spaceghoti

The most remarkable and unique feature of American politics is one that is rarely discussed: the Republican Party’s extreme anti-statist ideology. The Republican party is the only major conservative party in the world whose governing doctrine rejects higher taxes on absolute principle, refuses to acknowledge anthropogenic global warming, and denies that health insurance should be a right of all citizens. This last point surfaced during the second Republican presidential debate when Ron DeSantis was asked to explain why his state ranks near the national bottom in health insurance coverage. Because these moments occur so rarely, it was highly revealing.

The backdrop is that the Affordable Care Act provided health insurance to poor people by expanding Medicaid. A conservative Supreme Court ruling gave states the right to opt out of the expansion, turning down free funding from Washington if they wished. Originally, just 24 states joined Medicaid expansion. Over time, the sheer economic logic brought more states into the program. Turning down the money not only hurts people who can’t get health coverage, but it also hurts hospitals, which legally must treat people who show up in the emergency room, even if they lack coverage.

In other words, states were not choosing between spending money and hurting people. Helping people get insurance was practically free. (The federal government covers 90 percent of the cost, and the economic benefit of getting health care for the uninsured, both to covered workers and their health providers, easily exceeds the remaining 10 percent cost, paying for itself.) The states that refused to join Medicaid expansion literally had to accept economic sacrifices in order to pay for the privilege of denying health insurance to low-income citizens in their state.

Florida is now one of only ten states that reject Medicaid expansion. DeSantis almost never has to explain or justify this position. Shockingly, he had to do so at the debate.

Stuart Varney asked DeSantis why 2.5 million Floridians lack health insurance, which is a rate much higher than the national average. (Florida ranks fourth from the bottom in residents with health insurance). DeSantis first tried deflecting the problem to overall inflation:

DESANTIS: Well, I think this is a symptom of our overall economic decline. Everything has gotten more expensive. You see insurance rates going through the roof. People that are going to get groceries, I’ve spoken with a woman in Iowa. And she said, you know, for the first time in my life, I’m having to take things out of my grocery cart when I get to the checkout line …

This is obviously a total non sequitur. The uninsured rate in Florida did not get worse due to inflation. Indeed, it got temporarily much better because the Biden administration made emergency COVID-19 funds available to people in non-expansion states, like Florida. In any case, inflation is a national phenomenon that could not possibly explain why Florida ranks near the bottom in health insurance coverage.

Varney, amazingly, pointed this out. He asked DeSantis why Florida’s health insurance rate was “worse than the national average.”

“It’s not,” DeSantis replied. This was a pure lie. (Florida’s uninsured rate is in fact well above the national average, according to the Census Bureau).

But then, DeSantis proceeded to give something like an explanation for his position:

“Our state’s a dynamic state. We’ve got a lot of folks that come. Of course, we’ve had a population boom.

We also don’t have a lot of welfare benefits, in Florida. We’re basically saying we want to — this is a field of dreams, you can do well in the state. But we’re not going to be like California and have massive numbers of people on government programs without work requirements. We believe in your work, and you got to do that. And so, that goes for all the welfare benefits.

And you know what that’s done, Stuart? Our unemployment rate is the lowest, amongst any big state. We have the highest GDP growth events (ph) of any big state. And even CNBC, no fan of mine, ranked Florida the No. 1 economy in America.”

In the middle of this word salad, some coherent thought can be extracted. Florida is a “field of dreams.” It rejects “welfare benefits.” DeSantis never uttered the word “Medicaid” or “Obamacare,” which explains why his state’s citizens lack health insurance at such high levels. Yet he did manage to express his belief that health insurance ought to be an earned benefit, not a right. If people get jobs working in construction or day care or at a convenience store, and those jobs do not have employer-provided health insurance, the state should not step in. Those people should work harder.

Indeed, to give them subsidized access to medical care will sap their incentive. Poor people need motivation to work hard, and denying them the ability to see a doctor and get medicine is part of that necessary motivation. And while Florida is now a minority among states refusing Medicaid expansion, DeSantis’s fanatical stance lies comfortably within the heart of conservative movement thinking. Indeed, this is what is considered “normal” conservatism.

The horrifying nature of this normality is generally invisible. It fell to Fox Business host Stuart Varney, of all people, to make DeSantis explain himself.

Poverty in the U.S. is a choice directly reflecting federal, state, and local policies. The expansion of safety net programs in response to the pandemic-driven recession reduced poverty rates nationally in 2021 to below pre-pandemic levels. However, because policymakers ended many of these programs—including expanded unemployment insurance, the expanded Child Tax Credit, and economic impact/stimulus payments—poverty rates rose from 7.8% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022. Child poverty, which had fallen to record lows in 2021, increased from 5.2% to 12.4% in 2022.

Two bills due for House Ways and Means Committee consideration this week contain a slate of provisions that would expand health savings accounts (HSAs) — increasing tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit high-income people, exacerbating racial and ethnic differences in wealth, and costing over $70 billion combined, without tackling the most urgent problems people with low incomes face in accessing affordable health care.

Under current law, people enrolled in high-deductible health plans that meet certain standards can establish and set aside money in an HSA. These accounts offer a unique “triple tax advantage” enjoyed mostly by high-income people: (1) contributions are not taxed; (2) contributions can be invested for years in stocks and bonds with tax-free earnings; and (3) withdrawals are not taxable if they are used for qualified medical expenses that occurred after establishment of the HSA.

People with low and moderate incomes are far less likely to be able to contribute substantial savings to their HSAs compared to high-income people. And people with low and moderate incomes benefit much less for each dollar contributed, because they are in lower marginal income tax brackets. For example, a married couple earning $80,000 per year can deduct 12 cents for each dollar contributed to an HSA from their taxes, while a married couple earning $700,000 per year can deduct 37 cents for each dollar put into an HSA.

Data show that the benefits of HSAs skew heavily toward people with high incomes. An analysis of 2017 IRS data found that tax returns exceeding $500,000 in adjusted gross income were the most likely to report individual HSA contributions, and returns between $200,000 and $1 million were the most likely to report employer contributions. According to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates for tax year 2023, 77 percent of the total deductible value of HSA contributions goes to households with incomes over $100,000. (See graph.) Only 4 percent of the value goes to households with incomes $50,000 or below, and 44 percent goes to those with incomes over $200,000.

The House bills would expand HSA tax benefits, primarily helping high-income people, in various ways: by allowing more types of health plans to qualify for use with them, increasing how much people can contribute to their accounts, and allowing new health services to be covered pre-deductible without running afoul of federal tax rules.

For example, one provision would allow health plans that cover $500 of mental health services pre-deductible to qualify for HSA tax breaks. Another would let people who get care from a worksite clinic to get HSA tax benefits. Other provisions would newly allow Medicare enrollees to contribute to an HSA, allow people 55 and older to put more money in their accounts, and deem “bronze” and catastrophic plans under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as qualifying for HSA tax breaks.

While making health care more affordable is a critical priority, and some of the provisions are directed at populations or health care services in need of support, they do not target help to the people who need it most ― especially those with low and moderate incomes who are struggling to access health coverage and care.

Also making these bills counterproductive is their promotion of racial wealth differences. Privately insured Latino and Black people are about half as likely to have HSAs than are white and Asian people. This, combined with the accounts’ use as lucrative tax shelters, represents one of the many ways in which access to economic opportunity is inequitable, and it exacerbates long-standing differences in wealth, under which a typical white family in 2019 had eight times the wealth of a typical Black family and five times the wealth of a typical Latino family.

HSA tax breaks also come at a steep cost; they are already projected to cost the federal government $180 billion over the next ten years. The new provisions, which are assumed to be in effect after 2025, are estimated to cost over $70 billion combined over the eight years from 2026 through 2033, with costs increasing each year. Instead of throwing more money into these tax breaks, policymakers should target federal resources toward expanding coverage, increasing affordability, and improving health equity.

For example, for states that haven’t adopted the ACA Medicaid expansion, the federal government should close the Medicaid coverage gap, which would focus resources squarely on helping uninsured people below the poverty line — 60 percent of whom are people of color. Policymakers should also permanently extend enhanced premium tax credits for ACA marketplace plans, which are set to expire after 2025. These tax credits, unlike HSAs, have made health insurance more affordable for millions of people, narrowed racial differences in coverage rates, and helped fuel record coverage gains.

Reddit rolled out some changes this week as its continues its push for revenue and profitability jumpstarted by its API rule changes in July. Among the most controversial, the company will no longer allow users to opt out of ad personalization based on their Reddit activity and started a program that lets users exchange virtual rewards for their posts for real money.

On Wednesday, Reddit announced plans to "improve ad performance," including by preventing users from opting out of personalized ads except for in "select countries." Reddit didn't specify which countries are excluded, but the exceptions could include countries falling under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit spokesperson Sierra Gamelgaard declined to provide further clarification when reached by Ars Technica for comment.

Reddit's announcement, authored by Reddit's head of privacy, going by "snoo-tuh" on the platform (Reddit has refused to confirm the identity of admins representing Reddit on the site), said that its advertisers look at "what communities you join, leave, upvotes, downvotes, and other signals" to gauge your interests.

Snoo-tuh wrote:

For users who previously opted out of personalization based on Reddit activity, this change will not result in seeing more ads or sharing on-platform activity with advertisers. It does enable our models to better predict which ad may be most relevant to you.

Still, Reddit users have expressed concern over suddenly losing a privacy control they've long had. Meanwhile, Reddit's policy update aligns with its outspoken goals to become profitable and its plans to eventually go public. Reddit has already sacrificed other aspects of the user experience, as well as some community trust, in an effort to drive revenue. Reddit declined to provide comment regarding privacy concerns related to this latest update.

Other privacy policy changes announced Wednesday include allowing users to choose to see "fewer" ads regarding alcohol, dating, gambling, pregnancy and parenting, and weight loss. Reddit didn't commit to all ads being removed initially since its system of "manual tagging and machine learning to classify the ads" may not be totally accurate at first. Snoo-tuh said things should get more accurate "over time," though. Reddit’s Contributor Program

Also this week, Reddit announced its Contributor Program, launching in the US only for now. Reddit users with 100–4,999 karma can earn $0.90 per gold received. Users with over 5,000 karma can get $1 per gold received. Users can pay for gold to award to other users.

The scheme is reminiscent of the Creator Ads Revenue Sharing program by X, formerly Twitter, where premium subscription members can get a portion of ad revenue generated from their posts. Elon Musk announced the program in February, and it launched in July.

X's program has been criticized for potentially encouraging spam-y, bait-y posts and posts that are controversial and offensive, just for the sake of generating reactions and comments that will lead to the user making money. But that hasn't stopped Reddit from enacting a user payment scheme of its own (after all, Huffman has said Musk's X is an example for Reddit.)

However, clickbait and shock value posts are a strong deviation from what people tend to treasure most about Reddit: real human advice, discussions, and insight.

In an interview with BBC, social media analyst and consultant Matt Navarra noted that Reddit was incentivizing and providing opportunity for its top users but that it could also jeopardize Reddit's content quality.

Navarra told BBC:

[X's ad sharing program] incentives X users to post content that sparks the most replies, and the characteristics of content that typically generates the most replies is content that is divisive, polarizing, provocative, and controversial... exactly the sort of content that brands do not want to have their ads placed amongst. This has been problematic for Elon Musk, and it could become a new problem for Reddit's founders too.

When I reached out to Reddit about these concerns, spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt pointed me to Reddit's blog post about the program. It says that users have to be at least 18 years old and verified by Reddit to participate and that:

All monetizable contributions are subject to Reddit’s User Agreement and Content Policy. In addition, Reddit will take the same enforcement actions against contributions breaking Reddit’s rules and withhold any earnings on content that violates the Content Policy or the new Contributor Monetization Policy and Contributor Terms for the program.

A support page says Reddit's Contributor Program will avoid "fraud, spam, bad actors, and illegal activities" by putting users through Persona's Know Your Customer screening. It also points to "Reddit internal safety signals," "new monetization policies with enforcement and repercussions," "daily gold purchase limits," "automated detection and monitoring via Reddit’s safety tools and systems," "user reporting," and "admin auditing."

PHOENIX (AP) — President Joe Biden is arguing that “there is something dangerous happening in America” as he revives his warnings that Donald Trump and his allies represent an existential threat to the country’s democratic institutions.

“There is an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy. The MAGA movement,” Biden says in excerpts of the speech Thursday in Arizona, released in advance by the White House, referring to Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan.

Although voting in the 2024 Republican primary doesn’t begin for months, Biden’s focus reflects Trump’s status as the undisputed frontrunner for his party’s nomination despite facing four indictments, two of them related to his attempts to overturn Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

Biden’s speech is his fourth in a series of presidential addresses on the topic, a cause that is a touchstone for him as he tries to remain in office even in the face of low approval ratings and widespread concern from voters about his age, 80.

He’s also facing fresh pressure on Capitol Hill, where House Republicans are holding the first hearing in their impeachment inquiry.

On the first anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, Biden visited the Capitol and accused Trump of continuing to hold a “dagger” at democracy’s throat. Biden closed out the summer that year in the shadow of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, decrying Trumpism as a menace to democratic institutions.

And in November, as voters were casting ballots in the midterm elections, Biden again sounded a clarion call to protect democratic institutions.

The location for Thursday’s speech, as was the case for the others, was chosen for effect. It will be near Arizona State University, which houses the McCain Institute, named after the late Arizona Sen. John McCain — a friend of Biden and the 2008 Republican presidential nominee who spent his public life denouncing autocrats around the globe.

“I have come to honor the McCain Institute and Library because they are home to a proud Republican who put country first,” Biden says in the excerpts. “Our commitment should be no less because democracy should unite all Americans – regardless of political affiliation.”

The late senator’s wife, Cindy McCain, said the library, still to be built, is the result of bipartisan support from Biden, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs and her predecessor, Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.

“President Biden has been a longtime friend, tough political opponent and strong leader,” McCain said in a statement. “All traits that my husband, John, also possessed.”

As Biden has tried to do in the past, Thursday’s speech is designed to avoid alienating moderate Republicans while confronting the spread of anti-democratic rhetoric.

“Not every Republican -– not even the majority of Republicans –- adhere to the extremist MAGA ideology. I know because I’ve been able to work with Republicans my whole career,” Biden says. “But there is no question that today’s Republican Party is driven and intimidated by MAGA extremists.”

Republicans competing with Trump for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination have largely avoided challenging his election falsehoods. In addition, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill are only becoming more emboldened as he eggs them on, including toward a looming government shutdown that appears all but inevitable.

In closed-door fundraisers, Biden has spoken at length about reelection, imploring supporters to join his effort to “literally save American democracy,” as he described it to wealthy donors this month in New York.

“I’m running because we made progress — that’s good — but because our democracy, I think, is still at risk,” Biden said.

Advisers see Biden’s continued focus on democracy as both good policy and good politics. Campaign officials have pored over the election results from last November, when candidates who denied the 2020 election results did not fare well in competitive races, and point to polling that showed democracy was a highly motivating issue for voters in 2022.

Candidates who backed Trump’s election lies and were running for statewide offices with some influence over elections — governor, secretary of state, attorney general — lost their races in every presidential battleground state.

In few states does Biden’s message of democracy resonate more than in Arizona, which became politically competitive during Trump’s presidency after seven decades of Republican dominance. After Biden’s victory, the state was a hotbed of efforts to overturn or cast doubt on the results.

Republican state lawmakers used their subpoena power to obtain all the 2020 ballots and vote-counting machines from Maricopa County, then hired Trump supporters to conduct an unprecedented partisan review of the election. The widely mocked spectacleconfirmed Biden’s victory but fueled unfounded conspiracy theories about the election and spurred an exodus of election workers.

In the 2022 midterms, voters up and down the ballot rejected Republican candidates who repeatedly denied the results of the 2020 election. But Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, has never conceded her loss to Hobbs and plans to launch her a bid for the U.S. Senate. Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters and Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, also repeated fraudulent election claims in their respective campaigns.

Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who defeated Masters, said the importance of defending democracy resonates not only with members of his own party but independents and moderate GOP voters.

“I met so many Republicans that were sick and tired of the lies about an election that was two years old,” Kelly said.

Indeed, Republicans privately concede that the election denialism rhetoric that dominated their candidates’ message — as well as the looming specter of Trump — damaged their efforts to retain the governor’s mansion and flip a hotly contested Senate seat, according to three Republican officials who worked in statewide races last cycle.

The issue of democracy resonated more in Arizona than in other competitive states, and to have candidates deny basic facts on elections helped reinforce other claims from Democrats about GOP extremism on other, completely separate issues, said the Republican officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to candidly describe the party’s shortcomings last year. Though Trump-animated forces in the party dominate public attention, many Republican voters were concerned about other issues such as the economy and the border and did not want to focus on an election result that was two years old.

Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, who is seeking the Democratic nomination in next year’s Senate race, said a democracy-focused message is particularly important to two critical blocs of voters in the state: Latinos and veterans, both of whom Gallego said are uniquely affected by election denialism and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.

“You know, we come from countries and experiences where democracy is very corrupt, and many of us are only one generation removed from that, but we’re close enough to see how bad it can be,” Gallego said. “And so Jan. 6 actually was particularly jarring, I think, to Latinos.”

As he pays tribute to McCain on Thursday, Biden will also announce new federal funds being directed to build the McCain Library, which the White House says will offer various programs for underserved communities. The money comes from a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package passed in the early months of Biden’s presidency, and the project is in partnership with the with the McCain Institute and Arizona State University.

The president expressed solidarity with union members on strike, while the former president told them their movement is worthless

The United Auto Workers went on strike against the Big Three car manufacturers earlier this month. The historic labor stoppage could have broad ramifications for the economy, the labor movement, and beyond — but it’s already having an impact on the 2024 presidential election.

Donald Trump, who has long been trying to win support of the union, traveled to Michigan on Wednesday to speak to autoworkers as his Republican primary competitors debated in California. The trip comes a day after Joe Biden visited the state, where he became the first president ever to join a picket line.

Biden gave limited remarks while standing next to UAW President Shawn Fain, while Trump bloviated for over an hour onstage at an invitation-only event at a nonunion auto parts factory. The forums couldn’t have been more different, nor could their respective messages to autoworkers.

“You guys, UAW, you saved the automobile industry back in 2008 and before,” Biden said on Tuesday. “Made a lot of sacrificers, gave up a lot, and the companies were in trouble. Now they’re doing incredibly well, and you should be doing incredibly well too. Stick with it, because you deserve the significance raise you need and other benefits. Let’s take back what we lost. We saved them; it’s about time for them to step up for us.”

Trump told autoworkers the strike is misguided and ultimately pointless, while repeatedly casting Biden as evil and himself as the industry’s savior. “Biden’s cruel and ridiculous electrical — he wants electric-vehicle mandates that will spell the death of the U.S. auto industry,” Trump said. “You’re negotiating a contract, you’re all on picket lines and everything, but it doesn’t make a difference because in two years you’re all going to be out of business. You’re not getting anything.”

It wasn’t the only time Trump railed against the impact electric cars could have on the industry, seemingly unaware that part of what the UAW is striking for is a share of the electric-vehicle economy. The only message he could communicate was that the strike is worthless, and all autoworkers need to do is vote for him next year. “Your current negotiations don’t mean as much as you think,” Trump said. “I watch you out there with the pickets, but I don’t think you’re picketing for the right things.”

The “you” here is misleading, though. Trump was speaking before a crowd at a nonunion plant that employs about 150 people, according to The Detroit News, although the event was stocked with 400-500 of the former president’s supporters. The outlet noted that though some held signs that read “Union Members for Trump” and “Autoworkers for Trump” — in clear view of the cameras, of course — at least two of the people holding such signs acknowledged that they weren’t union members or autoworkers.

Nevertheless, Trump emphasized the importance of getting “your leadership” to endorse him. Fain, the UAW president, hasn’t just refused to do so, he’s attacked Trump at every turn. “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like Donald Trump at the expense of workers,” he said in a statement last week, after Trump announced he was coming to Michigan.

Earlier this week, Fain told CNN that he found a “pathetic irony” in the fact that Trump was holding a rally ostensibly for union workers from a nonunion business. “All you have to do is look at his track record,” he continued. “In 2008, during the Great Recession, he blamed UAW members. He blamed our contracts for everything that was wrong with these companies.

“I see no point in meeting with him,” Fain added, “because I don’t think the man has any bit of care for what our workers stand for or what the working class stands for. He served the billionaire class, and that’s what’s wrong with this country.”

Biden seemed to acknowledge this while speaking to union members alongside Fain on Tuesday. “Wall Street didn’t build the country, the middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class,” the president said. “That’s a fact. So let’s keep going. You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.”

Donald Trump is skipping another GOP primary debate this week and the theories abound as to why. Some paint it as a smart strategy, setting his opponents to take each other apart while he sails into the presidential nomination. Others, including the right-wing editorial board at the Wall Street Journal, have accused Trump of being afraid to debate. But watching clips of some recent Trump speeches, I have a different theory: His team is worried Trump will start talking about how he bested Teddy Roosevelt in a bear-hunting competition, before trouncing the 26th president in the 1904 presidential election.

To be sure, Trump was never playing with a full deck. Never forget when he recommended bleach injections for "cleaning" COVID-19 from lungs. Lately, however, his brain functioning, as impossible as it may be to believe, seems even worse. He appears to believe he's won every presidential election in the last two decades, instead of that one electoral college-based win against Hillary Clinton in 2016. During a campaign stop in South Carolina, Trump spun out a whole story about defeating a famous military leader named "Bush."

"When I came here, everyone thought Bush was going to win," he rambled, saying it was "because Bush supposedly was a military person." Then he added, "He got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East. How did that work out, right?"

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Trump did prevail over Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida in the 2016 GOP primary. But he appears to believe he defeated President George W. Bush, Jeb's older brother, who is actually the guy who "got us into the Middle East," when he invaded Iraq.

Before bragging about besting two-term winner George W. Bush, Trump gave another speech boasting about his imaginary win against another two-termer, President Barack Obama. "With Obama, we won an election that everyone said couldn't be won," he prattled on in a speech in Washington, D.C. last week. In the same speech, he confused Obama with President Joe Biden, and warned that, if he didn't win in 2024, we would enter "World War II," which famously ended the year before Trump himself was born.

Flat-out dumbassery or overt bigotry from Republicans is shrugged off, because of the belief that their base voters don't care anyway.

While Trump, who likes to call Biden "cognitively impaired," got widely mocked on social media for this, the audience he's speaking to doesn't seem to notice their god is brain-farting. That's because Trump fans, as I've written about before, don't actually listen when Dear Leader is talking. Instead, they wait for him to say buzzwords they can cheer, like "lock her up," but otherwise they tune him out. After all, MAGA is an authoritarian movement based on tribalist politics. Merit-based systems allow women and people of color to rise up, which is intolerable to the GOP base. What Trump says is not imporant. What they like about him is he's rich, white, male and a bully.

There's no way to know from afar what's going on with Trump. On one hand, he's 77 years old, and his own father died of Alzheimer's. On the other hand, Trump's narcissism has long fueled a willingness to lie shamelessly about his own supposed accomplishments, from making up golf scores even pros can't achieve to pretending he had a chance with women who hated him to falsifying charitable donations to claiming his inauguration drew crowds it didn't.

But claiming to have won elections he didn't run in would be next-level lying, even by Trump standards. Plus, it doesn't explain really his confusing Biden with Obama, or confusing the two Bush brothers. The likelier explanation is he's confusing his fantasies with memories. Nor does it explain how his social media presence, which was always ungrammatical and silly, has become even more unhinged and incoherent. Perhaps we've all become numb to it, but stepping back, it's really remarkable that he regularly issues violent threats on Truth Social that get ignored mainly because they're as incomprehensible as they are terrible.

That the press understands Trump isn't doing well is evident in the way they all politely ignore him screaming for the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, much like one would smile patiently at a dementia patient yelling invective about long-dead relatives. But of course, this is unbelievably unfair, because the very same press is in an endless hype cycle about "concerns" that Biden, who does not issue grammar-challenged murder threats regularly, is slowing down from age.

"Biden is old" is swiftly turning into one of those self-perpetuating B.S. media cycles that only end up seeming to smear Democrats unfairly, such as "Hillary Clinton's emails." First, the press runs a million pieces on this non-story, creating the illusion of controversy where none exists. Then voters start to parrot the "concerns" back in polls, concerns they only have because they're being told by a 24/7 news cycle to worry about this. Then those polls are used to justify even more coverage of a non-controversy, making sure a candidate is defined by something that was never a real problem.

With Biden, the rejoinder is "but he actually is old!" But of course, so is Trump. Worse, Trump, who is only 3 years younger, is clearly feeling his age a lot more than Biden, who does not forget what elections he ran in or how many world wars there were. Crucially, Biden isn't displaying the loss of impulse control we see with Trump, whose baseline of self-control was not good to begin with. Trump struggles to get through interviews without confessing to his crimes. Good for prosecutors, but also a reminder that a man who can't be a passable steward of his own freedom has no business running the country.

As Salon's Heather "Digby" Parton pointed out on Twitter, the press actually knows they're treating Biden and Trump very differently, even though the latter is way worse.

Part of this is the same old bothsiderism that has cobbled Beltway journalism for decades. The press exaggerates the flaws of Democrats while minimizing the transgressions of Republicans, in order to create a false sense that the two parties are equal. They do this to seem "fair," even though it's the opposite of fair to handicap one party so thoroughly. They also do it for market reasons, because horse race coverage benefits from false equivalence, while giving audiences clear and accurate information would take some of the sport out of it. It gets to downright silly levels the closer elections get:

A lot of the double standard is driven by perceptions of what the two voting bases care about. Mainstream journalists believe, with good reason, that Democratic voters care about qualities like intelligence, competence, and mental fitness. They also believe, with good reason, that Republican voters don't care if their candidates are babbling morons, so long as they a rich, white men. Indeed, being seen as "too" smart can hurt you with the GOP base, which suspiciously eyes intelligence as a gateway drug to rationality. So the Beltway press, in an attempt to be "objective," ends up covering candidates through these perceived partisan biases. A Democrat saying something wrong or off is "news" because his own party members won't like it, even if the mistake is inconsequential. Meanwhile, flat-out dumbassery or overt bigotry from Republicans is shrugged off, because of the belief that their base voters don't care anyway.

And it's true enough that most Democratic voters care about competence and most Republican voters do not. But that doesn't excuse the press's wild double standard on this. For one thing, it's basic journalistic ethics to report the truth without worrying whether their most loyal voters care. But also, it's foolish to think that giving audiences greater context doesn't matter. There are a lot of swing voters, independents, and people who haven't decided if they're going to vote yet. Those folks can actually have their opinion shaped by the information they're taking in. If the media focuses on Biden's age while ignoring that Trump is worse, a lot of those fairweather citizens may vote in ways they come to regret — or not vote at all.

That's bad news in any environment, but especially bad considering how much of a threat Trump is to our democracy and the nation's future. He was bad enough in his first term where he, as much as the media might often forget, attempted a coup. If, as all public signs indicate, his already fragile mental state is getting more disjointed and reckless, that's terrifying. What may be more dangerous than Trump's idiocy is that, while he's always been sociopathically impulsive and evil, he seems to be getting worse in his late 70s. If he gets power again, there's little that could contain him.

Sept 27 (Reuters) - The United Auto Workers (UAW) union plans to strike additional Detroit Three automotive facilities on Friday absent serious progress, a source told Reuters.

UAW President Shawn Fain plans to announce new targets at 10 a.m. in online remarks and workers would walk out of additional facilities at 12 p.m., the source added.

On Sept. 22, the UAW expanded its strikes against Detroit automakers General Motors (GM.N) and Chrysler parent Stellantis (STLAM.MI), but kept its Ford (F.N) walkout limited to a single plant. It is unclear whether Ford will be targeted in the next round of actions.

The union historically has picked one of the Detroit Three to negotiate with first as the so-called target that sets the pattern on which subsequent deals are based. This time, Fain targeted all three companies simultaneously.

GM, Ford and Stellantis were not immediately available for comment.

The automakers and the UAW remain far apart on core issues of pay, retirement benefits and time off. Fain has stuck with a demand for 40% pay increases over four years. The automakers, in separate proposals, are offering roughly 20%. The UAW is pushing automakers to eliminate the two-tier wage system under which new hires can earn far less than veterans.

Long walkouts at factories producing large pickup trucks could cost the automakers billions in revenue and profit. Analysts estimate GM, Ford and Stellantis earn as much as $15,000 per vehicle on each of their respective large pickup models.

The automakers, like their global counterparts, have been focused on cost reductions, which in some cases include job cuts, to help accelerate a shift to electric vehicles (EVs) from gasoline-powered vehicles.

The UAW, which represents 46,000 GM workers, 57,000 Ford employees and 43,000 Stellantis workers, kicked off negotiations with the companies in July.

Members of former President Donald Trump's legal team have been fined for "indefensible" arguments made about the properties associated with The Trump Organization.

New York Judge Arthur Engoron ruled on Tuesday that Trump, his sons and The Trump Organization committed fraud by overvaluing several of their business properties by over $400 million.

The ruling, made in relation to a $250 million civil case originally brought forward by New York Attorney General Letitia James' office, has been described by some as a "corporate death penalty" due to business licenses being ordered to be rescinded and handed over to independent receivers.

Engoron's order included $7,500 fines for each of Trump's lawyers for their continued arguments in defense of their client, including one that the square footage of an apartment could be subjective.

"That is a fantasy world, not the real world," Engoron wrote in the order.

The fines, which were reportedly greater than James had requested, followed efforts by Trump's legal team to move the case to another judge. They also sued Engoron.

Last week, following a series of statements made by Trump attorney Christopher Kise, Ergoron reportedly pounded on the bench, stating, "You cannot make false statements and use them in business."

Newsweek reached out to Trump's legal team via email for comment.

Attorney Andrew Lieb told Newsweek that the Ergoron ruling is an indictment not just on Trump, his sons and their organization but on Trump's attorneys for not properly advocating for their legal roles and instead essentially "letting the patient run the asylum."

"Trump's lawyers need to get a backbone fast as following the Trump legal strategy keeps getting them personally damaged," Lieb said. "We've previously seen criminal charges against Trump's attorneys. There have been disbarments and don't forget about the many civil cases.

"Now, we have sanctions for frivolous conduct where his lawyers made the judge feel like he was watching Groundhog's Day in rehearing the same, previously rejected arguments," he said.

Trump himself was quick to rebuke Ergoron's order, calling the judge a "Democratic operative" and claiming on Truth Social that his Mar-a-Lago property appraised between $18 million and $27.6 million "could be worth almost 100 times that amount."

Michael Cohen, Trump's former lawyer, said Tuesday on CNN that if penalties imposed on Trump and company exceed $600 million, there is not enough liquid cash available which will lead to bankruptcy.

Even a fine over $250 million, the same number in James' litigation, would be difficult to pay off, Cohen added—even if Trump was able to sell his 40 Wall Street building in Manhattan, New York, for $400 million.

"Many of the assets that he owns, he has limited to no basis in them like 40 Wall Street, $1 million basis. You also have, say, a $100 million mortgage onto it," Cohen said. "He's also going to have to pay Uncle Sam tax on the money between the basis and the sale price.

America faces a crisis of democracy, as the intellectual soil of the Republican Party has eroded. Authoritarian sentiments have overtaken the country’s conservative movement, which has come to realize it lacks the numbers to succeed democratically. Long-held laissez-faire conservative policies have no answers for modern problems like the climate crisis, global pandemics, monopolization, or wealth inequality. Social conservative policies on race, gender, and religion have no answers for a diverse, increasingly secular society where two incomes are required to make ends meet. Conspiracy theories have replaced policy principles as the unifying elements of the GOP, and one load-bearing pillar of our two-party system is buckling under their weight. But this crisis of democracy is exacerbated by a crisis of information.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” But the converse is also true: When the public is woefully misinformed there can be terrible consequences for democracy.

A few recent polls illustrate some shocking discrepancies between public opinion and basic reality. The Harris poll found that 51 percent of Americans believe that unemployment is nearing a 50-year high, even though the actual unemployment rate is nearing a 50-year low.

An Associated Press poll showed that Donald Trump is perceived as more corrupt than Joe Biden by only 8 percent of voters, despite the former’s lifetime reputation for real estate corruptions and multiple concurrent indictments. Whatever the knocks on Biden may be, there have been virtually no history, current evidence, or even significant whispers of personal corruption.

It is consequently unsurprising that in the latest Quinnipiac poll 51 percent of voters thought that Trump would do a better job handling a national crisis compared to 44 percent for Biden—despite the reality that Trump badly mismanaged the COVID crisis, while Biden enacted a raft of beneficial legislation and steered the country to economic recovery. Of course, as my Washington Monthly colleague Bill Scher noted, there can be a significant lag time between good economic conditions and presidents receiving credit for them. Inflation, though now tapering, has colored voters’ perceptions of the economy, but those views may change by Election Day of next year. Also, real ongoing structural economic issues—especially, the worsening housing crisis—can make people feel that their material conditions are worse than macroeconomic indicators might suggest. Still, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a broken media environment has led to degradation of public knowledge.

Media critics such as Jay Rosen, Dan Froomkin, and Will Stancil have long argued that imbalances in the fundamental constructs of both traditional and social media are responsible for the pervasive misinformation in American society and its deleterious impact on the health of our democracy. The conservative movement maintains a large and relentless propaganda machine with a massive audience, spanning every media platform. It is dominant in most traditional media channels. Fox News usually leads the ratings in cable news. Right-wing talk and Christian radio are often the only options on the AM band. Local TV news leads with sensationalist stories about crime and danger that activate conservative instincts, and the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast group owns stations reaching over 40 percent of American households. Conservative interest groups have been rapidly buying up local newspapers around the country.

The social media situation is even worse. As Max Fisher’s recent book The Chaos Machine persuasively argues, the algorithms that drive engagement (and profits) to social media companies tend to overemphasize far-right content. Conservative groups dominate the top Facebook pages, while YouTube relentlessly drives even viewers with left-leaning profiles to right-wing, conspiratorial content. And now Elon Musk is rapidly converting X, the former Twitter, into a far-right space while alternatives such as BlueSky, Post, and Mastodon struggle to gain traction.

There is no real left-wing counterpart to this. Cable news channel MSNBC caters to a center-left audience, but its reach is much smaller than Fox News. More importantly, much of MSNBC’s programming—particularly in the daytime hours—is not partisan or ideological but neutral journalism. Explicitly progressive content in traditional media outlets is virtually nonexistent. Progressive social media content is often eclipsed by the right, and what does exist tends to lack coordination or message discipline.

What conservatives bemoan as the “liberal media” is in reality a bevy of organizations like The New York Times, National Public Radio and CNN which have general editorial slants that may veer from center-right to center-left depending on the issue, but typically attempt above all to maintain an air of balance and neutrality between opposing partisan sides. Jay Rosen calls this posture the “View from Nowhere,” and describes it as a pretense at neutral objectivity that by its very existence imposes an artificial equality between partisan perspectives that the actual facts do not support.

Trump’s outrageous lies have precipitated a minor shift in which many traditional media organizations have become more comfortable with presenting a less artificially balanced perspective on political arguments, but this is mostly specific to Trump personally. Statements from other Republican leaders and conservative organizations are still typically treated at face value, despite often being obviously misleading or false.

As commentators Will Stancil and Oliver Willis frequently point out, the media imbalance often leads to strategic errors on the part of Democratic politicians. Democrats pass bills and put out press releases hoping that doing and saying popular and effective things will reap intrinsic rewards. But when conservative media is blatantly propagandistic and traditional media is doing its best to pursue artificial balance, those rewards fail to materialize. In turn, the public remains wildly misinformed about objective realities—such as which political actors are actually working to solve problems and do popular things.

Building a more effective and unabashedly liberal media apparatus has long been a challenge, as evidenced by the ‘00s-era failure of Air America Radio to compete with conservative talk radio. More educated and open-minded audiences are inherently resistant to one-sided claims and tend to consume a more sophisticated media diet. Yet a true liberal media would enrich that diet, correcting a destructively imbalanced information environment. It’s an expensive and difficult task, but as an old Chinese proverb says, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Five days out from an increasingly likely government shutdown, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is once again demonstrating a willingness—if not a downright enthusiasm—to cave to the demands of far-right members of his caucus.

The Washington Post reports on the latest from the spending negotiations, with McCarthy now embracing steep cuts to a slew of safety net programs that provide food assistance for children, veteran housing benefits, and home heating assistance. It’s an astonishing proposal that also includes a potential 80 percent cut in funding for low-income schools, as well as the slashing of funding for food assistance for poor pregnant mothers. The list represents yet another attempt to placate the very people McCarthy himself accused last week of being behind a “whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn things down.“ (As I said this weekend, the assertion is laughable; McCarthy is far more familiar with these people than he lets on.)

Will these latest concessions convince his fractured party to play ball? Who knows. Even if McCarthy succeeds in flipping the far-right, his plans are dead on arrival at the Senate and White House, proving that the top Republican is unserious about avoiding a shutdown. But regardless of how negotiations shake out, it’s McCarthy’s eagerness to screw over some of the most vulnerable people in society that shouldn’t be forgotten. For all the talk of a new GOP, Republicans are pushing for the same thing as usual: cutting programs that help poor people.

Joe Biden became the first president to ever walk a picket line on Tuesday as he rallied striking autoworkers in Michigan.

Donald Trump has taken a rather different tack with the United Autoworkers strike. Last week, the GOP frontrunner expressed sympathy for the UAW and announced that he would be traveling to the Detroit area to speak to autoworkers. In doing so, he generated myriad headlines about how he was courting striking autoworkers, in a populist departure for a Republican presidential candidate.

Then, his campaign disclosed that Trump will actually be addressing a nonunion auto-parts plant that is effectively undermining the strike.

These two approaches to the UAW’s fight perfectly encapsulate the two parties’ disparate orientations toward labor issues writ large.

Democrats and Republicans both wish to portray themselves as champions of the American worker. To an extent, this has always been true; to win power in a democracy, you need to claim some affinity for the most populous social class. But the competition for America’s populist mantle has intensified in recent years.

For decades, non-college-educated voters have been drifting rightward while university graduates shifted left. Trump’s 2016 campaign accelerated these trends, peeling off a critical mass of working-class Obama voters in pivotal Rust Belt states.

This development, in combination with an ascendant progressive movement, led the Democratic Party to align itself more tightly with organized labor, and loosen its attachment to a meritocratic conception of social justice. Whereas Barack Obama sometimes posited access to higher education as the antidote for inequality, Biden has concentrated both rhetorically and substantively on improving employment prospects for blue-collar laborers. In his first address to Congress, the president advertised that “nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created” in his economic plan “do not require a college degree; 75 percent don’t require an associate’s degree.” At the same time, the Biden administration has abandoned its Democratic predecessor’s fight with teachers unions over education-reform policy. And it has also curried favor with unions in the manufacturing sector by federally subsidizing domestic production and seeking to re-shore critical industries. More fundamentally, the president’s National Labor Relations Board has taken aggressive steps to abet union organizing.

Meanwhile, at the state level, Democrats have sought to improve working conditions by raising the minimum wage and creating statewide boards empowered to set minimum standards in certain sectors.

The Democrats will never be mistaken for a labor party. Unions are too weak in the U.S. for a party unequivocally committed to workers’ interests to wield national power. This reality was made manifest in the fight over Biden’s proposal to establish a special tax credit for union-made electric vehicles. Although the AFL-CIO fought hard for that provision, Democratic senators in low-union-density states resisted it, as it would have effectively encouraged auto companies to ramp up production in Michigan instead of building new factories in West Virginia, Georgia, or Arizona. Further, myriad business lobbies exert influence within the Democratic tent, as do upper-middle-class voters whose aversion to higher taxes constrains the party’s redistributive ambitions.

Nevertheless, organized labor is the most powerful mass-membership institution within the Democratic coalition. And as competition for working-class voters’ allegiances has intensified, the party has increased its support for organized laborers in their conflicts with management.

The GOP’s bid to claim the title of “workers’ party” has been far more superficial. The party has popularized cultural controversies that cleave highly educated liberals from the median working-class voter, even when those conflicts have few policy implications or material stakes. Trump, for his part, has an eye for publicity stunts that convey an ostensible solidarity with working people, as when he used the bully pulpit to pressure Carrier Global Corp to refrain from relocating production to Mexico, advocacy that failed to avert hundreds of layoffs at that firm once the media spotlight had shifted.

Trump and the GOP can make substantive appeals to blue-collar workers in discrete sectors. Although Republican officialdom has no interest in siding with unions in their conflicts with management, it is perfectly comfortable backing extractive industry in its disputes with environmentalists. And it is plausible that some workers in the fossil-fuel and mining industries have material reasons to favor Republicans over Democrats, although the substantive difference between the two parties on these issues is commonly exaggerated (under Biden, U.S. oil production hit record highs).

When it comes to policymaking that concerns all working people as working people, however, Republicans remain as committed to the interests of bosses as they’ve ever been. Under Trump, the GOP restricted workers’ rights to organize certain categories of workplaces, made it easier for employers to bust unions, denied guaranteed overtime pay to 12.5 million workers, effectively transferring $1.2 billion from their paychecks to their bosses’ bank accounts, proposed a rule allowing companies with fewer than 250 workers to cease reporting workplace injuries and illness statistics to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), asked the Supreme Court to uphold the right of employers to include forced arbitration clauses in contracts (thereby denying workers the capacity to press complaints against their bosses in open court), and restored the right of serial labor-law violators to compete for government contracts, among other things.

Biden and Trump’s approaches to the UAW strike illustrate these two distinct orientations in miniature.

Biden initially resisted calls for him to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers. There is no precedent for a president to intervene in a private-sector labor dispute in quite that manner. And the administration needs the cooperation of auto executives in order to meet its goals for the electric-vehicle transition. Nevertheless, with the UAW withholding its 2024 endorsement, Trump threatening to woo the union’s membership, and persistent lobbying from the AFL-CIO, Biden chose to do the unprecedented.

Speaking to workers in Michigan, Biden declared, “Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country. The unions built the middle class. That’s a fact. Let’s keep going, you deserve what you’ve earned. And you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” Asked by a reporter whether he was specifically endorsing the UAW’s demand for a 40 percent pay increase over the life of the next contract, a chorus of chanting workers pressured Biden into saying “yes.”

Trump, by contrast, never actually endorsed the UAW in its fight with the management of the Big Three automakers. Rather, he suggested that the real threat to UAW members’ interests are the environmentalists pushing the “all Electric Car SCAM” (a narrative that weaves a tapestry of lies around a single important half-truth). He then insinuated that he would be addressing striking workers, a gambit that succeeded in generating a week of headlines about the Republican front-runner’s heterodox courting of the union vote:

And yet, as Jacobin’s indispensable labor reporter Alex Press noted, Trump’s rally with striking autoworkers proved to be entirely fictional. In reality, the Republican candidate accepted the invitation of a (seemingly) conservative small business owner to speak to a crowd of nonunion auto-parts manufacturing laborers, whose ongoing work directly reduces the leverage of striking workers in their sector.

The business in question, Drake Enterprises, is a prime venue for a diatribe against electric vehicles; since EV powertrains require far fewer parts than internal combustion engines, the green transition poses a profound threat to parts makers. But holding a rally at a nonunion shop amid a strike is the opposite of demonstrating solidarity with striking unionists.

One party is capable of rallying to labor’s side, when presented with sufficient intra-coalitional pressure and electoral incentive. The other party will project a populist image while channeling workers’ grievances toward targets other than their employers and partnering with low-road businesses to erode labor’s bargaining power. Whatever else comes out of the UAW’s strike, it has at least made the choice facing American workers clear.