And the resignation wasn’t even a mistake! It was excellent politics that saved him and his family, friends, and party tons of pointless suffering. Let the guy take credit for doing the smart and right thing without being forced.

Nah. He vaporized a carefully planned right-wing scandal campaign, made sure he was replaced by a popular Senator who’s voted essentially the same way, and let every Democratic Senator point to their exacting ethical standards.

she’s losing for looking like HR

Yeah, I wish there were more Franken apologists treating him as a martyr rather than a victim (Admitting that using either of those words in this context is pretty gross). Dude made a politically savvy, selfless decision that almost certainly moved a marginal House seat or two in exchange for his career. That’s the…

Here’s my defense of Al Franken: He made a politically heroic decision to help his party instead of himself. People who want to remind us he’s a good guy ought to focus on that instead of trying to undo the good his sacrifice did.

Yeah, you make a good argument and I just get irrationally grumpy whenever someone in power promises to depoliticize politics. Sorry to be pointlessly contrary at you.

I think part of the problem is that we, as a nation/society/world, are kinda just fucked. Like, clever thoughtful people aren’t going to come up with solutions that are mutually acceptable to decent humans and the deranged death cultists voting for the GOP. Our options actually are ‘win’ and ‘perish.’

The thing is, Planned Parenthood is never going to reach a detente with the right, because they hate public health organizations AND women AND sexual health. If your plan is to “depoliticize” an organization like that, you just don’t know what you’re talking about.

Nah, they’d rather hire the actual righties trying to kill us (e.g. Jonah Goldberg and Erick E. Ericksen).

Man, I was going to say she started under the assumption of an HRC presidency, but...last year? What??

She seems to be imagining the existence of a significant chunk of well-meaning prolifers, who genuinely want to reduce unwanted pregnancies to reduce abortion, and so support PP’s missions of sex education and birth control access. That’s a nice thing to imagine, because otherwise a significant portion of our fellow…

Making things apolitical is political. I’d be happy for abortion to be apolitical, because it would mean the prolife movement had been utterly, permanently excluded from the political sphere. If Dr. Wen were offering to do that, I’d put her in charge of anything she wanted!

I don’t think they’re conservative so much as delusional. She wants to work with people who call themselves pro-life but want abortion to remain legal and people who want to criminalize abortion but expand access to birth control and that’s like 20 people in the world. Reaching out to unlikely allies is great, but…

I mean, it sounds like a generic sports site, so how bad could it be? Were it not for Deadspin’s reporting I would assume Barstool Sports was indistinguishable from Bleacher Report. It’s sloppy, yeah, but not unthinkably so.

I’m just trying to imagine the situation where the two sides of a civil war are “Racist” and “Communist.”

I mean just the background awfulness of [sweeping gesture with both arms]. It’s bad for mental/emotional health under the best of personal circumstances, never mind with serious personal stress thrown in.

Yeah, the basket of deplorables is for real. West Virginia is basically the canary in, uh, itself for how thoroughly whites will annihilate themselves before they’ll help any nonwhite person anywhere — including their imagination — to benefit. A real hard crash will peel off a few at the edges, though.

Financial ruin, like people experienced in 2008, seems to do it. Of course the cost of that in human suffering is probably still greater than the benefit. It’s scary how much closer the calculation is getting, though.

Reconstruction failed because it was run by white men who still, even after the insane horrors of the Civil War, couldn’t convince themselves that Black people were people. Same reason the New Deal and school integration failed. Until we have programs designed and run by administrators with the understanding that…

Lots of studies suggest that “openness to new experience” on the Big 5 personality test is very strongly correlated with political liberalism