If one team manages to build something that another team was trying to stop, the builders won and the obstructors lost. https://t.co/YpgBbZTbOm
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) March 11, 2021
Did anyone close to McConnell realize how that would sound out loud? https://t.co/N08l4kr9s7
— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) March 10, 2021
Just a reminder that the American Rescue Plan was passed with only Democratic votes, snd Republicans think that says something bad about Democrats.
— Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) March 12, 2021
When Republicans are taking credit for a bill they voted against because it’s so popular, you know that it WAS in fact bipartisan and they are just assholes.
— Katie Hill (@KatieHill4CA) March 11, 2021
have you ever smelled desperation through a tweet https://t.co/W538EF9sA9
— kilgore trout, ted’s travel agent (@KT_So_It_Goes) March 11, 2021
All the provisions of the CARES Act that actually worked and helped people — the checks, the expanded UI — were Nancy Pelosi's doing.
Sure, Trump demanded direct payments *after* losing reelection. But he just did that as a fuck-you to McConnell on his way out the door.
— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) March 10, 2021
the bill is *incredibly* popular among voters across the political spectrum. to the extent there is disunity, it's that congressional republicans voted against it en masse pic.twitter.com/nCXFqFhoD4
— Gerry Doyle (@mgerrydoyle) March 11, 2021
YOU VOTED AGAINST THE BILL https://t.co/YhtOTFLQpC
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) March 10, 2021
The American people wanted this and it was popular with Democratic and Republican voters. You work for us. You had a chance to support working class Americans but you again sided with the wealthy. https://t.co/qoWUtq2fOu
— Nikki Mersch Gronli (@DakotaGopher) March 11, 2021
Mr. Meghan McCain, aka ‘Box Turtle Ben’, plagiarist:
Fox podcast host: "This is another garbage speech full of lies from a senile person who thinks that they're in charge of America but actually isn't running anything" https://t.co/N2naJzX3EH pic.twitter.com/jFnSOttb2G
— Media Matters (@mmfa) March 12, 2021
stay mad forever https://t.co/QxsIdtzEWA
— Peloton InfoSec Analyst (Incident Response) (@CalmSporting) March 12, 2021
Hannity looks like he’s been crying, and will soon start crying again…
this is what crushing disappointment looks like https://t.co/ZtaAnyVTBz
— kilgore trout, ted’s travel agent (@KT_So_It_Goes) March 12, 2021
please, and i’m going to be rude here and so i apologize, shut the fuck up. https://t.co/GOMtowCJ65
— Peloton InfoSec Analyst (Incident Response) (@CalmSporting) March 12, 2021
Open Thread: Biden Addresses The Nation
Beautifulplumage
Well, we know Turtle McGee saw the ARP poll results.
Ruckus
If this doesn’t explain American politics in the late 20th and early 21 century, nothing does.
Towards the end of the shitforbrains maladministration a lot of news seemed to be people opening their eyes to actually how bad it had gotten. But now we seem to be, in the news end of things, going backwards, at speeds far faster than anyone should go in reverse. If it hasn’t be obvious that most “news” outlets are nothing more than a way to sell things on TV that most people don’t need, with support from newspapers that can’t even be used for fish wrap because the crap in the papers will spoil the fish, it should be now.
CarolDuhart2
https://twitter.com/RFlaherty46/status/1370028887602835459
The American Rescue Plan site.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
“Boring but radical” needs to be a rotating tag. My god does Cruz say some dumb shit for a group that specializes in saying dumb shit.
Tony Jay
Ah, the easy-breezy life of a Conservative barrel-scraping. Always part of the ‘Natural Party of Government’, even when the enfranchised proles fail to play along. Committed a crime? Broke the rules? Been exposed as a lying sack of shit responsible for the immiseration of millions? Don’t sweat it, that’s just food for the memory hole. In any conflict of opinion you get to fill the roles of Judge and Jury, while any suggestion of bias on your part is mocked as partisan whining.
It’s the life of a spoilt, entitled bully, full of doors that open themselves and utterly stripped of standards or consequences. It’s the sweetest gig imaginable, the only surprise is that everyone doesn’t try to jump on board.
At least, that’s what it’s like in the UK. I understand things aren’t much different over there?
Chetan Murthy
@Tony Jay: Tony, as long as you’re here, do you have any opinions on Richard North? On the one hand, he was Brexiter avant la lettre. On the other hand, once he realized that the UK wasn’t going to go for an EEA relatiionship, he’s been pretty steadfastly “this is going to end in tears”. With lots and lots of receipts.
At some level, it’s not enough, b/c he has never (and, I expect, will never) say that Brexit was a bad idea in the first place. But still, he seems better than the Tory Brexiters.
But then again, I only started reading him in 2016, and I’m not British. I could be wildly off target.
Eljai
The more I think about it, the angrier I get at that Jonathan Chait tweet. The orange blob squatter left a trail of death and destruction. But it’s all just a game to some of these media types. Jonathan Chait can just fuck right off to his comfy little bubble.
Ruckus
@Tony Jay:
Hard to say if our bad side is a greater percentage of the population or it’s just because it’s a slightly different setup of government, but one of the common problems is of course Rupert. He’s chosen 3 english speaking countries to completely screw up. OK rather different forms of english speaking…..
To be honest it actually does sound very similar in concept of direction and methodology of fucking up a government/country, screw the government just enough, through laws and enforcement that the screwing can continue and is profitable.
Ruckus
@Eljai:
I feel like we are going to need to make the stone that concept is engraved upon a whole lot bigger, if we are going to fit all the names of the fuckers that belong on it.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
To an an extent, I think our home grown swine seem to positively delight in breaking things far more than the UK’s. Trump is idiot and proud of it, wants the world to know while Boris Johnson only pretends to be one seems like a fair summery.
piratedan
Gonna repost this from the previous thread…. with some added vitriol for our fourth estate.
it appears all three of the major networks news organizations have been tasked with trying to make the current administration give some begrudging credit to the previous one. I’ve seen in the Psaki news conferences and on twitter where they imply that Trump should get some credit for the vaccine…
I keep wondering what in the fuck should he get credit for.. feel free to show your work… what exactly did they do that was above and beyond what any rational organization should do?
They gave money to some pharma companies to help develop a vaccine, but afaik, they lied about the national reserves (i.e. that any existed), had no federal coordinated plan for vaccine rollout and distribution, didn’t show public support for the vaccines when they came out and didn’t order enough, even when prompted to do so.
I just want to scream at these asshats, PLEASE TELL ME WHAT HE SHOULD GET CREDIT FOR? They want to give Trump credit for something? For greenlighting work on a vaccine to treat a virus that he claimed was a hoax and who never admitted the devastating impact it had and how he hamstrung his own experts at every step… THAT GUY? That guy who hosted super-spreader events during the pandemic, you want to give credit… to that guy? They want to give him credit for letting the private sector drive the bus on vaccine development? Like he was going to STOP them? It’s like saying you should get credit for closing an open door when it’s below freezing outside.
Why don’t they revisit Trump taking credit for Obama’s economy and show how deferential he was to the efforts of his predecessor.
rose weiss
At this point I truly don’t care much about the details. I’m just very relieved to see a light at the end of the tunnel that I hope isn’t another oncoming train. This past year has been almost unbearable. Loss, grief, anxiety, and isolation.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Question; Who do you all think will be the first Republican Representative to publicly service themselves with a handgun on the House Floor in the next three months? While drunk and ranting about the spike in Transgendered women getting abortions?
Chetan Murthy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: In which organ? I’m torn between dick and butt-cheek.
smike
@Chetan Murthy:
Wait, she’s got a dick? That might explain a few things, though.
Chetan Murthy
@smike: Oh wait, I didn’t mean to imply that it’d be Qbert or Steroid Greene. I figured it’d be Gomer Gohmert. Or maybe Gosar.
Anne Laurie
To be honest, one reason I’m glad Pelosi & Schumer are enforcing the metal-detection barrier: How many idiot GOP congresscritters might ‘accidentally’ shoot some innocent colleague(s), while waving their Precious around in defiance during a floor speech?
I mean, Boebert or Cawthorne or Cruz shoots themselves for their latest kabuki-stunting, I’d only feel sorry for the workers who had to clean up the mess afterwards. But they’d be much more likely to hurt other people, quite possibly not even on purpose!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Indeed. I am not totally being tongue and cheek, they really are on that trajectory.
Joey Maloney
I’ve been fearing a reprise of Brooks-Sumner except with firearms for quite some time. The fear has become more acute as the Qbillies get into office. Gohmert may be a vicious racist, an idiot, and a goddamned fool, but I feel like he at least has some rudimentary sense of self-preservation. I have no such confidence about Boebert et al.
BellyCat
Date is incorrect. Should read 2008 at latest. But, beat that drum, assholes….
?BillinGlendaleCA
Sen. Thune should try this, go to a Mercedes dealer and offer them 20k for a 60k car, and see how that works. You’ll get your ass thrown out on the street. That’s exactly what the Republicans in the Senate did when President Biden had them over to the White House. Sure, offer 50k and there’s a negotiation, the dealer may even throw in floor mats when you arrive at a price.
BellyCat
You forgot, “funded by the gubmint” //
Morzer
@Chetan Murthy: Pete North, his son, was more vocal, more of a jerk and more influential. They’ve both retreated to a position of “Brexit could never have worked with this government, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea or wrong.” At one point, they predicted civil war if Brexit was cancelled, which rather sums up their whole approach.
Comrade Colette
@Ruckus:
F off, I speak proper good ‘Murrican … wait, I think you’re on to something here. I actually speak a patois recognizable as English across all the oceans, which may be why I can’t understand a fucking word Rupert and his minions, may they burn in hell, say.
I’m starting to think the R brainworms function something like red pills in reverse, preventing operable anglophone cortices from processing any sound waves emanating from the left side of the spectrum.
Chetan Murthy
@Morzer: I’ve never read Peter. But yeah, that Richard cannot seem to bring himself to admit that Brexit shouldn’t have happened, is disappointing. I liken it to arranged marriage in India: sure, in principle it can work out for both parties. But in practice, there is a marked power imbalance, and so it’s gotta be more dangerous for women. You can’t be for the institution, without grappling with this problem.
The main proponents of Brexit (sadly for Richard) were charlatans and thieves. And traitors. I don’t think Richard has come to grips with that.
Ah, well.
Morzer
@Chetan Murthy: Richard North formed a partnership with Christopher Booker, which should tell you all you need to know about North senior. Pete got himself banned from Twitter, although he weaseled around that by using the Leave.Eu account. Pete was much more vocal, aggressive and shameless, by and large, while his father posed as an “intellectual”, although kook or crank would be a more accurate summary.
Tony Jay
@Chetan Murthy:
I’m not familiar with the name, but the type seems wearily familiar. All along the Via Brexitosa the Leave ‘argument’ shed bodies like a plummeting hot-air balloon, with early fluffers dropping off the radar once they realised that their pet version of “British Independence” was not what the tax-dodgers and asset-strippers at the heart of the project were driving towards. but the British Media never once allowed that to impact upon the central tenet of Brextremism, which I heard expressed many different ways by many different people, but always boiled down to some version of “Let’s just shut up and give it a chance, eh? “.
In the great Venn diagram of Leave arguments the circles marked ‘Early Promises’ and ‘Current Claims’ have the most miniscule overlap where, if you borrow a Deep Space telescope and focus it through the narrowest eye of the tiniest needle ever forged , you can just make out the words “Darkies Out – Tories In” next to a minute cameo of a smirking Vladimir Putin on a fat pony with Flobalob Johnson’s face.
The time ‘might’ come when the organs of British Infotainment decide they’re ready to suddenly notice that Brexit was always a sham that has fundamentally crippled the UK on a multitude of levels, and suddenly people like North will be their go-to guys for “background analysis of what went wrong”, but those days are far off in a barely imaginable future where Conservatism can be said to have failed without the person saying it immediately receiving a chilly text message reassigning them to coverage of sewage farm openings in the Outer Hebrides.
Sloane Ranger
@Chetan Murthy: Apropos of Brexit, the Office of National Statistics has reported that UK exports to the EU fell by 40% in January, which is the 1st month after the end of the transition period. Just a temporary hiccup, I’m sure!
Tony Jay
@Ruckus:
Yup. Murdoch. A genuine, fully-formed, out in the open supervillain who gets away with trashing entire nations because he provides the greedy with a free propaganda machine.
It says absolutely everything you need to know about Britain today that one of the very first people I heard about to receive a vaccine shot was the Australian with an American passport who jetted in to the UK to get spiked and, other than the bare mention of it happening, it wasn’t a story. It was just perfectly normal that an amoral billionaire would pick Britain as the best location to queue jump, nothing to see here, move along.
We’re fucked. This island can’t sink soon enough.
Tony Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Believe me, they’ve broken plenty. The difference is that you had an Opposition party that would make a fuss and, where allowed, fight back.
Here we have a supine Opposition that thinks it can win over the Tory Press by being endlessly akimbo, so there’s no one with a megaphone to point out how many of the basic safeguards of democracy Johnson’s bully-boys have trashed.
different-church-lady
If you want to feel better about the world, click on Chait’s tweet to see him being dragged through about 5000 yards of barbed wire and gravel.
Tony Jay
@Sloane Ranger:
Oh, definitely. Totally to be expected, nothing to worry about. After all, if it was a serious problem than you can be sure the BBC et al would pull a couple of stenographers off the Meghanorama beat and have them cover the story. But they haven’t, so it isn’t, so there.
Comforting, isn’t it?
prostratedragon
Piazzolla, Ferrer, Baltar:
prostratedragon
Did anyone close to McConnell realize how that would sound out loud?
Sometimes I think there should be a Dantean circle somewhere or other whose denizens get to hear nothing but themselves saying things like that, with suitable echo effects, over, and over, and over again.
AxelFoley
@piratedan:
Thank you. This is the same shit they tried to pull with Obama. Remember how they tried saying the Obama Administration should give credit to Bush when Obama had bin Laden taken out? Bush had nearly 8 years to get bin Laden, but didn’t really give a fuck about taken him down, just using him as a boogeyman. Matter fact, I remember at some point in his presidency, Bush saying in an interview that he didn’t even think of bin Laden.
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
Posting that at North’s site would be so pleasurable. But not a good idea for the FSB types would pop out of the ether and look you up
Tony Jay
@The Pale Scot:
I wouldn’t worry, I’ve had so many comments on the Guardian site moderated out of existence for insufficient adherence to Der Narrative that I’ve probably already led half a dozen different minions of the Konservative Keyboard Koalition to this site looking for my handler*.
*It’s Betty, btw. Gave her up straight away.
OzarkHillbilly
Yes.
RSA
I’m not seeing the difference between Chait’s tweet and a BJ Schadenfreude post.
Joey Maloney
Huh. Mentioned Gohmert upthread in the context of sneaking firearms into the Capitol, and lookie here:
The Pale Scot
@Joey Maloney:
Fuck that, make it a felony.
NO GUNS FOR YOU!
Soprano2
@piratedan: Oh man, can I steal this? I wanna steal it in the worst possible way.
evodevo
@Soprano2: Yes…it’s great…I already stole parts of it!!
No One of Consequence
@piratedan: PREACH
NOoC
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Tony Jay: Yes, well as the British 1% found out, Americuns’ don’t do quite very well.
Put it another way, it looks to me like while the Toris want to go back to the good old days of of the 1760’s, pre-mental breakdown George III as head of state and Eton being sole qualification for Parliament , they aren’t nihilist in a collective Mad Max LARP like the Republicans have become.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@RSA: Ah, but I want to savor Trump’s futile rage when I want to. To have to read it because of the horror he might start a nuclear war as part of a temper tantrum.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Joey Maloney: And were did Grohmet and Clyde conceal those fire arms?
HAve we already reach the point of Republicans with guns, literally, up their arses?
piratedan
if folks wanna borrow my soapbox and steal my rant, this IS Balloon Juice right? feel free, if you wanna drop me a h/t feel free but its not required. Just good to know other folks want to keep our media accountable. Gawd love ’em but the people driving this bullshit narrative need to be informed we ain’t having it.
dnfree
@Eljai: that was my thought too. Immediate anger. I used to think of him as a reasonable analyst but I haven’t for a while because of comments like this. He’s so elite that his privileges have privileges.
RSA
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Good point!