Glenn Greenwald discusses with Daniel Denvir the "comforting answers" Russiagate "offers to despondent liberals." Long story short: "the Trump victory was a traumatizing and disorienting event for most people," leading folks to "crave an explanation that makes sense and that lets you feel like the world is safe and understandable again." Key reminder: the Russian troll effort was "primitive and pales in comparison to the amount of money spent on messaging by political campaigns, let alone US corporations and lobbyists." And regardless of who goes to jail over Russiagate, I still think the Democrat play-not-to-lose mentality and Republican vote suppression had more to do with the result than Russia could ever hope to have done.
Say, did you hear about that time the National Restaurant Association hired Frank Luntz's group to poll Americans about raising the minimum wage, which of course the "other NRA" opposes -- and found over 70% of Americans perfectly happy to pay restaurant workers more even if it meant higher prices? No? That's likely because the big restaurant lobby, as you might expect, isn't happy with the findings, even though it hired The Father of The Death Tax to get those findings. I am a little appalled that 29% of Americans opposed a minimum wage hike "even if the average food service employee can't make ends meet," until I remember that 25% of the electorate is batshit insane.
Jim Naureckas at FAIRNew York Times hack advising Democrats to be more like "liberals" and less like "progressives." Apparently "liberals" know better than to "eradicate" economic problems like the income gap -- apparently they'd be content with handing out welfare checks, rather than, you know, minimum wage hikes and job-creating taxes on the rich -- and "progressivism" is somehow "intrinsically opposed to conservation," which is as ridiculous as saying conservatism is intrinsically opposed to progress. Anyway, I've never called myself a "progressive," because it's long been the Democrat way of running away from the word "liberal," but articles like the Times's give liberals like me a bad name.
Another week, another Congressional special election in a deep-red district that's somehow a tossup in at least one poll, and we learn that the Republican nominee for Arizona's 8th, current state Senator Debbie Lesko, has "routinely" introduced bills that are little more than ALEC model bills with a few words changed. It'd be nice if her dependence on/work for ALEC scuttled her election bid, but certainly the news has arrived too late (the election's tomorrow), and besides, not everyone knows what the American Legislative Exchange Council is, or how nefarious their works have been over the decades.
From the "Nobody Could Have Predicted" file: Mitt Romney doesn't even get a majority of votes at the Utah Republican Convention to pick a U.S. Senate nominee (among others) for 2018, and will face a primary against a state Rep who got more votes. Mr. Romney thinks Utahns didn't care for him running at the convention and trying to get enough signatures to appear on the primary ballot anyway, and maybe he's right -- or maybe good Utahns, like everyone else, hate those whom they perceive as "Establishment" politicians.
Finally, in the wake of our newest Supreme Court Justice casting the deciding vote against a part of immigration law allowing detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed "violent" crimes, our President now wonders aloud if Justice Gorsuch is conservative enough. All together now: one counterexample does not destroy a trend. Also, too, why should a President expect Justices to toe his line? And why should we enable that sort of thinking? That's not what our Founders wanted, was it?
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