Arsenic Lupin posted:

Arsenic Lupin posted:

comedyblissoption posted:

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1778518416158007786

quote:

Behind the scenes: The joke captured how Trump often privately interacts with Bolton, even occasionally in front of foreign heads of state. "John has never seen a war he doesn't like," Trump said in a recent Oval Office meeting, according to a source with direct knowledge.

quote:

In a SitRoom meeting last year, Trump's national security team was going around the table discussing a topic that was nuanced and had no relation to major military action. A source in the room said that as the conversation got to Bolton, Trump joked: "Ok, John, let me guess, you want to nuke them all?" People in the room "died laughing," the source said.

bedpan posted:

"John," Trump asked, "Is Ireland one of those countries you want to invade?"

In Training posted:

Feel like poo poo just want him back

bedpan posted:

"John," Trump asked, "Is Ireland one of those countries you want to invade?"

In Training posted:

Feel like poo poo just want him back

bedpan posted:

Trump often privately ribs Bolton about his public persona, according to sources who've been in Situation Room meetings with them. (Trump teases most of his top advisers and officials in different ways. For example, during discussions of trade with China, Trump has needled Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in front of other senior officials: "Steve, you're so weak. You're so weak. You didn't used to be this way in business. You're so weak now.")

quote:

According to a forthcoming book — Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington — Trump is also badger-curious, and used to pelt former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus about the official animal of his home state of Wisconsin.

quote:

Business Insider obtained a copy of Sinking in the Swamp and broke out a few more details: Trump would repeatedly “waste Priebus’s time” in meetings by asking about how badgers “work” and if they are “mean to people.” The president also asked his chief of staff if he had any pictures of badgers he could show him, apparently unaware of the properties of his cellphone beyond his favorite app.

“Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a ‘personality’ or if it was boring,” according to the authors. “An obviously enthralled president would stare at Priebus as the aide struggled for sufficiently placating answers, all the while trying to gently veer the conversation back to whether we were going to do a troop surge in Afghanistan or strip millions of Americans of health-care coverage.”

Truga posted:

jesus managers

In Training posted:

Feel like poo poo just want him back

bedpan posted:

Trump Reportedly Asked Reince Priebus How Badgers ‘Work’ and If They’re ‘Mean to People’

bedpan posted:

Trump Reportedly Asked Reince Priebus How Badgers ‘Work’ and If They’re ‘Mean to People’

Casey Finnigan posted:

temu: bootleg trash from nonexistent brands with nonsense names

Amazon: bootleg trash from nonexistent brands with nonsense names, but more expensive

Hmm...

Arsenic Lupin posted:

bedpan posted:

According to a forthcoming book — Sinking in the Swamp: How Trump’s Minions and Misfits Poisoned Washington — Trump is also badger-curious, and used to pelt former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus about the official animal of his home state of Wisconsin.

Cabbages and Kings posted:

From this I conclude that a lot of Amazon sellers are just bulk Temu buyers with cheap warehouse space somewhere.

bedpan posted:

Trump Reportedly Asked Reince Priebus How Badgers ‘Work’ and If They’re ‘Mean to People’

HashtagGirlboss posted:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/12/katyal-machine-politics-in-new-jersey-00151795

Lmfao imagine anyone thinking of Neil as anything other than a soulless careerist

Love the photo though. I don’t know why but it just suits him

quote:

NEW YORK

In 2020, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo led an effort to modify the state's ballot access law that changed the definition of a pre-qualified party, taking the Libertarian, Green and Independence parties off the ballot.
The petition requirement tripled to 45,000 signatures - including at least 500 in half of the state's 26 congressional districts, but the six-week petitioning period remained the same.

apnews.com - Fri, 05 Aug 2022 posted:

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Democrats, accused by the Green Party of meddling in its petitioning process to qualify candidates for the November ballot, have asked a state court to overturn a unanimous elections board vote granting the Green Party official recognition despite allegations of fraud.

www.nytimes.com - Sun, 08 Oct 2023 posted:

## Fearing Third-Party Spoilers vs. Trump, Biden Allies Try to Squash Them

With Democrats worried that a third-party bid could throw a tight race to Donald Trump, President Biden’s top aides have blessed a broad offensive to starve such efforts of cash and ballot access.

2023-10-11T16:31:28-04:00

Powerful allies of President Biden are aggressively working to stop third-party and independent presidential candidacies, fearing that an outside bid could cost Democrats an election that many believe will again come down to a few percentage points in key battleground states.

HashtagGirlboss posted:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/12/katyal-machine-politics-in-new-jersey-00151795

Lmfao imagine anyone thinking of Neil as anything other than a soulless careerist

Love the photo though. I don’t know why but it just suits him



Edit: oops, meant this for succ

Wraith of J.O.I. posted:

they should use this photo for every article on him

Cabbages and Kings posted:

I have, multiple times, found some useful-esque gadget on Amazon and then ordered an item from Temu which had the same description text, in some case the same photos, and a price at about 25% of whatever amazon wanted. From this I conclude that a lot of Amazon sellers are just bulk Temu buyers with cheap warehouse space somewhere.

Arsenic Lupin posted:

https://archive.ph/Gnch7 David French is shocked, shocked, to learn that the Republican party isn't pro-life at all.

quote:

The older I get, the more I’m convinced that we simply don’t know who we are — or what we truly believe — until our values carry a cost.

Dreylad posted:

nothing new for a NYT oped writer, but even when trying to write a consistent line about being pro-life it's sidestepping the issue that could affect his interpersonal relationships

BitcoinRockefeller posted:

The craziest fact about badgers is that dachshunds were bred to hunt them. I have a hard time believing a wiener dog could be anything more than an annoying yappie dog.

BitcoinRockefeller posted:

The craziest fact about badgers is that dachshunds were bred to hunt them. I have a hard time believing a wiener dog could be anything more than an annoying yappie dog.

bedpan posted:

Trump Reportedly Asked Reince Priebus How Badgers ‘Work’ and If They’re ‘Mean to People’

quote:

“Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a ‘personality’ or if it was boring,” according to the authors. “An obviously enthralled president would stare at Priebus as the aide struggled for sufficiently placating answers, all the while trying to gently veer the conversation back to whether we were going to do a troop surge in Afghanistan or strip millions of Americans of health-care coverage.”

www.seattletimes.com - Sat, 13 Apr 2024 posted:

“You are a communist, a bona fide red,” one reader sounded off.

“Your maddening moderate centrism doesn’t make you bold,” wrote another. “It makes you a lackey for the status quo.”

“Please try for once venturing outside your far-left, loonie liberal box,” chimed in a third. “There’s no room for you to go any more left. So you might as well try coming back, toward reality.”

I do get feedback. These were all from the past week. I’ve noticed that messages from readers increasingly tend to pigeonhole, label or categorize. I think it’s part of the polarization of society.

It’s got me missing former Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who called me “conservative columnist Westneat.” That was a good reminder that everything in politics is relative.

I was intrigued then when the pollster YouGov, in combination with The Economist magazine, decided to take pigeonholing to a whole different level.

They put out a vast model of voting characteristics, in an effort to typecast the political identities of Americans. It’s the combination of more than 100,000 poll responses over the past two years, aimed at forecasting how every imaginable demographic variable contributes to who we are politically — and to how we express that through the vote.

In this database’s world, I am not, it turns out, a communist. I am a “straight, white man, aged 55-64, from a city in Washington who is atheist or agnostic and has a college degree.” That’s all it needs to know to predict my politics in the presidential election, according to the modelers.

It forecasts I’m about 80-90% likely to vote for Democrat Joe Biden, and only about 10% to 20% likely to vote for the Republican, Donald Trump.

It can typecast you, too, just based on who you are — try it out at economist.com/us-voter.

What’s fascinating, or alarming, about the data is how locked in America’s political tribalism appears to be. Demography really is destiny. Policy scarcely matters, and one wonders if free thought is on the endangered list, too.

On the right-to-left spectrum, for example, the Trumpiest voter possible is a straight white man aged 75-plus from rural Oklahoma who is evangelical and didn’t finish college. That guy’s 92% likely to vote Trump.

Meanwhile, if you are a lesbian Asian woman aged 25-34 from a city in California who is atheist and has a college degree, it’s over, you’re voting for Biden. It’s 99% certain, according to the data.

There are thousands of varieties of people in between, with the purpose of the data set to try to identify the elusive “swing” voter. But they make up less than 3% of the total, so in theory this election as it stands, barring some big shake-up, seems practically cast in concrete.

There’s been a lot of talk about “divides” in politics, such as gender, racial or urban-rural gaps. And it’s true, where you live or what your ethnicity is goes a long way toward forming your political preferences.

But what stands out with this huge new data set is how one thing rules above all others.

“Although race is often cited as the central cleavage in America, the single most powerful predictor of voting intention is religion,” the Economist noted. “A model that knows nothing save for respondents’ religious affiliations can correctly identify which of the two leading candidates they prefer 62% of the time.”

If you take me, for example — a straight white man from a city in Washington who is atheistic or agnostic with a college degree — and simply made me Catholic instead, I — or rather my voter-type — would instantly shift about 30 points more Republican. I’d go from 10%-20% likely to vote for Trump to 48% Trump, 52% Biden. I’d be a swing voter.

If you made me evangelical, I’d move 60 points to the right and be a solid Trump voter.

But if you kept me an atheist or agnostic and moved me from Seattle to a rural area in Washington like, say, Omak, I’d move only 8 points toward the Republicans. In other words, religion causes vastly more political sorting than does the urban-rural divide.

Everyone’s an individual, of course, while these are aggregate predictions. But to a startling degree, religion, which is not talked about that much in politics anymore, is the engine driving it all.

So if the reader up top had specified that I was a “godless” communist, he might have been on to something.

In the exit polls for the last statewide elections, in 2022, 34% of Washington state voters answered “none” when asked for their religion. This makes the areligious the largest religious group in the state, by far. Coming in second were Protestants at 19%, with Catholics at 13%.

The Census shows that Seattle is the least religious big city in America. The least religious county in Washington, San Juan County, has 49% who classify as “Nones,” while a number of red counties in eastern Washington are at 20%.

There is no other factor that dictates the trajectory of Washington state politics like this one. It’s why the state is overwhelmingly pro-abortion rights, technocratic and pro-science. And why most cultural or morality-based politics falls flat here — especially if there’s some hint of mixing church with state.

Trump’s decision to start hawking Bibles? Just a hunch, that’s probably not going to land well here. But it’s possible he knows what he’s doing when it comes to certain swing states. As the Economist noted: “The more importance someone places on religion, the more likely they are to be a Trump voter. Godliness is next to Trumpiness.”

Are we all really this categorizable? Seems so, and in surprisingly banal ways that sophisticated campaigns, using artificial intelligence, can exploit to reach voters.

Stanford researchers created an AI algorithm that analyzes car makes and models lifted from millions of Google Street View images, and can use that alone to accurately predict how areas of towns will vote. Forget elemental things like your faith or your gender identity — you are what you drive.

“You are a communist”? Whatever. But “You are a Subaru driver” — now that would be really saying something meaningful in modern American politics.

quote:

The Quiet Magic of Middle Managers

mawarannahr posted:

‘You are a communist:’ No, I’m not, but the data knows my real identity