…you say that [DOT 23/9/21]

…they say tomorrow never comes…but then again friday will be with us on schedule…so…that might seem like nonsense

Yes, it stinks that Democrats always have to be the grown-ups and prevent infantile Republicans from trashing the Constitution and causing a global catastrophe. But that’s apparently how our government works now.
[…]
Amid all the other ongoing crises, the federal government is perilously close to defaulting on its financial obligations for the first time in history. That’s because Congress has not yet voted to lift the statutory debt limit, which is necessary to pay bills that Congress has already committed to under both Democratic and Republican leaders.
[…]
Financial markets currently treat U.S. debt as virtually risk-free, with all other assets benchmarked against it. If we demonstrate that our debt is not really risk-free — that we’re instead cavalier about repaying our creditors — panic would tear through other markets as well.
[…]
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and even supposedly “reasonable” Republicans such as Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) have said they’ll play no part in lifting the debt ceiling. They say it’s up to Democrats to address the issue using a special legislative process called “reconciliation,” which allows bills to pass with only 50 (that is, Democratic-only) Senate votes.

Democrats don’t want to do this. Why is a bit complicated. Basically, they fear the bad optics of good governance.
[…]
Democrats could go back and amend their budget resolution, but that’s an involved process that will require lots of floor time. Right now we don’t know exactly when the government will run out of money. Technically the last debt limit “suspension” ended in July; since then, Treasury has been moving money around to avoid default. Treasury has forecast that these “extraordinary measures” will be exhausted sometime in October, but a lot of uncertainty surrounds that date.

Bottom line: Time is short. The GOP has come close to blowing up the global financial system through a debt default before, and the party has only grown more nihilistic in the years since. Democratic lawmakers must immediately begin the long and politically thankless process necessary to lift the debt limit on their own. If they wait around for Republicans to do the right thing, it could be too late.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/20/once-again-democrats-must-be-grown-ups-keep-republicans-causing-global-catastrophe/

Mitch McConnell vs. Mitch McConnell pic.twitter.com/YmwubhEdVd

— The Democrats (@TheDemocrats) September 22, 2021

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, found that a prolonged impasse over the debt ceiling would cost the U.S. economy up to 6 million jobs, wipe out as much as $15 trillion in household wealth, and send the unemployment rate surging to roughly 9 percent from around 5 percent.
[…]
“This economic scenario is cataclysmic. … The downturn would be comparable to that suffered during the financial crisis” of 2008, said the report, written by Zandi and Bernard Yaros, assistant director and economist at Moody’s Analytics.
[…]
The path forward is unclear. Congressional Democrats on Monday unveiled a plan to package the debt ceiling suspension with funding the federal government — which would otherwise shut down at the end of this month — along with emergency funding for disaster relief and Afghan refugee resettlement funds. Republicans are expected to block the measure, with even moderate GOP senators saying they will vote against that package as long as it includes raising the debt ceiling. Democrats will then face a choice about their next steps.

Even resolving the matter before the debt ceiling is breached could hurt U.S. taxpayers and the American economy in the long term. The budget battles over the debt ceiling of 2011 and 2013 under the Obama administration created financial uncertainty and deflated business investment, costing the U.S. economy as much as $180 billion and 1.2 million jobs by 2015, according to Zandi and Yaros.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/09/21/debt-ceiling-recession-/

The Democratic-controlled House passed a stopgap bill Tuesday to keep the government funded at existing levels through Dec. 3, giving the two parties more time to come to a full-year agreement. That piece of the agenda isn’t particularly controversial, and Democrats and Republicans have a general handshake agreement on how to address domestic and military spending to keep everyone happy.

But for procedural reasons, the bill will be difficult to pass in the Senate. If it isn’t signed into law by Sept. 30, the federal government will shut down.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/infrastructure-debt-trillions-spending-where-congress-stands-key-deadlines

…at this point it’s not like mitch flatly contradicting his own positions on something is really all that notable…there’s a solid argument to be made for hypocrisy being a defining characteristic of the Geriatric Obstructionists Pathology he represents, even

Bipartisan negotiations in the US Congress over a police reform bill that was prompted by the killing of George Floyd have collapsed.
[…]
The House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in March, and Bass and the Democratic senator Cory Booker have since been working with the Republican senator Tim Scott to try to reach a bipartisan agreement on a bill that could pass the Senate.
[…]
Most notably, the bipartisan negotiating team could not reach an agreement on the Democratic proposal to reform qualified immunity, which shields police officers from civil liability for misconduct.
[…]
The sweeping legislation passed by the House would have banned chokeholds and qualified immunity for law enforcement and would have created national standards for policing in an effort to increase accountability. Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, setting off mass anti-racism protests that called for widespread police reform.

However, the only Republican who voted in favor of the House bill at the time said he did so in error, and later changed the official record to reflect his opposition.
[…]
Biden noted he still hoped to sign police reform legislation, but he said he would soon explore additional steps to determine what executive action he may be able to take on the issue.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/22/us-police-reform-bill-congress-bipartisan-talks

Owing to an exceptionally narrow reading of Supreme Court precedent, some appellate courts have ruled that federal law enforcement badges confer all-but-complete immunity from lawsuits — no matter how egregious an agent’s conduct. In effect, they have made the Bill of Rights an empty promise and, as one federal judge noted, allowed federal officers to operate “in something resembling a Constitution-free zone.”

It’s hard to hold police accountable. For federal agents, it’s all but impossible [WaPo]

…but all the same…it’s pretty hard to swallow that these kinds of dog & pony shows remain a viable strategy rather than grounds to ignore this sort of performatively histrionic approach to politics

If President Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill dies in Congress, it will be because moderate Democrats killed it.

Over the past month, those moderates have put themselves at the center of negotiations over the $3.5 trillion proposal (doled out over 10 years) for new programs, investments and social spending. And they’ve made demands that threaten to derail the bill — and the rest of Biden’s agenda with it.

In the House last week, a group of moderate Democrats successfully opposed a measure that would allow direct government negotiation of drug prices and help pay for the bill. One of the most popular items in the entire Democratic agenda — and a key campaign promise in the 2018 and 2020 elections — federal prescription drug negotiation was supposed to be a slam dunk. But the moderates say it would hurt innovation from drugmakers. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has likewise announced her opposition to direct government negotiation of the price of prescription drugs.

Similarly, a different group of moderate Democrats hopes to break the agreement between Democratic leadership and congressional progressives to link the Senate-negotiated bipartisan infrastructure bill to Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, which would be passed under the reconciliation process to avoid a filibuster by Senate Republicans.
[…]
Moderate Democrats want Biden to sign the bipartisan infrastructure bill. But it seems clear that they’ll take nothing if it means they can trim progressive sails in the process, despite the fact that many of the items in the “Build Back Better” bill are the most popular parts of the Democratic agenda.

Here, it’s worth making a larger point. In the popular understanding of American politics, the term “moderate” or “centrist” usually denotes a person who supports the aims and objectives of his or her political party but prefers a less aggressive and more incremental approach. It is the difference between a progressive or liberal Democrat who wants to expand health coverage with a new, universal program (“Medicare for All”) and one who wants to do the same by building on existing policies, one step at a time.

Moderates, it’s commonly believed, have a better sense of the American electorate and thus a better sense of the possible. And if they can almost always count on favorable and flattering coverage from the political press, it is because their image is that of the “grown-ups” of American politics, whose hard-nosed realism and deference to public opinion stand in contrast to the fanciful dreams of their supposedly more out-of-touch colleagues.

Given this picture of the ideological divide within parties, a casual observer might assume that in the struggle to move President Biden’s agenda through Congress, the chief obstacle (beyond Republican opposition) is the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and its demands for bigger, more ambitious programs. Biden was, after all, not their first choice for president. Or their second. He won the Democratic presidential nomination over progressive opposition, and there was a sense on the left, throughout the campaign, that Biden was not (and would not be) ready to deal with the scale of challenges ahead of him or the country.

But that casual observer would be wrong.[…]Progressive Democrats want the bill to pass, even if it isn’t as large as they would like. They believe, correctly, that a win for Biden is a win for them. Moderate Democrats, however, seem to think that their success depends on their distance from the president and his progressive allies. Their obstruction might hurt Biden, but, they seem to believe, it won’t hurt them.
[…]
There is nothing serious about an obsession with the most superficial aspects of process over actual policy and nothing savvy about leaving real problems unaddressed in order to score points with some imagined referee.

It’s All or Nothing for These Democrats, Even if That Means Biden Fails [NYT]

The president’s critics have explained their opposition by invoking the supposed sanctity of arcane House procedure, telling constituents that their votes for or against certain parts of the plan are meaningless and issuing economic critiques that make no sense. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia upbraided Democratic leadership for running up the “crippling” national debt — even though Mr. Biden has said that the plan will include enough tax increases to make it budget neutral.

There’s a simple reason Mr. Biden’s centrist critics can’t seem to explain themselves. The Build Back Better Act is centrism taken seriously — an effort to fix American democracy through economic support rather than structural political change.
[…]
Mr. Manchin’s critique demands particular attention. In addition to his phantom debt fears, Mr. Manchin has accused his Democratic colleagues of using the bill to fan the flames of an “overheating” economy that he insists is already imposing “a costly ‘inflation tax’” on working families.

It’s true that prices have increased unexpectedly this year, and true again that policymakers should be taking reasonable precautions against further increases. But in attacking the Build Back Better plan, Mr. Manchin is working against his purported aims. The law is designed not only to support employment but also to reduce inflationary pressure.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/22/opinion/biden-moderate-democrats.html

…but then some people can (& do) say any old shit

Local talk radio is not often mentioned in discussions about conservative media and messaging in America.

Fox News and even more extreme rightwing television channels like Newsmax and One America News draw the headlines, and Facebook is often noted as a source for conspiracy theories, but behind the scenes thousands of small radio stations make up a patchwork of conservative media across the US that is enjoyed by millions.

In terms of the spread of misinformation, talk radio’s impact is unappreciated, Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a progressive media watchdog, said.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/21/anti-vax-radio-hosts-dying-covid

…in all sorts of places

Facebook’s semi-independent oversight board says it will review the company’s “XCheck” system, an internal program that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules.

The decision follows an investigation by the Wall Street Journal that revealed that reviews of posts by well-known users such as celebrities, politicians and journalists are steered into the separate system.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/21/facebook-xcheck-system-oversight-board-review

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, signed off last month on a new initiative code-named Project Amplify.

The effort, which was hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose: to use Facebook’s News Feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to show people positive stories about the social network.
[…]
Project Amplify punctuated a series of decisions that Facebook has made this year to aggressively reshape its image. Since that January meeting, the company has begun a multipronged effort to change its narrative by distancing Mr. Zuckerberg from scandals, reducing outsiders’ access to internal data, burying a potentially negative report about its content and increasing its own advertising to showcase its brand.
[…]
So Facebook executives, concluding that their methods had done little to quell criticism or win supporters, decided early this year to go on the offensive, said six current and former employees, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal.
[…]
The changes have involved Facebook executives from its marketing, communications, policy and integrity teams. Alex Schultz, a 14-year company veteran who was named chief marketing officer last year, has also been influential in the image reshaping effort, said five people who worked with him. But at least one of the decisions was driven by Mr. Zuckerberg, and all were approved by him, three of the people said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-project-amplify.html

…while…well…that doesn’t exactly go for the rest of us

Online freedom is continuing to decline globally, according to a new study, with governments increasingly cracking down on user speech and misinformation on the rise.

The report from Freedom House, a Washington DC-based democracy advocacy group, found internet freedom declined for the fifth year in a row in the US and the 11th year internationally – for two distinct reasons.

Domestically, the lack of regulation in the tech industry has allowed companies to grow beyond reproach and misinformation to flourish online. Abroad, authoritarian governments have harnessed their tight control of the internet to subdue free expression.
[…]
The yearly study, which has been published since 1973, uses a standard index to measure internet freedom by country on a 100-point scale. It asks questions about internet infrastructure, government control and obstacles to access, and content regulation. Countries are scored on a scale of 100 points with higher numbers considered more “free”.

[…] global internet freedom declined for the 11th consecutive year, with more governments arresting users for nonviolent political, social, or religious speech than ever before. Officials in at least 20 countries suspended internet access, and 20 regimes blocked access to social media platforms, the report said.
[…]
The report called the Chinese government “the world’s worst abuser of internet freedom”, citing new legislation criminalizing certain expressions online and draconian prison terms issued to activists for online dissent – including an 18-year sentence against one activist for distributing a paper criticizing the government’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
[…]
The report further showed governments are clashing with technology companies on users’ rights, with authorities in at least 42 countries pursuing new rules for platforms on content, data, and competition over the past year.
[…]
Despite these issues, the report said legislation to address abuses of tech companies has been limited. It found that while 48 countries have pursued regulatory actions in the past year, little of that legislation has the potential to make meaningful change.

“In the high stakes battles between governments and tech companies, human rights are the main casualties,” said Allie Funk, senior research analyst who co-wrote the report, in a news briefing on Monday.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/21/internet-freedom-decline-free-speech-study

…& again…in a host of ways none of that is new or really all that surprising…& yet for some reason…here we go round again

Former president Donald Trump has sued his niece, Mary L. Trump, and the New York Times over the publication of a 2018 article detailing allegations that he “participated in dubious tax schemes … including instances of outright fraud” that allowed him to receive over $413 million from his father, Fred Trump Sr., while significantly reducing taxes.
[…]
The New York Times and the three reporters named in the suit — David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner — won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for their 18-month investigation that culminated in the article. Their work “debunked [Trump’s] claims of self-made wealth and revealed a business empire riddled with tax dodges,” according to the Pulitzer Prize board.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/21/trump-taxes-mary-times-lawsuit/

Former President Donald Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit Tuesday against his niece, Mary Trump, and the New York Times, claiming they conspired to obtain his tax returns for the paper’s Pulitzer-winning story on his undisclosed finances.
[…]
In a statement, Mary Trump called her uncle desperate.

“I think he is a loser, and he is going to throw anything against the wall he can. It’s desperation. The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that he thinks will stick,” she said. “As is always the case with Donald, he’ll try and change the subject.”

The New York Times said in a statement it plans to challenge the lawsuit.

“The Times’s coverage of Donald Trump’s taxes helped inform citizens through meticulous reporting on a subject of overriding public interest,” said Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the paper. “This lawsuit is an attempt to silence independent news organizations and we plan to vigorously defend against it.”

The suit was filed in New York State court in Dutchess County, which is where lawyers for the president’s late brother, Robert Trump, filed an unsuccessful claim to stop the publication of Mary Trump’s book.
[…]
The suit claims Mary Trump violated a confidentiality agreement that barred her from publicly releasing details of the family’s finances under the terms of the settlement of Fred Trump Sr.’s estate.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-files-100-million-suits-against-niece-new-york-times

…sure…it’ll probably fizzle out

Trump has threatened to sue news organizations, including the Times, for decades, but has followed through on only a handful of occasions. It’s not clear whether he has ever prevailed in any action that he or his political operation has brought over reporting or published commentary, either in court or through a settlement before trial.

He has repeatedly run up against laws and judicial rulings that make it difficult for public figures to win judgments against news organizations. As a result, courts have dismissed almost all of his claims, including one last year in which his brother, Robert, sought to prevent Mary Trump from publishing a memoir about the family that became a bestseller.

Trump just sued the New York Times and his niece. If history is a guide, he probably won’t win. [WaPo]

…discovery alone would most likely be ruinous for a start

Theory of Trump's lawsuit is as follows: “I may have defrauded @MaryLTrump out of tens of millions of dollars that she should have inherited from her father. But she never should have figured that out because of the confidentiality agreement I fraudulently induced her to sign.” https://t.co/ctpvpkfwDN

— Robbie Kaplan (@kaplanrobbie) September 22, 2021

…but somehow these suits don’t get thrown out with the contempt they so clearly demonstrate for the legal system

Of all of the things that might crystallize a sense of despair about the ruthless effectiveness of Donald Trump’s habitual dishonesty, I wouldn’t have expected it to be a legalistic six-page memo about the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution.
[…]
There is largely no point in trying to rationally rebut an irrational or emotional belief. But I hold the irrational belief that it can’t hurt, and I will not be rationalized out of it. So let’s walk through what we know about why Trump’s claims are false and were known to be false when he offered them.

We can begin with the fact that the former president is fundamentally not credible. The Post has a team of fact-checkers who reviewed every claim Trump made from the outset of his candidacy in 2015. They found tens of thousands of examples of dishonest, misleading or false assertions from him. Often, Trump repeated false things he’d said previously, marking at the very least a remarkable disinterest in accuracy. But given that most of his false claims were intertwined with his political rhetoric it was clearly the case that he was more interested in the impression his words left than their accuracy.
[…]
The culmination of this argument, though, came in that six-page memo. It was a lengthier version of a two-page memo written by a legal expert named John Eastman, a document presented to a bemused Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) who was “shocked” when he read it, according to Woodward and Costa. After all, the two-page memo simply stated that Vice President Mike Pence could ignore established precedent for counting electoral votes and try to declare certain electoral-vote tallies unacceptable out-of-hand, essentially pushing the finalization of the election to a legal decision from the courts.

In the lengthier memo, published in full this week, Eastman takes a slightly less aggressive tack. It begins by delineating various ways in which “state election laws were altered or dispensed with altogether in key swing states and/or cities and counties.” In essence, he’s arguing that Pence would be warranted in throwing out the results in some states not because people cast illegal votes but because states allowed people to vote in ways they shouldn’t have. It’s an argument for throwing out the demonstrated will of the people based on the way they were told to express that will. (A court in Pennsylvania, hearing such a claim before Jan. 6, had rejected the idea that votes cast using a process that shouldn’t have been authorized should stand, calling a rejection of them an “extreme and untenable” remedy.)

Somehow, we’re still learning the depths of Trump’s dishonesty [WaPo]

…&…well…honestly there was a bunch of other stuff I started out meaning to manage to include in this…but it’s that time again…& once again I need more coffee, some tunes to put at the bottom…& more time than I have…which when you get down to it is kind of the point of a lot of this bullshit…run out the clock wasting everybody’s time not doing the shit we clearly need to get done so that there doesn’t come a time when you have to answer for the shit you’ve done to prize your own interests at the cost of everybody else’s…I mean…for fuck’s sake…you’ve got boris bloody johnson cracking wise about kermit like he & his have moved the needle on climate change

Boris Johnson loves the Greek and Latin classics, but he thought a more modern reference might hit home in a Wednesday speech to the United Nations. The Oxford-educated prime minister cited a surprising inspiration Wednesday in his call for faster, bolder action on climate change: The Muppets. “When Kermit the Frog sang ‘It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green’ I want you to know he was wrong—and he was also unnecessarily rude to Miss Piggy,” Johnson told the U.N. General Assembly. “We have nothing to fear and everything to gain from this green industrial revolution. We have the technology: we have the choice before us.” He brought in a bit of upper-crust, Eton College flair later when he joked he would change his name to “Boreas,” the Greek god of wind, to show his support for renewable energy.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/boris-johnson-tells-un-general-assembly-never-mind-kermit-it-is-easy-being-green

…but I can’t even begin to get into how much every part of that makes me angry…or I’ll probably still be writing this post next week