US Politics XXV: At Least We're Not Australia

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MrsSpringsteen said:
OMG Steve Bannon arrested for allegedly defrauding lots of people in the build the wall scheme. Drain the swamp!
Click to expand...

Who?

Never heard of him, may have delivered covfefe and hamberders to Oval Office once or twice.
 
As much as I support Qanon, and their valiant effort to stop satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles , and the likes of one Mr. Tom Hanks who is warehousing enslaved women to birth babies and harvest their brain juices - I still find it strange that they would pick Trump, an actual pedophile, to be the one to head up the fight.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it gives me some pause.
 
Jerry Dunk said:
This convention is the most depressing shit imaginable. We have no hope, no matter who wins this election.
Click to expand...

The only depressing shit, is to see that there is still a small faction of people that can watch speeches from Warren, Michelle, Sanders, Barack, Harris, Abrams, Gabby Giffords, Ady Barkin, Yates, Jill Biden, Gwen Carr, George Floyd's family, Dreamers, Veterans, LGBTQ Americans, kids torn from parents, people who have lost their livelihoods and family members to Covid, with presentations on gun reform, police reform, racial justice, environmental justice, women's right to choose, the list goes on, and still make some sort of equivalence between the two parties.
 
womanfish said:
The only depressing shit, is to see that there is still a small faction of people that can watch speeches from Warren, Michelle, Sanders, Barack, Harris, Abrams, Gabby Giffords, Ady Barkin, Yates, Jill Biden, Gwen Carr, George Floyd's family, Dreamers, Veterans, LGBTQ Americans, kids torn from parents, people who have lost their livelihoods and family members to Covid, with presentations on gun reform, police reform, racial justice, environmental justice, women's right to choose, the list goes on, and still make some sort of equivalence between the two parties.
Click to expand...
The GOP is worse than the Democratic Party. That is plain as day. I'm comfortable saying it because it's an obvious truth. Please don't make me repeat this every time we discuss the Democratic Party.

Neither party even reaches the baseline of what needs to be done to get us close to a functioning country with any semblance of justice and livability for its people. Just within the last couple of weeks, the Democrats and/or the Biden/Harris ticket have reneged on climate change plans, pulled the public option off the table (which would not have been universal healthcare, but they seem not even interested in pretending to offer that now), and have started hinting that they will cite austerity and deficit concerns when they end up not doing most of the things they have included in their platform. It's happening right in front of our faces already.

This convention has been the culmination of the last two years, where the Democratic Party has taken the messaging of the most successful parts of the left movement, and co-opted them. The only takeaway they've had from the left has been marketing and advertising. They've taken Black Lives Matter, they've taken universal healthcare as justice, they've taken immigration concerns, they've taken income inequality (only to an extent), etc. and taken all the rheotric ... but none of the substance. It's all just changing their rhetoric and messaging, but it will be the same old shit from the Obama and Clinton years.

A Biden presidency doesn't scare me insomuch as I understand that it will be a slight to modest improvement overall from the Trump presidency. But what scares me is the complacency so many in the Democratic Party feel. They talk themselves into successes where successes don't exist. And that inevitably sets up the GOP for winning the elections thereafter. What scares me is a Biden presidency setting up the next GOP presidency in 2024. The Democrats spending the whole 2022 and 2024 election cycles insisting that they've solved so many of the problems, and the ones that still exist you can't complain about because "what if Trump was here still?" And then you have the 2010 election in 2022 and the 2016 election in 2024.

When people's lives don't improve, when you tell them you gave them the good healthcare again and they still go bankrupt from it, when they lose it because they lost their job ... when you tell them you've solved immigration but the increasingly large Hispanic community in this country notices that you're still doing the same shit Obama did ... when you say Black Lives Matter but you still increase funding for police departments while stripmining public schools and ceding more power to right-wing charter schools ... when you continue eschewing the social safety net because you still want to police the world and can't do it without spending half of your pandemic bill on the fucking F-35 ... you end up losing elections to more right-wing psychopaths.

So when Tucker Carlson or Mike Lindell or whoever wins the 2024 election and we do the whole "we need this centrist otherwise it's four more years of a fascist" routine again in 2028, and suddenly we're two years away from the 2030 point-of-no-return with climate change ... yeah, I'm fucking depressed as hell. There is no hope if this is all we have for a fucking opposition party.
 
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Jerry Dunk said:
The GOP is worse than the Democratic Party. That is plain as day. I'm comfortable saying it because it's an obvious truth. Please don't make me repeat this every time we discuss the Democratic Party.

Neither party even reaches the baseline of what needs to be done to get us close to a functioning country with any semblance of justice and livability for its people. Just within the last couple of weeks, the Democrats and/or the Biden/Harris ticket have reneged on climate change plans, pulled the public option off the table (which would not have been universal healthcare, but they seem not even interested in pretending to offer that now), and have started hinting that they will cite austerity and deficit concerns when they end up not doing most of the things they have included in their platform. It's happening right in front of our faces already.

This convention has been the culmination of the last two years, where the Democratic Party has taken the messaging of the most successful parts of the left movement, and co-opted them. The only takeaway they've had from the left has been marketing and advertising. They've taken Black Lives Matter, they've taken universal healthcare as justice, they've taken immigration concerns, they've taken income inequality (only to an extent), etc. and taken all the rheotric ... but none of the substance. It's all just changing their rhetoric and messaging, but it will be the same old shit from the Obama and Clinton years.

A Biden presidency doesn't scare me insomuch as I understand that it will be a slight to modest improvement overall from the Trump presidency. But what scares me is the complacency so many in the Democratic Party feel. They talk themselves into successes where successes don't exist. And that inevitably sets up the GOP for winning the elections thereafter. What scares me is a Biden presidency setting up the next GOP presidency in 2024. The Democrats spending the whole 2022 and 2024 election cycles insisting that they've solved so many of the problems, and the ones that still exist you can't complain about because "what if Trump was here still?" And then you have the 2010 election in 2022 and the 2016 election in 2024.

When people's lives don't improve, when you tell them you gave them the good healthcare again and they still go bankrupt from it, when they lose it because they lost their job ... when you tell them you've solved immigration but the increasingly large Hispanic community in this country notices that you're still doing the same shit Obama did ... when you say Black Lives Matter but you still increase funding for police departments while stripmining public schools and ceding more power to right-wing charter schools ... when you continue eschewing the social safety net because you still want to police the world and can't do it without spending half of your pandemic bill on the fucking F-35 ... you end up losing elections to more right-wing psychopaths.

So when Tucker Carlson or Mike Lindell or whoever wins the 2024 election and we do the whole "we need this centrist otherwise it's four more years of a fascist" routine again in 2028, and suddenly we're two years away from the 2030 point-of-no-return with climate change ... yeah, I'm fucking depressed as hell. There is no hope if this is all we have for a fucking opposition party.
Click to expand...


I do understand your overall point here. That there are lots of grassroots movements that the party has latched onto, and at this point, because Biden hasn't been elected yet, we have no way to know if there will be any meat on the bones that address the concern of those movements in substantial ways.

So the last thing that we have to go on would be Obama's presidency. Well, the first major difference is that in 2008 and 12, The only major social uprisings like we see today was the movement on financial/banking/income inequality. Beyond that, much of the focus then was still on Iraq/Afghanistan, and healthcare, and I'm sure I'm missing some things.
So, did Obama come in and solve everything? Absolutely not.
Did he make some very big changes and progress over his terms. Absolutely.

Again. I want to bring back some reality about our country, our government and the voters that make up our population. We are still talking about a country pretty much split 50/50, on average, and a divided government that rarely allows one party to hold the presidency and both houses for more than a year or two. So I don't think it's a surprise or a really a fault of a president that both pushes to make either liberal or "conservative" changes, depending on the party, but also tries to find those "middle ground" issues that a larger group of Americans support.
Usually this is the case because a president and house members want to get re-elected. Now with Trump, that is kind of all out the window. He only pushes what his most extreme base wants, and we will most likely see that that ensures his defeat in November.

But back to Obama. Even facing a Senate and then even a congress that vowed from day one to not support anything that he put forward, he, and the Dems managed to make some major victories. And yes, I googled for a more complete list.

Obamacare (which would have been far more successful if not for the deconstruction of it over the next decade)

Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform

Iran Nuke Deal

Paris Climate Agreement

Ended Combat Missions in Middle East

Saved auto industry and 2 million jobs along with it.

Repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell

Legalization of Same Sex Marriage

Reversed torture policies

Limited industrial carbon emissions

Raised fuel efficiency standards

New regs on water and air pollution

Protected Dreamers

Stopped private bank subsidies to provide student loans

Fair Sentencing Act

Expanded Federal Wilderness protected lands

Protected areas from drilling

Expanded overtime pay

expanded hate crime definition

Lily Ledbetter Women's Fair Pay Act

Executive order to protect LGBTQ from employment discrimination

Reauthorized and expanded CHIP

He also did all that while raising taxes on the wealthy, slightly lowering taxes for the middle and lower class, and decreasing the deficit by 65%


Good list, but also have to realize that there would be so much more if we lived in a country with a different system. Every one of those things were put through the ringer of the opposing party and watered down, and broken down enough that they would actually pass. This is the reality. Whether its a president Biden, or a Sanders, or a Warren.
And that means exactly what you said. This doesn't bring the full change needed for everyone to have the justice and livability that we strive for. But we are stuck in the reality that the justice and livability improves slowly as we have majority liberal representation in the government and not Republicans (I won't call them conservatives anymore)


So Biden has an even more progressive agenda, and hopefully over his time in office will make major progress in many areas too. But it won't be the dramatic across the board change that most of us would like, but more like gradual progressive change over years.
And that isn't just how our system was designed, but it also makes it more that way when we live in the most polarized time in our political history. It means the voting public can no longer be swayed in large percentages one way or the other like they used to.

Either way. Like I said before. Even if Biden is more of a placeholder for 4 years while we dig out of the Trump dumpster, I think that we finally have a very respectable group of leaders waiting in the wings to make more significant progressive change.


One last thing. Not sure what you mean about pulling the public option off the table. Do you have any source for this? I mean, Biden's whole plan is based on it, so I am doubtful.

His plan explicitly says.

All Americans will have a new, more affordable option. The public option, like Medicare, will negotiate prices with providers, providing a more affordable option for many Americans who today find their health insurance too expensive.

Give Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option like Medicare. If your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another, better choice. Whether you’re covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers. It also will better coordinate among all of a patient’s doctors to improve the efficacy and quality of their care, and cover primary care without any co-payments. And it will bring relief to small businesses struggling to afford coverage for their employees.

Access to affordable health insurance shouldn’t depend on your state’s politics. But today, state politics is getting in the way of coverage for millions of low-income Americans. Governors and state legislatures in 14 states have refused to take up the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility, denying access to Medicaid for an estimated 4.9 million adults. Biden’s plan will ensure these individuals get covered by offering premium-free access to the public option for those 4.9 million individuals who would be eligible for Medicaid but for their state’s inaction, and making sure their public option covers the full scope of Medicaid benefits. States that have already expanded Medicaid will have the choice of moving the expansion population to the premium-free public option as long as the states continue to pay their current share of the cost of covering those individuals. Additionally, Biden will ensure people making below 138% of the federal poverty level get covered. He’ll do this by automatically enrolling these individuals when they interact with certain institutions (such as public schools) or other programs for low-income populations (such as SNAP)
 
Well, it took a full 2 hours. But The White House responded to Bannon's arrest, saying "Trump doesn't know anyone involved with this project"
 
BEAL said:
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1296507292486164480?s=21

Mission accomplished.
Click to expand...

Shortly after USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy issued a public statement saying he wanted to "avoid even the appearance" that any of his policies would slow down election mail, USPS instructed all maintenance managers around the country not to reconnect or reinstall any mail sorting machines they had already disconnected, according to emails obtained by Motherboard.

"Please message out to your respective Maintenance Managers tonight. They are not to reconnect / reinstall machines that have previously been disconnected without approval from HQ Maintenance, no matter what direction they are getting from their plant manager," wrote Kevin Couch, Director of Maintenance Operations. "Please have them flow that request through you then on to me for a direction." A subsequent email sent to individual maintenance managers across various regions forwarded that request along with a single sentence: "We are not to reconnect any machines that have previously been disconnected."
 
womanfish said:
I do understand your overall point here. That there are lots of grassroots movements that the party has latched onto, and at this point, because Biden hasn't been elected yet, we have no way to know if there will be any meat on the bones that address the concern of those movements in substantial ways.

So the last thing that we have to go on would be Obama's presidency. Well, the first major difference is that in 2008 and 12, The only major social uprisings like we see today was the movement on financial/banking/income inequality. Beyond that, much of the focus then was still on Iraq/Afghanistan, and healthcare, and I'm sure I'm missing some things.
So, did Obama come in and solve everything? Absolutely not.
Did he make some very big changes and progress over his terms. Absolutely.

Again. I want to bring back some reality about our country, our government and the voters that make up our population. We are still talking about a country pretty much split 50/50, on average, and a divided government that rarely allows one party to hold the presidency and both houses for more than a year or two. So I don't think it's a surprise or a really a fault of a president that both pushes to make either liberal or "conservative" changes, depending on the party, but also tries to find those "middle ground" issues that a larger group of Americans support.
Usually this is the case because a president and house members want to get re-elected. Now with Trump, that is kind of all out the window. He only pushes what his most extreme base wants, and we will most likely see that that ensures his defeat in November.

But back to Obama. Even facing a Senate and then even a congress that vowed from day one to not support anything that he put forward, he, and the Dems managed to make some major victories. And yes, I googled for a more complete list.

Obamacare (which would have been far more successful if not for the deconstruction of it over the next decade)

Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform

Iran Nuke Deal

Paris Climate Agreement

Ended Combat Missions in Middle East

Saved auto industry and 2 million jobs along with it.

Repealed Don't Ask Don't Tell

Legalization of Same Sex Marriage

Reversed torture policies

Limited industrial carbon emissions

Raised fuel efficiency standards

New regs on water and air pollution

Protected Dreamers

Stopped private bank subsidies to provide student loans

Fair Sentencing Act

Expanded Federal Wilderness protected lands

Protected areas from drilling

Expanded overtime pay

expanded hate crime definition

Lily Ledbetter Women's Fair Pay Act

Executive order to protect LGBTQ from employment discrimination

Reauthorized and expanded CHIP

He also did all that while raising taxes on the wealthy, slightly lowering taxes for the middle and lower class, and decreasing the deficit by 65%


Good list, but also have to realize that there would be so much more if we lived in a country with a different system. Every one of those things were put through the ringer of the opposing party and watered down, and broken down enough that they would actually pass. This is the reality. Whether its a president Biden, or a Sanders, or a Warren.
And that means exactly what you said. This doesn't bring the full change needed for everyone to have the justice and livability that we strive for. But we are stuck in the reality that the justice and livability improves slowly as we have majority liberal representation in the government and not Republicans (I won't call them conservatives anymore)


So Biden has an even more progressive agenda, and hopefully over his time in office will make major progress in many areas too. But it won't be the dramatic across the board change that most of us would like, but more like gradual progressive change over years.
And that isn't just how our system was designed, but it also makes it more that way when we live in the most polarized time in our political history. It means the voting public can no longer be swayed in large percentages one way or the other like they used to.

Either way. Like I said before. Even if Biden is more of a placeholder for 4 years while we dig out of the Trump dumpster, I think that we finally have a very respectable group of leaders waiting in the wings to make more significant progressive change.


One last thing. Not sure what you mean about pulling the public option off the table. Do you have any source for this? I mean, Biden's whole plan is based on it, so I am doubtful.

His plan explicitly says.

All Americans will have a new, more affordable option. The public option, like Medicare, will negotiate prices with providers, providing a more affordable option for many Americans who today find their health insurance too expensive.

Give Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option like Medicare. If your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another, better choice. Whether you’re covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without coverage altogether, the Biden Plan will give you the choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers. It also will better coordinate among all of a patient’s doctors to improve the efficacy and quality of their care, and cover primary care without any co-payments. And it will bring relief to small businesses struggling to afford coverage for their employees.

Access to affordable health insurance shouldn’t depend on your state’s politics. But today, state politics is getting in the way of coverage for millions of low-income Americans. Governors and state legislatures in 14 states have refused to take up the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid eligibility, denying access to Medicaid for an estimated 4.9 million adults. Biden’s plan will ensure these individuals get covered by offering premium-free access to the public option for those 4.9 million individuals who would be eligible for Medicaid but for their state’s inaction, and making sure their public option covers the full scope of Medicaid benefits. States that have already expanded Medicaid will have the choice of moving the expansion population to the premium-free public option as long as the states continue to pay their current share of the cost of covering those individuals. Additionally, Biden will ensure people making below 138% of the federal poverty level get covered. He’ll do this by automatically enrolling these individuals when they interact with certain institutions (such as public schools) or other programs for low-income populations (such as SNAP)
Click to expand...
"Gradual change" is a euphemism for something they will never get behind. The things Biden is doing are what the Democratic Party stands for. Gradual change doesn't help enough people because everything is means-tested to the point where they end up like that absurd Kamala Harris program where she invented a hypothetical person that doesn't exist to give loan forgiveness for. Then, when the Democrats claim victory over passing the half/quarter/fractional improvement, everyone thinks that this is all they have to offer and vote for the other guy. It was the defining trait of the first two years of the Obama administration. It was the defining trait of the Clinton campaign in 2016.

As for my source on them abandoning the public option:

https://thehill.com/policy/healthca...r-biden-health-care-plan-if-democrats-win-big

Essentially, gradual change has now moved from a public option that woefully comes up short on lessening the burden on people, to whatever things lead up to a public option.

Biden does not have a progressive agenda if you read between the lines in most places. Look at how the markets responded when he got control of the nomination. Look at what his donor list is. That will tell you what his actual governing will look like. Party platforms are a marketing campaign, not a policy proposal.
 
Also, Nancy Pelosi endorsed and donated to Joe Kennedy over Ed Markey. This is her childish, petty, embarrassing, fucking insulting reasoning:

[tweet]1296503308685848580[/tweet]
 
Does Bannon flip ? In order to get a deal he has to give up the goods on everyone
 
The only thing that Trump doesn't like about this Bannon situation is that he wasn't somehow also profiting off the fraud.
 
The idea that Biden can’t string together a sentence really helped him truly meet the moment.

The whole thing radiated both BDE, and compassion.
 
Even tho Biden wasn’t anyone’s top choice in here, he may be the best hope at beating Trump.

Trump has nothing on him. They tried Burisma (and they’ll keep trying). They talk about how Joe’s mind is basically mush, and while he isn’t as sharp as he used to be (and neither will we) tonight’s speech was damn near perfect.

They have nothing to stick on him and Harris so that’s why they’re going to resort to violence.

Violence against the Post Office
Violence against protesters

And tonight Trump said he will deploy his police force to polling stations on election night.

His plan is to fuck up the mail and force people to go out and vote. In the cold, during a pandemic, and then scare people with his force.

It’s going to be brutal but we don’t have any other choice
 
Irvine511 said:
The idea that Biden can’t string together a sentence really helped him truly meet the moment.

The whole thing radiated both BDE, and compassion.
Click to expand...

Yes! I was trying to put my finger on it, and you summed it up.

Meanwhile, in Scranton, Trump spoke to a rally of dozens of people about shower heads, liking KimJong Un, and how California needs to clean the floors of their forests.
 
So I know that this was a small blip tonight, but after the NH kid thatBiden helped with his stutter (which brought the tears again), the story from the rabbi, where Biden, as a senator, came to a funeral at his synagogue. And it was because the woman that died had given 18 dollars to his first campaign. Just extraordinary.

I have been familiar with Biden for a long time, I always held him in high esteem. I have been pushing for him from the start as the one that would be best to beat Trump. But even so, I had no clue just what kind of man he is. There couldn’t be more opposite souls than Biden and Trump. And it really is what we need right now.
 
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