clowns to the left and jokers to the right
does that make centrists serious thinkers?
Ha!
Thanks for the OT.

The only reason to run for Congress now is to get in on the feeding-frenzy on all the graft, and then to get that nice gummint pension once your "service" is complete. All that unclean stuff like writing or debating legislation just gets in the way of what would otherwise be a floating orgy of pocket-lining.

Not a fan.

are, in a sense, precisely that, orders to the executive branch. Theoretically they cannot create new law or modify existing law, though this latter is a question of degree. They tell government employees and agencies how to operate and cannot tell citizens what to do or not do. However, by telling agencies where to focus enforcement or how to interpret existing statutes, they can indirectly criminalize or decriminalize stuff. As an example, a president could declare caffeine to be a dangerous drug subject to certain existing legal restrictions on possession and use. That would criminalize coffee. However, it would be subject to legal challenge on various grounds. The problem lies with the basis and purpose of such orders as they have come to be promulgated.

We have moved into a somewhat evidence free universe and somewhat anti-science as well. For a large swath of the public and the entirety of government from ageency heads upward opinions are actioable truths and everything is viewed through an ideological lens The argument isn't over whether or not it is legitimate for a government to protect the citizenry, but over what to protect it from and how to do so, and that is largely driven by fundamentally irrational frames of reference. This is true of all branches of government.

As to Congress, this is further complicated here by Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution:

Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business; but a smaller Number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the Attendance of absent Members, in such Manner, and under such Penalties as each House may provide.

This gives us shit like the filibuster rule in the Senate and a ton of silly shenanigans like the "No Hats" rule in the House. All along the way, there are tons of rules empowering the minority, in many cases, a minority of one, to gum up the works in both houses. Couple that with the triumph of ideology over reality and it all devolves into an endless pie fight which, unfortunately, often has severe consequences for we the hoi polloi.

be well and have a good one

.

but what else is new? The rules based orders just mean that you can change what the rules mean when it’s convenient for government. Take our 20 year, $5-10 trillion war against terrorism where numerous people are in prison for allegedly supporting terrorists. But now it’s okay to not only embrace a real live terrorist, but elevate him to run a country.

The UK is throwing people in jail because it says they are supporting Hamas when they condemn what Israel is doing and all the while they are supporting Jolani in Syria.

Greenwald absolutely nails this fcking hypocrisy.

seems to play a prominent part in the analysis of Riley and Brenner:

Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’.These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s CARES Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act.footnote3 All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

In short, we now have a government which feels obliged to make rich people richer before anything at all is accomplished, and you can in part thank Congress for that.

As for the slurs, I'm beginning to think that the whole point is that nobody in the West younger than eighty years old can remember what a real Communist or Nazi or Fascist was like, and nobody reads or does research anymore, so let's use those terms! (We are of course not allowed to discuss the Ukrainian Banderite Fascist beneficiaries of Federal largesse.)

Footnote: George Orwell, an author of the Thirties and Forties, on Fascists:

In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it, which involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil. In practice, of course, it is merely an infamous tyranny, and its methods of attaining and holding power are such that even its most ardent apologists prefer to talk about something else. But the underlying feeling of Fascism, the feeling that first draws people into the Fascist camp, may be less contemptible. It is not always, as the Saturday Review would lead one to suppose, a squealing terror of the Bolshevik bogey-man. Everyone who has given the movement so much as a glance knows that the rank-and-file Fascist is often quite a well-meaning person-quite genuinely anxious, for instance, to better the lot of the unemployed. But more important than this is the fact that Fascism draws its strength from the good as well as the bad varieties of conservatism. To anyone with a feeling for tradition and for discipline it comes with its appeal ready-made. Probably it is very easy, when you have had a bellyful of the more tactless kind of Socialist propaganda, to see Fascism as the last line defence of all that is good in European civilization.