I Will Not Title This @preston-t-umber - Tumblr Blog

Hi, I just wanted to share this photo I took. I think in fact, the most Photograph I have ever taken. No, this is not AI, this is a real photo, and whenever I look at it I feel like Tom Haverford staring at that abstract painting in Parks and Rec. Also I took it out the window of a car going 100kph, so, uh, yeah.

moonsworndandelion

morlock-holmes

There is something that is really infuriating about the current moment, where "We should lower student loan payments for low income debtors" is discussed as an insane presidential overreach, and "We should declare war on Denmark in order to reclaim Greenland" is a sober, sensible policy proposal.

Or, if not that, at least we shouldn't care because, come on, everybody knows that politicians exaggerate!

There's a lot of you who spent the Biden years explaining to me that "Defund the police" was so crazy that it discredited the President even as he actively disagreed with it, who said it was important even if nobody actually defunded the police because gosh it just shows the priorities of the left, who are pretty fucking quiet about the upcoming President talking about going to war with fucking Denmark.

This shit where only the left wing is responsible for what it says and the right can't be held responsible for what it says is getting pretty fucking old.

no-longer-another-bondi-blonde

reading-writing-revolution

More honest

flamboyantly-understated

I grew up in Massachusetts and I never realized that usually trains don’t scream in agony as they run until I visited DC a few years ago

massachusetts-official

Official Post of Massachusetts

justinspoliticalcorner

Democratic Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch push Constitutional amendment process to abolish Electoral College

Alexander Bolton at The Hill:

Three Democratic senators unveiled a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College system Monday, just more than a month after President-elect Trump stunned the Democrats by sweeping all seven battleground states, knocking off three Senate Democratic incumbents in the process. Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii,) Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), three leading progressive Senate voices, say it’s time to “restore democracy” by allowing for the direct election of presidents through the popular vote alone. The senators are troubled that the Electoral College has twice elected a candidate who didn’t win the popular vote in the past 19 years. In both those instances, a Republican captured the White House — George W. Bush in the 2000 election and Trump in the 2016 election. “In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple,” Schatz said. “No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it.” To be sure, Trump would have still won the 2024 election if it had been decided by popular vote. He collected 77,300,739 votes compared to Vice President Harris’s 75,014,534. But many Democrats think that they would have had a better chance to beat Trump if they had a reason to focus on running up the margin of Harris’s victory in populous Democratic strongholds such as California, Illinois and New York. Republicans, however, also have big, populous states squarely in their column, namely Florida and Texas.

Democratic Senators Schatz, Durbin, and Welch push Constitutional amendment process to abolish the antiquated disgrace known as the Electoral College. Presidencies should be decided purely by popular vote, and such a move would widen the battleground map, as it would force both parties to compete in states currently safe for their respective parties to get the vote out.

reading-writing-revolution

Not sure what to say about this. Is this an actual solution to anything? There are better problems to tackle. This seems like a bandaid to mask real issues.

preston-t-umber

I think you're wrong about this, the EC is. a cancer. A lot of Dems seem caught-up in the counterfactual where Harris might've won an EC victory without winning the popular vote while ignoring that A.) she didn't actually do that and B.) the EC gave us GWBush and Trump I, two of the worst administrations in US history. Even going back the the 19th century, the previous confirmed EC/PV splits produced pretty lousy outcomes as well, a bunch of administrations you'd find in the "Who?" section of Presidential history trivia at best.

Beyond that, the rural bias of the Congress is reinforced in the EC (the number of electors a state receives is equal to the size of their total Congressional delegation, which is why the smallest states get 3 votes, because the smallest delegation you can have is two senators and one representative). A lot of urban issues get ignored and a lot of problems with Democratic politics goes unaddressed because the votes of cities and concentrated populations in general are systematically valued less in the US system. Look at how gun policy in the USA is entirely designed around rural sensibilities, not urban ones. The judges who rule on whether this-or-that gun law are often Presidential appointees.

A proper, Popular-vote only Presidential race is very much working to address a root cause of a lot of the problems as far as how the nation is governed. That said, an amendment is pretty silly: a pure token effort that isn't going anywhere, but Trump made some incoherent mouth noises about it so it might make sense to try as long as no actual political capital is spent on it. A better approach would be the ratification of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is slowly but surely closing in on the level of support it'd need to make the EC theoretically irrelevant.

brittle-bold

good shirt from the market today

lesbiansagainsttheatre

actually i think graduates of a university should have access to the library databases forever and ever amen

earthstory

kedreeva

He’s being cleaned, not just pet, but judging by that big contented rumble you can hear, he’s quite enjoying it!

stephendann

When you’re a prehistoric dinosaur and it’s scritches time

xxtc-96xx

brushie brushie brushie

ospreyonthemoon

It really is fascinating that basically every animal on earth that has some sort of skin integument enjoys a lil scratch. I mean it makes sense but like. Humans evolved from social grooming animals and we have perfect little grooming hands and basically everything on earth with scales, fur or feathers can basically be convinced to let us give them free back scratches. Humans don’t even get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of helping out. We’re just really good at it. What a useful creature to be put on a planet full of animals who can’t reach their backs.

marlynnofmany

fedfer

Call me Linux the way I be Arching my back

arch-official

Approved

jame7t

I love that Star Wars is quite literally mostly bad. Disney’s like, ‘Let’s sell war to dumb babies but: most of it will be really really dumb.’ And it is.

You can’t even do the whole “ugh, if the ORIGINAL CREATOR were still on board, it would be good..!” because he made a lot of Star Wars too, and it was also mostly bad. Beautiful franchise no notes

reading-writing-revolution

Fuck Trump and his cronies...

depsidase

adrugand5moredrugs

ethicalanimefordecenthumanbeings

Inb4 they change the start of The Incredibles because he throttles his health exec boss

ethicalanimefordecenthumanbeings

Posting this will be considered hate speech in 2025

ottermatopoeia

I honestly feel like the proliferation of LED headlights was the canary in the coalmine for the general attitude we see in the political climate these days and i'm not even remotely kidding

ottermatopoeia

Very much in line with the attitude of "this choice will marginally improve the way I move through the world and make everyone else's experience SIGNIFICANTLY worse, but I don't really care, based simply on the fact that I am allowed to do it and there's nothing they can or will do to stop me" ya feel me?

mylittleredgirl

i was waiting in an auto shop during the first trump administration when an older lady came in and nervously asked about getting her headlights upgraded. her eye doctor said she should have brighter lights when driving at night, but she was very concerned about blinding oncoming traffic. she wanted to know what the safe mid-range was that’s brighter than what she had but wouldn’t cause accidents or problems for other drivers.

the guy told her they’d put in their brightest lights that would be amazing for her vision. this poor woman kept trying to rephrase to get him to understand her question. “i don’t want to look like i’m driving with my brights on.” and he said, “if someone flashes their lights at you, you just turn on your actual brights and that’ll teach them.”

like he literally could not understand that she was worried about other people, or about creating a generally safe driving environment. the only problem with LED lights is that it’s annoying for you when other dumbass drivers flash their lights at you, and that’s okay because you can punish them for it.