Facing perhaps the most dangerous presidential administration in history and already planning on infighting… what the hell…

There’s long been pressure that people that are a bit more left need to be strategically minded and work with what is there rather than get pissy because the candidates aren’t perfect. Well that cuts both ways, these are the candidates the people want and you need to work with them for the common good.

Note that he didn’t say that violent offenses didn’t work broadly or were immoral, just that it was never going to work with Iran specifically, which from what I’ve seen has been a long-held perspective even among the same folks that were eager to bomb away on Iraq. Even people that thought they could do this with Afghanistan were more skeptical about trying the same stuff with Iran. Even as those same people would have loved it to be the case they could do this to Iran, they had to admit it wouldn’t work.

So even for more warmongering sentiment, this Iran situation was still a dumb idea.

Colud be someone bragging to someone not expecting it to work all the way out to the media.

Or a narrative that is probably fairly described, but editorialized. E.g. if they did state the fact they had the help of psychologists in negotiating, that statement by itself doesn’t necessarily insult a man that thinks only very smart people pass cognitive tests.

So the reporting actually extrapolates into the obvious, but unstated implications of why pyschologists would be useful in this situation.

Yep, posessing a shred of dignity really gets in the way of manipulating Trump.

I don’t think this is unique, it’s just rare for someone to openly say it.

Especially since openly saying it runs the rather high risk of undermining the whole approach. If Trump hears this, he’ll get all pissy and tank things for the sake of his fragile ego.

You can see it in most every person in Trump’s circle. They all play the game of manipulating the president, all you need to do is risk your dignity and you can pretty much get him to do whatever. If they dare to serve their own ego, they fail.

Ok, I didn’t have that law, but my main problem with that law is that it is limited to people over 55.

Problem is property tax valuation ends up mixing up people just using their house as a place to live, and folks using it as a financial instrument. So people can get hosed on the property tax despite having no actionable wealth derived from their residence.

artificially low property taxes

I disagree with this one…

To be fair to the media, there just isn’t enough time to cover all of the blatant corruption of Trump and his orbit. There are only so many hours in the day…

That’s just proof that he’s onto something, Big Cancer is afraid to admit that a cheap cancer cure already exists, obviously.

Now I’m going to vote for you.

Texas Railroad Commissioner

Well guess he’s looking to use a lot of trains for something. Seems familiar…

stand in contrast to President Donald Trump’s ability to move markets throughout his first term and into his second.

This makes it sound like Trump otherwise had a uniquely good effect on markets. But his “good times” look the same as the market has looked back to the 90s except during Dubya’s term when the markets were very “meh” the whole time before crashing out.

Now he’s done perhaps even worse than dubya…

If they draft near-revolutionary people they get access to military equipment and incleases likelihood of actual revolution. If you concentrate them then they can coalesce as a group. If you spread them out then a lot of units will be dragged down.

Using ICE to round up dissenters avoids the risk of arming the would-be revolutionaries with credible military equipment.

Yeah, I thought if anything, Vietnam tought the lesson that the draft is a terrible idea for overseas deployment.

Of course, learning from history is not exactly the style of this administration.

If ThinkPad, easy. If IdeaPad, watch out, might not be viable.

It’s amazing how good Lenovo is about ThinkPad, and how crap they are about IdeaPad.

Because it’s not a very compelling theory that people particularly say this one out over various reasons. The turnout was actually above average by a few percent. It also assumes that most of those non voters would have gone against Trump. Which is far from assured

This was my thought as well. Perhaps the best way to step back from tariffs without looking like chickening out, and about the right time for campaign season to ramp up.

If his admin has any sense of strategy, they’ll take the out and then brag about price reductions in summer.

My belief has been they had to totally screw up 2025 to make people feel like 2026 would be getting better. I anticipate too many folks will just see year to year improvement and not reflect on why 2025 was a particularly rough year.

The repercussions will be at worst felt by the grunts on the ground, and those repercussions will be used as an excuse to somehow disregard contentious voting site results…

But is it an overperform? Looking back to 2011, the strongest performance by a GOP for this specific seat is 38%, and it was this election, the last GOP candidate had 18% before this…

For whatever reason, local and presidential elections can very much swing differently, and in this example it clearly looks like you can’t read much of anything into the results since it has been different from presidential outcomes already…

He was pretty milquetoast, but he got saddled with the post-covid ‘wtf’ the economy went through with shortages and price hikes combined with impacts from Russia’s invasion…

None of it reasonably Biden’s fault, but he got stuck with it happening on his watch so lot’s of people need to blame something vaguely controllable so they blame and vote against the president.

Presidents are usually as likely to be defined by their circumstances as their actual actions or inactions.