You may be tempted to see it as a good sign that our "liberal" media have been picking on Brazilian President/irredeemable asshole Jair Bolsonaro for his abject mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, but Brian Meir at FAIR reminds us that a) he ain't the only world leader bollocksing up that job and b) our "liberal" media still excuse (or praise!) Mr. Bolsonaro's cruel economic policy and disgusting public utterings. You will also want to resist the temptation to make fun of Mr. Bolsonaro for apparently being unable to put a mask on, because right-wing politicians look stupid on purpose, partly so that you focus on their stupidity and not their evil, but also so that they seem more "normal." After all (so the reasoning goes), how evil can someone be if they can't put on a face mask or speak in complete sentences? Of course our own lived, shared experience -- not just of this President, but of Tha Bush Mobb and Ronald Reagan, in particular -- should lead us to answer "quite evil." If we haven't already split the knot and concluded that stupid is evil, that is.
Nate Silver at Five Thirty Eight presents a pretty good analysis of last week's Wisconsin primary. I feared that right-wing coronavirus denialists would outvote regular Wisconsinites, but a liberal candidate unexpectedly pounded a right-wing incumbent in the state's sole Supreme Court race, which will hopefully make political parties pause before hiding important elections in primaries so that only their diehards will turn out. And speaking of turnout, about two-thirds as many folks voted in the 2020 primary as did in the 2016 primary, partly due to the pandemic (and, ah, all the state's machinations because of the pandemic!) and partly due to neither party's primary being particularly competitive. But the big story? Some 80 percent of Wisconsinites voted absentee, up from a mere 10 percent in the 2016 primary; as more Wisconsinites get used to the idea that they don't absolutely have to go to a polling place to vote, maybe that number will go up -- although we have to make Congress help out our Postal Service by then; you don't think UPS or FedEx are going to deliver these votes, do you?
You've hardly heard about this from teabaggers and the many other species of deficit peacocks, but our annual budget deficit could get as high as $4 trillion this year. That's of course due to recent pandemic-related legislation pumping out $2.5 trillion of as-yet-uncollected tax revenue, but let us not forget that our Congressional Budget Office (or CBO) said it'd be over a trillion this year well before the pandemic hit, just like it was about a trillion last year, and why? Because of the 2017 tax "reform," of course, a bigger gift to rich folks than the recent $2 trillion-plus "stimulus" was! You know how this game's going to go if Joe Biden beats our President at the polls this November: he'll be "hamstrung" to do anything of consequence because of the deficit, though deficits never seem to stop Republicans from cutting taxes on rich folk, and folks like Sean Hannity will yell TEH BIDENZ HAZ ALREADYZ TRIPLEDZ TEH DEFICITZ!!!!!, just like he blamed Mr. Obama after Tha Bush Mobb rammed a $700 billion bankster bailout down our throats at the end of their term. Of course, I fully expect Mr. Biden to go along with these fictions -- unless we make that impossible, of course.
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