And remaining silent about issues of race, gender, and origin that Republicans keep introducing does not make them go away. It guarantees that all voters hear is the hate peddling of the opposition.

There should be a hundred Democratic House members on the House floor defending McBride. There should be female Democratic House members complaining left and right about how they find it weird that Republicans are requiring them to share bathrooms with men.

The problem Democrats have on trans issues is that most Democratic leaders don’t really seem to believe in the validity of trans people. They’ll make vague platitudes about supporting rights. But it’s all very much a “you do you” type of thing. They don’t actually support or affirm trans identities. You don’t see many Democratic lawmakers out there saying, “trans men are men. Trans women are women” and actually meaning it.

These things are quite explainable, and quite defendable, if you’re actually willing to do it. For example, trans women don’t “force” themselves into women’s bathrooms. Do you know how most trans women decide it’s time to switch from the men’s to women’s restrooms? They don’t just one day announce they’re trans and start using the opposite facilities. Almost all trans women start their transition. Once they’re far enough along on their HRT and change in presentation, they inevitably start getting weird looks and harassment in the men’s restroom. Cis men start reading us as women, and we start getting harassment for being in the men’s room. That is when most of us switch over to the women’s room. And it works the opposite for trans guys. 99% of trans people work on the rule of, “use whatever restroom causes the least disruption.”

That’s how you can fight bathroom bans in a way anyone can understand. Trans people don’t form their beliefs and practices out of nowhere. It’s all quite logical and reasonable. But you have to actually be willing to defend people.

But that is not what Democrats do. They don’t defend trans people, they tolerate them. Democrats can’t give good, well-reasons responses to defend trans people, as they prefer to live forever on the fence. Yes, when it is politically popular, they’re willing to speak up for us in terms of vague discussions of universal rights. But when the other side starts demonizing trans people, because Democrats have never taken trans issues truly seriously, they don’t know how to properly respond.

And they’re fools for doing so. This kind of obsession and policing of gender ends only one place - with everyone forced back in the closet. And for cis women, that ultimately means being forced back into your traditional gender role, where the gender police think you belong - pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen.

Maybe he’ll just speedrun it and drops all pretense. Maybe the January 20th schedule goes like this:

12 PM: swearing in

2 PM: signing of first executive orders

4 PM: coronation. He’s literally declared himself, by executive order, absolute monarch “King Trump.” He has a gaudy royal coronation, crown, golden scepter, gilded throne and all. Some Catholic bishop performs the ceremony.

8 PM: First Royal Address. The Oval Office has been reconfigured to be a gilded and bejeweled throne room.

I imagine something like this.

Watch Trump forgive 10x the student loans Biden did, and SCOTUS ok it because “reasons.”

At least then we would know where we are, and we can start acting accordingly. One cannot play well without seeing the true state of the board.

Oz co-wrote a Forbes piece in June 2020 with former Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson endorsing a “Medicare Advantage for All” system that called for eliminating employer-provided insurance and Affordable Care Act coverage and putting “every American who is not on Medicaid” into Medicare Advantage, which uses private plans to cover enrollees. They proposed to fund it with a 20% payroll tax split between employers and workers.

I mean, if they actually did this, this would be great. Which is actually why I’m skeptical of it ever happening.

Still, our political system is really weird right now. We’re fundamentally in an era of political realignment. The old coalitions have failed, and new ones are sorting themselves out. The Republican Party of today isn’t the Republican Party of 30 years ago. Who would have predicted Republicans becoming the champions of ending free trade? Free trade helps corporate profits; Republicans were the original proponents of post-Reagan free trade agreements like NAFTA. And Republicans won on the issue so thoroughly that Democrats as well fully embraced it. After a few decades, Republicans now realized that neither side was opposing free trade, and thus there was a huge political opening. Despite corporate interests, Trump was able to lead the party to be against free trade.

Political parties ultimately seek power above all else. And Democrats have largely ceded the ground on transformational Social policy. If Democrats aren’t going to produce serious medical reform plans, there is now a huge pool of voters out there who want bold change, but currently have no one to vote for. It’s a huge political opportunity that Republicans could seize.

Of course, the big objection people would have to this is, but what about corporate influence? True, I don’t see Trump becoming a trust-busting Theodore Roosevelt any time soon. But this kind of reform is actually the kind of thing that corporations might welcome. But imagine a plan like this passes. Now businesses don’t have to worry about healthcare. They simply pay a flat tax, and that covers everyone’s healthcare costs. They don’t have to worry about costs rising unpredictably every year. They don’t have to fight insurers over coverage. They don’t have to hire more HR employees to manage enrollment. Nope, just pay a flat payroll tax, and you’re done. The number you deduct from your employees’ pay stub jumps up, but that’s about it. They have to pay their share of the payroll tax. But the amount they will pay in tax is likely far less than what they are currently paying for insurance. Companies stand to profit from this.

Employers who don’t offer healthcare to their employees would stand to lose, but every other company would benefit immensely from a federal health insurance program. Hell, Trump himself has probably personally battled with the inanity of dealing with health insurance plans as business owner. As long as the corporations or wealthy aren’t being taxed to pay for it, there may not actually be much corporate opposition to this plan. The healthcare industry gave more money to Kamala than to Trump. There are different kinds of corporate interests, and they do not always align. And for many corporate sectors, offloading the burden of healthcare to the government, in exchange for a flat payroll tax, could be quite tempting.

I don’t know if something like this will really happen, I’m probably just being optimistic. But perhaps, if we’re lucky, the sheer strangeness of the moment might allow for political options that would previously be unthinkable. If Trump actually wanted to have as his legacy some serious change to the healthcare system…this would be the way to do it. It’s something that would genuinely improve the system, but done in a way that doesn’t fall hard on the wealthy, and would be at least neutral in its overall affect on corporations. It’s the kind of thing that might actually get through Congress, pushed through on a strange coalition of ride-or-die MAGA Congress people and progressive Democrats. Sanders hand-in-hand with MTG, somehow finding a way to work for the betterment of all.

Back in reality, however, my more pessimistic side thinks they would insist on adding bullshit to it that would make it an abomination. This plan would effectively kill the private insurance market. Private insurers would still exist, but they would all operate through Medicare Advantage. The entire population, outside of those already on Medicare or Medicaid, would be enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Plan. The only plans that existed outside of this would be boutique luxury supplement plans (plans that offer services on top of what Medicare provides.) But it would effectively kill the market for purely private basic insurance.

They would probably start adding culture war requirements to these new Medicare Advantage plans. Expect plans to be prohibited from covering abortion, contraception, gender-affirming care, etc. Which would mean that no insurance plan would be able to cover these things. Hopefully that kind of crap would have to be left on the cutting room floor as the bill worked its way through. But it’s the kind of thing I would be wary of.

The machine totals and physical counts do not match. In this case, you are also admitting that our elections are not safe and secure.

If our elections aren’t safe and secure, if they have been hacked, we are already IN a civil war. Sticking our heads in the sand and denying reality doesn’t do anyone any good.

Or more precisely, we’re not actually in a civil war. But what you are saying then is that we simply must surrender to dictatorship. Because if a group is willing to use election fraud to gain power, they’ll be willing to use election fraud to stay in power. And if you’re worried about protest/dissent/violence/civil war now, just imagine what level of disorder and violence will be required to eventually dislodge an autocratic government once they’re fully established in power.

Exactly. The nice thing about this is that recounting is actually a lot easier in this case than a regular recount. You don’t need to recount the whole state. You’re just trying to determine if there was some massive swing. A few randomly selected precincts would be more than sufficient.

Yeah, its seems we should be doing verification checks regardless. Kamala ran a billion dollar campaign. And they can’t scrape up the cash to pay for hand recounts in a few precincts? You don’t have to recount a whole state. Just randomly select precincts and see if the vote totals between the hand counts and the computer tabulators are wildly different. With a recount on a close election, it’s expensive, as you literally need to recount every single ballot. Here all you’re trying to do is to make sure the vote tabulators aren’t rigged in some way. So you just need to compare the paper ballots to the tabulator counts.

It seems to apply to the entire capitol groups, so it would apply to everyone visiting the capitol. I hope a group of trans men arranges a never-ending parade of trans men using the women’s restrooms at the capitol.

Seriously. We have these $7500 tax credits on expensive luxury EVs, but you don’t get that level of support if you’re interested in a more modest vehicle.

Here’s an idea for a tax credit. How about a $2k tax credit for e-bikes? That will pay for the entire cost of a decent entry-level e-bike. E-bikes really are what is needed to make active transport approachable in the US’s sprawling suburbia. You could even sell it to people as, “get an e-bike. Use it on whatever trips you can. No risk to you.”

https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

But I only got into woodworking after I met my husband!

The key word there is “right to.” If someone is willing to have a plea deal or move quickly to trial, they can. But if you want, and have the resources to pay for a lawyer, you can delay the process out for a very long time. Just because you have a right to a speedy trial doesn’t mean you have to exercise that right.

Even a peaceful division of the US would be something they would seriously benefit from. The US permanently divided against itself, each side easy to manipulate into a military conflict against the other. We would have nukes pointed at each other within a decade. It would be like the splitting of India and Pakistan, along with all the accompanying human rights atrocities.

No, it’s that voters respond more to actions than words.

Democrats doomed themselves with the pro-democracy message in 2024. They shouldn’t even have mentioned Trump’s threat to democracy. It simply made them look unhinged to low-information voters. By the time the 2024 election came around, Biden’s own actions made running on the democracy angle nonviable.

The fatal flaw in Democrats’ messaging is that they ran on Trump as an enemy of democracy in 2016, 2020, and 2024. They ran on it, and yet, they did nothing about it.

Trump should have been hauled before a military tribunal and charged with treason on day one of Biden’s presidency. Any SCOTUS justices that tried to carve out special provisions for him should have been hauled in front of the same tribunal and been charged as accomplices. Every single person remotely involved with the conspiracy, including seating members of Congress, should be rotting in Gitmo right now. They all should have been sent to jail or the gallows within 100 days of Biden taking office.

THAT is how you respond to a threat to democracy. You do what you have to do, purge who you have to purge, and let history be your judge. Damn the consequences. Do some MAGA traitors want to start a riot in protest? Fine, send in the military to put them down. Do what you need to do and cut the rot out of the body politic.

You can’t just SAY something is a threat to democracy. You need to get off your ass and actually DO something about it. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and had pro-Confederate newspapers shut down, and that was just the start of it.

When democracy is threatened, sometimes you need to run roughshod over a lot of democratic norms, lest the enemies of democracy get away with it and try again. They only need to win once, you need to win every time. Which means that when someone does actually try to overthrow democracy, you need to come down like the hammer of God upon them. You need to respond with such overwhelming force that people are lining up at the door to strike a plea deal for a mere decade in prison. Realistically, when things get this bad, you need to be prepared to sentence thousands of people to decades in prison based on rapid trials in kangaroo courts if necessary. When thousands of people become so far gone that they think overthrowing a democracy is an acceptable option, the only real way to resolve that is to start handing out life and capital sentences like candy.

What did Biden actually do? He appointed an attorney general who sat on the Trump case for two years and only started an investigation when shamed into it by the House. And then Trump just ran out the clock. Garland prosecuted a bunch of the low-level people who physically stormed the capital, but he made sure all the actual high-level ring leaders escaped unpunished.

Biden didn’t have a spine. He showed, through his actions, that he really didn’t consider Trump a serious threat to democracy. And if the sitting president of the United States doesn’t consider someone a threat, why would you expect disengaged voters to do so?

My only hope is that if Trump’s promised Reign of Terror does occur, that he starts with all the leading figures of Biden’s Justice Department. While whatever mistreatment they receive will be for things that weren’t actually wrong, at least they will be indirectly punished for their actual crimes - failing to defend this nation’s democracy. If Biden and Garland end up themselves sitting in prison on some Trumped-up charge, well I’ll have zero sympathy for them. They will simply be serving their sentence for their cowardly failure to defend American democracy. If anyone is to feel the boot of a new autocracy, let them be the first. They are the ones that created it.

It’s about having a coherent message.

What exactly were Kamala’s biggest goals? In other words, if she could accomplish just three things in office, what would those three things have been? Can anyone answer that question? Does anyone know?

Because you certainly can with Trump. He wanted to deport millions of people, raise a bunch of tariffs, and exterminate trans people. Those were the three things he ran on.

What Democrats repeatedly fail to understand is that having a policy paper on your website is NOT THE SAME THING as actually having policy positions. You can’t just point to something on your website, written by a staffer, as what you support.

I voted for Kamala, but I still to this day have not a damn idea what the woman actually stood for. Sure, she had official policies, but she never had any core issues that she hammered on again, and again, and again. She never had an effective ‘elevator pitch’ for why she should be president, other than just that she isn’t Trump.

Democrats need to pick 3-5 things for an election cycle, 3-5 major policy positions. And then they, all of them, need to repeatedly and endlessly hammer home those things.

And my point is, in any situation where you actually end up using that firearm, you are far, far less likely to be afforded the right of self-defense than someone who isn’t trans or related to a trans person.

https://theappeal.org/advocates-say-brooklyn-da-is-prosecuting-transgender-people-in-self-defense-cases/

https://peopleslawoffice.com/free-cece-mcdonald-self-defense-homophobia-transphobia/

https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/az-jail-releases-transgender-woman-accused-of-assault/75-2ace8199-65b3-423b-909f-4b10db35d330

Again, whether prosecutors respect a self-defense claim largely comes down to the demographic characteristics of the person making that claim. If you use a firearm to defend your transgender son, odds are good that you will be charged with murder, even if you are indeed actually defending your son. Queer people don’t get to benefit from the 2nd Amendment.

What are you talking about? Try writing more than a single flippant sentence, and maybe you can get a point across.

Irrelevant. If you pass, you’re by definition not going to experience anti-trans violence, which is the discussion at hand.

But moreover, any time you use a firearm in self-defense, you WILL be outed to the police.

Among firearm self-defense folks, the common advice is like this:

Did you just shoot a home intruder? Leave your house. Go to your driveway. Leave the gun somewhere outside that is clearly visible, but a significant distance from you. Call the police and tell them a shooting has occurred, but that no threat still exists. Stand somewhere brightly lit where they can see your hands. Follow their instructions, but don’t talk to them without a lawyer. You most likely will be arrested.

The point is that any actual use of firearms in self-defense involves interaction with law enforcement. And they will run a background check on you, and your trans status will be revealed then. What tends to happen then is that a case that would be classified as self-defense, if committed by a straight white man, will instead be prosecuted as a homicide, because you are a trans person.

Alternately, you might find yourself forced to use the restroom of your AGAB due to a bathroom law. Now you have to out yourself to use the restroom. Do this long enough, a transphobe will assault you for being in the ‘wrong’ bathroom. When you use your firearm to defend yourself against assault, it is YOU who will be charged with a crime, not your attacker. Your attacker and your friends will lie, accusing you of doing perverted things in the bathroom the law requires you to use. The police will take the side of your attacker, and you will have the book thrown at you.

In practice, the 2nd amendment does not exist for minority groups. A white guy can walk down the sidewalk openly brandishing a semi-automatic rifle. A black kid will be murdered for reaching for something a cop thinks just might maybe be a weapon.

It’s not so much about alignment of views as it is pure loyalty. He wants people who will unquestioningly follow foolish, immoral, or illegal orders. And the best way to do that is to pick people who are completely dependent on Trump himself.

Think of someone like Gaetz. He was likely about to be kicked out of the House. Or Tulsi Gabbard, someone with zero political future on either side of the aisle on her own. He’s not just looking for people he likes; he’s looking for weirdos and political wash-outs who have zero future prospects without him. If Gaetz is working for Trump, and Trump fires him, where exactly does Gaetz go from there? The pro-Trump folks will see him as a traitor. The anti-Trump folks will still see him as the sex pest he is. He ran for Congress right out of law school, so he can’t really just go back to practicing law.

Gaetz’s only real path forward in life is complete subservience to Trump. If he gets and stays in Trump’s good graces, he can be supported through the Trump regime, and then, if he leaves on good terms, he’ll remain popular among the MAGA-set going forward. At that point he can always get a high-paying consulting job at some Trump-friendly company.

Compare Gaetz to Trump’s previous AG, Bill Barr. Prior to Trump’s first term, Barr had a decades-long legal career in multiple presidential administrations and in indsutry. I’m sure he was already well off enough for quite a comfortable retirement prior to becoming Trump’s AG. If Trump had ever told him to do something that he absolutely would not do, he could simply retire to life as a private citizen quite contentedly.