Tag: news

  • Gonna Party Like It’s 1999

    A new US party structure, by way of Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the Nordics. Three things need to change if we want a country that actually moves instead of just performing motion for the cameras: The first two are arguments for another day. This one is about the third — because the two-party…

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  • The Peace President Needs to Fund His Wars Instead of our Health and Child Care. So Democrats Talk About Crayons?

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    Sort of an Opinion piece but not really, it’s just this country is batshit off the rails. You seriously could not make up how out of touch these people are. WTF Is Wrong With Us? No Seriously… Let me set the full scene, because context is everything here. IHere is everything you need to know…

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  • Angry Old Extremely Religious Christian White Man Yelling from His Porch Syndrome

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    What finally broke my brain was the sequence. The Epstein files dropped. The same movement that built itself on QAnon, on “protect the children,” on Democrats running pedophile rings out of pizza basements — the moral foundation that supposedly separated them from the godless left — went quiet. Or shifted. Or decided that maybe context…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 13: How We Got Here

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    Part 13 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The structural picture this series has been building was assembled over roughly fifty years, through a sequence of policy changes that, taken individually, were always defensible on some narrow technical or ideological ground, and that taken together added…

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  • Is the Iran War America’s Biggest Self-Own of Self-Owns?

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    Three and a half weeks in. Twenty-four days of US and Israeli strikes on Iran, oil at $112 a barrel, thirteen American soldiers dead, the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, and the administration now scrambling to lift sanctions on the very country we’re bombing — just to keep gas prices from completely destroying what’s left…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 11: Who Profits?

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    Part 11 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The ten installments before this one traced where the money goes — the categories where household spending has grown, the mechanisms by which it has grown, and the structural reasons for the growth. This one is about who…

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  • WTF Is Up With MTG?

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    Something happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene and I’m still not sure how to file it. Six months ago she was the most reliably deranged member of Congress. She’d stalked a teenage school shooting survivor through the Capitol on video. She’d endorsed online conspiracy theories I genuinely do not want to type out in detail on…

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  • What’s Wrong With the Democrats. What’s Wrong With the Republicans. It Doesn’t Matter.

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    Neither One Will Deliver for You. Let me start with something that should be obvious but somehow never gets said out loud. Neither party won the last election. The other party just lost it more. That distinction sounds like splitting hairs until you realize it explains almost everything broken about American politics for the last…

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  • How an Angry Old MacDonald Became a Protest Song

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    It started with a question: What is actually wrong with this country, and why do we seem so far apart? The division felt real. The anger felt real. But when you actually looked at the polling data, something didn’t add up. Americans agree on almost everything that matters. Healthcare. Wages. Campaign finance reform. Taxing the…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 7: Phone and Internet

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    Part 7 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about phone and internet service, which has become the cleanest example in modern American life of what happens when a utility-style market is allowed to deregulate into an oligopoly. It is the most unavoidable monthly…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make LessPart 5: The Auto Trap

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    Part 5 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The first four installments traced cost shifts inside relatively well-defined transactions — wages versus productivity, employer-to-worker benefit transfers, overdraft fees, credit card interest. This one is harder, because the cost being passed to households is built into the…

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  • How MTV Killed the Video Star (And Cable/Network Greed Finished the Job)

    I’m not a media analyst. Smarter people than me — like Evan Shapiro, who you should follow on LinkedIn — dissect this industry for a living. But I spent years working inside broadcast television, and I’ve been chewing on this particular problem for more than a decade. So here’s my slightly obsessive take on how…

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  • Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

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    I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see is algorithm-served noise I didn’t ask for. One of those infographics floated past the other…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 4: Flooding the Zone

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    Part 4 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In 2018, Steve Bannon gave an interview to Michael Lewis. It was during Trump’s first State of the Union, and Lewis was writing for Bloomberg. Asked about the Trump media strategy, the line that came out — and that has been…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 3: Both Sides Are Hypocrites

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    Part 3 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → Last installment I said I’d take up the question you hear at every Little League snack bar and every Thanksgiving table the second you start documenting things one party has actually done. But Democrats do this too. The asymmetry isn’t real,…

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  • Term Limits: I Was For Them Until I Wasn’t

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    Honest opener: I used to think term limits were obviously a good idea. Get rid of the lifers, drain the swamp, fresh blood, problem solved. It polls at 87% support for a reason — pretty much everybody across the political spectrum looks at Congress and goes “yeah, these people should go home.” I was in…

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  • Vote FOR Something: An Honest Look at Voting Reform

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    The last time I felt good about a vote I cast for president, I was probably in college and the candidate was probably losing. Every election since has been damage control. I’m not voting for somebody, I’m voting against the other guy because my kids have to live in whatever country the next four years…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 1: When Empathy Becomes Transactional

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    Part 1 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → The way I’d planned to start this was with a list of names. Then I tried it and it read like an indictment, which isn’t what I’m going for. Let me back up. What got me writing this was noticing, over…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 10: When Freedom Means Control

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    I was raised on a fairly standard American small-government instinct. Don’t tread on me. The government that governs least governs best. Local control. Keep Washington out of your business. I grew up with that as background music, and a lot of it I still mostly agree with. I prefer that decisions about my kid’s school…

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  • The Argument Over Alex Pretti Is Bait. Don’t Take It.

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    By the time I started writing this, the videos of Alex Pretti’s last few minutes had been on my phone for three days and the argument about what they showed had hardened along the exact lines you’d predict. Half my feed saw a peaceful citizen being murdered by federal agents in his own neighborhood. The…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 8: Voter Fraud

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    I’ve voted in every election I’ve been eligible to vote in since I turned 18. That’s a stretch of decades that covers multiple states — I spent most of my adult life voting in New York City before moving up to Gardiner — and a fair number of polling places, school gyms, library basements, and…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 6: Immigration

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    I live in Gardiner, New York — population under six thousand, surrounded on every side by Hudson Valley farms. If you’ve spent any time up here in late summer or early fall, you’ve eaten an apple, drunk a wine, or watched a sunset over a hayfield that exists because of immigrant labor. Some of it…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 5: Public Media

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    I’m an NPR listener. Have been for years. Morning Edition while I make coffee. All Things Considered if I’m in the truck at five. WNYC out of New York carries it most days for me up here in the Hudson Valley. The voices are familiar in a way commercial radio voices never quite are, because…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 4: CRT, DEI, and Trans Rights

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    I spent most of my career inside the cable TV business, including a stretch at LOGO — Viacom’s LGBTQ-focused network, which launched in 2005 — and then at Bravo, whose audience and programming have skewed heavily LGBTQ for a long time. I later ran creative operations at Universal Kids. So I’ve watched the corporate diversity…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 3: What the Data Actually Shows About Guns

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    I have two boys in school. I coach travel baseball through Crooked Number, which means I spend a lot of weekends at fields full of other people’s kids. Both of those facts mean I have done, more than once, the thing parents in this country now do: walked into a school or a stadium or…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 2: What Happens After the Laws Change

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    I’ll be honest about where I’m coming from on this one. I thought about abortion the way a lot of people think about it — abstractly — until I didn’t. I had pregnancy scares as a young person, the kind that focus your attention in a hurry. Later I watched my wife actually carry our…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 1: The Culture War

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    This is going to be a ten-part series. Part 1 is the framing post — the thing about the culture war machine that explains the rest. Let me start where I live. I write this blog from a town in the Hudson Valley with a population under six thousand. I spent twenty-five years working in…

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  • Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

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    Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it. Americans are more polarized than at any…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 25: The Bottom 90% Agenda – How We Fix This

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    On September 3, 2025, a bunch of people who do not agree with each other about anything stood on a stage in the Capitol and unveiled a bill. The lineup was the tell. A Texas Republican from the hard right. A Rhode Island Democrat. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fist-bumped a Tennessee Republican from the Freedom Caucus on…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 24B: Rebuilding Worker Power – Why Unions Are the Key to Everything

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    At seven in the morning on August 3, 1981, the air traffic controllers walked off the job. Almost thirteen thousand of them, out of a union of roughly seventeen thousand five hundred, went out over pay, hours, and the kind of working conditions you do not want the people watching the planes to have. Seven…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 22: Media Consolidation and Capitulation – Why You Don’t Know Any Of This

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    On a Sunday night in April 2025, 60 Minutes ended the way it always does, and then it didn’t. The stories had run. The stopwatch had ticked. And instead of the credits, Scott Pelley was still on camera, talking to the audience about the show itself. He said the company that owns CBS was trying…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 21: Coordinated Sabotage—How They Break Public Services Then Blame Government

    In December 2006 a postal bill sat on the President’s desk, and most of it was the kind of housekeeping nobody reads. Rate rules. An oversight commission with a new name. Ninety pages of it. Buried in there was one provision that didn’t belong with the rest. The Postal Service would have to start setting…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 19: The Corporate Tax Dodge

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    One morning in late January, Tesla released its annual report, and up where the shareholders look was the number the company wanted them to see. Almost $5.7 billion of income earned in the United States in 2025. Roughly double what it had earned here the year before. A very good year, told the way a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 14: Rooting For The Wrong Team – How Culture Wars Keep Us Fighting While They Rob Us Blind

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    Two days after the killing, in the second week of September 2025, an X account with more than half a million followers reposted a screenshot of a private Facebook post written by a woman who had taken a new job earlier that month. The post was about the killing. The account’s followers contacted her employer.…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 13: U.S. Politics: Not Functioning As Founders Intended—And How We Can Fix It

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    Two Yeas A senator from Wyoming and a senator from California vote yes on the same bill. Roll call vote. Two yeas. The clerk records them as equivalent. Nobody on the floor notes the difference. Nobody is supposed to. The Wyoming senator represents about 588,000 people — somewhere between the populations of Milwaukee and El…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 12: The US Political System: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice

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    Watch the floor of either chamber on a December afternoon when the National Defense Authorization Act comes up for a vote. The bill is 1,800 pages long and nobody has read all of it. The members who will speak against it are mostly junior, mostly from safe districts, and mostly not on Armed Services. The…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 11: The Military-Industrial Complex: $968 Billion in Wealth Extraction

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    There’s a food pantry on a base near you. There’s a food pantry on most of them. Operation Homefront, the Armed Services YMCA, the local Feeding America affiliate, sometimes the chaplain’s office running a closet out of a side room. The volunteers know which weeks are bad — paydays, PCS moves, deployment gaps that didn’t…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 10: The Incarceration Industry: How We Built a System That Profits From Failure

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    You Don’t Get Out Say you did eighteen months. Drug offense, low-level, the kind that gets you four years in some states and twenty in others depending on which side of which line you were on when the cops showed up. You served your time. Today is the day you get out. Now find an…

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  • Make America Great Again — Compared To When?

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    I want to put this one in my own words because I had it backwards for a while. The first time I really thought about the slogan, I assumed the argument was about the again part — what year are we trying to get back to, what did “great” mean then, who was it great…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 3: Follow the Money: How the System is Rigged Against 90% of Us.

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    This is Part 3 in a series. Part 1 ran the numbers — America comes out near the bottom of every developed-world ranking that matters and near the top of every one that doesn’t. Part 2 walked through how language gets weaponized to keep you from noticing. This one is just accounting. Now That You…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 1: USA! USA! USA!

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    The first time I really clocked the USA chant in the wild was at a NASCAR race. Flags everywhere — not just flying, but as bandanas, t-shirts, full Stars-and-Stripes jeans, patches sewn onto things that did not previously have patches. (Aside: the U.S. Flag Code technically prohibits using the flag as clothing, bedding, or drapery.…

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