Category Archives: current events

Mandate!

I feel like the former president, agitatedly tapping away at my phone… fucking depressing, but there it is, as I shop for a new computer to replace a mint condition macBook that has been rendered obsolete “to protect my privacy”…

When the candidate of White Nationalists, Militant pro-fetus Christian Conservatives, Climate Change Deniers, anti-government “Libertarian” billionaires, rich people who wanted a tax break and every fascist-leaning follower Steve Bannon could bring into the fold, narrowly became president in 2016, his party’s electoral mandate, as reflected in the Senate, was 51-49 [1].

It was no problem for this narrow Republican majority to give a $1,900,000,000,000 tax break to the wealthiest Americans and their favorite corporations. It was a simple matter for them to change the filibuster rules to ram a 6-3 Federalist Society Supreme Court down America’s throat, in perpetuity.

Now, with Democrats in the narrow majority, there is a sudden cry for “bipartisanship” in our deeply divided nation, a cry taken up by two suddenly supremely powerful cartoonishly corporate Democrats, oil baron Joe Manchin III and the narcissistic Sphinx of Arizona, a senator who only talks to big donors and the president.

I’ve got no news here, except that Americans will have to settle for a somewhat puny compromise Build Back Better Act that will leave prevention of climate catastrophe underfunded and several popular, long overdue programs cut entirely. Manchin (who appears quite vulnerable in Red West Virginia — GOP voters hate him for disloyalty to Trump, any other Democrat outpolls him as the “blue” candidate) announced he will go no higher than 1/4 of the bloated U.S. military budget, and won’t sign on to any Clean Energy initiative that threatens his coal business or those of his fossil fuel donors.

Biden has agreed to all of the right-wing moderate’s demands. It will still be great, Biden insists, his party’s chance to do anything dramatic rapidly slipping away, amidst routine, painless, phoned-in GOP filibusters of all legislation the majority party proposes.

After all, as McConnell points out, it’s not like the fucking Democrat [sic] party has a goddamned mandate in this deeply divided coin flip democracy , you snowflake cucks.

Lifting millions of American children out of poverty, keeping multitudes safe from the threat of homelessness, preventing the destruction of our planet? Not nearly as compelling, to corporate Free Market donors, as more profits for the greedy investor class that funds the whole shit show. Ask “centrists” Kyrsten and Joe III.

You know what I’m sayin’?

[1] from senate.gov

115th Congress (2017–2019)
Majority Party: Republicans (51 seats)
Minority Party: Democrats (47 seats)
Other Parties: 2 Independents (both caucused with the Democrats)
Total Seats: 100
Note: At the beginning of 115th Congress, there were 52 Republicans and 46 Democrats. Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) resigned on February 8, 2017, and was replaced by Luther Strange (R-AL). Doug Jones (D-AL) subsequently won the special election held on December 12, 2017, to replace Sessions and was sworn into office on January 3, 2018.

Fascism, anyone?

Short video by the author of How Fascism Works, beginning with the cult of personality that causes the political right and democratically elected conservative leaders to fall in line behind a dominating autocratic leader.

Note that Stanley never mentions the one plank 2020 GOP party platform: whatever the Big Guy wants.

Führerworte haben gesetzeskraft!

The Leader’s word is law!

Biden…

Here’s Charles M. Blow, writing in the New York Times, on Biden’s so far uninspiring defense of the most fundamental principles of democracy.

Biden, Tepid in the Face of Catastrophe

Oct. 24, 2021

Charles M. Blow

By Charles M. Blow

Opinion Columnist

After months of tiptoeing around the issue of altering or eliminating the Senate filibuster rules to protect voting rights — and therefore democracy itself — after an unprecedented year of Republican assaults, President Biden has finally said that he is open to changing the rules. And on Thursday, he said it in the most weak-tea, weak-kneed way possible.

At a CNN town hall, Anderson Cooper asked Biden: “On voting rights, if it is as important to you as you say, I think there’s a lot of Democrats who look at the filibuster and would like to see it changed, even if it’s just on this one case. Why do you oppose that?”

Biden basically said that trying too hard at this point to save democracy would endanger his ability to save his spending bill, telling Cooper: “Here’s the deal. If, in fact, I get myself into at this moment the debate on the filibuster, I lose at least three votes right now to get what I have to get done on the economic side of the equation, on the foreign policy side of the equation.”

Biden then proposed bringing back the talking filibuster “immediately.” “I also think we’re going to have to move to the point where we fundamentally alter the filibuster,” he said, framing the craziness of the Republican filibuster to prevent Democrats from raising the federal debt limit as a possible catalyst for reforms. He concluded: “But it still is difficult to end the filibuster beyond that. That’s another issue.”

Cooper pressed on: “But are you saying, once you get this current agenda passed on spending and social programs, that you would be open to fundamentally altering the filibuster or doing away with it?”

Biden said that he would be “open to fundamentally altering it,” but when Cooper again raised the idea of doing away with it, Biden responded, “Well, that remains to be seen exactly what that means, in terms of fundamentally altering it, and whether or not we just end the filibuster straight up.”

Cooper again pressed Biden on whether he would “entertain the notion of doing away with the filibuster” for voting rights, to which Biden answered, “and maybe more.”

Why was this like pulling teeth? Why is Biden so reticent to say unequivocally that we must protect voting rights at all costs, even if it means altering or eliminating the filibuster? (Being “open” to something or “entertaining” it is not the same as demanding it.) Why does deciphering what Biden is saying here feel like working through a riddle?

Furthermore, why is it that Biden believes that he will lose whatever momentum he currently has on the spending bill by entering the debate over filibuster reform now? Won’t he also be lost if he enters it later? Also, why did he keep bringing up the debt limit debate as the filibuster destroyer, even though Cooper kept directing him to voting rights?

Biden is talking out of both sides of a mealy mouth.

You can’t move in the course of one exchange from saying that we might soon have to fundamentally change the filibuster, to saying you’re “open” to fundamentally changing it, to saying “it remains to be seen” what that change would or should look like.

Defenders of the administration’s approach tell us that this is all part of the choreography of Washington. This is the dance that must be danced. And, in the end, it will all work out: Some version of the spending bill will be passed, which will free the president to defend voting rights more forcefully.

I hope that all of this is true. I think we need what’s in the spending bill. It’s just that we need voting more.

I hope that my panic and exasperation over the Biden administration’s lack of urgency on voting rights turns out not to have been warranted. I want to be wrong on this. Being right would be cataclysmic.

Biden and the Democratic leadership want us to trust, to trust them, to trust Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. They want us to trust a system that has not earned that trust and often betrays it.

I can imagine a moment after the social spending bill vote in which Biden cranks up the pressure on passing a voter protection bill, having public meetings with stakeholders, traveling the country to lobby for it and possibly even giving an address from the Oval Office in support of it.

He could do all of that. He should have done it already.

But responses like the ones he gave at the CNN town hall are more infuriating than instructive.

Consider someone feeling like he is drowning and you do nothing until the last minute, until that moment before the panic overtakes him and he loses consciousness, and only then do you snatch him from the water saying, “Why were you freaking out? I had this under control the whole time.” How would you expect him to feel? Happy that you finally saved him, at the last minute, or bitter that you first watched and waited while he felt like he was drowning?

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Charles M. Blow joined The Times in 1994 and became an Opinion columnist in 2008. He is also a television commentator and writes often about politics, social justice and vulnerable communities. 

Bully Politics

Historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman discuss the rise of bully politics, a GOP style as prevalent now as it was in Congress in the decades leading up to the Civil War, when Southern Congressmen threatened, intimidated and physically attacked their northern colleagues. Here’s a nice slice, to whet your appetite:

Heather Cox Richardson

Because defaulting on that debt is essentially for the country to commit financial suicide, and all the things we’ve talked about in the past that would come from that. But what was really interesting about the way that the media talked about it and the way that pundits talked about it was they talked about it as if it was a Democratic problem. When in fact the Republicans were simply saying, “No, we’re not getting anything to do with this. We’re just not going to play.”

And so, the Democrats finally said, “Okay, we’ll do it on our own, even though you people ran up almost eight trillion of this in a 28 trillion debt. We’ll go ahead and do it ourselves.” And then the Republicans filibustered it, and said, “No, no, you can’t do it that way, either.” The Democrats go ahead and on a straight party line that is only Democrats vote to raise that debt ceiling, they go ahead and they buy the country until about December 3rd, to go ahead and figure out a way to raise the debt ceiling more permanently. And so, what happens?

Joanne Freeman:

So, following the agreement on raising the debt ceiling, Majority Leader Schumer gave a speech on the House floor, and he basically criticizes the Republicans for the brinkmanship, the game playing that they showed on this issue. And these are his words, Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans insisted they wanted a solution to the debt selling, but said-

Charles Schumer (archival):

Republicans played a dangerous and risky partisan game. And I am glad that their brinkmanship did not work. For the good of America’s families, for the good of our economy, Republicans must recognize in the future that they should approach fixing the debt limit in a bipartisan way.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, I will point out that’s a statement of fact. Schumer says, this is what the Republicans did. They had this risky reconciliation process that put a lot of things at risk and the brinkmanship didn’t work. So Heather, what was the response to that statement?

Heather Cox Richardson:

This is what made us want to do this episode. The response was that McConnell came out absolutely swinging. And now there’s a number of reasons he might have done that. He’s actually not operating from a position of strength right now in a number of different ways. But he says, “Last night in a bizarre spectacle, Senator Schumer exploded in a rant that was so partisan, angry and corrosive, that even Democratic senators were visibly embarrassed by him and for him. This tantrum encapsulated and escalated a pattern of angry incompetence from Senator Schumer.”

And then he goes on to say, this is in a letter to President Biden, “I am writing to make it clear that in light of Senator Schumer’s hysterics.” Important word there. “And my grave concerns about the ways that another vast, reckless, partisan spending bill would hurt Americans and help China, I will not be party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement.”

Now, what jumps out at you there is that the Republicans did everything they possibly could to make it almost impossible to pass the raising of the debt ceiling and to throw the country into default. That’s not negotiable. That’s actually what happened. Schumer said, “Hey, this is what happened.”

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m glad it didn’t work. That’s the extent of that statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And McConnell comes back with, “This is a bizarre spectacle. It is hysterics. Look at how we had this moment.” And this is actually how a lot of the media portrayed it. We had this moment in which we were all getting along so nicely. And now he’s gone ahead and thrown a monkey wrench into that, “And I’m not going to play anymore.”

Joanne Freeman:

The striking thing about that then is, if you’re talking about ranting and hysterics, and pumping up the emotion, that’s coming out of McConnell’s statement, that’s really not coming out of what Schumer is saying. So, he’s basically very upset that Schumer just made a blunt basic statement of fact about what happened. He doesn’t like that they were called out.

The Rise of Bully Politics

Voting Rights?

Republican senators voted 50-0 against DEBATE on a voting rights bill worked over by conservative Democrat and coal millionaire Joe Manchin.

Every Republican from Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Roy Blunt, Ben Sasse, John Thune, to Mike Braun, Richard Burr, John Boozman, Shelley Capito, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, Tom Cotton, Mike Crapo, Joni Ernst, to Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Fist Raising Josh Hawley and the rest of the Senate Insurrection Caucus had clear and obvious objections to Joe Manchin III’s “bipartisan” compromise bill. Manchin’s rewrite threw a few bones to Republican voter fraud mongers, notably a national voter ID requirement (not an unreasonable thing, if the IDs are easy for everyone to get). 

We can only imagine their objections since they voted unanimously to prohibit discussion of the bill on the floor of the Senate.  Here are some of the principled problems their party likely has with the Democratic compromise bill:

Election Day as a holiday is objectionable to all Republicans because it’s unAmerican, working people should have to take a day off without pay to wait on long lines to cast their vote, even during a pandemic spike.

Automatic and same day voter registration is unfair because it allows people who miss an arbitrary registration deadline to still vote.

Two weeks early voting– totally UNFAIR!

Anyone can vote by mail — an OPEN INVITATION to the massive electoral fraud Bill Barr stated was “obvious”  (before finding no evidence of it anywhere) and that Ted Cruz gave as justification for blocking confirmation of Biden’s electoral college count — widespread Republican belief in massive “Democrat” voter fraud in the Contested Election of 2020. 

Insulating election officials makes it difficult to put direct pressure on them to alter undesirable tallies!

Taking away the partisan advantage the GOP gains with gerrymandering puts the GOP at a terrible disadvantage!

Disclose!   Honest Ads!   FUCK YOU!  How dare you!

Empower the Federal Electoral Committee (put out of business by Trump for four years)?   The FEC makes criminal referrals for illegal electoral tactics! DEEP STATE! CANNIBAL PEDOPHILES!   SOROS!  GLOBALISTS!

Ballot paper trail rule is an INVITATION TO MASSIVE COLORED AND POOR PERSON FRAUD!!!

The GOP, party of only the highest democratic principles.