this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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It's more that they've needed his vote in a lot of cases, and the Senate has rules letting individual Senators block nominations.
That's their excuse, yes. In reality, though, they can do filibuster carveout exceptions for every bill (including one to remove the filibuster entirely) and appoint someone who's NOT a coal baron fox to guard the energy and natural resources committee hen house.
They CHOOSE to let him get in the way of mitigating climate change.
You can't do a filibuster carveout unless you've got 50 votes + 1 to do it. You can't do it when you don't have even that. Actually getting what we need means electing enough Democrats so that we can do stuff even when a few (Manchin, Sinema, maybe a couple others) are bought. That's why it was so easy to act in the House and so hard in the Senate.
Another copout.
The most effective way to elect a lot of Democrats is to nominate a lot of candidates that Democrats and the usually ignored left are EXCITED about, rather than "well at least THIS corrupt enemy of progress doesn't want to abolish the ACA and income taxes" shills.
That's not the priority of the geriatric (and one young one acting like a typical boomer) leadership of the private corporation masquerading as a political party, though. They're not trying to maximise the number of Democrats elected or the number of progressive policies passed.
They're trying to maximise campaign donations and other legal bribes as well as clinging to their own power and money. Those are their true goals and Manchin is excellent for those things. That's why they keep rewarding him for standing in the way of the things they pretend to want to do.
Then why aren't they winning primaries left and right?
I think you severely underestimate how right-wing this country is. That's the people's fault, not the politicians'.
Because the leadership of their own party is fighting for establishment-friendly candidates against them tooth and nail with tens of millions of dollars every election cycle, a lot of gaslighting and the full force of the party apparatus behind them.
It's frankly a herculean feat every time one of them overcome all that and even then, the leadership has been known to pull their support from the general election or even support the Republican candidate to avoid anyone from the left who might upset their corrupt status quo.
If they were that popular, no amount of campaign ads would defeat them. Campaign ads aren't mind control. Dollars aren't votes.
Americans vote for politicians who share their values, and let's face it: most Americans' values are firmly right-wing.
You clearly have no clue about how effective gaslighting and other propaganda can be or how shallow understanding of the candidates many voters have.
Progressive policy positions are almost universally more popular than gutless centrist ones, yet the centrist candidates backed by tens of millions worth of ads keep winning.
Do you really think that's a coincidence? Do you really think that the two giant corporations masquerading as political parties would spend BILLIONS of dollars on ads every election cycle if they didn't sway voters?
If so, you're a bizarre combination of ludicrously naive and profoundly cynical 🤦
What gaslighting?
You mean like Biden's ridiculous declaration of how great the economy is while everyone is either homeless or teetering on the brink? Yeah, that isn't fooling anyone. It is painfully obvious that Biden is Republican Lite, not progressive.
You mean like Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign messaging? It was limper than an overcooked noodle. “I'm with her”? Really? They may as well have gone with “it's her turn; how dare you lousy ingrates even consider voting for anyone else!” That's why she lost the general election. As for why she won the primary, real simple: Bernie Sanders is way too far left for most Americans. He was all over the news the entire time, so don't tell me he didn't get any publicity. He was on the primary ballot, so don't tell me he got shut out of the election.
You were doing so well with the accurate criticism of the Hillary and Biden campaigns but then you had to resort to their own propaganda talking points 🤦
Every policy position of his polls at 60-80% when not connected to his name. For that to happen, he has to be extremely personally unpleasant or the victim of an effective gaslighting smear campaign. By all accounts, he's extremely caring and genuine, if a little crotchety, so that leaves one possibility.
If by "he" you mean Trump rather than Bernie, you're right. Compared to his standing as a realistic challenger for the nomination and thus the presidency, he received LAUGHABLE amounts of coverage in the media! Even when admitting it, they put him in the category "democrat but not her". Same deal with the 2020 primaries. 🤦
Which doesn't mean much when the people hosting and controlling the contests are blatantly taking sides against him, in violation of their own bylaws.
Two, actually:
Pollsters also said Hillary Clinton was going to win in a landslide, and it's pretty hard to believe that bona fide progressives wouldn't vote for a bona fide progressive, so I'm leaning heavily toward #2.
No, I mean Bernie Sanders. I was blasted with Sanders spam constantly on social media in 2016. No one had any excuse for not knowing who he was and what he stood for.
In the 2020 primaries, the biggest concern was making 200% sure Trump does not get a second term. The primary voters decided that the best way to do this was to elect a centrist that would appeal to the right-wing not-so-undecideds that this godforsaken country is so depressingly full of, and even that only barely worked. Maybe you disagree, and maybe you're right and they're wrong, but I'm sure you can understand that there was an extremely dire situation with absolutely no room for mistakes.
If you want to fix that, fill Congress with progressives and pass a Constitutional amendment mandating approval voting or something similar. And yeah, that's on us voters, too.
I'm going to need some details on this before I can respond meaningfully.
No, that's another commonly believed distortion of reality. Pollsters concluded that there was a high probability that she would win the popular vote, which she did.
That the polls were about the EC and that they mentioned anything about the size of victory is gross misunderstanding at best and much more likely a convenient way to deliberately sow doubt about data that proves leftist policy positions much more popular than your own, whether you're a Republican or Republican Lite like the Dem leadership.
Which means that bona-fide progressives, especially young voters, were discouraged by the constant fawning of the media constantly declaring someone who was NEVER a bona-fide progressive the inevitable winner and didn't risk their job or jump through a ton of out of state voting hoops (in the case of college students) to vote against someone that both the commentators and the referees had already all but declared the winner.
DID vote for both Hillary and Biden in the general at MUCH higher rates than Hillary's followers did in 08, though.
..and the rest of what you said was also as if it was taken directly from the notes of Neera Tanden, so I'm just gonna stop wasting my breath now. Have the day you deserve.
The structure of the US Senate inherently favors the Republicans; it was designed that way by admitting a bunch of low-population states in the late 1800s. Same for the House, where the gerrymandering favors Republicans.
That means that the actual path to power for Democrats means not just energizing their base, but making common cause with a bunch of low-information and moderate voters.
That's why you see a real effort to win over moderates.
Nope. There are tens of millions more democrats and disenfranchised leftists than Republicans and disenfranchised nazis. Even in most of the "red" states.
It's true that the deck is stacked in favor of Republicans, but not so much that a coalition of the "always votes, blue no matter who" groups and the neglected millions to their left wouldn't have WAY more than the numbers needed to take 60-65% of both houses every. single. time.
The Dem leadership wouldn't want that, though. They'd lose their main excuse for kowtowing to their owner donors. Might even have to enact real systemic change that benefits regular people more than the already rich and powerful! 😱
The way you address that is by working with groups like the Environmental Voter Project to turn non-voting environmentalists into voters or the DSA to get people who will do the right thing past the primary in left-leaning districts.
Mobilization isn't some instant thing that's going to happen on its own just because existing elected officials change thier tune
And it's ESPECIALLY not some thing that's working at all when existing officials both elected and unelected are working non stop as well as spending tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars each election cycle to retain the status quo by, amongst other things, rigging primaries against left-leaning candidates in all districts.
You keep saying to unrig the system by moving pieces belonging to the party leadership that rigs it on the board owned by the party leadership that rigs it, stubbornly refusing to admit the blindingly obvious fact that the status quo will continue until the corrupt people at the top have been removed from their positions.
This isn't a project where a single example of a courageous politician suddenly solves everything. It's one where winning is a multi-decade project, so to get there we need to change the incentives so that even middling cowardly politicians will do the right thing.
Both the Environmental Voter Procject and the DSA are doing that though conflict expansion (to bring in people who weren't previously involved) and shifting the Overton Window (to make the unthinkable possible)
Correct. It's one where hundreds of cowardly politicians (and unaccountable unelected officials) too focused on their own wealth and power (and on not upsetting the status quo that's so lucrative to them) to ever help regular people.
It's also one where tens of millions of gaslighted and gaslighting regular people make up all kinds of excuses for the hundreds of cowards no matter what they do or don't do, forever.
It's also late in my time zone and I've frankly had enough of today, so I'm gonna head to bed. Sweet dreams about a better and more honest world when you get that far.
@VikingHippie @silence7 @climate
The silver lining of ecological degradation is that no amount of political posturing or businesses (ignorance) greenwashing will prevent the climate from deteriorating.
The planet's biosphere is the ultimate "authority", the ultimate power. As such, it's the ultimate "judgement" regarding how human cultures can, & can not, survive.
The planet is, what it objectively is. Ecological limiting factors are the ultimate long-term regulators.
Nature finds a way
Complaining about the problem doesn't do anything. What does something is changing the incentives that politicians face; that means giving them both a carrot (the opportunity to earn votes) and a stick (in the form of credible negative consequences) for corruption, which has completely broken down in that it's well-neigh impossible to prosecute any Republican unless they do something so extreme as to attempt a coup.
I've been working on the carrot because it's a key part of the process, and will continue to do so.
Lying about the elections isn't okay when Trump does it, and it isn't okay when you do it, either.
Equating the documented and admitted truth of the Dem leadership rigging primaries to Trump's preposterous lies about them rigging the 2020 general shows either profound ignorance or colossal dishonesty. Be better.
…doesn't exist and you know it. Be better.
So this is just a figment of my imagination? This court decision was purely hypothetical? The former head of the party is just a disgruntled employee making shit up? ANOTHER former leader of the party stepped down just for funsies? This is just the fevered ramblings of a lunatic or a Trump supporter (but I repeat myself)? They weren't the main reason that Cuellar, the last anti-choice democrat in Congress managed to "beat" Cisneros whose policy positions were many times more popular across the board?
You really need to get your head out of the fucking sand and/or stop knowingly lying.
That is an opinion piece.
Kushner-controlled paper. Not credible.
Paywalled.
And no, I'm not interested in you copy-and-pasting the text for me, because I don't trust you not to alter the text.
Not an admission of guilt. Sometimes people resign just to defuse controversy, even though they are not actually to blame.
That isn't relevant. It complains about how down-ticket candidates are selected, but Bernie Sanders was on the ticket.
If that were true, Cisneros would have won the election. She came close, but she didn't get the votes. And no, it's not cheating for politicians to endorse each other.
The feeling's mutual. If you want to successfully deceive me, you're going to have to try a lot harder than that.
Ok, I give up. You go ahead and keep believing the comfortable lies of the establishment including that voters can't be influenced to go against their own best interests AND policy positions.
I'll be over here in the real world if you ever decide to wake the fuck up and join us.
Join you in doing what, exactly?
Telling the truth rather than what billionaire owner donors and their pet politicians PRETEND is the truth, for starters.
Plenty of people already do that, to no avail.
Preaching to the exhausted choir on that one..