Favorites April 29 2021

Apr 30, 2021

Matt Gaetz's wingman wrote a confession letter. In it, he says both he and Matt Gaetz paid for sex with a 17-year-old, among other women. (But there's more...)

thedailybeast.comBombshell Letter: Gaetz Paid for Sex With Minor, Wingman SaysThe Daily Beast has obtained a confession letter that Joel Greenberg wrote after asking Roger Stone to help him obtain a pardon.

Gaetz was Definitely the big news today. Stone seems to be discussing bribery in their communications. The very unfortunately named Matt Gertz had a very negative reaction to this news. Finally, advice from Popehat

ProbableCauseHat @Popehat

Protip: if Roger Stone asks you to handwritte a confession to a federal crime so he can use it to bet you a pardon, don’t

ProbableCauseHat @Popehat

I mean this is the criminal law equivalent of letting a dude grope you because he’s wearing a “Female Body Inspector” t-shirt and it looks official

Just don't trust Roger Stone

Ezra Klein @ezraklein

I want to make an argument that will clash with the catechisms of American politics: Bipartisan governance isn’t innately better than partisan governance. In fact, it’s often worse, because it leads to the best ideas of *both* sides getting lost.

nytimes.comOpinion | 100 Days of Big, Bold, Partisan ChangeBipartisanship is overrated.

Only doing the things that both sides agree on means that voters can't clearly tell what the impact of each party's policies are. It also means that both sides so rarely find themselves with control that they spend most time talking up policies they don’t actually intend to pass if in power.

John Scalzi @scalzi

If you want to fuck with some anti-masker's head, tell them you're not wearing the mask for COVID, you're wearing it for the flu, and then watch their brain fumble with whether they need to be outraged about that or not

scientificamerican.comFlu Has Disappeared Worldwide during the COVID PandemicThe public health measures that slow the spread of the novel coronavirus work really well on influenza

I'm going to be very very interested to see what seasonal flu patterns are like later this year.

sarah jeong @sarahjeong

much of the politics of the 1970s have been successfully erased and buried. the revisionism worked. it worked on me. until I was a law student editing a law journal article about ERA and EEA, I had no idea that universal daycare had ever been inside the Overton window.

There's a lot of dialog regarding universal childcare because of Biden's speech, but I had also not realized that it was something discussed in the '70s