Yup. They’re just going to add tolls to some of the lanes and make you pay more to use what you already paid for anyway.

Congestion pricing, on the other hand: observably a good policy.

I do, yes.

It would be different if he were a reformer and it were happening for positive reasons, but that’s not how the US Government operates.

This corruption will be coopted and used by future administrations, and people will just forget that these practices were ever illegal to begin with, not unlike everything that became normal in the War on Terror. Everything Donald is doing now became legal and permissible because of the egregious abuses that were normalized by Obama and Dubya.

It’s clear Democrats are comfortable with this too, because their only opposition, if you can call it that, is sternly-worded letters.

We’ll see how they react when the Satanic Temple formulates some kind of neato, creative protest around it.

But I think we can assume the worst.

Indeed.

It’s another example of Donald making something explicitly legal that, before, was still occurring but technically punishable under the law. That’s what I hate about Donald the most, the normalization of the worst aspects of our governing system.

In a tent city, no less.

Someone is getting exceedingly fat and happy off of this.

I’m pointing to observable cause-and-effect.

I don’t buy it.

In 2008 when the travel industry crashed in the wake of the market crash, and again in 2020 after COVID lockdowns started, we saw significant decreases in pollution.

Meat isn’t the problem. Fossil fuels are.

I don’t have kids, but I do have a brother who is young enough to be my child, and I was very happy when he broke the nose of his bully.

That motherfucker had to learn.

allthatsinteresting.com

In fact, it didn’t.

Hoverboards actually do exist. And for bonus points, so do speeder bikes. You probably already know about real-life jetpacks.

I wish I could live another 100 years to see better optimized versions of them.

Went to turn it off.

Apparently I already did. Marvelous.

The furry little god pulled a Ferris Bueller and got away with it.

Legend.

Hello friend.

This point has been discussed elsewhere in the thread. I hope you have a nice afternoon.

I dunno, H.

I may be wrong in saying it’s indicative of a crash, and I’m okay with being corrected.

As to inaccurate or inflammatory, maybe it feels that way if you’re on the winning side of the equation.

I think we should be inflamed about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that thirty years of high functional unemployment being ordinary is an objectively bad thing, but when you couple it with the increasingly supercharged price gouging and inflation the US has experienced over the last several decades, things that seemed improbable before suddenly become feasible. (Like making fascists electable.)

I hope you’re right.

That ship sailed under Reagan, and it’s never getting back to port, sadly. Thanks to him, families now needed two incomes.

Then, Bush and Clinton came along, and you needed not only two incomes, but two college degrees. Now, with Dubya, Obama, and Trump, not even that’s enough, and they’re capping student loans instead of regulating student loan interest, so your only real shot at being a doctor now is being born in the right zip code.

America, baby. Dig it.

Also, not so fun fact, but this got me curious so I looked up the unemployment rate during The Great Depression: apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well, so I feel like that reinforces the point I’m making a bit.

We’re already there. The only reason we aren’t calling this a depression is that the stock market hasn’t been affected much.

But when 25% of Americans are functionally unemployed, it’s hard to argue we aren’t already largely ‘crashed’.

Voters were very clear that they would consider it a betrayal

No, they weren’t. There wasn’t a primary.

Trump says way more crazy shit than Biden and he won.

Apples to oranges. You saw Biden’s meltdown and I did too.

All politicians and forms of government are susceptible to corruption. Just look at Fetterman and Sinema. Just because someone claims to be progressive doesn’t mean they won’t help the billionaire class or fascists.

A salient point. The Democrats’ next campaign slogan should be: Better things aren’t possible if you vote for us.

Democrats are trying to stop progressives from throwing the election like they have every time they win a primary.

LOL, did you happen to see Joe Biden’s dementia on full public display last summer?

They are not trying to stop anyone from throwing an election, or they wouldn’t have let Joe Biden crown a weak candidate.

Democrats are rigging primaries to help the billionaire class, and doing so in full knowledge that they’re aiding fascists, because they themselves are profiting off of it.