“It’s a little too quiet” - US Politics February 2021

enhanced unemployment was to help people who lost their jobs, it was the program that paid many people more than they had ever made in their lives working retail and by God we couldn't have that continue on unabated

I'm currently collecting unemployment in NJ and between the state and the feds I get a little over $500 a week; it's definitely helpful. And I don't know how long the federal bonus cash will last, but NJ keeps extending unemployment — I'm gonna be able to stay on the rolls until mid-June at present.

thankful that my mother is getting the federal $300/week bonus again

i'm one of those people who made more than they ever had in their life with the cares unemployment last summer for about 3 months. i paid down most of my credit card debt! i could afford new tires for my car! i put two grand in savings! it was incredible.

Source tells me that roughly half the House GOP conference gave Marjorie Taylor Greene a standing ovation after she rose to speak a few min ago.

— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) February 3, 2021

She ain’t going anywhere.

the House is filled with the fringiest extremists of the party so I'm not exactly shocked but it did make my hair stand on my neck for a moment reading that.

I suspect this is more 'protect one of our own when the libs comes for her' but to me idgaf why they're applauding, they should be booted too

Here's that Pelosi release:

https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/2321-0

McCarthy (Q-CA) Fails to Lead, Hands Keys to Party to Greene

February 3, 2021
Press Release

* Sen. John Thune: House Republicans Must Decide if They Want to Be the Party of QAnon *

After several conversations and literally running away from reporters, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Q-CA) made clear that he is refusing to take action against conspiracy theorist Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. As a result, the House will continue with a vote to strip Greene of her seat on the esteemed House Committee on Education & Labor and House Committee on Budget. McCarthy’s failure to lead his party effectively hands the keys over to Greene – an anti-Semite, QAnon adherent and 9/11 Truther.

McCarthy’s cowardly refusal to deal with Greene breaks with calls from Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Republican Jewish Coalition and several prominent members of the party to take action against Greene.

As No 2. Senate Republican John Thune warned Tuesday, McCarthy has chosen to make House Republicans “the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon” and Rep. Greene is in the driver’s seat.

honestly...i hope i'm wrong, but this is not good. it may destroy the GOP earlier, and yeah, it's crazy and they sure are cowardly and dumb. but i think this is very bad. i was worrying earlier today about what would happen if a few more Q people manage to get elected, and that was back when i assumed MJT would face some sort of real accountability or be stripped of a position or at least be reprimanded. i did not have "House GOP formally goes full Q_anon" in my First Week of February 2021 bingo card

Well, we already found out what it's like to have a Q-ish president, so ...

like, whey did they even bother censuring steve king, the neo-nazi from iowa? maybe steve will see the GOP's renewed commitment to 8chan derivatives and make another run in 2022. i'm sure MJT and her party would welcome his very interesting views (some might say conspiratorial) about white supremacy

It’s not going to destroy the GOP because this IS the GOP. They are throwing their full support behind the Q fringe. We were deluded into hoping it would tamper down with Trump gone, but I think this week really hammers home that a not insignificant part of the GOP openly supports and endorses this bullshit and the rest are too fucking cowardly to denounce it.

ngl Liz Cheney #resitance hero is bumming me out. i'm sorry can someone remind me what she was doing the last 4 years? these folks don't make a peep until they're the ones in the crosshairs.

Liz indulged herself in frequently being 'troubled' by Trump's words and actions, but she didn't trouble herself to do a goddamned thing about it until after the insurrectionists invaded the US Capitol building. Her vote to impeach him, on the second time she had the chance to, was welcome anyway. Strange bedfellows and all that jazz.

Her vote to impeach him,

just the second time right? i mean, credit where it's due, but not nearly as tough a call after he's lost an election and whipped up a bunch of yahoos that literally endangered her life.

I don't know which House Democrat it was, but I liked the guy who said--responding to the idea that this sets a bad precedent where one party can take away committee appointments by the other--that if the line for that is going to be advocating murder of another House member, Democrats are just fine with that. And I think it's great that they're forcing all the House Republicans to vote on Greene tomorrow.

Agreed, Clem. The time for rolling over is long long past. Come hard as nails against this noise.

xxpost Liz Cheney is horrible and has said shitty/terrible things within the last 4 months so this one little thing for me is a pebble. esp since anybody with their frontal lobe destroyed could know impeachment - yay was the right vote.

You have to give Liz her due, which is not a hell of a lot when you come to examine it: one impeachment vote, but only on the second try.

No one needs to give anyone in that family anything except the middle finger

Like I said, give her what's due her.

I dunno, Lon certainly had his moments

there's a road near where I live called Old Cheney Road and usually I mistake it for a deer and shoot at it

lol

McCarthy feigned ignorance of the Q-Anon. He said he denounced “Q-on”.

“I don’t know if I say it right, I don’t even know what it is,” he said, despite having directly addressed the conspiracy theory group, and pronounced it correctly in the past.

McCarthy insisted that Marjorie Taylor Greene had denounced the conspiracy theory as well while speaking to her fellow Republican congressmembers. “I think it would be helpful if you could hear what she told all of us,” he said.

i don't even own a racist cult

“I think it would be helpful if you could hear what she told all of us,” he said.

"come on Marjorie, tell the rest of the House what you were telling me a moment ago. come on, don't be shy. come on, you were just doing it!"

lol what a fuggin tool

ive joked about Trump trading cards featuring the universe of sewer dwelling die-hards who were/are happy to indulge his worst instincts

but you could do a pretty good one with the actual monsters who got rehabbed (however briefly) on resistance social media, eg Bolton, both Cheneys, GEORGE W BUSH ffs, Bill Kristol, that Lincoln Project pervert, etc

James Comey, who was 48% of the reason we had Trump at all!

i don't even own a racist cult

lol

but if we’re sending out the same $1,400 checks just to fewer people, that’s just less stimulus period.

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) February 3, 2021

lol but also sob

The state of the American right: Newsmax anchor @gregkellyusa had to walk back his criticism of the Myanmar coup because too many of his fans support military coups. Kelly is now coup-ambivalent. pic.twitter.com/qdXmae9ifo

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 4, 2021

Coup made who?
Coup made you

Cheering on military coups has always been normal for the American right, tho

Eh i didnt know who that fascist was, but now having scanned his shit— why would one not expect him to be pro coup?

right wing conservatives are such persecution pornstars, they probably jerk-off to Golan Globus movies

I think it was more that he tweeted out something against it and got mercilessly ratioed by Trumpers and Q types who were absolutely furious that “their” coup didn’t work that makes it especially lolsad.

the new information was probably that the military without any civilian leadership will be even more brutal to the Rohingya

well, i'd expect that marjorie taylor greene has learned an important lesson, and she'll be changing her tone next time a-

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) would like the public to know that she’s apparently relishing in the backlash over her conspiracy-ridden remarks that have spurred calls for her expulsion from Congress as well as the revocation of her House committee assignments.

In an interview published in the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, Greene touted that she believes Democrats’ efforts to boot her off of committee assignments will help clear her schedule so that she can go on a national tour for the purpose of getting more Republicans into the House next year.

“How stupid they are,” Greene said, before Democrats on the House Rules Committee voted to advance a resolution to strip her membership on her committee assignments on Wednesday, setting up a final vote in the full House on Thursday. “They don’t even realize they’re helping me. I’m pretty amazed at how dumb they are.”

Greene said that she’d rather work toward campaigning efforts that would give Democrats and Republicans she views as centrists, including the GOP leadership, less sway on Capitol Hill.

“I think Republicans need to get back to who they are, and they need to stop talking and actually doing,” Greene said. “And (House Minority Leader) Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and all these leaders, the leadership, and everyone is proving that they are all talk and not about action, and they’re just all about doing business as usual in Washington. And so, what’s the difference between them and the Democrats? There isn’t a difference.”

oh weird! for some reason, after the leading house republican failed to take any action against her lies and many of her colleagues gave her a standing ovation for...?....it seems that she's emboldened to double-down! weird and very unexpected!!

republicans need to get back to who they are - reaaaaaaaaaaaaally huge pieces of shit

and they need to stop talking and actually doing

*strap a "trump won" mask on, do a podcast tour*

Yes! Get back to being the party of John Wilkes Booth. "Sic semper tyrannis!"

Remember when the worst person you knew was just some drunk asshole who lived down the street and not an elected official who held the fate of thousands if not millions of constituents in their shitty little spite hands?

This thread is well worth a read. A lot of assholes from Trump times are being systematically thrown overboard.

!!! Biden fired four of Trump’s awful appointees to @acusgov, an obscure but important agency with a lot of influence over the federal regulatory process. One of them, Roger Severino—Trump’s anti-LGBTQ warrior at HHS—is suing.

Complaint: https://t.co/esq1AnSz26 h/t @ZoeTillman

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) February 4, 2021

Remember when a bunch of US Attorneys got the chop and Alberto Gonzalez had to say “the pleasure of the president” a lot

Tangentially related to this thread, but I wanted to say I've been having fun (somewhat guiltily) reading r/wallstreetbets. Of course it's idiotic and silly, but tbh I legitimately gleamed a better understanding of how Q-Anon worms its way into peoples brains - the Inception-stacking of irony, rampant fantasy and misinformation, channeled into a frothing loop of confirmation bias. They really are the Q of finance, but thankfully I don't see a pack of self-proclaimed "retards and autists" marching into government buildings with guns when they get pissy.

As I understand it a healthy economy depends on the amount of dynamic flow through it I. E. Exchange of money. So the importance of the stimulus cheques is as much to do with there actually being arterial cash flow as individuals getting a needed handout. Is that right?
Cos I do think the economy was already teetering on the brink after 4 years of t and his accolades abusing it. That's before it was hit again by the effects of a widespread act of God or whatever equivalent term one would use.

But on the other hand looks like we're still stuck in a place where bad is heavily rewarded. Would be great if this was the first stages of the GOP actually imploding. One thing I'm noticing from comments here is that it presumably does put turtle mitch on the outs. Not sure if there is anybody as good at organising on the now popular batshit side of the party. Would assume belief in a nutzoid conspiracy might suggest that unlikely.

But on the other hand looks like we're still stuck in a place where bad is heavily rewarded.

c'mon, "Where bad is heavily rewarded" could basically have been in the Articles of Confederation

Useful review of what happened in 2009/10 https://theintercept.com/2021/02/03/democrats-covid-stimulus-obama-lessons/

christ what a cast of miscreants in that piece: Baucus, Nelson, Rahm, President Scott Brown, Messina, DeMint. and there’s no hell hot enough for Chuck Grassley.

also I’d totally forgotten about how close that Franken/ Coleman race was and how it gummed up the works.

I don't know if it's been posted but in case anyone else couldn't bypass the New Republic paywall for Sam Adler-Bell's profile of Manchin
https://archive.is/gMDil