August J. Pollak

They appear to think “authentic” means “said things I like to hear,” well yes that is the purpose of image consultants, it was like 20% of the entire Gore 2000 campaign budget

I think my favorite moment of Kamala Harris’ authentic instinct to take the right action was when she just put out a book a fucking week ago where she admitted how she didn’t do that

Genuine question to a handful of people in my replies: do you own a dictionary

it should be a tell about what's happening in the media now that most mainstream commentators seem openly frustrated that polling does not blame democrats for the shutdown

A couple making $82k implies two people each making $41k a year, which is $7,000 below the average individual cost of living in the United States. You know what would help that a lot? Not needing to spend that seven grand on health insurance.

I know I’m being That Guy™️ guy here but it’s wild how the Democratic talking point is “we want to keep your healthcare premiums at $500 a month” instead of wanting to make it, you know, zero.

My brother in Christ if you’re a young, pregnant, American citizen who shows up at the hospital you won’t have to worry about paying at all because your party passed a bunch of bills that guarantee hospitals won’t even treat you anymore

It’s considered a “bad thing” in politics at least for Democrats, because Pritzger embodies the Republican talking point of how the party is beholden to elitists (coughJews) and his Chicago politics (coughBlack people).

Also, only Republicans are allowed to be fat.

Yeah, well this is not really a new discussion, half of left social media is pointing out the Democrats destroy themselves by insisting leadership is a hereditary entertainment. They gave a guy a committee ranking membership who died six months later because he was “next in line.”

It doesn’t matter anymore that Pritzker is an untelegenic billionaire, a thing that should make him political poison. Unless he’s the greatest actor of our generation, he appears genuinely serious about the threat to his constituency while Newsome is, again, good at tweeting.

This is ironically, or perhaps hilariously, why Newsome is screwed, because it’s great that he’s doing funny tweets, but by its very nature it’s inauthentic. The real, serious politician Gavin Newsome is vetoing LGBT rights and losing every under 30 voter in America

I get that three years is eons away, but in a Zeitgeist vacuum is there anybody even close to looking like the leader of the Democrats than him, like imagine he does this for two more years and thinking everyone in Iowa then goes “yeah, Buttigieg seems cool”

What truly amazes me most about Pritzker is how long it took a Democrat to realize that if you simply did the right thing and kept doing it authentically, all you need to do is keep doing that and you’re going to become the president

asking people for permission to take their wallets would 'kill' the mugging industry, too

President Trump literally signed the law that says it’s not a choice.

A year or so after they fired me they hired a plucky, 24 year old go getter to be their new editor to promote their deeply held ideals for the furtherment of progressive change in America's youth.

His name was Jesse Singal.

I'm going to stop talking about the Center for American Progress now

I fought like hell to publish an amazing roster of then-babies Matt, @mcfadden.bsky.social, Mikhaela Reid, and @jensorensen.bsky.social and devoted large percentages of my week to convincing editors their comics that week weren't "too partisan to violate our nonprofit status." College kids LOVE that

They also had a student oriented website focused on promoting progressive outreach and group support for colleges. The average viewer age was in the mid-50s. The only thing it did of any lasting cultural and political impact was hiring @mattbors.bsky.social and not paying him enough

They have a 501c4 branch (the non-tax exempt status for entities that can do direct partisan lobbying and activism), its most successful outlet from the website ThinkProgress which at one point was one of the ten largest news blogs on the internet. They shut it down six years ago because reasons

As someone who worked there, the reason CAP isn't trying is because they're not a liberal Heritage Foundation devoted to generational furtherment of liberal ideals. They were a 501c3 dedicated to making Hillary Clinton and possibly her daughter president and they catastrophically failed at it

It's not a high bar but there are a handful of Republican Senators you could ostensibly refer to as "the smarter ones" and Kennedy is among them in realizing that no, these files aren't going to be stonewalled forever and it's going to get worse and worst for the people trying to keep doing that

Republicans literally ordered a bulldozer to rip up a pride-themed crosswalk.

There is no single political talking point more significant that must be repeated, loudly and frequently, than these are truly the biggest pussies on the face of the planet.

It's actually really impressive how much of where we got to right now stems from the top legal and political scholars in our media just declaring "well if that's true then the left is right, and we know they're not, so that isn't true" for like, thirty years

Yeah, lots of quotes that boil down to "Trump said he would do this, but I assumed the Norms Fairy would stop him."

Look at this. Look at these two sneering dipshits. They know exactly what they're doing here and they think it's hilarious.

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Pretending to be stupid is my biggest trigger, so you can understand how I am rapidly going insane watching every person you expect snark about Bari Weiss rising from a short-lived NYT career to this CBS nonsense insinuating that it was her pluck and grit and not marrying a billionaire heiress

It remains incredibly astonishing how much time and energy this administration is devoting to a case that is going to be dismissed in under 30 minutes.

(Taps the sign)

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It’s constitutional to ban abortion but unconstitutional to ban torturing children. No idea why 70% of Americans say they have no faith in the supreme court’s credibility.

We don't, there will be a new (and hopefully better) normal after this, that said, for the rest of our lives we'll have to be aware a non-trivial number of neighbors and fellows voted for actual fascism, and that's always going to be a bummer