Nah, he was just looking out for himself and liked his odds better with the armed officers than with the angry mob. Fact is if he thought he could get away with imposing his ideal Christian dictatorship on all of us he'd do it in a heartbeat.

He's an asshole and an idiot who was stupid enough to work for Donald Trump in the first place, and thinking that moron dirtbags like him have anything valuable to say is only going to dig America into a deeper hole.

I'm not who you were asking, but I've got at least two problems with this,

The biggest problem is cherry picking examples to reach a conclusion while ignoring contradicting evidence. We had plenty of more successful pop culture stuff that had overtly progressive and feminist themes, and conservative stuff doing well isn't really a new phenomenon this year (the article even points this out where it talks about American Sniper and Passion of the Christ).

The second biggest problem is that the numbers underlying this are suspect - it's easy to manipulate streaming numbers and book sales, and church groups are taking whole congregations to movies if they think it's a culture war win. Also, reading Sydney Sweeney and hawk-tuah girl as conservative wins are stretches that the author never really justifies (not to mention seeing Beyonce getting shit out by the CMAs as anything other than a sign that country music executives don't like independent black women who already have successful music careers beyond their influence).

Which gets to a problem that might only bug me, but this article has nothing to say about any of the art it's bringing up and misses what I think could be an actually interesting conversation - what does the kind of art conservatives are getting into tell us about them? Like, the fact that they've meme-d around hawk-tuah girl, when did conservatives get "sex positive"? (rape positive if we're being honest, but that'd be a conclusion an article could build towards by actually engaging with the material)

e; ttpos

Author of the article? Probably yes. OP? No, this is a fascinatingly wrong opinion (imo).

Who fucking cares what Mike Pence thinks? Republicans hate his guts since Trump turned on him and everyone else has always hated him, and he doesn't have any political power, so his opinion has like negative news value these days. I guess mainstream media companies just can't resist his dynamic intellect and incredible charisma /s (that "/s" doesn't really feel sufficient, he makes Jeff Sessions look smart and Jared Kushner seem human)

Also Pence you forgot you aren't VP anymore

ABC also forgot, how the hell this moron's opinion is worth a whole ass news article is completely beyond me

Meanwhile, the success of Chappell Roan, Inside Out 2, and the Fallout TV series tell us absolutely nothing /s

They pretty clearly do matter since we're all getting what they're getting

Either way, this would explain the discrepancy between the average policy preferences of the generation as a whole and what the ones who voted in 2024 voted for, we're basically talking about different groups

Did Trump actually win more young voters overall or just a larger percentage of the voters who bothered to show up?

This only matters if people in the federal government are willing to say "You don't have any legal authority to tell me to do anything and I don't want to help you, so go away" which I wouldn't count on always being the case

A redundant efficiency department with no direct way to make changes, it's like nominating a sex trafficker to be the attorney general or something

In related news

While Trump has functionally escaped legal jeopardy by winning the election, the other criminal defendant breathing a sigh of relief after Trump’s election is Mayor Eric Adams, who is currently scheduled to go on trial in April on corruption charges. Thanks to Trump, the mayor’s day in court may never come.

Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District whose office indicted Adams, is a presidential appointee who will almost certainly be replaced by Trump. Recall that back in 2017, less than two months into the first Trump term, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, abruptly and publicly fired 46 U.S. Attorneys who had been appointed by President Obama. That list included Preet Bharara, a mentor and predecessor of Williams.

After getting rid of Bharara, Trump named — and later fired — Geoffrey Berman as his successor. Berman’s days were numbered when he began investigating and prosecuting members of Trump’s inner circle; Berman was replaced by Jay Clayton, a Wall Street securities attorney and golf buddy of the president.

It’s hard to imagine that Williams will not be replaced by Trump and gone long before Adams’s trial date. And that’s where things get interesting.

It’s not at all clear that a new Trump-picked prosecutor will continue the corruption case against Adams, especially in light of the subtle political quasi-alliance between Trump and the mayor. “I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump semi-joked at the nationally televised Al Smith charity dinner. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241113121556/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-big-win-was-also-a-win-for-eric-adams.html

When a third party swoops into a negotiation and steals your leverage it has a significant impact on what that middle ends up being

Because placating the egos of the people in power make sense, same reason Zelensky congratulated Trump on winning

I got my numbers on sick days from here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_labor_dispute?wprov=sfla1

Unfortunately, it isn't just the media, look through this article and you can see a bunch of Democratic lawmakers and campaign consultants pushing this narrative. These are all people we need to get out of elected offices and off campaign staffs or they're going to continue to sabotage the Democratic party's ability to win offices and govern effectively.

Also, the bullet that was dodged hit the radiator of the car that could've taken us to the hospital

They still have it coming. Unless they're personally on Trump's hit list they're going to be too wealthy and insulated to feel any real consequences from a Trump administration. The people who are going to suffer the most are minorities and poor people.

A talking head who gets paid a six figure salary to go on TV and spout inane bullshit about immigrants eating pets shouldn't be replied to. Cletus in the comment section who has a two year degree and makes an hourly wage to do skilled manual labor and honestly thinks the government will let any migrants who want to do so walk into the country whenever they want and give them a welfare check for their trouble does need to be spoken with.

That's all a lot easier said than done, but I think that's the general outline of the problem here.

Workers were asking for 15 days of sick leave, Congress and Biden gave them 1 with the act that ended the strike. Later, the railroads continued negotiating with some of the unions and gave them four days of sick leave. People from the Biden administration were present for those conversations and take credit for that.

So, no, the Biden administration did not give the unions what they asked for, and yes they likely did do material harm to them by stopping that strike.

Related article that's not as good and on a crappier website, but has at least one passage that makes an important observation in passing - holy crap were there a lot of highly educated and highly paid legal experts who went on TV and said obvious bullshit

It was clear after Trump’s loss in 2020 — even before Jan. 6 — that his conduct warranted serious legal scrutiny by the Justice Department, particularly in the area of potential financial crimes. But that probe, which could and should have been pursued by Biden’s U.S. Attorney and aspiring attorney general in Manhattan, somehow never materialized.

...

Garland’s defenders over the years — including many Democratic lawyers who regularly appear on cable news — claimed that Garland and the department were simply following a standard, “bottom-up” investigative effort. Prosecutors would start with the rioters, on this theory, and then eventually get to Trump.

This never made any sense.

It did not reflect some unwritten playbook for criminal investigations. In fact, in criminal cases involving large and potentially overlapping groups of participants — as well as serious time sensitivity — good prosecutors try to get to the top as quickly as possible.

The Justice Department can — and should — have quickly pursued the rioters and Trump in parallel. The fact that many legal pundits actually defended this gross dereliction of duty — and actually argued that this was the appropriate course — continues to amaze me.

Archived at https://ghostarchive.org/archive/aWmXf

There's the Trumpist Republicans, who are unified and devoted, but then there's everyone else.

Ftfy, there is no such thing as a good Republican, there was decades of bullshit from them that led us to this point and they'll be fascist scum after Trump is gone. Anybody who can't admit that simple truth is either too dumb or too cowardly to be given political power.