Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of November 27

Washington Post editorial board: If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage (archive link)

As the researchers Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox have noted...

siiiiiiigh

here is a comment I wrote criticizing that Atlantic article when it was published back in June.

tl;dr - they're both conservative political hacks. calling them "researchers" is a real big stretch.

and as with the Atlantic op-ed, this Washington Post op-ed cites a survey from a conservative think-tank as its main piece of evidence:

According to a major new American Enterprise Institute survey...

these authors actually go a bit further than Stone and Wilcox, and almost propose a solution, but in a very mealy-mouthed way:

A cultural shift might be necessary — one that views politics as a part of people’s identity but far from the most important part.

what "cultural shift" might that be? well, the mismatch is that young women tend to be liberal and young men tend to be more conservative.

so what they're actually advocating, though they don't have the guts to come right out and say it, is that liberal women need to compromise and date conservative men. ignore that those men don't believe women should have bodily autonomy or reproductive rights. it's for the good of society, you see. something something declining birthrates.

and the laundering of right-wing ideas into the mainstream of US politics continues. the Washington Post gets criticized by conservatives as being part of the "liberal media". yet we see here that the editorial board is promoting a thoroughly conservative agenda.

Indicted Republican lawmaker George Santos expelled from U.S. House

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The House voted 311-114 to immediately remove the controversial freshman lawmaker, above the two-thirds majority required to oust one of its own.

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A bipartisan congressional investigation last month found that he charged almost $4,000 for spa treatments, including Botox, to his congressional campaign account. He also spent more than $4,000 of campaign money at the luxury retail store Hermes and made "smaller purchases" from OnlyFans, an online platform known for sexual content.

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Santos is only the sixth member to be expelled from the House, and the first who has not been convicted of a crime or fought for the Confederacy during the 1861-65 U.S. Civil War. Democrat James Traficant was the last member to be expelled in 2002, following his criminal corruption conviction.

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