Idk how this joke n now sound bite made it to the pod.. it’s kinda just middle school humor, no hate just never understood the meme blow up.

truly insane what this show does

A confidential polling memo circulating among anxious Democrats is confirming some of their worst fears: President Joe Biden’s support has started to tumble in key electoral battlegrounds in the wake of his disastrous debate performance in Atlanta, and Biden’s diminished standing is now putting previously noncompetitive states like New Hampshire, Virginia, and New Mexico in play for Donald Trump. What’s more, Biden has taken such a reputational hit that he is polling behind other alternative Democratic candidates—including Kamala Harris and Gretchen Whitmer—in hypothetical one-on-one matchups against Trump.

The memo was put together after the debate by OpenLabs, a progressive nonprofit that conducts polling and message-testing for a constellation of Democratic groups, including the 501(c)4 nonprofit associated with Future Forward, the preferred Super PAC for Biden’s reelection campaign. OpenLabs is something of a black box: Their website is mostly blank, they don’t seek publicity, and their client list is closely held. But their data-driven memos are trusted in Democratic circles, and typically passed around to a small group of clients and strategists. One of those Democrats forwarded me the  on Tuesday morning.

The poll—conducted online in the 72 hours after the debate and emailed to interested parties on Sunday—found that 40 percent of the Biden voters in 2020 that were surveyed now believe the president should end his campaign. That represents a significant shift from their last survey in May, which showed that only a quarter of Biden 2020 voters said he should drop out. Biden is also taking a major hit among swing voters: By a 2-to-1 margin, they believe Biden should exit the race.

This is, of course, only a single poll, conducted during the initial aftershocks of the debate. It will take a few weeks to determine if Biden’s slippage in the polls is a trend and not a blip. But given their reputation inside the party and connections to Future Forward, OpenLabs is a firm that Democratic campaigns take seriously.

The poll found that Biden has dropped only slightly in the national horse race against Trump, by .08 points. That mostly squares with the public narrative from the Biden campaign in the wake of the debate, as their team has labored to calm Democratic panic over Biden’s ability to beat Trump in November. Geoff Garin, one of Biden’s top pollsters, tweeted over the weekend that the campaign’s internal polling showed that the national race was mostly unchanged. “The debate had no effect on the vote choice,” he said. “The election was extremely close and competitive before the debate, and it is still extremely close and competitive today.” Polls conducted immediately after the debate by CNN and FiveThirtyEight suggested similarly negligible gains for Trump nationally, with CNN reporting that “just 5 percent of respondents say it changed their minds about whom to vote for.”

But according to OpenLabs, that’s only part of the story. While the debate may have barely registered in national data, in their surveys of key Electoral College states where voters are paying closer attention to the campaign, Biden is doing noticeably worse. In a poll including third-party candidates, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president has fallen by around 2 points in every single core battleground—and also in states that were not even on the 2024 map last week. In the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania, Biden now trails by 7 points, compared to 5 points before the debate. He has also dropped in Michigan, where he now trails Trump by 7. OpenLabs also found that he is now losing by roughly 10 points in Georgia and Arizona, and by almost 9 points in Nevada.

The most worrisome angle to all this is that Trump is now within striking distance in a variety of states that weren’t considered campaign battlegrounds last week. Biden is now only winning by a fraction of a point in Virginia, Maine, Minnesota, and New Mexico—and he’s now only winning Colorado by around 2 points. 

The survey also found that Biden is now losing in New Hampshire, news that aligns with a Saint Anselm College  released Monday showing Trump suddenly winning the Granite State. It’s the drip-drip of polls like these that will continue to put pressure on Biden and his team in the coming weeks, even as they seek to move on from the debate, as my colleague John Heilemann astutely  on Monday. The other signal that will be closely watched by the Biden campaign is whether senior party members, many of whom made a show of circling the wagons over the weekend, begin to break ranks. If Biden’s falling stature starts to damage Senate and House candidates down the ballot, Democrats on Capitol Hill might take their private concerns public and demand that Biden step aside before the Democratic National Convention in August.

OpenLabs—surely to the disappointment of the White House—also decided to test other possible Democratic replacements for Biden in matchups against Trump. The results were sobering. Harris, Whitmer, Gavin Newsom, and Pete Buttigieg all poll ahead of Biden in every battleground state. (Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, blows away Trump in her home state.) OpenLabs ran a similar survey back in September, and found no differences between any of those Democrats and Biden.

In the poll, Harris saw her favorable rating climb above Biden. As for the other would-be candidates, they obviously aren’t as well known as Biden and Harris, but OpenLabs tweaked their data to account for name recognition, extrapolating views of the lesser-known candidates to voters that don’t have an opinion using demographics and the voter file. 

That adjustment was eye-opening. Whitmer and Buttigieg demonstrated serious strength against Trump in the electoral college in a two-way race, with both of them polling above 50 percent in states totaling between 260 and 301 electoral votes. Harris and Newsom, meanwhile, did not benefit from the name recognition adjustment

Their polling data leaked that for the first time Harris is polling ahead of Biden.Nancy has turned on them and called for cognitive tests for him and TrumpClyburn said he would support Harris if Biden stepped aside.

This is the most hopeful I've felt all year. ^^

Excerpt: "It’s just a brutal, brutal sport to enjoy right now. The product gets more and more boring over time. Every team plays identically, and that’s statistically true, so don’t fight me on it. The pundits are obsessed with being smarter than everyone and they won’t allow any challenge to their most sacred nostrum, which is that the league has never had more talent. Perhaps this is true, in some objective sense, but I don’t watch basketball with a protractor, and this supposedly incredibly-talented league sure is full of guys like Donovan Mitchell and Anthony Davis and, yes, Jayson Tatum, who it’s simply impossible for me to be inspired by. Yes, I’m sure Davis has more midichlorians than Shawn Kemp and will rate far higher on the Ringer’s Top 1000 list that Kevin O’Connor will be working on until he’s 80. Cool. If you’d rather watch Davis shoot another half-hearted three and then complain to the ref than watch Shawn Kemp, I don’t know what to say to you other than “eat shit.”"

Full column:

I'm not a mathematician or a particularly "smart" person but I watched the entire 4 hour run last night. I was kind of freaked out. My potentially incorrect takeaway was that Eric is genuinely concerned about the spread of misinformation in the modern day, and people's tendency to bass things in emotion and "spiritualism" or whatever you'd like to call it, over data. He's also genuinely concerned about unnecessary gate keeping and false senses of superiority in the academic field which hinders science.

He thought it was a possibility that just because Terrance labeled his ideas in a non-mainstream way, that beneath the relatively meaningless labels, there may have been some interesting takeaways from some of his view points. He spent a great deal of time trying to wrangle in the attention of Howard and Joe so that he could get Terrance to present a framework of his beliefs, regardless of labels, so that he could then attempt to evaluate the ideas behind these labels.

Came off to me as though Joe has an aggravatingly short attention span, like many of us, and couldn't understand what Eric was trying to do, so interrupted him constantly with irrelevant questions that brought no one any closer to understanding anything.

Eric acknowledged that if given even a small amount of wiggle room, Howard would go off on repetitive, meaningless tangents every single time, completely missing the meat of what Eric was trying to explain, and Joe would then buy into these rants and get caught up in the wall of nonsense, forcing Eric to have to directly address the nonsense as apposed to using that time to accomplish his goal of getting Terrence to put together some kind of coherent frame work.

Eric was also displeased that Joe, having the number one podcast in the world, would bring on someone like Terrance and not press him when he says something like "1+1 does not equal 2". This, in Eric's eyes, is irresponsible being that Joe has such a large reach and therefore a responsibility to challenge guests when they say seemingly blatantly ridiculous things. In the initial Terrance interview, Joe seemed to have believed everything he said and if I remember correctly, kept referring to him as a genius. Being that people look up to Joe, it was like gasoline on a disinformation fire.

I love what Eric was trying to do here and I think his patience is absolutely fucking commendable, but I also think he did Terrance and other viewers that may believe Terrance a disservice by not being more firm with him in the idea that he is, for the most part, talking absolute nonsense and contributing to an epidemic-scale issue in the world. I say this because it was blatantly obvious to me in the end that Terrance, in his delusion, left the podcast completely unshaken in his beliefs and even of the belief that Eric thinks terrrance is correct.

I think Terrance is suffering from some kind of personality disorder or mental illness. I am well aware that Eric spent 4 hours of his valuable time to sit down with Terrance and try his best to get through to him while also using Joe’s platform to address a lot of serious issues. I am also aware that he tried his best in the most cordial way possible to get Terrance to understand. But I think Terrance’s delusion is so deep that the stroking of Terrance’s ego at times by Eric in an attempt to not offend him and maintain his attention is what may have contributed to no progress being made towards what I perceive to be his goal of getting Terrance to stop spreading misinformation.

I’m also concerned that Joe spent the majority of the pod interrupting and preventing an important mission from getting accomplished, only to then be visibly agitated in the end that the podcast ran so long.

Id like to close by saying that Rogan is more successful than I’ll ever be. He is not an idiot. If anything I am an idiot. Eric is a damn good man, as shown by his patients and thoughtfulness. I admire and envy his critical thinking and self-awareness. I feel sad when I think about Terrance because, as seen in his childlike ventures to get props, that he is blatantly mentally ill. He believes all of this enough to have devoted all of this time to it. He believes it enough to stand up at Oxford and present it. It’s similar to Kanye’s run for president. I hope he finds peace.

A longtime member of the Democratic National Committee is urging the party to establish a process to replace President Biden this summer.

The member, James Zogby, formerly part of the party’s executive committee, made the suggestion in a memo to Jamie Harrison, the D.N.C. chair.

Mr. Zogby, who shared the memo with The New York Times, said in it that many Democrats “are afraid of the uncertainties or even chaos” that could come if Mr. Biden stepped down. But he wrote that the “matter of finding a replacement is no longer speculative,” adding, “It is urgent and it isn’t going to go away.”

As a D.N.C. member for more than three decades who has also advised several presidential campaigns, Mr. Zogby holds limited sway over the party’s current leadership, but he could influence other stalwarts who are scrambling for other alternatives.

The process Mr. Zogby outlines in the memo, however, starts with an unlikely prospect: Mr. Biden announcing that he would drop out of the race. He also suggests that Mr. Biden instruct the party not to simply designate Vice President Kamala Harris as the nominee, but instead meet after the Fourth of July to “lay out a one-month campaign schedule to select the party’s nominee.”

Potential candidates would then need to secure the endorsements of 40 current D.N.C. members, including four from each of the party’s four regions, from the roster of roughly 400 members.

“Given the relatively small number of D.N.C. members,” he wrote, “such a process will most likely result in not more than five potential nominees.”

The party would then host two televised events for the candidates to “make their cases before Democratic voters across the country.”

The process would conclude at the party’s August convention in Chicago, Mr. Zogby suggested, where candidates would be formally nominated and votes would be taken among the delegates.

“The excitement generated by this process and the attention it will be given will be a plus for our eventual nominee,” he wrote.

 is a Los Angeles-based political reporter for The Times, focused on political attitudes and demographic change. 

I(36F) have two nieces 17 and 13, which I love and care about. I used to babysit a lot for the older one and always imagined having a close friendship with her. Nothing is further than the reality.

Their mother is a stay at home mom and my brother work’s his ass off to keep the family at float. She refuses to get a job but always complains about the lack of money they have. She always found excuses not to get a job( like: my children are needing me especially in their teen years since these are the crucial years” or “my girls cannot stay without their mom”- but they go to school by their own by bus etc)

A few months ago she(SIL) stopped talking to me and in don’t know what is causing this problem. I tried several times to approach this but got no answer. I’ve been very helpful to her for a long time and especially when she had a stroke and had no insurance and had to pay a big bill at the hospital.

Since I had my own daughter I did not have as much time to be the helping person I used to be and my husband is always telling me, I am a people pleaser when it comes to them and all efforts go unappreciated by them. I don’t think so, since we exchanged favours many times and it never bothered me to help whenever o could even though I had to go out of my way to do so. My family is like this and it is hard to explain the urge that I get to help whenever I am asked. Maybe I should discuss this in therapy.

This year both of my nieces had their birthdays and I wanted to go and say Happy Birthday and give them a gift, bur both times I was rejected and it was made clear that the family was not included in the party thrown for each of the girls. I respected their boundaries and instead I sent them some money in their bank accounts and wished them a happy birthday over the phone.

My daughter turns 5 and we have a small party with children of her own age and of course the grandparents and close friend(some don’t have children).

AITA if I don’t invite my nieces and their mother? My brother i out of town and can’t come.

I mean what are the odds that the exact years I was growing up was when sports, movies, music, and society in general were all at their absolute peak.

When I was growing up every single NBA game had Michael Jordan playing in it hitting clutch buzzer beaters and Shaq breaking backboards. I don’t remember a single boring game in the entire decade.

Why does nobody else realize that everything sucks now during the years where I’m a nearly middle aged man?