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!

Probably my fault for not explaining my thoughts well. They go something like this:

-Hayes et al are not moved by any of the economic arguments in play re: immigration.

-For them it isn't about GDP or growth or full employment or prices of goods and services (or jobs "Americans won't do").

-What they do believe in is a universal rights ideal that anyone can immigrate anywhere and it is the host country's obligation to accommodate.

-This is probably bolstered by attitudes about what the developed world, Westerners, white people, whoever, owe to the denizens of poorer countries.

-To the extent any exploitation or other moral issues arise from how immigration plays out in practice, their answer is to make every entrant a citizen and/or provide legal status allowing them to benefit from all protections.

-However, they also know that this position is a total non-starter politically.

-Instead they argue for immigration from a perspective of neoliberal economics as a means of winning the argument without actually owning or making the case for their true position.

-This is what causes the weird tension that Freddie is picking up on, and that renders their arguments nonsensical to anyone paying even a little bit of attention to the larger political context and partisan divides.

-Freddie's mistake is taking the argument Hayes et al are making at face value.

-To me it's obvious that they really care about all the mushy stuff, not about having people to work at illegally low wages rebuilding LA.

I think Philly's d-line is just that good. They can get pressure and sacks without help.

But really all the more reason for KC to try to do something that might draw some of those calls. Or anything at all to catch a break or change the momentum.

Instead they looked like they were playing an out of conference game at 1 PM in early October.

I see it as a red herring because it is a way to defend mass unskilled immigration without arguing their implicit but unstated actual position, which is about human rights trumping parochial and/or nationalistic concerns, not really about economics at all. I think their position on the subject would be what it is no matter what the economists (or the Economist) says.

Edit to add, I'm sure Larry Summers actually does hold the 'neoliberal' position on the merits, but I do not think thats the case for name your progressive pundit.

Yea the whole thing went the way the Eagles season has gone. Really good defense and 'good enough' offense to play keep away. You can sell out against Barkley but Hurts is still solid in the pass game, especially if he's going to benefit from field position and turnovers.

Washington played them better in all 3 meetings than the Chiefs did last night because they approached all of those games with an underdog mentality (i.e. go for it on 4th from the beginning) and still only went 1-2.

Who knows what happened behind the scenes but KC played the whole thing way too risk averse. Like, why not try a fake punt? Why not try a designed QB run? It's the freaking Super Bowl!

Not sure if a scouting failure or if they were just overrated all season long like many suspected.

I don't think Freddie is wrong in the abstract but I do think he's wrong about the actual beliefs that lead to what I think is fairly called total intellectual dishonesty.

My take is that progressives like Hayes and Blitzer on some level believe that immigration is a human right exercised by immigrants themselves, whatever the particulars of the legal regime they are (or more pertinent, are not) following. From this perspective answering no to anyone who wants entry is itself a violation of those human rights. They're just also smart enough to understand that this framing is incredibly radical and would never be acceptable to the wider electorate, and so they pivot to neoliberal economic arguments as a sort of red herring.

Oh yea, Eagles defense won that game, have to give them 80-85% of the credit. They pressured Mahomes without blitzing. He looked off all night and no one was ever open. All the Eagles offense had to do was not screw it up and they didn't.

At that point the Eagles had moved into more of a prevent, keep the ball in front of you defense. As soon as KC failed to do anything on the opening possession of the second half the clock became a factor. Objectively KC was shut out and as crazy as it is to say, in context of the game every single KC point was scored in garbage time.

I thought it was pretty meh.

But I also think hip hop sucks generally.

Yea Reid is much more likeable.
I still hated him when he coached the Eagles but that seems so long ago now.

I am pretty bored with the Chiefs but for whatever reason they do not annoy me to anywhere close to the degree the Belichick/Brady Pats dynasty did. I also despise the Eagles. This one is easy for me from a rooting perspective.

I let my oldest pick what we're doing for dinner and he (somewhat unexpectedly) said 5 Guys. So I'll be off to spend like $70 on burgers and fries that are better than McDonalds but probably not the 3 to 4 times better the price would imply.

I'm not telling you to be shaking in your boots over a lawsuit. I'm telling you there is a high probability that the courts aren't going to go along with a lot of this because it isn't how the law or constitution works. In the last 48 hours alone we've had freezes on the birth right citizenship EO, the order to put the USAID employees on leave, and on Musk and team's access to Treasury Dept data, including an order to destroy anything they've taken.

What even conservatives should be worried about, not that I imagine they will be, is an approach to governance that amounts to yelling 'Somebody stop me!' like Jim Carey in the Mask. Our system is only capable of containing so much defection and aggressive probing of boundaries before sparking a constitutional crisis. No one knows what's on the other side of that and no one with any sense should want to find out.

Alternatively, while I have my doubts about the GOP's ability to govern itself in Congress, if they are able to do so and pass laws rolling up USAID into the State Department or eliminating its functions entirely, well that's just life in a democracy. Elections have consequences and whatever I or anyone else thinks about the policy decisions Congress has the authority to do things like that. Same if they want to mandate some sort of audit, eliminate the Department of Education, liquidate the federal workforce, or whatever else.

As DD said, where Congress has spent the money, not spending it is a violation of the law. There's already been at least one lawsuit filed. We will see how that plays out. I am certainly open to the possibility that USAID is one of those odd duck institutions that no one is going to go to bat for in Congress or that creates little controversy within the GOP coalition and is therefore easily cuttable. But they aren't all like that. Federal largesse is spread out all over the place red and blue state alike, and plenty of Frontline GOP representatives have interests in keeping this or that alive. Currently you can only lose 4 votes.

Also are you really suggesting that if the GOP couldn't get the votes to pass its own budget, to the point Medicare claims payments were at risk, that the Democrats would be blamed by the public for that? Come on now.

I think the bottom line is that real solidarity is impossible without common interest. And the reality underlying a lot of this performative stuff is that there is no common interest, or the common interest is so nebulous and/or theoretical that it may as well not exist.

More like pick your little piece of turf and defend it and let whoever is most self interested pick their little piece of turf and defend that. Trump will win some but probably lose a lot of others. The end result is to turn the situation from some kind of existential threat to to the constitutional system to just politics.

Honestly I think the best strategy may be to turn Jaybird's theorem from the OP on its head. Instead of trying to unite disparate people, institutions, and interests, force Trump to try to dismantle everything he doesn't like one by one.

They don't care about that stuff Phil. You know that.

Absolutely!

Though I think what's really going on with a lot of this is the belief that we should have less a king than a CEO. One of the reasons I think that the Democrats have struggled to deal with Trump is the slow but sure elimination from the coalition of people with insight into the private sector and total take over by those used to environments where you get your way by manipulation of processes and succeding via proceduralism. They're just not used to dealing with people like this, who play chicken and/or engage in a bunch of puffery and craziness as a tactic. The lack of perspective makes Trump seem stronger than he actually is.

I myself have dealt with this kind of thing, particularly in tech, when the business people enter into regulated industries. Tech is mostly unregulated so unless your tech services something like finance or healthcare you can do a lot of moving fast and breaking things. But when you get into something like government you have to deal with rules and stakeholders and people who are bound to follow a playbook you can't control. In the government that playbook is what the law actually is, as it is written.

I am starting to hear and read that very few feds are taking the 'buyout' (really more of an extended resignation). If the civil service doesn't blink, and I think it's looking increasingly likely that they won't, he will end up with no choice but to go to Congress. While I have no doubts Johnson and Thune will do their best for his agenda, as they find it helpful to them, it will not be this kind of unilaterlism. And that's not even getting into the delays and road blocks that are going to start coming up as this works through the courts.

Heh while I appreciate the enthusiasm I think you're overly optimistic about how a lot of this will work out. Trump's record in court on in his first term was terrible. From 2019:

Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a nearly 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-real-reason-president-trump-is-constantly-losing-in-court/2019/03/19/f5ffb056-33a8-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html

Now you're right that if Congress passes an appropriations bill eliminating funding for an agency then that that will indeed be the law of the land, but we all know that hasn't happened yet and we also know that the GOP majority has barely been able to pass continuing resolutions by itself. So I think your best case is that this is all a lot of cart before horse. But until that happens I think we should fully anticipate that he is going to lose in court and lose a lot.

I think he's on much firmer ground when it comes to the DEI, 'gender' wackiness, and similar stuff which has never had a strong statutory basis and always rested on the weird internal politics of the bureaucracies and those who work in them. You know my posting history well enough to know that I personally won't mourn the end of that sort of thing and that I actually agree, that the Democratic party could help itself quite a bit by moving on from it.

Lastly though I think you also know that 'because the president said so' has never been the final word in this country and I don't expect it will be on the policy, or for Musk and his minions. All glory is fleeting.

This seems troublingly plausible.

Federal. So probably not much to really worry about while Trump is president (though who knows what happens if there is some kind of falling out or disaster that results in finger pointing). But that's why I bring up the statute of limitations issue. Again, not predicting what's going to happen one way or the other, just saying the advice I'd give to a young vassal of the DOGE in the moment.

One of our more scholarly lawyers would need to chime in. I'm not sure if there is any precedent that might be instructive. I do know that there are some very broad statutes on the books. The last place I'd want to find myself is standing between an AUSA and a federal judge whenever the winds change. Maybe it's a worthwhile risk for the richest man in the world but if you're just some guy being there in the first place means you've already lost.

I don't think it's 'hold out hope' so much as that for at least the next 2 years, unless Congress wants to step in (lol!), all anyone who wants to push back on (nominally) official action can do is raise a fuss look to the courts. However I think North is right about the inclinations of the federal judiciary. There are certainly some hacks on the bench but one upside of the lifetime appointments is that the courts tend to have longer and more circumspect view of the world that goes beyond the next election cycle or two.

For that reason, if I had the ear of one of these 19 or 20 year old muskrats going into federal buildings, I'd warn them that there are not, I don't believe, any statutes of limitations on various unpermitted access felonies. Of the many things that could happen, one that I think is very unlikely would be daddy Elon's writ extending to club fed.

David, what the CDC says still applies to the pregnant 'trans man' in this hypothetical and is still accurate because she is in fact still a woman. Pregnancy is impossible for anyone who isn't a woman and even if she may not like being a woman, absent some crazy scientific breakthrough, it's what she is and always will be. A piece of paper issued by the government doesn't change that and can't change that. The demand and at times willingness of the government to endorse beliefs that are at odds with very easily observable physical reality is indeed at the heart of the problem.

I know your only way of trying to debate that is with histrionics and I used to be more sanguine about all of it. However it is now clear that the language games you demand invariably lead to all manner of unacceptable and unworkable accommodations. In these very comments it's gotten you demanding public schools treat parents as guilty until proven innocent child abusers, whose price for using the public schools is to be treated by the state with extreme suspicion and as a threat to their own children. And that's not even getting into the other absurdities like 'female identifying' male sex offenders in womens prisons.

What those that call themselves trans should do is take their freedom under the 1st Amendment, and their freedom under Bostock and enjoy their lives. What they should stop doing is fighting for an official redefinition of physical sex with the nebulous concept of 'gender identity.' In the former lies a better path to a sustainable equilibrium. As for the latter, well, you see what's happening.

I dunno about the deep philosophical stuff but I still have yet to have someone explain crypto to me in a way that does not sound like an obvious scam.

Technically I think their enemy is Ottawa.