Joe Money, Joe Problems: the November 2021 U.S. Politics Thread

https://i.imgur.com/qmc2Ipr.jpg

dark lol

but also one wishes there were a way to bottle and redistribute this attitude - giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt, permitting the defendant to be seen as a human deserving of mercy and consideration - and apply it to cases where the defendant is actually innocent and/or deserves it

like if any one of the millions of unjustly incarcerated people of color had gotten a trial with, like, one tenth this much slack from the court? that would be a good start

Local news coming for Lauren Boebert:

#HeyNext Commentary: We should admit we hold Republican Congresswoman @LaurenBoebert to a different standard than every other elected official in Colorado. pic.twitter.com/jxX4xna0Ar

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) November 18, 2021

denver is not local to boebert's district

Kyle Rittenhouse, who could face a lifelong prison sentence if he’s found guilty of homicide after fatally shooting two people during last summer’s protests, might have a job offer from a Republican in Congress if he’s acquitted.

Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said his office may ask Rittenhouse, 18, to consider working on Capitol Hill.

“Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a pretty good congressional intern,” Gaetz said during a Wednesday night appearance on Newsmax. “We may reach out to him and see if he’d be interested in helping the country in additional ways.”

it's trolling, of course, but if he walks, i'm sure rittenhouse will fail massively upward. the judge, as well, probably is destined for some paid tv appearances and maybe a book deal

J.D. Vance, who’s running for Senate in Ohio, called Rittenhouse’s trial a “farce” this week. Last year, Florida state Rep. Anthony Sabatini tweeted that Rittenhouse should run for Congress, prompting some to call for the lawmaker’s resignation. And former president Donald Trump weighed in on the case soon after the shooting, saying Rittenhouse “probably would have been killed” had he not fired his weapon.

...Stinchfield, the Newsmax host, told Gaetz he might face competition in trying to hire Rittenhouse.

“I want him here at Newsmax,” the host said. “Maybe he can be a Stinchfield intern, too. He’ll have all kinds of job offers.”

Rittenhouse at absolute minimum is gonna get paraded out at GOP rallies and conventions for years

Lauren Boebert

Banana fana boebert

the kid is obviously a scumbag but he doesn't deserve to be sex trafficked by Matt Gaetz

sex traffic
isn't it Gaetz
luring right wing dollies
to a life of dates

899 lbs of fentanyl and 15,631 lbs of methamphetamine were seized at the southern border in October alone.

That much fentanyl is the equivalent of 204 MILLION lethal doses.

We need border security!

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) November 18, 2021

is this not an acceleration of orwellian practice?

George Zimmerman, help me remember. he was defended all around by conservatives, for sure. was he elevated to an icon, though, like a good person who did the right thing and should probably run for elected office?

zimmerman certainly had gop idiots working overtime to defend him (https://prospect.org/power/conservative-media-eating-zimmerman-trial/). i'm not saying that didn't happen.

what i'm saying is that now (and also with the person who was shot at the 1/6 coup attempt) it's not enough to defend them, they're actually getting elevated into public figures, people who should maybe run for elected office.

i may be a frog slowly boiling but i still notice that things are getting worse. this is fucked up. rittenhouse, who cares - he'll get acquitted, he'll be on tv and he'll get a gofundme to make him rich. hopefully we'll go away. but my point is beyond rittenhouse. there will be another one, and another. it's become almost a litmus test for the GOP and conservatives - sure, you may say you're conservative, but have you actually ruined anyone's life yet? have you hurt anyone, physically or mentally? maybe this will become a debate question in future GOP primaries, especially local ones - how many libs have you fucked up

i agree karl.

thinking about this piece again https://newrepublic.com/article/158977/madison-cawthorn-future-republican-party

It’s a further endorsement of vigilante and extra legal violence to intimidate the rest of us from activism or protesting, etc.

how do we fight this? Not asking from a defeatist standpoint, but legitimately from a "wanting to fight this" standpoint. if we know the types of politicians we need, with teeth, seem to get shoved out by the establishment picks, if Dem politicians seem reliant on rhetoric alone to solve violence, if we know the midterms are on tenuous grounds, and we know this country is armed to the teeth and terrifying...

how do we get the media to quit unwittingly being a partner to assholes who paint violence committed by liberals as carnage, even if it is truly self-defense, and all murders by conservatives treated as self-defense?

cos I'm basically feeling a lot of despair over the next few years and want a way out before I yeet myself off the planet.

radicalize people by showing them this post imo

“pay chasers” pic.twitter.com/qpszTG6Wia

— Sir Larry Olive-Tree (@larryolivetree) November 17, 2021

i'm a pay chaser

i'm a toker and a midnight toker

You mean, people who inconveniently want to live indoors and eat food? The nerve. How dare they.

welp I just shared that, "pay chasers" jfc.

it is nice to see the few asshole friends I had that a decade were saying "burger flippers don't deserve $15/hr" came around to acknowledge their assholishness when their own lives went belly up

what is this business, I'm going to apply six times under false names and keep driving up the wage demands

I assume the media isn't doing that unwittingly. Democrats are the Washington Generals and everyone involved knows it - the DNC, the media, the donor class - all of them. What really pisses them off about AOC or Sanders is that they are not supposed to actually try and win. That is not what anyone who has invested in the show wants to happen, and while they won't actually come out and say that everything they do screams it... the weird anomie of most elected Democrats, the media clinging like limpets to racist/alt-right framing of events, the DNC actively sabotaging progressive Democrats in primaries. Not sure what you can do about it, the only way to break through is a massive populist movement, but that energy now seems to belong to Donald Trump.

(xpost to Neanderthal)

Neanderthal: keep being awesome, play the ukulele or whatever, continue to be hooked on a feelin

lead by kind example

Personally I am skeptical about the efficacy of counterprotest (though I have def done both, that is, protesting and counterprotesting)

Sometimes screaming directly in the faces of these mousefuckers is exactly what they want, and seems to provide them with attention and oxygen. "Oh, seems like I touched a nerve!" "Oh, guess we're OVER THE TARGET."

Denying them attention / oxygen has also often felt like a mistake, because these algal blooms of bullshit have also thrived when good people did nothing.

How to avoid that trap? Maybe do neither - register your disgust about shit that is disgusting, of course. But also simultaneously show a better path: empathy and kindess aren't incompatible with joy. I've known many activists who seemed like they could not ever feel or show joy. Because there's always the nagging thought WHAT ABOUT THE TREES or WHAT ABOUT EAST TIMOR or WHAT ABOUT THE MELTING ICE or - of course - WHAT ABOUT THE CONSTANT STATE-SANCTIONED MURDER OF BLACK PEOPLE.

Kinda want to tentatively suggest that life has to have joy in it, even for those who are righteously (and justifiably) outraged

just my oped, thxbye

but that energy now seems to belong to Donald Trump.

but in a sadly circular way, maybe it only "seems" that way because of the media. we all know the obvious points about how the traditional media (washpost,npr,cnn) are highly invested in the horserace, particularly after the trump years. and the far right media (newsmax,carlson) has an obvious interest in pushing the message that most people are deeply conservative and angry at the socialist biden regime.

and yet, 65-70% of americans oppose the TX abortion law. about 80% of americans over the age of 12 have gotten at least one vaccine dose. 70% don't think the election was stolen (god, that one is terrifying, still). 70-75% believe the federal government should be regulating greenhouse gases.

the vast majority of americans are not crazy trumpers. "only" 30-35% are, maybe? but since they're united in their dedication to evangelical fascism and they have a well-established propaganda distribution network, their energy will always seem to be much larger and broader than it actually is.

Also, they've done a pretty good job of gaming the system for the last 40 years to insert themselves in too many actual positions of power and influence, nationally and locally.

heather up there, in addition to being a coffee shop owner, is also a gamer, cosplayer, and true crime podcaster!

the traditional media (washpost,npr,cnn) are highly invested in the horserace

Can we add that the traditional media - especially washpost and npr - get constantly accused of being knee-jerk leftist liberal commie pinko propaganda?

Some proportion of their criticism of Democrats has (perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not) been there in the vain hope of preemptively defending against the charge of liberal bias. Not that it works, mind you - they are still labeled Marxist by the right. But when they do this in hopes of catching a little bit of a breather from the unhinged right, they will inevitably catch hell from the left, and there really is no way to win.

It's like War Games, the only successful strategy is not to play

what are we discussing

the Democrats' bad brand

I mean, we're essentially just dancing around a lot of Chomskyan points about the media in the US. Which is cool, actually! I love dancing around Chomsky.

‘democratization’ of quantitative easing seems to be the only thing that’s even theoretically possible in this particular moment, but uh it ain’t gonna happen

these people are so miserable

Big Bird & Big Gov. Mandates?
NO 👏🏼 THANK 👏🏼 YOU 👏🏼 pic.twitter.com/JK3efVPQnK

— CPAC 2022 (@CPAC) November 18, 2021

I hope CPAC gets sued for using those images commercially w/o permission.

How did Bert and Ernie get dragged into this?

What's sad is that the whole Sesame Street gang was really looking forward to this roadtrip

god, conservative shorthand has become just completely incomprehensible to the outsider. i miss the days of stable and functional signifiers, like stink lines coming off of dirty hippies.

I couldn't resist curiosity anymore so I took a ride past the Kenosha county courthouse this morning. Pretty quiet at 10AM with some rubberneckers for sure, a few demonstrators in different groups, but mostly just a lot of news media setting up. There was a fistfight there yesterday, two people arrested was what I heard. Saw what looked like a mini-caravan gathered at a lakeside park, 4 blacked-out SUVs and trucks with large American flags flying.

The main difference between earlier this week and today is that the temperature dropped to like 35 and the wind is blowing, snow forecast for tonight, so hopefully less conducive for whatever chuds have come into town for this to roam around being brash assholes all day.

Democrats are the Washington Generals and everyone involved knows it

Democrats still won 3 of the last 4 presidential elections, and they are 4 out of 4 in popular vote. The party has never had that many progressive elected officials in years. The party is embracing more Keynesian policies instead of neoliberal ones. I feel like there's a disconnect between what I see online and the results. Except for the judiciary, there's to be hopeful.

I assume the Bert & Ernie thing is just the old rumors swirling around their cohabitation, but Big Bird is the new enemy because he was voluntarily vaccinated for a dangerous viral disease... on television

jesus fucking christ:

On Thursday they dusted off the “red scare” playbook to portray Joe Biden’s choice to run one of the agencies that oversees the banking industry as a dangerous communist.

Saule Omarova, 55, was nominated in September to be America’s next comptroller of the currency. If confirmed, she would be the first woman and person of colour in the role in its 158-year-history.

Omarova was born in Kazakhstan when it was part of the Soviet Union and moved to the US in 1991. For John Kennedy of Louisiana, a member of the Senate banking committee, this was like a red rag to a bull.

Questioning whether Omarova was still a member of communist youth organisations, Kennedy said: “I don’t mean any disrespect: I don’t know whether to call you professor or comrade.”

The remark prompted gasps in the hearing room on Capitol Hill...

I'll bet he looked around with a big shit-eating grin after that quip

slapped his knee!

DeSantis signing bills and doing a press conference at the Brandon Hotel, this really is the GOP's new political identity huh

Shit how did I manage to delete my post immediately after writing it. This app takes some getting used to.

What really pisses them off about AOC or Sanders is that they are not supposed to actually try and win.

I’m on the same page ideologically but if we take the campaign of India Walton in Buffalo as a case study, where did the playing to win narrative go off the rails?

Regarding the coverage in the corporate media, it feels like the bias against leftists is based as much on ideological opposition as it is based on overcompensating for right wing accusations of ‘media bias’. For much of 2019 the coverage of Bernie I saw from the corporate media was unequivocally negative, significantly worse than coverage of Trump.

the India Walton thing was strange, am I right in that the huge write in campaign for Byron Brown was largely driven by Republicans?

i miss the days of stable and functional signifiers, like stink lines coming off of dirty hippies.

yes, let's bring back "Calvin peeing on H.R. 237" decals

https://www.theonion.com/peeing-calvin-decals-now-recognized-as-vital-channel-of-1819565534

Rittenhouse jury still deliberating? idk its starting to feel like something might actually stick. may be one of those "we don't think he's guilty of the top charge but he definitely did something wrong" things

did they ever definitively figure out what started this altercation in the first place? like the accounts I'm hearing is that Rosenbaum just started running towards him for no reason but clearly there's more to it than that

It means someone doesn't agree, but remember the stubborn jurors who have often sunk cases before.

I'm picturing 11 people in a room and Juror #8 from 12 Angry Men going "these people, ya know, they come at you, what are ya gonna do?"