Socialism Just Imploded in Bolivia
Socialism Just Imploded in Bolivia
https://reason.com/2025/08/21/socialism-just-imploded-in-bolivia/
Tag: politics
Opinion | The Sydney Sweeney Saga Shows Why Republicans Keep Winning
“Meanwhile, in another corner of the internet, a bunch of conservative women started doing what appears to be actual Nazi salutes on Instagram (though some deny it). In many ways, it highlighted how ridiculous the “good genes” controversy was; as we saw during Medhi Hasan’s Jubilee episode, when right-wing influencers want to say they’re Nazi sympathizers, they don’t exactly use invisible ink. But it also served as a reminder: Here were people doing an actually egregious thing, and Democrats didn’t have the tools to make it stick. Indeed, Democrats have tried for years to tie the genuinely extreme, not-just-irritating views of the far right to the rest of the Republican Party, and most of the time, it fails.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/08/sydney-sweeney-republicans-win-media-ecosystem-00497761
The Online Right’s Fairy-Tale Gender Politics
“”Overwhelmingly, it turns out that the men with the most relationship options (wealthier, higher-social-status men) marry women similar in age to them and with high educational attainment,” writes demographer Lyman Stone in an article published this week for the Institute for Family Studies. “Relationships with large age gaps are more common for low-income men than for high-income men.”
Stone found that, contrary to stereotypes that proliferate online, the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that his wife has a graduate degree and the less likely it is that there is a considerable age gap between them. Further, high-earning men were mostly married to high-earning women. The average wife of a top 1 percent–earning man also earned over $100,000.
“The simplest explanation for these trends,” Stone wrote, “is that high-earning men who have more romantic options prefer to marry women who are more like a peer. When men have power to influence their mate options, they tend to use that power to find a peer-age woman for companionship and partnership in life.”
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yet there’s a coterie of tweets—and online personalities—devoted to insisting that high-achieving men find high-achieving women repulsive and instead choose to marry from America’s veritable cornucopia of smokin’ hot Applebee’s waitresses.”
https://reason.com/2025/07/25/the-online-rights-fairy-tale-gender-politics/
Democrats Flee Texas, Trump’s BLS Firing Raises Alarms, Ghislaine Maxwell Moved | The Headlines
Having independent professionals in parts of the government who provide key statistics is important for having a better idea of what’s going on in the country. We need these professionals to be independent so we can have a level of trust in the numbers. Trump fires such professionals just because he doesn’t like their outcomes, not because he has a fundamental disagreement with their methods. This is how we go dark in understanding our economy; with our main source of data being controlled by the leader.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F7RXXlUM4Y
Democrats retreat on climate: ‘It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts’
Democrats retreat on climate: ‘It’s one of the more disappointing turnabouts’
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/07/democrats-climate-retreat-california-energy-00439882
The GOP’s Big Fold
“These reversals may be surprising, but they were not remarkable. It was par for the course for congressional Republicans who, in recent years, have shown a proclivity for taking bold, theatrical stands before meekly capitulating in the face of political pressure — particularly from President Donald Trump.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/03/congressional-republicans-cave-megabill-big-beautiful-00439956
In Today’s GOP, There Is No Choice at All
“The sprawling measure — which at its core was really one big, beautiful tax extender — was never about those tax rates or Medicaid or the deficit. The underlying legislation was no bill at all, but a referendum on Trump. And that left congressional Republicans a binary choice that also had nothing to do with the policy therein: They could salute the president and vote yes and or vote no and risk their careers in a primary.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/04/republicans-megabill-vote-jonathan-martin-column-00439333
Texas Floods, a Misleading Social Security Email, What Your TV Knows About You | The Headlines
Republicans/Trump frontloaded the start of popular items in the big bill, and delayed unpopular items until after midterms, making it harder for voters to know what the people they are voting for actually did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Urfjw2964
Thom Tillis and the Painful Truth About Swing State Politics
“Republican Sen. Thom Tillis’ shocking retirement announcement Sunday reflects the real state of our politics, an example of how even the most competitive and best known swing states — places like North Carolina, that determine the presidency every four years — are infected by the same contagion as the most hardened one-party states. Amid our hyper-nationalized, hyper-polarized politics, any lawmaker seen as a moderate won’t last long, no matter what state they hail from.”
Tillis did not blindly support Trump; Trumped publicly attacked him and said he was looking for someone to replace Tillis; Tillis announced his retirement.
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“Purple state status doesn’t mean that the citizens are, by and large, more moderate than they are in other states, but rather than on average they resemble something approaching moderation. The truth is that purple states have very few purple voters; they simply have blue and red voters in roughly equal numbers.
In today’s nationalized political environment, those red and blue voters in purple states respond in the same uncompromising way to modern politics as they do in states dominated by the Democratic or Republican parties.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/01/thom-tillis-north-carolina-retirement-swing-state-00436038
Under RFK Jr., Vaccine Approval Is Getting More Politicized, Not Less
“Kennedy has politicized the U.S. vaccine approval process by summarily firing all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)”
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“Typically appointed to four-year terms, Kennedy has taken the unprecedented step of prematurely sacking the entire panel. Two days later, he announced his selection of eight new members, many of whom are chiefly famous for espousing contrarian views with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy.
So what did Kennedy find wrong with the original ACIP panel? The secretary asserted that it “has been plagued with persistent conflicts of interests” stemming from members’ “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms that enforce a narrow pro-industry orthodoxy.” At least in his Journal op-ed, the secretary offers no evidence of any unreported or improper conflicts of interest among those he just fired. It is worth noting that the fired ACIP members were vetted before they were appointed and that they each declare any conflicts that later emerge before each of the committee’s meetings.
What about RFK Jr.’s vague claims hinting at nefarious “immersion in a system of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms” on the part of committee members? If your automobile keeps stalling out, you take your jalopy to a trained mechanic for diagnosis and repair. If your computer system has been hacked, you seek help from qualified computer engineers. You earnestly hope that your mechanics and computer engineers are fully immersed in their respective systems of industry-aligned incentives and paradigms—that is, you hope they are experts who know what they are doing.”
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“The HHS secretary gives his game away when he characterizes his wholesale firing as being “above any pro- or antivaccine agenda.” With respect to his new ACIP appointees, Kennedy promised that “none of these individuals will be ideological anti-vaxxers.” That’s great. After all, an anti-vaccine agenda makes as much sense as anti–automobile repair or anti–computer debugging agendas. The agendas we want are pro–making cars run, pro–computers correctly ciphering, and pro–vaccines that protect against diseases.
However, in looking over the backgrounds of the new ACIP members, several of them can be fairly characterized as being at least anti-vaxxer-adjacent.”
https://reason.com/2025/06/12/under-rfk-jr-vaccine-approval-is-getting-more-politicized-not-less/