When I hear that Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have blocked over 300 highways in protest of his loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the Brazilian Presidential election earlier this week, all I can say is get over it! Your guy lost! I mean, even the bad man himself has told protestors to stop blocking highways, and has reportedly moved more quickly on his own transition than Mr. Trump did. These protestors would do much better getting organized about their concerns, if indeed they have any concerns they can articulate. In the meantime, this rubbish could be coming to America in a little less than a week.
Big news from Matt Stoller is that our Department of Justice has successfully blocked a proposed big corporate merger, that of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, and now might be a good time to remind everyone that if we put Republicans back in charge of either or both houses of Congress, they will defund all of our government’s efforts to fight monopolies. Another way of putting that might be that Republicans would defund the police. Seriously.
In a peripherally-related note, Sasha Abramsky at TruthOut reminds us that armed “election monitors” in Arizona are “Just the Tip of the Voter Intimidation Iceberg.” True law-and-order adherents like you and I will be heartened that Arizona Secretary of State/gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs has referred no less than half a dozen complaints to our Justice Department, but we won’t truly be safe until we successfully shame and shun right-wingers into complete and deserved loneliness. Sound harsh? Hey, it’s not violence.
When you hear that “celebrity politicians” are doing well in These Interesting Times by “getting the public to register transgressive behavior as entertainment,” you may be reminded that Satan was a much more compelling character than God in Paradise Lost. But we must remember that transgressive behavior is entertaining only if it’s fiction (and not always then, either!). We must also remember that Herschel Walker running for Senate is real, and if he wins, there’ll be real consequences.
Big real estate corporations have spent over $5 million trying to defeat a “mansion tax” in Los Angeles – and do the pro-mansion tax forces there understand that they have all the leverage? I mean, today’s moguls never think long-term financially, so that point where it costs less to pay the damn tax must be coming pretty soon. But to think they have the cojones to assert that a mansion tax would raise rents! Like they’re not already raising rents as high as they can! Like any civilized person should simply tolerate big corporations simply “passing their costs on to the consumer”!
Finally, when I hear that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was on a “suicide mission” to hold certain politicians accountable, all I can say is well, that’s how you’d have to do it! And seriously, I get tired of hearing assholes say they’re going to “hold politicians accountable” on a series of imaginary grievances. There are ways to hold Nancy Pelosi accountable for her actual corruption, but such thoughts will never touch the mind of David DePape. Let him rot in jail for the rest of his natural if he thinks breaking skulls solves anything.
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