Enough With The Cutesy Titles, People Are Dead: US Politics January 2021 pt 2

Long thread, by a reporter, about a couple of things in Buttigieg's mayoral background, only a few of which I'd read before:

Pete Buttigieg testifies today on his nomination to run the Dept. of Transportation.

I spent almost a year covering Buttigieg. He refused to speak with me, so I’m going to thread some of the things senators could ask him about today.

— Jonathan Larsen (@jtlarsen) January 21, 2021

Wait, you're telling us a clear CIA plant with no ethical sense is also a racist asshole?

(sorry, my absolute loathing of Mayo Pete has been ratcheted up again now that he's back on these scene. What an absolute turd of a human he is)

Hey, Amy Klobuchar says he's nice.

He is loathsome.

Wow tabes easy on the associative nicknames i beg

My favourite terrible fact about Pete Buttigieg (that I learned the other day) is that his husband still has a thirst trap picture of Mayor Pete in front of the Holocaust Memorial up on his Instagram.

That guy's actually called Chasten?

Wow tabes easy on the associative nicknames i beg

― Qanondorf (darraghmac), Friday, January 22, 2021 7:19 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

please, Mayo Pete is my father. call me Mayonnaise Pete.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/house-congressman-gun-andy-harris_n_600a0874c5b674575ae423ae

the courts would take them away from people

― Clay, Friday, January 22, 2021 2:19 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Then you get popular support for packing them

deems, Mayo Pete has been a nickname floating around Black social media since the guy came into the spotlight, fwiw. I just think it's hilarious and so am all for it.

lol

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55765516

I was reading the WaPo blurb on Biden cleaning house at Voice of America, and I was kind of surprised to learn:

The federal government spends $637 million annually to support the five news networks — VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Middle East Broadcasting, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting and Radio Free Asia

For scale/comparison, NPR's annual budget is around $250 million. So those five I assume very specialized and small international news divisions combined are the cost of two and a half NPRs? Has anyone ever caught any of their programming? For some reason I always thought it was just some person in a closet secretly tapping out morse code or whatever, but I guess it's more sophisticated than that?

JUst being reminded that Biden had to stop work on the Southern border wall. Was tasht actually urgent? I thought very little work had been done on that anyway. THought it was more of a talking point than a construction project.

Or is that the light that Biden took it in so made a firm pronounced stand against the idea instead of preventing a major construction fro continuing and therefore wasting money., Though might be interesting to have a rusting hulk stand asa folly and recognisable relic of the trump mess.

deems, Mayo Pete has been a nickname floating around Black social media since the guy came into the spotlight, fwiw. I just think it's hilarious and so am all for it.

― The return of our beloved potatoes (the table is the table), Friday, 22 January 2021 13:36 (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Irish geographic joke, all good

don't names like "office of cuba broadcasting" and "middle east broadcasting" tell you why we spend more on it than NPR spends? it's not for the purpose of giving the world free information and entertainment

Year ago, when I had a radio with short wave on it, it was pretty easy to listen to VOA. Don't remember anything about it though.

The fact that democrats can't seem to figure out how to deal with this first minor speed bump is very dispiriting.

They've figured out what to do -- they need to do it.

it's not for the purpose of giving the world free information and entertainment

So you're saying it's spy stuff and propaganda? I always thought the point was to be propaganda by way of diverse programming. Anyway, otherwise "office of cuba broadcasting" doesn't really explain it to me. How much can it cost to run an office dedicated just to Cuba?

Answer: Office of Cuba Broadcasting has an annual budget of $28 million, so something like that is a tiny piece of that $640 million budget.

How much can it cost to run an office dedicated just to Cuba?

yes but you have to put Cuban American radio grifters here in Miami on the payroll

VOA reaches approx 250 million people worldwide in 40 + languages so as propaganda goes, pretty broad reach. effectiveness is different question

lol

UNTRUTH USAGM programs are just propaganda
No. The mission of USAGM and its networks is to broadcast accurate, balanced, and comprehensive news and information to an international audience. The mission to promote freedom and democracy is achieved through journalistic integrity and through the dissemination of factual news and information to an audience that typically does not have access to a free press. USAGM broadcasters know that their effectiveness is based on their credibility and that their listeners are not interested in propaganda.

don't names like "office of cuba broadcasting" and "middle east broadcasting" tell you why we spend more on it than NPR spends?

Cf. Radio Martí, which has been broadcasting into Cuba since the early 80s, despite Cuba effectively jamming every minute of its programming, making it a colossal waste of time and money.

Note: Radio Martí is independent of the VoA, so whatever VoA is doing is ALSO a colossal waste.

My wife just did a good job perhaps explaining it to me, by suggesting taking NPR's annual budget, but then adding in the budgets of all the local NPR affiliates, and then have the programming designed to reach many different countries, cultures and languages. Adds up, especially if all these VoA affiliates and adjuncts have top-notch NPR-quality programming, with high production values, name reporters, etc.

Radio Marti is one of those Reagan-era boondoggles that no one much talks about yet should.

wait, which minor speed bump is being referred to?

Whether Schumer will tell McConnell to screw himself over the filibuster.

VOA has decent reporting, analyses less so,
having worked on journalism and media projects that have interacted with many countries across africa can def tell you that people do not give it any where close to the same weight as say, BBC or to a lesser degree RFI
Al Jazeera English service had had a huge surge of trust in early 200s but think as everywhere more and more people getting their info/misinformation from social media and much less from radio which had been the cheapest and broadest way to reach ppl. Now cell phones becoming more and more ubiqituous FB and WhatsApp or Telegram messages are where more and more ppl turn to for info

had no idea radio free europe still existed

i thought caek said they didn't have enough votes to get rid of the filibuster?

the moment my mom got her first fake news drops from fucking Line, I died a little inside

Radio Free Europe is a decent follow on twitter ime? Idk about their broadcasting.

Buttigieg is terrible and I hate that he's competent enough to move up through the ranks but a non-trivial chunk of me keeps coming back to "competent enough" and hating how much the rest of me craves that after the past four years.

Breaking: Leader Schumer says that Speaker Pelosi will send the article of impeachment to the Senate on Monday.

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 22, 2021

that's the stuff

This is phenomenal news. https://t.co/iW1QLq2KaD

— Ryan Morgan (@ryanheadedsouth) January 22, 2021

lol even David Brooks has come out more or less for getting rid of the filibuster, and he is a giant equivocating wuss.

"more or less"

Manchin has stated he will not nuke the filibuster - stating basically that without the filibuster there's no reason for having a Senate.

In a saner world, this might even sound like a noble principle. Rather than the simple majorities that allow legislation to pass the House narrowly, the Senate is there to cool the passions of the rabble, and ensure that legislation consists of things with broader support than 50%+1. Theoretically, needing to get 60% would require legislators to craft bills that have bipartisan support and that benefit a wider portion of the people.

Unfortunately that's not the world we live in. In the world we live in, the only bills that are supported by 60 Senators tend to be shit like "National Puppy Day."

David Brooks — the columnist @JoeBiden could absolutely not stop quoting during the Democratic primaries — floats Democrats nuking the filibuster. https://t.co/MlgV2L8Aib pic.twitter.com/LsA6kSt3R6

— Kevin Robillard (@Robillard) January 22, 2021

Well, he's in a sense right: without the filibuster the United States has two legislative chambers whose members get elected differently but serve the same purpose.

So amend the Constitution and eliminate the Senate.

The Brooks excerpt:

Everyday, I read that Republicans will never go for these spending plans, and I always want to ask the writer: Have you noticed that Republicans have already voted for roughly $3 trillion in new spending over the last 10 months? Do not underestimate how divided and confused their party is right now. Do not underestimate how much Republicans trust Biden personally.

Do not underestimate how many congressional Republicans would like to send checks to their people. Recently, I was on a call with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus and a similar group of senators. I was struck by how passionately these Republicans and Democrats are committed to one another across party lines, how deftly they used the evenly divided Congress to restart the Covid-19 relief effort in December, how fervently they want to break the partisan logjam.

If this doesn’t work and Republicans go into full obstruction mode, Democrats should absolutely kill the filibuster.

Someone should tell brooks how many republicans in the problem solvers caucus voted to overturn the results of the election.

That might be, on the whole (and plenty of it is still bullshit), the single smartest column David Brooks has ever written.

was on a call with the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus and a similar group of senators. I was struck by how passionately these Republicans and Democrats are committed to one another across party lines, how deftly they used the evenly divided Congress to restart the Covid-19 relief effort in December, how fervently they want to break the partisan logjam.

I don't believe a word.

There was a Politico article last month about Biden's media diet, and it mentioned David Brooks and Thomas Friedman as favorites of his. Since then, I've been hoping that he would have staffers who would slip him columns by Jamelle Bouie and Ezra Klein, but if Brooks is advocating for killing the filibuster, then that's good, too.

In a saner world, this might even sound like a noble principle. Rather than the simple majorities that allow legislation to pass the House narrowly, the Senate is there to cool the passions of the rabble, and ensure that legislation consists of things with broader support than 50%+1. Theoretically, needing to get 60% would require legislators to craft bills that have bipartisan support and that benefit a wider portion of the people.

not to mention, in this world, the 50 democratic senators represent 41 million more people than the 50 republican senators (roughly 56% of the total population).

I don't believe a word.

I mean, I believe they *said* it