Categories Government
I don’t think the sharp opposition between “hard-edge populism” & “conservative orthodoxy” holds. Many of the Trump administration’s achievements were boilerplate conservatism. Its own website trumpets things like “massive deregulation,” tax cuts, etc. /2
https://t.co/N97v85Bb79

The claim that Buckley and “key GOP politicians banded together to marginalize anti-Communist extremism and conspiracy-mongering” of the JBS has been widely repeated lately but the history is more complicated. /3

This tweet by @ThePlumLineGS citing a paper by @sam_rosenfeld and @daschloz on the "porous" boundary between conservatives, the GOP and the far-right is relevant in this context.
There's a great paper called "The Long New Right" that tells the story of the GOP/conservative movement's failure to police extremists for the last 50 years.
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 28, 2021
It's highly relevant to the insurrection and Marjorie Greene's lunacy.
I summed it up here:https://t.co/DTlzGomy5h pic.twitter.com/Dhc38CDuE2
This is a separate point but I find it interesting that Gaetz, like Roy Moore did In his failed Senate campaign, disses McConnell. What are their actual policy differences? MM supported taking health care away from millions, a tax cut for the rich, conservative judges, etc. /5

Rather than debate that question here (or in another forum), I'm making it an assignment. Specifically, I'm asking my Quantitative Security students to determine if it belongs in our coup/attempted coup datasets.
[THREAD]
A core goal of this course is to introduce students to how Large-N data on violence and security are created.
We put WAY TOO much emphasis on estimators & software (Stata v R 🙄); not enough on the quality of the data going into the analysis.
First, what happened? @johncarey03755 offers a succinct
Second, I'll ask the students to read some of the recent pieces that say the event was NOT a coup attempt.
These include...
...detailed twitter threads by
Let me try this again\u2026 What would it look like if this were a coup (failed, in progress, or otherwise)? 1/n
— Kristen Harkness (@HarknessKristen) January 7, 2021
demanding that media publish the presidents words with no editorial interference is exactly what the founders were worried about when they created 1A.
It\u2019s a little surreal to see the traditional anti-censorship discourse newly applied to the most powerful man in the world right after he incited a mob that attacked a rival branch of government to overturn a free and fair election.
— Matt Pearce \U0001f985 (@mattdpearce) January 9, 2021
free speech absolutists demand (checks notes) that the NYT allow Trump to write all its headlines.
the first amendment was not meant to allow the president to seize control of all media. it seems weird that you have to explain this to free speech defenders.
this is what happens though when you fetishize the speech act and completely lose track of what freedom of speech was supposed to do in the first place.
the president is literally the person the 1A is supposed to *protect media from.* It's supposed to allow media to criticize him and have an editorial policy independent of the government!
Texas Gov. Abbott blames solar and wind for the blackouts in his state and says "this shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America" pic.twitter.com/YfVwa3YRZQ
— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 17, 2021
2. Point 2: there were clear signs the grid would get overloaded under extreme cold conditions. Why? Due to a vacuum of regulations mandating winterization of turbines and power generators. This from sources, in Texas!
3. Point 3: Of the power shortfall that hit Texas, over 80% was due to problems at coal and gas fired plants. Power generators were just not winterized. Decisions to do so have been ignored since the 1990s.
4. Point 4: these are winterized wind turbines in Denmark. The ocean is frozen. The turbines are generating.
Same thing in Denmark. It's cold enough here that the ocean is frozen and yet look at those reliable windmills just chugging along. pic.twitter.com/1NTljk7hk9
— Elizabeth Gummere (@BethGummere) February 17, 2021
5. #Texas| the main issue is: catastrophic governance at the State level (no Federal oversight of the Texas grid) failing to allocate funding to winterise the Natural Gas, Coal and Wind Turbine elements that contribute to the grid. (~ 80/20
And I said, when that "response" - which you can read here https://t.co/gLEJzuqoAx - was published that every single notional rebuttal by Government of a claim made by the New York Times was false, misleading or both.
And it's time for me to make good.
Here's the first "rebuttal" by Government to the New York Times' claim that: "The government handed out thousands of contracts to fight the virus, some of them in a secretive V.I.P. lane."

A number of points might be made.
(1) Government cannot say the NYT got it wrong. (2) the NAO found the VIP lane (later renamed the high-priority lane) "sat alongside" the normal lane. And I have shown elsewhere VIP contracts were handled by different teams all the way through.

(3) Although Govt says "offers of support raised by Opposition MPs were dealt with expeditiously" the NAO report does not record any referrals made by an Opposition MP leading to a contract - and the Government response telling does not say any did.