Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Bark louder, little dog.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Tick tock motherfuckers!

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

“More of this”, i said to the dog.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Balloon Juice has never been a refuge for the linguistically delicate.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

You are here: Home / Politics / GOP Death Cult / Thursday Evening Schadenfreude Open Thread: Shots in Arms, Money in Pockets

Thursday Evening Schadenfreude Open Thread: Shots in Arms, Money in Pockets

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Politico is forced to admire President Biden’s tactics, very much against its own will:

… Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, arguably the shrewdest Republican strategist in Washington, has started floating a half-hearted anti-stimulus message that the coming recovery would have happened anyway.

“We are about to have a boom,” McConnell said last week after the Biden bill passed. “And if we do have a boom, it will have absolutely nothing to do with this $1.9 trillion.”…

It may be an overstated political cliché that if you’re explaining, you’re losing. But you’re almost certainly losing if you’re explaining, ahead of time, why the economic boom you’re expecting on your opponent’s watch shouldn’t be attributed to your opponent. One lesson of the volatility of the past dozen years is that fairly or not, the president’s party tends to get the credit or blame for the economy—or at least for the way people perceive the economy. Biden is visiting swing states this week to sell American Rescue Plan’s focus on giving Americans vaccines and money, but with economists across the ideological spectrum forecasting explosive growth, many veterans of the 2009 stimulus wars believe the economy will be all the sales pitch the bill needs.

“We’re going to see some fairly amazing economic numbers, and I imagine for the next few years, people will look around and say: ‘This is pretty darn good!’” says American Enterprise Institute fellow James Pethokoukis, a conservative economist who believes the Biden stimulus is somewhat excessive. “I’m sure Republicans will try to spin this, and I have long-term concerns myself, but the reality of a crazy strong expansion will be tough to spin away.”

Democrats seemed to have learned a bunch of lessons from the backlash against the Obama stimulus—that it’s important to sell your own product, that it’s even more important not to trash your own product, and that it’s supremely important to make sure your product works as well as possible. Even though the Obama White House pushed for the biggest possible stimulus it could get out of a bailout-weary Congress in 2009, most economists believe the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would have produced a stronger recovery if it had been even bigger. Biden was determined to make sure his relief act didn’t undershoot as well, even if that meant he would face criticism for ignoring the budget deficit and failing to attract Republican votes…

Reader Interactions

90Comments

  1. 1.

    debbie

    Joe’s smart enough to know what they’d throw in his way, and he’s adjusted accordingly

    ETA: I have to wonder why McConnell didn’t anticipate that.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    I’m so thrilled that the problems in getting the minimum wage included didn’t prevent us from appreciating this achievement.

  4. 4.

    Martin

    CA is putting some real work behind vaccinating homeless populations. Much easier with the J&J vaccine.

  5. 5.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    I honestly don’t understand why it’s taken as gospel that the Obama stimulus was unpopular. IMO it was the demonization of Obamacare that tanked the Dems in 2010 far more than backlash against the stimulus.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    Shots in Arms, Money in Pockets

    When did we start talking like Animal? Or has “the” neglected to pay protection?

    ;)

  9. 9.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    @Baud: I agree it should have been bigger, which would have put the economy in better shape. What I’m contending is it really wasn’t unpopular. Obamacare was despised, but the stimulus was neutral or maybe even a plus. Would have been a bigger plus if it had been bigger.

  10. 10.

    dmsilev

    @Martin: There’s also real motion on the overall “bring equity to vaccine distribution” front. The numbers are starting to creep towards equality, and that’s especially true if you look at first doses (i.e. capturing the last few weeks). According to the state dashboard, it’s still weighted towards the wealthier/healthier communities, but not nearly as much as the second-dose population.

  11. 11.

    Martin

    @Baud: Plus, it was mostly tax cuts in search of GOP votes that never came which also didn’t immediately stimulate the economy. That and the size of the thing led to a very slow recovery.

  12. 12.

    jl

    I read that even though Mr Potato head has become Potato head, you can still by a Mr and Mrs Potato head, the Mr still has a hat, and Mrs potato head still has a purse. And Cat and the Hat is still with us.

    So, the reactionary fakery is getting more and more ridiculous.

    OTOH, wki says all the potato head parts are still interchangeable. You can put the accessories on any way you want. Children are unprotected from unregulated and uncontrolled Potato Head gender mixing and matching!!!!!!!! Shocker. The depraved unisex radicals infiltrated our most precious national symbols long long ago. All is lost, and has been for quite a while.

    I’ll look for a Congressional GOP to outlaw interchangeable Potato Head accessories soon. To protect our vital essence.

  14. 14.

    Spanky

    @debbie:  ETA: I have to wonder why McConnell didn’t anticipate that.

    Because “arguably the shrewdest Republican strategist in Washington” is an exceedingly low bar.

  15. 15.

    smith

    The Obama stimulus came just after the massive bailout of the banks, whose bad behavior caused the financial mess in the first place. I think a lot of people looked on both as one big program, in which irresponsible bankers were made whole at great expense and the rest of us got the crumbs.

  16. 16.

    schrodingers_cat

    @What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: To be popular on Twitter and the MSM one needs to shit on the Democrats especially their beloved ex-President

    For example see the comment above. How was Obama and his team supposed to solve a liquidity crisis which is what the crash of 2008 was without infusion of cash to the banks.

    Every penny loaned to the banks was recovered BTW.

  17. 17.

    Baud

    @Martin:

    It was mostly tax cuts???

    The recovery would have been slower than usual because it was a financial meltdown that caused the recession.  Those always take longer to recover from. Of course, it didn’t help that the GOP took over the House and put the brakes on any additional help.

  18. 18.

    mali muso

    This week I got both a shot in my arm and money in my pocket (thanks Biden bucks!), so I’m feeling it.  It feels a bit weird to have optimism given the unrelenting awfulness of the past four years, not to mention the long COVID year.  But here we are.

  19. 19.

    dmsilev

    @jl: Have any RW nuts run amok in a grocery store, loudly demanding (maskless, of course) to know whether that bin of russets is segregated by gender? Because I feel that’s inevitably coming.

  22. 22.

    VeniceRiley

    Think I saw a huge vaccine freezer being loaded into our pharmacy downstairs. Shot and chasers all around! This will make a huge difference in hard hit and even harder to reach poor communities.

  25. 25.

    NotMax

    @jl

    OTOH, wki says all the potato head parts are still interchangeable.

    The parts haven’t been the same since replacement of the surgically sharp metal pins on the back.

    :)

  26. 26.

    Ruckus

    @debbie:

    In number of days, Joe is older, in real knowledge, Joe is smarter, in insane political slant, turtle has it all over Joe, in terms of end of career, turtle is working much harder to get there first. May he win that last race.

  28. 28.

    mali muso

    @dmsilev: I second this opinion.  He has a better sense of the politics and mood of the wider country.  Not obsessed with scoring cheap points with the Twitterati.

  29. 29.

    jl

    @smith: Bad economic and policy ideas influenced popular attitudes more then than they seem to do since the coivd pandemic. The voting public was mixed on whether underwater middle class homeowners should be bailed out, for example.

    Necessary things like sending dollars to other countries to rescue the regional dollar markets to stem the global financial meltdown were mixed up with the special favors to big banks.

    So any rescue package would have been controversial. A bigger one would have quickened the extremely slow recovery, and no one would have cared later, IMHO.

    So many are desperate today, very few care about the BS austerity, and moral hazard for thee but not for bigshot me, pundit and corporate media narratives.

  33. 33.

    jl

    @Baud: Never been a hobo Potato Head with bindlestick, can of beans, lotto tickets or nothing.

    We need mass protests on the DC Mall.

  35. 35.

    JMG

    I’m an old, but even when I was a little enough kid to play with Mr./Mrs. Potato Head, the accessories were interchangeable. This isn’t even inventive bullshit.

  36. 36.

    M31

    @NotMax: The parts haven’t been the same since replacement of the surgically sharp metal pins on the back.

    That’s it. I’m not buying any Potato Heads until the parts come attached to fully-functional 100% metal Lawn Darts

  37. 37.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @NotMax:

    Shots in Arms, Money in Pockets

    When did we start talking like Animal? Or has “the” neglected to pay protection?

    Because we’d start sounding like an early Belafonte song.

    You put the shot in the arm
    And the money in the pocket
    The shot in the arm
    And the plug in the socket.
    Well I’ll take the money
    And I’ll put it in my pocket
    But the shot in the arm
    It never do me no harm.

  39. 39.

    smith

    @jl: Interesting isn’t it? The Rs have tried playing the austerity card this time, but nobody seems to be listening.

  41. 41.

    Juice Box

    @Martin: CA has made the decision to push the bulk of its vaccines toward people with serious pre-existing conditions and toward lower  income communities. Although this is the right thing to do, of course, as an older, but healthy, not-poor person, it’s making me feel as sad as proud. My mom says that I should visit her in AZ.

  44. 44.

    jl

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: Too many policy academics actually believed the BS back then. After that whole school of macroeconomics and finance was reduced to a gigantic smoking crater, deeper than the eye could see, of total wrongness, failed predictions and devastated nonsense, some changed their minds. Some are still staggering around stunned amid rubble. Others are silently moping. A few, apparently coked up, still rant on business cable after losing high profile gummint jobs, though I don’t want to name anyone in particular.

  49. 49.

    Starboard Tack

    @Baud:

    They blew what credibility they had with the tax cut.

    The Republicans were planning on using any resulting defecits as a reason to cut social programs, but the Dems pushed them down the stairs first.

  50. 50.

    Ken

    Mitch McConnell, arguably the shrewdest Republican strategist in Washington

    How does it go? “Damning with faint praise”, or is it “Praising with faint damns”?

  52. 52.

    Tickraw

    Random question, and I apologize for bringing him up: Is it wrong that I feel so much joy watching people call Andrew Sullivan a racist concern troll?

  56. 56.

    Gvg

    I keep saying one advantage Biden has is coming after Obama. Democrats learned how bad Republicans were playing and decided not to let it happen again. They learned, you had to sell your accomplishments and I suspect they made plans for that even while they were working on this bill. It’s not just the actual politicians, democratic voters learned too.

  57. 57.

    Ken

    @NotMax: The parts haven’t been the same since replacement of the surgically sharp metal pins on the back.

    I was beginning to think I had imagined that, once upon a time, you had to supply your own potato.

  59. 59.

    raven

    Since the NCAA Basketball Tournament starts now can we get a thread for people to bitch about it? That “ramming it through in the dead of night” didn’t cut it. Go Illini!

  60. 60.

    Phylllis

    @NotMax: Those were for you to stick in actual potatoes (because in my day you weren’t provided with a handy reusable form). Which I can remember doing. I can also remember my brother and I using all the parts to come up with…interesting gender combinations, to say the least.

  62. 62.

    Starboard Tack

    @Ken:

    I was beginning to think I had imagined that, once upon a time, you had to supply your own potato.

    If you kept one long enough, it sprouted. I had one that looked like it was from a movie on Ghoulardi.

  63. 63.

    Shalimar

    @smith:  Also, no bankers were punished for greedily fucking up the economy. There was large bi-partisan support for trials. Pursuing criminal charges against a few dozen masters of the universe would have been a huge plus for Democrats in 2010.

  66. 66.

    smith

    @Phylllis:

    I can also remember my brother and I using all the parts to come up with…interesting gender combinations, to say the least.

    Hey, you don’t suppose that the current growing acceptance of gender fluidity might be the end result of kids playing with Mr. Potato Head?

  67. 67.

    JWR

    Speaking of relentlessly hyping, CT Congresswoman Jahana Hayes was on Amanpour&Co the other night, just nailing every question she was asked about the bill’s benefit to education. And this morning, NPR had a really good piece about its value to mass transit. It’s like there’s no end to the Good News for Biden news these days.

  70. 70.

    JaneE

    I see this “negotiating with the left wing” as a tacit acknowledgment of just how much ground the workers in this country have lost in the last 40 years. If that means going back to Democratic principles and aspirations from the middle of last century and trying to bring them to the fore today, that is hardly a move to the left. The only people who think that are too young to remember where the parties used to be on policy in the 50’s and 60’s. Without the GOP’s embrace of Southern racists to achieve a power base, we would not be the corrupt crony capitalist society we are now where stifling progress and harming individuals are acceptable business practices.

  71. 71.

    VeniceRiley

    @WaterGirl:  The 1st floor of my work has clinic, urgent care/x-ray, and pharmacy. 2nd floor is cubicle jockeys and meeting rooms and server cabinets and janitorial. It’s the way our FQHC does it all in house instead of sending all that revenue away.

  72. 72.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @jl: 

    The famous sign “Jump, You Fuckers” applies to those bastards. I’d have their heads affixed to the end of pikes and put outside everybody economic “think tank” or university that’s famous for such schools as a warning to others.

  73. 73.

    CaseyL

    @NotMax: 

    Hell, I remember when the parts were all that were in the box. You used an actual potato to stick the parts onto, hence the sharp pins.

  76. 76.

    Brachiator

    Democrats seemed to have learned a bunch of lessons from the backlash against the Obama stimulus—that it’s important to sell your own product, that it’s even more important not to trash your own product, and that it’s supremely important to make sure your product works as well as possible. Even though the Obama White House pushed for the biggest possible stimulus it could get out of a bailout-weary Congress in 2009, most economists believe the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would have produced a stronger recovery if it had been even bigger.

    It is wrongheaded to compare the ARP to Obama’s stimulus. Obama was responding to a recession. Maybe the stimulus should have been bigger. Old news.

    Despite what politicians and even some economists say, the Biden plan is NOT necessarily an economic stimulus. The economy was shut down, and the virus still has the final word until more people are vaccinated and more business activity can resume.

    We still don’t know whether some economic sectors will ever recover. Other sectors have been relatively unaffected and wages for some groups have actually increased.

    But by any measure, Biden’s actions may make any recovery stronger.

    Fuck McConnell.

    I don’t know that even the AOC progressives understand how much money Biden is putting into people’s hands once you look at the first and second stimulus, the new stimulus, increased credits and reduced taxes. I have reviewed a shitload of returns and am amazed to see how much tax savings people are getting from the Covid relief provisions relating to early pension distributions. And a lot of these people are upper income folks who might not qualify for the stimulus payment.

    The exclusion of some unemployment compensation not only reduces taxes, but increases some credits that people qualify for.

    Many people will be using the money just to maintain. The assumptions that people will spend or should spend to stimulate the economy are ludicrous.

    It will be very interesting to see what the average refund amounts are for March and April.

    Biden was determined to make sure his relief act didn’t undershoot as well, even if that meant he would face criticism for ignoring the budget deficit and failing to attract Republican votes…

    The Fed is not worried about the deficit. Republicans cannot be taken seriously.

  77. 77.

    Geminid

    @JWR: Jahana Hayes (CT-6), another member of the very talented Democratic House class of 2018. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is another. It’s good to see more of these capable people get recognition and media attention.

  78. 78.

    different-church-lady

    The Biden White House negotiating in apparent good faith with the congressional left is … not what I would have remotely expected

    The belligerents of the left share something in common with the belligerents of the right: they believe everyone in the world operates from a positions of bad faith and ill-will.

  79. 79.

    different-church-lady

    @jl: I’m still stuck way back on the whole “Why are we putting clothes on a potato?” part.

  82. 82.

    Miss Bianca

    Is Ryan Cooper as much of a dipshit as he sounds like in that tweet? Who is he, anyway? Name sounds familiar, but I can’t keep track of all the lefty Democrat scolds out there.

  84. 84.

    There go two miscreants

    I’d love to see an enterprising grocer with a sense of humor (likely to be a local organic place rather than a chain, of course) put out two bins of spuds, one labeled male and the other female. Just to tweak the right people.

  85. 85.

    Ilieitz

    @debbie: Mitch is an idiot. I guess he senile enough that he doesn’t remember that Biden was in the Senate for 37 years and he knows how the Senate works and how the game is played. Biden must laugh when Mitch is making these threats because he knows it’s all bullshit

  86. 86.

    Jeffro

    Not sure why President Biden working hand-in-glove with the left-er wing of the Democratic Party is a huge surprise…he’s always been happy to be in the center of our party, and that center has (thankfully) pulled ever so slightly left in recent years.

    Biden, running on – and now executing – Warren’s platform. Me likey!

  87. 87.

    Jeffro

    @JaneE:I see this “negotiating with the left wing” as a tacit acknowledgment of just how much ground the workers in this country have lost in the last 40 years. If that means going back to Democratic principles and aspirations from the middle of last century and trying to bring them to the fore today, that is hardly a move to the left. The only people who think that are too young to remember where the parties used to be on policy in the 50’s and 60’s.

    All of this.

    These recent “moves to the left” by the Ds are just pulling us back to the center-center of the country.

  90. 90.

    scav

    I’ve certainly never seen any marriage certificate for the Potatoes.  Has anyone, ever? This might be a very fluid relationship in more ways than one.

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