As a socialist that still votes for the lesser of two evils I look forward to them blaming me in a couple months because their absolute dog shit candidates dont win.
Is it the party and awful candidates to blame that they can’t attract enough votes? No it’s those stupid voters that won’t vote for our terrible candidates.
Wouldnt it have been nice for their to have been actual consequences that flowed out of these things so the same shit bags couldn’t take over the levers of power and attack the witnesses.
I see Jack Smith is also making the rounds saying how he had evidence of trumps crimes. I mean trump commits one a day at least in front of news cameras, often following up his criminal admissions with some word salad like “this will get me in trouble, you aren’t supposed to say it, but I’m not joking I mean it literally, I did this terrible crime because I’m so smart”
And then the media goes “what did trump mean when he said he hopes Iran nukes San Diego” and people get on there like hes some complex mystery they must unravel, perhaps it was a joke, perhaps it was an analogy, perhaps it was a veiled reference to the los alamos project?
The worst thing about this regime has been realizing that at every step there was some authority or institution that should have and could have stopped it, but again and again they failed.
Mueller felt bound by a corrupt memo that Nixon wrote. Smith felt bound by I dont even know what. Biden’s administration slow walked any kind of justice and would you look at that, by golly, we just ran out of time to do anything at all. Shucks. Maybe next time guys.
But it worked exactly one time for Bill Clinton. I mean we’ve tried it a dozen times since then to failure, but I’ve got a really good feeling about this next one.
You see it’s quite simple really, we can get Liz Cheney and, hmm, who else is popular with the right these days, maybe that up and comer Fetterman. Yea, have our candidate “pivot to the center” and pull in some “Biden Republicans”
Maybe during the primaries we can knee cap the most popular candidate with the most energetic base. We can run non stop scare mongering about them in friendly media outlets, talk about “electability,” and hey, if push comes to shove we can let the voting public know they’d be throwing their votes away because our chosen third way candidate is already way ahead because of pledged super delegates.
Then we can focus group the hell out of the messaging until it’s a completely bland melange of effectively nothing but empty platitudes guaranteed not to upset anyone. Some vague nod to things maybe getting better but make sure to steer clear of any Republican third rails, and if they make new third rails out of proposed legislation, tack hard away from it, avoid controversy as much as possible. They say the green new deal is socialism, we agree and say only fringe lunatics in the party want that and we are much happier with a public private partnership that can ensure healthy profits and a healthy planet. Sounds great, I mean the private corporations are already calling the shots so after taking all those bribes cough I mean campaign contributions, they will want to see a healthy return.
Yep certainly this time we will be able to cozy up to big money donors, pivot to the middle, spend most of our time courting Republican voters who routinely refer to us as baby eating demons (we are one well polished message away from swaying those votes, I can feel it) and the base will have to turn out anyways. If they sit on their hands we could get a super duper trump, and so we will put that gun to their heads and say “you have to vote blue no matter who” and then bitch and moan about how the stupid voters are just too damn stupid to see the brilliant and absolutely flawless strategy of our clintonian triangulation.
Graduated from Ohio public schools in the early 2000s.
The thing that stuck out to me was how different the tracks were. I was in the AP / honors track and learned a lot, I was friends with plenty of people in the standard track and it seemed like their curriculum was pretty awful.
I don’t recall students switching between the tracks either, I was with the same cohort of ~90 people and the other couple hundred students were left in the standard track. Pretty wild to use “how well did you understand prealgebra in 7th grade” to determine what quality of education you would get for the next half decade.
Overall though I think I was lucky, it was a poor public school where I never saw a levy pass (school levies are special taxes Ohio uses to fund their schools) but I had the good fortune of having dedicated and passionate teachers. From my chemistry teacher that taught us the value of the Socratic method to the retired semi-pro bowler turned calculus teacher whose infectious enthusiasm for calculus made me pursue a degree in mathematics.
I graduated though before one of the worst policy changes in recent history, the no child left behind policy (ironically my first job out of university was working on NCLB grant management software for the Ohio Department of Education). Possibly a well meaning policy, but it exacerbated teaching to the test and no child left behind just became “every child gets passed to the next grade no matter how poorly they are doing.” Replacing holding children back so they could develop and hopefully function at the appropriate grade level even if it took another year to shoving them through and leaving them constantly struggling with class work they can’t comprehend has been a massive, self-inflicted loss for the education system.
The problem with norms are that they are not enforceable and trump and maga showed that you can have all the power if you just don’t follow them.
We can’t pretend like we can go back to a world where good actors will voluntarily follow norms. What is needed is laws with teeth and more importantly punishment for powerful people that break those laws.
The Dems showed during the Biden administration that after 4 years of breaking the law in broad daylight they weren’t going to hold anyone in trumps administration accountable. I don’t hold out a bunch of hope that the same party leadership which continues to signal a business as usual stance is really going to change the next time around.
I live in rural Ohio, the number of signs that are proudly Republican is too damn high.
I’m always amazed, it’ll just be some guys name and then “REPUBLICAN” and that’s the whole sign, like it’s a good thing.