And here's the best headline I read all week: "The Surprising Popularity of 'Far-Left' Policies." The only way it could have been better is if they'd put ironic quotation marks around "surprising," because only Our Glorious Elites and their "liberal" media enablers would consider "protecting more public lands," "limit(ing) corporate tax loopholes," and "raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy" to be "far-left" positions, when in fact these policy proposals generally get majority support (and therefore bipartisan support) from Americans! But, as I've been saying for a long time, they love calling popular, good proposals "extreme," when their own solutions to everything -- make war on other countries so you can swing your balls around, cut spending that actually helps people, cut benefits for programs you've paid into all your life! -- are actually quite extreme.
The city of Tucson, AZ adopts resolution banning the privatization of its prison system. The even better news? Tucson isn't even the first locality to outlaw private corporations running their detention centers and jails, and a lot of the other localities that have done so are, like Tucson, in very red areas of the country. Of course, if you thought about it for a minute, you'd see that private prisons have no "market" incentive to improve prisoners' lives, because the more miserable they are, the less they'll be able to make it on the outside, and thus the more likely they'll become "repeat customers."
"Nearly Half of You Reading This Have Bullshit Jobs," announces the headline of this Daily Beast interview with the author of (you guessed it) the book Bullshit Jobs. The term "bullshit jobs" describes jobs that are a) quite well-paid and b) quite useless, the kind of job that exists to make other people look good, or at least not incompetent. They can range from the receptionist who takes one phone call daily but has to exist to make the boss look important to the "people who provide unnecessary supervision" to corporate-lawyer "goons." And they don't exist in spite of our "free" market ideology, but because of it, and its mania for quantifying everything. (Read the whole article; it contains, among so many other things, the best argument for a universal basic income I've yet heard.)
California Republican U.S. House candidate actually films herself harassing a transgender woman trying to use the bathroom at a Denny's. I won't name name this U.S. House candidate, since we shouldn't give jerks too much sunlight. But I will highlight her stupid argument, that a transgender woman was "invading my privacy" (italics in original) merely by a) being born male and b) wanting to use the women's room. Setting aside that following someone into a bathroom and then harassing them is an actual invasion of privacy, I could more easily argue that this House candidate is invading my privacy merely by being such an asshole that I noticed it. The good news? She'll be lucky to lose by only 50 points in this district, and thus she's the proverbial walnut in the batter of eternity.
Finally, upon hearing the so-far-unsubstantiated rumor that the Administration might fire Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, my first thought was: who on Earth do they think they're going to find to do that job better than she does it? By "that job," of course, I don't mean "informing the American people about what the Administration's doing," but the job of putting entire cartons of lipstick on the pigs this Administration keeps trotting out. Seriously, even Tha Bush Mobb's notorious last Press Secretary, Dana Perino, couldn't match the sheer will-to-lie of Sarah Sanders. Then again, I'd hate to report, in a few months, that I'd spoken too soon.
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