Leon Troutsky

It wasn’t “massive right-wing response to extremely left-wing policies”. It was the general public shifting away from more liberal economic policies and supporting Republicans who promised to reign in those policies. And once again, you can look at Jim Stimson’s data which shows that support for liberal policies began diving right after Obama took office and continued declining during his eight years. Then miraculously support for liberal policies increased shortly after Trump took office. Call it “fantasy” and whatever else you like. You’re arguing against the facts here.

Out of touch indeed... https://www.huffpost.com/entry/obamacare-not-liberal-enough_n_5106981?1396985846=&ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067 Just look at how many thought it wasn’t liberal enough compared to those who said it was too liberal! Just look at all those people clambering for single payer/public option! Edit: Also this... https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-isnt-a-secret-majority-supporting-obamacare/

It’s about as dumb as I thought it would be.

Glad to hear it!

I agree, especially about tossing her out of congress. But this is putting her front and center in the spotlight and forcing the GOP to either defend her or toss her and lose a lot of their base. So in that sense, it’s probably good to keep her in the news as much as possible. As I said in another post, the Republicans invited her into their caucus, welcomed her, and gave her plum committee assignments. F*** every one of them who didn’t speak out forcefully against her. They want to soft-peddle and mainstream these crazies? They can live with the consequences of their actions.

That’s not even close to the worst tweet in her twitter rage today...

But it is a left-right dynamic, or rather a more vs. less government dynamic. The reason the GOP won in 2010 and 2012 was because the public thought Obama was passing too much government spending and too much government involvement in the economy. And whenever one party gets in power and starts passing its agenda, the public immediately turns in the other direction in terms of wanting more/less government spending. That graph has been updated to the Trump years and follows the same dynamic. Support for conservative economic policy shot up immediately after Obama took office and

Obama increased the minimum wage. And for all the flaws of the ACA, a lot more people got health care under him. Those improved people’s lives. Unemployment came down, admittedly slowly, but it dropped. So average people’s lives did improve during the Obama years. And the GOP got huge wins in the midterms. Did people vote for the GOP because they thought they would get larger minimum wage increases and expanded health care? No, obviously not. The GOP ran on repealing Obamacare and scaling back government benefits. So the public didn’t lurch to the GOP in the midterms because the

Of course not. Just kind of laughing at the idea of “build that wall...but let me take my vacay there!”

Just so much hilarity here... One of the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 is asking a federal court to let her leave the country so she can make the most of a Mexican vacation she booked prior to the insurrection. In a court filing on Monday, Jenny Cudd’s attorneys said their client ”planned and prepaid for a weekend retreat with her employees” in Riviera Maya, Mexico, later this month and would like to attend. Cudd, the owner of a Midland, Texas, flower shop, told the court that the trip is “a work-related bonding retreat for employees and their spouses.”

The reason Dems are focusing on Qanon is to try to keep suburban voters and college educated voters who might swing to the GOP in 2022. If they can cast the GOP as the crazy party (which at the moment isn’t difficult) then they might be able to stem some of the natural midterm losses. The problem with the bolded is how do you define “much of anything...to improve the standards of living”? The narrative that often comes from the left is basically, “anything short of our policy goals like M4A and UBI and Defund the Police means they did NOTHING to help people.” Sorry, but that’s clearly

They just don’t understand the nature of what they’re dealing with. The only apology she can give is some weak *** “I’m sorry if you were offended” type thing. Because the Qanon people won’t accept her saying everything they believe is wrong. She’ll lose her core base of support and end up getting eaten by all the conspiracy mongerers that she’s been courting all these years. And that’s assuming she’s some lying politician playing up those conspiracies for political gain. If she’s a true believer, then she genuinely thinks that Democrats and Republican establishment types are satan

Yeah, what people don’t realize and/or just refuse to accept is that it’s the more politically informed and more politically engaged people who are most likely to believe in conspiracy theories. There are thousands of actual political science and psychological academic studies on this. It’s not even speculation at this point.

Also, it wouldn’t have applied to most of the people deplatformed. Trump wasn’t a candidate when he got tossed from Twitter.

Lin Wood getting busted for voter fraud would be enough to convince me that we’re living in a simulation.

Dude in the middle just up and left! He’s like, “my *** ain’t getting sued over this dumb ****.”

That’s probably part of it, honestly. Definitely need to up the stretch game. Part of is also because I have seriously flat feet. The whole thing is kind of a mess.

Literally I’ve been struggling with this for the past several months. Like every time I get into a moderate exercise groove something ends up getting tweaked. I’ve had what felt like strains or stress fractures on the top of one foot, then the other foot, then what felt like a mildly sprained ankle, and there’s a recurring shoulder pain, and what feels like a tight hamstring. It’s not all at once, but more like one irritating thing every week or so. And none of it is so painful that I feel justified going to the doctor. And I’m trying to figure out when I should lay off and let it heal an

This was the point I was making about removing MTG from committee spots... But can we just pause for a moment to say how extraordinary it is for one party to dictate how the other party handles its committee assignments? Yes, Greene has said some really crazy stuff. But members on both sides are already privately talking about how this could set the House down the path of mutually assured destruction, with one party going directly after members of the other depending on which side’s in power. It would be a different story if Greene had said the things she did while in office; her most con

By the way, the situation in Myanmar is a lot more complicated than “military coup overthrows democratically elected leader”. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/world/asia/myanmar-coup-aung-san-suu-kyi.html ^^^^I can post the whole article if anyone wants. Basically, Aung San Suu Kyi was moving towards consolidating power in an authoritarian way herself, and was very vocal in her support of the Rohingyan genocide that was led by the military. And while I always prefer democracy to authoritarianism, we have to recognize that neither the military nor the president are good actors i

The incitement isn’t just what he said on January 6th, but his role in organizing the rally, promoting it for a week or more beforehand, and his spreading of lies that he won the election for months. So yeah, he incited the riot in multiple ways.

Ouch... As Republicans splinter over how to deal with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon devotee from Georgia who peddles an array of false conspiracy theories, Democrats are seizing on the infighting to make her the avatar for an array of G.O.P. lawmakers. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Tuesday began a $500,000 advertising campaign on television and online tying eight House Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, to Ms. Greene and QAnon, an effort to force them to make a public affirmation a

@Jdrizzle, I wasn’t around last night, but the messaging on the $2000 stimulus checks was definitely bad. I don’t blame anyone for thinking they meant an additional $2000 and being surprised to find that it’s not that. As for the policy, I think it depends on the goal. Is it to stimulate the economy by increasing spending generally? Then larger checks are better. Is it to help people make ends meet until the economy recovers? Lowering the income cap for receiving a check makes more sense. Personally, it’s not a big deal for me either way. I just want people who need it to get it ev

I think too much is being made of that. The projections are around 4% GDP growth next year (which is pretty good). The pre-pandemic unemployment rate was around 3.5%, which is historically low. So saying that it won’t get back to that until 2024 doesn’t bother me a whole lot. They estimate the the unemployment rate will drop well below 5% next year and even more the year after. Also, those projections are calculated on the assumption that there is no more stimulus relief. If Dems pass a large stimulus package, GDP growth will be larger and the unemployment rate could drop even faster

Just another form of the “let me tell you how this GOP insanity is really the Democrats’ fault.”