The challenges ahead (Biden's America)

[elengil]

Kind of insulting to ballerinas, anyway.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Tru dat.

[N.E. Brigand]

In a new Monmouth poll, President Biden's approval rating is 40%, which is lower than it's ever been in that poll.

But the same poll finds approval for his Build Back Better bill at 61%, exactly where it was in the previous Monmouth poll.

(A different poll yesterday found Biden beating Trump 46%-45% in a hypothetical match-up. That could be seen as good news for Biden in 2024, given how poorly his approval has been polling. But that results would also likely mean a Trump victory because of the Electoral College. Are you ready to see a president elected twice without winning the popular vote?)

[N.E. Brigand]

Senator Joe Manchin, centrist Democrat of West Virginia, showed reporter Jake Sherman a two-sided card he carries touting Congressional activity over the past year:



Manchin says Democrats should talk more about these accomplishments.

I do wonder about the "context" portion of the card and whether Manchin is signaling that he thinks too much money has already been spent.

[N.E. Brigand]

Actual sentence from a Politico article about how Vice President Kamala Harris is extra careful about tech security, which leads her, for example, not to use Bluetooth devices (which may be easier to hack):

"But still, should someone who travels with the nuclear football be spending time untangling her headphone wires?"

I get that could be just a joke, but if so, given that a key factor leading to Hillary Clinton's defeat (and thus Donald Trump's disastrous presidency, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives) is that she was deemed not to be careful enough regarding electronic security, I think it falls flat.

As Nate Silver points out, Alex Thompson, the Politico reporter who co-authored this story yesterday, was a Vice reporter in 2016, and in October of that year, just three weeks before the election, he wrote about Congressional Republicans' plans, after Hillary Clinton became president, to investigate her past use of a private email server. There was even talk in that article of Republicans impeaching President Clinton for that previous behavior. And Thompson seemed pretty sympathetic to their point of view. The article was 22 paragraphs long. Just two paragraphs, both quoting Clinton associates, suggest that such an investigation would be frivolous. The piece is chock full of Republican allegations about how serious Clinton's poor email security was (we now know that the Trump presidency was much more lax about security), and it concludes with a comparison to Watergate!

But now Thompson is joking (?) that Kamala Harris is too hung up on electronic security to be an effective leader.

Remember how Gallup asked asked potential voters before the 2016 election what words they associated with each candidate and then turned those into word clouds?

Here's the word cloud for Donald Trump:



And here's the word cloud for Hillary Clinton:



Yes, the words "lie" and "scandal" were more prominent in people's minds about Clinton than about Trump.

But above all else: email.

The November 10, 2016 article in Business Insider article which reprinted those word clouds said that in retrospect, they may have been the key showing why Trump would win. But that victory wasn't inevitable, and it very much depended on the media continuing to push the email story. That survey was conducted in September 2016, which was before Russia used Wikileaks to dump the emails of Clinton aide John Podesta over the course of a month, something which was reported on daily by the mainstream media despite the innocuous nature of Podesta's emails (as far I know, nothing revealed in those emails was the subject of any criminal investigation, not even while Trump was President, because nothing was revealed there). Those leaks, by the way, started the very same day that the Access Hollywood tape appeared, in which Trump was heard joking (?) that he liked to sexually assault women, and whether or not the leaks started on that day because the Access Hollywood tape was released, the effect was that the tape, which would have ended the candidacy of any previous contender, was no longer covered within a week, while Clinton's emails remained the subject of regular discussion right through the moment on October 28, 2016 that James Comey announced the FBI had reopened its investigation into her email use -- before announcing a week later that the matter was again closed.

And those word clouds were compiled before a supposedly non-partisan outlet like Vice chose to publish a pre-election article that amplified the notion that Hillary Clinton's emails were significant enough to merit further investigations and possibly impeachment.

So when I see the media making similar "mistakes" again, even contradicting their previously held positions in the process, I ask: what is the agenda?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Jobless claims hit a new 52-year low

A new poll finds major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats

[N.E. Brigand]

I tried to find a meme of Tucker Carlson in a tutu, but alas I couldn't find one, and I don't have the photoshop skills to do it.

Embarrassed to say it took me almost 24 hours to get the joke.

[Frelga]

Why tutu?

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The typo was that the word "to" was repeated ("NATO seems to exist to to torment Putin.")

[Frelga]

I tried to find a meme of Tucker Carlson in a tutu, but alas I couldn't find one, and I don't have the photoshop skills to do it.

Embarrassed to say it took me almost 24 hours to get the joke.

It took me less than 24 seconds to give up.

This one may or may not be real. Nothing surprises me anymore.

20211209_093832.jpg (18.71 KiB) Viewed 911 times

[N.E. Brigand]

Earlier today, the Senate voted 64-36 to override a filibuster on a new bill: fourteen Republicans joined all Democrats. Then the bill itself passed the Senate 59-35, with nine Republicans joining the Democrats. What is this bill?

It's a bill that will allow another bill to be passed without the filibuster being allowed. That bill, expected in the next week or so, will raise the debt ceiling. This is a one-time exemption.

You need 60 votes to block a filibuster. So there are fourteen Republicans who will vote today to block a filibuster and thus allow a different vote to proceed without the filibuster next week, but fewer than ten Republicans who would actually vote next week to block that filibuster if the bill didn't have this exemption.

[N.E. Brigand]

This one may or may not be real. Nothing surprises me anymore.

20211209_093832.jpg

Apparently it's real, but it's four years old.

[N.E. Brigand]

Correction
Rolling Stone reports on a notable passage from The Chief's Chief, the new book by Mark Meadows, the White House Chief of Staff during Donald Trump's final year in office:

“Upstairs in the Residence, President Trump was growing anxious. He had given an order for the park to be cleared, and it was not being followed. The various law enforcement agencies that were supposed to be under the command of [then-Attorney General] Bill Barr were clearly not communicating with one another, and it did not seem that a single arrest had yet been made.”

Protesters had gathered in Lafayette Square on June 1 as part of the demonstrations sparked by the police killing of George Floyd. According to Meadows, the protesters were trying to take down a statue of President Andrew Jackson that stood in the park, prompting him to phone Trump. “It looks like we have a situation out here,” Meadows said, according to the book. “They’re trying to tear down statues and vandalizing the park. I assume that we have the authority to deploy whatever law enforcement is necessary to fix this?”

Trump’s answer was yes, and more. “Not only do you have the authority,” the president said, according to Meadows. “I want you to go out there and bust some heads and make some arrests. We need to restore order.”

Meadows writes that he “was not quite prepared to crack anything,” but notes that he “went to the front door of the White House and spoke with the head of the Secret Service” and “pointed out that we had orders from President Trump to open up Pennsylvania Avenue.”

“The leaders of these forces were resisting, but it was clear that the officers on the ground felt the same way President Trump did,” Meadows added.

Now I seem to recall that a report earlier this year from the Inspector General for the U.S. Interior Dept. of Interior (which oversees park police) found that, as the NPR headline puts it, "Police Did Not Clear Protesters To Make Way For Trump Photo-Op." I suppose that is not necessarily inconsistent with the new information in Meadows' book, but the book does appear to conflict with Donald Trump's reaction to the report: "Completely and Totally exonerating me in the clearing of Lafayette Park!"

Washington Post reporter Daniel Dale says the Rolling Stone report (and thus my comment referring to it) is wrong. Meadows here is describing a different event three weeks later. My apologies for the error.

[N.E. Brigand]

Jobless claims hit a new 52-year low

A new poll finds major warning signs for Biden and fellow Democrats

A new CNBC poll finds that Biden is 20 points underwater and Republicans have a 10-point advantage in the generic ballot for next year's midterm elections. The Republican lead was just 2 points only a a month ago. The top issues for poll respondents are inflation, immigration, and crime.

So what should Biden and the Democrats do about inflation, immigration, and crime?

And what do Republicans propose to do about inflation, immigration, and crime?

[Dave_LF]

And what do Republicans propose to do about inflation, immigration, and crime?

Blame them on Democrats (while they sit on their thumbs)

[elengil]

And what do Republicans propose to do about inflation, immigration, and crime?

Blame them on Democrats (while they sit on their thumbs)

It's worked for them so far.

[N.E. Brigand]

Further on that subject, this new column in The New York Times says that Americans are right to feel the economy is struggling (despite good jobs numbers):

Covid Malaise

Offices remain eerily empty. Airlines have canceled thousands of flights. Subways and buses are running less often. Schools sometimes call off entire days of class. Consumers waste time waiting in store lines. Annual inflation has reached its highest level in three decades. ... Sure, some major statistics look good, and they reflect true economic strengths, including the state of families’ finances. But the economy is more than a household balance sheet; it is the combined experience of working, shopping and interacting in society. Americans evidently understand the distinction: In an Associated Press poll, 64 percent describe their personal finances as good — and only 35 percent describe the national economy as good. ...
Schools are a particular source of frustration. Last year, the closure of in-person school caused large learning losses. This year, teachers have the near-impossible task of trying to help students make up for lost time, which has left many teachers feeling burned out. ... And school operations are still not back to normal. Students are sometimes forbidden to sit or talk with one another during lunch — or to eat indoors. Masks make communication harder, especially for students with learning disabilities. Positive Covid tests or worker shortages can cause schools to close temporarily.

So what should Biden and the Democrats do about these issues? During the pandemic's first year, when Donald Trump was president, Democrats passed a large relief bill that helped people, even though that would improve Republicans' chances of winning the 2020 election. By contrast, Republicans now would be happy to let the country fall apart. They are, for example, actively discouraging government efforts to increase vaccination levels. So Democrats have to go it alone. But go it alone on what? The column's author, David Leonhardt, suggests more cost-benefit analysis. For example:

Yet many Democrats, both voters and politicians, have been almost blasé about the costs of Covid precautions — the isolation, unhappiness, health damage, lost learning, inflation, public-transit disruptions and more. Democrats have sometimes focused on minimizing the spread of Covid, regardless of the downsides: Closing schools, for example, almost certainly harms children more than it protects them, given the minuscule rate of severe childhood Covid, even lower than that of severe childhood flu.

And schools are rarely closed due to flu outbreaks. And as long as teachers are vaccinated, the risk of harming them is minimized compared to the first ten months of the pandemic.

[Dave_LF]

I've been saying for some time that the majority of COVID restrictions--particularly those imposed upon children--are profoundly illiberal, and I still don't understand why the people and politicians most inclined to call themselves liberals are so blind to this.

There's something almost Tolkienian about mortals burning their childrens' world down in a doomed attempt to hide from death. There are worse things.

[N.E. Brigand]

It's possible that Biden's low poll numbers are typical of leaders globally: in the U.K., Boris Johnson is polling at 24% approval vs. 66% disapproval.

[N.E. Brigand]

Joe Biden is the first U.S. president to have 40 federal judges confirmed by the Senate in his first year since Ronald Reagan in 1981.

As White House Chief of Staff Ronald Klain notes, while three of Reagan's first forty judges were women, of Biden's first forty judges, thirty are women.