This article is an instructive example of the fantasyland I see some Democrats living in. It's written by a political foe of Lauren Boebert and interviews people who voted against her, in a city she lost, averring that Pueblo is in mid-backlash against her politico.com/news/magazine/…
(Disclosure: I fundraised for Boebert's opponent). The real story of Pueblo is much more interesting—a deindustrialized Rust Belt city that somehow wound up at the foot of the Rockies, and where a large Latino population consistently votes with low turnout
There are cities and communities like this throughout red state America. Reading, PA is another one that comes to mind. Democrats have assumed that the Latino vote was just theirs for the taking, since Trump was so obviously anti-immigrant. But these places remain unmobilized
Boebert won in part because her base of support is incredibly motivated. She won despite having no experience and contesting a geographically sprawling district with affluent islands like Telluride and Aspen and Durango. I expect her to do just fine in 2022
The country right now is full of dead-end small cities like Pueblo with no plan to how to breathe life into them. The local (and usually minority) population is just expected to vote for Democrats because what other choice do they have? I don't get why there's no plan to fix this
Basically the big metro areas and a raft of wealthy suburbs are doing great, rural America is gutted, there's ghost towns and cities left over from when manufacturing left decades ago, and we have a political system that weights the latter two over the former. There's your crisis
My own list of "how the hell is this in America?" cities includes Pueblo, Fresno, Butte, Huntington, Camden, Farmington, Stockton, Trenton, Bethlehem and Reading, PA, Gary, East St. Louis, Hartford, Flint, Salinas, and that's just the places I've seen. I'm sure you can add others
There's a popular stance that 'economic anxiety' is simply the public face of wealthy white rural racism, but if you drive around, half the country is a wasteland of trailer parks, car title loan places, and dollar stores, and there has to be more to the story than that.
If you're in a hurry, it's hard to find a quicker route for your "Two Americas" think piece than starting in Pebble Beach and driving east to Salinas. Just 23 miles take you from Jack Dorsey's beach house to full on gang wars. Other suggestions welcome!

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10 Jun
Clyburn is 80, Pelosi is 81, Hoyer is 81, Feinstein is 87, Leahy is 81, Biden is 78, Sanders is 79. The luminaries of the Democratic Party are so old they're not even boomers. Feinstein is clearly senile. But they intend to die in office, with the country. politico.com/news/2021/06/1…
They should let wolves return to Congress, to more naturally thin the herd. Major Biden can handle the White House
Meanwhile in the Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer is 82, but with luck and good health can survive for another two years until Republicans retake the Senate.
Read 4 tweets
9 Jun
Super tendentious framing in this tweet, implying that the other 17 intelligence agencies lean the other way. The body of this person's article clarifies that two agencies support the other hypothesis; and the remaining 15 are presumably ambivalent.
Another example of extremely tendentious framing in a Nature "explainer". You'd never guess from the wording of this statement that out of a half dozen major pandemics since modern laboratories have existed, one (1977 flu) is already known to be iatrogenic.
We need more honesty in our explainers, even if it comes at the price of muddying the picture being explained. Pandemic journalism has not served us well.
Read 6 tweets
8 Jun
Same energy as when I invited my friends over but realize I don't want to clean the house
I guess we're supposed to celebrate having a daughter of immigrants travel abroad to tell potential migrants to go fuck themselves in their own country, instead of a grandson of immigrants saying it from the White House.
That there's a functional legal process to immigrate to the US is a lie Americans tell themselves, but for Harris to go to Guatemala and lie like that is an insult. Guatemalans aren't even eligible for immigrant visas in 2022 because more than 50,000 came over the last 5 years. Image
Read 5 tweets
7 Jun
It was the perfect crime, right up to where the Feds got the private key and didn't even have to put on pants to go seize the crime money.
So to recap:

1. Ransomware crime team hacks Colonial Pipeline
2. Shortages due entirely to panic buying ripple across East Coast
3. FBI obtains secret crime key in unclear circumstances
4. FBI agent bites into donut and hits 'return' key, recovering significant chunk of ransom
I don't know who will star in this heist movie, but the soundtrack will be Yakety Sax
Read 6 tweets
7 Jun
Oh, hey, an Apple event! Looks like Apple Wallet is adding the ability to unlock doors and hold your government ID, realizing my dream of only having to lose a single device to lock myself out of my hotel, home, and office and put myself on a no fly list.
New Apple maps will more accurately display the depth profile of the lake the iPhone tells you to drive into
"Maps will send you notifications when it's time to disembark a train." This is bad news for Trenton, NJ, whose economy used to be based on manufacturing but now essentially relies on foreign tourists who miss the announcement to get off at Newark Airport
Read 33 tweets
7 Jun
Curious what the largest grain of salt sold at the Wuhan market is, so I can take it with Daszak's tweet. We know frozen anything is not a vector for covid, the paper itself says pangolins weren't sold, and somehow this key research from 2019 fortuitously emerges in June 2021.
Really—why is Daszak bringing up pangolins here at all? Even this serendipitously discovered paper points out their absence. Leave the pangolins alone.
For my money, this is the best part of the paper. "Hello, fellow merchant. I am an independent observer unconnected with law enforcement. Please provide me with a list of the illegal animals you are selling (and your written consent!) so that I may publish it in two years' time."
Read 8 tweets

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