He made this announcement to give media something other than the “Big Beautiful Bill” to worry about this weekend.

Are you suggesting that the primary structures came into existence without the support of the parties? Or that the people can somehow rise up and rewrite election rules over the objection of party incumbents? I thought we were having a serious discussion.

US primaries aren’t like France’s two round election system, even in open primary states. California, Washington and Nebraska have a single-ballot “jungle” primary system that’s kind of close (although Nebraska is kind of special because it’s only for non-partisan state legislature races), but most open primaries still list only the candidates of one party - you can’t vote for a (D) in one race and an ® in another. US primaries are supposed to let the parties - which are essentially semi-private clubs - reach consensus on who they run against the other clubs. Having the states run those primaries was supposed to be democratizing and let more people have a voice in their representation, and maybe it even worked that way a hundred years ago. It’s the nature of people to organize themselves into cliques to consolidate and maintain power, and they’ll figure out ways to manipulate any system to do that. The fact that no one votes in primaries - regardless of their structure - makes them an easy lever of manipulation.

US taxes all forms of income. Wages, investments, gambling winnings, gifts (after fairly generous exemptions). If money goes in your pocket, Uncle Sam gets a cut.

Is that not the second sentence in my original comment?

Not really. I’m saying that the system discourages change. If there’s blame for the DNC, it’s that their message has constantly been something along the lines of “be reasonable & empathetic; improve the world through measured change” which tends to demoralize people who think the system is seriously fucked. That empowers the career politicians. GOP propaganda, at least for the last 50-or-so years, has been “More guns! More babies! No brown people!” which tends to attract passionate radicals.

Voter turnout in primaries is pathetic. In 30 states, you have to be registered with the party - i.e.: give them your name and address for fund-raising purposes - to vote. This all works to bias primaries to ‘establishment’ candidates, or at least people well known among party apparatchiks. They are, theoretically, the best way to get progressives or populists into office, but practically, those progressives are fighting demographics and the general apathy of voters under 40.

The same phenomena that let MAGA take over the GOP keep the moderates in charge of the Dems. At least, until someone figures out how to motivate all the young internet revolutionaries to actually go and vote instead of memeing about how useless voting is.

Do you get so excited when someone says, 'My house was robbed"? Houses, of course, can’t be robbed. They can be burgled; only people can be robbed. Legally. Colloquially, we all know what they’re talking about.

Maybe “The Technician” does, but insisting that people be very carefully precise with language outside of the specific technical domain is a form of sealioning.

They’re happy to call it an intentional act of violence, so they’ve ruled out a lot of the explanations for an exploding car. The bar for “terrorism” is pretty low - they charged an Atlanta student with is for tossing bottles of water and dry ice out his window.

Regardless, it’s definitely a journalistic choice whether to quote the police lieutenant’s very careful, and possibly technical statement, or to quote the business owner (Musk) or US President speculating. And maybe it just turns out that it’s carefully ethical journalists reporting on potential right-wing violence, and usually unethical hacks reporting on possible attacks on the corporatocracy, but it sure does feel like a pattern.

It’s the Black Friday price gouging model. Remember when gas prices went from $2 to $5 in…2008? Everyone was so excited when they came back down to $3 that no one noticed we had a permanent 50% price hike.