So many Serious Opinion havers who just hate poor people doing the inane "let's means test everything lest billionaires send their kids to Southwestern Fresno City Community College for free!" line and I'm dying inside. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Absolutely no one honestly thinks means testing programs is anything more than a mechanism of gutting and rendering politically toxic (and invariably racialized) government programs. No one actually cares about Michael Bloomberg's children applying for Medicare!
Of course Joe Biden cannot credibly counter this argument because he made the exact same argument against Medicare For All during the primaries, helping further cement a rightwing conventional wisdom. Good times.
TAXING RICH PEOPLE MORE IS THE MOST EFFICIENT WAY TO MEANS TEST
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Another brilliant Michael Tomasky hire. Glib longtime DC insider casually condemns tens of thousands of seniors to no or substandard healthcare and is boring and fucking smug about it. The 1990s are back baaayybeeee
Adam Levine’s uncle thinks guaranteed healthcare for seniors is “a great idea” that “should happen someday. But it’s really expensive” & the obvious follow up any editor would ask is “Tim, if it should happen someday, when exactly will it not be ‘expensive’? This is nonsensical”
Let’s see how many discredited Iraq war boosters we can dust off and get cushy jobs at the new old New Republic, pay them six figures to write dull, smug pro-austerity takes that no one reads. Please, more of this
what is the point of this tweet? Primary debates are very much about normative goals, obviously tactics will change based on political circumstances but broad visions are important in that they inform voters of legislative priorities and ideological instincts
Big policy goals & grand visions are how politics is morally intelligible to most people. Why would I get excited for, canvas for, tell my friends & family to vote for a candidate who preemptively starts from a bargaining position of low expectations & guesswork about feasibility
Adults understand that debating the merits of normative policy aims isn’t the same as laying out a play by play legislative strategy based on Nate Silver’s predictions as to the political conditions on Inauguration Day
CNN is very clearly running paid PR for the UAE and it's hilarious to me they won't answer basic questions confirming or denying it. Anyway, remember this next time @brianstelter sanctimoniously goes on about "freedom of the press" or undue foreign influence from Russian or China
see more examples of CNN's hard hitting journalism on the UAE here. Highlights include six separate articles about how great their pools are. thecolumn.substack.com/p/cnn-wont-say…
hey all, this will be a carnival barking thread so feel free to ignore. A month ago I started a substack with contributions from @sarahlazare. In that month we have published 14 articles that I think are pretty good. I'll be posting a few here for you to read (or ignore)
We kicked it off with a breakdown of NYT reporter Peter Baker relying on an (undisclosed) Raytheon board member to criticize Biden's Afghanistan military withdrawal. thecolumn.substack.com/p/on-afghanist…
These metrics are totally meaningless bordering on made up. These figures are prearranged or pre-announced “charity” provided by the global north & major drivers of poverty—IMF, World Bank, EU & Bill Gates—they were going to “give away” anyway (see here: devex.com/news/donors-qu…)
Once again, Global Citizen has little to say about exploitive IMF loans, environmental destruction & anti-labor “trade deals” pushed by multinational corporations, blocking TRIPS waiver by EU & a host of other forces afflicting the global poor—Just more vapid PR for the powerful
A major donor to this program is Amazon, one of the most environmentally destructive forces on earth. What does any of this mean? What does it mean to “pledge” to grow a tree? How are these pledges enforceable?
"immigration crisis" news cycle gave us all the useless liberal tropes
1. Witness suffering and feeling bad about it while carrying out mass deportation anyway. 2. all the right humanitarian, anti-racist rhetoric front-loading... carrying out mass deportation anyway. 3. Optics!
when your ideology starts from a position of "what looks bad" rather than what is actually bad, your policy output will necessary be a meta one, focusing on what shows up on the evening news and NYT editorial board, irrespective of how your policies impact vulnerable populations.