The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[Eldy]

That's definitely exciting, though the triumphant wording of the tweet is perhaps misleading to laymen (such as myself!) in implying this will directly lead to fusion becoming a viable energy source.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04440-7

[N.E. Brigand]

Republicans in Congress are again calling for the impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of the Dept. of Homeland Security, apparently on the grounds that DHS has seized too much fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexican border. I can only surmise that the speaker in threat video, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and her Republican colleagues wanted those drugs for themselves.

[Sunsilver]

Okay, I just splurted my coffee...

[N.E. Brigand]

As Frelga notes in the WTF thread, yesterday the former president advised that he would be making a "major announcement" today that turned out to be, um, this.

Today, the current president issued this message:

[Inanna]

It says invalid link.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

What says invalid link? If you are referring to the Biden tweet that N.E.B. posted that shows fine to me.

[Inanna]

Huh. Not for me. I see the url (with the media tags) when I click on it, it takes me to an invalid url link. Must be a tapatalk thing.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

I removed the media tags. Does it appear now.

N.E.B. you don't need to use media tags on tweets, Facebook posts, youtube, etc. Just post the url without the tags.

[Inanna]

I was able to click on it and see it. Thanks, V.

And lol. That is so Cool.

[RoseMorninStar]

I was able to click on it and see it. Thanks, V.

And lol. That is so Cool.

Trump's NFT?

[Frelga]

Someone said they aren't even NFT, they are just jpegs. I am not sufficiently curious to check.

I think the cool was meant for Biden's tweet, listing his actual accomplishments. Not fantasy depictions of a man doing things he's never done and looking the way he never looked.

[N.E. Brigand]

Last spring, in order to alleviate high gas prices, the Biden administration authorized the use over this year of some of the fuel held in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, with the understanding that the Reserve would be restocked when prices dropped. The average cost of a gallon of gas yesterday fell below $3.00. Today the Dept. of Energy has begun the process of starting that resupply.

[N.E. Brigand]

NPR reports on how energy companies in Florida and Alabama are paying local media outlets to push stories friendly to those companies and to bury criticism.

[N.E. Brigand]

I personally would prefer it if President Biden't didn't attend the National Prayer Breakfast, whose organizers have dubious motives, to say the least.

(Edited to move "will be wild" post to correct thread.)

[N.E. Brigand]

This is sweet:

[N.E. Brigand]

A forthcoming book about Joe Biden's presidency, The Fight of His Life by Chris Whipple, reveals that the President referred to his Vice President, Kamala Harris, as "a work in progress." However, both Biden and Harris did answer written questions that Whipple submitted to them.

- - - - - - - - -
It appears that Congress is on the verge of passing a $1.7 billion "omnibus" budget bill (4,000+ pages long) to avert a government shutdown but also including a lot of other good things in it (though not an extension of the child tax credit that actually reduced poverty during the pandemic but expired a year ago). One of the most important non-financial features, it seems, will be the Electoral Count Act. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post notes, passing that reform helps to "Trump-proof" the next election against another January 6th and is implicitly a concession by the Republicans voting for it that Donald Trump broke the law, but those Republicans can justify voting for it by saying that it prevents Vice President Kamala Harris from having the power that Trump claimed Mike Pence had to overturn the election.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel complains that many Republican members of Congress (particularly in the Senate), using the cover of needing to prevent a government shutdown, will vote to pass this bill even though it includes many items that, on a standalone basis, many of them would vote against. But as Matt Ygelsias pointed out eighteen months ago, in the modern political environment, most of the real work has to be accomplished by what he called "Secret Congress," i.e., via negotiations behind closed doors, where Senators and Representatives don't feel the need to score political points. He was writing at a time when multiple high-profile legislation was stalled:

But it’s interesting to note that the sense of gridlock derives in part from the fact that something like the stalled political reform bill has attracted dramatically more media attention than something like the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021, which passed in May and appropriated $175 billion over five years to upgrade public water systems across the country. If water issues garnered a lot of coverage, Congress wouldn’t look so gridlocked. But okay, water pipes are boring. And yet, the Biden infrastructure plan has garnered a lot of coverage with incredible attention paid to the ins and outs of every bipartisan meeting. Are water pipes not infrastructure? Did you know that while it makes headlines every time Shelley Moore Capito pays a visit to the White House, she also quietly co-authored the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act of 2021 with Tom Carper that passed the Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously? Do you think it’s weird that legislation making Juneteenth into a national holiday passed last week with seemingly no warning?

I would add that the giant billionaire-friendly tax bill that was passed by Republicans (almost exclusively) in December 2017 was likewise thousands of pages long and only revealed publicly less than a day before it was voted on -- and Strassel had no complaints then. This bill actually has a decent amount of bipartisan support.

Anyway, some Republicans who won't vote for it are mocking individual parts of the bill, e.g., this section highlighted by Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina:



Elon Musk appears to agree with Bishop that's a silly way to spend $335,000 -- although I think it matters for improving water quality and addressing global warming. Bishop also calls out an allocation of $335 million to prepare for a possible influenza pandemic as a misuse of funds. He seems particluarly irked that epidemiologists use the word "surveillance." (Some of the replies are wild, e.g.: "Omg they’re planning another ‘pandemic’ aren’t they?" Pretty sure that person is serious and doesn't believe there was a Covid-19 pandemic.)

[River]

Flu surveillance is how the WHO makes its forecasts for seasonal flu shots. This Bishop guy is an idiot if he thinks there's anything novel or sinister behind it.

[RoseMorninStar]

No one should be taking advice from Elon Musk on how to spend money.

[N.E. Brigand]

Arizona has a contractor building a shoddy U.S.-Mexico border wall out of old shipping containers through ten miles of protected desert habitat:



Source with more pictures. Arizona's outgoing Republican governor apparently is rushing to complete this stretch before his Democratic successor takes office next month. It won't stop would-be immigrants, so what's the point? Fortunately, despite claims being made by protesters, because it's so badly built, it probably won't seriously deter the natural migrations of jaguars and other wild felines either.

The Biden administration had launched legal action, and Arizona has agreed to take down the ridiculous wall.

[N.E. Brigand]

Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, touting the law that he and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer sponsored in August: