Protest - Poor People's Campaign
15 Nov 2021
This was a protest organized by
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II of the Poor People's Campaign. Right now,
they're leaving their speeches in front of the Supreme Court and are
proceeding to the Capitol.
In legislative news, the "roads and bridges" infrastructure bill, called the BIF, has passed
and the Presidenr has signed it into law. The second, bigger one, the
Build Back Better bill, or the BBB, has yet to pass. Progressives
decided to allow the BIF to pass so that if the Democratic moderates, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, try to not vote for it or to extract an even higher price for their votes, then President Biden will take the blame for it not passing.
The current excuse Manchin is using to not vote for the BBB is inflation. This is a non-problem. None of Manchin's Democratic colleagus take his talking point seriously. The threat of inflation simply isn't that severe and doesn't justify any delay in passing the BBB.
Videos of marching and singing.
We had a Representative not quite grasp that one shouldn't express the desire to kill a co-worker.
Representative Gosar had a minion create a video based on a Japanese
anime cartoon wherein a character with Gosar's face attached killed
a character with the face of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC).
Among others,
Representative Matt Gaetz demonstrated that he didn't understand
that "killing" a cartoon character that is clearly designed to resemble
a known human being shows that the designer of the cartoon really,
truly wants to kill the
cartoon subject. The blogger brings up the subject of Kathy Griffin, a comedian
who held up a model of the-then President Trump's severed head. Griffin
was promptly ostracized and she was unable to do stand-up comedy for
quite awhile. Gosar was censured and removed from his committees.
After the censure, Gosar posted the video again.
He deleted it in a few hours, most likely because fellow Republicans
reminded him that he could still be expelled from Congress
entirely.
Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II
In another example of the Senate being dysfunctional and Senate procedures, like the filibuster, doing far more harm than good, another Republican senator has joined the fight against having America be fully represented overseas.
As 2021 nears its end, the Biden
administration only has four ambassadors to foreign countries — and
before a few weeks ago, the total was just one. For comparison, at this
point in Donald Trump's first year as president, the Senate had already
confirmed 22 ambassadors.
As
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy has said about talking with Republican colleagues: "This risks being hyperbolic,
but it's like negotiating with a terrorist." As Britain's Guardian put
it: "Ambassador shortage hampers Biden foreign policy as nominees hit logjam"
Texas Tribune:
Why the holdup? U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz has single-handedly delayed dozens of
key Biden administration nominees, mostly concentrated in the State
Department, in retaliation for a Biden decision to drop U.S. opposition
to a Russian pipeline to Germany.
The press is screwin up, as usual.
*Sigh!* For heaven's sake! Nothing in the Build Back Better bill is hidden! Everything is and has been completely open for months! The only reason the NY Times reporter is unaware of what's in the BBB bill is laziness.
There was a bit of a crisis concerning ports and cargo. Hundreds of
cargo ships were stalled outside US ports as the ports were
overwhelmed. With the usual can-do spirit and competence, "The number of shipping containers sitting on docks at the port of Los Angeles has declined by 29 percent in recent weeks."
You'd never know that seeing all of the gloom and doom in the media! There's been further good news lately, but Biden's popularity is going down because the press has it's narrative and nothing can be allowed to interfere with that!
So how is President Biden doing as far as his popularity is going? Well. according to CNN, not so great.
That changed in midsummer. The unexpected resurgence of the pandemic,
the resulting economic slowdown, the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and
congressional infighting over Biden's economic agenda dragged his
standing underwater.
The COVID-19 Delta Variant was a problem. It especially caught Florida
off-guard as Governor DeSantis had not taken advantage of improving
numbers to get Floridians vaccinated. In July, DeSantis was pro-vaccines, but was also anti-masking. By October, he was against vaccine mandates. The problem in Florida was and is not the president, but the governor.
Actually, Biden's jobs record has been dramatically understated, with the government reporting job numbers as far below what they actually were.
Afghanistan collapsed faster than exprected, but Biden get many, many
people out of there, long after the Taliban had taken over. This was
due to the US keeping communications open
with Taliban and by cooperating with them to keep the Kabul airstrip
operating right up to the date the US was scheduled to depart.
Congressional infight? 98% of both House and Senate Democrats agreed
with both the Progressive Caucus and President Biden on all of Biden's
goals. The "infighting" was and is a handful of moderate Democrats in
the House and two moderte Dems in the Senate.
So CNN plays more of a role in the president's popularity then they'd care to admit.
If they downplay or exaggerate items in the news, if they
mischaracterize how things actually are, they should be honest about
their role and not try and pretend that they're just looking at things
from 30k feet in their air or that they're taking "the view from nowhere."
The Build Back Better bill passed the House on the 19th. Democrats are aiming to get it through the Senate by Christmas. The House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to do a sort of, kind of filibuster
by talking for eight hours. About the only thing he proved was that
Republicans really don't have any meaningful, substantive arguments
against the BBB bill.
Prawnworks