It’s nothing we haven’t said before, but a righteous rant from Robert Reich, and it’s quite satisfying to read.
It cries out to be shared. Everywhere. If you’re on social media, I hope you spread the link far and wide.
I have always appreciated his visuals, and this one doesn’t disappoint.
Hopefully he will forgive me for sharing so much of his article.
“TRUMP WASN’T ON THE BALLOT, AND SHUTDOWN, WERE THE TWO REASONS THAT REPUBLICANS LOST ELECTIONS TONIGHT, according to Pollsters,” Trump posted after Tuesday’s blowout, not naming the pollsters.
Yet the media obediently repeated Trump’s words, as if they were news.
They aren’t news. They’re postures. His words and thoughts add nothing to our understanding of anything. Yet the media reproduces them as if they did.
He says whatever happens to be in his brain at the moment. He posts about whatever annoys him at the moment. He constantly changes his mind. His brain wanders in ways that cause many to question whether he — who will be 80 in June, and whose family has a history of dementia — is all there. He lies like most people breathe. He is impetuous and capricious. He has the attention span of a fruit fly.
With Trump in the Oval Office, “news” should no longer be defined as what the president of the United States says or writes or thinks, because the president of the United States is incapable of coherent thought.
One minute America is resuming tests of nuclear weapons, the next moment it’s testing only particular mechanisms involved in nuclear weapons, the next moment he accuses China and Russia of resuming testing and says we’ll do the same — although Russia hasn’t tested a nuclear weapon since 1990 and China has not since 1996.
One minute he’s raising tariffs on Canada because an official in a Canadian province aired an ad showing Ronald Reagan to be against tariffs, the next moment he changes his mind. He threatens to hike tariffs on all sorts of countries for all sorts of reasons — to take effect in a month, in two weeks, in 10 days. Or maybe never.
Isn’t it time that the media understood that Trump does not make decisions. Instead, he has moods.
He berates, soothes, scolds, threatens, compliments, and rages.
But moods are not, and should not, be news.
Only actions should be news — not threatened actions, not possible actions, not proposed actions that are mere bubbles on a stream of consciousness — but concrete actions.
Those who report on such actions should let us know exactly who is behind them, because often it’s not Trump.
The closing paragraphs:
rikyrah
I don’t believe him one bit.
OSZ
@OpenSourceZone
Senate Republican Leader Thune: I’m willing to give Democrats all the things they want after the Government reopens
x.com/OpenSourceZone/status/1986810843674329206
Ten Bears
Stating the obvious but the media is complicit. Wouldn’t be here but for them
Or maybe it isn’t obvious …
rikyrah
VoteHub
@VoteHub
We’ve just added shift from 2024 to our Georgia Public Service Commission maps. Seat 2:![]()
R +2 → ![]()
D +25 Seat 3: ![]()
R +2 → ![]()
D +26 Nearly 30 point shift ![]()
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It seems that Trump’s media ratings are down too. Oh dear, who would imagined that no one likes a babbling old asshole?
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: It’s almost like people don’t like what’s happening!
rikyrah
AND?
SO?
Don’t promise me a good time.
Republicans against Trump
@RpsAgainstTrump
Steve Bannon: If we lose the midterms and we lose 2028, some in this room are going to prison, myself included.
x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1986561872674627808
Jeffro
I like Reich, but David Brooks said it best:
“We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.” -D.B.
trump has always been beyond erratic; what’s different now is the malice towards the American people
the front page of the Times right now has no fewer than five different stories all tied together – if you look for it – by the theme of purely malicious chaos being caused by trumpov & Co
generals being fired with no explanation…flights being canceled across the country…govt jobs reports being canceled for the 2nd month in a row (but private reports showing jobs declining)…42 million Americans wondering about their next meal as trumpov makes an emergency court appeal to avoid feeding them…and op-eds wondering if we’re heading for another 1929-style crash
Dementia or demon; makes no difference. Where is Congress? Where’s #NoKingsIII?
We’re 10 months in with an astounding 38 months to go.
gratuitous
I want to know when Alcatraz is going to reopen.
Totally irrelevant and off topic, but why don’t those Democrats trust Republicans when they say “If you give us what we want, we’ll talk about what you want.” So cynical and mistrustful!
dmsilev
@rikyrah:
As you say, believing Senator Thune is …not wise. And beyond that, any agreement which doesn’t also include the House and Trump is pointless. And since Trump is hardly known for his tendency to abide by things he agreed to, we kind of have a problem.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah:
Agree!
But you have to watch the whole video. Because he’s not scared or worried. He’s talking about codifying all the shit that T is doing into actual law. And he says in the video that they have to “seize” what they want now.
Someone linked to that last night, and it might have been on Bluesky because I doubt I would have watched it on twitter. Is that video on Bluesky?
FastEdD
“I guess I got to tell ‘em
that I’ve got no cerebellum.”
-The Ramones
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: Anyway, even if he’s willing, Mike Johnson isn’t.
Omnes Omnibus
@rikyrah: Yeah, that’s horseshit.
p.a.
Can’t make deals with congenital liars.
Matt McIrvin
@WaterGirl: Bannon’s whole shtick is to pretend to be an inevitable oncoming doom, like Thanos in a Marvel movie. A few weeks ago he declared that Trump’s election to a third term was already guaranteed. A done deal. He’s never going to express a genuine fear that his side might lose.
Old School
@gratuitous:
I assume right after Trump and Musk visit Fort Knox to make sure the gold is still there.
bbleh
@rikyrah: lol I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.
Also, too, Trump WAS on the ballot, in many ways. The Republican Party IS the Trump Party now; if you’re voting for ANY Republican, you’re voting for Trump(-ism). And he’s constantly, pathologically reminding us of this, so it’s not far from anyone’s mind. AND some of the economic chickens now coming home to roost — healthcare costs, cutbacks in food and medical support, and now air travel restrictions — ARE his policies and DO influence people’s votes, even in non-federal elections.
rikyrah
WHERE WAS HER SECURITY?????
ABC News
@ABC
Mexico President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday that the harassment she suffered from a drunk man on the street was an assault on all women, adding that this is why she decided to press charges against him.
Read more: abcnews.link/MAAUcNJ
x.com/ABC/status/1986142101608730627
rikyrah
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar
It’s the first Friday of the month, which means we’ve gone 2 months now without a jobs report. For Trump, this is a feature of the shutdown, not a bug, since private surveys show the job market slowing dramatically. But without official data he’s able to keep lying about it.
7:43 AM · Nov 7, 2025
x.com/atrupar/status/1986791689550250020
Ishiyama
@rikyrah: Keep your eye on the Dow Jones.
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
It’s obvious. Been obvious. They are on the clock. Not just the Midterms but his health.
Redshift
The other failure of news that bugs me on a daily basis is that we’re still getting news stories accepting at face value the stated “objectives” of their actions. (And this is about his more competent minions, not about his addled brain.) So we get coverage of the assaults on cities that dutifully state that they were sent in to deal with crime, or their attacks on universities as an “effort against antisemitism,” just to name a few. We get stories about how officials are found to be lying in court, and stories about how ever more law enforcement officials are being moved from, y’know, crime, to immigration enforcement, but somehow that never filters back to the general news that more people see.
jonas
@Jeffro: The buried lede on all these stories is: The government is shut down because the House won’t reconvene because Johnson doesn’t want to have to deal with the Epstein Files.
Wait, it’s not buried. It’s not even there because the MSM are worthless.
rikyrah
Just evil.
The New Yorker
@NewYorker
One analytical model shows that, as of November 5th, the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. has already caused the deaths of 600,000 people, two-thirds of them children.
x.com/NewYorker/status/1986644874498871481
Redshift
@rikyrah:
I disagree with this. The shutdown isn’t what allows him to suppress the data, it’s just the excuse of the moment. His toadies already talked about putting jobs data out “less often.” When the shutdown ends, they’ll just be trying to guess whether it will be worse to put out numbers that are obviously doctored when compared with other public data, or not put them out at all.
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: Even before a bunch of MAGA billionaires bought them up, the big media operated on the principle that you can’t ever call a politician a liar, because it’s actionable speculation about intent. You can say they made a false statement of fact; you can say they said something without evidence; but you can’t peer into their soul to determine if they intentionally lied, and especially not if they’re lying about why they did something.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@rikyrah: Trust a Republican’s promise?
Not without a knife pressed to the throat of their favorite descendant.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: Yes, he ends with “there will never be another Trump.” Or something close to that, I watched it last night. So yeah, they definitely know the clock’s ticking. They are going to ramp up even more evil.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: That’s how I took it. Bannon is signaling that the stakes are so high Republicans cannot allow themselves to lose.
iKropoclast
Not at all foreboding…
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Geminid: I’ve got a bad feeling they’re getting closer and closer to deciding that the problem of a potential Democratic majority requires a final solution.
p.a.
@WaterGirl: I don’t know. There IS the matter of degree, but Reagan, W, and tRump (DEF not HW) all had that weird cult thing with their followers. W’s obviously succumbed to the stink of failure; tRump’s is 🤞🏻trending that way. But as long as white evangelicals huff the nazi nosecandy, that base, with the potential to expand beyond the base, exists.
Omnes Omnibus
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: You can’t “final solution” half of a country’s population.
iKropoclast
@Omnes Omnibus: You don’t have to, just enough that the rest will be pliant. We also already have a population mostly conditioned to be pliant due to capitalist labor priorities and manufactured scarcity.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, but from what they’re saying, they’re badly enough disconnected from reality that they might not know that.
cmorenc
@rikyrah:
Thune must think we’ve never seen the “Peanuts” paradigm of Lucy promising to hold the football in place for Charlie Brown to kick it, and always timely swiping it away such that Charlie falls on his ass.
Another Scott
+1 Yes, an informed citizenry is essential in a democracy. And in defeating the fascists.
Meanwhile, ICYMI, … BradDeLong.Substack.com:
(Emphasis added.)
Thank you, Prof. DeLong. I’ve felt for a very long time that the inflation spike was predictable and almost certainly (90+% confidence interval) transitory. But, man, the vibes… :-/
Take a look at that first graph. Imagine where we would be if similar recovery plans were in place after the housing bubble burst. There’s a ~ $1.5T gap between those red trend lines, and people are still feeling that. And that helped feed the rise of the right at home and abroad.
Grr…
Click over and read the whole thing.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Jackie
@rikyrah:
Lawrence O’Donnell covered that exact data last night. His voice was shaking with anger.
Josie
@iKropoclast:
Looking at the recent marches and elections, I don’t see the American people as being pliant. I see some possible violence in our future, but I suspect it won’t work out well for Bannon and company.
tam1MI
The question no one in the sniveling media will ask: If you are willing to do it, why not do it now?
Jackie
@Redshift:
My guess is nothing at all. Other resources will have to step up and challenge FFOTUS to prove otherwise. He’ll try, of course, but if his “facts” are the outlier of other reputable facts, only MAGA and their ilk will buy it.
Omnes Omnibus
@iKropoclast: Tell that to the people in Portland, Chicago, etc.
Bunter
@Jackie:
This may be where “vibes” help since so many jobs have been lost and people are looking, he can try to spin it as much as he wants but too many people are going to know someone out of work that can’t find a job.
cmorenc
@Ishiyama:
Watching your 401k retirement account’s recent progress is a roller coaster ride – thrilling on big up days, but sickeningly terrifying on down days, and you find yourself worried about the possibility of a catastrophic track failure. The AI bubble is distorting the entire market picture and your confidence in your understanding of how to manage your retirement investments to grow faster than inflation.
iKropoclast
@Omnes Omnibus: Those people out on the streets aren’t the people I’m talking about, but they are a minority of people. They’re the ones the Trump admin have to target to gain compliance from others. I could see it trying to get people to come out for No Kings, fear of the police.
prostratedragon
@rikyrah:
There’s a documentary short from them, with Atul Gawande.
princess leia
Several states (including California, Michigan, Oregon, and Wisconsin) have announced that they’ve begun processing full food stamp payments. Thank you to those states for stepping up to support families in need!
Meanwhile, the federal government has ignored, then appealed, orders to avoid making the payments.
Can vouch that here in OC, CA the payments are in the account!!! And last month’s carry over is there, too.
Omnes Omnibus
@iKropoclast: We disagree about this.
Vaguely related and rare sincerity based: From a few of your comments recently, you seem depressed. Have you considered taking a mental health break or talking to someone? I may be way off base or being intrusive. If so, I apologize.
Deputinize America
@Omnes Omnibus:
Pol Pot has entered the chat.
Juju
@cmorenc: Perhaps Thune has never read a Peanuts comic strip or seen any of the TV specials and has never seen or heard of this concept before and does not understand it. He does seem a bit thick.
iKropoclast
@Omnes Omnibus: From a few of your comments recently, you seem depressed
Huh, you noticed? I’ve certainly thought about taking a break. It doesn’t help that in most physical spaces I’m in in my daily life, I have pro-Trump nonsense being pushed from every angle. I used to think of this as an oasis, but it sure seems like this little microcosm of Democrats seems most interested in figuring out whom we need to exclude to attain future electoral success. The most common answers seem to be leftists and people who committed the unforgivable sin of living too long.
Like if maybe a couple hundred people here can’t figure out how to get along and stop talking past each other, what hope do the rest of us have?
Ishiyama
There’s the rub! Amateur “investors” are hooked to a system that they cannot depend upon with confidence; it distorts political dialogue, and undermines the collective will to provide, e.g., universal health care and more generous Social Security benefits to all, whether invested in the Market or not. “I’ve got my eyes on my own investments” is the antithesis of community.
MattF
Here’s Senator Tommy Tuberville predicting that New York will be ‘completely Muslim in three or four years’. So, yes, he really is that stupid.
Marc
I sometimes aim my anger elsewhere. What kind of alleged global economic system would allow the lives of 600,000 people to be ended at the whim of one so-called “democratic republic”? Aren’t the EU, China, and UN doing anything to fill in the gaps? How about those private charities that often seem to spend more on begging for money than food? I guess this is the future we’ve been waiting for.
ArchTeryx
@Omnes Omnibus: They’re disappearing people in Chicago by the dozen, maybe by the hundred. That’s not exactly the Khmer Rouge but it is not encouraging at all. Chicago is trying to fight back, but they can’t seem to stop the thugs from disappearing people right and left.
Omnes Omnibus
@iKropoclast: Part of the reason a lot of people come here is because they like nitpicky arguments. Most would not be able to hold down jobs if they did that irl. IOW, I don’t think this place is an accurate microcosm of the real world. For both good and bad.
ArchTeryx
@Deputinize America: He took out a quarter of Cambodia’s population, yeah, him and his Khmer Rouge, but Cambodia is a hella smaller country that the U.S. is. That being said, we have our very own Khmer Rouge running rampant already in at least two of our cities and they’re threatening to send more to others. People are being disappeared en masse to… where? Nobody knows now. Not to mention those missing people from Alligator Auschwitz.
It’s very ugly out there, but not Pol Pot yet. I fear, however, that that’s exactly what Steve Bannon’s aspirations are.
prostratedragon
prostratedragon
@MattF: The Corleone family will be completely legitimate first.
Belafon
@Jeffro:
Get it started.
iKropoclast
@Omnes Omnibus: When I say microcosm, I mean you get a diverse range of views from across Democrats and D supporting independents. It’s not necessarily representative proportionally, but most points are represented.
The despondency sets in when I realize that as I analyze how Democrats actually vote, it’s the more frustrating, less inclusive voices who seem to be winning. I feel increasingly homeless, politically speaking. And from couch hopping but that’s another story.
New Deal democrat
Fortunately, there are some very good alternate data sources for employment and unemployment data, which were in almost complete accord in October, and which I aggregated this morning:
bonddad.blogspot.com/2025/11/october-employment-situation-stagnant.html
Short story: roughly “0” jobs added, average wages still increasing at a good clip, the unemployment rate steady to rising slightly. The alternate source data on income and spending is unfortunately much more patchy, and that data is also very important for analyzing the economy.
Omnes Omnibus
Okay, I guess I am outvoted. We are looking a “final solution” situation. I’ve just been whistling past the graveyard. Now what? I mean, ffs, we can’t get three days beyond a really good election result without this attitude creeping back. Holy fuck!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@MattF: Reminiscent of some right-wing crank asking Paul Krugman how he’d feel if New York City were to become full of immigrants, as though he were presenting a foolproof gotcha argument against K-Thug.
Castor Canadensis
@rikyrah: In most countries, you don’t need security. Our PMs are perfectly willing to give folks the “shawinigan handshake” until the cops on crowd control get there.
See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shawinigan_Handshake.jpg
Article at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawinigan_Handshake
iKropoclast
@Omnes Omnibus: Check. This was ongoing as the election results rolled in
ETA: I recall an initial prompt of a Spanberger quote suggesting Mamdani couldn’t do what he promised under heavy discussion.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Omnes Omnibus: I wasn’t saying they’d actually accomplish a final solution, just that they’d be stupid enough to try it. They’re high on their own supply, and that leads to doing stupid destructive things.
WaterGirl
@prostratedragon: That’s sad.
Fair Economist
@rikyrah: The huge shift in the Georgia power commission is probably due to the Vogtle nuclear power plant debacle, where the initial cost estimate of about 14 billion ballooned to 34 billion. Georgians will pay for that every month on their electric bills for a generation.
ArchTeryx
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: They don’t have to go full Holocaust or Holodomor to cause a LOT of death and destruction. See: COVID-19 pandemic, USAID. The GOP is a death cult at this point and death cults love human sacrifices. They just try to distance themselves from them and hide behind statistics (or lack of them).
Ask the people of southwest Chicago whether we’re in Final Solution territory or not.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Maybe I’m confusing this thread with the others this morning, but I don’t see more than a few people taking that fatalistic approach.
I am pretty sure you are in the majority who don’t view things that way.
WaterGirl
@iKropoclast: Surely you have to admit that there was also a lot of celebrating and excited ment in those threads, that way out weighed any negativity?
Some bitching about what VA said about NYC was there, but it seems to me that it was a very small part of the discussion.
Matt McIrvin
@Omnes Omnibus: An amusing thread I’m seeing elsewhere is leftists getting upset about liberals being happy about Mamdani, because they saw Mamdani’s win as a victory over liberalism (as represented by Cuomo). Stop supporting our guy, we kicked your ass!
trollhattan
Tuesday was roughly a year ago but there’s still time soak in the aftermath. CA Prop 50 results, to date.
Yes: 5,683,569 63.9% Mp: 3,216,451 36.1%
ArchTeryx
@WaterGirl: I just take the bad news WITH the good. And the good news was very good! I’ve been describing it as the first earth-shaking footstep of the sleeping giant – the voting public – waking up. Kind of like that first footstep of the T-rex approaching in the original Jurassic Park.
I’m just worried that out of desperation, the death and destruction they are going to cause is going to be terrible. Look at what happened with COVID! And I’m a Chicago native. I see and hear about what’s going on there and it chills me to the bone.
tam1MI
I felt the same way after Biden was sacrificed on the alter of the Cult of Savvy, and TBH I am not sure I am all the way back yet. It will all depend on who gets nominated in 2026 and 2028, and what they say.
One thing I do know is that there is a group of Democrats out there who will never get my vote, no matter what the circumstances.
Matt McIrvin
@trollhattan: Honestly I see that as kind of a grim victory–actual democracy already lost so the best we can do is shoot back to balance their antidemocratic moves with ours, in the hopes that it all cancels out.
I don’t support Arnold Schwarzenegger’s angst about this but on some level I understand it.
HinTN
@bbleh: Wimpy had far more credibility than Thune (or any R, for that matter).
prostratedragon
Thoroughly corrupt:
Marc
In other amusing aspects of life, I had a home healthcare assistant visiting once a week to help set up showers and stuff. She is in her 60s, clearly immigrant, fairly dark skin, vaguely East Asian looking, and somehow disturbingly familiar, particularly the way she speaks and the jewelry she wears. Yesterday I finally asked, where were you born? She said Guyana, and it clicked, she was from the southernmost outpost of the British West Indies, while my Dad’s family was a few jumps farther north in Barbados. Quite possibly a distant relative. We had a good laugh over that. Small world…
Geminid
@iKropoclast: The prompt was someone saying Spanberger had called Mamdani a liar. If the person had just said what you described I would have let it slide instead of jumping in.
tam1MI
To which is Balloon Juicers can reply: We were hating on Cuomo before it was cool! 😎😎😎
rikyrah
@Jackie:
LarryO has been consistently on this story from the beginning.
He has never forgotten it.
tam1MI
What was somewhat hilarious about that whole kerfuffle was how the Further Left erupted in fury when Spanberger said we shouldn’t promise things we can’t deliver, yet when AOC said virtually the same thing they praised her to the skies.
iKropoclast
@Geminid: The prompt was someone saying Spanberger had called Mamdani a liar. If the person had just said what you described I would have let it slide instead of jumping in.
The liar thing was an extreme interpretation, but Id say valid. If someone is knowingly making promises they can’t deliver on…
If someone says “2+2” I don’t think we should be surprised if someone comes up with “she means 4.”
Kathleen
@rikyrah: Said Lucy to Charlie Brown.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: He’s just the GQP Sen leader. He can’t say shit for the House.
Paul in KY
@rikyrah: Hopefully unemployed now and replaced by a better version.
pluky
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: How to say one knows nothing about NYC without saying one knows nothing about NYC?
Paul in KY
@iKropoclast: Hope things get better for you and all of us ASAP!
iKropoclast
Heard. I’m with you there, I even have a particular test election where I live.
Also, if the donor veto rears its ugly head again for anyone, for any reason, and Democrats let it slide again; that’s as sure a sign as any that they ain’t shit, fully captured by the donor class. Now it stands as only a likelihood.
Kathleen
@Matt McIrvin: Some rando pod caster on Xeet noted that Hillary Clinton didn’t endorse ZM but congratulated him on his victory which made her a hypocrite and opportunist because she only wanted to “ride on his coattails”. Several commenters gently replied that she was Hillary Effin’ Clinton and she needed no coattails from anybody. OK I made the gently part up.
Paul in KY
@Omnes Omnibus: We had a thread dedicated to our great Speaker Pelosi and (of course) we can’t get 1 post in until she is being snipped at for her perfidities.
It seems to be the BJ Way ™.
Geminid
@iKropoclast: Sure, you could interpret her statement that way if you tried. But this person said Spanberger called Mamdani a liar flat out, not that she had given a long answer that could be construed as implying he was a liar. There’s a big difference.
Mehdi Hasan made the same claim the day before, but he restricts his replies so I could not take this with him. But there was an effort by a number of other “influencers” to dirty up Spanberger that started before the election, and when someone tried it here I spoke up.
Ruckus
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
The real problem is that they – conservatives, don’t know how things work or don’t work, and as you stated are high on their own supply, so it makes it just a tad more difficult for them to do anything positive. They still live in the 1800s and basically have zero clue what anything older than 100-150 years is about or how it works. And they weren’t very sharp then. They want a world that is so simple they can understand it. But a world that simple is like a car, of any year, that has run out of gas and the key to the gas cap was lost the last time they fueled up. Which seemingly was when gas was less than 50 cents/gallon. IOW they want a simple world with no one being outside their limited concept of living. But that world passed them by quite a few years ago. And they haven’t figured this out. And do not want to, making everything more than a tad difficult. As an old I can state unequivocally that the world, while different today quite a bit since I could first walk is also better, for many reasons. One is that conservatives have their heads up their dark, smelly place and don’t have a clue where they parked it and why it isn’t where they think it is. The world woke up, for the most part, but they haven’t a clue.
WaterGirl
@Paul in KY: In every thread, we could all be smarter about not allowing ourselves to be pulled down some unproductive or repetitive road by one of the first comments in the thread.
We don’t always have to take the bait.
Geminid
@iKropoclast: Well, I answered you but I fat-fingered my nym so the answer is in moderation. My apologies to whomever has to manually approve it.
WaterGirl
@Geminid: I assume you are aware that you had stray characters at the end of your nym that threw you into moderation?
tam1MI
Speaker Pelosi’s biggest blunder was also her most recent one. It’s still fresh in people’s minds.
iKropoclast
@Geminid: Haha, that’s fine. I can wait. I’ll probably be refreshing this page til end of day. I usually just pick a couple threads and stick to them til they die out.
kindness
The MSM loves Republican rule. Look at how they treated Bill Clinton, Barak Obama and Joe Biden. Compare that the Bush II or Trump. Look at how the MSM treated Hillary, Biden and Kamala when they ran for office vs how they treated Trump.
It’s cliche to say Washington is built for Republican rule, but far too many Village Elders and media owners do everything they can to make that happen without giving a shit about the rest of us or our concerns.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, …
Things don’t change until they do.
Forward!!
Best wishes,
Scott.
iKropoclast
@Geminid: Like I said, it was a fairly extreme interpretation. But we know these media personalities are drama llamas, nothing new there.
I’m not going to pretend that things like that aren’t contributing to my despair for the possibility that society might start acting in positive ways again. Like we can’t even wait for people to try before they’re declared a failure. If nice things start happening, I’ll probably see them. I’m done expecting anything good, though. I’m about at the point of wondering if the downfall of human civilization would or wouldn’t be better for overall life on Earth. The method probably matters there…
Paul in KY
@ArchTeryx: I personally think you’re sorta cavalierly throwing around ‘Final Solution’ as a term (given the general definition of it, etc. etc.).
Kathleen
@Geminid: I saw her comment and it was straightforward and plain. What I find funny is that Dems are always being criticized for being mealy mouthed, beholden to donors and consultants and less than forthcoming. Now another Democrat called him out and many professional Dem haters are outraged and horrified because she spoke her truth. C’mon, man. He’s the mayor of NEW YORK CITY for crying out loud. Hillary, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris are expected to take the body blows from ALL sides and they handle them gracefully and professionally but ZM should be spared because?
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Yes, I noticed after my comment went into moderation.
Paul in KY
@WaterGirl: Understand. There were (IMO) many many many other threads where those thoughts could have been/oh surely will be aired. Last thought on that.
Kathleen
@tam1MI: Every season the left creates a purity cudgel to separate the youthful pures from the corrupt, tired, useless olds. I’ve noticed for example people just can’t acknowledge Nancy Pelosi for her many accomplishments without taking a gratuitous “it’s about time” swipe. Um, yeah, she figured that out THAT’S WHY SHE’S RETIRING. Sorry it was not in the time frame that was not acceptable to rhetorical you. I’m still ulpset about her role in shivving Biden though.
Geminid
@iKropoclast: Hey, this serious suggestion: maybe check out your local DSA chapter. DSA members often get a bad rap for things people adjacent to their party say, but my overall impression is that they are a sincere bunch with positive attitides and a work ethic. The soreheads who get mistaken for them are too cynical and lazy to join an organization like that.
Some DSA members can get very doctrinaire, but there’s one who comments here occasionally who says they participate despite that, and concentrates on the good parts. I won’t name them, but they were a delegate to the 2023 national convention.
iKropoclast
@WaterGirl: You’re right. I did see some of that. What I engaged with on those threads is probably coloring my view. But also coloring my view is the fact that I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate. It feels like celebrating a ball tossed in the air returning to you, like an immutable law of physics just happened to work out in Dems’ favor…this time.
Geminid
@Kathleen: I think this is more about tearing Spanberger down than protecting Mamdani. She’s a formidable woman politician who is seen as a threat to the brand of politics people like Hassan, Klippenstein and others espouse.
Ed. They go after Hakeem Jeffries for similar reasons.
WaterGirl
@Another Scott:
Winsome Earle-Sears is black. Kamala was black.
Trump is white. So is Spanberger.
Could that explain it? If so, it appears that race Trumps all, even party affiliation. Just throwing that out there as a thought, not necessarily a good one.
WaterGirl
@@iKropoclast: Omnes may be right. Often it feels like all you see is the negative.
Redshift
@Another Scott: I agree with DeLong about the amazing success of Biden’s economic team, but I’ve always found the various iterations of “the vibes” as an explanation for the economy deeply unsatisfying, because it doesn’t really explain anything. It’s just saying “people didn’t see the reality because they didn’t.” Likewise citing disinformation — if you can’t at least propose an explanation of why it worked so well on this compared to other things, you’re not explaining.
I find Krugman’s proposal in this area more convincing — prices went up during the Biden administration (actually transitory), but wages went up more, especially for lower income people (where Biden did the best in my lifetime.) But people tend to perceive rises in pay as their well-deserved reward, and rises in prices as their well-earned reward being stolen from them, even if they’re both inflation, and they don’t like to be told they’re wrong.
(In addition, there was the very real snatching away of extra support to satisfy Manchin, which hit with very bad timing.)
iKropoclast
@WaterGirl: At this point in time, that just sounds to me like I have my eyes open. Republicans worse than ever, Democrats backsliding on civil rights, with a new loud segment pushing whole new threads of bigotry that hadn’t been salient this way in the past, aspirational agendas declared dead on arrival.
So no, I’m really not excited at the prospect of Democrats halfway cleaning up another Republican mess before society decides times up and we’re ready to dive into yet another deeper circle of hell.
Redshift
@WaterGirl:
I think Spanberger would have won anyway in this environment, but that is definitely a big part of why she won so big. Another is that Trump is such a racist that he wouldn’t openly endorse Earle-Sears and wouldn’t appear with her in person. He eventually told voters they should vote for her (or maybe just that they should vote for all the Republicans, can’t remember) without making an official endorsement.
Another reason for the blowout is that Republicans had candidates a lot of them were uncomfortable with for governor (Black woman) and Lt. Governor (gay man), so there was plenty of talk from anonymous party insiders that those two were hopeless and they should focus on the AG race. That’s not going to motivate the mass of voters who only really think about the top job. I read that one reason the result was so different from what it looked like during the leadup is that the GOP did pretty well in early voting (people who are more political) but their Election Day voting (lower propensity to vote) just collapsed compared to other years, which seems to fit.
Jackie
@WaterGirl:
You left out the double whammy: Both are Black AND don’t have the correct essential body part.
Hillary may have had a chance if her last name was Smith. She did win the popular vote in spite of having female genitalia.
Ben Cisco
@MattF: Today on My Idiot Senator™ (No Not Tradwife)…
Matt McIrvin
@Kathleen: I saw some video pop up on YouTube about how Hillary’s horrible outrage to Mamdani was blowing up in her face, but I didn’t click and didn’t know nor care to learn what it was.
JaySinWA
The end of the article:
Okay
WaterGirl
@Jackie: Good catch!
WaterGirl
@JaySinWA: Nicely done!
Ruckus
@kindness:
I’m an old and I’ve seen this countries population grow dramatically in my lifetime. The rest of the world as well.
The point is that this isn’t close to the same country or planet as it was in the lifetime of old farts like myself. The population, politics, communications, are all considerably different. What we are doing here is only 25 years old. This country is 248 years old. Think about how much has changed in the world and in this country in the last 75-100 years. It is a hell of a lot of change. Most for the better, some not so much. We still can elect a monarchy – an ignorant one mind you but we still can. Now when I say monarchy it’s not that we have a queen or king or ever have but we have hired leaders who may not have used that word but they have had the personality of a monarchy, a raised place to stand on and be above everyone else. And that ain’t a democracy. But it is part of humanity.
WTFGhost
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I wouldn’t trust a Republican to care about a descendent. Look at all the jokes about Eric!
@Geminid: Well, when you’re committing crimes, left and right, and a D administration isn’t willing to pardon you, you’ve got to win at the polls, and say that excuses all the criming.
@Paul in KY: Republicans have already helped kill Americans during Covid-19, and they cheered krybaby Kyle, who murdered two people and maimed a third. There’s plenty of room to throw “Final Solution” at the fasci. It is a bit “shrill” but Trump is salivating at the thought of invoking the insurrection act, and murdering people on the high seas, so, it’s appropriate to demand people look inside their souls, and ask, would they realize there’s tens of thousands of prisoners going to a camp, but no food, bedding, medical supplies, etc., to feed and care for them? Or would they just keep dusting the ash, from the incinerators, off their homes, and not ask questions?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Geminid: @Kathleen:
Yeah, they don’t really want a big tent. They constantly and fiercely attack moderates and get furiously angry when moderates are luke warm or skeptical about their candidates. I don’t know why they think that is productive. All it does is alienate people. If they want moderates to embrace them, they have to convince them that their ideas are actually realistic.
Thankfully, the very online left influencers are not most voters. I do know people who steep themselves in that nonsense. It distorts their understanding. But they usually vote the right way in the end, as do I. The tent is big enough for Mamdani’s and Spanbergers.
WTFGhost
@iKropoclast: Well… a lot of times people who are good are yelling, it’s because they have different visions of what’s good. And people are sometimes defending their dreams, so, what they’re discussing isn’t what they’re *saying*, it’s what they’re dreaming, what they’re hoping, so… man, yeah, life is hard, even when you’re trying to do right.
Listen, people ask if you’re depressed, here’s the biggest thing in the world about depression: when you’re depressed, you feel like there’s no point in doing certain things – maybe even having sex, or giving your partner the teasing touch that says sex is on your mind, if not foremost on your mind. Or maybe you acknowledge that you should, but you don’t find the time, or, you don’t realize your partner is there, available, because you’re a bit too locked in.
There’s lots of BS about fighting depression, but, the two things you need to do that are most important are: one, don’t believe lies, even if they feel like truths.
Depressed people hear lies like:
I always screw things up (sometimes it takes a long time, but I do)!
I’m worthless. People would be better off if I weren’t around
The world is horrible, what beauty is there to see?
Life is horrible; what joy is there to experience?
People are horrible.
Used to be therapists let you say stuff like that, because they wanted to validate your feeling. Now, they say, no, talk back to those kinds of statements, or, at least, force your brain to acknowledge that what you just heard in your head was bullshit. If you say the words, “I am worthless,” in your head, and no one answers, it’s like someone told you you were worthless, and someone you really trusted, even when other people are wrong.
So maybe you say “that’s bullshit,” and mean it, and carry on. Or maybe you want to self-soothe a bit more, and say “I know I’m not worthless,” that’s fine too. It’s no one else’s business how you deal with the voices in your own head, as it were.
The other thing you need to do is practice doing good things. Practice giving hugs and cuddles if you’ve got people or pets to hug and cuddle; try to do something fun, and try to get lost in it. There will be times when, if you’re getting depressed, you’ll be phoning it in, just pasting on a smile, and pretending you’re okay, but, there will also be times when you realize you did get lost in having fun, just for a few minutes, and then, it’s like, you know how to have fun again, you just need to exercise it a bit.
That’s my advice for how to “fight depression, despair, dickheads-in-office, and other horrors involving the letter D, like ‘dieting’ and maybe ‘Detroit.'”
Be well, and be happy, friend
ETA: Yes, some of the lies I quoted have a lot of truth to them. Doesn’t mean they’re not bullshit when they’re driving depression, not a healthy awareness of our troubled world.
Ruckus
@WTFGhost:
I was a mental health counselor for a not insignificant while and have talked with a lot of people about themselves and others close to them. We couldn’t stop people saying things like that but we could show them better ways of communicating their vision of life and understand that others didn’t always see the world the same way as they did and possibly why. Many people have a decent view of life but they can also believe that their way is the only way, and it rarely to never is. And that didn’t mean that they made reasonable choices or allowed others to make their choices. Often they didn’t. That doesn’t mean they were always right – or wrong, it meant that they might not see that there is often various ways of seeing life and living and that what works for one person isn’t always the best way for others. My experience was/is that a lot of people get told there is only one way and then they experience that the particular way in question and it doesn’t work for them. We are human, we – most of us, have functioning brains. Now that functioning may not work for someone else in any way, that doesn’t always make that way wrong.
Ruckus
@gratuitous:
@Old School:
I toured Alcatraz a number of years ago, after they closed it as a prison. Maybe 20 – 25 or so years ago. It was closed as a prison in 1963.
If shitforbrains reopens is he really, really is a sick fuck. Of course you knew that. It really, really isn’t in any condition to be a prison. Or anything else. And rebuilding is about all that can be done, it’s just old and has aged out, like things and humans do. And that rebuilding would be just slightly expensive. That word slightly is doing a hell of a lot of work…..
Ruckus
@Bruce K in ATH-GR:
they might not know that
I believe that it’s pretty obvious that what they don’t know is a very, very, very long list. And it’s a good bet that if something is rather bad for the rest of the country it is on their positive must do or destroy list.