Clear, bright sunshine, though, breezy chilly this mid-day Saturday here in California’s Central Valley — weird weather in the wake of last week’s triple-digit temps versus the forecast for a massive heat dome back East.
We’re in for the shits this summer — no shit.
Another time for a shine:
An informative, spot-on read:
In Public Notice today:“Performative public lying is a hallmark of far right authoritarian parties.”This is very importantEveryone should read this:
— Mona Burns (@monaburns.bsky.social) 2025-06-21T12:17:06.182Z
Interview this morning with Copelovitch at Public Notice — for the right-here-and-now:
There’s something deeper than a critique of journalists there. You can look at it and say, “Fine. ‘Both sides.’ The left is unhappy with how the media covers things.” But I think it’s a systemic problem. We have a set of political institutions that are uniquely unable to deal with the rise of what is now a far-right authoritarian party.
People in political science have figured out ways to code parties and figure out where they they fall on a spectrum, not only on economic policy but also in terms of support for liberal democracy. The Democratic Party and its support for liberal democracy basically clusters with all of the other center-left parties in rich democracies, like Labour in Britain, the Liberal Party in Canada, and Social Democrats in Germany.
Republicans, back in the 1980s and 1990s, used to align with the British conservatives or the German Christian Democrats. Now they cluster with Fidesz in Hungary, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the Law and Justice Party (PiS) in Poland. We have a set of institutions that have allowed a far-right party to take over a center-right party.
[…]
The media side is that we continue to cover politics as if it was still the 1970s or the 1990s, and everything our parties do is normal politics. “There are two sides to every issue. Both parties are basically center-right or center-left parties.” The journalism infrastructure in our country wants to pretend that that’s the world that we live in. The instinct is to treat everything politicians say as valid.
[…]
As someone who’s studied European governments and politics, how much of a problem do you think it is that people in America don’t seem to understand where their politicians fall on the global spectrum? People will say AOC is far left, but she’d fit in with many center-left European politicians. Elon Musk thinks he’s a moderate or a centrist. He’s not.
Go read the whole piece. Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice is well-worth the subscription — great source for truthful, factual political reporting!
Further along in the same swamp:
At any other point in American history, the events of last weekend would be understood as a sign that the country was falling apart.
And to close this shit out with irony — most-excellent interview with Morissette this morning at the Guardian:
Morissette’s take on Canada and the T-Rump, despite:
I ask about living in Trump’s America, and she says (with a touch of sarcasm) that she was looking forward to this part of the conversation. “The gift of travelling the planet is I get glimpses of how the international community perceive America,” she says. She has a way of summing up how Canadians respond to rudeness. They are, “Nice, nice, nice. Then piss us off on the wrong day and we explode.” Is this prime minister Mark Carney’s way of doing business with Trump? She laughs. “It becomes a hard no. We try to be amenable, but then it’s a very hard no. Unequivocal. So that’s kind of our thing, culturally. We came by it honestly.”
Dark days ahead, or not, yet here we are once again …
(Image out front by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here.)
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