. @VP Harris crosses through the Capitol rotunda on her way to Pres Biden’s joint address: pic.twitter.com/bjccIMVB2p
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) April 29, 2021
.@KamalaHarris will lead the Biden administration's push to bring every American online
via @Cat_Zakrzewski w @aaronjschaffer https://t.co/lA5qEUaJX3— Rachel Van Dongen (@RachelVanD) April 29, 2021
… President Biden announced the veep would take the lead on the issue during his first address to a slimmed-down joint session of Congress, where he touted his proposal to create new jobs through investment in expanding Internet access. Biden said his Americans Jobs Plan, which includes $100 billion for broadband expansion, will ensure that rural Americans who still don’t have access to fast Internet connections can get online.
“It’s going to help our kids and business succeed in the 21st century economy,” Biden said. “And I’m asking the vice president to lead this effort, if she will, because I know it will get done.”
The announcement signals that closing the digital divide is a top priority for the administration during the pandemic…
Harris is taking on the broadband work at a critical point, as the world is watching to see if she emerges as the clear heir apparent to lead the Democratic Party after Biden, as my colleague Cleve R. Wootson Jr. wrote earlier this week. Biden also announced she would lead the administration’s work on immigration, and he has also kept his promise to have Harris be the last person in the room when important decisions are being made.
“Among other things, he’s already put the Vice President in charge of handling the immigration crisis, and to me, that means that he trusts her to tackle big challenges,” Sohn said…
“No, I don’t think America is a racist country, but we also do have to speak truth about the history of racism in our country and its existence today," VP Harris tells CBS. "I applaud the president for always having the ability and the courage to speak the truth about it."
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 29, 2021
Started/Going pic.twitter.com/ywCIRC1cNQ
— PLAYING POLITICS (@PlayingPolitics) April 29, 2021
Immanentize
N.b. Kamala Harris has really great posture.
John S.
Were Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office a success? Our panel’s verdict
Spoiler alert: It’s The Guardian editorial team, so shockingly to nobody (especially Tony Jay), the verdict is that Biden has only been so-so because TFG was so awful, but he is ultimately failing us and needs to do way more.
Baud
She’s like Jared, except she was actually elected and is competent.
John S.
Apparently Rudy took to Tucker’s White Power Hour last night to rival his performance in the Borat movie. The incredibly aggrieved and paranoid spokesman for Four Seasons Total Landscaping had this to say:
He then went on to clarify that he’d much rather be in East Ukraine.
OzarkHillbilly
We’re just gonna have to agree to disagree on that one.
debbie
@Immanentize:
In heels!!!
Baud
@John S.:
“Shaka, when the walls fell.”
Cameron
I read part of what the NY Post reported about Biden’s address, which was a mistake on my part. Apparently I was watching a totally different speech, because I didn’t recognize anything – a lot of drum-beating implying cognitive decline, some “socialism,” and the standard Murdoch horseshit. Pretty obviously aimed at people who didn’t watch.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Sharing without comment because my language would be too vile.
satby
Powerful image of Ruby Bridges and VP Harris, and how far our nation has come. But Ruby Bridges is just a year older than me, so it hasn’t been all that long, and the battle against racism will outlive us both.
edited to replace the missing last letter ?
OzarkHillbilly
I’m sitting here at my desk and as per usual Percy is sound asleep behind me.
“Thump thump thump thump thump…”
No he didn’t wake up and gaze admiringly upon my visage, he is still sound asleep, must be a nice dream though.
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: And backwards!
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: Preach!
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: I would say he needs a first person experience with the practice.
satby
@OzarkHillbilly: She (and Obama) aren’t able to state that truth as freely as a white politician could, which is why Joe is doing so. White people got to clean their own house.
MomSense
The Biden Harris administration seem to be systematically dismantling the BS Reagan letthemeatcakeonomics that we have been suffering with for 40 years. I still can’t believe so many people fell for it and clung to it for so long. He basically recycled the old Horse and Sparrow but with a Laffer graph.
That’s the thing about the Republican Party. Even if you could somehow excise the racism, science rejection, mysogyny, xenophobia, and trumpism, you are still left with viciously cruel economic policies, and outmoded foreign policy.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@satby: That juxtaposition of Bridges and Harris is so telling.
And as you say, it wasn’t that long ago.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@debbie: I was once on a tour of an old house in which the guide mentioned that the original residents had been slave owners. I don’t remember how the discussion got there, but a youngish white guy asserted that many slaves had been happy in that state, etc. The guide plainly didn’t want to argue and moved us along.
OzarkHillbilly
@satby: Oh god no, they can’t possibly speak that truth without being crucified for all the hurt white people feelings that would result from hearing those soul searing words. The FOX News talking heads would explode on live TV and the gunk would spew across conservative living rooms all over this country.
And then black and hispanic people would have to clean it up.
MomSense
@satby:
There has been this several years long conversation/shakeup in the fiber crafting community that has been so interesting. It started off well, but white women keep commandeering it and now it feels like people are just getting fatigued and disengaging. So much virtue signaling and so little structural change.
Dorothy A. Winsor
My small press publisher arranged for a bunch of its authors to do an AMA on Reddit today. So I’ll be on there off and on to answer questions. The authors are mostly sci fi and fantasy writers. The guy who posted the opening paragraphs writes furry stuff. If you’re interested, drop by.
debbie
@MomSense:
“Trickle down doesn’t work.” That alone earns him reelection if he wants it. To finally hear those words out loud, broadcast to the nation, after 40 years of seeing it used to wound and diminish others, is joyous beyond words.
debbie
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
“An uncomfortable silence hung over the group…” //
MomSense
@debbie:
It was so good to hear him say those words. Trickle down has caused so much damage. Unrecoverable for too many of us.
OzarkHillbilly
Actually, Joe is wrong about that. It did exactly what it was designed to.
MomSense
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
There is a Chelsea Handler video making the rounds on social media. She talks to a group of white people who are doing some kind of reenactment of the civil war and the way they defend the treatment of slaves is fucking disgusting.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
rikyrah
They were so desperate for Bernie to be the Democratic nominee.
Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) tweeted at 6:00 AM on Fri, Apr 30, 2021:
Brian Kilmeade explains that Bernie Sanders would be president now if the Democratic Party didn’t “panic” and put “grandfather of the squad” Joe Biden in there instead, even though the squad is “now in control” of the country (???) https://t.co/WbAN2T1mcc
(https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1388085813729169411?s=03)
PST
@satby: I was born the year of Brown v. Board, and I remember driving through the South in those pre-interstate days seeing constant signs of de jure segregation. There is a direct line from Ruby Bridges to Kamala Harris.
MomSense
@rikyrah:
It’s so funny. They have nothing else so now they are stuck trying to pretend Bernie and the Squad are a shadow government.
Ken
And not just by contrast with the slouchers following her.
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
The Ruby Bridges / Kamala Harris pic got us talking about race in the 60s and George Wallace. “Am I wrong that white supremicists were considered fringe figures and wackos back then?” my wife asks.
We’ve made progress but it’s a weird sort of double-edged progress with the racism getting bolder and more blatant at the same time as (I believe) the majority slowly shifting away from it.
I was just reading a Wiki article on Wallace. I was trying to confirm my memory that he won some states in 1968. (He did). I hadn’t known that Curtis LeMay was his running mate. Or that he dropped another candidate, a former baseball commissioner, when it came out that he’d supported the hiring of Jackie Robinson.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Coincidentally, that’s also a GOP talking point.
OzarkHillbilly
A little on the long side, but a good story to start the day with:
Baud
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Same with guns FWIW.
NotMax
Random foodstalgia. Wasn’t the most appetite whetting of brand names, huh? (emphasis added)
Swanson’s choices even came in a television set themed box.
Related – by a decade later, America’s palates slowly broadened (in the loosest sense of the term) .
rikyrah
I remember ???
Kurt “Masks Save Lives” Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) tweeted at 2:14 PM on Thu, Apr 29, 2021:
Remember when conservative politicians were urging the elderly to just to go ahead, get infected, and die to help the economy?
(https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1387847655917854723?s=03)
Bluegirlfromwyo
@John S.: Rudy’s offer is acceptable. I’ll even pay for his flight.
NotMax
@debbie
Remember when for a fleeting moment in time it was sniffed at as “voodoo economics?”
Soprano2
Or they’re saying that Obama/Harris/Pelosi/Soros are in charge. (Strange that I didn’t see Hillary on that list.) They just cannot believe that Democrats elected an old white man as president. They so much want it to be a woman, non-white person, or Jewish
rikyrah
ABC 7 Chicago (@ABC7Chicago) tweeted at 6:00 AM on Fri, Apr 30, 2021:
President Biden will be in Philadelphia on Friday to commemorate Amtrak’s 50th anniversary and to highlight his infrastructure bill https://t.co/NFhbmiIkZN
(https://twitter.com/ABC7Chicago/status/1388085784943734787?s=03)
Amir Khalid
@John S.:
Absent an obvious train wreck, as there was under TFG, 100 days seems much too early for a harsh interim assessment of a four-year administration. The Guardian panel seem unimpressed because Biden has not managed to build Rome in a day.
Me, I think Biden’s had a brilliant first 100 days. The next 1,360 are going to be tough, but he’s got an ambitious and popular plan, and he’s put together a team that can do it if things in Congress go his way.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@NotMax: Bush Sr, who still had my respect back then. And who then became a full-throated defender of voodoo economics when he was made VP.
Baud
@Baud:
Oh, I think I misread who the speaker was. Never mind.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@PST: When I read about that lunatic southern private school that banned vaccinated teachers, I recognized the kind of school that was set up to avoid integration. They’re apparently still around.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: It’s worth repeating that once Republicans figured out who was mostly dying from Covid, with a few exceptions they lost interest in controlling it.
satby
@Dorothy A. Winsor: They’re still around, and going undercover to expose them as a “concerned parent looking for a school” is how Hillary Rodham Clinton first became a target of the right wing. She was identified by them as a threat before Bill was.
Cameron
@rikyrah: Yeah. I actually like Bernie, but didn’t vote for him in either 2016 or 2020. I figured he couldn’t win and, if somehow he did, he’d be a lousy President. This whole RW schtick of ‘demented Joe Biden controlled by socialist Svengalis’ has gotten old really quickly.
H.E.Wolf
He was actively pro-choice while in Congress (his nickname was “Rubbers Bush” because he supported accessibility to birth control) – and he pivoted to actively anti-choice, in order to become VP and President.
Interesting how a lack of integrity in one area often predicts a lack of integrity in other areas….
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@John S.:
When did Atrios join the Guardian’s editorial panel?
mardam422
Has Kamala Harris even been to the Internets yet? How can she take the lead on the internets and not go to the internets and have a press conference there.
John S.
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: He’s been there all along!
VOR
@Soprano2: The problem the Republicans have is their complete lack of expertise on policy. Seriously, their 2020 platform boiled down to “we do whatever whim Trump wants that particular day”. All they have is selling fear and culture war. So they talk about Dr. Seuss, getting rid of burgers, and grand conspiracies like pedophiles in the basement of pizza parlors. They can’t argue for their policies on their merits because: A) they lack policies B) what little policies they have are unpopular.
They just don’t know how to spread fear about an old white man who has a long record as a middle of the road, sensible public servant. Good lord, they were claiming the Biden marriage was a sham designed for electability. Um, people, you do realize the Bidens have been married since 1977 (43 years) and have a grown daughter together?
Geminid
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Theodore White’s The Making of a President 1968 has some really good political analysis of that election that is worth reading today. White had some good coverage and observations on Geprge Wallace’s campaign. White thought Wallace made a mistake in picking LeMay as his running mate. that a general would not win trust among Wallace’s target audience of white working class men.
White’s account of the 1968 election reminded me of how campaigns are dynamic, not static processes. After the anodyne Miami convention, Richard Nixon’s campaign was flush with cash and well ahead in the polls. Hubert Humphrey’s campaign was broke when it came out of a tumultuous and divisive convention. Yet Humphrey fought back, and almost succeeded in recreating the New Deal coalition that powered Harry Truman’s come from behind win in 1948. By the last week, Humphrey’s momentum was such White thought that had voters gone to the polls a few days later than they did, Humphrey would have won.
Kathleen
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: When the Black Guy was elected.
Barbara
@John S.: He can go anytime he wants as far as I’m concerned.
Haydnseek
@mardam422:It’s a series of rubes…….
Ithink
@OzarkHillbilly:
THIS! But unfortunately, as long as we have so many multimedia programs that can be properly designated as white power hours or white nationalist-adjacent, we have to be careful in context and deed about offending too many considered MOR before next year’s midterms. As for the diehard Trumpeters and Trumpistas, FOH with ALL of them!?
debbie
@NotMax:
And then he turned around and adopted them as his own! ??
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@OzarkHillbilly: I just Googled him and he was drafted by the Colts in the first round. :-) Another immigrant makes good! Thanks for the link – a really nice story.