That tweet of JV Trump is nonsensical. People don't put their kids in daycare to 'enjoy freedom in the labor force' they do it to, you know, feed and house those kids.
Do these mopes EVER run their stuff past a five-year-old to point out the sheer stupid coming off their keyboards?
Don’t worry, the Republicans congressional leadership has sent out a memo, “Stop with DEI stuff, you’re making us look bad. Focus on her record!” Unfortunately for them, her record includes a lot of prosecutions of sexual offenders, fraudsters and white collar douchebags, the perfect background for someone running against Trump. Well, there’s still her laugh, her hair, her clothes - all the usual misogynist playbook.
> ... and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something.
Alas, much of what it really did was harmful. This is my favorite example of Ds picking up on some bit of shit-for-brains R advocacy (Clinton was riffing off of Reagan's complaints about Government On Your Back, There's Too Many Bureaucrats, which Reagan and Bush I were both happy to complain about without actually proposing viable "solutions") and actually treating it as a serious problem to be addressed with a real-world solution.
Reinventing Government took a serious hatchet to the Federal head count. The problem was, most of those "useless bureaucrats" were doing something *important*, something that needed doing, that still needed doing after the Federal headcount for doing it got the ax. Which is how we got to the situation where much of what the Feds *should* be doing in-house is getting done at 3x the cost by private contractors. Who generally lack the career-long dedication to the mission that is really required to do a good job. This is one of the great unreported stories of the last 30 years, how the Federal Government has literally lost its brains.
and what's all this shit about Kamala's laugh? I laugh just like that, a serious (if you will), deep, resonant laugh, that sounds real, not that tepid Vance, 'heh heh heh' born of desperation to bond and be found witty.. a lot of these folks on the right strike me as aliens striving to grasp and adopt human behavioral patterns. and failing. utterly. 'please clap' transitions to 'please laugh.'
I had actually hoped, or at least thought, that maybe Usha would be content to let her husband be the idiot and the hypocrite of the family, but she's proven me wrong. what in the world does she think she is if not a DEI hire. my gawd. and, like Kamala, I am sure eminently qualified nonetheless, as you so aptly point out in your reasoning as to the considerations made in such a hire. looks good on the portfolio in every way except for that not ticking the white male box on the application.
Lots of people are annoyed with DEI over-reach; mandatory training sessions, loyalty oaths, and so on. But that doesn't mean they don't want D, E and I. The Repubs have exploited the backlash against formal DEI to the limit and beyond, effectively reaching affirmative action for white men. Time for a pro-DEI backlash, I agree.
I know. I hate the 2-hour video multiple choice test I’m required to pass every year, in fact I’ve stopped doing it. But I love the young folks in the office giving out their pronouns and doing serious work to increase our inclusiveness. It makes me hopeful.
The lingering problem is that it's still really hard to combat that maddening but simple logic on the other side...for example, how Biden's announcement that he was determined to appoint a Black woman to SCOTUS instantly means that the eventual choice will be based on "checking boxes" rather than merit. It's just a really difficult argument to combat (I've tried and failed more than once, with my Conservative Friend™ and others).
This is why I wanted to spend so much time on the actual process as it has worked since 1832. I was ready to do another rehash of the college admissions argument (I have a new way of doing it), but the choice of a vice president isn't anything like the way these people imagine it. It can't be exclusively "on merit" and shouldn't be and never is attempted, because it's a political decision. It inevitably involves checking boxes. Of which "merit" should certainly be one, but Republicans really don't have a right to complain about Democrats on that score, especially after Vance the "Appalachian".
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Monday he was considering four Black women to be his running mate, and has been receiving extensive vetting briefings about each potential candidate.
“I am not committed to naming any (of the potential candidates), but the people I’ve named, and *among them* there are four Black women,” Biden told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on “The ReidOut.”
Incidentally all the Black women he named, originally five of them (and I imagine the white ones as well) were far more distinguished than JD Vance: Harris plus Val Demings, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Susan Rice, and Karen Bass. But Harris had the broadest qualifications of the five.
The technique of taking some kernel of reality-based narrative and turning it into the Fox News talking point that's impossible to answer because it contains just enough truth and ambiguity to allow for a not-totally-bad-faith interpretation, really ought to have a name.
Okay, but the point stands. I remember when the Poet Laureate was pulled over by cops (or something like that) and people were saying it’s ridiculous, she got pulled over for “driving while Black” even though she was chosen to deliver the inaugural poem, and a bunch of wags on the YouTube news clip she was chosen to deliver the poem because she’s Black so what are you saying?
I mean of course you’re right about all of this, but the minute we say you have any kind of quotient or proportion or part of a hiring decision already made, it opens us up to the same rhetorical sledgehammer that I don’t know how to ward off.
It's based on a stupid misconception as to what merit is. As if you could put the whole population in a single file where each person is superior to all the people to their left and inferior to all the people to their right and the Head Boy at the right end must be king. It's a fantasy of people who have only ever been good at one thing in their lives (usually test scores). Real people are a complex mix of qualities and, as the guy said, born equal, different ones better at different things, some at poetry and some at presidenting.
I want a Black woman president not because I think she's superior to everybody else but because I think it's good for society as a whole, not for her, but for YOU AND ME AND THE REST OF THE CITIZENRY. I'm not giving her a prize, I'm giving US a thing we need, a valuable symbol if you like.
Electing a president isn't passing out goodies to the Best Boy, it's part of the process of taking care of everybody. I have no more patience for people who can't understand that.
And also because the one I have in mind would be good at it. That's important too, but I think lots of people would be equally good at it, hundreds of them probably. In terms of absolute merit, it doesn't make much difference which one you choose. Harris is smart enough, so is Vance for all I know, he did get good grades and he wrote his own book. Harris is a good politician, Vance isn't. Also she has a really great laugh.
I not only emphatically agree with everything you wrote but am moved by the grace and concision with which you explain it.
But, look: in their formulation, it's defined by exclusion: "Must be this ethnicity" means a line is drawn between that criterion and EVERYTHING ELSE and it is the "everything else" that gets labeled "merits," at which point we are already in the quicksand of reactionary thinking and cannot escape.
It's the same logical mousetrap as "Black Lives Matter" being retorted with "ALL Lives Matter," which makes perfect sense to them. They think, Wait, if "Black Lives Matter" then what's happening to the overall equation? Do other lives now NOT matter? We've got to remove that inequity. (The proper understanding is that the actual inequity is in fact precisely what's being addressed by demanding that the question get perceived and addressed.
So, I'm sorry. I'm just saying, yes to all (what you wrote) but I still can't figure out how to win the argument against a right-winger....which maybe shouldn't matter, but I like knowing I can win those arguments against right-wingers.
The “All lives matter” canard is just like a place get stuck explaining the 14th Amendment. Of course all lives matter, everybody knows that and nobody needs to say it. But then a cop murders a Black man and they start making excuses (“Oh he was probably on drugs”). Like they are denying Black lives are real lives, a form of dehumanization. You have to say “Black lives matter” because of those who behave as if it’s not true.
Enslavement of white people was already illegal when they passed the 13th Amendment. They passed it to stop enslavement of Black people. Civil rights of white men weren’t routinely denied when the the 14th Amendment was passed. That wasn’t the issue it was resolving.
The original Constitution wasn’t race conscious, but slavery and routine denial of civil rights existed. Radical Republicans of the 1860s made the Constitution race conscious. That was the purpose of the 13th and 14th Amendments, to say Black Lives Matter. If they refuse to recognize that I want to say fuck them. I just don’t care if I can’t win the argument.
All that to say (to the racists) “so, before we shit-cannned the slavery thing, and people with dark skin did all the work, that musta been because they were so much better at it, or the light-skinned people were too god damn lazy and no-count to do it themselves”
Fucking Tim Ryan. All he had to do is go out once a day in front of the cameras and say " I'm a proud Democrat." . He would have beat Vance like a drum, held by a stepchild, on a rented mule.
JD wears the hell out of that eyeliner. I'll give him that
Honestly, I need this choice of his explained to me. If anyone has a clip of Brit Hume expostulating on it, please link me. (This is the only time I will ever ask to be linked to Brit Hume, so take advantage!)
He means that crap daycare that is so heavily subsidized by what, exactly? (Yeah, I know, he’s really talking about K-12, which should actually be the job of members of the Trad Wives of America Society.)
He’s sneering at women who work at paid jobs for whatever reason, instead of keeping the house perfect for their husbands (of course they must have one, and divorce should be illegal), and greeting them with a pitcher of martinis when they get home from the office, like Jesus called for them to do.
(Jesus really was tough on divorce, but that was aimed at men, at a time when there were no outside careers for women other than sex work. Jesus was also cool with people not procreating at all, and even setting up communities of celibates, where Vance seems to believe not making babies is a crime, the one they would have called Race Suicide 120 years ago.)
If you’re a woman with kids who needs money to feed the family, before you think about K-12 you have to think about 3- and 4-year-olds, who will need something like full-time day care (very proud of what my much-mocked former mayor Bill de Blasio did on that subject), to say nothing of the lack of paid family leave to help you cope with the under-threes, where the US is behind every single developed country. Vance just wants women to have babies whether they can afford it or not, whether the fathers support them or beat them, whether they have any other interests in life or not.
The thing that enrages me the most, though, is that Vance and his wife are so fucking rich they never even need to think about it—while she’s in L.A. and he’s in D.C. they’ve got servants to take care of the kids in Ohio—and yet he has the balls to tell working class people how to manage their lives and calls himself a “populist”.
That tweet of JV Trump is nonsensical. People don't put their kids in daycare to 'enjoy freedom in the labor force' they do it to, you know, feed and house those kids.
Do these mopes EVER run their stuff past a five-year-old to point out the sheer stupid coming off their keyboards?
Don’t worry, the Republicans congressional leadership has sent out a memo, “Stop with DEI stuff, you’re making us look bad. Focus on her record!” Unfortunately for them, her record includes a lot of prosecutions of sexual offenders, fraudsters and white collar douchebags, the perfect background for someone running against Trump. Well, there’s still her laugh, her hair, her clothes - all the usual misogynist playbook.
> ... and Gore's signature initiative, "Reinventing Government", really did something.
Alas, much of what it really did was harmful. This is my favorite example of Ds picking up on some bit of shit-for-brains R advocacy (Clinton was riffing off of Reagan's complaints about Government On Your Back, There's Too Many Bureaucrats, which Reagan and Bush I were both happy to complain about without actually proposing viable "solutions") and actually treating it as a serious problem to be addressed with a real-world solution.
Reinventing Government took a serious hatchet to the Federal head count. The problem was, most of those "useless bureaucrats" were doing something *important*, something that needed doing, that still needed doing after the Federal headcount for doing it got the ax. Which is how we got to the situation where much of what the Feds *should* be doing in-house is getting done at 3x the cost by private contractors. Who generally lack the career-long dedication to the mission that is really required to do a good job. This is one of the great unreported stories of the last 30 years, how the Federal Government has literally lost its brains.
Thanks, that's important. I may tweak the text to make the point.
Did tweak it, in fact.
man, this is good! wonderful, even.
and what's all this shit about Kamala's laugh? I laugh just like that, a serious (if you will), deep, resonant laugh, that sounds real, not that tepid Vance, 'heh heh heh' born of desperation to bond and be found witty.. a lot of these folks on the right strike me as aliens striving to grasp and adopt human behavioral patterns. and failing. utterly. 'please clap' transitions to 'please laugh.'
I had actually hoped, or at least thought, that maybe Usha would be content to let her husband be the idiot and the hypocrite of the family, but she's proven me wrong. what in the world does she think she is if not a DEI hire. my gawd. and, like Kamala, I am sure eminently qualified nonetheless, as you so aptly point out in your reasoning as to the considerations made in such a hire. looks good on the portfolio in every way except for that not ticking the white male box on the application.
sheesh, these people!
Lots of people are annoyed with DEI over-reach; mandatory training sessions, loyalty oaths, and so on. But that doesn't mean they don't want D, E and I. The Repubs have exploited the backlash against formal DEI to the limit and beyond, effectively reaching affirmative action for white men. Time for a pro-DEI backlash, I agree.
I know. I hate the 2-hour video multiple choice test I’m required to pass every year, in fact I’ve stopped doing it. But I love the young folks in the office giving out their pronouns and doing serious work to increase our inclusiveness. It makes me hopeful.
The lingering problem is that it's still really hard to combat that maddening but simple logic on the other side...for example, how Biden's announcement that he was determined to appoint a Black woman to SCOTUS instantly means that the eventual choice will be based on "checking boxes" rather than merit. It's just a really difficult argument to combat (I've tried and failed more than once, with my Conservative Friend™ and others).
This is why I wanted to spend so much time on the actual process as it has worked since 1832. I was ready to do another rehash of the college admissions argument (I have a new way of doing it), but the choice of a vice president isn't anything like the way these people imagine it. It can't be exclusively "on merit" and shouldn't be and never is attempted, because it's a political decision. It inevitably involves checking boxes. Of which "merit" should certainly be one, but Republicans really don't have a right to complain about Democrats on that score, especially after Vance the "Appalachian".
Actually, that's not what Biden announced. He pledged early on to choose a woman and then, three weeks before the convention, said four of the women on his shortlist were Black: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/21/politics/joe-biden-four-black-women-vice-president/index.html
—
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Monday he was considering four Black women to be his running mate, and has been receiving extensive vetting briefings about each potential candidate.
“I am not committed to naming any (of the potential candidates), but the people I’ve named, and *among them* there are four Black women,” Biden told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on “The ReidOut.”
Incidentally all the Black women he named, originally five of them (and I imagine the white ones as well) were far more distinguished than JD Vance: Harris plus Val Demings, Keisha Lance Bottoms, Susan Rice, and Karen Bass. But Harris had the broadest qualifications of the five.
The technique of taking some kernel of reality-based narrative and turning it into the Fox News talking point that's impossible to answer because it contains just enough truth and ambiguity to allow for a not-totally-bad-faith interpretation, really ought to have a name.
Okay, but the point stands. I remember when the Poet Laureate was pulled over by cops (or something like that) and people were saying it’s ridiculous, she got pulled over for “driving while Black” even though she was chosen to deliver the inaugural poem, and a bunch of wags on the YouTube news clip she was chosen to deliver the poem because she’s Black so what are you saying?
I mean of course you’re right about all of this, but the minute we say you have any kind of quotient or proportion or part of a hiring decision already made, it opens us up to the same rhetorical sledgehammer that I don’t know how to ward off.
It's based on a stupid misconception as to what merit is. As if you could put the whole population in a single file where each person is superior to all the people to their left and inferior to all the people to their right and the Head Boy at the right end must be king. It's a fantasy of people who have only ever been good at one thing in their lives (usually test scores). Real people are a complex mix of qualities and, as the guy said, born equal, different ones better at different things, some at poetry and some at presidenting.
I want a Black woman president not because I think she's superior to everybody else but because I think it's good for society as a whole, not for her, but for YOU AND ME AND THE REST OF THE CITIZENRY. I'm not giving her a prize, I'm giving US a thing we need, a valuable symbol if you like.
Electing a president isn't passing out goodies to the Best Boy, it's part of the process of taking care of everybody. I have no more patience for people who can't understand that.
And also because the one I have in mind would be good at it. That's important too, but I think lots of people would be equally good at it, hundreds of them probably. In terms of absolute merit, it doesn't make much difference which one you choose. Harris is smart enough, so is Vance for all I know, he did get good grades and he wrote his own book. Harris is a good politician, Vance isn't. Also she has a really great laugh.
I not only emphatically agree with everything you wrote but am moved by the grace and concision with which you explain it.
But, look: in their formulation, it's defined by exclusion: "Must be this ethnicity" means a line is drawn between that criterion and EVERYTHING ELSE and it is the "everything else" that gets labeled "merits," at which point we are already in the quicksand of reactionary thinking and cannot escape.
It's the same logical mousetrap as "Black Lives Matter" being retorted with "ALL Lives Matter," which makes perfect sense to them. They think, Wait, if "Black Lives Matter" then what's happening to the overall equation? Do other lives now NOT matter? We've got to remove that inequity. (The proper understanding is that the actual inequity is in fact precisely what's being addressed by demanding that the question get perceived and addressed.
So, I'm sorry. I'm just saying, yes to all (what you wrote) but I still can't figure out how to win the argument against a right-winger....which maybe shouldn't matter, but I like knowing I can win those arguments against right-wingers.
The “All lives matter” canard is just like a place get stuck explaining the 14th Amendment. Of course all lives matter, everybody knows that and nobody needs to say it. But then a cop murders a Black man and they start making excuses (“Oh he was probably on drugs”). Like they are denying Black lives are real lives, a form of dehumanization. You have to say “Black lives matter” because of those who behave as if it’s not true.
Enslavement of white people was already illegal when they passed the 13th Amendment. They passed it to stop enslavement of Black people. Civil rights of white men weren’t routinely denied when the the 14th Amendment was passed. That wasn’t the issue it was resolving.
The original Constitution wasn’t race conscious, but slavery and routine denial of civil rights existed. Radical Republicans of the 1860s made the Constitution race conscious. That was the purpose of the 13th and 14th Amendments, to say Black Lives Matter. If they refuse to recognize that I want to say fuck them. I just don’t care if I can’t win the argument.
All that to say (to the racists) “so, before we shit-cannned the slavery thing, and people with dark skin did all the work, that musta been because they were so much better at it, or the light-skinned people were too god damn lazy and no-count to do it themselves”
No other option comes to mind.
Nice Article !
Fucking Tim Ryan. All he had to do is go out once a day in front of the cameras and say " I'm a proud Democrat." . He would have beat Vance like a drum, held by a stepchild, on a rented mule.
JD wears the hell out of that eyeliner. I'll give him that
.
Oy, the eyeliner!
Honestly, I need this choice of his explained to me. If anyone has a clip of Brit Hume expostulating on it, please link me. (This is the only time I will ever ask to be linked to Brit Hume, so take advantage!)
He looks like the bastard offspring of Billie Joe Armstrong and Rosanne Barr.
> Starting with Bill Clinton, and it's something we ought to give him serious credit for ...
For this, and for countless other things big and small. When comes such another.
He means that crap daycare that is so heavily subsidized by what, exactly? (Yeah, I know, he’s really talking about K-12, which should actually be the job of members of the Trad Wives of America Society.)
He’s sneering at women who work at paid jobs for whatever reason, instead of keeping the house perfect for their husbands (of course they must have one, and divorce should be illegal), and greeting them with a pitcher of martinis when they get home from the office, like Jesus called for them to do.
(Jesus really was tough on divorce, but that was aimed at men, at a time when there were no outside careers for women other than sex work. Jesus was also cool with people not procreating at all, and even setting up communities of celibates, where Vance seems to believe not making babies is a crime, the one they would have called Race Suicide 120 years ago.)
If you’re a woman with kids who needs money to feed the family, before you think about K-12 you have to think about 3- and 4-year-olds, who will need something like full-time day care (very proud of what my much-mocked former mayor Bill de Blasio did on that subject), to say nothing of the lack of paid family leave to help you cope with the under-threes, where the US is behind every single developed country. Vance just wants women to have babies whether they can afford it or not, whether the fathers support them or beat them, whether they have any other interests in life or not.
The thing that enrages me the most, though, is that Vance and his wife are so fucking rich they never even need to think about it—while she’s in L.A. and he’s in D.C. they’ve got servants to take care of the kids in Ohio—and yet he has the balls to tell working class people how to manage their lives and calls himself a “populist”.
This is really good. Thanks, Yas.