Paul Waldman

"Voters want us to be bipartisan!"

"Really? Has any election ever demonstrated that to be true? Ever?"

"Well, no. But that's what they say in the focus groups!"

"But if literally every election proves that to be false..."

"THE FOCUS GROUPS!"

The NFL booked the second biggest pop star in the world for the Super Bowl halftime show, and the right wing is desperately trying to convince people that they should be mad about it.

Also, she ends with "We'll fix it." By...making singing in Spanish illegal? Nuking Puerto Rico? What?

Counting the one taking this video I count no fewer than FOUR videographers accompanying her on this "inspection" but I can't imagine Kristi Noem would ever stage something like this solely for the purpose of creating social media content

America 2025:

The ideal man is a ruthless killing machine with a Jesus tattoo and rippling pectorals.

The ideal woman is a teen-coded AI heroine who is canonically a virgin.

bsky.app/profile/laur...

Who could have predicted that when you ally yourself with fascists who want to subjugate universities, use the law to punish critics of the regime, and deport people based on their ethnicity, it is not in fact Good For The Jews, how could we ever have known?

Republicans are blanketing the airwaves in Virginia with loathsome trans panic advertising directed at Dem governor candidate Abigail Spanberger. I assume that when she wins the election, which she's all but certain to do, all the pundits will say this proves it's a losing strategy.

Right? Right?

Trump Is Not Very Good At This He has a talent for saying the worst thing at the worst time.

It's nothing like a guarantee of victory for Democrats, but don't forget that Trump will always screw things up.

paulwaldman.substack.com/p/trump-is-n...

Here we have the Treasury secretary saying explicitly that economic policy is being made based on who voted for Trump. So now all of us will be paying for a farm bailout caused by Trump's idiotic trade war. Congrats, America!

I wrote about this here: www.publicnotice.co/p/trump-farm...

Trump targets states that voted for Harris in shutdown fight The Office of Management and Budget is withholding billions in energy and infrastructure money in more than a dozen states that voted against Trump.

Can you even imagine the utter nuclear freakout that both Republicans and the news media would have erupted in if Joe Biden had used a shutdown to punish red states?

www.politico.com/news/2025/10...

Read about it in Hegseth's new book, "The Polygraphs Will Continue Until Morale Improves: Leadership Secrets of America's Eleventh-Best Weekend Morning Show Co-Host"

"Let's talk about health care instead" isn't the answer to every political question, but this is about to happen to millions of people and they are going to be justifiably pissed off.

So in order to "create Grokipedia" I assume Musk will have his AI trashbot scrape Wikipedia itself, apply a "make this racist and sexist and all-around hateful" filter, and then serve it back to users. Should be really useful!

Kind of incredible just how sweeping and comprehensive the Trump administration's attack on their rural supporters has been. Not even malign neglect, just an outright assault.

One for the "AI is not sentient you idiot" files

The Right-Wing Infosphere: You're Soaking In It Their machine is so effective that even liberals don't realize it's warping their views.

I wish I could find the post, but someone on here recently pointed out that the elite pundit addiction to Twitter is distorting their worldview even further.

They really think America is far more right-wing than it is, which requires ignoring actual data.

paulwaldman.substack.com/p/the-right-...

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

Get ready for the next big bailout Trump's tariffs are wrecking the agribusiness economy — again.

"It isn’t like our farmers aren’t producing enough crops and need help in order to get production going again. The US produces a huge amount of food, more than we need here at home. But farmers need to have somewhere to sell it." — @paulwaldman.bsky.social

The Right-Wing Infosphere: You're Soaking In It Their machine is so effective that even liberals don't realize it's warping their views.

Ever wonder why even liberals still bring up Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” comment nine years later, and act like only Democrats have an obligation to be nice to their opponents? It’s not an accident.

paulwaldman.substack.com/p/the-right-...

Absolutely, but it's often vestigial. Go around coal country and you'll drive down Coal Street and cheer on the Local High School Miners, even if the mines are all gone. So yes, it's part of folks' identity, but it's not doing them much good anymore.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, coal mining represents 1/60th as much of US work force as it did at its peak, 100 years ago.

(In 1923, ~800,000 Americans were coal miners. Now ~40,000 are. US workforce 3x as large now as it was then.)

Obeisance to coal as fact-free as hostility to vaxx.

1. More Americans work at the Cheesecake Factory than in the entire coal industry, and that won't change. It's because of automation, not snooty libs.

2. Coal energy is now more expensive than wind and solar.

3. So this means: higher energy prices, more pollution, no jobs benefit. Genius!

Schumer still has in his head an imaginary swing voter who cares deeply about whether the parties are trying to be bipartisan and will give them credit and votes for doing so.

THIS VOTER DOES NOT EXIST

Clinton: Many of the people considering voting for Trump are decent people hoping for their lives to get better, and we should try to persuade them
Pundits: Hillary Clinton lost because she said that literally no potential Trump voters were persuadable and so she insulted all of them instead

Klein, like many powerful pundits, is living inside an alternate reality that's been created through their phone and television screens. He's grown more powerful inside that alternate reality by working to uphold the pillars of the anti-reality like "hillary clinton lost because she insulted voters"

This is a demonstration of how powerful the right wing misinformation machine is. They take a phrase or a word some Democrat said, attach the worst possible interpretation to it, and repeat their view of it THOUSANDS of times until even liberals remember it the way conservatives want them to.

Maybe...Satan?

You can have my idiosyncratic grammar pet peeves when you pry them from my cold dead hands

That's my other grammar pet peeve!

Generally good message, but points off for the use of the grammatically incorrect "they could care less." It's COULDN'T care less, Congressman.

No one objects to this anymore, I know. But when the whole world is wrong and you're right, it's important to tell them so!

This new wave of edgelord shooters is a beast of Trump administration's own making.
www.garbageday.email/p/the-rise-o...