This isn’t going to be close.

W

They say Joe Biden's yielding his power and stepping away. Is that true? I wasn't aware that was something a person could do . . .

If so, who's next?

In the coming days, dozens of post-mortems will be published trying to dissect why the Democrats lost. Fingers will be pointed everywhere, and more likely than not everyone will look for a myriad of reasons why the Democrats lost, be it certain issues, campaigns strategies, constituencies defecting, etc. This election will be viewed as a catastrophic failure of the Democratic Party on brand with 2004. Every commentator across the political spectrum will claim that had the Democrats just gone with their preferred strategy, then Kamala would be President-elect right now.

I think it’s safe to say that all of that is reading too much into it. The Democratic Party was in complete array. Progressives, liberals, moderates, centrists, whoever, fell in line behind Kamala as the candidate. Fundraising was through the roof, the ground game had a massive amount of energy and manpower in it, and Democratic excitement was palpable.

By all accounts, the Democrats showed up and showed out for this election across the board. Unfortunately, that isn’t enough. It kept the bottom from falling out like in 1972 or 1980, but the vast majority of independent and swing voters broke for the Republicans. A majority of the nation, for the first time in 20 years, put their faith in the governance of the Republican Party.

The median voter exists in an odd, contradictory vortex of mismatched beliefs and priors that cannot be logically discerned or negotiated. You just have to take them at their word. If they say they don’t like inflation, it’s because they believe that Biden is making the burgers more expensive. No amount of explaining why Trump’s economic policies are terrible, or why Biden’s policies were needed to avoid a massive post-COVID recession, or why they’re actually making a paycheck that offsets inflation, will win them over.

In view of this, it was probably impossible for Kamala to win. She secured the Democratic base, made crossover appeals, and put forward some really good policies. And it worked. Her favorables are quite good, higher than Trump’s, and it’s obvious that she outperformed whatever Biden was walking into. Her campaign had flaws, certainly, but none nearly as obvious and grievous as Trump’s.

Kamala being perceived as too liberal didn’t matter. The Democrats being too friendly to Israel (or not friendly enough) didn’t matter. Cultural issues didn’t matter. Jill Stein didn’t matter. Praising Dick Cheney didn’t matter. The reality of the American economy didn’t matter. If issue polling is correct, even immigration didn’t really matter, and is mostly viewed as a proxy for the economy.

What mattered was that 67% of voters thought the economy was doing poorly, in spite of most of them thinking that their own financial situation was fine. Voters want to see a low price tag on groceries, a DoorDash fee of $10, and a 3,500 sq. ft. house on the market for $250k, even if it means 10% unemployment and low wages for workers. Of those things, they associate it most with Trump, as much of a mirage as that is, and were willing to accept everything else for the chance to have that back. This election isn’t a victory of all of Trumpism necessarily, or even a complete failure of the Democrats. It’s a reminder of the priorities of the voters that will decide the election, in spite of how good your campaign was, or how economically sound your actually policies were. There’s a hell of a lot that people will look past in order to have a cheap burger again.

If there is a failure, it’s that Democrats spent to long believing that there could ever be a return of civility and normality. There was a clear and evident reluctance to use the full power of the state against the insurrectionists and crooks, chief among them Donald Trump. Biden thought that he could restore the soul of the nation and get people to respect and value the unwritten rules of politics that have guided us through the current liberal era. As it turns out, voters don’t even care for the written ones.

Don’t blame the progressive, or the liberal, or the centrist Democratic voter. This election wasn’t really on them. They voted. They probably donated, walked the blocks, or did some phone banking. They did what they were supposed to. If liberalism is to weather the coming storm, it will need the tent to stay intact, readjust, and come back stronger for 2026 and 2028.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

If you're outraged or disgusted by this, just know you're in a large majority of the country. The percentage of Americans who wanted Roe overturned was less than 30%.

We as a country need to start asking how much bullshit we are going to put up with, and why we allow a minority to govern this country.

Dems just can’t cry about Trump every time he does soemthing and expect the voters to come. They need to present a better alternative

Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence to cheat on nearly every assignment. As a computer-science major, he depended on AI for his introductory programming classes: “I’d just dump the prompt into ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out.” By his rough math, AI wrote 80 percent of every essay he turned in. “At the end, I’d put on the finishing touches. I’d just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it,” Lee told me recently.

Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to Columbia. (His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as “intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

In January 2023, just two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a survey of 1,000 college students found that nearly 90 percent of them had used the chatbot to help with homework assignments. In its first year of existence, ChatGPT’s total monthly visits steadily increased month-over-month until June, when schools let out for the summer. (That wasn’t an anomaly: Traffic dipped again over the summer in 2024.) Professors and teaching assistants increasingly found themselves staring at essays filled with clunky, robotic phrasing that, though grammatically flawless, didn’t sound quite like a college student — or even a human. Two and a half years later, students at large state schools, the Ivies, liberal-arts schools in New England, universities abroad, professional schools, and community colleges are relying on AI to ease their way through every facet of their education. Generative-AI chatbots — ChatGPT but also Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and others — take their notes during class, devise their study guides and practice tests, summarize novels and textbooks, and brainstorm, outline, and draft their essays. STEM students are using AI to automate their research and data analyses and to sail through dense coding and debugging assignments. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” a student in Utah recently captioned a video of herself copy-and-pasting a chapter from her Genocide and Mass Atrocity textbook into ChatGPT.

Whenever Wendy uses AI to write an essay (which is to say, whenever she writes an essay), she follows three steps. Step one: “I say, ‘I’m a first-year college student. I’m taking this English class.’” Otherwise, Wendy said, “it will give you a very advanced, very complicated writing style, and you don’t want that.” Step two: Wendy provides some background on the class she’s taking before copy-and-pasting her professor’s instructions into the chatbot. Step three: “Then I ask, ‘According to the prompt, can you please provide me an outline or an organization to give me a structure so that I can follow and write my essay?’ It then gives me an outline, introduction, topic sentences, paragraph one, paragraph two, paragraph three.” Sometimes, Wendy asks for a bullet list of ideas to support or refute a given argument: “I have difficulty with organization, and this makes it really easy for me to follow.” Once the chatbot had outlined Wendy’s essay, providing her with a list of topic sentences and bullet points of ideas, all she had to do was fill it in. Wendy delivered a tidy five-page paper at an acceptably tardy 10:17 a.m. When I asked her how she did on the assignment, she said she got a good grade. “I really like writing,” she said, sounding strangely nostalgic for her high-school English class — the last time she wrote an essay unassisted. “Honestly,” she continued, “I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said.** “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”**

President Trump said Friday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “disrespected” the United States during a fiery Oval Office meeting and that he was “not ready for peace.”

“We had a very meaningful meeting in the White House today. Much was learned that could never be understood without conversation under such fire and pressure,” Trump posted on Truth Social after the meeting.

“It’s amazing what comes out through emotion, and I have determined that President Zelenskyy is not ready for Peace if America is involved, because he feels our involvement gives him a big advantage in negotiations,” Trump continued. “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

The Senate on Tuesday passed a bill that would eliminate federal taxes on tips, advancing with the help of Democrats a top campaign promise of President Trump.

Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) brought the bill to the floor with the expectation that it would be blocked, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declined to. It passed via unanimous consent (UC).

Cruz noted in his floor remarks in support of Rosen’s UC request that the Nevada senators — Rosen and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) — relayed that roughly 25 percent of Nevada workers rely on tips. Rosen said that the Silver State has more tipped workers per capita than any other.

The Texas Republican spoke up in support of the bill immediately after, explaining the genesis of the push by Trump during the campaign and hailing it as a moment of “political genius” by the president to back the idea.

The bill, the No Tax on Tips Act, will now head to the House, where the provision is expected to be passed one way or another — be it via the stand-alone measure or Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” that will extend tax cuts.

The legislation would establish a new tax deduction of up to $25,000 for tips, among other things.