If we are lucky, the work he did will give us just enough juice to overcome Trump & Putin and survive this next chapter.
— LadyGrey ???????????? (@TWLadyGrey) December 29, 2024
federal dems have two jobs starting on inauguration day: loudly say no to every bad idea and loudly take all the credit for every good idea. that’s it. that’s policy in the wilderness.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 30, 2024 at 2:36 PM
a majority (if a very slim one) of americans decided that donald trump has all the answers, asking dems questions at this point is a category error. go ask donald trump, he's going to be the fucking president, ask him what he and his party are going to accomplish and how.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 30, 2024 at 2:38 PM
Sad that the best hope I have for 2025 politically is that Rupert finally dies & James, Prudence, & Elizabeth take out Lachlan & start to change the news operation*
*That’s not fantasy, Rupert & Lachlan fear it which is why they went to court to revoke their votes when Rupert dies (they failed)— Dana Houle (@danahoule.bsky.social) December 31, 2024 at 8:33 AM
90% of this is poor media diet feeding negative polarization IMHO
— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) December 24, 2024 at 11:29 PM
The more I think about it the more I worry it's less "poor media diet" than inability to distinguish between actual things happening & the media coverage of those things; the poor media diet is merely a symptom of this deep illiteracy
— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) December 25, 2024 at 7:25 PM
Reminded that the purpose of propaganda is not to convince you it's true, but to obliterate your ability to distinguish what is truth from what is false.
— DeathsHead419 (@deathshead419.bsky.social) December 25, 2024 at 7:28 PM
Actually, egg prices are skyrocketing because Donald Trump was elected president. Nobody needs to hear any of these convoluted explanations. The people are hurting and it's all due to Donald Trump, president. https://t.co/7mLCobgT3V
— Centrism Fan Acct ?? (@Wilson__Valdez) December 29, 2024
I think Biden had an old time mindset of thinking of Americans as workers.
But we’re not primarily workers anymore. We are primarily consumers. And the consumer economy was what people cared about. Not work. https://t.co/Z0OZHDDjDQ
— LadyGrey ???????????? (@TWLadyGrey) December 30, 2024
Albatrossity
I think future historians, if there are any, will refer to the past four years as “The Biden Interregnum”.
zhena gogolia
“Democratic voters knew he was a bad choice; never picked him.” Except in two presidential primaries and one presidential election. WTF is he talking about?
Elizabelle
Are we workers, or citizens, or consumers?
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: It’s Byron York.
Baud
Libs told Dems that people hated Reaganism. We were wrong.
Chief Oshkosh
@zhena gogolia: York is yesterday’s troll. He’s flailing around trying to get some eyeballs over a holiday. Fuck ‘im.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Man, I do not remember that. I remember libs telling everyone that Reaganism sucks (’cause it does), but I don’t remember libs saying that “people” hated it – unless those “people” were other libs, Dems, and various categories of non-RWNJs.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh: You don’t remember three decades of people claiming that Dems lose elections because they are too “neoliberal”?
Elizabelle
We would feel differently if we had President Kamala incoming.
This is looking like a good day to stay off the internet. Not up for the sourness.
sab
@Chief Oshkosh: Agree. Reagan won by landslides in the popular vote, not by eking out a win through the electoral college.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: This isn’t Reaganism, it’s something a bit different. Reagan was bad in a million ways but he didn’t make xenophobia the core of his argument.
p.a.
Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty
I posted a while back that if the Dems took the position of 2nd Amendment absolutism & a budget purchasing each family 1 gun (of the family’s choice) per year they wouldn’t make a dent in the white male vote. Gun lust is real, but it’s also a cover for we-all-know-what. And thanks to tRump, they don’t even need a cover argument: the racism & sexism is the point.
No idea what to do about that, as it’s also a crossover issue for male people of color apparently.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: We’re talking about economics here.
BellyCat
Americans are not “workers” and “consumers”. That’s a false dichotomy. We are now essentially “livestock” to maximize corporate profit in every way possible.
This is true whether the topic is work, consumerism, recreation, illness, child-rearing, death, etc.
Baud
@Elizabelle: We’d be happier, of course, but we’d also gloss over the fact that we had only eked out a win.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: “Landslide” has been defined down.
(Granted, the popular percentage Reagan got in his 1980 landslide was only barely larger than Trump’s in 2024… but that was because John Anderson was splitting the vote, and he destroyed Carter.)
sab
Gotta get up in 10 minutes. Boiler tech is coming! We might have central heat for the first time since Christmas Eve!
sab
@Matt McIrvin: I did not know that about the popular vote. I just knew he won 49 states, not a select 6 or so.
ETA Or maybe I am confusing Carter 2 with McGovern.
Geminid
Brrrh!…yesterday, from Oil Price Magazine:
I ran into this Oil Price article while looking up another one about a Russian LNG tanker. It had returned to port after four months at sea after it was unable to find a buyer for its cargo of sanctioned natural gas.
Elizabelle
@Baud: A win is a win. I will take it.
@sab: Yay! Warmth is good!
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: I’m only halfway through the first cup of coffee. Which “people” were saying this, and what definition is “neoliberal” carrying this morning? No comment on your comments, but maybe a sad comment on my cognition this A.M…
NotMax
Looking for some background music to help overcome the NYE nighttime bangs, pops and booms? An interesting 2½ hour collection, Classical Music That Goes HARD.
New Year’s tradition in this household is watching the full opera Die Fledermaus. A different, somewhat outre short take to brighten your day.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: That was in 1984. In 1980, he got 44.
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: As I said before, one moment this reminds me of is Bush’s reelection in 2004. The great story in all the post-election analyses was Christianist “values voters” who turned out over homophobia and abortion. So there were all these articles about how the Democrats needed to throw a bone to the cultural right, somehow. Make a Grand Bargain on abortion, toss the gays under the bus. And it was all bullshit. It wouldn’t have gotten them anything. If national Democrats had done that they’d have continued to lose–the cultural appeal gave them a piece of the Obama coalition a few years later.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh: I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not searching the Internet and all of social media for “neoliberal” and “Democrats.”
Viva BrisVegas
Greetings from 2025. Midnight +30 here.
Just to spite the bastards, have a Happy New Year.
Baud
@Viva BrisVegas: Happy New Year, time traveler.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: In 1980, it was 50.7% Reagan, 41.0% Carter, 6.6% Anderson (per Wikipedia). That’s still an unbelievable blowout by American standards, thanks to the three-way split. Without Anderson Reagan probably would have had a solid popular majority.
In 1984, it was Reagan 58.8%, Mondale 40.6%. Again, in a US presidential election that’s absolute murder, close to as good as you can ever do. Every recent election has been a squeaker by comparison, a game of inches.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Actually, under Reagan was one time we had a mass legalization of people who were undocumented! It’s the opposite of MAGA.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Even there: if we truly loved Reaganism, the people wouldn’t be turning Luigi Mangione into a folk hero like Ed Snowden with a gun.
People don’t know what they want. Or, rather, what they want is confused and impossible. They want high wages, low taxes, cheap goods and free services, for themselves, but not for other people, because they deserve it but other people don’t, and the fact that other people get the same say in this that they do pisses them off. And all this is easy to exploit.
Kosh III
@Elizabelle: “Are we workers, or citizens, or consumers?”
Peons, peasants, serfs?
Gin & Tonic
@Geminid:
Damn, I must have let my subscription to Oil Price Magazine lapse. My bad.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin: Interestingly, the Dems retained the House in 1984, and the Republicans lost two seats in the Senate.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t think those two things are contradictory at all.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic: I buy it for the articles.
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: Liar. You have a file drawer full of the centerfolds.
Old Man Shadow
@BellyCat: The preferred term is “human capital” or “human resources.”
Phylllis
Very small anecdata: USAA has emailed three times over the past few months asking very nicely, ‘Don’t you want to review your vehicle insurance coverage? You could save money by increasing your deductibles.’ Like they’re doing me a favor by decreasing their exposure. I’m good, but thanks.
m.j.
It’s about time for North Korea’s NYE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBpeRSC8VqA
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: yes, and there was a lot of talk then about how the Republicans were becoming the permanent “Party of the Presidency” and the people loved divided government, which was why they retained the Democratic power base in Congress.
I think it was probably more that Reagan just had a personality cult around him, much like Trump’s, but one with broader mass appeal than Trump’s. There’s been a fair bit of ticket-splitting with people voting for Trump and Democrats, or just voting for Trump and nobody else–it’s actually less partisan then these things have been.
Bush the elder did win in another landslide in ’88… but he was a one-termer. The Reagan juice ran out.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Americans want to be entertained, Joe Biden was boring.
Nukular Biskits
With reference to the Centrism Fan Acct post above, I have to admit that it’s very tempting to engage in the same short of absolute bullshitting as that done by Trump and his sycophants.
Goose/Gander.
But would that not be us diving down to their level?
Then again, as was discussed in the previous thread (and a couple of MM2 threads), short messages combined with incessant repetition is what marketing is all about.
Betty Cracker
I’m having a PET scan this afternoon—scooting in just before my annual deductible rolls over, whew! I’ve had so many scans at several different facilities, so they’re all a blur.
But I do know that this will be at my least favorite facility. It’s a dumpy, repurposed building that smells weird, and last time I was there, a fellow patient had a cellphone that shrieked “HELLO MOTO!” in a fake Japanese accent every five minutes, and the obnoxious ringtone owner shouted at callers in a BIG BOOMING VOICE. God, it would be rotten luck if he was there again!
I think it’s the same place that employs the snippy technician who scolded me for not holding still even though I think I WAS holding still and was certainly trying my best, aside from insisting on continuing to breathe.
How on earth do they make kids be still to get these scans? They must sedate them. Well, they should sedate me too. I’m naturally fidgety, I guess.
Anyhoo, Happy New Year!
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: I think that’s a bigger influence that most people realize or will acknolwedge.
Soprano2
The replies to that Byron York tweet…wow. “It was Obama’s presidency”, “It was Obama and Hillary’s presidency”, and lots of “it was stolen”. They think we live in a fantasy land, and we are sure they live in a fantasy land. I doubt the two can ever be reconciled.
Baud
@Betty Cracker: Happy new year. Fingers crossed on the test.
schrodingers_cat
@Betty Cracker: Good luck!
Old Man Shadow
I don’t share your faith that Biden will be remembered fondly.
He’s not even thought of fondly by enough of his own party.
He will probably replace Mr. Carter (RIP) as History’s Greatest Monster and future Democratic candidates will likely shy away from being so openly progressive and pro-union/pro-worker.
Soprano2
@schrodingers_cat: I sadly think there’s more truth to this than we want to believe.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
No, because they’re willing to give Trump credit for anything good that happens.
Soprano2
And they sure can’t understand that high wages and cheap goods are a direct contradiction! I’ve been telling people that we certainly aren’t going to lower our prices at the bar because I’m paying the cooks a lot more money now than I was in 2019, and that’s mostly because of what happened to the job market during Covid. Somehow they believe prices will go down but everyone will keep their higher wages.
LAC
I see York is still on his great journey of discernment regarding his ass and his elbow. He needs not to update us in 2025.
Baud
@Soprano2: People believe what they want to believe.
Soprano2
@Baud: Shoot, they give TCFG credit for good things that are happening now!
Jeffg166
I like that Biden’s ten days of morning Carter will end on the 19th. There will be ten days of what a decent person Carter was. I hope lots turn out to view his coffin lying in state in the capital.
Then the felon gets sworn in the next day. Will his crowd on the mall be bigger this go round? Will there be people on the sidewalk for the parade? Or will they all have to work that day like the last time when the crowds were very small.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2:
It’s not a contradiction if the high wages are just for me, not for you. Because, you see, I deserve it!
suzanne
This is probably true, and difficult to emotionally accept.
That observation I read years ago about not living in a market economy but instead a market society has been one of those things that stuck with me. I see it everywhere now; everything is a status game, competition is an ethos.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud:@Soprano2: Truth and nuance and working hard, getting stuff done is so last century in the age of Tiktok and Insta Reels.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Haven’t heard of that one.
Baud
@Jeffg166: If Oil Price Magazine is correct, it should be bitter cold.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Tiktok style short videos on Instagram.
Some on our side want our own influencers too. Mistermix has written glowingly about some of them on this blog.
Isn’t that what Trump is? An influencer who gets clicks. Joe Biden was the antithesis of that.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: People are working as hard as they ever did, while complaining that nobody wants to work any more, and it was ever thus. They’re just all convinced that somebody else is getting away with something and we’d better stop it. There’s an erosion of trust.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: I fell asleep during mine. One way of keeping still.
Splitting Image
@Matt McIrvin:
All of this is easier to understand when you remember that most Americans consider themselves to be “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
The rich guys in the club get high wages (more likely stock options and bonuses), low taxes, cheap goods and free services. For themselves but not for other people.
The Republicans basically campaign by telling people that they will be in the club this time, for real. Pinky swear.
Elizabelle
@Betty Cracker: Good luck, Betty. Hoping for no Hello Moto, and only good results from the PET scan.
And some good bubbly for you, after you have finished your nonfidgeting stay in the scanner.
Nukular Biskits
@Betty Cracker:
Not sure if you’ll see this but your PET scan reminded me of something that only someone who grew up in the South or in a rural area would appreciate.
Many years ago, I had an IVP to look at the kidneys and ureters. Prior to the actual imaging, they inject an iodinated contrast material that the kidneys take up and this allows the imaging to pick up all kinds of details.
Anyhoo, the technician warned me as she was injecting the dye that I’d probably experience a strong metallic taste in my mouth. No sooner than she said that, there was a familiar taste in my mouth and I excitedly told her, “Hey! That tastes just like raw butterbeans!” She nearly fell on the floor laughing, having never had anyone else tell her that.
Anyone who has ever shelled butterbeans/limas knows EXACTLY what I’m talking about here.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Sadly, that’s true. And, with that, if Trump supposedly deserves credit for EVERYTHING, he deserves universal blame as well.
schrodingers_cat
OT Do any BJers have first hand knowledge of London and the vicinity? Because I can has questions.
Rose Judson
@LAC:
Just a savage comment. Bravo.
Nukular Biskits
@Soprano2:
Have they started blaming him for the increase in the price of eggs due to another round of avian flu?
Or are they still blaming Biden?
schrodingers_cat
Also too, Blick has great clearance sales on Liquitex Basics Acrylic paint sets right now. I got a set of 53 with long brushes for 39 (50% of retail)
Mike R
@BellyCat: to the point and true, perfect summation.
Sure Lurkalot
@Soprano2:
Nirvana, 1991. And let’s not forget bread and circuses.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah. There’s the other thing. Citizens? Or an audience? And a passive audience, at that.
Joe Biden was an adult. He, and we, deserved better.
Shane in SLC
@schrodingers_cat: Here we are now, entertain us. I feel stupid and contagious. (No line better captures the sordid end of the American experiment.)
Shane in SLC
@Sure Lurkalot: Great minds post simultaneously. (Or sloppy minds forget to update the feed before searching to see if anyone beat me to it.)
Gemini
@Gin & Tonic: I ran into Oil Price while researching the clean energy transition. The site mostly deals with oil and gas prices in the short term and oil and gas projects in the longer term, but it also covers developments in renewable energy because of their projected impact on the fossil fuel industry.
Oil Price strikes me as a neutral observer in matters like wind power, the electrical grid, geologic hydrogen etc. They don’t seem to cheerlead any particular side, but rather try to provide sound reporting that cold-blooded decision makers can rely upon.
John S.
@schrodingers_cat:
I’ve spent lots of time in and around London. What are you curious about?
Another Scott
Meh.
AFAIK, it’s still the case that the most accurate hot take on the election is that too many Biden voters didn’t vote for Harris.
That’s it. That’s the tweet.
So far, all the rest – until we have reliable numbers – is kibitzing, AFAICS.
Here’s a story from December 4 from Pew:
Maybe working on those top two percentages (66%!) is a path forward? Maybe it’s not the price of eggs or DEI or Gaza or ooollldddd??? :-/
Have a safe and peaceful NYE, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Neo-Librettist
Agree about the Trump-Biden epoch and the endless empty promises for a return to 1962… just stop already.
Nukular Biskits
@Another Scott:
YOU’RE NOT BOSS OF ME!
Gemini
@Another Scott: I think another factor was that some Independents who voted for Biden in 2020 came out again to vote for Trump this time. Indies are a fickle bunch
Ed. Gaah! I fatfingered my nym in a previous post and it’s carried over.
jonas
The 91-92 recession combined with Ross Perot’s campaign did HW in. After the Persian Gulf War, Bush seemed invincible, but a little more than a year later he was political toast, largely because he seemed out of touch with people’s everyday economic struggles.
Another Scott
@Geminid: “Soar” may be doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
FRED – Natural gas spot prices since January 1, 1997. It looks like the spot price is $2.96 / MBTU at the moment.
FWIW.
Corrections welcome.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kay
@Jeffg166:
I feel like they’re going to turn Carter into a non-threatening caricature like they try to do with MLK Jr. Where they repeat one clipped MLK Jr quote and erase his whole message of economic justice.
Carter was fierce. He didn’t just chide us to put on a sweater. He was brutally, bluntly critical of US foreign policy in Central America and the Mideast. He said the US was an oligarchy with “unlimited bribery”. He said the most pressing problem in the world was vast income inequality. It wasn’t all Habitat and public health in Africa. He told what he believed to be the truth, always. People hated him for it.
Gemini
Deleted
Matt McIrvin
@Kay: Carter as President was also something of a right-winger by Democratic standards, a deregulator and austerian who spoke personally in the language of Southern evangelicals. It’d be easy to lean on that, though that was probably part of what made him an unsuccessful President at the time.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
RevRick
@zhena gogolia: South Carolina African American church ladies, the savviest voters in America, picked Joe, because they know white people better than white people know white people. They understood that the only way to oust Trump from the White House was to pick the bland white guy, who has always been at the Democratic Party’s center of gravity.
Soprano2
@Nukular Biskits: Of course not, anything bad is still blamed on Biden while things like the stock market going up are a result of the election. *rolleyes
Jeffro
LOL
I’m soooo stealing that, thank you and happy New Year!
mrmoshpotato
@Geminid:
Ha! Ha!
moonbat
@Elizabelle: Amen. Can’t get five comments in before everything is hopeless. Think I will make like Jimmy Carter and go build a house (model, in may case).
Anyway
Biden-fan here — but he lost many more pres primaries than he won…
JML
The reflections on Jimmy Carter and the commentaries about his presidency has me thinking about Biden’s legacy a bit. I suspect we will see the same kind of concentrated push on Biden’s time in office that you had against Carter by the GOP and their ilk to label and brand their time in office as being Terrible For America, because that’s how they burnish their own times in power: not by producing successful policies for the country, but by running down the competition.
Reagan acolytes demand that Carter be seen as being terrible, because that feeds the mythos of their icon Ronnie being The Greatest Modern President Evah. He was the shining star that led to a grand restoration of America in their minds when everything was wonderful (so long as you were white, male, and rich), but in order to have that you needed to be coming from a place of utter darkness. The same is true for the Trump acolytes and the desperate GOP hangers on who are using the cult to acquire power for themselves. They need Biden to `be seen as terrible to lower expectations for themselves.
Carter’s presidency is really quite unusual. It came at a time of real political realignment that few people understood at the time in any real way. They simply didn’t have the collapse of the Southern Democrats on their bingo cards or spot that the split on social policy would completely fracture an economic coalition. Right now we have the reverse split in the GOP: it’s held together on social policy of racism, sexism, and cruelty to The Other but has a massive split on economic policy that the oligarchs who run the show are hoping can keep getting papered over with more evil social policies, encouraging hate and resentment to The Other, rather than the oligarchs in charge.
Carter wasn’t nearly as successful as he could have been, in part because he simply was uninterested in doing the kind of coalition work necessary to work with Congress, while also having more competitors than allies there in his own party. Throw the global economic conditions on top of things and he was one term. Biden had a recalcitrant opposition Congress that was as useless as we’ve ever seen and global headwinds. The Congressional stuff has different roots, but…lot of similarities.
ArchTeryx
All I gotta say is that if we’re livestock, then I and my “herd” are going to show the rest of the normies our horns for the next four years. We’re taking care of our own, because most of us are LBGTQ+ and damn well know we just voted a wolf pack in (and that’s an insult to the wolves, frankly). I’ll be learning the art of 3D animation and motion graphics, because flashy presentation seems to be what gets people’s attention and the Blender community is as egalitarian as it can be (Blender itself, as rough around the edges as it is, is freeware!)
TL;DR: I go into 2025 battle ready, with my beloved friends and family at my side. The trolls can all go fuck themselves, right up to and including our SC(r)OTUS and incoming administration.
zhena gogolia
@Omnes Omnibus: I can’t keep these people straight.
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s 110% true, like mic-drop true. The issue that underscores them all.
Jeffro
@Another Scott: I just love the ones in the second category: “I don’t like politics; therefore, I don’t vote”(!)
Really? You ‘don’t like politics’, Mr. Nonvoter? You couldn’t be bothered to pick an issue – any issue – and take two minutes to figure out which candidate is closest to your views on that one issue?
I guess not. Well, in the end these clowns should remember: you might not be into politics, but politics sure is in to you.
Joy in FL
@Betty Cracker: Good luck in all the possible ways luck can manifest. And Happy New Year!
rikyrah
@Elizabelle:
not one lie told. I don’t think I would have stopped smiling from November 5th.
jonas
Funny how whenever some Republican pol (esp Trump) says something either incredibly offensive or stupid or both, people will respond by saying “Oh, he just tells it like it is!” or “He’s just a straight shooter who doesn’t watch his words like a regular politician.” But when a Democrat is blunt, or speaks an uncomfortable truth, the media and voters can’t crucify them fast enough. Carter’s frank diagnosis of American foreign policy and energy policy was a good example, of course, but there are others, such as Obama’s observation that WWC men in particular “cling to guns and religion” because they feel they’ve lost other kinds of cultural/racial capital they used to have.
Kay
@Matt McIrvin:
I agree that he was a deregulator but I disagree with “austerian”. I think he was happy to spend on genuinely poor people. I think he was impatient with middle class claims of poverty, which I frankly sympathize with. He didn’t pander to voters enough but that goes back to a really rigorous honesty and has pandering to voters been good for the country? Maybe not, right?
I’m not at all religious but I was forced as a kid to go to ordinary religious training (Christian) and I was bored out of my mind. I also met a lot of really mean adults in and around churches so I steered clear. But Carter made me understand that for genuinely religious people asking them NOT to talk in religious terms is silencing them. His faith informs his whole life. I can’t ask him to put it aside. It made me much more tolerant of religious people.
BTW, Al Gore did it too. His speeches were peppered with Christian themes and I thought he was great.
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro:
Yup!
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Day after the election, 2016. I walk into class to a group of devastated students. One of them pipes up: “This just shows what a deadend neoliberalism is.”
Anecdata, but still.
rikyrah
@sab:
praying that you do. no heat is no fun
Soprano2
@Kay: Right wingers won’t let people forget about that stuff, because they think it was bad. Geez, he wrote a book comparing how Israel treated the Palestinians to apartheid South Africa!
Ridnik Chrome
See also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: I was thinking of a video Hank Green made where he was trying to figure out what’s going on, and he thought the Internet has acted as an eroder of trust and that something like this happens every time an important new communications medium appears. He compared the impact to the printing press, which helped spark the Protestant Reformation and all the wars and strife associated with that, and the role of radio in the rise of totalitarianism.
rikyrah
@Viva BrisVegas:
where are you?
Soprano2
@JML: I think the Iranian hostage crisis played a big part in Carter’s defeat. It was on the news every night; Walter Cronkite counted the days since they’d been kidnapped! It made Carter seem helpless and weak, because there wasn’t much he could do about it. I read a book that detailed the rescue mission he approved; it had less than a 5% chance of success, so he was gutsy to approve it anyway, but because it didn’t succeed it became one more black mark against him.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: He hated the schmoozing that’s an essential part of the legislative process. He had teamed up with Ted Kennedy to enact the closest thing to a national health insurance system, which passed the Senate!!!! But he refused to engage in the back room deals that would have gotten it over the finish line in the House, where it went down to defeat. His moralizing got the better of him… and us.
zhena gogolia
@Soprano2: That rescue mission was huge in damaging his presidency. It was the “botched Afghanistan withdrawal” of its day, just as the cozy cardigan was Carter’s “tan suit.”
Matt McIrvin
@jonas: Democratic bluntness is an attack on the average white American’s feelings of their own specialness. Republican bluntness tells them that all of their worst impulses are good and true and the people they already hate are devils.
Kay
@Soprano2:
I can just FEEL media defanging the fierce Jimmy Carter and turning him into a kindly old man with a toolbelt.
He was honest. Let’s at least honor that by depicting the whole person.
Soprano2
@jonas: That’s because what people really mean when they say TCFG is speaking the truth is that he’s saying things they agree with. People don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear things they agree with.
JML
@Kay: I think part of what set people like Carter and Gore apart in how they expressed their faith through politics was they didn’t have the insistence that everyone must believe what they believed for the reasons they believed, or the presumption that their faith and religion made them better than everyone else. They didn’t insert that kind of language in there at all in the context of their faith, and that’s the opposite of much of what you see today from politicians who express their faith as part of their politics.
(Warnock is much more in the Carter tradition; good Georgia boys there)
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
they want to party like it’s 1924
Neo-Librettist
Reading Loomis on Carter, it struck me that Carter was effective in pushing his policy preferences. That those policies pissed off Congress, the D.C. establishment, and labor historians is tough shit.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: I met a guy who claimed to be on that mission. He said the sand was a big problem with the helicopters when they tried to take off. I don’t remember much else of what he said, it was a long time ago (1990). I read Mark Bowden’s book about the Iranian hostage crisis; it was really good.
rikyrah
@Betty Cracker:
sending you positive thoughts, BC
ArchTeryx
I’ll tell you a little story, which will be completely out of left field considering our politics, but I’m a furry and a writer, so here goes.
My current project involves a race of very new sapients. They’re called the Halavahdon; they’re half orca and half otter, eaten from nose to tail with curiosity, low tech level (as you’d expect of ocean-dwellers). Social.
They’re also the size of Godzilla.
But for all that, they’re harmless to us normal sized people. Like actual whales – even orcas! – they consider us friend-shaped, not food-shaped. We’re too small to eat anyway, and they’d much rather have allies and go share Colossal Squid with the Sperm Whales.
Anyway. They are organized, just like orcas, into pods. Pods are led by matriarchs, elder females past cub-bearing age. They do have a very loose central government, in the form of the Elder Pod. If there is a decision that needs to be made by all their people, the pods will gather in the same “region,” and talk it out with the Elder Pod. The Great Pod – all of them together – decide together as well. The Elder Pod has the final say, but they won’t go against the consensus. If there is an irreconcilable conflict or an emergency, the Elder Pod can take over and decide, but that is rarely necessary.
Otherwise, each pod lives their lives peacefully. There are conflicts and tussles as there always are with big predators. But they have never known war or even xenophobia. They live side by side with a sister species, the Leviaphins (which is another tale and shall be told another time, thank you Michael Ende). They are an innocent people, just starting to learn their place in the universe. All these titans want to do is find the right path for themselves, to try to do what they feel is right.
Why can’t we be more like them?
Kay
@Soprano2:
My father liked and admired almost no one outside his immediate family, but he admired Carter. He thought he told the truth, consequences be damned. He used to do this absolutely HORRIBLE fake southern accent imitating him. So bad. I would beg him to not do it in public.
p.a.
And they say Obama had a magic time machine!
Ohio Mom
@Betty Cracker: Yes, toddler Ohio Son was sedated for his MRI. They could at least give you an Ativan.
I’ve had an MRI, a CAT scan and the occasional x-ray but no PET scans; I’ve heard from others that they are a gauntlet, with the fasting and then having to lie still for so long.
Anyway, Here’s hoping for good results.
JML
@Soprano2: The hostage crisis absolutely was a big part of it (unsurprisingly the GOP almost certainly interfered in negotiations, much like Nixon fucking up peace talks in Vietnam) and coupled with lingering inflation Carter was in real trouble.
Kay
@JML:
Agreed. To me it was also interesting and engaging because I simply did not encounter Christians like them growing up. My thing as a kid with religious people was a gut feeling to protect myself. I clammed up and avoided them. I simply didn’t trust them. So it was like “OH, THIS is what that is!”
mrmoshpotato
Do you like onions?
RevRick
@Kay: He chose Alfred Kahn to deregulate the airline industry and the trucking industry. The former led to the consolidation of American airline companies. Where, oh where is Eastern and Northwest and TWA and Pan Am? The latter led to the bankruptcy of many traditional companies and the proliferation of so-called independents.
Generally speaking, Carter sucked at labor issues. He famously vetoed Humphrey-Hawkins, the bill that at least made an attempt at guaranteeing full employment.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: A while back I was looking at how poll numbers had changed over various Presidential terms, and Carter’s graph is fascinating. He was already in the doghouse and probably headed for defeat before the Iran hostage crisis. But when that first broke… his numbers spiked up! People rallied around him. It was a classic crisis spike like the Cuban missile crisis or 9/11, only Carter was unpopular enough to begin with that he only got up to, I think, a little above 50% approval.
When the failed rescue attempt happened and it became clear that Carter wasn’t going to fix it, he lost all that.
Geminid
@Ridnik Chrome: I thought the media has treated Rep. Ocasio-Cortez fairly well. She entered Congress in January of 2019 as the most famous member of a very talented, 60+ member Class of 2018, and that was the media’s and her media-savvy team’s doing.
Ocasio-Cortez is still very popular among Democrats and, as the page of screenshots that she posted after the election (and a front pager reposted here) indicated, among some Trump voters as well.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Joe Biden was good for my sleep.
I didn’t have to worry about him in the least. I knew he, and his Administration, were simply going around, doing what they felt was best FOR THE AVERAGE MAN. I had no doubt about that.
Only thing I ever disagreed with him on was Israel/Gaza, but, I know that my thoughts on that are far out of the Democratic Party mainstream.
First time I was even aware of the Middle East was during Carter’s term, and only realized it due to the reaction of the Camp David Accord. That was almost 50 years ago.
So, for something that has been going on long before I was even alive, and started when JOE BIDEN was just out of diapers…
No..I was never going to turn on Biden just because of the Middle East.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: Airline deregulation was a mixed bag. It led to a lot of the horribleness of air travel today… but it also led to people being able to travel by air today. In the regulation era, fares were kept artificially high enough that most people couldn’t afford them.
Now, was that good or bad? Environmentally, high fares might have actually been good, since air travel is wasteful and polluting, and the rise of mass air travel helped suppress alternatives like passenger trains. But deregulation did make something that was once a luxury in itself accessible to the masses.
Elizabelle
@RevRick: And Ted Kennedy primaried him. Will never forgive the late Kennedy for that. An own goal. Welcome Reagan.
Timill
@schrodingers_cat: Lived there 1976-1999 and worked there until moving to the USA in 2008. Ask away.
stinger
@m.j.: Thanks for the link! I missed Sydney’s, but just watched Hong Kong’s and it was most enjoyable. Loved the fireworks on the water, rather than high above. (Although those were good, too.) Bangkok next….
I wonder what the aliens observing our planet think when they see this.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Tony Jay?
...now I try to be amused
@Jeffg166:
I favor wearing black armbands for one more day.
Matt McIrvin
@Neo-Librettist: Loomis had been signaling for years with a certain amount of glee that his Carter obituary was going to be a hit piece that would piss everyone off. Because he loves to piss people off. But it ended up, I thought, being a pretty balanced assessment, and stressed Carter’s exemplary post-presidency and his good environmental record even as President.
Ohio Mom
Carter was a mixed bag, we all are, and the presidency is an impossible job. There were certainly things Carter did that I wish he hadn’t but as always, the Democrat is always the better choice. I voted for him twice, happily.
I am amused at a lot of the people who are heaping on Carter because most of them were/would have been the loudest critics of Carter back in the day. He was really dragged through the coals.
rikyrah
@Kay:
The eradication of actual diseases due to his leadership and influence..
ERADICATION – showing on a Macro level what could be done with good leadership and good governance.
ANOTHER reason why he was hated.
rikyrah
@Soprano2:
Ted Koppel got NIGHTLINE because of it.
rikyrah
@RevRick:
sigh…this makes me so sad to even read this…National Healthcare..back before 1980..
it would be another TWENTY EIGHT YEARS before the ACA
Gloria DryGarden
@Mike R: livestock, serfs, baby factories, canon fodder, consumers….
serfs, that’s your taxable base, isn’t it?
kindness
Am I a bad person for hoping Washington DC is deluged with freezing rain Jan 20th? Now if I also hoped lots of folk got terminal pneumonia from it, I’d be the sociopath Trumpers are. I’m not. I’m just a disgruntaled liberal living in Trumpers fantasy America.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Landslide used to be defined as a win by 10+% in the popular vote.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: For Donald Trump, even losing is winning by a landslide.
Neo-Librettist
“De-regulation”
So there is no regulatory framework for commercial interstate transport?
This framing of Carter is ludicrous.
Those transport bills passed with single digit opposition in both houses.
The Audacity of Krope
Yes. And do you have any particular people in your personal life who were especially obnoxious with that shit?
They deserve it.
My dad is going to hear about Trump “stealing” the election for the next four years even though I do not believe that to be true in any way.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: My late friend Chris was a staunch Democrat, but he held a grudge against Jimmy Carter over deregulation. Chris was a long-haul truck driver and top-notch furniture mover. He made a good living for his family in this industry, and that was not easily done by a Black man in Virginia at the time. Deregulation in the trucking industry began a race to the bottom that kept Chris among the working poor for the rest of his working days.
Deregulation might not have had such a severe impact on the middle class had Carter won a second term. Instead, Ronald Reagan made sure the benefits all went to the business sector.
Ironically, a substantial portion of the economic growth credited to Reagan was due to Carter’s deregulation.
The Audacity of Krope
Every positive economic news today +/- 8 years is Trump.
Every negative economic news today +/- 8 years is the most proximate Democrat
Hope this helps
Elizabelle
@kindness: Reagan’s second inauguration had to be held indoors, because it was too cold to be outside. That was a disappointment to the marching bands who had traveled, although I am sure they got to do something.
And — wiki is getting ahead of itself here! From the wiki link:
Excuse me, wiki. The Felon is not yet POTUS. I guess there is some small chance that will never happen.
And: all the screaming about his advanced age. It is … deafening.
And, OK, they did something for the school bands who did not get to parade on January 20:
Geminid
@The Audacity of Krope: I notice you change your Nym every so often. Have you considered “Krope Eulenspiegel” for your next one? Asking for a friend.
leeleeFL
@Soprano2: Probably the only good thing that addled SOB ever did. He and Nixon started the current re-thuglican party, and I, hope they both roast in hell for it. (And I don’t even believe in Hell!)
The Audacity of Krope
@Geminid: Haha, explain it to me and it may well bear consideration.
The Audacity of Krope
The only thing we know for sure is after life is…other life. From this, I have come to the conclusion that heaven or hell is simply the Earth we leave for posterity.
So don’t worry, we’re all going to hell together.
Princess
@Kay: That’s also a caricature.
Carter helped set the stage for Reagan with his “government can’t solve your problems” state of the union speech. And when he was president, he stuck to the Kissinger foreign policy line with disastrous effects especially in Iran, whose consequences we still live with today, especially in the Middle East.
He spoke boldly after he was president but while he was president he did not act according to what he later said. In terms of his effective acts, we have Habitat and Africa/Guinea worm. That’s not nothing, but let’s not try to turn him into a presidential veto he wasn’t.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Hey, I’m just repeating what an industry media site is reporting. Your argument is with the editors of Oil Price, who take natural gas priced much more seriously than I do. I only posted this story to give people here a heads up on the projected polar vortex.
wonkie
@Baud: People are still saying that. And my response is that the word “liberal” should not be in a term that describes conservative ideas.
The Audacity of Krope
I must not be a person, then, because I believe the evidence of my eyes and ears and it makes.me miserable.
Geminid
@The Audacity of Krope: You can look up “Till Eulenspiegel” for an explaination. This is not a slam, just an observation signed,
Yours with “profound knowledge,” Geminid.
Geminid
@Soprano2: The hostage rescue mission ran into a huge sandstorm while crossing the Iraqi desert. These “Haboobs” are known phenomena associated with strong weather fronts, and the failure to account for this one can be debited to planners and mid-level commanders. At least, according to some commentators I’ve read.
Soprano2
@Ohio Mom: They wanted to do one on my husband before his multiple myeloma diagnosis, but the insurance denied it because in order to have the test they say you have to have a cancer diagnosis. Kind of circular logic there. It was going to be a PITA to keep him from eating for 4 hours, so I’m kind of glad he didn’t have to do it.
The Audacity of Krope
@Geminid: You caught that, huh?
And I love this character you introduced me to. I usually insist that the the Krop portion “fit” with word/phrase segment it is replacing. But this may be too good to pass up.
THAT’S MY FAVORITE ANIMAL!!!😆😆😆
The Audacity of Krope
Why not? It is only through decades of perversion of the English language by Republicans that these are deemed to be mutually exclusive concepts.
Soprano2
@JML: The late ’70’s were a rough time. That’s why I say people who think things are bad today would be absolutely constantly crying if they’d had to live through that time. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Ford had won in ’76 – most likely the Democratic candidate would have won in ’80, because I doubt much would have been different during the period from ’77 to ’80. I was dating an Iranian student when the embassy was raided – that was exactly as much fun as you’re thinking it was. I felt sorry for him and his friends, they didn’t have anything to do with what happened but you can imagine how people looked at them. My college was going to build a sister campus in Tehran before the hostage incident. Of course, it never happened.
Geminid
@Princess: I disagree about Kissinger and Carter’s Iran policy. When protests against the Shah became widespread in 1979, I think Kissenger would have told Jimmy Carter to back the Shah to the hilt, human rights be damned.
The Shah might have responded by suppressing protests with live fire, as the Islamic Republic regime was to do in 2018 when it put down protests with machine guns and helicopter gunships, killing 1500 to 2500 of its citizens. Carter chose otherwise and allowed the Iranian Revolution to proceed without American intervention.
Neo-Librettist
The ICCs stewardship of trucking and rail had outlived it’s utility by the early sixties. The arbitrage opportunities presented by big data were manifest, and the ICCs scloretic dithering on industry minutia convinced the courts, and then congress, enough was enough.
The Audacity of Krope
Probably the right thing to do. Self-determination and all that.
The American public, of course, wants the American government to control everything except, curiously, the American public.
Soprano2
@Geminid: The weather people on my local stations have been talking about it for a couple of days now. I’m not looking forward to it, but at least I have a gas furnace now! I’m willing to pay more for the house to be warm all the time. My biggest fear is having an ice storm. I still twitch when I think about the January 2007 ice storm. twitch, twitch, twitch…..being without power for 13 days when you live in the city will do that to you.
Soprano2
I agree. The Shah was a bad guy (I heard stories) but he was our bad guy. Anyone who thinks he was good for the Iranian people doesn’t know what they’re talking about. My BF was here to keep him out of the Shah’s army. One little-known fact is that liberal reformers in Iran allied with the Khomeini backers because they wanted to be rid of the Shah, and they didn’t think Khomeini would actually come back to Iran from France. Boy, were they wrong….
KSinMA
@Betty Cracker:
Good luck, Betty!
The Audacity of Krope
@Betty Cracker: If I’m feeling fidgety; closed eyes, slow breath, show up high.
Geminid
@The Audacity of Krope: That’s how I saw it at the time. I had a general belief that monarchies were inherently bad, and that any system that replaced them would be better.
Now I question that assumption. The Islamic Republic that took power in 1979 proved far bloodier and repressive than the Shah’s regime, and it still is. They don’t hang political prisoners six at a time like they did in the 1980s when they executed thousands after secret trials, but they are still hanging too many of them including women. .
Betty
@Kay: Don’t forget the grief he got for his book on the Palestinians and referring to their treatment as apartheid.
The Audacity of Krope
@Geminid: I see your point. And “you chose this” loses a little salience after 50 years of, at best, controlled provision of choices.
My political coming of age was during Bush Jr.’s reign of error, though, so I’m pretty well bought into the “we should mind our own damn business in foreign affairs” argument.
montanareddog
@Geminid:
The UK (plus Canada, Australia, NZ for now), the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Japan are all monarchies. They all score high on freedom indices and there are a lot worse places to live. Just sayin’.
satby
@Betty Cracker: best of luck Betty!
LAC
@Jeffro: 🤣 please do and happy new year!
Geminid
@montanareddog: Our key CENTCOM allies– Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain– are all monarchies.
Say what you will about their governments, they are stable and committed to regional stability. That has value that arguably outweighs the potential of the systems that might replace them, and they afford their citizens– but not neccesarily their other residents– as much or more freedom than does the Islamic Republic of Iran across the Gulf from them.
Princess
@montanareddog: There’s a big difference between those constitutional monarchies and the Shahs of Iran! No comparison.
Origuy
On Inauguration Day, I will be incommunicado in the desert at Anza-Borrego State Park. Once I leave there, I have a few hours of driving and I will not be turning on my radio. With any luck, I will spend the entire day without hearing or reading any political news.