Here’s another image I liked

In the face of a frosty reception from the Biden Administration, Plan B has been abandoned. Absent a parliamentarian overrule followed by all Dems voting for it (not going to happen), going forward, in order to pass a $15 minimum either the filibuster has to go or somehow the $15 can be attached to “must pass” legislation. I would like to hear from Bernie about any strategies other than these two. Perhaps a less hastily crafted Plan B could be attached to the next reconciliation (infrastructure) bill?

I wonder if Biden’s statement supporting the right of the Amazon workers organization drive was related to his lack of firm support for this and $15 generally.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/540938-senate-democrats-nix-plan-b-on-minimum-wage-hike

But Democrats have dropped the effort, with one source familiar telling The Hill that there were concerns that working out the details could slow down the overall coronavirus bill. Democrats want to get the bill to President Biden’s desk before unemployment benefits expire in a matter of weeks.

“We worked through the weekend and it became clear that finalizing ‘plan B’ with the caucus would delay passage and risk going over the jobless benefits cliff on March 14,” the source said.

A source close to Sanders confirmed that he was also not moving forward with offering the idea as an amendment to the coronavirus bill, which he initially pledged to do on Thursday night.

“He is dedicated to raising the minimum age to $15 an hour, and is working on strategies to get it done,” the source added.

Neither Manchin nor Sinema had publicly weighed in on the back-up plan, but the White House gave the “Plan B” a publicly cool reception.

Going forward. Will Biden back this and use his “superpower” to convince recalcitrant Senate Dems?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/02/28/andrew-cuomos-survival-office-looks-doubtful/?utm_source=reddit.com

It is starting to look as if the question will soon be not if but when New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo will be forced to resign.

The New York Times has published a blockbuster story in which a second former aide to the governor has accused him of making unwanted sexual overtures. The account given to the paper by Charlotte Bennett, 25, is devastating and thoroughly corroborated.

The governor is not contesting her account, though he claimed he intended the things he said to Bennett to be playful and joking. “I now understand that my interactions may have been insensitive or too personal and that some of my comments, given my position, made others feel in ways I never intended,” he said in a statement issued Sunday evening.

All of this comes as Cuomo, who only a few months ago was lauded as “America’s governor” for his bravura public performance during the coronavirus pandemic, is being beset by a scandal trifecta. In addition to credible accusations of sexual harassment, Cuomo faces federal probes into whether he hid the covid-19 death toll in New York nursing homes, and fresh attention to his abusive leadership style.

Bennett, who worked as a briefer and executive assistant to the governor, did everything by the book after she became uneasy about questions she said Cuomo asked her last spring about her personal life, including whether she was monogamous and whether she had ever had sex with older men. Cuomo is 63, and Bennett alleges he told her “he’s fine with anyone above the age of 22.”

She reported what had happened and her discomfort about it to Cuomo’s chief of staff and special counsel. She accepted a transfer to another job within the administration where she would not have as much personal contact with the governor, but ultimately she left state government because she found Cuomo’s presence “suffocating.”
Cuomo under pressure in harassment probe

Her accusations — corroborated by texts and by others, including her mother, who say she told them about her interactions with the governor shortly after they happened — follow those of former state economic development official Lindsey Boylan, who alleges that Cuomo harassed her on multiple occasions and once planted an unwanted kiss on her lips. Cuomo denies that happened.

Now we finally have reached the point where it is not credible to deny climate change because people can see it playing out in real time in front of their eyes. #climate #ClimateAction @MichaelEMann https://t.co/8wfmxxbwWt via @guardian

— Bobscaping (@bobscaping) March 1, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/01/business/elizabeth-warren-wealth-tax.html

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, plans to introduce legislation on Monday that would tax the net worth of the wealthiest people in America, a proposal aimed at persuading President Biden and other Democrats to fund sweeping new federal spending programs by taxing the richest Americans.

Ms. Warren’s wealth tax would apply a 2 percent tax to individual net worth — including the value of stocks, houses, boats and anything else a person owns, after subtracting out any debts — above $50 million. It would add an additional 1 percent surcharge for net worth above $1 billion.

The proposal, which mirrors the plan Ms. Warren unveiled while seeking the 2020 presidential nomination, is not among the top revenue-raisers that Democratic leaders are considering to help offset Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure, education, child care, clean energy deployment, health care and other domestic initiatives. Unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Biden pointedly did not endorse a wealth tax in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

But Ms. Warren is pushing colleagues to pursue such a plan, which has gained popularity with the public as the richest Americans reap huge gains while 10 million Americans remain out of work as a result of the pandemic.

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/president-biden-orders-bombing-syria-iraq-20210228.html?outputType=amp

But I don’t understand what gives Biden — like his predecessors Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush — either the legal or moral authority to unilaterally launch a military attack in Syria, when there’s been no declaration of war and the only authorization of military force is nearly 20 years old in response to the 9/11 attacks. (Neither, by the way, do some Democratic Biden allies in Congress.) More importantly, I don’t understand why Biden doesn’t seem to have a plan to end that “forever war” that dates to 2001, or the never-ending presence of U.S. troops in places like Iraq since 2003, when they toppled Saddam Hussein but never left, for ever-changing and increasingly muddled reasons. The national conversation shouldn’t be about what Biden needs to do to protect our troops in Iraq but — in a world that increasingly looks nothing like 2003 — why in God’s name are they still over there?

The casual and arguably unconstitutional U.S. bombing inside Syria — coupled with a tepid and morally bankrupt response to another crisis in the region, the hard-to-dispute and now public intel that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of a U.S.-based journalist — are strong signals that Biden won’t change the fundamental direction of unbridled, unfathomably expensive militarism that has been America’s go-to maneuver for generations. The truth is that America executing its foreign policy with Predator missiles — regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican is in office, with the U.S. spending more on weapons and troops than the next 10 nations combined — makes neither President Biden nor America look strong. Our bullying and too often deadly ways, in nations stretching from Africa to Pakistan, shows us to be morally weak — clinging to superpower status with brute force rather than the force of our now-on-life-support democratic ideals.

The 78-year-old POTUS seems mired in 1990s groupthink on the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf. Those news reports citing White House sources on Biden’s backing-down cited counterterrorism — even though America’s real terrorist threat in 2021 comes from within, from right-wing extremists — and our shared regional concerns about Iran, even as the president looks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal that the Saudis helped undermine. Left unsaid were the even more tired reasons of oil — at a time when America is weening itself off fossil fuels — and our historic alliance with Israel, which persists even as the Netanyahu government — not unlike that of MBS — increasingly becomes a pariah on human rights.

Of course, also left unsaid was how many of those unnamed advisers who pushed Biden not to offend the prince known to many as “Mister Bone Saw” were among his new hires with recent financial ties to defense contractors or their lobbyists and affiliated think tanks — including new Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, who served on the board of directors of Raytheon, the defense industry behemoth that’s been doing business with the Saudis for decades. January brought the 60th anniversary of Dwight Eisenhower’s famed warning to the nation about the perils of the military-industrial complex, and while Biden surely didn’t “become president” when he ordered the airstrike in Syria, he did become the 12th president in a row to basically ignore Ike’s wise and prescient advice.

Indeed, in the six decades since Eisenhower’s farewell address, America’s insistence on massively outspending other industrialized nations on weapons has come at the same time that we’ve increasingly fallen behind on the things that matter more, like education, health care or clean energy. You don’t need to be a Pentagon rocket scientist to do the math here. In recent years, the U.S. government wasted an astonishing $1.5 trillion (yes, with a “t”) on a dysfunctional aircraft called the F-35, at the same time we underfunded higher education and saddled the middle class with $1.7 trillion in college debt.