Cont: The Biden Presidency (3)

[The Great Zaganza]

RBG = a former Supreme Court Justice

RGB = a color encoding format (red-green-blue, asopposed to HSV, hue-saturation-value)

I take full responsibility for the shortcomings of my spell checker and do not at all try to deflect blame.

 

[Delvo]

Biden doing a photo op with Christian Smalls (the amazon union organizer) and other union reps unironically kicks ass.

Shining some Presidential star power on union battles could really do a lot of good, and it requires no cooperation from the paralyzed legislature. Here's hoping more of this from Biden in the future.

So of course, within a few hours of that, he renewed a multi-billion-dollar government contract with Amazon, just like he'd said he wouldn't do.

It is astonishing to me how easily Republicans seem to be able to bounce back from what should be irredeemable setbacks.

They've been catering to their base, not beating it down with a sneer.

Immediately after the news broke they sent out texts and emails asking for donations, now this week they're telling protestors to not be so rude.

And the donations they took in this time were a fraction of what they took in on previous comparable occasions. Their schtick just isn't schticking like it did before.

 

[Bob001]

.....
Voters can't admit that it's their fault for not electing HRC (the SINGLE reason why this happened).

Well, if you want to go down that road, you might note that at a time when anti-establishmentarians Sanders and Trump were filling stadiums, the Democrats short-circuited the primary process and anointed one of the most controversial and unpopular faces of the old politics, and then she ran such a miserable campaign that voters who actually supported her stayed home because they believed she was a guaranteed sure thing. I remain convinced that some people voted for Trump as a "pox on both your houses" protest without imagining that he could actually win. I don't think Trump could have beaten any other Democrat.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Well, if you want to go down that road, you might note that at a time when anti-establishmentarians Sanders and Trump were filling stadiums, the Democrats short-circuited the primary process and anointed one of the most controversial and unpopular faces of the old politics, and then she ran such a miserable campaign that voters who actually supported her stayed home because they believed she was a guaranteed sure thing. I remain convinced that some people voted for Trump as a "pox on both your houses" protest without imagining that he could actually win. I don't think Trump could have beaten any other Democrat.

You are making my point.

 

[Joecool]

They can rule, but they can't enforce. There have been times in American history before when the Supreme Court's decisions were taken as advisory, not The Way It Must Be. We need to do the same again now, not only because the way they'll vote is minoritarian and crazy and destructive, or because two of the the votes for abortion in this latest case were the rapist and the sexual harasser married to a seditionist, but also because the last couple of them were appointed/approved illegitimately anyway.

I recall, when same sex marriage was approved. It was celebrated as the "law of the land". I didn't agree with it but accepted it as the ruling was made by SCOTUS.

But the democrat way is to view the ruling as "advisory" or to try and add more SCOTUS members so they can attain the outcome they desire, never mind the constitution.

That's like opening Pandora's box, especially when it looks like the dems are likely going to get shellacked in the mid terms.

 

[Stacyhs]

When R v W was passed, it became the law of the land. The idea of it being overturned was considered almost impossible:

Historically, the US Supreme Court rarely overturns decisions. In fact, in its 232-year history, it has done so only 233 times. That might sound high, but consider this: Between 1946 and 2020, there were 9,095 decisions made by the high court. In that time, data from the US Government Publishing Office show 161 overturned decisions. That’s fewer than 2% of rulings that overturn prior decisions in whole or in part.

The last time the Dems had enough votes to codify R v W was the first two years of Obama's administration, when they were fighting for the ACA which which was a lot more important at the time and fighting to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But now we have the usual whining about the Dems again. Sheesh.

Yeah, so "uniquely unpopular" HRC that she still got almost 3 million more votes than Trump. So, once again it's the Dems' fault.

 

[Stacyhs]

I recall, when same sex marriage was approved. It was celebrated as the "law of the land". I didn't agree with it but accepted it as the ruling was made by SCOTUS.

But the democrat way is to view the ruling as "advisory" or to try and add more SCOTUS members so they can attain the outcome they desire, never mind the constitution.

That's like opening Pandora's box, especially when it looks like the dems are likely going to get shellacked in the mid terms.

Was same sex marriage the law of the land for 50 years and then snatched away from same sex couples reducing them once again to being at the mercy of others' beliefs in controlling their lives?

Did same-sex marriage keep you from controlling your own body? Just how did it affect your life? Were you forced to marry a guy? But you 'accepted it'. How very big of you.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

Next generation covid vaccines that are designed to be effective against the more current strains are in jeopardy because there is not enough public funding for them.

Pfizer and Moderna are developing redesigned vaccines that target the omicron variant’s mutations to boost protection against infection. The current shots are still targeting the original virus strain that first emerged in Wuhan, China, in 2019. As the virus has evolved over the past two years, the vaccines have become less effective at preventing mild illness, though they generally still protect against severe disease.

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision by early summer at the latest on whether the U.S. should switch to the redesigned shots for a fall vaccination campaign, with its advisory committee set to hold a meeting on June 28 to discuss the issue.

However, the U.S. currently does not have enough money to purchase the new shots for everybody in the U.S. ahead of the fall, the official said. The U.S. Senate has failed so far to pass $10 billion in additional Covid funding for vaccines, therapeutics and testing despite Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen Mitt Romney, R-Utah, striking a deal in early April. The $10 billion Senate deal is less than half the $22.5 billion the White House originally requested.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/09/us-will-limit-covid-vaccines-to-high-risk-people-this-fall-if-congress-doesnt-approve-more-funding.html

I guess nobody told them that covid's over.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

When R v W was passed, it became the law of the land. The idea of it being overturned was considered almost impossible:



The last time the Dems had enough votes to codify R v W was the first two years of Obama's administration, when they were fighting for the ACA which which was a lot more important at the time and fighting to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But now we have the usual whining about the Dems again. Sheesh.

Yeah, so "uniquely unpopular" HRC that she still got almost 3 million more votes than Trump. So, once again it's the Dems' fault.

And for all the political capital of that supermajority, we got the Heritage Foundation healthcare plan and a sluggish recovery.

Yes, yes, I know "obstructionists" stopped us. The problem with that is, the Republicans seem to get a lot of their policies enacted with smaller majorities or even without a majority at all.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

And for all the political capital of that supermajority, we got the Heritage Foundation healthcare plan and a sluggish recovery.

Yes, yes, I know "obstructionists" stopped us. The problem with that is, the Republicans seem to get a lot of their policies enacted with smaller majorities or even without a majority at all.

Not to mention the rotating villains within the Democratic party itself that puts a hard limit on how progressive any proposal can be

The best you can hope for is that a Democratic party supermajority will pass some bill that, a couple decades ago, was proposed by the conservatives. Anything better than that and the conservative members within the Democratic party will squash it.

 

[Delvo]

And for all the political capital of that supermajority, we got the Heritage Foundation healthcare plan and a sluggish recovery.

When you have that much control, you simply do what you want as quickly as you want, and then do the next thing you wanted, and then the next. (The Republicans will promptly demonstrate this for us all after they win the legislature and the Democrats hand them another round of letting the Republicans pick the Democrats' Presidential candidate for them again to make sure it's the worst one they can find again.) There is no "fighting" with opponents who couldn't stop you no matter what they did on one thing and thus becoming helpless on another thing. Anything somebody might point to and call a "fight" (and not just any fight but such an enormous one that they just can't even try anything else while it's happening) is simply a show to dupe some voters, pretending they ever actually wanted what they are simply choosing not to do and thus proving they don't actually want it. And year after year now, it succeeds in duping a bit fewer people than before.

 

[The Don]

And for all the political capital of that supermajority, we got the Heritage Foundation healthcare plan and a sluggish recovery.

Yes, yes, I know "obstructionists" stopped us. The problem with that is, the Republicans seem to get a lot of their policies enacted with smaller majorities or even without a majority at all.

Do the Republicans get much done on a national level ?

I can see that they tried their best to dismantle the ACA and have dealt a blow to Roe vs Wade but the former hardly happened and latter wasn't a legislative win. They have limited power to "undo" things but haven't actually "done" anything for a considerable time. Then again if your entire strategy is simply "stop the Democrats doing anything" then I can see how it's difficult to change gears and actually do something.

 

[Delphic Oracle]

Do the Republicans get much done on a national level ?

Tax policy, energy policy, trade policy, a few wars lasting 20 years, a wide swath of the judiciary, and control of the state governments that actually control the national-level electoral outcomes so that they can have functional control of it from a narrow constituency.

Minor stuff.

 

[Shalamar]

I recall, when same sex marriage was approved. It was celebrated as the "law of the land". I didn't agree with it but accepted it as the ruling was made by SCOTUS.

But the democrat way is to view the ruling as "advisory" or to try and add more SCOTUS members so they can attain the outcome they desire, never mind the constitution.

That's like opening Pandora's box, especially when it looks like the dems are likely going to get shellacked in the mid terms.

One granted desired rights.

Another strips previously granted rights.

Do you see the difference?

 

[Delvo]

Not much has been said in here lately. A little roundup of some things that have come up recently without comment here:

►Apparently, he's finally, after all this long long long time, admitting the fact that the opposing party is an oppositional opposing opponent and can not be functionally "worked with". Or at least, he did for that one moment. He'll probably revert, at least partially, more than once. Losing one's religion is usually a gradual process with multiple setbacks along the way, often with some lingering bits & pieces stuck for life. Also note that this epiphany did not come with a sudden determination to do good things without them either; just that he'd supposedly given up trying to get them to cooperate.

►They say he's been "Agonizing" over what to do about student debt. Not long ago, when asked about it at a public appearance, he acted like he'd already decided, telling the person who asked about it that he'd like what Biden was planning to do. Really, it's always been perfectly clear that he doesn't want to do it, so, if he's still "agonizing", then that means he's aware of how important it is for the party's public image; he's not undecided on his own conclusion, but torn between his own certainty of what he wants and his awareness that it's the opposite of what the people want (especially those in the party he claims to be in).

►He announced & then cancelled his Ministry Of Truth in short order, one of the quickest turnarounds ever for a proposed new government office. There are claims that it's because of "right-wing attacks" of the concept, but, since the attacks were actually coming from all sides & edges & corners because the idea was so horrid, I think he really honestly changed his mind and came to understand how horrid it actually was. The idea was a bit of a knee-jerk. We all have those sometimes. It's good to be able to see them for what they are and self-correct.

►Half of his Twitter followers are fake. Apparently famous people can get surprisingly high "fake" follower ratios through no fault of their own because it just develops naturally as a result of how Twitter works (and there's some issue with how that was defined, seemingly including some that were real when they signed up but simply became inactive on Twitter since then), but it's usually well under that ratio. A ratio that high comes from paying for the fakes to be deliberately created to trump up your numbers. Guess whose ratio is significantly higher than Biden's: Elon's.

►The shutdown of the baby formula plant(s) has lasted a strangely long time and will still drag on for a while into the future, not because of Biden, but I think because the process of correcting the deficiencies & restarting is just too bureaucratically inefficient. Now he has used his executive power to get production started at other facilities in the meantime and fly some in from other countries in the meanmeantime. It's a good move, but he should have done it sooner. There was a vote first on a legislative route to achieving similar goals instead of the executive route, but, naturally, the Republicans voted to starve the babies.

 

[Tero]

Appearances are the odd thing. Biden seems completely ineffective to both parties. And the press. Trump as president was equally ineffective, but his stunts, like a tariff on China made him seem effective. "He is punishing Communist China, like he promised!" I guess you need some showmanship.

 

[bruto]

Appearances are the odd thing. Biden seems completely ineffective to both parties. And the press. Trump as president was equally ineffective, but his stunts, like a tariff on China made him seem effective. "He is punishing Communist China, like he promised!" I guess you need some showmanship.

Yes, I think a similar problem plagued Carter, and killed Gore as a candidate. Too thoughtful, not dramatic enough. Thought and care are boring. The public wants drama, big colorful mistakes excused by big florid lies.

 

[Bob001]

Yes, I think a similar problem plagued Carter, and killed Gore as a candidate. Too thoughtful, not dramatic enough. Thought and care are boring. The public wants drama, big colorful mistakes excused by big florid lies.

Carter was hurt badly by rising gas prices and the Iran hostage crisis. But Gore actually won the popular vote. in both cases America suffered from their losses.

 

[TurkeysGhost]

These last few paragraph's from Sam Adler-Bell's essay about the collapse of the Biden "Disinformation" Board seems a good indictment of the Democratic Party's response to the loss of 2016 and the rise of radical right wing politics generally:

Trump’s ascendance in 2016 posed a painful psychic challenge to liberal elites. It suggested the possibility that many millions of Americans were motivated by deep, venomous dissatisfactions with the world they had helped create, that our cultural disagreements were profound, not superficial, and that our perspectives were practically irreconcilable inversions of each other. Political reality seemed to tilt on its axis. How could a man who appeared to them so transparently abhorrent and clownish be welcomed by others as a savior — or at least as a tolerable alternative to the status quo?

“Disinformation” was the liberal Establishment’s traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection. It wasn’t that the country was riven by profound antinomies and resentments born of material realities that would need to be navigated by new kinds of politics. No, the problem was that large swaths of the country had been duped, brainwashed by nefarious forces both foreign and domestic. And if only the best minds, the most credentialed experts, could be given new authority to regulate the flow of “fake news,” the scales would fall from the eyes of the people and they would re-embrace the old order they had been tricked into despising. This fantasy turned a political problem into a scientific one. The rise of Trump called not for new politics but new technocrats.

Like other pathological reactions to trauma, the disinformation neurosis tended to re-create the conditions that produced the affliction in the first place. (Freud called this “repetition compulsion.”) By doubling down on elite technocracy — and condescension toward the uneducated rubes suffering from false consciousness — liberals have tended to exacerbate the sources of populist hostility. As Joe Bernstein documented in Harper’s last year, the “antidisinformation industry” has attracted massive investment from wealthy Democratic donors, the tech industry, and cash-rich foundations. Hundreds of millions of disinfo dollars are sloshing around the nonprofit world, funding institutes at universities and extravagant conventions across the world. Last month’s “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy” conference was headlined by Barack Obama and featured Anne Applebaum, David Axelrod, Jeffrey Goldberg, and a lengthy list of other academic, journalistic, and political luminaries. I’m sure very interesting ideas were discussed there. But gathering the leading lights of liberalism to an auditorium at the University of Chicago — so that they together can decide which information is true and safe to be consumed by the rabble outside — strikes me as a hollow exercise in self-soothing, more likely to aggravate the symptoms of our legitimacy crisis (distrust and cynicism) than resolve any of its impasses.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/05/the-liberal-obsession-with-disinformation-is-not-helping.html

The party simply refuses to believe that the obvious resentment towards the status quo is real, but is rather simply the fault of communication strategies that can be corrected with the right repacking of the same old neoliberal politics.

 

[Bob001]

These last few paragraph's from Sam Adler-Bell's essay about the collapse of the Biden "Disinformation" Board seems a good indictment of the Democratic Party's response to the loss of 2016 and the rise of radical right wing politics generally:
.....
The party simply refuses to believe that the obvious resentment towards the status quo is real, but is rather simply the fault of communication strategies that can be corrected with the right repacking of the same old neoliberal politics.

Why can't it be both? The Democratic elites have been clueless about legitimate working-class grievances. But that doesn't explain the impact of crazy internet lies. When people refuse to get covid vaccines because they think they're full of microchips, or when they swallow "Stop the Steal," or they embrace Q-Anon, or they think H. Clinton dines on infants in the basement of a pizza parlor, that's the result of false information that would never have gained a foothold in the pre-internet era and it's a real threat to our democracy. Traditional Democrats and Republicans have always had deep policy differences, but they worked from the same facts. No longer.

The worst thing about the "Disinformation Governance Board" was the stupid name, no doubt selected by a committee of bureaucrats. It sounds like a government propaganda agency. If it had been called something like the "Internet Integrity Project" or the "Information Security Conference" nobody would have noticed.