In our major target district in OC CA (after holding 45 and 47), art dealer Kim Varet has announced as Democratic candidate against Young Kim. Varet is an art historian who owns an art gallery in Tustin, has undergrad and doctorate in art history from Yale and Columbia. She is Korean American, but this district is whiter and more Republican than California as a whole. It's in OC inland foothills crossing into Riverside county.
Varet doesn't have a political CV so we'll see who else jumps in.
I suspect both districts will require a year like 2018 to win. Kim's district area we won in 2018, although Calvert's district has been closer since, but arguably, we had a better candidate in Will Rollins than we've had in CA 40.
I disagree; what our side actually needs is for Trump to continue to do exactly what he's doing so far; if he keeps going in that direction, BOTH of these seats become very winnable
It’s interesting how their plan was to make this a long slog of news, maybe 100+ days of things to wear Dems down. Unless they figure out how to the rig the elections, they’re going to realize they’ve just made everyone exhausted of them.
I do wonder what their plan to rig the elections are, though.
Thinks elections won't be happening. Also spends an excessive amount of time discussing potential elections. Man, you're either a glutton for punishment or you don't actually believe it. Don't know which
-2018 had good results (even if we did still lose Senate seats in very red states).
-2020 had good results.
-2022 had at worst neutral results, which I'd call a win in a midterm of an unpopular Democratic President.
-2024 had bad results.
Granted, I do think the Democratic Party should cultivate a positive message and not only rely on being "not Trump", but to point to the aftermath of the latest election and imply that it shows that the strategy has consistently failed is grossly misleading.
Quibbling modestly with your numbers, I wouldn't say 2020 had "good results" with Democrats losing 15 House seats. Certainly compared to the expectations going into election night 2020--where we were confident that Dems would be positioned to dominate redistricting after our high-single-digit national landslide--I'd say it fell far short of "good results".
The strategy has failed in two ways. First, we continually overestimate voters' judgment on rejecting a monster if he's pointed out to them. Over and over and over, we convince ourselves that people are decent enough to first recognize and then censure one of the worst human beings to ever aspire to the Presidency.....or that maybe they haven't recognized it so far but they will starting....now! Counting on this to happen for the sixth consecutive time sets us up for the sixth consecutive disappointment.
And with Trump and Musk taking a wrecking ball to civilization in real time as we have this debate, the Democrats track record of winning some races that never mattered in the Trump era is completely irrelevant. Sure, Democrats had a good generic ballot in 2018, but since it wasn't enough to stop Trump from expanding the Supreme Court supermajority, it was a net loss that led us to the armageddon we're living through today. And sure, backlash to the Dobbs ruling helped Democrats win some races they expected to lose in the 2022 midterms, but since they couldn't translate that momentum into a win in the cycle that counted two years later, 2022 was nothing more than a short-term dopamine hit on the road to perdition.
With that in mind, I stand by my position. Counting on the electorate to punish Trump in a meaningful way for the sixth consecutive cycle will almost certainly be too little too late just as it was in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Democrats haven't made this sale yet and I have no reason to believe that they'll be any better at it next time.
I made a prediction weeks ago on this site that not a single Trump nominee facing a Senate vote would fail confirmation; I am still holding to that(wishing I am wrong of course)
State Treasurer Robert Sprague announced Wednesday that he is abandoning his plans to run for Ohio governor in 2026, and that he’ll instead endorse fellow Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.
In 1994, Orange County CA filed for bankruptcy after the treasurer caused $1.6 billion in loses in the investment fund and was later convicted of criminal activity.
30 years later, we have a political fight going on between the newly appointed CEO and the treasurer.
The CEO has caused the investment of county funds to be removed from the treasurer, Shari Freidenrich. I'm hoping the County isn't playing games with our investment fund again.
Disclosure, I've been friends with Ms. Freidenrich for over 40 years and know her to be highly competent, even if Republican.
Bonta has been a supporter of Harris running in the CA-GOV race so I think not jumping in is to illustrate he's ready to support her if she ends up running. To my understanding, he passed on running for Governor after Harris lost to Trump last year.
Quite honestly, I'd wish Bonta would keep his mouth shut about this. He's said Harris "would be field-clearing" which essentially means he's trying to already trying to influence the race.
If Democrats want to have a less liable person than Newsom as Governor when it comes becoming the GOP's target all the time, they should let the CA-GOV race unfold as it may.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta won’t run for governor, ending months of speculation about him eyeing the crowded 2026 contest.
Instead, the Democrat will seek reelection as attorney general and back former Vice President Kamala Harris if she jumps into the fray to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom after his final term ends. Aides say Harris is weighing her options after returning home to Los Angeles.
“Kamala Harris would be a great governor,” Bonta told POLITICO, noting he hasn’t spoken directly with Harris about it. “I would support her if she ran, I’ve always supported her in everything she’s done. She would be field-clearing.”
The former state lawmaker said he was seriously considering a run last year but changed his mind after Republican President Donald Trump defeated Harris. Even before then, other top contenders — like former Rep. Katie Porter, who last March lost her bid for California Senate — were already making moves to run, complicating his path.
But Bonta said he feels a calling to lead California’s legal defense as the state faces off with Trump over a flurry of executive orders on immigration, gender, climate change and more.
Is anyone else less than enthusiastic about Democrats making USAID the hill through die on when we have so many other things this maniac is doing every day that impact people directly?
I appreciate the switching gears to go after Musk so hard and this should be a precursor to making income inequality a main plank of our platform going forward.
However the political capital being spent to protest foreign aid, and of course I support it btw because I have common sense, seems very strange to me.
All Trump has to do is say- I'm trying to focus on America and Democrats are more focused on sending money overseas.
I mean it just seems a little out of touch to focus so much on this specific agency and saying they will do all sorts of boycots and filibusters of nominees over it.
I highly doubt the average American even knows much if anything about USAID.
Staking a big claim on the Dept of Education fight would make more sense.
Trump is throwing everything at the wall for maximum shock and awe effect and we can't tackle every action effectively. The USAID thing seems like the wrong thing to take such a big stand on imo....
We need to fight everything. USAID isn’t the only thing we’re fighting back on. I was at the Treasury building protest yesterday and there were plenty of people there, including a ton of high-profile Democrats in Congress. But USAID is important. We can’t throw people under the bus who are just doing their jobs and helping save lives just because we think it isn’t quite as popular as some other agencies. And if Trump gets a win here, it will embolden him to keep acting like this against every program and agency he doesn’t like.
I think you are seriously not understanding that this is exactly the reaction Trump wants and it is unfortunate that now ten years removed from 2016 Democrats think a winning strategy is to "fight everything."
Time and time again that strategy has failed. Trump does and says outrageous things every day to distract. This was a distraction movie just as the Gaza thing is.
And I've got news for you, he's going to do what he wants and nearly all of this is going to the Courts anyway.
Pick and choose your battles. The average American does not care about USAID, sadly.
Doing things that harm large amounts of people is never a distraction - stopping that is the entire point, and we can’t just roll over and let him do it because it’s not an easy marketing win. We have the capacity to do it all. I agree that our primary message shouldn’t be the sanctity of USAID, but that’s not the message. The message is Elon Musk is coming in and destroying our government, and this is just one example of that.
The issue is less USAID and more Musk’s unilateralism more generally. It’s just that they picked USAID first.
The comms I’m seeing is less about USAID’s pros and cons and more about “Musk is trying to take over all government functions with a bunch of glorified interns”
This. I've heard a lot of grief about USAID specifically but that's because I live in DC with a lot of friends directly impacted by its dissolution. The wider conversation I've seen is about Musk being an unelected official making unconstitutional presidential-level decisions. I'd like to see what OP is talking about specifically, because between this and some other comments, I'm getting some real "old man yells at cloud" energy.
I refuse to rely on software that resides on the Cloud, and I insist on having all my data stored right here, on my own hard-disks. While I don’t yell at clouds but am approaching two-thirds of a century, you may call me an "old man who is skeptical of the Cloud".
Nerdy aside: If you haven't already you should switch to solid state storage (SSD) storage instead of hard drives. More reliable in the long term and if you have multiple backups (as you should!) you can duplicate one backup to another one much, much quicker due to improved write speeds. Those of us relying on local storage need to make sure it's reliable and less prone to failure.
He is violating the law by trying to do it without congressional authorization. Letting him get away with it makes it much easier for him to violate the law next time. Do you want to stop him in the Rhineland or wait till he gets to the French coast.
I value your enthusiasm to participate in the protests, truly. Good on you :) and so I mean absolutely no offense when I say that USAID is very much a beltway bubble issue that most everyday Americans don't even think about.
My mother is a perfect example. She is someone that will vote but only if motivated. All she has been saying for two weeks is that she is freaking out about Elon Musk and billionaires controlling everything.
Keep our messaging concise and focus on a handful of "pillars" to hammer home our differences with the GOP every single day.
Don't detour into the weeds on every issue.
If we have to explain an issue for someone to get motivated/outraged, we've already lost.
My pillars would be:
1) Trump and his billionaire friends are seizing the government and giving themselves kickbacks and racking up our debt to do it. We will stabilize US finances by taxing personal wealth on billionaires.
2) Trump promised peace but now he is suddenly promising to attack our friends for land and returning troops to the Middle East to seize Gaza.
3) Trump is incompetent and outsources the tasks to dangerous Christian nationalists.
4) It's easier to build more wealth when you already have it. In order to combat inequality in addition to taxing personal income on billionaires we will also break up their monopolies. Billionaires control every facet of American media and can legally buy elections.
These the main ones I can come up with on the top of my head. But add one or two more planks and it would still be concise.
Democrats need to be focused and not engage on every issue. Average Americans need messaging to be kept simple.
Seeing Chuck Schumer scream like he's at the super bowl about winning while standing in front of Treasury is not helping break through.
Trumps approval is near 50%. Don't give him what he wants.
Shuttering USAID may well cost millions of lives! And, no, that is not hyperbole. Moreover, it will seriously weaken soft, non-military American influence throughout the world. And it dangerously increases the risk of a new deadly pandemic reaching our own shores.
You are mistaking me for personally not caring about USAID, which is untrue, and me trying to explain that the average voter does not know what it even is.
Methinks you are mistaking my mistaking. At no point am I suggesting you don’t care about USAID; such a thought had not even crossed my mind. My only objection is to labeling and dismissing this as a "beltway bubble issue".
I'd like to see polling on this. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think a majority are against the U.S. helping children fight malaria in Africa via foreign aid.
True, though as stated it would be better to focus on things like chaos, incompetence, fucking with services people need, and "who elected Elon Musk?"
Jared Golden says that in his red district he's been inundated with communication from people complaining about Musk's unwarranted influence and messing with things, though there's honestly something self-delusional about Trump voters complaining only about Musk and not Trump. Musk didn't just pop out of nowhere after the election.
Yeah well Mark, you would say that considering you think everything a Republican does is a genius 12D chess move while seeing Dems as too stupid to plug in a monitor. I don't even know why you continue to be involved when your responses boil down to walls of text that in sum total say "Republicans will win forever while Dems will regret abandoning white male manufacturing workers. Tsk tsk"
Am I being uncharitable to you? Maybe. But you don't have carte blanche to arrogantly proclaim what is and will be based on lucky guesses. Drop the ego
Yeah I would say "uncharitable" would be an adjective that at least partially captures the string of strawmen you've built in an attempt to spook me into submission. Feels like there should be a harvest moon to illuminate as many strawmen as you've constructed.
Do you attribute every correctly called election prediction to be a "lucky guess"? If so, then every single one of us on this board is no better than the average joe on the street. If not, then how do you distinguish my guesses being "lucky" when they're inconvenient but right and others' guesses as especially insightful if the results match your preferences?
Five of the last six election cycles produced results that I consider disappointing from a Democratic perspective. Was it really a "lucky guess" for me to have looked at the trend lines of those preceding cycles and determined that we had a problem going into 2024? Or could it be a signal that Democrats have become really bad at messaging to the contemporary electorate? And that you and many others have become really, really bad at evaluating the trend lines and correctly predicting outcomes?
Why it's such a BFD is it's the first domino to fall in terms of Trump ripping up the Constitution and defying congressional statute to act like a king. Today it's USAID, tomorrow Education, next EPA etc.
If you just wait until a target gets hit that is "popular enough" the precedent has been set and it's too late.
The Congressional Review Service declared it's an illegal act today. How no-one has been able to get a court injunction of some kind is mind boggling and depressing . .what the fuck are they waiting for??
We have a big-tent coalition and rely in part on that small part of the electorate in the middle that is, beyond being ideologically inconsistent, are often underinformed, uninformed, and/or misinformed. Point being, if we wait for the perfect issue that fires up everyone before we get mad, we'll be lining up at the executioners block and someone in the actual line will be telling everyone to remain calm and keep their powder dry.
Republicans have been consistently able, over multiple generations, to attack democrats over anything and everything. They manage to pick the most esoteric, boring, bullshit things and turn it into the issue that their base froths in rage over. Anyone who wants to tell me that we cannot successfully make use of outrage over USAID being *unconstitutionally* torn apart is wrong.
We, as a party and especially our officials, need to be angry more often and more visibly. The last thing we need is to repeat our consistently failed practice of self-policing the outrage within our own tent. That self-policing of outrage is the real messaging problem as far as I'm concerned.
Where’s your evidence for that? He was trailing in the polls even before Covid hit. Unlike in 2023. He was able to win last year because of a politically incompetent president and administration.
Sanford would be an interesting candidate in SC. McMaster hasn't stirred up much angst. He's conservative but not super crazy. Unlike Haley though, he's been willing to back antiLGBT legislation, but has not put up $$ to oust in party rivals like Haley did to Lee Bright years ago. However, Mace has lots of detractors. Wilson could have trouble with corruption among DAs (called solicitors here).
SC has no party registration and open primaries. I would totally vote in the GOP primary to elevate Sanford over Mace or Wilson, knowing that in the fall I'd vote for whatever Dem was chosen. There's no way I'd take the chance that Mace would be elected and move SC to the crazy wing of the GOP like Wyoming, because she isn't seen as crazy enough to make people vote for a Democrat.
I'll have to think about Senate though. I expect Graham to get a strong primary opponent. Some GOP people here hate him. If he survived the primary would they stay home? Maybe. Or would they vote for a Dem? Unlikely. Hard to say. If the GOP nominated a nut, would that help the Dem candidate? Have to be Mark Robinson nutty.
Any chance we could switch to bluesky links for things that exist there as well? I refuse to go to that site now. I assume others here feel similarly, but I only know of my own preferences here.
I still wanted a bit more context. I found what I assume (but cannot confirm without clicking...) is a duplicate from Schatz over there:
"She still plans to vote to confirm Russ Vought, Trump’s pick for White House budget chief, who is expected to play a key role in the administration’s larger efforts to wrest spending power away from congress."
What a fucking joke. Do we have anyone besides Golden who can win this seat?
Troy Jackson is who everyone is pinning our hopes on. The names available in Maine seem to be jockeying for governor, as it's the more winnable race. But between him, Bellows, Golden, and Pingree, only one of them can be our gubernatorial nominee.
My hope is I'd like to see Jackson run for senate, Golden stay in the house, and everyone else fight over governor. I do like Bellows but I don't know how strong she would be, and she had her star dimmed by losing to Collins in 2014.
Golden has said he will not run against Collins as I understand.
Voting against 1 Trump nominee (Pete Hegseth) but being an automatic YES on all the rest should doom her as Harris beat Trump in Maine by 7 points!! 💙🙏🇺🇲
CA 40
In our major target district in OC CA (after holding 45 and 47), art dealer Kim Varet has announced as Democratic candidate against Young Kim. Varet is an art historian who owns an art gallery in Tustin, has undergrad and doctorate in art history from Yale and Columbia. She is Korean American, but this district is whiter and more Republican than California as a whole. It's in OC inland foothills crossing into Riverside county.
Varet doesn't have a political CV so we'll see who else jumps in.
https://www.ocregister.com/2025/02/04/los-angeles-art-dealer-esther-kim-varet-launches-bid-for-californias-40th-congressional-district/
At least Young Kim won't be able to call her opponent "Joker" in ads like she did with her previous Democratic rival (whose real name was Joe Kerr)...
This should be a good environment to knock out Kim and Calvert, hopefully. So somebody with more juice getting in the race would be nice
I suspect both districts will require a year like 2018 to win. Kim's district area we won in 2018, although Calvert's district has been closer since, but arguably, we had a better candidate in Will Rollins than we've had in CA 40.
I disagree; what our side actually needs is for Trump to continue to do exactly what he's doing so far; if he keeps going in that direction, BOTH of these seats become very winnable
Trump doing what he's doing is what created the environment in 2018 that I described. Without that, these districts are both heavy lifts.
I think he's going to be much worse in the 2nd term(he's proving it daily)
It’s interesting how their plan was to make this a long slog of news, maybe 100+ days of things to wear Dems down. Unless they figure out how to the rig the elections, they’re going to realize they’ve just made everyone exhausted of them.
I do wonder what their plan to rig the elections are, though.
If he continues exactly as he’s been doing, there might not be elections in 2026 – or at least not elections as we’re used to having them.
Thinks elections won't be happening. Also spends an excessive amount of time discussing potential elections. Man, you're either a glutton for punishment or you don't actually believe it. Don't know which
I should add that what I am saying is that our side really doesn't have to do anything; Trump is providing all of the campaign artillery for us
Trump creates an environment where we can win, but we still need a quality candidate that connect with voters.
In 2018, in my district (CA 45 at the time), Katie Porter narrowly won, but she got across the line by being impressive.
totally agree about viable candidate quality
I do wish Katie Porter had stayed in the House. She and her famous whiteboard were awesome there.
2026 will be the sixth consecutive election cycle where that's been the Democratic strategy.
And the Democratic party won more than they lost
They did? Based on where the Democratic Party sits on February 6, 2025, I'm not seeing much evidence of a lot of winning that's been going on.
And of those previous five cycles-
-2016 had bad results.
-2018 had good results (even if we did still lose Senate seats in very red states).
-2020 had good results.
-2022 had at worst neutral results, which I'd call a win in a midterm of an unpopular Democratic President.
-2024 had bad results.
Granted, I do think the Democratic Party should cultivate a positive message and not only rely on being "not Trump", but to point to the aftermath of the latest election and imply that it shows that the strategy has consistently failed is grossly misleading.
Quibbling modestly with your numbers, I wouldn't say 2020 had "good results" with Democrats losing 15 House seats. Certainly compared to the expectations going into election night 2020--where we were confident that Dems would be positioned to dominate redistricting after our high-single-digit national landslide--I'd say it fell far short of "good results".
The strategy has failed in two ways. First, we continually overestimate voters' judgment on rejecting a monster if he's pointed out to them. Over and over and over, we convince ourselves that people are decent enough to first recognize and then censure one of the worst human beings to ever aspire to the Presidency.....or that maybe they haven't recognized it so far but they will starting....now! Counting on this to happen for the sixth consecutive time sets us up for the sixth consecutive disappointment.
And with Trump and Musk taking a wrecking ball to civilization in real time as we have this debate, the Democrats track record of winning some races that never mattered in the Trump era is completely irrelevant. Sure, Democrats had a good generic ballot in 2018, but since it wasn't enough to stop Trump from expanding the Supreme Court supermajority, it was a net loss that led us to the armageddon we're living through today. And sure, backlash to the Dobbs ruling helped Democrats win some races they expected to lose in the 2022 midterms, but since they couldn't translate that momentum into a win in the cycle that counted two years later, 2022 was nothing more than a short-term dopamine hit on the road to perdition.
With that in mind, I stand by my position. Counting on the electorate to punish Trump in a meaningful way for the sixth consecutive cycle will almost certainly be too little too late just as it was in 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024. Democrats haven't made this sale yet and I have no reason to believe that they'll be any better at it next time.
That doesn’t look like the Appalachian Trail in the background behind Mark Sanford. Just saying!
Exchange during Senate confirmation hearing of AG nominee Pam Bondi:
Padilla: "Will you defend birthright citizenship as the law of the land?"
Bondi: "I will study birthright citizenship"
Padilla: "You're asking to be considered for Attorney General and you still need to study the 14th Amendment of the Constitution?"
maybe I am missing something here but Kraft seems like he's going to be easy to beat; billionaire father or not
I made a prediction weeks ago on this site that not a single Trump nominee facing a Senate vote would fail confirmation; I am still holding to that(wishing I am wrong of course)
With today's Republican Party, no argument here.
State Treasurer Robert Sprague announced Wednesday that he is abandoning his plans to run for Ohio governor in 2026, and that he’ll instead endorse fellow Republican Vivek Ramaswamy.
https://www.cleveland.com/news/2025/02/ohio-treasurer-robert-sprague-exits-2026-governors-race-backs-vivek-ramaswamy.html
wonder if Trump is big footing here ?? Vivek is just the type of asshole Trump would endorse
Democrats should prop up AG Dave Yost as Ramaswamy is off the richter scale. Could Amy Acton beat Ramaswamy in any scenario?! 💙🇺🇲
In 1994, Orange County CA filed for bankruptcy after the treasurer caused $1.6 billion in loses in the investment fund and was later convicted of criminal activity.
30 years later, we have a political fight going on between the newly appointed CEO and the treasurer.
https://voiceofoc.org/2025/02/oc-ceo-defends-stripping-elected-treasurer-of-17-billion-investment-pool/
The CEO has caused the investment of county funds to be removed from the treasurer, Shari Freidenrich. I'm hoping the County isn't playing games with our investment fund again.
Disclosure, I've been friends with Ms. Freidenrich for over 40 years and know her to be highly competent, even if Republican.
is the CEO also an elected office holder? Or appointed by the Supervisor Board?
Anybody else get the sense that Bonta passing on CA-Gov is a precursor to Porter or Harris getting in?
Bonta has been a supporter of Harris running in the CA-GOV race so I think not jumping in is to illustrate he's ready to support her if she ends up running. To my understanding, he passed on running for Governor after Harris lost to Trump last year.
Quite honestly, I'd wish Bonta would keep his mouth shut about this. He's said Harris "would be field-clearing" which essentially means he's trying to already trying to influence the race.
If Democrats want to have a less liable person than Newsom as Governor when it comes becoming the GOP's target all the time, they should let the CA-GOV race unfold as it may.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/05/california-governor-ag-newsom-00202528
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
California Attorney General Rob Bonta won’t run for governor, ending months of speculation about him eyeing the crowded 2026 contest.
Instead, the Democrat will seek reelection as attorney general and back former Vice President Kamala Harris if she jumps into the fray to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom after his final term ends. Aides say Harris is weighing her options after returning home to Los Angeles.
“Kamala Harris would be a great governor,” Bonta told POLITICO, noting he hasn’t spoken directly with Harris about it. “I would support her if she ran, I’ve always supported her in everything she’s done. She would be field-clearing.”
The former state lawmaker said he was seriously considering a run last year but changed his mind after Republican President Donald Trump defeated Harris. Even before then, other top contenders — like former Rep. Katie Porter, who last March lost her bid for California Senate — were already making moves to run, complicating his path.
But Bonta said he feels a calling to lead California’s legal defense as the state faces off with Trump over a flurry of executive orders on immigration, gender, climate change and more.
Is anyone else less than enthusiastic about Democrats making USAID the hill through die on when we have so many other things this maniac is doing every day that impact people directly?
I appreciate the switching gears to go after Musk so hard and this should be a precursor to making income inequality a main plank of our platform going forward.
However the political capital being spent to protest foreign aid, and of course I support it btw because I have common sense, seems very strange to me.
All Trump has to do is say- I'm trying to focus on America and Democrats are more focused on sending money overseas.
I mean it just seems a little out of touch to focus so much on this specific agency and saying they will do all sorts of boycots and filibusters of nominees over it.
I highly doubt the average American even knows much if anything about USAID.
Staking a big claim on the Dept of Education fight would make more sense.
Trump is throwing everything at the wall for maximum shock and awe effect and we can't tackle every action effectively. The USAID thing seems like the wrong thing to take such a big stand on imo....
We need to fight everything. USAID isn’t the only thing we’re fighting back on. I was at the Treasury building protest yesterday and there were plenty of people there, including a ton of high-profile Democrats in Congress. But USAID is important. We can’t throw people under the bus who are just doing their jobs and helping save lives just because we think it isn’t quite as popular as some other agencies. And if Trump gets a win here, it will embolden him to keep acting like this against every program and agency he doesn’t like.
I think you are seriously not understanding that this is exactly the reaction Trump wants and it is unfortunate that now ten years removed from 2016 Democrats think a winning strategy is to "fight everything."
Time and time again that strategy has failed. Trump does and says outrageous things every day to distract. This was a distraction movie just as the Gaza thing is.
And I've got news for you, he's going to do what he wants and nearly all of this is going to the Courts anyway.
Pick and choose your battles. The average American does not care about USAID, sadly.
Doing things that harm large amounts of people is never a distraction - stopping that is the entire point, and we can’t just roll over and let him do it because it’s not an easy marketing win. We have the capacity to do it all. I agree that our primary message shouldn’t be the sanctity of USAID, but that’s not the message. The message is Elon Musk is coming in and destroying our government, and this is just one example of that.
They’re people who aren’t in the US. Most voters don’t care and it’s a trap like the OP said.
Like gutting the National Science Foundation
The issue is less USAID and more Musk’s unilateralism more generally. It’s just that they picked USAID first.
The comms I’m seeing is less about USAID’s pros and cons and more about “Musk is trying to take over all government functions with a bunch of glorified interns”
This. I've heard a lot of grief about USAID specifically but that's because I live in DC with a lot of friends directly impacted by its dissolution. The wider conversation I've seen is about Musk being an unelected official making unconstitutional presidential-level decisions. I'd like to see what OP is talking about specifically, because between this and some other comments, I'm getting some real "old man yells at cloud" energy.
I refuse to rely on software that resides on the Cloud, and I insist on having all my data stored right here, on my own hard-disks. While I don’t yell at clouds but am approaching two-thirds of a century, you may call me an "old man who is skeptical of the Cloud".
Nerdy aside: If you haven't already you should switch to solid state storage (SSD) storage instead of hard drives. More reliable in the long term and if you have multiple backups (as you should!) you can duplicate one backup to another one much, much quicker due to improved write speeds. Those of us relying on local storage need to make sure it's reliable and less prone to failure.
He is violating the law by trying to do it without congressional authorization. Letting him get away with it makes it much easier for him to violate the law next time. Do you want to stop him in the Rhineland or wait till he gets to the French coast.
Not to reply to my own post but I want to add:
I value your enthusiasm to participate in the protests, truly. Good on you :) and so I mean absolutely no offense when I say that USAID is very much a beltway bubble issue that most everyday Americans don't even think about.
My mother is a perfect example. She is someone that will vote but only if motivated. All she has been saying for two weeks is that she is freaking out about Elon Musk and billionaires controlling everything.
Keep our messaging concise and focus on a handful of "pillars" to hammer home our differences with the GOP every single day.
Don't detour into the weeds on every issue.
If we have to explain an issue for someone to get motivated/outraged, we've already lost.
My pillars would be:
1) Trump and his billionaire friends are seizing the government and giving themselves kickbacks and racking up our debt to do it. We will stabilize US finances by taxing personal wealth on billionaires.
2) Trump promised peace but now he is suddenly promising to attack our friends for land and returning troops to the Middle East to seize Gaza.
3) Trump is incompetent and outsources the tasks to dangerous Christian nationalists.
4) It's easier to build more wealth when you already have it. In order to combat inequality in addition to taxing personal income on billionaires we will also break up their monopolies. Billionaires control every facet of American media and can legally buy elections.
These the main ones I can come up with on the top of my head. But add one or two more planks and it would still be concise.
Democrats need to be focused and not engage on every issue. Average Americans need messaging to be kept simple.
Seeing Chuck Schumer scream like he's at the super bowl about winning while standing in front of Treasury is not helping break through.
Trumps approval is near 50%. Don't give him what he wants.
4)
"beltway bubble issue"?? Are you serious?
Shuttering USAID may well cost millions of lives! And, no, that is not hyperbole. Moreover, it will seriously weaken soft, non-military American influence throughout the world. And it dangerously increases the risk of a new deadly pandemic reaching our own shores.
You are mistaking me for personally not caring about USAID, which is untrue, and me trying to explain that the average voter does not know what it even is.
Methinks you are mistaking my mistaking. At no point am I suggesting you don’t care about USAID; such a thought had not even crossed my mind. My only objection is to labeling and dismissing this as a "beltway bubble issue".
We all know this. This isn’t a question about morals but a question of political strategy.
Unfortunately you're right. It's a loser. It requires too much explaining to articulate why USAID should be a priority for people.
I'd like to see polling on this. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think a majority are against the U.S. helping children fight malaria in Africa via foreign aid.
Polling would probably say they are against foreign aid but in favor of specific programs. Easier to be against something in the abstract.
Exactly. Same with stuff like the DOE
True, though as stated it would be better to focus on things like chaos, incompetence, fucking with services people need, and "who elected Elon Musk?"
Jared Golden says that in his red district he's been inundated with communication from people complaining about Musk's unwarranted influence and messing with things, though there's honestly something self-delusional about Trump voters complaining only about Musk and not Trump. Musk didn't just pop out of nowhere after the election.
This Treasury debacle has certainly opened the door for that
Would a majority of people say they're in favor of abolishing USAID? I have doubts.
I’m confident they would. Look how many of them voted for Trump.
Issue polling shows voters don't particularly like MAGA positions outside of immigration and anti-woke/culture stuff.
Yeah well Mark, you would say that considering you think everything a Republican does is a genius 12D chess move while seeing Dems as too stupid to plug in a monitor. I don't even know why you continue to be involved when your responses boil down to walls of text that in sum total say "Republicans will win forever while Dems will regret abandoning white male manufacturing workers. Tsk tsk"
Am I being uncharitable to you? Maybe. But you don't have carte blanche to arrogantly proclaim what is and will be based on lucky guesses. Drop the ego
Yeah I would say "uncharitable" would be an adjective that at least partially captures the string of strawmen you've built in an attempt to spook me into submission. Feels like there should be a harvest moon to illuminate as many strawmen as you've constructed.
Do you attribute every correctly called election prediction to be a "lucky guess"? If so, then every single one of us on this board is no better than the average joe on the street. If not, then how do you distinguish my guesses being "lucky" when they're inconvenient but right and others' guesses as especially insightful if the results match your preferences?
Five of the last six election cycles produced results that I consider disappointing from a Democratic perspective. Was it really a "lucky guess" for me to have looked at the trend lines of those preceding cycles and determined that we had a problem going into 2024? Or could it be a signal that Democrats have become really bad at messaging to the contemporary electorate? And that you and many others have become really, really bad at evaluating the trend lines and correctly predicting outcomes?
C'mon man. No need for this. Let's discuss elections, not each other.
Why it's such a BFD is it's the first domino to fall in terms of Trump ripping up the Constitution and defying congressional statute to act like a king. Today it's USAID, tomorrow Education, next EPA etc.
If you just wait until a target gets hit that is "popular enough" the precedent has been set and it's too late.
The Congressional Review Service declared it's an illegal act today. How no-one has been able to get a court injunction of some kind is mind boggling and depressing . .what the fuck are they waiting for??
I couldn't disagree more.
We have a big-tent coalition and rely in part on that small part of the electorate in the middle that is, beyond being ideologically inconsistent, are often underinformed, uninformed, and/or misinformed. Point being, if we wait for the perfect issue that fires up everyone before we get mad, we'll be lining up at the executioners block and someone in the actual line will be telling everyone to remain calm and keep their powder dry.
Republicans have been consistently able, over multiple generations, to attack democrats over anything and everything. They manage to pick the most esoteric, boring, bullshit things and turn it into the issue that their base froths in rage over. Anyone who wants to tell me that we cannot successfully make use of outrage over USAID being *unconstitutionally* torn apart is wrong.
We, as a party and especially our officials, need to be angry more often and more visibly. The last thing we need is to repeat our consistently failed practice of self-policing the outrage within our own tent. That self-policing of outrage is the real messaging problem as far as I'm concerned.
Calling it unconstitutional or illegal is the best argument I’ve read so far Dems could use against this action.
And right on cue, this halfwit Al Green has been the first to introduce Impeachment articles against Trump.
Because making him a victim has worked so well for us before. This Democratic response is like clockwork on Groundhog Day.
I don’t know. They impeached him in 2019 and he lost in 2020. Maybe check your history before going around calling people half wits.
He lost in 2020 because of covid not because people were suddenly awakened to his lack of scruples.
If that was the reason he lost he wouldn't be in the WH currently.
Time and time again our party martyrs this mofo. /sigh
Where’s your evidence for that? He was trailing in the polls even before Covid hit. Unlike in 2023. He was able to win last year because of a politically incompetent president and administration.
You should be chair honestly. You have a winning platform of concern trolling
Who is Mo Green? The only one I came up with is the NC Supt. of Public Instruction.
Do you mean Al Green? Let's stick together, or Tr*mp and Elmo will take us to the river...
OK you edited your comment. We are writing about the same person, Rep. (not Rev.) Al Green, D-TX
he made his bones while you were still going out with cheerleaders !!..🙃
Sanford would be an interesting candidate in SC. McMaster hasn't stirred up much angst. He's conservative but not super crazy. Unlike Haley though, he's been willing to back antiLGBT legislation, but has not put up $$ to oust in party rivals like Haley did to Lee Bright years ago. However, Mace has lots of detractors. Wilson could have trouble with corruption among DAs (called solicitors here).
SC has no party registration and open primaries. I would totally vote in the GOP primary to elevate Sanford over Mace or Wilson, knowing that in the fall I'd vote for whatever Dem was chosen. There's no way I'd take the chance that Mace would be elected and move SC to the crazy wing of the GOP like Wyoming, because she isn't seen as crazy enough to make people vote for a Democrat.
I'll have to think about Senate though. I expect Graham to get a strong primary opponent. Some GOP people here hate him. If he survived the primary would they stay home? Maybe. Or would they vote for a Dem? Unlikely. Hard to say. If the GOP nominated a nut, would that help the Dem candidate? Have to be Mark Robinson nutty.
Senate Democrats pulling an all nighter to oppose the most dangerous Trump nominee.
We’re holding the floor all night to oppose the nomination of Project 2025 author Russ Vought.
https://x.com/SenBrianSchatz/status/1887229006631551004
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/opinion/trump-vought-omb-government.html
Any chance we could switch to bluesky links for things that exist there as well? I refuse to go to that site now. I assume others here feel similarly, but I only know of my own preferences here.
I still wanted a bit more context. I found what I assume (but cannot confirm without clicking...) is a duplicate from Schatz over there:
https://bsky.app/profile/schatz.bsky.social/post/3lhhmvls7kc2v
We are the the "Susan is concerned" stage of Republican denial . .https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/02/05/congress/susan-collins-elon-musk-trump-spending-00202633
When do we get to “troubled”?
Likely after Hegseth's SS guns down a few protesters.
"She still plans to vote to confirm Russ Vought, Trump’s pick for White House budget chief, who is expected to play a key role in the administration’s larger efforts to wrest spending power away from congress."
What a fucking joke. Do we have anyone besides Golden who can win this seat?
Troy Jackson is who everyone is pinning our hopes on. The names available in Maine seem to be jockeying for governor, as it's the more winnable race. But between him, Bellows, Golden, and Pingree, only one of them can be our gubernatorial nominee.
My hope is I'd like to see Jackson run for senate, Golden stay in the house, and everyone else fight over governor. I do like Bellows but I don't know how strong she would be, and she had her star dimmed by losing to Collins in 2014.
Golden has said he will not run against Collins as I understand.
Voting against 1 Trump nominee (Pete Hegseth) but being an automatic YES on all the rest should doom her as Harris beat Trump in Maine by 7 points!! 💙🙏🇺🇲