So what's the worst thing about Larry Summers's hand-wringing that the American Rescue Plan might be too big? I was all ready to say it was his fear of "inflationary pressures" that never seem to come no matter how often right-wingers whine about it, or his argument about "the gap between actual and potential output" like that matters to working families who can't pay the rent. But no, the worst thing about his op-ed is this: he praises the plan's "rejection of austerity orthodoxy" like he hasn't been one of the architects of austerity orthodoxy in America for decades! Which tells you he doesn't mean it! And not that I've done the math, but paragraph 9 sounds like absolute horseshit.
The Biden Administration is mulling sending masks to every American household. Cue right-wing whining about FREEDUMZ!!!!!! and tracking devices (not to mention mask-burning videos!) in 3...2...1...
Amazon finally offers an encryption option for its Ring doorbells -- but you still have to opt in to it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is right to note that, really, Ring should make encryption the default setting. I'll let them tell the rest of it: "EFF expends a lot of effort fighting against Ring and other Internet connected home security devices -- but we do it for good reason. Police departments that could not legally build and use a large-scale government surveillance network are using Ring cameras as a loophole to avoid public input and accountability. Consumers’ choice to buy a camera cannot and should not be a way to launder mass surveillance and streamline digital racial profiling."
Former Rep. Steve King (R-IA) comments at length over the (entirely deserved!) troubles Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is having these days. Surprise, surprise, he's learned not a damn thing about a damn thing, and why did he need 24 hours to prepare a response to Kevin McCarthy in 2019 about all the noxious and racist crap he's said for over a decade? I would think that any self-respecting asshole with a trail of slime that long would be ready to account for himself at length at any moment, lest he be regarded as a whiner as well as an asshole. But I guess that's how he wants to be remembered.
Voting machine corporation Smartmatic follows in Dominion's footsteps by filing a $2.7 billion defamation/disparagement lawsuit against certain right-wing media organs (Fox News) and certain right-wing political operatives and media "personalities" (Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Maria Bartiromo among others). I don't look forward to right-wingers incessantly whining about TEH FRIVOLUZ LAWSUITZ!!!!!, but if it takes the threat of getting sued, or even a successful lawsuit, to finally make certain media organs act responsibly, I won't complain about it. (After all, as Russell Kirk used to say, rights have responsibilities!)
Finally, Charlie Cook is an estimable political analyst, so I'm gobsmacked that he thinks the Biden Administration's refusal to yield to Republican demands on the American Rescue Plan is stupid. Good Americans don't care very much about the two parties cooperating in the best of times, but, ah, he does know that the Republicans spent two months trying to nullify the 2020 election, right? And he does know that right-wingers, incited by a Republican President and encouraged by over 100 Republican Congressfolk, attempted a coup on January 6? Given these events, he should be wondering why anyone would want to work with Republicans.
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