I'd prefer a parliamentary system with proportional representation: then you get parties which are smaller but ideologically coherent, and the negotiations and compromises are out in the open.

American politics for most of the 20th century was absolutely weird because the constitution leads to having two national parties, but each party had bizarrely incompatible factions so a congressional majority for any big policy involved a temporary bipartisan coalition.

Good to live in a town where you can turn on the car radio and get Gang of Four's "Ether". There may be oil under Rockall.

You've got 32 white squares, and only 30 black (or vice versa).
But each domino covers 1 white and 1 black.

Does the Vatican have good air defenses ?

Yes, and if I had my druthers it would be proportional representation which can lead to more smaller parties and then coalition governments. But the US constitution has huge powers for a winner-takes-all POTUS. Hard to get from here to there.

You can draw whatever lines you like and at each election you still have a choice of (usually) two (always) flawed human candidates and the only difference you'll make is by picking the one who's the closest to the region defined by your lines.

Now you've gone and made me feel all fungible.

Obama was extraordinarily competent and scandal-free. And he had some lousy policies - especially the pointless continuation of wars, and the turn towards austerity/deficit reduction. We can respect the good and criticize the bad.

How the fuck can Trump get through a photo op with a black guy, a woman, and a Canadian without annoying 2/3 of voters and starting a war ?

They should schedule a 3 hour speech but let Trump stay out there for six hours spreading wisdom and going through the whole list of countries and people he hates.

The advantage of 25A is that it transfers power quickly. The disadvantage is that if POTUS disputes it, you need 2/3 in both houses to sustain the transfer.

I like when conservatives are clear that they regard things like workplace safety as “communism” bsky.app/profile/phil...

[I think it's lucky for Israel that the Guy in Michigan has a hazy view of Israel, because if they looked closely at Netanyahu's policies in the West Bank and Gaza they might well re-evaluate the idea that Israel are the Good Guys. But that probably isn't going to change.]

My impression is that the US intel/national-security/defense community still have an *enormous* stick up their butt from the hostage crisis of 1979/80 and the Marine barracks bombing of 1983 (that's FORTY-THREE YEARS AGO!!!) and can't get over those and look at Iran as it is now.

However, the politicans are generally more pro-Israel than the voters. And then the national-security/foreign-policy elites are even more pro-Israel than *that [very probably because of shady stuff the Israelis do secretly that scratches some itch of the spook community].

If one of those wars also increases gas prices, that's one of the few economic issues that Americans care about.

But they also don't like foreign wars unless they're very short and have zero US casualties. So it's not popular to get sucked into Netanyahu's policy of fighting one war after another and sometimes several at once.

I think the guy in Michigan doesn't know or care about the details, other than feeling that most of the Middle East is very hostile to America and Israel are The Good Guys, or if not that then at least Our Guys in the region.

So many people thinking military dominance implies omnipotence.

That guy never has the slightest influence on American foreign policy though - it is run by a bipartisan elite that likes having a ruthlessly aggressive nuclear-armed proxy in a strategically important region.

Same old market manipulation as Trump calms the markets on Monday morning with waffle about negotiations, and postpones military escalation until after Friday market close.

Yes ok, but nobody could have predicted that *so many* of the things that were predicted would have happened.

The courts will slow it down long for all the money to be stolen.
Under the MAGA constitution, there isn't separation of powers but instead there's division of spoils.

From what I've heard, No Kings is getting strong turnout in small-town 'Murca so they don't even really need to go anywhere to hear how goddam pissed everyone is.

Well hmm, Vietnam spending boosted the economy, whereas the global economic shock of throttling oil/gas/fertilizer/helium through the Strait of Hormuz for (probably) months is going to cost the US certainly hundreds of billions, and maybe trillions.

Is there a buried pirate map somewhere which has an X marking the one and only spot we need to bomb to get peace and prosperity ? Because
a) bombs must be the answer, why else would we have so many ?
b) bombing everything at random seems to have not worked.

Could we just one fucking time try de-escalating to escalate ?

You don't happen to have a spare Theory of Mind lying around, do you ?

Americans strongly believe that everyone else is the same as Americans, but poorer and weaker. So the sophisticated analysis is "we're bound to win because *they* can't tolerate the economic pain" and "we're bound to win because *they* can't keep going after thousands of deaths".