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

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

Winnie the Pooh could not be reached for comment

https://scontent-ord5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.6435-9/196243742_4740120159336586_4651467984551144428_n.jpg?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=2c4854&_nc_ohc=QCDoke_lwl0AX_beImr&_nc_ht=scontent-ord5-1.xx&oh=00_AfD63hvn_qt62sfOa5YbymO60K7NZ4K5fs9z0Y2G3_phoQ&oe=63F8CCD5

I muted Sarah Kendzior a while ago, she's hyperbolic

the M&Ms statement is clearly a viral marketing campaign that will result in an explosion of spokescandies everywhere, likewise I assume this A&W announcement is tongue in cheek. Is conservative media this fucking dumb?

I mean who has given A&W a second thought in the past 40 years until now, they are a brand that hardly exists

Is Mr. Peanut still dead?

Is conservative media this fucking dumb? If it fuels the 24/7 outrage machine there is no dumb too dumb.

I drank A&W root beer for years as a child before ever finding out they had physical locations.

I have a distinct memory of going to an A&W restaurant in the midwest in the 1970s and they had phones at each table so you could order stuff.

It's possible I imagined it. But I think about it every time I go someplace like Red Robin or Olive Garden where they have tablets at each table - or Green Turtle, where every table has its own television, or Silver Diner which used to have a separate jukebox on each table. When I was a child, novelty restaurants were a rare treat. At the Spaghetti Factory in St. Louis, they had booths where the seats were things like bathtubs and cars and vintage canopy beds.

Terrible idea: a chain restaurant where every seat is also a toilet, so you can just keep eating without getting up to go to the bathroom.

It's all about the outrage. Any event that transpires, however trivial, must have an angle about the maleficent influence of WOKE LIBS that will inspire max outrage. Even decisions made by multibillion dollar corporations. Just look at that Fox anchor's sour face as she's reporting this devastating A&W news. So much palpable disgust in that sneer.

This is what happens when you have literally nothing else in your life worth living for, I guess.

The A&W thing is 100% a bit, lots of brands doing it today. Does Fox New not understand that a.) it is a joke b.) inspired by the M&M thing c.) which was itself caused by outrage on Fox News?

I remember diners with separate jukeboxes in each booth. Mercifully, hardly anyone ever used them. Can you imagine if everyone was playing a different song at the same time? Horrendous.

Unperson, no - your choice went into a diner-wide queue. You had an individual volume knob for when you didn't like the song.

A favorite prank of my college days was to put in eight quarters and request something obnoxious like "Monster Mash" over and over again, then leave.

i worked at an A&W for a while, after it was combined into a Long John Silver's I had worked at for a couple years. worst part about the A&W addition to the restaurant was how they made us put pants on

(didn't darlene love do backing vox on monster mash?)

Doesn't Waffle House have a jukebox at every booth filled with songs about waffles?