while i think clinton and obama were good presidents it doesn't change the fact they didn't effect the trend line of real wages for the brackets in any meaningful way. ok we saw an uptic under clinton that has since remained flat
We're actually seeing one of the limitations of the system Clinton and Obama worked within. The old Green Lantern Thesis that Obama was somehow supposed to charm people out of their own inexplicable rejection of their own policies has become a Green Lantern Revisionism. Some progressives, and some of them actually prominent, crossed my twitfeed in recent days complaining that Trump was outflanking Obama on the left, and I was asked to imagine Barack Obama, in the middle of the foreclosure crisis, ordering Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD—all objects of rightist conspiracism—to stop foreclosing and evicting. And, hey, remember that time we had a migration crisis on the southern border, and Speaker Boehner insisted on a GOP plan, so he took it to the floor and had to pull it because his own caucus was going to say no? And remember, then, how he publicly told President Obama to use his executive authority to address the problem? Of course, it's Boehner, so, hey, remember how he sued President Obama for doing just that, thus creating the DACA argument crisis leading and interwoven into the trumpswindle concentration camps?
American capitalism might be about to break. You and I can hopefully chuckle, someday, albeit ruefully, about how they needed to wait until they could blame the black guy and some woman in order to call the whole thing off.
Still, I remember twenty years ago, as we unpacked my ruby-red nosecone iMac, it wasn't quite astonishment, but some manner of nearly disbelieving admiration to consider that Apple had already achieved optimization to having mere
hours worth of inventory. And we must at some point admit, albeit grudgingly, this makes sense for a company obsessed with testing the boundaries of what counts or not as bricking.
Physical stock as a ledger liability is what it is. But we're talking about basic prophylaxis and medical supply. Yesterday, we got to hear that, sure the testing protocols are now available, but the hospital is running short on the sterile swabs used in collecting samples. Also, the spaceman billionaire tweeted that he would start manufacturing equipment if there was a shortage, to which the question translates, from tweetish, to what does he mean by if.
We didn't have the inventory on hand because American capitalism only sees short-term liability in doing so. We are slow to spin up the manufacturing response because any plan necessarily defies the formulaic discussion of profit margin and other such projections. It's not just that our system is designed with this glaring fault, but also that we insist on it, the proverbial,
Feature, Not A Bug. The system has been broken for a while.
Remember, though, there is a bloc who rejected Sec. Clinton in favor of Sanders, but came back, four years later, to an even more institutional figure in VP Biden. Trying to assess the system President Clinton worked within, and its relationship to what Obama countenanced in the Office, is difficult enough within their own historical contexts, but if we recall the lesson of '48—that is, a hundred seventy-two years ago—we should not be surprised to find the petit-bourgeoisie and aspiring proletarians scurrying after institutional security, and even less so for consideration of self-infliction.
So one thing we should note, as the moment eddies about, is that
our neighbor's comment↑, that, "It is unfair to blame these two presidents for the failures of their subsequent replacements", is not incorrect insofar as it goes, but does fail to approach the living question; part of why we have a Trump presidency is that enough people disagreed that Clinton and Obama "were good stewards of the Nation".
We could have had the better Clinton for a president, but she was apparently an extraordinarily odious representation of the institutions many who said no to her are, this time around, clamoring after. If it really was about policy and institutional failure, Biden wouldn't have just won Michigan.
A haunting prospect: At what point are some people hoping to hasten the end, because just like any old tinfoil, everything gets magically better, the day after?
†
Meanwhile, we should remember that if we
follow↑ the
posts↑, this side discussion about Vociferous' two-bit, generic, polymer capsule script in re not trusting any politician—a manner of rightist hackery we've suffered around here for years—is actually misdirection intended to beg people's attention away from
relevant consideration↑ of the thread, which is that Attorney General Barr's, and thereby the Justice Department's, handling of the Mueller report lacked candor.
Consider this part of his response—
As with everything else leftist, this will end up being a lot of nothing too. They love taking everything out of context (or they actually don't understand plain English), lying (or they actually don't know or understand the truth), and reading into stuff things that are not objectively there (or they actually believe what they imagine to be so).
—and try, for the moment, to look past the recycling of other people's criticisms of his own posts, because it's pretty easy to check what he's complaining about.
What McQuade said:
Always consider Barr's statements for what they don't say. Judge Walton said Barr lacked candor in his public remarks and letter to Congress, which do not jibe with the Mueller Report. As a result, he does not trust Barr or DOJ.
So, what did she take out of context, fail to understand, make up or lie about, or read into what was not objectively there?
"Judge Walton said Barr lacked candor", and, as a result, His Honor "does not trust Barr or DOJ".
So, what did Judge Walton actually say?
As noted earlier, the Court has reviewed the redacted version of the Mueller Report, Attorney General Barr's representations made during his April 18, 2019 press conference, and Attorney General Barr's April 18, 2019 letter. And, the Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report. The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr's statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.
These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr's lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr's credibility and in turn, the Department's representation that “all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by Attorney General [Barr]” is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions.
(EPIC v. U.S. Dept. of Justice & Leopold and Buzzfeed Inc. v. U.S. Dept of Justice, et al.↱)
So, it seems McQuade didn't take it out of context, or fail to understand English, or lie, or fail to know truth, or read into it what wasn't there. In other words, a cheap, rightist troll tried the same penny-clearance dime-a-dozen make-believe failure regularly punctuating our discourse since promoting it as a quota hire on the moderation staff over a decade ago, and, what, we're not supposed to notice?
This is actually part of the reason rational discourse is anathema, around here; apparently, some "political views" can't do any better than botchery and make believe. The tacit presupposition is that if we don't allow, protect, encourage, and cultivate this kind of stupidity, we will have silenced the political view it purports to represent. To wit, if these fallacious manners of uneducated trolling are not protected, then political conservatism will be somehow silenced. It is unclear how to justify the presupposition of conservative illegitimacy, but neither can we overlook the fact of market trends describing a depraved conservative ethic at large. Was a time I really would have thought conservatives were capable of better.
Still, really? Clumsy self-denigration is what conservatives have left? When did they last have anything better?
____________________
Notes:
@BarbMcQuade. "Always consider Barr's statements for what they don't say. Judge Walton said Barr lacked candor in his public remarks and letter to Congress, which do not jibe with the Mueller Report. As a result, he does not trust Barr or DOJ." Twitter. 7 March 2019. Twitter.com. 20 March 2019. http://bit.ly/39BPU0M
Walton, Reggie B. "Memorandum Opinion". Epic v. U.S. Dept. of Justice and Leopold & Buzzfeed Inc. v. U.S. Dept. of Justice. United States District Court for the District of Columbia. 5 March 2020. assets.documentcloud.org. 20 March 2020. https://bit.ly/3dkSMBt
