specialseaweed

Having the conversation with my kid that I need them to maintain the ability to pass and to remember to answer to their dead name in order to cross borders was a fuckin bummer, man.

I'm just sayin, it sucked real bad. I can't think of more effective way to drive home to a kid that their country hates them.

I largely agree with you. The Democratic party is a disaster. The evergreen tactic of throwing the coalition under the bus in order tack to the middle for some imagined Reagan Democrat vote that doesn't exist is infuriating and the policy that results is dogshit.

The only part I would argue with is that Old Joe ended up with policy that looked a whole lot more progressive than I thought he ever would. I think he deserves a lot of credit for trying. If he could have defended his policy with the voice of a young modern progressive, people would think much higher of his accomplishments.

But yea, I agree with you.

What would that look like in real terms?

What would that look like in real terms?

Fire Emblem: Three Houses. My kid and I assigned video games to each other for the summer and that's what I got assigned. They're playing Persona 5 Golden.

Not a patient game anytime soon, but they loved the original Fantasy Life and we've been playing and loving the new one too.

When they don’t do the things they say they will do, that makes them a liar.

There are times when a promise can't be fulfilled. It has become wildly more difficult for Democratic priorities to pass through the legislative process in the last 25 years as Republicans have used more and more obstructive tactics. I think a very good case could be made that Republicans have tilted the table enough to completely block a Democratic agenda even if they took Congress and the Presidency.

Lisa Murkowski got fucked by her own party literally this week. She negotiated and got legislation passed, only for Trump to basically line item veto it with an executive order.

And I'm so old I can remember when the Supreme Court struck down the line item veto. How can you possibly get an agenda through when there are no rules but what the Roberts court says there is?

if not horseshoe why horseshoe shaped

I love the WNBA because it has the best crowds. The games are so fun to see live. It's a party the entire time (at least in Seattle). I'm a sports fan pretty much across all major American sports and no crowds are as consistently fun as WNBA crowds. It's not even close.

The only thing better than smokin ribs has been eating the ribs someone else cooked.

Sounds amazing. We just got access to fishing the Puget Sound and I'm looking forward to salmon and rockfish.

I think it's important to remember that Biden was, perhaps more than any president in my lifetime (and I'm an old man), an institutionalist. He was a senator for just about forever, then the VP for 8 years. He was 78 years old when he became president. He is an old school liberal Catholic, a very nearly extinct person in the Catholic and Christian spheres.

I think he saw his presidency as a repudiation of right wing reactionary politics. His election, in his mind, was in large part a call to what he saw as the original intent and purpose of the executive branch. To put it plainly, he saw himself as elected because America rejected the politicization of government under Trump. Included under that umbrella of beliefs about the purpose of the executive was the unalienable requirement that the executive not direct the FBI to investigate the opposing political party. Remember, Joe Biden was a senator when Nixon resigned. He was there when Nixon was using the executive branch to attack Democrats.

Biden appointed Garland to the DOJ. Garland's record was perfectly fine and appeared well suited to the role, but his biggest strengths (in Biden's mind) was his nonpartisanship and his conservative view of government. By conservative I mean staying within the lines of what the DOJ should be doing, a cautious view of the use of DOJ power. Again, this was done in reaction to Trump and his... let's call it "expansive" view of government power. In Biden's mind, he was righting the ship.

And Garland was exactly as advertised, to a maddening degree. He was cautious to the point of being timid. He refused to throw the weight of the DOJ into investigations with political implications without reaching an imaginary bar of fairness that just isn't realistic. You saw it in the Jan 6th investigations. You saw it in the Kushner deals (and all of the Trump family deals which are obviously dirty). You saw it in Garland's unwillingness to take on wildly politicized federal prosecutor offices because doing so would be political interference (in his mind). You saw it when Robert Hur took unprofessionalism and partisanship to the absolute extreme when attacking Biden under the guise of a special counsel appointment and Garland did nothing because instiutionalism in his mind meant not interfering with the process.

And you saw it in the Epstein case.

Garland did everything by the book to an absurd degree that ended up paralyzing justice. Biden didn't touch Garland or any of it because he believes doing so was itself an injustice, even if Garland was wrong to handle it the way he did. In Biden's mind, the president should not have the power to demand the DOJ take action in a specific case like the Epstein case, especially if there's political implications.

He's running in the primary against one of the most powerful "behind the scenes" senators in the party. This is the Senate Republican political action committee trying to trash him into getting out of the race.