U.S. Politics January 2023: Kevin McCarthy's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Life

i think table's 'brain detergent' and 'soul rot' metaphors are very apt. there is a lot of pressure in this very inhumane world we've built to become inhuman. gop crazy talk .. like the beliefs are sort of beside the point, the point is that you identify yourself with this group that is at the avant garde of self-destruction. such a vast sea of bullshit we find ourselves in that most people would rather try to turn into reptiles than face any of it for what it is.

― ꙮ (map), Tuesday, January 24, 2023 1:34 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I still think a lot about the "Kanye. Elon. Trump." tweet. not in the sense of "here are three very famous and very insane conservatives" but rather by how much money and power they have, and therefore how much freedom from consequence they are. and knowing there's a whole generation of conservatives who look at these people and think, "I want to become that". they're role models.

then we wonder why films like Triangle of Sadness and Tár, whatever their merits, keep getting made

I wonder if Pence ratted on himself just to get back in the news

michael pence, dreading having to tell mother

An obvious but maybe easy to overlook factor in the ongoing parade of outright lunatics is that there is relatively a LOT of money on the right to fund all of these people. If your racist ranting loses you a sinecure at one of the more upscale think tanks, there's always some other insane billionaire or multi-millionaire with a boutique foundation of their own and some personal right-wing obsession — immigration, school vouchers, abortion, etc — who will snap you up. Same with the expanding right-wing mediaverse, where you can bounce from Fox to Breitbart to NewsMax to whatever. It's not that the left doesn't have its own rich people, but being crazy or radical on the left doesn't attract the same kind of funding. I've been thinking about this a lot as my state increasingly embraces the DeVos vision of dismantling public education — an objectively unpopular cause, based on every survey you can find, and one that is only alive because of some billionaires pumping money into it for decades until they could capture enough GOP party elites.

something I think about a lot is how real news and actual scientific articles are often paywalled while right-wing psycho news is always free. it's wild how all these people who insist they're free thinkers who won't be manipulated are getting 100% of their talking points from billionaires directly funding people like Charlie Kirk and Candice Owens. there's some real persuasive value to the idea that pissing people off only means you're getting close to the truth. it's real childbrained logic..."Why are you mad at me? I just spilled juice on the floor. It was an accident. You shouldn't be mad. Is it that you HATE ME?"

xp there's also the self-funded lunatics like Mike Lindell

This is why killing the FCC's Fairness Doctrine and allowing much greater consolidation and control over mass media were top priorities for the hard right when Reagan was elected president. Those were a huge stumbling block on the road to leveraging wealth into conservative political dominance.

Mike Pence leaked the story so he can be cool.

"I steal docs too! Love me!"

crudely drawn "TOP SECRETS!" on an old PeeChee folder

money and the politics funded by it are cause and effect

btw I wanna point out the XBox story was claiming that having a "power saving" mode was a way of indoctrinating children into "climate conscious politics". they also talked about the fucking M&Ms (not the M&Ms who fuck), saying Mars was taking them away for being "polarizing", even though they were the motherfuckers who were whining about them in the first place! (also, it's obvious they're gonna be 'brought back' in a Super Bowl commercial, who the fuck is actually fooled by this)

FDR was the most hated man in the USA (among the wealthy) for a good reason. Dismantling the New Deal has been their most cherished dream since 1933. They're still only about halfway there, but the super rich are very encouraged by their progress so far.

xpost I was straight-up indoctrinated by the crying indian commercials as a child... and to this day, I throw litter into trash cans! So the threat is real

Anti-littering indoctrination is the Road to Serfdom.

The thing about the Fairness Doctrine is it did not apply to cable, satellite, or internet, anything that requires a purchase. It was mostly radio impacted.

Which doesn't mean that it didn't have a seismic impact, as conservative talk radio was transformative. But Fox News wouldn't have been impacted. It's just that the thirst for it may not have been as large without the conservative radio boom of the 90s.

Nowadays I almost think reintroducing it would have little impact as people get their information from the internet and the damage is largely done

Might even hurt us more. Imagine if booking Fauci on a radio show required the radio to give airtime to anti-vax idiots.

We live in Hell

FDR and the New Deal saved capitalism. These right wing billionaires do not know what they are doing.

They never have.

FDR and the New Deal saved capitalism. These right wing billionaires do not know what they are doing.

― treeship., Tuesday, January 24, 2023 8:31 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it's the dialectic between the two that keeps capitalism alive and thriving. they may not know what they're doing but larger forces know that the chaos is needed. otherwise stuff like this might finally start to get some pushback:

In confidential memo, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen celebrated unemployment as a “worker-discipline device” https://t.co/kesjDiTwVJ by @Schwarz

— The Intercept (@theintercept) January 24, 2023

worker
discipline
device

...

btw I wanna point out the XBox story was claiming that having a "power saving" mode was a way of indoctrinating children into "climate conscious politics"

Would be wonderful to see a semiotics course taught by a right-winger

the one thing Conservatives truly despise is conservation

(Teddy Roosevelt excepted, obv.)

I won a conservation essay contest when I was in 6th grade and I was confused because my left-wing parents had not given me good associations with the word conservative.

did u come home crying

Hell no they gave me a little trophy, I was a happy lil dude. (I still have the trophy!)

it's heavily frowned on to throw away the conservation trophy

i won the 5th grade spelling bee, the words were pathetically easy and I didn't miss any, and everybody accused me of cheating, because my mother was there, and they accused her of mouthing the words to me.

i think my response was 'if u think i needed my mom to spell those words that says a lot about u'

then someone probably hit me because i was a weak little shit

my mother was totally mouthing the letters to me though, that's a her thing

I was straight-up indoctrinated by the crying indian commercials as a child

Me too. I also gave a hoot, used interjection!s, thought of legislation as an anthropomorphized scroll, and hankered for a hunk of cheese.

My ill-fated 1979 attempt to "buy the world a Coke," however, ran into challenges related to my $2 allowance.

the one thing Conservatives truly despise is conservation

(Teddy Roosevelt excepted, obv.)

― Andy the Grasshopper,

Nixon in his cynicism too.

I was straight-up indoctrinated by the crying indian commercials as a child

always makes me cry when Italians pretending to be Native Americans weep

Also don't forget that Keep America Beautiful was and is a packaging/soda trade consortium designed to put all the burden of recycling/reusing on the consumer, so they can happily just continue to mint fresh plastic pellets for the next 500 years, unmolested

welp, looks like Diamond died of heart disease caused by chronic high blood pressure

https://apnews.com/article/health-donald-trump-covid-heart-disease-02a4169cefd96576e76e49789ea1aa2e

^in on the lie

of course, health problems that aren’t covid are just a lack of personal responsibility to make healthy choices, according to a lot of D&S’s peers, so there’s no way they’d want that public

Biden gave away so much in the fiscal cliff deal in 2012 he was sidelined as White House negotiator. Zients took control and presided over $1 trillion in sequestration cuts.
This isn't the best team headed into the debt limit showdown.https://t.co/JFxnm4KdfC

— David Dayen (@ddayen) January 23, 2023

Zientz is Biden's new Chief of Staff. He was Biden's Covid chief for a bit

A horrific choice. Epically worse than Ron Klain. Zients is responsible along with Walensky for the horrific covid policies that led to mass death and long term disability. He is a investment banker who was not qualified for that job and not qualified for this one. https://t.co/bUyXZtLxQV

— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) January 22, 2023

Sarah Kendzior…there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time

The Washington Post story on Zients was a fluff piece where he was referred to as Obama's Mr Fix-It , and little to no critical takes on him were included.

Progressive criticism of him has been hidden in less noticed websites

https://www.commondreams.org/news/progressives-jeff-zients

is she good? I haven't heard of her

come on, it's not horrific. I think they're most focusing on the idea that with Zients' contacts he could help them corral some republicans into compromising on the coming debt crisis

Zients agrees with Republicans (and Manchin) on cutting non-military spending .

But Zients past (at Bain and elsewhere) plus his recent time as Covid directr is shaky

Over the span of two decades, the health care companies that Zients controlled, invested in, and helped oversee were forced to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud. They have also been accused of surprise-billing practices and even medical malpractice.

https://prospect.org/power/corporate-past-of-jeffrey-zients/

is she good? I haven't heard of her

― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, January 24, 2023 5:34 PM

I recall her being famous on Twitter for getting mad and making bad posts back in the day

Kendzior can be a bit dramatic , but there's plenty of other folks out there that have been critical of Zients

Kendzior played the Cassandra card a lot in the early years of the Trump administration, lots of overheated "I told you so" tweets. She wasn't always wrong, but I found it hard to take after a while.

technically if she was Cassandra she was right and just nobody believed her

republicans are crediting tucker carlson with coming up with a committee that is a hollow parody of the Church committee from the 70s

And don't believe me re: Tucker Carlson. Just ask @RepThomasMassie (via @NBCNews.) pic.twitter.com/cnUzcswc6t

— Derek Martin (@dmartkc) January 25, 2023

Aw @ Tucker's spirit of public service

sorry for culture war bullshit, but it's striking that

- i don't think anyone knew what the A&W mascot was in the first place
- if you add pants to a bear, it's woke police cancel culture
- if A&W were to remove pants from a bear, that would definitely be unacceptable
- the only acceptable conservative move is to not change at all

Fox Business responded to this news by lamenting the "woke police cancel culture" https://t.co/qQVR7BLeiT pic.twitter.com/BlJ4ZVuJtA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 25, 2023