American Politics

[Beijing4987]

Anyone here besides the homophobes notice that Fat Nixon's (Lord of Lords & Savior) co-conspirators are jumping off the sinking Maggot Ship? Mark Meadows has been granted immunity.

[Spidy]

... Thirdly anyone that ever watches porn knows the biggest ones are white, ever see john holmes? WHITEZILLA anyone LOL. ...

Look at you dude, fighting for white supremacy, in this made up, fabricated "dick" measuring contest. Good on you, for advocating for your fellow "dicky" brethren.

BTW, YOUR hero, John Holmes, died of AIDS March 13th, 1988. And naturally according to YOUR antithetical logic, AIDS is a GAY disease, passed on only by GAYS.

Ergo, John Holmes was GAY!!! (Naturally, according to YOUR antithetical logic)

Although known for his work in straight porn, he also did a gay movie. But you know, once you go GAY, you're GAY FOREVER (according to YOUR antithetical logic), no matter the number of "straight" porn films you make...right!

Holmes starred in a gay porn flick titled THE PRIVATE PLEASURES OF JOHN HOLMES
https://gay.aebn.com/gay/stars/5110/john-holmes

So if your hero did gay movies, it also looks like your hero, "raped BOYS" (I mean sexually abused boys), according to YOUR antithetical logic.

Who knew you have a "soft spot" for GAY Pornstar guys, with large dicks? Bravo, showing your true colors, this is progress, ...YES?

[EihTooms]

"In the agonized debates over how it can possibly be that Donald Trump has such a strong chance of being returned to the White House in 2024, it's important to stress the ways in which the Trump economy, before the arrival of Covid, departed in positive ways from the trends of the last half-century. Trump's presidency was a period not just of steady growth and low unemployment, but also of growth that was more widely shared than in much of the recent past with the strongest improvement in median incomes since the 1990's, wage growth for middle- and low-income workers outpacing growth for the upper class, and the lowest African American unemployment rate in decades."

1. Trump didn't have one earthly thing to do with the low unemployment rate trajectory that he inherited from Obama-Biden and that had been dropping like a rock in almost a straight line since Obama-Biden and the Dems brought GW Bush's Great Repub Recession to a halt in mid 2009 with nothing but resistance, slow-walking, obstruction and zero contribution in recovering the USA economy from the Repubs whose crap policies and crap srewardship Crashed it.

2. The only economic legislation passed by Trump before he created Trump's Pandrmic was passed on the last business day of 2017, took effect the following year and produced at least 1 million fewer jobs with it than without it by the time Trump's Pandemic wiped out millions upon millions of jobs.

3. Trump's Pandemic was the result of Trump's typically disastrous Repub economic policies, philosophies and stewardship of cutting back or totally ignoring regulations, oversight, monitoring as well as his utter disregard for National Security. He was warned not to remove the Pandemic Prevention and Response teams from those Chinese labs or it could easily be disastrous for worldwide economies. But he didn't give a shit and spent 2018 and 2019 doing exactly that, followed by his lying about it all through 2020.

There is no reason to subtract Trump's fourth and most disastrous economic year from his 4 year term economic record. Trump's Pandemic didn't just "happen" out of nowhere. More than any other person on the planet, Trump's idiocy, stubbornness and contempt for America, its people and its economy laid the foundation for it, developed and exacerbated it every step of the way.

[EihTooms]

"Typical Democratic douche. He virtue signals against racism and then makes a racist statement about blacks in jail and blacks and their cock size. ".

Firstly hes just sharing his true colors,"I don't know, the thought of gagging on a big black cock in prison somehow makes me warm and fuzzy".

Secondly he is accusing blacks of being a bunch of GAY rapists.

Thirdly anyone that ever watches porn knows the biggest ones are white, ever see john holmes? WHITEZILLA anyone LOL.

Or per Guinness.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/19/man-wi...-explicit-pic/

As I pointed out in my previous post on this topic, the reason he cited it being a black man's dick reaming Trump's anus is because that is the kind that would bother Racist Housing Discriminator Repub Donald "black countries are shithole countries" Trump the most.

And "big", well, Trump's anus is so accustomed to getting reamed by standard size Russian, Chinese and North Korean dicks since at least 2016, the wish had to be for the dick to be that of a black man and a big one, otherwise Trump might not even mind it or notice it happening to him by now.

[Spidy]

100% of the House Repubs could have saved McQarthy. They didn't. Own it. ...

Lololol. Seriously. Have you been drifting in and out of a coma since Trump was appointed so-called potus back in 2016?

A "rescued by the Dems" McQarthy would be as utterly useless to working with Dems after that as a "voted for by Dems" ANY OTHER Repub, as Emmer would have been, as Johnson will be, as ANY Repub will be with or without a single Dem vote or ALL of the Dem votes.

BTW, why don't the 18 Repub Representatives from districts won by Biden renounce their Repub Party affliction, switch to the Democratic Party and heroically save the country TOMORROW by flipping the Majority in the House to the side that doesn't want to burn down America and doesn't want to convert America from a democracy into a Theocratic, authoritarian dictatorship?

So when Trump shouted out and called to "Drain the Swamp", back in 2016, I doubt very much "moderate" Republicans even imagined, it would be THEM being flushed down "said" political swamp drain, on their way to quasi political oblivion, never to be heard from again, except at the fringes. Never has there been so few "moderate" Repubs, since Trump came into office.

Repubs, especially "moderate" Repubs, should take a good look in the mirror, given the recent fiasco in the House of Rep, given the 3-weeks it took them to find a speaker and Rep.Mike Johnson (R-LA), is who they came up with, designated and then voted for another election denier, who is just about anti-everything else to left of the far right Christian church.

Even the moderate holdouts, the "two ducks a swimming" (the 22, who looked calm on camera, but panicking behind close doors), couldn't hold off the latest round of MAGA threats (oops...I mean surge), and initially said they would never vote for election denier, but caved anyways.

Why There Are So Few Moderate Republicans Left. And why thats not likely to change.

Moderate Republicans are few and far between. Anybody with any ambitions within the party has, in other words, embraced Trump and Trumpism. These recent shifts arent entirely new, either. They are the latest iteration of a decades-long transformation of the GOP. In short, moderates have been bowing out.

And more conservative, more combative, more evangelical, and now more Trumpian Republicans have been stepping up.
...

In a survey of party chairs at the county-level (or equivalent) branch of government in 2013 well before Trump became president local party leaders said they preferred more extreme candidates to more centrist candidates

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...ublicans-left/

Unlike the remarkable comeback by the buffalo, it's not looking so good for the "moderate" GOP/Repub, make it off the endangered list? Or in time to save their Repub Party?

[Tiny 12]

Oh please! He and the other Democratic douches here have been stereotyping not just Republicans but people who vote Republicans for years.

I get why the elderly and those on welfare vote Dem but with these Democratic douches anyone who votes or who has voted Republicans is stupid.

I prefer "misguided souls" to "douches. " They certainly have a lot of misguided confidence they're right. About everything.

[MarquisdeSade1]

"Typical Democratic douche. He virtue signals against racism and then makes a racist statement about blacks in jail and blacks and their cock size. ".

Firstly hes just sharing his true colors,"I don't know, the thought of gagging on a big black cock in prison somehow makes me warm and fuzzy".

Secondly he is accusing blacks of being a bunch of GAY rapists.

Thirdly anyone that ever watches porn knows the biggest ones are white, ever see john holmes? WHITEZILLA anyone LOL.

Or per Guinness.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/19/man-wi...-explicit-pic/

[MarquisdeSade1]

What Happened to the American Dream?

Oct. 27,2023.

An illustration of a person walking into headwinds and an unfurled American flag.

Credit. Fran Caballero.

Share full article.

Ross Douthat.

By Ross Douthat.

Opinion Columnist.

You're reading the Ross Douthat newsletter, for Times subscribers only. The columnist reflects on culture and politics, but mostly culture. Get it in your inbox.

In the agonized debates over how it can possibly be that Donald Trump has such a strong chance of being returned to the White House in 2024, it's important to stress the ways in which the Trump economy, before the arrival of Covid, departed in positive ways from the trends of the last half-century. Trump's presidency was a period not just of steady growth and low unemployment, but also of growth that was more widely shared than in much of the recent past — with the strongest improvement in median incomes since the 1990's, wage growth for middle- and low-income workers outpacing growth for the upper class, and the lowest African American unemployment rate in decades.

Some of these trends have persisted, as this newsletter has discussed previously, into the Biden presidency, but they've been undermined by inflation and shadowed by rising interest rates, creating an economic picture that's more fraught than some of Biden's boosters want to acknowledge. (Even this week's eye-popping G. The. P. Number — third-quarter growth at a 4. 9 percent rate — coexists with data showing disposable personal income actually dipping just a bit, suggesting that the post-Covid stagnation in real earnings hasn't fully broken yet.) Whereas the Trump era was less complicated: For a few short years, the American economy performed in ways Americans once took for granted, closer to the long post-World War II boom than to the decades of recession-punctuated deceleration we've experienced since the 1970's.

Lately, I've been reading a portrait of that long age of disappointment — "Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream," a new book by my Times colleague and former podcast sparring partner David Leonhardt. It's a rich economic history of the post-World War II era, enlivened with both personal anecdotes (including some Leonhardt family history) and biographical sketches of famous or once-famous figures, from see. Wright Mills to Robert Bork and Barbara Jordan, whose ideas illuminate the larger transformations Leonhardt describes.

The book's argument belongs to a genre, reconsiderations of neoliberalism, that's somewhat familiar by now but is usually more narrowly polemical, where my colleague offers sweep and detail and depth of historical narrative. And the genre's entries usually come from predictable "outsider" ideological perspectives, from the far left or lately the populist right, assailing the neoliberal age in the voice of its traditional enemies. Whereas Leonhardt, I think it's fair to say, is a man of the moderate center-left both in ideological predispositions and in personal temperament, which lends his reconsiderations a more unpredictable aspect and gives some of his criticisms greater heft.

ADVERTISEMENT.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT.

He is, among other things, more fair-minded than some of neoliberalism's populist critics about the reasons that the United States turned to tax cuts, deregulation, privatization and a more minimal vision of the role of the state from the 1970's onward as solutions to real problems of stagnation and inflation and diminished American competitiveness. He's alive to the ways that economic history and the progressive moral vision do not always perfectly overlap; the reality that African Americans achieved their greatest economic gains before the full triumphs of the civil rights era, before the era of segregation gave way to the era of affirmative action, makes a crucial subplot in his larger case for the benefits of the postwar economic order.

And he's more attuned than some writers on the left to the fundamental tensions between the "Brahmin left," the worldview of the liberal professional class, and the interests of working-class America — not just in the way that cultural issues can distract from liberalism's economic commitments or undermine its political support, but also in the way that the cosmopolitan moral vision and the interests of American workers may sometimes be in direct tension.

This last point yields his greatest heterodoxy, from the perspective of current-era liberalism: an argument that mass immigration might have more to do with post-1970's wage stagnation than liberal experts like to think (even after the improvement in blue-collar wages under Trump's anti-immigration presidency), in addition to playing a crucial role in unraveling the trust and cohesion that midcentury liberalism depended upon for its grander projects.

That heterodoxy coexists with a core argument that's more congenial to Biden administration policy, especially insofar as the Biden White House has tried to adapt somewhat to Trump's populist critique. Basically, Leonhardt argues that post-1970's America lost sight of government's crucial role in promoting the democratic aspect of democratic capitalism, and that mass prosperity and widely shared wage gains require not only simple redistribution but also structures that counteract corporate power, elite self-interest and monopolistic entrenchment. What we need, then, is a more mid-20th-century mentality, encompassing everything from direct government investment in technology and industry and public works, to some kind of reinvented labor movement, to a post-Bork approach to antitrust regulation and the new behemoths of the digital age, to a renewal of democratic ambition and capacity in our gridlocked and often-filibustered Congress.

It's a powerful case, and there are good reasons that parts of both right and left, in Trumpism and Bidenomics, have reached for some version of its post-neoliberal vision. But in the spirit of our podcasting days, let me offer two points of possible rebuttal to Leonhardt's critique and prescriptions.

Editors' Picks.

A Mirror Reveals a Surprise About Bird Brains.

Yankee Fans Can Buy Mickey Mantle's Childhood Home. The Price: $7.

This Community Welcomes Mediums, but First You Have to Prove Yourself.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT.

ADVERTISEMENT.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT.

First, a libertarian response. In his account of Ronald Reagan and his legacy, Leonhardt argues (correctly) that post-1970's neoliberalism did not deliver either the pace of growth or the seeming equality of opportunity that defined the pre-1970's American economy. And he offers America's less libertarian, more social-democratic developed-world competitors as a different model, because "inequality has not risen as much in many countries as it has in the United States," while "broad measures of national well-being, such as life expectancy, fared worse" in America than elsewhere.

But to the extent that broadly shared prosperity depends on having rising wealth to share and redistribute in the first place, the neoliberal American economy arguably deserves a little more credit than this. In terms of per capita income, productivity growth and innovation, our post-Reagan advantage over our major European peers has been robust, and despite occasional talk of convergence, the American edge has pretty clearly increased under neoliberalism. Indeed, even during the post-Great Recession period, the era of life expectancy stagnation that Leonhardt identifies as indicting the USA Economic model, the American economy went from being close to the same size as the European Union's to being about one-third larger.

It's not that we can't potentially learn things from Europe while seeking answers to our social crisis. But whatever we learn can't be as simple as our neoliberalism went too far, their social democracy worked out better — unless we're willing to give up on all the surplus wealth and dynamism that we enjoy.

Moreover, the libertarian reader of "Ours Was the Shining Future" might argue that, to the extent that our own dynamism has been deficient relative to America's pre-1970's trend, that deficiency reflects not neoliberal overreach but all the ways in which neoliberalism simply failed — in its efforts to prevent the growth of regulation, the capture of government by entrenched interests, the culture of safetyism throttling innovation in fields from medicine to nuclear power.

The recent book by the Reaganite economic writer Jim Pethokoukis, "The Conservative Futurist," makes an extended version of this argument, tracing our era of stagnation to anti-progress ideologies and the regulatory bureaucracies that gave them the force of law. Leonhardt nods to this case by including, for instance, efforts to remove the "bureaucratic barriers that prevent the construction of new homes, schools and transportation systems" in his list of progress-oriented movements. But the libertarian critic would argue that when it comes, say, to the strangling effect that the environmental review process has on states like California, or union rules on construction in New York, the real neoliberal program has been found difficult and left untried.

ADVERTISEMENT.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT.

Then, finally, the example of Europe also points to a social-conservative response to Leonhardt's portrait, because of course one force among many driving European stagnation is the collapse of birthrates and the rapid aging of the continent under conditions of secularization and sexual liberation.

"Ours Was the Shining Future" urges liberals to concede some modest ground to cultural conservatives, but apart from its immigration heterodoxies, those concessions are mostly framed as a matter of coalition building and pragmatic political necessity. The underlying liberal social model is assumed to be basically compatible with the widely shared prosperity Leonhardt seeks.

But is it? To some extent, the deep trends that he bemoans are rooted in social liberalism itself. The slowing of growth is connected to the retreat from marriage and family, which has most of the developed world headed for demographic autumn, in which economic stagnation may be cemented by senescence. The socioeconomic inequalities of post-1970's America are connected to widening inequalities in post-1970's family structure, the rise of out-of-wedlock births and single-parent families that so many progressives are so conspicuously loath to treat as a matter of real cultural or political concern.

It's not that conservatives have a clear solution to these dilemmas (regular readers will note that I have not yet delivered a recently promised newsletter on plausible conservative responses to marriage's decline! Or that they're in any way resolved simply by electing right-wing governments, whether in Washington or Warsaw or anywhere else.

But we clearly live in a culture that's much closer to what social liberals wanted, back when this long era of disappointment began, than it is to any conservative social blueprint. So when liberals reckon with why disappointment shadows us, why the shining future dimmed, the role of their own cultural victories may deserve more attention even than what's offered by Leonhardt's broad-minded, self-critical and always interesting account.

[ErsatzJulian]

Your side is not absolved. Your side is responsible. Seven ultra MAGA Republicans like Gaetz and 208 Democrats put McCarthy out of office. They are the reason that Johnson's Speaker. All your side had to do was go along with the sane Republicans instead of the seven crazies.

Now hoards of American sex tourists will descend on Bangkok. They wont bang in the USA any longer, because they wont want to go to jail. Your price of poontang will go up. And those 208 Democrats, who voted with Matt Gaetz, will be the ones to blame.

I really do not understand the logic of this claim. The Democrats do not support McCarthy because their philosophies do not align, so why is it that when there is a civil war in the Republican Party, it is the responsibility of the Democrats to run to the rescue of McCarthy? Do you expect your enemies to run to your rescue when you are in trouble? What a egocentric and self-entitled worldview.

[EihTooms]

Typical Democratic douche. He virtue signals against racism and then makes a racist statement about blacks in jail and blacks and their cock size.

Oh, I don't think that is what he did at all. Clearly, the reason he made it a black man's cock was because that is the color that would bother Racist Housing Discriminator Repub Trump the most.

And "big", well, there is no point in fantasizing about Racist Housing Discriminator Repub Trump's ass being defiled by the cock of someone whose race he has characterized as governing only "shithole" countries unless it is big enough to at least get his attention.

[Elvis 2008]

There you go again. Stereotyping people with Tiny penises. This is sad. Just plain sad.

Oh please! He and the other Democratic douches here have been stereotyping not just Republicans but people who vote Republicans for years.

I get why the elderly and those on welfare vote Dem but with these Democratic douches anyone who votes or who has voted Republicans is stupid.

[Elvis 2008]

I don't know, the thought of Don gagging on a big black cock in prison somehow makes me warm and fuzzy.

Typical Democratic douche. He virtue signals against racism and then makes a racist statement about blacks in jail and blacks and their cock size.

[MarquisdeSade1]

"According to polls:

Sixty percent of Republicans support Trump, versus those who support other candidates or who are undecided. About 45% of voters are Republicans or lean Republican. And about 30% of Americans believe the 2020 election result was fraudulent.

Twenty-seven percent (0. 6 x 0. 45) to 30% alone isn't enough to win an election.

You are correct, only a single digit percentage of Americans are classical liberals, who believe as I do. However, on average we're smarter than other people.

https://reason.com/2014/06/13/are-co...than-liberals/

Reason magazine lololol what a rag nobody reads Nick Gillespie hes a turd ala the Mittens Flake cabal.

I don't consider libertarians as conservative, rather they are some perversion of conservatism, libertarianism is a deception and an abomination.

Smarter than other people? Really do tell?

Did you steal that line from your top cuck in charge.

https://grabien.com/story.php?id=439323

Ever see the movie Thank you for smoking?

I'm guessing this has a cult following with the "wise wing" LMAO.

Please tell us, smarter than whom?

And did you know just thinking you're smarter than "others" doesn't make it so.

https://efukt.com/22296_I_Am_Very_Intelligent.html

[Tiny 12]

No, no, no...There you go again, getting it all wrong and twisted!

If I wasn't CLEAR, that was me standing up for the rights of guys with tiny (multi-colored) dicks, that also have the RIGHT to have their tiny dick (if that's the case), also sucked-off by the incarcerated Orange Orangutan/Baboon, in the "presidential jail cell"....

There you go again. Stereotyping people with Tiny penises. This is sad. Just plain sad.

[EihTooms]

Your side is not absolved. Your side is responsible. Seven ultra MAGA Republicans like Gaetz and 208 Democrats put McCarthy out of office. They are the reason that Johnson's Speaker. All your side had to do was go along with the sane Republicans instead of the seven crazies.

Now hoards of American sex tourists will descend on Bangkok. They wont bang in the USA any longer, because they wont want to go to jail. Your price of poontang will go up. And those 208 Democrats, who voted with Matt Gaetz, will be the ones to blame.

100% of the House Repubs could have saved McQarthy. They didn't. Own it.

NEWS FLASH: McQarthy's great Repub sin was WORKING with Dems. Therefore, the instant Matt Getzakidpregnant stood up and inhaled in preparation to launch into his challenge, McQarthy was rendered utterly useless to Amerca as a factor in working with Dems again and participating in anything positive for America. Done. Finished.

LOL. And you think a single vote by a Dem to save him or a single vote by a Dem in support of ANY relatively normal, patriotic, non lunatic, non Election Denier, non America-hating Repub would not have DOOMED that one as much as McQarthy was DOOMED the instant he committed that Mortal Sin of working with Dems to produce a positive rather than typical Disastrous Repub Result?

Lololol. Seriously. Have you been drifting in and out of a coma since Trump was appointed so-called potus back in 2016?

A "rescued by the Dems" McQarthy would be as utterly useless to working with Dems after that as a "voted for by Dems" ANY OTHER Repub, as Emmer would have been, as Johnson will be, as ANY Repub will be with or without a single Dem vote or ALL of the Dem votes.

BTW, why don't the 18 Repub Representatives from districts won by Biden renounce their Repub Party affliction, switch to the Democratic Party and heroically save the country TOMORROW by flipping the Majority in the House to the side that doesn't want to burn down America and doesn't want to convert America from a democracy into a Theocratic, authoritarian dictatorship?