Last updated 2021-10-11 09:35:18

[mr_squiddle]

Well, I'll fix that. Sorta. Kinda.

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[mr_squiddle]

Seen on the Media Matters For Asterisk feed: "A Project 2025 contributor is pushing tariff policies that would reignite inflation."

Tariffs restore, perhaps incompletely, the price points that would apply to goods if they were made domestically. The extra money, however, goes not to domestic workers, who might spend it and thereby notionally encourage prices to rise, but to the federal government, which removes it from the money supply. That's DEflationary, not inflationary.

[mr_squiddle]

V jvyy org n pbbxvr gung ng 2:00 CZ gbqnl, Gehzc jvyy jvguqenj va snibe bs Inapr orpnhfr cnevgl, be cbffvoyl cnebql.

[mr_squiddle]

Maybe? Kinda?

Naljnl, gur vzcbegnag guvat vf gung Uneevf pna eha nf n trarevp Qrzbpeng, juvpu nyybjf crbcyr gb ibgr ba gurve snagnfvrf, fb fur unf gur punapr Ovqra pbhyqa'g unir. Fur'f fgvyy n arb-yvoreny naq vs fur jvaf jvyy pbagvahr Ovqra'f gjb-sebag nccebnpu gb Jbeyq Jne 3 ohg ng yrnfg jr'yy qvr va fbzrguvat bgure guna n Puevfgbsnfpvfg fgngr.

[mr_squiddle]

On Democratic UNderworld, someone says:
"Why was it so easy for Trump to break America?
"We were ripe for it.... Obama's eight years in the White House had made us Dems complacent."

Complacent..."contented to a fault with oneself or one's actions". Your actions consisted of voting for him, and when he threw you all under the bus for eight straight years you didn't notice, let alone care. That is indeed epic complacency, but it wasn't Obama who caused it, it was your own self-delusion, self-delusion that persists, undimmed, to this day.

[mr_squiddle]

Today's babble on BlueSky et al is "every talking point you hear from Fox News and OANN etc." is Russian propaganda, i.e. of Russian ORIGIN, which is weird because it's all the same traditional US hyperpatriot racist talking points they've been gurging since the 1870s. For some reason modern US liberals can't cope with the idea that the call is coming from inside the house; it MUST be of external origin.
Meanwhile, on DU they cite a poll that indicates 44% of respondents think K. Harris is extremist. These people can safely be assumed not to be left of the Democrats, so they must be GOP, meaning that center-rightism is now considered extreme leftism by 44% of the US population.
Whee!

[mr_squiddle]

I mean, the propaganda from the DNC started in 2016; how come they never argued for stripping Murdoch of his citizenship and deporting him as an undesirable alien? Unlike Tim Poop he was actually influential.

[mr_squiddle]

BlueSky Dept: "if you don't vote for the hippie punchers because they aren't perfect, they'll stop pandering to you and then you'll be sorry!!"

[mr_squiddle]

"I'm almost 40 and my whole life I've been hearing folks on the left accuse the Democrats of being no different than Republicans, and it's never been true."

Indeed! They've been Republicans on a time delay, pushing the actual GOP to the right and then occupying their emptied spot. E.G. Carter was a fiscal conservative whose Fed chief ended inflation by crashing the economy; Clinton ended welfare as we knew it, plus Glass-Steagal; Obama bailed out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, helped jail Occupy, left the black population worse off for his Presidency, lost countless Democrats their offices across the country, doubled the cost of Medicare by bailing out the insurance and medical industry, kept the wars going, appointed the self-made protege of Henry Kissinger to the State Department and turned Libya into an open-ended disaster...

"Democrats have always fallen short of what I wanted, but Republicans have always been an outright disaster. Imperfect is better than malevolent!"

Christopher Hitchens had a few things to say on Clinton in that department, and of course in the case of Obama we'd have been better off with McCain, who'd have done the exact same things as Obama except maybe he'd have gotten us out of Afghanistan, something left for Trump to do — maliciously, of course, to stick Biden with the rep of having lost, but nonetheless.

"Not to mention the fact that the Dems really have moved left to a significant degree in the last ten years!"

E.G. they shut down Bernie twice in that time.

"Remember the DSA? They won a string of victories after the 2016 election galvanized the left. Then all their best people became Democrats. The Dems are former DSA in lots of places."

Much like access-blogger Kos crashed the gates, they've disappeared into the game. AOC of course caves to Pelosi, but like Joe Lieberman, she's with us whenever it doesn't matter.

"Joe Biden has been the most liberal President of my lifetime, and Kamala Harris had a Senate voting record to the left of Bernie Sanders."

Forty-year-olds have never SEEN a liberal President. There hasn't been one since LBJ left office.

"The Dems aren't perfect but they're getting better and if you pretend that's not true, it'll stop happening."

The most liberalish thing Biden's done is emulate Clinton's feint at Microsoft. There were no results to that, and there've been no results to Biden's antitrust stuff either. (And was doing it at all just a concession to Bernie? Probably! But you'll never see him credited, which is just as well, because what credit can be given for kayfabe and kabuki?)

"In a democracy people who don't vote, don't count. If you abandon Democrats because they're not yet perfect enough for you, then all the Dems who tried to cater to you will get wiped out, and the survivors will see going left as a death sentence, and they'll stop doing it. They'll turn right again."

Perfection was NEVER on the menu. Even FDR did what he did in order to SAVE capitalism, which the GOPers of his day were too stupid to understand, hence the Business Plot (for which no one went to jail or was even formally accused of treason; by contrast, when a team of Nazi saboteurs landed on US soil and immediately turned themselves in as informants, FDR gave 'em the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern treatment). All that can be hoped for these days is a candidate who's at odds with the Establishment — not The Establishment, the PARTY Establishment. Which according to Atrios, at least, Harris is, which is good enough to provoke resignation on my part — until people like this come along and dispel my hard won and thin but happy cloud of self-delusion. There really is no point in voting, except that Trump's backing is organized apocalyptic Southern Baptist christofascists this time. You get World War 3 either way, but there's nothing more annoying than an ingrown believer.

Anyhoo, the Democratic Base didn't turn out for Kerry or HRC because neither made them feel good about themselves and the result was GWB getting elected for the first time and Trump squeaking in, and who did they blame? The Greens. I suppose a certain set of the left can be blamed, i.e. the idiots who thought of Trump as a protest vote (and who actually did abet his victory if they were in swing states) when they should have been trying to get the Greens qualified for matching funds. Fortunately, Harris makes them feel good about themselves.

[mr_squiddle]

Another Democrat, on the latest (as of this writing) school shooter:
"Did they have health insurance? Would it cover enough care to deal with a deeply disturbed family?"
The GOPers freak out when the left has any influence over national vocabulary; in a species that lives most of its existence in fantasy, words really do matter. So I really have to give the Dems credit for completely overwriting the concept of health care, which enhances human well-being, with health insurance, which enhances corporate wealth.

[mr_squiddle]

I see a Heritage Foundation bigwig has endorsed Harris — in order to draw attention towards Trump and away from his organization.

[mr_squiddle]

Apropos of nothing, it seems that the Texas winter blackouts were basically engineered for profit. The right-wing blogger I hereby codename Chris Cat-Bit blamed them on liberalism, specifically something something fossil fuels, but has now hidden those posts. He hides a lot of his posts after a while, and has admitted to doing so, even though the only reason to do it is, rather obviously, to avoid being called out on being wrong.
Chris, incidentally, bailed from his income-tax-free state because of climate change that isn't happening, and the insurance premium rises that are due, not to climate change as the companies involved seem to think, but corruption (for profit, i.e. capitalism); this comes to mind because I just read something to the effect that the income-tax-free state he left the first one for has just legalized the exact same type of corruption explicitly.

[mr_squiddle]

A Kossack: "I may be wrong but the stars seem to be aligning for Harris/Walz and they seem to have their ducks in a row as well."

At this time in 2020 the poll aggregates had Biden at +7.9.
At this time in 2016, Clinton +1.6.
Right now? Trump +0.3.

The only Democratic Party hope I can see is that — or perhaps if — the demographics of the polls really do skew right because of the bias of the elderly who answer them. On the flip side the kids skew left but don't vote.

Anyhoo they brought it on themselves but will never ever realize it.

Elsewhere, they rag on Jill Stein again. If protesting Democrats had voted for Stein instead of Trump in 2016 HRC would have won. They all deserve to lose.

Grace is conferred freely upon the undeserving.

[mr_squiddle]

Well, she made them feel good about themselves until she defined herself...as Biden.

[mr_squiddle]

Reproduction rates are falling in developed countries. Why? It's not because sensible people look at a dark future and say No; the kind of people who do that bred themselves out of the genome long ago. Nature throws babies at the hostile future in the hopes that some will survive: most of those baby turtles swimming out to sea will be eaten or otherwise lost to hostile conditions; the Bachs had 20 children and only half survived their parents; the number of Bach descendants alive today is estimated as between zero and eight. But when conditions become so good that the babies become their own competition, Nature says, nah. (Cf the famous study that built the ideal environment for rats.)

[mr_squiddle]

So here's a line from noted conservative Chris Catbit: "We owe Ukraine nothing."
Impressive, no? The US spent upwards of 20 years engineering a conflict that it expected to win easily through economic sanctions, failed, and now hangs the whole thing on its puppet.
Does CC think himself a Christian?
He does.

[mr_squiddle]

V rkcrpg Gehzc jvyy qrpyner znegvny ynj ba 2 Ncevy. Guvf vf jung ur zrnaf naq unf zrnag ol Yvorengvba Qnl. Ubcvat gb unir zl rkcrpgngvbaf fhoiregrq!

But the birth rates will go up per Nature's new orders.