US Politics: CPAC - Finding new ways to bring America to Rune.

[DireWolfSpirit]

If those things want equal sidewalk rights they need to grab a snow shovel and share in the path clearing.

signed: THE WISCONSIN DELEGATION.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

So, only about 40 minutes until Trump is inaugurated, right?  I can't wait!

A few things here.

First you used the wrong calendar. You were obviously not using a Mayan calendar.

Second It will be the biggest crowd ever, to attend an inaugaration in Richmond

Third You are laughing now. But deep down in your heart, you just long for the performance of Elvis and Tupac. Their rendition of the Stars Spangled Banner will put Lady Gaga and Whitney Houston to shame. And here, there will also be Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

So, only about 40 minutes until Trump is inaugurated, right?  I can't wait!

It's the 4th of March? JFC....

[Corvinus85]

41 minutes ago, DMC said:

Sorry if this is off topic, but I don't really know where to put this and I don't wanna start a new thread...

Sidewalk robots get legal rights as "pedestrians":

I think it may be time to call Sarah Connor.  There's also this - 

I haven't been on campus since covid (so pretty much exactly a year), but they started using these little fuckers all around campus to deliver food and whatnot in Fall 2019.  They were extremely annoying and, as I tend to walk fast between buildings, I nearly tripped over the little bastards on a handful of occasions.  The problem isn't just them being fast moving - they often stall out randomly.  I guess that could be fixed, but I don't care.  I am totally a small robot bigot when it comes to suppressing their rights.

 

39 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

They aren't people. They have literally no rights. It's the owner that will sue me in court after I murder 150 of the things.

There's one of these abominations in my supermarket. It idles from aisle to aisle, doing nothing but examining us fleshbeings for future extermination.

Which one you wants to be Chewbacca and which one wants to be this other guy?

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

26 minutes ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

If those things want equal sidewalk rights they need to grab a snow shovel and share in the path clearing.

signed: THE WISCONSIN DELEGATION.

You should have collectively invested less time into making shitty beer and cheap cheese and more time into animatronics, methinks. Maybe start with a frog and a pig in a semi-undefined relationship with a giant bird roaming about teaching people lessons.

Stay away from the vampire though. He's going to brag about how many people he could bite.

Food for thought. 

[DireWolfSpirit]

 

[Jace, Extat]

11 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

 

Which one you wants to be Chewbacca and which one wants to be this other guy?

You talkin' to Admiral Daala, Motherfucker!

[Jaxom 1974]

Is the former guy going to have any part for the Ides when it comes up next week?  Seems like a better time for shenanigans...

[DMC]

16 minutes ago, Corvinus85 said:

Which one you wants to be Chewbacca and which one wants to be this other guy?

Well, the little fuckers are much closer in size to the one Chewy scares off compared to the ones the other dude took on.  But I still don't think I'm worthy of being compared to Chewbacca.

[Martell Spy]

AFL-CIO to explore taking a stance on eliminating filibuster
Two of organized labor's highest priorities for the Biden administration, the PRO Act and the Raise the Wage Act, are both unlikely to garner the 60 votes needed for passage in the Senate.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/04/afl-cio-filibuster-stance-473676

Quote

 

The AFL-CIO's executive board will meet next week to determine its position on eliminating the filibuster, the labor federation's president, Richard Trumka, told POLITICO Thursday.

Two of organized labor's highest priorities in Congress — boosting the minimum wage to $15 an hour and legislation containing a long list of union priorities known as the PRO Act — are unlikely to garner the 60 votes needed for passage in the Senate.

"There are several ways to get them done," Trumka said. Ending the filibuster "is one of them."

"And quite frankly, we — we being my executive board — are going to have a discussion about that next Wednesday," he said. "We're going to have that discussion [about] where we ought to be on that very issue."

If organized labor coalesces around overturning the filibuster, a priority for many progressives, it could give the movement significant momentum. A major ally of Democrats and the president's election campaign, unions have seen early success in lobbying the Biden White House. Unions pressed Biden, after weeks of silence, to speak out on a high-stakes union election at an Amazon factory in Alabama — which some say was the most pro-union statement a president has ever made."

 

 

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, Martell Spy said:

AFL-CIO to explore taking a stance on eliminating filibuster
Two of organized labor's highest priorities for the Biden administration, the PRO Act and the Raise the Wage Act, are both unlikely to garner the 60 votes needed for passage in the Senate.

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/04/afl-cio-filibuster-stance-473676

 

OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SHEEEEEEEEIIIIT

This is gonna do it!

[Fez]

4 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SHEEEEEEEEIIIIT

This is gonna do it!

Well, the AFL-CIO does included the United Mine Workers of America. No idea how much juice the UMWA really have anymore, but if they went hard for it I could see that maybe making a difference for Manchin at least.

[The Anti-Targ]

Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. One day the the other lot will control all 3 branches of govt, and what they will do absent the filibuster is the wrong question, the right question is what won't they do? 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

31 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. One day the the other lot will control all 3 branches of govt, and what they will do absent the filibuster is the wrong question, the right question is what won't they do? 

We just lived through this under Trump from 2017 to 2019. What did the filibuster stop? 

The surest path back to united Republican control of every branch is for the Democrats to do nothing on voting rights because of the filibuster and allow Republican states to suppress the vote.

Protecting voting rights and passing other policies that will meaningfully improve people's live like a $15 minimum wage is the best way for Democrats to keep their majorities in Congress and not relinquish the executive branch back to Trump or to Trump 2.0.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

11 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

We just lived through this under Trump from 2017 to 2019. What did the filibuster stop? 

The surest path back to united Republican control of every branch is for the Democrats to do nothing on voting rights because of the filibuster and allow Republican states to suppress the vote.

Protecting voting rights and passing other policies that will meaningfully improve people's live like a $15 minimum wage is the best way for Democrats to keep their majorities in Congress and not relinquish the executive branch back to Trump or to Trump 2.0.

 

The thing is, what didn't the Republicans even put out into the public domain because they knew it would not get through a filibuster? As Rumsfeld famously once said, its the unknown unkowns you need to worry about. Anti-abortion measures? Discriminatory laws against all the phobias a lot of the right suffers from?

I'll tack this on here because it's off topic and because @Fragile Bird asked about the first one. There was another 8.0 earthquake in the same location just now. This time there is a tsunami warning and people in certain coastal areas are being told to move inland / to high ground. Almost the whole coastline has at least a beach threat, and maybe 20% of the north Island has a land threat. 

[Fez]

28 minutes ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

We just lived through this under Trump from 2017 to 2019. What did the filibuster stop? 

A lot actually. If not for the filibuster, the ACA almost certainly would've been repealed. If not the reconciliation rules causing the repeal bill to be such an unholy mess, McCain almost certainly voted for repeal.

Other bills House Republicans passed that probably would've passed the Senate if not for the filibuster, include::

• Repeal of Dodd-Frank
• Outlawing abortion nationwide after 20 weeks
• Gutting most remaining state gun control laws
• Expanding the criteria that allow the death penalty to apply in criminal cases

[Fragile Bird]

I see that idiot made good on his threat and all 600+ pages of the bill have to be read out. Stupid, asinine bastard.

[TrueMetis]

48 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

I see that idiot made good on his threat and all 600+ pages of the bill have to be read out. Stupid, asinine bastard.

Paying politicians well makes sense, but if you're being payed 6 figures on the public dime you should be locked in the room when it's in session and missing meetings and shit should see you publicly flogged. The fact that they can have this done and then fuck off somewhere else during is nonsense.

[Kalbear]

1 hour ago, OnionAhaiReborn said:

We just lived through this under Trump from 2017 to 2019. What did the filibuster stop? 

The surest path back to united Republican control of every branch is for the Democrats to do nothing on voting rights because of the filibuster and allow Republican states to suppress the vote.

Protecting voting rights and passing other policies that will meaningfully improve people's live like a $15 minimum wage is the best way for Democrats to keep their majorities in Congress and not relinquish the executive branch back to Trump or to Trump 2.0.

 

Seriously? 

The ACA being repealed (they would have tried again after McCain died if they could have done that AND the tax stuff). Massive deportation. Likely even more wealth inequity. Abortion laws being essentially overwritten to nonexistence. Repeal of things like the VRA entirely. For all the wish lists of things that Dems have, the Republicans have just as long a list and would love to do them all. And unlike most of the Dem things, the Republican ones are built largely around securing their power. 

[Kalbear]

Yay bleak futurism that confirms my biases

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html

 

Quote

And so this leads to a question of why. Why did nonwhite voters start sorting more by ideology? And that’s a hard thing to know. But my organization, and our partner organizations, have done extensive post-election surveys of 2020 voters. And we looked specifically at those voters who switched from supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Donald Trump in 2020 to see whether anything distinguishes this subgroup in terms of their policy opinions. What we found is that Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues. And having conservative views on those issues was more predictive of switching from Clinton to Trump than having conservative views on any other issue-set was.

 

Quote

Currently, even if we have an exceptionally good midterm, the most likely outcome is that we lose one or two Senate seats. And then, going into 2024, we have something like seven or eight Democrats who are in states that are more Republican than the country overall. Basically, we have this small window right now to pass redistricting reform and create states. And if we don’t use this window, we will almost certainly lose control of the federal government and not be in a position to pass laws again potentially for a decade. In terms of putting numbers on things, I think that if we implemented D.C. and Puerto Rican statehood and passed redistricting reform, that would roughly triple our chance of holding the House in 2022 and roughly the same in the Senate. The fact that it’s possible to triple those odds is a testament to how bleak the baseline case is. So we need to pass those reforms and we need Biden to remain popular. If his approval rating is below 50 by the end of the year, we’re probably fucked.