I have been suggesting “demilitarize the police” as an alternative slogan. There’s no reason that street cops should be geared up like they’re soldiers in Iraq who have to worry about IEDs. It creates a definite “us vs. them” dynamic that exacerbates tensions in the community.

The cop was the REAL plot twist to this one.

What PBO is saying is so frigging obvious and the backlash is deliberately obtuse. The most effective slogans put a positive spin on things and imply things are being added not taken away. One of the reasons the awful MAGA slogan is successful is because it capitalizes on optimism. Optimism that fascism will return…

Obama is right, and I’m not sure why denigrating his extremely successful campaign slogans (he got elected twice, didn’t he?) makes sense here.

they are spending several sentences every time trying to explain what the slogan actually meant. If you have to add three caveats, an explainer, and a small bit of backstory to explain a fucking slogan you have already lost the damned propaganda war.

Came here to say that he’s pretty much completely right, but I’m happy to see every single comment is already saying that.

Most people are idiots with the attention span of a goldfish.
You say “defund the police”, they hear “no police, anarchy, red menace communism”. And guess what ? Most of them won’t bother to do the…

“DEFUND THE POLICE” and then taking the next couple minutes or so to explain what they actually mean, it’s their time. But a lot of people aren’t listening by then.

It astonishes me how badly us lefties are at this type of stuff. As has been pointed out by folks far more clever than I, this is something that the righties are super good at; they find an easy to remember and repeat slogan and they FUCKING HAMMER IT until their base hears it in their dreams.

When I hear ‘defund’ it says to me zero dollars whatsoever toward policing because ‘defund’ has been sloganed by anti-choice nutjobs to mean that organizations like Planned Parenthood must close and receive no federal funding for anything, ever.

Obama is right.

He’s not wrong, though. “Defund the Police,” snappy as it might be, is a vast oversimplification of what that plan often entails (depending on who you ask)—redistributing funds to services that the police shouldn’t be involved with to begin with, like welfare checks and mental illness interventions.  Yes, explaining…

That's awesome! Truly you're doing good work :)

Especially when some of these women will be speaking to the American public on behalf of Vice President Harris. Thinking also of the boys who will grow up during this administration accepting diverse women in power as a fact of life.

In some nice news, it turns out that Donald Trump’s Wisconsin recount, which he had to pay a cool $3 million for, ended up actually increasing Joe Biden’s lead in the state.

They will never forgive him for not being Bernie Sanders.

At this point no he can’t the fact that they could have written an article about Yellen getting the Treasury Secretary nom and her stated position that significantly more stimulus money and Fed intervention is needed to get the economy running and that even in the best case scenario Biden will be largely reliant on…

Nope, I’m going to celebrate that qualified, experienced people are back in those jobs AND that they’re majority POC. It wasn’t that long ago none of these jobs were held by women. I was just hitting puberty when the first women held the jobs of Attorney General and Secretary of State, and that being the Clinton Admini…

Joe Biden can do no right, I guess.

I also don’t like crisp green beans. I like them cooked through but not mushy.

I just remembered the one Thanksgiving when my mom returned the cooked turkey to the store. She was pissed off that it turned out really dry. She hauled the whole 20lb roasted turkey in the roasting pan back to the grocery store, puts it on the customer service counter, and says she wants to return the bird because…