(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: No Trump Edition [1] ['Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags', 'Showtags Popular_Tags'] Date: 2022-08-21 x Chicken wings are now cheaper than they were before the pandemic https://t.co/PNGmOec4Xe — philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) August 18, 2022 College football season begins in five days, so cheap chicken wings is right on time! Jeff Stein of The Washington Post says that August, in particular, has been a banner month for Biden and the economy even as the spectre of inflation lurks. Beyond the economic rescue package and bipartisan infrastructure law passed last year, Congress this month alone also approved a $280 billion measure to expand veterans health care, a $280 billion law to counter China’s economic rise, and the Inflation Reduction Act centered on addressing the climate crisis, lowering health-care costs and raising taxes on large corporations. The recent wins, in particular, have sharpened the Biden administration’s imprint on the U.S. economy. His presidency combines some traditional features of Democratic policymaking — such as pursuing higher taxes and expanded access to health care — with a new focus on reviving domestic industry through targeted investment, supporting American labor, and cracking down on monopolistic firms through a heavier emphasis on antitrust enforcement. The outset of Biden’s term has been defined by pitched battles over short-term economic circumstances: The president has defended his 2021 rescue plan as leading to the biggest single-year jobs boom in American history, while critics have assailed that same policy for exacerbating the fastest price increases in four decades. The latest string of legislative victories, however, turn the battle over “Bidenomics” into one over the long-term trajectory of the nation’s tax code, energy sector and other structural parts of the nation’s economy, although the menace of inflation continues to dominate even these debates. Benji Jones of Vox reports on how the Colorado River drought could affect food prices. Meandering 1,450 miles from northern Colorado to the Gulf of California, the Colorado River is the lifeblood of the American West. It provides water to nearly 40 million people across seven states, Mexico, and more than two dozen tribes, and it irrigates millions of acres of land. The river is governed by a complex set of policies — collectively known as the Law of the River — that dictate how much water each state or tribe receives, and which will lose water first when the government imposes restrictions. (Typically, groups that have been using the water for longer have higher-priority water rights, including Indigenous tribes.) Last August, the federal government declared a water shortage on the river for the first time, in response to projections that Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, would be at just 34 percent of its capacity by the end of 2020. The declaration, known as a Tier 1 shortage, triggered cuts that affected Central Arizona, which has low-priority rights. Farmers in Pinal County, Arizona, who grow alfalfa, wheat, and other crops, suffered the most, said Paul Brierley, a former farmer who now leads the Yuma Center of Excellence for Desert Agriculture at the University of Arizona. “They’ve had to fallow [stop planting] about 40 percent of their acreage because they lost all their Colorado River water,” he said. Helen Lewis of The Atlantic writes a provocative piece about social justice as the new religion. In the U.S., the nonreligious are younger and more liberal than the population as a whole. Perhaps, then, it isn’t a coincidence that they are also the group most likely to be involved in high-profile social-justice blowups, particularly the type found on college campuses. They’ve substituted one religion for another. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff suggest that we look at campus protests as outbreaks of “collective effervescence,” a term coined by the sociologist Emile Durkheim to describe emotions that can be accessed only in a crowd. Singing, swaying, and chanting build up a kind of electricity, which ripples through the group. And that’s how a person can end up screaming “repent” at a stranger for the crime of holding a funny sign. If you’re isolated, reading and sharing political memes and commentary is one way to find like-minded people; meanwhile, social media and dating apps encourage us to label ourselves so that we can be instantly categorized by algorithms and advertisers. Many common social-justice phrases have echoes of a catechism: announcing your pronouns or performing a land acknowledgment shows allegiance to a common belief, reassuring a group that everyone present shares the same values. But treating politics like a religion also makes it more emotionally volatile, more tribal (because differences of opinion become matters of good and evil) and more prone to outbreaks of moralizing and piety. “I was thinking about that Marx quote that religion is the opium of the people,” Elizabeth Oldfield, the former director of the Christian think tank Theos, told me. “I think what we've got now is [that] politics is the amphetamines of the people.” [...] This phenomenon is not confined to the left, though. At Donald Trump’s rallies, booing members of the press, who were kept in an exposed pen, became part of the ritual. The storming of the Capitol involved hardened militia members and amateur gun nuts, but also dozens of otherwise law-abiding citizens swept up in collective effervescence. There are other religious parallels: QAnon’s lurid myths about blood-drinking elites echo medieval anti-Semitic tropes, and the QAnon rally where adherents awaited the resurrection of John F. Kennedy Jr. had a distinctly millenarian feel. As my colleague Adrienne LaFrance has reported, followers of this conspiracy-theory movement treat the anonymous Q’s online postings as something akin to divine revelations. “I feel God led me to Q,” one QAnon follower told LaFrance. Ms Lewis wildly overstates the case for social justice as a new religion. Having said that, I always chuckle when I read and listen to atheists speak of the necessity of “getting rid” of religion. Taking out the “god” part out of religion is easy compared to changing the reasons why humans form collectives and expression within those collectives. As long as humans have a need to be social and to form collectives, those collectives will resemble what we call “religion” in greater or lesser degrees, IMO. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight admits being “confused” about the election forevast for the Ohio U.S. Senate race. Our election forecast is … confused. The Lite version of our forecast, which just uses the polls, sticks to our polling average and has Ryan as a slight 56 percent favorite.1 The Classic version, which incorporates “fundamentals” such as Ohio’s Republican lean and Ryan’s fundraising advantage so far, puts Ryan’s chances at 39 percent and Vance as a slight favorite. And the Deluxe forecast, which also accounts for expert race ratings — in essence, the conventional wisdom that the race is an uphill climb for Democrats — has Ryan’s chances at 21 percent, making Vance a clear favorite. I’ll save the value of expert ratings and the differences between the Classic and Deluxe versions of the forecast for another time. But suffice it to say that they do add to our forecast’s accuracy — or at least they’re supposed to. So there’s no need to, say, blend the Classic and Deluxe forecasts together; the Deluxe forecast should be the one you’d bet on. It already puts the “right” amount of weight on the expert ratings, based on what would have produced the best forecasts empirically. Still, even a 21 percent chance isn’t nothing. So let’s step back and ask a more basic question: Is it plausible that Ryan could win in a state like Ohio in a political environment like the one we’re likely to see in November? [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/21/2117787/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-No-Trump-Edition Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/