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Sanders said lawmakers couldn’t agree on an amount of money to put in the package.
“The Republican leadership wanted zero and too many Democrats wanted zero and I had to work very hard with a Republican— Senator Hawley from Missouri — he and I worked very hard to rally the troops and get to where we are right now,” Sanders said.
Sanders says under the new deal, 445,000 adults in Vermont will get a $600 check. Despite the lower price tag, people working in severely-impacted industries say every buck counts.
“It would definitely help out especially being in a restaurant. Restaurant workers like me are taking a hit on hours and a hit on pay especially bars who can’t be open anymore and bars that can’t stay open passed a certain time,” said Tanner Merrill, a cool at the Waterbury Reservoir.
The package also includes an additional $300 each week for unemployed Americans, as well as a hundreds of billions of dollars going to small businesses, schools, the health care industry and vaccine distribution.
“We want to make sure that states have the financial resources to get that vaccine out to as many people as quickly as possible so there’s money in there for that as well,” he said.
Nancy Pelosi is a semi-senile “public servant.” Best the fake Democrats can do. No wonder I finally quit voting for them. It is not easy when I live in a closed primary state.
I wish there was some way to tax the Fortune 500 on this, but the problem is that the minute this arises, frequency traders punish those with 401Ks with selling off stock.
The draft language of the emergency coronavirus relief package includes a tax break for corporate meal expenses pushed by the White House and strongly denounced by some congressional Democrats, according to a summary of the deal circulating among congressional officials and officials who are familiar with the provision.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a proposal that had not yet been publicly released.
President Trump has for months talked about securing the deduction — derisively referred to as the “three-martini lunch” by critics — as a way to revive the restaurant industry badly battered by the pandemic.
But critics said it would do little to help struggling restaurants and would largely benefit business executives who do not urgently need help at this time. Some Democrats recoiled at the proposal, though it has also been denounced as ineffective by conservative tax experts as well.
During negotiations, however, Democratic leaders agreed to the provision in exchange for Republicans agreeing to expand tax credits for low income families and the working poor in the final package, according to a Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of internal negotiations.
“Republicans are nickel-and-diming benefits for jobless workers, while at the same time pushing for tax breaks for three-martini power lunches. It’s unconscionable,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
The cost to taxpayers of the proposal is not known, though tax experts expect it to not exceed a few billion dollars a year.
The Democratic Party is partly to blame for Donald Trump’s popularity among working-class voters, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has claimed.
Mr Sanders, who is registered as an independent but has close links to the Democrats, said the party needs to “transform itself” to win back blue-collar voters who chose Mr Trump in 2016 and 2020.
Despite Joe Biden winning the electoral college and popular vote with 81 million ballots, Mr Trump increased his support at the election, having been in the White House for four years.
In a record year for turnout, the incumbent won some 74 million votes compared with just under 63 million in 2016.
That increase of some 11 million votes, in an election where Republicans made gains in the House and Democrats lost seats, has led to some soul searching within the Democratic Party.
“This is a reflection of the Democratic Party,” said the left-wing lawmaker in a Friday interview with SiriusXM radio host Dean Obeidallah.
“I think if you talk to many of those … working class people who voted for Trump, they’ll say, ‘Look, of course we know he’s a liar. We know he’s full of shit. But at least he does this; he does that.’ Something the Democrats don’t do.”
What is clear at the moment is that Biden’s coalition still ended up losing ground among working-class voters of all sorts, a fact that continues to shape the focus of his team. Biden has signaled that improving the lives of working people is the overriding goal of his administration.
“When the American people see that this is an administration that wants to work with members of Congress from both parties to the extent they can in order to help improve their lives, we believe that will help Democrats across the board,” said Anita Dunn, a senior campaign adviser who has been co-chairing the transition. “It’s a challenge for the Democratic Party to communicate with voters who don’t want to listen to us right now.”
The rejection of Trump by college-educated and coastal voters did not extend across a broad swath of Americans, who had an opposite allergic reaction to what Democrats were selling. An analysis of county election result data by the American Communities Project at George Washington University laid the shifts bare by sorting actual ballot counts into categories based upon demographic characteristics of the counties where they were cast.
Compared with 2016, Democrats performed much better in places dominated by college-educated voters, increasing their margins by 4.8 percentage points in college towns, 5.9 points in exurban communities and more than two points is suburban areas. But Trump performed better in big cities by two points, in Hispanic centers by 3.5 points and in working class-dominant parts of the country by nearly a point.
In some places, the pro-Trump shift was even more striking. Ohio’s Trumbull County had become a talking point for Democrats heading into the election, featured in ads and highlighted at Biden’s summer convention as an example of the president’s empty promises to workers. Trump won the county by 6.2 percentage points in 2016. Months later, he traveled back to the area, bemoaned the shuttered factories and declared, “They are all coming back . . . Don’t sell your house.”
The nearby General Motors Lordstown plant, which had once employed thousands, stopped operation a year later. But Trump’s support only grew. He won the county by 10.6 percentage points in November.
“You move Biden aside for half a second and you have a Democratic brand that is completely disconnected from workers,” Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who represents part of the county, when asked what went wrong. “It’s working class, White, Black and Brown.”
He argues for a far more targeted economic message, promising a tax cut for the middle class, infrastructure spending and a new manufacturing agenda. David Pepper, the Ohio Democratic chairman, agrees that the party has failed to communicate directly with the more rural parts of America, and he has written a memo to the Biden transition urging the president-elect to make a shift in strategy central to his presidency.
“We need to go right into these small towns and tell them what the Democratic agenda is for them and why it will lift them,” Pepper said. “Until we do that, we will be on defense.”
Wisconsin Democratic Party chair Ben Wikler, who fought county by county to deliver a win for Biden of 20,682 votes in a state Trump won in 2016, put the challenge more in terms of the media consumption on the other side of the cultural divide.
“Drive through rural Wisconsin and it is hard not to listen to conservative talk radio,” he said. “One long-term lesson is the necessity of building communications channels that go beyond buying ads on someone else’s communications channel.”
There was clear evidence that advertising targeting rural White Americans could have an effect, though it often required delivering the messages with people from the other side of the cultural divide.
I posted this yesterday, but without much context. This is the interview itself.
phatkhat
…
phatkhat
I posted this last night, but not many people probably saw it. This is a good piece referencing exactly how the parties are reversing polarity again, as they have done in the past, and how the Dems are forcing the working people out. It’s an interesting blog, actually, and one I’ll be following.
Long read, but extremely interesting. I came across this on FaceBook. There was a link in a group I belong to, Alliance against Democrat Establishment Hypocrisy, which is definitely worth checking out if you are on FB. Due Dissidence is a blog I will be following from here out, because it kinda relates to how I feel.
Author gets into a lot of the ways/reasons the Dems have totally alienated the working class, and why they will not be able to count on minority votes to shore them up in the future.
Progressives joining the Republican Party is pretty crazy. Republicans are not actually helping working class people but f’n them over by playing on their resentments. Unfortunately, the Dems present a juicy target.
Did you read the essay? He makes some good points. It might be easier to perform a coup within the GOP – as the GOP moderates have done to the Dems – than within the DNC. I’m not rushing out to join up, but I thought his reasoning was pretty sound.
It’s not so much that the GOP is helping people, but populists from both parties have traction. The difference is that the GOP actually accepted the voters. The DNC intervened to squash their populist candidate. A populist candidate like Bernie would have more acceptance by GOP voters, the working class, the Obama>Trump faction, than in the Dem camp. Bernie went over pretty damn well with the Fox audience. And Trumpites I know actually like Bernie – he’s not a “real” Democrat.
I guess the point is, progressives will never have leverage in the DNC establishment. It’s either infiltrate the GOP or form a new party. We will see how the MPP goes. I know I Demexited in 2009, and not going back.
Yeah they don’t fix their primaries because their clueless voters are no threat to the ruling class. In any case, there is no way candidates who are progressive on racial etc. matters are going to be a threat to win a Republican primary.
Torabs
Agreed. Any perspective that fails to account for the GOP’s central plank being white supremacy is terribly naïve, at best (and I’m not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, either).
it looks like they don’t interfere in the primaries as much, for now, though. that was a big part of the article’s reasoning. i’m sure they’ll fix that soon.
It’s unlikely that Joe Biden expected that, of all his cabinet nominees, his choice for US agriculture secretary would cause the most blowback. Yet that is exactly what happened.
The former secretary Tom Vilsack, fresh off the revolving door, is a kind of all-in-one package of what frustrates so many about the Democratic party. His previous tenure leading the department was littered with failures, ranging from distorting data about Black farmers and discrimination to bowing to corporate conglomerates.
Vilsack’s nomination has been roundly rejected by some of the exact people who helped Biden defeat Trump: organizations representing Black people, progressive rural organizations, family farmers and environmentalists. If the Biden team was looking for ways to unite the multi-racial working class, they have done so – in full-throated opposition to this pick.
We remember when Vilsack toured agricultural communities, hearing devastating testimony of big ag’s criminal treatment of contract farmers. He went through the motions of expressing concern, but nothing came of it: the Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) kowtowed to agribusiness lobbyists and corporate interests, squandering a golden opportunity to rein in meat processing monopolies.
We remember when Vilsack’s USDA foreclosed on Black farmers who had outstanding complaints about racial discrimination and whitewashed its own record on civil rights. That’s in addition to the ousting of Shirley Sherrod, a Black and female USDA official, when the far-right media published a doctored hit piece, forcing her resignation.
We remember when Vilsack left his job at the USDA a week early to become a lobbyist as CEO of the US Dairy Export Council. He was paid a million-dollar salary to push the same failed policies of his USDA tenure, carrying out the wishes of dairy monopolies. Despite being nominated to lead the USDA again, he’s still collecting paychecks as a lobbyist.
The president-elect should have righted these wrongs by charting a bold, new course for rural communities and farmers in America. Instead, Vilsack’s nomination signaled more of the same from Democratic leadership.
“Democrats need to do something big for rural people to start supporting them again,” Francis Thicke, a family farmer in Fairfield, Iowa, told us recently. “The status quo won’t work, and that’s one reason why Vilsack is the wrong choice.”
With Cedric Richmond being one leading the Environmental justice charge from the WH, it is still terrible. His district is not a model for this type of leadership.
In interviews with nearly a dozen left-wing elected officials, activists and aides, progressives described 2020 as a mixed bag. They are deeply disappointed by the fall of their standard-bearers in the presidential race and lack of swing-seat trophies in Congress. But they also consider it a serious accomplishment that the so-called Squad in the House is growing and that they proved the upset by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) two years ago was no fluke.
Progressives managed to take out three Democratic incumbents in House primaries this year: Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal, unseated Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), the influential chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Marie Newman, a nonprofit founder, ousted conservative Dan Lipinski (D-Ill.). And Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist, beat political scion Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Miss.).
“The last time progressives were able to unseat a corporate-backed centrist Democrat in Congress was all the way back in 2006. In the past two cycles, we’ve unseated five different incumbents,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of the left-wing group Justice Democrats, which played a leading role in helping the three successful challengers this year. “We’re much more powerful than we were during the Obama years.”
The party’s left flank also succeeded in an open primary in New York’s 17th District, a liberal area, where progressive Mondaire Jones won with the help of the Congressional Progressive Caucus‘ political arm, which made an independent expenditure for the first time ever for him. Progressives fended off a challenge to Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) from Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass.). And they made gains in mostly safe Democratic seats — and a handful of competitive districts — at the local and state levels, putting even more self-described socialists and racial justice activists into office across the nation.
But their inability to flip a Republican-held House seat remains a major impediment for progressives looking to persuade Democratic voters that they don’t need to sacrifice their favorite policies in order to win — and it puts them at a disadvantage in the chamber compared with the moderate lawmakers who gave Speaker Nancy Pelosi her majority.
Justice Democrats, which recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run in 2018, did not turn any red districts blue in Congress. The same is true for Our Revolution, the political organization founded by Sanders in the wake of his 2016 presidential bid, and the Sunrise Movement, a group of young activists working to address climate change.
Some progressives pointed out that moderate and establishment-oriented Democrats also did not have a great general election this year, given that they lost ground in the House.
Still, the left will likely never be able to achieve its top goals, such as passing “Medicare for All” and the “Green New Deal,” without the presidency or significantly greater clout in Congress. In the wake of its losses, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is planning to conduct a postmortem of the election, according to a lawmaker involved. Justice Democrats is also expecting to undergo an analysis, “especially paying attention to districts where we didn’t make it quite over … and [analyzing] places where we did do well because we want to see what works,” Rojas said.
One issue became clear in the presidential primary: The inability to win over Black voters was a leading obstacle for progressives this year. Both Sanders and Warren failed to make headway with African Americans, and South Carolina dealt as big a blow to the Vermont senator’s campaign in 2020, as it had in 2016. If he’d won or even narrowed his loss in the state, Sanders would have denied Joe Biden’s then-flagging campaign a resurrection.
“The younger generation of African American progressives — I think we can follow their lead, their advice, their strategy,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Sanders’ former campaign co-chair. “And we have to do a better job of building coalitions with the Congressional Black Caucus.”
Progressives also said that fundraising was a challenge for down-ballot candidates, despite their favorite presidential candidates raking in millions of dollars this year. Some think that super PACs aimed at helping the left should be expanded, and that more should be done to build campaign infrastructure in order to win competitive districts. Others said progressives should invest in deep organizing across the country, using Democrats’ long-term work in Georgia as a model.
“There’s been a real dearth of year-round organizing that is not just based on sheer turnout or mobilization, but is about talking to people on the issues that matter to them,” said Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement. “I think we are focused so heavily on the turnout machine part of it that sometimes we forget to focus on the real, day-to-day organizing part of it and doing a better job of that.”
Progressives called for more efforts to recruit people to run in swing seats. While the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Sunrise Movement backed a handful of candidates in such competitive districts, other liberal groups focused their efforts on just one swing-seat contender: Nebraska social worker Kara Eastman, who lost by nearly 5 percentage points — worse than she did in 2018 — even as Biden carried the Omaha-based district.
Even then, Democratic strategists said that liberal organizations invested in her campaign too late and failed to cohere around a single, simple-to-understand communications strategy.
A handful of left-wing aides are debating whether they need to fine-tune their messaging. Republican attack ads in congressional races across the country, including those targeting Eastman, painted Democrats as radical socialists, tore apart Medicare for All and ripped into activists’ call to defund the police.
“Some of us are thinking that a left version of Frank Luntz might not be a bad idea,” said Robert Hockett, a former adviser to Sanders’ 2020 campaign who is now a fellow at the progressive think tank New Consensus, referring to the GOP messaging guru. “There are certain words that unfortunately raise flags for people.”
Wendell Potter, a former health care executive who now leads the pro-Medicare for All advocacy group Center for Health and Democracy, said his organization is planning to focus on improving its messaging so that it can go beyond preaching to the choir. Another group he leads, Business Leaders for Health Care Transformation, changed its name this year from Business for Medicare for All.
“I’m from Tennessee,” Potter said. “How can I go back to Tennessee and be persuasive to folks who I know voted for Donald Trump, and talk to them in ways that they’re not going to be shutting down just when I open my mouth?”
Some progressives have even questioned whether the phrase “defund the police” should be tweaked, though others have said it would be immoral to back down as Black Americans are killed at disproportionate rates by police — not to mention the fact that it likely wouldn’t work, they said, if they tried to get protesters to abandon the slogan.
As they figure out what to do next, left-wing leaders said that election results have proven that people of color, especially those who are relatively young, perform strongly in primaries, and that candidate recruitment efforts should reflect this. Most of the progressive challengers who unseated House incumbents in 2020 were Black. Black Lives Matter also touched off one of the biggest movements in American history this year.
“In order for the progressive movement to continue to be successful and to become more powerful,” said Jones, the New York congressman-elect, “it has to bring racially diverse voices into the fold, elevate those voices to leadership, and invest in candidates from underrepresented backgrounds in our politics who can connect with the electorate in a way that, historically, older, wealthy, white men have been unable to.”
That points a way forward, in the eyes of many on the left. While they aren’t ready to give up on swing seats yet, progressives said that picking off incumbent Democrats and winning open primaries in liberal areas is a more surefire way to make gains for now.
“It wasn’t that the Tea Party won a ton of swing races,” Berger said. “That’s not what made them powerful. They succeeded because they won a lot of Republican districts, and I don’t see why our project would be significantly different.”
There are signs that the left will be even more confrontational in intraparty fights in the Biden era. The Movement School, part of a sister arm of Justice Democrats that trains progressive organizers, said it is expanding. Left-wing congressional leaders have also demonstrated that they are going to more openly embrace taking on incumbent Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
In the past, even gadflies like Sanders have been reluctant at times to get behind candidates running against their colleagues. But both he and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, sent emails last week to supporters raising money for Justice Democrats and explicitly endorsing the group’s program that recruits primary challengers.
“The lesson that progressives can draw from this cycle is the importance of getting involved in primaries,” Jones said. “There are a lot of people in the House from districts more Democratic than my own who are not where they need to be on any number of issues.”
ikr? i asked someone how to pronounce Haaland yesterday, and she said, well, it doesn’t matter bc the tv networks often say it diff on diff channels. i said, yeah, and that’s ridiculous bc they have so much money and resources–they can just call the person up. it was like a new idea to them. so i’m glad that in my little way maybe they are now thinking a little more critically.
imho, they are simply corporate propaganda mouthpieces, and don’t have time to do real investigative work, like researching where someone is from. lol
Loeffler and Perdue are campaigning on a message that their opponents are culturally out of step with everyday Georgians, and political analysts say that Loeffler, in particular, was appointed by Kemp as part of a bargain to appeal to ordinary suburban women, voters who might be put off by Trump’s vulgarity and excess. But the senators’ obscene wealth and use of the stock market to gain even more money, coupled with a seeming indifference to the ways that their actions are perceived by Georgia voters, strains this premise past the point of credulity.
Loeffler owns a private jet. Perdue lives in an island gated community. Both are trading vast sums of money in a financial market to which most Americans do not have anything like their access. These are not ordinary Georgians. If anything, Loeffler and Perdue’s financial antics have underscored the degree to which the Republican party is part of the very swamp that Donald Trump decries. The question now is whether voters will see them for what they really are.
More than 100 religious leaders condemned Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s campaign tactics in an open letter over the weekend that spurned her attacks on the Rev. Raphael Warnock (D) and claimed the Georgia Republican’s political ads were full of “naked hypocrisy” and “blatant contradictions.”
In a letter first reported by the New York Times and signed by faith leaders in Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Maryland and Colorado, the authors characterized Loeffler’s criticism of Warnock’s beliefs and sermons, which she has repeatedly cast as “radically liberal,” as an attack on the Black religious community in the state.
“We see your attacks against Warnock as a broader attack against the Black Church and faith traditions for which we stand,” the letter said.
The Black share of in-person early voters was basically identical to the general election over the first few days of voting, but that began to diverge late last week–and even more so over the weekend, which is typically a strong period for Black turnout in Georgia pic.twitter.com/w3RU2drxZG
Our political system is dreadfully undemocratic, which makes it unresponsive. We have a Senate that gives disproportionate power to small rural states and an Electoral College that allows candidates with a minority of votes to become president, which among other things has produced a 6-3 conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, despite the fact that Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
Though the Democratic Party’s positions on issues are far more popular than those of Republicans, they find it nearly impossible to amass the power necessary to enact those policies on the national level. The result is a paralysis that is just fine with Republicans, but which makes voters more and more cynical. Negative partisanship becomes almost inevitable when your party can’t deliver for you even when it wins, so the only reason to be motivated to action is that you despise the other party.
Accountability is a cruel joke. Donald Trump did lose the election. But he got 47 percent of the vote, despite being the most dishonest, corrupt, and incompetent president in living memory—and he was those things before he committed what will certainly rank as the worst presidential failure in American history, ignoring and denying a pandemic that by the time it ends will probably have killed half a million Americans.
And what of his party? In an accountable system, they would have been ruthlessly punished for their ongoing support for Trump, yet they prospered in the 2020 election, picking up seats in the House and limiting their losses elsewhere. For years, people have thought that the GOP had to change to survive as demographic evolution narrows the number of Americans who will respond to their appeals to white resentment. But right now, they clearly believe that there’s no reason at all for them to change, and it’s hard to argue they’re wrong.
Our individualism is deadly. In no other country were the simple public-health measures necessary to contain the coronavirus so quickly and easily politicized. Trump bears much of the blame, but it didn’t take much for him to convince people that wearing masks is a terrible imposition on their freedom, and that it could be a worthwhile emblem of political identity. So many of us have spent our lives steeping in the ideology of “rugged individualism,” learning that any government edict is inherently repressive and making a personal sacrifice for the good of your neighbors, even a tiny one, makes you weak. No quantity of dead Americans has managed to dissuade so many of us from believing this.
There are no depths to which the Republican Party will not sink. That they so enthusiastically embraced Trump’s corruption should have been no surprise, but in 2020 they showed us the depths of their moral depravity. For weeks, almost the entire party (thankfully, except for the elections officials, judges, and state legislators in the states that mattered) acquiesced in an outright war against American democracy, out of a combination of delusion, cowardice, and outright hostility to the legitimacy of a system that includes the possibility that they might lose.
This will not be a one-off. From this point forward, any Republican who doesn’t claim that an election they lost was the result of fraud will be considered a traitor to their cause. And if you thought the Tea Party was scary, just wait until you see the right-wing backlash that grows up in response to the Biden presidency. It will be more radical, more consumed with conspiracy theories, and more violent.
phatkhat
There are no depths to which the Republican Party will not sink.
However true this may be, they had plenty of help from the spineless Democrats. Or, maybe, it was because the Dems stand to gain from the excesses of the GOP?
It was sad to see all these things become painfully obvious this year. But is anyone truly surprised, by any of it? Very much in character with the country I’ve known my entire life (born at the dawn of Reagan). Which is to say, completely devoid of any collective sense of community or respect for other people (at least at the national level).
Can the people who do want to come together save the country, in spite of itself? It’s going to be a hard fight.
The Rockefeller Foundation, a 107-year-old philanthropy built by oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, is breaking up with fossil fuels in an effort to save the planet.
Beyond pledging to dump its fossil fuel holdings, the $5 billion endowment is also promising not to make any new investments in the beleaguered sector. The moves make the Rockefeller Foundation the largest US foundation to embrace the rapidly growing divestment movement.
“Burning fossil fuels is not necessary to sustain our economy and economic growth over the long run — and it’s detrimental to our climate future,” Rajiv Shah, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, told CNN Business in an exclusive interview.
This divestment is especially symbolic because the Rockefeller Foundation was founded by oil money. The endowment was largely built from the proceeds of Standard Oil, a company that at its peak controlled more than 90% of petroleum products in the United States. ExxonMobil (XOM) traces its roots to Standard Oil.
More than a century later, the Rockefeller Foundation has decided it’s time to cut ties with fossil fuels because such investments conflict with its mission to lift up humanity. The step puts an exclamation point on the enormous pressure facing the fossil fuels industry as socially conscious investing goes mainstream and the climate crisis intensifies.
By divesting from fossil fuels — and instead plowing money into clean energy such as solar power — the foundation is striving to speed up the energy transition.
It’s tempting to dismiss all of this as simply the Noisy, irrational coda to a brutal election season. But it’s more complex than that. Trump is desperately fighting for his personal survival, but McConnell has abandoned him; ergo, Trump must now turn his rhetorical guns against the Senate leader. For his part, McConnell has clearly concluded that it’s in his political interest to cut his losses now and endure Trump’s rants and his supporters’ threats for the next few weeks, in order to maintain his political power into the Biden presidency.
Given Trump’s despotic ambitions, and his clear intent to maintain an iron grip on the GOP and its base in the coming years, and given the moral black hole so many GOP elected officials have managed to sink themselves into over the past four years, it’s hard to see how this confrontation doesn’t end up tearing the party apart.
I had hoped Trump’s candidacy in 2016 would perform that vital role—that it would break a rotten party wide open for all to see the vacuum at its core. It didn’t happen then. In these final weeks of 2020 and of Trump’s rancid regime, it seems to be happening now.
National Republicans are desperate to avoid a floor fight in Congress over the certification of the Electoral College vote next month, believing it would be horrible politics to continue waging what most recognize to be a hopeless battle to overturn the outcome of the election.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has intervened, asking his members not to join Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) or any other House members looking to object to the results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to certify the Electoral College count.
President Trump is waging a pressure campaign to get senators to revolt. Incoming Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), who will be sworn in Jan. 3, has said he’ll join the floor fight and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who has said he believes the election was “stolen” from Trump, is always a wild card.
Republican strategists are hoping McConnell can quash the insurgency, believing the debate over Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the 2020 election is tearing the party apart ahead of the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia that will determine the balance of power in the Senate.
They say it’s bad for the GOP’s efforts to win back swing suburban voters if the party is associated with erratic flamethrowers, such as pro-Trump attorneys Sidney Powell, Lin Wood and Rudy Giuliani.
I don’t have the evidence, but my hunch is that Biden made a deal with McCarthy and McTurtle about the House GOP who were willing to go along with Trump’s coup, that they not suffer any political damage from it.
I’m beginning to see how Obama had trouble with the GOP by trying to appease them. Biden must have been the influence behind it. Biden is totally naive if he thinks the GOP will work with his administration just because he was there longer. The GOP has transformed into a Trump cult.
Jeanne Bradley, a Republican voter from Hephzibah, Ga., is confused by the mixed messages she’s hearing about the election and about her state’s GOP leaders.
“We need to know more. You’re getting bits and pieces from all of the news media, and you don’t know what to believe anymore,” she said. “And it’s not just the news media. It’s people in general.”
It’s also President Trump.
He narrowly lost the state to President-elect Joe Biden, but he’s rejected that outcome and continues a pressure campaign on Georgia’s Republican leaders to overturn the result.
Trump has called Gov. Brian Kemp, a longtime ally with whom he has had some previous tensions, a “clown” and a “fool,” and he has referred to Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as “Republicans in name only.”
That’s because those officials have stood by Georgia’s election as legally conducted, in the face of unfounded claims of widespread fraud from the president. Legal challenges to the election from the Trump campaign and supporters have failed in federal, superior and state courts in Georgia. Multiple recounts have upheld the result.
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But for some Republican voters, the confusion persists.
“We don’t know,” Bradley said. “We don’t know if it’s just a ploy to get us not to vote Republican, too.”
Republicans still have Bradley’s vote. But there are other people, she said, who may throw up their hands in this chaos, vote Democratic, or skip the election.
The GOP can’t afford to lose any votes right now. Georgia’s runoff elections on Jan. 5 will decide control of the U.S. Senate, as GOP incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler face Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively. And if the GOP loses those seats, handing Democrats total control of Washington, there’s a risk that the divisions that Georgia has seen since November might intensify throughout the party.
$600 Is Not Enough, And It Won’t Get Easier (from the Daily Poster)
Congressional leaders announced an agreement on a new $900 billion stimulus bill that will deliver a boost in unemployment benefits and provide $600 checks to some families. Democratic leaders are depicting this as a big win and are promising that these kinds of emergency spending bills will become “much easier” in a new Congress under Joe Biden. Both of those arguments are ridiculous.
Here’s the truth: Democrats had a rare opportunity to win on a wildly popular proposal for much bigger survival checks, but they chose to lose. Here’s some more truth: one-time means-tested checks of $600 is not a big victory, and not even the bare minimum that should be considered acceptable during an economic meltdown that has been punctuated by mass starvation and intensifying poverty.
Though the legislative language of the final package has not yet been released, it appears the meager checks come in a bill that will give new tax benefits to corporate executives to write off their meals and provide other tax breaks to businesses that used the Paycheck Protection Program — which will be a windfall for the wealthy. Will the bill change the law to similarly exempt emergency unemployment benefits from tax levies? We don’t yet know, but there’s no indication it will.
According to a bill summary circulating on Capitol Hill, the legislation provides a mere $286 billion for the survival checks and unemployment benefits, and an additional $51 billion for food aid and rental assistance. That’s not nothing, but it’s obviously inadequate. For comparison, only three years ago, Republicans passed a $1.5 trillion tax cut that enriched the wealthiest one percent of households.
Much of the blame for this debacle certainly goes to Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, who seems absolutely determined to starve the country. But much of it also goes to Democratic leaders who had one of the easiest political opportunities to forge a bipartisan coalition or a much bigger lifeline to Americans — and then decided to squander it.
Let’s remember: Back in March, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton proposed giving low- and middle-income Americans between $1,000 and $4,000 of aid per month. More recently, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley joined with Sen. Bernie Sanders to push for $1,200 checks.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump reportedly told allies he wanted at least $1,200 and up to $2,000 — and he made a general demand for more money public in a Fox News interview last week.
“Right now, I want to see checks – for more money than they’re talking about – going to people,” he said. “I’m pushing it very hard, and to be honest with you, if the Democrats really wanted to do the deal, they’d do the deal.”
He tweeted on Sunday that Congress should give people “more money in direct payments.”
You can try to argue that the words of a handful of maverick Republicans and Trump cannot be fully trusted — maybe that’s true, but it’s moot. The point here is that there was a huge opportunity for Democrats to triangulate a group of Republican senators and a Republican president against McConnell — and Democrats refused to do it.
Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer followed Sen. Joe Manchin, Mark Warner and other Democratic corporatists into budget negotiations that kept producing smaller and smaller stimulus proposals, and now they are trying to portray a meager $600 one-time payment as some sort of enormous victory.
“Democrats should not take a victory lap on this bill,” tweeted Adam Jentleson, who was an adviser to former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. “It provides less than a third of the aid economists say is necessary and McConnell is getting all the credit — after blocking aid for months. Instead we should explain why this bill is inadequate and how Dems will deliver more.”
A summary from Democrats about the relief package says that party lawmakers secured $25 billion as they “fought to establish the first-ever emergency federal rental assistance program to be distributed by state and local governments. These funds will be targeted to families impacted by COVID that are struggling to make the rent and may have past due rent compounding on itself. These families will be able to utilize this assistance for past due rent, future rent payments, as well as to pay utility and energy bills and prevent shutoffs.”
Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told the Washington Post earlier this month that there will be as much as $70 billion in unpaid rental and utility debt by January.
Pelosi insisted at a press conference on Sunday that when it comes to future spending bills, “We’re going to have a much easier time than we’ve had with the Republican Senate and a Republican President.”
But if Democrats don’t win the Georgia Senate races and gain control of the upper chamber, that assertion makes no sense.
Democrats had a Republican president and at least some Republican lawmakers on record supporting bigger stimulus checks. That dynamic offers the best chance to actually pass something big — but it is likely to instantly change once Biden is sworn in.
Indeed, history tells us that once Democrats are in the White House, Republicans will suddenly pretend they are deficit hawks in order to try to block their opponents from spending money on basic necessities and then blame them for economic pain and suffering. That means it will almost certainly become far harder to pass emergency relief bills through Congress when Republicans have an even bigger incentive to try to starve the country for their own political gain.
Democrats are trying to put their best spin on the legislation, insisting that halting Republican Sen. Pat Toomey’s sinister attempt to shut down still-underutilized Federal Reserve programs is an enormous win. The legislative language hasn’t yet been released and Toomey is actually claiming victory on that, so it’s not even yet clear it is a win. But even if the provisions were taken out, that’s not much to brag about.
Yeah, sure, it’s probably better that those programs survived, so that there’s still a chance for them to be reformed to actually help human beings and not just enrich BlackRock and other Wall Street firms. But it’s not clear those programs are going to actually deliver on their original promise to help people — and the fact that Democrats mustered far more enthusiasm to protect these programs than they did to provide $1,200 checks to starving people says everything about who party leaders think they actually work for.
Taken together, when you account for the comparatively small-but-good things in this bill, on net it is not a victory for ordinary people — it is a victory for an austerity ideology that somehow still reigns supreme in Washington, even among Democratic leaders, and even amid an economic emergency.
If this ideology is not confronted and defeated soon, there will be even more financial pain and suffering — and no amount of Biden platitudes appealing to the soul of the nation will stop the political and economic nightmare that will follow.
No state and local aid is a big deal also. Even if state taxes are raised (and that’s a big IF), without the aid, states like NY are still going to cut services and the less well off will be the most adversely affected.
Benny
Yes, and I just heard that 500B is going to aid Israel. Our gov’t is so effed up.
Half the money seems to be so Israel can buy US weapons. Personally, I’d rather that money went to building solar panels or some such. Maybe the other half is to help Israel fund its universal health care system..
In the bill passed by Congress yesterday – part of an overall $2.3 trillion package – the act under the heading of “Procurement, Defense-Wide” detailed a total of $500 million for the “Israeli Cooperative Programs”.
Of that amount, “$73,000,000 shall be for the Secretary of Defense to provide to the Government of Israel for the procurement of the Iron Dome defense system to counter short-range rocket threats.”
In addition to that, a further “$177,000,000 shall be for the Short Range Ballistic Missile Defense program, including cruise missile defense research and development.
Congress justified limits on COVID relief in the current bill for unemployed Americans and impacted businesses to the need to address other essential needs. Defence companies and military sectors which are received money in the bill were said to be heavily hit by the pandemic.
yes. Bernie could have done more to explain MMT and exhalt Stephanie Kelton. sooooooo many people buy into the austerity “deficit!” chicken little theory. bums me out. lol
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called on the Trump administration Sunday to enact a ban on travel from the U.K. or require mandatory testing as a new, significantly more dangerous strain of the coronavirus emerges there.
The new variant in the U.K. could be “up to 70% more transmissible” than the current version, Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned at a press conference Saturday.
“Today that variant is getting on a plane and landing at JFK,” Cuomo said in a statement.
“How many times in life do you have to make the same mistake before you learn?” he asked, referring to a lack of action on the pandemic by the Trump administration. “The federal government is being grossly negligent just like the spring. All it takes is one person” to transmit the virus, he noted.
“We have done absolutely nothing,” Cuomo added. “To me, this is reprehensible.” He said the thought that the variant may already have crossed the sea to New York “kept me up last night.”
At least six European nations — the Netherlands, France, Austria, Belgium, Italy and Germany — have already shut down or are about to stop all U.K. flights. But the U.S. has taken no new action. As many as 120 countries — but not the U.S. — require a negative COVID test for travelers before they leave the U.K.
Outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr said Monday he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud — again breaking with President Trump as the commander in chief entertains increasingly desperate measures to overturn the election.
At a news conference to announce charges in a decade old terror case, Barr — who has just two days left in office — was peppered with questions about whether he would consider steps proposed by allies of the president to advance Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud.
Barr said that while he was “sure there was fraud in this election,” he had not seen evidence that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the result. He asserted he saw “no basis right now for seizing machines by the federal government,” and he would not name a special counsel to explore the allegations of Trump and his allies.
“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said.
Similarly, Barr said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, President-election Joe Biden’s son who revealed earlier this month he was under investigation for possible tax crimes. Barr said the investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally” by regular Justice Department prosecutors, and he hoped that would continue in the next administration.
“To this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said.
The comments are likely to further erode what is already a significantly damaged relationship between Barr and Trump.
Earlier this month, Barr broke with President Trump on his unfounded allegations of voter fraud, telling the Associated Press he had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Tension already had been simmering between the two men for months because Barr did not on the eve of the election release results from Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the FBI’s probe of Trump’s 2016 campaign, which Trump thought might be a political windfall. And after Barr’s comments, the president’s frustration was compounded when Hunter Biden revealed he was under federal investigation for possible tax crimes, and Barr had apparently kept that probe a relative secret, too.
Trump told Fox News recently that Barr “should have stepped up” and publicized the case — which would have violated Justice Department policy.
“All he had to do is say an investigation’s going on,” Trump said, adding later, “When you affect an election, Bill Barr, frankly, did the wrong thing.
After a meeting with Trump last week, Barr handed in his resignation, saying he intended to leave this coming Wednesday.
Since then, Trump has intensified his effort to overturn the results of the election. On Sunday, he said in a radio interview that he had spoken with Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) about challenging the electoral vote count when the House and Senate convene on Jan. 6 to formally affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
And at a frenetic Oval Office meeting days earlier, he seemed to entertain other steps that some advisers warned are baseless exceed the bounds of his power.
He suggested, for example, naming lawyer Sidney Powell — who has promoted the wild, false claim that Venezuelan communists programmed U.S. voting machines to flip votes for Biden — as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud, though the idea appeared to be a non-starter, people familiar with the meeting have said.
Barr had previously seemed to throw cold water on Powell’s allegation of a grand conspiracy, telling the Associated Press, “There’s been one assertion that would be systemic fraud, and that would be the claim that machines were programmed essentially to skew the election results. And the DHS and DOJ have looked into that, and so far, we haven’t seen anything to substantiate that,”
Trump also suggested that homeland security officials should seize state voting machines and investigate alleged fraud, though acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf and other homeland security officials have previously told the White House they have no authority to do so unless states ask for inspections or investigations.
Powell was present at the meeting, as was Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s disgraced national security adviser who has said publicly Trump could use the military to “basically rerun an election.” Flynn came to the Oval Office to discuss that idea, people familiar with the matter said, though Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone pushed back “strenuously.” Trump later tweeted, “Martial law = Fake News.
Trump and his political allies had in recent weeks been pressuring the Justice Department, in particular, to appoint special counsel to explore his unfounded claims of voter fraud. On Dec. 9, 27 House Republicans wrote to Trump urging him to direct Barr to make such a move, and Trump retweeted a post from Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.) that contained an image of the letter and appealed to the Justice Department to act immediately. “The DOJ needs to listen to #WeThePeople and address their election concerns NOW,” Budd wrote.
After Barr departs on Wednesday, leadership of the department will fall to his deputy, Jeff Rosen, who declined to answer questions in a recent interview with Reuters about whether he would name special counsels to investigate voter fraud or Hunter Biden. Rosen did not appear at Monday’s news conference.
yeah, that would cause pain for both parties. idt Barr’s motives are pure here. in a real investigation, it would open up to both major manufacturers. i’d like to see it happen under a Dem, but doubt that either party would let it happen, much less publish real results.
Academic researchers have found that millions of Americans receive these types of surprise bills each year, with as many as one in five emergency room visits resulting in such a charge. The bills most commonly come from health providers that patients are not able to select, such as emergency room physicians, anesthesiologists and ambulances. The average surprise charge for an emergency room visit is just above $600, but patients have received bills larger than $100,000 from out-of-network providers they did not select.
Some private-equity firms have turned this kind of billing into a robust business model, buying emergency room doctor groups and moving the providers out of network so they could bill larger fees.
Among the major consumer problems in the fiendishly complex health system, surprise billing was the rare Washington issue that both parties could get behind. Health committee leaders have been engaged on the issue for years, as has the White House. President-elect Joe Biden included the proposal in his campaign health care agenda. It had the backing of many prominent and powerful legislators, including Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and the retiring chairman of the Senate health committee.
A survey published Friday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 80 percent of adults want the practice banned. More than a dozen states, including Texas and California, have passed bans of their own on surprise billing.
Even so, the issue struggled to move through Congress as each policy proposal faced an outcry from some faction of the health care industry.
“There were a lot of things working in the legislation’s favor — it’s a relatively targeted problem, it resonates very well with voters, and it’s not a hyperpartisan issue among voters or Congress — and it was still tough,” said Benedic Ippolito, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who helped explain the issue to lawmakers early in the process. “It has almost everything going for it, and yet it was still this complete slog.”
Hospitals and doctors, who tend to benefit from the current system, fought to defeat solutions that would lower their pay. Insurance companies and large employer groups, on the other hand, have wanted a stronger ability to negotiate lower payments to the types of medical providers who can currently send patients surprise bills.
Legislation nearly passed last December, but was scuttled at the 11th hour after health providers lobbied aggressively against the deal. Private-equity firms, which own many of the medical providers that deliver surprise bills, poured tens of millions into advertisements opposing the plan. Committee chairs squabbled over jurisdictional issues and postponed the issue.
This year, many of the same legislators behind last year’s failed effort tried again, softening several provisions that had been most objectionable to influential doctor and hospital lobbies. The current version will probably not do as much to lower health care spending as the previous version, but will still protect patients.
After years of defeats, consumer advocacy groups cheered the new legislation.
“This was a real victory for American people against moneyed interests,” said Frederick Isasi, executive director of Families USA. “This really was about Congress recognizing in a bipartisan way the obscenity of families who were paying insurance still having financial bombs going off.”
The final compromise would require insurers and medical providers who cannot agree on a payment rate to use an outside arbiter to decide. The arbiter would determine a fair amount based, in part, on what other doctors and hospitals are typically paid for similar services. Patients could be charged the kind of cost sharing they would pay for in-network services, but nothing more.
This type of policy is generally seen as more advantageous to health care providers than the other proposal Congress considered, which would have minimized the role of arbiters and instead set benchmark reimbursement rates. Several states have set up their own arbitration systems, and have found that most price disputes are negotiated before an arbiter is involved.
“If this bill will force them to come to the table and negotiate a solution, it will be a definite win for everybody,” said Christopher Garmon, an assistant professor of health administration at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who has measured the scope of the problem.
wpDiscuz
https://www.wcax.com/2020/12/21/vermont-senators-weigh-in-on-covid-relief-package-deal/
9 months after the first relief bill
Way too late
too stingy—1/2 of the first $1,200.
Welcome anyway. Dying of thirst, even an ounce of water is welcome.
The medicine was withheld until the patient almost died. Then, the dose was small enough to prevent recovery.
It’s disgusting. But GOPers aren’t ashamed of themselves and illustrates that Nancy Pelosi is a terrible negotiator.
Nancy Pelosi is a semi-senile “public servant.” Best the fake Democrats can do. No wonder I finally quit voting for them. It is not easy when I live in a closed primary state.
Same. Closed primaries suck.
I remember being happy about Pelosi’s rise to Speaker! But she’s well past her sell-by date now, and needs to step aside, imo.
I wish there was some way to tax the Fortune 500 on this, but the problem is that the minute this arises, frequency traders punish those with 401Ks with selling off stock.
This is what Republican priorities are
https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/12/20/meal-tax-deduction/
Of course, that’s retroactive since the tax code is often part of an omnibus bill.
That damned craporate immunity BS was shelved, too.✊👍
But I think it will reappear, especially with this new mutant coming along.
Abolish the Senate.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/bernie-sanders-democrats-working-class-trump-b1776838.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-election-democrats-losses/2020/12/20/b5b2cec4-3ff5-11eb-8db8-395dedaaa036_story.html?utm_source=reddit.com
I’ve certainly notice a lot of talk from Biden & his cohorts about “union jobs!” – we’ll see if they really mean it soon enough.
I posted this yesterday, but without much context. This is the interview itself.
…
I posted this last night, but not many people probably saw it. This is a good piece referencing exactly how the parties are reversing polarity again, as they have done in the past, and how the Dems are forcing the working people out. It’s an interesting blog, actually, and one I’ll be following.
Long read, but extremely interesting. I came across this on FaceBook. There was a link in a group I belong to, Alliance against Democrat Establishment Hypocrisy, which is definitely worth checking out if you are on FB. Due Dissidence is a blog I will be following from here out, because it kinda relates to how I feel.
Why Progressives Joining the Republican Party Isn’t as Crazy as You Think
Author gets into a lot of the ways/reasons the Dems have totally alienated the working class, and why they will not be able to count on minority votes to shore them up in the future.
Progressives joining the Republican Party is pretty crazy. Republicans are not actually helping working class people but f’n them over by playing on their resentments. Unfortunately, the Dems present a juicy target.
Especially dumbed down educated ones.
Did you read the essay? He makes some good points. It might be easier to perform a coup within the GOP – as the GOP moderates have done to the Dems – than within the DNC. I’m not rushing out to join up, but I thought his reasoning was pretty sound.
It’s not so much that the GOP is helping people, but populists from both parties have traction. The difference is that the GOP actually accepted the voters. The DNC intervened to squash their populist candidate. A populist candidate like Bernie would have more acceptance by GOP voters, the working class, the Obama>Trump faction, than in the Dem camp. Bernie went over pretty damn well with the Fox audience. And Trumpites I know actually like Bernie – he’s not a “real” Democrat.
I guess the point is, progressives will never have leverage in the DNC establishment. It’s either infiltrate the GOP or form a new party. We will see how the MPP goes. I know I Demexited in 2009, and not going back.
i agree, but i’d wager that if someone like Bernie ran, they’d fix their primaries, too. but good point.
Yeah they don’t fix their primaries because their clueless voters are no threat to the ruling class. In any case, there is no way candidates who are progressive on racial etc. matters are going to be a threat to win a Republican primary.
Agreed. Any perspective that fails to account for the GOP’s central plank being white supremacy is terribly naïve, at best (and I’m not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, either).
it looks like they don’t interfere in the primaries as much, for now, though. that was a big part of the article’s reasoning. i’m sure they’ll fix that soon.
This one and his choices for foreign policy are the worst. Environment, Interior, and Health are better. Economics in the middle.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/21/joe-biden-tom-vilsack-agriculture-secretary
With Cedric Richmond being one leading the Environmental justice charge from the WH, it is still terrible. His district is not a model for this type of leadership.
A lot interesting in this article from Holly Otterbein so I included most. Bernie is not a “gadfly” however.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/21/progressive-democrats-reset-449496
Isn’t it interesting that Medicare, one of the most popular programs, is “bad” for messaging.
Sounds like PMC kept media talk to me.
Cori Bush is from St. Louis, MISSOURI. Not Mississippi. How do these major news sources get by with such sloppy editing?!?
Cos they figure a lot of people are ill-educated. Guess what? They’re right.
ikr? i asked someone how to pronounce Haaland yesterday, and she said, well, it doesn’t matter bc the tv networks often say it diff on diff channels. i said, yeah, and that’s ridiculous bc they have so much money and resources–they can just call the person up. it was like a new idea to them. so i’m glad that in my little way maybe they are now thinking a little more critically.
imho, they are simply corporate propaganda mouthpieces, and don’t have time to do real investigative work, like researching where someone is from. lol
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/21/georgia-kelly-loeffler-david-perdue-swamp
Dems need to keep hammering how much PPP money was funneled to Loeffler’s businesses–and find evidence that she was against more relief funds.
And promising that if they are elected, the relief checks will increase from the current $600 and $300
this. ever thought of post-retirement consulting, jcb?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/12/21/loeffler-warnock-georgia-senate-pastors/?utm_source=reddit.com
and the youngins’ are a comin’ up. :O)
https://prospect.org/politics/what-a-miserable-2020-revealed-about-america/
However true this may be, they had plenty of help from the spineless Democrats. Or, maybe, it was because the Dems stand to gain from the excesses of the GOP?
A lot of these yahoos are ex-GOPuke. Sad.
It was sad to see all these things become painfully obvious this year. But is anyone truly surprised, by any of it? Very much in character with the country I’ve known my entire life (born at the dawn of Reagan). Which is to say, completely devoid of any collective sense of community or respect for other people (at least at the national level).
Can the people who do want to come together save the country, in spite of itself? It’s going to be a hard fight.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/18/investing/rockefeller-foundation-divest-fossil-fuels-oil/index.html
Fingers crossed
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-gop-elections-mcconnell/
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/530910-republicans-desperate-to-avoid-floor-fight-over-electoral-college-vote
I don’t have the evidence, but my hunch is that Biden made a deal with McCarthy and McTurtle about the House GOP who were willing to go along with Trump’s coup, that they not suffer any political damage from it.
I’m beginning to see how Obama had trouble with the GOP by trying to appease them. Biden must have been the influence behind it. Biden is totally naive if he thinks the GOP will work with his administration just because he was there longer. The GOP has transformed into a Trump cult.
The GOPukes have been controlled by the rich FRightwingnut fruitcakes and their monied bosses for years. This is the result.
Biden is extremely useful to them. It’s a big club.
But we’re not in it?
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/21/948172589/trump-drives-a-wedge-among-georgia-republicans-risking-a-larger-gop-split
$600 Is Not Enough, And It Won’t Get Easier (from the Daily Poster)
No state and local aid is a big deal also. Even if state taxes are raised (and that’s a big IF), without the aid, states like NY are still going to cut services and the less well off will be the most adversely affected.
Yes, and I just heard that 500B is going to aid Israel. Our gov’t is so effed up.
Thankfully, it’s ‘only’ $500 Million going to Israel, you almost gave me a heart attack 😬
Half the money seems to be so Israel can buy US weapons. Personally, I’d rather that money went to building solar panels or some such. Maybe the other half is to help Israel fund its universal health care system..
yes. Bernie could have done more to explain MMT and exhalt Stephanie Kelton. sooooooo many people buy into the austerity “deficit!” chicken little theory. bums me out. lol
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/andrew-cuomo-trump-administration-covid-variant-uk-ban_n_5fdfd70fc5b60d416343641d?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cucmVkZGl0LmNvbS9yL3BvbGl0aWNzL25ldy8_Y291bnQ9MjUmcGFnZT0zJmFmdGVyPXQzX2toYmY4Zg&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAGtLLNInOoLBFbIr3-aHlKtjLX6KxvGrlyTNykDSGHXKs5z65m4nqzVgkRscW0LSUoa3JDVGU3qF14GFUPujKj3r9eowflmFxhh-pJFKOt3V0D5j5-v77GnXiZ4D_6Arr8rfXt-ku-QrYOYvDDluhrhrHVsZWRS1EmVEplKVLyX4
how many lawmakers have also bought into “entitlements! deficits!” and are, somewhere maybe even hidden deep inside, ok with so many of us dying.
I think there are many – on both sides of the aisle. Maybe their benefactors are pleased with the cull, and have told them to let it go.
Undercutting Trump, Barr says there’s no basis for seizing voting machines, using special counsels for election fraud, Hunter Biden
yeah, that would cause pain for both parties. idt Barr’s motives are pure here. in a real investigation, it would open up to both major manufacturers. i’d like to see it happen under a Dem, but doubt that either party would let it happen, much less publish real results.
Surprise Medical Bills: Congress is Interested in Banning Most of Them
Right you are, Andrew!
T and R, jcb!! 🎄☮️😊👍
Well, well, well, Mr. Ornery is back. @humphrey: great to read your comments! 😊👍