Tuesday Open Thread

15 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

1. Got offered a link to The Blue State Power Index from The American Prospect.  The list has a couple of paragraphs on each of the 17 states with a Democratic trifecta.

   We thought it would be instructive to look at the 17 states with Democratic governors and Democratic majorities in their state legislatures over the past two years, and study what they actually got done. We wanted to separate those states that took up the challenge of governing from those that were unwilling to use the power they have been bequeathed by the electorate.

   Spoiler alert:  Colorado is #13.  We ARE ahead of California and New York.  The writer of the couple of paragraphs:  "Ryan Cooper. the Prospect’s managing editor, and author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’ He was previously a national correspondent for The Week."

   Anyone want to chime in on the ranking?  Or offer alternative explanations of what is being done (and left undone)?

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   1. Doesn't Colorado have two Democrat state legislative bodies with one Libertarian executive?

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      1. With due respect joe, the last time I checked, "Democrat" wasn't an adjective. I don't think Secretary McMahon has had any luck changing that…yet.

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         1. Fair enough. I'm just salty.

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   2. I don't know enough about the other states to comment on the ranking. I thought the write-up on CO was factually accurate, but a little unfairly weighted toward Polis' libertarian/corporate-influenced vetoes. Outside of those actions, the CO legislature has passed basically 400-500 bills per year, mostly with Democratic main sponsors and quite a few with progressive actions, and some of them were touched upon in the ranking write-up but received less emphasis than Polis' vetoes of labor-backed bills. Don't know why the writer had to make an issue about family leave when CO voters passed a ballot measure in 2020.

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2. "What needs to happen". Marcy Wheeler.

   Marcy Wheeler says to stop focussing on Chuck Schumer and other Democrats because that takes the focus off Trump. She suggests some tactics in this article.

   Many of the discussions about Chuck Schumer make the same mistake he does: they assume the answer to Trump’s attack on democracy lies in winning midterms.

   That’s a luxurious thought.

   But it imagines we have more time to reverse Trump’s actions than we likely do, and it falsely assumes that the Democratic Party — rather than a trans-partisan or nonpartisan movement — is the entity that might reverse Trump’s attacks. Even if you could be sure of winning the House, without thinking more broadly you could only freeze things; without a whole lot more political work, for example, you couldn’t impeach and remove Trump.

   To be clear, the quickest way to slow or reverse Trump’s actions is to convince Republicans — somewhere between four and nine in the House, and/or four in the Senate — to stall his efforts. That’s actually what Schumer says too, but he’s not talking about ways (much less doing anything obvious) to make that happen. Barring convincing Republicans to do something to protect the Constitution, it’ll require a mass uprising (or strike) to bring about change. Barring convincing a politically active majority of the country to cherish democracy, even ousting Trump would just bring us back to where we were quickly, with some other right winger exploiting the Republican thirst for authoritarianism.

   Town halls

   And one of the things that are already going on — outraged constituents at town halls — is one of the quickest ways to affect that, as I wrote about here. Even Chuck Grassley resorted to bullshit claims at a rowdy town hall recently. Organizers have even succeeded in using empty-podium town halls to focus on Republican failures, and more Democrats are showing at town halls in other districts.
    

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   1. “Winning in 2026 will not be sufficient to stop the authoritarian push; but it is necessary.” Jonathon V Last in the Bulwark.

      Marcy also calls our attention to a good article in The Bulwark by Jonathon V Last.

      I was wrong about one big thing in 2024: I did not realize that most American institutions—the media, the legal world, big business, universities, the tech sector—would immediately capitulate to Trump.

      In 2016 I believed the Republican party’s submission was the result of the GOP’s particular failings. That was incorrect. The Republican party was merely the first institution to accept authoritarianism because it was the first institution Trump targeted.

      We now see that most institutions are weak in the face of authoritarianism.

      JVL’s Law is: Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.

      This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.

      The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.

      Once you accept that reality, our next steps become clear.

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      1. This is the JVL article that I referenced yesterday, including the Alexei Navalny mention.

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3. No post about the horrible violation of operational security?

   and that the top people are clearly regularly using Signal to avoid legally required retention of discussions?

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   1. I'm hoping some media outlets will ask Rep. Gabe Evans, erstwhile military man and current member of the

      Homeland Security Committee, and its subcommittees

      • Emergency Management and Tech 
      • Counterterrorism and Intelligence 

      for his reaction to the use of Signal as a mechanism for discussion and the assurances that Sec. Hegseth provided

      Hegseth … texted the group that “I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC,” and later wrote that “We are currently clean on OPSEC.”

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      1. For some, "I will do all thet we  can do" might  be a meaningul measure.

         With these clowns, "all that [they] can do" is nothing more than stroking *rump's ego.

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   2. The clowns are claiming, in a Senate hearing, that there was no classified information involved in the chat, despite the Atlantic not naming a CIA operative whose name was mentioned in the chat, which clearly seems to be classified information to me.  One of the chat participants was in Russia at the time, which makes things even more likely to have been compromised

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   3. If you know, you know….

      Hegseth and Other Top Trump Officials Just Failed OPSEC Jeff

      https://www.military.com/off-duty/hegseth-and-other-top-trump-officials-just-failed-opsec-jeff.html

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4. The Big Question on Nuclear Facing Colorado

   What will it cost, how long will it take?

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5. I agree. David…

   What will it cost in environmental and human impacts?  How long will it take to clean up the mess, once made? Which is, I guess, actually 2 questions.

   

    

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