Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Somebody needs to explain to DeSantis that nobody needs to do anything to make him look bad.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

You cannot shame the shameless.

In my day, never was longer.

“Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Let there be snark.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Alternative history is always a weak argument. Always.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

Second rate reporter says what?

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Pick-Me’s Bringing Butter Knives to a Real War

Pick-Me’s Bringing Butter Knives to a Real War

by | 364 Comments

This post is in: 

Jasmine Crockett gets it:

CNN has reported that Biden’s decision to pardon Hunter has left some Democrats fuming, as he repeatedly and unequivocally claimed that he would never take that step.

“I can’t say why my colleagues are acting the way that they are. I can say that the American people are tired of us bringing a butter knife to a real fight, a real war. And the reality is that, you know, a lot of my colleagues, even if they are lawyers, they’ve never practiced law, they’ve never actually been in a courtroom,” Crockett said of some Democrats who are critical of Biden.

“I need people to really recognize that we are living in some different times. And I applaud the president, because the American people have been so upset with Democrats not fighting back and not fighting with the same tools that the Republicans have been fighting with.”

(CNN is so messed up it’s hard to link to this directly, but here’s the page it’s from.)

Steve M has a good name for people like Jared Polis, who added to his track record of saying nice things about RFK Jr. by tweeting about his concern about the pardon:

 

Reader Interactions

364Comments

  1. 1.

    zhena gogolia

    Since I have a news blackout on all sources other than BJ, I don’t know which elected Dems have opened their mouths on this. Please tell me Chris Murphy hasn’t stepped in it again.

    Could we have Jasmine Crockett as president right now, please? make it happen

  3. 3.

    The Audacity of Krope

    I’m goddamn proud of Biden for pardoning Hunter. The whole thing was trying to pull a win out of nearly a decade of sham investigations. And the media played right along, natch.

    Disgusting.

  4. 4.

    cain

    Elected Dems should shut their piehole. The nation has spoken they are A-OK with not having a lot of law and order as long as they fulfill bringing in cheap prices so there is nothing to angst about.

    But for Biden, you know damn well that the Trump administration (spit) will use Hunter Biden as a puppy on a rag doll. They will torture Hunter to get at Joe in petty revenge. The whole thing was a circus to begin with. Most of us know this.  Cruelty is the point. Take that chess piece off the table.

  5. 5.

    rikyrah

    Candidly Tiff 🪷💛 (@tify330) posted at 9:30 AM on Mon, Dec 02, 2024:
    When Democrats stop caring about what the media thinks then we will win big again. Biden began that process last night. Let people judge, complain and bitch. Biden had the power and used it. F norms just do what is right. Joe nor Hunter should have to suffer because of political norms or fear of changing his mind. Trump is picking the worst people for his cabinet, take the damn gloves are off.

    And Dems going on TV being mealy-mouthed about it are the problem, stand with your President or decline the interview. Stop being punk assbitches especially if you are in blue district or state.

    (https://x.com/tify330/status/1863606795458973776?t=1BM28zJ9fRB_dDNED0OryQ&s=03)

  7. 7.

    rikyrah

    CJ G (@cjgproduxions) posted at 6:09 AM on Mon, Dec 02, 2024:
    Some of these democrats be so weak. Yall are always playing “defense” to anything Republicans say. Stand Up for something!

    America just told yall last month they don’t care about Felonies, and you are sitting here thinking the same rules apply and nothing changed !!! Joe Biden saw America for what it is and adjusted.
    (https://x.com/cjgproduxions/status/1863556070565630116?t=4Zm0GLh2D43aPBCYFRCqUg&s=03)

  9. 9.

    Trollhattan

    Some folks need a big, steaming cup of STFU.

    Meanwhile, Biden’s in Africa. Do they think that’s less important than Laptop Lad?

  11. 11.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Lobo: I’ll throw Adam Schiff, Jon Tester, and Sherrod Brown on that. Harold Ford is, full time. I never tended to apply the “pick me” term here, but you made me see it applies to anyone playing along with the media’s dumb games, again, all for approval.

    Pelosi and Warren were even playing more than a little coy with this. For shame.

  15. 15.

    Ohio Mom

    I’d say finding out which side someone falls on whether or not Biden was right in pardoning Hunter would be a handy litmus test except the only person I know IRL who is upset about it is my tote-bagger MIL, and I already know she is a tote-bagger. I swear NPR has a bug in her brain.

    As long as she continues to vote Blue, I’m overlooking all that.

  17. 17.

    scav

    @rikyrah: I’d extend that to the non-voting enablers as well. Or, maybe let them yammer under their breath while pointedly ignoring them.

  19. 19.

    matt

    yeah, political reporters who enforce ‘norms’ only on Democrats are the enemy, let them fall.

  20. 20.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    Our glibertarian, multimillionaire ($400m net worth estimate), techbro governor has a (D) after his name cuz it’s the only way, now, to succeed in statewide politics.  15 years ago, he’d have an (R) after his name and would appeal to a broad cross section of voters and perform like a moderate (R).  I usta think I squished my nose closed when voting for good ole Claire McCaskill back in Misery but it’s nothing like the pinch marks left when voting for this clown.

    A ton of CO Dems are pale blue Dems on a good day but most have the good sense to STFU on stuff like this.

  22. 22.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @rikyrah: This needs to be the motto going forward: You voted for Trump? You don’t get to lecture me on shit. Ethics, morals, rule of law. Not a damn thing. You got it?

    Facts. I don’t even know why I played like it was a serious argument, at least with certain people, for all these years.

    My entire life, Republicans have been accusing Democrats of everything under the sun; up to and including suborning pedophilia, vampirism, and Satanism (the last of which is actually pretty cool when done properly).

    Not once did they ever bring up enough evidence that it would stand in court. Not once. Meanwhile, Democrats have been letting Republicans get away with criminality for decades because prosecuting them, even if just, was both politically and culturally perilous.

    And, look, I get it. But after all that, I’m not at all surprised that a critical mass of the American people did not take Trump’s conviction seriously.

  23. 23.

    Geminid

    @zhena gogolia: I don’t know about Chris Murphy stepping in it, but Michigan Senator Gary Peters sure did yesterday.

    I guess this is an important story, but it’s pretty far down my list even though a lot of people are very concerned. American politics seem to be fairly static to me right now, and Syria has got my attention.

    The situation in that country is the opposite of static. It’s a frozen conflict that has suddenly unthawed like one of frozen turkeys unwitting people put into a deep fryer. I wouldn’t joke about it except that there has been relatively little loss of life, at least so far.

  24. 24.

    Sloegin

    Carter pardoned his brother Billy.

    George Bush Sr pardoned his son Neil.

    And yet somehow you can’t find this anywhere in a news discussion.

    Biden’s pardon is neither new or norm-breaking.

  26. 26.

    Torrey

    @zhena gogolia: Would my distinguished commentariat colleague be willing to accept the following friendly amendment?

    I WANT MADAME PRESIDENT CROCKETT RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT!

    (Would settle for January 20, 2025, however.)

    (Nothing against MVP or Gov. Walz; would be glad to accept them. But Crockett brought a howitzer to a knife(-in-the-back) fight, and I like that about her.)

  27. 27.

    ...now I try to be amused

    I wish Judge Merchan had made Trump campaign from a jail cell to drive home the point that he is a convicted felon.

  28. 28.

    Baud

    The Dem base is done. We don’t care what people think. They can go suck the teet of the nearest feudal lord.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    They played us.

    “What about morals and rules and norms and standards? Huh? High and mighty libtards!”

    Democrats try to be super duper upright because surely they will get brownie points…

    And they get Pitchbot headlines in the FNYT.

    We don’t have to roll in the mud. But we have to learn how they work us, too.

  31. 31.

    NaijaGal

    @rikyrah: This! Regular people understand not leaving your child at the mercy of monsters who want to torture him just to get back at you.

  32. 32.

    Eunicecycle

    @scav: some analysis I’ve seen said Sherrod Brown would have won in Ohio if there had been a normal turnout. It’s very depressing.

  33. 33.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @WereBear: We don’t have to roll in the mud. But we have to learn how they work us, too.

    Honestly, they play in our face and we try to answer them seriously. This leaves undiscerning audiences with two sides with seemingly intractable differences and the simplest, laziest answer; which the media is all too happy to validate; is unknowable and somehow in the middle.

    I really think we just need to stop treating them like they’re serious. Like, beyond the point of mockery, we should treat them as not worth engaging with. Full stop.

  34. 34.

    Shakti

    Honestly, I’m not sure which high crimes Hunter committed. Hunter has never held a government position and will never hold one.

    AFAICT, anyone who is focusing on Hunter Biden’s crimes is a Republican or voted for Republicans and is ready and willing to excuse all kinds of worse nepotisms and crimes, saying they shouldn’t matter, and they shouldn’t keep people from power.   They are not suadable in the least.

    There is no principle involved, whatsoever.

    They’ve just used it to beat Joe Biden over the head with it. And you’d think Trump et al’s ace NDA, payoff and coverup team could’ve figured out what crap might be connected to Burisma by now besides ‘person connected to politician got sinecure job.’ They didn’t because there is nothing and they didn’t want to find it.

    I cannot care if I’m being forced to accept such hypocrisies from them as an exercise of power. You cannot hold the moral power of a norm of an ideal over my head anymore to beat me with if all you see it is as a tool to beat your opponents with and you’ve made it clear multiple times.  It means you don’t see the norm as having any value in itself at all.

    I don’t believe you. I can’t pretend to believe you. I’m not going to give you the deference of pretending.

    Leave this poor nepo fail baby who suffered a significant brain injury as a child alone!

  35. 35.

    Jeffro

    @zhena gogolia: I’m good with Crockett as POTUS, but let’s make it a 1-2 punch and put Raskin or Moskowitz in there as VPOTUS.

    (I’d hate to break that act up, they are all awesome!)

  36. 36.

    ArchTeryx

    An interesting and somewhat hopeful sign from South Korea: The legislature met despite military blockading of the Parliament building and voted almost unanimously to revoke the martial law declaration. Apparently, the military forces were held off with… fire extinguishers and sofas.

    The military was ordered to be there, but they had zero interest in propping up Yoon. Believe me, if they wanted to dissolve Parliament or start shooting MPs, fire extinguishers were not going to stop them. So they slow-walked the blockade. MPs had to climb fences and go through windows – an inverse of 1/6 – but they got in and voted.

    Military commanders have said that they will continue to enforce Yoon’s martial law despite it being voted down in Parliament, but they’ve withdrawn from Parliament grounds. His own party turned against him, which may – may – give Parliament enough votes to impeach the son of a bitch. And from there, it’s not Parliament but a Constitutional Court that will decide his fate. They don’t fuck around with insurrectionists in SK once they fall from grace. Just ask ex-President Park Geun-hye – if you can find her. It took a while, but they turfed that motherfucker out for the deaths of 300 kids on the MV Sewol. (The owner of that ferry had the decency to go off somewhere and commit Korean hari-kiri. Park, in true Trumpian fashion, not only didn’t, but tried to make protesting illegal).

    I hope we can find the courage to do what they did when Trump does the same thing. If Schumer and Durbin refuse to lead the resistance from the Senate, then Crockett should push both of those useless fools out of the way and lead it herself.

  38. 38.

    Jeffro

    @rikyrah: This needs to be the motto going forward: You voted for Trump? You don’t get to lecture me on shit. Ethics, morals, rule of law. Not a damn thing. You got it?

    110%

    The minute a Dem does something – anything, any one thing – worse than all the things trumpov has done, someone please let me know.  I won’t hold my breath.

  39. 39.

    Trivia Man

    @Lobo: peters was my dad’s congressman – i took multiple victory laps dunking on him for that. Dad was a very early MAGA* and worked on peter’s opponent campaign. Rocky somebody, another early MAGA. So glad Gary Peters took the seat. Now … sigh

    * dad was a huge Humphrey supporter and had very liberal and compassionate positions. Until Pat fucking Buchannan convinced him IMMIGRANTS WILL OVERTHROW THE COUNTRY ANY DAY NOW.

  40. 40.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Bill Arnold: A distressingly large number of reply-ers to the NYT Pitchbot don’t realize that it is a parody account.

    I once saw a statistic, and I have no idea if it’s true or care to corroborate but seems relevant, that half of all people don’t have an internal monologue. Just nothing going on inside. I feel for them.

    Sounds peaceful…and boring.

  41. 41.

    Trivia Man

    @rikyrah: worse than defense is preemptive surrender. They might say mean things!!! Better not do anything they could object to!!

    Spoiler: they will object to anything you say

  42. 42.

    JoyceH

    @Jeffro: and every time Trump or his minions do something weird, like adding a MAGA rant to those totally bland and harmless holiday proclamations, jump on it immediately- “This is Not Normal!”

  45. 45.

    Belafon

    Like punching a Nazi, sometimes your core principles tell you that a choice of action doesn’t apply in a particular case.

  47. 47.

    suzanne

    So many Democrats are really good, kind people and they are ill-suited to this moment.

    I don’t love this pardon, but I hate what our country is becoming. So: NFLTG.

  49. 49.

    hrprogressive

    Please keep this handy as “Exhibit A” when I continue to say “Virtually the entirety of the Democratic Party needs to be thrown out and replaced with younger, angrier, more realist members”.

    Members like Jasmine Crockett, because she is a certified badass and Gets It.

  52. 52.

    Geminid

    @Bill Arnold: It’s the same with satirist Brent Terhune. People will argue with his parodies of an ignorant Trump suporter like he’s being serious. Terhune’s fans have adopted the response: “Youve been Terhuned!”

  53. 53.

    hrprogressive

    @WereBear: ​
     

    It’s long, long, long past time for the Democratic Party to play politics like the bloodsport it really is instead of treating it like the high school debate club they keep pretending it is.

    Get muddy. Get (metaphorically) bloody. Punch the fuck back.

    Country’s about to fall to shit because the purported liberal Party had been way more invested in their own power and “image” than in doing anything for the common people.

    Voters just proved it at the polls, so.

  54. 54.

    gene108

    I agree with James Carville that Democrats need to do a better job of attracting white voters. I do not think he is wrong here.

    I have no idea how to do it.

    Part of the difference in perception between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats pull in overwhelming majorities of black women voters, while Republicans pull in overwhelming majorities of white male voters.

    Given the historic and deeply ingrained power differential between these two groups of voters, I think it goes to explain differences between the parties. Democrats, like Polis, seek the approval of the white male power structure inherent to this country. The MSM seeks the approval of the white male power structure inherent in this country.

    Republicans represent the white male power structure in this country from broke ass Bubba’s to billionaires and Fortune 500 CEO’s.

  56. 56.

    Soprano2

    @Ohio Mom: Hey, I just wanted to comment about your new washing machine. Does it have a soak cycle? Mine is one of those that senses the water level and has a water saving feature, and it doesn’t have a soak cycle. If I want to soak anything I have to run the water, add more water, and then stop the cycle so that it will soak. I hope they added a soak cycle to later machines.

  57. 57.

    suzanne

    I will note that I — once again — agree with this lady. And not just because she appears to also be named Suzanne.

    “Not all of us were meant to be Miss Rachel liberals.”

  58. 58.

    Trivia Man

    @Jeffro: I will add – voted for trump or didn’t vote at all. If you didn’t think THAT asshole was unfit for office and worth getting out of bed to oppose your opinion on morality is dogshit.

  59. 59.

    Starfish (she/her)

    I don’t think Polis is a “pick me.”

    A “pick me” is someone who is engaging in some attention seeking behavior in hopes of advancement.

    Polis got rich in the first dot com boom, and Colorado is the home of the Libertarian Party. So Polis is sitting next to some tech oligarchs.

    Anyway, the ground may be shifting under some of our luke-warm Colorado Democrats, but I am not sure.

    Since I have been mean to anti-vaxxers for over a decade now, I am not sure of the “Are we still making space for a lot of anti-vaccine bullshit even post pandemic?” All I can say is that there was someone with their proud JFK, Jr. yard sign here in Boulder.

    There is a strong desire in Colorado for politics to feel fair, for our leaders to hold town halls and be accessible to their constituents, and for the voters to feel that they have influence in the state’s political system. So maybe opposing Hunter Biden is opposing things that feel unfair, but hey there are a lot of things about our national politics that are not like our state politics.

    I hope the next time one of these Senate seats comes open, Jason Crow runs for it. I think he would be better than both Bennett and Hickenlooper even though I very much feel that “Are the only Democrats we get on a state level white bros who have money or military experience?” Polis may try to go for that, but I hope he doesn’t get it.

  61. 61.

    p.a.

    I hope Joe didn’t trouble over his decision.  I hope he lit a big cigar when writing it.  I hope he felt, gorram this was fun, what can I fuck them over with next?

     

    My suggestion: get hold of, if not already in possession of, the other NATO nations’ intelligence files on tRump’s psychology/mental capacity and release/declassify/leak.  Don’t think that would compromise any intelligence sources.

    Inquiring minds want to know.

  62. 62.

    cckids

    My kids are 32 and 30.  The first Presidential election they remember is Bush v Gore, and all that followed.  They grew up in the age of Gingrich, Limbaugh, Rove, and all the associated hate and weaponized lying. They were so excited to vote for and support Obama, and saw clearly how he was treated. They have NEVER known a “normal” Republican party. They can’t comprehend how Dems will even attempt to work with Republicans, especially after/for Trump.

    J. Crockett is 100% correct.

  63. 63.

    Old Man Shadow

    The Supreme Court has said that the President is above the law.

    The American voters just said that they don’t care if their leader rapes women and is a convicted criminal felon.

    The nominee for Defense Secretary is an accused rapist whose mother called him an abuser of women.

    The nominee for Director of National Intelligence is called “Russia’s girlfriend” by Russia.

    The likely nominee to be FBI director has an enemies list and promises to turn the law enforcement agency into the President’s secret police answerable to the President.

    The American people, in their infinite stupidity, decided to gift the nation with a Congress full of lickspittles, sycophants, brown nosers, and spineless wimps.

    The American people gave a big ol’ middle fucking finger to decency, empathy, compassion, unity, basic fucking humanity and told us all to go fuck ourselves.

    But sure, I’m supposed to be fucking outraged that in a new age of lawlessness where facts and ethics and morality don’t matter, which the media pushed very fucking hard for and the American people embraced, that Joe Biden pardoned his son after he was targeted by actual lawfare.

    Go fuck yourselves, pundits pushing that bullshit.

  65. 65.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: I agree. I was listening to a program on 1A yesterday about the bill to protect the press that some people are desperately trying to pass before the end of the year. My comments can be summed up as “I don’t care what happens to all of you because you got TCFG, which is what you wanted because you were bored with competent governance and wanted the chaos back because to you it’s more interesting. You made your bed, now lie in it”. It’ll all be a big game to them until Kash Patel has the FBI start rounding up all the reporters who said bad things about TCFG.

  66. 66.

    Geminid

    @Starfish (she/her): Rep. Jason Crow is another member of the talented House Class of 2018, and one of the 40 to flip seats that year. Two others, Andy Kim and Elissa Slotkin, were just elected Senator so Crow will be in familiar company if he advances to the Senate.

  67. 67.

    LeftCoastYankee

    I’m doubting there will be this level of outrage from the media and butterknifers when the House calls Hunters laptop to testify at some absurd hearing in 2025.

  70. 70.

    Soprano2

    @rikyrah:  This needs to be the motto going forward: You voted for Trump? You don’t get to lecture me on shit. Ethics, morals, rule of law. Not a damn thing. You got it?

    I’ve been saying this since 2016, that I don’t have any reason to listen to a lecture about character and morals from a right winger ever again.

  71. 71.

    Soprano2

    @suzanne: I don’t love the reason he had to do it. I wish he hadn’t kept insisting he wouldn’t do it, because he had to know this kind of thing could happen.

  72. 72.

    Lobo

    @Starfish (she/her): ​
    Not to argue. The definition is about approval and throwing others under the bus for that approval. It is not necessarily about advancement. Jared fits that definition.

    A pick me is a woman that is willing to do anything for male approval. She will embarrass or throw other women under the bus to achieve this goal.

  73. 73.

    ...now I try to be amused

    I see Biden’s promise not to pardon Hunter as a campaign promise. All campaign promises have the condition, spoken or unspoken, of “if I am elected”. In Biden’s case it was “if my chosen successor is elected”, but it amounts to the same thing. The condition makes sense because Harris, unlike Trump, would not persecute Hunter Biden.

    Biden kept his end of the bargain. He dropped out of the race and supported Harris. He did everything he was supposed to do. But Harris didn’t get elected, so the bargain’s off. As far as I’m concerned, he is now free to do whatever the fuck he wants.

  74. 74.

    suzanne

    @zhena gogolia: I don’t love it because it is an indicator that much of what I loved about this country is dead and gone. The rule of law, impartiality, etc….. it’s gone. And Biden knows it, and he has to protect his kid, because the GOP is a bunch of psychopaths.

    It’s like when that guy cut his own arm off because he was pinned by the boulder: it was the least awful outcome possible in a terrible situation, and you wish it didn’t have to come to that.

  75. 75.

    Kay

    Well, some Democrats think Biden should have “violated norms” on THEIR behalf, rather than only when his family was threatened. He could have skipped the bizarre buddy- buddy visit with Trump, for example.

    “Fighting Democrats” vs ” norm defending Democrats” is an oversimplification, IMO.

    I support the pardon because it is on the side of truth. 1. It was a bullshit political prosecution and 2. Media discussion of “norms” is another one of their feel good fantasies about this country.

    My approach to the new fascism is to cling tightly to what is true. This act moves toward truth and away from bullshit so I support it.

  78. 78.

    Gloria DryGarden

    from the late night thread:

    A norm that restrains only one side isn’t a norm at all–it’s a trap.

  79. 79.

    A Ghost to Most

    Insanity: repeatedly being nice to christian fascists, and expecting a different response.

  81. 81.

    Elizabelle

    @cckids:  And that is terrifying, because it’s destabilizing.

    A German looking back in 1946:  they had not known a normal world and economy since, what, 1914-15?  Also about 31 years.

  82. 82.

    Kay

    The WH meeting with Trump moved away from truth and towards lying, bullshit “appearance of norms” so I opposed that. It isn’t about Biden or any individual actor – its about somehow getting out of this fun house mirror we’re in by being brutally honest, no matter the consequences.

  83. 83.

    Elizabelle

    Do not forget that wanker Michael Bennett’s brother is wanker James Bennett, NY Vichy Times opinion page editor, who was fired.  James is now at The Economist.

    Funny, that.

  84. 84.

    Shakti

    @cckids:

    I have trouble remembering a fair republican party. I thought Bush elder was ok? But I was a child and I kind of knew the Dana Carvey impression.

    I remember thinking the Clinton impeachment was bullshit.  And I didn’t even know everything that happened.

    My first election was 2000.  And that was bullshit. And I didn’t even know everything that happened, really.

    It’s just been an increasing ratchet of norms being shattered and broken by one side and an ineffectual follower of norms on the other.

    If you look at the wikipedia pages for how they passed the fiscal budgets for each FY, the disclaimers are instructive.

    Lawrence O’Donnell lives in some weird fantasy land along with the showrunner of The West Wing who was actively massaging the perception of reasonable Republicans as Clinton era nonsense was happening. Who the fuck is Tip O’Neill? What is this janky 70s cartoon about passing a bill into law? Also, Scandal is just laundering the political romantasy of GWB Condi Rice and election fraud in fiction, with a Republican president who was really a liberal Democrat, don’t @ me ABC (I loved it though, lol.)

  86. 86.

    Kay

    I think media’s absolutely bonkers level of focus on this tells us how bad Trump’s proposed appointees are. They can’t really face any of the new reality because they’re rigidly conventional, unimaginative people.

    They know this is going to be a disaster for the US so they’re running a way from it, as usual.

  89. 89.

    zhena gogolia

    @suzanne: It’s a good look. He’s saving his son from a gang of criminals who have been given power by the American people. The American people can STFU.

  90. 90.

    catclub

    @hrprogressive: It’s long, long, long past time for the Democratic Party to play politics like the bloodsport it really is instead of treating it like the high school debate club they keep pretending it is.

     

    You will find exactly this opinion on rightwing websites, with the parties swapped.  So I don’t know how true it is for either side.

  93. 93.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: No lies told about Polis.

    @Geminid: Jason Crow, my congressperson, the guy who helped barricade doors on 1/6, an up close and personal eye witness to broken norms, also criticized Biden for the pardon. As did milquetoast Michael Bennet.

    Insert EF Goldman words here.

  95. 95.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @persistentillusion:

    No lie told. Wankers, both of them. As a constituent, both have received their last vote from me.

    Bennett, of course, was a lead voice in the Tonya Harding Dems chorus so this babble from him should come as no surprise to anybody.  It’s way too early to know if he’ll run again in 28.  That’ll give me plenty of time to soften my nose for squeezing.

    As noted above, Polis is a techbro and as many of us say here often, techbros will be the death of all of us.  Thing is, a lot of crap he pushes is supported by a wide swath of the pale blue Dems of a certain demographic that have flocked here over the last decade or so.  Same with our Great White Dope of a Denver mayor who everybody knows will run for a Senate seat should one open up.  If that happens and he is the (D) nominee, it’ll be the first time in my life I won’t vote for a (D) for Federal office.

  96. 96.

    suzanne

    @zhena gogolia: I don’t think it’s a good look. I don’t think Biden would have done it had Harris won, and that indicates that it isn’t a good look, and he knows it.

    But, when the larger situation is terrible, when there is politically motivated revenge headed toward you and your family, sometimes good looks are no longer on the table.

    So, IDGAF.

  97. 97.

    Betty Cracker

    @Kay: I really hope Biden moves to protect the other folks Trump and his thugs have threatened. (I hear Kash Patel helpfully published a list.) The HB pardon is justified, imo, but protecting the Vindmans, J6 witnesses, etc., would have way more civic value.

  99. 99.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Shakti: in my opinion, the last decent Republican president was Eisenhower, so before I was born. Reagan was in bed with the religious right and senile to boot, Bush Senior and lesser were also in bed with the religious right and got us into bad wars, and then we got the orange excrescence. I won’t vote Republican for county dog catcher even. And I’m sure that the historians will be along to tell me how bad Eisenhower was (yes, he had affairs, yeah the interstate system destroyed Black neighborhoods in the cities) so I’d have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln as the last decent Republican presidents.

  100. 100.

    rikyrah

    @Kay:

    I think media’s absolutely bonkers level of focus on this tells us how bad Trump’s proposed appointees are. They can’t really face any of the new reality because they’re rigidly conventional, unimaginative people.

    Because, they know that THEY are very much responsible for us being in this situation.

  101. 101.

    Belafon

    @catclub: Did you ever watch the Owl House? Near the end, Luz, the main character, is asking if she’s just as evil as the bad guy because both of them claim to want to save people. Titan, who she is talking to, basically replies that you have to look at the resolution both sides want. The bad guy wanted glory for himself, and really didn’t care who was hurt along the way, while Luz and her friends wanted to actually help people.

    Yes, other people can say the same things, and they do, but they don’t want people to be allowed to live their own lives and they don’t want people to have any chance at happiness.

  102. 102.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @zhena gogolia:

    It’s a good look. He’s saving his son from a gang of criminals who have been given power by the American people. The American people can STFU.

    Exactly and thanks for again pointing out this is a legally granted power.  It doesn’t matter how it looks because it’s a granted power.  People who were in the Tonya Harding Dems Club screeching about how this “doesn’t look good” for Biden reveal themselves yet again.

    Also too, if we look at the people howling the loudest about this, those are people from within and without the left (and the media writ large) that we don’t give a shit about.  Biden has no more fucks left to give in that regard so good on him and a pox on those on “our side” who think otherwise.  Per #5 above: Stop being punk-ass bitches especially if you are in blue district or state.

    Now, if we all want to have a conversation about the pardon power and removing it from Ye Olde Constitution, sure, that’s a legit conversation to have.  But in terms of “how it looks”?  As we’ve been saying here for the last two days, it hasn’t mattered historically and when viewed thru that lens, what Biden just did is *nothing* in comparison.

  105. 105.

    Kay

    @Betty Cracker:

    Right. Norm breaking in defense of others. At least protect Fauci, who never did a single thing wrong and is an exemplary public servant.

    We’ll see.

    Not consuming as much media is interesting. They seem much more bizarre when you don’t imbibe daily. We “normalized” them, I’m afraid.

  106. 106.

    rikyrah

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    @Shakti: in my opinion, the last decent Republican president was Eisenhower, so before I was born.

     

    Peanut has asked me if there were any good Republicans.

    I, too, told her that Ike was the last decent one.

    Just like I told her that if there’s anything negative about this country… in the last 40 years.

    Ronald Reagan..

  107. 107.

    Ohio Mom

    @Soprano2: This morning I xeroxed the pages in the installation manual that had to do with operating the machine and carefully read and highlighted the pertinent parts. Right there, that tells you something about how unintuitive this appliance is.

    I think — am not totally sure— that I can soak things for up to a day IF the lid is shut. After 24 hours, the machine will empty itself. If the lid is open, as I recall, it’s a mere 15 minutes before it empties itself. Time will tell I suppose. Maybe be I will end up hauling and pouring water like you must. Which sounds awful.

    Who would design a washing machine without an obvious way to soak things?! I will tell you: men who hardly ever have to wash their own clothes, and when they do, are indifferent to the results. This is an argument for authentic diversity in the workplace.

  110. 110.

    cmorenc

    I wish that Biden would summon his humble Scranton Pa upbringing and give a 2 or 3-word answer to anyone questioning his pardoning of son Hunter:

    “Fuck off”.  Or better, “fuck off, asshole”

    Which he should follow up with: “I might be more concerned about the appearances of this, if y’all had shown more concern about the infinitely worse gallery of people Donald Trump pardoned: Roger Stone, Joe Arapio for starters.  And the gallery of thugs he’s announced intent to pardon, especially those who violently attacked the Capitol lethally threatening Congressmen and Senators.”

  111. 111.

    suzanne

    @WaterGirl:

    The incoming DOJ will have nothing to do with Justice.

    That’s what I don’t love.

    Yeah. I get that the pardon was necessary given the situation.

  114. 114.

    Bill Arnold

    @The Audacity of Krope:
    As somebody who does not have a regular constant internal monologue, no, there’s plenty going on. It’s just not linear language, or even easily mapped to linear language.
    I sometimes wonder how people with an internal monologue think, with all that chatter going on. :-)

  115. 115.

    Kay

    The truth is Biden has several sketchy relatives who have absolutely traded on the name. Frank Biden, his brother, is a for-profit charter school executive who regularly lobbies to take public school funding and line his own pockets. His charter school chain “Mustangs” is so sleazy only OH and FL allow it to operate. Similarly, Hunter never would have been given these jobs without a famous daddy – but political prosecutions are still wrong.

  117. 117.

    pajaro

    @Kay:

    NPR introduced the pardon as its top story, and asked whether it was going to create a precedent going forward, as if Trump had not  pardoned Jared’s  father.  It’s so freaking obvious that they do not recognize Trump’s action as counting, or even having occurred.

    If we don’t have to sacrifice our children for God, we surely don’t need to do it for NPR.

    Biden said he wasn’t going to pardon his kid when he had some reason to believe that the rule of law was going to apply to him.  He now knows that the FBI nominee has said he’s going to target Hunter, despite his utter lack of knowledge of the facts or prior investigations.    The facts have changed, so Biden’s view has as well.

  118. 118.

    Sure Lurkalot

    OT For those who are in the market for a new or renewed passport, afraid what will happen to the agency under Trump, I did a renewal online on November 18, the application was approved and I received notification yesterday my new booklet is in the mail.

  119. 119.

    Soprano2

    @Kay: Kash Patel has a literal “enemies list” of people he wants to go after who were only doing their jobs or doing what was right or required, yet somehow their discourse is dominated by this pardon. They’ve shown themselves to be worse than useless in the face of TCFG. Many of them seem to be terrified to cross him.

  120. 120.

    Bex

    @rikyrah: Thanks for that.  I also recommend that people read Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters From An American today for a good wrap-up the whole Hunter Biden story.

  121. 121.

    Kay

    You never heard about Frank Biden from media or Republicans because there are lots and lots of well connected charter school scammers, and media and Republicans would prefer not to discuss that.

    Hunter was safe to go after.

  122. 122.

    tobie

    Aileen Cannon broke every norm in her courtroom and put her thumbs on the scale for Trump. Where was the press outrage? Eli Honig treated her positions as legit? The press corp said Jack Smith’s prosecutors were testy, even as Cannon took their phones and prohibited reporting directly from her courtroom. Fuck them and their double standards.

  123. 123.

    cmorenc

    @rikyrah:

    Ronald Reagan

    What a malevolently insane world it is that if a magic Genie offered us a very narrow wish option: you can swap out Trump for any other GOP President of the past 40 years to be President the next 4 years – Ronald Reagan would be best (or least bad) choice.  At least Reagan would not have been snowed by or covertly in cahoots with Putin.

  124. 124.

    Miss Bianca

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: I quit the party after 40 years because of the behavior of Colorado Dems in the state party apparatus and our elected officials alike being among the first to start the “Dump Joe Biden1!!1” panic stampede. Haven’t forgiven them for that yet.

  125. 125.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Ohio Mom: yes, there’s no one who can solve a problem like the persons who are actually experiencing the problem. Which is why we absolutely need diversity in engineering and not just having the able-bodied white boys in the field.

  127. 127.

    frog

    @rikyrah:

    F norms just do what is right. Joe nor Hunter should have to suffer because of political norms or fear of changing his mind.

    Norms? The “norm” is to let the prosecutors, judges, and defense do their thing, which is what was going on. Then some GOP congress critters stepped in and demanded harsh penalties. The “norms” broke right there.

    Joe’s promise to keep out was before Trump’s cabinet pics promised to hound Hunter to his death. Anyone who wouldn’t pardon their kid in that situation is not much of a parent.

    Are all these complainers equally upset and howling about Trump pardoning Jared Kushner’s father? No.

    The outrage must be all about a politician not keeping a promise. //

  128. 128.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @pajaro:

    NPR introduced the pardon as its top story, and asked whether it was going to create a precedent going forward, as if Trump had not pardoned Jared’s father. It’s so freaking obvious that they do not recognize Trump’s action as counting, or even having occurred.

    If we don’t have to sacrifice our children for God, we surely don’t need to do it for NPR.

    They might not be FTFNYT but most days, Totebagger Radio gives them a good run for their money.

  130. 130.

    Chris

    “I can’t say why my colleagues are acting the way that they are. I can say that the American people are tired of us bringing a butter knife to a real fight, a real war. And the reality is that, you know, a lot of my colleagues, even if they are lawyers, they’ve never practiced law, they’ve never actually been in a courtroom,” Crockett said of some Democrats who are critical of Biden.

    What I’m tired of is pretending that this kind of piddly meaningless shit is the equivalent of Watergate so that the usual suspects can write yet another article about how Both Sides Do It (But Liberals Are Worse).  I was tired of it when Bill Clinton lying about a completely legal event in his sex life was treated as equivalent to George W. Bush lying the country into a war with a body count in the hundreds of thousands.  I was tired of it when Hillary Clinton using a personal email server was treated as the equivalent of Donald Trump asking the Russian government to interfere in an American presidential election so they could help him win.  I’m goddamn sure tired of it when Joe Biden using his explicitly constitutionally granted power to pardon a family member for a victimless crime that he’d already made full restitution for and has never in the entire history of this country resulted in prison time before, is treated as the equivalent of Donald Trump trying to violently end two hundred and fifty years of American democracy.

    It’s bullshit.  Everyone knows it’s bullshit.  The pundits who can’t stop talking about it know it’s bullshit, and they know we know it’s bullshit.  It’s every bit as much of a power move as every insane lie Trump has ever told.  Just like Trump, the ridiculousness of the claim is the whole point, forcing the entire political system to grind to a halt and discuss their latest brain fart with all the seriousness with which we’d discuss the Cuban missile crisis even though everyone knows it doesn’t deserve it, and therefore proving how important they are.  The only people taking this seriously are Democrats whose “a liberal is a man who can’t take his own side in a quarrel” tendencies have grown to the level of a full-blown mental disorder, and every one of these people need to go fuck themselves so that we can tell the punditariat that they, also, can and should go fuck themselves.

  131. 131.

    cmorenc

    @tobie:

    Aileen Cannon.  I never thought I would wish for the continued health, vigor, and desire of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito to stay on the bench for 4 more years, but if one of them retires, guarantee she immediately comees to the top of Trump’s list of prospective nominees.  Alito is a pure idologue, and Thomas is corrupt, but his votes are overwhelmingly motivated by ideology (which conveniently matches that of his generous billionaire pals).  Cannon is pure political hack on top of being an ideologue, and that is long-term much more dangerous than a pure ideologue.

  132. 132.

    sab

    @Kay: #75. Yay.  And you don’t even like Hunter Biden. I feel sorry for him and you think he is a jerk. But we both agree he shouldn’t have been prosecuted to begin with.

  133. 133.

    hotshoe

    @…now I try to be amused: ​
     
    Yes! I haven’t seen anyone else point that out — and I wish it everyone would — because seeing Handsome Joe’s “I won’t pardon” as a campaign promise strips away the basis for fake-outrage from folks who are determined to find something wrong with him. It was a limited contract based on Dems coming out to vote to keep the justice apparatus out of the hands of revenge-crazed ReThugs.

    It’s so obvious once you said it, but in this goddamn media and political environment, obvious somehow doesn’t get through to the snivelers.

  135. 135.

    Chris

    That’s Polis, except he’s a Democrat willing to throw other Democrats under the bus for the approval of Republicans (and members of the media, and other self-hating Democrats). Nate Silver isn’t a Democrat, but he built an audience full of Democrats when he was making his name as a politcal forecaster, and now he wants to be noticed every time he slags a Democrat. It’s the surest path to widespread approval in the world of politics.

    A phenomenon I’ve heard about in entertainment is that people will create a TV show (or other such product), the TV show will become very successful, the creators will try to engage with the fanbase… and then they’ll discover, to their absolute horror, that their fanbase is mostly women.  Not even necessarily “mostly,” but at least, that women are much better represented in their fanbase than they imagined.  And they cannot stand this.  They want a male fanbase, that manly men with pickup trucks and lots of facial hair will discuss in gruff voices over their manly drinks at the local bar.  And they not only double down on trying to market the show to men, sometimes they even start changing the show in an attempt to appeal to a “better” fanbase.

    There’s something similar going on with a certain type of self-identified Apolitical Technocratic Wonk, especially when they start getting a lot of publicity.  In theory, they want a job where they can print Just The Facts as they see them, as honestly as possible, and like all of us they want to be praised and recognized for doing their job well… but then they invariably discover that the only people in American politics who are actually interested in dry fact-based analysis whether or not it confirms their priors, are all liberals.

    Like a lot of entertainment writers with women fanbases, they can’t stand this.  And instead of concluding “huh, the only people who are interested in what I do are Democrats, maybe I should pay closer attention to that party,” they set about trying to win the Republicans’ approval.  And trying and trying and trying, more and more furiously and desperately as they go.  And the more they go on, the more their work suffers.

  136. 136.

    Sherparick

    @zhena gogolia:

     

    @Lobo: Jared & Bennett are going have real shocked look on their faces when Pam Bondi puts a special Trumpster U.S. Attorney in Denver to convene Grand Jury Investigation on every campaign donation and business record for the last 20 years to find one “t” not crossed or “i” not dotted to gin up a “false statement” investigation.

     

    @Lobo:

  137. 137.

    hotshoe

    @zhena gogolia:

    It’s driving me nuts that any good people are completely missing the point with this “not a good look for Biden”.

    This pardon is exactly how all parents are supposed to behave in a decent world — to love their children, protect them as best as possible, forgive their children even when the children have grown and are making adult-size mistakes.

    There’s a whole long Bible story about it.
    Luke 15:11-32

    How can our people have forgotten that story or missed its point so spectacularly?

  138. 138.

    Sherparick

    @sab: I don’t like Hunter, I think he is pretty selfish prick who has hurt his Dad, his Stepmom, and his children a lot, but I also feel sorry for him to have the whole weight a Special Counsel Investigation, fall on him like a ton of bricks because Trump and Barr wanted to hurt his Dad.

  140. 140.

    rikyrah

    @Sherparick:

    if Hunter was just a run of the mill Rich White Man…he would have never been charged. He was only charged because his last name is Biden.

     

    I have no issue at all with the pardon.

  143. 143.

    Sherparick

    @hotshoe: Also, I think at this point Biden has no more “fucks” left to give about what people thought of him.  He was an amazingly good president in so many ways & it is not his fault that American oligarchic class & the majority white people are governed by their resentments and greed & have lost all virtue so that Trump has a solid 46% of the vote no matter what.  Biden basically he made three big mistakes: 1) appointing Merrick Garland and not Doug Jones as AG; 2) withdrawing from Afghanistan (he should have torn up Trump agreement and put 20,000 troop back in the country because apparently the country preferred that to the bad TV of the withdrawal); and 3) deciding to run for reelection after turning 80 and not having the energy or interest in doing the infotainment part of the reelection job well still being a full time President. (Polls over the last year indicate that 20% of women blamed Biden for the Dobbs decision. The only way to disabuse was a very constant and repetitive campaign that Dobbs was Trump’s and the Republican Party’s “achievement.”

  144. 144.

    suzanne

    @hotshoe:

    How can our people have forgotten that story or missed its point so spectacularly?

    Because, supposedly, when you become the president, you’re supposed to put concerns of the country ahead of your family’s or your own benefit? And that lots of other people’s kids are in prison and that they would also like their children returned to them, but they aren’t powerful people?

    I had a big problem with TFG bringing his garbage children into the White House, getting them security clearances, etc. Even though it was legal.

  145. 145.

    JML

    @Kayla Rudbek: I mean, Eisenhower was pretty good for the times? He was about as racist as most of his brethren, opposed integration in the military, pretended lynchings weren’t happening in the south, etc. But good luck finding very many politicians back then that weren’t problematic by modern standards on race. Picking an outstanding Chief Justice…and regretted it. Warned people about the military-industrial complex…but didn’t nothing about it. Pretty good on foreign policy and didn’t screw things up on domestic. As modern presidents go, he’s easily the best republican. But his competition is Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump.

    oof.

  149. 149.

    Chris

    @cckids:

    I’m 37, and I’m in the same boat.

    I grew up with all sorts of ideas about a “normal” Republican Party, especially since my family was pretty moderate, the media was all-in on the idea, and even so-called liberal fantasies from Aaron Sorkin to John Stewart were crammed to the gills with “both sides do it” and the idea that there were bad and good people on both sides.

    The problem is, by the time I was old enough to cast my first vote in 2008, it had become very clear that this was all bullshit.  There are no Arnold Vinicks in real life.  The 2008 GOP ran the candidate who’d been sold to us for a whole decade as Real Life Arnold Vinick, and it turned out he was just as crazy as anyone from George Bush’s administration, and doubled down on that by launching Sarah Palin’s national career.

    The idea of working with these people, as opposed to doing everything humanly possible within the law to roll them back to as much of a minority status as we can, is batshit insane.  It already felt that way when Obama took office and it sure hasn’t gotten any better since.

  150. 150.

    JML

    @Sherparick: Hunter Biden definitely messed up, but I have sympathy for him. The death of his brother clearly hit him hard and was a major part of him spiraling. And he simply wasn’t suited to have the spotlight turn on him in any way.

    in a normal world, he would have been able to go to rehab, spend a few years on probation (maybe with some minimum security prison time), and hopefully get his life back together. but we live in the realm of right -wing crazy Trumpistan. I’m glad Joe gave him a pardon and the whiners in the media and the weaklings in the democratic party can fuck the hell off.

  151. 151.

    Bupalos

    I have no issue with the pardon, I can’t criticize Biden for it and understand as Biden asked us to that as a father he had to do what he had to do and that’s that.

    i also think it was politically unethical and will do some further damage to the party and American democracy going forward. Though not really a huge amount. Maybe more than I thought at first though, as I read Crockett’s screed and a bunch of the over the top “let darkness bury the dead” reactions here. Presumably this loud cheering for ethical retreat will burn out in a day or two.

  154. 154.

    suzanne

    @zhena gogolia: I’m aware of the context. I’ve said the pardon was the best outcome to this situation.

    But, like, it looks like yet another example of rich and powerful people fucking up and finding some way out of it. Whatever. That’s what this country is all about. That is the thing that makes me sad.

  155. 155.

    Martin

    So, let’s talk about Musk and Boeing.

    A lot of people – a LOT – feel that the US is a nation in decline. We can point to the economic metrics all we want, but the US seems to have lost the capacity to do big things. China builds 30,000 miles of high speed rail, and the US has two isolated segments, a quasi-HSR Amtrak segment, and a bit of major infrastructure in CA that started 16 years ago and might finish 16 years from now. A major nuclear plant expansion in South Carolina failed completely. A big one was when the Space Shuttle program was ended in 2004, after the 2nd failure and loss of life, the US had no backup plan – no capacity to service the ISS, which we were a major partner in. We had to bum rides off the Russians with their decades old Soyuz. The head of Russias space agency suggested we build a trampoline. To a country that is infinitely proud to be the only nation to have people walk on the moon, this is deeply humiliating.

    Congress tried to address the problem in their glacial, infighting way. Sen Shelby was deeply protective of programs that would funnel money to Alabama, but which were generally antiquated, slow, and expensive. Programs like SLS, which might launch once per year at a cost of over a billion dollars per launch.

    Enter Elon Musk doing a thing he deserves actual credit for. SpaceX was founded in 2001 and focused initially on small payload launches (a gap in the market). They quickly pivoted to a conventional low earth orbit (LEO) launch strategy which is the Falcon 9 with a focus on reuse – seeing if they could land it and reuse the largest part of the rocket. The incumbent at this time is ULA – a joint venture between LockMart and Boeing designed to shore up an industry that is almost entirely dependent on US government cost plus contracts. They have good rockets but no human rated capsule to ferry astronauts to and from orbit. SpaceX doesn’t launch Falcon 9 until 2010, 3 years behind schedule. SpaceX can make 4 rockets per year – fewer than ULA. They get a contract in 2006 to send cargo to the ISS and first delivery is in 2012. SpaceX doesn’t land their first rocket until 2016. In 2014 NASA awards a contract to SpaceX and Boeing to build capsules to bring crew to ISS by 2016. SpaceXs first test flight is in 2019, and their first crewed test flight is in 2020. Boeing’s first test flight is also in 2019, and their first crewed test flight was this year, which was a failure due to mechanical problems that made the return of the astronauts too risky. They’ll return on SpaceXs 9th trip to the ISS. SpaceX now launches a Falcon 9 more than twice a week – about 125 launches this year with another 10 or so planned.

    SpaceXs first successful launch was 14 years ago, and ⅔ of all the operating satellites in orbit were launched by them, and they out launch all other nations plus all other US operators combined.

    SpaceX has singlehandedly restored the US position as the dominant nation for access to space, and they did it quickly, and they did it inexpensively. Yes, Musk cluttered that whole space with unmet promises, radically unrealistic timelines, and a mountain of shitty behavior, but he ultimately delivered on the stuff that mattered, and he outran China, which is no small feat.

    Meanwhile, their biggest competitor, Boeing, long the pride of US aerospace dominance, has fallen into scandal, shitty engineering, slow progress, and the perception that they are holding US progress back because they prefer the fat cost plus contracts that let them milk the taxpayers of money, which doesn’t punish their slow pace, over a competitive market where they need to deliver. That’s the perception on both the left and right.

    There is no government operation here to point to and say ‘look how well we can do this’. We have an old incumbent that has gotten greedy and lazy, and a new upstart that is coming through. Everyone hates all of the conditions that lead to Boeing – Boeing themselves and their shareholder demands, their overly protective plans, their cost cutting, their protection of old markets, and the government processes that enabled them – from NASA to DOD to the FAA.

    I’ve argued that voters have turned anti-corporate, but I don’t think they feel that in a philosophical sense – like the concept of corporations is bad. I think they feel like the implementation of corporations is bad. They’re slow, greedy, enshittifying everything. Products are getting smaller, ad-free streaming tiers are going away, purchases replaced with subscriptions, and then those services get canceled turning your nice thermostat or whatever into a useless thing. Boeing is teetering. Intel is failing. We can’t build infrastructure either quickly or inexpensively, except sometimes in response to a crisis.

    SpaceX is an outlier. It feels like the answer to a lot of people. Musk gets stuff done when the core of America’s industrial base seems to be more focused on making things shitty to boost profits, and government seems just fine with this. One of the things the right hates are big banks. That goes back to 2008 and hasn’t gotten better (you can usually substitute ‘bankers and those who protect them’ for ‘coastal elites’). The tech bros want to roll out all kinds of fintech scams to disrupt the industry and Democrats oppose all of them, but Democrats aren’t providing any better ideas here other than to protect the status quo (institutionalism). Everyone wants out of a system of 25% interest rates on credit cards and $50 overdrafts, but only the tech bros are trying to reform that system. Even the CPSB protects this system. 25% and $50 fees is fine to the CPSB, just don’t apply those improperly.

    So yeah, you get a guy like Musk, who unfucked one of our industries saying he’ll do that to everything else, and a lot of voters will line up and say ‘yes please!’. Will he fuck things up? Sure, but he’ll at least take us off of this path, which we’ve been stuck on for a long time with no signs of things changing. Tech bros are for all of their faults seen as reformists of the status quo – because they are. Their motive are to just replace the incumbents with themselves, and be even greedier in the process, but at least the change will happen and we’ll deal with those consequences when they arrive. Don’t optimize prematurely.

  156. 156.

    scav

    It ain’t necessarily pretty or pure, but a solid response of tit for tat isn’t a bad response when trapped in a prisoners dilemma.  Shouldn’t be the go-to immediate Swiss Armny knife play, but it has its place.

  157. 157.

    hotshoe

    @suzanne: ​ No.The reason the president has pardon power granted by the Constitution is because we (collectively) understand that there must be a recourse in justice and mercy when the court apparatus, prosecutors/jury/judges have at some time performed with injustice and revenge.Pardon power is a moral good.
    Joe Biden is not responsible for Thugs having been able to use their power in corrupt ways in the past (or predictably in the future).
    Sorry, it’s bad not to be able to tell the difference between this moral instance –of justice repairing injustice in Biden’s case — and the others’ corruption which you correctly scorn.

    It’s okay to be full-hearted on the side of mercy in this case.

    We won’t (I hope) be living in the future timeline where Red-hatted justices will be able to hound Hunter BIden with a never-ending array of made-up charges. We know that they have vowed to continue their revenge crusade against him.
    You won’t (I hope) ever have to hear the news that Hunter has committed suicide/been shanked in prison and wonder if things would have turned out differently if Joe had had the moral courage to pardon his son.​

  159. 159.

    suzanne

    @hotshoe:

    Pardon power is a moral good. 

    Sure.
    I’ll feel better about it when lots of other, less well-connected people also get pardons.

  160. 160.

    Ruviana

    @Kayla Rudbek Ike was an instrumental participant in first the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Iran, Mossedegh, to preserve claims the U.S. and Britain had on Iranian oil. It’s always oil, isn’t it? This went so well that the following year, 1954, he decided to do it. again in Guatemala. The President, Jacobo Arbenz, was threatening United Fruit’s vast land holdings and the U.S. was worried about pesky commies. With the aid of various players including the Dulles Brothers, Arbenz was evicted and a puppet President installed. Sorry. Thinking about this makes me a little overwrought.

  161. 161.

    Martin

    @Old Man Shadow: So, I’ve just heard a pretty good explanation for why voters like Trump.

    They’re tired of the way in which politics has operated, pretty much their whole life. Lots of posturing, position papers, consultants – a lot of theater and inauthenticity. 

    Trump and the horrible people he nominates signals an end to that. Every obscene thing about them signals an end to that old political system. Voter tired of guys like John Edwards with his perfect hair and persona (who turns out to secretly be a piece of shit) seek a political system that is more getting things done and less Sunday shows. So how do you convince voters you aren’t the guy pretending to not be a piece of shit? By openly being a piece of shit.

    Voters don’t necessarily like that Trump is obscene, but his obscenity proves that he’s not politics as usual. Again, voters want things to change. Trump doesn’t necessarily represent how they want them to change, but he will at least end the old system, and that’s enough.

  163. 163.

    Martin

    @suzanne: Biden did do mass pardons of people charged with federal marijuana possession, and anyone convicted under DADT. The big exit pardons are usually done in the last couple of days. There’s a whole process to those done by a commission.

  164. 164.

    Bupalos

    @Kay: I support Biden in both actions in the sense that he simply had no other play available to him, much as we might imagine he does.
    And really, I didn’t think of it this way before, but there’s a sense in which both actions do damage to our democracy, and from the same root: Biden aimed his political appeals at “saving democracy” “saving norms” and “saving us from Trump.” Now both of them present as political lies. Ultimately choosing to run on democracy and norms was a political tack that almost guaranteed democratic decline and was based on a kind of denial of reality.  And it ultimately accelerated democratic decline when it proved to be a losing strategy electorally in addition to a problematic one in itself.

  165. 165.

    Steve LaBonne

    MAGAs wanted to burn politics as usual down, but the voters who actually decided the election pay no attention to politics and were Googling “did Biden drop out” on Election Day. Drawing sweeping conclusions from that is not likely to be a useful exercise.

  168. 168.

    Soprano2

    @Ohio Mom: Yep, I totally agree with this. It was engineers who have someone else wash their clothes, so they have no idea what’s actually practical.

  169. 169.

    Geminid

    @Ruviana: I think overthrowing Prime Minister Mossadegh was as much about Cold War rivalries as it was about oil. The U.S saw an opportunity to install a regime friendly to us and hostile to the Soviet Union to the north, in an historically powerful nation.

    By the early 1950s an opportunity like that was seen as a neccesity. This is not to justify the coup but to explain another aspect.

    Six years later the Turkish military overthrew a populist Prime Minister. The U.S. managed to keep its fingerprints off that one for the most part, but most Turks assume the 1960 military coup and a second one in 1980 were sponsored by the Pentagon and the CIA. There was no oil involved, only Cold War imperatives and another strategically important nation.

  171. 171.

    Soprano2

    @pajaro:  NPR introduced the pardon as its top story, and asked whether it was going to create a precedent going forward, as if Trump had not  pardoned Jared’s  father.  It’s so freaking obvious that they do not recognize Trump’s action as counting, or even having occurred.

    This is why I quit listening to their daily news programs. It’s so obvious that they hold TCFG to a different standard than literally any other politician, it’s gross. I can’t stand to listen to it anymore.

  172. 172.

    Chris

    @Ruviana:

    Yeah, Ike’s foreign policy was largely a disaster, even if later presidents were the ones stuck picking up the pieces, on account of turning the Dulles brothers loose on the world.

    On domestic politics, I’d also add that he was way too comfortable playing footsie with the McCarthyists and other far right lunatics, even if he then fucked them over when it became convenient.  And among these far right lunatics?  The fifties was probably the biggest comeback for religious fundamentalism since the Scopes trial of 1925 at least somewhat smacked them down.  Oh yeah, all the crap that became the bread and butter of Nixon (hey look, Ike’s VP!) and Reagan and all these guys was very much already cooking under Eisenhower.

    By the way, speaking of the Dulles Brothers?  You know who Eisenhower’s first choice for Chief Justice was, the guy he wished he could’ve had instead of Earl Warren?  John Foster Dulles.  The same Dulles who flipped the switch from “antiwar peacenik” to “crusading fanatic” in 1945, as soon as the nation’s biggest foreign enemy went from “Nazism” to “Communism.”  Can you imagine how the civil rights era would’ve gone with that guy presiding over the legal landscape?  Thank God Ike didn’t get his wish.

  173. 173.

    suzanne

    @Martin:

    The big exit pardons are usually done in the last couple of days. There’s a whole process to those done by a commission. 

    Yes, understood. So we’ll see what happens.

  176. 176.

    PJ

    @Bupalos: ​
      You’ve got a bee in your bonnet with this belief that pardoning Hunter was unethical, but you can’t name a reason why. There is no such thing as political ethics – there is no code of conduct which is enforced by anyone for politicians (as we have seen over and over in Republican administrations.) There’s just legal and illegal.

    Hunter was unjustly prosecuted for entirely political reasons, because his father was President. If he had been anyone else, he never would’ve been charged, and if he had been charged, he would have been allowed to plea out. He stands a good chance of dying in custody under a second Trump Administration. But for you, pardoning him is unseemly – “uncouth” as some pundit wrote up today – because his father is the pardoner. Better he should die in jail than the Democratic name be tarnished with correction of an injustice.

  177. 177.

    John S.

    @Soprano2:

    I honestly cannot stand watching or listening to any news — for many years now. It’s all so fucking useless.

    I prefer to read my news, which is unfortunate. That form usually provides one with more factual information, but alas, this is just not how most people want to consume their news.

  178. 178.

    Bupalos

    @Martin: Yup. He’s actually a very unpopular politician. It’s just that the system is even more unpopular. And so of course we ran the ultimate “let’s save the system, whatever else our differences” campaign.

    adding fuel to your prior comment here too, we passed the IRA two years ago. And simply were unable to implement it. Like literally incapable of even setting up the administrative structure to get much of it started. There’s a really good argument that government in addition to appearing mysterious to most people in how it arrives at policy decisions is simply unable to do the things it is ostensibly there to do.

  179. 179.

    John S.

    @PJ:

    Norms in politics are bullshit. As you point out, either something is legal or it isn’t. And if it’s something purely political in nature, the legalities can usually be twisted enough to give just the thinnest veneer of propriety.

  180. 180.

    Gloria DryGarden

    It appears to be time for the old compare and contrast paper. Remember those?
    to compare:

    Trumps pardons for what kinds of crimes vs the hunter Biden crimes

    # of impeachment’s, indictments, and for what crimes, in what evidence

    this apples to oranges thing where both sides say similar negative things about the other, but maybe one side is doing vastly heinous norm breaking things, and the other side is being lied about to cast doubt and to sway voters.

    how msm sanewashes republican actions and memes, but down ply’s any good done by democrats, and makes a big big fuss over small actions

    slam opinion pieces about these things, based on this model, into every media source you can get it on.

  182. 182.

    John S.

    @Bupalos:

    There’s a really good argument that government … is simply unable to do the things it is ostensibly there to do.

    This is why Republicans exist — to prove that government (run by them) is completely fucking worthless.

  183. 183.

    Fake Irishman

    @hrprogressive:

    oh come on. This administration has done incredible work with narrow legislative majorities for two years and we’re going on about how the liberal party only cares about its image and not about regular voters?

    I know we have to do some self analysis, but please can we stop embracing GOP frames on this blog of all places?

  184. 184.

    Martin

    @Bill Arnold: I credit Gwynne with the well managed part – like 100%.

    But I credit Musk with the leadership. His technical contributions are trivial at best, but he’s not risk adverse. He’s willing to crash rockets frequently if that’s the fastest way to figure out reuse. Boeing just sees that as a PR disaster and avoids that at all costs – so they get trapped in this ‘we need to model this out perfectly before we can try it’ loop which takes fucking forever, if it even is possible for highly complex systems. It’s not an engineering limitation, it’s a PR limitation. And I see a lot of people here falling into that trap of thinking Musk is a fuckup because his rockets crash – no, that’s expected. They know it’s not fully modeled, out but it’s time to try and see which stuff is well enough understood and which stuff isn’t. Engineering used to be a lot of fail early and often, and that got killed by the risk it presents to marketing and the effect on stock price.

    Leadership is a lot of risk management. How hard to push. And in a consolidated market, taking the risk to disrupt yourself. And that’s in really short supply out there. That’s probably his best characteristic. That’s why Steve Jobs was respected – he was similar in that regard, and at the very least he was a much less malicious asshole.

  185. 185.

    PJ

    @John S.: ​
     Indeed, believing that government doesn’t work and, when they are elected, making sure it doesn’t work, has been the Republican creed since Reagan. I suspect some commenters here would be more comfortable in that party.

  186. 186.

    Chris

    @Geminid:

    Plenty of hostility towards the Soviet Union in Iran without any need for a new regime.  The country had long experience with Russian imperialism and had recently finished another phase of joint Anglo-Soviet occupation, two powers they hated equally.  Meanwhile, no beef with the United States, which had a pretty good image in-country until certain events.

    There’s a reason Truman told Churchill to get bent when he was approached with the coup idea.

  187. 187.

    laura

    @John S.: and to make sure we never, ever tax the billionaires to pay for the kinds of social good we deserve. Listening to the republican opinion havers and legislators weeping and wailing about the debt (that did not exists when GW Bush was elected) and how we need to slash spending on entitlements because spending is out of control. Fuck all of them fuckers.

  188. 188.

    ColoradoGuy

    I think Stalinesque show trials are baked in at this point, and the media is pretending as hard as they can they won’t happen. Because the media owners are a bit concerned they might be in the dock after the fascists go after the Democratic leadership.

    I think Biden and his close staff advisors realized the Republicans are perfectly serious about show trials, and moved accordingly. Fauci and the J6 Committee need to be preemptively pardoned, because the gangsters will go after them, along with Hillary, Bill, and Kamala.

    “Norms” collapsed back in 2016, and The Law collapsed when the Supremes made the President not just any King, but an absolute monarch.

  189. 189.

    Layer8Problem

    @Martin:  We’re talking about the man who’s running X, right?  I’m missing the leadership angle there.  Perhaps he should apply his risk-taking to deep-sea submersibles and show us how that’s done.  Space X at least walls him off from stuff, as one does with some leaders.

  191. 191.

    Bupalos

    @PJ: It isn’t “better” that he not be pardoned. I think Biden did on the whole the right thing and only thing he is personally capable of doing. He put his son in this position and in fact upped the ante by making a political move to allow the prosecution to go forward as a way to contrast us with Trump.  There is no way he can allow his son to pay this price as a father who is entirely responsible for this son’s exposure within this system.

    But of course there’s such a thing as political ethics, and of course a president using the pardon for a personal benefit conflicts with our political values.

    Two or more things can be true. Values can be in conflict. This is a power Biden shouldn’t use as a president, should use as a father, and must use as a decent caring person with his family history and values. I don’t expect that to be accepted here in a space where people and actions are either good or evil and everything is simplified and moralized and lines up nicely.
    Of course though political ethics exists and requires Biden to adhere to his very loud promises which he used to try and retain power. Or refrain via recusal. And not doing so will be somewhat damaging politically.

  193. 193.

    Martin

    @John S.: But this kind of speaks to why Democrats are bad at the politics part. They need to figure out how to implement their agenda before they lose power. In 3 years, we’ll be singing the praises of the new factories being built under the IRA, and crediting Trump with the jobs.

    This mad scramble to get shit done before Trump takes office is infuriating. Did you all forget there was going to be an election?

  194. 194.

    JiveTurkin

    @laura: The debt is $36 trillion, give or take.  Take away the Reagan, Bush 2, and Trump tax cuts and it would almost certainly be less than $5 trillion.  And the tax cuts in each case were a temporary stimulus that could have been accomplished with checks to each household.  But that wouldn’t have accomplished the real goal which was to create more wealth inequality.  What people don’t understand is that ultimately it is a zero sum game.  If they have much more you will probably have less.

  195. 195.

    cmorenc

    If only Biden had appointed Jack Smith right out of the box to be AG, instead of awarding it to Garland as a consolation prize for being stonewalled out of a seat on SCOTUS.  We (and particularly Trump) would have long ago been in the FO phase instead of the FA phase.  Even though Smith probably would have needed to appoint a Special Counsel to handle the actual cases against Trump, he probably would have picked an equally formidable not FA type of person.

  197. 197.

    Geminid

    @Chris: There was plenty of hostility towards Russia, but a big preponderance of military capabilities on the part of the Soviet Union. Turks had an even deeper historic emnity towards Russia, but the US was taking no chances in that case either.

  198. 198.

    pat

    https://www.meidasplus.com/p/the-big-reason-why-hunters-pardon?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

    Ron Filikoski lays it all out.  Patel had been ranting about Hunter for years, and what he will do to him.

    Just the possibility that patel could become FBI director seems to have been the final straw and I just have to say, THANK YOU JOE.

    Now to go read some comments.

    Spent the morning in Urgent Care with hubby who has had a terrible cough for a few days and now has tested positive for Covid 19, against which we are vaxxed.  Got the Pavloxid altho we couldn’t really recall how many days he’s had this cough.  My home test just came out negative….

  199. 199.

    Bupalos

    @John S.: they do indeed know where our weak underbelly is. But I’m very tied in to and personally interested in HEEHRA. We simply couldn’t do the biggest thing we tried to do, AFTER passing it and WITH the cooperation and expertise of the most friendly states like Washington and California. In two years we could not accomplish setting up a rebate program or get a single homeowner project funded. Now it will not exist.

  200. 200.

    Chris

    @Layer8Problem:

    @Martin:  We’re talking about the man who’s running X, right?  I’m missing the leadership angle there.  Perhaps he should apply his risk-taking to deep-sea submersibles and show us how that’s done.

    Yeah.

    Generally speaking, when I see a guy who’s done such solid work in one endeavor and turned out to be such a total assclown in multiple others, I tend to assume that a lot of the solid work on that one endeavor was actually done by somebody else.

    (Exhibit A: George Lucas in the original Star Wars, when he had his wife up to her eyeballs in editing everything, when he had one of his friends to whittle down his insane ten paragraph opening scroll to a manageable three, when he had Harrison Ford around to tell him things like “you can write this shit George, but you can’t say it.”  Versus George Lucas writing the prequels twenty years later, when he’d become the closest thing Hollywood had to a god and there was nobody left to tell him he couldn’t do something).

  201. 201.

    Villago Delenda Est

    CNN, like the Vichy Times, WaPo, and the major networks, needs the Ripley Treatment.

  202. 202.

    Jeffro

    @Kay:I think media’s absolutely bonkers level of focus on this tells us how bad Trump’s proposed appointees are. They can’t really face any of the new reality because they’re rigidly conventional, unimaginative people.

    Yup.

    Reporting accurately on how unfit trumpov’s nominees are would sound partisan because there literally are *no * redeeming features to be discussed re: these people.  They’re horrible, they’re unqualified, they’re obviously compromised in most cases and corrupt to the core.  They’re deeply damaged people, ready to carry out unlawful (or worse) orders for trumpov’s upcoming RevengeFest.

    Dragging Biden for a perfectly legit, smart pardon (and of his son, no less!) keeps up the “both sides” BS, in spades.

  204. 204.

    PJ

    @Bupalos: ​
      Biden “put his son in this position” – you are just normalizing political prosecution.

    Your belief in political ethics is entirely made up. You cannot point to any code of political ethics in the American system. In any event, personal benefit, in and of itself, does make any action unethical! Actions are deemed unethical because they harm, or have the potential to harm, other people. No one is being harmed by this pardon – Hunter paid his back taxes, plus interest, a long time ago, and no one will be put in jeopardy by his freedom.

    You just don’t like how this looks, because you’ve bought entirely into the Republican/media framing – that Hunter is a crook who deserves to be punished, and his father’s pardon lets him off the hook from his just deserts. As was pointed out upthread, none of these people moaning now were upset when Neal Bush was pardoned, or Billy Carter (not to mention Manafort, Stone, Bannon, etc.)

  206. 206.

    divF

    @Martin: “Move fast and break things” works fine for things like the space program, where the human costs of the “break things” part is minimal to nonexistent. Not so much so with Social Security and Medicare.

    A lot of what the Dems are excoriated for being institutionalists about is actually for trying to prevent those horrific human costs. In these matters, the GOP and the techbros view these human costs as a feature, not a bug.

  207. 207.

    Martin

    @Layer8Problem: I’ve explained before how Musk thinks. He has a notion of what is easy and what is hard, and if he thinks it’s easy he reuses to listen to experts and if he thinks it’s hard, he does. I’ve had this explained to me by students that worked directly under him.

    He sees most aspects of rocket launches as hard – so he listens to his engineers there. He thinks running a social media company is easy, so he doesn’t. His instinct for risk taking there wasn’t wrong (Twitter had settled into a very risk adverse state) but his motivation was to win the culture war against the people that took his daughter  away, and having too much money and too little respect for the industry caused him to do a stupid thing.

    I’m not here to defend everything Musk touches – most of it is bad, but it’s predictably bad if you understand him. And the good stuff is predictably good.

    But who else does the public see that reflect the ability to reform US industry? Jobs is dead. Zuckerberg isn’t seen as an innovator. Most of the big founders are retired. The fact that bench appears so shallow is much of the problem.

  208. 208.

    Jeffro

    @Kay: Not consuming as much media is interesting. They seem much more bizarre when you don’t imbibe daily. We “normalized” them, I’m afraid.

    I know that I kept thinking that (NYT excepted – their bias was obviously never going to subside) as we drew closer to the election, most outlets would highlight the stark differences and emphasize the stakes.

    1) talk about a triumph of hope over experience!

    2)that “as we drew closer” lens…I need to drop that going forward.  News outlets should be on point all year-round.  It can’t be fluff reporting (much less ‘both sides’) up until September of an election year and then voila pivot to some actual facts.  Voters are just too dumb.  And the MAGAts are certainly running 24/7 lie-fests er ‘campaigning’ so the media need to keep pace all year, every year.

  209. 209.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Jeffro:

    “The media” has shown *no* indication of doing what you just described for a quarter century now.

    And there’s nothing to indicate that they’ll change.

    It’ll be up to us to work around that rather sizeable hurdle.

  210. 210.

    pajaro

    @suzanne:

    You seem unwilling  to accept  that if Hunter was an ordinary guy with an ordinary dad, he wouldn’t be involved with the criminal law at all, he would have gone to optima, paid his taxes and that would have been that.  The special treatment that he got was to be treated worse than others, not better.

  211. 211.

    rikyrah

    @Martin:

    Voters don’t necessarily like that Trump is obscene, but his obscenity proves that he’s not politics as usual. Again, voters want things to change. Trump doesn’t necessarily represent how they want them to change, but he will at least end the old system, and that’s enough.

     

    The old system?

    Are we watching two different candidates.

    They don’t want anything new.

    And, I’m tired of tiptoeing around this.

    They want THEIR country back.

    They want to back to the delusional world of Mad Men.

    Where they could pretend that they were big fish in big pond.

    When, in fact, they were the only fish in the pond because everyone else was shut off in sardine cans.

     

    They long for the days when all you had to be was WHITE in order to get a solid middle class lifestyle.

    I didn’t say White and EDUCATED.

    No. Just WHITE.

    When you have been told that your Whiteness carries a certain cache to a lifestyle that you are ENTITLED to…

    And, it doesn’t happen….

    They want Jim Crow 2.0

    They’d rather burn this country to the ground and turn it over to a fascist, rather than live in a pluralistic society.

    I will not buy any bullshyt about these people wanting something new.

    They want to strip away THE 20TH CENTURY.

    Phuck outta here that they want ‘ something new’. And I don’t even mean this in a hostile way towards you, BooMan.

    But, I have had it.

    Those muthaphuckas want to take away EVERYTHING THAT MY ANCESTORS FOUGHT  FOR ALMOST CENTURY FOR ME TO HAVE.

     

    I am THE FIRST PERSON

    THE FIRST PERSON

    In.my.family

    Who was born in  America with FULL RIGHTS.

    And, we have been here since right after the American Revolution.

  213. 213.

    Miss Bianca

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Certain commentators’ ice-cold contrarian “hot takes” were among the things I decided I couldn’t stand reading or listening to in the run-up to the election. Post-election, I am finding them only slightly less intolerable.

  214. 214.

    Elizabelle

    @rikyrah:  Yeah, the Martinsplaining has been a phenomenon to watch.

    Perhaps he can leave us and take up a role for the Republicans.  He takes sanewashing two to three steps into the future.

    ETA:  Uses a lot of words for “nihilists.”  Ignorant ones, at that.

  218. 218.

    Dan B

    @Elizabelle: And Feinberg has contracts with the Pentagon.  Conflict of interest is added to the list.  That was probably on everyone’s Bingo card.

  219. 219.

    Chris

    @Martin:

    The idea that U.S. industry can only be reformed by a techbro rock-star-CEO figure like Jobs, Musk, or Zuckerberg, seems like a pretty big problem right out the gate.

  223. 223.

    HeleninEire

    If I were Biden, at that lunch where the outgoing president hosts the incoming president, I would simply whisper into Trump’s ear. “I left lots of traps for you, Donald. ” And then exit.

  224. 224.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    I’m sure that Joe is very familiar with Democrats who do their best to score political points off of him and his administration. Many of these are the same Tonya Harding Democrats who kneecapped him in front of the rest of the country. I’m also pretty sure that Joe has completely run out of fucks to give after what the Republicans have put him and his son through for the last 10 years. His own party frosted that shit cake when they dumped him, a proven winner, for someone he was pretty much forced to select.

    I’m sure that Joe knew that the election was lost when the party shit their pants over his age and just fucking gave up on it at that point. The Democratic party doesn’t know how to put up a fight any more. Butter knives indeed…

  227. 227.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Chris:

    Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!

    Glibertarian techbros will be the death of us all.

    Also too, whenever anybody uses the word “reform” these days, it typically means the exact opposite of what they’re proposing.  “Reform” in a lot of these contexts is simply “deregulation” in a trenchcoat.  Or “Remake this into what will benefit *me* the most.”

  229. 229.

    Martin

    @divF: Except look at how the ‘break things’ part often plays out. Musk didn’t blow up rockets that had people on them. There are ways of doing these things that don’t involve breaking the core of the thing.

    And quite often the ‘break things’ are sacred cows that themselves are harming people.

    You seem to think that Musk is the perfect encapsulation of that statement – it wasn’t even his statement. I think Twitter is a great example of him breaking things because he thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. Being a self-centered asshole doesn’t need to be part of that approach.

    Democrats have opposed clawing back Social Security benefits from the rich or raising their contributions for philosophical reasons. But those high standards now lay tattered on the ground because voters have made it clear they don’t fucking care. So why not just do those things to shore up the system, show the public it’s safe, and not risk inviting some asshole in to tear it all down? That’s also moving fast and breaking things (the promise of Social Security to millionaires), but a much safer version of it. Instead, we debate while the problem grows.

    I have a different view. Democrats hold out to ensure nobody gets hurt, while voters say ‘we’re desperate, please hurt the billionaires’, and Democrats respond ‘we need some of them to win elections’. This is about harm reduction, not prevention. You can’t fix this in a technocratic way where there aren’t losers. Pick the correct losers and fucking get it over with.

  230. 230.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    Key takeaway:

    Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimize the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election.

  231. 231.

    Elizabelle

    @rikyrah:   But he’s a billionaire.  (And you know there are baked in conflicts of interest, as DanB mentioned.)

    Pig, meet trough.

    But:  The voters wanted something different!  Particularly for the department that has the ability to send their — well, somebody’s — kids into combat.

    It’s disruptive!

  233. 233.

    Layer8Problem

    @Martin:

    I’ve explained before how Musk thinks. He has a notion of what is easy and what is hard, and if he thinks it’s easy he reuses to listen to experts and if he thinks it’s hard, he does. I’ve had this explained to me by students that worked directly under him.

    I’ve missed your explanation, and I’m sure those students have insights that make Musk seem more than “rich narcissist motivated by his 1970s science fiction studies”.  He’s neither D. D. Harriman nor Tony Stark.  At least he’s using flame deflectors on his launch pads now.  NASA and their contractors had those worked out quite a while back.

  234. 234.

    Kayla Rudbek

    @Chris: yeah, this is the XKCD cartoon about the physicist saying that everything is easy/can be expressed as physics or Lord Rutherford saying that all science is either physics or stamp collecting (obviously the physicist has never taken an organic chemistry course in his life, and I do say his with purpose)

  235. 235.

    cain

    @Kay: Norms only apply to Democrats because these media people know that Dem voters expect them and anything to drive a wedge between dem voters and biden is good press.

  238. 238.

    divF

    @rikyrah: Brava !

    Jim Crow is still within living memory, especially if you lived in the South. I was born in 1952, and I was shielded from most of it because I’m white; plus my father was career military, so a lot of our daily life was spent in a racially integrated environment. But I knew then, and I remember now. We’re not going back.

  239. 239.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Layer8Problem:

    Musk’s path to gigantic wealth has been being born with it, then buying a company, then getting bought out for vastly more.

    Failing upwards, but with Hype!

    Our own Adam Silverman had this to say about the man a couple of years back and it remains on point:

    Musk is what happens when you’re raised in wealth that all resulted from apartheid in South Africa. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly gifted, he’s not actually an engineer.

    What he is is someone who was handed an emerald mine and all of its proceeds and profits as a toddler, continually failed upwards, and can’t even get it through his head that the one thing he’s sort of good at – being a promoter of the ideas of people that actually understand the tech they’re trying to build or develop or think up – is the only thing he’s sort of good at.

    And the minute he opens his mouth or decides to tweet, he does damage to the one thing he’s sort of good at and reinforces that he’s really a dumbfuck asshole.

  241. 241.

    Bupalos

    @PJ: I literally can’t even start in here because “political ethics does not exist” doesn’t allow me to. You’ll need to contact a few dozen universities and let them know, maybe fire up some wiki edits. This lands in the space of compromising civic values for personal gain.

    Carter’s pardons were of course unethical. “But no one mentions them on the internet” isn’t a rejoinder. I’ve said before lots of pardon use has been unethical.

    I use the term “politically unethical” here specifically because this will do some political damage specifically because of political promises and themes which Biden made and used and is hereby tarnishing that are likely to have an affect on our political future. Basically it’s going to increase political cynicism, though again, only marginally.

  242. 242.

    Carol

    @TaMara: +1  Polis is a libertarian not a democrat.  Bennet is…well, Bennet is a nonentity.  Will never be more than a mediocre senator.

  243. 243.

    Citizen Alan

    @cain: Yes he did! The prophecies stated that Christ would die, go to hell, and then rise again on the third day. Jesus died on Friday at sunset and arose on Sunday at dawn, so that’s a day and a half! God let his only begotten son out early for good behavior.

  244. 244.

    cain

    @Bupalos:

    That’s oregon. Progressive ideas, high taxes and implementation has been a shit show. People are tired even in this blue state of stuff not working.

    Progressives love shooting themselves in the foot here.

  245. 245.

    Bill Arnold

    @Bupalos:
    You appear to be in denial about the nature of the government that is about to take full control of the USA. [1]
    Authoritarians/fascists destroy people for their own amusement, and to cause debilitating fear among their opposition.
    The rules of opposition have changed.
    [1] The House will be dysfunctional, though.

  246. 246.

    cain

    @Martin:

    I work for Intel, it was a surprise to all of us to see our CEO take retirement. I don’t think it was voluntary, but he was doing some risk taking. But ultimately, the board held him responsible. But it isn’t exactly his fault – our internal management culture and how e take risks are terrible.

  248. 248.

    Shakti

    @zhena gogolia: “Fair” (as in plays by rules and norms) * is different than good.  And I was thinking about when they got elected.

    In my defense, I was literally in middle school and still learning about civics.

    I fucking hated Clarence Thomas at the time of his confirmation hearings and I just knew Anita Hill was telling the truth about her sexually harassing boss.  Just like I hated my sexually harassing peers. I didn’t have words for what either of them were doing. I didn’t have the foresight or gift of prophecy to predict what he’d do or realize he’d still be there decades later.

    I was glad Clinton won.

  249. 249.

    pajaro

    @Martin:

    Voters had four freaking years to see how Trump’s cratering of the old system worked out, didn’t they?  Nothing accomplished other than huge tax cuts for the rich.  Is that what they want from government?  Did they love his covid press conferences more than Biden’s roll out of vaccines?  And if Republicans want to burn it all down, why do they, as if by magic, now believe that the economy really isn’t that bad?

    Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim to know what “the people” think.

  250. 250.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @Bill Arnold: Authoritarians/fascists destroy people for their own amusement, and to cause debilitating fear among their opposition.

    It is Russell Vought’s stated goal in so many words.

  253. 253.

    zhena gogolia

    @Layer8Problem: I’m kind of puzzled as to why the media is being so fierce. He’s not running for anything any more. I guess any cudgel to use to beat and divide Democrats.

  254. 254.

    Martin

    @Chris: I don’t disagree. Like, at all.

    WHAT FUCKING ALTERNATIVE ARE DEMOCRATS OFFERING!

    I call this the 2nd worst child in the world argument. Someone defends their kid as not the worst child in the world, as if that’s suppose to result in us praising how wonderful they are. You get no points for being the 2nd worst. If you do not have an answer to the problem, voters will pick someone who claims to. They will overlook their pedopheila if they’re the only one trying.

    I draw this problem back fundamentally to the problem of investors having too much power, and the tendency to demand taking more and more money until there is no more to give. Investors are useful for new companies and useless to incumbents. Apple doesn’t need a goddamn penny of investors money – they are simply a drag on the company by making demands that cause the company to be less competitive. If we went after investors and (net) profits, that would be a more productive solution to the competition problem than tech bros. Maybe we could try that as a better solution. Democrats as a group are not interested in doing that.

  255. 255.

    sab

    @Bupalos: Almost every president in my lifetime (and I am old) has pardonned relatives. Mostly because relatives bad behavior only got noticed because of the relationship.

    Billy Carter, Neil Bush, Roger Clinton.

    Obamas were squeaky clean so nothing to pardon, but didn’t he let an aunt born in Africa stay in the country?

    ETA Shrub didn’t need to pardon anyone because his dad already had.

  257. 257.

    Shakti

    @rikyrah:

     

    @Kayla Rudbek:

    Decent =/= good =/=  normal.

    I must have really been screwed on this because every chart of “this is when things started to get fucked up” starts in 1980;  bush elder was the last president that won the popular vote to become president, and both shrub and trump lost the popular vote when they became president (in their first terms).

    Maybe my perceptions were all a function of brain development.

    b/c i learned about iran contra as an adult and blurted out ‘isn’t that money laundering?’

  258. 258.

    Martin

    @Layer8Problem: the flame deflectors was the perfect illustration of the problem. Musk thinks civil engineering is easy, so when the civil engineers explained the concrete would explode from the heat of the engines, he ignored them, because civil engineering is easy. He doesn’t do that with the propulsion engineers, the aerodynamicists, etc. He looked at the the flame trench or quenching systems as a profound waste of money.

    But the point still stands – he delivered, if only because it’s a context where he listens to the experts. His instinct to take risks and push for the better solution served him well.

    I’m not saying Musk is the solution to the problem. I’m saying Musks success with SpaceX represents the characteristics that voters like and want more of. Put them in a less shitty vessel, of course, but if Musk is the only available vessel, they’ll take him.

  259. 259.

    Ha Nguyen

    @Martin:

    You are an idiot. I used to read your comments with respect. But, now this is all gone, after you misread Ukraine.

    But, this valorization of Musk shows how much you’ve lost your analytical reasoning. Musk is NOT an engineer or scientist. Musk is a salesman, pure and simple.

    The Boeing 737Max disaster showed what happens when you try to go fast with new technology and is being used by more than one company.

    It’s also interesting that people don’t talk about the Boeing 787 which was a quantum leap in airplane technology and, was mostly successful.

  260. 260.

    Bupalos

    @sab: This is largely true. This case is in fact different I believe specifically because Biden loudly promised not to issue a pardon as part of not just a campaign but part of an entire theme and theory of that campaign- no one above the law, no special treatment for presidents, etc.

    Not morally different, politically different. This I think may be the most politically damaging pardon because of its backstory. It might already be. Though Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich had a kind of long tail that you can argue segued into a kind of corruption narrative that his wife got to inherit.
    people want me to be saying more than I am here. I think Biden did what he had to do and the only thing he could do, but we will pay a price.

  262. 262.

    Layer8Problem

    @zhena gogolia:  Well, Harris is no fun anymore, and Biden never stopped being old, or wrong about everything.  Our resident not-quite-a sealion is on it.  Actually, that one is more of a griefer, unless someone can suggest another more appropriate Internet term.

  264. 264.

    Geminid

    @Bupalos: Much of the IRA has been implemented. You may be talking about one part relating to home appliances and heat pumps. If you look up battery and hydrogen electrolyser factories etc. you’ll see a different story.

  265. 265.

    Ha Nguyen

    One of the problems with American industry isn’t the lack of Musk wannabes. In fact, it’s the over abundance of people who don’t give a shit about safety and want to go fast and break things. Witness the listeria and salmonella outbreaks BECAUSE the government and industry wanted to go fast and test lack of safety protocols on the consumer.

  266. 266.

    sab

    @Bupalos: I sort of agree with this comment. Biden had a tough choice because his opponent is so outside the law. Biden tried to reinforce norms and we just weren’t having it.

    Nationally we have lost our collective mind. Locally in my locale we are still us.

  267. 267.

    John S.

    @Ha Nguyen:

    Martin can defend himself, but I think you’re misreading him.

    I don’t take his comments as valorization of Musk. Quite the contrary. It’s just commentary on what some of the mythos around Musk represents and why people think he’s some kind of real life Tony Stark.

    I think the salient point is to offer disruptive solutions to problems in a more perfect vessel than the odious Musk. The question is whether or not Democrats can bring themselves to do that and stop being slaves to crumbling institutions and rules that no longer apply in the world we inhabit.

  268. 268.

    WaterGirl

    @Steve LaBonne:

    the voters who actually decided the election pay no attention to politics and were Googling “did Biden drop out” on Election Day. Drawing sweeping conclusions from that is not likely to be a useful exercise.

    Preach.

  270. 270.

    Martin

    @cain: It was not voluntary.

    Intel solution is easy – make different decisions a decade and a half ago. The double moat of proprietary x86 and having the best process because you were the biggest market due to x86 dominated was a trap. Intel was the company that established that low marginal cost for semiconductor manufacturing meant that scale was key because scale could insure you could afford the capex needed to stay in front. But x86 was only suitable for PCs and PCs were a market that had limited ability to scale. Mobile was the obvious bigger market, and Intel couldn’t make x86 work in mobile and when Apple asked them to make ARM SOCs for them, Intel wasn’t interested in possibly undercutting x86s role.

    But Intel is small now. x86 is getting gapped by ARM. TSMC is well ahead both on process tech and scale. There’s no getting back to where they were. x86 is still a healthy market, but not enough to prop up in-house fabs, and not a market going anywhere. So the fabs need to be spun off, and the US would support that because they want a domestic leading foundry, and probably put effort behind a consortium ownership structure with the other US customers. That would keep Intel in that game to some degree. I mean, I guess an invasion of Taiwan and South Korea imploding under the madness of their leader would do the same thing, but that seems like the wrong thing to pin your hopes on.

    But Intels business model got wrecked by Apple/ARM and TSMC, and as usual with almost all corporations, Intels board isn’t amenable to a change in business model until they hit rock bottom and have no choice. A decade and a half of papering over the problem of having missed mobile and being unwilling to spin off the fabs like AMD did is coming due pretty fucking hard. And I put a lot of blame on the analysts and the like that had convinced themselves Intel was immortal and beyond serious criticism for so long.

  271. 271.

    John S.

    @sab:

    And here I thought the pharmaceutical sector simply outsourced manufacturing to other countries just to save a buck — kind of like every other business does.

  272. 272.

    Ramona

    @The Audacity of Krope: when I was 15, I asked my then boyfriend what he was thinking and he said, nothing. I could hardly believe that it was possible to think nothing. It sounds so peaceful and utterly impossible for me.

  274. 274.

    Another Scott

    @Ha Nguyen: I’d go even further. 

    Musk is a troll.

    I remember well how:

    1. Musk saved those Thai kids in the cave with his submarine.
    2. Musk revolutionized transit with the Hyperloop.
    3. Musk took over residential solar with his solar shingles.
    4. Musk’s “Enhanced Autopilot / Full Self Driving” that we’ve all been enjoying since the late 2010s.

    [ groucho-roll-eyes.gif ]

    That SpaceX (and Tesla) is even still around is thanks to US Government contracts:

    In 2004, SpaceX protested against NASA to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) because of a sole-source contract awarded to Kistler Aerospace. Before the GAO could respond, NASA withdrew the contract, and formed the COTS program.[20]: 109–110 [28] In 2005, SpaceX announced plans to pursue a human-rated commercial space program through the end of the decade, a program that would later become the Dragon spacecraft.[29] In 2006, the company was selected by NASA and awarded $396 million to provide crew and cargo resupply demonstration contracts to the International Space Station (ISS) under the COTS program.[30]

    The first two Falcon 1 launches were purchased by the United States Department of Defense under the DARPA Falcon Project which evaluated new U.S. launch vehicles suitable for use in hypersonic missile delivery for Prompt Global Strike.[25][31][32] The first three launches of the rocket, between 2006 and 2008, all resulted in failures, which almost ended the company. Financing for Tesla Motors had failed, as well,[33] and consequently Tesla, SolarCity, and Musk personally were all nearly bankrupt at the same time.[20]: 178–182  Musk was reportedly “waking from nightmares, screaming and in physical pain” because of the stress.[20]: 216 

    The financial situation started to turn around with the first successful launch achieved on the fourth attempt on 28 September 2008. Musk split his remaining $30 million between SpaceX and Tesla, and NASA awarded the first Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract awarding $1.6 billion to SpaceX in December, thus financially saving the company.[20]: 217–221  Based on these factors and the further business operations they enabled, the Falcon 1 was soon retired following its second successful, and fifth total, launch in July 2009. This allowed SpaceX to focus company resources on the development of a larger orbital rocket, the Falcon 9.[34] Gwynne Shotwell was also promoted to company president at the time, for her role in successfully negotiating the CRS contract with the NASA Associate Administrator Bill Gerstenmaier.[35][20]: 222 

    (Emphasis added.)

    Even a billionaire cannot fund decades of early rocket research and development without government contracts.

    Nobody voted for Melon in November. The idea that vast numbers of American voters want Melon breaking the government, cutting their Social Security and Medicare, and all the rest, and that we should somehow cater to those voters, is nonsensical to me.

    FWIW.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  275. 275.

    Ramona

    @Bill Arnold: I’m curious whether people who don’t have “constant linear language inner monologue” can invoke extremely early childhood memories. I often hypothesize that I’ve lost all memories from the period before I acquired language.

  276. 276.

    Geminid

    What bugs me about Jared Polis is that this is none of his business. Polis has a fucking state to run. He could have deflected the question and pivoted to an issue of real importance to Coloradans.

    Unfortunately, everybody wants to be a pundit nowadays and Polis is no exception. But if he wants to shoot his mouth off about national issues, Polis would do better to join a political blog like Balloon Juice and use his public platform to talk about his day job.

  277. 277.

    Shakti

    @rikyrah: Yes. All of the logic holes and denials rotate around this.

    I’d go back further than Mad Men and the 20th century, though.

    Those 20th century people believed in germ theory and that vaccines were good and medical advances* were good.

    These people voted for SEPSIS. ** They voted for some OREGON TRAIL DISEASES to make a come back.  DIPTHERIA IS OK AS LONG AS THERE’S NO AUTISM! Unfreakingfathomable.

    Do they have any idea what it’s like to live in a place where you have to boil  and filter water always, it’s not safe to have cold drinks you didn’t see out of come out of a container you know was sealed, or ice, or to eat raw vegetables or raw fruit you didn’t cut? Or where you must always wash and sift everything.

    A lot of people are going to become seriously ill. Just look at all these e coli and listeria oubreaks in the last month or so. I’m pretty sure gargle rocks fail son Kennedy scion will not make it better.

    A lot of clowns figure in their hindbrains it’s going to hurt other people worse than me but when they find out they or someone they care about’ super fitness’ comes from modern medicine and that’s how they can be so sentimental about “life”?  That they are not in fact the main characters of Outlander but the extras who die of tetanus in the background?

     

    My mother is the same age as Ruby Bridges.

    My dad would’ve 100% been sent to Nam.

    But y’know these fools want the relative status bump of being HIGHER CLASS  from living in medieval plague pit death-bourg  rather than anything like an egalitarian society because it’s egalitarian?

     

    *Advisedly.

    **BUT MY RELIGION NEEDS YOU TO DIE OR BE SERIOUSLY MAIMED BECAUSE BAY BIES + JESUS. I’m never going to get over this.

  278. 278.

    Ramona

    @cmorenc: I’d choose HW. True, he nominated Thomas, but he also nominated Souter and I perceived him as a little better than Reagan. I also liked that he at least seemed to value prudence.

  279. 279.

    Layer8Problem

    @Another Scott:

    Nobody voted for Melon in November. The idea that vast numbers of American voters want Melon breaking the government, cutting their Social Security and Medicare, and all the rest, and that we should somehow cater to those voters, is nonsensical to me.

    “We need new thinking, politics as usual is broken, the old paradigms have failed us; it’s self-evident!  This is why Trump got elected again, because the alternative was just too much to bear.  Whatever happens now, at least it will be different; try to be positive and assume that will be good.  Techbros move fast, break things, and we reap the benefits!”

    And @rikyrah, Martin = Booman? Jesus f’kin Christ. What a time to be alive.

  280. 280.

    Steve LaBonne

    @John S.: Biden made a solid start on restoring American manufacturing (in general) but idiot voters think that can magically happen overnight.

  282. 282.

    Steve LaBonne

    I’m really sick and tired of still hearing the economic anxiety bullshit. Ever seen a Trump train of expensive trucks? Those are not people worried about paying bills, the way I had to worry about mine for years. They are racist misogynist authoritarian follower shitheads.

  287. 287.

    cain

    @Citizen Alan:

    @cain: Yes he did! The prophecies stated that Christ would die, go to hell, and then rise again on the third day. Jesus died on Friday at sunset and arose on Sunday at dawn, so that’s a day and a half! God let his only begotten son out early for good behavior.

    Well, there you go! Heh. God pardons, so can Joe.

    Also, we don’t really know if Jesus was his only begotten son, do we now? :-)

  288. 288.

    eemom

    also, another Q for anyone inclined to answer: what’s the feud between Silverman and the other FPers about?

    Guess I missed a lot in those years before misery loves company drove me back here last July.

  292. 292.

    cain

    @Martin:

    I have long stated that our board has been pathetic.

    One problem with Intel is that they still think they are a big brand and try to act like it. But it isn’t 1995 anymore and a child will reach the age of 17-18 years old before they even touch a PC.

    The key thing here is that with Intel not delivering, former customers are now looking at Arm and fabing their own chips and getting rid of the middle man.

    The other thing is that Intel needs to be more open in its firmware, hard to do with 20 years of cross licensing deals due to lawsuits.

  293. 293.

    Layer8Problem

    @eemom:  Beats the hell out of me, and I thought the same but it’s been a long long time.  A cursory DuckDuckGo says “maybe”, but I don’t care to go further.

    Next we’ll find out that Omnes is Fafblog.  Or maybe Baud.

  294. 294.

    Gin & Tonic

    @eemom: ​
    I think Adam believes that his, um, somewhat acerbic views on the American political landscape and more specifically, the Biden administration’s maladroitness in the foreign policy sphere, leave him out of step. Obviously I’m not privy to any internal communication.

    I. for one, greatly value his commitment to his nightly Ukraine war updates, and spend more time on those threads than any others here.

  295. 295.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ramona:
    My earliest memory is non-verbal. Emotional content (mom very upset about an assassination, holding me), TV against the west wall of the house just to the left of a window, making noises.

  296. 296.

    Martin

    @Ha Nguyen:

    You are an idiot. I used to read your comments with respect. But, now this is all gone, after you misread Ukraine.

    Ok. Not sure what that’s about. I misread things all the time. This place is a dialogue, not a seminar. If you think I’m wrong, walk me through it.

    But, this valorization of Musk shows how much you’ve lost your analytical reasoning. Musk is NOT an engineer or scientist. Musk is a salesman, pure and simple.

    I don’t valorize Musk. I called him an idiot many times above. I never claimed he was an engineer – in fact made it clear his biggest fuck ups are when he pretends to be one instead of listening to the engineers. That’s all you projecting. I never said any of those things. SpaceX operational success is all due to Shotwell, as far as I can tell. My praise of Musk is being willing to take the risk to chase reuse, which promised to revolutionize the speed and cost of space flight. He pulled that off when ULA wouldn’t even have considered pursuing it (and still haven’t, even after it’s proven). He’s willing to put PR aside to crash rockets to speed up development. That’s admirable. That’s about as far as my praise goes.

    I also don’t think he’s suitable for any of these tasks, but I can see why voters might. Name some better reformists with a proven track record.

    The Boeing 737Max disaster showed what happens when you try to go fast with new technology and is being used by more than one company.

    No it’s not. It’s what happens when you try and evade the need to certify a new design by bolting technology onto a 50 year old plane that it wasn’t designed for, and then covering up the various problems that it caused because customers wouldn’t have bought if they knew. 737Max was an exercise in cutting costs and chasing profits instead of doing proper engineering to design a platform that would endure into the future.

    It’s also interesting that people don’t talk about the Boeing 787 which was a quantum leap in airplane technology and, was mostly successful.

    Yeah. The design of 787 is very good. But it’s had nonstop production problems, again due to Boeing production mismanagement. It should not be that hard to ensure you don’t have loose parts banging around your airframe. It’s not enough to have good ideas, you need to have good execution as well.

    But read what I said above about 2nd worst child syndrome. We should demand better than ‘But Boeing didn’t fuck this one up’. Boeing is following HPs trajectory of having been a great engineering company, mismanaged into cheap profit-taking until their technical debt and liabilities killed the useful part of them. HP just didn’t have the benefit of half of their revenue coming from cost-plus contracting to a department of defense and NASA that doesn’t have many alternatives.

  300. 300.

    RevRick

    @Lobo: I went on Tim Kaine’s X page and essentially called him a shitty Democrat who owes President Biden an apology.

  301. 301.

    Geminid

    @Geminid:

     

    @Ruviana: I am not dismissing the importance of Iran’s oil resources as a reason behind the overthrow of Prime Minister Mossadegh. I just think the notion  that “it’s always about the oil” flattens history into too simple an analysis. By 1954 the Soviet Union had acquired nuclear weapons and that created a powerful Cold War dynamic that could have led us to overthrow Mossadegh even if Iran did not have large oil reserves. After all, the “Great Game” that the Russians and British played for control of Iran predated the Oil Age.

    But the U.K. did have influence in the matter, and the British typically use foreign policy to further private interests. This was a period  when the the British were handing off their power in the Gulf region to the US but were still trying to influence our actions, so they lobbied hard for Mossadegh’s overthrow and they found a receptive audience in the Dulles brothers.

  302. 302.

    sab

    @eemom: I don’t know either although I read most of them. He did sneer at Watergirl’s trying to cheer things up. Called it “hopium”. He was understandably distraught about our complete fuckup on funding and arming Ukraine. But then after the election he was pretty gracious about all her fundraising.

    He was routinely stomped on in comments not his front page threads so he stopped commenting except on the Ukraine threads. I fear we will lose him eventually, like we lost Rofer.

  305. 305.

    Martin

    @Ha Nguyen: One of the problems with American industry isn’t the lack of Musk wannabes. In fact, it’s the over abundance of people who don’t give a shit about safety and want to go fast and break things. Witness the listeria and salmonella outbreaks BECAUSE the government and industry wanted to go fast and test lack of safety protocols on the consumer.

    Just so everyone is clear – that’s not ‘go fast and break things’, that’s just classic corporate anti regulatory malfeasance. ‘Go fast and break things’ is about disrupting incumbent business models by getting new products and services to market quickly and winning by bringing a large number of ideas and letting the bad ones fail and the good ones succeed. It’s largely synonymous with ‘minimum viable product’. Get the idea out there, let customers sort them, kill off the incumbents unwilling to get with the new program.

    There is no ‘go fast and break things’ in the industry of growing cucumbers or processing lunch meat. There’s a LOT of evade regulation and skip the safety steps. That’s just simple, age-old greed, with possible regulatory capture. In a handful of instances, that’s the thing ‘go fast and break things’ is trying to break. Not enough instances, but a few.

  306. 306.

    Geminid

    @eemom: I’m hoping Mark Warner doesn’t run for relection in 2026. Fourth CD Rep. Jennifer McClellan would be an excellent replacement.

    Virginia has never had a woman Senator, and the Black Virginians who have carried the Democratic Party here deserve representation.

  307. 307.

    sab

    @Soprano2:Morning Edition in the morning rush hour and All Things Considered in the evening rush hour are dreadful. The rest of the day and night NPR is anywhere from okay to excellent.

  308. 308.

    Gvg

    @Martin: and the bench is thin because we have weighted the tax code to perpetuate the economic power in the hands of ONLY the ones who already have most of the money. They have too much which they invest wastefully and stupidly. Other people can’t afford to start their own businesses which a small number would one day be supper big ones, even though most fail. Start ups are way down from decades ago. And the cost of health insurance is also a factor. We did not grow a bunch of new Fords and Apples starting 50 years ago when we screwed up and let the rich form monopolies that keep new guys out. It also cut back on our middle class growth. There is a normal business life cycle and some big corporations are always due to die, but like a natural eco system, there should be new ones ready to move in and take over. We haven’t grown enough baby companies and middle sized, and it’s because we have protected the rich ones too much.

  309. 309.

    Layer8Problem

    @sab:  Rofer was a real loss that I never understood.  Martin’s a big boy and should be able to stand by what he says as well as Bupalos seems to.  Certainly editing could help.

  311. 311.

    divF

    @Martin: Democrats are offering *not* burning the place down, Like, not finding out what happens if Social Security and Medicare get zeroed out, and we sell out the country to Putin.

    This is all they can offer because of way the system is stacked against any substantial positive change.

    The only way we might do better is if we have a 1929-level disaster, that will pull the levers of power from the plutocrats for a long enough time that real systemic change can happen. And that is not a guarantee, because scapegoating sells. It is entirely possible that we will find out, though, since the incoming administration has every intention of burning the place down.

  313. 313.

    Martin

    @Steve LaBonne: They are also a tiny minority of Trump voters. You do yourself a disservice to project that image onto the 70 million people who voted for him. It prevents you from even trying to understand what voters wanted.

    To be clear, prior to the election and in the first week or two after I was with you and rikyah and a lot of the others. But these explanations don’t hold up against what we actually see. They’re not wrong for some subset of voters, but what the fuck are you going to do about them to win in 2028? Murder them? You can’t – ignore them. Focus on the voters that aren’t driven by racism and owning the libs. What’s motivating them?

    Even better, fuck them, and focus on the ⅓ of the potential electorate that didn’t vote. You want an FDR landslide, figure out how to engage them. Because every time Trump has run, even 2020, he added voters that were disaffected. He created new Republicans. Democrat don’t do that. We are so dismissive of non-voters as unreachable and not even worth trying, and insist we need to convert some asshole with a Trump flag on their F-150. No you don’t. Convert my neighbor who is doing well, but can’t figure out how to get their kid to move out because housing is so goddamn expensive. That is not a sign of a good economy, btw. At best it’s a sign of a very unequal economy.

  314. 314.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Martin: and insist we need to convert some asshole with a Trump flag on their F-150.

    Horseshit.  No one is calling for that.

  316. 316.

    Geminid

    @Layer8Problem: I think Adam Silverman, John Cole, and the other front pagers understand each other. That’s all I might ask for if I thought it was any of my business, which I don’t

    Ed. But hey! I look forward to sny observations you care to share about next year’s New York Mayoral race. That will be an important election.

  317. 317.

    Elizabelle

    @Geminid:  Jennifer McClellan is my rep!  And she is totally Senate-ready.  Would love to see her advance, and to see Mark Warner retire.

  318. 318.

    hotshoe

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Yep. Count me as one of the 999 — except I bet it’s more like “not one out of 100,000 Americans cares about the Rich pardon” — so maybe I’m one of 99,999.

    I’m old enough that I was (fruitlessly) on the streets protesting Viet Nam. I’ve been politically aware since way back then; I know how shady politics can harm the family and friends I love.  The fact that I could not care less about Marc Rich and it never affected my opinion about either of the Clintons …

    In my never-humble opinion, Bupalos is simply wrong about “we will pay a price” for Biden’s pardon. This pardon is not a question of “political ethics”; it is literally a life-or-death question re Hunter — but even if the Thugs / the media / concerned BJers can gin up concern about “ethics”, I just don’t see any lasting impact given the lack of interest in ethics shown by 80 millions of American voters.

  319. 319.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Martin: Oh bullshit. I used to have to work with a bunch of these people so I know them a lot better than you seem to. I also know the income distribution of Democratic vs Republican voters which is information that seems to be beyond your ken. You are typical of white cishet, and especially male, people who think the way forward is to throw everyone else under the bus. Rikryah has your number bigtime.

  323. 323.

    Steve LaBonne

    @divF: Democrats of necessity have had to be basically a status quo party throughout my lifetime, because they have had to defend the achievements of the New Deal against enemies who have never slackened in their determination to destroy them. Only LBJ was able to make some advances, which sadly have turned out to be in large part ephemeral. When we chastise them for defending the status quo against something much worse we are just exemplifying Murc’s Law.

  324. 324.

    Geminid

    @Elizabelle: Yes, and I expect Tim Kaine to retire in 2030. Governor Spanberger’s term will finish in January of that year and she will make an excellent replacement for Senator Kaine. Virginia could go from no woman Senators to two in this decade.

  325. 325.

    Elizabelle

    @Steve LaBonne:  That is so true.

    And we now have an electorate that is too ignorant to understand why the FDR administration was able to put into place the security net programs they did.  And why the millionaires and billionaires have always been trying to claw them back.  They fund think tank after think tank in that effort.  Buy up as many information platforms as they can.

    And too many people in thrall to whatever crap just appeared on their social media feed.  Care more about sports teams and music than their government, because they just take it for granted, and are ignorant of history.

    We are living through a tragedy.

    And Joe Biden has found himself to be a tragic president, albeit quite a good one in many respects.

  327. 327.

    Martin

    @cain: That child isn’t Intels customer. The OEM is Intel’s customer, and that’s a big part of the problem. The child is Apple’s customer, and Apple design hardware for people, Intel designs it for OEMs. That’s extremely obvious when you look at the features of Apple Silicon vs both Intel and AMD chips.

    Apple puts thunderbolt on their lowest end products because it’s a useful feature for customers, but Intel gates it on their higher end products as a way to upsell OEMs.

    And the ARM threat wouldn’t be so dire if Apple hadn’t run out there and shown what was possible, and that was a customer that was asking Intel to build what they needed and Intel kept refusing. Intel was more invested in protecting the business than growing it.

    I agree that Intel is nudging in the right direction, but man, it really feels like it’s too late. And nuking your CEO right before a new product launch is pretty rough. I’m just a rubbernecker here – and for your sake hope I have this all wrong.

  329. 329.

    John S.

    @Steve LaBonne:

    There’s enough assholes to deal with in the great wide world that we shouldn’t need to be picking fights with the people who visit this blog and for the most part are our natural allies.

    I don’t understand why so many people here feel the need to apply this us vs. them mentality to every fucking disagreement. It’s exhausting.

  331. 331.

    Steve LaBonne

    @John S.: There are a few commenters here who, as has been noticed by others, are only dubiously on our side. I’m fresh out of patience for that.

  334. 334.

    Andrya

    One thing the anti-pardon folk are forgetting:   there is reason to fear that, when  Trump is president,  persons in federal prison whom Trump regards as personal enemies may be singled out for mistreatment, even lethal mistreatment.

    This has already happened.  In the spring of 2020, with no Covid vaccine yet, prisons were regarded as particularly dangerous for the virus.  The Federal Bureau of Prisons started a policy of “compassionate release”- if an inmate’s crime was not violent, the sentence still to run was not too long, and the inmate had stable family ties, they qualified for release after completing a two week quarantine.   Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen (who had turned state’s evidence against Trump) qualified and completed the quarantine.  Then, suddenly, he was denied early release and required to serve his full sentence (quite realistically exposing him to a significant risk of dying of Covid).  (link)

    Given the hatred the Trump camp  has for Hunter Biden, it’s quite realistic for Biden to fear that something would happen to his son in federal prison.

  335. 335.

    John S.

    @Steve LaBonne:

    Yeah, but there’s also a few commenters here who seem to think that being a “white” (whatever the fuck this even means anymore) cisgender man automatically makes you a part of the problem. And I have no patience for that nonsense.

  336. 336.

    Layer8Problem

    @John S.:  So put up a #NotAllWhiteCisMales response, jeez.  We can actually differentiate ourselves individually from the voting blocs we inhabit.

  342. 342.

    Martin

    @Gvg: Yep. And every founder looking to disrupt the incumbent just becomes them when they succeed. They save us from the current tyrant to become the future one. They’re not the solution, but they’re still appealing because getting rid of the current tyrant solves the current problem, and getting rid of the future tyrant is a future problem we can tackle later.

    That can only be countered if you have a plan to save us from the current and future tyrants. I’ve been on this for 10 days, had a shit-ton of criticism of it, and not a single person has pointed to a better path. And people will always choose a bad solution to no solution. Always.

    And I think part of the problem is that there is still too much effort to defend the current economy, maybe because their definition of ‘economy’ doesn’t match others. There’s a lot of criticism here of billionaires having too much power – but people becoming billionaires and then being catered to by tax policy is also ‘the economy’, but this gets discounted as the thing voters care about. We care about it, why wouldn’t they?

    Who said:

    “I keep telling the wealthy, you’ve got to understand something: Unless this changes, you’re going to have a French Revolution in this country … Let’s have massive tax increases on billionaires … they made this mess, why shouldn’t they pay for it?”

    That was Steve Bannon, who did more to set the tone for how Trump campaigns than anyone.

    And yeah, there’s this huge contradiction between the idea that voters want billionaires to pay and then elect a bunch of billionaires. But again, there’s nobody promising to take down billionaires.

    Meanwhile there are people promising to tear apart the status quo – and I think that’s enough.

  343. 343.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Martin: I tend to agree w/ your analysis, & I’ve been thinking along these lines since the 2016 (when Trump’s surprise, to me, election shocked me out of my technocratic/moderate/gradualist inclinations). 4 years under Biden has only reinforced it. I think your read of a minority of Trump voters & the masses of disengaged citizens is largely correct. I have posted the below before, but I think Van Jackson makes the same point from a more academic POV:

    The Counter-Revolutionaries in Charge
    Arno Mayer’s old categories have renewed purchase in the MAGA/NatCon era.

    UN-DIPLOMATIC

    NOV 26, 2024

    The revolution may not be televised, but the counter-revolution sure will be.

    In this new political era, the dominant military power in the capitalist world-system is ruled by a Venn Diagram of baddies—ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security hawks. These elites take their opportunity to direct state power from the legitimacy afforded a single man. One of the only common elements about the diverse (but majority white and male) votes cast for Donald Trump is that they all saw Washington liberal elites as the enemy.

    To put it differently, Trump voters were against one set of ruling-class elites and so cast their vote for a man who has surrounded himself with a different cadre of ruling-class elites, all of whom seem to fashion themselves as enemies of the previous dominant set. MAGA politics marks the emergence of political counter-elites with nothing short of revolutionary ambitions.

    But what does that mean? Why is nobody talking about what is obviously emerging—counter-elites who are literally talking about revolution?

    …

    I too would very grudgingly give Musk credit for being so committed to reusable launch systems (& then largely letting his engineer wizards do their thing), when the space launch industry the world over was so skeptical of the concept (a big reason the PRC was slow to follow). However, he has ruined Twitter, & he is now undermining Tesla (product development far too slow, insisting on vision-only FSD when price of Lidars have plummeted so much). Setting him & Vivek Ramaswamy loose on the federal bureaucracy will break basic government functions & kill people/ruin livelihoods.

    OTOH, just being defenders of a status quo that a lot of people (even Dem voters) are dissatisfied w/, & that has lost legitimacy among the much of the citizenry, is not a tenable position for Dems, or Anti-Fascists in general. Otherwise, politics remains the periodic trench warfare every election season, determined by a couple of hundred thousand voters in a handful off states. & the reactionary counter-revolutionaries will likely drop political nukes on the US polity & eliminate even trench warfare as an option, the 1st chance they get.

    The US is far from unique here, & this is far from the 1st such moment in world history.

  344. 344.

    Chris T.

    @divF:

    Democrats are offering *not* burning the place down, Like, not finding out what happens if Social Security and Medicare get zeroed out, and we sell out the country to Putin.

    Yeah, but the Angry Hordes (MAGAts etc) want to burn it down. At least parts of it, whichever parts they’re angry about at the moment. Until of course the flames are licking away at their own houses and then they’re suddenly horrified, “how could anyone think we wanted to burn it all down?!”

  345. 345.

    Ramona

    @rikyrah: You are soooooo right! All those seemingly normal politically so-called non-polarized times, even the eighties and the nineties were set against a backdrop of Black misery that was not just simply unacknowledged but forcefully silenced. Now that the White majority has slightly attenuated and the decades of consciousness raising has more people willing to acknowledge the continuing oppression imposed on Black America, the backlash is vicious and crazed. White supremacists really would rather tear democracy down than share it like they did with public swimming pools.

    I am an outsider and I see it!

  346. 346.

    PJ

    @zhena gogolia: ​
      1) It helps them feel morally superior over a powerful politician, when, for reasons that mostly have to do with their paychecks, they find themselves unable to criticize most of what Trump and his cronies do. They also see themselves as elites protecting the precious norms of Georgetown and Manhattan cocktail parties;
    2) the corollary is “both sides” – attacking Biden for this pardon (and not, e.g., Trump for his) helps them paint Democrats as worse than Republicans.

  347. 347.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Gvg The US economy is far too financialized, which has all kinds of perverse consequences for the real economy (maximization of profits margins & asset prices rather than material outcomes), US public policy (monetary policy as the main economic tool, heavy dependence on direct cash transfers & the prayer that the “market” will produce net positive outcomes), & US politics (Wall Street is too big to fail, government run like business or household).

    Contrast that w/ the tools FDR had against the Great Depression, or even Ike & JFK had in the early to mid-Cold War.

  349. 349.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Steve LaBonne: Ayup.  “Economic anxiety” is good cover for the MSM to avoid talking about racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anything-but-“Christian” phobia, GLBTphobia, name fucking “other” to be hated while ignoring the fucking sequoia trunk in one’s eye.

  354. 354.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @cain: Did not know you work for Intel. I am sorry.

    The CHIPS Act is incentivizing a wage of investment in semiconductor fabrication in the US, & there is a dire shortage in human capital. However, I would not want to work for Taiwanese or South Korean companies. the workplace cultures are pretty toxic.

  357. 357.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Ramona: i access those memories via the body, feeling states, a few images, little movies that seem symbolic, but turn out to be real events.

  358. 358.

    Daven

    @Martin: The PR thing is another oddity about the man. He is clearly absolutely desperate for approval and validation but there are areas where he is able to ignore it.

    He will be terrible at anything outside of his niche even ignoring that he’s basically turned himself into an online troll. That runs into your point about ignoring any advice on what he considers the easy things even if he is acting in good faith.

  361. 361.

    Bill Arnold

    @Ramona:
    Was just shy of 3YO. I do not know if i was talking at that point; I think a little.
    West — that side of the house. The memory encoded as that side of the house. “West” might be an overlay from current knowledge; not sure; it had a regular view of the setting sun and I always have had an OK sense of direction, and memories of the same.

    Also, ETA, have a very good memory for mind states. Particularly the shape and emotional content and similar. Resembles memory for smells.

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