#did Obama get ads?

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #35

Sep 20-27 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris announced new actions to curb gun violence at the one year anniversary of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention. The Office is the first ever White House office to deal with the issue of guns and has been overseen by the Vice-President. President Biden signed a new Executive Order aimed at combatting the emerging threat of machinegun conversion devices. These devices allow the conversion of semi-automatic firearms to a rate of fire that can match military machineguns, up to 20 bullets in one second. The EO also targets the threat of 3-D printed guns. The EO also addresses active schooler drills at schools. While almost every school conducts them there is little uniformity in how they are carried out, and no consensus on the most effective version of a drill. President Biden's EO directions the development of a research based active shooter drills, which maximize both student physical and mental safety.

President Biden celebrated the one year anniversary of the American Climate Corps and announced new Climate Corp programs. The Climate Corps has seen 15,000 young people connected to well paid jobs in clean energy and climate resilience jobs across America. The EPA and AmeriCorps announced a new Environmental Justice Climate Corps program which will connect 250 American Climate Corps members with local communities and over the next 3 help them achieve environmental justice projects. In addition HUD announced it will be the 8th federal agency to partner with the Climate Corp, opening the door to its involvement in Housing. Since its launch the American Climate Corp has inspired 14 states to launch their own state level version of the program, most recently just this week the New Jersey Climate Corps.

The Biden-Harris Administration announced that 4.2 million small business owners and self-employed people get their health insurance through the ACA marketplace. Up from 1.4 million ten years ago when President Obama and then Vice-President Biden rolled out the marketplaces. The self-employed are 3 times as likely as other Americans to use the marketplaces for their insurance, one out of every 5 getting coverage there. The ACA passed by President Obama, defended and expanded by President Biden, has freed millions of Americans to start their own businesses without fear of losing health coverage for them and their families.

The Departments of Transportation and Labor pressed freight railroad companies to close the gap and offer paid sick time to all their employees. Since 2022 under President Biden's leadership the number of Class I freight railroad employees who have access to paid sick days increased from 5% to 90%. Now the Biden-Harris Administration is pushing to finish the job and get coverage to the last 10%.

The EPA announced $965 million to help school districts buy clean energy buses. This comes on top of the 3 billion the EPA has already spent to bring clean energy buses to America's schools. So far the EPA has helped replace 8,700 school buses, across 1,300 school districts in all 50 states, DC, tribal nations, and US Territories. 95% of these buses are zero-emission, battery-electric. The clean bus program is responsible for over 2/3rds of the electric school buses on the road today.

The Biden-Harris Administration took another step forward in its historic efforts to protect the Colorado River System by signing 5 water conservation agreements with local water authorities in California and Arizona. The two short term agreements will conserve over 717,000 acre-feet of water by 2026. Collectively adding 10 feet to Lake Mead’s elevation by 2026. The Colorado River Basin provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven U.S. states.

The Department of The Interior announced $254 million to help support local parks, the largest such investment in history. The money will go to 54 projects across 24 states hoping to redevelopment or create new parks.

HHS announced $1.5 billion to help combat opioid addiction and prevent opioid overdose deaths. The money will support state and tribal governments and help pay for mobile clinics, naloxone kits, and treatment centers. This comes as nationwide overdose rates drop for the first time since 2020, thanks to strong investment in harm reduction efforts by the Biden-Harris team.

The Department of Agriculture announced it'll spend $466.5 million in food assistance and development worldwide this year. Through its McGovern-Dole Program, the United States is the largest donor to global school feeding programs. The USDA will help feed 1.2 million children in Angola, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea-Bissau, Laos, Malawi and Rwanda. Through its Food for Progress the USDA will help support 200,000 farmers in Benin, Cambodia, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Tunisia shift to climate-smart agriculture boosting food security in those nations and the wider region.

At a meeting at the UN First Lady Jill Biden announced a partnership between USAID and UNICEF to end childhood exposer to lead worldwide. Lead exposure kills 1.5 million people each year, mostly in the developing world.

The Senate approved the appointment of Byron Conway to a federal judgeship in Wisconsin. This makes the 213th federal judge that President Biden has appointed.

[mariacallous]

The longtime owner of a distillery and taproom in Virginia did something new last month: He emailed employees detailed instructions on what to do if immigration agents show up at the business.

Call the business owners immediately. Insist to the agents that they must speak to your employer. Ask them if they have a judicial warrant — signed by a judge. Remember, everyone has a right to remain silent in interactions with law enforcement. And, finally, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have the right to enter public facilities, employees who hear about immigration agents nearby should “feel free to move the tasting room sign to CLOSED and lock the door. EVEN IF WE HAVE CUSTOMERS HERE.”

Speaking about the new policy, the distillery owner, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid retaliation, told HuffPost he was focused on making his employees and customers feel welcome.

“I sensed there was some fear and apprehension about this topic, and so I wanted to assuage that and basically be proactive and say, ‘Here’s how we’ll handle it if it happens,’” he said.

The company-wide email is part of a growing trend since President Donald Trump’s inauguration. While presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama largely prioritized the arrest and deportation of undocumented people deemed public safety threats, under Trump, federal agents arrest any undocumented person they can get their hands on, regardless of their criminal record or employment status.

Often, that takes place at workplaces — including a Baltimore pizza shop, Philadelphia meat market, New Jersey kebab restaurant, Mississippi concrete contractor and countless others over the past two months.

In response, immigrant rights and legal groups have seen a surge in demand for “know-your-rights” material, which explains how to interact with law enforcement including immigration agents. Demand is notably high from workers and business owners, they told HuffPost.

“We’ve seen an immense uptick” in demand for know-your-rights training, said Wennie Chin, senior director of community & civic engagement at the New York Immigration Coalition. The coalition includes groups that serve farm workers, domestic workers, taxi drivers, street vendors and a variety of other professions. One recent training was held for restaurant owners who wanted to prepare their own workplaces for potential law enforcement encounters, she said.

“Our team’s now doing at minimum three [trainings] a day, in person and virtual,” Chin added. “The volume has more than tripled. There’s not a day where our members are not doing know-your-rights work in the community.”

“The trainings are often hundreds of people in attendance,” said Jessie Hahn, senior counsel for labor and employment policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “A lot of those trainings have been specifically about worksite immigration enforcement and helping people understand their rights with regard to encounters with ICE at job sites.”

[robertreich]

Biden vs. Trump: Whose Economic Plan Is Better for You? 

Trump failed to deliver on his number one campaign promise:

President Trump presided over a historic net loss of nearly 3 million American jobs, the worst jobs numbers ever recorded under an American president.

This is no fluke. America’s economy has almost always done worse under Republican presidents. A New York Times analysis found that since 1933, the U.S. economy has grown nearly twice as fast on average under Democrats.

Now Trump’s defenders claim it’s not his fault that the economy collapsed under his watch. It was the pandemic. But there are two big things wrong with this.

First, the pandemic recession was as bad as it was because of Trump. His failure to lead with any national strategy left America in chaos throughout 2020, long after other nations had developed coordinated testing, tracing, and social distancing plans that allowed them to reopen their economies.

But secondly, even before the pandemic, Trump failed to deliver on his economic promises. Job growth slowed under Trump.

America added more jobs in President Obama’s last three years than in Trump’s first three.

Even before the pandemic most middle-class American households saw their incomes go down under Trump.

Trump’s major economic policy was cutting taxes on the rich and big corporations. He promised it would result in $4,000 annual raises for workers. How did that work out? Did you get a $4,000 raise?

Republicans keep claiming that if we just cut enough taxes on the rich, the wealth will “trickle down.” But it never works. Wage growth slowed after Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and big corporations. And the Bush and Trump tax cuts didn’t trickle down either.

These giveaways to the wealthy came at the expense of investments in infrastructure, education, and health care, making life more expensive and difficult for everyone who isn’t rich.

They also exploded the debt and deficit. Reagan oversaw a 186% increase in the national debt — the biggest percentage increase in over 70 years. The Bush and Trump tax cuts, that mostly benefited corporations and the rich, are the main reasons why America’s debt is growing faster than the economy.

Republican presidents have led us into the three worst economic crises of the last century, and Democrats led us out of them.

Republicans talk about running the country like a business, but they want to run it the way Trump ran his businesses: with massive debts, a string of failures, and payouts for the folks at the top, while workers get shafted again and again. Given Republicans’ track record, why would any hard-working American put their financial security in the hands of a Republican president ever again?

[us-cj]

From Mindy Robinson,

Are we ever going to get answers about the Las Vegas Sh**ting cover up, or nah? Where is Kash on this....and why hasn't anyone contacted me, when I have all the evidence the government covered it up right in front of me?

• Or the J6 pipe bomber, even though they have their license plate?

• Or the cocaine in the White House?

• Or who really was running the Biden administration since he clearly wasn't wiping his own ass, or even signing anything?

• Or how a military op Warp Speed vaccine that couldn't possibly have been long term tested, was touted as "safe and effective?"

• Or how the 9/11 Hijackers made an impossible flight maneuver into the Pentagon, or why the only video of it looks like a missile?

• Or why foreign countries are allowed to donate to, buy out, and control our politicians?

• Or why battleground states that Trump won, kept counting until all the down ballot races magically flipped days later?

• Or why they're allowed to put toxic chemicals and preservatives into our food, that's banned in other countries?

• Or why Fauci hasn't been strung up for the people he murdered through AZT, Remdesivir, and that virus he illegally created with a foreign communist enemy?

• Or why doctors who sexually butcher children, aren't in MF jail right now?

• Or why the government is adding a toxic chemical like fluoride into our drinking water, when we already have to go out of our way to buy toothpaste without it?

• Or why Congress is allowed to insider trade by owning stock at all?

• Or why psybicilin mushrooms that can naturally cure depression, PTSD, addiction, alcoholism, and personal trauma are illegal....but life destroying pharmaceuticals like opioids are not?

• Or why there aren't class action lawsuits across the nation against all these companies for poisoning us with micro-plastics?

• Or why drug companies are even allowed to put commercials on TV, when all it does is give them control of all the networks as major sponsors?

• Or why the J6 committee gave themselves congressional immunity from ever being sued, if they were truly righteous in their actions?

• Or how was Michael Byrd cleared of murdering Ashli Babbit BEFORE ever being interviewed about the incident?

• Or why there was no water in the fire hydrants during BOTH the Maui and LA fires?

• Or how did the RINO sheriff during the Las Vegas shooting who lied about the timeline 3 times, let evidence like the computer hard drive walk off his crime scene, and refused to investigate or name the 3 other people registered to the room...."won" a primary against a more popular Republican opponent, where over 40k couldn't vote due to a "DMV glitch?"

• Or why any Americans should pay taxes this year after finding out that DC swamp donkeys have been r*ping us through fake projects, charities, and foreign aid money laundering scams into oblivion?

• Or why the FBI covered up Hunter's laptop, and got away with lying about it being "Russian disinformation?"

• Or why every mass shooter is always "previously known to Feds?"

• Or what the hell happened with that Nashville truck explosion?

• Or what the hell happened with that Vegas Tesla explosion?

• Or those secret Jewish tunnels in New York, where they were pulling a dirty mattress and kid's high chair out of?

• Or why Obama bailed out the corrupt banks out of the housing market crash they caused using tax payer funds....instead of home owners?

• Or why no one was held accountable for the botched Afghanistan pull out, and leaving all those weapons and military vehicles there?

• Or why we haven't ended the foreign bank controlled, soul sucking usery system that is the privately owned Federal Reserve?

• Or stop who's spraying these goddamn chemtrails everywhere?

• Or why not a single election audit has been done in any state by independent investigators yet?

The tax payer funded, state sponsored fake news might have conveniently forgotten about all of this....but I sure as shit never will. 🇺🇸

[centrally-unplanned]

Let's see if I have one more election take in me:

I am deeply sympathetic to Sam Kriss's rage against the Democratic corpo-political shibboleth, and not just because we are both deeply enmeshed in the grand tradition of dissident Oxbridge-style cantankerous internet rants. He is right that Kamala was a weak candidate, for one. But more importantly, I still feel what he feels deep down. I remember the starry idealism of my halcyon youth, of believing that conviction, that vision, that the zeal only a platform birthed from authentic principles, tempered by struggle and sweat, would carry the day over crass, paint-by-polling-numbers incrementalism. When he describes Harris thusly:

"She’s a machine politician. She wants power, but not for any particular reason. It’s just that life is a game, and the point is to reach the highest level."

I see my own reaction to her when she first stepped into the 2020 limelight, and low-key hating her for it. I feel his heart, for it is my heart.

But it is not my brain. Because I am not a teenager anymore, and his critique is fucking bullshit.

He says all this stuff like:

The reason Kamala Harris lost is the same as the reason she was the candidate to begin with: the Democratic Party is allergic to democracy.

And how the electorate is seen as but ants from inside the towers of the Machine, like the Dems just invented "not running a primary" this time as a lark. As opposed to neither party in America ever having primaries against incumbent presidents! Because they are normally popular, and it would be a waste of everyone's time to do that! Could you imagine, launching a real primary against Obama in 2012? And possibly sabotaging his brand a bit for absolutely nothing? It is a reasonable policy, particularly when incumbents used to have an advantage for being so. Now they clearly don't, Biden was unpopular and too old, and the Dems took too long to realize it. A costly mistake, but it is a purely strategic error. Big orgs have inertia, and the Dems fucked up. It has nothing to do with an "allergy to democracy".

And Kriss can go off summarizing how the Harris campaign was offering voters nothing:

But for some unaccountable reason, among the general public, ‘Kamala: You Already Like Her!’ was not the brilliant pitch it seemed to be. [...] Another option would be to actually offer something to the voters.

Which sounds neat, but he made it up! I remember Kamala's actual campaign speeches, ads, and platforms, which she repeated so monotonically in her tightly-scripted campaign appearances: protect abortion rights, expand the welfare state, provide better child care support, lower the cost of housing. And most importantly, she ran on Biden's record of a strong economy and promised to deliver more of it. What does even mean for this to not be a real platform? Beyond not having some synthesized, totalizing "Critique" of modernity that packages it all into a beautiful, systematizing little box.

Because I promise you, voters synthesize jack shit. None of this is why Harris lost - voters have made that pretty clear:

You can find other data ofc, this or that point varies, but the story is not opaque. They didn't like Biden! They didn't like his inflation. They didn't like immigration, or they didn't like his liberalism, and they thought Kamala was too similar. She had too much policy baggage. And she wasn't charismatic enough to dig herself out of that hole - no disagreement from me on that front.

Though even then, by that we mean she lost an election by ~3-4% margins after getting subbed in at the 4th quarter while down by ~8% in the polls. That ain't bad!

None of the voters who matter share Kriss's sensibilities, and he cannot hide his disappointment in that. So he pretends that Donald Trump, the guy who promised 20% tariffs on everything to fight inflation, is giving them a real vision:

That’s what Trump did: he offered an enemy to blame and the prospect of doing violence to them

I don't know man, I think swing voters just don't like the last four years and think 2019 was better. I don't think the promises of orgastic violence against democrats are why Trump won! Actually a bit of an unforced error on his part.

But since Kriss presumes to value democracy, that thesis can't hold - so the lack of reality delivering on what his vision for democracy should be is displaced onto Harris's mistakes. The voters can never fail you. You can only fail to elevate them with the right candidate. Which, tactically? Sure, why not. But you can leave the moralism at the classroom door.

This ties into our dreaded media discourse debate, so it is time to bring in another explainer, by Michael Tomasky:

The line-by-line isn't interesting here; instead I want to focus on this quote:

Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president? The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

To which the immediate reply is: my dude, what are you talking about??

A 56 percent majority of Americans say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results through false claims of voter fraud, including 40 percent who believe he is “definitely guilty.” Republicans are less united than Democrats. Nearly 9 in 10 Democrats believe Trump is guilty, while nearly 7 in 10 Republicans think he is innocent. Among independents, nearly twice as many think Trump is guilty as think he is innocent.

You know how when you ~13 years old, and you have that friend who is just old enough to start taking Dungeons & Dragons books filled with splash art of succubi into the bathroom with him, but not yet old enough to get that "talking to girls" is an acquired skill? And they are blatantly, openly salivating over the first chick in the 7th grade class who discovered what power the combination of a camisole and a push-up bra holds over the male gaze? And she just completely ignores his faltering attempts at ~casual conversation~, so his brain script-cycles through its backlog of tween sitcom plots until it lands on, "Hey, what if I confess to her? Then she will know about my feelings!"

And you have to pull him aside and gently explain that, bro. She knows. That is not your problem.

Kriss is too intelligent a thinker to not understand this, but our dear Tomasky - and so many like him - has stuck his 14-year-old head in the sand over this. Swing voters know Trump is a scumbag! They know he lost the election, they know he raped a few women in his day, they know he is a serial fraudster. Even a bunch of those Republicans who, in polls, go "oh it's all a Dem conspiracy"? They know too; they just have the decency to lie about it. How could they not? Every media outlet in the country has been repeating it for a fucking decade! I might think voters are morons but even I won't stoop this low; they have eyes and ears, they aren't illiterate.

They just don't care.

Not enough at least, not enough to make it the only thing they consider. And here is the rub, here is the grand mistake Kriss & Tomasky are making - they are at least somewhat right to not care. The height of the Democratic privilege is that they get to play this card because they don't have to deal with it being turned against them. Kamala is a political chameleon but she is a decent person. She would never take a bribe from a foreign government, she would never assault a coworker, she would never, ever, deny a free and fair election.

Which means you don't have to choose between voting for a rapist and voting for someone who is going to shove a bullshit interpretation of the 14th amendment down your throat via a stacked court to ban abortion nationwide, forever. Pro-life people think abortion is genocide against babies! Why are you surprised they aren't voting for the pro-baby-genocide person because she is nice? How sure are you that you would do the same when that is reversed? I guess those boycott-Harris-because-of-Gaza people got some cred, but I think we all agreed they were dumb, right?

This is the rub of why outsiders always have so much difficulty understanding how people like Berlusconi, Trump, Le Pen, etc, get so much vote share - they have no stake in the political struggle beyond the vague idea of democratic norms. It is easy to say "Italy, choose a non-crook!" when you don't have to live with the policy programme of the other guy. From the inside the price of those principles is far, far harder. It isn't shocking that most choose not to pay it.

This isn't to give voters like a moral pass - Trump's conduct is truly disqualifying, I would vote Republican if the shoe was on the other foot in this case. My point instead is that they generally won't as a simple fact of life, and blaming them is futile. If you have wound up in a situation where the political system has taken its pool of hundreds of millions of potential candidates and narrowed it down to two for the voters, and one of them has "launched a coup but will say go to hell to the inflation guy" as a bundled package, someone fucked up and it isn't the voters.

You need political elites to do their part in the system - Republicans never should have let Trump be their candidate in 2016. Open primaries with no organizational thumbs on the scale are a mistake, actually, allowing arbitrary minorities to generate subpar candidates. The decision to let Biden run again was, fundamentally, born from the same impulse - the Democratic Party had no leadership capable of telling him no, because they outsourced that job to "primaries". The Dems are not "allergic" to democracy; democracy is allergic to too much of itself.

But the cat is out of the bag now! These changes happened for a reason after all. Which I won't dig into here - I will keep my point as focused as something as sprawling as this can be. Voters will not save you, and you should not be disappointed when they don't. It was never their job.

[eugenedebs1920]

I’ve been a political junkie since before I could vote. I remember, I was in 3rd or 4th grade, listening to the radio when my mom was driving me somewhere. A news brief comes on and it’s about George H.W. Bush and Desert Storm. When the segment ended I said, “George bush sucks!” My mom got mad at me, not because of the statement, but because of the word suck, saying, “where did you learn that word Eugene?! Do you even know what suck means?” Honestly I really didn’t, but I knew it was an insult.

I have never! Not once, bailed on my civic duty to vote since turning 18. Presidential election, midterm election, special election, local. If I was given the opportunity to voice my opinion, I was about it.

I’ve always stayed pretty informed. Sometimes, like the current moment, far too much. The whole process fascinates me. Both the campaigning and the idea behind a representative , democratic election. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not wearing a light up, goofy hat. Although I did attend a Democratic National Convention once. Not the convention itself but I saw Rage Against the Machine perform for my second time, and the DNC time was free!

My first election I voted for Al Gore. I liked him. I thought he was smart. I liked his stance on the environment. I liked that he had the experience under Clinton that he had. I will also tell you, I didn’t then, nor have I ever, repped hats, or shirts, or flags of ANY president or presidential candidate. A pin or two the day I received em, or on my backpack maybe. Never though have I walked around with my political affiliation, or my affliction to a politician on full display. There were times when it wasn’t hard to tell with long hair, patchwork pants, big beard but.

That’s what has me so perplexed, not the hair and beard thing, but the devotion. I don’t get it. It would be different if it was, I don’t know, not Donald Trump! I mean, who really is that guy?

I saw him on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, a couple times as a kid, thought he seemed smug even then, I missed the whole Apprentice thing, didn’t even own a tv during that time. Was too busy living life. Is that where this follow derives from? I never saw one episode. I heard it wasn’t that good, nor did it have that high of ratings.

He isn’t a very elegant speaker. Go read a quote of his. When he says it, it kinda makes sense, but when you read one, it’s nothing. He says a bunch of words but he doesn’t say anything. It’s actually embarrassing that Trump quotes will forever be part of American history. Here’s an example from a rally when talking about Kamala Harris “back home to mommy. And she goes back home to mommy. ‘Was that you darlling?’ And then she gets the hell knocked out of her. Her mothers a big fan of ours. You know that, right? Her father, her mother. No, you always have that.” Mind you a couple things here. Right before this little snippet I clipped, he was talking about California and “whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or independent this election is your chance to send a message”. Directly before, the next words are the mommy thing. It doesn’t piece together at all! Also. Kamala’s mom passed away quite a while ago from cancer. What is he even talking about!?

Now compare that to an Obama quote from 2004. “Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America - there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats.”

See. It’s coherent, it has a driven message, it’s passionate. I can get behind that. Not talks about Hannibal Lecter, and electric boats. I don’t get it.

Moving forward.

Let’s talk about his presidency. What bills did he pass? There’s the massive corporate and wealthy tax cut that did very little for 98% of Americans. What else? Anybody? “Well, he built the wall and Mexico payed for it” that is false. There have been small sections built, but scattered, not even one long area. He increased the national debt by over $7.5 trillion. His policies, or lack there of with Covid caused hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. Those stimulus checks to keep Americans afloat are the cause of the inflation that we just now got back to normal. When he had to “print” money to give us so we could survive, the value of the dollar went down because there was more capital with no transaction, so with less value the dollar represents, the more things cost in relation to it. Economics is some weird, complicated, almost dogmatic stuff, but it kinda makes sense.

Then there’s the whole not accepting the election results thing. I’ve written and talked about over and over again. It’s exhausting! This is BY FAR the worst thing potentially ANYONE has done to America. More so than the 9/11 terror attacks, Pearl Harbor, Boston marathon, that’s a bold statement. Yet, through his narcissism not allowing him to concede to defeat, and claiming the election was rigged, it is an immensely damaging assault on the very foundation of this whole American democratic experiment. His words have sown doubt into the fabric of democracy with his baseless lies. He absolutely had the right to contest the results, do investigations, recounts, audits, and file suit with the evidence he had supporting his claims. The thing is, he had no evidence, there was no proof of any fraud because, there was none. Thats the end of the behavior that was acceptable. When all those court cases were dismissed for lack of evidence, that should have been it, but no.

All the tweets, all the interviews, all the scheming and plotting, after the court cases and recounts and whatnot, that’s sedition! Thats purposely conspiring against the United States. He knowingly pushed false information to Americans, who believed their commander in chief, and perpetrated the worst assault on our nation’s capital since the Civil War. Thats treason!!

The fact that that wasn’t the end is flabbergasting! The fact he is still in the public eye, let alone running for the seat he so immensely betrayed blows my f*cking mind!!

I don’t care about party affiliation, first and foremost we are Americans. First and foremost our allegiance is to the constitution. First and foremost we abide by the law. This sycophantic groveling to this guy is disgusting! It’s saddening. It’s unamerican.

This upcoming election will, and is saying a lot about us as Americans. The outcome will reflect who we are. I’m not sure I can say with confidence what that is. In the words of 4th grade Eugene, It sucks.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

S.V. Dáte at HuffPost:

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Wednesday gave America its largest tax increase in at least three decades — more than $2 trillion over 10 years — by imposing an across-the-board 10% levy on all imports, with higher rates on dozens more countries and a further 25% tax on all foreign cars. “Foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream,” Trump said at a chilly, overcast ceremony in the White House Rose Garden attended by most of his Cabinet and hundreds of invited guests. “Our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” he said. The 10% rate is half of the 20% Trump had spoken about on the campaign trail, but nevertheless will cost American importers about $2.1 trillion in additional taxes over the next decade, costs that are passed along to consumers, according to a Tax Foundation estimate. Erica York, the group’s vice president of federal tax policy, said the total will be greater than that because of the higher tariffs charged to some countries.

That would make Trump’s tax hikes larger than the three that have been perennial targets of Republican wrath through the years: Republican George H.W. Bush’s increases of 1990, Democrat Bill Clinton’s in 1993, and Democrat Barack Obama’s in 2010 to pay for the Affordable Care Act. Trump, by invoking emergency powers, is going around Congress to impose the tariffs. He has created a base 10% tariff but is taxing imports from many countries more, based on how those countries tax American imports. For example, imports from European Union nations will be taxed at a 20% rate because Trump’s advisers claim its tariffs and “currency manipulation and trade barriers” amount to a 39% tax on American goods going into the EU. But while Trump and his aides claimed these tariffs were “reciprocal” ― merely matching the tariffs charged on U.S. imports by the country in question ― in reality, the rates were an arbitrary calculation of a country’s balance of trade with the United States. “The trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a Trump aide told reporters on condition of anonymity on a conference call just before Trump’s speech. It’s unclear how precisely imports from Canada and Mexico — the two other signatories in the United States’ biggest free trade agreement — will be treated. Trump had imposed 25% tariffs on goods from those nations, supposedly to punish them for allowing fentanyl to be smuggled into the U.S., but then delayed implementation for a month. The order Trump signed Wednesday says that it excludes products “compliant” with the trade agreement but did not offer definitions.

[...] In reality, tariffs are merely taxes imposed on imported products. When goods arrive at a U.S. port of entry, the importer — sometimes a private individual but more often a manufacturer, a wholesaler or a retailer — is required to pay to U.S. Customs the import tax due before the goods are released into the country. That expense is then added into the production cost of the goods, which is ultimately paid by the American consumer in the form of higher prices. Whether Trump understands how this works is unclear, even though his businesses often purchased both raw material and finished goods from other countries, including China.

Wednesday afternoon on "Liberation Day", Donald Trump imposes an economy-crushing tax hike by declaring a 10% tariff rate minimum for all nations besides Mexico and Canada (with several countries getting slapped with much higher rates).

See Also:

PoliticusUSA: Complete And Total Incompetence As Trump Slaps Tariffs On Penguins

The Left Hook (Wajahat Ali): Everyone Gets Tariffs, Trade Wars, and Turmoil on Bizarro Trump’s “Liberation Day.”

Daily Kos: Trump marks ‘Liberation Day’ with bizarre rant, conspiracies—and lame props

The Guardian: Trump announces sweeping new tariffs, upending decades of US trade policy

[positron2399]

More Whispers in the Stars concept art:

Just concept art of two characters of a "hard sci-fi" super hero comic I hope to write one day. The first two are of the second "super" we'll see in the series, her people are "tiny" parasitoid arthropod analogs, with females only being around 9 cm excluding the stinger, and males being slightly smaller at 8 cm. The bug girl eventually signs up for her nation's space force (for reference, her "homeworld" is an O'Neill Cylinder), becoming one of the specialized warships of her people thanks to the total consciousness transfer technology of her people (as opposed to the copy-paste system of Soma and Invincible)... Copy-pasting a "soul" is possible. As for the warship she became, it uses fusion propulsion and is armed to the teeth with lasers and auto-cannons, her front outright having an x-ray cannon capable of outright disintegrating any ship unfortunate enough to stumble in front of her.

Very clearly inspired by Asuka and her mech... I'll eventually get around to watching Evangelion, so plz don't spoil. Also, while I haven't been playing it, I do love the designs of the ships from "Children of a Dead Earth."

... I dread the eventual meeting between "Mars" and these people of The Killing Stars, their launch was practically ancient history thanks to the ~natural~ lifespan of her people (only 20-25 earth years)

The next is President Reidmen of the alternate US the story takes place in, he's more or less a stand-in combination of Mitt Romney, Regan, the Bushes, and a few tiny hints of Trump for added "good" measure. Unlike most stories, I'm trying to make him seem "not" evil despite the fact that he's absolutely creampieing the economy and quadrupling down on bombing the fuck out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine... Unfortunately for him and his shareholding buddies, the Superman (Delroy/The StarKnight) stand-in of the story refuses to let the US and Israel continue to "Manifest Destiny" and sending children to die "fighting tewwism" like he, his friends, and his brother did in Vietnam. The monstrous form isn't something he turns into, but how the StarKnight slowly begins viewing him as the "early" story goes on... also he's just really afraid of Dinosaurs, to the point where he couldn't watch Jurassic Park till he had his nuke-proof flying neutron-star body (he still had the lights on).

The thing about Riedmen is that he doesn't just sit around plotting to further bomb the Middle East, he has hobbies, he has fear, he has a corn farm and a family. He, much like Del, loves model train sets, and thanks to his wealth, it's far more impressive than our main protags, he has four shelter mutts and heavily advocates for the humane treatment of these animals, not because it'll make him look good, but because he actually cares, yet in the same breath will glorify any and all drone strikes Delroy failed to stop for it was "Al-Qaeda/Isis hiding in the Schools/Mosques/Hospitals." He also helps with the legalization of gay marriage in this world's US.

It was simply too funny to not have a Republican President with the last name "Reidmen." I also tried giving him a face that's either kind-looking or somewhat creepy for he is a very clear criticism of how Obama drone struck the hell out of so many children and how it was sold to children like me as a good thing, the American news at the time portrayed those mechanical abominations as some sort of "Super Hero" or "Angel." He has a mustache simply as it's been a very long time since a president had one and I thought it'd make him a bit more unique. The OFF/Paranoia Agent influence is real

@k1-2-ur-heart @toxetta @piko-chan @cyannidex33 @bladeechan @internetsinner

If you find them, the older posts aren't really cannon in terms of design, but are cannon in personality. The story itself would be paneled in a right-to-left flow specifically after Mob Psycho and the Pokemon Adventures manga, though I'd attempt to give it a more "Watchmen" feeling for the backgrounds and such.

!DESIGNS ARE NOT FINAL AND STORY MAY NEVER COME!

[thatscarletflycatcher]

Now that we are at the pope discussion thing, I'll give my hot take of the day and then leave XD

I keep bumping here and there into posts saying that Benedict XVI resigned because of the sex abuse scandals, and I'm left wondering how much people who keep bringing them up actually know about them.

The Boston Globe Spotlight report was released in 2002. Pope John Paul II died in 2005. Cases covered things mostly between the 1960s and the 1990s for that very obvious reason. Saying Benedict should have resigned or did resign because of them it's like saying Obama should have resigned for things that happened under the Carter, Reagan, or Clinton administration. With the added absurdity that abuse cases were in fact not dealt at a Rome level at all until 2001, and that changed in 2001... because Ratzinger pushed hard for it. And while we can argue whether the measures taken on the different cases by him while he was pope were appropriate or not and that is very open to discussion, at least he never accused victims of slander, as happened with Francis in the case of Juan Barros.

P.S.: I have also seen the idea that Benedict resigned because he didn't want to be a public spectacle of frailty and illness as John Paul II was, and while I cannot call that strictly eugenicist, it makes me very uncomfy. Yes, he did feel he was getting very old and his health was declining. Yes, he did say that his doctors telling him he should not travel to World Youth Day 2013 was a breaking point because he felt popes owe their presence at that event. But the point was less "we should hide sick and old people" and more "this job requires someone who has the energy to manage things, and if you stay long past that point it will be a field day for all and any bad actors" (which, you know, as beloved as John Paul II was, and deservedly because he was very charismatic and wore himself out in visiting different places and preaching, so many of the worst administrative and money issues of the Vatican were made worse for the lack of attention, and in the last few years due to his severe illness as well. Ratzinger watched all of that, and thought it was important that it didn't happen again. And this ties back to the sexual abuse scandals through the specific case of Marcial Maciel).

[batboyblog]

Do you think there is any benefit to the idea that Biden should just not bother with these TV debates anymore? With how the media is so strongly stacked against him, that it might be more beneficial to focus on things where he excels at like town halls and meeting people in person?

I think he agreed to do it, so backing out would look worse and be more damaging than any benefits from sticking to events that play to his strengths. Indeed the media attacked him pretty heavily for being over choreographed in events and interviews (sounds like Hillary being "over prepared") I do think Biden should, and if you look at the last few weeks he has, do more events with the people, and if he can wrangle a televised town hall that'd be great.

but on debate, we shouldn't think Biden is some historically bad debater. In 2012 Obama BOMBED his first debate with Romney, people were writing the death notices for his re-election (much closer to E-Day then July!) and it was Biden who swung into action at the Vice-Presidential debate, laughing in Paul Ryan's face and mocking him easily showing Ryan up as unlikeable and trying to destroy social security. Biden is good at being the every man reacting to "Malarkey!"

I think what went wrong in the first debate is two fold. First of all when you're President and you care to do the job, there's never ever gonna be enough time, there will always be one more call, one more meeting, one more thing that needs your attention. Biden mentioned aids adding things to the schedule. If you're a President like Biden who is good at the job and likes it, I can see how it becomes hard to say "no" because we're talking huge things. So Biden had been working too much, too hard, for too long. That week he went to Europe, did the G7 meetings lots of meetings lots of work, flew back to the US to California to do a fundraiser with Obama and George Clooney, flew back to Atlanta to do the debate. Along the way the guy gets a cold, so what we all saw was a guy who was tired from months of working too hard, jet-lagged, and sick. Trump did nothing that week, he golfed and hung out with friends showed up rested and not having a head cold.

The other thing is the prepped for the wrong debate. One team Biden pushed for rules that ultimately helped Trump. The rule of mics being off when the other is speaking, people hate when Trump interrupts, he's at his worse when he does that, you made sure he couldn't do that. Second no crowd, all politicians feed off crowds, read their energy. crowds cause Trump to lean into his worst instincts always reaching for the next big reaction, but also Biden feeds off people's reactions, in a way that is much better for him than it is for Trump.

outside the rules, clearly Biden and his team gamed out the debate assuming the moderators would do the heavy lifting of fact checking Trump and calling him on his lies and Biden's job was to look like the smart normal politician and spit out facts and figures. As a life long stutterer being able to recall and recite exact numbers and data points in just the way they were written down is not and never been a strength of Biden's, he's NOT dumb, but I can say you carry the baggage of people thinking you're an idiot from when you were a disabled kid your whole life, and I've read a lot of stories that some times in a room full of Harvard and Yale people he can get rattled. And I think that happened they pushed him to try to memorize their talking points their data sets and he got in his head. And when the debate turned out to not at all be what he planned for, when the moderators showed no interest in pushing back on Trump, Biden was caught off guard, a not sick, not jet-lagged, not tired Biden would have turned it around more quickly. We saw later in the debate Biden figure out what debate he was in and how to act and start to ditch trying to remember data sets and just throw out quips and lines "morals of an ally cat!", had he been feeling better, he'd have gotten there much faster.

So I think if Biden takes better care of himself, is strict about not adding more to his work load, takes time off to relax and rest before a debate (work on his tan like JFK did before the Nixon Kennedy debate) and also focuses on being himself, he's not Obama or Bill Clinton who are great masters of explaining complex issues with facts and figures that makes you feel like you're in school with a favorite teacher. That's not Joe, he knows the stuff, he does, but his skill his being everyone's favorite uncle telling it like it is, let him do that and he'll be fine.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[Rebecca Solnit: photographer unknown]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

January 10, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jan 11, 2025

Today the Department of Labor released the final jobs report of Joe Biden’s presidency. The nation added 256,000 new jobs in December, a number significantly higher than economists expected. That brings the total number of jobs created under Biden to 16.6 million and makes Biden’s the only administration in history to have created jobs every month. Under the Biden administration, the nation has also had the lowest average unemployment rate of any administration in 50 years, ending at 4.1%.

Dan Primack of Axios reported that the U.S. gained more jobs during Biden’s four years than it did under President Donald Trump, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush.

In a statement, Biden noted that when he took office, economic forecasts projected that it would take years for the country to recover fully from the effects of the coronavirus shutdown. In fact, the U.S. economy has grown faster and created more jobs than any other country with an advanced economy. Working-age women are now employed at record levels, and the gap in employment between Black Americans and their white counterparts is at the lowest level on record. The administration has brought the inflation of the early recovery back down almost to target levels, while incomes have increased about $4,000 more than prices. The administration, Biden said, has “achieved the soft landing that few thought was possible.”

CNBC economist Carl Quintanilla quoted Matt Peterson of Barron’s, who wrote: “It looks a lot like U.S. consumers are happy with the way things are...[a]nd so are the markets.... The only one who doesn’t seem to be happy with the way things are is Trump.”

Brian Platt of Bloomberg reports that Trump’s threats of tariffs against Canada already have Canadian officials drafting plans for retaliation. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau told CNN yesterday that Trump is talking about annexing Canada to divert attention from how significantly his tariff plans would raise consumer prices.

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noted late last year, MAGA was never an ideological movement so much as a vehicle to pull together different constituencies in order to get Trump elected president. Since members of those constituencies have little in common, that effort centers around creating a false world that demonizes Democrats and insists they have created a dangerous world that is biased against MAGA. The only one who can stand against them, the story goes, is Trump, who is being persecuted for his defense of his supporters. That narrative has helped MAGAs to find common ground in their defense of Trump and his cronies and their support for Trump’s vows to retaliate against those he considers his enemies.

That impulse appears to be stronger than ever after Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump today in the New York election interference case in which a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies for covering up payments to an adult film actress to keep her quiet about their sexual encounter before the 2016 presidential election. Merchan said that he could not impose a punishment without encroaching on the presidency, so in an unusually light sentence, he released Trump without restrictions. As legal analyst Joyce White Vance explained, Trump knew he would not get jail time or a fine, but wanted to avoid the sentencing itself because just a month after the sentencing, the designation of convicted felon will become permanent.

Although a unanimous jury convicted him, Trump insisted the trial was “a political witch hunt…done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election��. The fact is I’m totally innocent.” He seemed to think that ratings should override reality, telling the judge: “I got the largest number of votes by far by any Republican in history,” he said, “and won, as you know, all seven swing states—won conclusively all seven swing states.”

Trump’s version of the case appeared to be convincing to MAGA pundits and lawmakers, who echoed his calls for retribution. Trump’s lawyer Mike Davis warned: “Right now the Democrats think they’re the hunters. And guess what? On January 20th at noon, they’re going to become the hunted.” Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Ronnie Jackson (R-TX) all echoed Trump. “Trump will win in the end and America wins in 10 days when we get Trump back!!” Jackson posted on X.

MAGA supporters have embraced Trump’s attacks on Democrats and on the government, most notably with their fact-free attacks on the Biden administration's handling of natural disasters—first the terrible flooding in North Carolina, when the right wing spread the lie that government officials were stealing people’s land, and now the terrible fires in Los Angeles that have been fueled in large part by the climate change that cut rainfall since last May and brought an unusually hot summer.

While local, state, and federal officials are doing their best to battle the Los Angeles fires in raging winds and dry conditions, Trump and his allies are lying to create the belief that the Democratic government is to blame for the fires. Trump lied that there is a shortage of water because Democratic governor Gavin Newsom refused to divert water to the area. Others claimed—falsely—that Democratic Mayor Karen Bass cut the budget for the Los Angeles Fire Department, when in fact a 7% increase in funding came through negotiations outside the budget.

They have blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts for the blazes because the Los Angeles Fire Department is headed by Kristin Crowley, an LGBT woman who came up through the ranks in the department over twenty years. And Trump sidekick Elon Musk agreed with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that the fires are part of a “globalist plot” to trigger “total collapse” in the United States. “Gavin Newscum should resign. This is all his fault!!!” Trump posted.

In reality, firefighters are hard at work, with crews from both Canada and Mexico working along with Californians to suppress the fires.

Trump’s false version of reality has been a potent weapon against the Democrats, and he is promising to continue constructing that false reality: this week he has said he would replace the head of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), who is responsible for collecting the documents that establish the historical record of the actions of the national government. The archivist’s predecessor was the person who pursued the classified documents Trump took from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump told radio host Hugh Hewitt he would make sure that he had a loyalist in that position.

But it is an open question whether Trump’s false reality will be as convincing when he is back in the White House as it has been when he was sniping from outside. Trump has promised a number of conflicting things to the different constituencies in MAGA, and it is not clear that he can deliver them. And if he does, it’s not clear the American people will want what he is delivering.

Trump says he will nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services; more than 18,000 physicians have signed a letter warning that he is “unqualified” and “actively dangerous” to the health of Americans. Trump’s plan to elevate him to a position that impacts Americans is “a slap in the face to every health care professional who has spent their lives working to protect patients from preventable illness and death.”

Trump has vowed mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and the reinstatement of Title 42 to close the border to migrants, but as Biden and others repeatedly pointed out when Trump complained about Biden’s ending it, Title 42 is part of a 1944 public health law that can be invoked only to stop disease from coming into the U.S. Once the government declared the coronavirus pandemic over, Title 42 had to go. Yesterday, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that Trump’s advisors, led by Stephen Miller, are searching for a disease to invoke to reinstate Title 42. They have even considered invoking the old trope that immigrants might bring an unknown disease.

But, unlike non-emergency immigration law, Title 42 does not impose penalties for those who try to cross the border repeatedly, a reality Trump used to great effect against Biden as border encounters soared when people made multiple attempts. Now those numbers will be on Trump’s account if he uses Title 42 going forward.

In the meantime, the Biden administration today extended temporary protected status for about a million immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela who meet certain criteria. Their protection will be extended for 18 months under a 1990 law that stops the deportation of immigrants to countries at war or suffering from natural disasters. The new protection does not cover immigrants from 13 other nations who currently have protected status.

Nick Miroff, Maria Sacchetti and Marianne LeVine of the Washington Post noted that when he was in office before, Trump tried to end protections for Salvadorans and others, saying they came from “sh*thole” countries, and that he is expected to let protections expire during his second term.

When he was running for office, Trump pledged he would end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 24 hours, a vow Russian president Vladimir Putin has dismissed. Yesterday, Trump told reporters that Putin wants to meet with him and that they are setting that meeting up; the Kremlin denied that statement was true and noted it would be more appropriate to meet after Trump takes office.

Today the Treasury Department under Biden imposed new sanctions on more than 180 vessels, many of them in Russia's “shadow fleet” that carries oil, as well as on dozens of oil traders, oilfield service providers, insurance companies, and energy officials in an attempt to reduce the money Russia can realize from energy exports. The United Kingdom and Japan also imposed additional sanctions.

According to U.S. Ambassador to China R. Nicholas Burns, the Biden administration is also making a last effort to try to stop China from supplying Russia with equipment that it can use in its war against Ukraine. The U.S. is warning China that it is aligning “with the most unreliable agents of disorder in the international system.”

Trump may or may not be able to turn his promises into reality, but it is clear that some of his supporters’ plans will not go over well with the majority of Americans, especially as Trump fills his Cabinet with billionaires and spends his time next to the richest man in the world, who spent more than $250 million on Trump’s election.

Today, Ben Leonard, Meredith Lee Hill, and Kelsey Tamborrino reported in Politico that the Republicans on the House Budget Committee, chaired by Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), have made a list of more than $5 trillion in budget cuts they could make to fund Trump’s deportation plans as well as his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Options include cuts to Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (more commonly known as Obamacare), the Inflation Reduction Act’s investment in combating climate change, and the supplemental nutrition programs formerly known as food stamps.

For decades now, there has been enough wiggle room in our system to paper over the gulf between image and reality. That slack may continue.

But at least in some places, reality is catching up to the fake stories. During the 2016 presidential campaign, right-wing media spread the lie that leading Democrats were operating a child sex-trafficking wing out of Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Those lies convinced a man to drive from North Carolina to the restaurant with an assault rifle to stop the crimes, only to discover the story was a hoax. He pleaded guilty to carrying a gun across state lines and assault with a deadly weapon and was sentenced to four years in prison. This week, two North Carolina police officers shot the same man after he pulled a gun on them during a traffic stop. He later died from his injuries.

Yesterday a New York State appeals court refused to dismiss the lawsuit brought by the electronic voting systems company Smartmatic against the parent company of the Fox News Channel for the lies that channel’s hosts told about Smartmatic rigging the 2020 presidential election. Smartmatic is suing for $2.7 billion.

And today the figure the “Pizzagate” conspiracy was designed to put into the highest office in the land, and that the Fox News Channel hosts’ lies were intended to keep there, officially became a convict.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tomorrowusa]

It's the media, stupid!

No, I'm not talking about specifics of various news media outlets or nitpicking about particular stories or attitudes. The problem is the vast overall state of the media environment in the United States.

Kate Riga is on target with her blog entry at TMP. (emphasis added)

Democrats Just Can’t Compete In This Media Environment

[T]here’s one leading factor that Democrats absolutely need to respond to as quickly as possible to avert this kind of electoral disaster in the future: the media environment unequivocally favors Republicans. We don’t have a ton of data yet, and much of it is partial. But we can already tell that Harris performed best — that is, underperformed least — in the battleground states. In the places where her campaign flooded the airwaves with her messaging, put her on TV shows and radio stations and in local newspapers, scattered driveways with information flyers, positioned her beside local celebrities, she improved on the repudiation of Democrats that infected nearly every other state. In other words: In the states where she set up a temporary but pervasive media apparatus, she negated some of the nationwide drag. That speaks to the reality that most of the country is awash in right-wing propaganda all the time. For the olds, it’s Fox News and conservative radio; for the youths, it’s the right-wing manosphere podcasts and streams that Trump so assiduously courted all campaign long (plus soothing TikToks promoting retrograde gender roles, evangelical values and distrust of government regulation — think the trad wives and crunchy so-far-left-they’ve-looped-around-to-the-right content — aimed specifically at women). It helps explain Biden’s prodigious unpopularity, despite passing a ton of legislation that not only polls well, but has meaningfully improved people’s lives. It helps elucidate the consistent claims that people don’t know what Harris stood for, before and after she released her policy proposals. It’s a playing field that Republicans not only dominate; Democrats don’t even compete. They still depend heavily on traditional media sources that simply don’t operate the same way these right-wing PR arms do. And we know that these forms of media are powerful; they reach tons of people, and are seen as useful enough pawns that Russia has invested in some of them. This isn’t a novel observation. The Obama alums who started Pod Save America and the greater Crooked Media family did so after Trump won in 2016 specifically to try to build up a Fox News of the left. There are structural problems with mimicking this right-wing content beat-for-beat. The Pod Save guys, while open about their political allegiances, often criticize the party and its politicians. It would be much more difficult to recreate the fawning adoration of Donald Trump Fox News and those podcasts produce for, say, Joe Biden on the left. It requires creativity and investment, but I think Democrats and those aligned with them could do it. Voters say over and over that they prefer Democratic policies — even Republicans often vote for them when they’re standalone ballot initiatives. It’ll require a cultivation of talent, a saturation of these spaces, finagling how to wrest back the counter-cultural bad boy persona from those who are espousing a way of life most people consider retrograde, confining, divisive and exhausting, not to mention solely in service of the plutocratic elites that run the party. Obama was such a revelation because he hijacked technology in a way that was new and exciting for people, and it helped him micro-target low propensity voters. Trump has since taken that mantle. In the two and then four years ahead, Democrats have to find a way to get in people’s eyes and ears, to figure out how to make an affirmative case in these spaces that people would likely respond to if they were exposed to it.

It's not just Fox News – which is bad enough by itself. There are the rightwing talk radio stations dating back to the 1980s. They joined Christian fundamentalist stations which had been pushing social conservative positions since the 1930s. And now there are countless bro types who talk rightwing shit for hours at a time on their podcasts.

Apart from Obama's skillful use of social media when it was still new, Democrats have fallen behind with digital media. Most recently, Elon Musk bought Twitter simply to use it as a propaganda machine. Facebook and its sister sites like Instagram use algorithms which promote rightwing talking points.

There had been attempts to set up liberal talk radio. But they have been sporadic and met with mixed success. Al Franken set up a liberal radio network called Air America Radio in 2004. But it had only modest reach on mostly medium powered stations and ultimately filed for bankruptcy during the Great Recession.

We need to increase our news and information footprint in a major way and on multiple media platforms – and fast. Obviously that takes money and business talent. So if you find yourself next to Mark Cuban, Bill Gates, or Michael Bloomberg on a flight or in an elevator, have your pitch ready. If that doesn't happen, we need to start raising money on our own. Nobody said that freedom is free.

[uboat53]

It's two days after the election and Republicans are already insisting that Democrats need to drop their opposition to Trump and try to work together which… yeah, really.

If you find yourself wondering "sure, why shouldn't they?", I'll go ahead and lay it out.

First of all, Republicans have never done this, certainly not in my adult lifetime. Before Barack Obama was even sworn in the top elected Republican announced that his number one goal was to make him a one-term president. They spent eight years stonewalling every attempt he made at outreach and arguably caused a lot of pain to Americans in the process by preventing any efforts to ease the recovery from the Great Recession. In 2016, when everyone thought Clinton was going to win, every elected Republican was vocal about how their top priority was preparing to resist, attack, and investigate every aspect of the expected administration. Even in Biden's term, while some Senators did join him to pass an infrastructure bill, most Republicans spent the entire four years even denying that he was legitimately elected.

There's an idea in game theory where you set up a game that gets played over and over again ad infinitum. On each turn, two people independently choose to either cooperate or not for that turn. If they both cooperate each gets a 70% prize and if they both refuse then they each a 30% prize, but if one person cooperates and one person doesn't then the person who cooperated gets nothing while the other person gets a 100% prize (these numbers aren't exact, but they make the point). So how do you win the game? Well, obviously, long-term, the best strategy is cooperation, but if one person always cooperates the other person can take advantage of this to do even better by refusing their cooperation.

I'll spare you the math and game theory behind this idea, but it turns out that the optimal strategy, the one that leads to the best rate of return, is to cooperate on the first turn and then simply do whatever the other person did before on every turn after that. In this way you always leave open a return to cooperation, but you also prevent yourself from being taken advantage of.

Basically, when Republicans ask for (demand, really) cooperation, they're asking for something they've never been willing to give themselves. Maybe if, for once, they were at least magnanimous in victory, we might able to talk, but that leads me to my second point…

What, exactly, is there to compromise on? Look, if we both think that we need to invest in roads and schools but we have different ideas about what kinds of things need to be invested in or how much to invest, then we can have a conversation and that can lead to compromise, but that's not the nature of the disagreements on key issues. Republicans think that LGBT people should not have basic rights, that states should have the right to gerrymander minorities out of political power, that women have too many rights these days (abortion, no fault divorce, etc.), and that corporations and rich people pay too much in taxes.

Don't believe me? Look at the legislation they're already lining up and the policies they're preparing to put in place, they're not planning a single bill or policy that does anything but the things that I listed above. So what should the Democrats compromise on? Should we agree that LGBT people only deserve some rights? Should we trade women's rights against minority rights? Should we give up on tilting the economy back in favor of working people and accept even more national debt to give money to rich people?

The agenda that Republicans have proposed is so radical and so violently opposed to everything that the Democratic Party stands for that there's no room for compromise. Even if Democrats wanted to set aside party differences and do what's best for the country, Republicans aren't doing anything that Democrats could remotely agree is good for the country. And here's the thing, most Americans agree. Yes, I know, the United States just elected Republicans to power but, while they did so, they also voted almost entirely against Republicans on almost every issue that I noted above that was up for a vote, even in deep red states! Americans may like Republican vibes and messaging, but every time it comes down to actual policy, the policy that Democrats prefer wins over and over again.

So, as a Democrat, I'm expecting my party to resist. They won't be able to stop everything, but I expect them to raise hell, throw sand in the gears, and investigate fully to point out every last bit of self-dealing, hypocrisy, and flagrant disregard for the rule of law that goes on on the other side.

If Republicans don't like this, if they want cooperation, then they need to think long and hard about what they're actually willing to offer. Just getting less of this far-right policy isn't enough, we can probably stop more of it by resisting anyways. If they want cooperation, they need to think about which of our issues they're willing to give. Are they willing to pass legislation to protect the rights of women, LGBT, and minorities? Are they willing to nominate moderate judges instead of Federalist Society operatives? How about giving 80% of their tax cuts to the working class instead of the rich?

They'll find plenty of Democrats willing to talk if those things are on offer, including me. Of course, they're not actually offering anything; to them, "compromise" just means that we give in to what they want and that's why I have no problems saying that I intend to fully resist the policy of the upcoming administration and I expect my party and all its elected representatives to do the same. When compromise becomes a two-way street, I'm fine with going back to it, but I'm done with the one-way "compromises" the GOP keeps demanding.

And, if you're one of the "why can't we all just get along?" people in politics who want politicians to be bipartisan, I hope I've shown you what it will take to get there.

[dumpstain]

On Sinners (2025) by Ryan Coogler

Nat King Cole didn’t get to finish his concert in Birmingham, Alabama. “I just came here to entertain you,” he said. “I thought that was what you wanted. I was born here. I can’t understand it.” A car full of guns and brass knuckles parked outside the venue doesn’t leave much to the imagination, but could you blame the King for being surprised that white people, the same people he’d generously introduced to good music, would rush the stage and try to kill him in the middle of a performance? He searched for answers: “I have not taken part in any protests. Nor have I joined an organization fighting segregation. Why should they attack me?”

Thurgood Marshall suggested that if he was going to keep playing all-white clubs and staying at segregated hotels, the King should pick up a banjo and complete his transformation into Uncle Tom. I can’t tell you if King Cole ever deserved that label, but Mr. Civil Rights had a bigger point to make: Americans—even smart, socially conscious ones, even ones with a sun-bleached “I’m With Her” bumper sticker on their Suburu and a recurring annual donation to Black Lives Matter—have this strange delusion that you can opt out. That if you’re not a card-carrying member of the Klan or the White Citizens’ Council or the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or the Nation of Islam, you can reach for the sky and protest your innocence, secure in the knowledge that you did what you could. You can "just" be a singer. You can "just" entertain.

“There’s no more Klan,” the amiable farmer assures Michael B. Jordan. Sure, the Klan had slipped a little by 1932, shrinking from over 5 million members in the roaring twenties to “just” tens of thousands during the Great Depression; and sure, the title of Grand Wizard had lost some prestige since that chilly Thanksgiving night on Stone Mountain, 1915. (They didn’t wear Knights Templar crosses and pointy white hoods in 1956 when they drowned the majority-Black town of Oscarville, Georgia and named the resulting lake after a Confederate soldier-poet, but I digress.) It makes you wonder: if a movie could inspire the Klan’s second birth, could a movie cause the Klan’s second death? Apparently not. Mr. Griffith won’t save us, and he made it perfectly clear that Intolerance was not an apology. Over a decade after the Klan's revival, Buster Keaton had to revise his big Civil War train heist movie to make the Confederates the heroes, because studios thought contemporary audiences wouldn’t accept a movie that glorified the damned Yankees, not with Reconstruction looming so large in the rear-view mirror. At last: wholesome Judeo-Christian values. At last: real progress. With alcohol prohibited, only blood could slake America’s thirst.

But careful: the shocking barbarity of the past is a ruse. We build monuments to Harriet Tubman, Emmett Till, and Rosa Parks and dust off our hands, satisfied that we’ve added a little melanin to Mount Rushmore—but it’s an elaborate act of denial, a mass coping mechanism. My third grade teacher (this was near Atlanta in 2006) brought me up to speed on what she called the “War of Northern Aggression,” and on the surprising upsides of chattel slavery (“at least they had free housing!"). Easy to file her under “bigots of Christmas past” and move on; not so easy to remember how in 2009, I mimicked my parents’ anger that my fifth grade teacher, a Black woman, showed us Obama’s inauguration live on TV (an event which, for white moderates everywhere, became a convenient signpost for the definitive End of Racism). Easy to say I simply had no politics back then, that I was an innocent sponge, a blameless mouthpiece for generational hate; not so easy to remember playing devil’s advocate during a U.S. History class discussion on whether Michael Brown deserved to die in the street. Easiest to pretend that confessing sin can redeem me from it; hardest to admit that redemption doesn’t work that way. Beware the mirror: irony quickly becomes sincerity. Reflections quickly become reality. Bloody Mary doesn’t care if you believe in her. She shows up all the same.

Let’s collaborate. Let’s write a book called The End of History and the Last Black Man and put a big picture of Ben Carson on the front cover. Up yours, Francis Fukuyama. Up yours, Her Innocence Dolores Dei. Up yours, Pod Save America. Honestly, up mine. But Mary, little Mary (not so little anymore): now that is a true Ally. She’s read The New Jim Crow twice. She fully agrees with Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations. Scroll down her Instagram page and find the captionless black square she posted five years ago, pixel-proof that she would’ve marched behind Martin in Selma if she could, a white speck in the background of your history textbook. God, all this righteous solidarity is making me drool. What? You want some, baby?

Just one drop of your blood, just one tiny taste of your soul, that’s all we ask. We need your music, Sammie. My vampiric Human Instrumentality Project will solve racism forever. One teaspoon of color in a vast sea of pale mayonnaise—one soul diluted to nothing, reduced to chalk. Remmick just wants to learn how to speak jive and do the lindy hop. He’s bored of the Celtic dances, he’s tired of intentional famines and royal British bullets, he believes in equality like a crow believes that every roadkill is equally delectable, like a worm equally hungers for every corpse at Gettysburg. Remmick wants more than Carter family values. He wants to hum his way to the blues like Delta Slim. He wants to conjure spirits and testify to his woes like bright-eyed Sammie, like blind-eyed Willie Johnson. He craves electric guitars and West African rhythms. God, Remmick just wants to live. He wants to believe that the circle will be unbroken, Lord. Mary doesn’t even want to be white, Stack! Oh, you know she’s invited to the cookout. She’s risking her social standing as a white-passing woman; Stack’s risking his life and the lives of everyone he loves. All’s fair in love and anti-miscegenation laws—in war and one-drop rules—in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1932, one year before FDR tells America what it should fear.

Like Kimbley maintaining his individuality among the tempest of tortured souls inside the Homunculus Pride, Stack holds onto some of his Blackness even after joining with the monocultural hivemind. There’s an argument to be made for just giving up and giving in. There’s an argument to be made that Jazz Is Dead. Nancy Pelosi has donned the kente cloth and kneeled beneath the Apotheosis of Washington, thus healing America for ever and ever. Amen, alleluia, we (who?) have (when?) overcome (what?). LBJ signs the Civil Rights Act, then crosses his fingers behind his back and sends another 10,000 troops to Vietnam while MLK preaches against reckless American imperialism and receives a letter from the FBI gently suggesting that he kill himself. Peace and love.

I guess what I’m talking about here is original sin. A stain that can never be washed away or rubbed off or bleached out. America has committed at least two: slavery and genocide. But then Strange Fruit trended as a TikTok sound, and these United States were finally cleansed of prejudice. White people shook their legs to Elvis and bought Miles Davis records, Ryan Schreiber wrote that Pitchfork review of a John Coltrane album (“We was sittin' there watchin' the stage…”), Beyoncé got her Grammy for best country album. The secret order of Choctaw vampire hunters could finally disband. They have completed their ancient mission.

The dirt has piled on so thick you can’t hear the crunch of bones when you walk anymore, the varnish so dark you can’t find the bloodstains on the walls of your luxury plantation wedding venue, the memory so faded you can’t remember where you dug up that Civil War bullet. Imagine falling in love on this dirt. Imagine singing and dancing here. Imagine the constant smell of death. Imagine orange lanterns in the woods, the wide open sky, and the terrible rhythm of hooves.

All the grave markers, all the crude headstones—

water-lost. Now fish dart among their bones,

and we listen for what the waves intone.

Only the fort remains, near forty feet high,

round, unfinished, half open to the sky,

the elements—wind, rain—God’s deliberate eye.

Near the end of Glory (1989), Morgan Freeman leads a regiment of Black Union soldiers in the blues. It’s the night before battle. They will all die, and they know it. He coaxes Achilles out from his tent and shows him how to squeeze his legendary rage into twelve short bars. Blues straddles major and minor, doesn’t shy away from the flat fifth that European music once called the Devil. Delta Slim doesn’t think Sammie’s suffered enough for the blues. What Sammie offers that night isn’t exactly joy, but it isn’t exactly suffering either. It’s a spell. It’s a message from beyond the Veil. There are tales of people who can share that message, and of people who want to suck the message away before it even escapes your throat. The Ally nudges your shoulder and warns: Don’t stick around after sundown. Don’t tempt them. They’re summoned by the music, compelled by the great empty silence in their hearts to destroy it... and you have one delicious voice. Better not to use it.

[mugiwara-lucy]

Now as promised I would be getting back to my daily Politics/Vote Blue posts since I took a day off since yesterday was my birthday and apparently it's going around that apparently Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama asked Biden to step down.

Thankfully I've went to both of their Twitters so this was revealed to be bullshit put out by CNN (no wonder their shit network is losing viewers left and right) but I need EVERYONE TO CALM DOWN AND CONSIDER THE RAMMIFICATIONS if Biden were to step down.

If Biden DID step down, the ONLY WAY people MAY vote blue is IF (and it's a pretty strong if) Kamala Harris takes over BUT here's the problem.

The MAGAts in Red States have said they would make sure the next Democratic Nominee would NEVER get on the ballot and the sad part? They'd actually SUCCEED since I've had friends to call me in Red States (I live in a blue one) and confirm they've been pretty rampant with the Anti-Harris ads.

You all (Not talking to all Democrats/Liberals but the ones who think biden needs to step down) need to realize Biden is HERE TO STAY and if you're gonna be weak as to let some weak spineless Democrat Congress folks and some washed up actors like George Clooney or a dumbass news organization like CNN talk about how Biden is old and sleeps yet ignores Trump's fat, orange pedophile ass sleeping during his OWN SON'S SPEECH DURING THE RNC; I would almost say you deserve a second Trump term BUT I think of all the innocent people like my parents, grandparents, little sisters, friends irl, disabled, mentally ill, POC and my mutuals on here and they don't deserve to suffer just because some of you so called Democrats are as spineless and weak as the people you claim to be above.

[mightyflamethrower]

What's a Little Creepy About the FBI's Arrest Warrant for a Blaze News Reporter

We have another instance of the Federal Bureau of Investigation going off the reservation. A Blaze News reporter who has done a couple of stories on the January 6 riot, which embarrassed the Justice Department, will be forced to turn himself in on Friday. Steve Baker has cooperated with the Justice Department, which has had Baker on their radar for months.  

The creepy part about this story is that this reporter doesn’t know what charges he’s facing. The FBI has instructed him to wear clothing that suggests he’ll be forced to wear an orange jumpsuit. However, the Justice Department told Baker and his legal team that misdemeanors were the only charges facing the journalist. The outlet had all the details about the legal drama in a lengthy post, including the stories that might have painted a target on Baker’s back 

"They didn’t have to go this route," Baker told Blaze News on Tuesday evening. "We have been told that my charges are only misdemeanors. And my attorneys have been assured that this will be an ‘in and out’ affair with 'no intention' to detain me. But rather than issuing a simple order to appear, they went the 'arrest warrant' route."  What's more, Baker said he still does not know what the charges against him are, noting to Blaze News that the powers that be won't tell his attorney about the charges because they believe Baker will post them on social media.  Baker's Dallas attorney, James Lee Bright, added to Blaze News that withholding the nature of the charges against his client is a "really unusual" move. Bright also said he's hoping to get a copy of the complaint against Baker as early as possible Friday morning.  […]  Bright told Blaze News that he's "disturbed" about what's transpiring with his client, especially given that Baker has been "in full compliance" all this time. Bright also said the federal government "three-plus years later going after people who were legitimate functioning journalists that day" appears designed to have an "absolute chilling effect."  […]  Baker added that when he asked his other attorney, William Shipley, why the federal government is treating him like this, Shipley replied, "You know why. You've been poking them in the eye for three years" 

Baker's first Jan. 6 analysis for Blaze News came last October, following countless hours in a House subcommittee office looking at frame after frame of Jan. 6 closed-circuit video — and it had him wondering: did Capitol Police Special Agent David Lazarus perjure himself in the Oath Keepers trial? 

Soon after, the slow pace of getting an unrestricted look at everything recorded on video prompted Blaze Media editor in chief Matthew Peterson's appeal to House Speaker Mike Johnson to release all the videos. On Nov. 17, Johnson did just that. 

Baker's investigative efforts also resulted in two additional analyses, both focusing on Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn: "January 6 and the N-word that wasn't" and "Harry Dunn's account of January 6 does not add up. At all." 

In December, Baker alleged he uncovered major irregularities involving Dunn, Capitol Police, the press, and U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland). 

In January, Baker asserted that just-released U.S. Capitol closed-circuit TV video clips from Jan. 6 show Lazarus gave false testimony in the Oath Keepers trial. 

Like Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag, Baker also touched upon the curious case of the January 6 pipe bomber and the alleged targeting of the Republican National Committee, wherein new evidence suggests that the RNC was not the target. The FBI might have misrepresented the location of the supposed explosive device, which a then-FBI contractor discovered. 

The FBI has harassed and targeted pro-life activists, so going after reporters who have questioned their narratives about some highly politicized stories isn’t shocking. The Obama CIA and DOJ colluded to manufacture a fake narrative about Russian collusion against Donald Trump. The FBI made up evidence to justify an illegal FISA spy warrant against Trump campaign officials. The FBI and the Secret Service appear to be engaged in a cover-up regarding the ever-elusive pipe bomber who cannot be found. They can find hundreds who entered the Capitol building that day, but not this guy.