Soo… He resigned in late July and nobody really noticed/thought much of it bc we’re supposed to be getting a new mayor in October.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s former deputy has a new job. Here’s where he’s heading.

“Our society thrived when everyone was smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey,” wrote Daily Wire commentator Matt Walsh, completely ignoring the countless, well-documented, negative impacts (violence and death) of those two American vices. “We became the most powerful nation in the world with liquor and nicotine. No country of potheads has ever thrived, or ever achieved anything at all. Every city that legalized it became an even bigger shithole basically overnight. The entire history of western civilization tells us that marijuana is far, far worse for society.”

Dumbest fucking take I’ve read regarding weed in the U.S. in probably the past two decades. This is another one of those things that’s like so low on the list of outrageous things that require attention right now, but it’s just so fucking unbelievably dumb that it somehow becomes salient enough to be noticable above the chaos that is the normal background.

The way he is so confidently trying to gaslight society like an overbearing parent, as if we have no frame of reference regarding marijuana policy other than what we learned in D.A.R.E.

Those shithole cities with their absurd abundance of tax revenue from marijuana sales.

Opioid sparing effects in Medicare enrollees with access to medical marijuana.

Fewer lives ruined due to a reduction of nonviolent incarceration rates.

I’m not sure what kind of utopia Matt Walsh believes he is advocating for by rolling back even more evidence based progress, but it sounds like a shithole.

I mean I feel like Walz is a pretty good example of someone who had a career and then became involved in politics.

I don’t think you necessarily need to throw your career away, and I’m not sure we really need term limits for house and Senate seats (although 6 years between reelection is a bit ridiculous).

There are definitely some career politicians who have proven that they earned and deserve their seat, it would just be nice to see a bit more variety in the track most people take to politics.

Probably around 2020

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/warren-and-buttigieg-had-a-tense-exchange-over-fundraising-and-more-from-the-democratic-debate/

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/buttigieg-leads-2020-rivals-wall-street-contributions-n1106161

https://time.com/6255811/elizabeth-warren-buttigieg-monopoly-antitrust/

To be fair my problem with him is the same problem I have with most politicians. I would vote for him if it came down to him vs Vance no question, but just seems like at the end of the day his loyalty is with his donors before anyone else.

This definitely didn’t help change my mind on how genuine he seems https://www.commondreams.org/news/just-tell-us-what-you-believe-buttigieg-torched-over-non-answer-on-israel-palestine

This is true, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t support him as a nominee. Depending on who else would be running during the primary, he might truly be the best pick.

When I say career politician, I mean the not so great aspect of politicians. Jon Stewart actually seems like a genuinely caring and empathetic person, and I would prefer someone like that to someone who is willing to compromise their values for a check.

I would vote for him if he was the nominee, it’s just not ideal to keep having TV stars at the helm of a country. He probably would make some really well informed and bad ass cabinet picks. I’m kinda picturing him as the anti-Reagan.

If Jon Stewart was the nominee, I’d vote for him. I’d honestly prefer him to someone like Buttigieg bc he seems more genuine, but I wish America would just give a scientist or an economist (or really anybody that can make educated decisions about the policies being created) a shot before we turn to another TV star. I know it’s never going to happen in my lifetime, but that would be my preference.

That’s awesome! There were some sunglasses I saw that did something similar but they were very expensive

He definitely shouldn’t have pretended to grab that lady’s tits while she was sleeping (I believe she was a soldier??? she was a reporter) and taken a photo, but honestly in hindsight he probably should have just apologized, and put in a lot of effort to making up for doing something like that instead of resigning.

He did something really dumb, but he still wasn’t a rapist or a pedophile. America has set a very low bar in his absence.

I’m going to go with no. I appreciate John Stewart, but can we please stop having TV stars run for office? Same goes for career politicians.

I mean, I voted for her, and would vote for her again any day if it meant voting against Trump, but he’s not wrong.

She’s not really unique in that aspect compared to any other mainstream Democrat vs any outsider or mainstream Republican, and that’s probably ~90% of the DNC’s problem when it comes to overcoming voter apathy.

Realistically, most people are not expecting Dems to refuse large donations, but accepting a donation should not mean that you then compromise your own values to accommodate 1% of voters on any issue. That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. That’s just pay to play.

Ok Donald. If you get Putin to leave Ukraine on Zelensky’s terms, then maybe we can talk about something other than Epstein for 5 minutes. Maybe.

However, if you fuck over Ukraine, and then try to claim a victory for authoritarianism as a victory for peace (which you almost assuredly will) we double down on Epstein so fucking fast even JD Vance will start to regret betraying you to Rupert Murdoch before the midterms.

The governors of red states have been invading blue cities within their state for years. When Trump finally just declares war on his own people they’ll already be set up and ready to take full control in several states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and probably Tennessee (Memphis for sure. They’re actually #1 on the FBI list. Nashville has been successfully fighting back against their own governor for several years. Mostly bc they have the concentrated wealth necessary to win a legal battle compared to the rest of the state).

I think Trump faced way more pushback at the state level than he was expecting when he tried to take L.A. Not that he won’t keep trying for L.A. and other blue cities, but D.C. was already federal territory/a relatively easy target by comparison. He needed a show of force, so he picked a fight he knew he could win.

No you’re right, I’m the useful idiot for not buying what’s being sold to me by a reality TV star. Now is definitely not the time for alliances against a traitorous coup.

Might as well give up and accept it’s over. No point in fighting to hold on to what’s left. Every man for himself. It’s total anarchy.

“Put them through trauma.” Either it took you less than 8 months to break, or you’re fully aware of your usefulness.

If the law was perfect or if the law even worked as intended, he would have been in prison a long time ago.

If the law didn’t matter at all, he wouldn’t bother making threats and testing the waters. The military never would have been recalled from LA the first time around. The FBI would have already arrested the TX Democrats in Chicago, and TX Republicans would have just gone ahead with the redistricting without a second thought (which even I’m pretty surprised that they didn’t).

Will the law alone prevail and save us in the end? Not likely, but there is a difference between being naive and not allowing yourself to panic and be backed into a corner of black and white thinking. In many ways, doing so is accepting defeat.

Being smart and strategizing means using the law and along with everything else to your advantage while you still can. Trump has been bulldozing through law bc his goal is to betray his own country. Democrats in TX are breaking the law, but they’re doing it strategically to save their country. They’re aligning themselves with Democrats in other states, and uniting as Americans. That’s what we all should be doing.

Exactly, he is escalating bc he is feeling pressure. He is getting worried about the midterms. That is not to say that the law will surely prevail in the end, but just to point out that he wouldn’t even be bothering to test the waters with threats of “maybe your city is next” if he didn’t believe he would see pushback.

He’s already sent and recalled much of the military in L.A., so what tf is he even talking about? Floating the idea of sending them again only to then recall them again?

D.C. has gained autonomy as a city, but keep in mind it was already unique compared to Chicago, LA, and NY bc it’s already a federal district. When he called for a “federal takeover” a few days ago, he meant stripping the city of its autonomy in terms of taking the power from the mayor.

When he tried to take LA the first time, he experienced pushback from both city and state governments. Military morale was reportedly extremely low, he made them sleep on the floor bc he didn’t really have any kind of a plan other than a show of force. In the end, he basically succeeded in a public show of wasting money and resources for absolutely nothing.

Now what? He’s going to send in the troops again? Surely they’ll get the job done the second time around.

Customers need to already have the data they want to work with—Palantir itself does not provide any.

It blows my mind that the role of Michael Kratsios during Trump’s first administration as CTO has been basically ignored by the media.

He was brought into the White House by Thiel to help the president with “technology issues.” He is quoted in interviews as early as 2017-2018 saying the administration was trying to gain access to large protected government databases in order to train AI.

Thiel was planning for government data to be ready for Palantir to use ~8 years before the current administration began handing Palantir billions of dollars in contracts and giving employees military rank.

Kratsios is now science advisor for the POTUS, but still somehow barely receives press coverage. The rare coverage he does receive is never critical. Do you remember the big scary Elon Musk is running the White House, stealing our data, and we should all be terrified media narrative?

Musk was only executing the plans Kratsios made during the first Trump administration, and he stepped down as soon as Kratsios was confirmed by the Senate.

It’s like we can state the obvious, “This could be a way for an authoritarian regime to destroy civil liberty.” But nobody will just come out and say “Peter Thiel has already built a platform that will allow an authoritarian regime to destroy civil liberty and crush dissent, and he started planning it nearly a decade ago. Michael Kratsios is the flying monkey who made it possible for him to build it, and continues to quietly do his bidding.”

I’m not arguing with you that there are people that will pathologically vote Republican. Those aren’t the people that anyone should be worried about changing/trying to convince to switch sides. Doing so would be a losing strategy, and trying to outrun the bear.

There are way more people throughout the entire U.S. that fall into the voter apathy/“didn’t bother bc I’ve accepted both sides are essentially the same” camp. Those are the people that could be won over by Democrats not selecting an establishment candidate. This would be focusing on outrunning the opponent instead of the bear.

Why do you think so many people voted Clinton/Gore in 1992? When he first ran, Bill Clinton was just a smooth talking young guy from Arkansas, who seemed like he genuinely cared about people. Compared to Bush, he seemed like an outsider and a breath of fresh air.

This is a fuck ton of blue (including West Virginia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidential_election

Look at all the blue on that 1992 map, and compare it to all the red on this map when Dukakis ran against Bush in 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_United_States_presidential_election

Flashback: When Bill Clinton Was A Populist

The answer won Clinton rave reviews, partly–ok, mostly–because Clinton showed so much ability to connect with average Americans. (It helped, too, that Bush was so utterly lacking in the same ability.) But the answer was also a hit because it made a persuasive case on substance–one that would actually work pretty well today, right down to Clinton’s suggestion that simply reducing national debt isn’t a strategy for recovery. It takes investment, he says, and controlling health care costs.

We tend to remember the Clinton presidency for its largely centrist pattern of governance–the focus on balanced budgets, enthusiastic promotion of free trade, and so on. But that was a reaction (and, I’d argue, a mostly necessary reaction) to the political circumstances Clinton faced once in office. Back in 1992, even as he was promoting himself as a New Democrat who was tough on crime and demanded work from welfare recipients, he was still a pretty unabashed populist. He championed the need for public investment to create jobs and universal health care, giving them more priority than adopting a crash course towards balanced budgets.

People will vote for whoever can persuade them that their interests will be protected. That’s why Trump has his populist schtick even if it’s a load of horseshit. There is no intention of ever doing anything he has promised poor people, because you don’t make (enough) money doing things that actually help poor people.

He will make the claim though, and then follow through on his promise to hurt scapegoats. That alone is enough to keep just enough people on his hook.

Meanwhile, recycling middle of the road Democrats who are way too willing to compromise their party’s (supposed) values bc they’re afraid of stepping on wealthy people’s toes, only gives fuel to the argument that both sides are the same. The right knows this, and they very successfully use this argument (which is partially true) to create disinformation fueled voter apathy and control the narrative.

Using this strategy, the right doesn’t even have to worry about actually winning over voters from the middle or left bc they can always fall back on the base who is motivated by a scapegoat. They don’t even need a “good” candidate, they just need someone who can be persuasive enough.

It’s like the saying " I don’t have to have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."

Frankly, if the Democrats actually support the values they claim, they should understand that in 2025, wealthy people need to have their toes stepped on. We are not supposed to have one America where the wealthy profit from exploitation, and another America where everyone else to get exploited. Acknowledging that fact, is the very persuasive elephant in the room that would actually go very far in persuading people the both sides argument isn’t true. Except neither side is willing to address it.

Republicans won’t address it bc keeping that elephant invisible is the entire reason they care about running this country. They need power and control in order to protect their own interests.

I would like to believe that the reason Democrats won’t address it, is bc they have mistakenly convinced themselves that throwing endless piles of money into a campaign (via their wealthy donors) will help them create the most marketable candidate who can pull voters from the center and right. In other words, they’re too focused on outrunning the bear rather than their opponent.

“Sometimes I am attacked by my opponents for being far-left, fringe, out of touch with where America is,” said Sanders. “Actually, much of what I talk about is exactly where America is… You are living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, and if we had good policy and the courage to take on the billionaire class, there is no reason that every kid in this country could not get an excellent higher education, regardless of his or her income. That is not a radical idea.”

☝️ 100% this. Democrats, you want a candidate that will win? Stop focusing so much on what your donors want you to do, and start focusing on what your country needs you to do.