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

who's sleepin now you son of a bitch

"You know what happens during sleep? Your worst nightmare!"

a one-time payment of 1,400 isn't FDR

FDR had massive majorities to work with in Congress, not a 50-50 senate. He's doing well enough.

The people who talk about “the checks” over and over again like it’s the entirety of the covid relief package sound pretty far from being progressive. It’s weird.

Who?

People are saying

the best people

the prog people

So it's like there are only 2 real parties in the US so the Raving Monster Looney Party just became a branch of the GOP?
Amirite?

"became"

One thing at the moment with any thingto do with justice. I think most committees had the gavel turned over to them earlier this week but there was still some delay about confirming Merrick Garland. Could see why they might just be dragging their feet about that but do hope they grow up soon.
Did also just occur to me that it might look better if it was the forces of justice that were seen to be objectively looking into crimes of teh last administration rather tahn it being Dems per se. MIght just be something they were trying to have conveyed for the visuals . Though i think it is almost inevitably going to be contextualised as the Dems who are doing thhe investigating.
Anyway there were objectively noticeable crimes done by the last administration which should be obvious to anybody who isn't automatically going to dismiss anything done by them since that would mean it couldn't be a crime. There still appear to be more crimes being committed by those involved happenning. Really do hope we can exit bizarro world and see bad punished, good rewarded. Would be like an American dream or something.

Trump trigger warning, but this is lol-worthy. Two weeks after leaving office our former president is proudly touting his work on Zoolander.

Turns out that the scene in Wall Street 2 which he also cites proudly was cut from the film, possibly due to his extreme ineptitude at acting, and inability to even wear a tie straight.

”politics isn't about the weird worship of one dude”

Former GOP strategist Tim Miller breaks down the three current GOP congressional factions: 1) The Fear Caucus, 2) The Kraken Caucus, and 3) The Milhouse Caucus.

I'm gonna sample jim jordan saying digital thunderdome and turn it into the dopest song

lol @ "The Milhouse Caucus"

Can they borrow a feeling?

It's really something that current GOP delays/distractions follow months of not just legislative foot-dragging and obstructing but outright (and ongoing) cheerleading and enabling of sedition. And now they're all, hey, let's just move on, in the name of unity, while at *the exact same time* still delaying and distracting and obstructing, let alone in the middle of a deadly pandemic (whose death toll remains at least partly their fault) while teetering on an economic precipice (which they've never showed much interest in fixing, anyway). If there's a faction in that party offering a viably cooperative way forward, it's clearly not that effective in the face of all the batshittery and ratfuckery. So fuck the GOP, in any form. I hope they eat one another. Literally.

We're probably about one or two iterations of insanity away from that being a literal reality. First openly-cannibalistic GOP rep elected by 2024 at the latest, calling it now.

look, not eating people is the old politics

Biden should just ban it, they'd be eating each other in no time.

https://d28hgpri8am2if.cloudfront.net/book_images/onix/cvr9781439159231/paula-deens-the-deen-family-cookbook-9781439159231_lg.jpg

Cooking for the whole family.

They are trying to survive while the tectonic plates of our politics shift underneath them. And they are willing to go along with anything to keep from falling through the cracksKraken.

I think it's just a question of who gets to keep the GOP brand at this point. If they don't have the courage to force Trump out of the party while he's out digging up nutcase primary challengers on his revenge tour, now likely featuring MTG as the opening act, will Mitt & Co. go independent, or form a centrist alliance of some kind?

The Mitthouse party.

tbh I endorse the Republican Party going full Platters

The Republican Party
The Mitt Romney Republican Party
The Republican Party of Freedom
etc

we were all saying boo-urns

Just really leaning into being terrible here which is refreshing at some level. pic.twitter.com/gc0FxcKP9R

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) February 5, 2021

And the My Pillow guy apparently bought time on one of those kook right wing networks to air a three hour movie about the stolen election and the ... end times? I wonder if Kirk Cameron is in it.

He must really want to get sued to oblivion

"TAKE MY MONEY! I'LL ONLY SPEND IT ON CRACK!!"

This whole notion that "the Republicans have to make a choice" was always false. They can't make a choice, they need every vote they can get and that especially includes the MTG base, which is where a good chunk of the party's energy is right now. This is their current coalition, and if it includes a sizable number of straight-up white supremacists, would-be secessionist militias and general conspiracy kooks, so be it.

After Larry Summers op-ed warning about dangers of doing too much, President Biden today at the White House:

“The one thing we learned is we can’t do too much here. We can do too little. We can do too little and sputter."

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 5, 2021

biden...gets it? how long till he tells sinema/manchin to just shut the fuck up and vote

lord, if only we'd had a leader when the pandemic started. this is all great and i'm thrilled that Biden's getting the right messaging on this, but we're still just plugging leaks at this point. don't get me wrong, I"m thrilled about the fact that we finally have the government acknowledging it can't abandon its civilians any more. just lamenting how being held hostage by that melon-headed cunt for 4 years damaged people in ways that may be beyond repair.

but that's a refreshing statement by Biden. t hank fuck.

surely if you broadcast something you know is libellous, you get sued, even if someone else has paid you to broadcast it?

MyPillow guy Mike Lindell’s big lie special on OAN begins with an epic disclaimer pic.twitter.com/3nsoAznOUU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 5, 2021

do OAN want to get sued so hard they meet their makers?

I'm not OANed
I'm not OANed

Oh, I'm sure that disclaimer will take care of things for them, no worries.

It's like if you let a murderer murder people in your home but post a disclaimer about how you do not condone the murders taking place in your home. The police are always just like 'okay, cool'.

well Marj is up here reveling in this shit.

Say whatever else you like, but Lindell is an amazing orator. It's like aural butter, listening to him speak. Smooth.

Marjorie Taylor Greene on Trump: "The party is his. It doesn't belong to anybody else." pic.twitter.com/Euig27W1x0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 5, 2021

by all means, let the guest who is tooling one off on your dinner table do so while you tell other guests to do their best to keep eating

With his election fraud video, the MyPillow guy is trying to recapture the magic of Plandemic, which took on mythical status when it was banned from major services for being so dangerously wrong.

But nobody seems to care about this one, and he misspelled the title on YouTube.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 5, 2021

So far the MyPillow election fraud movie is just Mike Lindell narrating a PDF about how we should probably have a civil war. pic.twitter.com/ABarzx14rU

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 5, 2021

The Mike Lindell "docu-movie" is a rapid run through every minor character from the post-election. Even famous Giuliani witness Melissa Carone is here.

Possibly relevant: Lindell says he's been working 21-hour days on this and getting 3 hours of sleep a night. pic.twitter.com/QDk726lVHt

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 5, 2021

But those three hours of sleep are heaven, natch.

He's a Viking iirc

Also, very notable here on the labor front:

BREAKING: the NLRB denied Amazon's motion, allowing the union election in Bessemer, AL to proceed. "It's long past time that Amazon start respecting its own employees; and allow them to cast their votes without intimidation and interference" -@sappelbaum https://t.co/Bz8DpTxi8v pic.twitter.com/23FsgxPq2v

— RWDSU (@RWDSU) February 5, 2021

I am reminded that one of Biden's first actions out of the gate was canning that NLRB counsel who was a Trump appointee and clearly on the business side of things. Willing to bet that was a factor in this beyond the decision itself.

publicly admitting you only get 3 hours of sleep is such a disastrous marketing move for this guy