PKMKII

Another issue is that many of these restaurants are now owned by private-equity groups that borrowed a lot of money for their acquisitions and are not seeing the cash flow they needed to come out even. TGI Fridays, Red Lobster, Hooters of America, and P.F. Chang’s were all purchased by private-equity groups in the last decade. TGI Fridays has 58% fewer restaurants than it did in 2019, and Hooters had 23% fewer, according to data from industry research firm Technomic.

“Wait, it’s the fault of greedy capitalists bleeding companies dry for short-term profits?”

“Always has been”

Winning for establishment Dems means keeping the big dollar donations flowing in. Which is the fundamental reason they suppress the left and progressive candidates, them winning causes the Mark Cubans to hold back on the big checks.

You’re Ohio

Paul “the economy is doing great if you ignore food and housing costs” Krugman

Florida has a rule that ballot measures need to hit a 60/40 mark in order to get passed.

This is a direct result of a politics that doesn’t offer material benefits but rather gives people a way to posit themselves as The Adults in the Room. That itch is going to get scratched one way or another, either in the smug satisfaction of victory or the finger wagging at the “children” in defeat.

Stop the count!

Shit like this is what makes it clear Democrats don’t actually give a shit about winning. If they wanted to win they’d keep the Republican Party as unhinged as possible so they could continue to run on “it puts the neoliberalism on its skin or it gets the fascism again.” Having a “normal” Republican Party would absolutely nuke their chances of winning as they’ve erased any daylight between themselves and the Liz Cheneys of the GOP.

The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.

There is this cycle of hedonistic treatbros whiplashing between “the Dems are nanny state buzzkills that want to take away our good times that’s why we’re voting Republican” and “oh shit republicans are all puritanical weirdos that want to ban cleavage on television” so yeah this makes sense.

I don’t think that’s the whole story though. The migrant “crisis” is animating a lot of voters despite migrants having little impact on the vast majority of people‘s lives. People tend to assign outsized risk to the unknown/unfamiliar and vice versa. Nothing is more comfortingly familiar to the typical Amerikkkan than their oversized house kept at 65 in the summer and 75 in the winter with three giant SUV’s in the driveway that they drive everywhere on clogged stroads.