That Was Fast [DOT 2/6/21]

2/6/21 MegMegMcGee 48

Hi gang! Congrats, you made it to Wednesday and it didn’t even take that long. I hope the Wednesday ‘hump’ is easy for you to get over. Here’s a little bit of what else is going on in the world:

Hilarious. What a dum dum.

At Tulsa event, Biden announces Harris will lead push for voting protections in response to states’ recent ballot restrictions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ahead-of-tulsa-trip-biden-to-unveil-new-plans-to-reduce-black-white-wealth-gap/2021/05/31/b80c9c4e-c269-11eb-8c18-fd53a628b992_story.html

Totally Normal Thing.

Fact-checking Sidney Powell’s claim Trump could be reinstated
https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/01/politics/powell-trump-inauguration-fact-check/index.html

Sprots!

NBA stars react to Damian Lillard’s record-setting Game 5 performance
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/31550131/nba-stars-react-damian-lillard-record-setting-game-5-performance

Stonks!

AMC’s ‘apes’ gave it a lifeline. Now, its CEO wants to use the meme frenzy as a springboard for growth
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/amcs-ceo-wants-to-use-the-meme-frenzy-as-a-springboard-for-growth.html

Absolutely stunning!

Talk amongst yourselves…

Have a great day!

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48 Comments

  1. re: the sidney powell/re-instatement thing…I know it doesn’t mean anything in the sense that we don’t get to discount them from the political landscape or anything…but if your entire platform is predicated on appealing to a subset of voters who are prepared to countenance assertions that “no reasonable person would believe” logic would seem to dictate that you’re setting yourself as, variously, the party of the unreasonable/the anti-reason party/the official party of indefensible dumbassery…& so on & so forth…which not only seems like the sort of thing that ought to be disqualifying…but also seems to indicate a total absence of self-respect in that “no self-respecting politician would”?

    • Just to be clear, the drive for irrational people is not a problem for the GOP, it’s the whole point.
       
      It’s a cynical, vicious effort to promote the elimination of reason and fairness in American government, and the blatant signalling is designed to crystalize two things.
       
      First, for their followers it’s that there are no rules except what the leaders say. And second, for their opponents that there is no point to pushing back because the rules don’t matter.
       
      The GOP used to be much more passive about this. They would wait for events to cause an uproar before trying to capitalize. Those days are over.  The entire party is following the lead of Trump and manufacturing events no matter how absurd that they can use for fodder for their madness.
       
      The creation out of thin air of a fantasy stolen election isn’t supposed to be logical. It’s about grooming fanatics to back them with mob violence when they declare the next election is stolen. That’s why CNN’s fact checking about Sidney Powell is so much beside the point. Claiming August is when Trump returns isn’t a mistake or an error, it’s deadly serious.

  2. The Bess Bell twitter thread is pretty good. I had to google this for context. Bess Bell is a New Yorker writer, for one thing. Nancy Mace is a Republican Rep. from South Carolina of whom I was blissfully unaware who self-vandalized her own home to stir up panic. Someone who replied posted a picture of that moron who carved a backwards B onto her cheek and claimed an Obama-supporting Black man did it during the run-up to the 2008 Presidential election, so that was a nice memory from a kinder, gentler era. 
     
    In the Other Tweets, Bernie Sanders is calling for an end to the filibuster. I know mine is a minority and unpopular opinion among the left but I think we should keep the filibuster. Harry Reid got rid of it out of frustration at Republicans holding up Democratic Supreme Court appointments. What did that get us? Three Trump justices who got through on a party-line simple majority. People seem to think that a Democratic majority, razor thin as it is, will be with us now for all time and it won’t. As early as next year both the Seante and the House could be lost, I wouldn’t be surprised, and it’s very rare for a party to hold the Presidency for three terms. Let’s say Biden/Harris makes it to three terms and then it goes back to the Republicans. We won’t have a filibuster. The Republican Party gets ever nuttier, as it has since Reagan, and arguably since 1964, when Goldwater got the Presidential nomination. I really don’t want to imagination the legislation that will come out of a filibuster-free Republican administration in 2032.
     
    I feel the same way about expanding the Supreme Court. Suppose its number increases to 13 and Biden appoints four new justices. He picks bright “young” people in their 40s who hang around for 40 years. All well and good, for the time being, but the justices are not immortal. All this does is rather than one or two justices change over during any given administration (Trump’s three was high for a one-term President) you might have four or five or seven. The outcome will remain the same, and meanwhile a lot of bipartisan resentment gets stirred up about “packing the Court.” Roosevelt tried it in the 1930s and that’s what happened; there’s no reason to believe Americans today would be any more enthusiastic about it.

    • I would still say we should reform the filibuster though. Right now a “threat” of filibustering will stop the vote cold. I say make anyone who wants to filibuster do the full Jimmy Stewart and stand and talk while doing so, but also restrict talking to be on topic, and if there’s verifiable lies or misrepresentation of the bill’s content it bounces to a vote.
       
      Whip out Green Eggs & Ham to burn some time? Go to automatic up/down vote. Start talking about Obamacare Death Panels? Congratulations you just played yourself.

      • This is the thing about the current “filibuster” that is such bullshit.  It’s not a real filibuster, just a threat of one.  Fuck that.  You want to filibuster something, then get your fat ass up on that podium and talk about the bill.  Ran out of shit to say after a couple of hours?  Need to use the can?  Tough shit.  Either get another Republican up there to talk about the bill or sit the fuck down and vote.

    • …I’m not a fan of making the courts more political in terms of appointment of justices…but ultimately the makeup of the judiciary is inherently political since (assuming they take a case & produce a ruling) that’s where a lot of bucks stop (sometimes in an unfortunately literal sense) but I think I might be more of a fan of dropping people from the supreme court than adding seats?

      …I recall there being some statistic that argued there ought to be many more seats were the ratio of justices : population to have been maintained over the years since the supreme court was founded…but aside from the dubious nature of deciding to let people whose judgement may decline with age continue to dispense it until they “age out”…I feel like they’d behave differently if it were a post they could lose…admittedly I’m not sure how to achieve that without allowing more influence to be exerted over the supposedly impartial judiciary…but the likes of brett-likes-beer & amy coney barrett are explicitly appointed to further a political project to an extent that seems like it ought to disqualify them on the grounds that their hypothetical impartiality is a paper-thin sham that makes a mockery of the whole mechanism of the court?

      …as for the filibuster…I’m also uneasy about abolishing it…but I think it ought to mean something…currently it serves as a means to obstruct the process with virtually zero effort on the part of those who want to prevent a vote…much the way mcconnell’s refusal to bring things to the senate to get a chance at a vote was

      …I think there probably does need to be a mechanism to prevent god-awful legislation getting passed simply because the lunatics might be running the asylum again at some point…but I think it ought to be difficult…or at least involve going on the record with the how & why of the objection…which if it’s based in an actual principle & not just “we don’t want the other team to get a win” or “if every vote counts we’d never get elected” then that shouldn’t be that high a bar?

      …iirc the term owes its origins to the idea of hijacking the debate…& possibly the first time it happened in the senate was when andrew jackson was trying to wipe the record of his having been censured…which seems like the sort of thing a president shouldn’t be able to push through both houses…so I guess I’d argue that although it’s a hard needle to thread (since someone like mcconnell has zero problem condemning his opponents for far lesser offences against “procedural norms” than their at ease with committing anytime they have the whip hand) something of the sort is arguably necessary…but it doesn’t seem like the current incarnation can be allowed to continue?

    • The problem with this line of thinking: Your argument rests on the assumption that McConnell wouldn’t have done away with the fillibuster simply to get those justices on the court anyway. Reid gave him an out, but McConnell wouldn’t have cared about the niceties of precedent or procedure if he could take advantage of the situation. Hell, you can even argue he misplayed the whole thing anyway: Garland was DOA, and instead of sitting on his hands, Yurtle could have just let it come to a vote the Dems never could have won, and Garland becomes a footnote to history instead of a rallying cry.

      Moreover, royal “we” can’t complain that the right wants to destroy democracy while we stubbornly cling to a procedure invented to prevent minority rights in an already undemocratic body. If you get the votes, you ought to be able to pass legislation! And of course, some of it is going to suck. But the other side of this is a) most of it won’t because the GOP has zero interest in governing and b) it makes the courts WAY less valuable, and that’s a field of battle where the far right has an enormous current advantage. 

      Anyway, though, this is all moot because we’re going to keep the fillibuster — heaven forfend we violate the norms! — so in 2024 the GOP can win the House by 1 seat and refuse to certify Biden’s re-election and I’m sure Susan Collins will be “concerned” about the whole thing.

    • Yeah with that dumbass South Carolina politician

      As soon as they were reporting “antifa” symbols, I was like hmmm betcha it was someone on her team or family who did it for the publicity. 

      Perhaps even her!

  3. Also I thought this was interesting:
     
    https://news.yahoo.com/mta-debuts-elevators-midtown-subway-223100821.html
     
    You might have seen this subway station you’ve ever visited NYC: it’s at Carnegie Hall. This must have been very complicated, granted, but a decade and a cost of $84 million? And it says “elevators” but I bet it was only 2. The George Washington Bridge took almost exactly 4 years to build and that was in the 1920s/very early 1930s.

    • A further and completely irrelevant addendum to the subway elevators story: The MTA says that 10 years and $84 million was “ahead of schedule and below budget.” For years I commuted to the same subway station. One day I noticed that they had blocked off one side of a crumbling one-story cement staircase to repair it. That side finally re-opened and it still looked like a crumbling, one-story cement staircase. It took seven years.

    • The subway is a nightmare in terms of accessibility. (Not to mention resistance to updating old buildings by obtaining blanket historic landmark designations.) I often think about the woman who died whilst trying to carry her baby and stroller on the subway stairs during the winter. 
      Some MTA projects have taken so long that I forget that they did finally finish them. For example, because I rarely use the 2nd Ave line, I often forget it did actually open up after decades of being a long-running joke. And Brooklyn sections of the F,G were cut off at weekends for so long, I sometimes forget that they do for the most part operate 7 days/week. 

    • I would put it in the same tier as ballpark food (non-luxury-box) or the Costco hot dog. It gets you by in that specific context, like “fuck me it’s 2 and a half more hours til we’re gonna see a real restaurant on this stretch of I90, huh?”.

      • On Yes they like to pan to the crowd during baseball games and comment on the food people are eating – it all looks so gross and mega-portioned. Heresy of the day – melted cheese does not belong on everything. Gluttony is not a virtue.

      • Not even just the Costco Hotdogs! 
        Comparable to the whole Costco Food Court!
         
        Kwik Trip now sells meals–freshly fried or fresh rotisserie chicken, sides, etc. They also sell pizza & racks of ribs that are either able to be picked up hot in-store, or taken home to heat & eat.. 
        Much like Target’s & Walmart’s “Take & Bake” offerings!
         
         

    • Honestly, I hear that name and I instinctively think it’s Sidney Purcell, the lobbyist from VEEP. Technically, you would think it didn’t get any slimier than him, but here we are. 

  7. Can I be blunt? That’s just not how the Senate works. Rules get invented and ignored all the time, and upholding a “rule” because the other side will be bound somehow to honor it is a complete and utter fiction.
     
    Mitch McConnell invented a “rule” that Supreme Court justices can’t be considered before an election when he wanted to block Garland and then erased that “rule” when he wanted Barrett on the court.
     
    The fillibuster was invented out of thin air to block civil rights laws and various “rules” around it were fabricated as time went on. The GOP has honored and ignored all kinds of other “rules” as it suited them.
     
    The GOP side of the Senate has gotten to the point where they are on board with a mob attacking the Senate itself.  They will destroy the fillibuster as soon as they want to pass bills that need it. They are the mob at this point.

    • You’re not wrong. It reminds me of an article I read about Republicans who objected to Biden tax increases on the rich (so all of them) “threatening” to roll back any tax increases as soon as they were in power. 
       
      The author was like, yeah, so what? It doesn’t matter if you raise taxes or not, Republicans will always cut them for rich people and corporations when they are in power. Always. That’s the only thing they ever do. It’s an empty threat because they’re going to do it anyway. 
       
      Same thing with the filibuster. It will exist only as long as it’s useful to Republicans. When it’s not, it’s gone. So claiming that it will “protect” Democrats at some undefined point in the future is disingenuous at best. Get rid of it and permanently reform voting laws. That will put Republicans out of business. Manchin and Synema (can’t bother to check spelling) are just waiting to see who offers them the biggest bribes. Bribe them and get the shit done. 

      • To be clear, the GOP, should they force their way into power, won’t need to get rid of the filibuster because they will be ruling by a combination of presidential edicts, judicial fiat, and state government mandates.
         
        We will see the gutting of religious freedom, freedom of the press and women’s rights without the Senate doing anything. Gay marriage will become null and void when states are allowed to not only ignore it but punish institutions — employers, churches, universities — that honor it, and the federal administrative state is empowered to attack it in the same way that it was used to squelch racial integration. The principle of one man one vote is close to being buried.
         
        The steps DeSantis is taking in Florida to crack down on vaccinations is the model for how it would go, and if anyone thinks that doesn’t mean that Florida, Texas, Ohio and the rest won’t be ganging up to take down civil rights, gay rights, consumer rights, or the rights of non-fundamentalists is dreaming.  The US Senate will become as vaporous as the Roman Senate after Augustus. The filibuster may remain, but for all intents and purposes it will irrelevant.

      • Thing is, if you’re going to take that route, you have to nail down Manchin and Synema for all of the voting reform laws and secure their bribes BEFORE you shitcan the filibuster.  You’d have to set up a situation where there’s going to be a big old vote-a-rama where the filibuster is gone and then over the next few hours you ram through all of the voting rights stuff and all of the Manchin/Synema bribes.  The bribes have to be at the end, though, because those two assholes need an incentive to stick with the program.  Anything short of this scenario and it’ll just be open season the very second the Republicans take over again–which will probably be in two years.

        If that’s not the path that Democrats want to take, then they need to change the filibuster rules to require an ACTUAL filibuster–not just the threat of one (which is makes me fucking crazy when news outlets say that Dems couldn’t overcome a filibuster.  No, that’s not what fucking happened.  They refused to vote on something because someone threatened a filibuster.), and that said filibuster must be limited to the bill on the floor.  That, alone, will shut a lot of this stupid shit down.

        As for Republicans getting rid of the filibuster whenever they want to, that’s certainly possible, but let’s remember that every time the filibuster was weakened or removed for things like federal judges, it was Democrats who made the first move and then Republicans followed suit.  Let them make the first move on killing it, because even when Trump was in office and Mitch was running the Senate there were still some things that proved to be a bridge too far and I’m betting that this would be one of them.

        • The thing about supposed precedents is that there is always one you can find somewhere — McConnell made one up for blocking Garland and came up with another for passing ACB.
           
          The problem with letting the GOP take the first step at some point in the future is that it’s a vote they’ll take either way, win or lose. If they win, they have a clear path to what they want. If they lose, it will only be by the defection of 1 to 3 slightly less rabid senators, and they’ll make it that much easier to pick them off in a primary in a state where they’ve fixed the odds.
           
          The broader point is that getting hung up on the filibuster lets the GOP set the terms of the debate on the destruction of democracy. Handwringing feeds the media’s obsession with a narrative where it is the Democrats who are bound by norms while the GOP gets a free pass because the press feels it’s savvy  to not bother getting vapors over GOP power plays.
           
          The filibuster is just one piece of how the GOP operates. They’ll leave it while it serves their purposes and dump it when it doesn’t, just like they want to kill free elections wherever it serves their purposes, but moan and groan about neutral administration of the law when it serves their purposes. They want Democrats to get bogged down in the details, when 90% of the country doesn’t even know the Senate doesn’t even operate by majority rule.

          • Except McConnell’s “precedents” were widely recognized as total bullshit with zero legitimacy, except in the right wing echo chamber.  I submit that if the Republicans wanted to ditch the filibuster they would have done it already.  The fact is they don’t need to because Democrats remain too chickenshit to stand up to them. 

            It’s actually possible to enact a slew of voting rights legislation without bothering with the filibuster (fake or otherwise).  Any of the changes that would need to happen would require some serious money to implement.  Because it will cost money, they can utilize budget reconciliation to pass it.  The next major test, though, will be whether the right wing SCOTUS allows it to stand.  So, better to keep the filibuster in place (but reformed to force people to actually talk, and to talk about the bill on the floor) and have SCOTUS knock it down because that’s what the six of them are there for, than to ditch the filibuster and still lose to SCOTUS.

  8. More sprots. It’s Lou Gehrig Day today across MLB. Hands down my favorite Yankee. Read ‘Luckiest Man’ if you haven’t already. Special to me because while grasping for a diagnosis Drs thought I might have ALS. [I don’t]
    More attention needs to be paid to muscular diseases, though, so in spite of being teary over Lou, it’s a good thing.
     

    • …you know we appreciate you though, right?

      …imagine doing all that work for the sort of comment section you’d imagine would accrete at the bottom of that blog?

      …I’m starting to wonder if calling them his “base” wasn’t always meant to have a double meaning…there doesn’t seem to be much they won’t debase given half a chance

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