They are playing the same game they always have: use carrots like this to get voters to the polls, and hold off on those carrots until an election year.

The problem is that it doesn’t reliably work. Progressive voters just see three and half years of very little progress and six months of fearmongering and pandering, which causes as much or more apathy than it does engagement.

If you look at what the Right does, by comparison, it’s interesting. They throw red meat to their base on day one, and keep it up for the entire term. They know that they need to keep the base pumped and expecting results, which is a big reason why conservative voters turn out at much higher rates: they feel listened to.

This is why the entire country of Canada is called Canada.

It’s called the Information Deficit Hypothesis.

And yes, it’s been proven wrong.

More like seventy five cents, given Google’s profit margins.

Pirate an old, pre-CC version.

That’s what I do. Admittedly it’s Photoshop 3.0 on a Mac Quadra.

As a Marathon fan since 1994, the plans for the new Marathon make me sad.

He’s also a right-wing douchebag, if that helps.

I’m Canadian. I know.

Apparently our fiscally responsible conservative leaders are a-ok with paying private nursing agencies and clinics more than they would if they just staffed public facilities adequately.

I’m not sure why, but I’m always told that conservatives are “good with money” and “fiscally responsible”, which Ive learned means “good with transferring public money into private coffers”.

The other point from that thread is that the whole idea of having to price shop when you need care seems sadistic and inhumane to anyone from any other civilized country.

Even if pricing was transparent, it’s still the wrong way to manage it. Healthcare should be a utility, paid for by taxes, like it is anywhere else in the world that isn’t a capitalist dystopia like the US is.

That these articles are normalized is horrifying.

Ten years ago, being seriously compared to Hitler should have been a political death sentence. Now? Now it’s just this week’s op-ed.

That they even have to say that they’re having to have these discussions speaks volumes on its own.

Either PBS or NPR had a thing a few years back where they’d read sections of the Bill of Right on air, as part of Independence Day celebrations.

The right wing folks who heard it thought it was communist propaganda.

This had better not be a “well, we waited to fill these until the election year so that we can use it to mobilize the base”.

One, because it’s terribly cynical and self serving.

Two, because it doesn’t work on progressives nearly as well as they think. It runs the risk of alienating voters because they don’t feel respected for 3.5 years out of 4.

They shoot people who point things at them. They’ll simply say they "feared for their life” when someone tries to take a picture of them at a distance.

If Democrats want change, this is how to do it:

1. Win general elections; vote blue no matter who. 2 Primary out the corporatist candidates every chance there is, right down to the level of school trustee.

This actually works, as we’ve seen with the GOP and their turn to rabid fascism. It can also work for good.

That would be true of landlords didn’t also know that and, in turn, redline rent to the maximum tenants can possibly pay.

I don’t know about the US specifically, but In Canada, investors big and small have bought up all the rental stock and rents are now maxed out beyond what many people can pay.

Remember the red line on Russia with regard to the first invasion of Crimea? Or Syria even earlier?

Obama, and now Biden, actually embolden autocrata with spineless moves like these. Netanyahu’s going to keep pushing because, line a toddler, he’s not sure where the actual “red line” really is.

I know it seems weird to think about this now, but back when Mandela was being released, the conservative establishment was calling him a terrorist and insisting that we still needed to support the apartheid government In South Africa against terrorist communists like Mandela.

Reagan and Thatcher were both quite explicit about it.

So this really is nothing new. The Right is always going to back the powerful against the powerless, and will always come down hard on any person or group that challenges the “natural order”.

No kidding.

This is like healthcare, which every other nation has mostly solved, but the Americans bend over backwards to find the most byzantine “solutions “ for just to avoid taxing the rich and/or implementing a functioning welfare state.

The latest hysterical example was importing drugs from Canadian pharmacies because apparently buying from a (barely) socialist country is okay, but basic bargaining is somehow immoral.

Israel just needs some lebensraum but the lugenpresse keeps getting in the way.