After spending decades slavishly carrying water for the moneyed class

That hasn’t been my experience reading his columns, you got some examples of this?

That said, Krugman says the opinion editor for the last 4 years had interfered with his work, toning him down and adding false equivalences.

So his Substack is basically “Paul Krugman Unleashed” which it turns out is pretty glorious. Example: his “Health Insurance is a Racket” post starts off with a bit of Saint Luigi art.

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point

(I’ve been getting SOOO much mileage out of this headline over the past few months)

The thing is, many of the people who were hurting economically and wanted Trump to change things are already crediting Trump with fixing the economy. Polling in swing states between October and November showed a huge swing in voters perception of the economy even though nothing actually changed. So I’d argue this is just emotion for a significant fraction of voters.

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point

“Masked man with a gun ordering the teller to put the money in the bag faces criticism for risking a bank robbery.”

Hey, he had a degree in “meats” from Texas A&M. That’s basically an alternative prerequisite for nuclear stockpile maintenance.

Supposedly when he was picked for energy secretary he thought the position would be “symbolic coal baron”. He eventually found out about the nukes part, and to his credit he apparently realized the significance.

I certainly can’t think of a more relevant background than “gas executive who goes on Fox News a lot” for leading the organization responsible for the nations nuclear arsenal.

Same here, which is why my Bluesky feed is much better. Everyone wants to be where everyone else is (that isn’t X), and it seems like that’s Bluesky.

I’m gonna echo what others have said here. The mastodon signup process is too complex, and searching for instructions just leads to “what is the fediverse and/or activitypub” explainers.

I created a mastodon account a few years ago and it was my first introduction to the fediverse. It was frustrating and I only persevered because I REALLY wanted to replace twitter.

Once I got it set up, I realized that no one who I followed on twitter was there. My feed is currently like 2 people, plus a bunch of dead accounts from people who dipped their toe in but didn’t stay.

Joining Bluesky was simple, and there were already a bunch of accounts I wanted to follow. The recent influx has increased that, and it feels a lot like old school twitter without the nazis.

People originally joined twitter (and stuck with it for so long) because that’s where everyone else is. Mastadon is too clunky join and use, so people aren’t.

“Yeah but the Bible was talking about Christians, not Haitians and Mexicans”

-evangelicals, probably

I’m pretty sure that time he altered a hurricane map with a sharpie was in the Oval Office.

It’s also an unnecessary use of the passive voice. Did the nativist attacks fall out of the sky and land on the rally? No, Trump made them himself.

Maybe “Bleach blond bad built butch body”?

Referring to Marjorie Taylor Greene as “it” isn’t very nice

Fyi the internet archive has paywall free versions of most Atlantic articles

If the immigration doesn’t work, at least the bomb threats are adding some excitement for the townsfolk.

And this is after Dick Cheney already endorsed Harris…

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point

As usual, Rep. Jeff Jackson (D, NC) offers an insightful take on how this will play out in congress:

The government won’t shut down.

Instead, we’ll play our familiar game.

In round one, the right-flank will demand various poison pills in the government funding bill in exchange for their support. The Speaker will pretend to agree with them. He’ll even do TV interviews where he loudly tells us how much he agrees with them. He really has to sell how much he agrees with them… because of what he’ll do in round two.

Round two is the Speaker throwing his right-flank under the bus and saying no to all their demands.

There are a few ways he can do that, but the most likely path is that he’ll let their version of a funding bill pass the House and then become dead-on-arrival in the Senate. At which point, he’ll turn to his right-flank and say, “Guys, you know I tried. You watched me try. I did all those interviews where I agreed with you. But it looks like we’re outta moves here, so unfortunately I have to remove your excellent suggestions from the budget bill. Really sorry about that.”

Round three is the right-flank pretending to be upset and going on TV to blast the Speaker for his “weakness” - but in reality, losing this fight works well for them.

Why?

Because pretending to be upset on TV is their favorite thing to do, so they won’t be genuinelyupset with the Speaker because he’s giving them an excuse to do it. As I’ve seen many times, this is a group that would rather accept a policy defeat that opens a political opportunity than give up a political opportunity to achieve a policy victory.

So don’t buy the hoopla. Things will get super contentious leading up to September 30th (when the money to fund the federal government runs out), but we’ll get it done.

Source

Robinson is a far right, born again Christian culture warrior. This is newsworthy because it’s extremely hypocritical of him.

But Robinson has used the word “pornography” to describe everything from music and network television to LGBTQ-themed children’s books. During this year’s N.C. Republican Party Convention, for example, Robinson called public school teachers and administrators “all-powerful bureaucrats … who believe it’s OK to feed your children a steady diet of communism and pornography.”

Not that hypocrisy is new to Robinson. He also said

”Abortion in this country is not about protecting the lives of mothers. It’s about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down,”

after having paid for his wife’s abortion.

He has said that trans women should be

“arrested” if they go in a women’s bathroom. Instead, he suggests they should “find a corner outside somewhere” to relieve themselves.

He has also said that “some people just need killing” in a speech where he railed against a variety of evil people including rapists, liberals, socialists and communists.

He is thoroughly a piece of shit, and unfortunately there’s a chance he’ll be the governor of North Carolina. With an extremely Republican state legislature (currently a supermajority), he would be able to make life miserable for a lot of people.