Bannon is basically the fat kid that nobody liked in school, but his family was privileged enough to shield him from most harassment. Who grew up to be the asshole that nobody really liked, but people of a certain class will pal around with in the hopes of using him for their own ends.
Nobody ever liked you, Steve Bannon. Nobody will ever like you. You’re not even Hitler, but Goebbels: the more evil one, but always a second fiddle who will go down in history as a laughable little loser in the end.
Broken clock right twice a day and all that, but when the media reports Clinton has a 99+% chance of victory and Trump wins, I think that’s a pretty good indication that the news media does need to do some more listening before they speak.
Maybe that’s not what he meant, but if that’s what he is saying, he’s not wrong.
Long story short, Peña Nieto’s goverment is downplaying the role of oil in the Mexican economy (not necessarily a bad thing) and moving towards more gas production at the same time there is a move towards economic austerity.
The finer points:
The state controlled gasoline market has been “open” to the free market, first step of which was to stop subsidizing this resource which resulted in a hike in gasoline prices of about 20% along with great unrest and the biggest demonstrations in Mexico’s recent history. Peña nietos response was to go on TV and say “what would you have done?”
Electrical bills will go through the roof when the plan to remove subsidies there goes through, that’s going to be fun.
States are attempting to essentially privatize water resources to attract foreign investement (in the form of fracking) More unrest.
Basically the idea is that the invisible hand of the market will eventually bring prices down, something nobody believes will actually happen.
I recall most estimates of Trump’s odds as being somewhere from 1/6 to 1/20 – I’m pretty sure at least fivethirtyeight tended toward the former. Which would mean his election was like a dice roll, he would have to be lucky, which in practice means a number of different chances going his way.
For all the questions of how the experts got things completely wrong, it doesn’t seem plain to me that this was so inaccurate.
I’d be happy to offer advice - or a little manual assistance for anyone heading this way.
I’m beginning to really like it down here, making serious friends and becoming involved in their lives.
I didn’t say that he should “tell you the law is other than it is”; I don’t think that would help anything.
I’d suggest that when he takes the time to point out that horrible assholes are equally protected by free speech, it makes him sound as if he’s commiserating with those horrible assholes. Yes, Ken, we’re aware. How about talking about freedom of the press, instead, and how the administration is trying to quash it? How about discussing the many laws our president is breaking daily?
Principles are in a constant struggle with viscera. I want punching Nazis to be acceptable, and find the spectacle of Nazis getting punched to be viscerally satisfying. Jesus Christ and John Donne aside, Nazi suffering does not move me. But I know that sucker-punching someone because their views are evil is wrong.
Here the Trump administration, in its first day in office, has chosen to cast protest in terms of violence and crime. There are two important elements of this. First, consider how the page — by raising this as an issue as part of a discussion of crime, and by contrasting violence at protests with innocent citizens menaced in their life — suggests that violence at protests is somehow statistically significant in American crime. It isn’t. Moreover, especially in the context of Trump’s historic tendency to treat protest violence as emblematic of all protest, this focus raises legitimate concerns that the Trump Administration will be hostile to protesters and supportive of efforts to cut them back. That’s certainly the narrative of the administration’s media surrogates:
