Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

Republicans would impeach Biden if he bit into a whole Kit Kat rather than breaking the sections apart.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’m just a talker, trying to find a channel!

Polls are now a reliable indicator of what corporate Republicans want us to think.

I really should read my own blog.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Republicans can’t even be trusted with their own money.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

You are here: Home / Politics / Biden Administration in Action / Thursday Morning Open Thread: Okay, We’ll Call It Bidenomics

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Okay, We’ll Call It Bidenomics

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The GOP tried their best to make it a slur, but it’s hard to convince people that more jobs and higher salaries is a negative…


Professional ankle-nipper Matt Viser is sad that President Biden refuses to provide the tremendous content TFG so generally gifted the media — “Embracing ‘Bidenomics,’ president seeks to turn insult into strength”:

President Biden was midway through a recent speech at a labor rally when he turned to an explanation of a kitchen-table economic philosophy that he says was formed, literally, at his parents’ kitchen table. “The press has now called [it] ‘Bidenomics,’” he said. “I don’t know what the hell that is.”

The crowd laughed as he offered, “But it’s working.”

Two weeks later, the White House has mobilized an entire week around elaborating on, reclaiming and defining just what Bidenomics is — something they have cast expansively as broadening and benefiting the middle class.

On Wednesday, the president delivered a major speech on his economic vision, with an eye toward the 2024 campaign. It followed a four-page memo from senior advisers that highlighted the concept, with subheads including “Bidenomics is working” and “The American people strongly support Bidenomics.”…

“This vision is a fundamental break with the economic theory that has failed Americans for the last four decades now,” Biden said. “The trickle-down failed the middle class. It failed America. People working as hard as ever couldn’t get ahead.”

Instead, Biden touted policies that he said have helped average Americans and created millions of jobs, including a bipartisan infrastructure bill and legislation to increase computer chip manufacturing. Earlier this week, Biden announced a $42 billion effort to expand internet access across the country…

Embracing a term that was intended as an insult is a bit of political jujitsu familiar to Biden supporters, who had some success turning “Let’s go Brandon” — originally shorthand for an expletive directed at the president — into “Dark Brandon,” a meme of an all-powerful, edgier version of Biden.

The effort is also reminiscent of Biden’s onetime partner in the White House. Obamacare, referring to the health-care law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, was first used by Republicans to express their contempt for the Affordable Care Act, which they saw as an overbearing government program that would intrude on Americans’ medical decisions…

White House officials, in emphasizing Biden’s focus on the middle class, are consciously making a foil of Reagan’s professed aim of shrinking government and cutting taxes, including for the well-off.

“If Reaganomics was based on the idea that if you cut taxes for the wealthiest corporations, the wealthiest people in the society, and then at some point the remnants of those will trickle down to the middle class and the working class, Bidenomics is the exact opposite,” Anita Dunn, one of Biden’s top advisers, said Monday on MSNBC. “Bidenomics says that the way you grow the economy, in this economy, is you grow the middle class.”

Asked if the White House is confident the recasting of Bidenomics could change public perception about Biden’s stewardship of the economy, Jean-Pierre responded, “We’re going to try.”

‘Don’t these Democrats understand that the GOP owns the economy, at least when it’s good?’

Reader Interactions

120Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Saving the economy is an epic policy failure to savvy Twitter liberals.

    I’m pleased we did a better job this time because I’m all for progress and leanring from experience, but friends like these are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

  2. 2.

    zhena gogolia

    @Baud: Yeah, they’re talking about Obama???

    Heather Cox Richardson has a good newsletter on Bidenomics this morning.

  3. 3.

    Patricia Kayden

    I absolutely love President Biden and will enthusiastically vote for him again. He’s the only choice we have. No one on the Republican side will do anything beyond pander to the lowest elements of the extreme right.
    President Biden took this country up from the depths into which Trump took it. He deserves nothing but praise.

  6. 6.

    bbleh

    Most or all of the economic commentariat are sufficiently well-off (or better) that macro policies aren’t going to have much effect on their lives.  They were okay (or better) before, and they’re okay (or better) now.  But what DOES matter to them is their “professional” reputation, especially among their peers — the Hot Takes, the Savvy Skepticism, the Knowledgeable Worldliness, etc.  So that’s mostly what they focus on.  As to the actual lives of the actual rabble, well, you know, numbers go up and numbers go down, industrialization requires deindustrialization, we have to expect in times of yada yada that there will be some pain spread around yada yada, but it’s for the broader good etc.

    I think in my dream world, anyone who runs for public office or is in line for a high-enough policy position would have to have done a couple years’ community service, working at shelters and food banks, doing Meals on Wheels, doing in-home elder care, etc.

  7. 7.

    Tony Jay

    Obamacare, referring to the health-care law signed by President Barack Obama in 2010, was first used by Republicans to express their contempt for the Affordable Care Act, which they saw as an overbearing government program that would intrude on Americans’ medical decisions the first step in using Government power to liberate Americans from a grossly unfair and ruinously expensive model of health insurance that only benefitted already megarich Republican donors.

    Fixed that for ya, Mister Viser.

  8. 8.

    MomSense

    It is maddening that the Republicans have gotten away with their supply side economics bullshit for 50 plus years.  Reaganomics was a rebranding of the 19th century horse and sparrow economic scheme.  We had plenty of data and historical experience with it.  Massive wage inequality, roaring twenties followed by the Great Depression.
    We had Joe Scarborough’s Congressional BFF and the absolute disaster of what Brownback did to the economy in Kansas happening at the same time that the media let Republicans in the 2014 midterms get away with calling for the same bullshit policies that were actively destroying Kansas.

    There are so many more examples of just mindless acceptance of bullshit Republican policies by media when they could have looked around at the results and simply reported on what was happening.

  9. 9.

    bbleh

    Separately, about Dark Brandon etc., Biden owns his age VERY well.  He dresses impeccably, stands and moves well, is careful to be seen biking occasionally, etc.; he handles challenging questions with an aw-shucks grandpa attitude (or sometimes a don’t-bother-me-kid attitude when deserved); and he projects an air of easy been-there-done-that-got-it-under-control.  I think that is absolute catnip to older voters — he IS the happy, healthy older folks in the pharma commercials — and that’s why I think a lot of the yammering about his age is not just gonna fall flat but actually backfire a bit.

  10. 10.

    Baud

    @zhena gogolia:

    Tojan Horse propaganda.  Make a assertiion in the course of making a larger point, and expect people to gloss over it because they agree with the larger point. Very common practice.

  11. 11.

    WereBear

    Ummm. When was the economy good under Republicans?

    I spent the entirety of my adult working life under Reagonomics and it has been a steady whittling away of the economic stability and supports my parents enjoyed.

    It was a time of better opportunities, like me landing a corporate sponsorship with a proud post-war firm that would send me to college while I worked with full benefits. Three years later they started firing people without cause so they wouldn’t quality for a pension.

    That was Reagonomics. First wave.

  12. 12.

    narya

    @Patricia Kayden: Re: the only choice we have.

    On one hand, TOTALLY agree–I will vote enthusiastically for Biden. IN ADDITION, and in contrast to the other side, there is a seriously deep bench–just a ton of people, at every level, who are working to get things done to benefit everyday people. I’m glad to see our side embrace the narratives that Biden and others are putting out there–yes to unions, yes to a strong working/middle class, yes to investment in our infrastructure, yes to inclusiveness.

  14. 14.

    narya

    I think in my dream world, anyone who runs for public office or is in line for a high-enough policy position would have to have done a couple years’ community service, working at shelters and food banks, doing Meals on Wheels, doing in-home elder care, etc.

    @bbleh: My version of this is that I don’t fully trust anyone who hasn’t done grunt work. Doesn’t have to be community service, but it does have to be low-wage, hard (in some way), and necessary for you to pay the bills. Dabbling in community service or low-wage jobs isn’t the same as knowing that you need to work this shift to pay the electric bill.

  15. 15.

    NotMax

    Celebrate the centennial!

    Don’t know the exact date in 1923 so for the sake of argument let’s say it was today 100 years ago when the chicken farming industry was created. Brava Cecile Steele.

  16. 16.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: I guess I’m more tolerant of this kind of thing–if we want the kinds of policies the public will support to ratchet in a more progressive direction, I think it’s OK to be critical of the less-good versions of it from “our side” in the past.

    But it’s also important to remember that Democrats of that time were working in a political environment that we have already moved beyond. It’s not that Obama was a personally bad President–I seriously doubt that Joe Biden in 2008 would have supported everything that Joe Biden of 2023 does.

    I see liberals today bashing Bill Clinton as a “neo-loser” today and I cringe, because this is a guy who tried to introduce a universal health care program to the left of the ACA and got smacked down hard. But I understand it too. It was a different time.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Under that philosophy, no criticism can be over the top rhetorically.

    Would you feel the same way if a Republican called Obama’s economic rescue actions a “policy failure”? Would you stand with them and say “that’s a reasonable point of view.”

    The problem is actual policy based criticism is boring. There must be a villain for social media to pay attention.

  20. 20.

    TaMara

    I’m off to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo where I’m going to feed giraffes and hippos, and probably get a little nostalgic because I haven’t been there since I was a kid. I soooo need this day off.

  22. 22.

    Ken

    Huzzah, my air quality index is down to “Unhealthy” this morning! But I still think we need to invade Canada for this provocation.

  24. 24.

    Matt McIrvin

    @TaMara: That’s a remarkable place–we visited there several years back and I got some nice pictures of the elephants.

  25. 25.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    @Baud:

    I’ll add that, in the context of the tweets in the OP, the criticism was a totally gratuitous aside to the praise rightly given to Biden for his actions.

  26. 26.

    Amir Khalid

    The Republicans tried to make Obamacare a slur, too.  Obama had the perfect riposte: “Damn right, I care.”

  27. 27.

    Another Scott

    The problem with the economy today is that there aren’t enough cartoonists working for the CIA.

    This was a CIA project that was commenced in the 1960s to spy on Russia. They chose a cat for the job, but what they didn’t put into consideration is the fact that cats are hard to train. The cat’s job was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet embassy in… pic.twitter.com/vEfkb0J5Fj

    — Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) June 29, 2023

    The Hawaiian shirt and cigar are [chef’s kiss].

    (via Oryx)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: The alternative is to pretend everything a Democrat ever did was great, which isn’t honest or believable. There has to be some point where criticism of liberal policies for not going far enough is OK.

  30. 30.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @bbleh:

    “We have to make tough choices, which again means that we have to kick the shit out of the working poor and middle classes so that the special snowflakes of great wealth and privilege can continue to hoard black numbers on a digital ledger that make no difference to their personal lifestyle.”

  31. 31.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    That’s not the alternative.  The alternative is to make sure your criticism is fact based and has a decent connection to reality and relevant to the context in which it’s given.

  34. 34.

    Geminid

    I am encouraged to see the President embracing the term “Bidenomics.” It tells me that his economic advisors believe the economy will be good, not just now but next year as well. They could be wrong of course, but this conforms to my layperson’s view.

  36. 36.

    The Thin Black Duke

    If DeSantis is The Last Republican Standing next year, the economic impact of his punitive laws should be hitting the fan by then. Uncle Joe is going to have a lot of ammunition ready to go, I think.

  37. 37.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    OT – had so much fun last night. We attended a private bourbon tasting at the home of the couple who went to Africa with us in April. There were four couples all told – notably included on the guest list was one of the Wine and Crime podcast hosts (she and her husband were delightful – and younger than anyone else there by 20 years), as well as an exec from Kentucky Artisan Distillery (Jefferson’s, Ocean).  Leading the tasting was the co-founder of Angel’s Envy (who sold and made a fat stack of cash several years ago), who brought some amazing bottles and samples with him, including some 1979 Eagle Rare. He’s also a great storyteller and bourbon historian.

    My body will pay for this experience for a few days, but it was totally worth it.

  38. 38.

    japa21

    All figures are positive yet only 34% of voters give Biden good marks on the economy. Wonder why?
    Not really.

  39. 39.

    Uncle Cosmo

    Economists? Ptui! I worked for an office full of PhD economists for nearly five years.

    Some wag once said that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.

    Another said that the economist’s job description has only two tasks: (1) Predict what the economy will be like next year; (2) Explain why last year’s predictions were so ridiculously wrong. Blather, wince, repeat…

    They were a colorful crew, and most of them were nice people (with the exception of the narcissist barstid who was my immediate supervisor), but I wouldn’t have asked them how to get to the Interstate without checking the directions at the nearest gas station…

  42. 42.

    rikyrah

    @japa21:

    Show me where the MSM has been reporting positively about the economy.

     

     

    They have been yelling RECESSION for well over a year

    Trying to wish it into existence.

     

    When I say that they resent the competency of 46 and his Administration.

    I mean it 😡😡😡

  45. 45.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: That does sounds lovely.

    My writer group had its regular zoom last night. We did the critiques, and then a member who’d been to writer camp talked about what he’d learned about querying agents. And then another member blew up and started talking about how evil agents and publishers were, and how they cheated you, and how they added no value, and how AI was going to kill them anyway. At which point, I concluded he must have been turned down by a bunch of agents and signed off. Just a typical Wednesday night in Writerville!

  48. 48.

    narya

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: I’m a fan of bourbon-barrel-aged beer, and an Angel’s Envy barrel featured in one of the most interesting beer events I’ve ever attended. A bunch of experienced home brewers picked a recipe and each made a batch. They picked the best eight of their batches and put them all in said barrel, and documented it w/ a short film, then had an event in Logan Square. (We saw the event listed, but didn’t recognize ANY brewers, which is . . . unusual for us, so we signed up and only later found out the whole story.) It was a great event and great beer.

  51. 51.

    Baud

    The fairly decent run of Supreme Court decisions we’ve had (given the makeup of this court) probably runs out today.

  52. 52.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Baud: I’m not a big zoo fan but I would love to feed the animals.

    I would prefer feeding every declared candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination into a wood-chipper. But U B U, boyo! :^D

  53. 53.

    Suzanne

    @Amir Khalid:

    The Republicans tried to make Obamacare a slur, too.  Obama had the perfect riposte: “Damn right, I care.” 

    Obamacare and Bidenomics: not the pwns they seem to think.

  55. 55.

    narya

    @Baud: [waves a sorrowful goodbye to affirmative action] yup. And the 303 Creative decision promises to be full of religious self-righteousness and bile. Note that SalmonAlito hasn’t written many opinions this year . . . fewer than any other justice.

  56. 56.

    Scout211

    ABC  has identified the gigglers aides in the room at Bedminster where TIFG showed off the classified plans to attack Iran.  And as all news stories have stated, none of these people had security clearances.

    One of the top advisers on Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign is among the individuals identified but not named by special counsel Jack Smith in his indictment against the former president for allegedly mishandling classified documents after leaving the White House and obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.

    Susie Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers leading his second reelection effort, is the individual singled out in Smith’s indictment as the “PAC Representative” who Trump is alleged to have shown a classified map to in August or September of 2021, sources said.

    Trump, in the indictment, is alleged to have shown the classified map of an unidentified country to Wiles while discussing a military operation that Trump said “was not going well,” while adding that he “should not be showing the map” to her and “not to get too close.”

    . . .

    Sources have also further identified some of the other figures mentioned by Smith’s team in the indictment. Hayley Harrison and Molly Michael are said to be “Trump Employee 1” and “Trump Employee 2,” respectively. The indictment details their text messages back and forth about moving Trump’s boxes out of the business center as his Mar-a-Lago estate to create room for staff to work.

     

    Michael, whose name was previously reported as an individual identified in the indictment, is Trump’s former executive assistant who no longer works for him, while Harrison is currently an aide to Trump’s wife, Melania Trump.

  57. 57.

    M31

    @narya:

    SalmonAlito can’t write opinions, he needs to be hyper-vigilant and alert and ready for the moment when journalists dig into his corruption scandals and keep the phone line to the WSJ opinion page open for him to fax his pre-buttals

  59. 59.

    moonbat

    I remember reading a news story back in 2009 when Biden and Obama were putting their heads together thinking up projects for the American Recovery Act (BEFORE the severe trimming to that law brought about Lieberman and other fake “Moderates” supposedly on our side). They talked about rebuilding the nation’s energy grid — a long overdue project — and a host of other things.

    It’s my belief that Biden trying his best to do a lot of the things that he and Obama had on their wish list back then. If he wins in 2024, I predict we’re going to have that energy grid conversation again. It goes hand in had with the broadband access work being done now. I hope it comes to pass.

  60. 60.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @narya:

    I do enjoy a nice barrel aged stout. I suffer a bit later, though.

  61. 61.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Baud: I am pretty sure that the affirmative action decision will be pretty bad.  I am also sure that people will still be mad when Chad or Becky don’t get in at [insert school of choice].  They will just need to find something new to blame.

  68. 68.

    Geminid

    @moonbat: And Mitch McConnel made sure that stimulus legislation would not get a single Reppublican vote. Republicans knew the economy needed more help, but they wanted to beat Obama in 2022 and hoped to do this through austerity.

  69. 69.

    narya

    @Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: Sharing is caring! More seriously, I rarely drink a full can/bottle of it myself, unless it’s my only beverage for the evening. In the pre-pandemic times, there was a group of six of us (all of whom also attend the Great Taste of the Midwest) and we’d share a bunch of those big beers. It was perfect–you’d get enough to taste it, but not have to commit to a full pour. Might be time to resurrect those evenings. (We called them “beer from the basement,” because two of the folks involved had quite an inventory in their basements–why go out when you can drink what you already have?)

  72. 72.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Ken: I probably don’t spend $5-10 a month on postage anymore – and I have full time law office.

    I suspect that the only big mailers are health insurance companies, which inundate their insureds with useless mailings.

  73. 73.

    Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg

    @Betty Cracker:

    It was so delightful that I have stopped at the Circle K for a greasy sausage/egg biscuit and quart of Diet Coke, my only surefire hangover relief….

    Would totally do that again!

  74. 74.

    Roger Moore

    @Omnes Omnibus: ​
     

    They will just need to find something new to blame.

    No they won’t. They’ll just keep blaming affirmative action long after it’s dead and buried, and none of the people who agree with them will care. The Supreme Court could repeal Brown v Board of Education, and they’d still be whining about losing spots to affirmative action.

  75. 75.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Baud: Yes!! Get rid of the ridiculous Trump tax cut for the wealthy on day one.  Make millionaires pay their fair share of taxes. Hopefully, Manchin and Sinema will not be as powerful as they were in previous Senates.

  76. 76.

    JPL

    @Scout211: So did Michael retire a wealthy man?   hmmm   The CIA must be working overtime to repair the damage the orange asshole caused.

  77. 77.

    Patricia Kayden

    @narya: I’ve always heard that the biggest recipients of affirmative action were White women. The pain is going to spread around.
    The idea that affirmative action = unqualified minorities advancing over qualified White people is so ridiculous. It’s a lie that has permeated throughout our country.
    Shame on Clarence for benefiting from affirmative action and now destroying it.

  78. 78.

    Citizen Alan

    @Roger Moore:

    The Supreme Court could repeal Brown v Board of Education

    Don’t joke about that. I still think brown is on the chopping block by the end of this decade, and there are between three and five votes for bringing back separate but equal.

  80. 80.

    Betty Cracker

    @Baud:

    in the context of the tweets in the OP, the criticism was a totally gratuitous aside to the praise rightly given to Biden for his actions.

    Do you mean Copelovitch’s critique? If so, I guess I disagree because I’d call it incomplete at worst rather than gratuitous. He’s right to say if the recovery continues apace, those who advocated for robust stimuli were vindicated, and the historical record post-2008 is relevant. He might have provided additional context, e.g., Repubs and Blue Dogs took truly robust stimulus off the table for Obama, but do you disagree with the premise?

  83. 83.

    narya

    @Patricia Kayden: @Citizen Alan:  Yes, I believe there are votes to attack Brown. Our newest justice, however, is BRINGING IT. In one of the cases (forgetting which one), she basically pointed out the history behind the Reconstruction amendments, and noted that they were explicitly race-based, in order to address the race-based harms that slavery caused. ThomAlito want to destroy it all, with made-up “history,” and she is NOT having it. I think they’ll try an incrementalist strategy, though.

    ETA: the fact that people promulgate that “unqualified” minorities bullshit in the face of, say, legacy admissions, is enraging.

  84. 84.

    Baud

    @Betty Cracker:

    I disagree with “epic policy failure.” And the notion that history (if it’s being honest) will remember the imperfections and inadequacies rather than the success in saving the economy. And describing 2008 through 2018 as a single economic policy period. Beyond the range of reasonableness.

  85. 85.

    Sanjeevs

    (Ken) Paxton, his wife and a family trust spent almost $3.5 million buying six properties across the U.S. in less than 10 months from July 2021 to April 2022, real-estate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show. The properties are a five-bedroom luxury lodge in Oklahoma; a townhouse and two rental homes in Florida; and parcels of land in a Utah ski town and on Maui, Hawaii.

    The property purchases aroused suspicions of investigators working for House members in part because of the timing and the large sums expended, these people said. Paxton made $153,750 a year as attorney general while his wife, Angela Paxton, a longtime high-school math teacher, is a Texas state senator, a role that pays $7,200 a year, plus some per-diem payments every other year.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/impeachment-investigators-look-into-texas-attorney-generals-real-estate-spree-fee0a23?mod=hp_listb_pos1

    Paxtonomics – 3.5 million portfolio on a 160k a year government salary.

  87. 87.

    James E Powell

    @japa21:

    All figures are positive yet only 34% of voters give Biden good marks on the economy. Wonder why?
    Not really.

    Clearly, it’s Biden & the Democrats’ fault.

  88. 88.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Taken4Granite: The US economy seems to have a business cycle in which you can say with considerable certainty that there’s going to be another recession, but you can’t say when.

    The 2008 Great Recession was unusually deep but the recovery from it has also been unusually long–except that there there was also this profoundly deep, incredibly short recession caused by the COVID pandemic that is already over (the inflationary spike that happened during the recovery hasn’t entirely dissipated yet, though it’s dissipating). If you look at it on the charts of economic indicators the COVID recession really looks like this alien thing that dropped from outer space compared to the others.

    So guess the question is, did we just go back to the post-2008 business cycle and are waiting for the “overdue” next recession there? It kind of looks like that if you just eyeball the charts. On the other hand, if you look at the profiles of past recessions you can see they vary enough that just looking at charts is not going to tell you a lot about the future.

  91. 91.

    Scout211

    Scotusblog:

    The court holds that Harvard and UNC’s admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment

     

    Sotomayor dissents, joined by Kagan and Jackson as it applies to the Harvard case. Jackson dissents in the UNC case, joined by SOtomayor and Kagan.

  92. 92.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: I do think it’s not entirely fair to compare the COVID recession with the 2008 Great Recession as a gauge of policy success because they were so different in cause. COVID shutdowns were clearly a temporary exogenous shock that investors had no reason to expect would continue, and they knew there was all this pent-up demand that would come back. The 2008 recession was a situation in which the whole financial industry nearly destroyed itself.

  95. 95.

    patrick II

    The Republicans, and specifically FOX and the late unlamented Lindbaugh, spend much of their time with personal attacks and disparagement, so the candidate’s rating is usually much lower than his policies and then tey run against the candidate.  It worked when the personalized the attacks on Hillary during Clinton’s attempt at national healthcare, then Obamacare and now Bidenomics.  It worked when they were able to drag it down to the personal level, but now the linkage seems to raise the candidate rather than lower the policy.

  96. 96.

    Princess

    @Ken: I realize you intend this to be funny, but if you don’t call Covid the “China virus” you shouldn’t blame “Canada” for the wildfires. They’re a product of climate change and the US is a prime carbon producer. It’s nice to be able to declaim responsibility and agency and make yourselves out to be victims but you’re not.

  97. 97.

    p.a.

    A quick way to shut up tools railing against Affirmative Action is to ask them what they’re doing to end legacy admissions.

    And yes, I would lurve to see the plaintiff list if any anti-legacy laws pass.  Would like to see the Venn of them and the “no Nantucket offshore wind farm” people.  “B-b-but our views!”

  99. 99.

    Roger Moore

    @Citizen Alan:

    Don’t joke about that.

    I’m not joking at all.  A huge chunk of the right wing push over the past few decades has been trying to chip away at Brown.  The key is that Brown can’t really stand on its own.  In the period immediately following Brown, pro-segregation forces tried to work around it by privatizing government services to private actors who would discriminate the same way the government wasn’t allowed to anymore.  Congress and the Supreme Court worked to prevent that from happening.

    But a lot of what’s happened for the past couple of decades is eating away at the jurisprudence.  States that give vouchers to private schools now have to give money to religious schools on an equal basis.  At the same time, the Supreme Court has carved out a huge First Amendment loophole, where religious organizations are allowed to discriminate on the basis of “sincerely held” religious beliefs, and they’ve been continually watering down tests for how sincerely held those beliefs have to be.  The net result is that parents can now get the government to pay for their kids to go to a private religious school that’s allowed to discriminate.  Brown is in mortal peril.

  100. 100.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Omnes Omnibus: Sotomayor’s dissent begins on page 140.

    Today, this Court stands in the way and rolls back dec-
    ades of precedent and momentous progress. It holds that
    race can no longer be used in a limited way in college ad-
    missions to achieve such critical benefits. In so holding, the
    Court cements a superficial rule of colorblindness as a con-
    stitutional principle in an endemically segregated society
    where race has always mattered and continues to matter.
    The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal
    protection by further entrenching racial inequality in edu-
    cation, the very foundation of our democratic government
    and pluralistic society. Because the Court’s opinion is not
    grounded in law or fact and contravenes the vision of equal-
    ity embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment, I dissent.

  101. 101.

    Kay

    @p.a.:

    I will be like banning abortion, where we will be told there will be some kind of OTHER policy changes to mitigate the negative effects except the mitigating policy will never come.

  104. 104.

    Kay

    @Roger Moore:

    The net result is that parents can now get the government to pay for their kids to go to a private religious school that’s allowed to discriminate.  Brown is in mortal peril.

    This is true. Public school advocates use it to oppose vouchers all the time and conservatives have no response to it- no defense- they know the voucher schools are discriminating.

  105. 105.

    James E Powell

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Like Dobbs, this is the culmination of a decades-long project. It is unlike Dobbs in that affirmative action never had the broad, general support that abortion rights did and still do.

    It would not surprise anyone who really knows me if with my last breath I am still ranting about the elections of 2000 & 2016.

  108. 108.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    Saving the economy is an epic policy failure to savvy Twitter liberals.

    You got some for-instances?  I’m on Twitter regularly but I haven’t seen any instances of lefties either being against saving the economy, or saying Biden’s attempt was a failure.

  109. 109.

    Matt McIrvin

    Question: how can college admissions even BE race-blind? They could direct people not to mention it in the application, but they’d probably have to get rid of autobiographical essays, especially of the “challenge I have overcome” type (even ignoring other potential indicators of race: photos, names etc.). Seems like they’d have to bend over backwards to discriminate against Black students in order to avoid “reverse discrimination” lawsuits, because white people are always going to interpret the presence of Black students as a sign of sinister preference.

  110. 110.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    So true. “They got what they wanted! Now they’ll stop being so bitter and angry!”

    Fat chance. They’ll be madder. They get angrier and more violent every year.

  114. 114.

    Kay

    Matthew Yglesias
    @mattyglesias
    ·47m
    Rather than dragging feet on compliance, people who care about equity in higher education should try to direct financial resources away from the richest scools to the institutions that actually educate students from modest backgrounds.

    Here come the “should trys” which are supposed to replace the “must” but will never happen.

    “Someone somewhere should try to make college admissions more equitable sometime in the future”

    That’s all we’ll get. Stupid, vague think pieces. i love the “try”. They never propose mandating anything- it’s all left to “just TRY to be more fair, ok?”

  115. 115.

    cain

    @MomSense: Most of the press (at least the big earners) grew up as Reagan fanboys and so they probably let all that stuff slide in their coverage because there is zero critical thinking about economic policy.

    I think the whole gambit should be used –  bidenomics coupled with obamacare is making the U.S. a great place to be.

  116. 116.

    cain

    The other thing to note other than our dumb press is that Republicans use the same playbook over and over again. Dems are forced to try different playbooks because both the GOP and Press continue to use the same playbooks (which is why they work)

    But for how long? For every time they use the same playbook, it only seems to be working on the older generations who remember shit like Reaganomics, and whatever else out there. We are slowly going to be losing all that came before kind of how nobody is going to remember the Howdy Doody show.

  117. 117.

    Kay

    One can see why conservatives were so upsetby affirmative action- their children must compete in the marketplace purely on ability!

    “I can’t thank you enough for writing that letter to Georgetown on Buckley’s behalf,” Tucker Carlson wrote to Biden a day later. “So nice of you. I know it’ll help. Hope you’re great and we can all get dinner soon.”

  118. 118.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @cain: When the skies are orange it’s going to be harder to claim that climate change is bogus.

  120. 120.

    Dan B

    @narya:  The New Republic has a story about the hay couple who wanted 303 Creative to make wedding invites for.  The reporter called Stewart of “Stewart and Mike”.  First time anyone had called him.  He’s been married to a woman for years.  They have a child.  Totally bogus case brought by ADF.

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