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Varad Mehta Profile picture
Varad Mehta
@varadmehta
Jun 15 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Charlie Dent is as irrelevant to and informed about contemporary Republican politics as David Jolly. The only difference is that he still has some shreds of sanity and restraint left because he's on CNN and not MSNBC, unlike his Sunshine State counterpart. By having the likes of Dent and Jolly as "Republican" voices, CNN and MSNBC are actively keeping their viewers in ignorance about one of the country's two major parties, and therefore, by extension, in ignorance about American politics as a whole.
Jan 31 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Everyone who observed that Disney's suit against Ron DeSantis was doomed because of In re Hubbard, take a bow. It's only cited three dozen times in an opinion that's just seventeen pages long. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
Image We did try to warn you.
Jan 21 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
.@jawillick argues that SCOTUS should "punt" on the Fourteenth Amendment issue. If I'm reading him correctly, that means a holding which keeps Trump on the ballot because Section 3 isn't self-executing, though he doesn't spell it out in quite those terms. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/… "If the justices affirmed the Colorado decision, they would devastate the court's standing within the GOP, which would see its voters stripped of the right to vote for their favored candidate in an unprecedented way."

Props to @jawillick for acknowledging this. He's spot on.
Jan 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Does John Roberts want Republicans joining with Democrats to destroy the Supreme Court? If you think the answer to that question is "yes," then it's possible he'll boot Trump off the ballot. If you believe the answer is "no," then he won't. This is just bone ignorant, ivory tower oxygen-starved brain idiocy. Why are so many law professors such absolute detached-from-reality morons? Image
May 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
"Youngkin faces high-stakes state legislative races in November. So an announcement about a presidential race is likely to wait until right after that, Republican sources said."

THIS IS WHERE YOUNGKIN WAS A MONTH AGO. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAS CHANGED. THERE'S NOTHING NEW HERE. You have to read all the way down to the ninth paragraph (or the Axios equivalent of a paragraph) to learn that Youngkin still wouldn't announce until after the November elections. Which we knew six weeks ago. And that's way too late unless the entire field implodes. Image
May 22, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Why isn't Scott entering the race with the same stature as DeSantis despite his conservative record and political resume?"

Because his record and resume are thin in comparison and he gives off strong whiffs of the pre-2015 Republicanism the base hates. fivethirtyeight.com/features/tim-s… "Scott has never netted more than 4 percent of the vote share. In multicandidate ballot tests not including Trump, Scott has never received more than 7 percent of the vote share. And in the past month, he’s been overtaken in polls by Ramaswamy."

I've already noted all of this.
May 21, 2023 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
Every time I watch "Black Orchid," I think they only made that story because Peter Davison's costume as the Fifth Doctor was a cricketer's outfit. "Black Orchid" was a rarity for "Doctor Who" - in 1982 and still today. The first pure historical since 1966/7's "The Highlanders" and the first two-parter since 1975's "The Sontaran Experiment"; and the last in the traditional 25-minute episode format.
May 20, 2023 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The media coverage of Biden's handling of the debt limit isn't quite has negative as the coverage of the Build Back Better follies was for an entire year, but there's plenty of time left to get there. No one remembers it now, but this is the sort of headline Joe Biden was receiving regularly for over a year, from late April of 2021 to the eve of the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. theguardian.com/us-news/2022/j…
May 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Doug Burgum thinking about running for president isn't a sign Ron DeSantis is bleeding in the water. It's a sign Doug Burgum is experiencing a midlife crisis or suffers from a previously undiagnosed psychological ailment. One paragraph: Sununu, Burgum, and Christie are thinking about running for president. Two paragraphs later: No one runs for president without "a detailed and plausible path to victory." That is a self-refuting argument. No such path exists for those three, and everyone knows it. Image
May 20, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Hypnotic" is totally getting those "this movie rated 'rotten' on Rotten Tomatoes is currently No. 1 on Netflix" stories in a year. Image I actually liked "Hypnotic," so I'm in the 36%. There's a lot of stuff you've seen before ("The Matrix," "Inception"), but it zigs and zags more times than a drunk doing a sobriety test, never gets bogged down, has Ben Affleck, and is over in a very efficient 92 minutes.
May 7, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
Pick the adjective you prefer - brutal, abysmal, appalling, catastrophic - but however you slice it, the new ABC News/Washington Post poll is absolutely terrible for Joe Biden. But it's so bad I wonder if they didn't just get an especially hostile sample. washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… For those who haven't seen them already, the big topline numbers -

Biden JA
36/56 (A)
37/56 (RV)
30/60 (I)

Better on the economy
Trump: 54/53/54
Biden: 36/38/31

2024
Trump: 44/45/42
Biden: 38/39/34

2024 with leaners
Trump: 49
Biden: 42 msn.com/en-us/news/pol…
May 6, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
This is mostly a rehash of stuff that's already been chewed over plenty of times, but it does seem Team DeSantis is getting its ducks lined up and crossing its I's and dotting its T's in anticipation of a formal campaign launch sometime in the next month. washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/… An "ad blitz" that is airing only "in four early states" hasn't "change[d] the dynamics of the race at the national level"? Whoa! I guess Ron DeSantis should just pack it in and not bother getting into the race. Image
May 6, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"But if 'freedom' or 'woke' is not enough, he will probably need a new set of issues to unite open-to-anyone-but-Trump voters."

He only needs one issue to unify them: not being Trump. Which is what the issue was always going to be. Everything else is noise. There are many words here. "Alvin Bragg," "arrest," charged," and "indictment" are not among them. How you write, let alone publish, an analysis of Republican primary polling without discussing that escapes me. nytimes.com/2023/05/05/ups…
Apr 29, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Florida's ethics commission didn't think too highly of the complaints filed against Ron DeSantis. Image This is the polite, bureaucratic way of saying, "This is manure." Image
Apr 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
More than enough firepower to come out guns blazing. Especially since there will be so much more where that came from. H/t @baseballcrank. nypost.com/2023/04/28/ron… "DeSantis' financial advantage looms over the Republican field: Most contenders have cash balances on orders of magnitude lower than his."

One reason the also-rans are starved of cash is the big donors are waiting for RDS, who they expect to get in. politico.com/news/2023/04/2…
Apr 28, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
The media's knee-jerk assumption that Disney has already beaten Ron DeSantis and that it's all over but the shouting is really something. You'll rarely see it being more lazy and uncurious. Is it unwilling or incapable of accepting DeSantis might win? Yes. msn.com/en-us/money/ot… I'd love for just one reporter to ask one of these "experts" if they've ever heard of US v. O'Brien and how that might apply to Disney's suit. Image
Apr 27, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The same journos and Twitter experts who four weeks ago breathlessly insisted Disney had gotten the better of Ron DeSantis with its secret deal, are now breathlessly insisting Disney has gotten the better of DeSantis with its lawsuit against him for killing its secret deal. It's amazing how identical the coverage now is to what it was a month ago. Just inflexible, unblinking credulity. Never once will these people ask themselves why, if as they swore a month ago, Disney had gotten the last word in the matter, it needs to sue DeSantis today.
Apr 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Who wants to tell these donor class morons that their butthurt that Republicans meant what they said about abortion is how the party wound up with Trump? And just what position does Ken Griffin think a candidate for the GOP nomination can take on abortion and win? So he's going to give his money to Ron DeSantis, and a guy calling himself Juan DeSantis with a mustache and sombrero who looks suspiciously like Ron DeSantis. Image
Apr 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Second poll by a gold-standard pollster in the last week to show Trump under 50 percent and DeSantis with a quarter to about a third of the vote. Those trends are more important than the specific numbers. Just more confirmation of what we've always known: it's a two-man race. Without diving into the crosstabs, I'm guessing Biden has fewer Democrats who want him to run again, while Trump gets more Republicans, though not many more, given he's still at 60% don't run.
Apr 23, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Looks like I missed some straight-up insanity from GOP no-hopers. LOL, and this egotistical prick still thinks he can support Roe and win the GOP nomination. Usually when you have this much hubris it ends with you banging your own mother.
Apr 23, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It only took me sixteen years, but I finally got back to where I was in "Doom 3" when I stopped playing it in 2007. ImageImage What's funny is that I made steady progress through most of the game in the week after I started it, then I didn't play it again for months, picked it up again, then didn't play it again for a couple of years, then tried it one last time, then stopped for good. ImageImage