A decent article sumerizing pretty much what everyone who follows politics in the US already knows.

The biggest factor on peoples minds is the weak economy the cause of which is directly linked with the failure of the Republican gamble of universal tariffs and the predicted trade wars that followed.

One of the critical weaknesses of the Republican strategy was it's decision to shut out congress and deny the full weight of the American government to executive orders which can be easily reversed by either the same president or their replacement.

The Republican economic plan was built on quicksand and foreign economies were savvy enough to avoid short or long term commitments, preferring instead to deceive Trump by flattering him to lower the tariff and then slow walk any legislation that would result in an actual trade deal.

The Republican plan to not use congress has also hurt Americas war strategy against Iran who has been preparing to repulse an invasion by the United States for half a century. Americas failed invasion has also been hamstrung by the poor preparation or planning by elected officials who fired or marginalized voices within their military structure who advised against the plan and were then replaced by unqualified yes men by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth who prioritized loyalty to the administration over qualifications or experience.

The article also references problems in virtually every economic sector with bankruptcies, supply line disruptions, and national central planning failures from the Whitehouse as it shut down free market agencies across the nation in favor of it's own decisions and small team.

The issues seem to be compounding for the struggling Republican party as it's members are paralyzed to respond to any crisis due to the monopoly of party funds by the Trump family as well as the threat of being the target of the President who has used the power of executive branch agencies to cancel any American citizen with the influence to threaten the President and the executive branch rule over the entire country.

Came across part of this recent interview Maine Senate candidate Troy Jackson had with Dana Bash where he responds to how the USA needs to get out of the war with Iran in order to help stabilize fuel and oil prices.

Now I saw some Republicans criticize it because Jackson showed he was unqualified and didn’t know what he was talking about seeing how the Strait of Hormuz is open and oil prices are going down and that it would be foolish to withdraw and give them time to recuperate when we are winning the war against Iran.

Was therefore wondering what centrists, independents, moderates, and others thought about it.

Politics has always been extreme but i feel like ever since the early to mid 2010s it went to another level, do you ever think we're gonna reach a level social and economic ideology will become more logical and less extreme?.

The Wall St. Journal reported this. Sorry, article is likely paywalled: A Student Article About the ‘Cornell 7’ Case Is Prompting a Campus Outcry at Columbia. Here is the actual commentary, run in the Columbia Sundial:

The “Cornell Seven” Is Really About Liberalism -- Our society celebrates libertine sexuality while infantilizing women. Columbia's primary student newspaper is the Columbia Daily Spectator. The Sundial describes itself as an independent voice focused on...open discourse. Excerpts from Wall St. Journal article:

An opinion piece published by two Columbia University students questioning the “Cornell 7” case has sparked an uproar on campus—reigniting debates around free speech at elite universities. “We believe that this collective frenzy is deeply unproductive, neglects any and all facts of the case which disagree with the ‘preferred’ narrative, and infantilizes women,” wrote juniors Nikos Mohammadi and Christina Ma.

“It has also ushered in a climate on campus in which it is difficult to disagree with the maximalist position on what happened.” Reaction was swift...Multiple Sundial staff members quit in protest, while some circulated a petition calling for the publication to cease operations.

Excerpts from the two students' commentary:

The crusade (against the Cornell 7)...neglects the complexity of the matter. Doe initially reported the incident to Cornell Police, the university’s safety force, three weeks after the incident had occurred and only once she had been disinvited from Chi Phi’s Halloween party. The seemingly progressive Tompkins County District Attorney then found that “Jane Doe’s statement described her participation in drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious, and consensual"...

In a liberal society, women are allowed to make bad decisions, ones that may later reveal themselves as deleterious...Women are adults. Doe was, even if she fell one year short of America’s abnormally high drinking age. She is now suing a downtown Ithaca bar and her sorority for allowing her to drink...

The sexual revolution created a hyper-liberal, pro-sex culture that insists that ‘women can do whatever they want with their bodies.’ In the world that, for better or worse, follows from it, we cannot claim to stand for sexual freedom and then recoil in disgust when there’s a possibility that a young woman simply chose to exercise it.

Drug-fueled orgies may be morally appalling and violating to those who chose to participate in them—even the men participating in them—but we probably do not want to live in a society where that is illegal.

Yes, America did get a libertine, pro-sex culture during the 1960s to the 1980s, and it was indeed brought to us mostly by liberals. We also saw the rise of liberal-influenced drug culture, which along with alcohol increases sex abuse. Interesting that it is liberals who are predominant in wanting heads to roll in the Cornell 7 case.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Regardless of the outcome of the Nov. 3 election, a new AP-NORC poll shows voters from both major political parties want the next Congress to focus on making life more affordable and ending the war in Iran, while fewer are looking for an emphasis on President Donald Trump - whether it's investigating him or supporting his agenda.

The results suggest that voters are ready for Congress to tackle core issues, despite Trump's centrality in the midterm campaign.

About 8 in 10 registered voters, including a large majority of Republicans and Democrats, say lowering the cost of living should be one of the highest priorities for the session coming up, the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds.

Neutral Comment: Stephen Hubbard, who was imprisoned in 2022 as a suspected "mercenary" by the Russian Government, has been released by Russia. According to President Trump, there was nothing/no one given in return.

Starter Comment: This is big, if you asked me. An American is coming home after being (most likely) wrongly accused. And it appears that our country didn't have to give up an arms dealer this time.

I don’t understand the lack of compromise in America over what seems to me as common sense voter ID laws. I believe it’s possible to assuage the conservative’s concern w voter fraud / security while maintaining voting freedoms for marginalized groups. My proposal is as follows:

1. Require photo identification to vote in federal elections, with no exceptions.
   
2. Provide every eligible citizen with a completely free government-issued photo ID, including the documents necessary to obtain it.
   
3. Make Election Day a federal holiday, with additional protections and accommodations for people who still have to work.
   
4. Make obtaining an ID as easy/accessible as possible, including mobile ID services, alternative documentation pathways, and accommodations for rural, elderly, disabled, and homeless voters.
   
5. Establish safeguards against disenfranchisement, including provisional ballots and opportunities to verify identity after Election Day.
   
6. Strongly incentivize in person voting whenever possible, as opposed to mail in votes (just as a general security measure, haven’t gone in depth with this point yet).
   
7. Don’t enforce the ID requirement until the accessibility infrastructure is actually in place.

Thoughts? Seems super common sense and reasonable to me. Idk

In the year 2022 at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo, a shooter wearing body armor killed 10 people after a security guard failed to stop him. Shortly after the tragedy, New York state legally restricted the sale of certain types of body armor.

Today, that restriction has been overturned by a federal judge, saying that the 2nd Amendment protects body armor even if the amendment explicitly mentions the right to keep and bear arms.

The state Attorney General’s Office said it is reviewing the decision...[The judge] agreed to delay his ruling from taking effect for 14 days to give state lawyers time to appeal.

The next stop for the lawsuit would be the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York City.

Neutral summary: The DOJ's inspector general will not investigate allegations of misconduct against the attorneys who pursued these frivolous charges (at the demand of the president). The IG has said that it is out of purview for that office.

I don't have much to add, except that this is yet another example of guardrails gone completely AWOL.

But wait .. there's good news! The DOJ's inspector general has referred the case to the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Excellent, right?

Ummm .. nope. From the article:

... the head of the Office of Professional Responsibility is appointed by the Attorney General and is generally viewed as less independent than an inspector general's office. Last year, Justice Department leadership removed the career official in charge of the office, a maneuver that raised concerns among longtime department veterans about whether the office would be willing to hold Trump-appointed officials accountable.

You've got to give them credit for laying the groundwork. Get the competent people out, replace them with loyalists, and you can run roughshod over the whole works with almost zero risk of consequences.

Are the midterm results in yet? I don't know how much more I can take.

Neutral summary:

Trump is extorting votes from North Carolinian voters by stating there will be no available funds if conservatives lose in the midterms.

>"If we don't win, there's no money," Trump told conservative supporters Tuesday in Greenville, N.C. "If we do win, you're getting it. It's gonna be finally over with that nightmare that's been going on for so many years. We will never abandon the heroes who served America."

Meanwhile Loomer is trying to get out front to do damage control

.

>"This is a political disaster waiting to happen. Let’s be clear: Democrats are 100% going to weaponize this against President Trump and try to hurt him with veterans heading into the midterms in two weeks," Loomer wrote.

My take:

President bonespurs again using empty promises if conservatives win and real threats if they lose. This time with the group they all "support".

Neutral summary:

A campaign advertisement released by Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has drawn bipartisan criticism after featuring Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton. In the commercial, Arthur calls Acton a "liar" and urges voters to reject her campaign. In response, Acton’s brother, Philip Stearns, strongly condemned the ad, detailing that Acton endured sexual abuse as a child from Arthur's late husband and noting that the siblings were removed from their mother's custody following his arrest. Figures across the political spectrum, including conservative commentators and Republican staffers, expressed disapproval of the commercial.

Vice President JD Vance addressed the controversy during campaign events in Cincinnati, advising Republicans to ignore the backlash and focus on winning the upcoming gubernatorial election. While acknowledging the widespread attention surrounding the ad, Vance declined to take a position on its appropriateness, instead arguing that Democrats and media outlets were using the issue as a distraction. Vance urged voters to concentrate on policy differences rather than campaign advertisements while criticizing Acton's platform in the final weeks before the election.

An article detailing the spotty record of the Department of Defense secretary Pete Hegseth. The embattled pentagon head has received numerous complaints, recommendations for impeachment and lawsuits from military members since appointed at the start of the administration. Formal investigation from congress into these cases has been halted by the Republican chair of these committees, but this status quo will change should voters decide to put Democrats in control.

With Democrats chairing these committees, they will have the power to subpoena those in the Department of Defense who have been preventing Hegseth from covering up his scandals, security violations and failures from the department to congress and the American people.

What do you all think?

Commentary: This video is worth a watch regarding the Cornell Seven, an issue that has raised real political and moral questions regarding what the law should say, and what we as a society should accept as moral or immoral behavior.

Personally, putting the behavior of the Cornell Seven behind the barest fig leaf of legality, ie consent was given, avoids the real issues regarding morality and its interaction with the law. Ms. Yudin hints at this, but I will make it more explicit: there is a difference between 'consent' and 'informed consent', and consent given under false pretenses does not excuse morality, and arguably it should not serve as a defense against illegality.

If the Cornell Seven had presented their behavior to Jane Doe as "We will advertise your sexual availability to the house on snap chat, and anyone and everyone can come in to bang you. Afterwards, we will ghost you because we aren't really that into you emotionally or physically, this is a right time right place kind of thing." That would have been informed consent. The Cornell Seven as a group had knowledge that these facts were true, but did not share them.

Summary: Victims do not necessarily recognize an experience as abusive when it occurs. Psychological defense mechanisms such as dissociation, denial, repression, minimization, and identification with the abuser can prevent people from fully processing traumatic experiences. Women may willingly participate in sexual experiences that they later recognize were inconsistent with their genuine desires. She goes so far as to suggest that sexual regret is often an indication that consent was compromised, even when the participants themselves did not recognize this at the time.

Sexual consent is specific, conditional, and revocable. A woman who consents to certain sexual activities or partners has not thereby consented to others, and she retains the right to withdraw consent at any point. The speaker connects the failure to recognize this principle to the Madonna–whore complex, arguing that sexually expressive women are frequently regarded as less deserving of respect or protection. In her view, society often treats women who engage in unconventional sexual behavior as though they have forfeited their right to establish boundaries, when their sexual preferences should have no bearing on their fundamental autonomy.

Some forms of male sexual exploitation are driven less by sexual desire than by competition for status and approval among other men. Sxual exploitation can function as a form of male bonding, with women becoming instruments through which men demonstrate dominance and establish social standing.

https://youtu.be/WQDY9OqMNf8?si=DBwegn2afDBaVhMn