Interesting - it was the top story on nytimes.com. Wonder why it was buried in the print edition.
Interesting - it was the top story on nytimes.com. Wonder why it was buried in the print edition.
As a 16 year old, I went to the 1982 US Festival in southern California - the 3-day party modeled on Woodstock organized by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak. Saw Talking Heads, English Beat, The Police, Fleetwood Mac, The Ramones, The B-52s, The Cars, Tom Petty and lots of others. Really amazing.
Ok, so what else is there in the bill of indictment? And don't tell me to do my own research, because I did that and didn't find much.
If that's all you got, you're going to lose in your campaign to destroy him.
As best I can tell the entire case that Newsom is "throwing the LGBT+ community under the bus" consists of his expressing some sympathy for the idea that trans women competing in women's sports is unfair. Am I missing something?
I think the real journalists asking Trump questions during press gaggles are wasting their time. They should just let the right wing hacks ask the questions and record what he says - for the record - and then just fact check him. That's all that real White House journalism can be these days.
And then what? If you say, "actually sir, that's not true" - he'll just call you nasty and try to have you barred from the press pool. And nothing else will happen. The lie will become a new talking point. Online liberals will guffaw at the absurdity, but most people won't even see it.
Whenever I see exchanges like this, I wonder what's the point. Do the journalists asking these questions - no doubt in all sincerity - think they're "holding power to account?" Because honestly that is not what is happening. We know with certainty that when confronted like this, Trump will lie.
Right
This story was from 2024.
Trump Administration policies are expected to *slow the growth* of solar, not "gut" it. But the economics of utility-scale solar + batteries are becoming too compelling regardless of any cutbacks to incentives and tax credits. Wind is another matter unfortunately.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Virtually any liberal would give a similar answer, so clearly you don't understand what liberalism actually is.
Why is it so hard for the New York Times to say something Trump said is racist? Not "carrying uncomfortable racial overtones." Racist. What's with the weasel words?
You're cherry-picking two minor incidents. Trump was impeached twice and Dems dominated the news for weeks with the January 6 commission.
Finally, to say that our system doesn't have those features implies that what Trump is doing isn't that bad. If the system is useless, who cares if Trump brings it all down? If you think about it for more than a few seconds, you'll realize that the system has a lot that's worth trying to preserve.
You are mistaking "fake democracy" for "imperfect democracy." Also - it is complete nonsense to say that dems exist to say nothing better is possible. The eternal question is what constitutes "better." If mainstream Dems have a different vision of what "better" means than you do, win them over.
This is bullshit. People do not hate fair democratic elections, transparency, respect for the law and other things Democrats defend. Fucking cancer research - people do not hate that. The fact is that people didn't believe the warnings. They said "we survived Trump I - we'll survive Trump II."
Worse than trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election by encouraging an outright invasion of the Capitol? And then to have Trump pardon all the people who did it? It simply boggles my mind that that wasn't disqualifying for a majority of American voters.
That is a complete mischaracterization of what has happened and what is happening now. Both Clinton and Harris built their whole campaigns around screaming from the rooftops about the dangers of Trump and Trumpism. You're going to need a better explanation than "Dems don't say anything."
This had me scratching my head too so I looked it up. Turns out Benvenuto Cellini, the sculptor, also wrote a famous autobiography about 16th Century life as well as other works about art. Which, OK fine, but is that really part of a basic canon of works of literature?
Absolutely brilliant.
There's no evidence that it would have made a lick of difference in changing people's votes.
Yet another consequence of our inability to properly price negative externalities. If all those extra deaths in perpetuity from particulate matter had an actual cash cost to them, no fossil fuel project would ever make economic sense, even to the most hard-nosed executive.
“Socially liberal” in the context of US politics is usually code for belief in abortion rights and, to a lesser extent, gay rights. There’s nothing contradictory about believing in both of those things while also believing in smaller government.
Bad take. The solution is to build more housing!
This Vox explainer from a few years ago does a pretty good job of describing the process. It never gets old: www.vox.com/2019/5/24/18...
I remember that episode and was struck then by the ability of Republican media to conjure up a "scandal" out of nothing. Then the mainstream media feels like it needs to "cover the controversy" thereby further injecting the poison into the bloodstream. It's absolutely insidious.
In Berkeley a few years ago there was a whole kerfuffle because the famously liberal Robert Reich wrote a letter to the city council protesting a building near his house being converted to multi-family housing. The YIMBYs were having a field day with the hypocrisy.
Those signs on the Berkeley campus saying "This space reserved for Nobel Prize Winner." or some such shit - was dreamed up by the University marketing people. It's pure cringe.
Elon is nuts and none of this is real. That said, I am 100% behind the idea of a manned Mars mission.
You're behind the times - Olive Garden has been doing unlimited breadsticks for years.
Not to minimize the right wing slime machine, but the effect I'm talking about doesn't require it. The best known example is Medicare for All, which polls well when you describe it simply as extending Medicare. But when you describe it in more granular (but still accurate) detail, support drops off.
Very fair point. I'm in no way condoning or downplaying what is a serious breach of privacy.
Other things I wish people understood: progressive policies are often popular **in the abstract**. They often get a lot less popular when they become concrete proposals with real trade offs.
This is a very old story. Adult content has always been an early use case for new media technology. Videocassettes and PCs in the 1980s, the early Internet in the 1990s, mobile tech in the 2000s, VR in the 2010s and now AI in the 2020s. Pornography drove a lot of the early demand for all of them.
I'm a believer that Trump's policies will lead to all sorts of economic problems, but we may have to come to grips with the idea that it may take a while.
I’d buy anything from Samuel L. Jackson.
Not a notably left-leaning group, wouldn't you say?
The difference is that right wingers pushing tax cuts are doing it to reward their wealthy donors, so in that sense they work very well. There may be some who still believe the supply side arguments but it's mostly pushed to hoodwink the rubes. Who is rewarded if the left is resistant to building?
I saw this in the wild and couldn't believe we were doing this again.
The whole point is to politicize the general officer corps.
It's also complete nonsense. Lefties may believe that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans, but back in the real world, where real policy is made, things look a bit different.
Why is it so difficult to understand that BOTH free speech AND resistance to a fascist takeover of higher education are important. They're the SAME ISSUE.
Federal government grants represent 11% of Harvard’s budget. No way can the endowment replace that, especially since most of it is restricted in what it can be used for.
That was then. Today it's different. I haven't seen any leftist commentary in support of Trump's tariffs. Maybe there are some people supporting it, but it's not very prominent.
No it's not. The mercantilists these days are the MAGA types. If anything, the left, at least in the US, is now pro-free trade. Maybe that's just opposing whatever Trump is for. If there's any "rebranding" going on, it's Scandinavian-style social democracy being rebranded as "socialism."
Opinion polls certainly have issues that need to be addressed. In general this isn’t one of them.
It's a direct consequence of the steady transformation of American presidents into elected kings.
Trust me there is oodles of children’s programming. Wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix or Apple or Hulu snap up the brand name shows like Sesame Street.
I'm struggling to understand what benefit this spectacle will have. You get to reinforce your brand as a debater willing to take on the knuckle-draggers. So - good for you. But will any minds be changed? Will any insight be gained about the nature of the right in today's America? Color me skeptical.
I guess I'm skeptical, if that wasn't clear.
Haven't listened to the talk, so maybe this is addressed, but is there any research to support the idea that significantly increased numbers of people would vote if they could do it by phone? And would the ideological composition of those extra voters differ from the electorate that already votes?
On the contrary - Democrats vote for assholes all the time. Just in New York, we had Eliot Spitzer and Andrew Cuomo over a period of 15 years. Both spectacular assholes.
it's not just the Freedom Caucus. It's essentially the entire Republican Party. Their entire policy agenda depends on them being able to bamboozle the public to pass horrendously unpopular policy.
Help me understand this. What's the argument FOR city-owned grocery stores? Aren't supermarkets famously low-margin businesses - like profits of less than 5%? How much is a city-owned store going to be able to lower prices? They'll be buying from the same suppliers as everyone else.
There's a bit more to it than that. It's not like Mamdani didn't do research. Use research - polls, focus groups etc. - to understand what is important to the public. Ground your proposals to those issues in the context of your core beliefs.
But Mamdani and Cuomo weren’t the only choices! Brad Lander was the obvious best choice for centrists.
Archie Bunker was MAGA personified. Aggressively ignorant, mean-spirited and entitled all at once.
We should be so lucky to be the next London.
Forgive me, but Bernie and AOC don't seem like they're all that crippled. Also, I don't think either of them has a hostile relationship with the Dem establishment - there is healthy competition on the direction of the party.
Why you should never respond and just use the "report junk" function.
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Op-ed writers are not responsible for the headlines that appear. That's the editors trying to lure you to read the article. If you actually read the piece, you'd realize that his position is reasonable. Are you expecting him to root for the mission to fail?
Finally, you have the relentless Republican propaganda apparatus and coordinated messaging that has acted as a brake on stories coded as "left leaning." It's less about corporate owners spiking stories or otherwise influencing coverage and more about news organizations searching for "balance."
If the media has not told the story properly, it's because each new cut only changes things incrementally and that's generally not considered a priority story in the mainstream media. Also, much of this has been about obscure court cases and changes in arcane rulemaking processes.
I realize this is taken as a given by progressives, but I really think corporate media ownership is not the issue here. The bigger issue is that the weakening of regulatory oversight has been a decades-long Republican project that has become a story of death by a thousands cuts.
He's been a huckster and bullshit artist his entire life. This is no different from the numerous frauds he perpetrated in the New York real estate world 40-50 years ago.
Trump may very well be delusional. But I doubt that's actually what's going on here. This is less about delusion and more about propaganda. With Trump, everything is marketing and manipulation directed first at the MAGA base and second at low-attention voters. Nothing else matters.
LMAO
Honestly believe that the Israeli military objective is to sow enough chaos in Iran that it foments regime change at a time when they are most vulnerable. It's hard to believe they thought they could actually destroy the Iranian nuclear program completely.
Some of us remember when Ned Lamont ran against Joe Lieberman 20 years ago as an expression of frustration by grassroots Democrats with centrist Dems who were seen as doing the bidding of Republicans. His campaign then was one of the catalysts for the growth of the online left. How times change.
Is it just me, or are others getting tired of the constant references to the fact that this guy's sons are Marines? I mean, thank you for your service and all, but people who aren't parents of Marines are just as American and just as deserving to not be attacked by ICE goons.
The valuation was much higher when he was still telling everyone he was apolitical.
"Deserving" is a value judgement. I'm curious how you think Jeff Bezos "rigged the system." At the dawn of the consumer internet 25-30 years ago, there's no way you would have predicted a startup would beat out every major retailer to control e-commerce. So Bezos and his team kinda were smarter.
True of Gates, Bezos, Page/Brin and Zuckerberg. Ellison - sorta. Ironically, not Musk. Most of his wealth comes from Tesla, which is absolutely not a monopoly.
Apparently, it’s totally cool to tell Jews what we really think and decide that you know more than your Jewish friends on Israel, Palestine, and Zionism because you’ve “listened to people online”. I will say this as many times as I need to, but other people don’t get to redefine Zionism for Jews. 1/
None of that is happening either without a Dem trifecta.
This is primarily cynicism, not contempt. He says things in a way that is completely performative, because he only cares about the MAGA crowd and, ultimately, only really cares about Trump. He has decided that his route to being Trump's successor is to be as shameless as Trump.
Where I come down is to say that nuclear power should be a "last resort" source of energy -a lower priority than solar or wind for the vast majority of places. Maybe as reactor designs get cheaper that could change. But if I'm a state government planner now, I know where I'd be allocating resources.
I also understand the limitations of renewables and with storage. The land use question is a thorny one. So maybe solar and wind can't solve every energy problem everywhere. But the history with renewables is rapid technological progress and dramatically lowered costs and increases in efficiency.
But I'm not convinced about the cost questions. Yes, theoretically if more reactors get built, the costs will go down and contractors will get better at it. But this should be true of building any sort of infrastructure, and yet we see huge cost overruns everywhere - roads, trains, airports etc.
Thank you for this overview. I appreciate someone who takes the time to put together a real argument. You make a convincing case that the safety concerns should be manageable. But the MAGA attitude towards regulation scares the shit out of me. We can't trust that regulation won't be politicized.
But I'd really like to understand the arguments that refute the NIRS case against nuclear.
Economically, nuclear plants are huge wins for utility companies that are subject to guaranteed rate of return regulation. Spend more on construction = earn more money. Culturally, there are still a lot people who still don't take renewables seriously and still think it's for hippy-dippy lefties.
Not to mention (d) the risk of catastrophic meltdown. I'm trying to understand from someone who knows what they're talking about why, given these limitations, nuclear remains so necessary in the minds of many. Two factors seem likely to be important, one economic and one cultural.
I just listed to a webinar from the anti-nuclear folks at NIRS. They make the following argument: (a) The waste issue isn't solved, (b) nuclear plants are routinely subject to gigantic cost and schedule overruns and (c) solar and wind are much more compelling economically on a per MW basis.
...or even seemingly caressing an inner thigh. They were like an American hetero couple with a poor sense of boundaries around PDA. But these were also areas completely devoid of women in any public space. Women's lives were confined to the home. It was dysfunctional in the extreme.
The reason that you see a lot of affection between men in deeply fundamentalist cultures is that they live a life almost completely separate from women. In rural northern Pakistan, where I traveled 30ish years ago, you saw men walking down the street holding hands, draping an arm around a shoulder..
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Inner suburbs of big cities almost always have that. It's the next ring of towns where lots are bigger and public transit is more scarce that are sometimes described as soulless. But not everyone minds having to get around by car. The suburbs are popular for a reason.
This seems pretty reductive. Not all suburbs are isolated with dead, soulless streets. Also, people like having a back yard, good schools, less noise etc. etc.
He got it open in the first place. After literally 100 years of delays.
You know what's not common sensical? The progressive line that immigration is an irrelevant issue that only racists care about. No Dems are looking to ape Trump's immigration policies. There are Dems who want border policies that follow the law, are humane and *take the issue of security seriously.*
Propaganda is when the other side does it. FTR, I think there's a lot of unacknowledged bias in legacy media reporting, but it is not "propaganda" the way right wing media reporting is propaganda - that is, reporting designed to further a preconceived narrative.
The assertion was that it isn't permitted. That's what I was responding to. Personally, I think as a general principle the less mixing of religion and politics the better. But someone saying a short prayer before a meeting is really not that big a deal in the scheme of things.
What's remarkable is how seldom you hear prominent economists say clearly that cryptocurrency has no actual use case beyond trying to hide things from the government. In other words, for criminal activity. It really is that simple. I've heard Paul Krugman say it, but few others.
