Name this person.

He has said he will not announce until December his future plans — which he’s indicated could include running for reelection, retiring from politics or waging a bid for the White House in 2024.

f you said West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, you are right. Somehow.

The charter ers of such things always tell how Clinton did not announce until… Was it November?… as a reflection of how mad things have gotten. In his case, he was clearly running before that. And I suppose in Manchin’s case, he would have to be doing the same… Somehow. Along with everyone else whispering into the media that they area go if Biden shuts himself down.

Or maybe Manchhin wouldn’t. He’s not winning the Democratic nomination. Is this some weird team up with, like, Romney? Oh! I know! Sinema!

“Does it hurt the Republicans or does it hurt the Democrats? I don’t know the answer to that,” said Mark Updegrove, ABC News’ presidential historian.

Hey! Stranger things have happened than 3rd parry victor President Manchin. Like, for instance… Uh… That one guy? Or… ?

I see the headline, which appears to thematically duplicated on a different headline and instance of the same basic thing. Questioning the rubes at CPAC. So. What is woke? Get no coherent response. The duplucatiin, I think, comes with an answer from the author of a book on woke, and I am guessing he may have given a response that is coherent, just not one that is … Er… Politically correct — mind you not that I have to agree, just… It has cohetence.

It is less of a gotcha than they think. I have a definition in mind mindful of how it came to be popularized by its well meaning not evil adherents before becoming a punchline. But I do not know that it came affixed. The word slippage is something lije, oh, neoconservative — a word that had historical context in meaning, retained some meaning even as time wiped out its historical context, then as it became a punching bag effectively became meaningless except for those who are mindful of using it in a proper term. A more immediate and more related word may be “critical theory” — most impactful of course “critical race tgeory”, which has a meaning and has prophets are a bit duplicitous in setting it out, but whose popular opponents basically drop the meaning utterly as they carry on.

So. Do the Jay Leno “man on the street poll” thing all you want. It adds up to something. Just not all that much.

Pi Day passed without fanfare. Ideally it is the Mardi Gras going into the Idea of March — a final fling before the heavy stuff.

The thing is I have a precise harbinger of doom on the looming 2008 Bank failures. The Housing bubble was obvious. It was an ad in an alt weekly showing someone who stereotypically should not be buying A home saying “I didn’t know I could buy a home.” On our new tech bank failure, there is no precise thing to point to, but there are various small minutiaes of Tech Lords selling us fantasy lands and claiming it as the new reality and there is the bubble that came into being during Highest Covid and that mass quarantine era when all we had was our tech.

The reality for economy is innovation comes out of these bubbles. It probably does not necessarily have to be the case. The problem is that we cease to allow the bubbles to fully burst — moral hazards are bubbled into being instead. Socialized loss and all that. The things of revolution, your “99 percent” Occupy thingy. Except. The comparison here is being made to college debt relief. Which is… You know… There in that 99 percent but skews toward the 33 percentile. The class divides divide.

I suppose the two political parties, its candidates, and strategists play with this sort of pounding into one dimension. And then get tripped up from time to time.

Fairfax County is Virginia’s largest school district, and one of the biggest in the country. A recent test question in an advanced placement (AP) government course asked students a multiple-choice question to choose an “accurate comparison of liberals versus conservatives.”

Some concerned parents say regardless of your politics, you should be furious with the nature of the question.

The choices represented a bunch of stereotypical identities — based on race, gender, sexuality and age.

The options written under the liberal column were: “Young, white males”; “Middle-aged, urban lesbian”; “College-educated black male professional”; and “White, upper-middle class suburban male.”

Under the conservative column, the choices were: “East Coast, Ivy League educated scientists”; “Southern male migrant laborer”; “Catholic, midwestern middle-aged male”; and “West Coast, Hispanic teacher.”

I am reminded of recent commentary by Mexico’s president which are interpreted as a “trying to move the elections” by the American right. Never mind Biden has read the polls and is maneuvering in a more hawkish direction on the border, it will still fall short of anything any Republican will come out with, leaving the otherwise comments by Mexico’s simultaneously bi and mono partisan in its rebuke on American policy. But the thing here is — like with the test question — you judge the Latino vote as going up and down in its partisan split. The test question needs to get very specific in its micro-demographics. And Mexico’s president’s comments, if they are influencing anything in an electorate North of the border, land in a wash.

A lot of fun is being had at the expense of a Texas state legislator who proposed a bill cutting ten percent on property tax for each child, hence it gets cited as “have ten kids — no taxes!” I suppose as we go into the reasoning for the proposal, the man is fitted alongside his religious injunction to “be fruitful and multiply”, an injunction I overall reject — and some behavioral economics come to play. But I am not entirely uncertain it does not make sense despite that, and I can skip right past the glib witticisms.

A simple matter. Some big families are to hatched. And, to paraphrase a former First Lady turned US Senator turned Secretary of State turned two time failed presidential candidate, “It takes a village”. The one thing here is that parents who have that big family will have that big family regardless — except maybe at the very tip of the margins — so in that sense neither his reasoning nor the detractors is mornings hold.

The scale of incentive works out to something like arguing against the Libertarian / Conservative argument on progressive taxation — the rich and wealthy don’t quit because larger earnings are taxed at a higher rate. But now I am stuck at one last rub: my defense of two strains coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum converge to the same point.

It is hard to decide how deeply or salt grain less it is to describe the fluctuations and fissures of the third parties. The Libertarian Party is currently controlled by the radical Mises Caucus, rowdy Internet trolls who are upset by the ex Republicans who won more votes than anyone else but have a different idea of Libertarianism. The Green Party had a tough narrow split decision to participate in the “Rage Against the War Machine Rally” dominated by right wingers and Putin apologists, which makes sense as Jill Stein is photographed dining with the man. The People’s Party — supposed off ramp for Bernie Sanders in the way the Constitution Party had been designed to lure Pat Buchanan — is just one guy’s money laundering scheme.

The real tragedy is I see no evidence that the Modern Whig Party is still kicking. They appear to have thrown up their hands electorally and gone off to other established ballot lines. The Modern Whigs havw, sadly, gone the way of the Whigs.

Sometime in the past year or two, there was this brouhaha where some celebrity of note, upset over political actions made by West Virgininia politicians, made remarks about the rubes of West Virginia and less than average standards of wealth and living. This allowed the governor to score political points by making a crude and homely response in the State of the State address, less than dignified for the occasion but I gather that is part of his crafted political image.

In the latest skirmish of political figure making hay off of less than desirous reports from a different political entity — Texas’s governor tweets on Wal-Mart departing from Portland. It becomes a little surreal in many respects. Over the past post covid era I have been amused by the alarming reports that a few Starbucks have closed up off of crime incidents and some lagging economied, which — what? Leaves people jab Bing to walk an extra three blocks to get to a different Starbucks? Wal-Mart is an especially tricky item. Over the past decades, city council have adamently been at war with Walmart incursion. The effect there have been two Wal-Marts in the city, off on the edges, but they have been kept from making incursions any deeper. Part of it lies in labor and business practices, surely, but then after and beyond that are those aesthetics. You lay waste to stretches of Hawthorne where the businesses appear to be basically short term hobbies of trust funders and lots of room to showcase their artifacts — the extreme antithesis of Bog Box Walmart.

The city is probably categorized as a weed and stripper based economy at this point anyways.

Maybe things are not all in sync with Portland, and the dis-conjunctions created the unfavorable relations for those on the edge of the city Wal-Mart’s such that they had to leave in a puff. And to be sure, I have occasionally shopped at one of them. I may go out and buy a pair of shoes — the business closure that really hurt was Payless Shoes. But I am trying to get some firm locations for a couple generally nick-named locales on the map, and what its relationship with one of this one Wal-Mart. That would be the area long known as “Felony Flats”.

Looking ashunder at the logic, limits and promises both, of urban growth boundaries and restrictions, the governor of Texas equates the lack of Wal-Mart with bad. I suppose Wal-Mart now ceases to be a politically easy cudgel for city politicians to dump on — until such time as they decide to slide back in as profits remain available –, but if the city’s citizenry largely wanted it shocked he’d aside to never to have to look at it, and now will look at it less — does it really signify great perils?

As with skipping a few blocks to get to Starbucks, I guess everyone can skip off to Vancouver?

Tucker Carlson is busy showing footage of January 6 non-rioters to insist that no riot took place. It is a strange gambit. Understand, the baseline established reality is that a riot took place. Beyond that, things are open to a little bit of conjecture and a bit of interpretation on plausible and im-plausible deniability from figures of outgoing governance — namely the ex President. But the majority of the people there did not riot. And golly gee whillikers. We have this line before, complete with the mockery of “mostly peaceful” assemblages. And imagine this — most of the people at this event, laughable premise as it came off of, were not charged with anything and are at most suffering some bit of social stigma from involving themselves in a cause of ridiculousness. Though, I guess, some aren’t. Red state / Blue state and all that. But others aren’t. The ones who stormed into the Speaker’s office and gazelles at the House chamber, for instance.

Carlson continues privately castigating Trump’s lies on the election. Sure, there is easy delineation of coming to the defense of “peaceful protesters” and the cause. But the troubles come in that was not his public stance, so the latest brouhaha just becomes part and parcel to the whole spiel.