Beware the Ides of March -- U.S. Politics March 2021

Meanwhile, I am enjoying the mental image of Lindsey Graham with his AR-15, sniping through his blinds at the post-tornado pillagers. Ideally he is in a bathrobe and slippers.

If only she knew someone on the inside ...

White House, 2019
Proceedings of the President's Coronavirus Task Force
Pandemic Level: Code Red

BIRX: Get me a man on the inside. Get me the Chair of the President's Coronavirus Task Force, Mike Pence.
Mike Pence: ...
FAUCI: That would be Vice President Mike Pence, Chair of the President's Coronavirus Task Force. Who is sitting in his traditional and fundamentally ordained position at the head of the table.
PENCE: That's right. I am the Chair of this Task Force.
BIRX: Thank you Dr. Fauci, thank you Vice President and Chair Mike Pence. I've noticed that President Trump keeps mocking COVID and acting like it's not a big deal and blaming it on China in a racist way every single day even though everyone repeatedly keeps asking him to stop saying things that increase nationalistic and racist hatred.
PENCE: ...
MARK MEADOWS: The Vice President is deliberating. But I'd sell my soul for money at any rate, at any rate all!
BIRX: I see. Vice President, also consider that far less than 100,000 have died in the U.S., as of the morning of this very funny meeting, and there are plenty of things we could do to prevent deaths over that number. For example, one thing that keeps coming up in the research is the problem of the entire GOP and their very persecuted follower-victims being united in the idea that COVID is overblown, that the cure has become worse than the disease, that it was implanted here by a global conspiracy connected to bill gates, who is now coordinating federal officials to make sure that the vaccination death sentence "passports" will all contain the mark of the beast, that there's no way a healthy patriot could get sick from COVID, that it only takes a few months off of the lives of people in the nursing homes (god bless them), but that no one really knows anyone who's really gotten that sick from it, and it's isn't it kind of fucked up that we shut down the whole fucking world for this thing, I mean think about the damage to all of us at home, and the children who aren't going to school, as well as the coordinated globalist effort to eliminate Christianity by forbidding Christians from meeting at any place at all, only in the catacombs. Pretty much the entire GOP is saying all of that, in one form or another, and it gets way weirder than that.
PENCE: ...
MEADOWS: The President of the United States. Is in the building! He just got back from the clubhouse and Christie says he is in a very, very good mood!!
PENCE: The President. My new mother.
PENCE and MEADOWS together: Our better mother.
BIRX: Isn't there an Admiral that is connected with this team? Or the Surgeon General guy, he seems pretty with it! How can we mitigate these completely preventable deaths over the next year? We need to do something!
ADMIRAL and SURGEON GENERAL carry Dr FAUCI off stage, through the seats and out of the back of the auditorium. Audience plants throughout the audience cheer and support and livestream FAUCI's exit

White House, 2020

the coverup has started

i don't even know what you're talking about in the first place, i was never here

Can someone explain to me why the Internet is mad at Elizabeth Warren this time? Is it really because she sassed the Amazon Twitter account?

To be clear, Senators shouldn’t threaten to muzzle dissenting voices but all of this appears to be in the context of antitrust proceedings and am I wrong for thinking that context has a material impact on the tenor of her comments?

lol remember a little over a year ago when Sanders vs. Warren consumed us

sure, but life moves on. among other things, first we had to endure Super Tuesday, then the world came down with covid19

Oh I get it now

New: Amazon's Twitter war with @berniesanders & @SenWarren came after Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction with the company not pushing back aggressively on criticism execs feel is inaccurate or misleading, Recode has learnedhttps://t.co/bxapcGeeck

— Jason Del Rey (@DelRey) March 28, 2021

Who's mad at Elizabeth Warren right now besides Jeff Bezos?

It was some inartful phrasing. "... And fight to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets.”

Like, that's just a dumb thing to say. You don't have to be powerful to heckle senators with snotty tweets. The internet does it all day every day. And it does sound pretty censorious. But I don't think it's going to lose Warren a lot of friends or anything.

yes and in general senators are not really the first victims of big tech overreach that anybody should be worrying about!

All I know is that I was scrolling through the timeline and Devin Nunes' Cow (I know) was comparing her to Nunes and I was like "uh where is this coming from"

Thinking creatively!

Axios: Schumer believes he has a route to move additional bills by simple majority.

Schumer aides argued to the parliamentarian that revising this year's budget resolution could "trigger an additional set of reconciliation instructions," which would allow further 50-50 votes.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 29, 2021

NY in fine company with SC, AR and whichever dumb, square state that is.

― What's a vaccine? (PBKR), Sunday, March 28, 2021 12:16 PM (yesterday)

I kinda feel like they are being realistic though, whereas my fine state of CA is just like, "sure everyone is eligible as of April 15th" ... not that it reflects whether everyone is actually going to get it any time soon

lmao

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/upshot/trump-biden-geography-quiz.html

clicking through these, being unable to visually decipher which of these neighborhoods are heavy trump zones vs heavy biden zones, i feel like there is a subtle lesson here. the american education system is broken

Karl's house has the biggest-ass American flag.

for a while I was going off of whether the visible cars were foreign or domestic and doing pretty well ...

this graph is incredible. you never see lines that straight!

This chart shows that trend in aggregate: the closer to 50-50 the vote was, the harder time people had guessing it right. (Astonishingly linear btw!)https://t.co/o5NBvoj7U7 pic.twitter.com/6oWnXEyjCJ

— Kevin Quealy (@KevinQ) March 29, 2021

I didn't even try to guess; I just hit the Biden button for every one and was right about 50% of the time.

lol same, only I hit the Trump button

fun fact: all but two of the Trump neighborhoods I got were in Ohio

If you see flags, it's Trump.

I also missed a neighborhood 5 minutes from me, lol.

kind of curious about those extreme outliers

i saw flags but it was biden (massachussetts)

not really familar with the trump / biden signifiers of the northeast but other than that i did pretty good

If you see flags, it's Trump.

I also missed a neighborhood 5 minutes from me, lol.

― What's a vaccine? (PBKR

um not really? I thought so with the first slide. Turned out to be a Biden district.

I’d say those fascist thin blue line flags are probs a pretty good Trump indicator, but I didn’t see any...

kind of curious about those extreme outliers

― John Cooper of Christian rock band Skillet (map), Monday, March 29, 2021 1:51 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i think one of them is bay ridge brooklyn

NEW: The initial draft infrastructure proposal circulated at the White House called for $3T in spending & $1T in tax hikes, per 3 sources familiar

But this week, White House expected to push ~$4T in spending & as much as $3.5T in tax hikeshttps://t.co/eSUt55MX8B

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) March 29, 2021

it's almost impressive how creative people (white men) can be with their thin blue line themed death cult fascist bumper stickers and paraphernalia. like, a skull, with a beard, with a gun, with a helmet, against blue and black stripes. like damn you sure love all the death-related stuff! at least all the giant trump flags are finally gone.

i think one of them is bay ridge brooklyn

Yeah I got this one, clicked Biden and was corrected.

We took the quiz and kind of defaulted palm trees and pick ups =Trump, which was generally correct. There were a few that made us pick Trump because it looked pretty rural, but we were sometimes wrong with those. Though of the ones we were wrong on it was often a place where one or the other won by 1%.

I got 20/21, only one or two legit "guesses."

There's the one photo with no houses, just a wooded area (houses are there, you have to scroll around) and I'm like, I don't know how Mr. and Mrs. Woodchuck voted.

mr. and mrs. woodchuck voted for donald j. trump, i'm sad to report

their son woodchuck todd doesn't vote to maintain a veneer of objectivity

Don't know if this is the right thread but:

BREAKING: Arkansas has become the first state to ban health care for trans youth.

— ACLU (@ACLU) March 29, 2021

On Monday morning, Fox announced a new paid contributor to the channel: Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

“Welcome to the family,” “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said to Lara Trump when announcing her new role.

“I sort of feel like I’ve been an unofficial member of the team for so long,” Lara Trump replied, capturing the state of affairs quite accurately.

also, philip bump sucks

lol okay

NEW: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has privately told confidants he's seriously considering not seeking re-election and possibly leaving Congress early for a job at Newsmax, three sources with direct knowledge of the talks tell @axios https://t.co/ILFDBefB0w

— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) March 30, 2021

pay and benefits and exposure are likely better, this guy has no interest in public service

Yeah, I mean, why would you not do this? The only part of the job these guys like is strutting in public and why would they not take a gig that has that without the annoyance of having to campaign, etc. Ron Johnson could end up there too.

OANanism

gaetz is gonna pull a palin, huh

who is the youngest fascist in congress, madison cawthorne? put him on the show, too. dude doesn't even have a policy team in DC; they straight up replaced it with a "communications team"

I've said this before, and I usually don't say this sort of thing, but I wish that little fascist shit Cawthorn had died in that car accident. We'd all be better off.

speaking of which, one of the quiz images was mostly a cemetery and I was like, "Is this a trick question?"

Id also be ok w him surviving the car crash but with his pretty face smashed to bits