Time for progressives to make like an electric truck and #TankIt, I suppose.
If a counterparty in a negotiation refuses to even begin negotiating, there’s little choice left but to move along to the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. That’s not the BIF — which falls short of addressing the climate challenge and other needs. It’s nothing.
If Manchin’s best alternative to a negotiated agreement proves to be nothing as well, we may be stuck. At least we’ll have clarity about that situation, though.
This statement from Manchin illustrates the point. What separates the infrastructure investments in the BIF from the investments in human infrastructure — child care, pre-K, Medicaid expansion — that _directly_ relieve costs that burden the working class?
To drill down: why is it “vengefully tax[ing],” by Manchin’s lights, to revise the tax code so the wealthy no longer pay lower percentages than workers — but not vengeful to impose a work requirement on a *child tax credit* designed to aid the next generation?
The Manchin statement has no substance to engage with; it’s all affect, all show. If that’s all he can offer while expecting House Dems to pass the BIF tomorrow, progressives have no choice but to #TankIt.
To take up another Manchin line, that other Dems “ignore the reality that … families continue pay [sic] an unavoidable inflation tax”: Biden proposes to *remedy* inflation for core costs—child & health care, housing, education. Manchin mistakes the cure for the disease.
Meyer is right: the 49th and 50th votes seem at odds with _each other_, never mind the Dem caucus.

Another example: Manchin named prescription drug price negotiation as a policy, along with the child tax credit, he’s open to including. But Sinema seems categorically opposed:
(Source for the above tweet: see link below.)

If Manchin wants to raise some income taxes and negotiate prescription drug prices while Sinema says ix-nay to both, it’s difficult to see how a consensus might eventually develop _between them_. politico.com/news/2021/09/1…

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More from @ggreeneva

28 Sep
Sargent has this right: when Dems spend their time explaining Republicans’ irresponsibility on the debt limit, they’re missing the point. What Dems _want_ the public to view as hypocrisy is intended, in fact, to demonstrate Republicans’ power to do as they please.
To sputter about hypocrisy makes Dems look feckless. Republicans are being consistent: they’re asserting that they can do as they please, and don’t mind if anyone calls them out.

Dems would do well to refuse to play along — by junking the debt limit entirely.
“[Republicans] must allow us”: no, Sen. Durbin, they won’t allow it. The whole goal here is to demonstrate Republicans’ power _by disallowing it_.

Dems get nowhere by appealing to some imagined, impartial center to judge this hypocrisy for what it is.
Read 7 tweets
27 Sep
He’s complaining about Catherine Rampell, who _is_ a columnist for the Washington Post — while Brit Hume is the man who serve up glistening gems of thought like these: ImageImageImage
(* _serves_ up)
Hume “can assure us [he] is not” having fantasies about Trump’s anatomy: yes, we already know.
Read 4 tweets
24 Sep
The centrist approach to policy making remains aloof from Dems’ political interests — and unaffected by the lessons of the last Dem trifecta.

By deferring policies that solve problems for *4 election cycles*, Dems forgo most of the benefit of whatever political risks they took.
Like … aside from a sprightlier CBO score, there is *no upside * to deferring benefits to a huge voting bloc for *7 years*.

A policy delayed for that long before implementation may as well not exist — in political terms _and_ because a future Congress can bloodlessly undo it.
All I want for Christmas is a Democratic Party purged of all reticence about embracing the possibilities of policy feedback.
Read 4 tweets
24 Sep
This is just about the most ghoulish piece of political journalism I’ve ever forced myself to read. politi.co/2ZtoL02
“Thousands have died, but DeSantis’ prospects in 2024 — which have ebbed and flowed with the pandemic — have resurged as the refrigerated trailers parked at Florida hospitals begin to fill more slowly.”

– this Politico article, essentially
Just a repellent, thoroughly macabre piece of work.
Read 6 tweets
23 Sep
Beyond the racism, the deaths tied to such rhetoric (e.g., Christchurch, El Paso), and the Radio Milles Collines-level incitement, the brazen lying jumps out.

The DHS just sicced horse-riding agents on Haitians who got lashed before being deported—but Fox talks of “replacement”?
I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but our politics and discourse are in a f––ing wretched place right now.
When Biden entered the race, he cited Charlottesville and called the moment “a battle for the soul of America.”

I trust that his feelings were sincere. I just wish I had a better sense, tonight, of what the battle plan is.
Read 4 tweets
11 Sep
Pat Moynihan, when talking of low-income communities of color, called what Tapper did here ‘defining deviancy down’—reacting to social breakdown by shifting standards “so as to … raise the ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.”
To Tapper’s argument: sure, some vaccine refusers have steeped themselves in misinformation. But misinformation isn’t a new condition in American society. Mass rejection of vaccines, by contrast—viewed against the backdrop of our responses to the 1918 flu and polio—absolutely is.
Rather than acknowledge the past standard, Tapper excuses the vaccine refusers of the present — treating their deviance as beyond what society, or at least its journalists, can afford to recognize, while scolding Biden as déclassé for naming it. jstor.org/stable/4121206…
Read 7 tweets

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