The Prime Minister's immoral and obscenely expensive plan will only end in tears for everyone involved
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Not bloody likely… Walter Shapiro in TNR runs down all the consequences we’ve seen so far from the Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe vs Wade and the political problem it’s caused for Republicans: Even a huckster with Trump’s disdain for the truth cannot spin away the fact that Republicans are on the unpopular side of the abortion debate. Fifty-nine percent of voters in a Fox News poll in late March said that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Wall Street Journal poll in mid-March found that a stunning 39 percent of suburban women in swing states consider abortion to be their most important voting issue in 2024. It wasn’t supposed to be like this for Republicans. In the spring and early summer of 2022, as the Alito draft became the official opinion of the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, the prevailing GOP view of the political aftereffects of the decision was, in effect, “It will all blow over.” No Republican predicted that abortion would still be a powerful weapon for the Democrats in 2024 and beyond.
On this week’s bonus episode of Lever Time, Arjun Singh and Democratic strategist Mark Longabaugh explore Democrats’ winter and spring of discontent.
Axios on the GOP civil war: A growing number of House Republicans are accusing their conservative colleagues of enabling Democratic wins, especially after this weekend’s foreign aid votes. Multiple members believe they could have gotten concessions from Democrats on border policy in exchange for Ukraine funding, only to be blown up by backlash from conservatives.GOP leadership brought up border security provisions alongside their foreign aid package — but the package was blocked by Republicans from reaching the House floor under normal rules. It ultimately failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to pass the House under suspension of the rules. “If you were a true conservative, you would actually advance border security, but what they want to do is they want to blow up border security,” Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.) told Axios. “[T]he members who scream the loudest about border security were actively and knowingly preventing us from getting it done,” another member said. “They’re making us the most bipartisan Congress ever,” a third member told Axios.
Drama has erupted over an incident that occurred at a Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) show this weekend. Where a couple were kicked out by the comedian performing, after being caught trying to conceive a baby during the show. ”We... Read More ›
Following up on my earlier post today, I see that Philip Bump has some nice charts to illustrate the point that Biden has an advantage among likely voters: On Sunday, the network published the results of a national poll that asked respondents, among other things, to evaluate how interested they were in the election on a scale from 1 to 10. Fewer than 2 in 3 selected 9 or 10 — lower than any similar measurement by NBC’s pollsters this late in a presidential election year since at least 2008. Among Republicans, 70 percent indicated they were very interested in the election. Among Democrats, only 65 percent. Among independents? Fewer than half. This isn’t terribly surprising. It is consistently the case that independents — generally meaning independents who tend to vote for one party or the other and independents who don’t — are less politically engaged and less likely to vote. Comparisons of national polling conducted by the Pew Research Center with Census Bureau estimates of the electorate show how much of the nonvoter pool in each recent election has been made up of independents.
A 19th-century tale of hermaphrodite flowers, Charles Darwin, and women’s right to vote.
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The Past & Present Reading Group is discussing, in the first half of 2024, Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. This work is often considered a crucial read to grasp Marx’s methods of analysis, with Marx diving off Hegel as one might a springboard. Yet our group has immediately plunged into deep swirling waters of postcapitalist debates over money.
The post Value Par Excellence: Money versus Real Values appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
So, Richard McManus asked me about how ActivityPub supports cross-server usage. As an example use case, let’s say a user with the account eric@social.example wants to comment on a photo by dionne@photos.example. In this scenario, Eric would go to the page https://photos.example/users/dionne/photos/1 and enter a comment. How would that work? I can talk about how … Continue reading Cross-server Interactions in ActivityPub
Issue 54 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our January and February 2024 online issues. It includes contributions from bestselling author Tom Vanderbilt, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, journalist Mark MacNamara, evolutionary biologist David P. Barash, and more. This issue also features a new illustration by Mark Belan.
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There’s a ton of legal analysis coming about today’s opening arguments in Trump hush money trial and I’ll try to recap some of it for you later. But in the meantime I found that I enjoyed Olivia Nuzzi’s colorful twitter observations about the atmosphere in the courtroom and I suspect you will too: Hello from Manhattan criminal court where Donald Trump’s hush money trial officially starts this morning It is another freezing day inside this courthouse Donald Trump just arrived, railed against Letitia James, and then walked into the courtroom.
In response to questions about starvation in Gaza and Sudan, a Federal Labor MP has explained, ‘In Australia, the cost of living is the issue. It’s voters’ major concern, and a political priority.’ As though quality of life is entirely affected by enough money to go shopping, politicians and economists’ emphasis on cost of living Continue reading »
The PM has announced a series of big-dollar programs to promote energy transition, “green” industries, local manufacturing and “critical” minerals. He is juggling themes that are not always consistent. The government needs to be prudent as it backs projects with taxpayers’ money. Mr Albanese seems to be walking about with a Venn diagram in his Continue reading »
It is extremely hard to kill off a public figure of the calibre of Mike Pezzullo. As with a person of similar personality, Tony Abbott, one can be sure they are out of the play for good only when their bodies lie at a crossroads at midnight, with a wooden stake through their hearts. Before Continue reading »
Although lobbying is integral to democratic representation, there are concerns regarding the secrecy and unfair influence of professional lobbyists, which may ultimately lead to corrupt conduct by lobbyists and/or officials. As the OECD has observed: “[l]obbying is often perceived negatively, as giving special advantages to “vocal vested interests” and with negotiations carried on behind closed Continue reading »
What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. This remains the primary objective of Continue reading »
Twelve months since the launch of the Albanese Government’s new cultural policy, REVIVE, it’s time we promoted Australia’s heritage of folklife. In 1976, America’s Bicentennial Year, President Gerald Ford signed into law the American Folklife Preservation Act, which established the American Folklife Centre in the Library of Congress. The aim of the Centre is to Continue reading »