This, but unironically. Just do it, ferchrissake.

Should I feel targeted, as this description applies to several hundred million people in the U.S. alone.

As legal-bullshit specialists, I wouldn’t put it past 'em to figure out how it’s legal for the Republican Party to spend on federal races, but not Democrats.

No worries, The Best Supreme Court That Money Can Buy™ will find some bullshit excuse legal reasoning to overturn this ruling.

This won’t stop until we abolish first-past-the-post voting, and it’s really simple to explain why: First of all, incumbents have a huge advantage in name-recognition and fundraising. They have a big advantage in their party’s primary just based on that fact. But also, FPTP voting drives people to vote strategically, against the other party’s candidate rather than for their party’s candidate. In most circumstances the incumbent is the best shot at keeping the other party at bay. (And people definitely think this way. I recall well the interviews with Democratic primary voters in 2020 chose Biden over their preferred candidate because he was the most “electable.” Or the people who voted against Clinton in 2016, even though they claimed to dislike the guy they voted for.) Then, in the general election, well, obviously, FPTP means you can’t split the vote by voting for anybody other than your party’s geriatric candidate. Voilà! A gerontocracy.

I mean, obviously, there are other factors (like the octogenarian incumbent has risen to be a real big-wig after decades in the political party structure), and replacing FPTP with a better voting system won’t fix this issue entirely. But it’s enough on its own to keep the gerontocracy going.

Guardedly optimistic. He won’t be able to do everything he wants to do, but dammit, we have to start somewhere.

I guess I’m the designated article-reader today. TL;DR: Businesses need government approval to process EBT payments for the SNAP program. The regime is strictly interpreting a regulation that’s intended to prevent price-gouging SNAP recipients to inflict maximum cruelty by preventing discounts instead. It could enforce the rule by revoking a store’s SNAP-EBT approval.

Oh god, we’re so screwed. This guy can’t lie even halfway credibly.

Yeah, fuck ‘em, they’re gonna do that no matter what. The trick is to be loud and proud enough that people hear our message directly, and can compare it to the gutless liars’ version.

This is conclusion is gob-smackingly obvious when you frame it differently: Are we born and do we compete with each other to sacrifice our whole lives to boost The Economy? Or is humanity—living a good life filled with family, friends, love, and leisure—what’s important, and economic activity is good only so far as it supports us? If it’s the former, then it doesn’t matter how many people are hurting as long as The Economy is healthy. If it’s the latter, then the mere existence of billionaires is bad and wrong.

We don’t need two political parties that answer the question in the same way.

Yet when it’s applied in Utah, they melt down like snowflakes.

What, was the statue as fragile as his ego?

Wake up, babe, new cope just dropped.

A day of celebration, I take it.

The one my grandfathers had to employ?

Jesus Christ, Ezra, have you learned nothing about messaging?! Frame the issue properly: Democrats aren’t going to shut down the government. Republicans are going to shut down the government by refusing to offer the concessions needed to get Democratic votes. We’re supposed to have a representative democracy, and the whole point of Congress is consensus. If the Group Of Pedophiles isn’t willing to comprise, that’s 100% on them.

Also, that statement shows the profound depth of the capitalist Stockholm Syndrome. I would have hoped an economist would know better. On the contrary, our economy should give everyone a job with a good income. In the pie-in-the-sky case, we could provide a good living for everybody without anybody having to work. That was the vision of the future back in the mid-20th century.

The model of everybody earning their right to a living through a job gets increasingly fraught as more and more work gets automated. But yeah, that’s exactly what the U.S. political class wants, to keep Americans are always desperate and striving, so that their wholesale wealth extraction operation can continue apace.

This has to do with the long list of signs and symptoms that Trump has dementia. What does this have to do with Biden? He might be suffering from it, too. Those signs can be addressed separately, and there’s no reason it can’t be both men. They’re both ancient.

Projecting what?

This whole thing is ridiculous. Anybody who’s had, or had a loved-one with a chronic illness, knows that there are good and bad days. The descent into dementia isn’t a smooth, linear, downhill run. He’s not dead, but he’s on the glide path that direction. This pattern of him disappearing from public view at random has been going on for several years, and the length of each occurrence is growing. It’s up to 3 days now. (There were a couple of instances between election and inauguration when his handlers couldn’t find an excuse to pull him into seclusion, and there were some really over-the-top batshit loopy interviews as a result.)

But, I guess American public discourse is so degraded that we can’t handle anything but binary distinctions now— he’s either in perfect health or he’s dead?