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

i understood caek was being ironic.

Just do it and be legends. Just once.

this is why I don't get why they just don't do the EO for debt forgiveness. Isn't one of the big arguments over Executive orders is that they can repealed by the next guy? what they going to do reinstate all those loans?

i think the thing is that the minimum wage should be much higher than $15. $15 isn't enough to live on in this country either, but poor people can get fucked say the leaders and corporate overlords.

_Just do it and be legends. Just once._

this is why I don't get why they just don't do the EO for debt forgiveness. Isn't one of the big arguments over Executive orders is that they can repealed by the next guy? what they going to do reinstate all those loans?

this is why I don't get why they just don't do the EO for debt forgiveness.

Because Biden doesn’t want to?

I mean, whatever. I'm always going to be a target for certain posters around here, I get it. Whatever.

I appreciate some of y'all keeping me in check when my pessimism spun out of control.

At the same time, I happen to find it highly encouraging that we are even talking about canceling student debt or talking about a federally mandated minimum wage. Because, given where we've been, it's a huge step forward. Will Biden do the right thing? Who knows, maybe not. But I'm encouraged that the trendline is pushing these ideas that were barely even pipe dreams half a decade ago into real conversations. It's not enough and it's way too late, but jfc giving up all hope isn't going to help either.

No one else gets to issue EOs unless Harris smothers him with a pillow.

Talking doesn’t mean shit if there’s no action. They’re going to lose the House in 2022 and 2024 is at best a toss-up. This is the chance to make “progress.”

I agree with Sanders when he says the only way to reach any wackos on the right is to show them results, help them even if they act like the don't want it and hey if they are still assholes about stuff at least you helped a bunch of good people too.

jvc, I'm not actually or actively trying to target you. I empathize and wish I didn't feel the way I feel.

But other than the speed and fury with which it punishes people and allows capital to flow toward the richest, the US has given up all pretenses of being an advanced society.

some of y'all are like, "trust the process"

Whether or not the process delivers a $15/hr minimum wage, or a lesser increase, or no increase, has nothing to do with my faith in it or your lack of faith in it. At this point in the political cycle the election is over and the process is being driven by powers over which you and I have little or no control. We are mainly watchers of that process, most of which occurs out of our line of vision.

My main objection to how the conversations here tend to run is the amount of leaping from speculations to conclusions about the end product and then asserting that one's conclusions about that future result constitute the sole possible truth.

I also have a personal, somewhat aesthetic objection to the highly emotional and sometimes emotionally manipulative rhetoric that gets used here constantly. It grates on me, just as my rhetoric seems to grate on the posters who employ the rhetoric I most dislike. I don't see any resolution to that situation.

xpost - I mean, my default setting for a lot of things in life is (obviously) pessimism. So I get it. And, believe me, I am newly infuriated by the spinelessness of the Dems on a near daily basis. It's maddening.

But when I step back and think about how we are seriously considering things that I've been told my entire life would never have a chance in hell of happening, I like to imagine that we still have some hope to right this ship before it sinks completely. The alternative is, I don't know, giving up completely?

posts that purport to predict the future, both positive and negative, are fundamentally flawed, is how I look at it

lol @ "geez, come one, it's only been a month" when it comes to COVID,

does this help?:

It had been 13 months by the time they took office, now 14, and they haven't closed the borders and established a contact tracing system. It's been nine months since the now-Vice-President insisted it was essential to pay everyone $2,000 a month, backdated, until the virus was suppressed, and now they're fighting about maybe sending $600, once. Americans are literally able to fly in and out of other countries, without testing, for a five-day mini-break, on a whim. There's no quarantining policy for entry. Vaccine distribution is increasing, but that was the previous administration's policy anyway. The new admin is not actually introducing new and effective policies to stop the spread, 13 months after the government learnt about the virus, despite the now-President's messaging about pandemic preparedness even before that.

Aimless, your first paragraph is exactly right, but I simply don't think that speculating or viewing things as forgone conclusions is as nefarious or manipulative as you make it out to be. Much of what I've seen in my lifetime has made me this way, and doing some amount of reading of history has helped, too.

Generally agree put contact tracing is not possible or useful when there are tens out thousands of cases a day. It’s a thing you do when there are tens to stop that growing. It doesn’t help you get down from where we are now. So faulting this admin on that is not fair.

There are too many cases to use contact tracing as a general prophylactic, but it would be a huge help to track mutants and new variants.

💅

GULP: MANCHIN OPPOSES OMB DIRECTOR NOMINEE NEERA TANDEN

— Sam Stein (@samstein) February 19, 2021

xp whoa sic is senator robert kelly?

a big blow for poster's rights

xp

does this mean Manchin is good now?

Never good but occasionally funny

This seems right.

Joe Manchin doesn’t give a shit about Neera’s bad tweets. It’s a power play.

He was pissed that Kamala went to WV to promote Biden’s relief bill and wanted to fire a shot across the administration’s bow. Tanden is controversial, which makes sinking her nom easier to defend.

— Joshua Holland (@JoshuaHol) February 19, 2021

in blast from the past news, Beto has been doing good down in TX this week

Beto run for comptroller

There is so much weird shit in the Senate that has nothing to do with anything I the voter or I just the person trying to live here care about but it does somehow ending up having big effects on what living here is like (re impenetrable Kamala-Manchin beef I mean.) Then again I guess "is Neera Tanden OMB director" does not qualify as something that has big effects on what living here is like.

Bernie Sanders will not say how he would vote on Tanden when pressed by @wolfblitzer.

"I worry less about what Ms. Tanden did in the past than what she'd do in the future," he says. Sanders adds he'll be talking to Tanden early next week.

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) February 19, 2021

It's sad that Republicans will finally be faced with the horrible reality that people sometimes tweet injudiciously.

Manchin remains a Democrat IIRC

I know--I meant the idea that the other side will reject her because of tweets.

I wasn't paying attention to twitter when Tanden was on, was she really that toxic? Does anyone even like her?

putting this here because i can't remember what the current racism thread is called. this book looks v interesting.

"Once the civil rights movement expanded America’s conception of “the public,” white America’s support for public goods collapsed."

"McGhee and her colleagues, she writes, discovered that if you “try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree … right up until they hear the countermessage that does talk, even implicitly, about race.”

Also good stuff on privilege discourse: "But her work illuminates what’s always seemed to me to be a central contradiction in certain kinds of anti-racist consciousness-raising, which is that many people want more privilege rather than less. You have to have an oddly high opinion of white people to assume that most will react to learning about the advantages of whiteness by wanting to give it up."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/19/opinion/heather-mcghee-racism.html

interesting idea... but then what? not sure how we're supposed to deal with white people who only want a "common" good that excludes minorities

Rolling Race 2021

it's not really an idea, it's a diagnosis. it's important to understand the scale of the problem. a lot of people still want to deny the scale of it, including most liberals in my area. and i'm not sure who "we" is supposed to be in your statement.

armchair liberals, of course

no i'm talking about people running for and/or occupying office in the democratic party in my city, which is reflective of the democratic party at large. and the point that "if you “try to convince anyone but the most committed progressives (disproportionately people of color) about big public solutions without addressing race, most will agree … right up until they hear the countermessage that does talk, even implicitly, about race" seems to be playing out on the national stage right now? big public solutions are currently being whittled down to nothing. in the name of not helping rich people (uh huh yeah right)

the democrats' real challenge right now is going to be - how can we further systems of oppression while still appearing to be on the moral high ground? one answer that has emerged recently is "we don't want to help rich people, so we can cut out this pittance we were teasing you with." they are dealing with the fact that people are finally calling their bluff on means tested programs and they aren't deflecting very well lol.

this is a spit take (all of this is lol) and i should probably stop posting but there's an iceberg underneath centrists like manchin and sinema and it's the internal core of racism of their constituencies.

very well said IMO

I heard Heather McGhee on the radio the other day, her examples were fascinating. Cities all over the country shutting down public amenities rather than integrate them. Swimming pools were the biggest victims. White parents would literally rather have no pools than pools with Black kids in them. (And then of course there was an explosion of private pool clubs.)

I want to read the book. I mean, it's stuff we know is part of the fabric, but her take is interesting.

Here it is, it was on Fresh Air: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/17/968638759/sum-of-us-examines-the-hidden-cost-of-racism-for-everyone

(this is not a Terry Gross episode, for those who can't take her. or you can just read the transcript there.)

yeah, McGhee is a sharp thinker. proof that not all Democratic think-tank leaders are bad!

seems utterly insane to me that the dems don’t use romney’s family security act, it’s better policy than anything those dipshits have come up with and you can claim bipartisanship. but what do I know

― k3vin k., Friday, February 19, 2021 7:38 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

cuz romney is the only Republican who supports it

jealous of those itt posting from alternate universe where Dems have 60 majority in the senate :)

They don’t need 60 votes to abolish the filibuster

they just need joe manchin to vote for the filibuster which will never happen

it might happen if the alternative is "joe manchin blocks covid relief".

https://newrepublic.com/article/161367/kyrsten-sinema-minimum-wage

If the parliamentarian rules against including the minimum wage proposal in reconciliation, and Democrats decide to overrule the parliamentarian, Sinema would still be unable to block its inclusion in the bill. The parliamentarian has no official power; the vice president, as president of the senate, decides whether to overrule the parliamentarian. It then takes 60 votes to overrule the vice president’s decision.

In other words, if the parliamentarian rules that the wage hike shouldn’t be in the bill (which is far from a given), and the vice president overrules her, Sinema couldn’t stop Harris. Even if she got Joe Manchin and Angus King and Mark Kelly and Jeanne Shaheen on board, they would not be able to block the inclusion of the minimum wage proposal. Their only other option would be to sink the entire package over one of its most popular elements.

Kyrsten Sinema is bluffing. It’s a bluff Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris should call.

It takes an incredible amount of work to be the worst freegan.

god I fucking hate these people so much

i like clarification on the authority of the vp to change senate rules but man theres a lot of rules need changin.

did anyone ever clarify why that vp didnt decide the impeachment vote would be a secret ballot? i dont love secret ballots, but *shrug*.

but i also think they should secret ballot kicking out insurrectionist senators. i’m pretty sure 17 gopers would kick out cruz in exchange for an abbot appt.

theyre clear they’ll play 52 pickup. they played it and been playin it and signs sure point to “keep playin it.” show them the cost of 52 pickup. make em fucking pay. but then DELIVER THE GOODS.