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Michael Hobbes

@michaelhobbes.bsky.social
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  1. 1

    "We may think companies are immoral, but that’s because we assume they are coldly dedicated to their bottom line, not making billion dollar decisions based on something someone sent them on Facebook."

    We used to be able to buy things in this country
    Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy
    1,485 232
    Jul 25, 2026
  2. 2

    This ideology has been far more damaging to the country than anything the DSA is proposing
    www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

    Joe Manchin was born in 1947 in Farmington, West Virginia, a small coal mining town. He was a local football star and attended West Virginia University—where he met his wife, Gayle—on a scholarship before suffering an injury that sent him back home to run his father’s furniture store. Sixteen years later, in 1982, he decided to run for the state house. Impressed by the Republican congressman Arch Moore’s decision to help his Democratic father secure a small business loan, he announced, to his father’s chagrin, that he would enter politics. He wanted to serve his constituents, he says, though he doesn’t explain what he wanted to accomplish for them; he reasoned that he “was raised right,” with “good values,” and was “a talker” who would like the work of campaigning. What are these “good values”? Manchin rarely specifies. “My journey in public service has been defined by standing firm when I must, finding a compromise where it’s possible, and always putting my state and my country above politics,” he explains. He writes more about legislation that he killed—ranging from abortion rights to cap and trade—than about bills he championed, although he does discuss supporting a gun background check bill after the Sandy Hook shooting, introducing bills to address the opioid crisis that ravaged West Virginia, and helping to write the Inflation Reduction Act under Biden. He seems to care most about what he views as fiscal responsibility, constantly seeking to rein in “reckless spending and unchecked government overreach,” and always finding compromise, no matter what the issue is. Manchin is widely understood to be captured by corporate interests—he repeatedly shielded his family’s coal business from regulation, to the detriment of action on climate change—though he understandably fails to address this on his own.
    1,125 187
    Jul 26, 2026
  3. 3

    Reply to @michaelhobbes.bsky.social

    If you make me take my phone out at the store to buy toothpaste I am going use it to buy toothpaste online

    1,048 113
    Jul 25, 2026
  4. 4

    Reply to @michaelhobbes.bsky.social

    "I don't want to make anyone's life better — that's why I got into the profession where you're supposed to make people's lives better."

    If one were to imagine an alternate timeline in which Kamala Harris won the 2024 election—persuading voters for whom pessimism about the economy was often the dominant issue—perhaps the decisive episode to revisit would be the death of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislative package. This, as much as any, may have been the moment when reality forked. Under the plan an estimated 3.4 million Americans would have gained health insurance, families would have saved thousands each year on childcare, and 35 million households would have been able to rely on monthly payments from an enhanced child tax credit, among many other provisions to make life more affordable. Its collapse helped convince voters who wanted solutions to the insecurity created by inflation and the long-simmering crisis of inequality that Democrats lacked the necessary fighting spirit. The legislation passed the House and had support from every Democrat in the Senate—except one. Joe Manchin opens his memoir, Dead Center, with a meeting in the White House. In stilted reconstructed dialogue, the now retired Democratic senator from West Virginia—who declared himself an independent shortly before the end of his last term—dramatizes his conversation with Biden in the Oval Office on December 14, 2021. The president, calling Build Back Better “my hallmark legislation,” is asking for his vote. Manchin responds that passing the bill would “forever change the psyche of this country to be ‘what more can my country do for me.’” He recounts how, after the meeting, he went on Fox News and announced that he would vote no. “I had just killed Joe Biden’s ‘hallmark legislation,’” Manchin writes, with evident glee.
    579 76
    Jul 26, 2026