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David Roberts Profile picture
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31 Jan, 5 tweets, 2 min read
This is a familiar tactic from the Obama years. They want Dems to agree that a) it's good to "compromise" on helping people, b) the absurd GOP number is a reasonable "other side" of negotiations. And if Dems engage in good faith? The GOP votes will vanish.
This happened over & over under Obama. Dems would negotiate their own bills down to nothing and then *Republicans would oppose them anyway*. Christ I hope they learned something and won't fall for this again. The right response to this pathetic gambit is: "fuck off."
Something else I'm sure will give me Obama flashbacks: the press will report this as "more partisan squabbling." Somehow they'll never make it clear that one party is fighting to give Americans more help & one party is fighting to give them less.
Good.
... is our senators learning?

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More from @drvolts

David Roberts Profile picture
1 Feb
Murc's Law: Only Democrats have agency. Everything Republicans do, they were made to do by Democrats. Democrats made them vote for Trump, made them be racist, made them elect Qanon lunatics, made them assault the capitol.
Ask a Republican a moral question & you will never, ever get a first-order answer, about the actual morality of the acts in question. It's "Dems did something worse." It's "Dems made us do it." It's endless variants of, "It's not our fault!" The moral worldview of an adolescent.
An adolescent doesn't care whether or not what he did was wrong, he just doesn't want it pinned on him. He doesn't want the blame, or any responsibility. If he can escape accountability by pointing to someone else who allegedly did something worse, that's enough.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
31 Jan
There is a sociological tale to be told about a certain kind of person who had some intensely negative personal interactions with snooty liberals in college, or in their youth, & have transmuted the resulting resentment into a full-on cosmology.
I'm not talking about conservatives (though they share the obsession). I'm talking about people who ideologically incline toward liberalism but view annoying liberals as an overriding national emergency, to the point it occludes all their other political instincts.
Greenwald, Taibbi, that Conceptual James guy, lots of the IDW & Quillette & Persuasion types -- it's clear reading them that their personal resentment is so intense that they feel the need to build these giant theoretical sand castles around it, to lend it deep significance.
Read 10 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
29 Jan
Who's written the best piece about why @SenatorSinema is so much more conservative than her state requires of her? Why deny people aid & stymie climate policy & generally cause misery when you don't have to? Why ensure that the Senate is paralyzed & useless if you don't have to?
More on @SenatorSinema's terrible political moves -- terrible on the substance, terrible on political strategy. They're good for one thing: building a flattering image in the DC press. What a sad waste. politico.com/news/2019/10/2…
This review of @SenatorSinema's book is revealing. She learned that working with Rs at the state level is pragmatic (true!) & has now made that into an image/identity, which she has carried to DC. But the same strategy in DC accomplishes NOTHING. phoenixnewtimes.com/news/we-read-a…
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
29 Jan
Congratulations to @MontgomeryCoMD, where a NIMBY-ridden county council threw up so many barriers & restrictions that renewable-energy developer Chaberton Energy has given up entirely & is withdrawing -- no solar fields, no jobs, no energy. theseventhstate.com/?p=14662&fbcli…
Chaberton president @StefanoRatti wrote to the council:
NIMBYs are going to kill us all.
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
28 Jan
The @nytimes ed board just wrote the dumbest shit I have ever seen committed to text. You want to know why elite institutions are utterly failing in the face of a white nationalist insurgence? Look no further. Every braindead DC dysfunction, right here. nytimes.com/2021/01/27/opi…
This is the worst part. After saying Biden shouldn't take the actual actions he CAN take, it says he is entirely responsible for "hammering out agreements with Congress." And if he fails, it's his fault. And his legacy.
I literally can not think of a more perfectly crafted way to set Biden up for failure. You couldn't do it better if you had malicious intent.
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
27 Jan
This is a good paper/thread, but there's something slightly odd about study after study discovering that the world's pathetically low carbon prices are producing pathetically little effect. That's not really the locus of disagreement, is it?
The policy-relevant dispute is not whether low carbon prices will magically have large effects (they won't), but a) whether higher carbon prices are politically possible, and b) whether higher carbon prices are worth the political effort relative to other carbon policies.
Evidence to date suggests that, when it comes to direct pricing of carbon, it requires enormous political effort to achieve even a modest price (which has modest effects). The question is whether commensurate political effort directed at other policies can produce more impact.
Read 5 tweets

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