Ep 874: They Ain't Playing 4-Dimensional Chess
The Professional Left Podcast #874: Federal jobs and local economies are in chaos as Trump and Musk wreak havoc at USAID and beyond. Driftglass and Blue Gal break down how Republican propaganda keeps winning despite their awful job creation record, and why some Never Trumpers can't quit bashing Democrats.
The hosts dig into research showing Dems are way better at creating jobs (shocking, right?), while Republicans excel at... lying about it. From Trump's whiplash-inducing tariff decisions to his sketchy State Department picks, and from NASA scrubbing diversity mentions to protests at USAID - it's been quite a week at the Cornfield Resistance.
Links for this episode:
Pew Research on jobs: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/01/07/what-the-data-says-about-federal-workers/
Driftglass and Digby on the Bradcast 2/5/2025 https://bradblog.com/?p=15297
Driftglass and Blue Gal on The Cliff Schecter Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tb0TkDaY3M
Episode artwork by Bluegal
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Recorded February 6, 2025. It's not safe for work, but it is safe for democracy.
1 comment:
Reality used to have a limiting effect on rank populism: when really bad policy fucked things up, popular opinion turned against it and sucked away the power it had invested in rank populist policymakers. This stopped being true right about the time that the rank populists got majorities of voters to vote for them even as they denied them the Medicaid expansion and thus straight up killed thousands of them. (Leopards, faces, etc.)
I, at this point, am extremely doubtful that those voters can be made to call a leopard a leopard again.
It seems to me that the only way we win elections again is for the goddamn Republicans to fuck up badly enough that the ordinary lives of all of those folks too comfortable to bother knowing anything about their actual government get disrupted enough to cause them to vote for Democrats.
Call it the Biden/covid effect.
And then we have to be ready. (We also have to somehow keep democracy alive while in the minority, but we were gonna try to do that anyway.)
That's why I'm saying unkind words about John Fetterman.
We very nearly succeeded this last time, but Manchin and Sinema just couldn't get with us on it.
I don't know whether hearing himself referred to as "Fettermanchin" will inspire any thought in the senator from Pennsylvania, but I feel it's worth a try. Perhaps some semblance of an ability to feel shame has survived his senatization, and we need to get to it before the next administration has to rely on him for a vote of sanity.
Thank you again for the podcast. Well, the first atmospheric river storm passed without snowing us in, now we have the second lined up and coming at us. It would be good for the state to get the snowpack, but the snow can pack all it wants at slightly higher elevations and still provide runoff in the spring. Meanwhile, all of that rain can run down into the valley with the water Fergus let out of the reservoirs and soak into the ground and replenish the depleted aquifers that have been pumped many meters below their natural levels by the farmers during those long years of drought.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
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