The Politics Thread

[Noel]

That was funny as I kept looking at the expression on Kamala Harris' face. She's like, "Wait. Did he just say???" 

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[DramatistDreamer]

While it was amusing to look at the light-hearted banter, the media with all their short attention spans regarding anything not related to sex and violence, need to also keep front of mind that there were some pretty substantive things that were said in that press conference and signing.
The declaration that the intent was always there to start out with a specific goal and to expand the ACA to be more line with something like universal coverage. And the necessary closing of a loophole that was closing off pathway for coverage for millions of family members that happened to live with a head of household that had health insurance via their employers, even though coverage didn’t extend beyond the employees, which excluded family members. Also that Republicans have gotten in the way of making the ACA more expansive and covering more people who would benefit from it.

 I wish the media would do its actual job and keep these aspects included in the most important aspects of their reports.

It’s cool to laugh and reminisce. In these times it served as a balm for most of us, but the media’s job is different from  the rest of us…they need to report on what the “meat “ and intent of the actual PC and signing was about, beyond optics. 

Edited April 6, 2022 by DramatistDreamer

[janea4old]

For those unfamiliar with the abbreviation:
ACA "Affordable Healthcare Act" which was once nicknamed "Obamacare".
t's a federal program distributed to the individual states of the USA, and it is implemented differently in each state per the politics of each state. 

The original goal was healthcare for all, but they started with helping certain groups.

I would not be alive if it weren't for the ACA.  Simple as that.

I fully support expanding it so that everyone gets coverage.

Edited April 6, 2022 by janea4old

[DramatistDreamer]

Shortly after posting up thread about media responsibility, that very sad news about Eric Boehlert came through.

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[JaneAusten]

I heard about that earlier and am in shock.  

[DramatistDreamer]

With such unexpected news, that’s understandable. There’s a bevy of tragic news these days, in all directions, it seems.

[JaneAusten]

I find so many people in our own country so tuned out to what's going on. I can't blame people, but I have friends who don't want to even discuss Ukraine for example or the abortion cases as another example because it's just too depressing and they are tired of depressing. I wonder how some of them would have survived being a minority before 1965 especially, or the Great Depression and WW2 when poverty and rationing of many resources were widespread. I have plenty of friends and family who are tuned in, but the disinterest or "tuning out" hoping it will just go away frankly kind of appalls me.  And my mom passed away about 6 weeks ago. She was elderly and was suffering from vascular dementia and had a good and healthy life, but it still hit me hard. But frankly she lived through some of those times herself and Im glad for her sake she's gone from the current world we live in.

[DRW50]

I'm  so sorry to hear about your mother. 

Those who don't want to hear about this and that are likely to enable the Republicans who will be ruining their lives whether they pay attention or not. It's very demoralizing. Republicans are now fully unhinged, the party of MTG, calling everyone a groomer and fully supporting insurrection and murder, yet they are as popular as ever, if not moreso. I just hope those who have the resources to leave the  country do so while they can. 

[DramatistDreamer]

Oh @JaneAusten I am so sorry to hear about your mother. My deepest condolences to you and your family. I hope you have people to surround you with love and to be of comfort to you.

[Khan]

My condolences to you and your family as well, @JaneAusten.

I figured that would happen in the wake of the pandemic.  There comes a point when people just can't take anymore bad news.  And I think the Republicans are especially taking advantage of our collective reticence, for lack of a better word, pushing through all this terrible legislation that's going to destroy the fabric of our country in the long run.  The pushback to certain things isn't as strong as it should be, either because people are tuning out, or they've just plain given up.

[Vee]

I think there's a lot of pushback. But I think there's just also a lot of profound exhaustion on everyone's part - understandably - as well as profound institutional inertia. A number of Democratic politicians - not the bulk of the party, but certain folks - wanted to believe 'it can't happen here' to any number of things that have, in fact, happened, and just want to roll things back to the easier long-bygone times of relative bipartisan comity in Washington, where both parties come to the table, negotiate fairly and each side resumes their cliched roles of social conscience and 'principled fiscal conservative.' Except there are no more principled conservatives, and being social consciences is no longer enough.

I don't think this inertia is Biden's fault, though I do think his rhetoric and action could always stand to be stronger in some areas, like most presidents over the years. He wants to do a lot more, but he's stymied by some people who are either truly corrupt (Sinemanchin, the GOP) or a handful of others who simply do not grasp or do not want to grasp the existential crisis we are now in. They want to go back to 'normal' as described above, and that means moving as little as possible outside the norms of what we are used to expecting from regular order in American government in terms of shaking things up or making bigger moves. But there is no going back. We have to do better, not just on action but on messaging, something a lot of Democrats are often inept at or approaching from a perpetual post-Reagan defensive crouch towards the media and 'fiscally responsible' GOP. And we have very little time in which to do better on these things before the hole gets deeper and tougher to climb out of. 

I don't think things are as apocalyptic as they are sometimes made out to be. But they are very urgent, and very serious. Certain things are cyclical in politics, like always, and will continue to keep cycling back and forth. But for other things the cycle might change, or stop. I think it's okay to take breaks as informed citizenry from following the cycle every second of the day. I keep a close eye on things, but I take mental health breaks for myself, for the trauma of the last few years, for my family's illnesses and my own struggles. If I tried to keep following everything Joe Manchin said or did everyday based on what he watched on Fox News last night, I'd lose my mind. I stay engaged, but I catch my breath and step away from time to time. I keep putting one foot in front of the other and that's all those of us on the outside can do, aside from helping, contributing or campaigning in our own ways.

Edited April 7, 2022 by Vee

[FrenchBug82]

I agree with a lot of the sentiments expressed here.

Look at what happened with the Don't Say Gay bill. A rare example of activist success in establishing a negative narrative for one of the avalanche of awful bills Republicans are pushing through around the country... and Republicans fired bazookas, turned their propaganda machine up to 1000 and now all we are talking about is Democrats being pedophiles and teachers groomers and the conversation is them making these insane awful accusations freely and Democrats being outraged.

And we are not talking about the bill anymore, even though it will be around ruining kids' lives long after the current news cycles.

It is an exhausting cycle because the media buys into it and Democrats are torn: calling them out is allowing to switch the discussion to their choice and having the conversation being "of course we are not pedophile" is not... great or ignoring them and letting really ugly narrative or vague impressions settle among low-information communities.
See what happened to Biden being communist, absurd as it is to us, among some Latino communities. Republicans repeated the BS over and over and over, Democrats thought that was so transparently absurd they didn't push back and enough of it filtered through voters with very little attention to politics to cost significant amount of votes.

Most voters don't care about politics and only a few things make it though their memory. That's why Republicans repeated all kinds of tales about Hillary because by the time she did run, a lot of voters had a vague impression she was corrupt despite not really knowing anything specific about it (because there wasn't!)
That's why Republicans are constantly pushing dumb edited videos and misleading memes about Kamala Harris being stupid. They are planting a seed that might reach voters here and there, especially low-income white voters always culturally inclined to assume a successful black man or woman has to have been "given favors" (affirmative action and all), enough that by the time she runs that image will have been very firmly planted and it will be considerably easy to turn that narrative into an open weapon.
Inversely, they didn't believe Obama would run and would be the nominee in 2008 and they actually spent most of 2007 complimenting him because they wanted to undermine Hillary. So by the time they switched to TERRORIST FIST JAB in the summer of 2008 it was too late. They still managed to dig the hatred deep over subsequent years but they hadn't done the long work.

Anyhow, this is what is going on here. Republicans repeat things that are awful and mendacious. But they repeat them so much that, well, people start to think there is no smoke without fire

Meanwhile Democrats have a cornocupia of things that are TRUE and would hurt GOPers badly but they are constantly changing messaging and letting themselves be distracted by fake outrage machine enabled by media.
And as soon as a Democrat tries to be more outspoken and aggressive, there somehow always is another Democrat to tsk tsk him about civility and immediately story becomes intra-Dem fighting rather than the legit criticism of Republicans.
Exhausting cycle. 

Edited April 7, 2022 by FrenchBug82

[DRW50]

I don't think that is as true as it used to be. Not that long ago there would have been more Democrats out there praising the Florida legislation and advising the party to co-opt it. The party as a whole has been unified against these bills and know what they are really about. The vicious attacks against KBJ along these lines didn't get much traction in Democratic division outside of anonymous quotes in Punchbowl. And Democrats have managed to bring attention to hypocrisy and ugliness in some cases, like the child marriage bill in Tennessee,  while extremists spend a lot of their time of late ranting and raving about Disney, which is all theater to  line their pockets, as Disney is generally too big to fail and Disney also has never done anything to fight this type of legislation anyway. 

With that said, it doesn't really matter even if Democrats are more unified than they used to be - media and the courts and gerrymandering and the general stupidity of the public are all against them. 

And of  course Manchin and Sinema ruining things, which  is another topic entirely. 

I see that James Carville, who is  a king of this type of complaining about Democrats to get press, is  involved  in a failing campaign against John Fetterman, the likely nominee for Pennsylvania Senate. This is a  case where  I actually wish he was succeeding, because Fetterman is a Bernie dead-ender who went on shows with loathsome grifters like Brie Brie and taunted  Jon Ossoff only to later try to glom onto his stock-banning bill after he was elected to the Senate. 

Fetterman has been ducking debates in part to avoid questions about pulling a gun on a black jogger in 2013. Conor Lamb, with Carville, ran ads on this incident, which have now been pulled off the air. 

https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/2022/04/01/conor-lamb-revives-gun-incident-attack-john-fetterman-senate-race/7248008001/

Even if Lamb may be more of the same, Fetterman just gives off the entitled, alienating vibe of so many  Bernie dead-enders, with many assuming he will  win because he wears a hoodie and looks like a  professional wrestler. Just more divisive and toxic brocialism to a near-inevitable November loss. It really makes you wonder why the party ,and the base, cannot do better. 

[Noel]

I do not think that this is spreading a good message. I'm not for any kind of war, but to bar Russian marathon runners from running in the Boston Marathon? Come on. Seriously.

[JaneAusten]

I don't want to setup a doomsday machine here. There are lots of good things happening. I blame the media almost entirely. The other day I did see a video of Chuck Grassley a GOP senator from Iowa getting reamed out at an event with voters by a republican voter for his inaction at the KBJ hearings.  The voter was a republican who told Grassley he just sat there while the GOP made soundbytes for TV and told him he no longer cared about the country, only his party, not speaking out while these people launched viscous attacks on KBJ. He told Grassley it was time he stepped aside and let someone else run.

The media is putrid. One would have thought things might change after Trump but if anything it's gotten worse trying to make Biden seem worse then Trump. The worst part IMO are stories these people kept to themselves to publish in books. Bob Woodward who made his name for exposing Nixon in Watergate is the most egregious and this is someone who should know better. It's frankly disgusting and immoral.  I don't cry a bit when these people attacked by the right. I know I should but I can't help it. They are no better than their paymasters and care nothing about holding powerful people accountable, only their pocketbooks.