Politics, Crime

• It sure seems to me that what I'm hearing from the corporate Dems is that the only way to get past the obstruction of the Manchins and Sinemas (and there are others, believe me) in order to pass good stuff like Build Back Better, is to elect more Democrats to the Senate. And the only way to do that is to make sure we don't run those awful progressives. Instead, we need to run more centrist folks--presumably like Manchin and Sinema. Rinse, repeat. Stop blaming the voters and start getting shit done.

• Too often political issues are reduced to faux-binary choices. Either totally open borders or lock 'em in cages, as if there aren't other possibilities that are more decent and humane. The current crime panic is another case in point. The Ted Cruzes (and now too many Dems) tell us that our choice is between raging crime rates on the one hand, and letting cops shoot an unarmed person once in a while and reinstituting stop-and-frisk. Believe it or not, progressives are not in favor of crime. But this progressive is not in favor of, and will not support, unconstitutional solutions (some of which have dubious effectiveness anyway).