Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Every decision we make has lots of baggage with it, known or unknown.

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

They spent the last eight months firing professionals and replacing them with ideologues.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Fucking consultants! (of the political variety)

Of course you can have champagne before noon. That’s why orange juice was invented.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

I swear, each month of 2025 will have its own history degree.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

If America since Jan 2025 hasn’t broken your heart, you haven’t loved her enough.

Second rate reporter says what?

You are here: Home / Archives for @heymistermix.com

Read a fucking book.

Perhaps some day, over a glass of whiskey that I accept, despite my gastritis, we could talk frankly about this.

mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.

Kevin Drum, RIP

by | 83 Comments

This post is in: 

Kevin Drum’s wife Marian posted this on his blog today:

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

A Facebook page, ‘In Memory of Kevin Drum’, has been created as a place for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post your thoughts and memories there.

Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and challenged him through the years.

He will be greatly missed.

Marian

Kevin blogged his struggles with multiple myeloma and prostate cancer by posting graphs of his biochemistry, treating it like any other subject covered. His work on publicizing the effects of lead was great service journalism. He was a steady hand and, agree or disagree with what he wrote, the world is worse for his loss.

Only comments about Kevin Drum, and his legacy, please.

Kevin Drum, RIPPost + Comments (83)

A Couple of Bangers

by | Leave a Comment

This post is in: 

Tam R mentioned this in the comments of a post and it’s a banger, just a clear-eyed recitation of facts and what Europe needs to do now that Trump has abandoned them.

With Trump’s announcement that he’s delaying Mexican tariffs for a month showing that Claudia Sheinbaum was smart to delay her counter-tariff response until the weekend, this piece that Gloria DryGarden sent in from Facebook is an interesting read. It’s attributed to David Honig who teaches negotiation at Indiana University Law School:

Trump, as most of us know, is the credited author of “The Art of the Deal,” a book that was actually ghost written by a man named Tony Schwartz, who was given access to Trump and wrote based upon his observations. If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, or if you’ve followed Trump lately, you’ll know, even if you didn’t know the label, that he sees all dealmaking as what we call “distributive bargaining.”

Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.

The other type of bargaining is called integrative bargaining. In integrative bargaining the two sides don’t have a complete conflict of interest, and it is possible to reach mutually beneficial agreements. Think of it, not a single pie to be divided by two hungry people, but as a baker and a caterer negotiating over how many pies will be baked at what prices, and the nature of their ongoing relationship after this one gig is over.

The problem with Trump is that he sees only distributive bargaining in an international world that requires integrative bargaining. He can raise tariffs, but so can other countries. He can’t demand they not respond. There is no defined end to the negotiation and there is no simple winner and loser. There are always more pies to be baked. Further, negotiations aren’t binary. China’s choices aren’t (a) buy soybeans from US farmers, or (b) don’t buy soybeans. They can also (c) buy soybeans from Russia, or Argentina, or Brazil, or Canada, etc. That completely strips the distributive bargainer of his power to win or lose, to control the negotiation.

One of the risks of distributive bargaining is bad will. In a one-time distributive bargain, e.g. negotiating with the cabinet maker in your casino about whether you’re going to pay his whole bill or demand a discount, you don’t have to worry about your ongoing credibility or the next deal. If you do that to the cabinet maker, you can bet he won’t agree to do the cabinets in your next casino, and you’re going to have to find another cabinet maker.
There isn’t another Canada.

So when you approach international negotiation, in a world as complex as ours, with integrated economies and multiple buyers and sellers, you simply must approach them through integrative bargaining. If you attempt distributive bargaining, success is impossible. And we see that already.

Trump has raised tariffs on China. China responded, in addition to raising tariffs on US goods, by dropping all its soybean orders from the US and buying them from Russia. The effect is not only to cause tremendous harm to US farmers, but also to increase Russian revenue, making Russia less susceptible to sanctions and boycotts, increasing its economic and political power in the world, and reducing ours. Trump saw steel and aluminum and thought it would be an easy win, BECAUSE HE SAW ONLY STEEL AND ALUMINUM – HE SEES EVERY NEGOTIATION AS DISTRIBUTIVE. China saw it as integrative, and integrated Russia and its soybean purchase orders into a far more complex negotiation ecosystem.

Trump has the same weakness politically. For every winner there must be a loser. And that’s just not how politics works, not over the long run.

This is another cross-post from my new place — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off.  You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here.  Kay is also posting there now if you’re interested in her take on things.

A Couple of BangersPost + Comments

Checking In With Our Former North American Allies

by | Leave a Comment

This post is in: 

Mexico extradited 29 convicted and suspected cartel members to the United States on Friday. Caro Quintero, the convicted murderer of DEA agent Kiki Camarena, was the most notable one, and the others were members of a laundry list of cartels including the Sinaloa and Zeta organizations. A lot of these guys had been in prison for a long time and are older (Quintero is 72, for example).

This extradition might be in response to Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Tuesday, it could be in response to US adding cartels to the list of terrorist organizations, or it might just be another instance of President Claudia Sheinbaum backing away from her predecessor AMLO’s Hugs not Bullets policy. This policy promoted social welfare programs to make life better for people living in cartel-dominated areas. AMLO and Claudia’s Morena party is still committed to that policy, but Claudia seems more inclined to crack down. Her government has cooperated with the US in allowing drone overflights of Mexican territory. Those drones are equipped with sensors that can detect fentanyl labs.

Claudia didn’t say a lot about this at her Friday press conference, but she did note that part of the reason for the extradition was that her government lacked confidence in the integrity of the judiciary, and was concerned some of them would be released from prison. Quintero, for example, was released from prison in 2013 after an appeal, disappeared before he could be imprisoned after losing an appeal to the Supreme Court, and was captured in 2022. Mexico has judicial elections this year after AMLO pushed through judicial reform last year.

Claudia dives into crowds all over Mexico with little visible security in her car tours or when she flies (coach, commercial) to other towns in the country. She’s fearless. I’m concerned for her safety now that the cartels are almost certainly out for revenge.

Now let’s look to the North. If you’re not reading Charlie Angus, who is a Member of Parliament for a town in north Ontario, you’re missing out on a great political communicator. In the last couple of days, he’s detailed his visit to anti-Russian protests at the Russian embassy in Ottawa, his take on Canada leaving the “five eyes” intelligence gathering arrangement with Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and the US.

Doug Ford, Ontario Premier, won re-election on Friday. Cue sad trombone. He gambled by calling a snap election, and won on the strength of his voiced opposition to Trump’s tariffs. His party kept their majority in the provincal legislature, picking up one seat. The Liberals did so poorly that their leader, Bonnie Crombie, lost her riding, yet she was re-elected to her post as party leader. Ford took a political risk here and won. He definitely is MAGA-curious, but his strong anti-US rhetoric, coupled with quickly pulling US goods from the LCBOs (province-run liquor stores) and threatening to cancel a Starlink contract certainly helped his case. He was able to win before the fact that he was full of shit about cancelling a Starlink contract and that he quickly put the liquor back on the shelves when the tariff threat abated truly sunk in.

The Liberals, who were left for dead politically last year, are surging in Canadian polls, almost entirely at the expense of the Tories. Libs are the red line, Tories are the navy blue line below:

Checking In With Our Former Allies

Most of this is due to the Canadian Tory leader Pierre Poilievre being considered likely to sell out Canada, and not meeting the moment because he’s just a sloganeer (“verb the noun” is a taunt made about his slogans). Liberals appear to be uniting behind Mark Carney as leader. Carney is the former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, worked for Goldman, etc. In other words, he’s going to be the white, male, somewhat conservative leader that the Liberals think can appeal to a broad swath of Canadians.

Oh, and this is funny (not funny ha-ha): Trump might have to ask Canadians for eggs.

This is another cross-post from my new place — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off.  You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here.  Kay is also posting there now if you’re interested in her take on things.

Checking In With Our Former North American AlliesPost + Comments

Disrespecting the Bing

by | Leave a Comment

This post is in: 

Disrespecting the Bing

A joint Zelenskyy/Trump news conference was cancelled today, after an Oval Office dust-up where Trump and JD Toady Vance both went at Zelenskyy about his ingratitude to the US. Then the group of state media that Trump assembles in the Oval Office asked piercing questions like why Zelenskyy isn’t wearing a suit. The Guardian live blog has the details.

Adam will almost certainly have better analysis of the geopolitics of the meeting. But I want to focus on the circus aspects, because that’s what’s being pushed through what we used to call the puke funnel. This is a clear case of Trump and JD setting up a “disrespecting the Bing” situation, which is a reference to the a Sopranos episode where the gangsters wanted to off someone, but they couldn’t come up with a good reason, so they made it appear that the victim disrespected the club where they all met (the Bing). The irony that drives the humor here is that the Bing was a strip club / house of prostitution.

One of the differences between the way that Trumpists are reacting to this, and sane people are reacting, is that sane people think the optics and substance of this are terrible. On Bluesky, there was a ton of outrage about what happened, and they’re not wrong. A Politico foreign affairs correspondent posted the exchange between JD and Zelenskyy and said it was “jaw dropping” that the White House posted it to their rapid response account. The clear implication from the reporter was that the exchange was terrible and it was incredible that the White House bragged about it.

My jaw is not dropped. They know what they’re doing. They want to leverage their base’s inherent distrust and dislike of foreign aid by making Zelenskyy look like an ungrateful ass who couldn’t even bother to dress for a meeting and won’t say thank you. And it will work. They have the machinery to make it work. We don’t have machinery to get out the other side of the story.

This is another cross-post from my new place — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off.  You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here.  Kay is also posting there now if you’re interested in her take on things.

Disrespecting the BingPost + Comments

Aviation Update

by | Leave a Comment

This post is in: 

The FAA layoffs are still being processed by the aviation community. We know they hit government officials who manage pilot medicals, and they also hit the group that makes navigation charts used by pilots and air traffic controllers. This piece has more detail on all the layoffs.

Elon’s snout is in the trough, this time with a ridiculous accusation against Verizon that got Starlink the contract for communications for the FAA.

 

poor Verizon signed up for Trump 2.0 to get tax cuts and and rubber stamped mergers, but instead an unelected oligarch cosplaying as a government efficiency expert is elbowing in on the company’s $2 billion FAA contract while falsely accusing them of killing air travelers

[image or embed]

— Karl Bode (@karlbode.com) February 26, 2025 at 1:18 PM

It’s easy to root for injuries here, but Starlink is no comparison to a robust fiber-optic connection, which is what I assume Verizon bid to supply. I have Starlink and used it for work (my subscription is inactive). It’s not a robust piece of hardware, it requires a line of sight to the satellites, so it can be disrupted by very heavy rain, snow (the dish has hardware to melt snow) and it must have a clear view of the sky. Every piece of hardware and redundancy engineering for a land-based fiber network is more resilient.

The media is on high alert for aviation incidents, and there have been a lot of them, just as there were before the media was on high alert. This runway incursion at Chicago Midway airport, where tragedy was narrowly averted by a Southwest Airlines’ crew quick go-around is the newest example. It’s pretty clear that the problem was caused by the crew of a private jet misinterpreting clear instructions to hold short of the active runway where the Southwest jet was landing.

This brings me to another general regulatory issue. After the Colgan Air crash in 2009, the FAA tightened up the regulations for commercial airline pilots. In the past, first officers could start flying after 250 hours of experience, now they need 1,500 hours. Regulations about fatigue, and a database of pilot records showing training, and training failures, were also instituted. Taken together, these changes made it harder to find qualified pilots, and wages of pilots flying for regional airlines finally rose to a what people imagine pilots make.

This means that the next tier of pilots, commercial pilots flying passengers for hire but not for an airline (like business jets) might just be not-so-great, or not as good as they used to be. This video about the near-death of Dale Earnhart Jr at the hands of a pair of pilots who did a terrible job is just one example. Another is that incursion at Midway posted above.

Then there’s General Aviation (GA), the doctor in his Beechcraft, the rich guy who likes to fly his plane but doesn’t like his recurrent training. My interest in aviation started reading Flying Magazine at the barbershop, and the Aftermath section of that magazine was, and is, full of GA pilots fucking up and killing people.

My point isn’t to slag on non-airline pilots here. Rather, we all have a huge interest in all pilots being properly certified, trained and following the rules, because they all share the same airspace. That’s part of the FAA’s job. As far as I’m concerned the FAA needs more resources to do this job, not less. Because as we’ve seen recently in DC, even highly experienced pilots flying in regulated airspace can have mid-air collisions. And the history of aviation includes GA pilots having mid-airs with commercial airplanes.

This is another cross-post from my new place — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off.  You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here. 

Aviation UpdatePost + Comments

You cried a tear, I wiped it dry / I put you up upon a pedestal so high

by | Leave a Comment

This post is in: 

This guy decided he’d have an easy post that would appeal (he thought) to the totebaggers who read the HuffPo:

NEW COLUMN — Trump put up a new portrait of Ronald Reagan overlooking the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. If it could move, it would turn its back in shame.

www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-…

[image or embed]

— S.V. Dáte (@svdate.bsky.social) February 23, 2025 at 10:19 AM

I beg to differ. Reagan would fucking clap, a standing ovation. The guy who hired Lee Atwater, who kicked off his campaign with a “state’s rights” speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the same county where three CORE workers were killed in 1964, would fucking love the idea that someone was finally kicking blacks and women out of high-level government jobs. The “Southern Strategy” candidate who helped complete the South’s turn from segregationist Democrats to wish-we-could-segregate Republicans would be happy to see that his dreams, the wishes that his heart made, finally came true.

I don’t mean to be too critical of Mr Date, who probably just wanted an easy hook for his story. But Reagan’s legacy needs no burnishing from anyone who is to the left of, say, Mike Lee or the ghost of Jesse Helms. Reagan’s presidency was eight years of retrograde motion. It started the long trip to where we are today, beginning the inexorable motion backwards from the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to, well, the notion that anyone who thinks that US history was anything but a cakewalk for blacks and women is “woke”.

One of the key talents of right wing propagandists is revisionist history. Making Reagan a secular saint is a hardly even a reach for those revisionists, who are busy trying to convince us that the Civil War was fought over economic issues. But we don’t need to participate — in fact, we need to push back. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II and Trump represent a steady slide into racism, sexism, stupidity and hate. Treating Trump like some kind of aberration, rather than the logical consequence of 45 years of Republican policy, ignores the plain facts in front of our faces.

(The title is a deep cut but it’s CanCon.)

In case you missed it, I have a new site where I’ll be writing — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off. The site is hosted on beehiiv, which is like Substack with fewer nazis. You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here. Thanks for all the kind comments from lurkers via email or in my adios post yesterday.

You cried a tear, I wiped it dry / I put you up upon a pedestal so highPost + Comments

And If I’m Dipshit Drunk on Cheap Perfume / I Am the Man in the Fucking Room

by | Leave a Comment

This post is in: 

So, this happened. Heroes did this as far as I’m concerned:

This morning at Dept of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) HQ in DC as mandatory return to office began, this video played on loop for ~5 mins on screens throughout the building, per agency source.

Building staff couldn’t figure out how to turn it off so sent people to every floor to unplug TVs.

[image or embed]

— Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 7:51 AM

This reminds me of something I saw recently from yv_edit, a TikTok and YouTube creator who talks about feminism and men. She made the point that men, not women, are naturally submissive. They place themselves in a hierarchy, and they’re submissive to the men above them in the hierarchy, and shit on the ones below them. The ones below them submit to those above, and shit on those below, and on and on and on.

This is Trump, in my opinion, but we haven’t seen much of his submissive nature because he’s usually at the top of the male hierarchy wherever he exists, especially with the useless numbskull men that usually surround him. Most of them are supplicants.

But Elon is different. Trump defers to him, because Elon is much, much richer than Trump (even using the imaginary finances Trump uses to gauge his wealth).

If this is right, then the predictions about Elon and Trump breaking up in the near future probably need to be re-calibrated. This wouldn’t just be about Trump jettisoning Elon when Elon is no longer useful — if you’re under someone in the hierarchy, the person above you makes that decision.

Does Trump owe Elon? Absolutely. Does Elon have kompromat on Trump? Almost certainly. But I think the hierarchy thing is worth thinking about.

(Also, Neko Case is a citizen of the world so her music counts as Canadian or Mexican content, as far as I’m concerned.)

In case you missed this morning’s post, I have a new site where I’ll be writing — heymistermix.com. John graciously invited me to cross post here, with the comments off. The site is hosted on beehiiv, which is like Substack with fewer nazis. You’ll need to subscribe to comment. Subscriptions are free, and you can just visit the site to read my stuff. I’ll cross-post some of it here. Thanks for all the kind comments from lurkers via email or in my adios post yesterday.

And If I’m Dipshit Drunk on Cheap Perfume / I Am the Man in the Fucking RoomPost + Comments