I mean, if you jumped on a literal pile of trash bags outside a restaurant, maybe?

I would love to see a lot more humility re: why Trump/Fascism was able to take root in the GOP/Movement Conservatism (and how there's a straight, unbroken line from Goldwater>Trump) from Kristol, et al., but I also respect their consistency and principle (since 2016, at least).

They're gonna talk about this the same way we talk about Nero "winning" Olympic events in poetry and rhetoric.

"The international globalist conspiracy has tied and bound The West, gagged us and whipped us into submission. The West is made to wear a collar and call the invading foreign hordes 'Sir.'"

Newsom thought he was gonna come out like Warren Beatty in Bullworth, but he could never be Warren Beatty.

I'm having flashbacks to every party in my 20s where I got cornered by some guy who'd just done a monstrous rail of coke and NEEDED to tell somebody about how the mainstream press gets the podcasting ecosystem, like, TOTALLY backwards.

This, to me, is cinema.

POPEYE [through tears]: I yams what I yams an' dat's all dat I yams.

THERAPIST: Self-awareness and self-acceptance are the first steps on the road to self-actualization, Popeye. I think we've made some real progress today.

"What part of 'universal middleman, collecting rents with the bare minimum of upkeep, forever' didn't you people understand? Do we have to print out the business plan? Because you know what that sounds like? Work."

The orange man, also the President turns out. So a lot of the bad stuff runs through him, who is bad. So yeah, orange man bad, sounds like a plan.

Also, would a moderate Dem have drawn anything like the attention that rallied Behn's candidacy down the stretch? Hard to imagine a bog-standard "red state ConservaDem" getting nearly as much play as a SocDem firebrand.

"You ever see two rats on the subway tracks fighting over an empty potato chip bag? Anyway, let's watch this documentary on the Falkland War."

This is correct, though the Republicans would almost certainly argue he's not eligible, and some GOP state election officials might try some fuckery (since the current GOP hates John McCain and would have no problem arguing that he was an "illegitimate candidate" too)

Anyway, WUDM is a very good movie, and also will probably get a few lapsed Catholics back in the pews (and probably a non-zero number of young Catholic men to join the seminary).

On the contrary, the fact that the essay's a turd is part of the point. Making them give a good grade to a good essay isn't an exercise of raw, might-makes-right power. Making them give a bad essay a good grade means you've dominated them.

Better yet if it's at a public school so the 50 mil comes out of a state budget that's already struggling to keep the roads paved and the schools open

Yeah, the "strong" floor verbiage Jeffries rolled out is a little dumb (because it avoids the common sports terminology for no discernable reason), but the general framework of "high floor, no ceiling" isn't terrible messaging (though we can criticize what it implies for policy, obviously).