US Politics, April 2024: "Are You Better Off Today Than You Were <Checks Notes> Four Years Ago?"

He's too young for the New Deal. He was elected to the Senate in 1974 in that year's huge Democratic wave. All this hack knows is where the wind blows, and for 30 years, through Gerald Ford and WIN and Carter and deregulation and Democratic Leadership Council and Atari Democrats and Clinton and Clarence Thomas, the winds blew toward accommodation, "centrism," defensive crouches. If he'd been president in 1989 or 2009 he would've been a disaster. This was his moment.

Money doesnt sing or dance or walk tho xp

I gotta give Steve Mnuchin and Nancy Pelosi credit for the free $$: the best demonstration ever that some kind of UBI does not sap "initiative" or whatever.

Let's not give too much credit to the guy who's aiding and abetting genocide.

yes, milo, we know

You simply have got to hand it to him

How gauche of me

I think they should go back to giving struggling people free money

love how people just don’t want to discuss the fact that he’s aiding and abetting a genocide. the party of “but”

If by "people" you mean ILX, we do -- all the time! And I agree with you #dialectics

We already have at least 3 threads where these things are discussed? The only thing we need now is a “Why Is There No Thread for the Palestinian Genocide?” Thread

But did you know the president responsible for the most progressive legislation since the New Deal also sent more than 50,000 boys to their deaths?

in table's defense, the main headline about Biden today is the military aid bill, seems fair to mention while discussing Biden's relative merit

the airline refund thing today is cool--don't know specifics, hope they're not too barfy. but how sensible!

― a (waterface), Wednesday, April 24, 2024 11:10 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I hate to admit it but Mayor Pete may actually be a good politician

in table's defense, the main headline about Biden today is the military aid bill, seems fair to mention while discussing Biden's relative merit

― rob, Wednesday, April 24, 2024

You'll notice that when he referred to "his" legislation he barely mentioned Israel. Here's your cynical politics at work.

also in table's defense, Biden is committing incomprehensively huge amounts of money to genocide that could be given to struggling people or dedicated to social infrastructure

xp
I didn't notice that, but given that he called it "A good day for world peace" he'd basically have to leave out Israel or look demented

ah but now I'm seeing he also said: “My commitment to Israel,” Mr. Biden said, “is ironclad.” Alas

I hadn't realized the theatrical TikTok thing was part of this package too

that could be given to struggling people or dedicated to social infrastructure

I seem to recall a bill Biden proposed with a bunch of domestic spending in it. Whatever happened to that one?

we should have a macro that adds "he's contributing to genocide you know" in parentheses every time someone types the word Biden in a post

in the voice of Foghorn Leghorn

xpost - but then what would milo have left to post about?

Biden is committing incomprehensively huge amounts of money to genocide that could be given to struggling people or dedicated to social infrastructure

― bae (sic)

US government spending isn’t a zero sum game, all of the government’s money is ultimately free

*federal government spending

In addition to the incomprehensible amounts of money given to pay for Israel's genocide, he's also given incomprehensible amounts of money since 2021 to broadband, rural hospitals and clinics, reducing the price of insulin, and tax breaks for electrical vehicles.

Don't you guys see? If you admit someone has done something good, it's like you're minimizing their evil!

I'm not zinging anyone. I love the lot of you. I regard these exchanges in the same spirit as volleying one-liners and one-ups over beer and many cigarettes in a backyard.

are you all under the impression that "Biden is pretty good" is an opinion that has gone unaired on ILX?

Let's get some cutting edge opinions in here

what's the worst that could happen

why the Biden admin is issuing so many executive branch rules this week:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-04-23-biden-administration-regulations-congressional-review-act/

iirc this was the kind of thing the Obama admin was pretty terrible about

thanks, Newt!

Democratic Congresses are unlikely to overturn rules from Democratic presidents, and the same with Republicans. So the CRA is only useful when a president from the opposite party comes into power with a unified Congress to reverse their predecessors’ rules. During their presidencies, Bush and Obama showed little interest in using that power.

It took Donald Trump to break this reluctance. As president, Trump signed 16 CRA resolutions overturning Obama administration rules, 15 of them in his first year in office. “This is Newt Gingrich’s knife against the throat of the administrative state that Trump weaponized,” said Segall.

i'm still mad about the old genocide that nobody here gave a shit about. i'm not on to the new genocide yet but i'll get there!

"Brown University researchers, in a report released Monday, draw on U.N. data and expert analyses to attempt to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — impacts “so vast and complex that” ultimately, “they are unquantifiable,” the researchers acknowledge.

The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate. Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were “‘indirect deaths” caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health condition s. Brown University researchers, in a report released Monday, draw on U.N. data and expert analyses to attempt to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen — impacts “so vast and complex that” ultimately, “they are unquantifiable,” the researchers acknowledge."

but sorry new news only from now on promise! just ignore that above. heck, everyone else did.

also ignore my pathetic cut & paste abilities. heck, everyone else did!

but more currently:

"More than 355,000 Russian personnel have been killed and wounded in the Ukraine war, according to the UK MoD."

https://www.euronews.com/2024/03/03/russia-likely-suffered-at-least-355000-casualties-in-ukraine-war-uk-mod

#lockheedmartinforpresident

Nah Scott yr good… go Bears!

Nah Scott yr good… go Bears!

I was talking with my brother this morning, who's very online and furious about Gaza and the general apathy about it in the public. I had to give him a whole lil TED talk about how American voters have shown over and over they do not give a shit about foreign affairs except/unless/until American lives are directly implicated on a daily basis, and even then it's variable. (By "don't give a shit" I mostly mean it's not a vote-swaying issue for them.)

I don't think Americans are unique in this, although our sense of separation from most of the rest of the world is probably more pronounced thanks to the oceans and all.

People have been pulling up the old pro-Iraq War writings of pro-Israel libs like Josh Marshall. They just wait for their bad takes to be forgotten and then claim they were on the correct side all along.

of course it's not vote swaying. Dems are horrible on this issue but Republicans are way worse.

I'd say that's a little backward, the parties can be/are horrible on it because most voters don't give a shit. To the degree Biden has moved rhetorically at all, it probably has mostly to do with there happening to be an important bloc of Arab-American voters in Michigan, which for this year anyway is an important state.

People on the right also mostly don't care about any of this, but they are happy to hate on anti-war Ivy League longhairs because that's in their DNA.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/04/24/us/elections/nikki-haley-trump-zombie-votes.html

Ballots cast for candidates who have suspended their campaigns are sometimes called zombie votes. This phenomenon is hardly new.

In fact, a review of contested primaries since 2000 reveals that sizable shares of the electorate routinely chose someone other than the eventual nominee, even after all other serious contenders had dropped out. ...

The zombie vote in this year’s Republican primary has actually been low by historical standards. In Democratic and Republican primaries going back to 2000, roughly a quarter of voters picked a candidate other than the eventual nominee even after all the other serious contenders had exited the race.

Write-in votes not counted yet in PA but there are signs of an Uncommitted showing:

But the spike in write-ins on the Democratic side greatly overshadows GOP write-ins, likely reflecting, at least in part, the work of the Uncommitted Pennsylvania movement. The group had set a goal of getting 40,000 “uncommitted” votes statewide. Biden won Pennsylvania by a little more than 80,000 votes in 2020.

By Wednesday Uncommitted Pa., by its own calculations, said the 67 counties across the state had reported 57,951 Democratic write-in votes for President, which would represent 5.7% of the total vote and nearly three times the number of write-ins cast in the 2020 presidential primary.

i was one of them

Worthwhile pod ep from two leftist academics with Columbia/NYU history:

https://goodbye.substack.com/p/campus-crackdown-and-an-assessment

Today, we talk about everything that’s happening on campus from Columbia to NYU to Berkeley. Tyler talks about the responsibilities of faculty in these moments and what he thinks is driving a surprisingly strong faculty response to the arrests in New York City. We also talk about how to process the instances of antisemitism at these protests and Jay talks about some of the difficulties that have arisen with the leaderless activism model over the past decade or so

Oops, wrong thread.

Sorta

no def not, those antisemite wingnuts have been a fringe issue forever, they are never going away, I remember them at abortion protests in the 80s and Iraq protest in the 90s, shunning/ostracization/disavowal is the only answer to their trolling

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/25/israel-gaza-ceasefire-adam-smith

Protesters calling for Israel to cease fire in its war with Hamas who have disrupted US public events and infrastructure are practicing “leftwing fascism” or “leftwing totalitarianism”, a senior US House Democrat said, adding that such protesters are “challenging representative democracy” and should be arrested.

“Intimidation is the tactic,” said Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the House armed services committee. “Intimidation and an effort to silence opposition … I don’t know if there’s such a thing as leftwing fascism. If you want to just call it leftwing totalitarianism, then that’s what it is. It is a direct challenge to representative democracy now.”

"Adam Smith" is a little much