Joe Biden is (currently) President of the United States

that was during a winter surge and wasn’t an incredibly contagious variant, i’m sure you’ll argue this point and i’ll be wrong somehow

the plan was afaict a total abstraction to get votes but if there was a plan it was vaccine distribution which happened on an earlier timetable than the trump admin was capable of, i think, that’s also just a thought experiment. vaccine disparity between us and world still unforgivable ofc

“keep the economy humming even or especially if it costs lives” is such a deeply embedded cultural value idk if we’ll ever see the other side of it

like i’m still blown away that there was ever a lockdown

lockdown-ish, as I like to call it - it was state by state, and some states never did, and various degrees of permissiveness as to what you could do. I was pissed when we reopened just about every state too early, without them meeting the guidelines established for re-opening.

but yea, I am surprised we saw Red states doing it at all - I also was shocked that we managed to get the $600 per week unemployment passed (with the predictable pushback from Rs), less surprised when the initial rollout was a disaster due to giving the responsibility to states (which was a bad move).

there was a lockdown?

yeah, a lockdown on my freedom

spring 2020 when the they decided to actually try paying people to stay home (republicans no less) was, in retrospect, very radical for the us imo. those few months with no traffic and a paycheck every week, more than i've ever made before, were totally amazing from my pov. feel like the last two years has been both sides of the government just making absolutely sure that will never, ever happen again.

Yeah, it definitely had the feel of "ok fine, we're gonna do this HORRIBLY DESTRUCTIVE TO THE ECONOMY thing once, but that's it, we cannot keep doing this HORRIBLY DESTRUCTIVE TO THE ECONOMY thing after so get your affairs in order!". and I suspect a lot of Rs were thinking election year when they did it - it gave "I don't need no handout" conservative cranks an out to where getting a handout was acceptable ("ah couldn't do mah job!"0

now I have friends terribly afraid of losing weeks of work and not being able to pay rent and there is eerie deja vu.

dunno how President Manchin feels about it now

the Empire of West Virginia has seceded

The sick part is, we have evidence those checks...stimulated the economy and provided household savings.

saved my mother from utter ruin (or my brother and I from ruin, more like). and many many friends.

sounds awful. for democrats, i mean, that they were able to help you. that's not the kind of message they want to be sending heading into the midterms.

don't worry I assured everybody that my folks will be reporting to a worker's prison as soon as the pandemic is over

the message, instead is this: we're back on track and we're headed toward tomorrow. we can't look back now, we've got to go forward. we have to forget where we've been and think about where we're going. where are we going? that's the question we need to be asking. we need to be listening to each other more. we need to be quiet, sometimes, you know, and just listen? everybody, just be quiet and listen, ok? now everybody, i want you to grab the hand of the person next to you, go ahead, that's right don't be shy now, it's just hands! and let's close our eyes now and just listen in, toward the middle, listening to our own breaths. let's forget the past, together. where is the past, if we can't return to it? what is the past, if your past is different than my own? when was the past, and which one was it? forget the past. no one can be wrong here.

*joe biden quietly breaks from the circle and is escorted by secret service into air force one

"dunno how President Manchin feels about it now"

https://y.yarn.co/3742b89f-8b66-4eaf-9699-a630617ce08c_screenshot.jpg

We got to sop up all that free money, because we caaint open up the KFC except at the drive through. Good lawd fellas, man's got to sit down at the KFC after the church meetin' or else he gits it all over his Sunday clothes.

that was during a winter surge and wasn’t an incredibly contagious variant, i’m sure you’ll argue this point and i’ll be wrong somehow

(sincerely not trying to generate argument with any individuals, least of all Brad, but imo we are currently in a winter surge exacerbated by travel for Thanksgiving family gatherings, just as last November, when in the previous post the same dude described it as a "surge (that) demands a robust and immediate federal response which has been woefully lacking")

(at the very least I don't see any way in which December 27 2021 is less "winter" than November 13 2021!)

Joe Biden, November 2020:

"I am alarmed by the surge in reported COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, and fatalities. This crisis demands a robust and immediate federal response which has been woefully lacking."

Joe Biden, January 2022:

lol idk, google some shit and figure it out

trump gave everyone $2000 when way less people had COVID

yeah, and they used it to buy fentanyl

$2000 in two payments over the span of 10 months, during a period of time when Rs were more amenable to voting "Yay" on a recovery package (i.e. when they had a Republican President in office whose approval rating could benefit, when the pandemic was new).

being that DINOs like Manchin want means testing for people receiving any benefits like this now, good luck getting this shit passed now.

lets not pretend it wasn't a Democrat proposal that virtually every Dem voted Yes on

Does that matter to the populace in general? A Republican President and Republican Senate were in office when people got those checks and the situation somehow seemed less hopeless. Oh, a Democrat is stopping Democrats from doing anything to assuage misery now? I'm sure when the midterms roll around "elect more Democrats to stop Democrats from stopping Democrats from helping you" will be a killer slogan.

Those dastardly Republicans just doesn't work when it was Biden who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into not restarting student loan payments at the peak of Omicron.

Got it, so should we vote for Republicans or just not vote?

that's the point.
that's why there has to be a revolution.
but it can't, because of what's happening.
so, we just have to keep watching out for that

I don't know, vote for whomever you want to, doesn't seem to matter much in the end.

today I learned a city testing site that I found by Googling charged me $1,068.89 for a test I didn't even end up getting 🙃 https://t.co/kgVSTS1bUZ

— Alex Shephard (@alex_shephard) January 5, 2022

right.

so what are the steps after that? it's that there has to be a big fundamental change, many are saying. some presidential candidates would refer to it every single day as "a revolution". but why doesn't that revolution happen. welp, yes, alas. we'll just have to keep an eye on all that

Steps after voting for whomever you want to vote for? I dunno, they usually hand me a sticker on the way out. I like to put it on my hat for the rest of the day.

Do any of you know what primaries are ? We need more people to primary out centrist assholes, and more people to run in those primaries.

i do not know what primaries are

but i know they're one of the first things in a process, probably one of the most...essential parts of it

for me it's always been about the secondary and tertiaries, though. i'm talking brown & crouppen

i enjoy primaries most when too many people are trying to primary the centrist and they each get a little bit of the vote, as a treat

With the right primary wins, 125 members of the House Progressive Caucus could have folded on Build Back Better instead of 85.

So let’s get on that revolution thing. Most Americans agree with us on that, right?

Whole lotta people showed up for a revolution last Jan. 6th!

Ok can’t succeed don’t try sorry to have said anything

the revolution will be endlessly revised

Finally, bipartisanship:

NEW: Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper claims that Trump said when demonstrators were filling the streets around the White House following the death of George Floyd: “Can't you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?"

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) May 2, 2022

Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, and we must fight any and all attempts to overturn it. As president, I will codify Roe into law and ensure this choice remains between a woman and her doctor. https://t.co/kaJbYWcYhL

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 5, 2019

but we must wait until it has already happened and is far too late, to even begin to muster a counterattack and to begin to do what is right

November 2, 2020:

The first thing @JoeBiden and I will do in the White House is get this virus under control.

— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 3, 2020

May 13, 2022:

Biden urges local leaders to use unspent Covid relief money to hire more police

May 21, 2022:

576 officers lost their lives in the line of duty in 2021. 

We passed a Senate resolution designating this week as National Police Week to honor the officers who put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities. One small way to recognize their courage.

— Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) May 21, 2022

(444 of these deaths were from COVID.)

May 23, 2022:

Two months after dropping the mask mandate, my city is at 377 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 residents in the past 7 days. This is the second-highest peak of the pandemic to date (testing is now largely self-reported, so raw numbers are certainly far higher than recorded, but will still be below January 2022.)

May 24, 2022:

A mass-murderer entered a Texas high school and killed at least 19 children and two adults. Some of the dead children were so badly shot that parents had to be DNA swabbed to compare to corpses, in order to identify them. Current police funding is at a level (40% of the total city budget) that the school district has a distinct force. Multiple members of this school district police force fired on the murderer outside the school, but failed to stop him entering the premises.

We passed a Senate resolution designating this week as National Police Week to honor the officers who put their lives on the line every day to protect our communities. One small way to recognize their courage.

This National Police Week marked the second anniversary of the protracted murder of George Floyd by a group of police officers. When hundreds of thousands of citizens protested this brutality, Joe Biden repeatedly called for the protestors to be shot and for police funding to be increased.

Joe Biden repeatedly called for the protestors to be shot

source? are you talking about the "aim for the leg and not the heart" thing?

cant believe it all started with that kamala tweet. a true butterfly effect.

the kamala effect

I do consider my legs to be part of me, yes.

sorry, not gonna buy any theory that posits Kamala affecting something