That’s the best question. Clarence Thomas shouldn’t have been able to openly flaunt his corruption for decades, but he has. Is this just going to be more firm hand-wringing by the Dems with no enforcement mechanism whatsoever? At that point, it would be better to just recognize the court as illegitimate in the public eye as opposed to giving the false sense that it is in anyway ethical.

They can’t even do bullshit PR correctly. You do the listening tour before the steady stream of unpopular decisions that go against the feedback you just collected.

Any third party player is a negative to Biden right now, even if it is “just” Manchin.

The election is won and lost on the 10% of independents within purple states, and this ‘coalition’ would batter left-leaning independents with ads

Great article. Insightful and over a longer time horizon than I expected

Pretty easy to see that this will lead to immediate short-term gains but long-term pain. I can’t tell you the amount of infinite loops I’ve found myself in with AI chat, even among the most simplistic questions.

I am pessimistic that he is “stuck”. Billions and billions and billions of dollars are rarely stuck. The demographics are changing, but not nearly enough so that a D win is inevitable. That, paired with some of the structural victories he already has achieved (redistricting, conservative supreme court) make me believe that we are going to see his legacy continue for decades on. Dark.

I would be absolutely shocked if this wasn’t just smoke and mirrors marketing.

I genuinely hope so. I know that not all hope is lost, but some days the relentless march of climate change articles – Vermont thousand year flood! Phoenix, 99 degree overnight low! is crushing.

Boring

I support this. While the GOP base continues to shrink and die off, the Dems are doing no favors but continuing to make a vast swath of voters feel unrepresented. I was 18 when Obama came around in his first run and I felt represented then. I don’t think I’ve felt represented personally since then.

This is not an endorsement of the GOP. Just an echoing of the general feeling of invisibility.

Your comment is spot on, and it’s what led me to ultimately cutting bait entirely, after 12 years of heavy daily use: it’s never coming back to what I remember it as.

Reddit is certainly not going to die anything – the website itself will likely be around 10 years from now – but it won’t be the reddit I remember or loved. So I moved on. I toyed around with Squabbles for awhile but this feels much more like the reddit experience I’m looking for.

No governor exemplifies “The cruelty is the point” more than DeSantis. Most GOP governors will provide all of the public talking points but still do what benefits some of their constituents when the window is open. Desantis is a different (worse) breed.

Progress is still progress, even if it’s just slow incremental work to move back to pre-Trump norms.