Yes, and those exploitative labor relationships so popular in the South serve to reproduce an embedded social structure that favors the usual suspects. Pic stolen from an excellent piece in the NYT yesterday from Jamelle Bouie.

Such a great development. We can talk all we want, but votes like this one are where the rubber actually hits the road in terms of shifting power from capital to labor.

A viable Trump candidacy courts controversy and sells subscriptions. End of democracy? We will worry about that later.

“My husband, Wesley, and I join hands in prayer around our kitchen table. Then we worry about the Mexicans.”

The problem as I see it is not that they have been critical of Biden, but that they are not ringing the alarm bells loudly enough over some of the batshit garbage Trump has been spewing recently. “Dictator on day one”, cutting off funding for schools that require vaccinations, etc.

It is reminiscent of the “both sides” criticism moderates get — in an effort to provide even coverage, they are functionally giving the crazy and the corrupt a free pass.

This inevitably happens in states and in industries with low or no union participation. Reason number 1,000 why workers have to stick together. Unionize … and strike.

They know exactly what they are doing.

Vaccines don’t work. Global warming is a lie. The United States is not a democracy. Babies are too small to be seen with the naked eye and can be frozen and thawed out. Biden is corrupt because Vladimir Putin said so. Am I missing anything?

Add the Carroll verdict and we are North of $440 million in about 3 weeks.

Edit: Also need to calculate statutory interest on top of this. Appeal bond is going to be brutal.

Yes, judging by the tenor or the questions it probably won’t even be close. They may end up ruling that Section 5 requires enabling legislatIon to be passed before state enforcement of Section 3 can proceed, but who knows. I think the fix is in on this one, regardless of the actual merits of the legal theories.

I’ll also go out on a limb and say that even though I am viscerally with Colorado here, a victory could easily turn into chaos once GOP-controlled courts in battleground states start engaging in a tit-for-tat. I can already hear the MTG-caliber arguments about humane border policy equating to insurrection.

The upcoming immunity case is going to be way more problematic for Trump, I think.

This one was always going to be a long shot. The real story here (or one real story, I guess) is why nobody had the guts to ask Thomas to recuse himself.

Rolling Stone following a rich tradition started by the late, great Hunter Thompson. His obit for Nixon is an absolute classic.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/07/he-was-a-crook/308699/

Our distinguished House Speaker voted against expulsion.

This is frightening stuff. I feel like it should be at the top of every newscast, every conversation, but somehow we seem to be sleepwalking into the end of democracy. A “nah, can’t happen here” attitude, coupled with Trump fatigue, social media distractions, struggling to make ends meet, and good old fashioned apathy, are going to get people killed.

Too early to tell for sure, but Georgia is starting to look grim for Trump, Inc. The state RICO statute by its nature lends itself to rolling up these “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” type conspiracies that are hard to prove individually but taken together show a coordinated pattern of conduct. With every co-conspirator who rolls over and takes a plea deal in return for testimony, it gets easier to prove, and more worrisome for those left.

Open question is whether the Fulton County DA can prove the requisite RICO predicate acts. I think they are trying to pin them on false statements and an unlawful attempt to influence an official, as well as the county election office interference, but it would be interesting to see a dispassionate analysis that evaluates the likelihood of success with those allegations.

Also unclear is what impact Meadows’ testimony in the Federal case will have, if any, on the Georgia proceedings.

It is one thing to hop on the internet and complain about the system (like we are doing now), but another to actually do something about it.

Unionizing - and then actually striking for better pay and conditions - are the most immediate ways to move the ball. As he says, workers have not historically improved their conditions by working harder, but by refusing to work en masse.

As pointed out time and time again, the MAGA caucus is interested in maximum chaos for social media clout, not governing. It will be interesting to see how much of the ‘mainstream’ GOP goes along with this idiocy.

I get the sense they are pretty spineless, because after all, who wants to anger the base and have to give up the fancy Washington restaurants to return to the sticks and live among the rubes once the inevitable MAGA primary challenger takes you out?

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Viewers get a throw-away line about Big Three’s “record profits” but no sense of what those profits have been: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis made a combined $21 billion in profits in just the first six months of this year. According to the UAW, they’ve earned a quarter trillion dollars in profit since 2013.

This right here. There is a staggering lack of understanding about just how money is circulated in the economy. The assumption is that if you let billionaires and corporations concentrate capital it will be good for the rest of us because they will create jobs. That is true at the margin when capital is at a premium, but in an era easy money, investment isn’t the problem. You can also rest assured that without unions corporations will cut every job they can to boost the bottom line.

Conversely, there is this puritanical sense among some that if you pay workers more, then they will get lazy … or something … and that is bad for the economy. This is bullshit. Billionaires hoard capital. Workers, because they have to, spend their paychecks (lower marginal propensity to save) and keep money circulating. Paying people decently is good for the economy.

I am deeply suspicious of of overly simplistic answers to complex human questions, but I swear that 90% of modern U.S conservative policy can be explained either by grift or fear of the other.