I was just thinking Blazing Saddles, keep a Bart. It would shut up all the people who insist you couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today. It would be hilarious for Kermit to play the super drunk Waco Kid. That said, I’m not sure if the treatment would push the satire of racism, or defang it.
He said force, not kinetic energy. They’re probably treating the acceleration term in F=ma as proportional velocity, which strikes me as naive, but it makes the math easier and it’s correct if the error bars are big enough… Functionally you’re comparing momentum at that point, but I imagine you can find some American truck built to evade CAFE standards that has a 4-1/3:1 weight ratio with some version of the Civic.
I mean, obviously I don’t know how the internals of how the party works from first hand experience. That said I seriously don’t think we should build them up into a bete noir. Every party is in the business of winning. The party went to the center because Nixon walloped McGovern, and Reagan crushed both his elections. Also, the DLC found a way to fund the party after labor support waned for a variety of reasons.
Did the party impede Sanders’ primary campaign against Hillary? It’s been acknowledged that they did. Of course he’s been a career independent, and not a party member for one thing. Probably more importantly, party leadership still doesn’t think going to the left will win nationally. Of course we choose our candidates through a primary process, but like it or not, the party’s job is to win elections, and it’s not outside the party’s mandate to support candidates who they think will win.
But party leadership isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t a conspiracy. It is a group of people trying to make sense of things and find a way to succeed. Of course the old guard is resisting change because they still think they’ve got the recipe for success. Time will tell how it plays out. It’s going to be hard work, and as party voters our ability to influence change in the party has been diluted by a bunch of consultants that are telling the old guard what they want to hear, and only face a reckoning every two years. I imagine, in the face of fascistic tendencies in the rightwing party, moderation and compromise will be even less attractive, even to a center left party. We’ve got to make our voice heard, and when we get a crack, we’ve got to deliver wins.
Indeed. It feels like a lot of historical context is missing in Lemmy political discussions. The Democratic party was the party of FDR, JFK, and LBJ. The Democratic Leadership Council took over the party after the left candidates failed to deliver election successes, but even then, the DLC had to do the work to take the party leadership positions, build a funding network, and win elections. Before that FDR had to wrestle party control from the the Dixiecrats.
Hopefully Hogg and allies will be successful in reforming the party once again.
The why doesn’t strike me as hard. A number of domestic voting blocks in critical swing states will mobilize hard against any perceived flagging of support of Israel. It will play poorly in the press broadly, and opponents will successfully fundraise on the issue.
The worst part is the party is being entirely realistic. Jeremy Corbyn showed what happens when a party leadership is not sufficiently supportive of Israel. Any left of center leader will be tagged as radical, but the accusations of harboring antisemitic elements lost labour what should have been a landslide victory.
Continuing to write Israel a blank check may be widely despised, but the left might hold their nose and vote blue anyway. The left is famously never satisfied, so what else is new?