Enough With The Cutesy Titles, People Are Dead: US Politics January 2021 pt 2

a friend of friends dipped his toes into WI politics but got his ass handed to him by Rob Swearingen

Something I've been thinking for a while — the 2020 election ends up feeling similar in some ways to 2018. Obviously much less of a blue wave overall, but the same sense from a short remove that actually the election ended up looking better for Democrats two months later than it did on election night. A lot of that in this case is the Georgia elections, obviously, but also once all the noise settled down around the presidential election it looks like a plenty decisive victory (however close some of the individual states). I'm not exactly optimistic about either what can be accomplished in the next two years or how things look for '22 and '24, but ... I'm a lot more than I was in the second week of November when it felt like we'd barely escaped giving Thanos the final infinity stones but were still pretty well doomed.

I think GA has a better shot keeping Warnock in 2022 than if it had been Ossoff

def agree and wish their reelection schedules were reversed

Also helping Warnock is the fact that Kemp is up for re-election.

Rob OTM

Smart, funny, suitably gritty.

icwydtt

Kemp getting owned and Warnock being reelected would be beautiful

def agree but even so wish their reelection schedules were reversed

xxposts to self

Dems have won every statewide election in WI since Trump's election. they've been close but I feel like a good D candidate will probably win here, especially given what an unparalleled disaster RoJo has been

I'm usually overly optimistic when it comes to stuff like this but 2020 was looked upon as a horrible year by basically everyone and Trump & the Rs played no small part in that, if things are back to normal after 2 years of Dem rule I think that'll really boost their chances. not to mention every R Senator is gonna have to go on record as either betraying their party or their country and I can't see either being good for their electoral chances

― frogbs, Tuesday, January 26, 2021 11:08 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

what’s feingold up to?

but also once all the noise settled down around the presidential election it looks like a plenty decisive victory (however close some of the individual states).

true but a single half-point swing towards Trump would've given him the victory. what's so frustrating about this is that Dems have to consistently hit 53-54% of the vote just to break even thanks to the Electoral College, the unrepresentative Senate, and gerrymandering, and it sucks that we're facing five different crises in parallel otherwise they might be able to look into doing something about it

BREAKING: Biden to order DOJ to end private prison contracts as part of racial equity push https://t.co/376agiZ6Bd

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) January 26, 2021

um

i'm unable to feel good news but from a distance that looks like it rocks

Now do ICE

think of all those private prison guard jobs we're going to lose

good on em but apparently does not apply to not apply to private prisons that contract on behalf of ICE?

ic an't type on ipohne

good to see McEnany land back on her feet, she did a great job and deserves continued success and fame and fortune

Amid a slew of former Trump aides struggling to find jobs following the former president’s exit from the White House, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany may have already found her footing in the post-Trump world — by potentially boomeranging back to her safe space of Fox News.

In her termination financial disclosure report obtained by CREW on Tuesday, McEnany indicated that she had reached an employment agreement with Fox News starting this month.

it's not like she professionally lied for a fascist while prominently wearing a christian cross for a few months or anything

old man rupert murdoch has personally flown over to NYC to oversee a new era of fox news, very different from any previous one. they are going to need to make a pivot straight into christian fascism, and only rupert knows how to balance out the christianity with the fascism (the secret is not to lower one or the other, but to raise them both up until they're both at the ceiling)

She has that coveted FOX News look about her.

While there has been undoubtedly some good news from his administration so far, I'm honestly quite shocked that his tepid and pathetic COVID response isn't getting more press. So he's promised to maintain the exact same grossly inadequate pace of distribution that we already had? Yay?

He's said they intend to increase the pace; I think it's smart not to make any specific promises before a coordinated plan can actually be devised, which will also involve identifying multiple existing points of failure.

where are you hearing that? word on the street is that the 100M doses in 100 days goal was too low, and they're going to be more like 1.5M per day by early summer. that's way better than trump's response, which makes sense because the trump admin didn't have a national vaccination distribution plan.

xp

the other words on the street, though, are that there are other forms of covid-19 already forming, and since 40% of the U.S. is dumber than jenny mccarthy, we're all fucked

In the meantime, whatever else, this is hilarious.

PETER DOOCY: Mr President, what did you talk to Vladimir Putin about?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: You. He sends his best. pic.twitter.com/Fq0zglc9aK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 26, 2021

xpost - I get that he wouldn't want to promise any specific number or metric, but I would just hope he'd push for a higher bar to clear than just "exactly where we were".

he has promised specific numbers/metrics: 100M doses in 100 days

and there are indications that the number/metric of 100M was too low, that it'll be more like 150M

I don't really think it's fair to criticize them for that, the Biden admin has been on the job for one week and I think they assumed that the Trump admin would have **something** in the way of a distribution plan, not just an empty folder

saw one of the peripheral guys i spent the mid-90s with, riding back roads with while smoking weed and listening to the beastie boys or sonic youth, caping for Kayyleighh on facebook and i really felt mortality slap me in the face. guess that's the demo now jfc.

he has promised specific numbers/metrics: 100M doses in 100 days

My point is that we were largely already hitting 1M doses per day, so this is not an improvement at all. That's literally just carrying on with where we already were.

turtle derps:

But McConnell, speaking after Schumer, said it was Republicans who had secured a victory, by ensuring that the filibuster is not in immediate peril. He went to on to describe in detail how the GOP would respond if Democrats changed their position and moved to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass their agenda.

Republicans, he said, would exercise their rights to object to routine business and demand frequent quorum calls — procedural feints that would grind business to a standstill and require senators and Vice President Harris to be on constant standby for roll-call votes.

“None of us on either side want to live in a scorched-earth Senate,” McConnell said. “This gambit would not speed the Democrats' ambitions. It would delay them terribly. And it would hamstring the Biden presidency over a power grab which the president has spent decades warning against and still opposes.”

Mitch choke on a chicken leg

xp

yes, which is why everyone's expecting the goal to go up (to 1.5M doses per day, or 150M over 100 days). the problem is that it's unclear right now how many vaccinations are being held up, if there are previous ones that can be released, etc etc. the trump admin left them a project management shitshow, this is one of the most complicated projects, ever, and it's been 6 days.

“None of us on either side want to live in a scorched-earth Senate,” McConnell said from the floor of a Senate whose earth he has been instrumental in burning to an absolute fucking cinder.

it's weird to see these quotes from McConnell carry that implied "yes, we're evil, we have no choice but to be evil"

so rather than immediately jumping the gun and saying "1.5M a day is the new goal!", they're waiting until they know what they actually have now and can expect in the near future, so they can set a realistic expectation rather than aim too low again (or too high)

xp

It's a great joke, I don't care if he runs it into the ground.

Here is the video... https://t.co/aFv10lufrb pic.twitter.com/1jHIsF9vPi

— Johnny Verhovek (@JTHVerhovek) August 8, 2020

it's weird to see these quotes from McConnell carry that implied "yes, we're evil, we have no choice but to be evil"

it's the kind of abusive posture that defined Trump but was normalized by McConnell as senate majority leader during the obama years

Doocy is gonna be busy, damn

Biden with a Reagan-esque exit line.

things will come full circle if Biden starts throwing Bernie memes at Doocy every time D asks a question

I believe Biden is raising the goal to 1.5 million a day. I don't know when. Supply of the vaccines is obv a bit of a problem in getting there.

I mean, yeah, why be aggressive in pushing vaccine distribution at all? Be chill, take your time, weigh all the options. What's another 100,000 dead Americans?

i support Biden's bully campaign against Peter Doocy

Defense Production Act was only invoked a few days ago, but it seems reasonable to assume that Pfizer and Moderna were attempting to maximize production output already to meet anticipated global demand. The major problems seem to be downstream of manufacture and they arose from a shocking lack of centralized command and control, communication and coordination from the Trump/Pence administration. Biden's people have to undo the tangle and rebuild on the fly.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think we will get there and we are undoubtedly in a better position with a Biden administration than we were under Trump. Absolutely. At the same time, I find it frustrating that the one very specific metric he kept touting was not ambitious at all, in fact was what we were already meeting.

Trump was actually getting individual states to compete against each other over what pandemic medical supplies they got. Meaning there was even more of a mess. Definitely not first do no harm

apropos of nothing but I recognize that bike trail parking lot (Gordons Pond); I recently lost an argument with my son about a pine cone in that same spot