If you read well, you can do anything. If you don't, everything is harder, and some things are completely out of your reach - you're done before you get started.
I'd give anything to have had my deficit properly diagnosed by 3rd or 4th grade.
Compensating for your difficulty - and having to defend yourself against "He's a bright kid, but he doesn't apply himself ... he's not living up to his potential" - that shit's exhausting.
It's been going around for some time now, that it's not Red vs Blue, or Conservative vs Progressive, or even Good vs Evil (although we've seen a lot of that too)
And there's certainly a Class vs Class element to it - a big one actually.
But what it's come down to is liberal vs ill-liberal. Do we want our version of democracy to work for us, or do we want a version that just requires us to obey - and work for - the government?
I have one basic bone to pick with Mr Frum - he left out the yang:
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals - and you know it."
--Agent K, Men In Black
And that's the eternal paradox - the necessary rights of the individual, and the necessary commitment to a collective society every individual depends on.
... two days ago, when some of the Jan6 mob gathered again on the National Mall to celebrate having tried to totally fuck our democracy five years ago, they were outnumbered by the cops and counter-protesters.
We have to deal with asshole ICE "agents" (eg) who get caught up in their own daddy issues - or whatever drives their pathetic existence - but we should also keep in mind just how small the various factions are that make up the gang they think is huge and powerful and impossible to resist.
What's really at work is the large network of shit-slingers and bots that blast the nonsense that fuel these idiots' fantasies of dominance and conquest.
We should continue to believe them when they tell us what raving assholes they are, but we also have to see them for the scared little men we know them to be when they're out in the open, and exposed to the disinfectant properties of either literal or figurative sunshine.
You know you're in a really bad place when the most important profit center driving your business - and your business decisions - is the guy monitoring Trump's social media feeds.
It's not a terribly smart thing to hold your breath on this shit.
Trump is pressuring Boebert and Mace hard to get their names off the discharge petition
Even if the vote is called, there's bound to be delays - debate, conference meetings, etc
If the thing passes, there's no guarantee Johnson will act quickly to deliver the demand to Bondi
Bondi almost absolutely fight it and stall and do whatever Trump instructs her to do
This is Trump, so he'll take it to court and we'll spend a year waiting - unless enough Republicans get antsy enough about the re-election chances if it drags out and remains an issue during the mid-term campaigns
So yes, it's pretty damned close to being the smoking gun, but since there's no honor in MAGA, the GOP, or the White House - we can't reasonably expect any of them to act honorably.
It's not definitive, but there's an awful lot of smoke here.
And what's up with Tulsi Gabbard doing a full blown press conference today?
And isn't it a little interesting that everybody (me too, BTW) gets very circumspect and cautious when information pops up that might actually be the smoking gun?
Suddenly we all get real careful to say things like "allegedly" and "it appears to be".
Elissa Slotkin may be a bit more military/CIA than I'm willing to snuggle up to. But she hits it on the head and gets directly to that point.
I may work with somebody I wouldn't piss on if he was on fire, but the job is to get shit done, and you don't get shit done when all you do is sit around and bitch at each other.
Sometimes, defense helps you not lose, but it's offense that wins it for you.
Harris in particular, and too many Dems in general, went into 2024 with an Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once "plan", and when you try to win everywhere, you almost never win anywhere.
Communication is 10% words, 20% tone and inflection, and 70% body language. So stop smiling all the fuckin' time.
That's my main problem with the way too many Democrats present themselves - particularly guys like Michael Bennett and Tim Kane and until recently, Mark Warner. I think they're good and decent people, but when one of them puts that stupid little smile on his face as he lambastes some Republican jackass who applauds the anti-abortion laws that are obviously and proveably killing women, all I want to do is slap that smile around to the other side of his fuckin' head.
I don't like thinking I'm adding to the problem of the Fire Hose Of Shit, but when practically every day gives us another major grift, I don't know how I can just brush it off, and let it become part of a very ugly process of normalizing official corruption.
Trump is exactly the guy Madison and Hamilton worried out - the unscrupulous jerk who would use the founding documents as a guide to subvert them, and to warp government structure to serve his own ends - to make his own law.
He simply doesn't care about honor, or the rule of law, or right-n-wrong.
Unfortunately, there are about 275 people in Congress who are willing to go along with all this shit - because they're either cowardly phonies, or active participants in the project to tear down our traditions of democratic self-governance in order to replace it with a corporate-style plutocracy.
It's not a bad thing for media to keep these things in public view, but instead of the usual 10 minutes of exasperation, we need an acknowledgement of the fact that these assholes are actively working to kill democracy, and we need to know how we go about beating them - including civil disobedience.
