Sam Knight at TruthOut reminds us that Joe Biden's vaunted "bipartisanship" is a sham that actually helps promote the Republican agenda. Read the whole thing, because it's a pretty devastating analysis -- he downplayed how much his $200,000 speaking gig helped out the Rep. Upton (R-MI), and then cast Mr. Upton as a health care fighter who "saved lives" without mentioning that Mr. Upton freaking voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Plus, you know, Mr. Biden supported "free" trade, mass incarceration, the Iraq war, and bankruptcy "reform" while in the Senate. Seriously, read it even if your first thought upon reading the headline was "well, how well did Mr. Biden's 'bipartisanship' work with Republicans in eight years as Vice President?"
Trevor Aaronson at The Intercept suggests that our courts might be a "better battlefield" to fight our President's lies -- specifically citing the 2001 Information Quality Act, which mandated the creation of standards for information our government agencies put out, and perhaps more importantly, let federal judges force our government to retract published info that doesn't meet those standards. Very few plaintiffs have tried suing under the Information Quality Act, and I wonder which federal judges (cough Roberts Kavanaugh Gorsuch cough) will throw out lawsuits because plaintiffs don't have "standing" to sue, though it seems to me pretty much any American who feels lied to by our government would have standing to sue.
Didn't know there was a "Conservative Case for Antitrust," did you? Well, don't blame conservatism for that -- blame contemporary "conservatives" who seem to think conservatism is all about militarism and religious bigotry and who gets the most money. Certainly a "conservative case for antitrust" wouldn't surprise you if you've long thought of a viable conservatism as one that would oppose concentrated power anywhere. I might quibble with some of Jonathan Tepper's rhetorical strategies ("number of antitrust lawsuits filed by TR and Taft" is a statistic begging for more context), but I wouldn't quibble with the overarching notion that truly free markets require market competition. It even warmed my heart to hear Friedrich Hayek prefer "inefficiency" to monopoly.
The flesh is willing with Elizabeth Goitein's quite reasonable and thorough assessment that the longer our President waits, the worse his case for declaring a "national emergency" over the Southern border becomes, but we all know that for this President, the past isn't just another country but an alternate universe. And worse, if terrorists inflict a 9.11-style attack during the next government shutdown, Our Glorious Elites will declare that we are all Americans now and that we must cleave to our President in These Difficult Times, never mind the multitudinous ways he would have failed to protect us, and our "liberal" media won't be very interested in recalling how our President could have declared his little emergency right away but dithered for months on end.
Finally, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz mulls an independent run for President, and Jonathan Chait explains why he's a fool to try. Mr. Chait's analysis is mostly pretty solid -- it warms my heart to hear a media pundit actually say the center isn't where conventional wisdom says it is, and it warms my hear further to hear Mr. Chait describe opposing the massive corporate tax cut of 2017 as a "layup," one that Mr. Schultz misses, no less -- but I don't think the problem with a Schultz candidacy is he thinks expertise in one field will translate to another, but that as a billionaire he's surrounded himself with people who'll never tell him when he's full of shit. That would explain his apparent belief that Americans yearn for a great nonpartisan independent hope even better than a general theory of how we misread the "center" would.
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