1) If I believed that abortion was genocide and that the Clean Air Act was the first step on the road to Stalinism, then I would want McConnell to handle things exactly as he has. But once we drop the pretense of an apolitical judiciary...
2)...Democrats have no obligation to let the timing of various deaths + the biases of Senate and Electoral College award Republicans a high court supermajority for a decade -- despite the fact that their party has lost the popular vote in 6 of 7 presidential elections...
3) And the idea that they are obligated to honor the right's fortuitous triumph is all the more absurd when one considers the profound unpopularity of the conservative judicial agenda (not least on corporate power) and the audacity of the modern right's judicial activism...
4) The court recently came one vote shy of vetoing the a Democratic president's top legislative achievement on grounds that many conservative legal minds had initially thought specious. John Roberts rewrote the Medicaid expansion. Scalia invented a personal right to firearms...
5) It is constitutional for Dems to add justices, and the end result of that action -- the gutting of judicial review -- is preferable to letting the unelected adherents of an extremist ideology dictate what the democratic branches of government can and can't do for a generation.
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1) Unbelievably sleazy behavior here. Stoller has no substantive response to Derek's actual arguments (eg "How can concentration explain the housing crisis if 49 of 50 US homebuilding markets aren't concentrated?"), so he baselessly accuses of Thompson of "unethical" conduct...
2) There is no journalist malpractice here. Thompson claimed that housing expert Lance Lambert rejects the theory that large homebuilders are slow-walking construction to juice profits. Lambert confirmed this to Stoller, as the latter acknowledges.
3) Stoller is portraying the fact that Lambert doesn't recall being sent Musharbash's article as an act of fraud. But Thompson's article does not claim Lambert reviewed Musharbash's piece, or attribute any opinion about that piece to him.
1) I spoke with @davidshor about his autopsy of the 2024 campaign. Based on voter file data, 26 million voter interviews, and precinct returns, he reaches a few conclusions.
One is that if all registered voters had turned out, Trump would have won a landslide:
@davidshor 2) TikTok appears to make its users more Republican.
@davidshor 3) Trump probably narrowly won younger voters. The gender gap among 18 year olds is also the highest ever observed. Trump won *nonwhite* 18-year-old men.
Trump and Musk are trying to usurp Congress's authority over spending -- and the impending debt limit fight might give them a golden opportunity to complete their power grab
This is concerning, since Trump's lawlessness is making a debt limit breach more likely. Republicans (almost certainly) need Democratic cooperation to raise the debt ceiling. But Trump is undermining the entire basis of bipartisan dealmaking:
BCBS told some extremely overpaid specialists (median salary: $430,600) that they would be cutting their pay by applying some of Medicare's payment rules.
This is how single-payer works: Squeeze rentier providers, lower costs.
If you're outraged by this, you're getting played!
fwiw, I get it. The wording of the announcement sounded bad (as the anesthesiologists wanted it to)! But now there are leftists on here calling for the assassination of an insurance CEO because her company did exactly what they ostensibly want bureaucrats to do under M4A
To be clear, my point here is not that there couldn't be any bad outcomes for patients. It's that the alternative to capping pay rates to doctors who make $400,00+ a year is to have everyone pay higher premiums to support their extortionary billing
1) Fwiw, I think one key part of the "Abundance" argument is that the corporate elite aren't the *only* bad actors in the political economy; upper-middle class folks who prioritize myopic (or classist) quality-of-life concerns above shared prosperity are also a problem...
2) And I think anti-monopolist discourse sometimes serves to absolve this class (whose considerable size allows it to wield immense power) of responsibility for the social problems it principally creates...
3) This can take the form of giving excessive analytical weight to corporate malfeasance that is real and worthy of condemnation but which contributes only marginally to a given social problem...
1) Over the past four years, Dems gave $36 billion to the Teamsters, walked a picket line with the UAW, and aligned trade and education policy with the AFL-CIO's interests.
But this was not enough to prevent their share of the union vote from falling.
2) The forces driving non-college voters out of the Democratic tent - e.g. our forever culture war over cosmopolitanism - look stronger than unions' capacity to liberalize their members.
Controlling for demographics, union members are now barely more Democratic than other voters
3) One recent study suggests that all this shouldn't be surprising -- since unions' capacity to make their members more progressive has always been exaggerated. vox.com/politics/37802…