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klyrs

It's an election year, don't hold your breath.

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Election year is 25% of a single administration's term, why should events be ignored 25% of the time?

It's also not like they're not campaigning for the other 3 years of the term.

Yes, but the public memory is increasingly short.

Hell, anymore it’s more like 50%.

well at least 50%. I guess everybody forgot there are mid term elections which affect what the administration can do with help of congress.

In this case, because I don't expect Biden to win another term and I expect the prosecution of this case to take longer than a year. The last several administrations have opened their term by tearing down everything that the prior administration had done. To be specific: I'm not confident the prosecutor behind this will have a job at the end of the year.

I genuinely think that if Biden does not win another term there are far larger problems for the American project than Ticketmaster, including democracy existing as we know it today.

On your opposite side, they think if Biden wins babies will die horrible deaths.

American politics are full of superlatives, and very devoid of any real actions. Once the hero or the devil gets elected, nothing happens much.

Yeah except for Roe v. Wade which you might consider a bellwether event for anti-contraceptive activists. But other than that yeah nothing much happened.

>including democracy existing as we know it today.

Weren't there similar predictions back in 2016? How is it different this time? Or to back up a bit, what exactly does "democracy existing as we know it today" mean? It could mean anything between "US becomes North Korea" and "the whitehouse revoked the press credentials of someone who said something mean about trump".

It wasn't wrong in 2016 either, what's your point?

That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.

>It wasn't wrong in 2016 either, what's your point?

Of course "it wasn't wrong" if claims are vague like "democracy as we know it", which means they can be used in a motte-and-bailey manner to initially imply that the US is going to turn into China/North Korea or whatever, but then later be walked back on to whatever the predictions don't really pan out.

>That the coup failed and Congress wasn't murdered doesn't mean they didn't try.

Was the claim back then that they'll "try" (however poorly planned/executed), or that they'll actually succeed?

The general thought was that a simpleton business monkey who made a virtue out of ordering people around and not accepting "no" for an answer would continue to operate autocratically even as the leader of a democratic bureaucracy.

There was a lot of equivocating that it was all some campaign schtick, the media was misrepresenting him, etc. "4D chess" and all that.

It turned out that the straightforward analysis was the correct one. Sometimes a spade really is a spade.

This round he's playing for double or nothing - having broken a bunch of laws is slowly catching up with him. He continues playing the victim while indignantly expressing a desire for overt revenge. We've already seen the mechanisms by which this will happen (paralysis of federal law enforcement, mobilization of paramilitary goon squads into the power vacuum, and political reality distortion field justifying everything as if President is equivalent to Dictator). So yeah by any reasoned analysis, 2024 really is Trump xor America - you decide.

(Once again, standard disclaimer - unaligned libertarian here. I'd never voted for a major party candidate before 2020. Specifically, I considered a 2016 a toss up between two differently-bad options, and still have no regrets there. But now that we've seen a concrete track record as opposed to mere vacuous campaigning, it would be utterly foolish to ignore it)

You're downplaying what is unambiguous and obvious. Please engage in good faith.

I think if he comes back he won't leave. There's a reason why many of the people that worked with him most closely believe he's dangerous and unfit.

>I think if he comes back he won't leave.

So to confirm you're predicting that if he gets elected he'll stay in power beyond 2025?

Yes, I think he'll try with a much higher likelihood of succeeding than when he tried last time.

That's typically how coups go, as far as history go.

Unified Reich of America. It's just one letter aways from USA.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/22/t...

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69045271

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/21/politics/trump-nazi-allus...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/after-backlash-trump-pulls-...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/21/dona...

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/21/trump-unified-reich...

https://apnews.com/article/trump-election-2024-rhetoric-germ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/us/donald-trump-reich-vid...

Once there is backslash, just blame a junior staffer instead of making the head honcho resign for not controlling what goes into an important PR stream.

I'm pretty sure that if the incumbent conservative President loses to the radical reactionaries, that incoming administration will be tearing down much more than merely the prior administration - more like two hundred years of the painstaking progress we now take for granted.

(Just for context here, lest the postmodern fence-sitters write me off as some rabid partisan - I'm an unaligned libertarian who had never voted for a major candidate in a national election before 2020)

Because they've had the entire term to take action and the only reason anything is happening now it to attempt to build some momentum going into the election itself. Soon as it's over, everything most likely goes away.

It takes time and work to put together cases like this. I look at it the other way: they've only had three years, and have already done some impressive things.

FTC has been aggressively pursuing antitrust since pretty much day one of the admin. You just weren’t paying attention.

To the contrary, I've been paying very close attention. I'm just not confident that the DoJ can pull this off before the end of the Biden administration.

Ah I see. You’re saying that you don’t expect this to complete, not that this is cynically political/false… sorry!

If one party's election-year pandering is legalizing marijuana and enforcing antitrust law, I'll take it.

Rescheduling marijuana is a multistep regulatory process set out in law that Biden initiated with an executive order the month before the 2022 midterm election, so its kind of weird to call it election year pandering.

Rescheduling is not descheduling.

It's better but it's still a half measure and far away from the blanket pardons that the President (any president) needs to be signing asap.

I get the whole "progress is slow thing" but this is a case of politicians being the only slow ones. A supermajority of the public supports alcohol/marijuana parity.

Their literal job is to perform based on what made/makes them desirable to the electorate.

But we have Taylor Swift to thank for this one and she's not running for office.

What? Because she set her ticket prices so high?

Pearl Jam

How dare politicians implement popular policies to appeal to voters!

I think the objection is the timing. If the administration truly cared about such things, they'd do them in non-election years. But they seem to save up these things for election years so people feel listened to.

Yes. I think that is the objection. But it's absurd. It's not like the FTC has been sitting on its hands the past 3 years. Last year, for example, they sued Amazon for illegally maintaining a monopoly. In 2022, they sued Walmart for facilitating money-transfer fraud, Harley Davidson for illegally restricting customers' rights to repair, countless health insurers to block illegal mergers. In 2021 they sued Frontier Communications for advertising false internet speeds, Lockheed Martin from illegally acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings, Nvidia from acquiring Arm Ltd, etc. There are hundreds of cases this FTC has brought in the past 3 years. Cynically saying "LOL ELECTION YEAR" at this case, because it's the first case you've paid attention to is just... so comically predictable.

If Fox News lies to them enough times it becomes the truth :P

Right, right, right. So what we really need is for politicians to be consistent and never do anything at all, including during election years, because they don’t really mean any of it (as we wise folk all know).

I’m confused about why you’re so opposed to the biggest climate legislation package ever signed into law.

Inflation.

I think your perspective might be...tainted. I kid, I kid. But typically it's spelled "perineum" just fyi. I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years. Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.

> But typically it's spelled "perineum" just fyi

It's a very old mispelling that I'm sticking with.

> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion. Everything I've read suggests that it'll likely be inflation-neutral or slightly reduce inflation over the next 10 years.

Over the next 10 years, maybe. But circulating money that didn't exist before (that's what happens when the government increases the debt) devalues existing currency proportionally. It is, by definition, inflation. It's effectively a flat tax which disproportionately affects the poor (as all flat taxes do).

The result is an _immediate_ spike in inflation that _maybe_ cools if the projected revenue is real (it often isn't). That inflation had been staved off for the last... two decades or so by lowering interest rates, encouraging people to spend money they wouldn't otherwise (or borrow it themselves) thereby increasing their buying power and offsetting their devalued currency.

Unfortunately, you can't lower interest rates forever and so, when they reach rock bottom, all your inflation chickens come home to roost.

> Even if spending on it gets up to a trillion dollars over a ten year span, you're still talking about one tenth of what gets spent on defense contractors and the military every year.

Spending more money you don't have is worse than spending less money you don't have.

> I'd be interested in seeing a non-crank source for your assertion.

Back to that though... The reason why the government is spending the way it is recently is because of Modern Monetary Theory[1]. Politicians love it because it says they can spend as much money as they want and debt doesn't matter. They don't really believe it though because they only implement the part where they get to spend all the money you want and the debt doesn't matter. I don't think it's very controversial to consider the "mainstream" (in quotes because the reason they are mainstream is because politicians and political think tanks love them, they aren't actually mainstream among economists) MMT sources to be the cranks.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory

Biden held significant sway in the country as VP from 2009-2016 and now again from 2021-2024. The fact that he chose to do the bare minimum on the last possible year 12 years into the job with less of a majority than he’s had in the past right as his election polls are starting to tank certainly seems telling.

> Biden held significant sway in the country as VP

Hahaha. Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I agree, but VP? There's a reason why there's a Veep TV show.

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