Weird that the Dems have become the patriotic party and the Repubs are ready to hand over the country to Putin. Never thought I’d see some shit like that.
But I’m on board for the Dems being pointed the right direction for once.
Politics
Khanvincing
Billionaire Donors Have It Out for This Legal Prodigy, but President Harris Will Need Her.
If Harris wins and fires Khan, that will be a huge unforced error. I’m glad that seems to be off the table now. Obviously, it’s great that billionaires hate Lina; it means she is doing her job correctly. She’s the best thing that has happened to the FTC in ages.
I’m biased as I’m a Khan OG; I’ve been reading her papers and work since she was still in law school. And she’s a good example that wisdom has little do to do with age. She’s only 35 now, but became FTC chair when she was 32. And she was incredibly smart and wise already when I started reading her when she was 23.
Just shows how busted that whole discourse is, really (to veer completely off-topic).
Raving
Trump is losing his audience. Gibberish is boring.
No one likes to listen to a senile old man rant and ramble, no matter what party he is a part of. It’s not entertaining; it’s just sad.
Standard Fare
It’s funny that the GOP/MAGATs are calling Harris’s policy proposals far-left. Even for the US, they are mild center right and would’ve been Republican policies in the 1980s. In Western Europe, they’d be quite far to the right, but not quite far right.
She’s a standard-issue Democrat. Shocking.
Patriotism Transition
This is really revealing as to the so-called vibe shift of the last few months:
Left Behind
This is from a conservative perspective I do not share, but I still agree with the overall take. Secularism is dominant now. Religion has been largely vanquished. The left as much as the right has reacted poorly to this, attempting to replace old-fashioned Protestantism with its even-more-inferior substitute, wokism. Except it’s not been done with any sort of awareness or forethought, as the vast majority of the left doesn’t understand that there is a religion-shaped hole in their lives they are attempting to fill.
Religious urges seem to be nearly universal in the human soul1. Attempting to eliminate them only makes those compulsions emerge in a more dangerous, less controlled form elsewhere. This is also true on the right, where we see worship of a two-bit fraud like Donald Trump and other pathologies.
Clubgoing
It’s odd that conservatism is becoming the divorced dads/incel club and liberalism is becoming the angry cat ladies/blue-haired feminists club.
That cannot be healthy for the ol’ republic.
Non-friends With Low Standards
Trump is held to a much lower standard than Harris1. That has been true of every election Trump has participated in. We have a terrible press corps, really. It’s not wholly their fault, but a lot of this divergence is in fact on them.
NIMBY Blowback
From what I can tell, most of the hate directed toward Kamala Harris over “price controls1” is actually because she wants to streamline permitting and smack down NIMBYs, thus making housing easier to build.
The NIMBYs are doing all they can to fabricate whatever petty calumnies they can to make sure this doesn’t happen. For many, their entire politics is based on the price of their house and nothing else. That’s a lot of what we’re seeing now.
Reading
I hate Matt Yglesias, but he’s right — Harris was obviously and clearly talking about antitrust enforcement, not price controls. Motherfuckers cannot read.
Combat
It’s going to be interesting watching the MAGA clowns argue in November or January why their very obvious coup is not a coup. We don’t need barely-literate doofs attempting to hijack high office while we’ve got at least one and maybe two major wars ahead of us.
And so many other problems that won’t be solved by putting a nearly 80-year-old doddering paranoid case in charge of them. And yes, the senility issue is true of Trump or Biden.
Port
The harsh reality is that 99% of Americans don’t give a crap what’s happening in Gaza or Israel and it won’t have any effect on the election one way or another. Being a large geographically-isolated country makes the US very inward-facing.
Hardly anyone cares that Kamala supports Israel or doesn’t support Israel. I certainly don’t and I know more than most voters.
Trusted
Harris to Call For ‘Price Gouging’ Ban on Food and Groceries.
This is just a poorly-worded attempt at anti-trust action, which is great. We need a lot more of that. These are not “price controls” in any traditional (or harmful) sense.
Harris, in her speech, will specifically single out the highly consolidated meat industry, deeming its processing middlemen “particularly egregious” price fixers with a history of being found to have illegally controlled prices.
She also plans to direct her administration to carefully scrutinize proposed mergers between large food companies with an emphasis on considering whether they will result in higher grocery prices for consumers
That’s exactly what the FTC and DOJ should be doing a whole lot more of. We need to get American trust enforcement back on track as illegal consolidation and related price fixing is causing unnecessarily high inflation. I support what she’s doing 100%, but not the speechwriter who put those words in her mouth. This statement also makes it more likely she’ll keep Lina Khan in place at the FTC, who is the best chair that org has had since the 1950s.
Some Big News
The Swiftboating of Walz is Sick, Inacurate, and Will Fail.
Agreed. So the big scandalous news is that Walz retired after serving 24 years in the Guard? The Republicans have to do better if they want to have any hope (besides another coup).
His unit was fully staffed and had adequate leadership without him. In fact, had the unit not had appropriate staffing, they could have denied his retirement and ordered a “stop loss,” which happened to thousands of military members in jobs that needed people. Stop loss was used regularly and would have been enacted if the situation deemed it.
Exactly. I was at risk for stop loss when I got out because my unit was going to be sent to Kosovo. Like Walz, I’d already declined to re-enlist before I knew this deployment was likely to occur. Luckily, I did not get stop-lossed but it was a real possibility.
The article I linked to is slightly inaccurate, though. There is no “Chief Master Sgt.” in the Army National Guard (or regular Army). That’s an Air Force rank. It’s Command Sergeant Major. Walz held that rank for a few years, but never completed the coursework to keep it upon retirement. Happens all the time, especially in the Guard. It’s probably more appropirate to say he is a “retired Master Sergeant” or whatever it says on his DD-214 but really it’s irrelevant. Walz served as a CSM and then retired. End of story.
Nothing really to see here.
Kampaign
Kamala is a much better candidate than I thought she’d be, and actually has energy for campaigning and fundraising. This’ll be a good natural experiment to see how much that matters1, especially if the economy continues to hum along about the same as it is now.
I am glad that I was wrong about her capabilities and prospects.