Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

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In 2016, Trump was aware of what his political success was based on. It's why he said Bernie would be a more dangerous opponent to him than Hillary, because Bernie could encroach on his territory. Trump-Hillary was a choice with, on one hand, the old machine that had been grinding the peasants down for years while telling us that's just how it's supposed to be, and, on the other hand, somebody admitting that there were things going wrong and needing to be fixed. Trump-Bernie would have been a choice between two of the latter.

It was only later that Trump would end up falling in line with the Republicans he was surrounded by.

And after being out for a while, he started to have a return to his original non-Republican self, scolding them for taking some of their ideas too far and thus harming their own party's image with the voters as a result. And when he did that is exactly when his popularity started recovering.
 
Here's a glimpse at what real presidents do, even if it doesn't get them much publicity.
Two years ago, when Biden assumed office, China believed that it was overtaking the United States technologically, intimidating it militarily, and winning the race for global respect and popularity against an exhausted, divided America. Today, in a remarkable turnaround, China is the country that veers between covid-19 lockdowns and casual sacrifice of elders, between clobbering its real estate sector and coddling it, between persecuting its entrepreneurial champions and promising to make nice.

On the foreign policy side, meanwhile, the Biden team has inflicted a series of humiliations on its chief rival.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/03/biden-china-balloon-foreign-policy/
 
Bob001 said:
Let's just note that almost every source believed Clinton was a sure thing in 2016, so sitting it out or voting for Jill Stein was seen as inconsequential. If Sanders supporters actually thought Trump could win, they likely would have voted for Clinton. I continue to be convinced, without hard evidence, that a certain percentage of people voted for Trump not because they wanted him to be President, but just because they thought it would be a safe protest against "the establishment." If they really thought Trump could win, some might have done something else.

Clinton's worst mistake -- among many -- was to campaign as if she had already won. Nobody likes to be taken for granted. If she had ended every speech with "This isn't over! I need every vote! I need your vote!," it might have gone differently.
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Or if she had pivoted away from her corporatist position much earlier and taken a more worker centric campaign it would have helped. Clinton ran an awful, lackluster and off message campaign for a candidate that needed left wing and worker votes.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
Clinton ran an awful, lackluster and off message campaign for a candidate that needed left wing and worker votes.
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Hey now, you can't say that sort of thing out loud around here. Now everyone's going to have to pile on about how she was simply entitled to those votes and it was in fact those voters' fault she lost for not bothering to turn out for a candidate who was so confident of her victory she took them entirely for granted.

[ETA] Oh I almost forgot: while implying that despite those voters being a big enough bloc to have cost Clinton the election all by their petty selves without any other mistakes on her part they're also such an infinitesimally small bloc that no future milquetoast candidate should be expected to make any overtures towards them as a correction.
 
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Gulliver Foyle said:
It depends, are the people in badly paid low productivity jobs. In that case, then it is very bad for both workers and long term economic prospects. The UK fell into exactly this trap in the Seventies and was only rescued from being the Sick Man of Europe by EU membership.
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If you need a job, it's easier to find one you can live with when the unemployment rate is low. You may not have seen the numerous reports that restaurants and the hospitality industry are having trouble finding employees despite raising wages to historic highs because many have gone on to better jobs in other industries.

Generally speaking, low unemployment is good for workers, less so for big business.
 
Bob001 said:
If you need a job, it's easier to find one you can live with when the unemployment rate is low. You may not have seen the numerous reports that restaurants and the hospitality industry are having trouble finding employees despite raising wages to historic highs because many have gone on to better jobs in other industries.

Generally speaking, low unemployment is good for workers, less so for big business.
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It's Biden's fault that restaurants and the hospitality industry are having trouble finding enough employees. His anti-business agenda is hurting restaurant and hotel owners. This would never have happened under Trump!



:sarcasm:
 
Stacyhs said:
It's Biden's fault that restaurants and the hospitality industry are having trouble finding enough employees. His anti-business agenda is hurting restaurant and hotel owners. This would never have happened under Trump!



:sarcasm:
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I love how the service industry (at least in my area) puts signs on their windows saying "Nobody wants to work!". When you investigate, you find out they're only offering 15-20 hour a week shifts, scattered all over the map, and expect all employees to work at a moment's notice, though they'll also routinely send these employees home without notice when it's slow.

If they have kids, or 1 or 2 other part-time jobs (which they will need for a 15-20 hour a week job) they're branded as "lazy" for not finding the time to work for them.

Rant over.

ETA: Sorry, I lied. Don't forget about the jobs that "aren't meant for adults," (code for "we should be able to pay kids slave wages") said by people who think teenagers can work 24-7 shifts. ???????
 
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Biden ordered the Chinese spy balloon to be shot down on Wednesday but the Pentagon advised waiting until it was over water as a safety precaution. Fighter jets shot it down over US waters and the data contained in its hardware can now be recovered.
 
Stacyhs said:
Biden ordered the Chinese spy balloon to be shot down on Wednesday but the Pentagon advised waiting until it was over water as a safety precaution. Fighter jets shot it down over US waters and the data contained in its hardware can now be recovered.
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FWIW, I'm going to say that it's highly doubtful that it's actually a "spy balloon," rather than simply a pretty normal weather balloon that someone made a mistake underfilling and went waaaaay off target as a result. As in, it's pretty much a given that that's a lot of hullabaloo over nothing in reality, manufactured/amplified for gain by less than ethical forces. All that hullabaloo is likely to feed into CT and racist hatemongering and paranoia, either way, and add yet more stupidity to that. That it's received as much coverage like that as it has should likely be counted as an embarrassment for our country.

China's fairly certainly got spy satellites to work with, either way, and a lonely "spy balloon" where they have very limited control over where it goes, if any, and vastly greater exposure to being dealt with with pathetic ease would be rather inane, to say the least. If it was a short range thing where there was better predictability, then it could be a viable means of spying. Other side of world? Not likely.
 
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Aridas said:
FWIW, I'm going to say that it's highly doubtful that it's actually a "spy balloon," rather than simply a pretty normal weather balloon that someone made a mistake underfilling and went waaaaay off target as a result. As in, it's pretty much a given that that's a lot of hullabaloo over nothing in reality, manufactured/amplified for gain by less than ethical forces.
....
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A lot of experts are saying that this thing is much larger than a weather balloon, that the equipment hanging from it is the size of three schoolbuses, and that it is maneuverable, powered by solar panels. Not the typical weather balloon.
https://www.boston.com/news/politic...any-questions-about-suspected-spy-in-the-sky/
 
Bob001 said:
A lot of experts are saying that this thing is much larger than a weather balloon, that the equipment hanging from it is the size of three schoolbuses, and that it is maneuverable, powered by solar panels. Not the typical weather balloon.
https://www.boston.com/news/politic...any-questions-about-suspected-spy-in-the-sky/
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Correction - based on that article, the whole thing is the size of 3 school buses. No mention of the equipment size, just that it could be up to 1000 lbs. That is large for a normal weather balloon, to be sure, and by enough to lead me to reconsider my position. With that said, it's worth noting that normal weather balloons can more than triple their size, though, when they get up to around where this one is. Reduced air density and all. Of some note, there's also a very limited ability to carry weight by balloon. This one's larger than the usual, but that still remains true. I suppose we'll likely hear about how maneuverable it is actually is in the coming days, either way, but the additional weight from solar panels, potential batteries, wiring, and maneuvering equipment should be directly and significantly cutting into the weight limits.

I think that it's also somewhat worth stressing a quote from the article, too, though -

For now, officials said the U.S. will monitor it, using “a variety of methods” including aircraft. The Pentagon has said the balloon isn’t a military threat and doesn’t give China any surveillance capabilities it doesn’t already have with spy satellites.
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Even if it does indeed end up being a spy balloon, it doesn't actually change anything of note and is inferior in a bunch of ways, which makes it pretty stupid to try to use for spy purposes. That is, unless the US is greatly overestimating China's spy satellites' capabilities.
 
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Aridas said:
FWIW, I'm going to say that it's highly doubtful that it's actually a "spy balloon," rather than simply a pretty normal weather balloon that someone made a mistake underfilling and went waaaaay off target as a result. As in, it's pretty much a given that that's a lot of hullabaloo over nothing in reality, manufactured/amplified for gain by less than ethical forces. All that hullabaloo is likely to feed into CT and racist hatemongering and paranoia, either way, and add yet more stupidity to that. That it's received as much coverage like that as it has should likely be counted as an embarrassment for our country.

China's fairly certainly got spy satellites to work with, either way, and a lonely "spy balloon" where they have very limited control over where it goes, if any, and vastly greater exposure to being dealt with with pathetic ease would be rather inane, to say the least. If it was a short range thing where there was better predictability, then it could be a viable means of spying. Other side of world? Not likely.
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I just remembered that we have a totally bat **** crazy Republican party so this means that it is:

a) Totally possible for a country (a group of morons) to do something this stupid.

or (and?)

b) The Republicans are spying on Dem National Committee headquarters again.
 
mgidm86 said:
I just remembered that we have a totally bat **** crazy Republican party so this means that it is:

a) Totally possible for a country (a group of morons) to do something this stupid.

or (and?)

b) The Republicans are spying on Dem National Committee headquarters again.
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To be clear, at no point did I mean to negate the possibility of China doing something inane entirely. Especially given the current general unrest in China, there's a lot of room for dumb crap to be done for various ends, political and non-political. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if this was actually some marketing stunt or test gone wrong, for that matter, rather than an actual government initiative.
 
Aridas said:
Correction - based on that article, the whole thing is the size of 3 school buses. No mention of the equipment size, just that it could be up to 1000 lbs. That is large for a normal weather balloon, to be sure, and by enough to lead me to reconsider my position.
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Poorly phrased. Here are other links:
The substructure beneath the suspected Chinese spy balloon, believed by officials to be the steering and surveillance apparatus, is roughly 90 feet, according to a defense official. That's roughly the length of three city buses.

The balloon carrying that substructure is significantly larger and taller, the source said.
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https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/suspected-chinese-balloon-us/index.html

The payload of the balloon — that is, the part under the balloon conducting the surveillance — is the size of two to three school buses, and the balloon itself is much larger, according to a U.S. official.
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-spy-balloon-montana-flight-tracking/
 
Aridas said:
FWIW, I'm going to say that it's highly doubtful that it's actually a "spy balloon," rather than simply a pretty normal weather balloon that someone made a mistake underfilling and went waaaaay off target as a result. As in, it's pretty much a given that that's a lot of hullabaloo over nothing in reality, manufactured/amplified for gain by less than ethical forces. All that hullabaloo is likely to feed into CT and racist hatemongering and paranoia, either way, and add yet more stupidity to that. That it's received as much coverage like that as it has should likely be counted as an embarrassment for our country.

China's fairly certainly got spy satellites to work with, either way, and a lonely "spy balloon" where they have very limited control over where it goes, if any, and vastly greater exposure to being dealt with with pathetic ease would be rather inane, to say the least. If it was a short range thing where there was better predictability, then it could be a viable means of spying. Other side of world? Not likely.
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I think our Intelligence agencies are likely better at identifying weather balloons from 'spy balloons'. I suggest you're being rather premature writing it off as a 'weather balloon' or 'some marketing stunt or test gone wrong' and an 'embarrassment for our country'.
 
Stacyhs said:
I think our Intelligence agencies are likely better at identifying weather balloons from 'spy balloons'. I suggest you're being rather premature writing it off as a 'weather balloon' or 'some marketing stunt or test gone wrong' and an 'embarrassment for our country'.
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Entirely possible. We'll likely see, either way. To me, though, this is the kind of thing that feels a lot like, for example, the hullabaloo around just one of many periodic caravans of people heading to our Southern border to seek refuge. Theme well in line with right-wing narratives being pushed? Check. Blown well out of proportion in the media? Check. Ripe for CT? Check.
 
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Aridas said:
Entirely possible. We'll likely see, either way. To me, though, this is the kind of thing that feels a lot like, for example, the hullabaloo around just one of many periodic caravans of people heading to our Southern border to seek refuge. Theme well in line with right-wing narratives being pushed? Check. Blown well out of proportion in the media? Check. Ripe for CT? Check.
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"Blown well out of proportion in the media? Check." I don't agree.

As for 'ripe for CT?' Absolutely. As I've posted in the "Thread for Stupidity for GOP Politicians Who Don't Have a Thread of Their Own", James Comer is already spreading the seeds:

“My concern is that the federal government obviously doesn’t know what’s in that balloon. Is that bioweapons, weapons in that balloon? Did that balloon take off from Wuhan? We don’t know anything about that balloon. But the fact that this balloon was slowly making its way to the United States for several days and this administration never alerted anyone about the possibility of this balloon coming up, I think it is very concerning. It’s very concerning. They didn’t shoot it out of the air before it even reached the continental United States,” Comer added.

Notably, the balloon crossed into the continental U.S. from Canada and flew over Montana – meaning the U.S. would have had to shoot it down over Canadian airspace.
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Whatever it turns out to be, I presume that if they did shoot it down, an actual answer will be forthcoming. I'm holding off guessing, since crazy conspiracy theorists can turn a weather balloon into a floating doomsday, but crazy dictatorships can also do utterly crazy things and lie about them.
 
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