I endorse all of this.

Trump is hard to get a messaging handle against but messaging against Elon, the richest man on Earth who's also a deadbeat dad drug addict is the easiest layup imaginable. Democrats just need to tie this shutdown to him. They should start calling him President-elect Musk.

Yeah.

Also I think the only election postmortem that really bears figuring out is this: why do wide swathes of Trump voters disbelieve what he says and have instead installed a fictional Trump in their head who has wildly different policies from the real one? I don't have an answer for this.

My election postmortem podcast conversation with Walter Olson has been turned into a nicely-edited-and-shorted-to-the-best-bits article for @theunpopulist.net. Should you want the unexpurgated version, you can find it here: www.aaronrosspowell.com/p/what-do-we...

Not to mention - Hunter has been the subject of an enormous number of weird conspiracies that even though untrue, would likely be followed up by a Bondi-led DOJ and wreck his son's life. This spares Hunter those bad faith investigations.

The funniest thing about this, of course, is that Wendy (the Deep State) survives while Jack (KP) dies!

I remain surprised that the Fetterman campaign is an outlier in terms of Democratic communication. It was a hard-hitting, fight-first mentality that clearly worked! He was able to beat a Republican that polls had in the lead by 5.

This makes strategizing against him tough. Especially in an information environment where he can take credit for Biden's successes on the border and on the economy without doing jack shit about either.

I say this not to minimize the potential damage that Trump can do. Only to highlight the challenge in knowing what he'll really go for versus what he says he'll do.

I absolutely believe he WANTS to do everything bad he says he'll do but he can be deterred by advisors and donors (see e.g. TikTok).

The thing that makes this challenging is that it could be as Katz describes or it could be that Trump just continues Biden's existing policy of focusing on criminal immigrants, holds a few Potemkin raids and calls it good to appease his donors.

Trump is lazy. He doesn't like to follow through.

This is the beginning of a full-court-press effort to beat the corporate media into submission.

I wrote a book about how to run for local office and I hope lots of people read it and sign up with Run for Something to actually run. www.simonandschuster.com/books/Run-fo...

Anti-Semitism goes respectable. SPOTLIGHT ON THE HILL Lobby, bills itself as "The Paper You Can Trust." It claims to report the news the other papers miss and to uncover the conspiracies the other papers dare not expose. The Spotlight never lets its readers forget that it was first to rip the lid off the world-conquering intentions of the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission. More recently, the Spotlight has been exposing other conspiracies against American free-dom, including plots by the Internal Revenue Service to harass tax protesters and conspiracies by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to arrest stalwarts of the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian-Patriots Defense League, and the American "Nazi" party (quo-tation marks are one of the Spotlight's many stylistic idiosyncracies). But the Spotlight's fundamental editorial obsession is with the "Zionists" and "dual loyalist" friends of Israel who conspire to take over the US government and to propagate the malicious fiction that the Nazis killed six million Jews. In recent months, the Spotlight seems to have become a veritable cheering section for the Institute for Historical Review in Torrance, California. This is the organization whose pseudonymous director Lewis Brandon in reality a British professional racist named David McCalden) recently offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. The Institute organizes annual conferences on why the Holocaust didn't happen and publishes a quarterly, Journal of Historical Review, which features the works of such enlightened savants as Robert Faurisson, the French literature professor recently found guilty of falsifying history and given a 3-month suspended prison sentence. The astuteness of the institute's scholarship can be discerned in the title of a few of the Journal's recent articles: "The Mendacity of Zion," "The Holocaust and the Myth of the Past as History," "The Fake Photograph Problem," and "Human Soap." The Spotlight maintai…

hate Jews and only took a job at the Liberty Lobby for the money. After leaving the Liberty Lobby, Richardson became a private lobbyist for various new right causes and a member of an informal circle of right-wing political strategists known as the Six-Pack because it meets under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, which Joseph Coors helped to found and finance. But more alarming than the easy entrée afforded an ex-Liberty Lobbyist into the salons of what passed today for mainstream conservatism is the mass exposure the Liberty Lobby now seems to be able to obtain for its bizarre doctrines. I SPOT CHT circulation figures are to bebelieve —even if they are discounted by half-the newspaper has a large readership. Last winter the Spotlight held a gala at the National Press Club to celebrate its achievement of a circulation goal of one-third million. That's more than The New Republic, the National Review, and the Nation combined. The Spotlight claims paid circulation; that means all those 333,334 subscribers pay up to 50 cents each week to read its rantings. Furthermore, the Spotlight regularly publishes a list of around 400 radio stations that it says carry a five-minute daily "This is Liberty Lobby" broadcast. (I've heard them in Washington on WEAM-AM at 6:30 pm daily.) Twenty TV stations are listed as carrying a weekly Liberty Lobby TV program, "Spotlight on the News," hosted by Liberty Lobby board-of-policy chairman Robert Bartell, a jovial man who resembles Captain Kangaroo. The Spotlight's credibility is greatly enhanced by the casual way in which some Congressmen use the Spotlight and related media to publicize their views and themselves. During the past year or so, Senate Majority Whip Ted Stevens, Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, and Senate Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Alan Simpson all have been featured guests on the Spotlight's TV show. One Spotlight article has appeared under Hatch's byline and two have appeared un…

In 1981, Ronald Reagan tried to appoint a guy to HHS who worked for a Holocaust denying outfit called the Liberty Lobby that published a popular conspiracy rag called The Spotlight that sold quack cures to its credulous readers who they scared into distrusting all medical advice except theirs.

and of course the president-elect himself

One thing that should be a part of Democratic politicians messaging to Republicans in D.C. is this: Trump is a 78 year-old lame duck. You can show a spine and outlast him just fine.

Democrats should hit this nomination hard. It's low-hanging fruit.

Trump's first term was a tragedy. His second term hasn't even started yet but "farce" sounds about right.

Looking at a poll testing Kamala Harris for governor of California, and already want to argue with anyone saying "Nixon tried that and lost."

Nixon ran against an incumbent after winning his home state by 0.5 points. Harris would be running in an open seat after winning the state by 20 points.

The thing about coups is that they require loyalty if you don't have guns. And does ANYBODY like Gaetz?

Less a sign of a coup and more just a sign of chaos.

You know I thought Trump would push us into recession in less than 2 years but now I'm starting to think we're gonna get a full on depression.

Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is a National-Security Risk None

Gabbard is a walking Christmas tree of security risk warning lights

www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

The image contains a post attributed to Elon Musk that states: 1. "All actions of the Department of Government Efficiency will be posted online for maximum transparency." 2. "Anytime the public thinks we are cutting something important or not cutting something wasteful, just let us know!" 3. "We will also have a leaderboard for most insanely dumb spending of your tax dollars. This will be both extremely tragic and extremely entertaining." It includes two emojis of a laughing face with tears.

Having read the Federalist papers reluctantly, this is literally the thing the founding fathers feared more than anything, a demagogue with a factious temper and sinister designs mobilizing ignorant mobs to undermine government.

There are precisely two people who gain any benefit from what Trump is doing right now with respect to his cabinet picks and threats about recess appointments:

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping

Ding-ding-ding

Trump team vulnerable to cyber threats by not signing transition memos, experts warn Transition experts say cooperating with GSA is critical to ensure the Trump administration has the cybersecurity resources necessary to protect sensitive data.

“To go at this alone, without the aid of GSA and the technology expertise around cyber, would be, I think, a very risky decision,” federalnewsnetwork.com/technology-m...

I don't think this is accurate at all.

Yes yes yes. I have run a 24/7, 365 operation since I got elected. I have a permanent campaign HQ that rotates between off-year and on-year organizing.

People thought it was nuts when I first set it up. I said you’re setting yourself up for disaster if you only show up 6 mos before an election.

The Framers answer to this would absolutely have been throwing the President in state jail. While he was VP, Aaron Burr had two outstanding state warrants against him!

(Burr murdered some guy. Can't remember their name.)

All - Bluesky Directory A curated collection of all things relating to the Blue Sky social media platform.

Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn't a list of them for people to find.

So I built it:
blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack...

The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database.

Missed your stater pack? Message me and I'll get it added.