Outside the Beltway

Leftovers from last week and over the weekend.

Trump is still in the GOP driver’s seat.

Some stories worth noting but not at great length.

Republicans are dying at a much higher rate than Democrats.

I went down the rabbit hole a tad…

The ball is now in Merrick Garland’s court.

Is this how the cult ends?

There are at most eight toss-up states for the 2024 Presidential election.

Spoiler alert: the GOP has already failed this test multiple times.

The margins for 2024 are likely to be slim. But that hides a larger story.

The ship is abandoning the sinking rat.

Alas, it probably doesn’t matter.

Some of the early reactions to the inevitable announcement tell the tale.

The New York Post and Wall Street Journal are blasting the losing loser.

The 2020 loser has doubled down on losing.

The Needle is Broken

He’s using a tool he denounced as cruel to deal with a humanitarian crisis.

Another example of the arbitrariness of the death penaly

How a hideous, diabolical, pestilential, God-abandoned hellhole became our 3rd largest state.

Wherein I take issue with a charactization made by Tom Nichols and discuss the politics of language.

A shameful stunt reminiscent of an even darker era.

This is just playing crass political games with human beings.

Manipulating public opinion with dubious survey research.

Are 20 arrests worth a $1.2 million dollar investment?

What we believe and what we say we believe are often not the same.

States are sponsoring an increasingly controversial image.

She’s almost certainly going to lose her House seat. Can she get a promotion?

Some Democrats are less than pleased.

A new initiative aims to right decades-old wrongs.

It’s not all about Trump.

Very little progress has been made towards racial justice.

Ezra Klein discusses the dynamics of American conservatism in historical perspective. Plus, he helps illustrate a key problem that we have in thinking about American politics (IMHO).

Pointless change that will increase costs and create confusion.

Because they’re indoctrinating the youth with their biased agendas and liberal, unfactual diastribes.

The latest strategic moral panic from the far right

The only way to save our freedom is to destroy it.

Two related examples: are they “cancel culture” or not?

We can only hope.

Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans truly represent most Americans. Fixing that is exceedingly unlikely.

We’re three short years from the next election.

Let’s look at the numbers and the clear effects of policy choices.

The Catch-22 of passing a massive spending bill in an undemocratic system.

The difference is politics, not reason.

As the pandemic’s effects continue to worsen in Florida, DeSantis continues to play the worst kind of politics.

His executive order blocks schools from having masking rules.

Thinking about party evolution and behavior going into 2022.

Public health shouldn’t be made into a partisan issue.

Ron DeSantis and friends are afraid of higher education.

You know, some light weekend thoughts.