McBoo-lie

Trump 2.0 has been marked by an increasingly wide and obvious gulf between media elites and the general American public, which the elites themselves seem oddly confused about.

This week’s main story is about how more and more white nationalists, antisemites, and Nazi sympathizers seem to be integrating into the Republican Party, how some of them are currently running for office, and how old you can be for JD Vance to consider you “a very young boy.”

"Mamdani photographed sharing a kiss with someone who isn't his wife" -- NY Post tomorrow

My heart is heavy. Walter Koenig, our Ensign Pavel Chekov, passed away early today. Walter and I met on the bridge of the Enterprise in the 1960s, and we stayed friends for nearly six decades. When Brad and I married in 2008, Walter stood beside us as our best man.

How racist and desperate do you have to be to look at this and say, “Got ‘em!”?

Politico wrote up Zohran playing basketball with the uncovering-a-big-scandal tone the same day the NYTimes wrote up "credible allegation that The President of the United States raped a woman" as a political strategy story. Broken media in a nutshell

Lina Khan on Mamdani: "One thing we saw the mayor be very attentive to is all sorts of daily nickel and diming -- taking on junk fees, subscription traps. Those can seem very micro and targeted, but in the aggregate I see those as really designed to take on unfair methods of competition."

As a Buffy fan who grew up trick-or-treating in Orange County, I found this essay almost unbelievably delightful.

The other thing about this is that in addition to the basic dishonesty, Jolene Riessen et al will always say shit like "I don't see Democrats doing me any favors" and then you'll look back and see stuff like "Joe Biden personally authorized the Free Money For Corn Farmers Initiative in 2022"

Meanwhile, one of the most harmful policy movements in America right now is a property tax revolt that is shifting us away from our most economically efficient tax, all so property owners can have a little more in their pockets next month.

Ethics aside, this take could use some contact with reality. Biden's expanded CTC didn't motivate recipients to vote to maintain it. Trump offered $5000 checks and it hurt him in the polls. The empirical claim that welfare creates single issue voters just doesn't hold up.

I'm going to try to do this cleanly. Today's right wing governments are networked to each other. Those networks are well-documented. You can read about them in books. Following the elections in one node of that network is good practice for understanding the U.S. node.

“Pickup basketball games” is surely the “wears a tan suit” of the Mamdani admin.

Kind of funny, in an Ancient Greek Hell kind of way, that this guy handed Trump the presidency in 2016, and as a reward Trump is kicking him in the teeth forever. www.nbcnews.com/politics/jus...

Yissss

one of the really useful takeaways from fukuyama's political order books is a clear conceptual understanding of what corruption *is* in its fundamental nature. and the answer... is patronage networks organized on personal connections! corruption is *inherent* in these discretionary systems!

looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation

Putting Chekov in perspective, imagine if Star Trek: Enterprise, which premiered right after 9/11, had introduced a Muslim officer in its second season. Typical with Trek of this era, Enterprise would address 9/11 only through metaphor.

I sure hope so

Well this is eleventy-million kinds of Fucked Up. @latimes.com (who once contracted with me as a freelance reviewer and whom I struggled to get paid by) asserts that *merely reading its website* constitutes a permanent waiver of your right to sue it under *any circumstances*.

I think the lesson from Lula is not never talk about the opposition; it's articulate a positive vision that's basically, We Can Just Do Things. That's why Mamdani-ism is so popular - voters have an intrinsic sense that their electeds have agency they're not using

I don't know that there is a definitive line to cross that makes you say, "I live in a police state now" but when masked gunmen can routinely brutalize the public, citizen or immigrant alike, with impunity, you have reached that point.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers claims mass deportation pays for itself because illegal immigrants impose such huge fiscal costs. What are these costs? It doesn't say, so I figured out what CEA did to invent them... www.cato.org/blog/white-h...

Eric Lipton. below, has led an effort over the past two years to document the destruction of environmental protections under Trump II. It has gone for the most part unnoticed compared to, well, many other things, probably because it’s happening far from the Oval Office. But it’s very important.

Closely related to my observation that whenever a commercial tries to show AI being useful in an everyday end-user way, they end up showing how you can use it to do something like “find a canvas tote bag.”