We literally do, though. We negotiate all the fucking time. Reagan was negotiating with terrorists when he said that.

Same reason Charlie Brown hasn’t kicked that football

Last time they did that, sales of Treasuries actually went up. Quixotically, the downgrade hurt the stock market. People divested of equities. And then they needed to move the money to a safe place. So… uh… Treasuries.

Um, yeah. It’s a little thing called free enterprise, folks. Look it up.

That Time the Libertarian Party Debated the Private Ownership of Nuclear Weapons

Democrats always have great policies.

Glances at Gaza

Glances at Afghanistan

Glances at Vietnam

Glances at NYC under Mayor Eric Adams

Glances at Dianne Feinstein raising a Confederate Flag over the San Fransisco Mayor’s Office

Like, seriously, do you not realize that politics is primarily about heart? The ancient Greeks, Caesar, or Napoleon could have told you that.

All famously democratic leaders.

Nobody respects this man.

He’s a tool to extract surplus labor value from the country. And in that regard, he’s a national treasure. The folks in Trump’s inner circle have enriched themselves enormously. And the wealth they’ve accrued will be recycle into future generations as a means of bribing, extorting, and abusing the next generation of “democratic” leadership into furthering the cycle of abuse.

When Trump dies, he’ll be held up with the same veneration as Andrew Jackson, William McKinley, and Ronald Reagan. The icon of what a President should be - an extraordinarily useful idiot.

They feign respect of Trump while holding the knives to stab him in the back

Trump won’t be stabbed in the back. He’s the golden goose, shitting out the US Treasury like clockwork. He’ll be celebrated for ages by the oligarchy. The gift that never stopped giving.

Bullying Works

Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul

It is a difficult task to find news and videos that see and present North Korea, as a country. An actual place where people live and North Koreans as a people, not as a herd of complacent sheep under the thumb of a “despot”.

The film “Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul” addresses the common view of North Korea head-on and asks a very simple question, is any of it true?

…

“Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul” or “LCPIS” gives insight into how the war has affected those in the South and those in the North. What’s more important is that the narratives of the two “former” North Korean Citizens is completely alien to what is commonly said about North Korea.

…

South Korean human rights lawyer Jang Kyong-ook, is the first testimonial of the film and speaks to a variety of abuses that the South Korean government has committed and continues to commit. His explanation of the National Security Act, or NSA for short shows South Korea in a much different light than the West presents it.

Often the South is said to be the good half of Korea, it was the one to embrace democracy and economic liberalism after all. The reality is, the South was ruled by numerous dictators, committed dozens if not hundreds of war crimes in the Korean War, and as mercenaries during the Vietnam War is an often “forgotten” fact.

Mr. Jang, speaks to the creation of “spies” by the NSA where they coerce false confessions and testimonials from defectors to continue the narrative of the North being a proverbial hell on earth.

…

After Mr. Jang, the North Korean “defectors” are given time to speak. The most notable thing about both of them is that they both wish to return to the North. With the South so often being portrayed as a land of milk and honey when compared to the North the fact that the “defectors” wish to return, expeditiously, does again speak to the narratives about the North not being wholly accurate.

…

It has become a bit of an open secret that defector testimonials are dubious at best. As reported by the Guardian, many of the stories about the North fall apart with a bit of scrutiny. Many stories about the North come from Radio Free Asia which receives funding from the U.S. government and often publishes the most outlandish stories from the North with little to no pushback in the media landscape. And that’s the big thing about the film.

It speaks to the nature of truth in the face of a machine, an empire, that wants the world to believe one thing. It’s a bit bittersweet upon viewing LCPIS. A common notion in the West is the truth will come out. It may be slow but when it arrives it will win. But the nature of propaganda, especially when it has strong financial backing, shows that truth in the modern age is as valuable as the screens it’s read on.

Reduce federal spending, reduce federal taxes, and let states manage their own policies

This would require states to pick up their own slack. And even the bluest of blue states seem loathe to inherit the responsibilities of the federal government. California doesn’t want to implement its own national health system. Vermont doesn’t want to implement Single Payer. Massachusetts doesn’t want to make state universities free of charge. Colorado and Virginia don’t want to cut their policing budgets or implement public housing and jobs programs. Washington State won’t match its minimum wage to the state cost of living.

All of these governments are run by corporate oligarchs. Some of them wear a liberal veneer, financing parades for the wealthiest members of the LGBTQ community or issuing land acknowledgements for the destitute native populations sequestered on their reservations. But actual socialist policies - publicly owned utilities, publicly owned and distributed agriculture products, fully democratic school boards, free-at-point-of-service mass transit - are vanishingly rare in practice.

There will still be people unhappy with their state’s policies, but moving to another state is a lot easier than moving to another country.

The biggest draw to a given state is employment with wages in excess of cost of living. Texas continues to bring in lots of people abroad because the O&G industry pays very well and the cost of living is comparatively cheap. People are fleeing NYC in droves largely because the cost of living exceeds even the unusually high local wages. Meanwhile, West Virginia is emptying out with the death of the coal industry while Utah balloons its population with California retires and Silicon Valley tax dodgers.

State policies that fixate on economic growth do far more to drive migration than any kind of social policy, because you can’t eat social policy. If Florida has transgender people drawn and quartered, but their real estate market and entertainment districts can land 20-year-olds into the six-figure income range, more people will continue to move there. If New Hampshire launches a full blown secession movement from the tyrannical Trump Regime, but its townships keep getting overrun by bears, you’re not going to see an influx of new residents.

Sooooo that goes both way, right?

Republicans get to be vindictive because they believe they’ve got nothing to lose. They don’t see blue states as winnable and they don’t believe they need those votes to run the country. They focus power within the executive branch and secure the courts in order to rubber stamp unitary executive authority.

Democrats have to be servile because they believe they can’t win without red-state support. They consistently insist that states like Texas and Florida are within their reach if they just move a little farther rightward. And they believe they need the support from these states in order to secure the power to govern nationally. They focus on securing legislative majorities because they believe they need 60 votes in the Senate and a surplus of Democrats in the House in order to affect any kind of policy reforms.

Blue states can stop paying fed taxes, right?

Taxes are collected at the point of individual employment and business transaction. My employer sends a chunk of my paycheck directly to the IRS. My company pays business taxes directly to the US Treasury. None of it passes through any state or local agency. And state/local agencies have no authority over the federal collections process.

Blue states do host a variety of federal assets and employees. So, you could see a state government try and pull a Ft. Sumtner - effectively threatening to evict federal employees and claim federal property as their own - because they don’t like federal policy. But the last time states tried that it ended very badly for them.

Yeomni Park recounts in vivid detail how she was sold to a mentally ill family in China as sex slaves by a gang of human traffickers

Spoken like a guy who isn’t currently furloughed due to the budget fight.

Strictly interrupting the Constitution to mean “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose”

The people need to be confident that they can stand up to rogue and criminal federal officials, knowing that state and local officials will have their back. The public need to know that critical shortfalls in health care and education and emergency services are going to be backfilled by state and local governments while the shutdown persists.

What I’m seeing now is a bunch of city/state chuds working hand-in-glove with the Feds, while mayors and governors just throw up their hands and insist they can’t act. Merkley’s filibuster is fine on its face, but this isn’t a fight any given Senator is in a position to win.

If Trump is pulling the plug on the CDC, we should see every blue state in the country stepping in to hire up all those officials that got let go and continuing the work regionally. If Trump is letting crypto-bros run rampant over the money supply, we should see state AGs hounding down Silicon Valley scammers and prosecuting crooks and criminals under local prohibitions on fraud, embezzlement, and corruption. If Trump’s ICE agents are breaking into people’s homes without a fucking warrant, the local Sheriffs and State Troopers need to find and arrest those agents and prosecute them for their crimes.

I don’t see any of this. I see Dems making speeches and blustering, but backing down as soon as a Fed shows up with a mask and a gun to do highway robbery. If that’s how the country is going to operate going forward, the very concept of law and order is dead and we’re consigning ourselves to military dictatorship.

Easy to forget that 2008 was just three Democrats running for a book deal and twelve Republicans running to be Pope

We should run Mamdani in 2028

I’m going to need to see if he can hang on to NYC while Trump overruns it with ICE agents first.

Also, kinda waiting to see if 2026 happens at all, or if we get a SCOTUS ruling that says elections are dumb and nothing in the Constitution says a President can’t be dictator for life

Texas is a shithole state with less freedoms than I have as a Californian.

When you’re getting your head caved in by the cops, the LAPD doesn’t feel much freer than the thugs running Austin.

I can walk down the street right now and buy weed from the weed store. Texans can’t.

Most major Texas cities have fully given up on marijuana prosecution as a waste of time and resources. Meanwhile, California’s the state with ICE agents crawling up everyone’s assholes, while your governor does dick all to stop it. Quixotically safer to be undocumented in San Antonio than San Bernadino, simply because your state is on the President’s shit list.

Texans are a bunch of cucks that let their legislators shit on them.

Californias are a bunch of cucks that let their legislators shit on them, then insists the shit doesn’t stink.

Dianne Feinstein was more responsible for the appointment of Amy Comey Barret than Ted Cruz, ffs. Your state is as big of a fascist shithole as anywhere in the country. You just cover yourself in Patchouli and dose yourselves in Kambucha, then pretend you don’t use slave labor to keep your wildfires in check.

Some of those that work forces

Are the same that burn crosses