«The one thing we really know about Trump is that there’s usually less to his bizarre policy pronouncements than meets the eye. When in doubt, he tends to default to not actually doing anything or else just enabling conventional right-wing politics.

But there really is an incredible amount that we don’t know.

Not in the sense that I’m stomping my feet, complaining that the media isn’t telling us what’s really going on. I think the best reporters in the business simply don’t know what’s going on, and to an extent are left to write around their ignorance. Part of the problem is that Trump is secretive, hypocritical, and pathologically dishonest. But it’s also the large asymmetry between the partisan coalitions. If Kamala Harris had won the election, there would have been intense interest from Democratic Party-aligned media in the details of her transition. Not just in who was getting picked for what job, but what it signified. And this interest from left-of-center columnists and publications would be complemented by interest from Democratic Party elected officials and interest groups.

Republicans aren’t really like that. Liberals read more, and conservatives watch more television. Republicans are more interested in conservative ideology, and Democrats are more interested in specific issue areas. This means that while the right of course has its own factionalisms, there’s not much of a market on the right for granular policy-focused debates and inquiries. And in the absence of Republican pressure on Trump to clarify what he means, we’ve just been talking a lot about Greenland.»

https://www.slowboring.com/p/nobody-knows-what-trump-is-going

I will never forgive these “conservatives” for putting a polite face on racism, but this part is correct:

«Seeing all the reports of Trump’s ambitious plans, with all the eager beaver apparatchiks ready and willing to implement them, has felt a bit intimidating. Seeing the scale and scope of it all over this past weekend could sap one’s will to resist.

But of course that’s part of the point of all the boasting and big talk. Don’t fall for it. Don’t be cowed. Don’t be demoralized. Trump and Trumpism aren’t as strong as they look.»

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/dont-be-shocked-dont-be-awed

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/vivek-ramaswamy-expected-to-depart-doge/

*gasp*

So soon?

(An actual (short) blog entry, for once, rather than me quoting somebody else.)

Young Senator Joe Biden voted for bussing, back in the 70s, and it almost cost him his job. After that, he pulled his horns way in and played the game necessary to stay in office.

Because you can’t have a good effect if you’re not actually in office, right?

When he became President, I had hoped young idealistic Joe Biden would come back, now that he had finally reached the pinnacle. But I don’t think he ever did, and now he’s leaving office with useless gestures that the clown we elected to replace him for reasons will simply immediately undo. Or that will have no effect, like his claim that the ERA is now law.

So… yeah, he was my President and continues to be, but mostly because the alternatives were worse. I was never a Sanders guy (insistence that it’s all about class, and race doesn’t enter into it is just moronic, sorry). I was a Bullock guy early on, then a Warren guy, and I would have preferred Buttigieg (Warren withdrew after our primary), but when Biden was the last one standing, I voted for him enthusiastically because the math is simple.

But I’m always going to be disappointed. I feel like I got less than half a loaf.

«The more education a person has, the more scare quotes they seem to use, and Bruno was no exception (and neither am I, even as I deplore this habit in others). The less education, the more accidental quotes, whose purpose is the opposite of scaring, and simply to declare that a thing has a name but is being named by someone without a high level of literacy: “Corn Muffins,” handwritten by a minimum-wage employee on a sign in a bakery case. “Sale,” also handwritten. The not-so-literate and the hyper-literate both love quotation marks, while most people use them only to indicate, in written form, when someone is speaking. In my life before this life, as a graduate student, there were know-it-all women in my department who held their hands up and curved their pointer and middle fingers to frame a word or phrase they were voicing with irony, as a critique. They were fake tough girls who were not tough at all, with their fashion choices veering to chunky shoes and a leather jacket from a department store. They were getting PhDs in rhetoric at Berkeley, as I had planned to, before I abandoned that plan (and spared myself their fate, which was to subject themselves to academic job interviews in DoubleTree hotel rooms at a Modern Language Association conference). Listening to them prattle on and bend their fingers to air quote, a craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge, I sometimes used to imagine a sharp blade cutting across the room at a certain height, lopping off the fingers of these scare-quoting women.»

– Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner.

Yyyyyiikes.

“craven substitution of cynicism for knowledge.” 😏

https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2014/marchapril/feature/the-first-americans#:~:text=Clovis%20First%2C%20as%20it%20was,after%20those%20found%20at%20Clovis.

Today’s random rabbit hole.

Hmm.

«Charisma does not originate inside the person called “charismatic.” It comes from the need of others to believe that special people exist.»

Cynic much? (I think I like it.)

https://a.co/2zcmInM

Yet another article calling out that the stimulus was overdone and caused high inflation (over and above what might have been expected).

«Exactly how much inflation the law caused is debatable, but one group of economists compared the US experience to that of European countries with less ambitious stimulus programs and attributed about 3 percentage points of inflation to excessive stimulus.

Given that the inflation measure the economists used peaked at 6.6 percent, that implies that without the bill’s pressures, overall price increases could have been reduced, perhaps even halved.

That wouldn’t have just helped avoid a Trump comeback — it possibly would have been better for workers. Inflation was high enough that the median worker saw incredibly weak wage growth, certainly weaker than under Trump or Obama’s second term.

…

I’m not in the best position to judge; I cheered on the American Rescue Plan as it happened, thinking the risks of overheating were smaller than the risks of being too meek. But I was wrong, and it’s worth asking how policymakers like Biden got this wrong too.»

https://www.vox.com/politics/394712/joe-biden-president-legacy-inflation-manchin

Also, I got around to reading the rest of this article, and, woah. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Harsh condemnation of Biden. I don’t think he’ll go down as one of America’s great presidents, unfortunately.

Definitely better than Trump, but I wish he had just stuck with a single term, from the get-go. I guess any person who wants to be president wants to be president for two terms, so… here we are.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/15/us/politics/nonprofit-stacey-abrams.html?unlocked_article_code=1.pU4.XwJ2.Abl5iOwuECeK&smid=url-share

Well, dang.