preston-t-umber

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Hi, I just wanted to share this photo I took. I think in fact, the most Photograph I have ever taken. No, this is not AI, this is a real photo, and whenever I look at it I feel like Tom Haverford staring at that abstract painting in Parks and Rec. Also I took it out the window of a car going 100kph, so, uh, yeah.

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There is something that is really infuriating about the current moment, where "We should lower student loan payments for low income debtors" is discussed as an insane presidential overreach, and "We should declare war on Denmark in order to reclaim Greenland" is a sober, sensible policy proposal.

Or, if not that, at least we shouldn't care because, come on, everybody knows that politicians exaggerate!

There's a lot of you who spent the Biden years explaining to me that "Defund the police" was so crazy that it discredited the President even as he actively disagreed with it, who said it was important even if nobody actually defunded the police because gosh it just shows the priorities of the left, who are pretty fucking quiet about the upcoming President talking about going to war with fucking Denmark.

This shit where only the left wing is responsible for what it says and the right can't be held responsible for what it says is getting pretty fucking old.

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I grew up in Massachusetts and I never realized that usually trains don’t scream in agony as they run until I visited DC a few years ago

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I think you're wrong about this, the EC is. a cancer. A lot of Dems seem caught-up in the counterfactual where Harris might've won an EC victory without winning the popular vote while ignoring that A.) she didn't actually do that and B.) the EC gave us GWBush and Trump I, two of the worst administrations in US history. Even going back the the 19th century, the previous confirmed EC/PV splits produced pretty lousy outcomes as well, a bunch of administrations you'd find in the "Who?" section of Presidential history trivia at best.

Beyond that, the rural bias of the Congress is reinforced in the EC (the number of electors a state receives is equal to the size of their total Congressional delegation, which is why the smallest states get 3 votes, because the smallest delegation you can have is two senators and one representative). A lot of urban issues get ignored and a lot of problems with Democratic politics goes unaddressed because the votes of cities and concentrated populations in general are systematically valued less in the US system. Look at how gun policy in the USA is entirely designed around rural sensibilities, not urban ones. The judges who rule on whether this-or-that gun law are often Presidential appointees.

A proper, Popular-vote only Presidential race is very much working to address a root cause of a lot of the problems as far as how the nation is governed. That said, an amendment is pretty silly: a pure token effort that isn't going anywhere, but Trump made some incoherent mouth noises about it so it might make sense to try as long as no actual political capital is spent on it. A better approach would be the ratification of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is slowly but surely closing in on the level of support it'd need to make the EC theoretically irrelevant.

Democratic Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch push Constitutional amendment process to abolish Electoral College

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

Three Democratic senators unveiled a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system Monday, just more than a month after President-elect Trump stunned the Democrats by sweeping all seven battleground states, knocking off three Senate Democratic incumbents in the process. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii,) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), three leading progressive Senate voices, say it’s time to “restore democracy” by allowing for the direct election of presidents through the popular vote alone. The senators are troubled that the Electoral College has twice elected a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote in the past 19 years. In both those instances, a Republican captured the White House — George W. Bush in the 2000 election and Trump in the 2016 election. “In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple,” Schatz said. “No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it.” To be sure, Trump would have still won the 2024 election if it had been decided by popular vote. He collected 77,300,739 votes compared to Vice President Harris’s 75,014,534. But many Democrats think that they would have had a better chance to beat Trump if they had a reason to focus on running up the margin of Harris’s victory in populous Democratic strongholds such as California, Illinois and New York. Republicans, however, also have big, populous states squarely in their column, namely Florida and Texas.

Democratic Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch push Constitutional amendment process to abolish the antiquated disgrace known as the Electoral College. Presidencies should be decided purely by popular vote, and such a move would widen the battleground map, as it would force both parties to compete in states currently safe for their respective parties to get the vote out.

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good shirt from the market today

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actually i think graduates of a university should have access to the library databases forever and ever amen

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Call me Linux the way I be Arching my back

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I love that Star Wars is quite literally mostly bad. Disney’s like, ‘Let’s sell war to dumb babies but: most of it will be really really dumb.’ And it is.

You can’t even do the whole “ugh, if the ORIGINAL CREATOR were still on board, it would be good..!” because he made a lot of Star Wars too, and it was also mostly bad. Beautiful franchise no notes

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Fuck Trump and his cronies...

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Inb4 they change the start of The Incredibles because he throttles his health exec boss

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I honestly feel like the proliferation of LED headlights was the canary in the coalmine for the general attitude we see in the political climate these days and i'm not even remotely kidding

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Holy fucking shit y'all.

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Corporate legacy media is catering to a conservative viewer that does not read NYT or WaPo, or watch MSNBC.

Their death is self-inflicted.

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Trump lying about #Project2025 speaks to the absolute absence of character that a leader must have.

That manifest absense of character should be disqualifying and covered every day on page one.