It's amazing how Schumer is somehow to blame for the seven Senate Democrats and one Independent who voted with Republicans for the continuing resolution, led by John Fetterman from the very beginning.
It's amazing how Schumer is somehow to blame for the seven Senate Democrats and one Independent who voted with Republicans for the continuing resolution, led by John Fetterman from the very beginning.
But this simply ignores everything Trump has flooded the zone with since January 27. That's a backward-looking poll.
Trump's has been a non-stop roll out of actions designed to alienate everyone in every arena.
Republicans are angry, too.
Has Ed been living under a rock?
Ed Kilgore here in "Today’s Angry Democrats Are Not Tomorrow’s Tea Party of the Left":
... it’s not accurate to say that the current wave of anger is ideological or the product of an aroused Left. As Politico notes, Democrats unhappy with their party are not at all united in any ideological diagnosis or prescription:
Despite the restive energy in the party’s progressive wing, the Democratic discontent does not seem to be centered around a desire to pull the party to the left or the right. Democrats cannot seem to agree on which direction the party should move in — recent Gallup polling found that 45 percent wanted the party to become more moderate, while 29 percent felt it should become more liberal, and 22 percent wanted it to stay the same.
I think it's way too early to say this is or is not like the Tea Party period. It was 21 months from Santelli's Rant to Election 2010, so it's still very early innings, the beginning of the game. We're not even two months in.
The energy I've seen in the interim directed against office holders does resemble the Tea Party movement in some ways, which was a maelstrom of angst for its time, sucking rich and poor and everyone in between into its vortex. Its energy reverberated long after into the November 2010 election and later into the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The violence against Tesla does not resemble the Tea Party. But it is energy. And it is ideological. Elon Musk is a traitor to the green energy movement, making the prospect of climate doom more probable to them. The left is most definitely aroused.
I can still remember my congressman warning me that unless he voted for TARP in September 2008 my credit card might stop working. Politicians like him then weren't focused on ordinary people and their views, same as today at Republican town halls where one tone-deaf politician after another is greeted with derision by people upset about losing their government jobs and in fear of losing benefits they've earned.
The Tesla protesters think climate doom is near, just as the craziest factions of the Tea Party movement were sure another Great Depression was just around the corner.
No, the politicians in 2008 were focused on the big money failures of investment banking like Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, which were outside the FDIC system, not on the people whose traditional banks and jobs were in actual peril.
Civilian employment fell by 3.5 million just from December 2008 to March 2009. 24 banks failed during this period alone, after 22 failures already in 2008 up to that point.
And what the politicians did subsequently fixed nothing.
461 more FDIC banks went on to fail by the end of 2014. Civilian employment crashed by 10.05 million from July 2008 to January 2010, and did not recover its July 2007 level until October of 2014. Between 2006 and 2014 there were approximately 9.3 million real estate foreclosure filings or the equivalent.
Millions were badly hurt. Many never recovered. They and their children voted for Trump in 2016.
People getting hurt is the standard of comparison in these things.
Putting 600,000 government workers out of a job all of a sudden in 2025 is really bad, stupid, and downright mean, but not on the same level as the Great Financial Crisis. But start missing Social Security checks or disappearing your neighbor in the middle of the night because something was wrong on his immigration paperwork and things might get spicy. A shooting war with Canadians or Mexicans, or Panamanians or Danes, would be next level.
American tourists or workers or residents abroad incarcerated in a tit-for-tat with the Trump administration might start to focus even more minds.
Who knows what's next?
Like I said, early innings, the energy is building, but Kilgore isn't here.
Johnson added conservative sweeteners to the CR, which isn’t “clean” (i.e., a simple extension of current funding levels for everything) as advertised, but instead adds immediate money for defense and mass deportation, and cuts domestic spending by $13 billion. House Democrats already inclined to vote “no” on the CR because it contains no language forcing the executive branch to actually spend the money appropriated (which would restrict the power of DOGE or OMB to unilaterally “freeze” spending, cancel grants or contracts, or fire personnel) now have even less motivation to keep the government open. ...
To kill the CR, Democrats would have to launch a filibuster, and in that
circumstance it would be much easier for Republicans to blame the
Donkey Party for shutting down the federal government, despite the clear
intention of the Trump administration to keep gutting the government if
it remains open. If just seven Senate Democrats choose to join
Republicans (or all but Rand Paul, who is demanding deeper cuts; he’s
effectively matched with Democrat John Fetterman, who’s vowed to vote to avoid a shutdown), the CR will pass.
If Senate Democrats are put to the challenge and subsequently cave, they will have more than likely forfeited any real Democratic leverage for the remainder of 2025 beyond stirring up public unhappiness with Trump 2.0. Appropriations aside, most of Trump’s legislative agenda will be enacted via a gigantic budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered. So the decision not to deploy a filibuster on the one crucial occasion it is available will represent an admission of powerlessness that won’t make rank-and-file Democrats happy. ...
More.
Welcome to the party, pal.
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| yippee-ki-yay mofo |
President Donald Trump says he’ll ‘demand that interest rates drop immediately’
Does this dope pay attention? Oh, that's right, he doesn't pay anyone.
Anyway, the Fed cut rates by a full point since the September meeting, and rates on bonds and notes soared anyway.
The Fed can't demand anything, but President Goofy Nuts pretends it can, and he can.
But who is running the show right now?
And why is no one . . . alarmed?
The worry is not that Biden will say something overly candid, or say something he didn’t mean to say, but that he will communicate through his appearance that he is not really there. ...
Biden instead was cocooned within mounting layers of bureaucracy, spoken for more than he was speaking or spoken to. ...
the traveling protective pool — the rotating group of reporters, run by the White House Correspondents’ Association ...
In April . . . My
heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. I tried to
make eye contact, but it was like his eyes, though open, were not on.
His face had a waxy quality.
-- Olivia Nuzzi, "The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden", New York, July 4, 2024
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/conspiracy-of-silence-to-protect-joe-biden.html
https://archive.ph/z0ULo#selection-1637.80-1637.190
Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change
(as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented
by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment
of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from
her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and
sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to
aggressive policing tactics.
Some NDAs include carve-ins allowing you to talk to a therapist or close
friends; others include carve-outs for specific friends with loose
lips. The terms can expire at the end of a project or on a specific
date. David Bowie’s divorce NDA ended after ten years, at which point
his ex-wife, Angela, went on TV and said she was now free to let the
world know she had once walked in on Bowie in bed with Mick Jagger.
More.
The incendiary claims, neatly timed with the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones' first gig, have been made by Christopher Andersen, author of Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger.
Speaking
with friends and family of the seemingly ageless rockers, at least four
of the showmen's glamourous set have recalled stories of the men's
antics. The two had a deep respect for each other, Mike (as Bowie knew
Mick) admiring Bowie's creativity, and Bowie admiring Jagger's
"financial genius" as the frontman of the Rolling Stones, writes
Andersen. ...
The men frequently engaged in threesomes, but had a deeper emotional bond too, said Ava Cherry, a backing singer. She recalls some of their steamier moments together: "Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex."
Bebe Buell, a Playboy model who had daughter Liv Tyler with Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, recalls being pursued by Jagger, and went on to sleep with both men. She too claims that bedroom activity was wild and far from monogamous. "I used to get some pretty strange phone calls from Mick and David at three in the morning," she told Andersen, "inviting me to join them in bed with four gorgeous black women ... or four gorgeous black men."
But it was the moment that Bowie's wife Angie caught the two men in bed together that seems to cement the rumours. The blonde, with whom the singer had a son in 1970, Zowie Bowie (now Duncan Jones), says she one day found the men curled up in bed together, asleep. She said she "felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been [having sex]. It was so obvious, in fact, that I never even considered the possibility that they hadn’t been".
The rest is here.
Donald Trump has never been popular. He’s still not popular. His unfavorability rating is just as high today as it was heading into Election Day 2020. This group of disengaged voters doesn’t like Donald Trump, and never did. What’s changed, to my mind, is that Joe Biden went from being a broadly appealing person — they didn’t necessarily love him, they didn’t necessarily even like him, but he was acceptable — to someone who many voters do not find acceptable anymore.
More.
The group ... believes they’ve found persuasive evidence that results in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania may have been manipulated or hacked. ... the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.
Here.
Hillary lost because blacks didn't turn out in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia. She underperformed Obama 2008 in 39 states.
The Russians didn't put the stink on her campaign.
She did that all by herself.
Assiduously avoided here in "The Cult of Adam Tooze":
Another model Tooze said he looks to in his role as public intellectual is that of his maternal grandparents. “Leading synthesizers of global data on childhood nutrition,” Peggy and Arthur Wynn published research on poverty and family policy and together wrote a pseudonymous book attacking Tory business connections called England’s Money Lords. (Arthur was also, for a time, a Soviet-spy recruiter at Oxford.) They continued their work into their 90s. Arthur died over his word processor one night after Peggy had gone to bed; he was making a list of things to do.