Our Justice Department sues to prevent Meta’s acquisition of a virtual reality app corporation, thus saying not-so-fast to Meta’s mad dash to create the “metaverse” which is totally not Decentraland or Sandbox or Second Life. Naturally Meta’s entire retort to the suit is regulation chills innovation, an offensively absurd argument which persuades very few Americans. Of course, they don’t throw it out there to persuade so much as to give people pause. Don’t pause, good peoples. The famous cliché instructs us that necessity, not “freedom from regulation,” is the mother of invention.
Hoo boy Donald Trump sure has big cojones throwing around phrases like “law and order” like he personally isn’t the most lawless individual most people know, but I’ll grant that calling for the death penalty for drug dealers is probably fairly popular, and it would absolutely be the wedge he uses to do all his other unpopular fascist crap, like sending the National Guard into cities and parking police cars on every corner and “removing” prosecutors who don’t do exactly what he wants. Seriously, cop cars on every block? It’s like they never want a teenager to vote Republican again!
Pema Levy at Mother Jones runs down all the state laws that essentially enable every citizen to be a “snitch” for money, like the odious Texas anti-abortion law. People like thinking of themselves as vigilantes, but that doesn’t mean they like other people to be vigilantes, particularly when they gum up their lives! Our Supreme Court should throw out all these laws, given that they’ve previously ruled that you must be able to prove harm was done to you to have standing to sue about anything. Think this Court will respect that precedent? I’d sooner lay money that the Detroit Lions will win Super Bowl LVII.
Thinking Republican Doug Mastriano has a real uphill battle to win the Pennsylvania Governor’s race? Think again: corporations still love plowing money into the Republican Governors Association, and the RGA’s working hard to elect Mr. Mastriano, even as they’re pretending they’re not. Hilariously, the corporations that have given to the RGA either don’t respond to questions or respond with stupidity. “We give to both sides” is a stupid thing to say when one side literally imitates Nazis in saying a “Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy” runs the world.
What does it mean that figures such as Christie Todd Whitman and Andrew Wang have come together to form a third party optimistically called the Forward Party? It means someone’s created yet another gravity well to suck in money from the rich and/or inattentive, that’s what! A plurality of Americans call themselves independent, but BFD – I’m an independent, too, and I won’t vote for Republicans even under threat of catheterization with barbed wire. People don’t hate parties so much as they hate politicians who constantly give them the backs of their hands.
Finally, let the record show that Republicans reacted to the possibility that Democrats might actually pass an even more slimmed-down Build Back Better bill by killing popular veterans’ health care legislation, and threatening to derail legislation protecting gay marriage as well. When I say the only way to talk to a Republican is to tell him to stop whining, this is why, because all of this is literal immaturity on Republicans’ part. If Democrats want to win the midterms – and we have ample reason to believe that they don’t! – they should run ads depicting their Republican opponents as tantrum-throwing babies from now through November.
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