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

like, at my hoity-toity well-managed liquor stores you have to WORK to find something over 50 bux that's not champagne

https://i.imgur.com/naDoiLZ.gif

also the average american goes to, what, 1-2 concerts per year?

hence why I let my bro pick the wine:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRqCfglX0AEadL8.jpg

this is quite good https://www.gawker.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-is-american

Josh, do you know if there's an article somewhere with these quotes?

I don't know, tbh. He posted in on Facebook, but he's been reporting on it for the WaPo. Mark Guarino. Maybe it's made its way into an article?

The phrase ‘cold civil war’ was coined by me and the concept was discussed in 2010, when it was just GOP attrition and resistance to Obama.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FEpjGinXMAUSPqb.jpg

Christ, what an asshole.

Josh, thanks. I found the post on FB and am one of many people who shared it.

NPR must have gotten cyber-bullied

CORRECTION: MarketWatch deleted an earlier tweet that inaccurately implied that $5-a-gallon gasoline, $90 bottles of wine and $200 concert tickets were typical purchases of late among average Americans. The story has been corrected.https://t.co/Y8kBdRHPKI pic.twitter.com/n48rruC9h7

— MarketWatch (@MarketWatch) November 20, 2021

3.41 for gas, 100 bucks for bela fleck tickets, no mention of wine

MarketWatch != Marketplace. It's owned by Dow Jones/News Corp.

can someone please catch me up on what is going on with the various bills

i’m seeing that 2.2T has been approved for *waves hands* stuff and then i read this little gem

It was only after her call with Mr. Manchin at the baseball game that Ms. Pelosi discovered that the West Virginian’s demands were contained in a sort of makeshift contract he had delivered to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, in late July. The document, which was signed by both men, had been kept secret — including from her — for months.

The measure is likely to change as it moves through the evenly divided Senate, where Republicans are unanimously opposed and Democrats cannot afford to lose even a single vote from their party.

oh right well fuckin never mind

good rundown here in any case - https://www.nytimes.com/article/build-back-better-explained.html

Hopefully the next White House Correspondents’ Dinner will take some hard swings at the “both sides”-ass media, particularly Politico

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/21/biden-build-back-better-infrastructure-523166

Will that change anything? Probably not, but it’ll cheer me up at least

Don’t call it a comeback. Seriously, don’t.

Done.

politico is just bad

"Multiple people dead after driver plows through a holiday parade in Wis" wtf is wrong with this world

yeah not happy with my state this week

that video, the one from the city's stream of the parade where the last of the marching band is going by, then the red car suddenly goes rushing by, the screaming -- very chilling and hard to forget. it's like wtf man

Had to quit searching twitter for updates, the disgusting amount of brand spanking new accounts calling this "Dems/BLM" "revenge for the Rittenhouse verdict" was horrifying. Social media is such a fucking cancer.

Liberals are simultaneously tree hugging namby pamby neutered bleeding heart wusses and baby killing deranged violent anarchists. Conservatives too dense to spot the contradiction.

that is how the tabloid mentality works. the enemy is both pathetic and a mortal threat and you deploy each monstering according to the situation. basic shit tbh and it has worked for decades - longer? - for those cynical enough to play the game

It goes back way longer than decades. It was used on the jews for millennia.

tbh "both pathetic and a mortal threat" is kind of how I feel about the modern right.

'they are like children/they are brutal savages' used by europeans in regard to most colonized peoples

suspect IDed

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2021/11/22/suspect-waukesha-parade-incident-identified-darrell-brooks-jr/8717524002/

lol tipsy otm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/22/fox-news-contributors-quit-over-tucker-carlson-larger-truth/

...The two contributors — conservative writers Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg — quit Fox to protest Carlson’s online special “Patriot Purge.” As Ben Smith of the New York Times reports, they objected to its depiction of an alternate history of Jan. 6 as a “false flag” designed to create a pretext to persecute conservatives.

This is being widely seen as the latest sign that the right’s institutions are purging themselves of the few remaining conservatives who are hostile to Donald Trump and his movement, and what this says about how much the Trump era has transformed the conservative firmament.

What’s more interesting is why this was the final straw for the two Trump critics. Hayes told the Times he was alarmed by Carlson’s propagandistic recasting of federal prosecutions of the rioters as a “domestic war on terror” against the right.

Specifically, Hayes noted that he was disturbed by Carlson’s comparison of Jan. 6 defendants to terrorism suspects tortured by the United States, and his suggestion that “half the country is going to be subject to this kind of treatment.” Hayes said this is “truly dangerous".

Mr. Hayes said he’d been particularly disturbed recently when a man at a conference of the pro-Trump group Turning Point USA asked its leader, “When do we get to use the guns?”

In a follow-up statement, Hayes and Goldberg cited a quote from Carlson’s video — “the left is hunting the right” — and noted that this rhetoric could prompt Americans to act on it. They added: “This is what actually happened on January 6, 2021.”

...But a true reckoning requires more than just observing this trend. It also requires reflecting on the instrumental nature of propaganda like that coming from Carlson. Much of the discussion treats the possibility of violence as a mere incidental byproduct of that propaganda, depicting it merely as conspiracy-theorizing-for-profit getting out of control. But this isn’t quite right.

Instead, let’s note that this bundle of propagandistic devices — the suggestions that our system is incapable of rendering trustworthy or legitimate outcomes, that the Jan. 6 rioters’ underlying cause was just, that they are persecuted political prisoners, and that this reflects broader scorched-earth warfare the left is waging on conservatives via our institutions — has a purpose.

This isn’t to say the propaganda is a deliberate effort to incite violence. The point is broader: It’s that all this appears designed to lay the justificatory foundation for efforts to resist or subvert legitimate democratic outcomes by any means necessary or available in the future.

That is what creates the risk of sparking more violence. That is what is so dangerous about what we’re seeing now.

"Whaddup, peeps. I'm out of my FOX gig now. I'm coolin' it behind Target. Hit me up if you like my LinkedIn!

https://i.imgur.com/jt73C0a.jpg

https://t.co/cjDL0VamXn pic.twitter.com/3hDU9vmckW

— Matt Lech (@MattLech) November 19, 2021

Remember just after Jan 6 of this year, when there was widespread speculation that FOX had its come-to-Jesus moment and was putting distance between itself and the crazies and toning down its incitements to insurrection?

I do, vaguely. That was, what, a decade ago?

"out-organizing voter suppression" is what happened in the 2020 and 2018 and 2016 elections, and beyond, as well. the frightening part is the suppression gets more extreme every time

we are stress-testing democracy to see how much it can handle, nothing to see here

We’re at the point where I doubt we could pull together as a country to fight an alien invasion. Don’t want to seem alarmist, but this country is a mess.

what do you think is happening at the border?! We gotta stop'em, man!

Yeah, as soon as I posted that I knew “space” should’ve been included

the thing people misunderstand about the War Against the Machines is that it all started with humans trying to shoot skynet satellites out of the sky

There's a PBS documentary series currently being broadcast (narrated by Henry Louis Gates, Jr) about the Reconstruction and the events coming out of it that effectively reads like a contemporary news report.

We're regressing. The period of 1990-2015 effectively reads like a recapitulation of the period of 1890-1910, the heyday of tycoons like Morgan, Rockefeller and Carnegie, big business consolidating into monopolistic 'trusts', and open corruption and bribery in Congress and state legislatures.

How is portraying 1/6 as a false flag squaring with the celebration of Ashli “Horst Wessel” Babbitt?

I think the idea is that the FBI guided the true believer rank-and-file into storming the building and therefore she’s still an innocent victim of the tyrannical state.

how do they square a false flag operation which trump promoted for weeks beforehand, to the point that there are posts in mid-december 2020 here referencing 1/6, planned out with his staff, attempted to run over the justice department with a plan for a coup sealed by pence, and then stood there the day of and got everyone riled up and watched in glee all day as his supporters overran the capital, etc etc etc (there is so much)?

how do they square all of that with it being a false flag operation, unless it was trump who led the entire effort?

they don't need to square the facts. they only need to ignore them completely, announce the new party line, and the followers will obediently forget the existence of whatever doesn't square and fervently accept the new version as true, because they are nothing if not fervent and obedient followers who can only recall whatever they were told most recently by their leaders.

^^^

The joke that conservative "belief" is "whatever makes liberals angry, updated daily" has never been more true.

yeah I mean look KM you know probably better than anyone that there is no squaring up anything in today's GOP. I thought of Covid as the one thing that might be a "come to Jesus" (lol) moment for conservatives, since they all parroted the same lines about how it was just the flu, how only terminally ill people were gonna die, how it was all gonna go away by the summer, etc. etc., and thought surely as the bodies start stacking up and as the PEOPLE THEY KNOW start dying horrible deaths that surely they might realize that they were actually wrong about something. instead we find out we are at the point where they are literally willing to die rather than admit this.

so 1/6 is just...whatever the fuck they want it to be. it was antifa. it didn't happen. it was infiltrated by the FBI. the media made it up. the people who were there were just patriots trying to cosplay for a day. it wasn't actually dangerous. whatever makes 'em feel better.