RustyVenture

He was also toast before he got the shot in the arm that was all of the other Reagan Democrats dropping out simultaneously except and we were ordered to treat the Jim Clyburn endorsement and SC primary win as if it decided the whole election. Right before all this the man was talking about leaving record players on for kids at night to help them learn, saying he didn't care about young people's issues, saying he'd veto M4A, and getting chewed out by his eventual VP pick for being a segregationist.

I'm still convinced that if Trump started selling cloth "Keep America Great" masks on his campaign website or worn one around for a few days he would've won.

See, no amount of turd polish is gonna make that turd shine. You can't paper over the poison that the bill is laced with and expect to be praised for stumping/voting for it when people who are the unwilling recipients of the poison get strapped down to the table for no other reason than an absolutely abominable ploy to "paint the other guys as hypocrites" or to shut down "the whiny complaints of Trump"—a guy who, by the way, isn't even in the government. The bill:

• Changed to asylum rules that would have risked removing the legal review of cases by judges (which lots of mainstream press disgustingly dressed up as "speeding up the process")
• Included billions in additional funding for the fascist border patrol and the private companies operating the concentration camps
• Revived construction of the wall Trump wanted
• Imposing dystopian levels of round-the-clock surveillance (also run by private prison corps) on immigrant families

Then there's the provision that would give the president unilateral power to restrict asylum whenever they get nervous around one of the White House's maintenance workers (and of course Biden made this even more draconian in his executive order by halving the number of crossings that would allow the president to trigger the closure).

The spoonful of sugar the Democrats managed to get into the bill effectively pits different sets of traumatized groups (that we had a hand in traumatizing) against one another: The party can sing the praises of the "good" parts of the bill while anyone pointing out all of the fashy shit in it that's actually really fuckin' bad can be refuted by referring back to the few issues Dems didn't agree to allow the GOP to fully steer. That Biden seemingly believes the executive order will be struck down anyway just continues to affirm he's just as willing to toy with people's lives, enact racist and inhumane policy out of moral cowardice, and waste time on a lark as the GOP is, while facing far less scrutiny for doing so because "it could always be worse!"

I'm old enough to remember when these policies were as sickening to the current president and his party as they were and still are to me. Democrats like Biden and Chuck Schumer were quite vocal about the the previous regime's border policies and how needlessly harmful they were. Now that it's more politically advantageous to jump on the mixed austerity-and-manufactured border "crisis" bandwagon, the most vulnerable people, their families, their relatives, and the advocates that do crucial work filling in the gaps the US government refuses to fill are left high and dry wondering where the party that was supposed to be there for them went and why they're now pawns in an electoral gambit that didn't even fucking pan out!

Now we'll get to watch the GOP draw a new line in the sand and demand the Dems step over it so they can meet in the middle, and because they have no answer that will satisfy their base/protect the vulnerable and satisfy their business partners, friends, future and former employers, or the industries that thrive on exploitation of the most vulnerable. Or they win this year and just do this shit anyway—after all, any Democrats in Congress who get re-elected and supported the 2024 bill will be on the back foot for explaining their flip-flopping to the far-right opportunists who will absolutely drag them through the mud over it, and batting away an empowered Republican party even more eager to maximize the suffering of brown people instead of shifting things back into their own favor for once.

Hey, it would actually be a good idea for the Democrats to not pass inhumane, illegal, Republican border policies just to “own the cons.” Them doing what the GOP wants but with less pushback (and more slobbering excuse-making from their cult of pathetic dimwitted losers) is precisely why the “both sides” argument is merely a statement of fact made after observing objective fucking reality.

Next time, Democrats should actually do the opposite of what they did here and what they did with the racist bipartisan border bill instead of defaulting to hurting real people, wasting time and money over a measure that will by all accounts be shot down by the courts, and breaking national and international laws just so they could pretend they pulled off a 5D chess move that literally no one outside of their low-information cult will ever reward them for.

“What kind of slime would I marry?”

I love how this basically gives up the game that the only real activism these people believe in is voting.

Like we know you’re not going to be fighting for us; you never have before!

Atlantic Ocean to Florida:

Now he's back in the US working for Amtrak on high speed rail, but haven't heard much about his progress since he started last year beyond corridor studies (and I know he's once again been handed a pretty shit deal, since HSR wasn't a funding priority in Amtrak Joe's vaunted infrastructure bill).

Also, how does the Governor have any say over the city subway system?

The MTA is a state run agency that was formed in part to undermine the downstate political machine led by Robert Moses who is like the archetypal 20th century carbrained racist that was instrumental in the destruction of poor and minority neighborhoods to build highways and who purposefully sabotaged the development and operation of New York's mass transit systems for literal decades. His legacy lives on in the lack of rail connections both in NYC proper but also across most of Long Island. There's also a rich history of belligerence between the state government and city government, and like a lot of places especially in the northeast US a product of that is a spaghetti bowl of adversarial, duplicative, and parochial governing and rulemaking bodies that all get to have a say and dip their beaks.

Bill de Blasio and Andrew Cuomo constantly fought over shit like petty children. Cuomo's enormous ego tripping was especially noxious, leading to high-profile controversies like the last-minute shitcanning of the repair of an old but crucial subway tunnel that ran under the East River that got flooded during Hurricane Sandy. This also resulted in nixing a really promising busway pilot the MTA had planned after an extensive, nasty community engagement process that would've seen 14th Street in Manhattan closed to mostly everything but buses that would replace subway service during the 18 months it would take to do the repairs. This, among other political encumbrances, was likely a large factor in Andy Byford's resignation barely two years into the job. Cuomo is that much of a shitheel that he sandbagged and ostracized a guy his own board appointed either as a way to stick it to the NYC mayor or because Byford was actually trying to turn things around, getting recognized for it, and putting pressure on Albany to act.

All of this type of shit has left scars all over the state and it's just sad in the end. So many communities decimated by poor planning and political dick-swinging. As much as I miss living there—because it is truly a cool place to live/work/visit and riding trains and buses everywhere is dope and it's one of the only places in Amerikkka you can actually do that—I don't think I could ever hack it in NYC today. It just seems like it's become so much more of an oppressive place since I moved out a decade ago, but maybe it's also that I'm not a carefree lib anymore lol. Either way, fuck all these pigs and fuck this absolute clown shit.

Everything that doesn't present the American fascists as absolute sweethearts who are totally concerned for human suffering but aww shucks we just can't stop exporting it because reasons must be perpetuated by bots. I am very smart.

Yes, actually. At least for the USB-C thing. John Gruber has always been one of the most insufferable Apple sycophants out there. When I was a teenager and in my early 20s I had thought he caught a bit too much flak for his takes and thought most of his justifications were sound (this is also likely because I was an Apple user myself and wanted the things he said to be true), but around 2016-17 he also started weighing in more on politics (massive turbolib) and it broke me out of that bubble right quick.

Since the pandemic started he's become an even more unbearable asshole with bad takes, and it looks like they're only getting worse.

One side wants to give you affordable healthcare and housing

Oh, which side is that?

one side wants to quit NATO

Critical support to whichever side this is, especially if the “other” “side” thinks NATO is anything more than a cartel of the most monstrous terrorists on the planet.