That was a hell of a read.

Yea I don't know how anyone who isnt independently wealthy has bought a house since 2022 or so.

If there's a deal on the table my guess is that it's something like Russia keeps most of what it's taken, with some swaps for the areas of Russia it's occupying, Ukraine gets guaranteed massive arms imports, training, and logistical support from the West, sufficient to create it's own credible deterrent against future Russian incursions. NATO is almost certainly out of the equation if it ever was to begin with.

I wasn't really convinced. I think Smith is right in the sense that the government data isn't wrong or misleading. It just isn't measuring what is actually impacting peoples' assessment of the economy.

In my estimation It's all in the cost of living. You can have a job and still feel poorer. People lost a significant chunk of their actual income from inflation and the cost of money made it harder to make big purchases like a home or car. People feel those changes in a way that they don't feel a low unemployment rate or good stock market.

It doesn't matter. He has no credibility on any topic.

If they'd listen to me they'd win so much they'd be getting sick of it. Same goes for the Republicans.

I think compromise is possible but still don't follow where you're going with this. Yea it was stupid to compare Romney to Hitler. It was also stupid to say Obama was a Kenyan born Alinskyite radical black Marxist. And yet. It would be nice if we could establish a consensus that those sorts of politics are stupid and at best unhelpful. But if that's really what we're waiting for I think we will wait long.

Meanwhile the GOP stonewalled Obama from 2010 on, culminating in the Senate refusing to even have a vote on an open SCOTUS seat. Was all of this conducive to the kind of comity we're hoping to establish? I don't think so. And while I don't normally like to put on my partisan hat like this I think it's impossible to have a conversation about the behavior of the Democrats without these facts informing it, along with the unfair attacks against Mitt.

It would take me thousands of words to unpack but I believe that most current political debates can still be traced to the crisis of trust in government unleashed by the GWOT. If I wanted to really get aggressive I'd say it's had the mirror image impact on our polity that winning World War 2 did. Trump is of course very much a part of that.

I feel that way about a handful of things Trump is doing and I am probably to the left of 75-80% of the country. I doubt I'm alone.

However if you ask me if those things are worth the price of other things going on or likely to go on under this administration I'd still say no.

Yea I recall those debates. Clinton was very prominently confronted about these kinds of counterfactuals by Chris Wallace and it was such a big deal it dominated a whole news cycle. I'd say Clinton had the better of the exchanges but I suppose ymmv. I would also say though that the GOP called it 'wag the dog' when Clinton did attempt a strike on bin Laden when he was in Sudan, which suggests to me that if Clinton wasn't taking the threat seriously enough then neither was any politician on the national stage at the time.

Do you think you know? Or that Elon Musk knows?

I'm happy to concede that having a conversation like that on the merits requires a level of research no one on this blog is going to do. However to the extent we're arguing about what was in the platform and legislation actually accepted by the administration I'd say the evidence is clear.

I am not one to defend the constant calling up of the famous Austrian in American politics but that's just changing the subject.

What killed Romney was the proposal for wholesale restructuring (read massively cutting) of entitlements. Some changes there may well need to be on the table at some point but I know that you know that isn't the same as auditing fraud waste and abuse in discretionary spending or ferreting out millions spent on teaching the women of Kandahar about Gloria Steinem or whatever.

Google is your friend:

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2010/07/22/improper-payments-elimination-and-recovery-act-cutting-waste-and-fraud-government

No real disagreement on the principle. This is where I interject that there was a 'smarter government' component to the Obama administration. That inclination seems to have been lost in the Biden admin and the unusual circumstances of slow growth and essentially 0% interest on government borrowing that preceded it. I am all for bringing those concepts back.

I am against domestic boondoggles. But all domestic boondoggles at least put money in the pockets of Americans, and even the worst of the worst are to some degree defensible on those terms.

The boondoggles Russel is defending caused untold damage (Chris understates it only because it takes books to describe how bad both wars and related activities were). The money would have been better spent by flying around in a helicopter dumping it out over American cities.

This is down right hysterical, given we spent at least $5 trillion dollars for the Pentagon to fight 'islamofascist' terrorism abroad when at the end of the day all we needed was reinforced cockpit doors and maybe a narrowly defined special forces operation in Afghanistan.

No but in light of the house bill you shared above it's a much closer call than I would have thought.

Is there any timeline on when/if something substantive will be released?

I'm dying to yell 'we're through the looking glass here,people..' at everyone I know.

Someone needs to keep Skinner distracted so we can bust into his office and sneak a peak at those documents.

Fair enough.

I watched it with 2 of my buddies (also old millennials) and my 7 year old. None are hip hop fans, but also no one had any particularly strong reaction to it in real time, pro or con. It is possible I am being knee jerk because my Facebook feed is currently full of smug reprimands (including by one of those friends!) aimed at people who did not like the half time show. A lot of 'white people am I right?' kind of stuff. There is also a really conspicuous lack of people complaining about the half time show, not that I doubt the existence of people complaining about the half time show. Feels very twitter circa 2020 and I hate it.

Ha I didn't really think about it on that level and maybe I misread you. I am but a humble metal head. No act I like will ever, nor should they, play the super bowl for no reason other than the fact that everyone watching would absolutely hate it. Maybe one day when the members of Metallica reach their 80s they'll go embarrass themselves in a similar way that a lot of rock acts from earlier eras have over the years.

Knowing I will not like the music means I watch for spectacle, not really anything else.

Agreed. That's where your green card at the border suggestion comes in, and where the total unwillingness to accept that sort of arrangement from the wider electorate follows.

I think having the discussion on those kinds of terms would be more productive. Yglesias has his One Billion Americans book that I have not read but as I understand it makes some arguments in that direction.

What it inevitably runs into though is that in the age of jet travel hundreds of millions of people could be here in a relative blink of an eye. Even our own, relatively open door past of mass immigration is not a parallel for what that might look like.

Nevertheless I'd take the honesty of that kind of conversation over what we have today.

But isn't it more fun if the music you like says something profound about you and your various failings as a human being? Be better!