Late-diagnosed autistic, special interest-haver, dad, cyclist, software professional
At what point does this sort of thing stop being politics and start being organized crime? So now I halfway-hope the vigilantes that try to do this will end up facing criminal charges for it
But, I also halfway-expect cops and prosecutors to look the other way if the victims of this kind of crime ends up being the kind of people they’d be disproportionately policing and convicting anyhow
Grew up in a rural red state. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to really understand their politics, and as best I can summarize, here it is:
They are angry about how life has gotten worse for them, economically and culturally.
They have very good reason to be angry about that, because it has.
They are misinformed about what changed since the 50s and 60s, and too many of them seem to think more racism and sexism will restore their prosperity and dignity
They have decided the only thing to do about it any more is to burn everything down until they get the respect they feel entitled to
They are sincerely sad and angry it hasn’t worked yet
The shorter story here, of course, is that the establishment GOP of the late 70s underestimated the willingness of its fascist wing to not die and completely didn’t do the necessary things to prevent the party from being almost completely taken over by fascists
23k is the max annual contribution
If you’re over 50, you can put $30,500 in your 401k, the extra $7500 per year is called a ‘catch-up contribution’
It’s true that the cultural left didn’t suppress wages or unions or offshore manufacturing jobs or cause all those farms to fail or any of those other things, but one thing that made the left vulnerable to such charges is that when the Democrats embraced neoliberalism, they implicitly became the party of credentialed professionals. When the Democrats abandoned the working class to compete for the donor dollars the right had long enjoyed, it meant that the working class went from having 1 party for it to having 2 parties actively working against its interests.
It’s so wild to me that the GOP has been considered the working man’s party by anyone since the 1890s
Consider the possibility that the game here does not depend on Trump winning in the Electoral college- all that needs to happen is Biden not winning 271 or more EC votes for the congress to decide the presidency via the Contingent Election process outlined in article2, sec1 clause3 of the constitution, later modified in the 12th amendment.
In that scenario, each state delegation has 1 vote- and the GOP has enough state-level gerrymanders to control enough state delegations that if it comes to pass that the 12th Amendment process decides the presidency, they are very likely going to be able to install whoever they want.
If the smart money in the GOP has decided Trump won’t win but it still wants him in the oval, anything that prevents Biden from getting 270+ gets them better odds than any other pathway
“should we get rid of the cap so the rich pay a fair share or keep it and collectively pay for things by way of inflation?”
The problem with the latter is honestly that inflation hurts the poor a lot more than it does the wealthy and if anything, gives the wealthy a lot more power. Power is really the issue here- when the rich have the ability to override democracy by spending money, that’s a big damned problem
Damn you, I’m in
The US is monetarily sovereign and can always issue enough currency to meet any demands upon it.
Yes. When congress appropriates funding and it’s signed into law, the effect is that the US Treasury spends that money into existence. The mechanism, of course, is that Treasury directs the fed to issue bonds to create the money, and when you pay taxes that money doesn’t go into an account Congress can spend from, it goes back to the fed to zero out the bonds used to create it.
Of course, if we continue cutting taxes the way we have, that will eventually balloon the amount of currency in circulation and that can be problematic if it’s untethered to reality
I think the biggest problem isn’t the tax rate, but the fact that the billionaire class can circumvent the tax system entirely
That’s only possible because they’re allowed to buy influence in the system to make it allow for that. In reality, the other threats (they’ll take their wealth to other countries and leave us poor) are bluffing; most of their wealth isn’t portable. Also in reality, most of the policies they demand (and get) aren’t democratically popular, they’re only viable because they spend so much collective money on propaganda and think tanks to get people thinking the money will trickle down or that without them as ‘job creators’ all will be spoiled or lost.
It’s bullshit, and it only works because we let it work. Apparently we need to move in hundred-year cycles between letting the titans of industry squeeze everyone dry before we remember to assert public power to prevent that
It’s like the Supreme Court thinks it can supersede the constitution because it thinks the amendment was poorly worded
That, or they had an outcome they wanted and found a way to get it
During his impeachment trials, the GOP argued that impeachments are not a criminal proceeding, they are a political one- so they acquitted on politics saying that this is for the courts to decide. Now that the matter is in the courts, they argue it’s for congress only, not the courts.
With a justice system like this one, who needs torches and pitchforks? /s
there are a lot of birthrights which are increasingly only available if you have money
This is the logical consequence of the anti-new-deal/anti-desegregation/anti-civil-rights jurisprudence that turns on capital supremacy and property rights trumping the notion that the state has an interest in protecting any other sort of right; it’s something the capital supremacy folks have always wanted but which the desegregation crowd finally joined in on when they thought they could get segregation back by backing capital’s ability to smuggle discrimination under the skirts of its property interests.
When you look at the White Flight phenomenon and correlate it to the widespread disappearance of public 3rd places, When you notice that state colleges and universities lost funding and started hiking tuition shortly after desegregation meant black and brown people could attend them, it sure looks like Americans were faced with the decision to have desegregated public wealth or no public wealth, they chose the latter
IMHO one of the biggest failings of the media for the last 50 years has been in the assumption that fundamental policy areas like antitrust (whether enforcement, or non-enforcement) isn’t ‘newsworthy’. The prosperity our reactionaries keep on going on about (that of the 1950s and 60s) owes a lot of its existence to successful antitrust enforcement, and a lot of our dissatisfaction with otherwise-favorable economies today owes itself to un-checked monopoly behavior.
Oh he knows what it actually does- it effectively criminalizes the sort of health care tangentially related to abortion, and when you’ve driven reproductive health care out of your state and made it illegal to travel to get it, you’re that much closer to having total control over women’s bodies. He doesn’t give a shit about babies, he knows that defining embryos as babies will give reactionaries and jurists the ability to treat women of child-bearing age as presumptively criminal if they don’t seem to know ‘their place’.
The whole pretending-to-care-about-babies or life is just a pretext to make pursuit of the thing they really care about- controlling women- socially respectable.
Every time he says some out-of-touch dumb-as-shit thing like this I get hopeful that this will be the thing that’s too absurd, too stupid, too off-the-rails… and then I realize there are so many people that eat this shit up and the real despair sets in
And none of this would be happening without Boothe.
It’s soo interesting that Kennedy’s assassination (which also elevated a VP from the south named Johnson) wasn’t ever talked about like it was more of the confederacy being ungovernable over desegregation and civil rights
On the one hand, their pro-Palestinian politics are morally valid and increasingly popular as the world watches horrifying human rights violations in Gaza- I agree with them, it’s important to put pressure on the Democrats to get on the right side of this issue.
On the other hand, I honestly think we are one GOP sweep victory away from an end to democracy in the USA- and my take on that is that the establishment-Dems probably think a 4-year stint of being punished by Republicans will teach those uppity leftists and minorities to toe the line better and in the interim they’re pretty sure they’ll be fiiine.
The reason I lose sleep over this sort of thing is I believe that once political power becomes decoupled from the consent of the governed, the rights and protections that arise in the constitution will become instead favors granted by an unaccountable power, contingent on whether or not they find you supplicant enough. Also we shouldn’t count on being able to vote our way out of a situation where the rules prevent voting from making a difference- should it come to that, it’s dark days friends
Yeah I still can’t get over how a couple of days later his right ear didn’t have a mark on it. At his age, even with the best of plastic surgery, he wouldn’t have clean skin on an ear for at least a week if he’d actually had a bullet pass through any part of it. I don’t believe things he has to say about his health- he has a pretty solid track record when it comes to not telling the truth about his height, weight, bone spurs, being a stable genius, etc