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So today I met with a client. He’s a 53 year old Mexican immigrant who arrived here as a teenager with 0. At 25 he started his own little restaurant in a suburban NY community teeming with Hispanic mainly Mexican immigrants. 28 years later, his restaurant is such a success that he bought the building for $1.6 million and now it’s worth $3.5 million. While I’m meeting him the workers cleaning his exhaust system are working around us. I ask him about them; the owner of the small business is a Guatemalan immigrant in the country for 15 years. He worked for a contractor for 13 years then started his own business installing and cleaning exhaust systems. He has 3 employees. Suspect that his son/daughter will probably be a doctor, lawyer or executive somewhere. The American Dream. Alive and well in the immigrant communities of this nation.

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I am exceedingly wary of the R candidates moderating their speech or scrubbing their websites of extreme language re abortion (the election lie, too, for that matter). I see a big "bait and switch" potential here. These candidates should be asked point blank what their views are concerning the various aspects of the abortion debate (and the Big Lie). Even with that, the specter of bait and switch looms large in the background.

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Ted Johnson's piece is fantastic. Great insight into conflating Dream and Promise.

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The American Dream has always been a pipe dream, if not an outright lie, for significant proportions of Americans. The American Dream should have actually been called the white Christian male American Dream.

Even then, it only really held for a brief period between WWII reconstruction, up until the death of union membership in the 1980's.

Now, Americans have the lowest rate of social mobility of every industrialized nation, don't have universal healthcare coverage, and have maternal mortality and just general life expectancy numbers that are on par with third world countries rather those of other Western countries.

This fake American Dream has been abused by Republicans for decades. It's how they get the poor and uneducated to consistently vote against their own economic interests. Why do they vote for a party that is only interested in protecting the interests of the uber wealthy? Well, because the mirage of the American Dream tells them that one day, they too will be millionaires if they just work hard enough.

The American Dream is such a ridiculously ironic misnomer.

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The question of what constitutes ‘upward mobility’ in our society is unfortunately easily able to be reduced to ‘how much is enough?’ I think it should be enough to be able to achieve great things AND be constrained to a maximum annual personal income through a progressive tax. One more private jet benefits no one, even the owner.

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Dobbs is a transient issue that will affect the next election and the next election only because:

1) The 2023 recession (+ stagflation) is going to dominate the conversion going into the 2024 election so much that we'll be asking ourselves "remember when Dobbs happened? That was only a year ago!" come next year when the national subject has shifted to the next set of jingly keys. American voters have an incredibly short political memories, and it is SO important--especially for highly-educated Bulwark readers--to remember that *the majority of American voters are not as rational and well-informed as you are because they think with their gut more than with their gay matter*.

2) MAGA takes the house either way, so all Dobbs does as a motivating force is lessen the gains MAGA is already set to make before the country moves onto the next issue (likely the recession).

3) Once MAGA takes the house, they will be the ones driving the news narrative with Hunter Biden investigations and pointing out how hypocritical liberals are for going after MAGA elites on corruption when liberal elites are equally corrupt (there are of course, GREAT degrees of difference between MAGA corruption and Biden corruption, but America is largely blind to matters of degree once two sides are doing the same shit).

If you think the Dobbs decision will do more than buy the dems a few less seat losses in the house *this election* and then become a backseat issue from there then I don't know what to tell you. You're simply *not* paying attention to how things work here and how short our national attention span is.

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First Republicans have been clamoring for Biden to apologize for suggesting that the Republican Party has become a home for racists, white supremacists, Christian nationalist--- oh, and Nazis. Aside from the fact that truth is an absolute defense against slander, libel and defamation---- Biden should apologize just as soon as Republicans quit calling Democrats socialists, communists and baby killers.

I hope that Republicans are richly rewarded for their post-Dobbs insanity.

Putin only really has to wait until Trump is back in 2024... so Biden needs to win the war in Ukraine sooner rather than later.

The American Dream is exactly that a dream that hever has been and never will be.

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Thank you, Jim for a well analyzed look at how the GQP is coping with their own "success" to debase and deny full citizenship rights to women. I do hope their own insanity brings them to their knees. The entire GQP could benefit from a bit of suffering, and humiliation, if it inspires them to change at a fundamental level. We can only hope. And vote.

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Nancy Davis' problem isn't solved by exceptions for rape, incest, or the [physical] health of the mother. I don't think any Republicans would be willing to do anything because the language of it gets too tricky. "Pregnancies that won't result in a viable baby"? "Pregnancies that produce children with critical genetic abnormalities"? They are all going to sound like science fiction/eugenics.

This is the problem they have created for themselves by not trusting women and their doctors to make proper health decisions.

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The extract of Eric Edelman's remarks on "Beg to Differ" was good to highlight, but there was another great exchange when Edelman was asked about diminishing US munitions stocks.

The latest "Shield of the Republic" podcast, with Amb. John Herbst joining Edelman and Cohen should also be featured.

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The narrative of the American Dream--greater economic prosperity for the next generation-- is obsolete when everyone realizes that we have no idea what jobs will exist in 20 years or how long they will last. That is where we are today. Therefore, creating political expectations using an obsolete narrative imperials that messenger in the long run. Narratives about meeting great challenges, like fulfilling the ideals of liberal democracy (or the flip side of the coin, fulfill the ideals of our constitutional republic) and meeting the challenges of a new economic frontier may play better.

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I just finished reading Sarah Churchill’s book about the origins of the “American Dream”. I suggest that you read this book for a deeper dive into the many meanings of the American Dream!

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The Republican party SHOULD be associated with the horror and suffering that women are now being put through. It was their court, their pols, who have inflicted this, who have taken from women a right to self determination and bodily integrity. The deluge of nightmare stories we've seen since Dobbs are the inevitable result of the actions of the forced birth movement, and these stories don't even include the women quietly suffering, the women forced to bear children they don't want and can't support, the children born into worsening poverty, the lives and dreams and aspirations now limited and constrained. Making abortion illegal is always a horror show.

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Aug 30, 2022·edited Aug 30, 2022

The modern American woman has about 360 ova in her lifetime. Let's call them eggs.

It's always a question of which of those ~360 turn into babies. Some intentional attempts don't make it; some unintentional ones make it. She may decide on two or three in her life. Either way, she ain't gonna have more than ~ 1.7 on average to success.

If Romesh Ponnuru and David French can indeed convince a ten year old rape victim to fully gestate, she will likely decide early on to stop the charade and turn off subsequent ones (by a variety of means). On the otherhand, if she aborts early ones and becomes an executive, she may have her share in her thirties. May be she will freeze some and have them later.

The question is: Who should be playing God with the fate of those 360 eggs?

I certainly don't want Romesh or David to play God. And definitely not Ted Cruz. Let it be the girl/woman.

The forced-gestation crowd needs to realize that it's a zero sum game. If they want to improve on the ~1.7 average, change the support system. Not by force.

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