This is such hilariously bad messaging.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Mr. Bessent Americans think things are too expensive and are concerned Donald Trump lied about affordability concerns.
"Well maybe Americans should stop being punk ass wimps. Stupid nerds."— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 3:52 PM
What's really telling here is that the administration clearly doesn't have the people ideas or mechanisms to do anything but stick first policies. They're like this because they have literally 0 answer to what to do other than do more warcrimes or abuse immigrants.
— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 3:53 PM
Stop *helping*, Joe!
“.. What they might say: ‘It’s taking longer than we anticipated. We’re working very hard. We’re stabilizing things,’ ” Manchin said. “You can’t tell me it’s sunshine outside when it’s raining like hell.”
@wsj.com
www.wsj.com/politics/pol…— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 10:11 AM
===
if you're going to have these rat bastards on the air, you have to have follow up questions ready. tom cotton is the chairman of the senate intelligence committee, "i dunno, haven't asked" is, if true, a deliberate dereliction of his duties both as a senator and in his current role as a senator.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 7, 2025 at 6:22 PM
it is quite literally cotton's job to ask questions about the pardon of a convicted cartel trafficker and former president of a foreign nation currently serving a sentence in an american prison, and it is the job of reporters and anchors to point that out and ask him about it.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) December 7, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Republicans use the "I'm not familiar with that" dodge several times a day now, and if a reporters or anchor isn't ready and willing to shut them down as soon as they try it, that means they're either incompetent at their job or a willing accomplice to the lies.
Either way, never trust them again.— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 12:57 PM
===
In the era of slavery, free black people had to carry their "free papers" with them so they could prove to the authorities that they were free, or else they would be thrown in jail and sold.
— Adam Rothman enjoys a good sandwich (@adamrothman.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 9:32 AM
===
"We wanted a bigot to lead us, and we got exactly that, but how dare you call me a bigot?"
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 9:56 AM
===
Perhaps…not a true change of heart, then? Gosh
— Kai Ryssdal (@kairyssdal.bsky.social) December 7, 2025 at 7:46 PM
On The Road – Albatrossity – Bryce Canyon
MagdaInBlack
Quite the line-up of arrogant, ignorant, pompous, punch-able assholes this morning.
*edited to clarify my true feelings.
lowtechcyclist
Mornin’, y’all.
zhena gogolia
@MagdaInBlack: Haha. I said to myself, don’t get out of the boat, but I watched the one with the guy talking about immigrants and the one with Greene, and now I’m nauseated for the rest of the morning.
Baud
Unlike Dems, who inherit Republican disasters, Trump has twice inherited an improving economy.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Morning.
MagdaInBlack
@zhena gogolia: I edited for clarity of how I feel.
Suzanne
Hoooooo boy.
lowtechcyclist
You gotta wonder just what these interviewers do to prep for interviewing Republicans. Other than wake up, get dressed, come in to the studio.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Mornin’.
It’s Monday. Last week was insane. Hoping this week is better.
Betty Cracker
Is Curtis the guy who replaced Romney? Utah Republicans are kind of fascinating to me. They almost never do anything to cross Trump and the other hate-mongers in their party, but I think they sincerely find the whole thing icky.
Baud
@Baud:
This worked in Trump 1. He campaigned on the economy being terrible and then said the economy was good as soon as he one. They’re just trying the same thing again. The big problem is he decided not to coast and instead implemented his tariff policy, putting a target on his back.
NotMax
High time to revisit John McCutcheon.
Scout211
They don’t even know that they are being manipulated to believe what Trump and his minions want them to believe.
Personal example:
We try to stay away from politics when my book group meets but we do socialize a bit before we discuss the book. Our one conservative Fox watching member made a statement about how Somalis in Minnesota committed fraud by claiming Covid business money illegally. She was appalled and shocked at the “Somali financial crimes.” I told her that the fraud she is talking about occurred everywhere in all areas and all races and ethnicities. It was a mess at the time, helped many small businesses at the time but it was difficult to control. And it occurred everywhere, even here in California. She looked at me and said, “Oh. I didn’t know that. The Somalis are just what everybody is talking about now.”
And why is “everyone talking about” the supposed financial crimes of Somalis in Minnesota?
It’s probably quite shocking to Trump, his minions and his News propaganda services that suddenly the public doesn’t believe their propaganda. Affordability is real world personal example that we experience daily and affects our lives. It’s not some “other” that is made to be an enemy or traitor or criminal. It’s affecting everyone personally and suddenly messaging isn’t working for the Trump team.
ETA: clarity and typos
Chetan R Murthy
That piece of shit Sporkfoot is infuriating.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Princess
I see MTG is using the old “I know you are but what am I?” defence. Has anyone else noticed that the quality of MAGA rhetoric, from Trump on down, has fallen off a cliff? I feel like first term they’d be quick to come up with some counter attack or creative insult or gish gallop. Now it’s all “oh yeah? Well, you smell!” I feel like I’m in middle school.
rikyrah
@Baud:
And, people know the amount that they are paying. The black and white on those receipts are REALITY.
JUST LIKE THE BLACK AND WHITE ON THOSE HEALTHCARE PREMIUMS ARE REALITY.
$$$$$ are reality that can’t be lied away😒
Ten Bears
I would believe one word Liz Cheney say’s before I would believe anything MTG says
Long before. She’s a master manipulator, wielder of weasel words … running for pretendident, reaching out to pull one over on the centrist lib-er-al contingent
‘Course I’m not a lib-er-al; just outside looking on …
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@Baud
One = won
Betty Cracker
@Princess: In an earlier interview, Greene admitted to her own part in degrading political discourse. Maybe the question caught her off guard back then, and now she’s reverted back to schoolyard retorts? I think Greene, like Trump, is a stupid and unserious person but has a similar instinct for seizing on listeners’ depravity and reflecting it back to them.
p.a.
My fbook is just chock full of R congresscritters with the message “Things are GREAT! NO INFLATION! WAGES UP!” My message each time “yeah! Run on this message!😂😂😂. Enjoy your town halls! No curated audience, right?”
Clap Harder!
Kevin Bacon, Animal House, “ALL IS WELL!”
And yes, I know my reacting means I’ll just get more messaging.
ETA: and the responses on these posts are 80+% negative. Not scientific, but a good sign!
ETA ETA: Not a lot of “But Donnie just needs more time for this to work.” either!
sab
@Princess: And they all have the exact same two responses. Either the agressive one you noted, or the “I was too busy [not doing my job] to notice anything around me.” Nothing else.
NotMax
@rikyrah
“PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!”
//
Jeffro
it’s almost like, once folks get past whatever dark charisma or entertainment value or perceived strength trump has…
…the entire GOP is nothing but douchebags, all the way down.
Baud
@Jeffro:
They were that way before Trump.
Trump is the result of Republican character, not the cause of it.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: I’ve done that so many time- throw in a homonym that really had NOTHING to do with the actual word I wanted to use!
gene108
@Baud:
In 2016, there was a really strong partisan divide on how someone felt about the economy. Once Trump was elected, all the Republicans and Independents who thought everything was terrible under Obama reversed their opinions immediately.
In 2024, frustration over the economy was still partisan but much more broad based. COVID and the post-pandemic inflation spike disputed people’s view on how things are going economically, despite what looked to be good economic data.
I’ll bet people’s view of the economy improved after Trump won. He squandered whatever goodwill he inherently has with Republicans and Independents on the economy with his tariff policy.
Hurting corn and soybean farmers in his trade war with China was a bad start, and he’s done nothing to help.
*************************
A President and Cabinet full of billionaires and multi-millionaires is out of touch about affordability? Color me shocked.
Professor Bigfoot
QFT, with a small correction.
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211:
It sounds like some of the public DO still believe their propaganda. They’re still retaining that core of people who watch Fox News all day and believe it.
Geminid
There is another important election tomorrow, a runoff for Miami mayor. AP’s Adrianna Gomez Licon reports:
The contest pits Republican Emilio Gonzalez, a former city manager, against Democrat Eileen Higgins, who served on the Dade County Commission until last month when she resigned after winning a runoff spot in Tuesday’s election.
Miami has not had a Democratic mayor in almost 30 years. It’s also been a while since it had a non-Hispanic mayor, but Higgins wants to change that:
Miami has a large foreign-born population, 56.9% compared to 23.% for Florida as a whole. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, who is the child of immigrants, campaigned with Higgins Sunday as he did in New Jersey last month for gringa Mikie Sherrill.
There is a lot more in the AP article, which might be accessible through this link:
share.google/tvVp5ef7OgGv7dyZ9
gene108
@Princess:
Bondi does this all the time in responding to Democrats during Congressional hearings.
Baud
@gene108:
I would expect nothing less from a champion of the working class.
Jeffro
@Baud: right…I never said he was the cause?
He’s the spokesperson for their inner douche (apologies to actual douches, which are at least useful)
Baud
@gene108:
It is very difficult for the media to take Republicans to task for their behavior.
frosty
@zhena gogolia: Thanks for the warning. I don’t generally play these clips because I don’t want to bother other people in the house. I’ll make sure to avoid these.
Eyeroller
Krugman has put out a series of sesays on “affordability” recently, most of which I think can be read for free https://paulkrugman.substack.com. By most objective economic measures, Americans are, in fact, doing well. Purchasing power is higher than it was in 2020, and we still have low unemployment. And of course we are very well off compared to a lot of the rest of the world.
But ther’es a dimension to “affordability” that explains a lot. “We also care about economic inclusion, security, and fairness.” He quotes (possibly behind the paywall) Adam Smith discussing how people need to be able to afford “social respectability.” In most of the US owning a house or condo is.a big part of that. And housing prices have gone up, especially compared to the median income of 25-34-year-old households.
The “secuirty and fariness” are also factors. Even many Republican rank-and-file think billionaires have too much power, they just don’t want to do anything to take it away from them. And expensive education and especially healthcare would, I would guess, add to a feeling of insecurity that our general lack of worker protections engenders.
Baud
@Eyeroller:
Organizing hate requires financial backing.
ETA: I also don’t disagree with Krugman. I was a minority voice ehi thought Biden deserved immense credit for how he handled the economy after COVID. But most Americans didn’t agree with me, so here we are.
JoeyJoeJoe
@gene108: Assuming that democrats take control of one or both houses of Congress, if Bondi pulls any of that stuff, Democrats should hold her in contempt of Congress and actually arrest her, as they would anyone who disrupts proceedings. Even if they’re not really supposed to do that for someone testifying, given her behavior, they have to show that they won’t allow that kind of stuff.
Scout211
Oh yes. They definitely still do. Especially when the propaganda demonizes “other.”
My point was that it’s not working for affordability because it’s happening to them personally. It’s not someone or some group that they can fear or hate.
Betty Cracker
@Geminid: I sure hope Higgins wins, though it’s a longshot. Republicans throughout the state will absolutely panic if she does.
Suzanne
@Eyeroller:
The other thing about homeownership in the U.S., where our social safety net for seniors is relatively weak compared to Europe….. the goal is that you have a paid-off living situation by the time you retire so maybe you can live on Social Security. Or you can downsize, and the idea was….. you’d have a bit of a windfall.
I understand that the stock market has gone up faster than the housing market, but that is not especially helpful when one doesn’t have surplus to invest. You have to live somewhere in the meantime.
BretH
I object to calling today’s Republicans “conservatives “. The appropriate term is “reactionary “.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
It worked then because reality gave it an assist. The unemployment rate in September 2016 was 5.0%, exactly what it had been in September 2015. But by March 2017, it was down to 4.4% and kept going down from there.
The Obama recovery had been slow anyway between too small a stimulus, and Larry Summers deciding to bail out the banks rather than the people they were foreclosing on, so the economy didn’t quite catch fire until after the election.
Trump might’ve lucked out again this time if he’d just done nothing. But this time, unlike last, all sorts of people (Musk, Vought, Miller, etc.) came in with detailed plans to implement their agendas, and every last one of those agendas was bad for this nation and its economy.
IOW, they fully own this disaster. And with any luck, a lot of GOP Congresspersons will pay for it in November.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
It was slow but it was a recovery. Trump did nothing to get that unemployment rate down. That success could have been Democrats’, but misogyny came first.
Baud
JML
@Suzanne: and if you have a paid off living situation (house/condo/townhome/etc) you can a lot more flexibility if the economy goes sideways, the market tanks, whatever. I saw this pretty clearly with my mom, where having a paid off house just brought the monthly living expenses down to a very manageable number.
Now, my mom also grew up relatively poor and was very frugal, so she always worried about what could happen…but she had a financially secure retirement. I certainly am looking at how to have my house paid off by the time I retire.
When so many people can’t realistically look at buying a house let alone get it paid off by retirement, are any of them going to feel like they’re doing well in this economy? Even if they start building out a retirement and investment portfolio, it can be hard to think of that as real.
Scout211
In a follow-up to a previous discussion here, The Daily Beast reports:
Insiders Reveal Trump May Axe ICE Barbie Over Secret Romance
. . .
Is this a warning to Noem or are they floating this move ahead of January?
Elizabelle
@Scout211: There’s a reason they’re going after Somalis. The NY Times served this one up a week ago, and never, ever opened reader comments on it.
The headline personalizing that it happened on Tim Walz’s watch struck me as odd. Do they do that with GOP governors??
Gift link:
How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch
Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
It’s a legitimate issue for the NYT to cover. But it’s interesting to see how the NYT’s writing style changes when talking about Democrats.
Dave
@Jeffro: I would say he is a vector though both reflective of and also an accelerant of what already existed.
Elizabelle
Yesterday, the FTF NY Times ran a big front page story on how it was immigration that defeated Biden. (Of course, Harris was the nominee, but …)
I did not read it, but the Sulzberger Times was promising lots of scoops from Biden admin insiders.
Does anyone think the NY Times still wears a mask? I despise AG Sulzberger and Joe Kahn.
Scout211
@Elizabelle: Thanks for the background.
So this is an attack on Walz, and Somalis are collateral damage, plus useful for their propaganda against immigrants.
Ugh.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Definitely. There was absolutely zero that a new Administration could do to lower the unemployment rate in time to show up in the March numbers, even if they actively pursued that end. And of course what Trump did was nothing.
I was just making the point that people weren’t taking the same economy and deciding it was now great rather than lousy. It was already a distinctly better economy by the spring of 2017 than it had been the previous year.
Ben Cisco
@MagdaInBlack: Largest collection of untreated disorders on the planet.
TONYG
@MagdaInBlack: In an alternate reality, the “journalists” who work for the corporate media would force these assholes to give honest answers and would have security escort them out of the studio if they refuse to do so. But in the real world …
Elizabelle
@Baud: Totally agreed.
The not opening that big a story to reader comments, though. That is a flag.
A lot of times the readers have more interesting things to say than the great ones at The New York Times. And they can push back on the framing, and you know that framing exists.
The FTF NY Times did not want pushback. (Although, fraud is fraud, and if convicted, I hope these people do long, long sentences as a warning to others.)
You know they did not have this story in 2024, or they would have flung it at Harris Walz with everything they could.
piratedan
one thing is certain, if Crockett runs, there will be a big uptick in eyes on this race. Since it’s not my state, its not my choice, I leave that to the good people of Texas. The key is getting butts to the polls and it seems that many of those in Texas that have not been voting for whatever reason, are they not inspired by their choices and why seems to be the real question. I have no answers but I can see positives for each candidate (even Allred) yet the question remains, what kind of mechanism do Dems have in getting people to the polls and instilling hope in them to pull that lever. I like Crockett because she’s incredibly public about keeping receipts and pointing out lies and corruption. Talarico seems to be a “more approachable” version of Beto who has no problem seizing the moral high ground. Allred seems really normal and yet he couldn’t do enough to stand out from Ted fucking Cruz.
Texans appear to be no better than the voters of Tennessee, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana etc where they allow their racism to act as their primary motivation, clinging to a nostalgic past that was simpler for them to navigate. How do we fix that? Do we need to rebroadcast Roots and have a Ken Burns documentary on the Civil Rights Movement made to reach white people?
TONYG
@Suzanne: Bessent has a net worth of more than a half-billion dollars.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
A few of them might have stolen enough money to bribe Trump for a pardon.
TONYG
@lowtechcyclist: I don’t think that they even prepare their own questions. These “journalists” are basically D-List actors reading from a script.
Baud
@piratedan:
This is controversial, but maybe we start by not telling people that white people vote the way they do because Democrats betrayed them.
Scout211
And new this morning at Public Notice
. . .
And concludes:
Baud
Eyeroller
@Elizabelle: Some people doubt the power of the FTFNYT to set the media agenda, and not just at Fox. That’s an excellent example of how it works.
ETA: There sure have been a lot of “Biden insiders” eager to talk to the likes of Olivia Nuzzi and Jake Tapper and now thte FTFNYT. But we’ve seen that in the past, where Democrats rush to the press with dirt (real or gossip) while Republicans rarely do.
And there’s no hard evidence that immigration was the biggest driver of the election, compared to econonic concerns — not so much personal “economic anxiety” as “wrong track” anxiety.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
FTFY
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
But we DID betray them! By insisting that all people, regardless of race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, or whatever, should be treated equally and have access to the same opportunities. No more almost automatically doing better than all those others just because you’re a white man. Stab in the back! //
TONYG
@rikyrah: Very rich Wall Street people like Bessent literally live in a bubble. They usually don’t even SEE ordinary people, except for a few people who work for them. Bessent might actually believe that ordinary American are doing fine, because he himself is rich and he doesn’t have the intelligence to imagine how other people are doing.
Elizabelle
@Baud: LOL.
I see Trump is making noises about the Netflix deal for Warner Brothers. One thinks he did not get his snout wet enough.
PAY attention to ME.
WaterGirl
@Baud: ProPublica strikes again!
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
This is 100% true. Dems had been a white populist party, and in one of the fastest and most remarkable transformations in political history, became the civil rights party. We didn’t even return to our roots after Reagan won 49 states. It’s a legimate beef for racists who were given no choice but to ally with billionaire capitalists to defeat us.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
They are a bright spot.
mappy!
Affordability…
Edmond Bertrand, Substack
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
Gotta call malarky on that one, Baud. It might be a legitimate issue for the NYT to cover if they also covered the much, much, much worse COVID fraud and abuse that occurred (and likely is still occurring) in Texas.
Scout211
@Elizabelle:
And he personally met with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos on November 24 before the Warner Brothers Deal.
Belafon
Biden/Harris: We pulled the economy out of a major recession. While inflation is an issue, we’re doing better than other countries.
Trump/Oligarch: We’ve decided you need to endure some pain for our benefit. Why aren’t you happy you sniveling, ungrateful fools?
hueyplong
@piratedan: “Do we need to rebroadcast Roots and have a Ken Burns documentary on the Civil Rights Movement made to reach white people?”
I kind of think there was a Ken Burns documentary on the Civil Rights Movement, “Eyes on the Prize” (maybe someone else did it).
Just teeing this up for others as one who aspires to membership in the obligatory “not all white people.
ETA: Burns did not make it. It’s appearance on PBS confused me into thinking he did.
Belafon
@Elizabelle: There has never been so much corruption in one room, except for when Rick Scott sat alone.
Phylllis
@Suzanne: This is rich coming from a guy who sold his Charleston waterfront mansion for $18.25 million back in the Spring.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh:
Well, they should be covering that too.
Baud
@Phylllis:
That’s the whole point.
WTFGhost
@Baud: Trump really does seem to believe that being President means taking credit for whatever good things happen, and blaming other people for everything unpopular. Since 1994, that’s more or less been the official position of the Republican Party, reversing with the change in Presidential party, so you could see how he got confused by that. Of course there’s no problems, or, if there are, they’re all the fault of Dems, probably for hiding the Epstein files.
(Sorry, I just couldn’t resist the last. It’s been a long-ass-arbitrary unit of time. )
Belafon
@piratedan: I want Crockett in Congress. But, as a Texan, the only way that’s truly going to happen is if we kick some serious butt over the next 4 years, fix the Supreme Court, and reset the laws on gerrymandering.
In races here in Texas, not only do you need Democrats to turn out, you need Republicans to not turn out. I’m afraid that the only Democrat running that has a shot is Talarico.
Another Scott
@piratedan: Agreed that good Texans need to decide, and part of that is showing up. Even with the voter suppression tactics and all the rest. Grr…
Part of winning elections is standing up and being there and being prepared if lightning strikes. The folklore is that Ann Richards won and became governor because the GQPer wouldn’t shake her hand. One never knows what might swing enough of the electorate to get the win.
I’m sure Crockett is looking at all the difficulties and the various potential paths. Who knows, she might even figure that she needs to run for Senate even if she doesn’t see a personal path to victory. Maybe she figures that she’ll have coattails elsewhere even if she doesn’t win, she would provide a foundation for a stronger run in 2028, etc., etc. Lots to consider…
Politics is a complicated business. I’m glad we have good people willing to step up for all of us.
Best wishes,
Scott.
WTFGhost
@Princess: Worse, ol’ Empty is saying “no, we just have to be nice to each other going forward, so Dems have to be nice to me, and I won’t call them the evil pedophile terrorist-lovin’, terrorist-bein’, epstein file concealin’ traitorous scum that needs to be wiped out, lest they destroy all that is good and right in the world until I find cause to do so again.”
Belafon
@Eyeroller: The 2024 election was death by a thousand cuts: inflation, vaccines, racism, immigration, trans, all of it boiling down to white people’s hate. No one thing did them in.
Eyeroller
@mappy!: Referencing Krugman again (a chart that may not be visible to nonsubscribers), a lot of the adjusted housing affordability problem happened fairly quickly, starting in the early 2000s. The housing bubble pumped it up, then that collapsed and “affordability” increased toward baseline (i.e. prices went way down), but then it ramped up again around 2014 with a very large jump circa 2020. So it’s partly due to collapse of construction after the housing bubble, then a surge in demand during the pandemic.
The affordability of cars is almost entirely the fault of the demand for huge vehicles with lots of options. It is indeed true that a good portion of this is driven by auto manufacturer marketing, but it’s still a consumer choice. People have been habituated to consider only the monthly payments, and ever-increasing car loan terms have kept that fairly low, plus the fraction of cars that are leased has soared. (This seems to be a “social respectability” affordability phenomenon.). Edit: now it’s difficult for those of us who would prefer a smaller vehicle to get one.
Education at state institutions used to be much more supported by taxes, but we know what happened there. Private institutions have always been able to charge whatever the market will bear, and increasing wealth concentration has enabled the small fraction of the population that can go anywhere, to pay high tuitions, which drives the overall market higher, and then tax support has not kept up with higher market rates and increased student demand for amenities.
RevRick
@MagdaInBlack: You left out stupid and lying. The whole Trump administration is a regime of stupidity and lies. And bald-faced lies, at that.
WTFGhost
@Professor Bigfoot: It’s a constant bugaboo of mine; when my pain is bad, I have to speak-and-write, and that makes homophones easy to slip in. That’s part of why I sometimes joke or pun off of unexpected homophones or typos in my own writing.
I know it’s possible to process language without sound – I’ve done it, I’ve digested a page or two of text at a time doing it. I just couldn’t continue to do it, and it always exhausted me, so I always fall back on the old standby of speaking to myself.
I bet a lot of old folks who mumble to themselves are simply doing the same thing, making multiple notes in their heads, to help keep a topic present long enough to act on it when focus and working memory might be zeroed out without the extra cues.
ETA: it appears my e-mail address on this device is incorrect.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: If they are attacking Walz, they must see him as a threat.
hueyplong
@WTFGhost: I will only embrace MTG as a martyr to Republican cruelty. If she retains a political career, or really any career, that ain’t martyrdom.
Another Scott
@Belafon: … Musk’s $250M money bomb late in the race, the lies to Hispanic groups that the GQP is better, etc., etc.
Yeah, 2024 was a unique race, just like 2016 was.
I don’t know the secret sauce, but I do know this – “all politics is local”. Candidates have to figure out their own message and campaign style to get enough votes. The rest of us have to give them space to do that, even if they talk about things we don’t like or disagree with.
“Just win, baby.” – N.P.
We can’t get on the road to the policies we want without having the majority. That’s job one.
GQPer – “… and the other candidate is horrible and for X, Y, Z!!”
Sensible voter – “Does the other candidate support Tmurp?”
GQPer – “Er, no, but …”
Sensible voter – [waves back of hand] “Then she’s getting my vote. Thanks.”
Eyes on the prizes.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: Republicans may claim to be conservative, but they aren’t. They’re reactionary. Conservatives want to conserve something, but that gang of thugs and thieves are trashing and looting everything worth valuing.
different-church-lady
@Eyeroller:
We did it to ourselves.
Eyeroller
@Belafon: Polling is increasingly difficult but at least according to what I’ve seen (and I again rely on authors like Krugman), a lot of the swing in some minority subgroups was driven by economics. Also a big slug of misogyny, but part of what made the latter such a factor was probably unwillingness to trust a woman to handle the problem, along with the completely unjustified but very pervasive (among all ethnic groups and education levels) that Republicans are “better for the economy.”
As to white people, it was a lot purer racial and gender resentment, it appears. Based on my personal experience in my purple and semi-rural precinct (my anecdata), as well as reports on election day and some subsequent reporting, Trump turns out a LOT of late-Boomer and GenX white men who are otherwise mostly nonvoters. My polling place was overrun with them that day and I seldom see that.
Belafon
@Another Scott: “Sensible voter”
But we need a majority.
Jeffro
Yup.
It’s nice that we all have iPhones and cheap calories, but when it comes to the important things in life – much less building any sort of wealth – it’s very clear what’s happened.
Thanks for the bread and circuses, though, Republicans!
Jeffro
He tells the truth and goes right at them (almost the same thing), so yup.
Another Scott
@Eyeroller: I think a big part of the rise in car prices was semiconductor factories around Austin, TX being suddenly shut down by that winter storm which caused massive power outages. Semiconductors that cars needed suddenly weren’t available, so prices went up, vehicle prices went up (higher costs and they couldn’t make enough of them), etc., etc. It set a new baseline for prices that held even after things “returned to normal”. The transition to EVs and HEVs also had an impact, of course, and also was affected by the chip shortages.
It’s yet another example that “everything’s connected”. Texas refusing to be part of the national power grid has national (and international) economic implications.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Soprano2
@Baud: We had our quarterly update meeting from our department head this morning. They’re working on the design of a new building for us. They had budgeted around $33 million; the initial estimates came in at over $70 million! I was tempted to say “Trump’s tariffs, huh?”, but I didn’t.
Belafon
@Eyeroller: I think we all agree that there’s not going to be one weird trick we can do to win, one fix from the last election that we can change to guarantee a victory.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: Yeah, what a clueless tone deaf thing to say. I hope they keep trying to sell that message. Even the Biden administration didn’t go that far.
Lapassionara
@RevRick: This, times a thousand. Republicans have coasted on their reputation for being conservative for decades, but they are not at all conservative, and it doesn’t hurt to point that out, over and over again.
jonas
This is by far the most baffling thing about American politics over the past 30 years. Republican administrations have run this country into the ground three times now. People are still “Yeah, but, taxes…” or whatever. I dunno. Maybe this presidency will finally break the fever, but I’m still seeing polls where Trump is getting shellacked, but voters still “trust” Republicans more on the economy. It’s totally insane.
schrodingers_cat
@Belafon: WP hated that Biden’s policies, economic and otherwise, benefited non-white people as well.
cmorenc
@Jeffro:
I have often encountered Trump supporters who will freely admit they recognize what an awful, shitty human being Trump is, but that they nonetheless “like his policies” or “many of the things his Administration is doing” – utterly failing to connect why Trump’s shitty personal qualities might potently infiltrate his policies and actions.
brendancalling
@lowtechcyclist: Their prep is basically like colonoscopy prep, but for the brain: the press corps shits out any pre-existing knowledge, probing questions, or accountability.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
To be scrupulously fair….. tariffs are definitely a factor in the pricing I am seeing right now. But there’s also a ton of denial. I see it in my clients all the time. The expectations and the budget….. are often not in alignment! LOL!
I had to break it to an owner last week that every automatic door opener that they want will probably be about a $12K add per door. They had, like, no idea. Many such cases!
Gloria DryGarden
@WTFGhost: I wrote you a long reply last night on the Sunday night thread. I hope you’ll go read it .
hueyplong
@jonas: It makes more sense if you read “trust on the economy” as nothing other than “perceived to be more likely to give me a tax cut.” “Perceived” is doing a lot of work for 95% of GOP voters.
schrodingers_cat
@jonas: Economy is a stand in for things they cannot state they prefer the Rs for. What Rs do better than Ds is keep the undesirables under the boot heel.
Others can be women, minorities, immigrants anyone they don’t like or are suspicious of.
Scout211
AP News
Soprano2
@rikyrah: I looked in my cart at WalMart last Saturday and said to myself “Is that really almost $100 worth of stuff?” I can afford it, but I remember when I couldn’t always afford everything I needed. I shop weekly and it’s rare that I spend less than $100 total for us. Maybe that’s not much, but it seems like a lot to me.
Baud
@Scout211:
Whoa.
SW
Tom Cotten is obviously a man who was hanged (deservedly) in his past life.
Another Scott
@Scout211: Good news. Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Matt McIrvin
@Eyeroller: This was all a huge problem for Democrats in 2024–the Republicans ran on it, so they know this perfectly well! How can the economy be doing badly when the top-line economic indicators are mostly good? Well, obviously, the gains are poorly distributed and the masses are getting hit with higher prices without necessarily higher wages.
It just hasn’t gotten any better under Trump, on the whole. That cohort who will rate the economy as doing better as long as a Republican is President is still there, it’s just that there’s a real signal from the real economy poking through the noise.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I believe wages were going up. There just wasn’t enough time to catch up to that COVID inflation spike.
oldgold
@mappy!: This is the stuff we need to illuminate.
Suzanne
@Baud: People make dumb choices when they’re angry. I remember reading a quote from a woman interviewed after the Brexit vote. She voted for Leave, though she really wanted to Remain. She said she was pissed off about the state of the country and wanted to send some sort of message. She regretted her vote, but she didn’t think beforehand that it was going to be close.
I think of that a lot.
Soprano2
@Baud: You’d think by now if they really wanted to get answers, they’d be ready to either play the footage in question or read the Republican what was said or tell them what happened and then ask for a response to it. Of course, we know they’re lying when they say they aren’t aware of these things, but I think you have to make their non-response ridiculous.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Elizabelle:
To quote Rufus T. Firefly, Leader of Freedonia, the Land of the Brave And Free:
“♫ If anyone’s caught taking graft / And I don’t get my share / We’ll stand ’em up against the wall / And POP goes the weasel! ♫”
(Okay, it’s Groucho Marx, Duck Soup. It’s scary how prescient that inter-world-war movie could be about events going down almost a hundred years later.)
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I’ve had quite a few people ask me why we don’t buy a bigger, better house. My reply is two things – 1) We’ve lived her for over 40 years and done a lot of work on the house, and 2) it’s paid for! That second one usually shuts them right up. There’s a lot of utility to having a house that’s paid for.
Tim C
@Scout211: This right here. The Trump administration’s strategy is completely understandable once you accept the median GOP voter is a moron who believes what they are told to believe. It got him the presidency twice so now it’s what they go with.
And for the most part, it works on his base.
Gin & Tonic
We are in line at the NYC Federal building for my DIL’s swearing-in. There are hundreds of people here for the same thing. Fuck Trump.
Scout211
Deleted.
Jay
@Eyeroller:
42 million Americans rely on SNAP.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: The media badmouthed the economy by focusing on the negative (inflation) and rarely on the positive (full employment). Also labor and the many parts of the left didn’t have Biden’s back, the way moneybags have the R president’s back.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Congratulations to her and all of you. It has been an arduous journey.
gene108
@lowtechcyclist:
You left out the Republican TEA Party takeover of state governments, the massive state tax cuts for the rich, and the firing of many state and local workers.
In 2011 and 2012, for every private sector job added, an approximately equal number of state and local workers were laid off.
Also, Republican governors rejected ARRA money, because maintaining new infrastructure would be too expensive once built. Never mind the urgent need to get people to work.
We would’ve had a much faster recovery if it wasn’t for Republicans sabotaging Obama at every turn, in order to make him a one term president.
RevRick
@different-church-lady: The same could be said for housing. The average home size back in the 60s was, what, 1100 square feet? And now it’s more than double. Of course, that is also due to zoning laws that establish lot sizes and setbacks and parking requirements and such.
Elizabelle
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I really like the David Downing fictional series about pre- and post- WW2 in Germany and Eastern Europe. He set the most recent novel in Los Angeles; Union Station; have not yet read it.
Lead character is a British-American journalist who becomes a spy, and the books are really good at describing the culture and politics of the time. Carefully researched.
Anyway, at one point journalist John Russell is watching Duck Soup in its original run, although in an Eastern European country. Cannot remember how they mistranslated the title, but it was funny.
Downing names his novels after railway stations in Berlin (where Russell lives). Zoo Station is the first, and it begins, poignantly, with Russell in Danzig on December 31, 1938 and young Poles gathering outside and wishing each other a happy New Year.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: It has. Thanks.
Jeffro
Fox News floor keeps the MAGAts well-propagandized + snooze media follows along + Dems have never really worked hard to counter any of it.
Gloria DryGarden
@Elizabelle: I was seeing something about all this yesterday on Facebook. I told my person I didn’t believe it, and if there was a problem, to go after it legally. She said she lives in Minnesota, and that Walz was useless about this. She said the Somali men were a problem.
It was pretty disturbing. I’m not ready to study the deep details of it, but it was unpleasant to read of such negativity about Walz. I’m glad you passed on this information above.
Jeffro
@Gin & Tonic: congrats to her!
jonas
@schrodingers_cat: I think that’s definitely part of it. But there are also plenty of polls where they also ask about which party they prefer on immigration, crime, etc., and of course Republicans score way higher on that. Then they get to economy and voters are like “oh, yeah, the economy too.” WTF.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
A decent enough top-level overview on car prices this year:
usatoday.com/story/cars/shopping/2025/12/07/car-prices-rise-sales-dip-2025-shopping/87644337007/
More details at least on GM’s response to P-Tape’s proposal to heavily modify CAFE standards:
gmauthority.com/blog/2025/12/gm-ceo-mary-barra-said-current-fuel-economy-regulations-risked-plant-sh…
The takeaway was that GM didn’t necessarily object to the Biden-era targets, just the time mandated to meet them.
Hey, with the average price of a new car hitting $50K, when the new Bolt EV hits shortly at a hair under $30K, it’ll be (relatively) a bargain!
Soprano2
Not only that, but it costs more today to be considered middle class than it did in 1971. You had one phone that cost maybe $15/month. Now, you have as many phones as there are adults, each costing a lot more than $20/month. Everyone watched free TV – there was no streaming or cable or satellite TV. Now most people pay to watch TV every month. There was no “internet service” that most of us pay for now. And so on. People today who live like my family did in 1971 would be considered poor. We didn’t have air conditioning in our house until I was 10 years old!
Soprano2
@Suzanne: It wouldn’t surprise me if denial is a factor, too. They want to put in an outdoor eating area – for a building that’s going to be within a mile of our large sewage treatment plant! As far as I’m concerned that’s a HUGE waste of money that they could easily do away with. Talk about denial…..
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Yeah. Having paid-off stuff is the best! And again…. our social safety net is really insufficient to the task for retirees. A paid-off place to live is essential for those years.
This is part of why it has to be easier for young people to get started.
Jackie
@piratedan: Speaking of Allred…
I’m glad Allred is shifting to running for his old seat, but man… I don’t want to lose Crockett’s voice in the House.
gene108
@Another Scott:
Or it could be an ego trip on her part. Politicians letting their big egos decide they’re the best for the job, despite whatever difficulties they’d have getting elected is probably more common than thoughtful consideration of all the pluses and minuses of a campaign on their chances of winning and on down ballot races.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I’ve actually talked to people who are afraid to have a paid-off car, because they’re afraid they won’t be able to make room in their budget for a car payment if they need to start making one again. I tell them they should direct that money into savings, so that they are used to still making the payment, but people are extremely resistant to that idea.
Suzanne
@Soprano2:
People are dumb, Part Infinity.
gene108
@Eyeroller:
It’s the decision by U.S. automakers to focus on higher profit margins per vehicle sold than market share. Wall Street rewards them for this thinking.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Awesome.
Professor Bigfoot
@BretH: That slides too deeply into “no true Scotsman” territory.
I prefer to take them at their words and recognize that “conservatism” at this time in this country is a fundamentally neo-Confederate ideology.
Baud
The Trumpire strikes back!
JML
@Gloria DryGarden: The Somali population in MN isn’t really that large, but they’re concentrated in a few communities and they’re easily targeted as being different, foreign, etc. and there’s plenty of bad actors only too happy to whip up the racism (especially in the generally very very white suburbs and exurbs of MN) for political gain. Immigrant, Muslim, and black brings a lot of the quiet racism to full-blown hate.
The fact that some Somalis took advantage of the pandemic and the lack of guardrails around the support services that suddenly had huge piles of cash, orders to get it in the hands of the people fast, and no real monitoring or enforcement capacity has made them a big target. now, were they they only ones? Hell no. But they make a convenient target, especially to bludgeon Walz. The fact that it’s common in the Somali community to send money back overseas has become the latest line of attack to make them the most disfavored community that people (mostly white, but there’s a real push to get the African-American and Hmong communities to turn on the Somali) should feel free to attack as being unworthy of being in the state.
Notably, no one seems to care about the Chamber of Commerce fraudster; I wonder why? (I don’t really wonder) mprnews.org/story/2025/12/01/jonathan-weinhagen-minneapolis-chamber-commerce-pleads-guilty-mail-frau…
Soprano2
@Suzanne: Yes. You can do a direct deposit into a savings account on our payroll system, so it would be extremely easy to do. Our culture has a bias against saving money. I think a lot of people think it’s useless to do because they’ll just have to spend it – which of course is the whole point of doing it!
mappy!
And then they lie about it. It’s like when teenagers do something stupid and get caught.
Mining local voter results over the years has unearthed a bounty of pig-headed decisions made in the brief moments of filling out a ballot. It’s often evident with down ticket votes. You scratch your head and wonder why they picked what they did. Like I posted previously, Taco won the town but the top vote getter was our incumbent liberal D House Rep.
Go figure.
Pauline
It’s a good thing I’m usually the only person at work at this hour, because my immediate response to that Bessent quote about Americans not knowing how good we have it was a very audible JFC!
I don’t usually say my thoughts out loud but that was a very visceral reaction.
RevRick
@lowtechcyclist: @Baud: @gene108:
Yes, the stimulus was too small, but that was, in part, a political calculation to get the Republicans Collins, Snowe and Specter on board.
But I must push back on the lie that the Obama administration bailed out the banks instead of mortgage holders. TARP was enacted under Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulsen stuffed billions into the big banks, which many resisted, because they didn’t want to give the government warrants (partial ownership), but he insisted, because he wanted to send a strong message to the credit markets. The majority of the money went to bailing out AIG, the big reinsurer, and Fannie and Sallie Mae.
The Obama administration used TARP money to bail out the auto industry, and attempted to create a mortgage guarantee program, HARP, which failed due to bank resistance and confusing requirements and paperwork. The one bank they did bail out was the regional bank ThirdFifth. What really helped the banks was the Fed policy of quantitative easing.
Of the twenty five biggest financial institutions failing due to the housing crisis, only one was a bank: Washington Mutual.
WTFGhost
Attention Frontpager with spare time – please let me know if my nym and e-mail are both correct, and consistent, through this post.
I tried posting through a different device, a never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed Kindle Fire. At one point, I realized my e-mail address was obviously wrong… then, I couldn’t tell whether it was right or wrong. The text was too small. I had an edit window open, so there’s an “eta” and the problem shouldn’t occur *after* then. But it might have occurred on any responses prior to, or including, that one, on this post.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: We just had a doggie emergency last week (she’s okay!), and I am very glad that I have been maintaining an emergency fund. I couldn’t always.
Now to see if the pet health insurance is easy to deal with…..
Josie
@gene108:
I suspect that this is an ego thing with Crockett. She said that she could win by bringing out Latino and Black voters, but I’m not sure that will work statewide. Talarico is following Beto’s playbook of going to every possible location in the state and meeting with rural as well as urban voters. Beto came within 3 points of beating Cruz by doing this. It’s possible to get that close in a wave election.
zhena gogolia
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah!
Soprano2
@JML: We had one of those fraudsters here – he owned a couple of restaurants. He took over $5 million for a house for his mom, a boat, and a bunch of other stuff.
frosty
@mappy!: That’s a pretty stark set of statistics. Lays out the affordability crisis in just a few lines.
Sure Lurkalot
@RevRick:
In the burbs, that is more true. Denver’s typical city lot is 6,250 sf, 50×125. Time was you wouldn’t be allowed to put a 3,000 sf structure on a single lot because of bulk plane restrictions, but those went by the wayside. Some blocks are completely transformed, large structures built out to the setback, blocking out light from each other and the street. Some spotty with big behemoths dwarfing the smaller houses from yesteryear.
Neither houses nor autos need to be so large. Consumer choice, yes, but also the always must be bigger than, must be more than ethos that is shoved down our throats.
Suzanne
@Josie: I like Crockett, but I am skeptical that Texas will vote for her.
I wish we had a better way to help talented people have political careers when they come from red states.
Chris T.
@Suzanne:
“And we’re working on that now, pretty soon Americans will realize how good they had it before we got into power!”
Josie
@Suzanne:
You make an excellent point. Talented young people have a difficult time as Democrats in Texas. Hopefully we can figure out how to change that at some point.
schrodingers_cat
@RevRick: What was Lehmann brothers if not a bank?
JML
@Soprano2: there’s no shortage of them, and funny: most of them turn out to be white, republican dudes. But we’re going to get story after story about the Somali bad actors; they wrote one story on this Chamber guy and won’t talk about him again unless they find out he ripped off even more money somewhere.
We’re also supposed to trust anything the Chamber dudes say as gospel for what’s best for the economy, because they supposedly know so much about business and finance and so forth, but also managed to hire a guy to run their show who was a massive grifter and ripped them and the public off…
I assume the Orange Asshole will pardon him soon…
catclub
Why not? no one went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American electorate.
This is one thing Trump gets. If he tells them the sky is green, a much larger number than zero will accept it.
Soprano2
@Suzanne: I’ve also mentioned that if people did that they’d have a large down payment if they did need to buy a car again, which would reduce their payments a lot. I think there are a significant number of people who cannot stand to have much money in an account – they want to spend it!
laura
My too long reply to Rev Rick got eated, but spouse and I were able to pay off our 30 yr mortgage in 22 years due solely to a HARP loan that almost halved our interest rate. Thanks Obama!
kalakal
@Gin & Tonic: Congratulations. It’s a tough goal to reach. The atmosphere at mine was great, I’m sure it will bat your DIL’s too.
dnfree
@NotMax: It’s always a good time to revisit John McCutcheon. Thanks for sharing.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
An investment bank. These are different than retail banks where people deposit their money. Retail banks have had tighter controls on what to do with their money than investment banks.
Rev. Rick is mistaken that the only retail bank that failed was WaMu. Wachovia, for example, merged with Wells Fargo, which saved Wachovia from closing. There were other bank mergers that were pushed through to save retail banks.
Ealbert
The sad thing is that until you have around $2,500 to put into a savings account (that is the minimum amount for a money market account at my bank), it often doesn’t pay to have a savings account. It takes at least $1,000 to not have to pay a $3.00 a month service charge and for that, they will offer you a whopping .02% – two tenths of a percent interest! You would be better off hiding it under your mattress – at least then it wouldn’t be eaten up by bank fees.
piratedan
you know, it’s kind of telling in these days of conspiracy theories and assassinations that how little curiosity surround the people and motivations of the following:
the Capitol Pipe Bomber
DJT assassination 1 (The earing of the President)
DJT assassination 2 (The golf course stalking)
The Charlie Kirk assassination
The Hortman Family killings
just a “nothing to see here” vibe around them entirely, not even a cautionary tale that posits that maybe, just maybe these RW folks are just a tad unhinged and not exactly buying into the whole, we’re a nation of laws thingy.
Belafon
@Suzanne: We need to also figure out a way for House members to run for higher office without having to give up their seat. Senators and Governors don’t get punished that way, but House members running every two years means they have to make a choice.
Suzanne
@Belafon: Agree.
I am skeptical that Crockett can win statewide, but I’m also happy that she’s giving it a go. Let’s see what she can do.
Librettist
@Baud:
The nepo baby didn’t change the offer that failed.
He just fluffed Trump at whatever event they were at and wrote another strongly worded press release.
Jackie
@Gin & Tonic:
Oh, SO EXCITING! Dec. 8th will be a wonderful anniversary to celebrate every year on forward!
Wapiti
@Ealbert: When I was a kid, we had bank accounts. Other kids talked about their credit union, because their parents worked someplace that gave them that option. These days, credit unions have wider scope of customers – I can have an account at Boeing Employee Credit Union (BECU) just because I live in Washington State. They apparently do not charge maintenance fees.
Geminid
@piratedan: Charlie Kirk’s assassination does not get much attention from general news outlets these days, but there is a fierce controversy raging over it in some conservative social media spaces. Without getting into the substance, I’ll just say it’s very polarizing and shows no sign of resolution. I expect some of these folks will be arguing about the assassination ten years now.
Kristine
Today’s featured photo is amazing. Otherworldly.
West of the Rockies
Hey, Tom Cotton, 500 million tons of drugs is over a quarter pound of drugs for every man, woman, and child in America (population 350 million approximately).
Hey, America, get your drugs Mc Quarter Pounder, courtesy of Donald Trump!
*I know there are other gender identifiers, and was using phrasing that normies and cultists would comprehend.
Librettist
@Librettist:
Trump also went off on nepo baby and Paramount after seeing the MTG interview.
Trump has memory issues with the who, how much and why of the bribes.
rikyrah
@Geminid:
I am curious.
How does the Latino Republican Mayor justify what the Orange Menace is doing with regards to Immigration?
Not only the raids but Alligator Alcatraz, and the cut off of Cubans from the favorable Immigration policies that they’ve enjoyed for DECADES
schrodingers_cat
@gene108: Exactly. The 2008 collapse started with Lehmann brothers (an investment bank) collapse
Plenty of retail banks failed as well. Number of failing banks was second only to the Great Depression era and the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 80s.
The number doesn’t tell the whole story because of the consolidation in the banking sectors in the 90s and the aughts.
Ruckus
@Princess:
Has anyone else noticed that the quality of MAGA rhetoric, from Trump on down, has fallen off a cliff?
It’s a cliff on the edge of a garbage dump, and the dump is filling up rapidly. It’s also difficult to have any quality whatsoever when your concept of government and business is to take as much money as possible for doing, at the most, is nothing and leave as little as possible for everyone else. That is the concept of money that is everyone else should pay you for your pompous arrogance and your desire that you get everything and they get nothing. Now they’ll never admit that but listen to them and what they really want. It is not to make life better for everyone but better for only them.
Bupalos
It should be sufficient to submit this without comment, but I’ll go ahead and comment: that’s not what that article was about. It’s a mildly oppositional but generally fair and well sourced year-by-year tick-tock on how the Administration went from holding the political capital of a 2020 backlash to Trump’s spectacular cruelty to, by 2024 holding a pretty spectacular deficit that I think any fair minded election observer would consider decisive.
The sources here are pretty much all internal Biden administration folks. That they are talking to reporters now in this way has it’s own political context, to be sure. But this kind of characterization of this kind of journalism– as a kind of media-control conspiracy– is problematic I think. Administrations are always complex and full of disagreement. This is an article presenting that internal disagreement. As these things always are, it has an “I told you so” flavor from Democrats who are likely positioning themselves for the future.
They Call Me Noni
@Wapiti: Several years ago we moved our money from Chase to a local credit union and love it. We have a checking account, savings account, CD that we’ve rolled over a couple of times and an HSA account. Except for the HSA we had all the same at Chase and they didn’t know us from Adam. We go into our credit union and they know our names and are always helpful.
You know what the deciding factor was? One day I went to Chase to get a money order and they wanted to charge me $14 for it! The bank was quite busy and I lost my shit. I asked the teller if she could see all our accounts that they lend out and make money off of and she said “yes, but you don’t have the kind of account you need to receive a free money order. Maybe you should change the type of account you have.” My reply was “or maybe I should change my bank.” I said it loud enough for every person in there to hear me.
SFBayAreaGal
@RevRick: Washington Mutual, used to be Home Savings of America. Chase Banks took over Washington Mutual.
I was a customer of Home Savings and Washington Mutual.
Matt McIrvin
What’s gotten cheaper since 1971 is a lot of consumer goods that used to be considered luxuries: home appliances, home electronics, communication and information tools, many of which didn’t even exist.
A lot of services and experiences too, especially if they cater toward the upper middle class or higher: restaurants are better in many ways, more people can go to Europe for their vacations.
But that only goes so far toward quality of life. You can’t eat video games. When housing, education and health care get prohibitively expensive while inequality increases, it just destroys people. It’s a society eating its seed corn.
Aziz, light!
@Ealbert: I couldn’t have retired without the interest my credit union pays me on the balance in my checking account. It ranges from two cents a month to a whopping four cents a month. I dutifully enter this windfall in Quicken.
But they don’t charge me any fees to speak of.
Aziz, light!
@rikyrah: My understanding is that many Cubans and other Latinos in Miami are all aboard the IGMFY train.
satby
Late to the thread, but had to share this from a newsletter I subscribe to:
S Cerevisiae
@Ealbert: My credit union doesn’t have any fees and has a program where you can round each purchase and the change goes into savings, painless and it adds up. I much prefer credit unions to banks.
Chris T.
@Soprano2:
Ages and ages ago, I had a credit union car loan that auto-deducted from my paycheck. (Auto-deduction got a discount on the interest rate. Though it was pretty small, and a 2 year term; when I got it the nice lady at the credit union asked “are you sure you don’t want to borrow any more?” But I digress.) Anyway, once it was paid off, it kept auto-deducting and putting money into a savings account, and I just let it roll…
UncleEbeneezer
Comedian and incredible Trump-impersonator, JL Cauvin is running for a House seat in NJ. He knows he will likely lose but he wants to start creating a lane for Progressives who are also proud of the Dem Party and not interested in constantly shitting on it. I think Crockett would be great for this as well. She’s quite Progressive but doesn’t do the performative blaming of Oligarchs and the Dem Establishment.
Baud
@UncleEbeneezer:
Especially if people think he’s Trump!
(OTOH, zhena will be moving to New Jersey to vote for him, so that’s at least two votes).
RevRick
@schrodingers_cat: It was a nonbank entity, an investment firm.
Iron City
@They Call Me Noni: I have not had a bank account in 40 years. Do it all through several credit unions, one of which is the largest in the world. Over the past few years, I see them acting more and more like the banks, but don’t know why. There are more formula / algorithmic methods of doing things it appears, possibly an artifact of being a big financial institution. Maybe they get their bankers at credit unions from the same place bank banksters come from, and those rats are infesting the credit unions now.
JML
@S Cerevisiae: I like this rounding up program! it’s going to be small but any painless way of adding savings appeals to my frugal heart.
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2: It seems like there’s a lot of “advice” out there aimed at making carrying a lot of debt seem normal. And then we castigate people for letting it get out of control.
One thing that people sometimes don’t get is that often (though not always), paying down debt is going to give you a higher yearly return than most investments.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Soprano2: I have an excellent credit score, and no consumer debt. The credit people tell me I could raise my score by getting a consumer loan (car loan, I guess). No thanks!
zhena gogolia
@Baud: Just saw this! I’ve kind of lost touch with JLC because I can’t stand to think about Trump, even to laugh at him. I saw that in passing.
Captain C
@Suzanne: Didn’t the FTFNYT and others crucify the Biden Administration for saying things that could be creatively twisted into this?
WTFGhost
@schrodingers_cat: That was the problem – it was acting like a bank, but had no banking controls, no way to unroll complicated financial transactions, no readiness for a federal takeover.
@Gloria DryGarden: I’ve seen it and copied it – thanks you!
Matt McIrvin
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Credit scores are about how much money lenders can make off of you– if you’re frequently delinquent on debt, that’s one problem, but being too frugal for their taste and not carrying any debt is also a red flag. They really don’t want you to pay it off early!
You should have seen the letters we got from Chase when they realized we were fixing to pay off our mortgage. It was like a jilted boyfriend screaming outside the window.
Captain C
@Betty Cracker:
Nailed it.
NotMax
@Captain C
Anyone who doesn’t see she’s aiming for the governor’s office immediately needs to visit an eye doctor.
AMagicianNamedGob
@Betty Cracker: You aren’t wrong, but a funny thing about that. When you stand in line with those icky folks and vote for the same icky things they vote for, you tend to get that same stink on you.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Drink a 6 pack?
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
They want study income. It helps grow their stock (value!), and it is nice to make a very decent salary sitting at a desk and having a $25 -$65 lunch every day. I mean one does have to wear an expensive suit or dress, depending on your concept of proper clothing and often suck up to someone in the office but it’s better than sweeping gutters or working in a steel mill, repairing cars, or toting that barge.
Ruckus
@Iron City:
They act like banks because they move around a lot of money. Likely a lot more than they used to. And in a bank the job is to make money off of your money. I say NEVER FORGET IT IS ALLLLLLLL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS. NO bank is there to make money FOR you, they are there to make money OFF you. Yes they do this by guarding your money, providing services you need and being graceful in not telling you how much money they make by watching yours. Do you pay with a check or credit card? They work by making it that you don’t have to carry a lot of money around to pay for food or utility bills or gas for your car. And as things cost a lot more than they did half a century ago or more and as there are a lot more people than there was 50-100 years ago and we make more money that wouldn’t be all that good sitting in your house while you are at work, or in your wallet or purse while shopping.
Another Scott
@RevRick:
Nit:
I think you meant Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. (Sallie Mae is/was the student loan behemoth.)
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Sheldon Vogt
@Professor Bigfoot: Reactionary, not conservative.