Yeah, I'm not sure I'd associate cycling quality with a red/blue split. Places like Utah and Idaho are deep red and are practically paradise for cycling. Eastern Washington, where I used to ride a lot when I lived in Seattle, was similarly red yet great for cycling.

Left leaning places are typically more willing to spend money on cycling infrastructure, though, so that's something.

It's actually quite nice. But the US is large, and different places have very different people with very different attitudes towards cyclists (or other road users of any kind, for that matter)

I ride 10,000 km per year in the US and find the vast majority of drivers to be respectful of me.

With that said, there are some crazy people out there who really shouldn't be driving.

In fairness, I've seen people with Actual Intelligence do the same thing.

I don’t know. Recent polls showed the Platner/Collins race as a statistical dead-heat (tied within the margin of error). Collins has massive amounts of money to spend, and significant support from outside of Maine. Platner was generating a lot of enthusiasm; there were many houses with Platner signs in their lawns that had never publicly displayed such support for a candidate before. I think a lot of those people are going to be pretty disillusioned by this entire experience, and it won’t take many former Platner supporters staying home to tip the scales for Collins.

We’ll see what happens…

(edit: some coverage of the poll I mentioned, obviously from before the latest Platner issues were published. centralmaine.com)

His replacement will have no chance. This whole campaign and all the controversy around it have been so poorly managed. The dems have shot themselves in the foot again. So now we get six more years of rapist-enabler Susan Collins. This is not an improvement.

I always remind myself of this when they do something so colossally stupid. It's small comfort, of course, but it's something.

Not quite. The court’s position is that there cannot exist an independent agency. They don’t see any provision for such a thing in the constitution. And if you take a purely literal originalist interpretation of the constitution, they’re right. Nothing in there says anything about “independent agencies”. Such independence was established ~140 years ago by precedent. So they’re not rewriting the dictionary, but they’re certainly rewriting a core legal doctrine that has been in place for >50% of the nations existence.

In my opinion, assuming there’s ever actually an opportunity to fix this mess, a key change we’ll need to make is that there needs to be a higher standard for the supreme court to overturn its own precedent. Like, maybe the vote needs to be unanimous or something. This activist court has been decades in the making, and is radically rewriting much of the foundational doctrine under which the country has operated for generations.

Honestly, 13 is not a lot. It's certainly possible that they've got silent backing of many of the other dems in the house, but even if they do, the fact that they're silent about it tells you that they know this is a risky position to take.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go pair my bike with my phone so I can upgrade the derailleur’s firmware…

I agree that Snowden didn’t have much impact on a broad population, which is really disappointing. However, his leaks went a long way toward encouraging broad use of encryption on the internet. Before Snowden, http:// was a perfectly normal thing to encounter in your browser. Not it’s rare and triggers warnings when it is encountered. Similarly, encrypted SMS (iMessage, RCS, etc) is common, etc. Snowden’s leaks accelerated the deployment of all of these techniques, which is better than nothing.

I agree that it’s not rational. I think it depends a lot on selective memory and compartmentalization. A recent comment on a local news story exemplifies this. Somebody claimed that gas prices being down from their post-Iran-attack peak proves (proves!) that Trump was right again. But they ignore several key facts, like prices are still higher than they were before the war, they’re still higher than they were at the end of the Biden presidency, and that the underlying issues exposed by the war have not been resolved and gas prices may still rise.

Where I live, there are still Trump and MAGA flags all over the place. None have come down over the past year, and many are replaced with new ones as they fade. Nothing Trump has done has put a dent in his support among his most vocal supporters. This is further reflected in the campaigning among the GOP candidates in the recent primary election for the state governor’s position, where they’re basically in a competition to prove that they’re more like Trump than any of the other choices. It goes as far as one using “Fight Like Hell” (remember that one?) as a campaign slogan.

There’s no hope for some people.