what people don't realize is that the eastern-western divide actually kind of blurs together in the middle, with the exact midpoint, and therefore the best barbecue on earth, appearing in shelby nc
when someone says "ah yeah I love nc barbecue, the vinegar is so good" you just know the next thing they're going to say is "sweet tea is just sooooo sweet, I'm just, like, not really into sweets"
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I’ve wondered if this is the root of the low-level panic a lot of Democrats feel, the constant attention suck that is Trump and politics, the doomscrolling: it feels like nobody is in charge and if we don’t pay close attention to every problem, every problem will get worse.
I’ve said this before but it’s simply exhausting - truly, physically exhausting - to know that not only will all manner of horrors occur between now and next week, every single week, but that even the people in government purportedly on our side will likely do nothing about them.
Did she help ferret out his misdeeds? Did she outmaneuver him at the negotiating table, achieving Dem priorities? Did she hold his cronies accountable or uncover corruption at the agencies? Did she ever use any of the "arrows in her quiver" that she wasn't going to talk about?
Or was she, at best, a mildly irksome presence for Trump in the House, someone who insulted him time to time while holding her own caucus at bay and suppressing any movement within it to impose consequences or accountability on the administration?
The irony is that the kind of government Jamelle is describing - one in which the branches act to protect their own governing prerogatives - is much more reflective of the ideas of the US constitutions than the mechanistic process envisioned by his critics
A lot of people have this 5th-grade view of "checks and balances" where it means rules built into the system - veto, judicial review, confirmations. But it's broader than that: it's the idea that a hypertrophied branch will be cut back down to size when it endangers the other two
"Checks and balances" is a principle to be upheld and expressed in government, not an invitation to comb over the rules until - oops! - you find the trump-card rule that can't be checked or balanced, and use it to secure permanent control in defiance of electoral majorities
protip: talking like this ("the takes were right directionally, but wrong magnitude-wise") is the secret handshake that makes you a member in good standing of the white male pundit social club
no normal person talks like this and the ideas being communicated are just broad observations undeserving of a veneer of mathematical precision. it's just a register - one designed to convey the speaker's own empiricism, objective rationality, and authoritative knowledge
didn't Nate and all the other forecasters absolutely rake @gelliottmorris over the coals for his estimation of a 85%-90% probable Biden victory months ago
but of course, the bigger issue here is, this is all impossible to falsify! the election gets modeled once and run once! so if Trump wins reelection, we'll never know if he got lucky, or got very lucky, since both are completely plausible outcomes
"There's a contest. It will never happen again. Through very complicated proprietary techniques we have estimated you have a 10% chance of losing."
So why are you even attaching a probability to the results? Win or lose, we learn almost literally nothing from the estimation