Jonathon M. Floyd

At the rate it's going, the Republican Party's current leadership is on pace to make itself completely electorally nonviable by 2026. The GOP is going to have to completely clean house to survive. I don't know where we go from here, but it's not into whatever MAGA imagines as a glorious future.

That doesn't mean they're all going to become Democrats--there absolutely is still, unfortunately, a electorally meaningful constituency for racism, nativism, and Christian nationalism--but it could very well depress turnout and make a huge difference in swingy districts.

There is no electorally meaningful voting base that will be happy with the destruction of our vaccination scheme, or selling Ukraine to Russia, or pardoning corrupt politicians, or continuing to cover up the Epstein files. All of those things will hurt the current GOP *with its own base*.

Something to keep in mind when thinking about 2026 and beyond is that there really is just a minuscule constituency for the most extreme and broadly harmful stuff this administration is doing. Even among people who still willingly identify as Republicans, there aren't that many antivaxxers!

They're not affiliated with us, they're the Tim Ballard clowns and half of them have been or will be excommunicated.

I believe it's called "Dune"

ME: they shouldn't be able to say 'your order has shipped' when they've just created a label. That's not shipped.
ISAAC CHOTINER: so, you've never claimed to have a task underway when you've merely opened the file?
ME: that's not-
CHOTINER: in this Teams message to your boss, you said-

I delight in telling “well-meaning” Christians who ask me about my family’s conversion story that my South Indian relatives have been Christian longer than my European relatives.

Right absolutely, they're trashing the country and hurting our allies, but all that's doing is wrecking their future election chances. For their "plan" (such as it was) to work, they would have needed to seize enough power to steal the 2026 midterms, and there's no shot of that happening.

A still from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Gul Dukat is sitting in Sisko's chair, drinking kanar and acting like he owns the place. (Dukat is a Cardassian, a kind of grey alien with bony ridges on their face and neck.) Caption: "... is s there a single statue of me on Bajor?"

The most realistic scene in DS9 is when Gul Dukat whined about how the Bajorans never erected a statue in his honor. A prophetic text.

Trump's dementia has grown so extreme that a select group of advisors are now running the country without his input. To find who those advisors are and what their plans are, buy my new book, which will appear in March 2029.

Nobody in Trump's camp seriously expected to beat Harris--his inner circle this time around is filled with people who have the political instincts of sea cucumbers. They bet the house on authoritarian power consolidation while having no practical ability to make it happen.

It really is right and proper that the Robot Apocalypse be not an uncontrolled super-AI, but a machine that just reflects our own narcissistic personality flaws back at us until we break.

Praying for a generational run by Kosovo to steal the last spot

We need to have a serious discussion about how willing FIFA has been to bribe, cheat, and actively encourage corrupt behavior. It's been dirty for decades and it's getting worse, not better.

"We've moved on from that"

It was a federal crime! You don't move on from that!

So, this is obviously partisan garbage, but I can't help but feel like this will come back to haunt the GOP in a major way. As has already been said, gerrymandering your entire state into 2024 Trump+10 districts just in time for the biggest blue wave in decades might not be the best idea.

You know what? Sure.

My sizzling take is that college basketball is far superior to college football for the simple reason that its method of deciding a champion isn't at the mercy of a collection of unqualified corporate-motivated fat cats who believe in Notre Dame's eternal birthright to be in the playoff every year.

Really, the only way to genuinely fix this is to scrap FPI, implement impartial NET/ELO rankings for CFB, evaluate schedules based on a basketball-style quad system, and force the playoff committee to use blind resume comparisons. Then you don't really need any of the other record-based rules.

I mean, I think there should be a hard-and-fast rule that no three-loss team is allowed to make the playoff period and that no two-loss team can make it unless every one-loss P4 team is already in.

BYU did this exact thing back in 2020--they added the Coastal Carolina game on like four days' notice to boost their resume. It backfired spectacularly.

let’s say you could establish that a pardon was obtained by bribery. I think this would support an argument that the pardon is legally void

This guy will be a Republican within a year if he gets elected. He's a white working-class cosplayer with Nazi tattoos for crying out loud. He's literally the prototypical northern Trump voter.

At least a top-5 priority for the next administration has to be aggressively reforming the pardon power. It really shouldn't exist at all in this day and age--or should only be available for clemency in extreme situations, like the death penalty--but that would take a constitutional amendment.

He could lose them anyway if it's proven that Hegseth did give that order--or even if he didn't but continues defending Bradley and his other subordinates. But for now, he's trying to stave that off by distancing himself from the order and giving Republicans a veneer of plausible deniability.

This may actually be somewhat telling--Trump recognizes that his political capital is dwindling and that he runs the very real risk of publicly losing a lot of defense-oriented Republicans in Congress if he openly embraces such blatant, clear-cut war murders.

There's an alternate timeline where Galtieri was hanged at the Tower of London and I can't help thinking I might like living in that one more.

Falklands Discourse™️ is always fun.

Michelle Obama on a beach in Hawaii somewhere