Vaccines, Infrastructure, and Kids In Cages: US Politics April 2021

See how they’re suffering already? The Australian government had to take broadcast rights away from the public broadcaster, AND give a $30 million untendered grant, AND then another $10 million bonus for no reason, just to show women’s football exclusively to a fraction of the previous unrestricted audience. Lebron has Rupert on the ropes.

xp

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bernie-sanders-senate-budget-committee-b1825305.html

they call him the idea man

No idea what the trends are on this but I’m constantly struck by the range and quantity of objectively successful people who enjoy some of the highest living standards in human history who are nonetheless consumed by bitterness.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 30, 2021

Might as well collate this Gaetz story from circa 2013 itt:

U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz accused of creating sex game with 'points' for sleeping with staff

More details now revealed:

Matt Gaetz's Florida sex game included a 'Harry Potter' challenge and 'extra points' for sleeping in sorority houses, a female Republican tells Insider

Anyone who had sex with a certain conservative woman "won the whole game regardless of points," she said. That woman was known as the "snitch," a nod to the "Harry Potter" game of Quidditch. The GOP source said she "heard specific references of Gaetz being involved and scoring points." She declined to name the woman to protect her privacy.

Another way to obtain points was to have sex with "virgins," ABC reported this week, citing a source

Lawmakers who participated publicly bragged about it, even among their female colleagues; some male legislators who didn't participate jokingly lamented the fact that they abstained, the Republican said.

Some - to me - quite good and surprising picks in here and, after a quick scroll through, no immediately glaring omissions either, although I'm sure they'll come when I think on it a bit more.

(Of course 18 years is a hilariously short period of time to even think about a canon and even tho it is essentially a click-bait article, it seems like it would be of interest here).

http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/a-premature-attempt-at-the-21st-century-literary-canon.html🕸

🐦[Damian Lillard didn’t used to hold back💀 pic.twitter.com/p0Yvt3eFUJ🕸
— r~ steph curry’s burner acct~ (@fymroo) May 8, 2020🕸]🐦

preemptive apology as i am not spotify savvy, but there was a series of old school hiphop compilation albums from the early 90s called /street jams: hiphop from the top/ and they really gave me an education back in my junior high cassette walkman days.

part one🕸
part two🕸
part three🕸
part four🕸

there was also the slightly more "new school" oriented (i.e. post-run d.m.c.) but equally as great rapmasters🕸 series. i had like five of them, but i never knew just how many volumes there were. according to discogs, there were at least nine volumes (!!).

https://reverb.com/item/35773270-japan-casio-fujigen-eg5-1984-grey-guitar-with-a-cassette-player?show_sold=true🕸

Also, this stuff still resonates...

🐦[Biden could end up with 306 or 290 Electoral College votes and a popular vote margin of over 5 million. If Trump got this, it would be seen as a big and decisive win. https://t.co/LE290cLc3o🕸
— Tom Wright (@thomaswright08) November 4, 2020🕸]🐦

Trump loses popular vote but manages an EC win, GOP parties like it's the biggest mandate ever. Dems win popular vote even bigger and manage a likely similar EC victory, it's all *tug at collar* aiiiiie we better not screw this up.

what am I looking at here?

ILX's most consistent poster.

#oneveryoddthread

good morning!

what?

It’s called a digest. Now we don’t need to go anywhere else!

#onethread
#onepost

he's getting ready to make a deal

West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin said he does not support Biden's infrastructure bill as written. He does not support a 28% corporate tax rate and says that 25% is more appropriate, reports @elwasson.

Manchin was appearing on the WVMetroNews' program, "Talkline."

— Nancy Cook (@nancook) April 5, 2021

let's call it 27% and then hire antifa to do the catering

yeah Froggy wants a-courtin'.

Lol at Talkline (cf Simpsons' "Smartline").

Some actual good news

FUCK YESSSS. Everyone you made your voices heard. Gov. Hutchinson has vetoed the bill.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) April 5, 2021

He explains that the bill is creating new standards of legislative interference in the decisions of families and physicians.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) April 5, 2021

why are you making me google governor hutchinson

oh fuck wow, that is good news I was *not* expecting

of course...

Gov. Hutchinson recognizes that General Assembly will likely override. This is not over. Arkansas has a simple majority override. We have to flip a lot of votes. Keep up the pressure folks. We need to protect trans kids!

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) April 5, 2021

What I think you're seeing here (and maybe I'm wrong, I can't look into the dark souls of these people) is that the struggle between the true-believing loons and the traditional cynical business-suit-wearing "I just don't wanna pay taxes" people within the GOP is not over. The difference between "happy to spout vile anti-trans BS to cynically win votes" and "actually believes they were put in office by The Lord God to enforce genital determinism" may not look like much, but here it is, the difference. Human rights for trans people are not a threat to capitalism, and business-suit Republicans have no reason to alienate tons of people, including some rich people, unless it's to protect capital. Democrats relocate shoe factories too.

Human rights for trans people are not a threat to capitalism

*phew!*

one for the c&p over and over thread

some leftover gaetz schmutz
https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2021/04/02/heres-the-creepy-voicemail-from-matt-gaetz-and-joel-greenberg-left-for-florida-rep-anna-eskamani

:)

Earlier this week, the Times broke the story that Gaetz is being investigated for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl and violating laws against sex trafficking in the process. The story has since been confirmed by multiple outlets, as well as Gaetz.

https://media2.fdncms.com/orlando/imager/u/blog/29073527/screen_shot_2018-08-21_at_10.31.16_am.png

nightmare material

Matt Gaetz is an extremely dumb motherfucker who, in a just world, would not have been trusted to do a single damned thing, ever.

and yet, somehow he has failed upward at every step

tbh a driving motivation for me to accrue wealth and power is to have the resources to partially inoculate my kids from their inevitable fuckups

The only photo more frightening than that one:

https://i.imgur.com/93dlDpx.jpg

who's da meathead on the right?

that's Joel Greenberg

Infrastructure Week is here!

#BREAKING: Senate parliamentarian to let Democrats bypass GOP filibuster on two more bills https://t.co/2DLODweqZc pic.twitter.com/TUDcfnGUl7

— The Hill (@thehill) April 5, 2021

nice

Oh fuck

Thank you senate parliamentarian!!!!

Infrastructure Week is here!

Yes, but it was all Trump’s idea.

A little over a week ago, I called on the USPS Board of Governors to fire DeJoy.

Today, I received the letter below informing me that, "DeJoy continues to enjoy the Board's full support..."

RT to tell them how unacceptable this is. pic.twitter.com/0QDIxnVJQa

— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) April 5, 2021

This article is pretty good, though the first paragraphi is blood-boiling.

When the political scientist Robert Pape began studying the issues that motivated the 380 or so people arrested in connection with the attack against the Capitol on Jan. 6, he expected to find that the rioters were driven to violence by the lingering effects of the 2008 Great Recession.

Why did he expect that? The author apparently never asked him.

But instead he found something very different: Most of the people who took part in the assault came from places, his polling and demographic data showed, that were awash in fears that the rights of minorities and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American politics and culture.

If Mr. Pape’s initial conclusions — published on Tuesday in The Washington Post — hold true, they would suggest that the Capitol attack has historical echoes reaching back to before the Civil War, he said in an interview over the weekend. In the shorter term, he added, the study would appear to connect Jan. 6 not only to the once-fringe right-wing theory called the Great Replacement, which holds that minorities and immigrants are seeking to take over the country, but also to events like the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 where crowds of white men marched with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us!”

“If you look back in history, there has always been a series of far-right extremist movements responding to new waves of immigration to the United States or to movements for civil rights by minority groups,” Mr. Pape said. “You see a common pattern in the Capitol insurrectionists. They are mainly middle-class to upper-middle-class whites who are worried that, as social changes occur around them, they will see a decline in their status in the future.”

Well, yeah.

I am just gonna assume based on that first paragraph that Robert Pape is a comfortable white man

https://popular.info/p/mcconnell-versus-the-first-amendment
(worth subbing to imo)

As Georgia considered its bill to restrict voting, Delta refused to take a position. But about a week after it passed, CEO Ed Bastian issued a memo that said the new law is "unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values."

Hours later, Georgia Representative Sam Watson (R) introduced an amendment "to repeal a tax break on jet fuel." The provision was quickly approved by the Georgia House. Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (R) did not try to hide that the measure was retaliation for Delta's statement on Georgia's voting law:

They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them, and they reap the rewards of those benefits and then turn around and do this. As all of you know, I can’t resist a country boy line or two, you don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You’ve got to keep that in mind.

The provision was not taken up by the Senate and the legislature adjourned, so it will not become law. But Ralston said the issue "could be revisited during next year’s legislative session."

booming Jamelle Bouie column:

The laws that disenfranchised Black Americans in the South and established Jim Crow did not actually say they were disenfranchising Black Americans and creating a one-party racist state.

I raise this because of a debate among politicians and partisans on whether Georgia’s new election law — rushed through last month by the state’s Republican legislature and signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican — is a throwback to the Jim Crow restrictions of the 20th century.

Democrats say yes. “This is Jim Crow in the 21st century. It must end,” President Biden said in a statement. Republicans and conservative media personalities say no. “You know what voter suppression is?” Ben Shapiro said on his very popular podcast. “Voter suppression is when you don’t get to vote.”

The problem with the “no” argument here is that it mistakes both the nature and the operation of Jim Crow voting laws. There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.

I haven’t read the article by the person who was shocked SHOCKED to discover the rioters were racists, but in defence of his initial assumption it turns out they were mostly failed business owners and bankrupts. Like literally a majority of them.

Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades, according to a Washington Post analysis of public records for 125 defendants with sufficient information to detail their financial histories.

lol

This maybe the wackiest Civil War memory story in a while. 20 years from now this will make a great vignette in a book on Civil War memory. https://t.co/sc8T1PwbhU

— Dr. Adam H. Domby (@AdamHDomby) April 5, 2021

http://www.al.com/resizer/BFnI2oW2apxmcR9AEUi-OCw0WAU%3D/700x0/smart/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/advancelocal/VP4XCFMJE5FN3AN3KYGCHRQEBE.jpg

I was very confused because I misread the group name as White Lives Matter and I was like "I think irony is irrevocably broken"

In other news: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/06/politics/alcee-hastings-died-florida-democratic-congressman/index.html

A guy constantly in the news down here for most of my childhood.

I saw the Davis toilet/chair article last night and misread it the same as DJP, provoking momentary, "wha-what?" before I re-read the name.

I would make a nice donation to be able to relieve myself on the Davis toilet/chair.

Valuing that chair at half a million dollars is just a load of stupid pro-Confederacy propaganda. The communique from the group struck just the right tone.