Eric Levitz
@EricLevitz
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Think out loud for https://t.co/1Dbt4zwdm2. [email protected] https://t.co/0pFwy0400C
Joined September 2012
This is strange since the President of the United States assured me that American consumers do not pay the cost of tariffs.
WHITE HOUSE: LOWERED CANADIAN TARIFF ON ENERGY TO MINIMIZE RISE IN COSTS.
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This already exists. It is called the Government Accountability Office. Musk's proposition is not that a public entity should monitor federal spending for waste. It is that he - an unaccountable private citizen - should be able to cancel spending that he deems wasteful at will.
On a separate note, it appears that DOGE is trying to do a line by line item, agency by agency audit of the United States government to eliminate fraud, redundancy, and unnecessary contractors. If that is the case, this needs to be applauded.
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Kamala has her flaws. But I think Americans who haven't heard from a presidential candidate who isn't Trump or Biden for 8 years will be awestruck by the magisterial oratory of a replacement-level 50-something politician.
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If they can do this to Donald Trump, they can do it to *any* American who tries to falsify business records so as to conceal the hush money payments they made to their pornstar ex-mistresses during their presidential campaigns.
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1) There is no rational argument for why it should take 60 Senate votes to pass a law, but only 51 to give someone the lifelong power to dictate what kinds of laws Congress is allowed to pass.
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The far right gloating over the murder of a progressive young man on his way home from a wedding is among the most morally abominable things I've ever seen on this website.
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40 million Californians get just two senators and they spent one on this.
A mask-free embrace between Feinstein and Graham to cap things off. And the Amy Coney Barrett hearings are over.
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The U.S. government is trying to exile a legal resident for coauthoring an oped it didn't like. It is difficult to imagine a graver attack on free speech rights.
Marco Rubio on Rumeysa Ozturk: "We revoked her visa . once you've lost your visa, you're no longer legally in the United States . if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don't want it. We don't want it in our country. Go back and do it in your
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1) Despite having only a 50-vote Senate majority, Democrats are about to pass a nearly $2 trillion bill that puts more than $7,600 into the bank account of the typical family of 4, establishes America's first proper child allowance (on a temporary basis for now). .
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The idea that Democrats are duty-bound to support a Republican speaker who reneged on a budget deal and launched an impeachment inquiry into Biden because he heroically agreed to keep the government running for 45 days is deeply strange.
Remember, Democrats may say they want more responsible Republican leadership, but they will side against that every chance they get - and then complain if anyone tries to hold them responsible for their own choices.
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[dr manhattan voice] It is 2003. I am listening to Ari Fleischer explain that the Middle Eastern country we're going to war with will greet us as liberators. It is 2020. I am listening to Ari Fleischer. etc, etc.
Ari Fleischer: "I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani"
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The Fallout tv show was fun but also probably the dumbest satire of capitalism I've seen. No, investors in a fallout shelter company would not have an interest in engineering a nuclear apocalypse to increase the value of their shares on markets that would no longer exist.
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Once you acknowledge the plain fact that the U.S. has deliberately engineered -- and maintained for over a century -- an agricultural system dependent on migrant labor, you see that "the undocumented" aren't an illicit foreign presence, but a hyper-exploited domestic caste.
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Time to accept that we simply have a mad king. The guy slapping 25% tariffs on Canada's postage while calling for its annexation - and releasing scarce water into the Central Valley to fight already-contained fires in LA - isn't doing a bit or pursuing a secret, rational strategy
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Out-of-touch coastal elites in Kansas may reject forced birth, but out in the Heartland of America (Harvard Law), real Americans (20-something Catholic converts in bow ties) actually *like* it.
I've seen enough: in a huge victory for the pro-choice side, the Kansas constitutional amendment to remove protections of abortion rights fails.
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DOGE has not presented evidence of "fraud"; they have highlighted millions of dollars worth of spending that Musk considers wasteful. By contrast, the GAO identified $233 billion of fraud in 2024. We don't need to let a billionaire ignore federal law to do government oversight
What’s crazy to me…is the insanity of people literally imploding over the people finding massive fraud, rather than the people doing massive fraud.
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If income had been distributed as evenly over the past five decades as it was in 1970, the median full-time worker in the U.S. would now take home $92,000 a year (instead of $50,000), according to a new RAND study.
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Whereas left populism posits a binary between the people and the elites, right populism conjures a three-part division of society between “the people,” the elites, and the undeserving others whom the elites coddle at the people’s expense.
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I support Bernie Sanders because in the wealthiest country in human history, *no one* should have to go without seeing their class enemies ritually executed in Central Park.
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Removing unvaccinated nurses from hospitals where they can transmit COVID-19 to cancer patients who lack functioning immune systems (something that has happened multiple times according to physicians I know) seems like it *should* be an intended goal of the vaccine mandate.
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Look, all Trump needed to do tonight was win back soft Biden voters by demonstrating his stalwart commitment to the Proud Boys, signaling his contempt for the democratic process, and making lots of inscrutable references to minor events from the Fox News Cinematic Universe.
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If Democrats don't use their trifecta to rebalance America's electoral playing field - and/or, attain a degree of popularity without modern precedent - they will clear the way for a proto-authoritarian right to take power by mid-decade.
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Biden has not just been having difficulty with extemporaneous speaking. He's also been struggling to read speeches off a teleprompter. Here, he mistook text promising a 5 percent cap on rent increases for a cap on rent increases larger than $55.
The NAACP Convention breaks into applause after Joe Biden just announces he is going to cap raises of rent to $55. That of course is not remotely true…
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Justin Trudeau muttering, “touché, Mr. Trump,” while pressing a big red button on his desk labeled “Halt Fentanyl Exports”
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Made this point last month but Bloomberg's rise makes it worth repeating: It seems possible that once you let any individual citizen accrue $60 billion, your democracy lasts as long as that citizen remains too cheap (or uninterested in power) to end it.
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1) The Trump administration just gave a random Silicon Valley CEO -- who possess no public office or accountability -- access to the Treasury Department's payments system (and with, your Social Security number)
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Between 2013 and 2021, New York raised its minimum wage by 72% in inflation-adjusted terms, an unprecedentedly large increase. Many economists predicted that this yield massive job losses. A new study indicates it actually spurred job *growth*
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Look, this statement is disappointing. But Nancy Pelosi is a vulnerable incumbent who only won her district by 74 points in 2018. This is just what a Democrat has to do to compete in right-leaning San Francisco.
The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must be done with reverence. The President shouldn’t use the painful images of 9/11 for a political attack.
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Pelosi’s got her faults. But it was nice to have a Democratic leader with a ravenous appetite for attaining and wielding power (and some idea of how to do so).
“Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, convinced Biden will lose, has been working the phones since June 27 in hopes of finding a way to ease him off the ticket.”
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Given how inevitable a pandemic like this was -- and the high probability that we were never going to fund pandemic readiness adequately until we saw the real thing -- we are so incredibly lucky that the one we got happens to spare children.
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Originalism, like “free market” economic doctrines, seems like little more than an elaborate mystification of power — a way for reactionaries to insulate their unpopular goals from democratic challenge by casting those aims as dictates foisted upon them by some distant agency. .
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A Democratic upset in a 2018 race for "Harris County judge" just might deliver Texas to Biden. Meanwhile, recent Dem wins in PA State Supreme Court races could thwart voter suppression in that tipping-point state. Downballot elections, they matter folks!.
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The flood of endorsements this afternoon suggests the party has made its decision: Barring a literal face-plant at the presser, Biden will be the nominee. I think this is a colossal error in both political and moral terms. Hope I'm wrong.
NEW: Rep. @AOC tells us she spoke to President Biden over the weekend and it’s time to end the speculation over his future:. “Joe Biden is our nominee. He is not leaving this race. He is in this race and I support him.”.
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BCBS told some extremely overpaid specialists (median salary: $430,600) that they would be cutting their pay by applying some of Medicare's payment rules. This is how single-payer works: Squeeze rentier providers, lower costs. If you're outraged by this, you're getting played!.
Blue Cross Blue Shield in Connecticut, New York and Missouri has declared it will no longer pay for anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries. It the procedure goes over a certain time, anesthesia will not be covered for the duration.
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I've seen enough -- time for Biden to end the embargo of Cuba.
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7). where *Joe Biden* is going to deliver the largest direct increase in worker purchasing power in U.S. history. Imo, to look at that and decry Democrats as indistinguishable from Republicans is both mendacious and more conducive to advancing nihilism than progressive change.
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Perhaps we should not give unconditional military aid to a country that vigorously opposes America's official policy goal in its region.
BREAKING: Israeli ambassador @TzipiHotovely rejects the idea of a two-state solution. "The answer is absolutely no", she says. 📺 Sky 501, Virgin 602, Freeview 233 and YouTube
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Yes. A private citizen is taking control of government agencies, granting himself and his cronies access to sensitive information, and publicly asserting the right to personally veto congressionally authorized spending he dislikes. The constitutional crisis is already here.
This is an excellent summary of Musk’s takeover of the Treasury from @NYMag’s @chasdanner, with quotes from WSJ, NYT, WaPo, and my op-ed from @MSNBC yesterday. But this quote from @smotus is right on the money. This isn’t efficiency. It’s a coup.
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I think condemning countless HIV patients to death for no reason — while potentially incubating a new, drug-resistant strain of HIV — is a more consequential act of misgovernance than spending $25,000 on a queer opera in Peru. But I know many on this site beg to differ.
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Bari Weiss's Twitter exposé revealed that Bari Weiss is a liar.
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"Presidential candidates should cater exclusively to whichever 7ish states happen to be evenly split at a given point in time, and the candidate that does better in those states should get to be president in defiance of the popular will" is such a weird principle to insist on.
Just to lay down a marker by which you can judge me, in case everyone does indeed switch sides: The electoral college is an excellent institution, and my arguments for it are wholly independent of who it temporarily benefits. Same with the filibuster, Senate, and Supreme Court.
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If you'd said four years ago, "By the time Trump leaves office, a virus he helped spread will be killing 4,000 Americans a day, while an insurgency he incited will menace state capitols and put Congress in mortal peril," you'd have been accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, no?.
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Texas is an open-carry state. The punishment for blocking traffic is not summary execution.
@EricLevitz The "protestor" was wielding an AK and illegally blocking traffic.
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New lighthearted meme to text to my boys while silently seething
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Bernie Sanders has a 100% rating from the American Civil Liberties Union. His belief in freedom of expression is so unyielding, he has scolded progressive college students for being impolite to Ann Coulter. He's not an authoritarian communist.
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Obama spent much of his first year in office seeking bipartisan buy-in for the ACA. Biden just slapped the bulk of his healthcare plan on top of a 1.9 trillion relief bill and rammed it through Congress before his administration’s two-month anniversary.
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Governor Abbott understands the importance of keeping our elections secure from the threat of voters
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The sole reason why the GOP is able to demand one-way concessions in debt-ceiling negotiations is that it is plausibly willing to sabotage the country. That should be a scandal for the party, yet much of the press treats it as perfectly normal.
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Monopoly issues aside, pretty stark how much weaker Facebook's affirmative case for its product is. Google can get you the answer to most any question in seconds. Amazon can deliver most any product to your door in two days. Facebook can. waste your time and make you depressed?.
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The attempt to stigmatize the argument, “we should replace the old white man with a more qualified Black woman” as a byproduct of regressive racial (/gender?) biases is one of the strangest talking points I’ve ever encountered.
These are the folks calling for Biden to quit. Gosh, if there was only something they all had in common.
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Insane that members of Congress are allowed to trade/own individual stocks in any circumstance.
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The Trump administration's agenda on student debt is so corrupt and regressive that it's literally unbelievable. A straightforward description of its policies sound like an unhinged partisan attack.
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I was losing thousands of dollars on trade with grocery stores and restaurants. Now I’m not doing business with grocery stores and restaurants. Therefore, I am saving thousands of dollars (and starving to death).
Trump: "We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China. Now we're essentially not doing business with China. Therefore, we're saving hundreds of billions of dollars. It's very simple."
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[attack ad voice] Bernie Sanders says he's a socialist. But his late-60s writings on sexual repression betray a fondness for the work of Herbert Marcuse, whose Freudian worldview is fundamentally anti-Hegelian -- and thus, anti-Marxist. America deserves better.
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No one deserves to be randomly killed for the crimes of their government, whether they are Palestinian or Israeli or anything else.
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1) I spoke with @davidshor about his autopsy of the 2024 campaign. Based on voter file data, 26 million voter interviews, and precinct returns, he reaches a few conclusions. One is that if all registered voters had turned out, Trump would have won a landslide:
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Let's say I told you last August, "In a year, 170,000 Americans will be dead from a pandemic, unemployment will be 10.2%, and schools will be inoperable in much of the country" - then asked, "what will Trump's approval rating be?" . Would you have said, "higher than it is now"?
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.@AOC's claim that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democractic rule might seem radical to Sean Hannity. But to America’s founders, it seemed like common sense.
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Imo, the fact that the world’s two most populous countries have ostensibly become authoritarian ethnostates hellbent on ethnically cleansing their Muslim populations deserves more attention than it’s getting.
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Biden is presiding over one of the largest reductions in wage inequality, and increases in real wages for low-income workers, in modern U.S. history. (And the public writ large doesn't seem particularly enthused)
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Really not sure how anyone is supposed to negotiate a trade agreement with someone who has no coherent demands and an increasingly fragile grip on reality
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The idea that Hamas committed no rapes on 10/7 always should have been treated with extreme skepticism, given how atypical it would be for any military force to go door to door killing families without committing sexual violence. In any case, there is no excuse for denial now
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My God. The Democrats have become self-aware.
Schumer: "We cannot do the mistake of 2009 where they whittled down the program so that the amount of relief was so small that the recession lasted 4 or 5 years. And then on the ACA, when they spent a year, a year and a half negotiating and then didn't come to any agreement.".
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I think the Democratic Party should not stick with the course of action that gives Trump his best chance of winning the presidency, according to Donald Trump (and the available polling data and the vast majority of Democratic operatives).
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This year's been an endless series of disorienting events. But the Mets doing something that makes me feel. the *opposite* of ashamed. has finally broken my tenuous grip on reality.
The Mets and Marlins took the field, had a 42-second moment of silence, and then walked off. The only thing left on the field: a Black Lives Matter shirt.
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A bill that did nothing but establish universal pre-k, $500 billion in climate funding, and a permanent child allowance kinda seems preferable to the emerging grab-bag of ill-designed, underfunded programs that are all set to self-destruct during the second Trump administration.
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"A monk-like aesthetic extends from his clothes. to his personal life. He shares a penthouse with about 10 roommates and cooks for himself."
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Biden did not cut the pandemic welfare programs. Congress enacted aid programs on a temporary basis. Biden then attempted to enact the largest expansion of the welfare state in a half century. The Senate refused to pass it.
Biden 1) cut pandemic welfare programs; 2) didn't replace them with anything, despite promising to do so.
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The fact that Donald Trump was nearly assassinated does not make it less important for Democrats to put forward the strongest possible nominee. If you believed Biden wasn’t your party’s best bet yesterday morning, you still have an obligation to do something about that today!.
Top Democratic sources believe that Democrats who had thoughts about challenging President Biden are now standing down "because of this fragile political moment," @CostaReports reports. Concerns about Biden's debate performance "faded almost instantly" after the attempted
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Here, Biden tries to say "I prepared for this like it was an NSC meeting, drilling down into fine details, but I realized halfway through the debate that that was the wrong approach"- but by the time he gets to "halfway through" he forgets his talking point and veers into another.
Forgive me for who I'm getting this clip from, it's the first one I found. But what happens to his voice when everytime he's on TV
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. It should perhaps go without saying, but the "point" they think they are making is idiotic. No set of criminal justice policies could ever fully eliminate random homicides, and the right is committed to making it easy for criminals to access handguns.
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According to my eyes and ears, Biden is very bad at politics, whereas Elizabeth Warren is *very* good. But according to the polls, my eyes and ears are garbage, just absolute dogshit, like I'm wearing a pair of shattered binoculars and hearing aides that only hiss static.
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I actually don’t think he’s making that presumption. Remember, Judge Curiel was “Mexican” even though he was a son of Indiana. For Trump, nonwhite Americans are “from other countries,” no matter where they’re born.
There’s a lot of repellent stuff in these tweets, but it’s interesting that Trump presumes Ayanna Pressley (born in Chicago), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (born in NYC), and Rashida Tlaib (born in Detroit) were not born in the USA.
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Very cool of Newsweek to publish this extremely sober and not at all fascistic take
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3) None of this remotely commensurate with what working people are owed. But it is going to make the lives of hundreds of millions much better than they are now, and much better than they would have been had Democrats not come to power. .
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"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
.@chrislhayes made this observation a while back, but “law and order” for the president and his allies means impunity for the white and rich, punishment for the black, brown, and poor.
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Bernie got the most votes in Iowa. Pete got the second-most. Biden collapsed. As a result, Sanders now has better chance of winning the nomination than any other candidate. These things we know. These are the only things we really need to know.
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Why is NBC's Chief Foreign Correspondent doing unabashed, rightwing political commentary? And what point does he think he is making, exactly - should the president not be in contact with the ruling regime of a country he wishes to evacuate U.S. citizens from?.
Biden says US in constant contact with Taliban to get safe passage to airport. So, US asking former enemy, the Taliban, to please allow us to get our people out while they take the country.
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in hindsight, would've been smart to win a few more Senate seats.
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Turns out, it is not actually responsible or smart for pundits to present the fact that Biden, Pete, and Amy collectively won a majority of the vote in New Hampshire as proof that most Democratic voters prefer "a moderate nominee" to Bernie Sanders.
#National Democratic Primary, Head-2-Head:.Sanders 54% (+21).Klobuchar 33%. Sanders 54% (+17).Buttigieg 37%. Sanders 53% (+15).Bloomberg 38. Sanders 48% (+4).Biden 44%. Sanders 44% (+2).Warren 42%. @YouGovUS/@YahooNews 2/12-13
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If you find yourself making the argument, “11 year-olds aren’t really children tho,” you should take that as an extremely strong indication that you’ve strayed from the righteous path.
Here is the death age distribution in Gaza from before this conflict (from a pro Palestinian source). The vast majority of "child" deaths were ages 10-18.
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No, historically high turnout does not invalidate alarm at the fact that the president is openly trying to win reelection through voter suppression and disenfranchisement.
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Herzog’s statement has the same logic as “settlers aren’t civilians.” Given that this is coming from a president not a student group, the chorus of condemnations should be louder than that drawn by the Hamas apologists. Somehow, I don’t think it will be.
There you have it. Israel's president Isaac Herzog makes the Israeli state's official position abundantly clear: that the Palestinian civilian population have collective guilt. This is the mentality which, throughout history, leads to genocide.
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An hour into the RNC, one thing's already clear: If Biden wins this fall, a great fever will finally break, and the spirit of bipartisan comity shall reign throughout the land.
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According to polls, Joe Biden is on track to win a lower share of the Black vote than any Democratic president in modern history. Other than that though, “it’s racist to replace Joe Biden with a Black woman” is an airtight argument.
Seems like @CedricRichmond message got thru to some congressional Dems . “I think it’s interesting that not one African-American member [of Congress] has called on the president to step down,” Richmond said, before warning white lawmakers that they “risk alienating some of their.
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IMO, Dems would have a better chance of winning if their nominee were capable of giving (coherent) interviews to swing-state media outlets, keeping a strenuous campaign schedule, and persuading more than 30% of voters that they're fit to serve. It's odd to me how many disagree.
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Georgia is poised to slash nearly $1 billion from K-12 schools, thanks to the GOP's opposition to major fiscal aid to states and cities. Democrats should let GA voters know that they need to back *both* Ossoff and Warnock if they want those funds restored.
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Personally, I think it is bad for major employers to work in concert to blacklist young people for political speech, including speech I disagree with.
I have been asked by a number of CEOs if @harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their.
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To secure the presidency as a Democrat, you must win the popular vote by at least 4 points, *while* persuading capital and the GOP that you aren't threatening enough to be worth preempting in a coup. Biden did it! He will be president. So stop freaking out - the system works!.
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3) Democrats should not cede to a set of arbitrary rules that makes the GOP's priorities (tax cuts, judges) easy to pass, but all civil rights and regulatory legislation nearly impossible to enact.
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2) makes ACA plans much more affordable, provides $27 billion in rental assistance, improves the left's prospects for winning progressive reforms at the local level by leaving states in better fiscal health than they were pre-pandemic, and cuts poverty in the U.S. by one-third. .
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This is a dumb tweet. But how is this guy supposed to know that Russia has the world's largest nuclear arsenal, or that this *might* explain the West's reluctance to intervene militarily? What is he, the chief foreign correspondent of a major news network?
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Not the most important thing here, but it is weird that many people are looking at a calamitous demonstration of the very high stakes of U.S. elections and concluding, "casting a ballot against theocracy is more trouble than it's worth.".
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In 2012, Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney argued that America's corporate tax rate should be 25%. In 2021, Sinema insists that it shouldn't be any higher than 21% - but also, apparently, that billionaires should pay taxes on their unrealized capital gains. Pretty weird!.
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