The former president and his wife Jill were attending a ceremony at Trinity College in Dublin, where their son Hunter was awarded the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse.

The award by Trinity’s College Historical Society was in recognition of Hunter Biden’s recent advocacy on American politics and media, as well as his work raising awareness of addiction and recovery.

Haha what?

(They definitely made a big donation to the college.)

Personally, I’m skeptical that this was by accident.

The reps who missed this seem to have common political alignments.

My guess is that they would rather wait until after the new congress gets sworn in to Impeach Hegseth because the extra time is good for their allies in the war industry, and because they have some dumb political game theory about how it helps them if it happens on their preferred schedule.

I don’t think that 11 similarly-minded reps somehow had an oopsie-daisy on the day of the big vote.

I’m not a parliamentary expert, but that doesn’t sound correct to me.

Doesn’t the speaker control who chairs each committee and what legislation makes it to the floor?

As speaker, Jeffries can – and will – put allies as chairs of committees to make sure that Medicare for All never gets out of committee. He could single-handedly prevent a vote to abolish ICE from taking place, even if a majority were in support. The speaker is third in line of succession to the presidency, and is arguably the most powerful position in the federal government after the President.

I don’t think your characterization matches reality at all.

‘…Anyway, that’s why I’m excited to give Hakeem Jefferies my full and unconditioned support.’

(Did the article mention this? It’s paywalled for me.)

I think this is one of many possible adjustments, but I agree with your point that a lot of people had questions about how thoroughly this had been planned, and didn’t quite trust the current version. That’s how I felt (although I voted for it anyway).

Anyway, I agree with you that there will be other versions of this, and some version will eventually pass.

Respectfully, this take is ignorant.

I mean ignorant in formal sense, in that you’re speaking without a strong foundation of knowledge. But also in the informal sense in that frankly, what you’re saying is ugly and insulting to the working class of America, whose capacity to think you dismiss on the basis that you don’t know why they did something other than what you’d do.

To be clear: there ARE voters who match your description. However in many cases – as was the case in California’s billionaire tax – those are not the deciding votes.

The people who decide elections are – contrary to popular myth – complicated.

In the Bay Area, residents voted both to reject the wealth tax AND reject a measure that would make it harder to raise taxes in the future AND voted to raise their own taxes through a 0.5% sales tax to fund a public transit rescue package.

From even a cursory glance at the results across CA’s elections, it’s clear that voters didn’t have some flat left-versus-right metric, they demonstrated complicated, nuanced, choices.

Before concluding that this failed because working class voters are dimwitted savages too dumb to govern themselves, let’s wait until organizers and academics actually study the returns.

And in 2028, I’m going to go back out and work on passing the next version of this.

I remember folks asking in 2024 “What do we do if Trump wins?!?” and my answer was “The same thing you should be doing if Kamala wins: the same thing you should be doing now.” Which is organizing locally and building outward.

If you have a union, participate in it. If you don’t, get to know your coworkers and normalize talking about what you’d like collectively. Organize your apartment building to get together on the holidays. Know who your city council member is, and your county supervisor. Participate in mutual aid and lobby for laws in your own backyard. Think about not just what you don’t want – Republicans in national office – but what you really, really want: a shorter work week. Guaranteed access to living essentials. And then find the people, both inside government and out who have ideas for how to do this and ask how you can help. And keep doing it through the ups and downs.

Because your despair at Trump’s victory can be just as ephemeral as your joy at Paxton’s defeat if this is just sports. But if we have a purpose and a plan, every step forward or backward is part of a journey in which we can see our progress towards something that matters more than just the latest poll.

I think I’m going to start using my own domain, so I can change hosts if needed without having to change email addresses. This seems like it’s going to be an issue we’ll always need to be prepared to deal with.

He’s a baller in interviews.

Also: I like how he uses his look.

I want to be clear: I don’t think every candidate should try and look like a macho tough guy. But I think everyone should find their look and lean into it. And his happens to be a flawless visual performance of traditional masculinity.

Which makes it so satisfying to watch when people try and put him off his game with fearmongering over evolving gender norms, and this absolute chad just dunks on them about what losers they look like when they insist on creating a lists of state-approved genitals.

I wish him so much success tomorrow, but regardless of the outcome he’s done amazing things in the campaign, and he’s going to be a force in American politics either way.

Jesus.

Can you imagine what she would’ve been like as a senator? The woman appears to have no foundation.

And her fiancé… this relationship sounds toxic. In all directions. His behavior and hers sound awful.

I think that’s a crude way of putting it.

But I agree that simply labeling black characters “Magical Negros” is unconstructive.

My understanding is that Spike Lee coined the term to point out when black characters are tokenized in a way that diminishes them as full, realized characters. Was Foreman not given these relationships because the writers neglected his character? Or was this just because of who he was as a character? I didn’t watch the show, so I’m genuinely asking.

I find John Coffey in the Green Mile a great case study. He literally is a magical negro. But also… constructively, what is the element of the film that needs corrected? Was his character disrespectful to black culture?

It didn’t seem that way to me, but if someone else feels otherwise I’m open to that opinion.

This can’t be right.

$5M is way too low to cover statues in gold.

Unless he’s paying Jarod $5M to pay a guy on Craiglist $75 to spray paint three statues gold. That might check out. Otherwise no way.

I don’t buy it.

You can find countless politicians – most of the Democratic party – who have learned how to support Israel in 2026: you promise in a closed door meeting to guarantee funding for Likud, never bring up Israel unprompted, and if asked, talk about how terrible Netanyahu’s leadership has been for Jewish security. And then you launder the cash as hard as you can and hope no one notices.

Most AIPAC candidates don’t talk about Israel these days. AIPAC is well known for running ads on whatever topic seems most likely to hurt their critics without talking about Israel.

I think Stevenson started from a place of being a pro-imperialist nat sec ghoul, but now is just having a public mental breakdown, tbh.

Wait, she’s not Jewish??

I say this as a Jewish anti-zionist: what the actual fuck?? Like… I grew up indoctrinated into zionism and left when I got old enough to start paying attention to news. So… what’s her damage?

Maybe this sounds silly, but I have a lot of pity for Jewish liberal zionists. It’s a cult. And I’m familiar with Christian Nationalist zionists (also a cult, but different one). I feel sympathy for people operating on childhood brainwashing.

And I kind of get folks like Biden, who probably formed an opinion before '67.

But what’s her fucking deal? I can have grace for people who were born into this or are really old, but she just sounds like she learned that Israel is an apartheid state in college and said, ‘Neato!’

I am so much more disgusted with her now than I was when I assumed that she was a member of the tribe. ULGH.

Agreed.

Tactically, if she wanted him to lose she should’ve just stuck to what she was doing, which was supporting him in words while undermining and maintaining plausible deniability. Then if he loses, you can lament that there was just no saving a flawed candidate.

Now if he wins, she’s a loser twice over, and if he loses it’s a phyric victory: she’s the villain who lost Democrats the seat, and instead of proving his politics can’t win in a swing state, the story is just that he got stabbed in the back by an ally.