Cops Fear Mangione Will Inspire Copycats Because Duh
Internal NYPD report concludes that Mangione makes a damn convincing case
Dec. 11: New Mangione details … Progressives draw red lines for DNC … Kennedy nomination under the weather? … Weiner is back maybe! …
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Trump Vows To Help Billionaires Squash Small Businesses
President-elect Donald Trump yesterday promised that people rich enough to “invest” (whatever that means) $1 billion in the U.S. will get “fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals.”
As economist Justin Wolfers explained with all his highfalutin jargon, “[T]his would give big business a leg up over small business.”
In fact, some of the regulations most burdensome to our noble capitalist warriors were created not by everyday people who need them but by big companies seeking to throttle upstart rivals who lack the economies of scale to hurdle those regulations. It’s true, my trusting Newsfuckers, sometimes rich people use the government to create systems that hurt rivals and exploit the people (yes, we’ll get to Luigi Mangione, don’t rush me!)
As a creature of impulse, Trump obviously didn’t think through the implications. As the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Alexandra Adams asked the AP, “What if someone wants to build a waste incinerator next to Mar-a-Lago or a coal mine next to Bedminster golf course?”
Of course, Trump is an equal-opportunity scammer, so this is also a con he’s pulling on the rich. Because Trump can’t just unilaterally yoink every federal regulation. Federal law requires the executive branch to do due diligence on environmental regulations. Any attempt to skirt them will be challenged in court.
And federal regulations aren’t the only regulations. States are actually allowed to do shit in addition to deciding on your abortion rights.
That said, with the new, Republicanier Congress coming in next month, there’s a real chance they’ll act fast to gut environmental regulations. Sens. Joe Manchin (I-WV) — remember him? — and John Barrasso (R-WY) had a controversial bill ready to go to fast-track environmental approvals, but some green groups warned it would trample the rights of communities disproportionately targeted by toxic energy projects and disproportionately too poor to fight them in court.
The left’s rationale for passing it was to ease the way for sustainable-energy projects, and the reality is Big Oil doesn’t have an appetite for sinking lots of new wells.
But now Republicans won’t need Manchin or any Democrats anymore, which means now they can get through new legislation — possibly not applying to green energy — freeing Trump’s billionaire oil-baron buddies to build their leaky pipelines and refineries next door to the homes of Trump voters. And small businesses.
Cops Fear Mangione Will Inspire Copycats Because Duh
A secret, internal police report warns that people celebrating the murder of CEO Brian Thompson could see accused killer Luigi Mangione as “a martyr and an example to follow.”
The New York Times obtained a copy of the report, which was based in part on the written statement Mangione had on him when he was arrested. Originally described as a manifesto, it’s actually pretty short. More of a minifesto. (Spoiler: Most of it’s been reported already.)
And here’s what’s different from past statements from killers accused and otherwise: Everyone seems to agree the minifesto is pretty reasonable. Other than shooting a guy in the back, no notes!
In fact, Mangione’s lawyer says people are offering to pay his medical bills.
And in a segment that aired Tuesday but was taped before Mangione was identified, Joe Rogan — America’s leading public intellectual — declared health insurance “a dirty, dirty business. The business of insurance is fucking gross. It’s gross. Especially healthcare insurance.” To clarify his position, Rogan then added that, “It’s fucking gross.”
And the reason cops have reason to fear Mangione copycats — good luck getting those abs! — is that our political system appears utterly immune to any tactic other than violence to address an industry that one leading public intellectual recently labeled “fucking gross.”
State politics have largely been gerrymandered out of the people’s control. Corporate interests have a death-grip on both parties. Studies show that when it comes to legislation, the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many. Did Spock temporarily die for nothing?
As your repetitive TFN discussed as recently as yesterday, the mainstream position in the United States is that health insurance companies are vile creations and the government should just make sure everyone gets the health-care they need. But even high-profile “journalists” treat this position as the irrational rantings of a crazy fringe.
Never mind that proponents of private health insurance are the tiny fringe in this country. And never mind that America is a tiny fringe among the world’s developed nations, almost all of which have exactly what our crazy, fringe, majority wants.
So what was Mangione supposed to do? Start a political party? Which couldn’t raise money because it’d be ignored by corporate media and blocked from ballots? Launch a protest movement? Oh, like the ones that inspired Democrats to shut down the oil industry?
As The Lever pointed out yesterday that it pointed out in 2022, Gavin Newsom became California’s governor after saying in his 2018 campaign, “I’m tired of politicians saying they support single-payer but that it’s too soon, too expensive or someone else’s problem.”
In fact he was so tired of politicians saying that, that after he became governor he came up with new reasons. Namely, “This is hard work.”
That was after the insurance company poured millions of dollars into Democratic coffers and Newsom’s causes, The Lever reported.
The end result, even in the Socialist Republic of California the guy who got elected to do single-payer isn’t/hasn’t/doesn’t/wosn’t/shasn’t.
So, the NYPD hardly gets everything right. But give them credit for this: Of COURSE they fear Mangione will inspire copycats.
Battle of the Nice Guys
Luigi Mangione and Brian Thompson had something important in common, according to testimonials from those who knew them. They were both super-nice guys.
Thompson’s funeral was Monday. So was Mangione’s capture. Here’s what the people who knew them have said:
“One of the nicest people.”
“Curiosity and kindness.”
“A deep concern for the future of humanity, and a determination to improve himself and the world.”
“Incredibly loving”
“Everybody got along with him and he got along with everybody else. He was just a great, silly, funny, smart guy.”
“A model person.”
No one need feel obliged to feel anything about either of these people. But let’s at least acknowledge that our culture and society must be incredibly fucked up to produce a nice guy who kills another nice guy for killing thousands.
It’s important to grapple with how Mangione might have become a murderer. And how Thompson ran a system that denied needed medical care to people, under his supervision more than doubled denial rates for Medicare Advantage, and oh maybe did some insider trading that ripped off firefighters, the holiest of public-service professions.
Here’s the Times: “Friends and colleagues said they struggled to reconcile how Mr. Thompson, a man they remembered as mild-mannered and humble, could be portrayed as a symbol of the excesses of the health insurance industry.”
That’s because we’ve made cartoon villains out of the corporate executives, assuming that ruining lives and destroying the planet can only be the work of cackling mustache-twirlers.
In reality, our laws and regulations and corporate structures desensitize all of us. “Nice” people do things every day without regard to the effect on others. Buying SUVs. Not putting the grocery cart back. Little shit like that, all rationalize-able.
And we also enemy-ize others. Ever play a videogame and find yourself hating the other players?
When your job incentivizes not building a well-made product of value to people but simply getting their money, your brain will transform customers from people we want to please with our craftspersonship into opponents to be outsmarted and outthunked and outmonied. Even by nice guys.
I know this because I’ve experienced and battled against exactly this in creating journalism over the years.
As I’ve said, the only way Democrats can rebrand themselves as populists is by having the right enemies. You want to win votes? Make damn sure the rich people of Goldman Sachs and Blackstone are out there savaging you every day. And you do that by naming them.
But naming them is just a tool — a spotlight to draw attention to the underlying systems that create nice-guy villains, and to build the political will to destroy them (the systems, that is).
ALSO Something else connects Thompson and Mangione. Thompson was accomplished, but so was Mangione, as writer Heidi Moore points out:
…he's the wet dream of Centrist Meritocracy™️: Smart, highly educated, productively employed, good-looking kid from a good family. Everything they want everyone else to be, everything they keep saying you're a loser if you're not. He's their golden boy made tangible. That is going to seriously mess with the smug pundits.
Speaking as a smug pundit, can confirm!
Progressives Call on DNC to Reject Secret Illionaire Money
In a new memo, the outgoing and incoming leaders of the sprawling Congressional Progressive Caucus laid out their vision for the Democratic Party going forward. The party organization, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), will pick a new leader in February.
In the memo, caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and her successor, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), outline four principles they want the new DNC chair to fight for. Among them: “Reinstate the 2008 ban on corporate PAC donations and specifically push to ban SuperPAC spending in Democratic primaries.”
The other principles: Restructure the party to empower populism, rebuild the party’s base of workers white and non-white, and, well, they’d like the next DNC leader to have a record of actually winning shit and doing shit.
This may feel like pointless wishful thinking, but this kind of thing really can push DNC candidates to make these commitments in hopes of winning over the DNC delegates who’ll choose the next chair. (Skepticism can be self-fulfilling prophecy, y’know!)
RFK, Jr., Not Immune from Senate Skepticism
The hilarious trolling nomination of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to oversee America’s federal public-health agency reportedly has developed symptoms of complications from past overdoses on bullshit.
Kennedy is a skeptic of established practices such as vaccines and science and behaving normally like a normal person. And Politico says “at least” three Republican senators haven’t committed to backing Kennedy, by far the strangest of a deeply strange clan.
The three known not-yeses are Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK). It’ll take just four GOP defections to end Kennedy’s nomination the way vaccines ended polio.
Like some — most? — other nominees of President-elect Donald Trump, Kennedy has been accused of sexual assault and denies it because why not, what’re they gonna do? Go public?
But some Republicans have concerns about Kennedy’s policy positions, too. “[V]accinations are an important part of our public health, starting with the requirement that kids get vaccinations before they go to school,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Politico.
Kennedy has given himself wiggle room in the past on vaccinations, so your non-predicting TFN won’t be surprised if Kennedy simply says what he needs to in order to assuage Cornyn and others on vaccines. And if Democrats see that he’s got the votes, it might make sense to get behind Kennedy’s and Trump’s hostility toward Big Pharma and the rest of Big “Health.”
Y’know, just in case anyone out there’s feeling frustrated about political inaction against Big “Health.”
Three Quickies
House Republicans just published the text of their military funding bill and obviously it includes an attack on the troops. America already hates its troops so much that it inflicts the closest thing we have to socialist medical care on them. Now, the GOP wants to take some of it away. As Congressional Equality Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) PFLAGged, the GOP bill would force military service members to pay the costs of gender-affirming care for their kids on their own. As Pocan notes, gender-affirming care has been medically affirmed by countless medical organizations. And as I’m sure John Fugelsang will argue, it’s also been affirmed by Jesus.
Y’know when things start to go south with your main squeeze but your professional and social circles are so inextricably intertwined that becoming exes is gonna be unavoidably awkward for years? Anyway, Kimberly Guilfoyle has been named ambassador to Greece, which is like 4,000 miles away.
Due to popular demand,Anthony Weiner is back! You may remember him as “Carlos Danger,” after the briefly famous former New York City member of Congress swapped his promising political career for a gross criminal record thanks to getting a 15-year-old girl to do sex things for him online. History buffs may recall that the discovery on his computer of emails between his wife and Hillary Clinton led the FBI to reopen the Clinton emails case in October 2016, making the subsequent eight years even grosser than what Weiner did with/to a 15-year-old girl. Anyhoo, the reason for this delightful jaunt down memory lane is that Weiner has filed for a possible run for New York City Council. (Sadly, Weiner was actually a terrifically effective communicator and advocate for many of the policies that might have saved the 2024 election from turning out like the 2016 election.)
TCB
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Anyway, for clarity’s sake I should probably at least footnote it when I’m knowingly ironically calling shit socialism. So, thanks for the free — dare I say socialist? — advice!
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Go get ‘em, kids.
It’s always been amusing to me that the only governor who ever came close to implementing universal health care in their state was Willard “Mittens” Romney. Yes, the Massachusetts general assembly had quite a bit to do with it, but he’s still the only one. My sister was on MassHealth before she qualified for Medicare and paid $15/mo for her coverage. The payments are based on a sliding fee scale and there are health plans available to anyone not insured through their job (Medicaid is part of the whole scheme). The ACA was based on MassHealth and when Obama was handing out praise, Romney’s (Democratic) successor got it all. And Mittens went on to lose the 2012 election for being elitist and out of touch with the poors.
"But let’s at least acknowledge that our culture and society must be incredibly fucked up to produce a nice guy who kills another nice guy for killing thousands." AND WITH A PLASTIC (fucking) GUN!