Rolling Stone following a rich tradition started by the late, great Hunter Thompson. His obit for Nixon is an absolute classic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/

Our distinguished House Speaker voted against expulsion.

This is frightening stuff. I feel like it should be at the top of every newscast, every conversation, but somehow we seem to be sleepwalking into the end of democracy. A “nah, can’t happen here” attitude, coupled with Trump fatigue, social media distractions, struggling to make ends meet, and good old fashioned apathy, are going to get people killed.

Too early to tell for sure, but Georgia is starting to look grim for Trump, Inc. The state RICO statute by its nature lends itself to rolling up these “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” type conspiracies that are hard to prove individually but taken together show a coordinated pattern of conduct. With every co-conspirator who rolls over and takes a plea deal in return for testimony, it gets easier to prove, and more worrisome for those left.

Open question is whether the Fulton County DA can prove the requisite RICO predicate acts. I think they are trying to pin them on false statements and an unlawful attempt to influence an official, as well as the county election office interference, but it would be interesting to see a dispassionate analysis that evaluates the likelihood of success with those allegations.

Also unclear is what impact Meadows’ testimony in the Federal case will have, if any, on the Georgia proceedings.

It is one thing to hop on the internet and complain about the system (like we are doing now), but another to actually do something about it.

Unionizing - and then actually striking for better pay and conditions - are the most immediate ways to move the ball. As he says, workers have not historically improved their conditions by working harder, but by refusing to work en masse.

As pointed out time and time again, the MAGA caucus is interested in maximum chaos for social media clout, not governing. It will be interesting to see how much of the ‘mainstream’ GOP goes along with this idiocy.

I get the sense they are pretty spineless, because after all, who wants to anger the base and have to give up the fancy Washington restaurants to return to the sticks and live among the rubes once the inevitable MAGA primary challenger takes you out?

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Viewers get a throw-away line about Big Three’s “record profits” but no sense of what those profits have been: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made a combined $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. According to the UAW, they’ve earned a quarter trillion dollars in profit since 2013.

This right here. There is a staggering lack of understanding about just how money is circulated in the economy. The assumption is that if you let billionaires and corporations concentrate capital it will be good for the rest of us because they will create jobs. That is true at the margin when capital is at a premium, but in an era easy money, investment isn’t the problem. You can also rest assured that without unions corporations will cut every job they can to boost the bottom line.

Conversely, there is this puritanical sense among some that if you pay workers more, then they will get lazy … or something … and that is bad for the economy. This is bullshit. Billionaires hoard capital. Workers, because they have to, spend their paychecks (lower marginal propensity to save) and keep money circulating. Paying people decently is good for the economy.

I am deeply suspicious of of overly simplistic answers to complex human questions, but I swear that 90% of modern U.S conservative policy can be explained either by grift or fear of the other.

Nah, I would probably get canned. Thanks for the kind word, though!

You too. Thanks.

Here is a perspective from within the belly of the beast in case it is interesting to someone: state legislatures starving higher ed for funding is a story that goes back over 30 years. It is responsible to a significant degree for the tuition hikes that have made a college education too costly for many students. In effect, this funding cut and resulting tuition hike has shifted costs of an educated workforce from wealthy taxpayers to young people. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/state-funding-higher-education-still-lagging

Administrative bloat is also a problem, and falls into a couple of categories. You have the university presidents and coaches, on one hand, where the appointments are themselves a political plum in some states and game day is an excuse for rich alumni to drive $300,000 RVs to sit in corporate skyboxes. (State legislatures don’t seem to have issues with that spending, for some reason).

Then there is the multiplication of various vice-provosts, directors, department heads, etc. Some of that is legitimate administrative bloat, but it tends to gets pared back fairly regularly when a recession hits or enrollment drops. In many institutions a lot of the remaining bloat is administrative infrastructure built up around competition for students, compliance with Federal mandates, and research efforts to make up for that lost state funding. You have student life. Dining services. Residence life. Disability services. Equal opportunity offices. Financial aid offices. Faculty affairs offices. Institutional research. Institutional support. HR operations. State mandated procurement and budgeting units. Huge staffing structures around the research enterprise. Units dedicated to service and outreach. And the list goes on, and on, and on.

The point is not that all of these these activities are good and have to be preserved, or that they are bad and have to be axed. The point is that a lot of university activity that at first blush looks like cancerous growth is a response to the need to compete for tuition paying students, to keep the feds and state legislatures happy, and to land that the next big grant. A good bit of THAT can in turn be traced back to the aforesaid budget cuts and rising expectations about the sort of support that institutions of higher education are expected to supply.

Wow, that ended up longer than I intended, but I’ll leave it for the 1 or 2 of you who care about this stuff.

What a colossally dishonest take. Being glad no American lives are being lost is not the same as disregarding Ukrainian lives. And it sure as hell doesn’t support the implication that withholding assistance to those struggling in the face of Russian imperialism is a superior outcome to the status quo that somehow respects Ukrainian lives to a greater degree.

(Personal opinion): It would be a better discussion by far to make a policy argument in good faith and be prepared to defend the likely outcome with logic and evidence, rather than bombarding the site with this drive-by libertarian agitprop.

That was a dig directed at those that shout “socialism “ at things that are clearly not socialism (like negotiating prescription drug prices), but you are of course correct. Thank you for correcting my rhetorical excess, internet friend!

Amazed at how the same people who defend a business model that depends on price inelasticities to extract the last dime for lifesaving meds somehow react with horror at the idea that the biggest negotiator of pharmaceutical prices in the U.S. has the gall to negotiate lower prices. The government isn’t ‘dictating’ anything. It is using its market power to drive the price down.

That is the vaunted free market at work. Anything else is just corporate socialism.

OP, we have received reports about the source of this post. Reviewing it, there is a good bit of libertarian and what could be considered pro-Russian propaganda elsewhere on the site, to the point it could be fairly considered an opinion blog pushing an agenda. The headline also deviates from the original source reporting. Other mods may ultimately take this down, but in the meantime please consider substituting the original article upon which this (opinion) piece was based:

https://archive.li/QmPGT

The Right: Political violence committed in the name of Islam is “terrorism” and all Muslims bear collective responsibility for stopping it.

Also the Right: Political violence committed in the name of white supremacy can only be attributed to mental illness. Don’t you dare hurt the feelings of white folks by suggesting their grievance-based political movements are to blame.

We have all heard the “never wrestle a pig” adage. This is the pig picking a fight. It is a deliberate attempt to muddy the waters and politicize the concept of justice. The proper response - both rhetorically and ethically, is to say “show me the evidence under penalty of perjury in a court of law and we will be the first to hold Biden, or anyone else, accountable.”

West is right in the quote above. Progressives have every right to advocate and agitate through the primaries and beyond. Arguments about electoral unity in the face of creeping fascism definitely have their place, but it is way too soon to be making them. (Edit: in other words, take a wider view and save that messaging for the general election).

Primary season is where the edges of a coalition have a chance to pull the party back from the center. West probably can’t win, but his voice and others like it are keeping the Overton window from drifting ever rightward. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to appreciate that he is out there.

Gentle reminder that this is the nice Lemmy instance.

This is a good article and the point is well made that there is a lot of troubling colonial history that the story told in the film does not include. The point has also been made that the movie is a biopic about one individual and that wasn’t the story it was trying to tell.

Feel free to explore those issues, as there are some inherently political concerns involved, but please do so without the ad hominem. If “you this” or “you that” starts creeping back into the discussion, we’ll be forced to lock the thread.