“Zero cities with over one million people currently have Republican mayors. From the standpoint of the textbook Median Voter Model, this is awfully puzzling. Even if urbanites are extremely left-wing, you would expect urban Republicans to move sharply left to accommodate them. Once they do so, the standard prediction is that Republicans will win half the time. But plainly they don’t. One possibility is that Republican politicians are too stubbornly ideological to moderate. But the idea that virtually no one in the Republican Party is power-hungry enough to tell urban voters what they want to hear is deeply implausible. The better explanation, as I’ve explained before, is that urban voters have party preferences as well as policy preferences. They don’t just want left-wing [sic] policies; they want left-wing [sic] policies delivered by the Democrats.” (09/16/21)
“Australia is joining a new Indo-Pacific security partnership with the U.S. and U.K. that will allow it to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, sparking a rift with France at a time when the Biden administration is pushing allies to counter Chinese assertiveness. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, U.S. President Joe Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the security partnership in a virtual meeting on Wednesday. France said the move halted a 2016 deal with French military shipbuilder Naval Group to build up to 12 submarines, a project that had blown out to an estimated A$90 billion ($66 billion). … In a press briefing, Morrison defended the decision and said he understands it’s disappointing for France. Touting a ‘forever partnership’ with the U.S. and U.K., he said would take as many as 18 months to work out details of the agreement before work on the subs begins.” (09/16/21)
“One of the immediate effects of the shutdown of legal booze was the scramble to obtain alcohol in whatever illegal way it could be had. … The government had already anticipated that people would try to divert the industrial alcohol to the glasses of now-criminal tipplers. The government therefore decreed that industrial alcohol had to be laced with chemicals that made it foul tasting and even poisonous. … Deciding that causing thousands of deaths was fine as long as the result was less drinking, and since dead men — or women — don’t drink, the bureaucrats pushed things forward. … The callous zealots of Prohibition may have been reincarnated in the mandatory vaxxers of the current Administration. They give no indication that they find any problem in causing millions of people to lose their jobs if they continue to make their own decisions about whether or not to vaccinate.” (09/16/21)
“After Congress passed the American Recovery Plan, Joe Biden’s $2 trillion economic relief legislation, the president proposed roughly $4 trillion in further spending. The American Jobs Plan, also known as the president’s infrastructure proposal, accounted for about half of that money. The rest was included in the American Families Plan, a $1.8 trillion package that the Biden administration described as a set of ‘investments and tax credits for American families and children over ten years.’ In other words, it was a welfare bill, and quite an ambitious one. The plan would put most working-age American households on the dole, even when the economy is strong and the country is not in crisis.” (for publication 10/21)
“A US federal appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit that challenged the National Security Agency’s (NSA) practice of mass interception and searching of US citizens’ international internet communications. The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, said in its lawsuit that the NSA’s so-called ‘Upstream’ surveillance programme captures some of its international communications and is a violation of the US Constitution’s First Amendment free-speech rights and its Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. In a divided ruling on Wednesday, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the lawsuit must be dismissed after the government invoked the ‘state secrets privilege,’ which meant that a full exploration of the issue in a court would damage national security.” (09/16/21)
“According to the Pentagon’s annual reports on military justice, there have been more than 1.3 million cases of discipline in the US military since 2001, mostly relating to the so-called ‘War on Terror.’ But as The Intercept highlighted, the generals who misled Congress and the American public about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have not only avoided repercussions after conducting a disinformation campaign for 20 years, but were instead rewarded for their deceivingly positive assessments.” (09/16/21)
“It takes a certain amount of gall to parade before the plebes, maskless while they are masked — though we are told the celebs masked up once the red carpet parade was over. To pretend to be ‘with the people’ and somehow against the rich while hobnobbing with the super-wealthy is one thing, but twirling and smiling and showing off while the lowly servants are not even allowed to show their faces … undermines that whole ‘tax the rich’ theme. … All this echoes Marie Antoinette — had she ever possessed the temerity to parade about as Jean-Paul Marat.” (09/16/21)
“Bulgarian President Rumen Radev on Thursday reappointed a retired general as interim prime minister to lead a new caretaker government until the next early election is held in November. The Balkan country, which is the European Union’s poorest member, is gearing up for its third parliamentary election of the year after deep divisions between the parties in parliament prevented them from finding common ground for a coalition government. Radev presented the new caretaker Cabinet, which will have to organize snap parliamentary and regular presidential elections on Nov. 14th. It’s the first time that a caretaker government enters power after a previous caretaker Cabinet.” (09/16/21)
