touches on something I’ve been a broken record about: Elon Musk becoming a neo-Nazi was the best think to happen to Mark Zuckerberg because it makes it so much easier to overlook what a repellent worm Zuck is

I don’t know who still looks at political cartoons these days but I hope there are people out there who do because Luckovich has been killing it this year

Sex pest solidarity

Traditional American politics is premised on the notion that sometimes you lose and sometimes you win and you have to deal with that.

But Trumpism is premised on the notion that any result where you don’t win is illegitimate, unlawful, fraud, criminal.

You can’t negotiate with people like that.

Continuing the last point, the opinion section, despite some good writers and op-eds, ultimately is a center-left operation that appears to view its job as poking sticks in its liberal readers' eyes first and critiquing the threat the right poses second, like the Atlantic but more annoying

The other issue is that centrists and conservatives view it as some kind of Democratic Party organ, but its politics coverage is at best "bothsidesy" and at worst outright hostile to the Democratic Party, and we think it's important to keep pointing this out

I think people focus on the NYT specifically because its influence on news generally is greater than ever due to deep cutbacks at so many other outlets over the years, so it affects the news that even people who don't subscribe to it consume, in terms of both what's covered and how it's framed