
Fresh off giving us exactly zero criminal allegations against President Biden and his son on “Judgment Day,” now our House Oversight Committee has started investigating FTC Chair Lina Khan, supposedly for “acting in defiance of legal precedent” (it’s not like we’ve had antitrust laws on the books for over a hundred years or anything!) and for “deviat(ing) from its mission to protect America’s consumer,” by which they must mean America’s job-killing CEOs who can no longer redistribute your income upward to themselves as easily as they could when we just let them buy whatever corporations they wanted whenever they wanted. Good luck with all of that, Gomer, ahem, Comer.
Ho hum, our “liberal” media falls all over itself calling the whole debt limit “deal” a “triumph of bipartisanship.” An alien confronting this phenomenon for the first time would conclude that “bipartisanship” must mean “when one side gets some of its aims enacted and the other side doesn’t,” and very little “liberal” media coverage from the last several decades would dissuade them from that conclusion. Also too, we hear more than enough from our “liberal” media about “winners and losers” among the political parties, but not nearly enough about whether we the American people win or lose with these debt limit dramas.
In a related note, ha ha ha the debt limit “deal” has a good chance of actually increasing spending on food stamps! Of course, actually doing something was never a Republican aim – with Republicans these days, the only aim is drama. Less a laughing matter, of course, is that decreased IRS spending, which Republicans just had to have, will increase the deficit, because our IRS won’t be able to go after rich tax cheats as well as they could before. Still, the debt limit deal managed to preserve over two-thirds of the Inflation Reduction Act’s boost in IRS funding, and as Saul Alinsky might say, if you start with nothing and you get something, you win. (Republicans could say it, too, except they’re afraid of getting radical leftist cooties.)
The incomparable Sonali Kohatkar reminds us that when we advocate for a four-day work week, we need to attend the pitfalls! Like, for example, corporate efforts to cram 40 hours into four days when it should be 32 hours, or our need to make the same money in a 32-hour work week as in a 40-hour work week, or the temptation to use the shorter work week to do more side hustles (when working less is the entire point!). Personal to anyone who responds with “no one wants to work anymore”: virtually every economist worth a damn will tell you that people are far, far more productive today than they were even 50 years ago, so CTFO.
The Columbia Journalism Review tells us about Defector, the worker-owned sports/culture media website that has billed itself, not without justification, as “the last good website.” (Full disclosure: I pay real cash money to read it; Drew Magary’s annual “Why Your Team Sucks” NFL previews are alone worth the price of admission, but the other stuff is also terrific.) So much about Defector is great that I went and digged through this article for criticisms, and here they are: they don’t get many scoops and they don’t cover controversial topics like sports betting very much, each exactly the kind of editorial quirk you’d find in a worker-owned media outlet, not that I'd know that from experience or anything.
And now here comes Cornel West to declare a run for President and actually make me think twice about declaring my vote for Joe Biden months ago. Like Bernie, he supports all the right things, and his candidacy is far, far better news than that of antivaxxer Robert Kennedy, Jr.; Mr. West is probably about as well-known as any American scholar, but still not as well-known as, say, almost any reality TV star, and if you’re still afraid he’ll take enough votes from Joe Biden to elect Donald Trump, I would refer you to the election of 1948, where an unpopular Harry Truman faced two Democrats running to his left and right in the general election and still got over 300 electoral votes. (If Mr. Trump somehow loses the nomination and still runs as an “independent” – which of course he will, because grift – Joe Biden might get 400 electoral votes whether Cornel West is running or not.)
Finally, when I hear that Donald Trump wants to know exactly who in our FBI and Justice Department is actually working on active federal probes into his misbehavior, I’m beyond thinking he’ll purge them all if he wins another term as President. I mean, of course he will! And his millions of votaries who all squeal TEH LAWZ ANDZ TEH ORDURZ!!!!! when police kill another Black man for brandishing a cellphone will all cheer him on. But it couldn’t be that Mr. Trump wants their identities exposed so his votaries kill them before he has to purge them, could it? After all, as any boss knows, it’s so much better to get volunteers to do your work for you than people you have to pay – or, in his case, people you try to avoid paying.