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« Liberal Outrage: April 2018 | Main | Liberal Outrage: June 2018 » Liberal OutrageThey're still building them around here for some reason Interesting article on the decline of office parks in New Jersey. I do kind of take umbrage at the idea that the decline is due to the preference of millennials and not the fact that there are no jobs and what jobs do exist are in New York. By fnord12 | May 30, 2018, 10:08 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | May 25, 2018, 3:18 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | May 25, 2018, 3:01 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Watch this switcharoo: Even the headline, Jeff Bezos' annual salary is a lot less than Bernie Sanders probably thinks, is garbage. Did Bernie say anything about salary? No, but he "probably thinks" something about Bezos' salary, so let's build a whole article around that to obfuscate around what Bernie says about Bezos' wealth compared to that of his workers. You also have to love this line (currently being employed by Elon Musk stans as well) that a business owner doesn't draw a large salary from his company. No, he just hoards all the wealth the company is generating. Imagine thinking that saying that you can live your (lavish) life without drawing a salary is a defense against not treating workers fairly. By fnord12 | May 24, 2018, 9:55 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Using New Jersey as an example, Jeff Stein says that "higher taxes on the rich may be easier to campaign on than to enact" and the Twitter conversation is just about how this is just a normal feature of our (weird) democracy even when one party controls all branches. But the real issue is that Steve Sweeney is a corrupt conservative who runs as a Democrat because he knows that's what he needs to do to win in New Jersey (same as New York's IDC). Which i guess also may be a feature of our (weird) democracy, but i feel like that context is missing from the discussion. Stein did good with counteracting Sweeney's obvious nonsense, for what it's worth: "It is not logical to consider provisions that raise taxes on the rich, while ignoring provisions that cut their taxes," said Steve Wamhoff, ITEP's director of federal tax policy, in an email. By fnord12 | May 22, 2018, 1:49 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link "...that means journalists, including Playbook's reporters, are failing at their job of informing Americans exactly how corrupt their political system is." Libby Watson on why Politico Playbook (among others) can fuck right off. By fnord12 | May 12, 2018, 10:57 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link In the midst of an article about the first victim of Jeff Sessions' attack on "black identity extremists" (aka the New COINTELPRO) comes this gem: We need to build a whole new justice system from scratch. Departments and agents who get their intel from Infowars can't be redeemed. By fnord12 | May 11, 2018, 12:35 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link ...He was confirmed 49-46 with only Republican votes, over the objections of Democrat Tammy Baldwin, Wisconsin's junior senator. That has typically been enough to sink a nomination in recent years, because senators from both parties have enjoyed an effective veto over the selection of federal judges from their home states, a tradition known as the "blue slip." Baldwin's GOP colleague from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, used his blue slip power to block one of Democratic President Barack Obama's nominees for the same 7th Circuit seat that his party filled Thursday. But with Republican Donald Trump now in the White House, GOP senators are effectively ending the veto power of home-state senators for nominations to the influential appellate courts, the second-highest rung of the federal judiciary. Urging her colleagues this week to reject Brennan's nomination, Baldwin warned on the Senate floor that his confirmation will "send the message neither this nor future presidents needs to respect the role of home-state senators in the selection of judicial nominees." Blue slips are garbage and any idiot could have seen that the Republicans would ditch them at the first convenient moment. The fact that Democrats honored them during Obama's administration (allowing this exact seat to go unfilled during all that time) is the real political malpractice. By fnord12 | May 10, 2018, 3:46 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link Ryan Cooper on Trump's withdrawal from the Iran deal. ...France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., and China are all still parties to the deal, and all of them still believe the agreement is holding. There is virtually no chance that diplomatic system will be able to be reimposed. Indeed, many Iranian elites have argued Iran should continue to stick to the deal despite the U.S. betrayal, if European powers will continue to uphold it. ...Trump is scheduled to try to negotiate a deal with North Korea soon which of necessity would look very much like the Iran deal. In fact, in addition to his Iran deal announcement, the president said Tuesday that he had dispatched Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to Pyongyang for a series of meetings with North Korean officials. But the only reason such a thing could possibly succeed now is if the Koreas and China have sufficient confidence in their own arrangements so as to make U.S. participation basically unimportant. By fnord12 | May 8, 2018, 10:49 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link As someone who used to donate regularly to ACORN, a group that did great work, their demise and especially the Democrats' complicity in it has always pissed me off. Zach Carter and Arthur Delaney have put up an overview of that, arguing that it was an important turning point in our history. (One new thing i learned is the role that Jon Stewart played, and i found more on that here.) By fnord12 | May 5, 2018, 10:17 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link By fnord12 | May 5, 2018, 10:04 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link Elaine Kamarck previously argued for more superdelegates. Now she's defending the DCCC's interference in primaries on the grounds that uh, there weren't many black people in the districts. Kamarck's general argument is equally incoherent but it seems to stem from the idea that political parties are private clubs and the leaders of those clubs ought to be able to do whatever they want with them because they are, er, "more concerned with electability than with ideological purity". Leaving aside the fact that the DCCC's track record on determining who is "electable" has been terrible, the real issue is that voters should get to vote for their candidates in fair elections. Voters can use whatever criteria they like - electability, purity, actual policy positions, whatever - in deciding who to vote for. But the elections should be fair. The quaint notion that political parties are private clubs is technically true thanks to a lack of foresight from the framers of the constitution, but we've been correcting that mistake over the years by making primaries more and more open, and Kamarck is weirdly invested in trying to undo that. What's ironic is that the same people who make the argument about the parties being private clubs will howl and scream when people vote for third parties, and will fight to exclude those parties from ballot access, debates, etc.. The two main parties are the only game in town, and they shouldn't be rigged by "party leaders". By fnord12 | May 3, 2018, 9:20 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link This kind of reporting is getting more common. Upwards of sixteen Russian social media accounts said encouraging things about an anti-pipeline protest! Don't those dedicated activists know that they're Useful Idiot dupes? See also what happened to Anoa Changa. By fnord12 | May 3, 2018, 9:54 AM | Liberal Outrage | Link In the run-up to Trump's reversal of the FCC's net neutrality rules, Comcast took out a lot of ads swearing that they were nonetheless committed to net neutrality. But these don't look like the actions of a company in favor of net neutrality. By fnord12 | May 1, 2018, 5:52 PM | Liberal Outrage | Link « Liberal Outrage: April 2018 | Main | Liberal Outrage: June 2018 » |