Last fall as we were all girding ourselves for the impending “Red Tsunami” and contemplating what it was going to do to the remains of the Biden agenda, I wrote that we should be prepared for Revenge of the MAGA cult and recognize that it was inevitable that the Republicans were going to try to impeach Joe Biden. At that time Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene had already filed five impeachment resolutions against him and it was well known that Donald Trump would not be very happy if the new Republican majority didn’t issue payback for the two impeachments on his record. One of the resolutions she filed on Biden’s very first day in office claimed that he had tried “to influence the domestic policy of a foreign nation and accept benefits from foreign nationals in exchange for favors.” That was, of course, based upon the bogus Ukraine scandal that prompted Donald Trump’s first impeachment. Nothing would be more satisfying to Trump than for Biden to be impeached for doing what Trump did when he attempted to blackmail the President of Ukraine into smearing Biden.
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“The Labour Party has made it clear: First Past the Post is flawed and deeply damaging to our democracy,” one campaigner said.
Elections watchdog raises concerns as party spending limits could rise by 52% - while ministers keep donations to under £11,000 anonymous.
The all-circus, no-bread party Polling suggests (as I wrote earlier) that Americans really don’t get that things are looking up for them economically. Inflation is down — down by 44% — from last September. Unemployment is at record lows in many states, the lowest in 54 years in February. What Republicans cannot afford is for voters to notice. So it’s culture wars a-go-go (Politico): Republican policy riders seeking to limit diversity efforts, drag shows, Pride flag displays and promotion of critical race theory are rife throughout the House’s dozen proposed annual spending bills, including those that would fund the national parks, pay for roads or maintain U.S. embassies abroad. The cascade of social issues turning up in the must-pass bills is noteworthy for how it’s pervaded this year’s appropriations process — and for how the GOP concerns have spread far beyond top-tier conservative causes such as limiting abortions and gender-affirming care.
Are we both perpetrators and victims of the Elon Effect?
In 1963, the summer I turned 11, my mother had a gig evaluating Peace Corps programs in Egypt and Ethiopia. My younger brother and I spent most of that summer in France. We were first in Paris with my mother before she left for North Africa, then with my father and his girlfriend in a tiny town on the Mediterranean. (In the middle of our six-week sojourn there, the girlfriend ran off to marry a Czech she’d met, but that’s another story.) In Paris, I saw American tourists striding around in their shorts and sandals, cameras slung around their necks, staking out positions in cathedrals and museums. I listened to my mother’s commentary on what she considered their boorishness and... Read more
You may argue that theory is secondary: of course woke activists seek solidarity, justice, and progress. Their struggles against discrimination are animated by those ideas. But they fail to see that the theories they embrace subvert their own goals. Without universalism there is no argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power. […]
The banks know it. Why don’t more Americans? Those folkloric man-on-the-street (or in a rural diner) puff pieces are as infuriating as they are uninformative. They do, however, reinforce false, often minority, impressions of what’s really happening in the country, Timothy Noah argues in The New Republic. Misinforming tales abound (his mock example): “People Believe Stuff That Isn’t True, but They Feel Like It Is True, So Let’s Give Them a Hearing Because We Don’t Want to Seem Elitist.” Outlets such as The Wall Street Journal regularly hand Joe Everyman a megaphone and let him expound on microchips in vaccines, schoolteachers “trying to turn your children gay or trans,” and the crappy Biden economy that isn’t. Given a platform, uninformed views steer public opinion by making the wrong seem right. Polling later confirms that people think the economy sucks. It doesn’t. Ask Morgan Stanley.
Daniel Brock Johnson’s second book of poetry, Shadow Act: An Elegy for Journalist James Foley, is a representation of the relationship between two friends. On the one hand, the journalist James Foley. On the other, the poet. It’s as if the two men were bound together so deeply and eerily that their lives are each other’s shadows. Foley’s adventures—he is eventually murdered abroad—may seem utterly opposite to the quieter life of the poet, but the letters the two men exchange—some of which drive the poetry in this collection—are only part of the revelation that Foley’s hunger for the scene of action, the war zone, the story is drenched in a longing for peace. Just as the poet’s peace reposes at the edge of all the violence and turmoil of our times. Worked out over poems that vary dramatically in shape and style, and that move from the terse and lyrical to the long-lined and prosaic call of grief, this collection is a dazzling display.
Subject access requests reveal that educators who make minor criticisms of Government policy are subject to vetting, defunding or removal from events
On 28 June, the parliamentary session’s final Senedd cross-party group (CPG) on digital rights and democracy, of which Open Rights Group (ORG) acts as secretariat, took place online with over 20 attendees tuning in to hear a follow-up to a previous group session on facial recognition technology. During the last meeting in February, we discussed the landmark […]
There is a stark contrast in the response to the closure of Nigel Farage's Coutts account - and bank account closures of progressive organisations in 2015
[CHERYL and ADAM sit on a designer couch in their West Village apartment that they can afford even though they don’t really seem to work. SARA enters.]
SARA: Steve broke up with me!
ADAM: Aw, sweetie, there are plenty of fish in the sea.
CHERYL (gesticulating with a Bop It): Which makes it statistically unlikely you’ll ever find your perfect match.
SARA and ADAM (hands on hips, smiling): Cheryl!
- - -
[CHERYL and SUSAN shop for lavish dresses even though it’s not really clear whether they have jobs that pay them enough to afford this lifestyle. DAVE enters.]
DAVE: Well, it’s over. Jill said she never wants to see me again!
SUSAN: It’s not you; it’s her.
Ukraine's population has not grown much since 1960 but Russia's invasion had led to a catastrophic drop in the birth rate
Streaming services are pulling content to avoid paying workers — and could claim a tax break for doing so.
The MVC team discusses Paul Verhoeven’s hyper-violent satire of the corporate police state.
- by Aparna Chivukula
- by Shayla Love
On the face of it, you might expect North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll to be despondent about his political future. Elected in May 2019 with 34 percent of first preference votes, the left-wing regional leader was blocked from Labour’s shortlist for the broader position of North East Mayor by Keir Starmer and his allies. […]
Spending only happens if there was something to buy. If that spending is then deficit spending it has a lower inflationary impact than spending that is tax-matched.
If one considers a college education as an asset that provides an income stream, the return on a college degree appears to be quite high.
Right now we have central banks attempting to control inflation by crushing wages. But wage-push demand isn’t the primary driver of inflation, it is corporate profit taking (increasing prices much faster than their costs) and some genuine supply bottlenecks.
This cannot be fixed by central banks except by smashing ordinary people flat, and in certain senses not even then, since it will lead to long term maldistribution of resources which will lead to real economic problems in the future: problems not based on distribution or finance, but on lack of physical ability to create what we need.
If we want to fix this we have to make it so that those who control economic decision making can only do well if the population as a whole does well. That means politicians who want to help the population (not 90% of European or American pols) and corporate leaders who need the population to do well.
May Rostom On average, parental contributions help children buy homes four years earlier than those without them. Out of every 100 new homeowners below the age of 30, 16 will have had help from ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’, or Bomad for short. That rises to one in four new homeowners under the age … Continue reading Bomadland: How the Bank of Mum and Dad helps kids buy homes