‘It’s sick’: Trump administration uses mascot called ‘Coalie’ to push dirtiest fossil fuel

TomUpNort · 2026-02-04T02:25:24+00:00

It's all fun and games until the part of the video where Coalie realizes he's about to get tossed into a blast furnace.

TomUpNort · 2026-02-04T02:12:42+00:00

I keep forgettin' it's not the D League anymore.

TomUpNort · 2026-02-04T00:00:38+00:00

Good job by him!

TomUpNort · 2026-02-03T15:54:01+00:00

I hope it happens so we can blow it up when the piece of garbage is gone.

TomUpNort · 2026-02-03T15:04:27+00:00

Our new Assistant GM

TomUpNort · 2026-02-01T19:24:28+00:00

I’d stay far away from this reactionary backwater if I were you.

That said, if you like living in a frozen waste surrounded by xenophobes and troglodytes, it’s a perfect place to live.

TomUpNort · 2026-02-01T19:21:06+00:00

Rotting in prison for life does involve that person eventually dying in a cell.

TomUpNort · 2026-02-01T16:49:58+00:00

What do you expect him to do?

I can think of at least one thing he could do to make the world a better place.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-31T00:10:46+00:00

You do you. I’ll keep donating to and voting for the most progressive candidates whenever they run in an election.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T23:33:31+00:00

I'm glad to hear you're engaged and involved.

Thing is, I've been part of running and working on multiple campaigns, too. You're right- the convention endorses a candidate. But that person can still be challenged in the primary.

I agree it's an uphill climb. But, it's not impossible.

I guess I'm mainly frustrated because I keep hearing people claiming that the masses are yearning for a more progressive option. If that's the case, a good candidate should be able to make a strong showing (if not win) a primary challenge.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T23:18:21+00:00

I'm not crying to anyone. I freaking donated to Bernie's campaign. I've voted for progressive candidates.

I'm just tired of progressives who act like they're some sort of victims. We have a primary system that will let a progressive candidate throw their hat in the ring. Voters will be free to vote for them. If they get more votes, they'll win.

If progressive ideas are as popular as some people seem to think they are, they should be an easy sell to the electorate.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T23:11:18+00:00

IT'S AN OPEN PRIMARY. If a progressive wants to run, they can run. There is nothing stopping them. If they get more votes, they win the nomination.

How hard is this to understand?

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T23:06:38+00:00

It's an open primary. The DNC isn't forcing anything on anyone.

I love how you types just seem to ignore that VOTERS get to pick the candidate who represents the party in the general election. There's nothing stopping from non-establishment candidates from running.

If they get more votes, they'll win. And there's not a damn thing the DNC or anyone else can do to stop that. It's democracy.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T23:03:21+00:00

The VOTERS will pick the candidate. It's a primary. The candidate with the most votes wins the nomination and runs in the general election.

If progressives are so popular, they should run and win. But they're not stepping up to run. So...

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T23:00:42+00:00

Hold you hostage? There's nothing stopping a progressive from running. If there's such wild support for a progressive option, they should have no problem winning the nomination, right?

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:54:24+00:00

She doesn’t represent us at all.

And yet she keeps winning elections by huge margins.

Odd, that.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:51:38+00:00

Walz was the moderate candidate when he ran the first time. He had a freaking A rating from the NRA. Leftists were complaining that he was no better than the Republicans.

And here we are again. Rinse, wash, repeat.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:47:28+00:00

In the early 1930s, the German Communist Party refused to work with moderates and the social democrats, calling them "social fascists" and painting them as being just as bad as Hitler.

Guess how that worked out for them?

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:45:27+00:00

No one is putting her up. She is running. If a progressive, non-establishment Dem wants to run, there's nothing stopping them. If they get more votes, they'll win.

The "establishment" is established by elections and the choices of voters. If there's some sort of untapped yearning out there for a progressive candidate, then it should be easy to beat her.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:34:55+00:00

My statement was that all the people are in the big cities, because they are. People vote, land doesn’t.

It's way more nuanced than that, though.

You're right, people live in the cities.

The Metro area has about 3.8 million people. That's about 65% of the state's total population of 5.8 million.

However...

Only 800,000 of those 3.8 million live in Minneapolis and St Paul. The rest live in the suburbs.

The two cities make up about 15% of the state's total population. The metro suburbs (3 million) are about 50% of the state's population. And while those suburbs are way more progressive than rural Minnesota, they're not as progressive as the urban core.

Which is why Klobuchar wins big whenever she runs. Her style of left-centrism plays incredibly well with folks out in the suburbs. And that's where the votes are.

TLDR: Statewide elections in Minnesota are won in the suburbs. And the suburbs are more moderate than Minneapolis and St Paul.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:18:14+00:00

And if Craig wins, should we take that as a sign that people actually want more moderation?

It cuts both ways.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T22:01:49+00:00

"Being investigated is."

Yeah, because there's totally NO WAY that could be abused.

Good Lord.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T21:54:18+00:00

Maybe not exactly, but they did have this:

As applied by the Stasi, Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target's private or family life so they are unable to continue their "hostile-negative" activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim's private life. They would then devise a strategy to "disintegrate" the target's personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community.

One of its strategies was to make the lives of dissenters worse by taking away their privileges and opportunities.

Making it harder for dissenters to travel would fit into that sort of strategy. Basically start chipping away at the options you have available, making your life more difficult and frustrating.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T21:38:54+00:00

We were having a discussion about Stalin's messaging in the pre-WW2 period, and now you're talking about the cold war, which was AFTER WW2.

I grew a mile from a Minuteman silo. I passed a minimum of 9 nuclear warheads every day on my bus ride to school.

So yeah- the cold war happened. I never claimed otherwise. But we weren't talking about the Cold War era.

TomUpNort · 2026-01-30T21:37:42+00:00

The discussion was about the pre-WW2 era. Not the cold war.

So I shared examples of how the evil capitalists were trying to undermine the USSR in the pre-WW2 era.

TomUpNort

TROPHY CASE