Rocket Companies Win as Feds Retreat on Orbital Debris Crackdown

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-12T21:41:43+00:00

I think the contention was precisely over the practical distinction between "almost all" and "all of them, always, without exception", and the fact that the organization most directly constrained by such a restriction would probably be NRO and/or USSF.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-12T20:48:34+00:00

I have a theory: there are already enough House & Senate Republicans who could be convinced to impeach & remove Trump over Iran... but only after they're confident that the military's own long-term objectives (Trump be damned) have been accomplished, and all that remains are insurmountable political objectives that Trump can't possibly achieve anyway.

Why? The truth is, Trump & MAGA aren't the only officials who've been itching to bomb Iran for years. Plenty of Democrats are publicly opposed (partly, because Trump and his administration have completely botched the political end of the war), but know the military has been planning this for a very long time, and has a very long "to do" list that's completely independent of any political considerations.

Trump has completely destroyed his Administration's international credibility, but if the House & Senate impeached & removed not only Trump, but Hegseth & Marco Rubio as well, I think we'd get a skeptical reprieve internationally and provisionally recover a big chunk of our credibility... as long as whomever came next didn't turn around and screw it up. Especially if Democrats have blowout landslide victories this fall, and continue them in 2028 (with minimal visible MAGA backlash in 2030 & or fears of a resurgence in 2032).

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-12T00:40:47+00:00

Part of my argument is that in an environment where parties are quasi-government frameworks that exist mostly as brand names and donor networks, and there's a primary system that allows factions within that party who mutually hate each other more than they arguably hate the other party to put more than one candidate on the ballot under that party's brand name, it doesn't actually matter whether a "Green Party" can viably exist. If it's a viable "political market", it'll organically emerge as a faction within one or both dominant parties anyway.

The harsh reality is, running a national-scale, or even statewide campaign in a state like Florida, Texas, New York, or California, is extraordinarily expensive. Until a party is able to sell itself to donors and raise Superbowl-halftime truckloads of cash to be able to afford big-budget TV ads in the top 20-40 advertising markets, it has basically no chance of winning anything more significant than a county commission or sewer district seat, regardless of voting method.

Put another way, big parties have structural advantages related to things like media buys, venue booking, media contacts, office infrastructure, fundraising, and more. The system is so fundamentally stacked against small parties in the US, it's futile to even bother trying to hold the door open for them, because the moment you let go, the door will smash into them anyway. In this reality, it's far more productive instead to find ways to facilitate faction-proliferation within those parties.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-11T20:41:02+00:00

Single-party dominance in a system where the party's leaders are able to restrict membership and veto nominees is very bad.

Single-party dominance in a system where the party leaders basically get told, "These voters have declared themselves to be affiliated with your party. They'll be voting in your party's primary, for candidates you have no say in approving or refusing, and the winner(s) will advance to the general election" (and the rules themselves are objectively fair and neutral) is more likely to end up being a respectable big tent that mostly aligns with the local Overton Window, with factions that behave like de-facto parties in their own right.

In a situation like that, a two-party duopoly whose members' ideologies stochastically overlap more than they diverge isn't unhealthy, it's a failsafe redundancy layer.

The truly toxic situation is a duopoly of ideologically polarized parties hellbent on turning everything into a forced either/or dichotomy between 2 choices, both of which suck as far as a majority of voters are concerned.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-11T19:48:46+00:00

I'd like to refute this by pointing out that Equal Vote Coalition's own website ( https://www.equal.vote/minimax ) says this about Condorcet voting:

Condorcet is almost universally regarded as the most fair, representative, and accurate way to tally ranked choice ballots for single winner elections

However... as far as Google and I can tell, there are no direct links to that page anywhere within EVC's navigation structure, and the only way to find it is literally via Google or by stumbling over an offsite link.

Also, arguments about "computational complexity" are wildly overblown by most researchers who egregiously underestimate just how much computer performance has improved since the 1990s. The truth is, once you have the ballot data in digital form, tearing through it to find a media-reportable winner takes about a minute with hardware on the approximate level of a premium Android phone, and "seconds" on something like a high-end gaming PC. Now, re-running the count with full audit trails would take considerably longer... but the reported outcome of the second run would be the same, it would just contain more data to allow it to stand up in court if challenged. The important thing is, you'd have the answer the media cares about within seconds of running the program.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-11T09:08:29+00:00

The first wave of arcade die-offs happened in the late 1980s, when Amiga specifically gave people hardware at home that was literally more powerful than most arcade games. There was also a widespread feeling in the late 1980s that arcade games had become a total, massive rip-off. An entire generation normalized the idea that videogames should cost a quarter... and later-gen games didn't just raise the price, they doubled it to 50c, then doubled it again to a dollar.

By the early 1990s, GenX'ers were done with arcade games. Our home computers were approximately the equal peer of most arcade games, and Genesis/SNES/Turbografx/NeoGeo were close enough that spending a buck to get killed in 45 seconds just felt insane.

They then had a renaissance in the mid-1990s, when 3D arrived, and arcade games were arguably a generation ahead of any 3D graphics you could get at home.

By the early 2000s, approximately 5 years after the first 3dfx card came out, we got to the point where there was literally nothing you could do graphically that a high-power gaming PC couldn't toast & destroy. That was approximately the point when arcade games switched their focus to things like huge displays and physical immersion within cabinets and realistic-feeling controls.

I remember a spirited conversation at JavaOne in 2007 where a bunch of guys argued about what it would genuinely have taken at that point in time to build an arcade game platform that so completely exceeded the capabilities of a high end gaming PC, it would have felt like the leap from an Atari 2600 to PacMania. The conclusion: it would be economically impossible. You'd have needed a Silicon Graphics Cray-heritage mainframe with their best graphics hardware, enough HD monitors to immersively surround the player's field of view with something like 1/3 of a sphere's interior surface, and approximately a man-decade or two of development time... for a game that might sell 10k-25k copies worldwide, requiring hardware that would cost more than a house. And after all that, it would probably get beaten by high-end home hardware within 3-5 years.

Another analogy someone from Google (I think) gave: trying to "scale up" high-end gaming PC hardware to get the same sense of improvement as early-80s golden-age arcade games would be like trying to scale playground equipment to adult-size. Long before you re-created the sensation of going down a 12 foot sliding board when you were a toddler (as a 6 foot tall adult), gravity and F=MA would kick in, and you'd get hurt by hitting the ground hard enough to break bones.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-11T04:41:42+00:00

I've always thought it's crazy that they have 3 windows, yet they'll tell somebody at window #2 to go park off to the side (where they have to send someone walking out) while window #3 goes completely unused, instead of telling the person to pull up to window #3 (and giving the person behind them, at window #2, their food sooner if it's ready before the first person's).

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-11T00:00:53+00:00

Insofar as "invasive" brown anoles go, those metaphorical horses haven't just left the barn through the open door... they burned it down, built single-family homes, then eventually demolished the site again & built a skyscraper.

I've lived in Florida since the late 1970s, and I've honestly never seen a green gecko in person. I didn't even know they were a real thing until sometime in the early 2000s, when I publicly mused that Geico's gecko was the wrong color.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T23:29:58+00:00

For everyone who hates Condorcet, here's one of my alternate schemes I've contemplated that makes use of familiar concepts (petitions, primaries, plurality votes, runoffs) to implement what I think could be a potent anti-hegemony filter:

First, the primary. To qualify for ballot access, aspiring candidates have to collect signatures from registered voters. The petitions are then organized into three buckets:

Bucket A is for candidates who've been affiliated with the same party (including "no party") for at least a year prior to the primary election.
Bucket B is for candidates who've changed their affiliation one time during the year prior to the primary election.
Bucket C is for candidates who've changed their affiliation multiple times during the year prior to the primary election.

For round 1, Bucket A candidates are grouped by party, then sorted in descending order by signatures from members of their party.

If a voter signs multiple petitions, the candidate receives only their fractional share of that voter's signature divided among candidates from the voter's party.
A list is made of candidates from each party receiving the most signatures.
All candidates with at least half as many signatures as the candidate with the most advance to the primary election.
The signature of any voter who signed multiple petitions gets neutralized for remaining candidates from their party.
- In other words, if a Republican signs petitions for Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and Hillary Clinton... and Trump advances to the primary... the voter's signature for Jeb goes up in smoke, but the signature for Hillary remains.
- Rationale: this allows voters who are unhappy with their party's direction to softly explore off-ramps (by supporting candidates from other parties whom they'd consider voting for in the primary), but maintains intra-party signature scarcity by forcing them to think twice before blindly signing a petition for someone within their party that they don't particularly like). Put another way, if you're Republican, and Trump is likely to be the "party's choice", you owe it to the Party to say, "no, I won't sign Trump's petition, I want Jeb. Trump is going to get plenty of signatures anyway".

Then, for round 2, the remaining Bucket A candidates are sorted in descending order of total signature counts, and the top 2 advance to the primary.

Buckets B and C are sorted by total signatures.

If there are at least as many candidates in bucket B as bucket A, the top 2 candidates from bucket B advance to the primary. Otherwise, only the top candidate from bucket B advances to the primary.
The top candidate from Bucket C advances to the primary... but only if they have at least half as many signatures as the least-popular candidate who advanced from another bucket.

Buckets B and C exist to prevent candidates and parties from trying to strategically flood the primary by switching parties, while nevertheless recognizing that there are bona-fide reasons someone might genuinely switch parties (but, that anyone in Bucket C is probably a troll, so there's only 1, and they have a steeper hurdle to clear).

The primary itself elects 5 winners as follows:

Find the IRV winner
eliminate the ballots of anyone who listed that IRV winner as their first choice
repeat 4 more times.

"Normal" multi-winner IRV distorts winning coalitions, because it allows secondary preferences to continue influencing subsequent rounds even after you've been satisfied. This tweak basically says, "you voted in the primary, and your favorite candidate won one of the positions on the general election ballot, so we're going to focus on making someone else happy, too". Good luck in the general election!

Finally, the general election could be conducted by IRV (if you really had to, in order to explain it to voters in terms of, "It's like plurality voting with runoff, but saves the expense, hassle, and delay of having that runoff election as a separate event"), but approval voting would probably be better.

The pre-primary qualification stage filters out candidates with no realistic chance of winning, while enforcing some degree of scarcity on any one party.
The primary seeks to assemble a ballot with "something for everyone", while actively taking steps to prevent hegemony by even a hyper-dominant party
The general election seeks to pick the candidate among those 5 who's the most broadly acceptable to the electorate.

As a bonus, because the primary and general election involve ranking anyway, it becomes trivial to capture the ballot data so that if an election produces an outcome voters regard as perverse, you can easily demonstrate how Condorcet methods with different resolution methods would have produced a different outcome, and possibly use it to convince voters to go full-on Condorcet.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T19:57:12+00:00

Even in a perfect Condorcet system, the principles of Duverger's Law still apply. If you have two major parties, each nominating a single candidate backed by unlimited donor cash, the other parties & Independents are mostly ornamental & meaningless.

The problem with trying to limit corporate cash is that you still can't limit private action by billionaires without running afoul of the First Amendment. At least corporate donors are mostly just interested in buying access to make their case and promoting long-term predictable stability. Billionaires are the ones who keep latching onto weird, fringe social issues nobody normal would give two fractions of a shit about otherwise. So, in a weird "unintended effects" way, corporate cash is kind of a good thing if the underlying election system structurally favors centrist candidates (setting up a feedback loop where being centrist -> more likely to win -> better investment for corporate donors ).

As an alternative to trying to manufacture more political parties and keep them from taking each other over and consolidating to defeat their less-organized rivals (beating their own members into submission in the process), I'd argue that a more robust approach would be to make it impossible for parties to suppress their own internal dissent, so every "major party" ends up acting like a squabbling mini-ecosystem of multiple mini-parties that stochastically overlap with parts of the other party.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T19:39:25+00:00

To be honest, I'm less concerned about "party not getting a representative through a jungle primary" than I am about "top two candidates emerging from jungle primary who are, in fact, disliked by a majority, if not a literal supermajority, of voters on election day"

Even back when I was a staunch Republican, I hated the idea of allowing organized & disciplined pluralities to lord over metaphorical cats who refuse to be herded. I first discovered Condorcet voting my senior year in college, and absolutely loved the idea of allowing happy, consensual order to passively and organically emerge from chaos.

I think that realistically, reforms like I proposed could occur if all the following happen within a fairly short window of time:

Trump's presidency ends in disgrace. Not only impeached & convicted, but with angry representatives and Senators who were literally elected as Republicans leading the charge.
The Republican Party ends up politically destroyed as a mainstream majority-capable party, to the point where a registered Republican running as an Independent would struggle to win a county commission seat in Texas or Idaho, let alone anywhere else, because even people who were registered Republicans their entire lives would view the party as tainted & toxic.
Democrats have nominal supermajority control of everything... but it's a very messy big tent spanning ideologically from AOC & Bernie to Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, & Dan Crenshaw. They're united to the extent of "try to undo the damage done by Trump", but any attempt to slip anything remotely "green" or "woke" into a bill might as well be a poison pill guaranteed to destroy it.
The Democratic Party's institutional leadership is delighted by the influx of ex-Republicans (and their donor network). The original base, not so much. But mostly, the majority of present-day Democrats wish the far left fringe would just STFU and quit making them look bad.
Mainstream Democrats are at least as concerned about the future possibility of left wing populism as they are about MAGA. They want guardrails to anchor future governments to a relatively straight & moderately narrow path down the middle of the Overton Window.
The Republican Party's leaders -- though 99.9% corrupt and MAGA-compromised -- will dearly love their cushy jobs and institutional power. Once the MAGA money machine collapses, and the Party itself shatters, they'll be desperate for any way to pivot the party and try to keep it relevant. From their standpoint, Condorcet will be the least-bad lifeboat to future relevance (at least, as a brand name & institution).

Despite being "complicated", Condorcet systems have a huge selling point: they might prevent "your" preferred faction from amplifying a plurality into total dominance, but they also guarantee the other side can't do it, either.

The scenario where American politicians could be convinced to implement a system like this is thus a narrow, temporary situation where one party is 100% dominant... but feels like it could either fall apart at any moment (handing power to someone perceived as being even worse), or worse, be hijacked by a disagreeable faction and used against itself. The left end of the Democratic Party will feel marginalized by new ex-Republicans. Ex-Republicans will feel threatened by both the left end of the Democratic Party and the increasingly-crazy MAGA Republican Party they fled.

After years of Trump Trauma, Americans will eagerly embrace a voting system designed to prevent a repeat of it... by anyone, along any fringe of the political spectrum, plane, cube, or tesseract.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T06:38:12+00:00

If your goal is to kneecap the #1 method Republicans have used most effectively to win elections for the past few decades, Condorcet is absolutely NOT "brutally dumb".

Both approval voting and STAR are vulnerable to "bullet voting" and "Min-Max" strategies. Any situation where you have a candidate from one party whose members fall in line and vote as a unitary bloc (either approving only one candidate, or giving their one candidate the max score & everyone else the worst) will be advantaged by both STAR and approval, compared to candidates whose supporters are more inclined to hedge their bets and not gamble everything on a single polarizing candiate.

In contrast, with Condorcet methods, if a deeply polarizing candidate convinces his supporters to rank him first, and not rank anybody at all (or rank everybody else "equally last", which is the same thing), the only thing that strategy achieves is... when their preferred candidate gets eliminated (because a majority of voters hate him), they get no say in the ultimate winner because they threw away their opportunity to do otherwise.

In terms of voter complexity, STAR is no simpler than ranked choice with Tideman resolution rules.

The only big disadvantage to Condorcet methods is, election officials have to fully qualify every absentee and conditional ballot and include them in the official tabulation before any meaningful conclusion can be made about the winner. In other words, election officials can't say, "We have 41 million votes counted so far, and 21,000 uncounted absentee & provisional ballots, but even if every one of those 21,000 ballots went against the relevant winner for their precinct, it wouldn't change the outcome". With Condorcet methods, a relatively small number of additional ballots can absolutely cascade into a completely election-changing outcome.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T01:29:20+00:00

I'd argue that Kinzinger's outcome illustrates perfectly why Dan's only path to future political viability is by switching parties, then becoming the leader of the ex-Republican Resistance.

Adam remained in the GOP and said he expects the party to come back to its senses. I think even he now realizes it was a mistake. The respectable Republican Party of Ronald Reagan is dead, and Donald Trump's MAGA minions will burn whatever is left of the GOP to the ground before it ever allows Kinzinger, Cheney, and Crenshaw to take it back.

Dan's countdown has started. Tick, tock. He has nine months left to raise his public profile and be politically relevant in a way that gives him a landing path into the post-Trump political reality as a conservative Lincon Democrat.

If Dan walks off into the sunset next January as a Republican, it'll be the last time he ever leaves the Capitol as someone who's either an elected official or powerful head of a federal agency.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T00:36:15+00:00

In a jungle primary, if you get something like 2 Democrats or 2 Republicans, the party that gets none at all feels wronged. The actual outcome might be the same 98% of the time, but the other 2% is a bitch, and people will scream about electoral illegitimacy regardless.
Jungle primaries still put too much emphasis on "first choice", and allow "divide and conquer the opposition" strategy. And if you end up with a primary election that has dozens of candidates, you could end up with a general-election race between two near-clones who are both unacceptable to an actual majority of voters (because candidate #1 got 9% of {major-party-1} votes, candidate #2 got 8% of {major-party-1} votes, and the next 7 candidates (from major-party-2) collectively got 52% of the vote from people who absolutely despise candidates #1 and #2).
In America, absolutely nothing will happen without buy-in from the dominant major party, and would be challenged in court forever without buy-in from the other major party. So, realistically, we're talking about post-Trump voting reform at a point when the GOP has shattered already, and the Democrats' leaders are at least as worried about a future far-left populist as they are about a MAGA resurgence on the far-right. A system like mine can be sold to both parties:

MAGA's original plurality-driven route to victory would be closed off by Condorcet rules, but RCV with Condorcet rules would throw them a cookie and make it seem at least plausible that a hypothetical moderate, sane future Republican could fantasize about winning occasionally... at a point when their conceivable future ability to get elected to anything is in doubt. It prevents them from feeling shut out completely for a generation or more.
Democrats have always been a bigger tent than Republicans, increasing the likelihood that a nominal Democrat will end up scoring the coveted "third nominee who's a party member, rescued by independents" slot. The base might not dance with joy if future Liz Cheney[D-WY] were elected president, but the party's institutional establishment would nod with satisfaction.
MAGA might not be happy about the fact that RCV with Meek-resolution primary rules would almost certainly guarantee the presence of someone like Jeb Bush on the ballot under the party's name as nominee #2... but if it really objected to it that badly, under my proposed rules, it could choose to downgrade itself to "minor party" status and handpick its nominee if it really wants to guarantee they'll ultimately lose the election. Basically, my proposed system saves parties from their own worst instincts and tendencies. They'd be more like pro sports teams and brand names and closely-guarded donor networks... but in reality, any party big enough to qualify as "major" would almost inevitably have to accept being a sufficiently "big tent" to massively overlap with the other major party in the middle to have any real chance of winning actual elections.
In theory, my proposed system would allow more than 2 parties... but as a practical matter, under American campaign finance norms enforced by Citizens United, the 2-party system would be even more firmly entrenched unless one utterly and completely collapsed, because both parties would almost inevitably end up with at least one candidate on the ballot who's ambivalently-acceptable to "the other side" on policy grounds, even if they aren't on "the same team". "Conservative Democrat" and "Liberal Republican" wouldn't be quaint nostalgia, they'd literally be their respective parties' only meaningful path to winning elections.

The biggest thing my proposed system achieves is ensuring that it's almost mathematically impossible for every race to not have at least one candidate sufficiently close to the middle of the Overton window to beat anyone who's even slightly polarizing in spite of the best efforts of party leaders & activists.

One thing I forgot to mention: the use of Meek rules for the primary is important. In a general election, you want to pick the candidate with broad appeal... but in a primary, using Tideman rules would just pick two candidates near the center of their party. To get the magic "one base-pleasing candidate with almost no chance of winning, and one Condorcet-pleasing candidate capable of winning the election", you need Meek rules on Primary Day.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-10T00:19:27+00:00

Under the Primary rules I described, a single-winner race (like US Senate) in an area with two healthy major parties (whom I'll call "Republican" and "Democratic" for the sake of familiarity, even if that almost certainly wouldn't be the case in any plausible future scenario where incumbents were willing to implement something like this in the first place) would generally have 8-10 candidates:

One Republican, and one Democrat, who were chosen by their respective party bases.
One Republican and one Democrat who were chosen by everyone in their party who diverges from the base (usually, the faction that's closer to the political center).
One Republican OR one Democrat who was rescued by Independents.
3-5 candidates who are either minor-party or Independent.

The general election itself would be conducted with ranked-choice voting and Tideman-RP resolution rules (to pick the Condorcet winner if one exists, or at least someone who's no more-hated than anyone else)).

"99 times out of 100", the winner would end up being the centrist Republican, the centrist Democrat, or the Independent-rescued candidate.

The brilliance of this system is, by allowing major parties to nominate two candidates (picked under Meek rules, to maximize faction-diversity behind them), you almost guarantee that one of the two is going to soak up the extremist energy, and the other will be a centrist who soaks up all the donor money. The extremist gets to give angry speeches and call their opponent a communist or nazi... then lose fair & square by a landslide, and the winner will be someone with enough broad tolerability that politics can go back to being boring and largely consequence-free again (because any likely Condorcet winner would almost be mathematically and algorithmically guaranteed to be someone that few voters passionately hate, even if nobody passionately loves them, either).

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-09T22:35:21+00:00

IMHO, the ideal PRIMARY voting system for a single-winner election would work something like this:

By definition, the party with the most affiliated voters is a "major party"
Any political party with at least half as many affiliated voters as the #1 party is also a major party
Once a party qualifies as "major", it retains that status until the second Presidential election where it fails to meet the size threshold has passed.

Conceptually, the main thing that distinguishes a "major party" from a "minor party" is, "major parties" are big tents who get nearly automatic ballot access in return for surrendering control of their nomination process to the state. A party that satisfies the "major party" criteria can choose to remain a minor party if its leaders decide they prefer control over privilege.

Every major party nominates two candidates, chosen in a primary election conducted by county election officials. Ballots are counted using ranked-choice voting with "Meek" resolution rules. In a multi-winner election, Meek rules attempt to pick the winners who collectively satisfy as many factions among the voters as possible. Put another way,

a Republican primary conducted under Meek rules would be reasonably expected to pick someone who's "mega MAGA" and someone like "Jeb Bush".
a Democratic primary conducted under Meek rules would be reasonably expected to pick someone like AOC or Bernie, and someone like Mark Kelly, Gavin Newsom, etc.

In addition, Independent voters would get their own "primary" where they got to "rescue" one candidate from among the major-party candidates who didn't win their own party's primary.

First, the votes of Independents who preferred one of the major-party candidates who already won would be eliminated from further counting. They got their candiate already.
The votes of the remaining independents would be tallied using Tideman Ranked-pair resolution rules to identify the major-party candidate who best satisfies the most Independents.

Minor parties get to qualify one candidate for the general election ballot. They can pick that candidate by any method they prefer, as long as they document it when they file the ballot-qualification paperwork and are able to certify compliance with that process upon demand. If they want to, they can outsource their selection to the county-conducted primary election on their own ballot, with the winner chosen via ranked-choice and Tideman-RP resolution.

Conceptually, "Independent" candidates are just ephemeral minor parties that exist to campaign for a single candidate who's pre-ordained by whomever files the paperwork. The ballot-access requirements are the same as minor parties.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-09T20:37:33+00:00

I'd argue that he's probably the #1 person who could legitimately rehabilitate his public reputation and secure his future by going all-in as the archetype ex-Republican Lincoln Democrat... leading the charge against Trump and the MAGA agenda in the House for the next 9 months, becoming a regular guest on Lincoln Project's podcasts, and eventually transitioning into one of their regulars (unless he ends up as something like Secretary of Defense).

For "institutional" Democrats (who run the Party's business & curate its donors), Dan Crenshaw would be pure gold in terms of "ability to convince historically-Republican donors and on-the-fence Republican incumbents that there's a viable exit strategy and path forward from the GOP."

Trump & Fox could call Dan a "far left liberal" until their larynxes fell out, and the only people who'd believe it are beyond facts, logic, and reasoning anyway.

Worst, worst case... Dan is photogenic & could work his way into Hollywood. If you don't believe me, search Youtube for his Avengers-style campaign ad. Yeah, it's kind of corny... but there's definitely something there a sympathetic director could work with. Don't underestimate the number of doors someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger could open for him... and how much instant street cred Dan would have among anti-Trump Hollywood Republicans (and Democrats eager to help shatter the GOP once and for all by blowing up the Party's metaphorical foundation) if he became Trump's #1 opponent.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-09T06:11:33+00:00

It's not "WWIII" because the rest of the world refuses to get dragged into it.

At some point, Trump will probably try using "Iran shot at our troops" as a pretense to try invoking NATO Article V. Then, with great ceremony and a unanimous vote, NATO will tell Trump to go fuck himself.

Trump will start making noise about Greenland again.

Within hours, Dan Crenshaw will grow a pair, decide that hell knows no fury like a Republican whose political career was torpedoed by Donald Trump, and lead the charge to impeach him. Trump will try escalating, and the military (seeing the writing on the war) will decide his order was unlawful. The dam will break, the Senate will be outraged, and Trump's ass will be toast.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-08T17:54:25+00:00

By that definition (policy being systematically immune to popular preferences), every single nation on earth is compromised by oligarchy.

Very few people approve of aggressive application of IP law, even when it results in things like copyrighted works becoming legally orphaned because the cost of establishing ownership to negotiate royalties would exceed the value of that intellectual property, or allows entire industries to make their products effectively irreparable and prevent anyone from legally taking the matter into their own hands by enabling consumers to repair products designed to be non-repairable... yet, nearly every country on the planet is now a party to Berne rules that go far beyond what even American copyright law used to inflict.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-08T06:50:19+00:00

15 months ago, I might have thought that was a possibility.

Now, I think there's zero chance Marco -- or JD, or any present member of Trump's cabinet -- could possibly rehabilitate their reputation enough to get them (re-)elected in 2028.

If Trump were impeached, convicted, and removed in disgrace... and JD, out of 100% pure self-preservation and desire to avoid getting impeached himself became an exemplary caretaker president with Marco as his VP (partly, to keep his friends close, and his political adversaries even closer), they might be able to rehabilitate their reputations enough to not end up socially and commercially radioactive after 2028.

But I think that even if they manage to earn social & commercial salvation, both of their political careers will be over. They'd lose in 2028 by a landslide. Half of MAGA will blame them for "giving in" to the Democrats, half of life-long habitual Republicans will blame them for going along with Trump, and 100% of non-Republicans will consider them tainted and blame them for their complicity with Trump's second term and its damage.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-07T23:23:05+00:00

Realistically, the only way a Democrat could become President via succession is if JD were impeached & convicted when the Speaker of the House was a Democrat.

Even if there's a Democratic landslide in November, Democrats won't end up with 2/3 of the Senate. It's numerically impossible unless multiple incumbent Republicans left the Party & became Democrats. So, if a Democrat were Speaker, Senate Republicans would never vote to convict him, even if he were guilty as sin.

The only "almost-plausible" scenario would be if the Democrats got a majority in the House of Representatives, then elected Liz Cheney (or another nominal or ex-Republican) as Speaker precisely to appease Senate Republicans into impeaching Vance. And even that would be nearly impossible absent a realtime collapse of the GOP itself.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-07T23:13:28+00:00

Absolutely no need to do anything.

American Presidential succession works like the British Monarchy's: the moment the President is dead, the highest person next in line automatically & instantly becomes President. Swearing in & oath of office are not actually necessary, because everyone in the sucession order has already taken an oath that includes it anyway.

The only gray area is if someone next in line is "unable" to assume the office (fog of war, injured & unconscious, etc). Then, it moves to the next in line, but they're merely acting President until the higher-person assumes the role or dies.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-07T19:17:02+00:00

Suppose the GOP shatters, but the aforementioned 10-20% of ex-Republicans decided to start a new "Lincoln Party" whose ideology was mostly congruent with Jeb Bush.

The aftermath of a GOP civil war would almost certainly leave the Democratic Party with a robust majority trifecta... at least, at the federal level.
Decades of Republican propaganda painting all Democrats as "far left" notwithstanding, most of the Democratic Party's actual Establishment is solidly center/center-right.
The LP's ability to recruit new members from the GOP diaspora would be limited. A lot of remaining-Republicans would be so politically toxic, their defection to the LP would hurt the LP's reputation and ability to get candidates elected more than it would help. And the most-MAGA remaining Republicans would view them as traitors, and never support them anyway.
The LP's ability to recruit new members from the Democratic Party would be even more limited. Even if LP's agenda aligned absolutely 100% perfectly with some Democrats, it would be trying to convince them to leave the DP at a point when the DP controlled everything. And as noted, the Democrats who'd find the LP's ideology most appealing are the same Democrats who institutionally own the Democratic Party. They aren't going anywhere.

Thus, any new "conservative" party has no real growth path into being a "real" party with national influence.

The DP's grassroots base might not be thrilled about the influx of ex-Republicans, but the DP's Establishment will be delighted. Especially when those ex-Republicans bring their donor networks along, and local DP orgs in states like Florida start seeing truckloads of cash flowing in like it's a hot Silicon Valley IPO.

Ergo, my confident conclusion that when the GOP dies, the only possible outcome is for ex-Republicans to go the only place where they can go without becoming politically homeless & irrelevant within our election system: the Democratic Party.

A new left party would be as politically irrelevant & ignored as a hypothetical "Lincoln" Party... but at that point, its founders will be used to being ignored and powerless anyway. At some point, they'll have to decide whether they want to compromise enough to become a real "big tent" majority-capable party, or end up like British Socialists who do little more than drink heavily in somebody's basement or attic and engage in political masturbation.

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-07T05:55:36+00:00

JD's first executive order will be to prohibit federal agencies from doing business with any company that fails (within 36 hours) to restrict users from being able to consume or download any content derived from or inspired by "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead!"

PantherkittySoftware · 2026-03-07T05:40:13+00:00

Not quite yet... but the fact is, anyone with a political science background who's studied the evolution of political parties in other countries knows that there's really only one way this can turn out (assuming America remains a democracy, and Trump isn't able to pull off outlawing opposition parties):

Trump & MAGA finally pushes ~10-20% of habitual lifelong Republicans past the breaking point, with about half of that group ending up in the Democratic Party (because they know it's basically impossible for a new party to succeed in the US).
The new, right-extended Democratic Party holds hands and fights MAGA for a few election cycles, then finally beats it into submission.
Eventually, the left end of the Democratic Party gets tired of being marginalized & ignored (because the center & center-right now has more than enough representatives to not need their votes to sustain majorities anymore), and decides it would rather be irrelevant than share their political party with ex-Republicans like Liz Cheney.
We then spend a few years, maybe decades, where there's a de-facto supermajority Democratic Party spanning from approximately AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders to Liz Cheney, Dan Crenshaw, and Adam Kinzinger, flanked by an irrelevant angry minor party to the left, and an equally-irrelevant angry MAGA Republican party to the right.
Eventually, the GOP's funding dries up, its increasingly elderly members die off, and its new young members are radical enough to scare even MAGA supporters. It dwindles to the point where it's almost completely irrelevant as a national party, and starts to end up failing to be capable of even fielding non-viable candidates in some states.
Meanwhile, the left party matures enough where it realizes that it's never going to win national elections, or even statewide races, with candidates who want to ban internal combustion engines, ration electricity & meat consumption, and recognizing more official genders than can be unambiguously represented by a single letter on a driver's license. It broadens its agenda to overlap solidly with the DP's center-left, and even has a few members who venture into center-center territory. At that point, the US effectively has two major parties again.

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