Ladies and gentlemen, the realignment! The new House Republican whip Tom Emmer - who accepted millions from FTX - just attacked regulators at a DC lobbying conference for crypto and said SBF simply lacked ‘character.’

Chairman of Ticketmaster Greg Maffei is on CNBC blaming the site outage on Taylor Swift. He says she didn’t go on the road for four years so the demand was more than they can handle. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Here's the video clip.

https://twitter.com/econliberties/status/1593264401934696451

Republicans were the central political power behind crypto. There are endless examples but here’s the head of the Senate Banking GOP Pat Toomey in March. Meanwhile here’s Democratic Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown at the same moment.

It’s not a surprise the crypto goons are trying to pin this collapse on Dems. The dirty cops always go after the clean one.

1. A good symbol of the political challenge for conservatives serious about building a real governing party is crypto. The GOP failed to have any workable means of addressing the scam. They in fact embraced it. Why? 2. Three reasons. One, a large chunk of the GOP is openly for sale. That’s the easy problem. Two, the GOP is historically opposed to financial rules constraining Wall Street. Three, the GOP saw crypto as a path to liberty.

I'm seeing a lot of 'SBF was a huge Democratic donor' and it's true. What is also true is that his partner Ryan Salame was a huge Republican donor because they divided up the parties.

And the GOP was far far far more into the crypto grift. This is simply reality. While Gary Gensler was asking Congress for more authority to regulate crypto, the Republican commissioners were demanding he allow crypto ETFs, which would have allowed a lot more harm. cnbc.com/2021/07/02/bit…

Who is responsible for the credulity around crypto and Musk?

A LOT of people. For instance six days before SBF's Ponzi scheme came undone Matt Yglesias attacked the New York Times for having made a 'weird' editorial decision to look at tech as a corrupt power center. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… What a 'weird' NYT editorial decision to express skepticism to tech instead of blind optimism.

Yesterday the CEO of Delta was on CNN talking about how their pilots couldn't strike because it was illegal, and then the anchors slobbered all over him for Delta's socially progressive advocacy. No mention of shitty service. HR-speak/woke union-busting is what everyone hates. Like it or not, and I don't like it, this is the Dem brand. Smug jerk CEOs who cut flights to your city and stick you with ticket fees, and then get admired by equally smug media elites talking up diversity while they ignore attacks on working people.

https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1589975037242937349

Democratic soul-searching should start with turning off MSNBC and getting out of the bubble that has existed since we denied Obama and progressives engineered a foreclosure crisis. The bubble has gotten successively worse over time. Pretty much all Democratic and elite media (though not policy) trends can be explained as attempts to avoid admitting what Obama wrought.

There are two theories of democratic collapse. One traces the rot to a bunch of people who disdain elections. The other traces the rot to decades of elections not seeming to change anything. Most voters are in the latter camp. In 2012, Obama advisor turned millionaire banker Peter Orszag wrote an editorial for Bloomberg arguing we should make voting mandatory. Just six months before arguing for mandatory voting, Orszag wrote a column in the New Republic subtitled “Why we need less democracy."

I argued a year ago that we have an inflation-price cycle, and got roundly mocked and dismissed. Today this thesis is the consensus among radicals such as... the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management. ft.com/content/837c38… The profits driver of inflation was obvious last year, but it took too long for the policy consensus to shift. So today, when inflation is the number one issue on the minds of voters, policymakers have nothing to offer. mattstoller.substack.com/p/on-inflation…

Oh wow a real attack on private equity looting. Washington state AG Bob Ferguson filed a suit to stop the absurd Albertsons $4B special dividend in the Kroger merger. atg.wa.gov/news/news-rele… As @musharbash_b notes, this is a strong complaint. Ferguson notes Albertsons bought Safeway and divested some stores to private equity owned Haggen. Haggen paid its investors, went bust, and sold its stores back to Albertsons. Beware! agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/uploadedfiles/…

We can’t even start a conversation about reckoning until liberals stop buying Fauci bobble head dolls. No one has admitted error.

https://twitter.com/ProfEmilyOster/status/1587032027307679744

The original sin was Obama's choice to help foreclose on tens of millions and lie about it. This is documented in @rehundt's "A Crisis Wasted." To succeed Obama had to kill the listening ability of Dems, aka eliminate bringers of bad news. So now they can't even see error.

Chalk up a win for free speech

https://twitter.com/joshua_sisco/status/1587211571901497344

The Antitrust Division just blocked Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster. A huge win, the first successful labor monopsony merger challenge, and a key blow to publisher control over speech.

1. Re: Elon Musk and Twitter. I am concerned, but not for the reasons you might think. Let's start with the basics. FTC Chair Lina Khan did the right thing in not challenging the purchase. There's no antitrust violation, and she's about the rule of law. economicliberties.us/press-release/… 2. Elon Musk doesn't own anything that competes with Twitter, so there's no market power increase and it doesn't appear there's any restraint of trade. Since Khan is about the rule of law, there's no challenge. Antitrust isn't a blank check to do whatever.

It’s less crime than the hopelessness. Many blue areas are run badly. For example Washington DC is a mess, @MurielBowser is awful and out of touch. So is the city council. Dems have built impenetrable bureaucratic machines run by weirdos.

https://twitter.com/mchalfant16/status/1585957287482445824

The problem is when there’s a crime it doesn’t seem like anything happens to deal with it. And there’s a lot of shootings these days. That’s not acceptable.

1. Want some good news? Well today's BIG newsletter on monopolies is packed with flavor. First, @AGKarlRacine may actually stop PE billionaires from looting the supermarket giant Albertsons. Which is surprising and great. mattstoller.substack.com/p/has-private-… 2. How will a GOP takeover of Congress impact antitrust? Will Mitch McConnell put an Amazon lawyer onto the enforcement commission charged with investigating Amazon? Why is Tucker Carlson praising Elizabeth Warren? mattstoller.substack.com/p/thunder-on-t…

In the mid-2000s I was part of the anti-Bush progressive movement. The theory was we lacked tactical power. We need our own Fox News! Our own Heritage and candidate training! So that's what we built. We succeeded.

Later I realized we didn't understand what we were promoting. The same thing is basically true of most of the stuff built on the progressive side in and around the Obama years. It's why the progressive caucus just withdrew its eminently reasonable statement on Ukraine. The Reagan-era intellectual vision is usually the default.

Progressives pushing peace talks with Russia over Ukraine. Good. It’s about time. washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/… It’s beyond childish that the Biden administration says it’s not their place to ask Ukraine to have peace talks.

It would be irrational for China to attack Taiwan because China has too much to lose.

I'm glad we all agree World War I was too irrational to have happened. China is not run by hyper-rational technocrats, it's run by a group of cunning but sort of dumb mobsters engaged in a perpetual war against one another while balancing domestic and foreign affairs. If China had a free press this would perhaps be more obvious.

Remember we had all those shortages and China covered up the origin of Covid and then used its control of PPE production for geopolitical purposes and we were like 'hey maybe this dependency on a hostile power is bad'?

I'm kidding that never happened. In case you're wondering we did build a domestic industry of PPE production during Covid. So that problem was solved. Except the government under both Trump and then Biden allowed hospital monopolies to re-offshore mask and PPE production to China.

Ladies and gentlemen...

With this kind of attitude it's completely baffling why people in rural America hate Democrats.

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1583068735480688640

I sat in a room full of D.C. think tankers right after Trump was elected and listened to a consultant talk about how we need to depopulate West Virginia because it's not efficient to live there. I was like 'isn't that, you know, ethnic cleansing?' and it got real uncomfortable.