The back and forth and mental gymnastics are wild, but most posts seem neutral to positive on organizing with an explicitly anti-feminist, pro-christian nationalism group.

Link

linky to bsky

I was made aware that I missed this cursed blunt rotation in a recent Bad Empanda live video. Wtf is Progressive victory?

Ross Douthat: Joe Manchin Would Be ‘the Most Moderate Candidate’

I’m Ross Douthat, and I’m a columnist for The New York Times. I’m here to make the case that the Democrats should nominate the senator from West Virginia Joe Manchin.

Much of the Democratic Party and many of my friends in the media are convinced that this election has almost existential stakes for the United States of America. And if that is the case, there is a reasonable argument for the Democratic Party to nominate someone who is as close to the center of American politics as you can get, with a long record of voting for Democratic causes. So, Manchin 2024.

I’ve thought Joe Manchin should run for president for a while. In 2023, I made the case that he should run as an independent. I thought, as a moderate Democrat, Manchin was well positioned to run, basically, I argued, a kind of test-the-waters campaign.

But the reason to think of him as a plausible third-party candidate is also the reason to think of him as a plausible nominee for the Democrats — if their absolute goal is to defeat Donald Trump, no matter what.

Manchin is a guy who successfully managed to get elected to the Senate from West Virginia over the course of multiple election cycles where West Virginia was being transformed from a reliably Democratic state into a reliably Republican one. And his strategy always seemed to be: Pull a given piece of Democratic legislation more toward the middle (or toward the middle as he understood it), but be willing to vote for it when push came to shove.

He was more socially conservative in various ways on issues ranging from abortion to immigration. He tended to be more skeptical of large spending bills of all kinds, climate change legislation in particular. He did a lot of things, especially in the Biden era, that made more ideological Democrats incredibly frustrated with him. At the same time, he remained a pretty reliable vote for Democratic causes and programs and judicial nominations and everything else.

In imagining him as a Democratic nominee, you’re picking someone who in a different kind of era would have been the leader of probably a pretty big centrist faction in the Democratic Party. And so nominating him wouldn’t require the Democratic Party to radically shift its positions on almost any issue. It would be a unique signal to the country that the Democrats were willing to make a major ideological compromise, which is the kind of signal that, if you are determined to win the election at all costs, you want to be sending.

I think Manchin’s biggest challenge in the incredibly unlikely event that he was the Democratic nominee, is that because he is a moderate who is despised by key activist groups in the Democratic coalition, most Democrats are just not going to turn out for someone who spent the Biden years trying to make Joe Biden’s agenda more moderate and sometimes contributing to derailing it.

That’s always the problem with trying to nominate the most moderate candidate: You risk alienating your own base. But I think in this scenario, given the lateness of the hour and Donald Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee, that what you would gain among swing voters would outweigh what you would lose in the party’s base.

Both political parties have nominated candidates for president who are broadly unacceptable to the middle 30 percent of Americans, and it would probably be useful for the country if one of the two parties tried to nominate someone who was much more acceptable to Americans in that middle ground.

https://archive.is/ZOj0x

https://nitter.lucabased.xyz/ContraPoints/status/1808529692405662047#m

Any fucking questions

Wow, it sure is weird that this mysterious escalation in violence” just keeps happening out of nowhere!

Western diplomats tried to head off a full-fledged war there

Fuck you

https://subium.com/profile/notalawyer.bsky.social/post/3kwgffrflne26

https://archive.is/jMIo6

Seriously how do people write such slanted headlines it's fucking art.

Alternative title: "America continues to illegally occupy area of Cuba near Cuban military facility"

"One Painful Debate Is Not Evidence of America’s Decline

Russia and China have seized on last week’s painful presidential debate to push their narrative that America is in terminal decline."

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1dtzsv5/americans_of_reddit_bearing_the_events_of_the/

https://x.com/theereal_one/status/1808164412089356777

(this should pass rule 8 because of the amount of engagement i think? account also has a lot of followers)

https://x.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1807932287255711792

https://x.com/johnpavlovitz/status/1807850938264162803

Biden Stan says we should listen to mittens political advisor and keep biden in

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