Anyone have a non-paywall link to the video?

Both supporters and detractors will buy them, someone’s going to get rich.

You can’t arrest me for pretending to be a diplomat, I have diplomatic immunity!

I think we might be agreeing, it’s just that “mediocre” means different things to each of us. My team supports human spaceflight, and no one we have is crummy. The “mediocre” people have pretty decent technical skills if you’re looking across all software development domains.

Personally, I’ve found the decent technical skills to be easier to come by than the other ones, and having all of them in one package is a real discriminator.

People have those things in spectrums, not all or nothing. You have to have at least some of all of them, but I’d argue that mediocre competency with really good communication and accountability is a better combination that really good competency with one of the others being mediocre.

I’m halfway through scrolling this long thread, and this is the first comment I’ve seen that isn’t overly cynical. It’s also correct.

I’ve been working for 38 years, and I’ve been someone who makes promotion decisions for 15 of them. The third one is helpful, not essential, but the others are super important. The people who rise to leadership positions aren’t necessarily the top technical people, they’re the ones who do those things with a good attitude.

The other thing I’d add is that they’re people who are able to see the big picture and how the details relate to it, which is part of strategic thinking.

Isn’t it still a state crime even if it’s moved to a federal court? Still state charges and state standards.

I agree she’s not a progressive, and I wish she was. But I think she’s pretty effective at working the system to get things done, and she still seems pretty shrewd. I mean, the linked article makes a good case that she outplayed both McConnell and McCarthy.

The article’s point is that the committee was successful because of who was in it, and Pelosi was the one who orchestrated that, not showing McConnell or McCarthy to get away with their shit.

I sure feel that way about Feinstein, but Pelosi still seems to be one of the more effective politicians.

It’s hard to align “kind” with supporting DeSantis policies. Is she a one-issue voter who looks at something like abortion and dismisses everything else? Because the guy is responsible for a lot of suffering.

To the extent DeSantis popular, it’s only because he says and does things to “own the libs.” He isn’t a good speaker, he isn’t charismatic, and he doesn’t have actual ideas for accomplishing anything.

The people who end up voting for him in the primaries will be the ones who simply want to piss off liberals, but figure Trump will be in jail.

I think it’s a valid thing to pay attention to, and your example supports that, doesn’t contradict it. In the early part of the 2016 election, Clinton was considered a shoe in against Trump. But Trump excited his base h he filled stadiums - while the support for Clinton was much less enthusiastic. And, as we know all too well, Clinton lost.

So yes, seeing the kinds of crowds a candidate draws is one measure that’s worth looking at. It’s not the whole thing, for sure, especially when some candidates aren’t above paying people to attend.

Google news, NPR, a few other places more rarely. Not that I’m super prolific.

Spot on. You could do one for 2024 for MTG and Boebert, but sadly some people would be excited by the prospect.

Oh, God, I’d almost forgotten that name. In those days one of my employees came to work on Halloween dressed as a “Tea party crackpot.” His clothes made to look like made out of china with a big crack down from the neck, then big fake tea bags all over and each had a nut job quote from tea party members. I think about a third of them were Bachmann’s. Things like ''I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back" and ‘‘Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.’’

I was going to say that there isn’t a dumber elected official, but then I remembered Boebert. Man, if someone is going to be that dumb, they should at least be nice, and either way they shouldn’t be helping to run the country. Such a complete embarrassment.

There’s a giant number of posts, but only a small number of bots responsible for them. When I see a post like that, I click on the bot’s username, then click “block.” Didn’t have to do that very many times before those posts disappeared for me.