Sam Pizzigati at the Our Future blog foresees "A Nation Where Only The Rich Have Homes." Dystopia has landed in the Bay Area, where millionaires rant about homeless folks parked in RVs along the waterfront and GoFundMe campaigns have actually emerged to fund lawsuits fighting affordable housing. Why, it's like these folks have never heard of irony! If we taxed the rich a lot harder than we do, we wouldn't have any of these problems -- not homelessness, which is almost entirely a post-Kemp/Roth phenomenon in America, and not whining about homeless people getting a "better view" of the beach.
Barbara G. Ellis at TruthOut reports that well over half of rural voters also want Medicare-for-All health insurance -- and reminds us that rural folk "have horrifying mishaps the urban/suburban public are unlikely ever to experience," plus "the problem of long-distance travel to reach a medical facility." She also gives some good advice about how to talk to rural voters about Medicare-for-All -- or, to be more precise, how to listen to rural voters' health care stories. Strange that a "liberal" media that seems to love horror stories about health care doesn't typically run stories about folks getting mangled by tractors or crushed by jacks. Maybe they can't hear such stories because they have all that money in their ears.
Ho hum, YouTube doesn't abide by its own rules regarding harassment, mainly because of money from advertising. Using algorithms instead of human beings to "demonetize" websites that deserve it is undoubtedly part of the problem, though that doesn't fully explain why the history teacher making instructional videos about the fall of the Third Reich always seems to get shafted while the guy actually spouting racist rubbish gets off -- but who, exactly, would want to advertise with right-wing trolls who do little other than call their opponents foul names? It can't be all about the eyeballs, since anyone can get attention by merely being an asshole. Thus a Drop Fox-style campaign against YouTube seems long overdue.
Annoyed by all the drama our President has been fomenting about whatever agreement he has or doesn't have with Mexico over tariffs and immigration? Dean Baker comes to the rescue, as usual, by explaining how tariffs work. Long story short: consumers don't necessarily bear all the burden of tariffs, and tariffs can be an effective negotiating ploy, but in the hands of this President, tariffs will almost certainly become just another tool with which he enriches himself and his cronies. Also, too, assessing tariffs against Mexico makes no economic sense when you've been negotiating a trade deal with Mexico! Sadly, as I've said, it does make political sense.
I'm not sure this report about Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao greasing the skids for projects in the home state of her husband, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell will have the negative effect against Mr. McConnell's 2020 re-election effort that I'd like it to have. I mean, yes, it is textbook corruption, but will Kentucky voters feel that way about it, particularly after Mr. McConnell shows ads touting his role in "the revitalization of Owensboro"? Statistics showing Kentucky ranking only 25th in Department of Transportation money since the beginning of 2017 aren't convincing, of course, once you see that email from February of 2017 regarding "Ky-specific issue(s)." And by "Ky," they didn't mean the jelly.
Finally, China's "Great Firewall" of internet censorship now blocks both the Washington Post and The Guardian in addition to most other major English-language papers of record. Most news reports speculate that China is doing all this censoring because it doesn't want its citizens to read about the 30th anniversary of the Tianenmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese government literally ran over protestors with tanks; I guess that could explain the timing, but with tyrants you still have to wonder. It couldn't also be that the Post and the Guardian have been highly-critical of our President, could it? I mean, tyrants do seem to attract each other.
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