ExFed

Or the courts will find some way to single out CA’s map; like the fact that they even had a public referendum makes it illegal … Maybe that’s a bit cynical, but that’s where I’m at these days.

Boosting morale and rallying people around common values is absolutely capital-L leadership. A good leader strives towards greatness. A poor leader merely avoids ruin (only to run into it anyways).

If you want to skip the editorial fluff and just skip to Paul Krugman’s post: https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/too-cruel-too-soon

Because we voted a criminal into office and let him take control like a king. Laws, like the Hatch Act, are optional.

The Rs are using every resource they have right now to make the public think this shutdown is the Dems fault

illegally, to boot. MAGA and the GOP are massively overplaying their hand. The only way we get out of this ahead is by forcing them to apply all that pain they promised the American people.

I agree, but also somewhat disagree: people are voting with their dollars, and (in this one case) they seem to value the Constitution.

The / character isn’t a part of the base64 encoding. In fact, only one part of the URL looks like base64. No plain base64 tool (whether via CLI, self-hosted, or otherwise) will be able to decode an entire URL like that. You’ll first need to parse the URL to isolate the base64 part. This is literally solved with a single line of bash:

echo "https://link.sfchronicle.com/external/41488169.38548/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaG90ZG9nYmlsbHMuY29tL2hhbWJ1cmdlci1tb2xkcy9idXJnZXItZG9nLW1vbGQ_c2lkPTY4MTNkMTljYzM0ZWJjZTE4NDA1ZGVjYSZzcz1QJnN0X3JpZD1udWxsJnV0bV9zb3VyY2U9bmV3c2xldHRlciZ1dG1fbWVkaXVtPWVtYWlsJnV0bV90ZXJtPWJyaWVmaW5nJnV0bV9jYW1wYWlnbj1zZmNfYml0ZWN1cmlvdXM/6813d19cc34ebce18405decaB7ef84e41" | cut -d/ -f6 | base64 -d

See TIO for example.

edit: add TIO link

At this point, if someone says “don’t vote because everyone sucks” I’m assuming they’re secretly rooting for authoritarianism. Two things can be true at the same time: we can vote for someone who doesn’t pass some bullshit purity test while also continuing to work towards a better society for all.

It’s been a century since the Spanish Flu, yet we still vaccinate for it. We will never “move on” from COVID any more than we did for the Flu.

If you want to challenge Big Pharma, there are better ways than spouting bullshit.

… Biden did more for blue collar jobs in the States than anyone since Lyndon Johnson.

For fear of reminiscing “the good old days” … Yes, I did like a lot of his policies, especially regarding linking (ever-so-slightly progressive) climate policy with blue collar jobs. The theory was that red states would see enough of the benefits (or the hope of benefits) to soften on the Left. That clearly didn’t work out in the short-run. The Biden administration’s biggest weakness is Trump’s unfortunate strength: capturing media attention and driving a narrative, regardless of truth (i.e. bullshitting).

Oh, I’m not saying anything about Newsom, just trying to dispel some sadly common misinformation about NAFTA. I’ve yet to form a solid opinion of the guy, but I’m not without cynical biases, so he’s got an uphill battle to win in my mind.

Sure. But let’s set the record straight: blue collar jobs in the States didn’t suffer because “Democrat bad and hate workers!” That’s a myth perpetuated by politicians who would manipulate us for their own gain, Republican and Democrat alike.

In meantime we gotta figure out what to do with a ball of shit filled with rat poison.

The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing people he didn’t exist. The greatest trick the Republican party pulled was convincing people that its most unpopular ideas are entirely Democrats’ fault.

NAFTA was championed by, majority supported, and voted in by mostly Republicans. It was ultimately bipartisan, but Democrats were significantly more opposed to it than Republicans (of Republican Congress members, only 10 in the Senate and 43 in the House voted against it; of Democrats, 28 in the Senate and 156 in the House voted against it).

This isn’t to say that NAFTA is objectively bad policy; most economists argue that it ultimately benefited the whole country. However it did expose US manufacturing to significant competition, reduced bargaining power for manufacturing workers, and shocked communities which were solely reliant on the sector to support them. Larger cities were mostly unaffected due to their more diverse economies, and in many cases thrived off increased trade and lower prices for goods. As a reminder, urbanites trend Democrat, rural folk trend Republican.

The trope that urban liberals successfully screwed over rural conservatives just isn’t true. Instead it seems that, at screwing themselves over, urban liberals failed and rural conservatives succeeded.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1031/vote_103_1_00395.htm https://clerk.house.gov/Votes/1993575

Considering that I made a comment pointing out the futility of trying to make good-faith arguments within this environment and a mod removed it, I think this is a relevant quotation. Thanks!

Yeah, get this ML crap outta here.

Removed by mod

Let’s just admit the answer to the question “does he associate with people who can do math?” is a resounding “no.”

We’ll need ranked choice (or some other voting scheme other than First Past The Post). Otherwise it’ll just end up the same as it always has.

How Republicans feel about the economy changes depending on who the President is rather than the actual performance of the economy.

Although it seems they’re particularly susceptible to it, this phenomenon isn’t entirely constrained to Republicans. It’s classic groupthink. Any idea or emotion that reenforces the group is good, and idea or emotion that threatens the group is bad.

If you’re looking for news sources, AP and Reuters are a starting place but you should be reading as many different sources as you can. I hate to encourage the use of Google but news.google.com can be a useful resource for quickly finding a bunch of different sources covering the same topic.

Fully agree on AP and Reuters. They’ve got good journalists. As for aggregators, Google News is good, but I’ve found Ground News is better, and it’s not run by a monopoly, so there’s that.

[citation needed]

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lincoln-masters-court-congress/