Putting aside the hypothetical about which side benefitted more from appeasement, what’s the equivalent here? Give Trump everything he wants and hope that he let’s you still have an honest election in 2026? 2028? Hope that he leaves office after two terms when his biggest projects seem to be adding jets and ballrooms to his taste? Hope that he keeps over and dies? And what are you willing to give up for those hopes? Martial law in Chicago? An NYC mayor who’s more focused on feeling up his secretaries than on addressing the cost of living crisis? Mass deportation of American citizens? Forced and intentional starvation of American citizens? Destruction and corporate capture of our federal institutions? Obliteration of the rule of law? Continued support for genocide in the Middle East and abandonment of our allies in Europe and across the globe? Where’s your Poland and what are you trading Czechoslovakia for?

I think Graham Platner, if you take his word for what is in his past and present political mindsets, would be an example of a right-to-left swing, but not done as a politician. Shaun on YouTube is another one that comes to mind potentially, depending on how old he is for whether that qualifies as an under age 25. In the US at least, we don’t really have a strong left wing to draw in people looking for a change, so most of those conversions are happening less in the public sphere and more in corners of the internet, where it hasn’t been enshittified to ensure even those spaces are dominated by tight wing narratives

This was in May, Jan Schakowsky, the congresswoman for IL-09, announced shw would not run for reelection in 2026. So not really the past few weeks. Am I missing something? https://schakowsky.house.gov/media/press-releases/schakowsky-announces-she-will-not-seek-re-election-2026.

She running for an open seat though? Or is one of her opponents a congresswoman in a neighboring district or a state congresswoman?

Correlation, but not perfect. Largely because most of the Union stayed, so you get states like North Dakota that was part of a Union territory but a red state. That and Appalachia (e.g. West Virginia, Ohio) swung pretty hard from the union cause to the confederates thanks to coal baron propaganda and the erosion of union power in the post Regan era. The confederate states are almost all red though, with the only current exception being Virginia and varying degrees of hope for near future conversions in Georgia, North Carolina, and Texas

Chicago calls its downtown neighborhood “The Loop”, named after the loop of elevated heavy metro rail that runs around the core of said neighborhood. The eponymous Loop handles 45k passengers a day, probably an order of magnitude higher than the Vegas “loop” lol

Yes, but only because the ranked choice voting in the Democratic primary likely gave some voters/organizers/donaters confidence to back a longshot candidate like Mamdani, which eventually snowballed into a plurality win in the first round of the primary, a majority win after ranked choice took effect, and a polling lead in the first past the post general election. Still a success story, I’d say, but not a direct and unquestionable cause/effect chain

Narratives like this support DOGE’s actions. The GS-5 working for your local national park is not your enemy, it’s the multi billionaires that used their influence to kill the child tax credit in 2022 to fund a tax cut for them in 2025 that are the problem here. Ilhan’s bill focuses on government employees because it is a messaging bill in a government shutdown environment and because it keeps the bill simple, the government already has mechanisms for OMB to reimburse government employees for eligible expenses, so this is just directing that infrastructure to add a category to the list of eligible expenses as opposed to creating any new systems or changing the tax code. It’s not even close to a final step, but it helps some workers, and that’s better than the current trend of the government stepping on workers in favor of billionaires

I very much doubt you will find an example of Ilhan attacking Mamdani or childcare support. This is at least the second time she’s tried to pass this bill, the first was during Trump’s first term. A majority of federal workers are not furloughed during a shutdown, although it’s hard to find numbers on how many of those are working with pay vs. without pay. I’m positive she also spoke out when Republicans and Manchin and Sinema killed the childcare tax credits from the build back better bill that reduced child poverty to record lows, she’s pretty consistently one of the good ones.

It’s also worth pointing out that this is as much a messaging tactic as a real bill. There ain’t no way Republicans are passing this bill, but having this and other bills like it on the table makes them put up or shut up if they try to attack Democrats for holding government workers’ livelihoods hostage over the shutdown. Having it focus on government workers increases the strength of that message, even if broader relief would still be necessary if this passes.

Introducing bills like this, and thus establishing a counter narrative of “this is what the Democrats want for the country, as opposed to what you are getting today from the Republicans”, is miles better than the Schumer strategy to date of doing his level best to agree to all of the Republican demands in order to make living under the Trump presidency as unbearable as possible in the hopes that people will vote Democrat for change despite Schumer putting no daylight between Democratic and Republican positions.

If you refuse to answer the questions correctly because acknowledging facts about our system of government would undermine your weak justifications for your fascist behavior, the fact that you actually knew the correct answer deep down doesn’t change your score

And Thom was the only person in the world who voted for Ted Cruz’ amendment to the BBB that would have outlawed state-level AI regulation. And Susan Collins played dumb as bricks to justify not voting for justice in Trump’s impeachment. Schumer is Cheney level heinous (already a high bar). These fuckers are just broken clocks

His skin does not look that healthy recently, plus he’s got the signature AI stare into the irrelevant distance despite clearly presenting something to the camera. His suit is a little too shiny too. No dead giveaways, but if this was a photo shop job, I’d bet that GenAI was one of the tools used in that manipulation toolbox

I think I just found the one ethical application of LLM AI

Italy beefing with Afghanistan in 2018, smh even America had moved on

Doesn’t mean it isn’t AI-generated

Not really, he wasn’t. The myth of Nazi/fascist competence comes from a combination of propaganda and “right time, right place” in terms of when they took the reins of the German economy. A kind of funny example that isn’t Nazis, but their contemporary fascists, Mussolini’s Italian regime damaged the on-time performance of trains in Italy, but the regime kept saying the trains were running on time to the point where it’s become a whole saying about excusing fascism because of its competence/results (“at least the trains run on time”).

To be clear for any dummies like me who just woke up and are reading this, this comment is comparing DOGE to the early days of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, not comparing Greg’s bravery to the early days of Social Security

Kamala still sends me emails asking for money, I think for the DNC. That is the problem with corporate Democrats, they think resistance looks like fundraising

There was a lawsuit from the AFGE (federal employees union) I think that they had to drop because it relied on the assumption that DOGE was a federal agency. When it was revealed that DOGE was just a renaming of the US Digital Service, that invalidated the premise of the lawsuit. Idk how the USDS had money lying around in its budget for a bunch of new and unqualified GS-15s to just be added to the payroll like government billets aren’t painstakingly difficult to establish, but that is another question, I suppose

Fair, I just think jumping to the conclusion that those folks would have come out to vote for Biden is a stretch when you look at how well his campaign was going. Worth remembering that Harris way outperformed Biden in terms of approval rating, which is a very imperfect metric, but the best one we have for guessing if folks would have come out to vote for Biden but stay home for Harris. In 2020, Biden was a challenger to an incumbent who was botching Covid from both a health and economy perspective. In 2024, he was an incumbent struggling to get out of the shadow of the global post-covid recession and some very unpopular decisions in foreign policy regarding the Middle East. Assuming he would have received 2020 levels of votes is not congruent with those facts