version

Well-known member
That, or the establishment lied and can just walk it back with little consequence now Trump's out of office. It could also have been a genuine mistake on the part of the intelligence agencies.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Ah this is about the bounties.
When I read that Trump had called it a hoax I assumed it was referring to the electoral interference thing which he always named The Russia Hoax, although I guess he used that phrase to denigrate loads of things... I suppose his tactic was to hammer away at phrases he saw as winning ones.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Trump would claim he was being smeared with a "cake hoax" with his face and hands covered in icing and his mouth full of cake.
 

Leo

Well-known member
The Biden Boom Has Begun

Last week, fewer Americans applied for unemployment benefits than at any time since March 2020. Last month, retail sales in the U.S. rose by 9.8 percent, the largest increase in nearly a year. Factory activity in the state of New York just hit its highest level since 2017; in Philadelphia, manufacturers are now more confident about business conditions than they have been since 1973. As of this writing, U.S. stock values have hit an all-time high. All of this news is better than expected. And yet the yield on U.S. Treasury bonds declined Thursday morning — a sign that global investors believe America can have its post-COVID economic boom and its low inflation, too.

In other words, it’s a good morning for “Bidenomics.”
 

Leo

Well-known member
Joe Biden’s First 100 Days Reshaped America

Biden’s success so far as the result of his avoidance of intense partisan conflict, which means “Republicans can’t stop Biden because he is boring them to death.”

"Biden’s strategy of boringness is a fascinating counterpoint to a career spent trying desperately to be interesting. Biden used to overshare, with frequently disastrous results that led him to accurately self-diagnose as a ‘gaffe machine.’ Whether his advanced age has slowed him down or made him wiser, he has finally given up his attention-seeking impulse and embraced the opposite objective. Biden’s success is a product of the crucial yet little-appreciated insight that substantive advances don’t require massive public fights. The drama of inspiration and conflict is not only unnecessary to promote change but even, in certain circumstances, outright counterproductive.”

The key insight here is that talking too much about his agenda,aside from its most blandly popular pillars — Covid and recession bad! Infrastructure and jobs good! — only serves to polarize debate around the issues and provoke a more ferocious backlash from the right. Better to say nothing and ram stuff through Congress in enormous bills than to speak every day making a detailed case for each agenda item.

This dynamic used to frustrate BARACK OBAMA, who gave good speeches and believed he could move voters by aggressively making a moral case for his policies. At one point during the immigration reform debate of 2013, Senate Democrats begged Obama not to discuss the issue in a high-profile speech in Las Vegas because they knew it would damage delicate negotiations with Republicans.

Obama “was not happy, to put it mildly,” Sen. BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.) told Ryan at the time. Biden needs no such warning.
 

Leo

Well-known member
Hedges is good people.

I'm sure he is, but it's usually impossible to have a conversation with someone like that. his convictions are so absolute, everything's black-and-white. maybe it's just me, but I don't find people like that to be persuasive. it's a tone and stance that just turns me off from the get go. he makes some valid points, but my reaction is "yeah, ok."
 

Leo

Well-known member
he's got impressive background: 15 years at the NY Times, then NPR, Dallas Morning News, CSM.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Whatever this guy's credentials, this isn't journalism, it's just a series of opinions stated as cast-iron fact without any arguments or evidence to back them up. Or at least it starts that way, and it didn't make me want to read the rest of it.

More generally, I'm extremely wary of people who argue, from a seemingly progressive perspective, that "X and Y are just as bad as each other", where X may be Obama, Biden, or the Democratic party as a whole, or Blair or the Labour party in a British context, and Y is Trump or the Republicans, or Johnson/the Conservatives. Apart from the fact that it's demonstrably untrue, it's tailor-made to benefit the side that's clearly worse, because the intended effect is either to dissuade progressives from voting at all out of sheer despair, or to vote for tiny fringe parties that can offer wildly progressive agendas that they know they'll never have to make good on because they stand no chance of ever forming part of a government. Ralph Nader in the 2000 US election and Jill Stein in 2016 are good example of this tendency.

This guy working for RT is all of a piece with this overall take - Stein was a guest of honour at a gala dinner hosted by Putin in 2015...
 

Leo

Well-known member
well, he was at the NY Times for 15 years, NPR, and as patty said, won a Pulitzer, so he's got solid journalistic credentials. But people change, and he's apparently not the guy he was in the past.
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Think he got fired from NYT for being a bit too radical or something like that

But I get what @Mr. Tea is saying. I just don't mind it coming from him because I trust him to be truthful and I share his pov more often than not. He's close with Cornel West, and those two together are a great team when it comes to social and political commenary
 

Leo

Well-known member
what a weird photo

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