Yeah, I applaud his cojones but this headline is just the title of a single video game forum post with a screenshot of a Facebook post. Searching around, I don’t see any indication that his is the deciding vote or anything.

Gotta focus on the truly hateful symbols, like rainbows, “everyone is welcome” signs, and abstract nouns.

Arguably the most effective Speaker in history, and got an incredible amount of maximally progressive legislation through the House on the thinnest of margins again and again and again. There’s a reason Republicans hated (and feared) her so much.

This reminds me of when the Ukraine blackmail story first broke. Even before the impeachment push, it seemed like the story was far more riveting – entirely because of the whistleblower angle. I remember thinking at the time that if all the transcripts being shown on the news with the reactions and dramatic highlighter effects had instead been a public statement by Trump that “yeah, we’re withholding weapons until Zelensky gives us dirt on Biden,” the entire thing would have blown over in a week. Maybe this could be similar?

(You know what else has the cachet of secrecy and coverup? The Epstein files.)

So sick of these kinds of posts. At this point it should be obvious that the blatant hypocrisy isn’t stupid or some clever “gotcha,” it’s the entire point. It’s a demonstration of impunity and contempt for fairness and logical consistency.

I’m wary of the hype over this gambit because it’s been tried several times in the recent past and has always ended with a few key legislators caving and returning to the capitol for no real concessions. Hopefully they realize that people are not in the mood for token resistance (and Abbott’s threats against them will steel their spines).

They should try to be funny/creative/clever, for one thing, and either using an existing format or creating a new one. This is literally just pictures and direct quotes from the Founders. Like the sidebar here says, “Random pictures do not qualify as memes.”

This is not a meme.

It’s literally the name of the bill.

This isn’t even Facebook-meme tier, it’s email-forward-from-90s-AOL-account tier. C’mon.

27%

White House publishes a table of steep percentage fees charged on imports from various countries that make little sense, claiming it’s based on a rigorous and complex system of economic calculations

Somebody notices the percentages for all these countries are just the trade deficit divided by imports, which is a formula as simple as it is arbitrary

White House lackey says “Nuh uh, we have a totally complex formula for this” and publishes an imposing equation full of Greek symbols and letters

Turns out the Greek symbols refer to arbitrary values set by the White House that cancel each other out, and the letters just represent… the trade deficit divided by imports.

tl;dr: They used a dead-simple, arbitrary formula for their economy-wrecking trade war and tried using fancy-looking math to cover it up

Direct from USTR.gov:

To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.

Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25. The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

Potential legal problems for Goldberg if he continues eavesdropping after realizing the chat is real.

Tyranny.biz

I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past – his unemployment, his wife’s involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay – would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).

I like Reich, but this is dumb. They never railed about bureaucrats “destroying government,” they railed about them destroying healthcare, education, the economy, etc. – and they didn’t even give a shit about those things, they were just cynical covers to defend privatization of those areas. Destroying “Shrinking” government has been their stated goal since at least Grover Norquist, and they love that it’s being done now (even in a way that actually does destroy healthcare, education, and the economy).

Scott is a bag of shit, but the nominee for SoS is Florida’s other senator Marco Rubio (who is also a bag of shit).

Democratic presidents since LBJ:

• Jimmy Carter
• Bill Clinton
• Barack Obama

Which ones had a bigger record of progressive economic accomplishments than Biden? Closest one is Obama, but his Recovery Act was less than half the size of Biden’s Rescue/Infra/IRA/CHIPS packages. Biden was also more strongly pro-union and pro-regulation, and accomplished his many wins in half the time and with far narrower majorities in both houses.

This would be a compelling argument if the Biden administration hadn’t been the most economically progressive since LBJ.