Whappen? (I'm travelling).

The Trumpy Court decides on State Legislator powers today - you know, that one where the Trumpy people want the power to control election ballots. Gee - I wonder how they'll decide.

Warnock is going to pull this off tomorrow, right? Whenever I hear Walker speak, I cannot comprehend how it can be a close race. And naturally, he is another Trumpy pick. It's so wonderful that the Trumpy picks have massively failed. A Warnock win tomorrow would be a wondeful finale.

Yay!! Trump is holding a rally for Walker tonight!! :)

Edit: Actually he's calling ino a tele-rally. But still.

Trump Org found guilty of tax fraud.

This is a great day for people that hate Donald Fucking Trump.

(Come on Warnock!)

You could (almost) remove 45 from that sentence. It's a great day for justice, period.

and speaking of justice, cristina kirchner was found guilty of corruption today and was sentenced to six years.

she's got temporary immunity while she's vp and her appeals last though xD

Wow, hadn't seen this. :eek:

Piñera [ETA: aka Piranha] should be in jail now, but the Senate saved him. Sounds familiar?

Alright, we won. 52-48 was the ideal in order to neutralize Manchinema, but I'll take it.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSS!!!

i could not sleep waiting for this

well congrats to all earthlings, and happy dreams

To be honest, I don't much like talking about politics, but I really like reading about what people write and listening to other people's opinions.

TOLD YA.

...

More seriously this time:

Kyrsten Sinema Formally Enrolls in the Party of Wall Street and Big Pharma

The senator’s switch to “independent” aligns her more completely with the special interests that she has so diligently represented since coming to the chamber.

tempest in a teapot. schumer had it right, he said she's always been independent.

this is no surprise, it's just a change of label. she votes with democrats most times, but sometimes she doesn't, and now she's apparently just trying to avoid getting primaried or something.

bernie is also not a democrat, but can nevertheless reliably caucus with them.

arizonans are never gonna be berniebros. same as west virginians btw--it's actually a miracle that manchin is still there. the other w. va. senator is a republican and trump won there with almost 70% of the vote in 2020. arizona is barely purple sometimes and only recently.

besides, it's very possible that synema and manchin were right in not wanting to pump 4 **trillion** dollars into the economy, considering the current rate of inflation.

modern monetary theory which ignorant people think means "free money" actually requires taxes in order to control the money supply. but raising taxes in the american congress is super hard and slow, so all we have left is... "classic" (i guess?) monetary regulation by the fed's technocrats, who are free to operate as they see fit. of course their method is based on human sacrifice (increasing unemployment). ugly for sure, but you can't just have an unlimited money supply because that would destroy the economy for all. the liz truss fiasco is fresh in everyone's memory i presume?

so, regarding reality: it is what it is. just the labels changed.

--

ps i'm overdue for reading a financial times piece about the insane amount of debt great britain is going to have to issue in coming years. they're wondering who's going to want to buy those bonds. great britain: the next argentina!

a disturbing snippet from "the economist":

At age 19, Itamar Ben-Gvir was Israel’s most toxic political activist. He had been the leader of the youth wing of the far-right, anti-Arab Kach party when the Israeli government designated it a terrorist organisation in 1994. A year later he was tainted by the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He had no part in the murder, by a Jewish extremist furious about Rabin’s attempts to compromise with the Palestinians. But weeks earlier Mr Ben-Gvir had vandalised the prime minister’s car and boasted on television that “we got to his car, we’ll get to him too.”

Now aged 46, Mr Ben-Gvir will soon be made national security minister in the incoming government of Binyamin Netanyahu. He was once considered too dangerous to be conscripted into the army; now he will lead Israel’s police, which previously investigated him for inciting violence. To many, his rehabilitation symbolises the hard-right turn of Israeli politics.

Mr Ben-Gvir’s mission has been to make palatable a movement regarded by nearly all Israelis as beyond the pale. Raised in an affluent suburb near Jerusalem, he moved to a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. He opened a law practice that specialised in representing radical Jews accused of anti-Arab terrorism. He joined another party, Jewish Power, on a platform softened just enough to comply with rules prohibiting political parties from inciting racism. After years of leading groups of thugs in the streets of Jerusalem crying “Death to the Arabs!” he began correcting them to shout “Death to the terrorists!” instead.

But the rebranding wasn’t enough: in 2020 the party received only 19,000 votes. Its salvation came from Mr Netanyahu, who in his quest for a right-wing majority pressured Jewish Power to merge its candidate list with those of two other far-right parties. The new “Religious Zionism” list, which Mr Ben-Gvir co-leads, won 14 seats at the election in November, making it a critical part of Mr Netanyahu’s coalition.

Mr Ben-Gvir is trying to project a more moderate image, promising that as security minister “we will make sure law-abiding Arabs are secure as well”. But his election-night message revealed his long-held beliefs: “It’s time for us to return to being the landlords of our country.”



--

oy vavoy... :(

"It is what it is... The two-state solution is pie in the sky... Let the electoral markets work... This is Realpolitik..." ;):D

well, this is not a mere change of label. it's a clear and definitive change of personnel. you can see it's different, yes? the lunatic is in charge of the asylum. very bad news.

--

as for the mention of realpolitik and the two state solution (i know it was in mockery but...) hamas in control of gaza and shooting rockets with support from (a near-nuclear) iran... has to play a part in israel's turn to the right, don't you think?

i mean, in spite of peace and democracy ideals people might hold, pragmatic concerns tend to take priority under duress. this of course plays into the hands of hardliners... and here we are now (entertain us).

and of course, yes, let elections work! because what else? why, i can't even... what did you mean there?

Fact Check: No, Obama Wasn't Guarded by a Reptilian Secret Service Agent

Just to be clear, you know.

fresh(ish) analysis of how kari lake lost arizona by embracing trumpism

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ke-trump-loss/

tldr: it looks loke arizonans would have easily chosen a non-extremist republican, but she hanged herself from trump's tree instead. well this is the same as i said above lol. just more filler. lots of data & sources quoted in the article though.

And then there's the Kyrsten Sinema drama going on in Arizona as well.

i think it's just the same character with different labels. i see no big drama in the relabel. but maybe it's just me lol.i never counted her as reliably democrat. which might play out with her constituency? az is red/purple.

but apparently she's negotiating some kind of immigration reform for the lame duck session? for real. i was reading thst the midwest is desperate for agricultural workers and she got a mention there.

oh yeah here it is: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...onal-security/

"Although a bill expanding legal agricultural migrant labor would help farmers in Ohio and other states, a broader bipartisan immigration fix being developed by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) would be more meaningful. The still-evolving bill is reported to include a path to citizenship for the dreamers in exchange for $25 billion in funding for border security."

i didn't know this about her till this morning. the article in "the nation" soup nazi linked was all pharma pharma pharma. and i like the nation, much respect to them, but they're staunchly leftist so i take them with a (fat) grain of salt.

Kyrsten Sinema is a perfect example of why bisexuals cannot be trusted. Too addled to decide on their preferred sexual partners, too addled to decide on anything politically.

actually, her next race could be a 3-way xD xD xD

==

ps here's a lucid analysis of the situation plus horse race potential:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/1...enate-00073594

-

eta: and here's a bit of history, from another leftist publication i respect: https://www.motherjones.com/politics...o-her-defense/


lolololol

McCarthy seems to be struggling to win the Speakership. I'm having a hard time guaging why some GOP are saying no, but I would love to think that his infamous Jan 6th Condemnation Of Trump Followed By The Kissing Of The Ring At Mara-Lago Shortly Thereafter has played at least a minor role in this?

goddamn, alexandra petri wrote a great column about the... the times we live in?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...tter-overkill/

she normally just goes for goofy absurdity for the lols, but this time she got a little more serious, and i love it

---

Opinion Not another column about Elon Musk
Image without a caption
By Alexandra Petri
Columnist
|
Follow
December 17, 2022 at 8:35 a.m. EST

In “The Madness of King George,” there are several scenes where very learned doctors dedicate considerable time and effort to squinting at the contents of the king’s chamber pot. Watching the movie, you think, “Well, at least we are at a stage of civilization where we don’t have to do that! We do not live in a world that hinges so completely on the condition of one or two powerful men that it is worth our while to spend hours every day examining their stools in minute detail and trying to draw conclusions from them." But then Elon Musk buys Twitter, and — I can think of no better analogy for what has ensued.

One of the most correct tweets about Twitter is that every day it has a new main character and the goal is not to be it. But now Musk is the main character every day, and in addition to encouraging some of Twitter’s worst voices, he is astoundingly boring. Here is a sample of his tweets: “The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters.” “Thanksgiving cuisine is such a delightful symphony of flavor!” At one point he tweeted a mildly amusing AI-generated conversation, only to reveal he hadn’t even crafted the prompt himself. Not to mention all the memes about psyops, although I guess that counts as a mention.

Most recently, he suspended journalists who were reporting on him and his efforts to ban an account that tweeted the location of his jet, saying that their reporting amounted to sharing “assassination coordinates.” Columns and columns have been poured into the abyss: Why take this step? What about all his protestations about free speech? Will we ever know what his politics are? (Could it simply be that they are what they appear? That he wants to bring creepy, far-right voices back on Twitter not from an abstract, principled commitment to free speech but because those are voices he enjoys hearing, and ban journalists and critics because they are ones he doesn’t?)

I have complained about this before. But one of the minor, in the scheme of things, yet persistent frustrations of the Trump era was the sheer amount of brainpower that all kinds of people — good, busy, even witty — had to spend staring into the unfathomable abyss of his words and actions and trying to extract meaning from them. What was covfefe? People spent hours on that! The sheer volume of analysis and jokes and grunting, straining effort to make sense of what made Donald Trump tick — and what made his head open up and a screaming bird shoot out of it at regular intervals — was debilitating.

There are so many people to know about on this planet. Some of them are pleasant and others are wise and many of them are kind and a few of them are funny and polite to waiters. Some of them possess remarkable skills and others are tremendous listeners and still others know what to do if you spill certain kinds of things on certain types of surfaces. Lots and lots of them own cats, and when they go online, all they do is post pictures of those cats doing cute and interesting things. There are so many people who are interesting. And instead we have to follow Elon Musk and Donald Trump. We have to watch them host SNL, and read their inane tweets, and know precisely what they are going through at all times, because their whims can cost people jobs and ruin lives.

There is something desperately boring about despots and plutocrats. And one of the frustrating consequences of an unequal society is that the rest of us have to care what is going on with them. Now Trump might be gone, but we still have a main character we don’t want. Not that this is a new phenomenon. The ancient historian Suetonius may not have been the most accurate source, but seeing people like Musk and Trump in action, I feel more sympathetic to his accounts of what boring people, given power answerable to their whims, wind up doing. I thought it was ridiculous when he said Nero, literally the emperor of Rome, decided that, actually, what he wanted to be was an actor — but here is Musk, one of the richest men on the planet, who has decided for no reason whatsoever that what he wants to be is a Twitter troll! And not even a funny one; just as transphobic and anti-vax and awful as the bog standard. I’m sorry I doubted you, Suetonius! Maybe if we are lucky Musk will start doing more of the fun caesar things, such as trying to get a horse into the Senate, and will stop his mission to turn Twitter into a hateful cesspool! But somehow I doubt it.

I hate that we have to pay attention. Our lives will be impacted if Trump is again elected president, say, or the roads are suddenly filled with exploding cars, or if the place where journalists go to water-cooler about breaking news gets seized up and its rules rewritten, seemingly arbitrarily, on the fly. Mark Zuckerberg changes an algorithm, and livelihoods in the content economy shudder in terror. I would like nothing better than to not have to know or care about these people. With the amount of time I pour into them, I could have invented Narnia twice. But instead we are sitting there squinting into the king’s stool.

Every time I think I have seen it all with Trump - ie I'm certain that he can never surprise me anymore, or sink even lower than he ever has before - he surprises me. Trading cards!!

so the sinema show on immigration died last week, i just found out. could not get 60 votes in the senate.

a tragic outcome.

The final report. 10 MB pdf. Over 800 pages. Ideal light reading to enjoy by the fire during the holidaze.

Neat-o column by DA KRUG yesterday:

Does Elon Musk still get money from paypal? Anyway, cheers for the above articles.

hahahaha, been on vacation so missed that, but YES, tesla has been horribly overvalued for too long, based mostly on the musk myth. but now everybody knows the emperor has no clothes. besides that, he's been alienating his liberal customer base with insufferable profascist behavior.

cathy wood, who is a huge crypto propagandist, is also a massive musk fan. she enjoyed the height of her success during the pandemic/stimmy trade. now her ark fund (yes, it's a biblical name) has come down crashing hard. krugman is not mentioning her by name, but anyone can look up her public statements and see those "parallels" incarnate.

bill gates, btw, has been famously shorting tesla stocks. musk called him a hypocrite on climate for that. hahahahah, the fucker thinks he's the savior: "only i can fix it."

but anyway, speaking of myths, there's the myth (repeated by krugman there) that electric cars will save the world. this is utter and complete bullshit. electric car manufacturing is enormously resource intensive and it promotes/justifies more sprawl. it's greenwashing for car culture.

bicycles, on the other hand, could save the world, if we only started designing the world around them. better yet, good old walking as the first option is even better.

beyond that, the future of transportation is not batteries and home chargers, but hydrogen fuel from renewable hydrolysis.

Hey, I did that experiment in high school! :)

right? the bubbles rejoin inside a fuel cell, and blam, electricity, no waiting for 90 minutes at the charger

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/hy...-cell-vehicles

Also, in a few decades we'll have fusion:

hahahahaaaaaaaaaaa

funnily enough i was listening to jaco earlier. "honest to god," as they say

Round 2:

The piece of shit.

It's good that this is finally out there, but I'm too jaded to think it's gonna move the needle in terms of the motherfucker's popularity. Now, if it leads to criminal prosecution for tax fraud, then we're cooking with gas. In New York City's war on crime, the worst criminal offenders are pursued by the detectives of the Major Case Squad. These are their stories. CLANG CLANG.

i don't know what will be the outcome of all this, or if it will be a good one, but i can't deny i truly enjoy watching kevin mccarthy suffer failure after failure after failure in his nefarious quest for speaker.

truly, we need to learn to appreciate life's small pleasures :D