You’re right.

And if we take a step further in this direction, we can see that this article… is fake.

It’s not real. If you read it carefully, it’s a case study in media manipulation.

The article starts by quoting Henry Cuellar, who is a long-time corporate Democrat wildly out of step with the party. He isn’t representative.

After that, it repeatedly asserts the will of unnamed moderates, with a few unattributed quotes.

Once it’s built up some momentum it presents quotes in which people say things that don’t actually substantiate the article’s premise, but frame it to imply that they did. Consider this one:

“They need to be very thoughtful and deliberate on what sort of impeachment investigations strategy is pursued,” said Phil Gardner, a senior adviser for the moderate campaign group Blue Dog Action

“There is so much corruption, so many things to be outraged about, that it could very quickly end up consuming the entirety of the caucus if we’re not careful,” Gardner said, adding: “Impeachment is a very grave decision.”

An editor could put this in an article headlined “Centrists Argue Against Impeachment” or “Centrists Begin Plans for Trump’s Impeachment”. The absence of context and choice of quote is selected to allow it to be used to imply agreement with the author’s premise, regardless of the subject’s intent.

But where things really get absurd is around the 26th paragraph, when the article includes a long quote from Sam Forester, who just won back a Trump +9 district:

“I think everybody in this country should have the choice to join Medicare,” Forstag said in an interview with CNN days after he won. He added that seniors in his district have only a single provider to choose from for Medicare Part B plans, while people with private insurance have only two choices — both of which just dramatically raised rates.

“I am, and we should all be, very angry that the last time Democrats had unified control of our government, they made tiny piecemeal incremental changes, and they applied Band-Aid solutions instead of actually fixing our healthcare system,” Forstag told CNN, summing up his push for big change.

This quote appears in the context that moderate Democrats are concerned that too much action is a political risk. The quote directly contradicts the article’s premise, but to get around this they present him as a “populist” and imply he’s part of the left flank, even though he’s exactly the kind of rural, red-state working class Democrat that will control whether they keep the house in two years.

The obvious conclusion is that the author, Sarah Ferris, was told to write an article that promotes a conflict narrative that supports CNN’s business and pro-corporate, insider-friendly posture. Facts were irrelevant.

Fwiw, I have a theory about AOC: I admit, I was way into her cult of personality a few years ago, and I know a lot of people either still are or have snapped the other way.

I think on January 6th she got a big taste of what being a Malcolm X or a Che Guevara really means. She’s talked about getting trapped in the capital in Katie Porter’s office, and I think after surviving what she expected was her own assassination by a fascist mob at 30 she realized that she wasn’t really as down with the revolutionary life as she thought.

Which I can forgive. I don’t blame her. She’s not the cold-blooded badass we’d hoped for, and that’s okay.

She’s a good member of congress, but we’re going to have to look elsewhere for the future leader we thought she might be.

We’ll see, but the original post is clearly not aware that the reason he’s in trouble is because he just got caught doing big big crimes with his mistress.

The sex stuff is fine, no one cares. It’s all the international crimes they were doing that is a no-no.

Yeah, you and me both.

I hate to say it, but 2026 MCU isn’t really for us: it’s for a new generation.

That’s okay. I still like a lot of it, but I find things easier to enjoy if I accept that I got served, and now they’re on to serving different, presumably younger fans.

My brother had this rewrite of Iron Man 3 where after spending the whole movie designing unreliable, janky modular armor (a metaphor for his disjointed, insecure mind), in the climax, he calls up a Chinook-style heavy-lift copter with a gantry in it, during his fight with Kilian, and the 37 carries him up just before it gets destroyed and falls apart. And then the gantry starts assembling a suit that is newer, but a throw-back.

The chopper gets shot down, and is falling, spinning, while the gantry whirs and zips around Tony, and then it crashes.

And after a beat, Iron Man stands up out of the wreckage, rebirthed anew in Mk. 38.

Ah. I miss when the tech felt like that.

Also, humanoid robots have gotten good enough that I wish they used them a bit. Imagine Jocasta as a practical effect! How good would that look?!

That was the show at its finest. This show was very uneven, but whenever it was silly I was digging it.

Also, Billy: “So you’re Scottish now? How come you’re ALWAYS the cool twin.”

Eh… I don’t think they mean much.

Originally, the post-credit scenes were teasers for what was going to come next. Now, they’re really just rumors… like ‘Hey! We pitched Fiege on this! Hope he does something with it!’

Will any of this happen or matter? Does any of it make sense? Who knows!

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Oh… so he didn’t say this, right? This is a dramatization of how he thought and acted.

Is that a real quote? Where’s it from?

The former president and his wife Jill were attending a ceremony at Trinity College in Dublin, where their son Hunter was awarded the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse.

The award by Trinity’s College Historical Society was in recognition of Hunter Biden’s recent advocacy on American politics and media, as well as his work raising awareness of addiction and recovery.

Haha what?

(They definitely made a big donation to the college.)

Personally, I’m skeptical that this was by accident.

The reps who missed this seem to have common political alignments.

My guess is that they would rather wait until after the new congress gets sworn in to Impeach Hegseth because the extra time is good for their allies in the war industry, and because they have some dumb political game theory about how it helps them if it happens on their preferred schedule.

I don’t think that 11 similarly-minded reps somehow had an oopsie-daisy on the day of the big vote.

I’m not a parliamentary expert, but that doesn’t sound correct to me.

Doesn’t the speaker control who chairs each committee and what legislation makes it to the floor?

As speaker, Jeffries can – and will – put allies as chairs of committees to make sure that Medicare for All never gets out of committee. He could single-handedly prevent a vote to abolish ICE from taking place, even if a majority were in support. The speaker is third in line of succession to the presidency, and is arguably the most powerful position in the federal government after the President.

I don’t think your characterization matches reality at all.

‘…Anyway, that’s why I’m excited to give Hakeem Jefferies my full and unconditioned support.’

(Did the article mention this? It’s paywalled for me.)

Regarding the lever: my husband was like, ‘That’s it? Shouldn’t there be, like a piece of glass, or a key you need to turn? Huh.’

This show is fun, but so uneven. And the writing is… bad.

I particularly dislike the nihilism on display in Marvel these days.

Tommy is criticizing Ultron for having killed a bunch of people in Sokovia when he was a kid, and I’m like… bruh; he just vaporized some poor lady in front of a crowd.

Vision is like, ‘Has he changed?’ and I’m like, BRUH: he just used your body to murder a lady. Like… CASUALLY.

Did she have a family? She looks like someone who had a family. For some reason, we the audience are supposed to apply to her death the weight of someone breaking a lamp.

NGL: I’m kind of disturbed that the writers of this show seem to be exhibiting signs of psychopathy. And the producers are cool with all this? It’s weird.

I think this is one of many possible adjustments, but I agree with your point that a lot of people had questions about how thoroughly this had been planned, and didn’t quite trust the current version. That’s how I felt (although I voted for it anyway).

Anyway, I agree with you that there will be other versions of this, and some version will eventually pass.

That’s a great way to put it. What a tonal contrast.

Phlox Flocks was such a fun horny character.

Edit: corrected a misspelling. Thanks. Anarocockworthorgange.

Respectfully, this take is ignorant.

I mean ignorant in formal sense, in that you’re speaking without a strong foundation of knowledge. But also in the informal sense in that frankly, what you’re saying is ugly and insulting to the working class of America, whose capacity to think you dismiss on the basis that you don’t know why they did something other than what you’d do.

To be clear: there ARE voters who match your description. However in many cases – as was the case in California’s billionaire tax – those are not the deciding votes.

The people who decide elections are – contrary to popular myth – complicated.

In the Bay Area, residents voted both to reject the wealth tax AND reject a measure that would make it harder to raise taxes in the future AND voted to raise their own taxes through a 0.5% sales tax to fund a public transit rescue package.

From even a cursory glance at the results across CA’s elections, it’s clear that voters didn’t have some flat left-versus-right metric, they demonstrated complicated, nuanced, choices.

Before concluding that this failed because working class voters are dimwitted savages too dumb to govern themselves, let’s wait until organizers and academics actually study the returns.

And in 2028, I’m going to go back out and work on passing the next version of this.

I remember folks asking in 2024 “What do we do if Trump wins?!?” and my answer was “The same thing you should be doing if Kamala wins: the same thing you should be doing now.” Which is organizing locally and building outward.

If you have a union, participate in it. If you don’t, get to know your coworkers and normalize talking about what you’d like collectively. Organize your apartment building to get together on the holidays. Know who your city council member is, and your county supervisor. Participate in mutual aid and lobby for laws in your own backyard. Think about not just what you don’t want – Republicans in national office – but what you really, really want: a shorter work week. Guaranteed access to living essentials. And then find the people, both inside government and out who have ideas for how to do this and ask how you can help. And keep doing it through the ups and downs.

Because your despair at Trump’s victory can be just as ephemeral as your joy at Paxton’s defeat if this is just sports. But if we have a purpose and a plan, every step forward or backward is part of a journey in which we can see our progress towards something that matters more than just the latest poll.

I get that, but these are also a tool for political revolution.

Bernie Sanders and AOC hosted a series of nationwide rallies against oligarchy in 2025. When they started, the political pundit class ridiculed these as out of touch. Oligarchy? That’s just a thing in Russia. Americans don’t even know what that is.

… cut to today. Oligarchy is a mainstream concept. They rallied people – not just folks like you and me, but a lot of normie #resistance liberals who were convinced in 2018 that Trump was an aberration on a well-functioning meritocratic American government – to shift political consciousness and organize in their communities to resist fascism.

Rallies are a tool to educate, motivate, and build public pressure, and can absolutely be used for good.

I actually don’t mind it. Regular direct communication with the public? That’s an improvement from Biden, who disappeared and rarely spoke to the press.

Don’t get me wrong: I hate what Trump SAYS at his rallies. But the rallies don’t bother me.

Town halls are better, though.