I agree I thought it was a pretty bad final episode. Show had gone significantly down hill since the political troubles. There was a time it was elite.
That’s what initially made me interested. Former bohemian socialites migrating to the right might be interesting. Instead it sounded like rich bohemian socialites where
< high vocal fry >
the joke is, like, um, we’re not trying and that’s, like, what makes us cool
My guess is, left or right, I probably wouldn’t have liked them.
Yes, this was a big deal and still is. This was likely covered in the show, but there was a huge expansion in prison facilities at that time and the broad trend was to build them in smaller towns (often those recently gutted of their industrial base) far from the major population centers that supplied the prisoners. In part, this was because land and labor was cheap. But it had the additional benefit of being cruel - long travel distances make it difficult to visit, serving as an additional punishment for both prisoners and their extended family. Plus, it is a form of gerrymandering as the prisoners are now enumerated in rural districts (where they cannot actually vote). Great deal all around.
This part is insane.
omg reaganomics is SOCIALISM
I’m still subscribed to David Axelrod’s podcast, but almost never listen to it. When I checked my feed this morning, whoooooooo boy.
That’s gonna be a no for me, dawg.
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With right/left being decided almost entirely by attitudes towards media and elites rather than articulatable political views.
Greenwald and Taibbi are right wingers and David Frum and Rick Wilson are lefties.
I can’t listen to 5-4 without becoming incredibly depressed.
Lol. Pretty sure they call Glenn rightwing because he clearly is for US politics. Afaik, zero leftists have called Rick Wilson or David Frum lefties, but great job DESTROYING that strawman.
ETA: I checked Glenn’s Twitter a few days ago, I think when Dobbs dropped. Like every lefty on that day, he was tweeting about how Hillary Clinton is racist for saying Clarence Thomas is motivated by grievance.
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Right, what are Glenn’s rightwing political views? Note that pointing out Hilldawg fucken sucks isn’t a political view.
Lefties seriously threaten free speech by yelling at racists. Disgust for illegal immigration. Transphobia.
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Oh right, hallucinations. Carry on.
It’s more anti-anti-right wing which has the effect of shilling for right wing people and the policies they espouse. It’s nearly exclusively what he does for his American audience. Got to balance that range.
The Ezra Klein / Kate Shaw episode was painful. Ezra going on about hiring historians to do originalism better. Wake the fuck up dude.
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One thing I find strange about the court’s constant appeal to history is that if these questions are truly to be decided historically, it really seems we need a different kind of institution staffed in a very different way. I mean, the Supreme Court is important. What it does is important. We could definitely give it some budget, and it could have a team of 20 excellent Constitutional historians at the top of their game, consulting, who are part of it, who work full time for it.
I’m sure lots of great people at great institutions would happily spend two years or five years at a time on the Supreme Court for that experience. And instead, it’s nine lawyers with a bunch of 20-something clerks who are arguing about American history, and really using history as the core of what is claimed to be a legal ruling. It just seems very bizarre. Like, if we have to find the right answer, to the extent there is one in our history, I don’t think this is how you would build an institution to do that.
He’s not saying that the Court should hire historians; he’s saying that the justices and their clerks are, relatively speaking, really bad at understanding history.
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But they’re not trying to be good at understanding history. The history stuff is just a made up excuse to reach the conclusion they want to reach.
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I think they legitimately believe that university history departments have been infiltrated by Marxists who have skewed the conventional wisdom on history to against what conservatives know in their hearts to be “true”. They’re trying to be good at history in a way that proves leftists to be wrong.
Conservatives are true believers who think they are doing what is best for America. They’re incredibly-wrong, but they are not the sort of villains who are self-aware of how evil they are and consciously choose to be bad.
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yeah that was just mindblowing
“oh man the deplorables on the bench are using history as their justification and they got the history wrong” as if that matters one bit? like oh yeah if only they just knew the facts they would have ruled better, yes ezra you dumb fuck, that’s the problem, you fucking nailed it, democracy is saved, just tell alito he’s wrong and all problems are solved
WHAT
THE
FUCK
Ezra drives me nuts because all he does is legitimize right-wing toolboxes when he has them on his show.
I’ll never forget the Clinton campaign putting out an ad that was a throwback to an LBJ ad where a lifelong Republican tells the camera Goldwater is too much and he can’t vote for him. An ad maybe ~11 living people remember from 1964.
Of course Ezra thought it was absolutely brilliant and would be a game changer.