PELOSI: "The fact that people have jobs always contributes to an increase in inflation and that’s a good thing." pic.twitter.com/bnBKm1O6Yf
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 13, 2022
Most Americans have come out ahead economically in the pandemic, despite inflation | Analysis https://t.co/3gC1ieulGZ
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 14, 2022
… Red-hot demand for labor means lower-income workers can command wage increases that outpace rising prices. So can middle-income workers who switch jobs.
Relief checks approved by lawmakers of both parties and sent out by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have given the majority of households a cushion. Those higher up the income scale have seen handsome increases in the values of their homes and investment assets.
Even those who fault Biden’s policies for exacerbating inflation risks acknowledge that, right now, the pandemic economy continues to offer large, underappreciated rewards.
“For most people,” concludes Michael Strain, who directs economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, “the current economic situation is good.”…
At realtimeinequality.org, economists at the University of California-Berkeley estimate that disposable income for Americans overall increased by 5.3% after inflation from December 2019 to December 2021. Using that measure, which includes the effects of both labor income and Covid relief payments, the bottom 50% of earners saw their disposable income rise by 10.9%, compared with 3.8% for the middle 40% and 4.4% for the top 10%.
Examining changes in wages alone, Arin Dube of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst estimates that two-thirds of American workers have seen their wages go up after accounting for inflation over the last two years. Over just the last year — when inflation accelerated substantially — roughly one-third of workers have come out ahead, Dube says.
Outsized gains at the bottom of the income scale chip away at inequality and create opportunity for younger workers who fill many lower-skill, lower-paying jobs. The labor market is running hot enough that millions of Americans keep quitting their jobs for higher-paying new ones in what White House economist Bharat Ramamurti calls “The Great Upgrade.”
More affluent older Americans have benefited from booming real estate and financial markets. Since February 2020, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen roughly 19%…
The Biden administration has worked for months to ease choke points in the supply chain for scarce goods such as automobiles. But the principal inflation-fighting power lies with the Fed, and Americans unhappy about inflation today may not like tomorrow’s higher borrowing costs much better.
“The people screaming for Biden to do something do not want the Fed to raise interest rates,” says Betsey Stevenson, a former Obama administration economist now at the University of Michigan. “They want more damn cars.”
Speaking of C.R.E.A.M.:
$200K in missing gold, $268M in missing bitcoin, files labeled w/“dirty” accounts and a package to a Ukraine hotel from darknet vendor of fake passports/bank credentials sealed detention of NY husband in $3.6 billion crypto heist. Along with his wife’s cat https://t.co/NTYqEsALY0
— Spencer Hsu (@hsu_spencer) February 15, 2022
Nicely written article, with photos. He’s got dual citizenship, a Russian passport, and the keys to their financial accounts; she’s got frozen embryos stored here and her frenetic social-media presence. So he’s in jail, she’s out on bail, and we can only await further installments from Razzlekhan, the self-proclaimed “Crocodile of Wall Street.”...
Baud
I’m not 100% sure, but I believe the contents of this post are illegal in a number of Republican-controlled states.
NotMax
Any takers for the proposition the official greeting designation has never been rescinded?
;)
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Shhhhhh…. Maybe they won’t notice.
Benw
What’s the pirate word for treasure?
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: “Heaven no” works for me, I’d rather be in Hell with the sinners anyway.
Baud
And you thought the government was too bureaucratic.
Steeplejack (phone)
@OzarkHillbilly:
That’s why we deliberately avoid becoming a top 10,000 blog—to stay under the radar. ?
Steeplejack (phone)
@Benw:
Loot or booty. Maybe trove, depending on the crossword.
NotMax
@Baud
Holy water under the bridge.
//
germy
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: That’s how-many-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin crazy.
Faith and belief are one thing, but organized religion almost always goes off the deep end, it seems to me. It’s hard to resist becoming about maintaining its own strength and survival.
Baud
@NotMax:
Heh.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Damn, I was baptized in Texas. I never get good news.
Baud
@germy:
That’s what I call a wet dream.
Ken
@germy: I was expecting Cthulhu fan art.
Kay
I just think it’s ideological for media and they should admit that. This was a massive government intervention to prop up the economy, one that pushed supports down to ordinary people, and that goes against the Right wing view that people have to suffer complete economic collapse periodically so they have searched for the downside and found it in inflation.
But they only cover the downside. Full employment is the upside and it’s a big one.
I;m not celebrating inflation. I’m celebrating a successful rescue of an economy that was guided by the fact that ordinary people ARE the economy. It worked.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
That’s how I am too.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Ooooff, NotMax has some competition this AM.
OzarkHillbilly
@Kay: You must be some kinda Commie.
Baud
@Kay:
Obama’s stimulus worked too, just not as well because it was not big enough. We still had to waste all of our time apologizing for it. It’s always the same story. I choose not to play this time.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@NotMax: I didn’t think “hello” had anything to do with “hell” except in these people’s sick little minds. So I looked it up.
Dorothy A. Winsor
My comment at #21 is in moderation. Have I been bad?
Ken
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The real hard-liners claim the rite is invalid unless the words are “ego te baptizo” etc. That would reduce the number of baptized Catholics to under ten million, but omelets, eggs.
danielx
@Baud:
Democratic propaganda: they may not be able to define it, but they know it when they see it.
Soprano2
Boy, this is true. They aren’t going to be happy when the Fed starts to try to get inflation under control. What these people want is for the supply chain to get better and the price of gasoline to go down. I continue to believe a lot of this unhappiness is driven by the higher price of gasoline. Lots of these people bought big gas hog SUV’s during 2020 when gas was super cheap. Somehow people think always think those super cheap prices are going to last forever. I think it’s true that the oil producers are deliberately keeping the price of oil high because they want to make up all the money they lost in 2020, and hurting Biden is probably a bonus for many of them. We know Saudi Arabia for one loved TFG and his kids. Of course, it would also help if the press would quit doing multiple stories every day about how bad inflation is now. They rarely talk about anything else in the economy these days, just inflation.
Baud
@Soprano2:
On the news this morning, they said the used car shortage is mostly because rental car companies didn’t buy as many cars during the pandemic, so they haven’t sold as many used cars when turning over their fleet.
Central Planning
@NotMax: I wonder if he ever saw a sea sheaven. Or when his favorite sports team got beaten did he say they got a sheavenacking. What does he do with his eggsheavens?
Soprano2
@Baud: Maybe, but I have to think it’s also because people aren’t buying new cars as much because of the new car shortage because of the microchip shortage. It’s a domino effect. Same thing happened during the Great Recession – when I bought a car in 2012, I bought a new car for the first time in my life because the used car market was so pathetic and the new car financing actually made it cheaper to buy a new car! I’d never seen anything like that before.
Mousebumples
In local election news, Wisconsin has primaries today. Milwaukee’s democratic mayoral primary will (probably) determine who will win in April.
I’m curious to see who advances (out of a field of 9 or 10) to the local school board election. I think 8 advance, and we vote for 4 in April. I was willing to support more candidates than I had feared since our school district is a mix of urban and rural.
Soprano2
Ain’t this the truth! When they do cover full employment it’s in a negative way, like talking about labor shortages. It’s rare to hear them say how great it is that it’s easy for people to find a job these days. They have an “employer bias” where they see it all through the eyes of the employer. I agree, it’s ideological and they should just admit it. When a Democrat is president they do everything they can to find the downside in the economy.
catclub
yes, Biden should emphasize,” would you rather have low inflation and high unemployment? We disagree and think people should have good jobs at good pay.”
SiubhanDuinne
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Awful lot of links. I expect that what did it.
catclub
also on CNN they were worried about the consumer. I think the consumer is going to buy like crazy this year. Think travel and airlines.
people _say_ they are angry but they are buying like crazy.
germy
John S.
@Benw:
Nice Beastie Boys reference!
Baud
@germy:
Technically, only juries and judges can call something a crime.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: More than 7 links throws you into moderation.
Baud
@catclub:
Nah, Biden should tank the economy. People vote Republican when they feel like the Dems have made it economically safe to do so.
sab
@Kay: I am so old that I remember when my grandmother’s savings account paid her a noticeable amount of interest.
Now that I am old, I would have liked to see the same thing, being able to put my money in an FDIC insured account that pays more than pennies per year on ten thousand dollar accounts.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
If I had a truck, I’d park it on this blog to protest the restrictions on my linking freedom.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@WaterGirl: Thanks. For some reason, I didn’t think the link would come through when I copied and pasted.
germy
Kay
@Soprano2:
It started right out of the gate, with the completely unsupported assertion that we had a labor shortage because people received government supports. You and I talked about this at the time- there was a labor shortage– not enough workers, not lazy moochers. The lazy moochers were in their government hammocks because they got 2400 and an unemployment bump. It’s ideological. They’re Right wing on economics. Rigidly conventional people who approach this from a center-Right perspective.
They would have preferred if we pushed the lowest tier off a cliff like we usually do. That’s the natural order of the universe. People must suffer.
danielx
@sab:
Old enough to remember when minimum interest on passbook savings accounts was fixed by law/regulation. Old enough to remember when credit card debt was tax deductible. Old enough to remember when banking was relatively simple and ran by 3/6/3 – pay interest at 3%, loan money at 6%, on the golf course by 3 pm.
balconesfault
A narrative that I think has been sorely missing as inflation increases is the failure of tax cuts to do what they advertised.
Every time they roll the tax cuts out, 2017 included, there’s an argument made that the tax cuts will stimulate investment in productive capacity, which will make life better for everybody.
Instead we get to see what we always see when you stick a bunch more money in the pockets of the super wealthy and corporations … stock buybacks, inflated real estate prices, precious metals and artworks going up in price, and more yacht being bought. Of course this go around has brought out even new ventures like people pumping money into Bitcoin and nfts.
Clearly, what the money didn’t go to was creating all that new productive capacity and privately funded infrastructure that would have smoothed out these inflationary pressures.
And now the inflationary pressures will be used as a cudgel to elect politicians who will push through even more tax cuts. Lather rinse repeat.
Kay
@Baud:
Larry Summers. The guy who advocated for insufficient supports in the last collapse now insists he could have fine tuned to this to rescue employment with no inflation? Sniping from the sidelines.
Sick of these people. Can we get some fresher, less conventional experts? Shake it up a little. Are we stuck in the 1990s forever?
WaterGirl
@Baud: And I would immediately declare a state of emergency and throw your (pants-less) behind in jail. None of this fucking around for a week before doing anything.
Soprano2
@germy: I think what the Olympic committee did was terrible. It rewarded possible doping, and punishes all the other skaters who won’t get a medal ceremony at the Olympics if this skater wins any medal. They should have disqualified the Russian skater partly as a warning to others that they can’t cheat like that, withhold the test results until too late, and get away with it.
WaterGirl
@Dorothy A. Winsor: If you don’t care about the links, you can use “paste and match style” or whatever it’s called on your operating system, and then it copies the next but not the links.
mrmoshpotato
Salty. balls.
And fuck that cat. We know it was the mastermind. I hope they throw the book at it.
Betty Cracker
@balconesfault: Great point, especially since the public (surprisingly, to me) seemed to grasp that the Trump tax cuts were a plutocratic scam.
Benw
@Steeplejack (phone): I say it’s booty
@John S.: that’s what it is!
Kay
@germy:
Trump benefits that he doesn’t have the completely unprofessional James Comey delivering punditry at press conferences. All Comey had to do was follow standard practice, but he sees himself as such a genuis, such a moral and ethical “leader” that he overstepped his bounds. He’s an ego maniac- a freelancer. STFU. Don’t OPINE on investigations. Why is that so hard for him?
germy
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: Yep. And also, why are Russians allowed to participate under the “Russian Olympic Committee” banner when the nation received a two-year doping ban? I’d feel bad for the non-cheaters who weren’t allowed to participate, but isn’t the entire point to punish the nation that ran a state-sponsored doping scheme? And how are they punished if their athletes get to participate regardless? By not seeing their flag and hearing their anthem? Boo-fucking-hoo. They should have been locked out.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
They’re still realy unpopular and it’s bipartisan. It’s a 65% issue for Democrats. People understand “fair” and this is unfair.
Soprano2
The problem is that this seems logical to the average person. They think this is what they would do if they got that money, so they think everyone does it. I kept telling people over and over that it wasn’t true, especially several months after the extra unemployment was ended, and got responses like “Well, once they sell all the stuff they bought with that extra money they’ll have to get a job”. They all claimed to know someone who was doing exactly what they thought all the unemployed people were doing, laying on their parent’s couch playing video games. I’d say “that sounds like the parents indulging them to me”. People who never quit working and never got unemployment also had a lot of resentment towards those who got the extra money, at least that’s what I’ve heard from people. “How come I didn’t get to quit working for three months and just lay around taking a vacation?” is the attitude. There’s also bad blood here between people who were able to work at home and people who weren’t, especially when the people who were working at home whined mightily when they were required to come back to the office.
gene108
@germy:
https://twitter.com/CentristMadness/status/1493450856779460611?s=20&t=DiCpxNs4ZukIAboepsfelg
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl:
LMAO!
Betty Cracker
JFC, the balls on this motherfucker:
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Damn. I’m simultaneously frightened and turned on.
Kay
@Soprano2:
But once it became clear that there was a labor shortage, not a lazy moocher surplus, shouldn’t there have been some effort to correct?
“That theory we all glommed onto immediately because our priors are that working people are lazy was in fact not correct”.
BlueGuitarist
good reply to
“From first dates to engagements…share a photo …and tell us how Starbucks has played a role in your love story”
“Here’s a picture of me waiting in the unemployment line after Starbucks fired me for trying to organize a union”
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
He’s trying to stay in the news since no one is talking to his slimy ass anymore after he blocked our agenda.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
So much for “he always votes for our judges”.
Glad he’s still out there working hard to harm the Biden Administration. Wait until you see his austerity deficit reduction plan! It’ll be awesome. 50 bucks all the “deficit reduction” funding is taken out of the hides of people who make less that 250k a year. If Democrats go along with him they’re committing political suicide. He’s not very bright and his closest associate is an actual lobbyist, which explains a lot, I think.
Soprano2
@Kay: Yes, there should have been, but people are wedded to this idea and won’t give it up, and that includes reporters. I still hear people saying “There aren’t enough workers because young people are lazy and don’t want to work, it’s all those government handouts people get”. I always reply something like “You do know older people said that about us when we were young, don’t you?” and they say something like “but now it’s true!”. I mean, it’s complete denial of the true situation. Somehow human nature has changed, and now even though it’s never been true before now (and certainly wasn’t true when they were young!) it’s true now that young people are lazy and just don’t want to work.
Sideshow Bill
@OzarkHillbilly: But that’s where the preachers will be!!
Ray Wylie Hubbard said it best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygTsN_sr4k8
Spanky
@Betty Cracker: Move his offices to the parking lot. Fuck’m.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty Cracker: So R administrations get a full four years to appoint judges and D administrations get two?
Geminid
Speker Pelosi is heading to Israel today, accompanied by fellow California Representatives Barbara Lee, Adam Schiff, Eric Swallwell, Ro Khanna, and Representatives Ted Deutch (FL), Bill Keating (MA), and Andy Kim (NJ). They will be welcomed tomorrow in a ceremony at the Israeli Knesset, and then observe the Knesset session.
catclub
@sab:
Look up Kasasa Saving and Checking accounts at your credit union.1.5-3% interest if you look around. Which is much better than 0.01%.would you pick up $500 on the ground?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Soprano2: Friend of mine works in the oil industry said the fuel prices spike is during the pandemic gasoline consumption fell off a cliff so a lot of refineries were shut down, now it’s back up it takes a white to reopen those refineries, more so than normal because the workers they laid off are now working in other, better paying job.
Uncle Cosmo
@OzarkHillbilly: “Heaven for climate, hell for clientele.”
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
He and Sinema have a nice little con going. He says he’ll be willing to raise some taxes on rich people and corporations, then he points to her as opposing that. Foiled again! And miraculously the tax cuts all remain in place past the midterms. Good teamwork, I have to admit. Those two do nothing but protect those tax cuts. It’s what they’re paid to do and who they work for.
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: I thought the reason Democrats are told to indulge him is because he’s “good on judges.” Well, I guess he was “good” on Kavanaugh. Not for Democrats, though.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Sounds about right.
@Kay: Dem leadership is going to have to address this at some point to maintain organizational discipline and coherence. Manchin has conveniently provided an expiration date on his utility as a caucus member for judiciary purposes.
New Deal democrat
The economy isn’t bad, but we shouldn’t look at it with rose colored glasses. Average real wages after inflation for non-managerial workers have been essentially flat since June 2020 with the exception of the several stimulus months last spring.
There is a demand-pull aspect to inflation: sales have been up 10% year over year almost every month since last winter. Consumers had the stimulus (and child care credit) money to spend, and they spent it. A sudden 10% increase in demand can’t be met by supply immediately, so prices go up. Demand for gas is also back up to pre-pandemic levels.
There is also a supply constraint element to inflation. Part of it is a roughly 4 million shortfall in laborers due to the pandemic that has endured for a year or more. This means workers can choose the highest paying job opening and take it, causing a big increase in wages. The other part is a shortfall in things like lumber for houses and parts for cars, creating inflation in those items as well. And oil supplies are hitting their constraints as well.
The Fed can’t cure the pandemic-related shortfalls, and should not raise rates for that reason. It should only take into account tempering the demand-pull aspect to inflation. But basically, the fact remains, the only way to solve the current inflation problem is to solve the pandemic.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
Manchin is a moron and I blame Schumer for allowing him to utterly dominate the senate Democrats for the last year. It isn’t just that he blocks everything- he sets the entire narrative. We had Right wing senators with Obama but they didn’t declare themselves majority leader and President.
Schumer needs to start working. He’s weak. There’s an empty space and Manchin is filling it. Close the gap.
Gin & Tonic
Soprano2
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I have wondered how much of the high price of gas is due to a shortage of workers in the oil fields. I haven’t heard any stories about it. I’ve also wondered if the shale oil fields are open again. At these prices, I’d think they’d be producing like mad.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
catclub
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: One of the crazy things that happened in 2008 was that in the summer, when demand and the economy were probably already slipping, oil prices spiked WAY up. That is one case where it looks like the futures market just went crazy. Similar to when the futures price went negative in march 2020, but the opposite direction.
jonas
Grammatical errors in performing the rite do not invalidate it. This actually goes back to a papal pronouncement in the early Middle Ages in response to the Anglo-Saxon missionary Boniface who had been re-baptizing people in Germany who had been previously baptized by an illiterate priest with the phrase “Baptizo te in nomine patria et filia et spiritus sancti” (“I baptize you in the name the fatherland, the daughter and of the holy spirit”). The pope at the time, Zacharias, told him that as long as it was done out of ignorance, the people didn’t need to be re-baptized.
Yes, I know, shades of the Latin grammar lesson from The Life of Brian, but true story!
Soprano2
And yet, you rarely hear anyone in the press state it this clearly. There’s a lot of complaining about inflation, but little talk of what would actually fix the problem, except to talk about “supply chain problems”. They don’t mention what’s actually causing that, like workers staying home due to being sick with Covid, or China shutting down whole cities due to Covid outbreaks! Nope, it’s all Biden’s fault somehow.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: I don’t know who that is, but he and Jen Psaki are exactly on the same page. We believe what we see, not what they say.
prostratedragon
Happy Birthday, John Adams:
Captain C
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
The Iron Law of Bureaucracies as applied to organized religion.
jonas
That’s surprising. Oil refinery jobs are pretty well-paying. Where did they go that pays more?
Captain C
@mrmoshpotato:
As always, the cat in charge will get away with it. There’s inevitably at least two on the jury who just want to give him/her cuddles and scritches.
Benw
@rikyrah: good morning!
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I’ve been agnostic on Schumer because obviously it’s a tough situation, needing to placate a pair of lying saboteurs. I think Manchin hoodwinked Biden too, unless Biden wasn’t telling the truth when he assured Jayapal that Manchin was on board for BBB if the infrastructure bill passed. Manchin is the bad-faith liar here, so Biden obviously deserves the benefit of the doubt over him.
I think there’s a lot of blame to go around for the Dems’ predicament. The wingnut strategy to hurt Biden by deliberately prolonging the pandemic is working. The MSM coverage has predictably been shallow and irresponsible. But Manchin in particular publicly knee-capped Biden, and there must be consequences, IMO. Not because it would give me a thrill to see that prick lose power (although it would) but because otherwise, that corrupt shitstain is the face of the party.
jonas
Yeah, but it takes time to get production up and running, and they’re facing the same supply chain and labor issues as other businesses, esp. the shortage of truck drivers.
Gin & Tonic
@WaterGirl: Ukraine’s Foreign Minister.
Geminid
@Soprano2: I think this is more of a demand problem than a supply problem. People may gripe but they still drive as much as they want.
Oil field workers make good money. I remember reading a few years ago that in West Texas Marathon Oil was paying some oil rig workers $180,000 a year (that included a lot of overtime). They should be able to get workers at those wages. One particular problem with shale oil in places like the Permian Basin is that individual wells don’t produce for long so companies have to keep drilling. That may be why supply has not caught up with demand, but the oil is there and accessable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
the one thing I blame Schumer for wrt Manchin is sitting on that letter of IIRC July of ’21 in which Manchin said he wouldn’t go over 1.5T. Pelosi has said publicly she knew nothing about it, I haven’t heard anything so concrete from the White House.
And if anyone can name a way to counter Manchin’s power other than electing more Dems to the Senate and thus minimizing his power, you’re more knowledgeable about politics than I.
Soprano2
@jonas: This is true. It frustrates me that the press NEVER reports on issues like these when they talk about the higher price of gasoline. They present it as if it has no real cause other than saying “It’s going to be a problem for Biden and the Democrats in the midterms”. I do think there is some gaming on the part of certain producers who are keeping the price artificially high in order to recoup the money they lost in 2020.
prostratedragon
Lindell dropped by one of his banks as a “reputation risk.”
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: The problem with interpreting Russian troop movements is that they could be a setup: the Russians can say, “see, we were deescalating, but then the Ukrainians went and did this [false flag attack] and we just had to respond.”
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
Yep. It’s ideological. Conservatives would have preferred it if there had been no pandemic related slowdown, even though this would have exposed more workers to the virus. Failing that, they wanted to force people back into low paying jobs as quickly as possible.
Yep. Even though study after study showed that most people used the extra money on things they needed or to reduce debt. Still, conservatives insist on imputing bad motives to people who got any relief.
And stuff like this is especially annoying…
Wouldn’t this be starting a small business? And if people pay tax on the extra income they earn, isn’t this a good thing?
What is worse is that frauds like Manchin and Sinema appear to back these bad arguments to justify opposition to Biden administration relief efforts.
SiubhanDuinne
@prostratedragon:
I know I’m a bad person, but this news gave me an ear-to-ear smile.
prostratedragon
@SiubhanDuinne: Refreshing the headlines has been a continual source of laughter for me today.
Soprano2
@Brachiator: One thing that’s funny is people citing things like “big flat screen TV’s” as something people are selling for big bucks. Have they been to WalMart lately? Big new flat screen TV’s aren’t that expensive. Shoot, at the pub we’ve actually had customers offer to give us their old TV’s when they get a new one. That’s how we got the TV we put on the patio! You can’t give those things away. It’s a lazy way to think about the problems caused by the pandemic, based on old stereotypes that were never true anyway.
Amir Khalid
@Ken:
Do Catholics believe Latin is God’s favourite language, endowed by Him with a special divine power? I know Muslims who hold precisely that same absurd belief about Arabic.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I tried again to work my way through an explainer of John Durham’s latest effort to give Sean Hannity talking points, and once again cannot follow it all the way through
I ain’t got that mental energy and time. As best as I can figure out, the criminal charge is an accusation of lying to the FBI based on one interview with a lawyer, Michael Sussman, in an interview with one agent who made no recording or contemporary notes on that interview. Now Sussman is the Keyser Soze of a grand conspiracy by the Clinton campaign to hack a computer in…. the Obama White House?
Cameron
This is pretty encouraging. I hope there is a peaceful solution, and it happens soon – Ukraine is getting screwed with or without an invasion. It could really use a break.
https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/in-private-talks-with-putin-biden-cuts-the-hype/
Cameron
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Maybe it’s being narrow-minded on my part, but I felt I knew all I needed to know about Durham was the fact that Barr chose him.
topclimber
@NotMax: Water over the damned in Theological terms.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Cameron: that was my first thought when he was named, and he’s done nothing to change my mind. A complete hack.
I can’t remember the name of the deputy whose resignation was taken to be a sign that he was off the rails. This latest Alex Jones-level effort to spin up a conspiracy theory suggests she was right.
Hoodie
@Geminid: Especially true for US production, which includes a lot of deepwater and fracked sources. It’s not like Saudi, sitting on a gigantic pool of oil and basically turning on the spigot. I work with a startup that originally was a play in the fracking market, but they gave that up and went into distributed electrical energy storage when gas prices took a nosedive in the mid to late 2010s. It takes a long time to bring offshore or fracked resources on line, and it’s a massive capital investment. Another factor is that, with increased penetration of electric transport and renewables, long term prospects for investments in oil and gas extraction will likely be less attractive.
Brachiator
@New Deal democrat:
But wouldn’t prices. also go up because businesses were trying to make up for past lost revenue?
Food prices and restaurant prices have increased significantly (not sure about the price of booze). There were times when restaurants had to close or were forced to limit seating.
People shopped less or ordered more online instead of buying from local retailers. And supply chain disruption maybe led to increased costs of getting inventory, and these costs were passed on to consumers.
I also wonder whether stimulus money increased demand or just sustained it.
gene108
@Soprano2:
You can’t collect unemployment if you quit your job. You have to be fired to get unemployment.
That’s like a basing understanding of how things work these people don’t understand
zhena gogolia
@Cameron:
As soon as I saw that in the headline I gave up any intentions of reading the article.
WE AREN’T THE ONES MASSING TROOPS ON THE BORDER
How hard is that to understand?
ian
@Baud: That’s not true. What you just did was a crime.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
Same.
catclub
yeah but the cost of living in those boomtowns is high. especially the bars and the sex.
balconesfault
@Kay: I blame the Maine voters …
Baud
@Soprano2:
For a long time, it was cell phones.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Schumer was never going to let himself be accused of pre-compromising.
catclub
@Hoodie:
Yes, but short-term, the emphasis on ESG investing going away from oil, gas and coal, means that those investments may be MORE profitable, because less money will flow there. again short term.
Old School
Geminid
@Soprano2: According to Reuters, oil production from the Permian Basin is expected to hit record volume this month. The Basin accounts for 40% of U.S. oil production, from west Texas and southeastern New Mexico.
I drove across the Permian Basin three years ago, on I-20. There were a lot of wind generators on ridges, and oil pumps and drilling rigs below, with cattle grazing among them.
Betty Cracker
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Well thank God no one from the DoJ shut down that shameless hack’s sham investigation on 1/21/2021.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: That would have been a PR disaster.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Oh, bother….
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/12/richard-nixon-final-days-1968-campaign-personality-insight-00008196
What’s next? “The Augusto Pinochet I knew was a reflective man, his extensive library full of nonfiction works of history, politics and military strategy. This tendency to withdraw from the limelight for study made him seem aloof, even though he was quite warm on a personal level among his most trusted aides and confidantes…”
Soprano2
@Baud: But cell phones are still worth quite a bit of money!
Brachiator
@Soprano2:
Yeah, this stuff is ridiculous. As you note, TV prices are low and keep dropping, and people often order online. Big non-issue.
A side issue that I wonder about. In California, and elsewhere, there was a time when people were told to stay home. Also, there were no swap meets. I think that this must have had some impact on street selling, food carts and the local grey economy that a lot of lower income people depend on.
In any event, the reality is that a lot of people scramble to make a living anyway they can. The are not relaxing on government money.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Everything that Biden administration does is wrong in fact they are worse than Trump. (the second part is implied and not said aloud, but most of these progressives only have smoke and harsh words for Ds not the Rs)
I read variations of this sentiment over and over on Twitter and here too from our progressive betters
Florida gun activist yesterday:
How much longer until he becomes Republican?
Sure Lurkalot
@sab: When I first started working, there was a civil engineer nearing retirement. He was worried that he wouldn’t keep his lifestyle up with his 8% CDs.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@zhena gogolia: also, as a non-lawyer, I would need somebody to spell out for me how easy it would have been for Garland to do so, he just didn’t want to
“There oughta be something someone could do!” too easily becomes, “If [Democrat X] had any balls! they would just….”
I am highly averse to there-but-for-balls! rhetoric
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I looked at the first paragraph and was reminded that Pat Buchanan, who is I believe still with us, was a major influence in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses, and was a major voice in political media well into the Bush II years. IIRC in the early months of her show he had a regular segment on The Rachel Maddow Show, which I suspect was imposed by suits still nervous about being seen as too liberal. It was framed as the “Uncle Pat” segment, the “your crazy right wing uncle” thing being implied. I always wondered if he got the joke and refused to appear anymore.
senyordave
Anyone who thinks that inflation of 7% is not a major problem is off their rocker. And while most Americans are better off now then pre-pandemic, there has also been an enormous increase in consumer debt, and that will begin to catch up with people soon, especially as interest rates creep up.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@balconesfault:
Stock buybacks should be treated as income to the existing shareholders.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: I’m sure it would have made Nina Totenberg frowny, but would anyone outside that bubble give a shit if, say, the deputy AG told a Trump hack few people have ever heard of that his transparently partisan investigation into a matter that had already been investigated multiple times — at great expense and to no useful conclusion — was over?
I mean, it’s not like we’re talking about the POTUS telling a news anchor (on camera!) that he fired a high-profile person like the FBI director to obstruct an investigation. There’d be real consequences to something like that. Oh wait…
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: Of course the media always treats Republicans exactly the same as they do Democrats.
Like Jim above, I don’t even know if Garland could have legally stopped the investigation.
geg6
@Amir Khalid:
No, only the lunatic fringe types like Mel Gibson and his dad think that. Opus Dei and such.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: My guess is never since he knows 100% of Republicans are in bed with the gun lobby, which enabled a madman to murder 17 people in his school.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: Republicans sure thought so at Garland’s confirmation hearing. They pressed him repeatedly for a pledge to keep Durham in place, and he repeatedly refused.
Jeffro
I guess when Biden crosses some critical ‘no fun’ threshold???
Most people seem to pick elected officials for a host of really dumb reasons. It’s irritating. I don’t need ‘fun’ as a job requirement for President of the United States.
New Deal democrat
@Brachiator:
“But wouldn’t prices. also go up because businesses were trying to make up for past lost revenue?”
Only if the same (or nearly the same) number of customers were willing to pay those increases. Which they have been, because:
“I also wonder whether stimulus money increased demand or just sustained it.”
Absolutely, positively increased it by over 10%. Go to this link:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RRSFS
Retail sales suddenly increased 20% beginning last March, and have remained up over 10% ever since.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: True. He could continue to bash Dems from the left.
laura
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: easy peasy: https://youtu.be/mUMBkrKwfVI
Marcy Wheeler/Emptywheel is an excellent resource on Durham’s flat footing.
catclub
do you mean 1 year of 7% inflation, or 5 years? Those are very different.
We have had about 10 years (maybe more?) where they targeted 2% inflation and it came in below that. There is catching up to do.
The Fed has PLENTY of tools to reduce inflation, and will use them. They mostly involve unemployment increasing.
Spanky
@Jeffro:
Alrighty then. How about “He hates the same people I do.” That seems to be the driving reason for a large number of (non-Democrat) voters.
“Quiet competence in governance” doesn’t seem to be a sufficient reason for Americans. They want a TV President.
Old School
@Old School:
HeleninEire
@Baud: Wow. Stealing this and posting on Facebook.
Old School
H.E.Wolf
@Central Planning: My father had stories about an acquaintance of theirs in NYC in the late 1930s. She belonged to a Protestant sect (name of sect withheld, because my dad couldn’t recall it) which forbade swearing.
She used to say “Amsterbless Avenue”, which bounded one side of their neighborhood, and “The Other Fellow’s Food Cake” when she baked it. And according to my dad, she did this in all seriousness.
ETA: People are fascinating.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Yep. And center-left Dems will continue to bash leftier Dems, accusing them of being as bad as or worse than Republicans. That seems to be how it works.
zhena gogolia
@Spanky: We don’t operate by hate. That’s why I’m a Democrat.
I have to respond belatedly to something Suzanne said the other day. She challenged me to “invest in” the younger generation because they would be the ones taking care of me in the nursing home. (Not usually a big motivation for my political choices.) I responded that I had invested by being a lifelong Democrat, since Democrats promote policies that spread the wealth and care for the environment. (Earlier I had noted that it was people who couldn’t get excited about Democrats who had given us Reagan, GHWB, GWB, and TFG.) She retorted something like, “Well, your investment hasn’t done very well, because the wealth is even less spread and the environment is shit.” THUS IGNORING MY POINT. If we had had Carter’s second term, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Hillary Clinton, THE WEALTH WOULD BE SPREAD AND THE CLIMATE WOULD BE IN BETTER SHAPE. Maybe it wasn’t “fun” to vote for them, but it was ESSENTIAL. I have lost patience with stupidity over the course of my life.
Peale
@Soprano2: O.K. then. The next time there is a pandemic, those lucky ducks who work in industries where the government is actually discouraging their customers from coming in can get nothing and the unemployed can just go move in with their lucky ducky relatives who can work from home. Problem solved.
Soprano2
Oh, it’s all up. The price of supplies is higher, too – a case of gloves costs double what it cost before Covid hit.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@H.E.Wolf: there are people today who are willing to go in front of cameras and say that yoga and Harry Potter are tools of the Devil, so that doesn’t surprise me a bit.
Soprano2
@gene108: But a lot of people were involuntarily laid off when their business was temporarily closed down. That’s what I’m talking about – lots of people got laid off.
zhena gogolia
@Betty Cracker: They’re worse than Republicans when they undermine the Democratic president. We don’t expect Republicans to support our side.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Do the cable news hosts who bring the Parkland kids on to express their anger and disappointment about Biden ever mention Marco Rubio?
Brachiator
@Old School:
Wow. This is an incredible non-admission of guilt. But I guess this was crafted carefully to avoid any leveling of criminal charges. This is how the extremely well-connected get away with things.
So his only “crime” is his past association with Epstein.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: It’s the impatience of youth. Isn’t Kasky one of the gun activists who became active after the Parkland school shooting? They want things to happen right now, not realizing that making change takes time and a lot of hard work. That’s how the GOP did it.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Just because one does not kiss the ring of Maple Sugar Jesus does not make one establishment or centrist. Who BTW has a very gun lobby friendly voting record
According to this calculus an immigrant who became a citizen five years ago is establishment but a person who has been in the Congress longer than I have been in the United States is an outsider.
Miss Bianca
@Old School: Ah, what it is to be rich, royal, and well-connected.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
You all don’t anyways.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: Has there been a permanent decrease in how much people are driving? Or at least one that’s noticeable? I hear all this stuff about people continuing remote work; wouldn’t that affect demand for gasoline? I wonder if that’s part of the reason for keeping the prices higher, a reduction in demand that has continued?
Miss Bianca
@zhena gogolia: That seems to be a universal problem among non-Republicans. If only we were as passionate about voting to play the long game to preserve democracy, the environment, and our rights as citizens as the other side seems to be about using the forms of democracy to destroy it, this country (and the world) would be in much better shape.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Miss Bianca: I think if was Grover Norquist whose argument for a Romney presidency was “all we need is a pen”. There are people on the left who think, and pretty much say, the same thing, only one side is acknowledging the power of the other two branches of government, the other is wishing it away.
Betty Cracker
@zhena gogolia: Are Manchin and Sinema worse than Republicans? They’ve undermined the POTUS and the party a hell of a lot more than the Parkland gun control activists blabbing on Twitter.
I suspect those traumatized Parkland kids — young adults, now — have done more to drive turnout for Democrats than everyone on this blog combined and probably multiplied by 10,000.
Are they frustrated and impatient? Yes. They’re young and passionate and still figuring out how all this works. It kind of comes with the territory, along with the energy.
Kay
@zhena gogolia:
No one has done more to undermine Joe Biden than Manchin and Sinema. They were much more effective at it because they are Democrats. They blocked his entire agenda. They never even made an offer. Still, no one knows what they want. The whole Party is now apparently switching to “deficit reduction” on orders from Joe Manchin. That’s a compelling message. Boy, that will make people crawl over broken glass to get to the polls. They’ll be lining up to volunteer to pay for the Trump tax cuts.
zhena gogolia
@Kay: If people had voted for more Democrats (Gideon, for example), Manchin and Sinema would be irrelevant.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: This also ignores that the environment is a lot better than it was in the 1960’s, when we didn’t do anything! That’s in spite of Republicans trying to fuck that up every time they get into power. It seems that there are some Democrats who would go for a dictatorship too, if only the dictatorship did what they wanted it to do. That’s a pretty seductive thought.
zhena gogolia
We need massive turnout in every election. Bitching about how Joe didn’t cancel my student loans doesn’t help us get to the place where he can.
Soprano2
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Did you know that in Alabama if you teach yoga in school as phys ed you are barred from using any Sanskrit terms, and cannot even say “namaste” at the end of a session? I guess they’re terrified that hearing those words would cause kids to become Hindus or something. And that’s after the repealed the law making it illegal to teach yoga in schools just last year.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
My impression is that some on the left believe that they have direct action in their back pocket so they don’t have to grin and bear it when it comes to the slow grind of Congress.
A tiny but vocal number of them go full Sarandon and believe having the GOP in power will force enough people into direct action that it will be successful.
I believe both groups are a minority of progressives. OTOH, it doesn’t take a large drop off on turnout to change election results.
matt
@Baud: Sorcery doesn’t work unless you use very precise incantations.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: The slogan of Defunding the Police worked like magic. Not for us but for the Republicans. It scared a lot of people off Ds.
Betty Cracker
@schrodingers_cat: Well, I didn’t say establishment or centrist; you did. I said center left, which is a different thing. But all are points on the circular firing squad, and I don’t see how blasts from one direction are righteous and evidence of incipient Republicanism from another.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: I can’t show you what you refuse to see.
Peale
@senyordave: There has not been an enormous increase in consumer debt during the pandemic. Unless there is some market for black market loan sharking out there, consumer debt levels are actually well known. Total consumer debt (Student Loans, Credit Cards, Mortgages, “Other”) is up 3% between 12/31/2019 (the last pre-pandemic quarter) and 12/31/2021 (the last period data is available). Credit card debt itself is down 7%. Other, the bucket that includes auto loans, is up 2%.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes, let’s ignore the fact that two Right wing Democrats succeeded in blocking the entire Biden agenda, while loudly repeating they supported none of it to every reporter they could find and focus instead on “defund the police”.
This is the Manchin/Sinema political strategy for Democrats. How’s it going? They pushed Biden down to 40. Let’s see if they can get him to 30.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay: it’s possible to hate Machinema and still be aware of the damage done to this country in the last twenty-odd years by the anti-Democratic Left.
They both voted for infrastructure, have not blocked a single judge that I’m aware of, and the only blocked nominee I can recall is Neera Tanden, when Manchin joined hands not with Sinema, but with Bernie Sanders.
And that Louie DeJoy fella a lot of people are so mad about? who’s currently trying to stop the USPS from switching to EVs? One of the main reasons we can’t get rid of him is because Bernie decided to “send a message” by blocking Obama’s nominees to the USPS governing board. Ah, once again the highly effective strategy of message-sending! From Nader to Bernie, where would we be without it.
you’ve seen news I haven’t.
lowtechcyclist
@OzarkHillbilly: In the words of Billy Joel,
I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints,
sinners are much more fun
oatler
Sinema’s got an ad in AZ urging voters to thank her for her hard work.
Baud
@H.E.Wolf:
Didn’t the Devil Rays change their name to Rays for this reason?
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Unlike you I have never caped for either Manchin or Sinema. But without him Turtle is the Senate Majority Leader. That is math.
Also what Jim said at #178.
Baud
@oatler:
She paid for her own thank you ad?
schrodingers_cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Tanking of Neera Tanden’s nomination by Manchin and Maple Syrup Messiah was met by yawns by most Balloon Juice front pagers IIRC.
If the misogynist, pro gun and anti-immigrant senator (why is he considered left I will never understand) hadn’t run against HRC we would not even be having this conversation right now
He is a populist with many non-democratic and illiberal tendencies.
piratedan
@oatler: aye, it’s been running the last six weeks “lauding” her efforts in getting legislation passed that “helps” Arizonans, encouraging us to “thank her”.
all paid for by dark money groups with the usual deceptive names…
lowtechcyclist
Actually, I’d be all for a dictatorship that would move aggressively to deal with climate change. Dictatorships all come to an end, but climate change will be close enough to forever to make no practical difference. And untrammeled global warming will kill far more people than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.
Kay
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Oh, well. It doesn’t matter what Mancin says anyway. Sinema has already announced she will never rescind any of the Trump tax cuts so if they’re planning to follow Manchin’s orders on deficit reduction they won’t have any revenue to do it.
I just humbly suggest Democrats don’t blame voters this time. A political party blaming their own voters is ludicrous and embarassing.
Baud
@Kay:
Which politician blamed voters? Or are you talking about Democratic voters blaming voters?
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Unfortunately, many people who would take that deal don’t realize how illusory it is.
Geminid
@oatler: You’ll see a lot of ads like that. They won’t win a primary for Sinema, though.
Has Mark Kelly hit the airwaves yet? He’s got an ample warchest. He might be leaving the airwaves for the Republican candidates to trash each other, though.
matt
@senyordave: with my 3% fixed rate mortgage 7% inflation makes me money.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: FWIW I think many of these vocal red roses are occasional voters at best. Most of them didn’t even turn out when their Messiah was on the ballot, let alone any un-fun D.
Cameron
@zhena gogolia: But we’re the ones with missiles lined up on someone else’s border. How hard is that to understand?
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I’d like to think I’d be a fun president.
matt
@schrodingers_cat: I think a lot of them are irrelevant margin dwellers in California/ other safe blue states as well.
Brantl
@Kay: FFS, how? Manchin and Chinema have him over a barrel, how do you miss that?
Baud
@Cameron:
What are you referring to?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Okay. That sounds good. I don’t know what you’re referring to, but… okay.
I’ll add one of my own bits of advice: Don’t let charismatic idiots confuse voters by not pointing out that they’re idiots, however emotionally appealing their charismatic idiocy might be.
Be frank and honest with voters. Hard work and the slow, and often boring, boring of hard boards. That’s all there is.
Kay
@Baud:
I’m talking about telling voters that they cannot expect anything unless they vote for Democrats for two or three decades, or harkening back to 2016 or 2010 or 2000 and determing that VOTERS were the problem.
It’s insane. The actors who have the LEAST individual power are accorded the only accountability for results. It has never worked and it will never work because it’s nonsense and people recognize that it’s nonsense. The proximate cause of Joe Biden’s agenda being blocked is not “voters”. It’s two hugely powerful senators. Their decisions. Their actions. They’re responsible.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I have no idea. Is this BiP reborn?
Baud
@Kay:
I don’t know which political figure did that in the past. There are certain things politicians can’t say and that’s one of them. But I don’t recall seeing it.
ian
@lowtechcyclist:
The Venn diagram of people who favor dealing with climate change and people who favor dictatorship?
Subsole
@Kay:
He’s too busy tweeting about how mean ol’ Joe Biden needs to unilaterally cancel student debt by executive fiat…
So, yeah. Worse than weak.
Kay
@Brantl:
I don’t understand how the senate majority leader has absolutely no idea what two Democratic senators want and are doing, so much so that he seems shocked when he finds out. He’s supposed to know more than we do. That’s his value. I can fucking count to 50 and see we’re 2 short. If that’s his only role than I don’t think we need him.
New Deal democrat
@Soprano2:
“Has there been a permanent decrease in how much people are driving?”
Here is a link to what you want:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WGFUPUS2&f=4
The blue line tracks gas usage for the last 52 weeks compared with the 4 previous years. The huge decline in spring 2020 is apparent, as is the nearly complete recovery by summer 2021. It has fallen off somewhat during Omicron, but I expect it to rebound again now.
schrodingers_cat
@matt: That’s true for most of these podcast bros and sisters and tweeters.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: An obvious solution is electing more D senators in 2022 so that these 2 are no longer that relevant.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Kay:
in fairness to Schumer, with those two, I find it very easy to have no idea what those two are doing. Sinema, I think, is the star of a movie playing in her own head, and she’s making up the script as she goes along. I don’t think Manchin knows what he’s going to do, say, or think from one day to the next. I think he’s both mercurial and easily manipulated by people like Susan Collins, said to be his closest friend in the Senate and not, as I long believed, the stammering idiot she plays on television.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@schrodingers_cat: not just the obvious solution, but the only solution. Wishing there were One Weird Tricks can be fun, but there aren’t any.
matt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: why not both?
Steeplejack (phone)
@laura:
Wheeler did an excellent job summarizing it on Morning Joe today.
japa21
Can we agree the biggest problem right now is the two jerks in the Senate and that the far left part of the party has been problematic in the past and could be again in the future?
@Kay: I recently saw a FB ad for Tim Ryan which specifically mentioned Manchin and that electing Ryan could make Manchin irrelevant. It blasted Manchin for not supporting BBB. IIRC, this is an approach you have been advocating: Push the agenda you want and put the blame squarely where it belongs.
Captain C
@Old School: So, basically a better option than letting discovery, or for that matter a trial happen.
Omnes Omnibus
@schrodingers_cat: I have been told that emphasizing turnout and more voting is not the solution to the problem.
schrodingers_cat
@Omnes Omnibus: I know, I have seen those posts.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: OK thanks, that’s what I was wondering. So, the supposed huge boom in work from home hasn’t had much effect on gasoline consumption in the U.S.
Betty Cracker
@Omnes Omnibus: I must’ve missed that. What I have seen is people who are trying to discuss politics on a blog devoted mostly to discussing politics pushing back against tone policing. That isn’t the same thing as dismissing the efficacy of voting and turnout.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: I believe the exact words were you can’t out organize an extreme gerrymander. The solution was to leave the country or at least relocate to a blue area.
lowtechcyclist
‘Illusory’ increasingly describes our prospects for dealing with it under our current system of government.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
True, but different doesn’t necessarily mean better.
rikyrah
@Kay:
clap clap clap
thank you, Kay
schrodingers_cat
Putin didn’t just court the RWNJs and MAGA he spread his net on the left too. BS campaign was helped by Putin’s cronies in both 2016 and 2020.
TYT and others like them have also been mainstreaming Kremlin propaganda.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: Well then, you missed it. And if you want to call comment threads wailing that democracy in the US is inevitably doomed, discussing whether breaking the US up into a number pieces or emigrating was the better policy, and telling people who disagreed they were pollyannas is discussing politics, fair play to you.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud: There are no guarantees either way.
Not that it matters: any dictator we’d get in the U.S. in this decade would be a right-wing dictator with a deep antipathy towards dealing with climate change.
Subsole
@Kay: And you think whining about how Democrats are all just the same as Republicans so what even is the point in voting helps…how?
I mean, yes. The 2 dipshits (2 out of 50, but sure, let’s just tar the entire goddamned party, Kam. Why not.) DID cripple us! So what do Kam and co. do? Get on Jack Dorsey’s twitter dot com and DEEPEN the damage by insisting there’s no point and they’re all the same. And he is a LOOOOONG way from the only lefty doing so!
How, precisely, does that help?
You have repeatedly raised very compelling points that we need to connect, to convert these folks into reliable voters. That the local party apparatus needs to get its act together and reach out. That we are in this mess because we are too top-down and macro level in our thinking. That we need new blood in our consultant/strategist pools. I agree wholeheartedly.
But the kids have work to do too. Part of that is NOT selling abject pox-on-both-houses horseshit that really just boils down to broderist bothsiderism with a new, gritty edge for today’s youth.
How do you reach out to people being gorged 24/7 on a diet of “lol don’t bother voting because cringe winemom neoliberal shitlibs are literally the same as Republicans because ~vibes~ uwu lol”?
Seriously. Instead of shitting on the entire party with rampant doomshilling, Dude could be urging people to go local and work from the state and municipal level! It would be better for everyone involved! The local outfits get new blood, the kids get to see how the machine they are trying to take control of actually works. And fix where it doesn’t.
Which has the added benefit of making them less susceptible to some loudmouth charlatan who tells them he’s gonna fix capitalism with the stroke of a pen and cow all opposition with the veiny tumescent magnificence of his big ol’ swangin’ general strike.
You could even frame it as ‘abandoning the corrupt neorliberal centrist oligarchist paradigm to focus on community mutualism networks’, or whatever the fuck they need to say to impress themselves with themselves long enough to get it done.
But intensifying discouragement so you can bask in the soothing rays of internet kool is not gonna improve things.
I mean, how hard would it be to go after Rubio? He is every bit as culpable as Manchin. But nope. Let’s just take another hit on Murc’s Crackpipe of Agency and sit around blaming Biden.
Subsole
@lowtechcyclist:
Yep. Their solution to climate change would be concentration camps.
For-profit concentration camps. Because there is NOTHING the GOP cannot make even more perverse.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
This isn’t even an “obvious solution”. None of us have any idea if two additional D senators make the two Right wing D senators “irrelevant”.
This isn’t how politics works. You don’t go into Ohio and tell people to vote for the Ohio senator to make the senators from West Virginia and Arizona “irrelevant” so under some elaborate decades long process they will eventually get something. This is the campaign message? It’s horrible.
It’s the worst transactional politics ever. No one is going to come out for this. Has it ever once worked?
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
What do you do if you tell voters two additional D senators make the two Right wing senators “irrelevant”
and then they don’t because one of them is also Right wing?
“We need 62 just to be sure”. It’s endless. It’s not just “endless”. It’s completely grim and you”re presenting it as a transaction so you shouldn’t be suprised when voters demand you make good on your end, because you just told them it’s a transaction. X for Y.
Subsole
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
This is fair.
On the other hand, him throwing out some utterly absurd Bernie bait about Biden cancelling student debt is…nit productive.
If the kids qre disillusioned, it us largely because weaklunfs like Schumer and opportunists like Warren (whomst I gave cone to deeply regret voting for) are feeding them illusions. Or rather, they are slapping a patina of authenticity onto the slurry of illusions being fed to the yoots by an entire constellation of clout-scrabblers, crazies and outright provocateurs online.
We are unamused, to say the least.
Dopey-o
Curious that God is so weak that a priest fumbling the words can negate His plan for our salvation.
As a Catholic, I was taught that God knows our intentions, and will extend His grace to us. I want the baby baptised, I take the baby to see the priest, the baby is saved. *
I notice that Old Testament Catholics place tremendous faith in the power of formulae and rituals, sort of like the the Pharisees’ fetishes with the letter of the law. Jesus addressed that (He called them hypocrites, IIRC.)
———-
* The Catholic doctrine of Sufficient Grace says if I love God and my neighbor, but have no chance to be baptised, I will still be admitted to Heaven.
Betty Cracker
@Subsole: I don’t think Kasky said there’s no difference between Dems and Reps, at least not that I saw quoted here (I haven’t read his entire Twitter feed.) In the tweet quoted here, he basically said he’s discouraged (“less fun”), which is understandable if irritating. Also, you’re dead wrong about Kasky not taking it to Rubio. He definitely has — did so on national TV after the murders. The Parkland activists routinely troll Rubio on Twitter. They aren’t perfect, and I’m not defending everything any of them has ever said. But you’re mischaracterizing him, and that’s not right either.
J R in WV
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Too many links, you bad gurl~!~
But what yummy links they are!
Subsole
@Betty Cracker:
If that’s the case then I retract my criticisms. I see far too many people on the left who have plenty of smoke for the folks trying their best, and none for the folks causing the problem.
Sadly, all I saw was the same tired “Biden could fix everything with the magic bully pulpit but he’s too much of a loser to even try,” nonsense.
Also, when people tried to make the points I was making (though with much more grace and wit than I, thank Bog) about needing to stay engaged, he tweeted out this:
He doesn’t need congress to appoint a national director of gun violence prevention, which he promised on his pathetic campaign that required literally everyone to drop out if he was gonna crawl his ass past the finish line. Leave me alone you simp ass fuckboy losers
It got even bro-ier after that.
Granted, it’s twitter. But…this is not the way to get people listening to you.
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
All of this. Plus, the IOC should be completely composed of former competitive athletes, not Aristocrats and wealthy people sucking money out of the games. Every penny raised should go to the athletes, not the infrastructure ruling class snobs making these terrible decisions.
Black girl smoked legal weed after her mom died — OUTTA HERE YOU DRUGGY DUSKY BITCH!!! White girl used a performance enhancing medication, from a nation with a history of drug violations? Shame on you, come on down anyways….
How is that moral or ethical??? It isn’t, not at all~!!~
J R in WV
@Amir Khalid:
Obviously some Catholics do believe just that — mostly members of Opus Dei or other RWNJ Catholic cults.
On the other hand my friend the Episcopal Bishop learned Latin, Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, not because any of those languages are especially holy, but in order to read the founding documents of her religion in the original languages, before being filtered through a translation.
She is also a former professor of epidemiology and horse vet, who heard a call. Smarter than 2 or 3 regular smart people combined!
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
Maple Sugar Jesus? Help me out here, please! Who the heck is Maple Sugar Jesus???????????????
Subsole
@J R in WV:
Bernie.