Dude, who even knows.
When I was taking Blue Bitch up from LA that one time I passed through Ukiah where they were having some sort of harvest festival, I guess on the pretense that anyone grew wholesome legal crops around there, and one of the booths was Wal-Mart, where they were just giving away vendor-level food and bags of candy, I also took a card that referenced their hopes to build a store on the edge of town. So they were cultivating goodwill, for political purposes.
That’s why ‘90s Wal-Mart was all about not selling pornography, and music only with Bowdlerized lyrics – so as to appear congruent with rural culture (that over the '80s had been significantly redefined in religious-moral terms) for political purposes, to lubricate local government approval processes their business depended on.
So if you’re trying to influence major retailers re: queer stuff in culture that’s one angle. A significant difference though is that Wal-Mart already largely built out through rural America in the early-mid 90s (and Target in inner suburbs and exurbs in the late 90s-early 2000s). And of course the big box model entirely faces challenge from online retail now, so all the pieces are going to be in slightly different places with different angles between them.
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So thanks to its Progressive Era western state heritage, Oregon has particularly strict and toothsome balanced budget requirements.
Oregon also has a decade-old Democratic legislative lock, teetering on supermajority. But Oregon also has a two-thirds state Senate quorum requirement, which means that a coordinated mere third of the body can go truant and render the body null – not quite an exploding Diet (the case there was a failed vote voided the entire legislative session, including matters already passed), but close.
And the Republicans have so coordinated; they may lack leverage under regular order, but thus they have established that Oregon can legislate – and budget – on terms acceptable to the Republican Party or not at all.
There’s those toothsome requirements though, it seems state operations would not continue even to the degree federal ones do under “shutdown”, the state might be closer to a federal post-“fiscal cliff”; the reference point I think of is when in the 90s the Portland school district ran out of money one year and the school year just ended a few months early
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Amusing to see the radikiddies-but-still-electoralists tantruming that Biden even negotiated the debt ceiling well rather than Green Lanterning through. Kind of hope they try to make a thing of it so they can get smacked down in the ensuing fight; Biden himself is reassuringly continuity-establishmentarian but he hasn’t really done anything to purge his party or render it safe ex-him
(ignoring the Covid maximalists to renter the world is a good start to reining in the trend starting with Bill Clinton feeling our pain that government’s just gotta do something to pacify people who cry out loudly and agonizingly enough by imposing costs on everyone else, but their approach of just not engaging won’t leave clear lessons for the rest of the party)
And what’s their leverage here? I occasionally see foot-stomping that Biden depended on their votes for election and will for reelection, but like, if they tried to sabotage his reelection and fail they could just be totally dismissed, and if they succeed… was Kerry ‘04 more solicitous of Naderites after Gore '00? I don’t see it.
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Seeing a dispensary frame cannabis edibles as the thing for a designated driver to take for the night instead, which is some innovation.
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 3 notes
Man all the rosebushes – which must have been messes under the previous methhead couple owners’ tenure and then on divorce trimmed back for sale by her dad to these thick stumps that gave off like 3 man-high nightmare canes a year – have finally been developed to the point where they split their spring growth into a candelabra of color that keeps going a while if you deadhead them. Good stuff!
Must be weird to be the guy going hard through my archives and like two days ago was the harrowing cultural crisis of the mid-2010s and now I’m just going on about my yard and how everything is awesome
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Man all the rosebushes – which must have been messes under the previous methhead couple owners’ tenure and then on divorce trimmed back for sale by her dad to these thick stumps that gave off like 3 man-high nightmare canes a year – have finally been developed to the point where they split their spring growth into a candelabra of color that keeps going a while if you deadhead them. Good stuff!
Post reblogged from Marta Monica Jaramillo Restrepo AKA La Tuti with 46,845 notes
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