I'm a political junkie, which keeps me in a constant state of agitation. This would make me a masochist if it weren't for the fact that I was born bitchy. Following politics just allows me to share my natural gift with the public in a more focused way than would otherwise be possible.
“We suck less” is what Democrats have been running on for 22 years. Obama’s two presidential runs were the only exception to this, but at the end of the day, he was where hope went to die in America. To the die-hard Obama fans, you have to stop ignoring the fact that he had orchestrated the biggest income redistribution to the top 1% in American history up to that point. He admitted it in that link I just shared. Trump subsequently outdid Obama when his big bullshit bill passed. Nonetheless, Obama’s presidency was the last shred of “hope” that the American electorate had. The country became less and less hopeful every year he served, as evidenced by the loss of 910 Democratically held seats across the country during his tenure as president. Virtually every election since 2016 has been about “no more of this shit”, with the electorate shifting away from partisanship and into voting for anything different.
I’ve been saying this for a few weeks now, on my Facebook page, and I still stand behind this analysis: yesterday’s elections were not a blue tsunami. They were a red riptide. Democrats did absolutely nothing to win favor among the electorate. The response was purely a function of how badly Republicans stunk up the place.
A blue tsunami and a red riptide look exactly the same on election night, but they’re different in one very important way: A tsunami has durability in the next election cycle. A riptide does not.
Democrats have 9 months to do something once they’re sworn in. Sucking less isn’t going to carry them through the 2028 election, so they will be very vulnerable to a populist Republican presidential candidate like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Green. No republican who served in or didn’t fight the Trump administration has a snowball’s chance of ever getting elected, but a Republican who has been railing against Trump for the past year will. The electorate has been voting for “no more of this shit” since 2016. This is never going to change unless one of the 2 parties starts delivering meaningful results for working people. I believe that we’re largely past the era of 2 term presidencies. We’re past the era of strictly partisan voting. Seven million people who voted for Obama twice voted for Trump in 2016. Voters are willing to try anything to stop the immiseration they’ve been subjected to for the past 30 years. This isn’t unique to the US. It’s happening all around the world.
The good news is that we only have 8 weeks to definitively find out which path Democrats intend to take. Do they plan on keeping up the well-meaning-but-hapless shtick they’ve been putting on for 30 years, or do they intend to do things? We’ll have our answer on January 4th, the very first day of the new Congress. If Chuck Schumer doesn’t end the filibuster on that day, that will be a clear signal that they plan to continue the losing strategy of “What can we do, we don’t have a super-majority?” I wrote this same fucking post in 2012 when Harry Reid had a chance to end the filibuster. He didn’t. The reason was clear to me then: Democrats wanted to hide behind the filibuster by using the rotating villain strategy, to claim that they just couldn’t get anything done without a supermajority. Fortunately, a significant chunk of the electorate has figured it out now. The well-meaning-but-hapless shtick will never work again.
From now until the end of the year, we need to make sure that #endthefilibuster is trending on social media every single day. If you are represented by one or two Democratic Senators, you need to call them and make it clear that what you expect for your vote is an end to the filibuster.
I honestly can’t emphasize this enough: your vote yesterday won’t make a fucking bit of difference if you don’t actively put pressure on Senate Democrats. Your work here is not done. As it was in 2012 when Reid didn’t end the filibuster, not doing a little more work right now will lead to another decade or more of increasing misery for all of us.
I’m calling Schumer and Gillibrand’s offices today. I will make sure that they get at least 2 calls a week from people that I know. If we all do this, we have a chance to start meaningfully reversing course on the nightmare we’ve been living through. If we do nothing, there’s absolutely no chance of that happening since Schumer has absolutely no intention of jeopardizing funding for Israel by ending the filibuster. I bring up Israel because he has plainly stated that his main objective is to maintain Democratic support for Israel. Not ending the filibuster means that there won’t be any bold action on anything from Democrats, which (let me say it again) means that President Tucker Carlson will be a scenario we end up with in 2028.
I see the times we’re living in as a “mask off” moment, at least politically speaking. The current occupant of the White House is a lifelong grifter and con man who is very predictably looting the country for his own enrichment. The seemingly endless barrage of stories detailing his grifting and double-dealing might feel like something new to most people, but it doesn’t to me. I’ve been paying close attention to our legislators’ self-enrichment schemes for a couple of decades now. The galling thing is that none of it is illegal, and it’s never been limited to one party.
This is the system that our legislators created for themselves. Here, watch Nancy Pelosi tell you herself:
She and Dianne Feinstein both miraculously married financial geniuses. Both of their husbands brilliantly managed to outperform the stock market. During her tenure in Congress, she and her husband have managed to outperform the S&P 500 by 559%. Genius! Dianne Feinstein’s wealth accumulation was a little less subtle. Yes, her husband also managed to beat the S&P 500 year after year, but then, he shrewdly got into the defense contracting business. Can you guess what happened next? Yep, his firm was apparently uniquely qualified to get hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts. There’s much more to how Dianne Feinstein enriched herself, but that’s all too long for me to go into in this post.
You get the point, though, right? Nothing the motherfucker in the White House is doing right now is new. The only new part is his lack of fuck’s to give about how it all looks. He did, after all, correctly proclaim that he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue without losing any supporters. Guess who else didn’t lose any supporters over their robbery of your ability to achieve a modicum of financial security? Feinstein, Pelosi, and the hundreds of other thieving members of all three branches of our government.
They all benefit from the fact that, at any given time, only half of the electorate will care about their individual corruption, which enables them to create the rules that make whatever they do legal, or at least, not illegal.
All Trump is doing is taking the mask off the corruption.
In the past month, we’ve had another mask-off moment. It happened when establisment democrats lost their shit over three candidates in NYC winning primaries against their establishment opponents. The mask had actually come off a couple of months before that primary election, when establishment Dems piled onto an insurgent senatorial candidate in Maine, but I will circle back to that later. Jamie Harrison, former head of the DNC posted an angry rant demanding that people who didn’t like the democratic party get out of his sandbox. Never mind the fact that, under penalty of death, he couldn’t get a democrat elected during his tenure as chair of the DNC. Who needs to win elections! The status quo must be maintained at all costs! And then James Carvill put out an angry, red-faced rant in which he proclaimed that he couldn’t possibly be in the same party as Darializa Avila Chevalier. The democratic tent just isn’t big enough for her! Some of us couldn’t help but notice that the tent was never too small to accommodate The Joes, Manchin and Lieberman or John Fetterman. Actually, I noticed that at least 16 years ago, when I wrote my very first blog post. I’m genuinely thrilled that a significant part of the democratic electorate can see it now.
I’ve said this hundreds of times: the democratic party would rather lose 1,000 elections than lose one corporate donor. Everyone seems to be catching on now.
Now back to Maine. Graham Platner has taken the state by storm. He has generated unprecedented excitement for his candidacy, so it’s curious that the democratic party establishment has done nothing but try to blow up his candidacy. I’m particularly flummoxed by the fact that the same people who defended Bill Clinton in the 90s, and lionized him for the nearly 30 years since he left office, thought that leaking text messages about Platner’s extramarital sexting would sink his campaign. These are the same people who defended actual penetration. Did they think that sexting was going to be a deal-breaker? They conditioned their voters to condone the penetration of a intern for fuck’s sake. Since Janet Mills had to drop out of the primary, she’s touring Maine with Susan Collins to appear at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, birthday parties, block parties, and any other event she can attend with Collins. After Platner won the primaries, several establishment Dems said that they couldn’t vote for him.
That’s super weird, since they claim to want to take back the Senate. There is precisely ZERO chance of democrats taking back the Senate without Maine. None, nada, zip, zilch. It can’t be done. Mask-off. Once again, people are noticing this time.
My disdain for the democratic party grew exponentially in 2020 when they demonstrated that they don’t have any more use for democracy than republicans do. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to the primaries, shall we? Bernie won the Iowa caucuses. Platitude Pete came in second, Amy Klobuchar came in third. Biden came in fourth. That is such a terrible showing for a former VP, that he should have dropped out then. Next came New Hampshire. Same results, except that Elizabeth Warren came in 4th, leaving Biden in the dust at 5th place. Now, Biden did manage to get second place in Nevada, but not without Bernie lapping Biden’s total vote count. LAPPING. Bernie received 41,075 votes to Biden’s 19,179 votes. Platitude Pete took 3rd place. Next came South Carolina. Biden finally managed to win his very first primary state after three presidential runs. That’s right, Biden ran for president three times and didn’t win a single state until the fourth contest in his third attempt. What happened next shocked the fuck out of me. After South Carolina came Super Tuesday. Every single democrat but Bernie dropped out of the race on the eve of Super Tuesday, after they had all made their ad buys, and endorsed Joe Biden. I guess that all of that losing made them that much more confident that he was the one to beat the “existential crisis” that is Donald Trump. Cory Booker and Julián Castro forgot all about the concerns they had raised about Joe Biden’s cognitive state. Huh. Sadly, so did that democratic electorate. They ignored what their lying eyes had shown them about Biden’s mental faculties during those primary debates and did what their party told them to do.
Did I mention that no poll exists on planet earth that has Trump beating Bernie?
Democrats were fucking lying when they said that Trump was the biggest threat to democracy both in 2020 and in 2024. They weren’t lying about the statement; they were lying about their desire to beat him. A friend of mine door-knocked for Kamala in PA in 2024. I don’t know how many of you have door-knocked for a candidate, so I will briefly outline how it works. First, you’re not knocking on the doors of anyone who is registered with the opposing party. The point of door-knocking isn’t to change minds; it’s to fire up reliable and semi-reliable voters. As you’re knocking on reliable and semi-reliable doors, you make notes about your conversation with that voter if they’re still unsure. Those notes are then sent back to the national campaign apparatus. My friend said that she knocked on a whole lot of doors, where Gaza was a big problem for Kamala. A few weeks into the campaign, the volunteers were told not to bother with the feedback about Palestine. The campaign wasn’t interested in that information.
No, really. That’s what happened. I have other friends who started volunteering later in the campaign. They were told not to provide any feedback about Palestine that was given to them by voters.
So, to recap the past 2 presidential elections, first, democrats coordinated a mass drop-out of candidates in the race to endorse a serial loser with cognitive decline in order to stop the clear winner from running away with the nomination, and then, they chose to ignore an issue that subsequently cost them 19% of the total votes they could have gotten.
In both instances, they were protecting their donor base at the expense of potentially losing presidential elections. Fortunately, the electorate has changed a lot since 2020. I do not believe that this electorate would forget the cognitive decline they witnessed with their own eyes, so that they could do what the party says they should do.
Personally, I love these mask-off times we’re living in. I don’t love reading about how Trump handed his pool guy millions of our dollars to fuck up the reflecting pool, (probably) just so that he can get free pool services for the rest of his miserable life but I love the clarity that this communicates about the system of government we actually have. We have a bona fide banana republic and everyone is starting to realize that.
If you’re angry with Trump over his grifting, you’ve missed the point entirely. You should be angry with the system that makes space for this. If you’re consuming media that directs your anger at Trump, you’re being intentionally misdirected. You’re being misdirected so that you can allow yourself to believe that things will go “back to normal” after Trump. You’re being misdirected so that you can’t see that “back to normal” has always beenthis. You’re being misdirected so that your longing to put the mask back on puts you in a situation where you want to vote for the standard, establishment politician whose stock portfolio outperforms the S&P 500 by 559%.
Why do I seem to focus on democrats in this post? Two reasons: republicans haven’t promised their base anything but hate and division for over two decades now, and they’re delivering; democrats make a myriad of promises to lift up the working class, and they’re constantly (and deliberately) failing.
I’ve still managed to hang onto my sunny optimism, despite how bitchy both parties make me on a daily basis. I want to believe that these mask-off times are sparking an awakening in the electorate. So far, the democratic primaries are pointing in that direction.
I don’t know who the democratic presidential nominee will be in 2028. I to know with 100% certainty that it won’t be Kamala, Platitude Pete, or Gavin Newsom because 2 years from now, millions more people who have borne the brunt of neoliberalism will be eligible to vote. I suspect that it might be someone who doesn’t currently have a high profile. I absolutely wouldn’t be so sure, were it not for the great unmasking that we’ve been living through.
Yes, I said that both parties are just like ammosexuals. Let me explain. I was reading an article that talked about how republicans’ answer to everything is tax cuts, while democrats’ answer to every problem is taxpayer funded subsidies. That is a completely accurate assessment. Since the article I was reading was in a mainstream newspaper, it didn’t go into the obvious: both approaches are monumentally stupid and ineffective.
I don’t think I need to go into why tax cuts are useless. Most people who aren’t in the top 5% have figured that out by now. I will say that there’s one aspect of the tax cut fever we’ve been infected with for forty-five years now that a lot of people haven’t figured out: when taxes go down, fees and fines go up because that money still needs to be collected. Licenses (driver’s, marriage, fishing, etc) cost exponentially more to obtain than they used to. Parking tickets and moving violations cost waaaaaay more than they used to. Parking meters cost more than they used to. As we discovered when the stray doge found its way into our government, there isn’t actually that much “waste” that needs to be dealt with. Most of it is in the one place they didn’t look: the Pentagon, which has never passed an audit and still gets more and more money every single year. There’s a reason why no legislator or president hasn’t been screaming about the Pentagon’s inability to account for the money they’ve gotten: they’re running expensive covert operations all over the world that the American people know nothing about. That’s the only possible explanation for why we haven’t heard a peep of outrage from our representatives and yet, we constantly hear some of them crow about the “fraud” and “abuse” in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA which amount to less than 3% of their operating budgets.
Taxpayer funded subsidies are also a bullshit “solution” to problems that ultimately makes them bigger, although that approach does temporarily act as an opiate for the masses. Here’s the deal: when you funnel taxpayer dollars to a for-profit business, that business just keeps raising the price. We should never have replaced tuition-free universities with tuition grants of any kind (including GI grants). What we got for a significant chunk of that cash is people (a lot of them veterans) getting suckered into shitty for-profit colleges like Full Sail “University” and getting useless degrees that will in no way help them to build successful careers. What we also got was skyrocketing tuition rates all across the country because universities had this reliable pile of taxpayer cash to count on. And then there’s the ACA. I called it a steaming pile of shit while it was being voted on because I understood that this new revenue stream that insurance companies were delighted to get their hands on was never going to do a fucking thing to actually lower the cost of insurance, especially since said steaming pile of shit legislation came with a four year extension on pharmaceutical patents. How in the actual fuck are rates supposed to go down when insurance companies were now going to be paying for brand name drugs for 50% longer than they were before? Suddenly, these health insurance CEO’s who had a dying (literally) business model were able to see themselves as titans of industry for creating this massive, brand new, totally reliable revenue stream that guarantees them a 20% profit margin. I’m sorry, I meant to say, “administrative cost”. Medicare runs on with 4% administrative cost, Medicaid runs slightly under that, and the VA runs closer to 2%. According to the KFF, healthcare expenditures in the US went from $3,002.11B in 2014 to $4,866.49B in 2023. If you look at the previous nine years, you’ll see that expenditures went from $1,894.68B in 2004 to $2,855.93B. Those numbers haven’t been adjusted for inflation so the ACA did jack shit to bring down costs. Instead, insurance became so fucking unaffordable that Biden had to increase the income level at which a family (or single person) could qualify for subsidies. The original bill provided subsidies for households whose incomes were between 100% – 400% of the poverty line. For an individual, 400% was an income of about $43,000 a year and for a family of four, it was an income of $88,000 a year. As part of the American Rescue Plan Act, Biden increased the subsidies so that a family of three making $103,000 a year would qualify. That expansion is what the shutdown was about. That “15 million Americans” number that you keep hearing are the people were never able to afford insurance, even through the exchanges until the subsidies were expanded. It did not include the original cohort of people who received subsidies. They were never at risk of losing their subsidies.
This piece shit of a plan is only eleven years old and we’ve already had to expand the number of people who need taxpayer funded subsidies in order to be able to afford insurance. Where do you think we’re going to be in three years when this latest extension expires? Do you think that premiums are going to go down, or will they go up? Will wages go up, or will they stay flat or go down as AI becomes more prevalent?
Taxpayer subsidies do fuck all to fix any problem and since we’ve already established that there’s very little waste in government run programs, where do you think that all of those subsidies are coming from? It’s not from taxing the rich or the corporations at the levels they should be taxed at. It’s primarily coming from the Social Security trust fund, Japan and China (in that order).
So why the fuck are tax cuts or taxpayer subsidies the only solutions that democrats and republicans ever have? That’s easy. It’s because they’re like ammosexuals, trying to come up with a solution to school shootings. You see, they start from a place where limiting or regulating guns in any way is a nonstarter so their solutions are very limited and therefore usually don’t start until after the shooting does. Similarly, both parties have taken the idea of costing a single corporation (or billionaire…. and now trillionaire) a single nickel off the table.
So now here we are. And here is where we will be stuck as long as we keep falling for the same bullshit and voting for the same bullshit politicians who keep telling us that this bullshit is the best we can do.
It’s not, and it’s about time that we all realized that in big enough numbers to change things. It’s primary season. THIS is your chance to put the breaks on this cycle of lunacy.
I don’t see an end in sight unless democrats cave and I firmly believe that they need to hold firm on their position. I don’t have a lot of confidence that they will because, they’re democrats and democrats don’t have backbones, political instincts, or the will to win for working people even if it means (like in this situation) keeping the gravy train going for private, for-profit insurance companies.
I posted the following on my FB page a few weeks ago to break down what democrats are really fighting for:
Secondly, understand that democrats are holding firm on one single piece of funding in order to allow the rest of the republican’s highway robbery of the working class to continue unabated: they want to maintain the premium subsidies for Obamacare. Have you stopped to think about that for a minute? Democrats are holding out for taxpayer money to keep flowing into the coffers of private insurance companies so that 15 million people don’t find themselves unable to afford the monthly cost of insurance, which includes a 20% “administrative cost”. Medicare’s administrative cost is 4%. IF ONLY democrats had a blueprint for a more cost effective way to deliver healthcare. OH RIGHT – Medicare, duh! Also, there’s the VA, which is even more efficient than Medicare. In fact, almost half of Americans are ALREADY covered by the Medicare, Medicaid VA combination: the least healthy half. I referred to Obamacare as a “better than nothing piece of crap” when it passed and I was right.
Well, I ended up doing a little digging after I wrote that post so let me share some details about the state of the ACA which I referred to as a piece of shit right before it passed. Before I can get to the current state, I have to back up and explain 2 key provisions in the original bill. The first provision subsidized premiums for households whose incomes were between 100% – 400% of the poverty line. For an individual, 400% was an income of about $43,000 a year and for a family of four, it was an income of $88,000 a year. As part of the American Rescue Plan Act, Biden increased the subsidies so that a family of three making $103,000 a year would qualify. That makes sense, because you can’t fucking afford to pay for health insurance in America if you’re feeding and housing three people on $103,000 a year. That expansion was supposed to expire in 2022 but Biden extended it for another three years so it’s going to expire at the end of this year.
This shutdown fight is about that expansion, not the original subsidies but I’m going to get back to the shutdown shortly.
The other significant provision in the ACA when it was passed, was a backstop guaranteeing that insurance companies wouldn’t take any losses on their plans in the exchange. That meant that if they had to pay out more claims than they had collected in premiums (plus their 20% “administrative” fee), taxpayer money would cover those losses. In 2014, little Marco Rubio inserted a poison pill into an omnibus spending bill that killed that backstop. Since insurance companies aren’t ever, ever going to lose a single dollar because that would defeat the whole purpose of their existence, this meant that those costs would manifest themselves in premium increases.
One more thing to remember about the original bill; it increased the length of pharmaceutical patents by 50% so instead of 8 year patents, they now get to charge a premium for their exclusive drugs for 12 years before a generic can be made available. This increases the cost of insurance, since insurance companies are paying higher prices for those drugs for 4 years longer.
Now back to the shutdown and the expansion of subsidies. The result of Biden’s expansion, which republicans want to kill is that we have nearly twice as many people receiving subsidies as we had in 2014 when the ACA went into full effect. When we talk about 15 million people losing their coverage because the steep premium increases will make it unaffordable, we’re mostly talking about the people who couldn’t afford coverage in 2014 because it was too expensive, but they didn’t qualify for any subsidies and then got insured in 2020 because they could get subsidies. In 2014, they made too much to qualify for subsidies, but not enough to actually afford to buy insurance. They have never made enough money to afford insurance. If you clicked on that first link I posted in this piece, you know that my beef with this piece of shit legislation is that it did nothing to actually bring down the cost of health insurance.
I fell down a rabbit hole of articles and data in an attempt to try and figure out what the exact impact of the ACA was on healthcare costs over the past week and I couldn’t do it. Covid really skewed everything. There were data sets that claimed that the ACA slowed the rate of increases and there were data sets that showed that the ACA doubled the rate of increases. Neither made sense to me and I ultimately concluded that covid made it impossible to get a clear picture.
Reason and logic tell me that there’s no way that the ACA slowed down premium increases, especially after I looked at earnings reports and stock price trends for the big 6 insurers. If you recall, all of the stock prices went up on the day the legislation was signed. We injected trillions of taxpayer dollars into this industry and did nothing to bring down actual costs. In fact, the big pharma patent extensions did the opposite.
If you’re as big a nerd as I am, and you’re interested in digging into some interesting facts about our health coverage as it compares to other countries, this data is really illuminating and will give you a pretty good idea of how to actually bring down costs.
So what’s my point here? It’s the same point I’ve been making for 15 years. We deserve better than this. This piece of shit bill that has done nothing but raise the cost of healthcare for everyone in the country is not what we need to be fighting for. Yes, we need to demand that democrats hold the line on this but funneling more and more taxpayer money to private corporations is not something that we should be applauding because at the end of the day, it’s the same pig that republicans have been raising for decades. Democrats just put some lipstick on it to fool you into embracing it.
You need to be vocal about not being willing to vote for any democrat who isn’t prepared to, on day one die on the Medicaid (it’s more comprehensive than Medicare) for all hill. We need to move everyone intoMedicaid and then turn Medicaid into a VA system that employs all of the doctors and negotiates with pharmaceutical companies. This is a much more efficient use of our resources than what we’re doing now, where we’re spending the most money on healthcare per capita and have the worst outcomes.
I have not watched cable news in about 15 years and yet, I’m a news junkie. Why is that? Because I realized that cable news kept me disinformed. Something awesome happened around 2003 in response to the Bush/Cheney presidency. Independent media emerged in response to the horseshit that the mainstream “trusted” news sources were peddling. Remember this years long turd from the New York Times? It wasn’t just The Times. They were all doing it. Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for opposing the Iraq war.
The only good thing that came from that horrendous presidency, is that the mainstream media was exposed for being nothing more than stenographers for the establishment. Unfortunately, the majority of the generations that were consuming news at the time didn’t notice. But a decent percentage of us did, and upcoming generations totally knew it and never experienced disillusionment with mainstream media because they grew up knowing it was propaganda.
I did enjoy Keith Olbermann’s rapier wit during the Bush years. When Rachel Maddow took over his slot on MSNBC, I tuned in because I was a big fan of every iteration of her show on Air America Radio. She cohosted a show with Lizz Winstead, founding writer of the Daily Show and champion of women’s reproductive rights. She also cohosted a show with Chuck D of Public Enemy, a fierce fighter for progressive causes and equal justice. Maddow was a true progressive who really understood that the corporate takeover of our government was the reason for 90% of our country’s problems. She understood that a combination of republican neocon ideology and the military industrial complex were responsible for getting us into and keeping us in Iraq and Afghanistan. She knew that big Pharma is the reason why Americans can’t afford life saving drugs. She was a big supporter of then congressman Bernie Sanders.
So I watched her on MSNBC, not because I expected her to do the same type of show that she had done on Air America. At that point, I was acutely aware of the main stream media’s role in propagandizing the American people on behalf of the establishment. I watched because I believed that she would do what she could do within the constraints of working for corporate media to actually inform viewers. In the beginning, that’s what she did. Her shows were definitely not as informative as what I was getting from independent media, and she never really told me anything I didn’t already know but she was raising issues for “normies” that wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to.
As time went on, she was doing fewer and fewer stories about things that directly impact working people’s lives and focused more and more on DNC propaganda. Her show became the same old, same old partisan horserace hackery that everyone else was doing. I stopped watching entirely and listened to the podcast once or twice a week. The end for me; the moment when I realized that she was the most insipid person on cable news came during the 2016 presidential primary. She did one of her 40 minute monologues about a Supreme Court decision that vacated former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s conviction on corruption charges. Basically they said that if someone lavishes gifts on a politician, and then that person gets state contracts, there’s no corruption unless there’s video evidence of a bag of cash being handed over while the politician clearly states that the donor will receive a lucrative contract in exchange. Disgusting, and definitely worth a 40 minute segment.
Less than a week later, Maddow had Andrea Mitchell on to discuss an allegation that Bernie had made against Hillary (remember, this was the primary). Bernie accused Hillary of illegally laundering money to her campaign through state democratic organizations. Bernie was lying. What Hillary was doing was not illegal anymore. It was not illegal because of another Supreme Court ruling. In McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court removed the aggregate cap on donations that an individual can make in an election cycle. The maximum amount that a single donor can make to a candidate of a party is $2,700 per election cycle. There was also an aggregate cap that capped the total amount that somebody could give during an election cycle. The Supreme Court removed that cap. That’s what made it possible for George Clooney to throw a $350,000 a plate fundraiser for Hillary. That $350,000 donation would get distributed to state democratic entities all across the country and then sent back to Hillary’s campaign. This is now perfectly legal because of SCOTUS, but it’s definitely corrupt just like Citizen’s United. So Bernie lied to try and get the media to talk about the McCutcheon ruling.
You would this was right in Maddow’s wheelhouse since she had just spent forty minutes on how the Supreme Court legalized corruption, right? Nope. She did a four minute segment with Andrea Mitchell about how Bernie lied, never mentioning the Supreme Court or uttering the word “McCutcheon” once. She didn’t even explain what I did about how the money gets laundered around and around. She just spoke about the ‘Hillary Victory Fund’ that the DNC set up and emphasized that they had also set up a ‘Bernie Victory Fund’, failing to mention that he never touched it. Way to outsmart Bernie and keep your audience in the dark Rachel. Bravo!
It was disgusting and insipid, and it’s an excellent example of how the “liberal” corporate media exists to manipulate liberals just as much as Fox News exists to manipulate conservatives. That’s when I decided that she had gone from being someone I respected to being the most insipid person on cable television. Yes, more insipid than Tucker. Why? Because while Tucker is a prolific liar, he does fundamentally believe in republican ideals. As one of the heirs to the Swanson frozen food fortune, he’s all for fucking the working class over in order to protect his inheritance through as many tax cuts as he can trick his viewers into supporting. He grew up believing that trickle down makes the world work. She knows better and decided to sell you out to the establishment that she knows has been robbing you for decades, just so that she can collect a fat paycheck for herself.
There’s absolutely no reason to fall for this crap anymore. There are a myriad of independent outlets, just like Air America Radio (long defunct) where Maddow once earned my trust.
For podcasts, there’s The Majority Report with Sam Seder. He’s another Air America alum. He has the best analytical mind I’ve ever come across and he’s totally unemotional about politics. There’s Indisputable with Dr Rashad Richey. He’s excellent on matters of racial justice. There’s The Young Turks. They will teach you to decode politician speak better than anyone else and they will teach you to spot how the main stream media is manipulating you. There’s Unbossed with Nina Turner. She will inform you on how establishment democrats are enriching themselves at your expense, while still giving you hope that we can undo this mess. Lastly, in the podcast category, there’s This Is Revolution. This one will make you the most uncomfortable if you’re switching from msm news but the more I’ve listened, the less uncomfortable I’ve become and the more they’ve won me over on some of their perspectives. They will give you the best world history lessons you will get now that the world no longer has the amazing Michael Brooks to educate us.
I do read the New York Times and The Washington Post every single morning because I think it’s important to stay on top of the corporate spin and they do occasionally do some good investigative journalism. I go to The Hill and Politico to get unvarnished establishment propaganda and to learn about who is turning on whom. There was a period of time when they were peddling fluff pieces full of effusive (unearned) praise for Mayo Pete and stories about Kamala Harris’ blunders. That made it clear that Biden was floating trial balloons in regard to replacing his veep in the next election. But to get the information that the msm won’t give me, I go to The Intercept, Pro Publica, and The Lever every single day. They have earned my trust the way Maddow once did.
I do, of course fact check everything I read. I actually fact check articles that sound good to me more than I fact check anything else. Trust but verify is my approach to news.
It’s bullshit. There is no debt ceiling crisis. Not really.
Let me debunk some shit that literally none of the mainstream media media will educate you on.
Fact #1: No corporate owned politician will allow the debt ceiling to be breached. Why? Because their owner/donors have literally everything to lose. Approximately 90% of our politicians are wholly owned subsidiaries of corporations. That includes Biden and McCarthy. The other 10% are funded entirely by grass roots donations. All but one of those are progressives. The progressives don’t want the debt ceiling to be breached because they’re progressive and the mere discussion of tanking the world economy (that part of the media narrative isn’t bullshit) is unconscionable.
Fact #2: Anytime there’s a “debt ceiling crisis”, the president has all the power. It doesn’t matter if the opposing party controls both chambers of congress. Unless the opposing party has a super majority in both chambers, the president has 100% of the power in this situation. Why? See fact #1.
If the president refuses to negotiate over raising the debt ceiling, congress is completely powerless. They have to raise it. Their owner/donors won’t let them tank the economy.
There is no crisis unless the president creates one. That is an empirical fact.
When Obama, and now Biden agreed to negotiate with republicans, they created a crisis. And they did it by breaking a stated tenet of the US government; we don’t negotiate with terrorists.
Yes democrats – I understand your compulsion to blame McCarthy for this but you’re just wrong. Let me repeat: the president never has to engage in negotiations because the terrorists have no leverage.
Have you ever asked yourselves why democrats never deploy the same tactics that republicans win with? Do you think it’s because they’re the “good guys”? If you do, that’s a pretty flawed opinion because “good guys” should be doing everything they can to do good things.
No, democrats are getting paid to lose. They’re getting paid to lose by the same owner/donors that pay republicans to win. They have been cast in the role of well meaning but hapless in the political theater that we’ve been treated to for the past four decades.
Remember when democrats “tried” to pass a $15 federal minimum wage under reconciliation and the senate parliamentarian said “no”? Remember? Remember how they gave up after that because, what could they do? Raising the minimum wage was something democrats really wanted to do but their hands were tied, right? Oh wait, would you look at that; twenty years earlier, when the then senate parliamentarian stood in the way of W’s tax cuts for the rich, republicans fired him and passed the tax cuts.
Huh. Maybe democrats just didn’t know they could do that because none of them have been in office for that long? No, come to think of it, Biden was in the senate when republicans fired the senate parliamentarian.
Hmmmm. Maybe there’s another explanation I haven’t thought of that doesn’t involve democrats profoundly sucking. I’d love it if someone can point me to that explanation.
Make no mistake: this debt ceiling crisis is 100% Biden manufactured and you are definitely going to end up on the losing end of these unnecessary negotiations.
I am flummoxed as to how anyone can still buy into this “good guy” and “bad guy” narrative that has been created in order to get voters to enthusiastically vote against their own self interests. If you’re not looking long and hard at your primary candidate options, you’re part of the problem. If you have even dismissed a candidate because “they’re not viable”, you have bought into the corporate media narrative that keeps you voting against your own self interest.
I don’t vote for a corporate owned democrat until I don’t have a choice. When it’s general election time and my options are between a democrat and a republican, I vote for the democrat because I know that they will be slightly less shitty than the republican. Slightly. That’s the reality.
I just wish that the rest of the electorate would wise up and put me in that unpleasant situation less often.
I know I’ve been slow to post about Jordan Neely’s murder. That’s because I needed time to process the facts and my feelings about what happened. My process generally involves challenging myself on my initial opinion until I land on an opinion that includes the facts and my values.
First, let me say that since we don’t have all the facts yet, I’m not advocating for a first degree murder charge (yet). Right at this moment, we don’t have any witnesses who have claimed that Jordan assaulted anyone. That might change and I will form a different opinion if that happens. I certainly won’t take the choke holder’s word for it. The good news is that there are cameras on the subway so we’re not going to have to rely on witness testimony to see what happened.
The opinion I hold on the forefront of my mind in regard to this incident is that my heart aches for him. He lived a heartbreaking life that ended the way his mother’s did: by being choked to death. When he was 14 years old, his mother was strangled to death by her live-in boyfriend, who stuffed her body in a suitcase and tossed it along a highway like trash. When Jordan was 18, he has to testify against his mother’s murderer. What happened to his mother broke him and that’s all I can think about.
My opinions about the incident are eclipsed by my heartache for him, as should anyone else’s.
Now back to the day he was murdered. I watched the video shot by the reporter on the train because I believe that watching is the least we as the public can do. I saw him in a chokehold for over 2 and a half minutes. He was already in the hold before the video started. I’ve heard that he was in that chokehold for 15 minutes. I don’t know that to be a fact so I’m only going to speak to the 2 1/2 minutes that I personally witnessed.
There’s a reason why the majority of police departments don’t allow chokeholds; they kill people. We all know this, so using a chokehold on another person is completely inexcusable Full.Stop. Using a chokehold on someone means that you don’t care if they die so the choker in this instance is trash.
Knowing that he served as a marine for 4 years makes this even worse. He was ostensibly trained on chokeholds and knew what I had to research to learn. If you do a chokehold “correctly” a person would be rendered unconscious in 8 – 10 seconds. It is still dangerous to do it “correctly”. This asshole had Jordan in a chokehold for at least the 2 1/2 minutes that I witnessed. What we know right now absolutely warrants a manslaughter charge. I am reserving judgement on a murder charge, but even if we have confirmation that Jordan didn’t assault anyone, that’s going to be a difficult charge for the prosecutor to make. We have to start prosecuting these vigilantes because encouraging them by letting them walk with no consequences creates a world that no one should have to live in.
Before he was murdered, Jordan said, “I’m tired already. I don’t care if I go to jail and get locked up. I’m ready to die.” He said he was hungry and thirsty. That doesn’t sound like a dangerous person to me. That sounds like a desperate person who is slowly being killed by society. That sounds like a person who is literally crying out for help. The asshole wanna-be hero in this story has an outsized penchant for fear. He should not be applauded for that.
The right wing media loves to report that Jordan was arrested 42 times. That’s forty-two opportunities that New York City missed to help this man. It was actually many more than 42 opportunities. He was on NYC’s outreach workers’ list of the “top 50”, meaning that that he was among the unhoused who are urgently in need of help. Here’s what they neglected to do during their numerous attempts to help him: give him a home. Providing the unhoused with permanent shelter works. It works. Let me show you again that this fucking works. If the city you live in has tried it and it didn’t work, it’s because of corruption, misuse of funds and crony capitalism. When the money isn’t siphoned off to pay back owner/donors, housing the unhoused with no preconditions works. It works for everyone. Every last member of society benefits by housing the unhoused.
I had brunch with a very dear friend who I absolutely adore yesterday. He’s had encounters on the subway with unhoused people who were having a mental health episode. Those encounters scared the shit out of him so he doesn’t feel that the choker (I REFUSE to use his name) did anything wrong. I can see that perspective, but I don’t share it.
I’m not a fearful person by my nature. I actually rarely have strong split second emotions, and I never have. In any given situation, my brain goes to assessing what’s happening based on what I know.
During that brunch, my friend told me about his friend who lives (or works – I can’t remember which) on the upper west side. His friend does a good amount of humanitarian work so he’s certainly a kind person. He told my friend that when the city put some of the unhoused up in a hotel on the upper west side in the early days of the covid pandemic, he personally witnessed a crime spree. As it happened, I was very familiar with that situation. Our then mayor made the decision to move some of the city’s unhoused people into some of the plethora of empty hotels across the city. One of those hotels was The Lucern, located on the Upper West Side where the primary demographic is fine, white liberals. Here’s what those fine, white liberals did (I encourage you to read the article). They started a Facebook page to band together. They got so much backlash, that they made the page private because that’s what you do when you’re right and righteous; you hide. They insisted that crime was going up in their neighborhood and they saw that crime everywhere. The problem is that the crime they saw was entirely imaginary. They had to imagine crime so that they could tell themselves that they are good people. My friend’s friend imagined crime that wasn’t happening. This is why I always find anecdotal evidence completely worthless. Anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence of anything except what a person thinks they see with their own eyes. It’s total bullshit that I won’t entertain because data is what I rely on to inform myself.
I have also experienced encounters with unhoused people in the middle of a mental health crisis on the subway. I’ve never been afraid. Maybe that’s because I understand that people with mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of crime than they are perpetrators of crime, and that they’re legitimately frightened all the time. Or maybe it’s because I know that half of our population is two paychecks away from being unhoused and that being unhoused is not a result of a moral failing.
Our culture is seriously diseased in this regard. We fundamentally believe that the unhoused got that way because of something they did so they deserve this. We believe that despite the fact that the vast majority of us are justifiably feeling screwed by our government that only exists to fellate the 1%. I don’t know where the disconnect is in regard to applying what we know to the unhoused. I used to be bothered by the idea of giving an unhoused person money, just to have them spend it on drugs or alcohol. That no longer bothers me. I would medicate the shit out of myself if I had to live on the streets too and so would you.
We see the unhoused as trash that we don’t want in our neighborhoods. We don’t look at them when we walk past them.
And that’s why Jordan Neely was killed and why some applaud him for doing the killing. He was just taking out the trash that we’re afraid of and want to remove from our consciousness.
Here’s what I do when I’m on the subway with someone who is having a mental episode: I either walk away or I feed them. Before the pandemic, I always kept a few protein bars in my purse for just these occasions. I had fallen out of that habit until this happened. I went to Costco yesterday and stocked up. A desperate person is not going to harm you if you treat them like a human being and make even the smallest gesture to help.
Can you imagine what living in a society where you’re invisible all the time and the only interaction you have with other humans is one where you’re seen as trash?
When you see an unhoused person, look at them and say, “Hello”. That simple act of seeing someone as human can help to diminish mental health episodes. If I have food or water on me, I give it to them. The leftovers that are packed up for me after I have a meal seldom make it home with me (don’t forget to ask for utensils when they’re packing up your meal!)
These are human beings with very human stories. Please let that thought be the first one you have when you see an unhoused person.
And please, I beg you – don’t let your fear turn you into the type of person who applauds murdering vigilantes. I promise you that this won’t turn out well for you.
This one is going to be short and to the point. You can all relax about the Georgia runoff. Warnock is going to win, and it’s not going to be close.
It wasn’t going to be close yesterday, but now that Catherine Cortez Masto has won her senate seat it’s not going to be remotely close. Voting for Walker was easier for people who were already in the voting booth to vote for other republican candidates. But showing up just for Walker is something many voters won’t do. Now that democrats have held the senate, there’s even less incentive for even the most “democrat” hating republican to take time out of their day to show up for an abusive, abortion happy pathological liar. The balance of the senate is no longer at stake. I just don’t see them turning out in big numbers to vote for Walker.
This is going to be a very low turnout election. The only caveat to my prediction is that lower democratic turnout could happen, although I think that’s less likely. If you have friends in Georgia, please tell them to make sure to show up.
Other than that, relax and enjoy overeating day. This one won’t be the nail biter you think it’s going to be.
This post is going to be short and sweet. I’m not going to break down individual election results.
A week or two ago, I shared on my Facebook page that I didn’t see a red wave coming. Admittedly, my evidence was less than compelling but the combination of early voting numbers and the results of the abortion vote in Kansas in August left me feeling that there was going to be no red wave this year.
There should have been. The party that wins the White House almost always loses big in the next election. The fact that it didn’t happen this time is more significant than any other pundit will tell you.
Unfortunately, I can’t yet unpack precisely how this is significant moving forward because I need to wait for the demographic numbers to see who actually voted in each state. But I do know that this is monumentally significant.
In terms of the practical implications of how these toss up races land, virtually nothing will change even if republicans keep 50 seats in the senate. We get to keep Social Security for at least two more years and absolutely no major piece of legislation will pass in the next 2 years.
I don’t really like predicting election results. Literally no one is better at it than a coin toss would be. That said, I was actually pretty spot on this year mostly because I don’t predict races where I don’t have any clear indicators. I never commented on Wisconsin or Arizona. I nailed everything else I called this year. Once I knew that Fetterman recovered from his stroke, I knew that he was going to win with absolute certainty because he ran a masterful campaign. I knew Warnock was in trouble. I didn’t know if he was going to win or not, but I knew that it was going to be way closer than it should have been, given his opponent. The media kept trying to make the governor’s race here in NYS sound like it was going to be close. I never thought it would be.
So on the heels of my prescient prognosticating, let me blow up all of my credibility by attempting to forecast a presidential election two years out, with absolutely NO idea about what will be happening in the country or the world when that election happens. What I’m trying to say here, is that you would be foolish to read anything I’m about to say in any context other than light entertainment.
Trump is going to officially announce that he’s running for president again in the next week or so. It doesn’t matter who else runs in the republican primary; Trump will be the nominee unless he drops dead in the next 2 years. He has a solid (roughly) 35% of the republican electorate squarely behind him. They are as immovable as a 4 year old who loves their meth addicted, domestic partner abusing, unemployed daddy. No other republican has a high enough profile to successfully run against him except for DeSantis (or DeSanctimonious, as Papa has referred to him). DeSantis has already declared that he’s too scared to run against daddy. That could still change, and I hope it does because I really need the entertainment value of watching 2 republican “stars” viciously tear each other apart. This matchup in particular would be as down and dirty as politics have ever gotten. It would be white walkers vs dragons.
So Trump will be the republican nominee. Biden is going to run again and democrats will go along with that even if they have to Weekend At Bernie’s him to cross the finish line. Despite the leaks we’ve been seeing in the media over the past year, he’s going to keep Kamala on the ticket even though she’s been an unmitigated disaster. Democrats aren’t bold enough to drop a sitting VP. Sorry, Mayo Pete – you’re going to have to wait a little longer. Unfortunately for you, by the time it’s your turn, the only demographic that doesn’t think you’re oily will be a tiny sliver of the electorate.
Trump is going to lose. He’s going to lose because instead of running a populist campaign like he did in 2016, he’s just going to keep whining and crying about his imaginary victimhood. That is just not an appealing campaign strategy. He’s going to lose. Biden isn’t going to win, so much as Trump is going to lose. I really believe that Trump is the only republican candidate who Biden wouldn’t lose to.
So there you have my preposterous two-year-out election prediction. I stick by everything I’ve said about Biden, Trump, Harris, and Mayo but anything can happen over the next 2 years so I’m just having fun with this.
I know that democrats have been chomping at the bit to see Trump indicted. I also know that most of you are watching each new development in the multiple investigations into Trump’s crimes and telling yourselves, “this is it!” I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don’t believe that Trump is ever going to be indicted for a damned thing by the federal government (more on that later).
I understand how good it feels to believe that he’s going to end up in prison. Believe me, I understand but I believe it’s a fantasy. A lovely fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless. Many a meme perpetuating this fantasy can be found on my Facebook page. I’ve started to realize that not making it clear that these posts are happy place fantasies is antithetical to what I’m trying to do here. When I started this brand, my goal was (and is) to get people to think about politics in a completely different way than the way they’ve been thinking about it for the past 40 years. Politics is not sports. You don’t pick a team and stick with that team through thick and thin. What we’ve gotten with that approach is that corporate bank accounts have gotten thick, while yours has gotten thin.
This happened because virtually no politician is fighting for you, and it’s time that we all realized that so that we can make more meaningful choices in order to undo everything that has been done really, since Reagan.
Perpetuating this fantasy about Trump being locked up suggests that democrats are going to do something about it, which simply isn’t believable if you divorce yourself from that team mentality and apply a basic tenet of life that everyone on the planet knows to be true: follow the money.
This shouldn’t be difficult to work through since the Roe decision just happened. Democrats never bothered to codify Roe into law for one primary reason: it’s an issue that they fundraise on heavily. You can tell yourself all the sweet little lies you want to make democrats the “good guys” on this, but they’re not true. Democrats had two chances to make it happen. That’s a fact. But they wanted to keep fundraising on Roe and to get elected on the basis of being champions of women’s reproductive rights. Don’t believe me. Believe your own lying eyes:
I know that fantasies are more fun and probably better for your short term mental health, but it’s time to stop the fantasizing because those fantasies have become toxic to your own self interests.
Nancy Pelosi made it clear where democrats stand on prosecuting people in power when she didn’t want to “look back” at W’s crimes. That’s where they stand ideologically.
In terms of where their motivations lie, it’s clear in the tens of thousands of fundraising emails that we’ve all gotten on the basis of “getting Trump”. Do you honestly believe that democrats are going to take that gravy train off the tracks? Really?
If democrats were serious about indicting Trump, they would have put handcuffs on more than just one person who ignored their copious subpoenas. They would have made an effort to motivate Trump’s allies to show up by making it clear that there’s a jail cell waiting for anyone who doesn’t show up, and that they can plan to occupy that cell until they’re ready to appear before their committees. Putting one person in handcuffs for ignoring a subpoena after several people had already done it is purely performative, and you know it.
If you divorce yourself from your team mentality, you know that what I’m saying is true because you’ve witnessed it with your own eyes. It’s time to stop with the fantasies and start making electoral decisions by following the money like your life and livelihood depend on it because they do.
The only caveat to this might be Georgia. It’s possible they might go rogue and hand down an indictment, but I really don’t see this happening on a federal level. If it happens, I’d be elated to eat crow and profess how very wrong I was.
I’m not saying that you won’t see fantastical and fun memes about Trump being locked up on my Facebook page. They’re fun. But I do pledge to make it clear that these are fantasies of a perfect world, just like Law and Order is a fantasy of a functional justice system and West Wing is a fantasy about how government should work. I watch both, but only because I like to fantasize in order to ease the angst of reality.
