Saturday Report 8/17/24 - Are insults all Republicans have left?

The Best of the Rest of the News

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

— Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Walz are leaving Reagan’s neoliberalism in the dust as they double down on President Biden’s incredibly successful Keynesian economics strategy to rebuild the middle class and invigorate the economy. Harris told a crowd yesterday that, as president, she will put a ban on food price-gouging by massive grocery store monopolies, give a one-time $6,000 tax credit to families with newborns, restore the original Biden tax credit that cut America’s child poverty rate in half (before Republicans refused to renew it last year), get giant hedge funds out of the single-family housing rental business, build at least 3 million new homes, offer a $25,000 down payment for new homes for first-time home buyers who’ve paid their rent on time for the previous two years, and use federal funds to end most medical debt. The policies are sweeping and transformational, although reading both The New York Times and The Washington Post yesterday and today you’d completely miss most of the details and how they’ll affect average Americans (although you will read the whining comments of conservative economists). I’ve been writing about how Democrats should abandon Reagan’s and Clinton’s neoliberalism ever since I first published Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It back in 2007. Thank the goddess that the Harris/Walz campaign is following Biden’s embrace of modern, New Deal economics instead of staying with Warren Harding’s and Ronald Reagan’s libertarian BS.

— Are insults all Republicans have left? Is that why they can’t they just let people be who they are and debate policy? Like the pathetic man-baby he is, Trump complained Thursday that he’s being criticized by Nikki Haley and others in his party for his racist and misogynist personal attacks on Harris. “I’m entitled to personal attacks,” he sniveled, claiming his pathetic claims about Harris’ intelligence, female voice, and race were something that would resonate with the Republican base. Meanwhile, Tim Walz told Harris that he likes “white guy” food when he was offered a taco. “You mean with tuna fish and mayonaise?” Harris asked him, and he replied, “Mostly ground beef and cheese.” Harris asked if he liked spicy food and he added that black pepper is about as spicy as food usually gets in Minnesota. It was cute, and another insight into his personality, but Republicans are trying to claim that it was “racist” for Walz to talk about “white guy” food. Seriously, is this all they have? Nobody wants their abortion bans, their hatred of queer and Black people, their weird obsessions with who’s having sex with whom, their fealty to billionaires, and their anti-union policies. I get it that they need to find something else to talk about, but do they really think this is going to work for them? It’s pitiable!

— In what has to be the most bizarre attack on Harris yet, Trump says that if she’s elected a truly terrible thing will happen: In his own words, “everybody will get healthcare!” Seriously. He called a single-payer system where everybody is covered “communism.” I’m guessing that would be a huge surprise to Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. Once again, Trump and the GOP display their colossal idiocy in the service of greater profits for the insurance industry.

Speaking of idiocy, JD Vance says Amazon gave money to Black people to burn down big retail stores to increase Amazon’s profits. It doesn’t get weirder — or more racist — than that. Here’s his exact quote, in the context of his saying Amazon donated money to BLM (which is possible, but not for that reason): “Who benefits most when small businesses on Main Street are destroyed? Who wants to see their competitors unable to deliver goods and services to people, so that you get it delivered in your brown Amazon box? Jeff Bezos.” In the same speech, he claimed Democrats support women’s abortion rights so there will be more women in the workplace, thus driving down wages and providing Democratic business owners with “cheap labor.” When they were passing out brains, as the old saying goes…

— Geeky Science! “We should have better answers by now”: climate scientists are baffled by the unexpected explosion of global heating. Global warming has kicked into high gear and temperatures are increasing far faster than scientists had anticipated; it has some of the world’s top researchers both baffled and alarmed. British scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York told The Guardian: “The 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system.” Meanwhile, Trump, Vance, and Republicans in general continue to deny global warming as we break record after record, and Project 2025 wants to remove any reference to the climate crisis from all government documents, just like fossil fuel industry shill Ron DeSantis did earlier this year in Florida. In exchange for fossil fuel money, these people are willing to see our grandchildren (and possibly our children) face an unimaginable hellscape. They are moral criminals and, frankly, should be legal criminals.

— Wisdom School Alert! Are You In the “Having Mode” or the “Being Mode?” The good news is that the transition from "having" to "being" is available to all of us. Give it a try. The only thing you have to lose is your anxiety and unhappiness…

Are You In the “Having Mode” or the “Being Mode?”

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