Dear Canada, thank you!
Is it too much to hope that the orange monster might actually be the one to stop the authoritarian trend of late – because he’s so ridiculously over the top and apparently dangerous?
Totally open thread.
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WaterGirl
Pete downunder posted a superb primer for Australian political parties and elections. I plan to post his write-up in a thread as soon as I can figure out what would be a good time of day for him.
Baud
Like Jesus, the US died so that others maybe saved.
thruppence
It is often reported that this delusional clown has the lowest poll numbers at this point in his term than any President in 70 or 80 years. My God, who could have been worse than Trump?
prostratedragon
Here’s a trend:
To which commenters added
raven
@thruppence: lbj
RevRick
@thruppence: The previous low was also Trump, the first time around. The only historical contenders for this dubious distinction might have been John Quincy Adams or Rutherford B. Hayes.
Baud
@raven:
He was riding high early in his term, though.
Baud
@thruppence:
That might be the limit of historical polling data.
RevRick
@raven: At this point LBJ was enjoying sky-high approval.
RandomMonster
Amazon has already caved on listing tariff costs on products. Bezos the Ball-Less strikes again.
thruppence
@raven: But at least LBJ did some positive things, even as Vietnam destroyed his presidency. I don’t think Trump will be remembered as well.
RevRick
@Baud: Unlike Jesus, the death of our Republic is not going to give rise to new life anytime soon.
Jeffg166
https://petebuttigieg.substack.com/p/are-you-better-off-than-you-were
Rightwinger fantasies have a way of blowing up in their faces. They never learn.
Eolirin
@prostratedragon: Our DNI is a Russian asset.
Chief Oshkosh
Remember Reagan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queens and young bucks eating steak? I want every Trump-voting farmer who accepts the coming bail-outs (and they are coming and they will be accepted) to be righteously shamed by the public and the press (not like the actual needy that Reagan and every Rethugligan since has denigrated). Since there won’t be a market for anything they grow, they won’t be growing anything. I want them hounded by reporters asking: “Hey, what did you do to earn everybody else’s tax dollars?”
West of the Rockies
@Baud:
Certainly it’s the limit of modern semi-reliable polling. What was polling like during JQ Adams’ time? A guy on a horse going from farm to farm and another in a pub querying drunks?
Baud
@West of the Rockies:
We need to bring that back.
Lord Fartdaddy (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
I don’t know about anybody else, but I think I’ve had about enough of this winning. I’ll happily go back to the kind of losing we did under Biden and Obama.
Doc Sardonic
Seems that Mango Mussolini is below Harry Truman’s second term ratings which averaged in the 30’s from 1949-53. The ratings averaged out to 36.5, his low water mark was 32.
WTFGhost
I was just thinking.
We need lefty bloggers who are willing to go there, say “come the eff on(they might even use the actual f-word!)! Ukraine was knocking Russia around like a dog with a ragdoll, when we provided them with full support. Now, we don’t get to have that pleasure, because Trump is Putin’s little bitch, going YipYipYip while trying to hump Putin’s crotch, which, let’s face it, is disgusting.
“We should be providing Ukraine with all the weapons they need, and permission to end this war by kicking ass, and taking names, like we expect American allies to do! But NOoooOOOO! Trump is Putin’s *bitch*.”
I know, “bitch” is mostly about violence and sex as a metaphor for dominance, and it’s really problematic, and all, but, lefties are far too polite on tone, trying to slap a face, when they should be… curb stomping… uh… sensitive… let’s just stop.
Because curb stomping reproductive organs is also violent/dominant and, also might be frowned upon.
Um. I’m not very good at this sort of thing, because you see that line? To you it looks nice and wide, most of the time, sometimes narrower, sometimes wider, don’t cross the line? Yeah, for me, it’s this ridiculous, space filling squiggle, so, just putting my foot down means I’m crossing the line all sorts of ways.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: LOL — agree! It would be a suitable occupation for me. All I need is a horse and an expense account.
prostratedragon
@RevRick: Re-elected in a historic landslide in 1964. Began having trouble in the South with multiple civil rights acts in ’64 and ’65. The Vietnam erosion probably didn’t gather steam until 1967, air.
prostratedragon
@Eolirin: Oh, yes! If I had a bluesky account I’d probably add that, plus the lawless attorney general.
Matt McIrvin
@thruppence: The one he’s competing with is himself in his first term.
Note, that time, his poll numbers recovered a bit when he got a big tax cut passed and the economy hadn’t crashed.
WTFGhost
@Chief Oshkosh: I’ve heard that lots of farmers have already been screwed by deals they had, “you pay up front for this water conservation system to help mitigate climate change; the US pays you the money over time” and wow, Trump just cancelled all that “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
I don’t know how many of them are finding it hard to sell their products, but I’ve heard pork and soybean farmers are seeing effects from China’s retaliation.
Trollhattan
Anybody having gaps in their mail service? Rare for us to get nothing but as of yesterday the last delivery was Friday.
Trollhattan
@WTFGhost:
IIRC Brazil stepped up bigly in soy production during Trump 1.0 and we lost a chunk of that market permanently. You’d think they would learn, but nooooo.
Suspect it’s one reason Grassley feels compelled to push back on Trump now.
Matt McIrvin
@West of the Rockies: People tried taking really unsystematic straw polls as early as the 1820s, but political polling as we know it today began with Gallup in the 1936 election cycle, and regular approval tracking polls seem to have started during the Truman years
https://www.history.com/articles/presidential-polls-start-gallup
Captain C
@thruppence: That might be when they started those polls. Otherwise, I would guess Hoover, but the crash wasn’t until 7 or so months after his inauguration, so possibly not even him.
sab
@Trollhattan: We are having mail gaps. Ohio here.
Matt McIrvin
@thruppence: …Anyway, *lots* of Presidents have had lower public approval than Trump has now, just not at this point in their term in office:
https://news.gallup.com/interactives/507569/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx
Truman, LBJ, Nixon, Carter and both Bushes were all way in the doghouse by the end. The Bushes both show a truly spectacular *range*–looks like George H. W.’s reputation recovered a bit in the lame-duck period after he lost reelection.
LBJ was actually a bit more popular than you might think given, my God, everything that was going on. There was maybe some residual goodwill…
RICH GARDNER
Okay, got my photoessay out about last week’s 50501 demonstration! !
https://pastphotoessays.blog/2025/04/29/50501-protest/
cmorenc
@thruppence:
James Buchanan, our 15th Presideng 1857-1861 (from Pennsylvania) notoriously bungled handling tensions betwen southern slave states and northern non-slave states in a manner that especially angered everyone in the North, and failed to prepare the Northern military for the obvious forthcoming civil war. To be fair, it would have taken a political genius and a gigaton of luck for anyone as President to navigate the escalating tensions between slave vs free states in the latter 1850s, but Buchanan was particularly inept for the times.
Matt McIrvin
(The thing you notice looking at that long-term historical data is that ever since Obama got in, the range of possible Presidential approval seems like it’s contracted: everyone just seems to revert to the mean of hard partisan polarization, with their party loving them and everyone else hating them, after a possible short honeymoon. That’s even true with Trump–he’s had this hard approval floor from Republicans staying loyal, and I wonder if it’s even possible to break that.)
JustRuss
Apparently? I think the word you’re looking for is “obviously”.
catclub
@RevRick:
Now, 9 months after inauguration Hoover was probably not looking that great.
LBJ might have BEEN terrible, but I bet his poll numbers in early 1964 were pretty good.
On the other other hand, polling has become ubiquitous in only the last 20 years or so.
catclub
Trump? learn?
We will find out how little they learn when there is another pandemic style crisis – measles gone wild!
jonas
@RandomMonster: I don’t think Bezos has much to do with Amazon’s day-to-day operations any longer — this is on whoever the CEO and head of e-commerce are now. But it’s possible Bezos can still pull strings if he wants, I guess. Bunch of jello-spined cowards.
Also, can you imaging the media shitshow if some retailer wanted to put an “inflation surcharge” on their website or menu or whatever a couple of years ago and the Biden administration had gone all ballistic about it and forced them to take it down? One, the company would have told the government to get bent and done it anyway, and two, WH correspondents would have been falling overthemselves for two weeks straight hounding the WH press secretary about it.
Jackie
@thruppence:
Trump version 1?
Matt McIrvin
Bill Clinton’s least popular times in office were actually early in his first term, when stuff like the fight over “Hillarycare” and the fight over gays in the military were going on and the economy was still in recession, and he may be one of the contenders even though he became quite a popular President later.
Reagan had a crushing recession during his first term that for a time made him quite unpopular, but at this point it hadn’t happened yet.
Nelle
@Trollhattan: About a year ago, no mail delivered to us for two or three weeks. I didn’t want to complain since all they deliver, when it comes, are ads and bills. Still, it was odd.
prostratedragon
Wise words from a Dutch giant.
catclub
My memory is that GWBush bottomed at about 23% approval. And at the same time Cheney was at 11%
Bush had just told Cheney to fuck off on bombing Iran.
We did not know it at the time.
jonas
Hoover’s first nine months in office preceded the 29 Wall Street crash, so his poll numbers — if there were any then — were probably pretty good.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Baud: do we rise again or are we in “once there was a spot that was known as” the United States timeline now?
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: And then Hoover’s administration continued through the first 3 years of the Great Depression with no sign that he was doing much of importance to address it, which must have been agonizing.
It’s kind of amazing to me, actually, that FDR got as much goodwill as he did considering that he didn’t actually “fix it”, just gave the people means to survive as the Depression dragged on (and there was even a recession in the late 1930s when he tried cutting spending). People seemed to extend him more patience than they would today. I wonder if he’d have survived anything like today’s political media environment.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@thruppence: President Buchanan was a miserable president. Worse? I will leave that to the historians.
Betty Cracker
@Trollhattan: Same.
Butch
@Trollhattan: We routinely go days without receiving any mail. It seems like it’s a fairly recent development.
Soprano2
So I’m starting to see pictures of the storm damage. Lots of big trees down. Right now our building is running on generator power. My power at home is on because I was able to view hubby through the Blink camera. I hope that means no damage at our house. There is disagreement about whether we had a big wall cloud or a tornado, I saw a video that certainly looked like a tornado right where my nail salon is!! My manager lives about 1/4 mile from there. He said going to the bar there was power out and trees down everywhere, but our building is OK. Thank goodness
ETA – I just checked the city utilities outage map. Holy cow, outages everywhere!
Matt McIrvin
@HopefullyNotcassandra: There is no way the United States is ever going to return to being the hyperpower titan that we were after World War II, or just after the collapse of the USSR.
But there are worse fates than not being king of the world. There’s the possibility of the US (or whatever successor state(s)) becoming a more decent society. The question is just whether our egos can stand being just that.
The United Kingdom eventually got its shit together and had a pretty good thing going as a part of modern Europe, then stabbed itself in the eye because too many of them could not emotionally take the idea that they’d given up on Empire.
sab
I bought powdered milk yesterday. I am lactose intolerant so I don’t much like milk. My husband lives on it, but I don’t know if he will like the reconstituted powdered.
19th century a major cause of death was bad milk. Not spoiled milk, but infected milk. Cows with TB. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of milk disease, probably the cow ate something she (the cow) shouldn’t have.
I read somewhere that a third of all early deaths of American adults were from TB. My grandmother’s mother died at age 30 from TB. Grandma was a baby. Her sister was a toddler.
Cutting back milk inspectors and other agriculture inspections seems like such a good idea. Thank you DOGE muskrat teens for finding such a good way to fund your six figure salaries.
rivers
@Matt McIrvin: These are the bills he passed in 1968 – (Medicare and Voting Rights and scores of others were earlier)
Fair Housing
Indian Bill of Rights
Safe Streets
Wholesome Poultry
Food for Peace
Commodity Exchange Rules
U.S. Grain Standards
School Breakfasts
Bank Protection
Defense Production
Corporate Takeovers
Export Program
Gold Cover Removal
Truth-in-Lending
Aircraft Noise Abatement
Auto Insurance Study
New Narcotics Bureau
Gas Pipeline Safety
Fire Safety
Sea Grant Colleges
D.C. School Board
Tax Surcharge
Better Housing
International Monetary Reform
International Grains Treaty
Oil Revenues for Recreation
Virgin Islands Elections
San Rafael Wilderness
San Gabriel Wilderness
Fair Federal Juries
Candidate Protection
Juvenile Delinquency Prevention
Guaranteed Student Loans
D.C. Visitors Center
FHA-VA Interest Rate Program
Health Manpower
Eisenhower College
Gun Controls
Aid-to-Handicapped Children
Redwoods Park
Flaming Gorge Recreation Area
Biscayne Park
Heart, Cancer, and Stroke Programs
Hazardous Radiation Protection
Colorado River Reclamation
Scenic Rivers
Scenic Trails
National Water Commission
Federal Magistrates
Vocational Education
Veterans Pension Increases
North Cascades Park
International Coffee Agreement
Intergovernmental Manpower
Dangerous Drugs Control
Military Justice Code
Vietnam was of course the fatal mistake – and fatal for so many. But. it would be a shame to ignore the myriad ways in which he made life better for Americans – ways which are being unmade even as we write.
Bupalos
I’d say that is indeed a vain hope. I think the deepest reason for the global authoritarian drift is democracies finding the simply don’t have the governing capacity to meet some very big challenges. As long as we’re unable to reduce inequality or carbon emissions or the destabilizations of new technologies, we’re going to be limited to mostly fighting rearguard actions in a general retreat. With more and better Trumps likely on the way.
It’s great that Canada hates Trump, everyone should. But that doesn’t necessarily translate into a shot in the arm for democracy.
Matt
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Ten years from now, we’re either not going to have a Republican Party or we’re not going to have anything resembling democracy.
prostratedragon
Song for today, suggested by Rachel Maddow:
Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, “100 Days, 100 Nights”
catclub
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
 
I was just watching a Youtube video on the Yellowstone supervolcano… and others.
Ned F
@Matt McIrvin:
That would be the time social media began to take off.
Matt McIrvin
@rivers: Without his perseverance on Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson absolutely would have been the greatest progressive President in American history, surpassing FDR.
Matt McIrvin
@Ned F: that would be the time we elected a black guy.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Texas seems to have a warmongering culture despite all the good things about Texas.
LBJ persevered on a war he didn’t believe in because he knew the voters he knew demanded it.
Pete Downunder
@WaterGirl: Thank you. I’m up now (4:20 am) sad to say. Happy to take questions. I did not try to explain how our Senate elections work because it’s bizarre and I’m not sure I fully understand it myself sometimes.
DanB
@thruppence: Polling began 80 years ago so the accurate statement would be “the lowest number ever polled by any president”.
David Collier-Brown
A last update on the numbers:
Mr Carney has a “minority government”, but that dosen’t mean what it sounds like. He doesn’t need to do anything special to govern. He might invite the NDP or the Greens to negotiate alliances with him, and he might well do so, but unless he does something obviously evil to the BQ and NDP, the Conservatives can’t oust him.
The liberals have 168 seats. To throw them out, the Conservatives would have to band together with two other parties to get 169 votes. That’s for a motion of “no confidence”, polite Canadian for “we don’t trust you, please <EXPLETIVE> die”).
The Bloc Quebecois just might vote with the Conservatives (probability less than .01 (:-)) but that only gets them 167 votes, one too few.
That mean they would need the NDP to add it’s 7 votes to force the Liberals out. How probable is that? Exactly zero. The NDP is our leftmost party, and cordially detests the Conservatives, who are being led by officers from our rightmost party.
Indeed the Conservative leader, Mr Polievre (pronounced “paul yev”, all one word), has lost his seat, which effectively means that he has been fired by the voters in his riding. He now needs to find another job.
Similarly Jagmeet Singh, leader of the NDP, has lost his seat and resigned. I’m hoping he’s replaced by Charlie Angus, https://charlieangus.substack.com/
HopefullyNotcassandra
@raven: Lyndon Johnson gave us Medicare, the civil rights act and voting rights act. President Johnson, who began life as a public school teacher in rural poor Texas, strengthened our schools and made sure every child, no matter how poor their parents, had a decent school with adequate funding.
Vietnam was a both sides nightmare if there ever was one. The bombings of Laos and Cambodia were solely a Nixon war crime. President Johnson listened to those who protested against him, and did not seek reelection. No doubt, the war in Vietnam is President Johnson’s responsibility; yet, surely his other enormous achievements extricate him from being found wanting in comparison with this president whose policies may actually destroy this country?
Note: This president is actively trying to destroy President Lyndon Johnson’s legacy by claiming the civil rights act must be used to help incompetent white men lord in absurdity over all others. When this president says DEI, he means LBJ’s civil rights act.
One last thought, Lady Bird Johnson beautified our highways, too. Every time I drive a federal road and see loveliness springing forth along the way, I remember Lady Bird. It seems such a small thing, flowers blooming and trees shading. Yet, that loveliness makes everything better. Don’t you think? Conversely, if Melania Trump has any legacy, my guess would be it is “I don’t care. Do you?”
Matt McIrvin
@David Collier-Brown: Through the night I was looking at the Liberal + NDP number to see if that ever dropped below a majority. There were times when it seemed in danger.
prostratedragon
@HopefullyNotcassandra: And paving the White House rose garden.
Bazza
@David Collier-Brown: The NDP have to have a leadership race and also figure out whether and how they can continue to exist in the current political environment. They’ll be voting with the Liberals for just that reason for most of the year, I would guess.
The Conservatives are in basically open warfare between the Ford and Pollievre wings of the party, there was some high school level s**t-talking on the CBC last night. My guess is that the most likely cause of an election before 2026 would actually be the Liberals deciding that the Con civil war + NDP paralysis opens up a better shot at an actual majority mandate. I am not super confident it’ll happen, just because Carney is a serious guy. Trudeau would have been more likely to pull the trigger on that kind of thing. But who knows in this upside down world we now live in.
Charlie Angus is done being an MP and god love him, he did his time in the salt mines. If I was writing NDP fanfiction I’d have their sudden resurgence come with Wab Kinew stepping up to the plate. That would be a thing to see.
WTFGhost
@RandomMonster: First, Bezos doesn’t run Amazon.
Second, it was only Amazon Haul considering showing tariffs, because that would make their “OMG CHEAP $5 goodie” into an “OMG that’s $12.50 with a 150% tariff”
(Amazon Haul seems like a Temu-like thing, where you see something that’s so cheap, you buy it, even though you know it’s junk. Then you never throw it out, because that would be like admitting Having Been Wrong, which means Being Defeated. Soon, yes, SOON, you Start Unconsciously capiTalizing LeTTers whiCH… WHY DIDN’T SOMEONE TELL ME?
Dad blasted threw out cheap crap from Haul, which was gum, which tasted like ass, which has multiple jokes made possible thereby.)
Thirdly, Bezos doesn’t run Amazon. Really. Hasn’t for years. Jassy. Andy Jassy. Used to run Amazon Web Services, the reason Amazon is probably Skynet.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@RevRick: John Quincy Adams?
I disagree. John Quincy Adams set the stage for our modern financial system.
Moreover, in 1841, John Quincy Adams said this (albeit not as President) to the Dred Scott Supreme Court in the Amistad case
He reminded the justices that this was the behavior of a king, and that when George Ill unjustly sent men overseas, “that was one of the most odious of those acts of tyranny which occasioned the American revolution.
Does that not sound familiar? A few people suffering in a prison in El Salvador can relate, sadly. John Quincy Adams won that case.
I still think this president’s competition for worst ever is only President Buchanan, who wanted the Amistad survivors enslaved and sought vigorously to make it so, among other great and irretrievable moral deficiencies and cowardices of character.
Old Man Shadow
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Multiple nation-states constantly at war or bickering and threatening one another with war.
Or maybe a giant insular failed state like North Korea but with white Jesus.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@RandomMonster: not just caving
Amazon is claiming it was never so.
sab
@Butch: Where are you? ( state or region)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Matt McIrvin: IIRC, and lived through it, inflation was a real problem, which the first Reagan administration dealt with by causing a recession. It worked nicely, and since it was early in the administration, the unpleasantness was over by the time he ran for reelection and it was “morning in America”. The lesson is, get the bad stuff out of the way early, NOT near the election time!
RevRick
@Captain C: Modern polling began with George Gallup following the 1936 election where a poll of readers of Literary Digest hilariously asserted that Alf Landon would handily beat FDR.
gvg
@thruppence: Maybe Hoover during the great depression?
rikyrah
@Baud:
tell it, Baud
HopefullyNotcassandra
@WTFGhost: and from snap cancellations. This president is horrible to farmers. Farming is a gamble based on love (not my words) in the best of times. This president is chewing farmers up and spitting them out. I don’t know how many are still standing to get any kind of bailout. This president destroyed a bunch of them in his first term, too.
This president does not appear capable of aiding anyone anywhere. Everything he does appears to be solely in service to his ego.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Trollhattan: Yes.
ExPatExDem
So, has everyone seen the video of the mob of Orthodox Jewish men in Brooklyn chasing a single woman down the street, throwing things at her and threatening to rape her because they thought she was pro-Palestinian?
One NYPD officer stepped in to protect her, or who knows what would have happened.
Link
RevRick
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I’m not judging JQ Adams as a President, but by the manner of his election by the Electoral College. When he appointed Henry Clay as his Secretary of State, the Jacksonians howled Corrupt Bargain for the next for years.
Similarly, Hayes was elected in what amounted to a behind-the-scenes deal. The results were so disputed that Congress had to create a special commission to choose the winner. Hayes was known as His Accidency throughout his term.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Matt McIrvin: I was assured by my elders that LBJ would have won reelection hands down. This would have saved us from Nixon too, if true.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Soprano2: stay safe !
Omnes Omnibus
@Bupalos: So you think we need to do what? Look for left authoritarians who will solve our problems? That never really works well. I’ll opt for trying to muddle through with democracies, thank you very much.
I am sure that I lack your deep understanding of this moment in time, for which I most humbly apologize. But, fuck it, I think government by the people, for the people is worth fight for.
WTFGhost
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Well, there is a difference between “forty men have been accused of war crimes and lesser criminal activity in X_Country, where due process and fair trials are a reality, hence, we’re extraditing them,” and “we grabbed forty men and sent them to El Salvador; they have had due process in neither country.”
Was that not “a thing” at the time, or was there some gentlemen’s agreement “we’ll punish our people for being naughty in your country, we’d never give a wink and a nod to raiding parties against *you*, our good friends!”?
(Someone will twig to “war crimes” and ask about “status of forces” which, I believe, usually grants the UCMJ (is that the right abbr.?) authority over US military personnel, so any official action by the military should be a US military trial, per my understanding. But if a few rowdies “unofficially, we swear, these morons aren’t on our MI team or anything like that!” threw a few molotovs, that might also be a “war crime” that results in extradition being, shall we say, “extremely expected.”)
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Matt McIrvin: The dirty economic secret is that the Depression didn’t really end until government spending REALLY ramped up to fight WWII.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@rivers: I should have waited and read your post. !!! You have the LBJ receipts. He was a very important president.
gvg
@Butch: You know, I think the mail advertisers are finally noticing that most people just recycle what they send.I don’t get as much junk mail as I used to. Still some, just not as much. Probably they can target more accurately now and don’t need to send mass mailers to places that are never going to buy x product.
Rivers
@Matt McIrvin: absolutely- I was 21 when he chose not to run again. I remember how much I hated him for
Vietnam – as for all the amazing things he had done – it wasn’t that I was unaware but rather (what an idiot) I thought that’s the sort of thing presidents usually did. I learned how wrong I was.
WTFGhost
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Well, that’s the problem. During the depression, it was clear that the problem was demand side. You could find cheap workers, and cheap raw materials, the supply side was okay, for the most part, but, there was no demand.
Not until the government started creating demand, by spending money, to people, who now had demands of their own, so suppliers met those initial demands, then slowly had to grow to meet new demanders (fresh workers, workers getting raises, etc.).
The US economy is a consumer economy, and demand driven. Anybody but a liar, or the worst kind of moronic chucklehead, knows that.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@sab: TB has been a scourge since ancient times. And no cure until antibiotics were discovered around WWII. Henry VIII’s elder brother died if TB. Think what English history could have been!
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Bupalos: the thing is Winston Churchill is still correct despite democracy’s problems that you cite.
Churchill was quoting someone else. Who? I don’t know.
HinTN
@Trollhattan: Very much so, and some expected bills flat out not delivered. Thank you, Mr DeJoy, for trashing a well functioning system.
ExPatExDem
@Matt McIrvin: I think things will get worse before they get better. Other than the extreme elderly, American adults of today have never lived in a time where the U.S. wasn’t the world’s big swinging dick.
Rather, they’ve been conditioned to believe that this is the natural state of things due to our innate cultural superiority. Something like that doesn’t die quickly or easily.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Matt: Although my Republican ancestors and President Lincoln are dismayed to hear it, I think you are correct.
raven
@HopefullyNotcassandra: fuck lbj
Captain C
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
I think Shrubya’s in the conversation, between his veep and cabinet choices, ignoring the pre-9/11 intelligence, the lies leading to the Iraq War and the incompetent execution of the subsequent occupation, the Katrina disaster, the shitty SCOTUS picks, and all the bad decisions which led to the 2008 financial crash and disaster (plus a lot of other things that I don’t have space to mention).
frosty
@catclub:
f you like that sort of thing try the book Nuclear War: A Scenario. Very well researched. Armageddon less than an hour after North Korea launches one missile.
In Pentagon war games in the 80s it didn’t matter who started it, whether it was intended to be limited, or de-escalated, every game ended with everybody launching everything.
Now we have a guy in charge who asked, last time around, “If we have them, why don’t we use them?”
HopefullyNotcassandra
@catclub: as far as that goes, a lovely British Astro-physicist once told me while I fretted about that same super volcano
“Relax. A supernova might have exploded in our neighborhood and we would not even know it until we were dead,” with a huge grin.
Eolirin
@Matt: I think ten years is extremely generous. I give it 4.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@prostratedragon: ugh. Yes, that too
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Old Man Shadow: how I hope not. !!
HopefullyNotcassandra
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Was it not Paul Volker, at the Federal Reserve, who caused the recession to end stagflation, starting under President Carter?
stacib
@Trollhattan: South side of Chicago here, and I’m now getting mail about once every eight to ten days, and the delivery is often after 6:30 p.m. There are Next Door groups all over Chicago complaining about the same thing.
mvr
@Trollhattan: Yes, we no longer get mail every day. Sometimes it is clear no one did the route or at least our street. I think we may not have a regular carrier anymore and wind up with substitutes.
This is Lincoln Nebraska where we used to have fabulous service until some time during Trump I, when they moved the mail processing to Omaha from the local PO. Morale at the PO seems to have gone down along with the level of service. It now takes 3 days to send mail across town have waited literally weeks on a priority package delivery.
lowtechcyclist
@gvg:
I noticed this maybe three or four years ago: the usual six or seven pieces of junk mail per day dropped to one or two, sometimes three. Occasionally none at all, and only by the end of the day am I sure that the mailman’s not just running unusually late.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@RevRick: Those “elections” were screwy. The corrupt bargain for Chester A. Arthur goes there too. Maybe without that bargain we don’t end up at this absurd and horrible juncture?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@WTFGhost: sadly, enslaved people had no claim to due process, whatsoever. That is one of our country’s original sins.
Matt McIrvin
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): And Republicans take that not as an indication of just what a colossal Keynesian stimulus you really need, but as some proof that violence and human sacrifice are the true lifeblood of a civilization.
mvr
@catclub: LBJ was only terrible on Vietnam War. And not as bad as Nixon/Kissinger on that with sabotaging the peace talks and the secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia (going from my memory here).
His Civil Rights record was downright brave for a politician who knew how the South would react.
Jackie
@sab:
It’s fat free, so add more powdered than directed. Put in the freezer until icy cold, just beginning to slush. Shake thoroughly. The iciness gets rid of the powdered taste.
Miki
@Trollhattan: I use Informed Delivery to let me know what’s supposed to be delivered each day. So far it’s been very accurate.
mark
@mvr: Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I wonder how much coverage that will get.
sab
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Didn’t Jimmy Carter appoint Volker? Reagan had nothing to do with strangling inflation. Just the usual story: Democrat does the tough stuff, gets blamed. We re-elect the next Republican who causes more problems and then blames the Democrats when they get elected to fix another fuckup.
WTFGhost
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Heh. Thinking of “democracy” reminds me a bit of a Granny Weatherwax story (Pratchett, Discworld.)
She flies in on a terribly difficult birth. A midwife asks her if she spoke to the husband, to ask about whether he’d prefer she save the woman or baby.
Well Granny waves off that nonsense, and goes to work. A best possible result is obtained. Granny is then asked why she didn’t want to talk to the husband.
“Is he a good man?” she asked, and gets the answer “Well… yes, a very good man.”
“Then why would you put him through making that decision, when it won’t make no difference?”
And it’s true – the big problem of democracy is, there are a lot of hard decisions that have to be made, and we have to trust that the right kinds of people are making them, and we shouldn’t agonize too much over each bad choice they made, unless we notice a lot of screw-ups.
But then, watching for screw-ups takes time, and money, and isn’t entertaining, so it doesn’t sell well, so we end up with people insisting they’re deporting “RAPISTS HUMAN TRAFFICKERS SEX TRAFFICERS THE WORST OF THE WORST!” and we should trust them, because they’re the kinds of people who insist they’re deporting such vile individuals, when they’re likely expelling green card holders with parking tickets and a tattoo.
sab
@Jackie: Thank you. He is used to 2% so that might work.
Milk just makes me cringe. I used to get hives. Now just iffy stomach.
Matt McIrvin
@Doc Sardonic:
As far as I can tell, he’s not there (yet). Those were Gallup approval polls; his last Gallup had him at 45%. There are some that are lower, but only a few polls dip below 40%.
Trump is the lowest *at this point in his term*. Most incoming Presidents are still in “honeymoon” territory now. The most notable exception was Trump himself, last time. But, as I said, Bill Clinton did have some early trouble that had him almost as unpopular.
ExPatExDem
I saw that Gerry Connolly will be retiring from Congress due to his ongoing battle with cancer.
Which makes Nancy Pelosi’s previous c-blocking of AOC as ranking member for House Oversight look extra petty in retrospect.
They Call Me Noni
@ExPatExDem: What the fuck is wrong with people? A mob of grown men attacking one woman because they thought she might be pro-Palestinian?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Matt McIrvin: exactly – always take the wrong lesson from history 😮💨
ExPatExDem
@They Call Me Noni: Even if she was true blue, “from the river to the sea”, a pack of men chasing and menacing a single woman is repugnant.
gene108
@prostratedragon:
From the thread. Duffy on Fox News.
https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lnxgefbwb724
He’s right. Subways in the U.S. are dirty.
The rest of it’s nonsense.
Like road rage isn’t a problem while driving.
************
I feel like, for whatever reason, Trump and his minions successfully lied their way to a second term, so they keep doing what brought them there despite reality.
I mean Trump got 49% of the vote by confidently declaring and convincing people other countries pay tariffs, there’s a million homicides per year committed by illegals, etc.
In office, people are living with the consequences of those lies. They aren’t able to defy reality, like they did in the campaign.
Trollhattan
@Miki:
Oh, nice. Thanks!
Omnes Omnibus
@ExPatExDem: @They Call Me Noni: Oh good, let’s have that fucking fight again. It’s a really good use of our time and energy. JFC!
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Jackie: my husband’s family used to mix it half and half with fresh milk to make it more palatable but much cheaper. They had 4 kids to feed.
Belafon
@gene108: I don’t really consider stopping on the highway during rush hour freedom.
Omnes Omnibus
@gene108: Honestly, I bet he and his family were some of the people who constantly ran the stop sign on my parents’ corner when he was their neighbor. Fucker.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Since Trump is taking it back to the 1860s, consider this bit of ACW
So much winning
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@sab: I lived through it but was not apparently paying good enough attention! What I do remember was amazing inflation in the late 70s (banks were paying like 12% interest on CDs), and then sometime with the recession under Reagan it went away. Ford had WIN pins – whip inflation now, and then Carter was elected, so he inherited the inflation. Thanks for the correction (you and someone else earlier).
ExPatExDem
@Omnes Omnibus: I suspect this will generate about the same level of condemnation from elected Dems as when ICE abducted Mahmoud Khalil.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
What fight? Who’s defending the behavior of the men in question?
Omnes Omnibus
RIP Mike Peters.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Cars are so much more dangerous than public transit, it’s a ridiculous comparison. About 40,000 people die in car accidents every year.
The numbers for public transit are blatantly contradictory from different sources and hard to figure out, but it looks like it’s fewer than 100 homicides per year and a few hundred suicides. Just putting platform screen doors in subway stations would probably prevent a lot of that, though it’s a big ask.
Don’t know what that is per passenger-mile, but I find it hard to believe that driving around in the middle of the city would be safer than riding the subway. I guess speeds are low at least but the potential for car-pedestrian accidents is high.
ExPatExDem
@lowtechcyclist: Fetterman might volunteer for it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@ExPatExDem:
A few House Dems visited Mahmoud Khalil at the detention facility he is being held at recently
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: AOC teamed up with toxic Nina Turner ( if she can’t win then everyone else must lose) and the old guard Democrats didn’t like it. I was in terror of Nina Turner representing me so I didn’t like it either.
AOC will have to be a good Democrat for a few election cycles before I trust her. Growing pains for a young politician. Party loyalty does matter. Without party all you have are inflated egos.
Omnes Omnibus
@lowtechcyclist: I linked to an incorrect comment. I meant to be responding only the Gerry Connolly comment.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108:
I mean, maybe they can, if they simply arrest or kill anyone who dares to oppose them. But it gets hard when the numbers get large.
ExPatExDem
@Omnes Omnibus: It’s okay to say it. Pelosi was wrong, petty, and mostly trying to protect her Queen Bee status.
mrmoshpotato
@prostratedragon:
Teddy Roosevelt needs to rise from the grave and whoop some ass.
They Call Me Noni
@Omnes Omnibus: What? You don’t find it abhorrent?
WaterGirl
@RandomMonster: I don’t know what that means. Can you share more information.
artem1s
I was checking out election results on the National Post this morning and made the mistake of reading the comments (never read the comments). Canadian MAGAts are just as delusional as US MAGAts.
I want to congratulation the CA Liberal party for staying in power and keeping their sanity despite the misinformation campaign to discredit Trudeau’s administration and legacy. I have no doubt the same foreign forces attempting to split the Democratic vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024 are as prevalent in CA as they are in the US.
Jeffro
We’re unable to do these things because we let the rich get astronomically richer, which allows them to saturate & shape the media environment, buy themselves rough parity (or better) in political representation, and keep on plundering the planet.
Highly progressive income taxes and much higher corporate taxes will defund the enemies of progress.
WaterGirl
@Pete Downunder: I was away from the thread until just now. Can you give me a time frame (please translate to Eastern Time because I suck at time zones) and I will put up the during the time frame you specify.
Thank you!
JustRuss
This. Cars and cities are a match made in hell. I was in Paris a couple months ago, using the Metro was a breeze. But at one point we had to rent a car, and drive a few miles through the heart of the city. What a stressful nightmare.
@Belafon:
Omnes Omnibus
@They Call Me Noni: I accidentally replied to your comment.
lowtechcyclist
@Omnes Omnibus:
OK, no problem.
ExPatExDem
From the disturbing activities of our new American Gestapo/Runaway Slave Patrol (ICE/CBP):
19 year old U.S. Citizen Jose Hermosillo was arrested in Tucson and held in custody for 10 days at a for-profit detention center, until his family was able to produce proof of his citizenship.
CBP fabricated a narrative that Hermosillo had self-surrendered to CBP and told them he was a Mexican national who had entered the US illegally. Hermosillo and his family says that the former is 100% bullshit.
All of this took place this month.
sab
@mrmoshpotato: We have enough problems without Teddy Roosevelt running around with his gun.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: A lot of this is really just the reflexive conservative hate of cities: after all, nobody is proposing bringing subways to Podunk Center and making everyone drive private cars in Manhattan would be absurd, so it’s a nonsense comparison. But to the Fox News viewer mind nothing like Manhattan should exist, even though the network headquarters are there.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@mrmoshpotato: this gop has amnesia about Teddy Roosevelt. He never even existed so far as this party is concerned. Maybe I missed some fulsome Teddy praise from this or that gop’er, but I don’t think so. This president does not even rely on Teddy’s imperialism. It is bizarre to me.
cckids
And now we have this.
A family who’d just moved to Oklahoma was caught up in a middle of the night ICE raid, when our home-grown Gestapo came with a warrant for the previous occupants of the house.
“But any comfort they had disappeared Thursday morning when about 20 men, armed with guns, busted through the door.
Marisa said the men identified themselves as federal agents with the U.S. Marshals, ICE, and the FBI.
On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service denied having agents present during the raid, telling News 4 they were “aware of the operation before it happened,” but did not assist in any capacity.
“I keep asking them, ‘who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening,’” she said. “And they said, ‘we have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.”
She said they ordered her and her daughters outside into the rain before they could even put on clothes.
“They wanted me to change in front of all of them, in between all of them,” she said. “My husband has not even seen my daughter in her undergarments—her own dad, because it’s respectful. You have her out there, a minor, in her underwear.”
Marisa said the names on the search warrant were not hers or anyone in her family.”
You should read the whole thing. It gets worse, and ICE & co have zero regrets or intention to make things right. F*ck these people.
brendancalling
Congratulations to Canada! I sure wish we had their gun laws here in the United States. I got out of work 40 minutes late, because we had a lockdown at the very end of school. This is all hearsay, because no one ever communicates with us teachers, but apparently two parents are having an ongoing argument. When they came to pick up their respective children, they came armed with a gun and a knife, and things got heated.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@ExPatExDem:
I think I remember seeing this back when it was first reported. So, this CBP/ICE chucklefuck decides, on the basis of Hermosillo’s appearance, that he must be an undocumented immigrant from Mexico and that he has to present his “papers”. That’s absolutely fucked
WaterGirl
@cckids: Horrifying.
ExPatExDem
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Probable cause: Brown skin and surname ending with a vowel.
Jackie
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I did, too, back when the government was doing the free cheese and powdered milk giveaways. I’d mix powdered with whole to equal 2%, but sab doesn’t want to use processed milk at all due to the new lack of FDA QC inspections.
brendancalling
@ExPatExDem: my dad is Jewish and recently wound up on the radar of some orthodox/Hassidic Jews while he was in NYC w/ my stepmom. They started proselytizing at him, and dad’s response began with “you don’t want to talk to me.” And then I guess he unloaded on them about how they’re awful people who are ruining Judaism and how he can’t stand them. Dad is usually pretty mild mannered, and my stepmom was flabbergasted with how angry he got.
Chief Oshkosh
@cckids: So, a bunch of thugs broke into an OKC home, traumatized a woman and her children, abused them physically and mentally, stole their computers, phones, and cash, and then busted up everything that they didn’t steal.
So, why shouldn’t these thugs be horse whipped in the public square? Oh, because they claim to work for ICE.
Assuming we ever gain control of the government again, ICE has got to go.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): my mother did the same thing half whole milk half reconstituted powered milk. My parents were foster parents and we had from three to six kids most days growing up.
Pappenheimer
@HopefullyNotcassandra: don’t count us out. You should see just how bad Rome got and then recovered from….though I wonder if we could benefit from a Social War.
cckids
@Chief Oshkosh: Indeed they do. The day will come when they try this with someone who’s armed & comes out shooting. And that person will not be afforded any “stand your ground/castle doctrine” leniency. We live in dark times.
Jackie
FFOTUS fired Doug Emhoff from the Holocaust Museum. NYT, so no link.
sab
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Ohio has a referendum in the works to revoke The S Ct Scalia invented out of whole cloth qualified-immunity-for-government-agents -doing bad-stuff-against-the-rules-with-impunity because they work for the government.
That will only protect us from city, county and state actors. But it is a start.
If cops in an ill-advised chase total you parked car and four others, you cannot even collect on insurance because qualified immunity.
The cops are worried about personal liability. Well then, have your union negotiate that the city pay for insurance coverage. Its not a big deal. It should be a big deal when uninsured cops total your parked car and you have no remedy
ETA More expensive when the cops kill innocent bystanders, but same thing. Why should those families bear the entire burden when the cops were doing their government job. Maybe the government should have to pay for what harm government agents did.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@brendancalling: The funny thing is Canada’s gun laws are a lot like Texas’ used to be.
It takes several months to get a gun. There is a background check. You have to pass a safety class. That is it to buy a non-restricted gun. It is slightly more difficult to buy a handgun or more dangerous rifle. It really only stops crooks and dangerous people from buying a gun. You do have to register a dangerous gun.
https://www.wikihow.com/Buy-a-Gun-in-Canada
Why can we not do sane things? Because there is a rump minority in this country in thrall to the power of communist dictators.
sab
@Jackie: He is American and Jewish, so he really has no link to the Holocaust. They were German or Slavic East Europe. ///
DanB
@cckids: We have a beautiful cat that belonged to my partner’s sister. She is not getting along with our two cats, probably because she’s always been an only cat. Let Watergirl send me your contact information if you’re interested. She’s going to a rescue this evening.
Matt McIrvin
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): ThIs is literally the plot of the Cheech Marin parody song “Born in East L.A.”
DanB
@WaterGirl: We’ve got a beautiful cat we can’t keep. I understand that cckids lost hers. I’d love her contact info.
cckids
@DanB: That sounds wonderful :) I’ll contact WaterGirl
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Matt McIrvin: Movie too
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_in_East_L.A._(film)
Belafon
@JustRuss: We really should design things around the idea of “Walk or ride to the things you have to do, and drive to the things you want to.” But all I hear from people when discussing mass transit is the crime they bring (somehow cars don’t).
sab
@DanB: Too bad. With time they might come to terms. If it’s no kill then that is okay. She will find a home.
Suzanne
We have a severe thunderstorm/wind alert. Possible tornadoes. A good reason to work out indoors instead!
Belafon
@Matt McIrvin: Well, a lot of people here in Texas would like to build a high speed train from Dallas to Houston, which would have stops in some places along the route. I personally think this would help overall because it would mean that people could live in those small towns and work in the cities, but it gets blocked for all sorts of reasons.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@cckids: it appears this regime is using “special U.S. deputy marshals” for this illegal crapola. A special U.S. deputy marshal guards judges, true. Yet, the director can appoint anybody a special U.S. deputy marshal “if necessary”.
I wish our press was investigating this! My guess is these are thugs this regime is hiring off the street (from the police beating January 6 felonious thugs, perhaps?) and not actually marshals regularly employed by our U.S. marshal service.
Think of it like this:
This president has empowered some silly sadistic person (Headly Lamar) to appoint anyone to a posse formed solely to arrest and detain immigrants for whose detention no-one is even trying to obtain a judicial warrant. The posse is then reported to the press as special U.S. deputy marshals.
I hope I am correct. I have great respect and admiration for our U.S. Marshals Service.
Suzanne
@Belafon: Mass transit is also a Schroedinger’s Form of Travel. Simultaneously brings crime and becomes a craphole, but also is a handout to rich white people.
Bupalos
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not saying democracy itself is deficient, nor recommending authoritarianism of any stripe. Democracies can certainly have oodles of governing capacity, and at times ours has. It’s a current observation: democracies as they exist right now around the world (and the United States especially) are being drained of governing capacity by forces like unrestrained capitalism, information technology and its relation to post-truth information environments, and climate change. It’s just naturally going to create more enthusiasm for authoritarianism, and yes, we’ll probably see more of it on the left as well.
We have to soldier on through. I just expect a lot of losing and necessary retreat as we hopefully learn to fight better as years go by, and figure out how to digest and grow out of some of these destabilizing forces.
RevRick
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Arthur succeeded Garfield after his assassination. He was picked to be VP by NY Sen. Roscoe Conkling, who believed he’d toe the party line. Surprise! Arthur supported Civil Service Reform… the same reform Trump is gutting.
RaflW
@jonas: The press is a single-direction ratchet. Only Democrats get the harsh scrutiny of political reporting. The deeply odious WHCA dinner headlining a facile lump who thinks out lout that the press wasn’t hard enough on Biden is confirmation that we have to go it alone in all this.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
The backroom deal that got Hayes the presidency was actually very simple: Republicans wanted to keep the Presidency, Democrats wanted to end Reconstruction in the South. They agreed to support Hayes if he agreed to end Reconstruction.
Great book on the subject published in 2004:
https://www.amazon.com/Fraud-Century-Rutherford-Samuel-Election/dp/0743255526
cain
@sab: Perhaps they will drink milk much to their detriment?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@WTFGhost: You are absolutely right. People get bored People get silly. Our press gets broke lazy and pushes the silly.
Yet, when we were not bored and worked together, we managed to send home baked birthday cakes to our soldiers unmarked on the frontlines of Bastogne. We can do anything we set our minds to do.
We need to decide to do good things in our communities and achieve them together.
Somethings I don’t get. How can most of us both be way too busy and bored simultaneously? Why can we not get organized to achieve the things a majority of us want in every state, rural area and city?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: that is the corrupt deal? I goofed, thought it was Chester A Arthur’s.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@RevRick: I goofed. Confused him with Hayes. My apologies.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Suzanne: there are some gorgeous, clean, crime free mass transits in the world. Freaking Moscow has one. The art buses of Pasadena, California are a pleasure, too.
RevRick
@ExPatExDem: I’m really uncomfortable with ascribing motives to other people. Maybe it’s because I flunked mind-reading in seminary. Maybe it’s because, I’m mindful of Martin Luther’s interpretation of the Commandment about not bearing false witness: “We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him(sic), slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way.”
AOC did get a promotion to one of the two prestige money Committees of the House. My sense of Pelosi is that she has some pretty thick skin. Her motives for favoring Connolly may be as benign as rewarding a party stalwart since his only other Committee assignment is Foreign Affairs, a position that grows out of his ten years of service as an aide with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, from 1979 -1989.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Belafon: President Obama wanted to build that. Some people have to be against everything he wanted to see. That drive is a nightmare unless you take the toll roads. Texas used to have the most beautiful roads I had seen anywhere without any toll roads. Modern GOP rule is not even good for the wild pigs.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@sab:
It absolutely is a start. Do you anybody else have any idea what this Issue 2 that’s on the ballot that’s being voted on next week? It sounds pretty innocuous:
Suzanne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: There’s a lot of beautiful transit systems. I’ve ridden many.
RevRick
@Suzanne: Passenger vehicles have a higher death rate than either buses or rail transit. Motorcycles have the highest rate, while air travel has the lowest.
sab
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I think it’s a start. God knows we need to fix bridges and highways.
My husband thought it was to move the Browns to Berea with a new stadium, but I don’t see any such language. It seems to be for roads and bridges and infrastructure. What’s wrong with that?
Until I hear otherwise, I am voting yes
ETA Your quote of the language says what it is limited to. Roads, bridges, sanitary systems, wastewater and drainage. Who could object to that? And bond issues. Lenders pay, not us, unless a default.
lowtechcyclist
@Chief Oshkosh:
This. It needs to be defunded, disbanded, ended. Give all the agents a year’s severance or whatever it takes to get the legislation through Congress, then end the agency itself. We don’t need this homegrown Stasi. It’s evil. End it.
RevRick
@Suzanne: I rode NY subways in the 70s, as well as the Erie Railroad in NJ into Hoboken, the PATH train under the Hudson, the LIRR to visit the future MrsRev, and the old New Haven RR back home to Stamford. To put it charitably many were shabby. But they were far less stressful than driving around the NYC Metro Area.
Suzanne
@RevRick: Agreed. Auto travel is deadly. And expensive.
Gloria DryGarden
@catclub: notice the clickbait headlines on those super volcano videos.
From what I’ve read, this eruption is not coming on. Thousands of years, perhaps? I’m content to let the scientists study it. If it blows, everything west of the Mississippi is toast. Not much one can do about it, too far to outrun. The remains might not be as historically usable as the ones discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum/ Ercolano…
But Yellowstone is a cool place, always changing.
Doc Sardonic
@RevRick: Mango Mussolini and Secretary Duffy say “hold our beers”
Gloria DryGarden
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): perhaps tell us what state this amendment is in? Was it already mentioned?
Not usually a fan of amendments, they are very hard to change. But this one seems effective, on the surface. It’s a big job, to parse out all the nuances and money backers in all the ballot issues we get to vote on.
David Collier-Brown
@RaflW: Look at who owns it. In Canada, all the papers, including the so-called leftist ones, are owned by very well-to-do persons.
Baud
@RaflW:
QFT
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
Not to mention (and maybe this is a big reason why the RWNJs hate mass transit) they’ve enabled their metro areas to grow well beyond what would have been possible without them. Can you imagine NYC without the subway? The DC area without Metro? Those cities just plain wouldn’t function anymore without them.
David Collier-Brown
I ran into an interesting article this morning, about why we and the US have such polarised politics… demonology!
See https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-demonology-won…/ (:-))
What they are actually talking about is “a long-standing pattern of demonizing perceived enemies, rooted in religious language — even when God is left out of it.”
TL;DR? The demonology they’re talking about is “a political worldview that casts opponents not merely as wrong, but as existential threats. Tracing its evolution from the Cold War through the rise of modern evangelical and right-wing networks to Trump’s 2024 campaign trail, they show how the language of faith and family has been co-opted to wage a political war — one that doesn’t end with an election, because for demonologists, “the enemy is never vanquished. Once one issue or group of people is crushed, the threat will simply hop to another issue or group.”
RaflW
@David Collier-Brown: Absolutely. I think there’s also a subtler layer of reporters who are personally liberal but sort of long-term embarrassed or at least painfully self-conscious (or, sometimes, even self-loathing) that makes a lot of journos dismiss liberal activism but become ‘fascinated’ by what they see as iconoclasm on the right.
David Collier-Brown
@RaflW: Also, a New Yorker article on “brainwashing” talked about how, when put in an echo chamber newsroom, we “reeducate ourselves” to fit in with everyone else.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/07/its-always-the-other-side-thats-been-brainwashed
RaflW
@lowtechcyclist: I toured the Madrid subway system. Their retired generator house that’s part of the tour is quite stunning. We also went briefly into an abandoned station that has been preserved, and the tile work, the adverts, just the whole feel of it was quite lovely.
That some US cities (and other countries, too) have under-invested in the stations and even rolling stock is not the fault of transit per se, but of penny pinching.
I remember the first time, as a kid, we went to D.C. and the comparison between their futuristic vaulted stations and some of the filthy, dingy stops on the Lexington line in NYC was stark. (Alas the D.C. system has been very poorly funded in later years.)
Baud
@RaflW:
Unfortunately, a lot of people who aren’t journos find the right (and rich people) fascinating (and entertaining).
Steve LaBonne
@sab: You should vote yes (as I already have). It’s a renewal of a longstanding program which is about critical infrastructure like roads and bridges. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the Browns.
RaflW
@David Collier-Brown: The Cletus safari as mean girls initiation ritual.
Baud
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Gloria DryGarden:
Ohio
Steve LaBonne
@RaflW: Of the North American systems I have significant experience with (New York, Boston, Chicago, DC, Montréal) I would say Montréal is the best.
Matt McIrvin
@David Collier-Brown: I will never forget how the really big push to make people worry about “The War on Christmas” happened IMMEDIATELY after George W. Bush won reelection in the fall of 2004. The right-wing noise media couldn’t let their fans relax and bask in victory for one moment.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
We have always been at war with
East AsiaSanta Clause.Glory b
Someone on Bluesky said that only President Harrison had a worse 100 days because he was dead for 70 of them.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Hey, you can’t-a fool me, there ain’t no Sanity Clause.
Baud
@Glory b:
Following Harrison’s lead would have made Trump’s 100 days better than it was.
RaflW
@Steve LaBonne: I lived in London for a half a year right out of college (Thatcher era, eghad). The Underground was not in tip-top condition but I loved it. Rode it daily for work, but also enjoyed exploring around the inner region at night and on weekends (my Zone 1-2 weekly card was, I think £6 and I got a ton of value from it).
sab
@Steve LaBonne: That is what I thought. Husband was just doing uninformed speculation.
Baud
@sab:
That’s the best kind!
prostratedragon
@gene108:
“It’s like an old Catskills joke: No one rides the subway anymore — it’s too crowded.”
(That was a refreshing nap@)
Steve LaBonne
@sab: That’s one of my favorite pastimes!
sab
@Gloria DryGarden: Goku told you already, but its Ohio. As Steve laBonne says, it’s a renewal from back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Ohio had a sensible government (severe liberties in paraphrasing Steve)
dww44
@Baud: LBJ did a lot of good…the Voting Rights Act for one. He was a loyal and patriotic American politician. Way way better than DJT.
karen gail
I would never blame LBJ for Vietnam since the US got involved in the 1950’s; one retired Admiral called it the only “honorable” war US has ever fought in because we were there at request of France. The French didn’t want to give up their colony and give the people of Vietnam freedom.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@David Collier-Brown:
That’s exactly what idiots like Newsom either don’t understand or don’t care about re: trans people. The Right will simply move on to the next group to destroy
Geminid
@RevRick: I’ll add that House Democrats voted 119 for Rep. Connolly and 86 for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez. It was a secret ballot by the two Representatives’ colleagues. They knew both candidates and also the value of Overight Committee leadership. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez took the decision in stride but her most ardent fans cannot get over it.
The Energy and Commerce Commerce does not afford its members the five minutes of media exposure per hearing that the Oversight Committee does, but it’s a very powerful committee in a substantive sense. That’s why Oversight typically has 7 or so freshman Democrats while few Representatives make it onto Energy and Commerce before they’ve served three terms.
In a way, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has come full circle. Environmental legislation was an early interest of hers, and that’s one of Energy and Commerce’s areas of jurisdiction. If and when Democrats have the House again, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez will have a hand in progressive environmental legislation that will make onto the House floor, and hopefully will be signed by a Democratic President some day.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@sab:
@Steve LaBonne:
Will vote yes then. It seemed fine, but I don’t trust SOS Yost. I still remember how the redistricting ballot issue language from last year was absolutely mangled so that it said something else
Geminid
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I see Ohio Secretary of State Yost is running for Governor. I didn’t think Trump’s endorsement of Vikek Ramaswamy would clear the field. A Black businesswoman from eastern Ohio is running too, and Lt. Governor Coach Tressel may also throw his hat in the ring.
sab
I still don’t know what to do on city council. One guy looks fantastic on paper. I voted for him for school board, and that whole couple of years were a serious clusterfuck. He was in the leadership but then had to resign hen his day job required it. But they hired a superintendant from Cleveland, disrespected her very publicly on her first job review and continued to be rude ( he was Shool Board Chairman at that point), then they ran her out of office, hired an i terim superintendant, ran a search, rushed to hire without vetting, instead of waiting fo r the next school board to take office. Then he was just fired or put on administrative leave. So our school board is paying three former superintendants $250,000 each per year while laying off actual teachers all over the place.
He was gone when they hired the third guy, but the precedimg was not good.
Will he be a useful advocate dor DEI, or just a guy who pisses everyone else off.?
The other guy seems to be a good guy, recommended by everyone in government, who in any other city might be our moderate Republican but is a Democrat here. That is actually a lot more cynical tha he deserves.
Hence my dilemma. ( Potential troublemaker) who shares my values, or good solid leadership guy who possibly doesn’t. Trump has taken all trust out of voting. I don’t want disruption but I do want my values ( DEI.)
I ask my husband what he thinks, and he says he is waiting on me.
WaterGirl
@DanB: @cckids:
She’s a gorgeous kitty!
WaterGirl
@cckids: Just wrote to you and Dan B.
David Collier-Brown
@Matt McIrvin: Keep ’em frightened, angry … and contributing.
sab
@Geminid: Thank God I am a Democrat and don’t have to decide. Yost is appalling. His kids don’t even support him. He is riding the right-to-life horse as hard as he can. Very big on voter suppression. Very big on nit-picking referenedum issues even to the point where the state and US SCt laugh at him.
Ramaswamy is the slimy Trumper we have already seen. Ohio is racist and Christianist to our toes so I don’t see him winning a primary or the general.
I don’t know anything about the third candidate.
I wish the Democrats had somebody, but who would want to run when we vote down good people for every position?
We voted for Moreno, the immigrant hating immigrant who supports tariffs while importing foreign cars and was time-stealing from his employees.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Great news!
Citizen Alan
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I think if LBJ had run, he’d have done better than Hoover. It was a close election, wasn’t it? And if he’d managed to pull out a peace deal in the summer of 68 without the traitor Republicans wrecking it, I think he’d have won easily.
And the world would be so much better a place. Whatever you think about LBJ, Richard Nixon put four assholes on SCOTUS in a single term, one more than Shitgibbon did. One of them was Rehnquist, and we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of that racist prick.
sab
@sab: Missed the edit time-out. I am a Democrat but I do like Tressel. He lost his job for protecting his kids from minor transgressions ( free tatoos) that are perfectly legal now. We liked him at Akron U. We were glad he thrived at Youngstown State.
My anti-athletics sister who was a tenured professor at Ohio State adores him.
But he is still a Republican even now.
Steve LaBonne
@sab: We’re so screwed. But doubly so if Ramaswamy wins. He’ll go all DOGE on state government. There go the contributions that fund my pension.
YY_Sima Qian
What do you know, Trump is good for something. To think, I’d MAGA had only gone half as crazy & malevolent as they have in the past 3 months, reactionaries would likely have won in Canada, & probably Australia, too.
Unfortunately, the AfD just overtook the CDU in polling in Germany. May need Musk & Vance to visit Germany more often…
brantl
@thruppence: Nixon, but not in 100 days.
Ksmiami06
@Chief Oshkosh: that’s overly generous, hung is better
brantl
@HopefullyNotcassandra: The only reason I’ll BJ would’ve beat Nixon would’ve been because it was Nixon. A large part of America knew what a scumbag Nixon was. There were ignorant people who didn’t want to admit to themselves that he was an absolute shit bird, but they knew it and I think in a private voting booth, they wouldn’t have voted for him, but it might’ve been tight.
brantl
@raven: Do you ever fall down from that automatic knee-jerk reaction?
Vicki Delany
You are welcome, Watergirl. Canadian election results gave me a huge sigh of relief. In my own riding the slimy far right conservative MP lost. Make no mistake – the surprising resurgence of the Liberals was a direct rebuke of Trump. Elbows up