To be fair, I strongly suspect that Biden and a good chunk of democrats don’t give a shit either.
1 Like
The last Democrat who really gave a shit about it was Al Gore. The world would have been different had he won the election (which I still think Bush jr stole)
1 Like
I meant the Republicans don’t give a shit about bipartisanship.
Democrat presidents are always reaching across the aisle, but you never see that from their GOP counterparts.
3 Likes
Back about 15 years ago when Biden was a Senator(Lieberman-Sanders bill in discussion at the time), I was surprised to see how conversant he was with climate change policy. His real sticking point was always the possibility of the US taking unilateral action in the absence of a framework that required meaningful reductions or constraints elsewhere.
It’s not an equal playing field given what the two sides ostensibly think about the role of government and what they want to achieve. Their respective views on government has one side wanting to create things and the other wanting to ossify government so things stay the same. The levers that are available to the respective sides to achieve their goals are different.
In the absence of the green portion of he BBB bill, Biden is left with only executive powers and that is a particularly shit way to go about solving long term problems. They are subject to easy reversal, and the administrative cost of making changes only to then revert back a few years later is enormous. Doing something you know is going to be overturned as soon as the other party gets back in the Whitehouse is a bigger waste of time and resources than doing nothing.
President Kamala Harris, step on up!
On a serious note, I hope Biden is OK. At his age Covid can easily be serious.
3 Likes
2 Likes
The Secret Service have provided only a single text message to the J6C confirming that every other message has been lost as part of a fucked up data migration that occurred in the days after the riot. For those with any doubt, none of this is remotely credible. Not that the practices they claim they followed (which relies way too much on individual agents being responsible for the fidelity of their data, and the outcome requiring that every single agent did it wrong), nor that they would go ahead with the planned migration without first making sure everything was backed up given the historical events they were intimately involved in just days prior.
And this is the guy who is the white house with a large help from the “but her emails” crew.
5 Likes
This should be a massive scandal. At the point where the Secret Service is no longer accountable, both of its roles have to be taken away.
5 Likes
Yeah. Add in that they knew there were guns at the event on the ellipse and did nothing. It is difficult to express how out of line with SOP that is for them. Now we know they have clearly participated in an agency wide cover up of their activities on that day and it’s not just mind blowing in terms of the illegality, but critically undermines their ability to carry out the responsibilities they are in place to do. People continue to use Watergate as a comparison, as in this is as bad as Watergate, despite pretty much everything about the trump presidency being orders of magnitude worse.
I think this is why the fake scandals the Trump people go on about are so damaging. When they invariably then do the awful thing they accuse other people of doing it creates a tendency to view the issue through the lens of the hypocrisy rather than the real seriousness of the issue itself.
6 Likes
A significant issue amongst all spectrums of society. It’s a little crazy.
Watergate was shocking for the time, probably wouldn’t last more than a few news cycles these days. Certainly wouldn’t get to a Senate trial.
2 Likes
Ah jeez, he’s gonna get elected again isn’t he
It’s ironic that the main reason there is no progress in helping the common American IS the Republican Party, yet he gets to use that as an excuse to get re-elected
I think the J6C hearing have had a bigger impact than most assumed. The Murdoch Media empire appears to have dropped him in favour of DeSantis and we’re increasingly seeing evidence of the MAGA voters going along with that. Everything is liable to change once the campaign properly kicks in to gear, and you can easily see Trump doing to everyone in the field what he did to them in 2016. Murdoch’s move is not a principled one, meaning they want a different candidate and will try to create the environment to make that happen, but if Trump takes the legs away from DeSantis, who I think will be a far less attractive candidate than most assume, Murdoch will come back to home to Trump.
The irony is I think the way the press and Washington types act, they will fall over themselves to present a DeSantis as a return to Republic normalcy (see Glen Younkin in Virginia) rather than treating him as the more polished version of Trump he really is. That will create the path for a victory for him in the General election that I dont think Trump has, but I still think Trump is the most likely nominee.
1 Like
Just got back from a week in FL, and I saw a a few people flying flags saying DeSantis 2024. Obviously it doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things, but I could see some traction for him. I don’t like the fella, not just in terms of his positions, but he also seems quite mean spirited. To me he very much looks like a Trump lite - younger, better orator, better debater, sharper, a bit-less-mafia-like-crime-lord, but cut from a similar cloth.
Some of the Murdoch empire has broken ranks with Trump. That could be telling too.
I have to say I am disappointed with the Democrats. I think there are too many old school Dems that enjoy their comfortable positions, but aren’t in the trenches scrapping it out effectively. The rules have changed. The Republicans have seen to that. A reasonable Democrat, reaching across the aisle, is going to get nowhere. And other Dems - like Kirsten Sinema, and Joe Manchin - just stymie the Biden agenda and stop big things from getting done.
With the economic fallout from Covid and the Russian war of aggression hitting, Biden will be a fall guy for it. It will add into the mistaken political mantra that the Democrats can’t be trusted with the economy, and I expect the country to tilt Republican, both at the midterms and the next Presidential election.
It is a horrifying thought, especially when you consider how the levers of power, from the Supreme Court down to voter suppression, are skewed in a Republican direction, but that’s what I expect will happen.
The old breed of Democrats are not fit to prevail in that sort of fight, so Pelosi, Schumer, and others, will need to move aside.
A new breed will need to come to the fore, AOC, Tlaib, Omar, etc. perhaps aligned with some capable moderating forces too, like Buttiegieg. They will need to work out how to gain traction and prevail in the mid to long term, as I think they would have support from the public in big policy ideas, but they would need the political ring craft to dismantle, or overcome, the stacked deck that the Republicans have been building for some time now.
1 Like
I think the problem that needs to be solved is the seemingly growing distance between what voters understand and feel vs what is true.
Trump and Bernie together opened up the door to acknowledging that the standard economic metrics the experts use to judge the strength of the economy often have little bearing on how the general public are experiencing the economy. Trump and Bernie had different ideas on what they meant and how to address it, but it opened the door to a rejection of these standard metrics. Trump used that during his presidency to allow the entire discussion to be based on vibes and that seems to have carried over into Biden’s presidency. We now have a vast collection of polls that show voters believe the economy is objectively bad, but personally are feeling ok…its like a form of concern trolling. Voters think the economy is losing jobs despite it adding millions. More voters now think we’re in a recession than thought we were in one in during the Trump covid lock down when there actually was one.
Ultimately I think voters cannot get their heads around actual policy and markers of performance of the economy and government. They respond to vibes and that is all narrative driven. People like Newsome and Bernie understand how to tell a narrative. Very few other democrats do and instead want to point to policy positions that no one understands or can connect to how it improved their situation.
2 Likes
Good point. And Gavin Newsome is one to watch for the Democrats, for sure. As Governor of California he has an enormous job, which would be like running the 7-8 largest country in the world. But then recently he has taken out ads to poke at Ron DeSantis in FL, saying come to California if you want freedom and prosperity.
On the one hand, Florida is nothing to do with Newsome, so he had no business doing that. On the other hand, he wields a lot of power, so he can spark a fight with whoever he wants to. And at that point it looked like a preemptive sort of move for some sort of national run for office. Gain recognition outside your own State, and poke at a bear in another state who might be a future political rival?
Game on.
Covfefe.