So, I live in Georgia & I'm happy to see Dems on the PSC, but electricity here is 8 cents per kWh. There were some big cost overruns adding nuclear reactors to Vogtle, but them and Watts Bar are the only people to add nuclear since 1990. Relative to a lot of other states, it's hard to argue Georgians are being gouged.

And I really would like to know what's in the data center deals, especially what happens when the data center goes tits-up 3 years into the life of a 40-year power plant

President Blue coming in in 2029 making a show of pulling down the curtains to wall in the Michelle Obama conference room, the Jill Biden first aid station, Melania Trump coat room, all the way back to the Martha Washington coffee room would give Trump an aneurysm. Doesn't get much more Ozymandias than seeing your crowning monument parceled out to a bunch of wives, while you're still alive.

The ballroom is basically just a 50' tall missile-proof warehouse. It'll be easy to fill with stacks of cubicles for the First Lady's staff or even a replacement movie theater.

"They" lost a lot of seats to the progressives, too. All these new representatives join forces with the returning progressives, and the corporate establishment won't look quite so inevitable.

Maybe it's time for the Democrats to go through the equivalent of whatever internal civil war process put Mike Johnson in the chair.

Taxing them to pay for government social programs doesn’t change any of that. It only reinforces our dependence on them.

You're thinking of social programs as permanent assistance, and that's their framing. I mean, there definitely are people with special circumstances who need persistent support, but most of us just need relief from crisis, a hand up from the hole we started in, training to useful skills, doctor when you're sick... Look at what people do with the 'free money' they get from Universal Basic Income experiments.

There’s no tax revenue if there isn’t profit or income first

Also a trap of their framing. It's absolutely possible to tax wealth itself or unrealized gains. Property-wealth taxes are how you convince farmers it's time to sell to a housing developer. Billionaire stock-wealth represents revenue that wasn't paid to the labor that produced it, so it seems fair to take some of it back to benefit those underpaid workers.

The reason your job is soul crushing is you have no alternative. The billionaire has no competition, no motivation to keep his workers happy, because they don't have anywhere else to go, except maybe another soul-crushing billionaire job. Downsize the corporations so they have competition, and you'll see better, more rewarding jobs appear.

The nature of capital is accretion. Gotta do something with excess profit, and the easiest thing is to buy one of your competitors so you can have their profit, too. The rise of mega-corps means the death of small-corps, and means that more and more jobs are at the mercy of the billionaires. The rich aren't sitting on piles of gold, they're sitting on piles of...everything - all the stores, all the factories, all the jobs, all the hospitals. There's no freedom from them while they sit on their piles of everything.

Impeaching Trump won't do that. I mean, with a Dem-led senate, there would at least be a trial, but they'd need at least 10 GOP senators to remove, and that won't happen.

Impeaching Hegseth? Clarence Thomas? Aileen Cannon? Go for it. Still probably won't happen, but those are all people more vulnerable to the shame of impeachment. They might even resign.

There's a lot of criminal activity to expose among people who can actually be indicted and convicted. People who might testify after Trump's get-out-of-trial-free card expires, but most importantly, people who can now be made to stop hurting the country.

I'd still rather see them use War Powers over Iran and close ICE concentration camps than put Elon Musk in jail, if it came down to a choice, but I think they can do all three.

And Elon. MF spent half a billion dollars, and got nothing. He's a much more vulnerable sacrificial lamb for anyone wanting to demonstrate their commitment to punishing Trump-adjacent corruption.

Americans on the whole hate Trump, but there's still that core of 30-ish% who love him uncritically. They're all Republicans, which makes them around 60% of the GOP and more than enough to determine primary outcomes. It's hard to get nominated as a Republican without Trump, and now we see that it's hard to win with Trump.

I suspect that most of those cult members will just stop voting once their idol fades away. Maybe that will let the Republicans recover in 2030, but you just know Trump's going to be out for his base in 2028.

Distance is not enough: depending where you center those districts, they can still be biased. There have been a bunch of initiatives for algorithmic districting, with all kind of constraints - compact, competitive, .... Somewhere along the way, electoral reform and campaign finance just fell off the public radar. Along with Medicare for all. I mean, I get that fascism is kind of a priority at the moment, but elections are fundamentally how you fix that.

The meme "small loan of $1M," back in the early 70s, would be around $9M today, with inflation, on excellent "Daddy's money" terms. Nevermind the subsequent supplemental "loans". Easily enough to push your retirement forward to Thursday.