It seems to apply to the entire capitol groups, so it would apply to everyone visiting the capitol. I hope a group of trans men arranges a never-ending parade of trans men using the women’s restrooms at the capitol.

Seriously. We have these $7500 tax credits on expensive luxury EVs, but you don’t get that level of support if you’re interested in a more modest vehicle.

Here’s an idea for a tax credit. How about a $2k tax credit for e-bikes? That will pay for the entire cost of a decent entry-level e-bike. E-bikes really are what is needed to make active transport approachable in the US’s sprawling suburbia. You could even sell it to people as, “get an e-bike. Use it on whatever trips you can. No risk to you.”

The key word there is “right to.” If someone is willing to have a plea deal or move quickly to trial, they can. But if you want, and have the resources to pay for a lawyer, you can delay the process out for a very long time. Just because you have a right to a speedy trial doesn’t mean you have to exercise that right.

Even a peaceful division of the US would be something they would seriously benefit from. The US permanently divided against itself, each side easy to manipulate into a military conflict against the other. We would have nukes pointed at each other within a decade. It would be like the splitting of India and Pakistan, along with all the accompanying human rights atrocities.

3 of these guys marching down the street: a joke.

3,000 of these guys marching down the street: a nightmare.

No, it’s that voters respond more to actions than words.

Democrats doomed themselves with the pro-democracy message in 2024. They shouldn’t even have mentioned Trump’s threat to democracy. It simply made them look unhinged to low-information voters. By the time the 2024 election came around, Biden’s own actions made running on the democracy angle nonviable.

The fatal flaw in Democrats’ messaging is that they ran on Trump as an enemy of democracy in 2016, 2020, and 2024. They ran on it, and yet, they did nothing about it.

Trump should have been hauled before a military tribunal and charged with treason on day one of Biden’s presidency. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to carve out special provisions for him should have been hauled in front of the same tribunal and been charged as accomplices. Every single person remotely involved with the conspiracy, including seating members of Congress, should be rotting in Gitmo right now. They all should have been sent to jail or the gallows within 100 days of Biden taking office.

THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You do what you have to do, purge who you have to purge, and let history be your judge. Damn the consequences. Do some MAGA traitors want to start a riot in protest? Fine, send in the military to put them down. Do what you need to do and cut the rot out of the body politic.

You can’t just SAY something is a threat to democracy. You need to get off your ass and actually DO something about it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-Confederate newspapers shut down, and that was just the start of it.

When democracy is threatened, sometimes you need to run roughshod over a lot of democratic norms, lest the enemies of democracy get away with it and try again. They only need to win once, you need to win every time. Which means that when someone does actually try to overthrow democracy, you need to come down like the hammer of God upon them. You need to respond with such overwhelming force that people are lining up at the door to strike a plea deal for a mere decade in prison. Realistically, when things get this bad, you need to be prepared to sentence thousands of people to decades in prison based on rapid trials in kangaroo courts if necessary. When thousands of people become so far gone that they think overthrowing a democracy is an acceptable option, the only real way to resolve that is to start handing out life and capital sentences like candy.

What did Biden actually do? He appointed an attorney general who sat on the Trump case for two years and only started an investigation when shamed into it by the House. And then Trump just ran out the clock. Garland prosecuted a bunch of the low-level people who physically stormed the capital, but he made sure all the actual high-level ring leaders escaped unpunished.

Biden didn’t have a spine. He showed, through his actions, that he really didn’t consider Trump a serious threat to democracy. And if the sitting president of the United States doesn’t consider someone a threat, why would you expect disengaged voters to do so?

My only hope is that if Trump’s promised Reign of Terror does occur, that he starts with all the leading figures of Biden’s Justice Department. While whatever mistreatment they receive will be for things that weren’t actually wrong, at least they will be indirectly punished for their actual crimes - failing to defend this nation’s democracy. If Biden and Garland end up themselves sitting in prison on some Trumped-up charge, well I’ll have zero sympathy for them. They will simply be serving their sentence for their cowardly failure to defend American democracy. If anyone is to feel the boot of a new autocracy, let them be the first. They are the ones that created it.

It’s about having a coherent message.

What exactly were Kamala’s biggest goals? In other words, if she could accomplish just three things in office, what would those three things have been? Can anyone answer that question? Does anyone know?

Because you certainly can with Trump. He wanted to deport millions of people, raise a bunch of tariffs, and exterminate trans people. Those were the three things he ran on.

What Democrats repeatedly fail to understand is that having a policy paper on your website is NOT THE SAME THING as actually having policy positions. You can’t just point to something on your website, written by a staffer, as what you support.

I voted for Kamala, but I still to this day have not a damn idea what the woman actually stood for. Sure, she had official policies, but she never had any core issues that she hammered on again, and again, and again. She never had an effective ‘elevator pitch’ for why she should be president, other than just that she isn’t Trump.

Democrats need to pick 3-5 things for an election cycle, 3-5 major policy positions. And then they, all of them, need to repeatedly and endlessly hammer home those things.

And my point is, in any situation where you actually end up using that firearm, you are far, far less likely to be afforded the right of self-defense than someone who isn’t trans or related to a trans person.

https://theappeal.org/advocates-say-brooklyn-da-is-prosecuting-transgender-people-in-self-defense-cases/

https://peopleslawoffice.com/free-cece-mcdonald-self-defense-homophobia-transphobia/

https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/az-jail-releases-transgender-woman-accused-of-assault/75-2ace8199-65b3-423b-909f-4b10db35d330

Again, whether prosecutors respect a self-defense claim largely comes down to the demographic characteristics of the person making that claim. If you use a firearm to defend your transgender son, odds are good that you will be charged with murder, even if you are indeed actually defending your son. Queer people don’t get to benefit from the 2nd Amendment.

I haven’t played it, but I have a special place in my heart for Eve Online. It has the type of cartoonishly evil scams you just don’t see anymore. For example, centuries past, a common scam was for people to set up fake banks. Get people to deposit money at your fake bank, then disappear into the night one day. Today, an era where it’s a lot harder to just up and disappear, this type of scam is far less common.

But not in Eve! A few years ago there was a massive scammer who got a bunch of people to put all their money in his bank offering suspiciously high interest rates. The bank collected a huge amount of money. Then one day the bank operator just loaded all the cash into his spaceship and flew off into space! It would be like if Wells Fargo went bankrupt because the CEO just absconded to Switzerland with all the bank’s holdings one night.

What are you talking about? Try writing more than a single flippant sentence, and maybe you can get a point across.

Irrelevant. If you pass, you’re by definition not going to experience anti-trans violence, which is the discussion at hand.

But moreover, any time you use a firearm in self-defense, you WILL be outed to the police.

Among firearm self-defense folks, the common advice is like this:

Did you just shoot a home intruder? Leave your house. Go to your driveway. Leave the gun somewhere outside that is clearly visible, but a significant distance from you. Call the police and tell them a shooting has occurred, but that no threat still exists. Stand somewhere brightly lit where they can see your hands. Follow their instructions, but don’t talk to them without a lawyer. You most likely will be arrested.

The point is that any actual use of firearms in self-defense involves interaction with law enforcement. And they will run a background check on you, and your trans status will be revealed then. What tends to happen then is that a case that would be classified as self-defense, if committed by a straight white man, will instead be prosecuted as a homicide, because you are a trans person.

Alternately, you might find yourself forced to use the restroom of your AGAB due to a bathroom law. Now you have to out yourself to use the restroom. Do this long enough, a transphobe will assault you for being in the ‘wrong’ bathroom. When you use your firearm to defend yourself against assault, it is YOU who will be charged with a crime, not your attacker. Your attacker and your friends will lie, accusing you of doing perverted things in the bathroom the law requires you to use. The police will take the side of your attacker, and you will have the book thrown at you.

In practice, the 2nd amendment does not exist for minority groups. A white guy can walk down the sidewalk openly brandishing a semi-automatic rifle. A black kid will be murdered for reaching for something a cop thinks just might maybe be a weapon.

It’s not so much about alignment of views as it is pure loyalty. He wants people who will unquestioningly follow foolish, immoral, or illegal orders. And the best way to do that is to pick people who are completely dependent on Trump himself.

Think of someone like Gaetz. He was likely about to be kicked out of the House. Or Tulsi Gabbard, someone with zero political future on either side of the aisle on her own. He’s not just looking for people he likes; he’s looking for weirdos and political wash-outs who have zero future prospects without him. If Gaetz is working for Trump, and Trump fires him, where exactly does Gaetz go from there? The pro-Trump folks will see him as a traitor. The anti-Trump folks will still see him as the sex pest he is. He ran for Congress right out of law school, so he can’t really just go back to practicing law.

Gaetz’s only real path forward in life is complete subservience to Trump. If he gets and stays in Trump’s good graces, he can be supported through the Trump regime, and then, if he leaves on good terms, he’ll remain popular among the MAGA-set going forward. At that point he can always get a high-paying consulting job at some Trump-friendly company.

Compare Gaetz to Trump’s previous AG, Bill Barr. Prior to Trump’s first term, Barr had a decades-long legal career in multiple presidential administrations and in indsutry. I’m sure he was already well off enough for quite a comfortable retirement prior to becoming Trump’s AG. If Trump had ever told him to do something that he absolutely would not do, he could simply retire to life as a private citizen quite contentedly.

The 2nd Amendment, in practice, only exists for white straight Christians.

My crazy prediction is that trump will try to duplicate the burning of the Reichstag. Except, in typical fashion, he will do so in a comically inept fashion. He’ll try to burn down the Reichstag, and he’ll actually succeed! Unfortunately, he’ll burn down the Reichstag…the actual Reichstag, not the US capital, but the present-day German parliament building.

See, fascism gives the appearance of a united front because it rallies around a singular leader, but it’s not. Everyone below that leader is trying to stab each other in the back in order to be in the good graces of the leader.

That Nazis were actually very incompetent at governing. It didn’t stop them from committing the Holocaust.

I stand firmly by this statement: “Politics are never as good as they seem and they are never as bad as they seem.”

That works until it doesn’t. “I assume neither side is actually a Hitler,” is a perfectly good heuristic, until one side actually goes and nominates a Hitler. Then that heuristic failures spectacularly and you end up electing a Hitler.

I work in higher education, and I have to say, I think we probably have been pushing it too hard. I want to see everyone have access to tuition-free university education, but I also expect enrollment to decline. I’m an elder Millennial. We were pushed hard that we had to go to college. It was that or work a retail or fast food job. Where I grew up, in white suburbia, trades weren’t even seriously discussed among my peer group. My parents were college graduates, and unless I showed some really strong self-interest in a trade particularly early, it was just assumed I would be going to college as well.

College turned out well for me. But I know many in my peer group weren’t so lucky. I managed to graduate with a modest amount of debt I was subsequently able to pay off, but I knew many with crippling levels of debt. I work in higher education, and I see many students today with crippling levels of debt.

In my peer group, we were told to go to college, and we did. And some of us found success with our degrees, and some didn’t. But now people in my peer group have had to deal with paying student loans while ALSO paying far higher prices for any kind of trade service than our parents did. We have people with masters degrees working as baristas, but now we have to pay out the nose for any kind of plumbing, electrical, HVAC, or carpentry work. There are millions of people in my generation that probably would have been better served with an apprenticeship in the trades than a university diploma.

So yeah, I have no doubt that the parents of today, people my age, are likely having much more nuanced conversations about potential career paths than we received. Are you a 16 year old that likes electrical stuff, but are terrible at and have little interest in math or physics coursework? Are you considering studying electrical engineering? While you might be able to struggle through an electrical engineering degree by the sheer force of grit, you should seriously consider whether being an electrician is a better option. So go study your options. Go learn quite a bit about what the actual day-to-day work of electricians vs electrical engineers looks like. If you decide you hate working on your feet, have zero interest in outdoor or dirty construction work? Well, maybe an electrical engineering degree is worth struggling through. Does the thought of doing office work fill you with dread? Do you love getting your hands dirty? Maybe an electrician is the path for you.

Repeat that conversation across a thousand disciplines, and I think that’s the kind of thing that’s happening now a lot more than it did for my generation. And I expect it to have a negative impact on college enrollment.

People demanded unity.

Who are these ‘people’ that demanded unity? Centrist Democrats reflexively dash towards the center. It’s just part of their belief system; they’re personally centrist and fundamentally opposed to major transformative policy. No one ‘called’ for Biden to be some big unity candidate. That was his choice, not the peoples.

Obama proved himself a centrist, but he ran as a progressive. That’s the crucial difference.

Honestly, I at this point wonder if progressives would be better off running as Republicans. Trump has largely, at least on messaging, distanced himself from a lot of traditional Republican economics. His base doesn’t really care much about traditional Republican policies like tax cuts or even deregulation. It’s mostly just driven by grievance and raw rage against vague elites. Mostly that is directed against cultural elites, but that same movement could be directed against wealth inequality. And the Republican Party has proven itself much more receptive to new ideas than the Democratic Party has. The Republican Party can be taken over by charismatic figures, while wealthy donors and special interest groups largely control the DNC. This isn’t likely to change any time soon. The existing Democratic leadership has more to gain by losing as a centrist than seeing a progressive win and force through change in the DNC.

I say progressives should try running as Republicans. Call yourself a “radical Republican,” hearkening back the historical radical Republicans in the post-Civil War era. Say you were going to stick it to the wealthy, give the little guy a shot, and not do any DEI. Hell, repeatedly hammer the nepotism and social advantages the wealthy have as “wealth DEI.” Rail endlessly against big business and elites. Vow to not appoint anyone who went to an Ivy League school to any position in your administration. Promise not to even talk to a single Wall Street Banker.